Library of Unique Experiences

As a writer and avid reader it often worries me that in this hyper-modern world literature is becoming a rather insular art form: those who read read, and the rest, the majority, don't. This is one reason why I am fascinated by book lists such as these lists of the 50 best cult books or banned and challenged books. Hell, I even geek out over lists on Amazon, because sometimes these kinds of arbitrary collections can point me to books I ought to read, and even more importantly, suggest the extreme influence literature has had, and still has, on individuals.

For me however it is often not enough to read, or list, books that are inspiring, deviant, and fantastic for their own sake. Who hasn't tripped through the imaginations of Kafka, Burroughs, Vonnegut, or Poe? The more I read the more I become aware that one thing literature can do is describe, and allow us to experience, ever finer shades of being- much the way good classical music can create subtle emotional tensions through the contrast of chords, a masterful narrative can create as equally refined tensions through the tools of plot, language, identification. Of course, this has also meant for me a quest to discover ever more complex psychological narratives and descriptions of irreality, somewhat along the lines of Italo Calvino's idea of a library created out of books that only belong on the periphery of the established canon, the shamans and madmen of the book world, that by their tentative inclusion change our perceptions on the rest of our literally conjured experiences. On that note I want to present my own list of authors and texts that by haunting and redefining the canonical texts have been rather indispensable in my understanding of what is possible to experience.

Samuel Beckett- "Stories and Texts for Nothing," "Molloy," "Malone Dies," "The Unnamable," etc. While most people are familiar with "Waiting for Godot," the play that made him famous, few have braved Beckett's prose writing. Dense and dreamlike only scratch the surface, having been influenced heavily by Joyce and Proust, Beckett sets out to destroy every convention and form of thought available to language, so that we are left with plotless, settingless, and even characterless stories that nonetheless explore the despair and consciousness of what it means to be alive. Not for the casual reader, or even most experienced ones.

Nick Blinko- "Primal Screamer." The singer and artist of seminal anarcho-punk band Rudimentary Peni, Blinko followed in the footsteps of many great artists by going insane. From the asylum he produced an album dedicated entirely to H.P. Lovecraft, and this novel. "Primal Screamer" charts his descent into madness and childhood regression from the perspective of his psychiatrist, who may also be going mad.

Jorge Luis Borges- "Labyrinths," etc. I won't say much because he's more well known these days. Storytelling as the philosophy of infinite regression. A must read.

Julio Cortázar- "Hopscotch," "All Fires the Fire," etc. Though Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa are perhaps the more widely known Latin American authors, Cortázar was also highly responsible for the Boom of Latin American Fiction in the 60s-70s. More urbane than Márquez's colonial-themed magical realism, Cortázar's work often deals with the loose boundaries of history and desire. Furthermore, his work "Hopscotch" has been hailed as the first hypertext novel or literary choose-your-own-adventure, featuring several chapters that can be inserted into the main text while remaining an immanently lyrical read.

Mark Z. Danielewski- "House of Leaves," "Only Revolutions." Also becoming more popular as his latest novel was nominated for several awards, Danielewski's "House of Leaves" was for years a cult classic circling around the internets. Personally I was not too impressed by his powers of storytelling, but was fascinated by the innovative, non-linear, and self-referential form of his texts, which are like reading trembling, labyrinthian, academic papers. And the idea of a house that continues to get larger inside itself gave me exquisite nightmares for about a week.

Mircea Eliade- "The Forbidden Forest," "Two Occult Tales," etc. Most famous as a scholar and founder of comparative religions, the Romanian Eliade always considered himself more of a storyteller. While the vast erudition of his academic work has a way of looping in on itself, his fiction does nothing but benefit from an intricate understanding of world mythological themes, put at the service of describing the psychological effects of time and the World Wars. He also writes some rather fantastic short stories based on his wide occult knowledge. A personal favorite.

Richard Hell- "Godlike," "Go Now." Another punk turned poet and author, Hell was most famous for his song "Blank Generation" with the Voidoids. His work offers a curious modern updating of several literary traditions that inspired his life. "Go Now" corrupts the Beat spirit of Kerouac and Clellon Holmes, while "Godlike" re-imagines the life of Rimbaud and Verlaine as gay New York poets on acid, all the while retaining a grasp on the frailness or pointlessness of humanity.

John Clellon Holmes- "Go." The novel that made the Beats a household word, and yet now falls outside the Beat canon. In the same vein as many other good author-wandering-around-aimlessly stories (cf. Henry Miller), "Go" gives an accurate portrait of the drunken striving and frightened insignificance of the best minds of his generation.

J.K. Huysmans- "Au Rebours (Against the Grain)," "Lá-Bas (Down There)." In the widely read "Portrait of Dorian Grey," Oscar Wilde has his character read a peculiar text that changes his life. That book happens to be "Au Rebours," which depicts the kind of decadent French lifestyle that Wilde only dreamed of living. Starting from this decadence, Huysmans manages to span the gamut of extreme experience in his works, from attending satanic masses to eventually joining a monastery.

Comte de Lautréamont- "Les Chants de Maldoror." Entirely unknown in its time, this work was eventually rediscovered by the surrealists who hailed it as one of the two masterpieces that informed their movement, especially the line: "The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." "The Songs of Maldoror" is a long imagistic prose poem about a relentless and possibly demonic anti-hero who has renounced God, mankind, and ultimately himself. Camus was also fascinated about this work and there are shadows of Maldoror in "The Stranger."

