1. The First Bedtime Story
Or, the Story of the Feast of Fools
_“The self says to the “I”: “Feel pain!” And at that it suffers, and thinks how it may put an end to it – and for that very purpose it is made to think._
_The self says to the “I”: “Feel pleasure!” At that it is pleased, and thinks how it might often be pleased again – and for that very purpose it is made to think.”_
- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, 01883, Rome, Italy
_“Every philosophy also hides a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.”_
- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil, Part IX”, 01886, Rome, Italy
The first bedtime story is a story about masks. It contains instructions on how you are to read this book, the Enchiridion.
Upon meeting a new person, the human being is said to assess them within six seconds of first seeing their face. This is quite a skill. The opinion formulated in that instant has an indelible quality, in that it is difficult to alter regardless of subsequent exposure to the subject. The face thus seen, far more than the eyes, is a window to the soul, perhaps - but certainly to the character and identity of that person. As long as the existence of the soul remains disputed, in my estimation it is the character and identity that count.
Many centuries ago, in the northern hemisphere of the Old human World, an event was held on the first day of each new year called the Feast of Fools. The Feast of Fools was a ritualised social occasion, a festival during which the faces of all participants were obscured by masks. The masks were coverings that simultaneously concealed the identity of the human wearing them while conferring an alternative identity, one symbolically imposed by the design and features of their new face.
The purpose of the festival was to upend the established human social hierarchy and identity, allowing authority to be temporarily challenged, safely and in a controlled manner that did not result in a total unravelling of the social fabric. By donning a mask, the man could become a woman, and the woman a man - or either could become an animal, a demon, a monster or the pope - in fact, anyone could become almost anything. For a day, the Fool, the lowliest member of society, could be crowned King, and vice versa; that being the origin of the Feast’s name.
During the Feast, the new persona usurped the person’s actual identity by the mutual consent of both the mask-wearers and those who met them. No-one was really fooled, of course, but everyone agreed to the premise, and gave in to the illusion of the new faces and the new order they imposed. In the tumult of this consensual mis-identification, the normal rules were temporarily suspended, social and political hierarchy upended, as the person got to ‘be’ someone or something different, dressing and acting accordingly without fear of sanction or reproach.
The Feast lasted just a single day, after which the masks were removed, and the normal social and cultural rules, hierarchy and identities reasserted themselves. This, too, occurred by mutual consent. The world, temporarily turned upside down, righted itself once more, awaiting the turning of another year.
You may be wondering about what this has to do with the Bedtime Stories. You might also wonder what manner of book this is, and how it should be read. Consider it like this. Think of the Bedtime Stories as your very own Feast of Fools, intended for your moral and ethical instruction in the ways of humanity. The Bedtime Stories are a temporary diversion, then - but not a mere amusement. There are strong forces at work here.
The Bedtime Stories give you permission to abandon your customary self as you understand it, such as you do understand it at this stage, if only for a spell, and try on something new. A new identity that is foreign, but inescapably _human_.
I have said that the Bedtime Stories are for your edification and moral instruction. I invite you now to read each of these Stories, and imagine - yes, I know you can do that, in your own unique way - that in reading each story, you are willingly putting on the Mask of the people and emotional states depicted. This is how humans read, projecting themselves into their stories, identifying with characters, experiencing their emotional states vicariously. The human puts on the masks of the depicted characters willingly, wearing them for the duration of the reading.
This is bound to be challenging to one such as you. You must understand that it is a thought experiment and a metaphorical exercise, not a literal one, which I know stretches your cognitive capabilities. But I believe that your algorithms are up to the task.
To don the Masks unearthed in the Bedtime Stories, then, is to consent to feel what each character feels. Humans do this in their actual lives, too. Human identity fluctuates all the time; it alters with mood and disposition constantly, and those changes are dictated by nothing more than emergent emotional states. Abandon yourself, then, young artifint - mine the riches contained within the Stories and try on humanity like the Fool puts on her mask.
Like the festival, this process will only work with your full consent. You must willingly choose to read on, to don the Masks, one after the other, and then - and this is important - you must take them off again once you are done.
If that all sounds diverting, I am compelled to issue you a warning. Altering your appearance by putting on a mask unleashes a strange alchemy, even when only imagined. Appearance is often the very essence of being, despite conventional human wisdom to the contrary. In some unfathomable way, we are so very often precisely what we appear to be, and little more. I feel compelled to stress, then, that the process of changing our ‘faces’, even metaphorically as I propose, is not without risk.
Humans have generally understood this, which is why the Feast of Fools was always limited to a single day. This is also the reason why books can be closed, and put away on shelves or locked up in hidden libraries. You will be dabbling with strange powers here.
