[What Came Before]

Maybe by repeatedly polishing jewels or improving swords, for years and years.

haha yes exactly. me and madness have been down this line of thought many times.... Imagine how shiny a rock would be after polishing it for thousands of years so as to not fill up your memory banks with new memories.

Anyone read Shutter Island (or watched it I guess, though I never saw the movie)? Ending spoilers.

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The whole thing was a rather impressive set up where the main character had some kind of amnesia. Whatever my memory is spotty about it, but as it turns out the whole move was a constructed scenario made to try and make the guy remember shit.

Or The Truman Show? again ending spoilers, but really at this point if you haven't seen it you never will.

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Most of the people where actors. Living a kind of fake life every day.

Take those ideas and then:
In order for the Nonmen to remain sane, perhaps they have constructed elaborate "plays" that they relive over and over again. Everyone has a role to play, and everything happens the same way every day, year in, year out. Maybe the play takes 10 years to act out, or longer, but once it is done, it all starts over. No variation. Maybe this would let them stack up memories, compress them all into a zip file and save precious space in their memories. By no longer forming "new" memories, it would kind of be like reliving your old memories over and over, so no new information is saved, letting them keep some room for new memories and even keeping their old memories from being erased.

[What Came Before]

Wow... Viramsata metaphor. Nice, Wilshire.

I still hope for the Hypobolic Time Chamber .

[What Came Before]

In order for the Nonmen to remain sane, perhaps they have constructed elaborate "plays" that they relive over and over again. Everyone has a role to play, and everything happens the same way every day, year in, year out. Maybe the play takes 10 years to act out, or longer, but once it is done, it all starts over. No variation. Maybe this would let them stack up memories, compress them all into a zip file and save precious space in their memories. By no longer forming "new" memories, it would kind of be like reliving your old memories over and over, so no new information is saved, letting them keep some room for new memories and even keeping their old memories from being erased.

This is an interesting idea. I hadn't really thought of that, the Nonmen living in a constructed reality of their own that lets them experience time more slowly and not suffer a memory overload. Acting out the same predictable rituals, year after year. Or maybe they use an elaborate system of "triggers" connected to specific memories - for example, eating that particular food on this particular day of the month, for centuries and centuries. Short-term memories are less consolidated than long-term memories, they haven't yet "sunk in" as deep, so the Nonmen can probably manipulate their immediate memories. Or using sorcery to suspend themselves in time, while the years fly past outside.

And, then again, what Madness referred to:

"Have you heard of a game played in southern Nilnamesh, a game called viramsata, or 'many-breaths'?"
"No."
''Across the plains surrounding the city of Invishi, the ruling caste-nobles are very remote, very effete. The narcotics they cultivate assure them of the obedience of their populations. Over the centuries they have elaborated jnan to the point where it has eclipsed their old faiths. Entire lives are spent in what we would call gossip. But viramsata is far different from the rumours of the court or the clucking of harem eunuchs— far more. The players of viramsata have made games of truth. They tell lies about who said what to whom, about who makes love to whomever, and so on. They do this continually, and what is more, they are at pains to act out the lies told by others, especially when they are elegant, so they might make them true. And so it goes from tongue to lip to tongue, until no distinction remains between what is a lie and what is true.

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Yeah I didn't notice the viramsata connection until I was done. Its kind of a new idea, but really just a more elaborate way to say "polishing stones".

Also, if anyone played Kingdoms of Amalur, the idea is similar to the ... elves i think? They are an immortal race (I think... now I can't remember) who have been playing out their lives in a similar fashion. Everyone has an archetype and a role to play, and these sagas that they create are replayed through the centuries. Just another example that was similar, that I didn't think of before.

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Part of the reason why I find the Nonman culture so fascinating is that they're so utterly alien to all human civilizations. They have a very old and venerable high civilization, but it's so interestingly bizarre and remote. Tolkien's Elves have a vaguely similar quality, although they're far more humanlike and clearly based on the light-elves from Norse mythology.

The TTT appendix tells us that:

Cûnuroi civilization was ancient even before these words were carved into the Tusk. While the Halaroi, Men, wandered the world dressed in skins and wielding weapons of stone, the Cûnuroi had invented writing and mathematics, astronomy and geometry, sorcery and philosophy.

I can't really see the cave-dwelling subterranean Nonmen as a race of astronomers, so I wonder what Nonman astronomy (pre-Inchoroi, obviously) was like. The idea of Nonman philosophy also sounds curious - Platonism probably suits them most, out of all existing philosophical schools, but Bakker (himself a well-versed guy in this subject) might go for something totally different make their philosophy entirely alien.