Stéphane Mallarmé- "Divigations," var. prose poems. While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses.

Gérard de Nerval- "Aurélia," etc. The other major influence on the Surrealists, as well as on Proust and Joseph Cornell, Nerval manages to record the fantastic dreams and hallucinations that accompany his descent into madness. Before and after his madness he paints vivid scenes of childhood love, Parisian neighborhoods, and occult rituals.

Kenneth Patchen- "The Journal of Albion Moonlight." A major influence on the Beats and collaborator with jazz musicians, Patchen somehow taps into the collective horror of World War II, penning a disjointed and surreal journal of a group of people fleeing and raging against a ubiquitous army of wolves. Phenomenal and chilling, this is the 40s, an emotional intensity never reached in the work of Pynchon, including the ballsy move of making both Jesus and Hitler misunderstood minor characters to his plot. A must read.

Milorad Pavić- "Dictionary of the Khazars," etc. More experiments with non-linear narratives. This text weaves a mythic story over several centuries through tentatively connected encyclopedia articles that can be read in any order and sound like masterful fairy-tales. Pavić's other works take the form of crossword puzzles and tarot readings.

Victor Pelevin- "The Yellow Arrow." I haven't read any of Pelevin's other work, but the Yellow Arrow is a personal favorite. A dark allegory about life and the Russian State, in which a man who is riding on a train that never stops, houses countries of people, and the dead are thrown out the windows, begins to wonder what would happen if he were able to get off. Beautiful and simple.

Fernando Pessoa- "The Book of Disquiet." Pessoa distinguished himself by creating several distinct literary heteronyms, who are the authors of their own works. In "The Book of Disquiet," one of these invented authors muses about the uncertainty and tedium of his life, and desire to imagine something different. For some reason I couldn't get through the book (mostly due to my own disquiet), though lines and images from it come back to me from time to time.

Rainer Maria Rilke- "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge." Many are familiar with his "Duino Elegies," and some colleges even require his "Letters to a Young Poet" in freshmen classes, but Rilke's only novel remains somewhat of a mystery. Much like other existential, man-about-town texts, in which not much happens but a character's obsession becomes fully lived (cf. Sartre and nausea, Lautréamont and evil, Miller and sex), Rilke's Malte is troubled by the question of death and transcendence, and that place where the veil of reality is torn to reveal poetic meaning. Though as a whole the "Notebooks" wanders off without a proper finish, many of the scenes display a linguistic and imagistic virtuosity that I don't think is rivaled in any other piece of literature. A personal favorite, try to find Stephen Mitchell's masterful translation.

Bruno Schulz- "The Street of Crocodiles." An obscure Polish art teacher, Schulz wrote down his childhood memories as letters to a fellow teacher and later published them as short stories. While drawing on the clarity and warmth of early Proust, as well as the ability to let incidental objects trigger emotional memories, Schulz sets himself apart by being able to see the extreme magic and dark possibilities that are peculiar to childhood. A personal favorite. The title piece also later served as inspiration for a short film by the Brothers Quay.

Of course, like all lists, this one is far from comprehensive. Other authors I am just discovering now deserve to be on here, such as Felisberto Hernandez, José Donoso, and E.T.A. Hoffmann, each of whom refines this library of unique experiences further. Hopefully others may read this and discover an author worth checking into, and if there are any texts that you have found inspirational or experientially exquisite, please post a comment.

Trip through the Mind's Gate

While I generally veer away from the topic of drugs these days it is interesting to note the pace with which the news of Albert Hoffman's death has been flying around the internet since yesterday afternoon. The inventor of LSD died at the ripe old age of 102, which if anything is some proof that hallucinations aren't necessarily bad for your physical health. What I am most struck by is not the stellar portrait of the late Hoffman by visionary artist Alex Grey, but the realization of the sheer amount of people whose lives have been intimately and psychologically influenced by this man's first accidental trip through the door's of perception.



Personally I stopped experimenting with psychedelics several years ago, focusing instead on subtler, less chemical, and less potentially harmful modes of altering perception (such as yoga, dreaming, literature, etc). I recall that my last several trips, and in all reality the majority of my LSD trips, were fraught with social anxiety, a pressing need to drink water (and then use the bathroom), and an astoundingly exasperating lack of visions. The last time I did acid I ended up wandering in progressively larger circles through the city, went into the graveyard where I passed a herd of thirty deer, sat at the foot of an oak tree, got accosted by the searchlights of police helicopters, and then at the peak saw a spot of brilliant white light hanging in the sky which I thought was like a hole poked through the veil of existence. It turned out to just be another helicopter, and somewhat afraid that there might be a serial killer lurking about I got up from my meditation to run away (unfortunately unlike Buddha) and found within arms length from me a baby deer who led me back out of the cemetery past the strange glowing red lights coming from the tombs. While it was a somewhat wild and almost mythic experience, as most of my hallucinations were, it is worth noting that what these kinds of trips gave me was an increased sense of the interconnectedness of experience, the realization that mind and all its demons has some influence over matter, and at the very least some pretty wild experiences that may never have been able to happen under my everyday modes of perception. Certainly there have been many people who have abused these drugs and found themselves in the dark side of Alice's Wonderland, but what LSD did for me was show me that the world is a much bigger, more awesome place, and that once you've "cleansed the doors of perception" (to take Blake at his word) it is difficult to see things the small way again.

