Paprika, by Yasutaka Tsutsui

This is also exciting: Made it into an incredible animated feature by Satoshi Kon in 2006 that I longed to read the original of, Paprika, the surrealist dream/detective novel By Yasutaka Tsutsui, is finally being released in English translation!

"The setting is Tokyo's Institute for Psychiatric Research. Major breakthroughs are taking place, using new machines which access the minds of sleeping patients. A couple of top psychoanalysts are in line for the Nobel Prize for this revolutionary innovation. One is the young and beautiful Atsuko Chiba, who uses the equipment at night to cure some of Tokyo's leading citizens of mental trauma. Atsuko has to be discreet because there are strict restrictions upon the machines, so she disguises herself as an alter ego – the eponymous Paprika. Unfortunately, back at the Institute the machines are being misused by her enemies on the staff, and the most powerful versions have gone missing."

[Edit: Of course it only seems to be available in the UK so far, and they won't ship stateside...]

On the total reaction to life

"Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, "What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?" It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have?"

[William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902]

Manifestoes from Beyond the Real

Artists from all times have attempted to escape or transcend the constraints they saw in the culturally constructed realities in which they found themselves, often through the penning of manifestoes as statements of purpose for the new realities they wanted to instead create. I have also often struggled with this desperation against the day, in this age against the quotidian, the snarky, the postmodern, the realism that is "just this," when clearly there is so much more to living that can not be contained by pale reiterations of last century's visionaries whose words and worlds no longer apply, at the edge of the future, the crumbling edge of what may be left for us, the necessity of human survival let alone all the possibilities of the imagination, which are vast and untapped except by scattered madmen and genre writers. Despite the beauty of the manifestoes given below though, I have been trying to formulate a new perspective, not against reality or realism, because obviously we do live in the real world, if a limited constructed one, but a sense of reality that contains all that, all the horror and wonder, all the magic, dreams, the future, alternative histories and galactic alignments with the stars spiraling out of all expected orbits, the sense that every day, every moment, is an ultimate moment, reality being pushed to the furthest edges of where we have been, with the realization that we are only now barely learning just how far and fantastic we can go.


"The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded." [from Rudy Rucker's A Transrealist Manifesto]

"Leave it all, new... the entrance is in the area and the entry into adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero of heroes unveiled. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience fired, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions. If the poet is interfered, the reader will have to interfere... The true imagination is one that dynamite elucidated, injected into other microbes esmeraldas imaginations. In poetry and whatever, the entry must be in the area and the entry into adventure. Create tools for the subversion of everyday life. The stations of the subjective human being, with its beautiful trees and huge obscene, as laboratories of experimentation. Fix parallel glimpse situations and so heartbreaking as a large scratch on the chest, in the face. Analogy endless gestures. There are so many that are new or when we notice, although we are doing / watching in front of a mirror. Stormy night. The perception is opened by an ethical-aesthetic brought to the last." [from Roberto Bolaño's "Primer Manifiesto Infrarrealista" (translated by Googlebots)]

"We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds." [from F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto]

"The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity... Taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking, has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams" [from Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism]

"So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence." [from The Situationist Manifesto

Like a Holy Hand Grenade

And this is just crass:

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent President George Bush top secret wartime memos with cover sheets that mixed Scripture and battle photos to cast the Iraq invasion as a holy Christian crusade. Rumsfeld, not a man who wore religion on his sleeve, appeared to be trying to manipulate - or curry favor with - the Bible-quoting Bush, according to an explosive story in GQ.Some Pentagon analysts worried that if the memo covers leaked, they would inflame the Islamic world, undercut Washington's Arab allies and bolster those who claimed America was out to Christianize the Muslim world.One official was so disturbed he kept the report covers and recently gave them to GQ writer Robert Draper, a leading chronicler of the Bush administration."Commit to the LORD, whatever you do, and your plans will succeed - Proverbs 16:3," appeared on a April 1, 2003 report over a photo of a U.S. soldier near a highway sign pointing to Baghdad. The next day, U.S. forces reached the Iraqi capital."Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps the faith - Isaiah 26:2," appeared on a April 3, 2003 memo...

The Convergence of the Dynamo and the Virgin

I'm currently rereading, well, trying to finally finish Gravity's Rainbow, before Pynchon's newest novel comes out (a 60s noir novel Inherent Vice) and wanted to share these angles on Pynchon's trajectory and early influence:


"The larger principle of the V, the allegory of increasing death and dehumanization as the Modern world begins the downward slope of the parabola of “gravity’s rainbow,” the parable of self-destruction inscribed in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Distinctions, political and otherwise, disappear, revealing a broader concept, the V, the idea of convergence of possibility into certainty, of diversity into uniformity.

