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.

borderlines of the imagination

I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manual. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.

I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a necessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pavic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.

Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyone's quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.

Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all worn out marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.

digging through pages of time

Long days of welling memories between the mechanics of living. engineering the sounds and sayings, looking for work and a roof, flashes of each time i've looked for work, a roof, strum and song and all the harsh grating of details. i almost got a whole house for cheap, but not cheap enough, so instead i went to goodwill to look for books to sell and came home with a stack for my own library. i can't help myself. of course there were some excellent finds. a copy of PKDick's Exegesis, a book on missing myths in america, a pocket edition of the surrealist poet Apollinaire's "alcools" who coined the term surrealism (in french unfortunately, but it was only a dollar. these texts can not be lost to time).

the greatest find, comparable to a DJ's record crate digging, was a copy of the Comte de Lautreamont's "les chants de maldoror" which i've been meaning to acquire for awhile and never expected in the snooty shadyside thrift shop. hailed as a masterpiece by the surrealists (it contains their founding quote "beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table") this prose poem was written in the late 1800's by a mysterious youth who died at the age of 24. many of the writers i admire, and the ones they admired, relied heavily on this text, which from the sound of it falls in the same type of journalistic literature as my two favorite novels, rilke's "the notebooks of malte-laurides brigge" or sartre's "nausea". where the "hero" of the notebooks is obsessed with and sees through Death, and in "nausea" with the existential horror of Emptiness, Lautreamont's anti-hero Maldoror is obsessed with Evil and the absence of god and how this is acted out (in apparently disturbing and imagistic passages that almost had the book banned for obscenity when it was first published). i look forward to reading this when i'm done with Henry Miller's "Plexus", along with the copy of Yeat's symbolist text "a vision" which i also recently tracked down. now if i can only find a copy of stephen mallarme's poetry in the trash...

lautreamont is also credited with saying: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author's sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one."

and

"Poetry must be made by all and not by one."

advice to Sartre

"all the time, one thing.
tuesday does not exist."
-siga

it's good to remember at the end of a long day that sometimes the universe is more meaningless than you.

here's to adventure

"for the most banal to ever become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc. etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk alot of this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she'll be old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time."

-Sartre, from "Nausea"

on the books

and just because I approve of this meme going around, the 20 books that have most impacted my life (in no particular order):

1. Carlos Castaneda - Journey to Ixtlan
2. Crimethinc. Collective- Days of War, Nights of Love
3. Hakim Bey- The Temporary Autonomous Zone
4. var.- The I Ching
5. Octavia Butler- Parable of the Sower
6. Douglas Hofstadter- Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
7. Ayn Rand- Atlas Shrugged
8. Joseph Campbell- The Power of Myth
9. Jorge Luis Borges- Collected Fictions
10. Jalaluddin Rumi (Coleman Barks trans.)- Essential Rumi
11. Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.) Duino Elegies
12. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea- The Illuminatus! Trilogy
13. Jean-Paul Sartre- Nausea
14. George Orwell- Nineteen Eighty-four
15. Victor Hugo- Les Miserables
16. Kurt Vonnegut- Cat's Cradle
17. Lewis Carroll- Through the Looking Glass
18. Jostein Gaarder- Sophie's World
19. John Clellon Holmes- Go
20. Marshall McLuhan- Understanding Media
and though there are countless more books I want to include I honestly can't leave these two out in shaping my approach to living:
21.Bill Whitcomb- The Magician's Companion
22. John C. Lilly- Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer

It pleases me greatly that most of these books are fiction. There's nothing like a good story to really affect one's outlook on the world. Especially if your attention span for nonfiction is virtually nonexistent.

flungness and the primacy of spiritual experience

In his now infamous(ly incomprehensible) philosophical text Being and Time, Heidegger talks about the concept of flungness, the primal feeling of finding ourselves seemingly flung into the world and having to continually reinterpret what it means to find ourselves there as beings who are and have to be. Now, if you were to only read a definition of this concept, it may not seem so readily understandable, even translated out of Heideggerian into common English. But, if you were to find yourself flung into the middle of a street with a car bearing down at you at remarkable speeds, it becomes more apparent that yes, you are there, and have to do something about it. And quickly if you don’t want to be run over. Granted, most of our experiences do not seem to require such immediate interpretation, but that does not diminish the feeling of flungness that accompanies every moment of directly experiencing the world and having to interpret ourselves in it, even if that flungness is mostly subliminal. I wake up, and for a brief moment do not know who or where I am. I wait for the bus in the snow, it shows up late and I don’t have enough change, but then some stranger offers me a ride from out of nowhere. These are moments in between knowing the world in which we feel ourselves flung to the wolves, moments that bring into question everything we thought we knew enough of to get by on.