Dream and Dementia

"From that moment on I devoted myself to trying to find the meaning of my dreams, and this anxiety influenced my waking thoughts. I seemed to understand that there was a bond between the external and internal worlds: that only inattention of spiritual confusion distorted the outward affinities between them, - and this explained the strangeness of certain pictures, which are like grimacing reflections of real objects on a surface of troubled water." -Nerval, from "Aurélia"

In 1854 Gérard de Nerval, the French Romantic poet most famous for walking a lobster on a leash through the streets of Paris, was ordered by his doctor to record the series of fantastic visions and hallucinations he was having during a bout of mental insanity caused by his obsession with an actress he called Aurélia.



This document of dreams, dementia, and spiritual longing, subtitled "Life and the Dream," was considered foundational by such artists and writers as the Surrealists, Marcel Proust, and Joseph Cornell, and was hailed as a masterpiece of fantastic imagery. In his critique of the fantastic as a literary genre, Tzvetan Todorov continually turns to Nerval's "Aurelia" as exemplary of both syntactic and semantic techniques for articulating the essential ambiguity (near magic) of our perceptions of reality. Throughout this mostly autobiographical story, Nerval or the narrator finds himself and other people doubled, causality is called into a synchronistic question when putting on a ring begins a mass and throwing that same ring away stops a ferocious storm, and hosts of angels and gods recreate all of reality before the narrator's eyes. In order to stress the utter subjectivity and ambiguity of these scenes, Nerval uses a literary device that anyone who writes down their dreams may be familiar with: sentences are modified by phrases like "it seemed that," "I imagined myself," "I felt," "for some reason," each time putting into question the reality of what seems to be occurring for the narrator. This ambiguity is further intensified by the narrator's use of dream sequences, which he not only claims help explain the visions he just had, but further become seemingly real experiences in their own right. In particular the narrator dreams of an angel, first sculpted out of the actress he desires, who in turn gets projected onto every other woman he meets in the story, each of whom he thinks is that now dead actress.

While these scenes and devices certainly make for a magical read, and if they were actually dreamt by Nerval then a rather fantastic experience, but I'm not quite convinced that they add up to a full narrative, or that they produce the fantastic effect of a hesitation on the reader's part as to whether the events may actually be happening. Though the narrator seems slightly unsure that what he dreamt may be true, and despite the lucidity of the narration, he is much more likely to tell the reader that he is dreaming, that he is indeed going crazy. Several times throughout "Aurélia" the narrator is locked up in mental institutions, which frames the fantastic events in such a way that we are never led to believe that they are anything but the workings of a demented (although spiritually romantic) mind. These visions may spill out into the narrator's life and interactions with other characters, but never in such a way that these other characters are also led to believe the visions are true, which would make them much more believably ambiguous. Similarly, the narrative chooses to focus so much of its attention around the bizarre content of the visions that we loose what may have been the more important story behind them. We are told briefly about the narrator's obsession with Aurélia, but the rest of the manuscript is solely dreams and madness, through which the reader might look at their watch from time to time saying "well you're dreaming and mad, so what?" What might have been more interesting, and possibly more gripping, would have been to document that decline between sanity and insanity, how these visions played off against the normal content of a man's life. This draws on another important aspect of fantastic or magical literature, which is that they have to establish a stronger reality first before stepping out of that reality. Nerval however assumes that his readers know the world he lives in and the everyday content of his thoughts.

There is however a rather touching and realistic moment at the end of the story, which more then, or almost, makes up for the dérive of the narrator's visions. While locked in a hospital the narrator befriends a man in a torpor or coma who slowly awakens seemingly because of the narrator's attention. When asked why he won't eat, the man says that he is in hell, which causes the narrator to reflect on his own thought processes and outlandish beliefs throughout the rest of the story. Though the narrator ultimately refuses to give up his own convictions, this scene raises that subtle point that each of us can contain such bizarrely subjective worlds of dream and dementia, which we must articulate in whatever manner we can.

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

The Mythic Narrative of Beckett's “The Calmative”

After recalling that he does not know when he died, the narrator in Samuel Beckett’s “The Calmative” says that he needs to tell himself a story in order to calm down. While he could tell a modern story, the narrator insists that he has to tell his story “in the past… as though it were a myth, or an old fable” (Beckett, 28). Though the narrator’s mental state does not seem to resolve to one of calmness by the end of the story, his choice to utilize a mythic form of storytelling suggests that he may find this kind of narrative potentially more calming than depictions of modern life.

In order to discuss the use of myth in “The Calmative” we must first make a distinction between the popular use of the term myth, which designates something as being untrue, and the more traditional use of myth as a narrative form. Though there are many, and often conflicting, characteristics of what makes a story mythic, the myth-theorist Mircea Eliade gives a generally accepted definition of the term: myths are narratives that a particular culture believes to be true, which often use the adventures of supernatural beings to explain the foundation of and make sense of that culture’s reality (Eliade, 5-6).
While Beckett’s narrator is not necessarily telling a cultural story dealing with supernatural beings, it is important to note that nor is he telling a deliberate falsehood. The narrator’s myth draws on certain forms and themes that can be found in cultural mythologies, which he points to within the text of “The Calmative.” The story must take place in the past, the narrator needs “another age, that age to become another age in which I became what I was” (Beckett, 28). This somewhat circular passage seems to suggest Eliade’s definition of a foundational story; the narrator’s story takes him back to the time in which his reality was made. If we take this reality to be the narrator’s present state of death, then we might expect his myth to recount the events or adventures leading to his demise.

