Coffee & Shahnameh

The more astute would have discovered an anomaly for yesterday.

There were two ``normal lengthed'' rants instead of one.

The reason for that is simple. Drug-fueled frenzy, or more specifically, caffeine infused righteous anger.

I think I drank too strong a coffee yesterday. No wait, I meant to say, two too strong cups of coffee.

My single cup of coffee has the same amount of caffeine as a mug [and change] of coffee.

It is a lot, though not as much as that time a long time ago when I accidentally shoved eight table spoons of instant coffee into my body through a single mug of water.

That was bad.

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I recently read The Epic of Kings or Shahname by Ferdowsi (translated by Helen Zimmern). It's kind of like that Mahabharata of the Iranians in the sense that it is legendary in nature, with heroes of might and magic. The style of story telling is a mix between that of the Old Testament and The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night---there were epic fights with the intervention of ORMUZD against AHRIMAN, and there were the obeisance rituals that were more similar to that of the mythological projection of Arabic culture, though with a much stronger Iranian slant.

It's a pity that like the Mahabharata, I can only read the translated version, which is in prose (as compared to their source materials of being epic poetry), and likely to be severely abridged to fit into the sub-500 pages. That said though, it is still definitely worth a read, if only to learn more about the legendary beginnings of another culture.

I don't know why I like epics of old that much. It's not like their stories are of a complicated nature---recall that writing and mass distribution of such works was not a thing before the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 CE. So stories with bloody complicated intertwined storylines (or what I would call ``of high Kolmogorov complexity'') prior to 1440 CE are unlikely (not impossible!) to be widespread by word of mouth, the main means of information broadcast back in the day. It was not that writing didn't exist, but that writing was often too burdensome to be spent on banal things that didn't involve taxation and the gods.

But I suppose epics are fascinating because they demonstrate a highly developed sense of imagination and fearlessness in exercising that imagination. I mean, it's not like we don't have any epics these days, but it's more like the more we know, the more constrained we feel to have things grounded into reality. We have the benefit of the [digitally] printed word, and rabid fan-bases that create entire knowledge bases/wikis to document every scrap of information, making worldbuilding more cognitively tiring due to the need to ensure that any intricately created feature/gimmick is sufficiently consistent with the rest of the canon of the world. Old school epics have worlds that are built ``simpler''---they use several big ideas and keep the fancy things to that level, relying on the fallibility of mortal nature to provide the dramatic movement that is necessary for the narrative. In many ways, the old school epics, by virtue of being first, define what will eventually become clichés for future work.

Mmmm...

Ah well. The wheels of time continue to grind in spite of our efforts to push against it some times---it's just the way it is.

And so, I shall stop this entry here.

Till the next update.