When I was in school I didn’t think I knew everything, though there were some moments when I felt pretty sure of myself. But everyone else seemed a lot surer, not because they actually were, but because they had read enough to back up their assumptions about reality. The teachers were particularly guilty of this, and seemed to suggest that this kind of book learning was enough to get by in the world. At the time I was a young punk, not at all satisfied with sitting in class all day listening to some old white dudes lecture while there was a whole world out there to explore. Even if that meant finding a new place to go get high during lunch. It wasn’t enough and I knew it, so I dropped out and moved out, hoping to fling myself into situations and experiences that might teach me in a more direct manner. Though I didn’t learn advanced calculus or how to write a master thesis out in the world, I did find myself confronted almost every day with questions of love and communication, politics and survival that seemed to reflect a much more basic understanding of human experience in the world. Small basic truths surprisingly not taught in schools that helped define my own flung place in this world better than anything I read in a book. Not that I didn’t read, but now it was less to learn something new than to find terms and arguments in which to express my own experiences in, which often would not have made any sense without the experience to back them up. When I found myself in philosophical discussions I couldn’t quote passages to those who had studied them extensively, but I tried to enlighten the conversations with personal anecdotes that portrayed the abstract points. It took a while to get to that point, and I often found myself having to rely on abstracts in order to fill in the gaps between my experiences and knowledge; but the more I was in the world the less I had to rely on the ontological maps of others. The understanding was fostered from my own interpretations.

But then I began to experience things that were far outside any interpretation I had found read about so far, synchronicities and acts of magic that did not seem to stem from any logical cause and effect. I was now flung not in front of a speeding car but a charging seven-headed beast that forced me to not only interpret how I would get out of the way but where it came from in the first place. Despite my wonder at this new spiritual dimension the world was rapidly taking on I also felt a terror comparable to Sartre’s idea of Nausea, like when the character in his novel looks at a single stone and feels himself flung beyond any possible interpretations. The Romantic poet Blake expressed this when he said "To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." Except that such abstracts as infinity and eternity were utterly meaningless in face of this direct experience and only seemed to hide the experience itself. In the same way the texts I read on these type of magical world views only seemed to hide the experiences of it behind abstract mappings and symbols, and not say what it meant and felt like to perceive so intensely.

Poetry is one of the few literary forms enamored by direct experience and split second reinterpretations of being flung into the world. Images are called up to reflect the world in a single grain of sand and flung back into the face of the unknown. But even here there is the pull to use abstracts and well-worn expressions, even to describe the vastness of the spiritual experience. Blake and the other Romantic poets fell into this, relying on symbolic interpretations of old religious texts to augment feelings that seemed too ineffable to put into words. About a hundred years later Rilke tried his hand at spiritual poetry, but broke from the Romantic’s approach of grandiose iconography to show how the spiritual breaks through in the small details of our daily lived experience. This wasn’t a new approach, as Rilke was directly influenced by the 13th Century Sufi poet, Rumi, whose body of work is filled with the idea of finding god in wine, laughter and sorrow, in the face of a friend and the turning of stars. Here were images that spoke directly to my own experiences of the world’s mystery, and offered me a voice to describe what I also felt, a light sliding through the features of all things that was recognizable only in giving myself to it fully. The spiritual experience became a continual feeling of being flung beyond all interpretation, experience that never needs disclosing because we are always here in it.

Not that I still don’t try and ground myself in attempts at understanding, but the desire to pull myself out of the air no longer feels so necessary, or the precise words so important.

***

It is night and all around you
strange shadows dance beyond
the flickering streetlamps.
One approaches in the dark
and for a moment you think
it is your death, beautiful
and mysterious in the twilight.
As you watch, in fear
and more wonder than a single heart
can hold, it takes form;
a tree, a beggar, a lover,
any of the known things
that might stumble towards you
in the night.
Suddenly you laugh
for it is a face you recognize
from each night before;
your own, reflected in the dark
glass of an empty storefront.
Who says your death
will not look that way too,
flung so suddenly in your path;
and will not your relief
at finding yourself there
be like finding yourself
each time you look in a mirror?

Dying is only a metaphor
for each moment you realize
you are still alive.
But it only happens once.
Living is to die
over and over again,
the knife's edge
of finding yourself there
always pressed close
against your chest.
Will you flinch away
or fling yourself bodily
into its embrace?

Only the young and insane
want to die so readily,
the feeling of blood pushed
so close to the skin
draws them out of themselves
and into each other's arms.
They cut their hearts out
of the mirror's glass
and polish them in starlight
so they can find themselves
in the middle of the night
and quickly die again.