The Unlimited Story Deck – Artist’s Statement

“I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?” -Laurie Anderson

As a storyteller and theorist on the role that narratives play in our lives, I am concerned with how we produce stories, particularly in our contemporary, hyper-mediated age. We are exposed to narratives everywhere we turn, from the news and movies, to the expression of our memories and daily experiences. Despite this overwhelming abundance of narrative forms, it seems that people often take in stories passively, and do not think about how each of us are continually narrating the world around us. The uncertainty over the future of print media and the Internet’s allowance of the production of rapid and potentially low-quality narratives point to a pressing need to encourage people to continue to learn and enjoy the art of good storytelling. To this end I have created a game and technology, called the Unlimited Story Deck, which can be used to highlight the ways in which we construct narratives, both individually and as communities, and encourage people to tell and enjoy telling new and quality narratives.

There is a myth that that the authorial process is a challenging, mystical, and solitary craft. On the contrary though, everyone is telling stories all the time; the ability to form narrative connections between diverse concepts in our lives may be one of our most rudimentary abilities. Scott McCloud, in his Understanding Comics, suggests that we make such intuitive narrative connections when making sense between the panels of comics . We recognize patterns and desire causal or associational relationships between the contents of our experience, regardless of what those contents are or the contexts and mediums in which they are encountered, just as in comics we don’t need to be told how to interpret the variously arranged and disjointed panels. The Unlimited Story Deck works by presenting its users with a variety of such juxtaposed concepts, from which we can recognize and express our narrative connections.

But what are these contents or concepts we recognize and construct narratives from? The Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander believed that all reality was constructed from one underlying substance that he called the Unlimited, essentially a storehouse or database of all potential qualities that could be intermixed and expressed in the world . While this was subsequently disproved as a valid physical theory of the Universe, it may serve as a metaphor for the field of storytelling, in that all narrative realities are constructed from the intermixing and expressing of the unlimited storehouse of conceptualized language. Specifically, we find in stories concepts for characters, settings, events, objects, and dynamics, which are intermixed and expressed in a variety of ways. Each card of the Unlimited Story Deck presents one of these types of storytelling concepts, which can be played in a variety of ways to construct narratives.

While one of my aims is to see how we tell stories outside of expected forms or mediums, (otherwise how might they be novel), it seems we can tell stories from concepts because they are familiar or recognizable from our experience; we know the associations and trappings and how they might be used. There are through the wealth of human narratives certain types of stories that are told again and again, and which anyone who has ever read a book or watched a movie might immediately recognize. Like Anaximander’s Unlimited, one imagines a database of all available narrative types, a technology that Heidegger would call a “standing-reserve” of concepts , which reveal these concepts for us to use in story creation. For the Unlimited Story Deck I have collected such recognizable types of content, which should allow its users to more readily and enjoyably create narratives. Though the form of a deck is limited, physically by the need to shuffle the cards, the permutations of narrative connections between any of these concepts is as unlimited as the human imagination.

While I believe our ability to form narrative connections is intuitive, telling stories still takes work. As media theorist Espen Aarseth suggests, texts are machines for the production of narrative meaning that require the input of a human user to make them operate . Even traditional narrative forms like the novel require some amount of feedback and interpretation from the reader to make sense of a story. On the other hand, this ergodic feedback can be fun, when viewed as games that encourage us to enjoy the act of problem solving or narrative resolution . While it does not present the kinds of goals typical of games, the Unlimited Story Deck is intended to induce the same kind of fun when played by randomly generating concepts that we have to express as narratives, and as such stands in a tradition of storytelling and card games that require interaction to form narrative connections.

Aarseth notes that one of the oldest books, the Chinese I Ching, makes use of discrete nonlinear/random methods for being read, producing 4096 possible distinct readings from the permutations of its symbols . A similar and more direct antecedent is the divinatory system of the Tarot, which presents its users with randomly drawn cards that each contain a concept or archetype from which a reading is constructed. Some important aspects of the Tarot to note are that 1). The archetypes are drawn from familiar or basic situations in human life, 2). Provide open guidelines for the spatio-temporal arrangement and reading of the cards, and 3). Ask the reader to consider the cards and their constructed narrative as a representation of the reader and their personal associations to the cards’ contents.

This last point becomes important when considering another antecedent: that of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Though many actions in RPGs are decided through the chance of dice rolls, this kind of game’s fun comes primarily through the story that the players and game master construct and express from the randomness of events and charts of possible outcomes. The players are encouraged towards this act of narrative construction because they identify themselves with the characters in the story. While the Unlimited Story Deck could be used in a similar, self-representational way, it seems that this identification between reader and character may be an integral part of how we interpret stories: by imagining ourselves into the situations and relationships presented these become real for us. Many of the cards in this deck have thus been addressed to the user to encourage their involvement in the stories that can be constructed.