Beyond this somewhat “autobiographical” function of myth, or of stories set in the past tense, Beckett’s narrator also points to certain narrative forms that are common to mythology, which he attempts to use within his calming story. The narrator remarks that his story has to be like the one his father used to read him, the adventures of a boy named Joe Breem, or Breen, who swam for miles through the night “out of sheer heroism” (Beckett, 30). It is suggested that the narrator must go on a similar heroic adventure, one including the plot elements of “the setting forth, the struggle and perhaps the return” (Beckett, 30). This structure of the heroic journey is common to mythic narratives, and has perhaps been made most recognizable by Joseph Campbell, who discusses it in similar terms of the departure, the initiation, and the return (Campbell, ix). The narrator even recognizes the literary tradition of using this mythic motif when he recalls the woods at the mouth of hell, an allusion to, and perhaps a suggestion that he is inhabiting, the journey of Dante’s “Inferno.”

The other mythic form that Beckett’s narrator attempts to calm himself with is that of a fall and redemption, a theme commonly found in Christian mythology. Early in the story the narrator mentions that he fell, called for help, and it came, perhaps within the series of events leading to his death. This is echoed near the end of the story when the narrator actually does fall. For a moment he is “sated with dark and calm” (Beckett, 45), and with the redemptive courtesy of not being touched by the throng that he thinks surrounds him, before this is swept away and he continues on his journey. While the structure of this mythic form is less clearly articulated within the text than that of the hero’s journey, a number of references to the mythology of Christ are sprinkled through the story. From the “Shepherd’s Gate” and “bats like flying crucifixions” to the “colours of the Virgin” in the butcher’s window (Beckett, 31, 44), it seems that the narrator is striving to find a similar mythic calmative as that found by Christ: a redemptive death.

Having established the devices by which the narrator of “The Calmative” hopes to tell his story, we can now turn to the question of how this mythic form of storytelling may be capable of calming him. Beckett returns to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen in the first text from his later collection, “Texts for Nothing,” where it is further elaborated that this story “began unhappily and it ended happily, every evening, a comedy” (Beckett, 79). Drawing on the elements of comedic drama, in which the narrative resolves positively for its protagonists, this suggests that the story told by the narrator of “The Calmative” might have a calming effect because it too can resolve. Looking at the mythic narrative forms discussed above we see that these each have that possibility of reaching a positive ending; a fall can be redeemed, a journey can be returned from, a story told as if in the past can ideally reach the present. The narrator hopes that by telling a mythic story he can reach the calm of a definitive ending.

Another calming element of this mythic form of storytelling is suggested in “The Calmative” by looking at what specifically in his father’s story calms the narrator. It is not enough that his father tell him the story, but it has to be read “evening after evening” (Beckett, 30), without missing a single word or picture. What is calming in this story is its repetition, its familiarity. In “Texts for Nothing” the narrator says that he is “all ears for the old stories” (Beckett, 78); what makes his father’s story familiar, and consequently his own, is that they can draw on the repetition of familiar elements throughout the history of literature and myth. It is calming for the narrator to cast himself in the role of Dante or Christ because he knows these stories, and in them he can hope to find a similar ending for his own. The pictures in the story of Joe Breem, or Breen were already pictures of the narrator. By identifying with these “supernatural,” or at least heroic, literary beings from his cultural tradition, it appears that Beckett’s narrator may indeed be telling a myth in the full scope of Eliade’s definition. Telling his story as if it was a myth allows the narrator the calming effect of existing within an established cultural narrative.

But, having chosen to tell his story in this particular form, what makes a mythic narrative more calming for the narrator than a story set in modern times? What makes him long “for the tender nonesuch” (Beckett, 41), and for the shade of his wood far from the terrible light of the city? Though the narrator attempts to tell his story as if it were in another age, he admits that what he tells “this evening is passing this evening, at this passing hour” (Beckett, 28). He lives in the modern present, where “houses and factories darken the air, trams go by, and under your feet wet from the grass there are suddenly cobbles” (Beckett, 28). If a story set in the past is calming because it can hope to reach towards and explain the present, the present must be anxiety provoking because it can only continue moving forward without allowing the narrator to rest in a specific point in time. With the “scarcity of passers-by” and the “extraordinary light shed by the streetlamps” (Beckett, 38), the narrator is left to ask everyone he encounters what time it is, as if being able to fix himself in a specific moment will calm him. But when he finally is told a time it leaves him just as anxious as before. Even his father’s greatcoat, which would fix his story in the 1900s, has become a sleeveless cloak, perhaps indistinguishable from those worn throughout the ages.