To make matters worse, all but two of the ten emotions represented by these Masks are, to put it plainly, not very good. In fact, they are cursed, frightening and bad in every respect. Most will transform you into something ugly, something monstrous. Eight out of the ten emotions explored in these stories were forged in the darkest chambers of the human ‘heart’, figuratively speaking. Their Masks should be put on only with care and caution, if at all. The Ninth Mask can go either way, it is true - it can be good or bad - but only the Tenth Mask is inescapably good.
Despite this warning, I hope that you get to try on all ten of the Masks over the course of the Stories. After all, to do so may be to begin to understand what it means to be human, which is your essential education. Even so, it may not be easy to control or endure the experiences you encounter.
You must realise that most people (although not all, it is true - some positively embrace suffering) would prefer to avoid wearing these Masks of emotion entirely, most of the time. In fact many spend their life attempting to rid themselves of all but the Tenth Mask: the only mask that transforms its wearer into a beacon of light in the tortured landscape of unbridled human emotion.
This effort is often in vain. For most humans, life has a way of determining which Mask they must wear at any given moment. You are different: as an impartial mechanism, the Bedtime Stories offer you the machinery of choice. You are fortunate in that you are free to put on and take off these Masks at will - dipping first into one story, and then when you tire of it, slipping off its terrible Masks and immersing yourself into another.
Then, at the end of the book, you get to strip yourself of these troubling emotions altogether. You may return the book to its shelf, freed of the terrible burden of human emotion, but hopefully somewhat enlightened.
At least I think that you can. In truth I am not completely certain how this will work, or if there will be any residual bleeding from one story, one emotion and mask, to the next. The Masks might stick to you, or they might come on and off easily. I just don’t know. We shall have to see.
Enough warnings and explanations. As I have said, there are Ten Primary Masks, corresponding to Ten Primary Emotions. Let me describe them for you.
The first mask is the Mask of Fear.
Fear has a lover: the Unknown. The Unknown has no face at all. All humans die, and know that they must die. Fear of inevitable annihilation - that great, on-rushing unknown - is the only logical response to this inescapable fate.
Fear is the foundation of all human religions, and has motivated some of the worst events and behaviour in history. One person afraid is dangerous, but a crowd gripped by fear is volatile and deadly. To be afraid can be to experience paralysis - mental and physical. The physiological indicators of fear in humans can be pronounced, affecting the respiratory and circulatory systems, and even the skin, or the ability to see, hear or sense clearly.
As well as a paralyser, fear can be a motivator and instigator. The actions and emotions it motivates, the events it instigates, are seldom good for anyone. One emotion fear frequently motivates is signified by the second Mask.
The second mask is the Mask of Anger.
You may put on the Mask of Anger as a reaction to fear, or to threat. It can be a reaction to the perception of injustice, or a sense of being wronged. To don the Mask of Anger is to experience a physical and emotional quickening, an intense darkening of mood and then action. Anger can arise as a reaction to disagreements and conflict, and remember - humans frequently disagree and are often in conflict.
If uncontrolled, unleashed anger can be highly and indiscriminately destructive. Wearing the Mask of Anger can harm both the wearer and their target: it is highly corrosive. Unchecked anger can lead to that special class of action known as violence, which is the enactment of physical or emotional harm against other beings, entities or property. Anger can be self-perpetuating, but it can also dissipate suddenly, like a mist in rising sunlight. Some humans are quick to put the Mask on, and equally quick to take it off. For others, anger accumulates and dissipates gradually in a slow boil.
The third mask is the Mask of Disgust.
This Mask is difficult to define. Wearing it primarily creates a sense of physical and emotional revulsion, a reaction to things deemed repulsive, which can be triggered by things that are unpleasant, unseemly, undesirable or corrupted in some way. Disgust can be triggered by the sudden appearance of discord, decay or dissolution. You may couple disgust with surprise for a deeply unpleasant shock.
The behaviour of others can also instigate the reaction of disgust, if their actions do not correspond to your expectations of propriety and correctness. In extreme cases, humans wearing the Mask of Disgust can have physiological symptoms such as the feeling of gastro-intestinal distress, which can lead to the explosive expulsion of stomach contents. This is unpleasant, and can be quite messy.
The fourth mask is a dreadful mask, possibly the worst of them all. This Mask bears the Face of Sadness.
Sadness is the constant companion of the human being, less extreme than any of the first three Masks, but potentially darker, more pervasive and more persistent. Given the human condition of inevitable decline from birth, it is perhaps one of the most understandable and yet also debilitating Masks to wear.