A last few antecedent forms to consider include collectible card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, where players place cards on the table that each represent different characters or forces operating on each other. While this may look the most like the Ultimate Story Deck, collectible card games don’t generally encourage narrative creation and have very particular constraints of game play and goal-situations. Another card game worth mentioning though is Fluxx, where the cards played change the rules and end-situations of the game. This is closer to the player relationship to the cards played in the Ultimate Story Deck, but once again without the use of narratives. Lastly is the card game 1000 Blank White Cards (which I have yet to play, and so can’t speak freely about how it operates), essentially blank cards drawn on by the players to make up the game as it goes along. The Ultimate Story Deck seems very similar to this, but with a preset range of cards and a focus on narration somewhat more similar to the Surrealist storytelling game Exquisite Corpse, where a narrative is made up by people passing around sentences to be finished or continued.


This project is still unfinished, the cards are being designed and should hopefully be done next week in time to start play-testing how the Deck works. More details forthcoming.


1. Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1994) 62-4
2. Philip Wheelwright [Ed.] The Presocratics (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 53
3. Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology. Basic Writings. David Farrell Krell [Ed.] 322
4. Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University) 20-1
5. Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041203/koster_01.shtml, 11.30.09)
6. Aarseth 9

Literacy Narrative

For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:


Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.

When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6^th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.

Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.

I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.

An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.

In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.

As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7^th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.

Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.

Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.

Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.

Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.

Infinite Jest vs. the Importance of the Tome

Having hurtled through "Gravity's Rainbow" earlier in the summer, I decided to continue my roll of large-scale fiction and tackle another tome that's been on my list for half a decade, Infinite Jest, a task made easier by knowing that countless others are also slogging through David Foster Wallace's masterpiece. I am currently at the halfway point, some 550 pages in, and since that's beyond the Infinite Summer reading schedule I won't say anything specific about the novel's plot and instead focus on its extreme length. One might wonder, in an age of increasingly brief and fast communications, when narratives over 140 characters are considered too long for our casual attentions, why anyone would read, let alone write, a novel as thick and dense as a dictionary, despite the quote that "the enormous novel of technical, scientific, or historical knowledge [has] become the highest credential for male writers." Besides smarmy erudition, what purpose could such massive stories serve?

Personally I have always been partial to these sprawling and epic books, perhaps due to reading Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as a child, followed by an unabridged copy of "Les Misérables" in middle school, and have recently come to feel that what Tomes (as I distinguish them as a literary form) do is allow an author to create and represent a fully realized world or reality, far beyond the ability of lesser fictions. Certainly the novel as a form was originally invented (at the end of the 19th Century) in order to represent reality as it is, ie: Realism, though it never quite did this. Even contemporary realist novels fall into the same problems of being able to present only selected facets of reality (and hence are more artificial than realist), relying on current cultural assumptions to convey what there isn't room to say about how worlds work, and preferring to deploy the quotidian and inconsequential as the most available sign of "real life," while completely neglecting to address other, larger, and just as necessary (if not more so) aspects of human existence, as if reality only happened in small towns, bars, or foreign countries. Some examples: historical/global change (Pynchon and Neal Stephenson's more tome-like works), a person's lifetime (Eliade's "The Forbidden Forest," Ellison's "The Invisible Man," Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"), Familial generations (Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"), the fantastic/mythic ("Lord of the Rings" and other fantasy series, serving as an escape (in Tolkien's sense) from being too close to events so that we can see them on a larger perspective), or the worlds hidden and horrendous that lurk just behind the ones in which we live (Delaney's "Dhalgren," Bolaño's "2666). As Roberto Bolaño suggested, though I can't find the source, the quest and the apocalypse are the two most prominent themes in American literature, and I would argue in stories in general since long before stories were written down. And it seems preposterous that one could even think to tackle these themes, much less represent a real world, in anything less than 800 or so pages. The novel on the other hand can only capture a subset, most predominately the individual (person or location). Short stories best communicate a series of events or Poe's unified effect, and flash fictions the immediacy of an event. The tome meanwhile can convey all these at once, while at the same time placing the character in a local, national, and global milieu to which they have to respond, in a world that is not just fully articulated but is itself changing alongside (and at best reflective of) the character/s. What the shorter forms dangerously lack is the ability to remind us that we live in such a total world, with all a worlds' problems, peoples, beliefs, circumstances, etc, beyond the immediacy of our easily distractable and entertainment-starved attentions. One could argue that the briefer our narratives become the less they are able to represent to us humanity and its deepest struggles on that necessary ultimate level, leaving us to forget the past beyond our last twitter or status update. If the written word has a future it is in striving to keep representing reality as it really and vastly is: all-encompassing.