"We discover in “Entropy” the origin of Pynchon’s symbol of the V... "Henry Adams, three generations before [Callisto’s] own, had stared aghast at Power; Callisto found himself now in much the same state over Thermodynamics, the inner life of that power, realizing like his predecessor that the Virgin and the dynamo stands as much for love as for power “ (280). Pynchon may have found the title for V--and the concept of the V as allegory--in Henry Adams’s Education. In the novel V, the V is embodied in a female principle of death, the Lady V. In Gravity’s Rainbow, it is the V-2 rocket.

"Pynchon also shows in “Entropy” that he has copied Henry Adams’s historical method and that his novels are “historical” in the sense that, like Adams, he rewrites history to deal with events and signs that conventional history tends to ignore.

[from allegoria paranoia on Pynchon's early short story Entropy]


"But to [Henry] Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel... Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

"[The virgin and the dynamo] were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love. The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force -- at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.

"The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force, as the mechanist might prove by losing it, and nothing could be gained by ignoring their value. Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done; the historian's business was to follow the track of the energy."

(This one also supports what I would call Pynchon's apocryphal use of history and culture) "Historians undertake to arrange sequences, -- called stories, or histories -- assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves required to know what they were talking about."

[from The Education of Henry Adams]

The whole idea of a converging point of history seems similar to Bolano's use of the year 2666, a date set far enough in the future that the meaning of current events is like a shadow leading toward it. A similar concept is the singularity; technological, astronomical, apocalyptic, or otherwise. Pynchon's beauty is setting the horror and sublimity of any inevitable future against the possibility of that future also containing love, Adam's virgin. From Gravity's Rainbow: "The whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Throuh the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs."



[from the internet]

The Arch Nemeses

Red Arrow looked out over the Metropolis, his cape languid in the stale boardroom air. Through the dirty ninety-ninth story window he couldn’t see anyone on the street below, but he knew they were out there, the bustling crowds, the criminal element. For every happy, law-abiding citizen walking the well-lit streets there was a nefarious opposite, like a shadowy doppelganger already out stealing purses, raping, murdering, heedless of the police lounging ineffectually around the corner. What were the statistics this year? It made him shiver. Back home, in his small Michigan town, Red Arrow knew all his neighbors by name; it was enough to catch the ne’er-do-wells just to appear in a flash, your mask and gauntlets shimmering in the righteous streetlights. He didn’t know how they did it, Fox Fire, Green Scorpion, the Queen of Hearts, these big city superheroes, who were only just as human, justice chained to the costume. But that’s why, he supposed, they founded the World Superhero Registry, so that the various local crime-fighting networks and justice societies could work together, patrol all the turf, make the world a safer place for everyone.

And safe the world they did. That’s why the whole Registry was gathered here in Doktor D’s penthouse lair, to celebrate a hundredth capture, Black Arrow busting up an illegal dumping operation down in the bay. The room was decked in her colors, black and purple streamers draped over the Dok’s criminal watch charts and armory, Nix and Nostrum slow dancing like black cats or ninjas, Geist Green Scorpion, and The Eye comparing the cut of their trench coats, swapping tips on not getting caught in elevator doors. Red Arrow it seemed was the only hero not enjoying himself – maybe Black Arrow too, collapsed tipsy in the corner singing old Wobbly songs in her self-congratulation – wondering, what evil deeds are being performed in our absence tonight?

But wait, Doktor DiscorD is also discontent, scrolling through data on his Disconsole computer system as if it were about to catch fire, and then leaping up! Do you ever wonder, he captures the room, red and blue goggles especially piercing the arrow on Red Arrow’s forehead, why none of us has an arch nemesis? Everyone shifts gazes. Captain Jackson looks queasy (that fake public service motherfucker).

It’s simple really, Geist begins, the government told us not to pry into torture, piracy, or the subprime market if we wanted to get licensed… Tothian adds: I’m after Bin Laden.

Wrong answer! The Doktor, sewing his casual chaos. No one’s threatened us yet, our existence, you see? Any nemesis must be opposed to the very supernature of our being. Take these guys, for instance, these mad scientists. Wait, what’s up Dok? Everyone rushes in closer.

No, it’s just a bunch of professors and respected physicists deary, the Queen of Hearts titters. But look, they’re studying paranormal phenomena: precognition, remote viewing, telekinesis. I tell you it’s the White Visitation all over again, Darpa spending four million on “neural-signal” communications research.