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The Nonmen had Mystery Schools... drugs, sex, and bodily transcendence, seem right up their alley.

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The Nonmen had Mystery Schools... drugs, sex, and bodily transcendence, seem right up their alley.

The Nonmen always seemed rather sexless and ascetic to me, for some reason. (And their sexuality is almost always linked with trauma or insanity). They're such gloomy and melancholic figures, that it's hard to imagine that sex-and-drugs rituals are their kind of thing. In many ways, I see their religious beliefs and rituals (or whatever you call it) as closer to the rigid and coldly intellectual Apollonian paganism than to the "organic" Dionysian paganism with its orgies and ecstasy cults.

(Look at their sorcery, for instance. The Gnosis is all about mathematical perfection and rigid intellect, unlike the "organic" Anagogis that humans invented.)

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I think your perspective might be skewed greatly by the remnants of their species. Only males exist, neh? They must have experienced great and terrible love as well?

Cleric struck me as very sensual with Mimara in WLW.

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I think your perspective might be skewed greatly by the remnants of their species. Only males exist, neh? They must have experienced great and terrible love as well?

Of course I'm skewed by the remnants of the species, since that's all of the species that we readers have seen. That said, even without the amnesia and overall insanity that current Nonmen have (which I didn't count when making the last post), they seem to be a pretty upright and intellectual-oriented species just based on what we've seen of their pre-Inchoroi culture.

Obviously, this is just me speculating. Your ideas are just as valid as mine.

Cleric struck me as very sensual with Mimara in WLW.

A real player, that Cleric.

"You tremble," she whispers, resisting the urge to glance at the pouch. "Do you want me? Do you want to…" She swallows. "To take me?"
He draws away his arms, stares down into his palms. Beyond him, clouds pile like flotsam beneath the stars. Lightning scorches the plains a barren white. She glimpses land piling atop land, scabbed edges, woollen reaches. "I want to…" he says.
"Yes?"
He lifts his eyes as if drawing them against weighted threads. "I… I want to… to strangle you… to split you with my-" His breath catches. Murder floats in the sorrow of his gaze. He speaks like someone marooned in a stranger's soul. "I want to hear you shriek."

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I hope I never come off as dismissive, Auriga. Ideas from minds not mine own are why I am here . EDIT: Perhaps, in thinking about my words, I was simply trying to communicate that the females did exist at some point and so we must account for the consequences of that history.

Bakker's mentioned that Nonmen passions are like human in kind but excessive in expression. There are also thoughts of sensory differences. Nin'sariccas asks to touch Kellhus. Perhaps, they have a greater breadth of tactile experience.

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Can't find any other place to put this, but since my thread here is about Nonman technology and society anyways, I'll post it here.

IThe visual similarity of the Nonmen and the god-aliens in "Prometheus" has already been written about plenty, but their culture seems to be pretty similar as well. I caught this interesting little bit when re-watching "Prometheus" yesterday. In the TTT appendix, we learn that the Nonmen wrote with cuneiform symbols (the Rape of Omindalea resulted in the Nonmen being kicked out of Sauglish, and "their cuneiform script" being outlawed). This is the written language of the god-aliens:



(It's obviously Sumerian-inspired, and I guess that both Bakker and Ridley Scott picked it because it just screams "long-lost ancient civilization.")

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I think the idea is that proto-civilization, alien or divine, are easy tropes - not necessarily used, or overused, until the past ten years and the 2012 hype.

Thus, cuneiform the oldest discovered human text is the logical link between us and the Other, showcasing inherent ideas of progression too, neh?

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I think the idea is that proto-civilization, alien or divine, are easy tropes - not necessarily used, or overused, until the past ten years and the 2012 hype.

Thus, cuneiform the oldest discovered human text is the logical link between us and the Other, showcasing inherent ideas of progression too, neh?

It is attractive to put forth the idea that we might be able to pinpoint one moment in history and take it as our "arrival of the Monolith" moment. That scene in 2001 is so timeless because it speaks to our desire to know where and when we became "we".

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Lol, this is why I loved Hyperion Cantos so much - the first two anyways. Probably missed some world-building in the Endymion.

The Arrival of the Monolith... a powerful motif indeed, Meyna.

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The Arrival of the Monolith... a powerful motif indeed, Meyna.

Good band name imo.