So how does Infinite Jest work as a tome? It clearly encompasses a lot, but this far in I don't think it encompasses enough. The world represented is on one hand a futuristic satire of the West, where the Americas are one country, years are subsidized by corporations, and everyone is still as hung up on pleasure as they were last century. But at the same time the actual action (if there is any) is set in a tennis academy and halfway house in Boston that already feel outdated, presumably late 1990's era, leaving the represented world feeling somewhat contradictory and slapdash, as if these disparate ideas were thrown together to satisfy DFW's theme of Entertainment rather than because they formed a cohesive, realistic whole, like most other tomes I've read manage. Secondly, though the novel takes place over a period of ten years, most of the action takes place in a period of several months, the last of which is told first, so that the reader is not given that epic sense of broad-scale changes taking place over large swathes of time (we only get these events in flashbacks), but instead a flattening of event-ness, where the action focuses solely on the minutiae of everyday life, so that it reads that nothing of narrative importance is happening at all (except for in what up to this point seems a series of subplots). Third, due to this focus on the quotidian unjuxtaposed with the epic or kairotic, told from the POV of multiple quotidian characters, I am hard pressed to believe that any of these narratives add up to something. Though supposedly they do. Though I have a sinking suspicion I already figured out what in the first hundred pages. Lastly, and most relevant to Infinite Jest's infinite length is the banal, unmusical, longwindednes of its language. DFW broke the primary rule of engaging storytelling and chose to tell descriptions instead of show events occurring, which is frightfully slow to plow through in search of the moving bits. Whole pages are spent describing the structural integrity of a roof for instance, or sentences will repeat information just given a sentence before, as if DFW thought the reader too stupid or distracted to remember what he just said, most of this description seeming to serve no other purpose than to showcase the erudition of the author and/or the hyper-intelligent main protagonist (though all the other characters speak this way too). Not even to mention the colloquial use of the word "like," which is not nearly as funny or enduring as Pynchon's use of "that," for instance. And then there are the endnotes, almost a hundred pages worth, which I respect for their contribution to Ergodic literature, though in this case these notes are often even more irrelevant details, could have just been included in the text, sound faux-academic like some of the more ghastly footnotes in Danielewski's "House of Leaves," or can't even be left unread/add another perspective like the extra chapters in Cortazar's "Hopscotch," because IJ's endnotes contain actual information about what's going on in the story, often more useful information than is ever presented in the main body of the text, which just comes off as unadoringly postmodern. In fact, it seems that the first half of the book is DFW's attempt at creating this world (with how this world was created being the payoff?), while he never seems capable of just letting the created world do its thing, as if he was afraid that if he stopped tinkering the whole thing would fall apart.

One thing Infinite Jest does well is that all its diverse characters/ruminations do in fact relate to the main theme of Entertainment (though admittedly a Western upper/middle class view of entertainment). This is particularly poignant in the Marathe/ Steeply dialogues, which are my favorite sections so far and could have been a much more streamlined philosophical document or cultural critique. I could care less about privileged tennis prodigies, and only find the AA digressions interesting due to knowing people in the program (though these bits are deeply informed, they are told in an ironic/hopeless manner almost counter to the kind of spiritual prescience and egolessness necessary it seems to really tackle the issue of addiction without mocking it, which leaves me thinking its no wonder DFW erased his own map last year if this was his worldview, or a worldview he was motivated enough to write over a thousand pages on). Nevertheless, I am still curious to see what happens, to see how and if it all ties together, and hope that my perspectives on the tome's style and discontinuities are proven wrong. If not then at least I will have the satisfaction, as an ardent reader, of having gotten through it, a satisfaction like that of mountain climbers who have reached the summit of a particularly challenging peak. As a tome, at least Infinite Jest is a challenging peak, and not just another narrative molehill.

open endings

I have been reading for a long time, pouring through stories at an unprecedented rate since I cold put sentences together, even being precocious enough to read the unabridged version of "Les Miserables" by 7th grade. But up till now, literature has always moved in one direction, from the front cover to the back, and I wrongfully assumed this was the only way to tell a story.