Silent Talk? What’s this, some telepathic Pynchonian phantasia? Fox Fire furious behind his faux fur mask. Amazonia growls. We’re superheroes God damn it, not ghost hunters!

They’re about to turn on each other, the party collapsed to a superbrawl, when Red Arrow yells Stop! and flashes the team with a red-gelled flashlight beam – a neat trick, he’s found, the advantage to get a solid punch in, like to sock the Captain right now for that one time… but hold it! – The Doktor’s right. Listen, if they develop mind-reading soldiers, Johnny Law who can stop bullets with his bare hands… we’ll be out of business!

It’s worse than that, Doktor DiscorD dons a maniacal smile, if mankind can learn to tap into the powers of the cosmos then we will no longer have the right to call ourselves superheroes. We will be no more special than any man or woman, glitzing up in costume to perform a citizen’s arrest. We must strike first, our arch nemeses await. Who’s with me?

The Bird Watchers (for Renée)

Little black eyes tremble nervously in the grass, always nervous, always trembling, always prey to the above – blinking – on a tall branch hooded eyes scan the ground, spot the vole, prey, predate, a tension in the claw and feather, to strike – blinking – beyond the camera, a falcon web cam, blue eyes barely catch the peregrine in flight, the beauty of nature’s butchery for the beholder, turn to their companions – blinking – did you catch that? No, we were watching the bald eagles, did she catch that mouse? It wasn’t a, let me play it again so you can see – blinking – eyeless, roving, the camera catches the bird watchers, zooms from street view to aerial, ascending geo-synchronous orbits (we know where you live) – blinking – all the data trapped by satellite, coalesced in a thousand retinaless, searching, sending, the visions of a lifetime in digital format – blinking – spiderbots serving the servers, into the empty iris of the IRS, FBI, tax companies, social networks, Google, empty neural tubes, crawling, webworks, who’s – blinking – watching – blinking – in a back room of the Audubon Society, attentions are measured like Big Brother or reality TV, to monitor which species no one might miss, the prey, the forgotten – blinking –

The Pandemic

By the time Rosita and I got to the Recovery Room the Pandemic had already begun: all the hip young bods dancing in their tightlegged latex, the girls sporting the new antimicrobial kid gloves, in varying shades of neon like floral radiation warnings, clapping and waving in the sterile blue lights. DJ Grippe was spinning the latest off N1H1 Records, Afro-Iberian dance beats that’d make your heart skip, the club the perfect vessel to blend all the strains of young international health into one rollicking party. You can see it in the eyes, every one of us still living, not like the alleys full of victims we had to pass on our ride here, choking and swelling in the endless dry winter, spreading the disease molecules with even one careless breath.

We got drinks – thin-necked bottles sipped through straws like delicate proboscises – and found a table with an empty table on either side of it so we could breathe freely within the current World Health Organization regulations. Rosita made sure to swipe each surface with a sanitary napkin before she sat down. Without actually touching anything I gave the appearance of leaning against the wallpaper, velvety winged pigs this month, the design sported by all the bartenders. It would all be burnt tomorrow and decontaminated for next month anyway. The owners of the Recovery Room tried to keep up with the latest fashions, since the first club to host the Pandemic fell into quarantine for hosting what would have been an ironic barbecue, except everyone fell sick. You couldn’t get kicked out of here for anything faster than an errant cough or sneeze. And everyone was watching, because the latest fashions were swathed around our faces.

I pointed them out to Rosita: The Japanese folkpunks in their austere Kabuki and Kami prints, several clowns and mock-stars (famous politicians, actors, etc… the Barack wasn’t so popular this season after a failure to provide national healthcare), it seemed the abstract contingent had done away with representing the mouth altogether in favor of Mandrian-like lines. There was even some old rocker sporting the Rolling Stones lips over his own, everyone with their projected desires plastered like smiles across their plastic faces. Rosita sipped discreetly through the side of her mask while I explained how the first international influenza pandemic wasn’t nearly so colorful, at least, you didn’t get your vaccine in a shot glass at the door. It’s all a big blast, don’t you think? Not as contagious like the Red Death, now that would be some gala!

What about her? Rosita asked, pointing a violet trembling glove across the room. Wandering through the crowd, stumbling as if actually ill, and leaving a wide empty void around her as she moved, was a girl clearly breaking some taboo or illusion of sanitary. We could hear it in the whispers behind the masks around us. Look at that shaved head, so last century, so chemo-chic. And those eyes, gaunt, horrific, what does she think she’s carrying? And then she turned our way and we saw what was causing the stir. Of everyone in the Recovery Room, this girl alone was not wearing a protective facemask. But no, it was something else, a thick scar running along the exposed collarbone as if some vital gland had been removed, and there, at the base of her thin-necked throat, a growth like a rotting blossom, dead set on consuming the otherwise unblemished skin from within.