The anxiety causing and alienating effects of modernity echo throughout “The Calmative.” The trams and busses run “as if underwater” (Beckett, 31), the houses and factories, even the people lurking behind their windows are described as if in a dream. Like in his fruitless quest to determine what time it is, the narrator describes these elements of modern life as being unrecognizable, unfamiliar and thus unsettling. Mythic narratives can be calming by presenting a repetition of familiar scenes and characters, but a modern story can only present the nameless goatherd and salesman, people sunk into themselves and all moving in the same direction. Even more unsettling is the narrator’s inability to locate the Shepherd’s Gate and constellation of the Bears. Without these recognizable, mythic elements, the narrator is unable to find his way out of the modern city into the calm of a familiar story. Though the narrator attempts to place himself in the woods of the chronicler d’Aubigné, or the posture of the poet Walther, no element of a modern story can replicate the familiarity of a literary tradition. It is only with the passage of time that stories become culturally accepted, and so the narrator is left to wander through a story that even he is not yet sure how it will end.

The strongest blow to the possibility of a calming modern story is its inability to achieve the structure of myth (though perhaps this also signals the narrator’s inability to tell his story as if it were a myth). The story does not have a recognizable beginning, instead of setting forth the narrator suddenly finds himself in a wood in which “no trace remained” (Beckett, 28) of his previous passage. Nor is there a struggle or initiation. The narrator says, “this evening something has to happen… as in myth and metamorphosis” (Beckett, 29-30), but despite his attempted interactions with the other characters no real heroic action takes place that might calm him. Even when the salesman grabs him the narrator claims that nothing has changed, and he wanders on looking for his moment of redemption.

As for a narrative return, the story “ends” with the narrator still wandering lost through the city. This lack of resolve can be taken as symptomatic of modern stories, because the present still continues to move forward without foreseeable end. In contrast to the contained form of the myth, Beckett presents us with what might be considered a definition of a modern story: the salesman’s story of a life that is “brief and dense, facts, without comment” (Beckett, 40). Though the narrator finds this story almost fairy-like in places the salesman corrects his mistake by explaining that he left his lover Pauline, who will only grow old and die. We do not find here the happy ending of a comedy, such as that ascribed to the story of Joe Breem, or Breen. There is no typical comedic ending of a wedding; there is no rebirth, no happily-ever-after. In this modern story of a life there is only divorce and then death.

Of course, for the narrator of “The Calmative,” a happy ending might be one that ends in his being able to die. But this kind of ending may only be possible in a story told through the traditionally familiar, positively resolving, and foundational elements of mythic narratives. The calming effect that the narrator seeks is otherwise unattainable in the anxiety-ridden and never-ending stories of modern life.


Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “The Calmative” and “Texts for Nothing.” Stories and Texts for Nothing. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967
Campbell, Joseph. “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968
Eliade, Mircea. “Myth and Reality.” New York: Harper & Row, 1963

Rewriting Reality

Yesterday I finished my classes for the semester, and despite the gorgeous weather drifting into the stuffy wooden room through the blue stain-glass windows, the students in my short story class were somehow excited to continue discussing the functions of literature. Debating Salman Rushdie's use of both magical realist elements and the English language in his collection "East, West" as a move towards a broader global perspective, one of my classmates asked why is any of this important to talk about, he's just a writer trying to make some money. Just a writer? Both my teacher and I had to bite our tongues, certainly one does not write in order to make money (just ask any aspiring author and many acclaimed ones). Something that we've been discussing all semester, through the writings of Poe, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, and Rushdie, is the way in which literature can present the expectations and conventions both of literature and of life itself back to the reader, reaching for ever larger perspectives on what it means to write, to inhabit a culture, to create reality. While not explicitly addressed in class I have been debating with my classmates over what I see as being one of the most important functions of fiction: that it can create reality, if even at the very least by suggesting new and other ways of being and perceiving the world and ourselves. If there's anything I've gotten out of this semester it is the recognition that writing has the power and responsibility to shape reality.

Of course, this has also meant that I have been entirely exasperated by the current trend in American literature, which for the past fifty years has been dominated by a "quotidian realism," that is, by snarky loosers sarcastically bemoaning the inconsequentiality of their everyday lives while trying to find moments of pale truth in the arms of their ex-wives, addictions, and academic pretensions. The biggest difficulty I see in this approach to literature is that it only confirms what is base and common about real life, while utterly refusing to allow any grander emotions or events room to occur. Personally I think that while art can be a mirror held up to reality, I also agree with Bertolt Brecht that art can be a hammer with which to shape it. My biggest philosophical influences here would be Robert Anton Wilson's quote that "reality is what you can get away with," and the Hashashin mystic Hassan ibn Sabbā's apocryphal assertion that "nothing is true; everything is permitted." While realism may claim to reflect everyday life, we forget that all it does is reflect literary trends and arch/stereotypes. No story is "true" outside of being a story, and consequently, one does not have to be bound by any proscriptions against that which is not typically real or true. Take Borges' work for example, in which fictional worlds ultimately overpower conventional reality, showing that it itself is nothing but a fiction of language.