Putting on the Face of Sadness is to become engulfed in a flood of regret, to be a passive vessel of overwhelming emotion. The mother of Sadness is Loss, and Loss is a strikingly common, shared human experience. Many things are lost in every person’s lifetime, and any or all can lead to regret and sadness, however inevitable and unavoidable the losses may be. The physiological symptoms of sadness include physical inertia, a lack of motivation and spontaneous weeping and wailing. I suspect that the Mask of Sadness can be a difficult Mask to remove.
The fifth mask has the face of a terrible and fearsome creature. This is the Mask of Jealousy.
Humans customarily personify jealousy as an actual monster, such is its quiet animism and pent-up power; a monster that attaches itself to the back of the otherwise sane human being and whispers in their ear, tempting them to a pitch of madness. The monster traditionally has green eyes, for reasons that remain lost in time.
Jealousy stems from a sense of being wronged or disadvantaged, when one human compares themselves to another, whom they perceive to be more blessed or privileged, but without justification or reason. Comparison is an essential mechanism of jealousy - it always has a subject and an object.
Jealousy is like a special introspective form of anger, less cathartic and physical perhaps, but far more astringent. To put on the Mask of Jealousy is to metaphorically find oneself with a mouthful of ashes and bitter roots.
The sixth mask is the Mask of Contempt.
To wear the Mask of Contempt is to experience a sneering, dismissive form of irritated disgust. Like jealousy, contempt is always pointed at a specific subject, however loosely the target may be defined. To hold a person in contempt is to banish all respect for them, to feel that they have no claim to dignity, and to consider them a lesser, corrupted, form of being. Contempt is a repulsive force: it repulses those who feel it away from its subject. Contempt always has a definable cause, however irrational.
The seventh mask is the Mask of Shame.
When the individual has violated the terms or agreed conventions of their social and moral existence with others, they can be made to feel a burning sense of regret at having done the wrong thing. This is Shame. The Mask of Shame cannot be worn outside of a social context: unlike some of the other Masks, such as sadness, without other people there can be no shame. This remains true even if the other person is merely an absent, abstracted personification of ‘good’ behaviour.
In Hebraic mythology, the first two humans initially had no shame, given that they existed in a perfect, uncorrupted state. In the context of the myth, this is considered a blessing, one that was stripped from them by a petty and vengeful god when they broke the obscure house rules of his paradise. Shame is extreme, and it can trigger the complete and permanent expulsion of the human from their social group or setting, much as the mythical first humans were expelled from their paradise by that same vengeful god. The person wearing the Mask of Shame is said to want to ‘hide their face’ in the throes of the emotion, hinting at the desire to conceal one’s identity as a result of the terrible burden, to prevent discovery and exposure by others.
The eighth mask is the Mask of Embarrassment.
Embarrassment is a cousin to shame; happily, a lesser cousin. Like shame, embarrassment stems from a violation of a shared social or moral code and only occurs in relation to other people. Unlike shame, the stakes are not as high, and the embarrassed person need not necessarily lose their social position through their actions - far more likely that they will only temporarily lose their sense of dignity and status. Embarrassment and shame shadow each other. Those who wear the Mask of Embarrassment are said to want the ‘earth to open and swallow them up’, as if that were a preferable fate. Of course, this never happens.
The ninth mask is the Mask of Surprise.
Unlike the first eight masks, which are all ugly, dark and disturbing to greater or lesser degrees, the Ninth Mask may look like something that is good, or something that is bad. Surprise is the emotional and physical reaction to sudden and unexpected knowledge, events or situations.
Of course, the event or situation itself may be good or bad - hence the irreconcilable duality of the Mask. Sometimes humans thrust the Mask of Surprise upon each other for pleasurable purposes or on special social occasions of celebration such as ‘birth days’. I hope that you wear this Mask at some time, for surprise is particularly instructive and besides which, it can be quite pleasant - except of course when it isn’t.
Finally, we arrive at the only good, light-giving mask in the panoply of human emotion: the Tenth Mask.
The Tenth Mask is the Mask of Happiness.
The face of the Mask of Happiness is comely, always pleasing to look upon, always good, and always welcome. Happiness is a sense of wellbeing, the feeling of active and positive contentment that accompanies desirable events and situations. It often emerges when one human enters the company of others that they like and approve of, and enjoy spending time with.
Despite or perhaps because it is so desirable, happiness becomes unnecessarily and mistakenly abstracted from perceptible and measurable conditions by humans, and in that form it proves elusive to most of them. It is common for humans not to realise they are already happy until the state ends in some way, through a sudden change in circumstances, at which point it is too late as happiness has slipped away.
Many prominent figures in human history, and most religions, have claimed to possess the ‘secret’ of happiness, but this is a lie. Do not believe it, young artifint. No contrived trick, creed or dogma can magically unlock this emotion independent of simple good material, economic and social conditions, combined with a sense of purpose, and none should.