Does she want to catch the flu? Rosita asked as the girl moved away, her delicate ungloved hands trailing on every dirty countertop, a pariah in this land of hermetically sealed emotions and collisions. She couldn’t go home like the rest of us and wash away the germs and be well again. I couldn’t get my mind off that tumescent flesh, so real, so malignant. I’ve never seen a neck so smooth and sorrowful. A reminder of the anarchy trembling at the cell walls of each of us, an endemic that can’t be hidden or held off by any pretty face. No, I sighed, that’s cancer. Don’t worry it’s not contagious. Ugh, Rosita shuddered, I wish they’d kick her out anyway. You ready to dance yet? Hold on, I said, and then brazenly pulled off my mask to drain the rest of the bottle, even though people stared at my own naked uplifted cheeks, pallid from months without sunlight or fresh air.

Upcreation

[from The Technium]

"Upcreation is the term for the peculiar, profound, and still mysterious way by which complex structures appear in the universe. By complex structures I mean galaxies, stars, planets, life, DNA, termite mounds, rain forests, human minds, and the internet. These complexities tend to "emerge" from simpler systems (clouds of gas, pools of molecules, nodes of communication) in a fashion we broadly call self-organization. But in the right circumstances self-organization can often also be legitimately called self-creation. Without an outside agent, the parts cohere into a new organization that brings forth an "emergent" level or self not present before. Since the new emergent level of complexity encompasses, without destruction, the previous "lower" levels of organization, I call this self-creation of higher levels "upcreation." A set of entities lifts itself up to a new level of organization in a new entity. By this perspective, DNA chemistry "upcreates" life, and life upcreates minds, and a mind might upcreate a supermind. Upcreation takes place in smaller increments as well: Honey bees upcreate a hive, protists upcreate multicellular organisms, corals upcreate a reef, shoppers upcreate a market, web surfers upcreate Google PageRank.

But while this emergence usually "happens" in an almost passive way in the past, we humans would like to be able to make it happen on command. We would like to upcreate artificial minds and artificial life. However, much to our dismay, upcreation turns out to be something very hard to imitate. For some goals, like making a human-like artificial intelligence in computers, bumping a system up to the next level of complexity has so far been a total failure. A large part of the difficulty lies in our lack of a good understanding of what happens during emergence. What does it mean to make a new level, how do we recognize one, and what are its preconditions?"

The Creative and the Insane

[from The Independent]

"At first glance, Einstein, Salvador Dali, Tony Hancock, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson would seem to have little in common. Their areas of physics, modern art, comedy, and rock music, are light years apart. So what, if anything, could possibly link minds that gave the world the theory of relativity, great surreal art, iconic comedy, and songs about surfing?

According to new research, psychosis could be the answer. Creative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis. Such traits may allow the unusual and sometimes bizarre thought processes associated with mental illness to fuel creativity. The theory is based on the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the healthy and the mentally ill. Rather, there is a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits without having the debilitating symptoms.

Mental illnesses have been around for thousands of years. Evolutionary theory suggests that in order for them to be still here, there must be some kind of survival advantage to them. If they were wholly bad, it's argued, natural selection would have seen them off long ago. In some cases the advantage is clear. Anxiety, for example, can be a mental illness with severe symptoms and consequences, but it is also a trait that at a non-clinical level has survival advantages. In healthy proportions, it keeps us alert and on our toes when threats are sensed."

Culture may be encoded in DNA

[from Wired Science]

"Knowledge is passed down directly from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way.

Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations.

“Song culture can emerge ‘from the egg,’ as it were, if one allows for multiple generations to elapse,” Mitra said. ”In a similar way, we may ‘grow’ our languages.”

Though there are approximately 6,000 different languages in the world, they all share certain structural and syntactic elements. Even when a language arises spontaneously, as it did in the 1970s among deaf school children in Nicaragua, it adheres to these stereotypical human language features.

The study’s findings might have implications beyond language to other culturally-transmitted systems, said evolutionary biologist and cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch, at the University of St. Andrews.

“We can think about both birdsong and human culture — especially language but including other aspects of human culture, like music, cuisine, dance styles, rituals, technological achievements, clothing styles, pottery decoration and a host of others — in similar terms,” he said. These culturally-transmitted systems must all pass through the filter of biology."


This is good to know... that long after contemporary communications technologies have absolutely butchered language, our ability to say things clearly and beautifully may one day reemerge from our genes.