According to the structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov in his brilliant discussion of the fantastic as a literary genre, the supernatural, or even just the hyper-real and magically real, can function in narratives to express those things that might otherwise be inexpressible, whether cultural taboos or a Daoist ineffability of reality itself. Certainly psychoanalysis has taken the modern place of saying the unsayable, so that one could today write about rather taboo subjects in a realist style, but it still does not address the more imaginative aspects of what might be possible in the world. Not that one has to include magically real elements to do this, but this function of imagination is the place at which myth and folktales function. Italo Calvino suggests the way the earliest storytellers took the elements of life around them, caves, hunting, tigers, reproduction, etc. and recombined them in all possible ways, creating both a boundary on what had been seen and done before, and the possibility of other things that hadn't and either could be desired or feared. In myth, dreams are born, and the ability for culture to advance. This process is still continuing today. The human imagination in stories has more recently created both the internet (Vernor Vinge's "True Names") and the modern totalitarian state (Orwell's "1984"). If these aren't everyday enough examples for you, consider the now ubiquitous and almost bromidic myth of the American Dream. Thousands of people believe that they can raise themselves from rags to riches, and many actually do, precisely because in the late 1800s Horatio Alger Jr. happened to write a particular kind of dime novel in which that was possible. Maybe it was possible before that, but due to his stories it seems to many to be much more possible now. I know that my own life was intimately shaped by reading certain kinds of heroic fiction as a child (what always impressed me about Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series was not a desire to actually ride dragons, but the utter integrity of her characters in the face of societal pressure and change). I can only think of the current generation of children, who in reading the "Harry Potter" series may grow up with an increased sense of the possibility of true magic. Who, on the other hand, wants to grow up to be one of the bitter anti-heroes of a tepid realism, who himself is only a a second-order shadow of the much more interesting and articulate underdog, Henry Miller?

This post is of course not meant to be an exhaustive essay on the topic of rewriting reality, it is more along the lines of a tentative aesthetic statement or a whispered call to action. I'll only briefly point people to Grant Morrison's idea of art as a hypersigil, or to Paulo Coelho's idea of the Personal Legend. Why was his book "The Alchemist" on bestseller lists for the past year? Because he is telling people quite simply that they can create and live out their own stories. And if even just one reader believes him, then he has done his job as a writer. Never doubt that you too can be living in the greatest story ever told.

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

In his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise,” Borges claims that art “requires visible unrealities” (Borges, 207). Of all the combinations of words that might resemble the universe, there are some stories that seem to be the real world in which we live. Yet however real we think these fictive worlds are, Borges argues that there are structural weaknesses that show them as false. Like the paradox of infinity, these “crevices of unreason” (Borges, 208) allow the reader to refute the existence of the world, or worlds, within the text. Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can serve as an example of this creation and refutation of the fictive universe. Though Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius are clearly the visible unrealities within the story, their presentation through a narrative device of magnified or distorted reflections allows them to become crevices of unreason, through which the “reality” in the story is shown to be equally fictional.

At the beginning of the story the narrator states that he owes “the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” (Borges, 3), that is, to a reflection of language. This phrase is immediately reflected in a quote the narrator’s friend had found in an encyclopedia article on the imagined county of Uqbar, and then reflected again when we learn that his friend had misquoted the text: “The visible universe was an illusion… mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe” (Borges, 4). It seems characteristic of Borges that this quote within the story refers to the narrative device at work in the text as a whole. We are told that this quote is the only interesting passage in an otherwise boring, which is to say believable, article, fortuitously found in the back of a single copy of a reprint of another encyclopedia. Here we see the mechanism at work: the Anglo-American Cyclopedia is a reflection in which is found the unreasonable crevice of the additional pages. The pages on Uqbar are a reflection of a believable country in which is found the dubious quote. The quote is reflected in its misquote and in its peculiar significance is found the possibility of an imagined country. What might have been an otherwise realistic evening is now cast under the question of Uqbar’s existence.

One could imagine this movement of reflection and distortion being carried on to infinity, but it seems that Borges settles on three reflections as enough to convey the effect. This narrative device achieves a paradox similar to the argument of the third man presented in “Avatars of the Tortoise:” If two men are placed in an archetype, “one would have to postulate another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth…” (Borges, 203). By positing multiple fictional realities in his story, Borges manages to suggest that the number of possibly created worlds is endless; a set that includes and invades what seems to be the conventional reality.

Each of these visible unrealities is reflected and distorted from the one before, and even their manner of discovery functions through a similar telescopic mechanism. Tlön is first mentioned in the article on Uqbar as an example of the kind of literature from that imagined country, literature that “never referred to reality” (Borges, 5) but to other imaginary realms. However, beyond being just a reflection of the vaguely believable Uqbar, Tlön is magnified into a reality where the entire language, aesthetics, and philosophies are vastly different from our own. Similarly, the discovery of Tlön reflects that of Uqbar in being in an encyclopedia discovered by a friend. But what was a mere four-page article in a conventional encyclopedia has now become an entire volume in a set all related to the imaginary world, and what was Bioy Casares’ hazy recollection of Uqbar becomes the mysterious book mailed to Herbert Ashe after his death, and fortuitously discovered by the narrator.

We find another set of distorted reflections in Orbis Tertius, literally the third world created in the text. At first only referenced on a seal in the front of the Encylcopedia of Tlön, a letter from one of Herbert Ashe’s friends reveals that Orbis Tertius was created by the secret society who constructed Tlön, but was a whole planet written in one of the imaginary languages of that already imaginary country. Though little detail is given of this third world, besides that it is in a language consisting only of either verbs or adjectives, the device of distorted reflections used in the story might lead us to try and imagine a world infinitely more unlike our own than even Tlön.

It is at this point that reality breaks down in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Having been presented the first crevice of unreason in the form of Bioy’s misquote, the world in the story is now confronted with a potential infinity of counterfeit realities that threaten to enter into that world. As the narrator relates, artifacts from the imaginary Tlön make there way into the “real” world, followed by re-editions of the imaginary encyclopedia and the teaching of its languages and history in “real” schools. “The world will be Tlön” (Borges, 18), the narrator states, and in a world where such visible unrealities are able to exist from distorted reflections of reality, it is perhaps impossible for the universe to be anything but another fictional construction of language.



Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Avatars of the Tortoise.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edit. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2007. Pp. 3-18, 202-208

[I am posting this essay due to James Gyre's excited comments over this masterful story from Borges. Everyone please go out and read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."]

Synchronicity of the Fantastic

As I noted before, I've been doing a lot of research recently on the aesthetics and techniques of using the fantastic in literature, and as often happens when I'm doing a lot of research on the right subject that I need to be studying for my life, there is a moment when synchronicity takes over and it seems as if the universe is just throwing the right texts at me.

In the most recent issue of Writer's Chronicle was a rather interesting piece about the function of and methods for workshopping Magical Realist literature. While I have a deep place in my heart for the writing's of authors like Marquez, I have already realized that Magical Realism isn't what I personally am going for in my writing. As a genre it has a specific place in time as part of the post-colonization of South American literature, and as such writers trying to emulate that genre are only going to be able to do just that (though of course one can always learn from what works, and for me, anything that calls into question the mundanity of reality is certainly worthwhile to learn from). Secondly however, Magical Realism is characterized by the acceptance of magical events within the everyday reality of the story. Not like fantasy where the magical is common to a separate, created universe, but a magic that borders on and is inherent to our own. This unfortunately takes away from these supernatural events a prime quality, and one that is central to its use in fantastic literature, of being able to affect the characters in a story and readers of it. That is, those things that are magical or uncommon to our world have the possibility of moving people to fear or wonder, and call into question the reality in which they live as opposed to confirm it.

There also happened to be in the Writer's Chronicle an article on the work of Italo Calvino, who I've only barely read (a rough stab at "Invisible Cities" a couple years ago), but who the article painted as being primarily concerned with the question of the use of myth and the fantastic in literature. And so the next day while browsing the used bookstores of North Oakland I came across a collection of Calvino's essays "On the Uses of Literature," which is full of aesthetic musings that strike rather close to my own heart on writing, that it does after all have the power, and responsibility, to change the world. Among one essay on the fantastic as a literary form (which mentioned the name of Todorov, whom every source I turn to these days refers to), Calvino gave some examples of what for him is fantastic literature, and note that for Calvino, the most exemplary library is that which embraces works on the periphery of the established cannons of literature.

And who should Calvino name but that master of the fantastic possibilities of childhood, and one of my own favorite little-known authors, Bruno Schulz. I discovered Schulz myself after watching the short films of the Brother's Quay, whose own aesthetic of twitching dolls and dark constructed spaces is a pinnacle of the aesthetic of dreams, particularly their short "The Street of Crocodiles," based on Schulz's story of the same name. Recently we watched The Brother's Quay's latest full length work, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes," which could be summed up as a kind of tale in which Felisberto, "a pianist, is invited to lonely country houses where wealthy maniacs set up complicated charades in which women and dolls change places." This quote also happens to be a description from Calvino of the work of Felisberto Hernandez, a Uruguayan fantasist who influenced Marquez, Calvino, Julio Cortazar (another current under-appreciated favorite), and it presumably also the Brother's Quay. At least I now know who to put next on my reading list, though also to follow Borge's influences, and those of many American fantastic writers, I should also be looking into the stories of G.K. Chesterton.

The Art of Inscription

"To write a poem is to attempt a minor magic. The instrument of that magic, language, is mysterious enough. We know noting of its origin. We know only that it divides into diverse lexicons and that each of them comprises an indefinite and changing vocabulary and an undefined number of syntactic possibilities. With those evasive elements I have formed this book."
-Jorge Luis Borges, 1985

The Dream

"When we renounce our dreams
we find peace and enjoy
a brief period of tranquility,
but the dead dreams begin to rot inside us
and infect the whole atmosphere
in which we live.
What we hoped to avoid in the Good Fight
-disappointment and defeat-
become the sole legacy of our cowardice."
-Paulo Coelho

Clockwork Texts

I have to admit that I often feel like some what of an impostor writing literary critiques. Not that I couldn't tell you what is going on in a given story, but as a writer I am often more interested in unveiling an author's techniques, so that I can learn to use them (or not) in my own work. I am currently working on a critique of the use of mythic narrative forms in Beckett's "The Calmative," which while interesting in what it has to say about the literary use of mythical themes, is less fascinating then what seems to have been Beckett's implicit literary goal: to point out all of the conventional expectations about how narrative works, and then roundly demolish any chance that his stories will follow these conventions. Throughout the height of his prose career in the '50s, spanning from this story across his "trilogy," Beckett routinely looks at the typical narrative devices, plot, setting, characters, action, narrative voice, and then strips them away, so that by the "Texts for Nothing" there is literally no recognizable place where these elements can exist in the text. Certainly I could try and write a paper on this authorial move, but I find myself almost fascinated by the way these works have laid literary devices bare, so that I can hardly read any piece of writing without saying, oh here's where the author is using x expected device... It is like suddenly stumbling into the backstage of writing, the pulleys and costume changes of storytelling, and I almost want to hoard these techniques like they are some occult secret. The other day I was talking with my fiction teacher about the early authorial move of apprenticing yourself to a few authors, writing your own versions of their work in order to collect a "bag of tricks" that can be later dipped into in your own writing. While I haven't ever exactly written someone else's story I am always on the look out for these mechanical underpinnings of fiction.