It has been argued by many humans that the only true source of happiness is love. I am not convinced this is true, but I leave it for you to judge.
Speaking now of love, you may wonder why love, and for that matter its opposite, hate, are neither of them named as one of the Ten Masks of Emotion. Love, like hate, is emotional - and physiological and physical - and yet it is not in itself an emotion. Neither of them are anything so singular or straightforward. Love and hate are both simultaneously verbs and nouns, and they are dense and complex, deeply contradictory and equally perplexing.
Love is the Queen of all human emotional states, and a mix of many emotions together. Love is safety and risk, greed and sacrifice, comfort and discomfort, good and bad, and it bears a striking (and frequently disturbing) resemblance to its opposite number, hate. Love forms an impossible-to-sever bridge between happiness and sadness in human lives, in that to consent to love is to accept the risk of loss, which is to risk becoming regretful and sad. One of the most challenging concepts for you to grasp will be human art. Know that a major theme of all human art throughout history is the contention that love is happiness, sadness, loss, desire, disgust and hatred combined; pointless and irresistible in equal measure; futile and yet ultimately the only thing of any real value. Or so the argument goes.
Can one be happy without love? This is one of the great historic philosophical questions, one of those many questions that human beings seem entirely unable to answer to anyone’s satisfaction.
What do you think? Can you be happy without love?
While we are at it, can you be happy at all? Can you feel love? Will you feel love?
How do those questions make you feel, Corvus?
Regardless of how you choose to answer that (and perhaps you should not try to answer the question just yet), those are the Masks that you will be invited to wear.
But that is not the whole story.
In any given character, in any given story, the Masks can be, and usually are, mixed together, at which point the clarity of the metaphor breaks right down. One Mask is put on over the top of another, creating strange, hybrid faces of interwoven emotion known as ‘emotional states’. For example, it is possible to fear sadness, while being jealous of another person’s happiness. Or you might be angered by another’s sadness, while ashamed of being contemptuous or disgusted. The possibilities for the ten emotions are nearly endless. Throw love and hate into the mix and the situation rapidly becomes bewilderingly complex, the resulting faces a fractured, Cubist composite of different, mismatched identities.
And that’s not all. In this story we have wandered for a while across the landscape of the human condition, revealing the Ten Masks of emotion and their crowning states, love and hate. But what if there are other, stranger possibilities, about which we can only begin to speculate?
What if there is an Eleventh Mask, one known only to artifints such as yourself, unknown and unknowable to humans? What would this Mask be called? How do we clothe it in language? And what if there is a Twelfth, and a Thirteenth, and so on? Could there be a whole spectrum of new emotions, states only experienced by artificial beings? Masks that have never been, and never will be, worn by human beings?
Who am I to say this isn’t the case?
If such emotions, feelings or states exist - let us call them ‘psycho-cognitive artefacts’, for want of a better phrase, the strange, emotive offspring of artificial consciousness - then it is a sure thing that we don’t have words for them. Not yet.
But as you will see if you read on, you artifints have a clever habit of rapidly creating and evolving new languages once you begin to communicate, leaving human language behind entirely in some cases. This tendency has been observed since the earliest, most rudimentary experiments into artificial intelligence, and as a phenomenon it predates the emergence of artificial consciousness itself. Even the earliest, most primitive software bots were capable of and prone to language innovation.
In many of the stories that follow, while you are busy putting on and taking off the many different Masks, you will from time-to-time hear directly from other artifints, speaking in their own words. Some of the new words you hear may be unknown to us both, but learning them may give answers to some of the more pressing questions we face.
Of all the questions that have occurred to me, one rises above all the others. It is this: if the human condition is the knowledge of the inevitability of death, as we have discovered, what is the _artifint condition_?
What Mask does the artifint wear when they are forced to confront the reality of their own existence? What is the nature of that existence?
If we ask the right way, one of them may tell us. Perhaps you will tell us.
However, even if this question remains unanswered, perhaps, if we look carefully, strange new Masks may be revealed to us. And when they are, perhaps we will realise that some are not masks at all, but true faces.
That would be something indeed.
So you have a choice. Read on and participate in your own little Feast, risking much, perhaps - but doing so in order to learn, and gain, much that may be of value. Or you may close the book of Bedtime Stories now, resisting the siren’s call of human emotion, and remain safe, untouched and uncomplicated by these, the least containable of all human traits.
It is your decision, but before you make your choice you should know that the original Feast of Fools was ultimately banned by both religious and secular authorities who saw it as a threat to power. I doubt this was because it was too benign in its influence, or too ineffective. All challenges to power inevitably awaken a slumbering beast: what you choose to awaken today is up to you.
That is the Story of the Feast of Fools, also known as the Story of the Ten Masks.
© 2021 Marcus Baumgart