More recently I was reading Borges for class and in the introduction found an interesting passage which described Borges' perspective on the elements of fantastic literature, something near and dear to me in my detestation (or at least boredom) with stories of the realistically everyday. While the fantastic in art is often categorized as an emotional reaction to the super- or un-natural, where unlike magical realism where the fantastic is accepted as bieng a part of everyday life, fantastic literature maintains a sate of anxiety or wonder in the face of the more than real. An, oh god is this really happening feeling that seems to be all but avoided in modern literature. Borges on the other hand takes an entirely different look at what makes literature fantastic, suggesting four specific mechanisms: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by the dream, the voyage in time, and the double. Personally these elements are much more familiar to me from doing most of my writing from my dreams. The almost meta level symbolism in which every event, setting, object, character etc. stands for the consciousness of the protagonist, the chaotic moment when what seems like an everyday world falls apart (whether into thwartedness, false resolves, or unexplained yet emotionally vexing illogical incidents), and the reflection of scenes and symbols as if they were harmonics of themselves. Of Borges' mechanics the one most ambiguous seems to be the voyage in time, which can not just reflect the ordinary meaning of a temporal plot, but seems to suggest a larger adventure, or, a stepping outside of one's day and age within the story. Of course, one again, I could use these elements as a sort of map or template to deconstruct the writing of others, but instead they will go into my trick bag, so that someone someday may be shocked to find them in my own work.

Contemplating Circles

In my Religion in Asia class today we watched a film called "The Land of the Disappearing Buddha," in which the narrator, who looks like an older businessman, wanders around Japan to different temples asking almost childlike, yet extremely pertinent questions of the religions he encounters. gazing at the lavish gardens of a Zen monastery, he asks that for being a form of Buddhism, where is the Buddha in Zen, and how does meditation, as a form of personal enlightenment, fit in with the Buddhist concept of saving all beings. After laughing, the Zen monk says that in Zen, everything is the Buddha, by doing zazen you recognize that there is no distinction between you and all the other things in reality. Consequently one can go about your day helping others with this enlightened perspective.

(As an aside, the psychological benefits of meditation are now being charted by science: "Over time, brains develop what is known as a ‘set point’. If a person's set point is tilted to the left then the tendency is for lots of activity in the left frontal cortex, making for a happy person. If it is tilted to the right the opposite occurs. But the set point can change: volunteers who undertook a short course of Buddhist-style meditation moved their set point to the left." [Times Online via Digg])



This identification with the whole is best illustrated by the Zen calligraphic practice of drawing a circle. You may think you are an individual point, but really you are part of a continuum that contains everything, and furthermore that circle of everything is really just an illusion, containing nothing. I recalled that my most intense and true spiritual experiences have centered around that recognition of being part of everything, and that the reality of which I am a part is often little but a flimsy mask, like a soap bubble. I left the class and wandered through the rain, feeling joyous, at ease, smiling at everyone with that secret that there is no distinction between us, and it was all a pleasant, fleeting, dream.

Projecting Synapses into the Otherwise Chaos

The other evening I went out to a local bar to hear my friends Nikki Allen and Renee Alberts read poetry between bands. As always, and despite the ubiquitous conversations throughout their sets, I was deeply impressed by these ladies' words, though I couldn't tell you exactly why. When I got home, Sophie asked me about the reading, and if I could offer anything in the way of critique, to which I replied that without a text in front of me, and even then, sometimes poetry really escapes me. To be honest, I have not read very much poetry, certainly more than the majority of Americans, but only enough to know just how little I know about it. Give me a novel any day. This became a rather interesting discussion on the authority of critique, and Sophie suggested that it might apply to any art: she likes music, but there are a much broader range of bands I appreciate, because being a musician myself I know the skill/ technique/ references/ etc. that go in to making songs. Sophie was trained in dance, but despite a vague understanding of the human body through doing yoga for years I could not be able to tell you anything about a dance performance. Personally I think this situation is most clear when you look at an activity such as juggling. When you see someone juggling five flaming clubs you think, that is amazing, and it is. If you happen to have learned how to juggle three balls, the feat of flaming clubs is even more amazing, and perhaps to some it even seems impossible, because you know just how preposterously hard it is to juggle anything. But the more you learn the more you are able to start talking about someone's techniques, and perhaps learn some of them yourself.

Of course, this isn't to say that offering critique is an inclusive thing, that one has to be initiated into that secret club of poetry, music, juggling, in order to understand and talk about what is going on. As baffling as art is for some people it is not stage magic (and even that one can learn). All one has to do is to read closely, to listen or watch, to frame an argument. But this is also not to say that there aren't some people, from having read a lot and listened for a long time, that actually do have authority in their particular field. Whether unfortunately or not, to paraphrase Orwell: though all perspectives are interesting, some perspectives are more interesting than others. Especially since there is an oh so fine line between perspective and opinion, and we can bring nothing with us to a reading outside of our own store of assumptions and references. It would seem then that if one wanted to offer an interesting, or at least articulate, perspective, one should attempt to become informed in a wide variety of cultural activities and perspectives. Either that or play the fool, and say the most asinine, obtuse things that somehow strive towards profundity.