In the past several months I've discovered a near infinitude of story telling mechanisms, stumbling through several cases of what is called 'ergodic literature,' that is, texts that require a non-trivial effort to traverse the text, more than just the movement of eyes and pages from left to right, the reader performing the bare minimum necessary to interpret what they are reading. Several entries ago I mentioned Milorad Pavich's "Dictionary of the Khazars," a novel told through encyclopedia entries that one can read in any order, assembling the sense of a narrative for themselves. More recently I have fallen into what is perhaps the most important work of this type, Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch," the story of several expatriate intellectuals living in Paris, debating semantics until several disturbing events drive them apart. Beyond a beautiful sense of language and rhythm, Cortazar sets up fifty-six main chapters, which can be interspersed with over a hundred more following various cues in the text, and drastically changing the meaning of the work on a second reading. "Hopscotch" has been hailed by some as the originator of hypertext fiction, though it was written in the late 60s, and requires that one actually has to search through the book for the next chapter. After this I picked up Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which while not quite as impressive literaturely as "Hopscotch" was endlessly more ergodically fascinating. The 'story' is really a critical text about a film called the Navidson Record, which may or may not exist, written and annotated by a blind man and found by a young punk who adds his own twisted footnotes and storylines to the already winding text. The core narrative itself is about a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside, passages leading to evolving corridors, stairwells, labyrinths, and the text itself reflects the characters movements across tunnels and abysses. I couldn't put the book down, felt myself almost being consumed by it as quickly as I was consuming it, and when I finally finished it I was struck by the realization that the way I approach literature will never be the same.

For years now, I have been trying to sort through my dreams in order to write a novel out of them, and continually come upon the problem of how to organize them, how to present material so that it maintains it essentially dream-like quality. But all of this stood within what I thought were the bounds of conventional literature. Now however it is like I stepped through a door into a terrifyingly large space, full of possibility of what it means to tell a story. It reminds me of being a child, and climbing up to the top of a lighthouse, the closed stairwell spiraling with the familiarity of the Everyday, but on reaching the top you are confronted with the sky, vast, inviting, a sense of space suddenly reoriented from safety to terror, clutching the railing at the edge of the known while still wanting, desperately, to learn how to fly. I think about my work now, already at such an early state, and am struck by the sheer possibility of where it could go, how it could be conceived. Not quite the writer's fear of the blank page, but a fear of what could be put on it. Mallarme, in his poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," itself a masterwork of non-linearality, with the words spilling in literal waves over the pages, describes this feeling of facing the page as being "cast into the constant neutrality of the abyss." Anything is possible, but then the pen falls and something happens, but between those two just what is open to anything, fluctuations of mood and light and desire.

Not that it is necessary to tell stories in such roundabout ways, narrative abounds with ways of breaking that sense of constant time and meaning; flashbacks, delay. Both Pavich and Danielewski's latest ergodic works recieved horrible reviews (but as they are about respectively the tarot and the history of revolution, both themes that intrigue me, I will probably read them anyway, at least to seee how not to tell this kind of story). But there is still sometyhing fascinating about having to flip through a text, back and forth as cues take you. It is much more like how the mind works, not in some linear train of thought, but full of connections, associations, symbols that relate to each other in countless different ways, always suggesting much more than just what is on the neurons around them. Dreams may appear to be narrative in scope, but this is only a 'secondary revision,' the collecting of the images themselves being the key to their understanding, always pointing to each other and to something deeper, hidden beneath the linearality of events. Awhile back I had a dream in which I was teaching a school of witches a game about how history is created. I placed a chair in the middle of the room, then arranged progressively wider arcs of chairs around this center. One person in the front tells a story about an object on the chair, which like an endless game of telephone gets passed back through larger groups of people, each time getting further and further removed from the 'truth' of the event, everyone of course having their own idea of what truth is, until their are countless stories surrounding any one object or event. Somehow, this seems more true to me than any one history ascribed by one person (usually the victors), as we all have our own perspectives and an ability to decide what that means to us. Of course, I may have read too many choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a child.

choose your own life

Sublime coffee shop chaos. Wet weather’s so thick I’m still picking up the wifi single from my house several blocks away. I finally slept, and dreamt last night dreams that seemed almost innocent and pulled from life compared to the others of late; sneaking into festivals, playing music with gypsies on rooftops, saving lovers and loosing them again, swimming through piles and piles of books. Dreams that don’t have to mean anything.

Last night finally watched "I Heart Huckabees." Someone’s been snooping around in my subconscious again. I thought my life was the existential detective comedy. Wait, or was it a tragedy? I can’t remember anymore. The meaningful interconnection of all things, vs. the inevitability of human drama. Does it even matter what is true? Only if we want it to. My dreams, the deer and the helicopters, picking up my collapsed bookshelf and finding that the two most prominently in the spot where everything fell apart were Crimethinc.’s anarchist cookbook "Recipes for Disaster," and a book on chaos theory, playing viola on the roof of that party and remembering that the first major role I acted in high school was in Fiddler on the Roof as Perchick the student revolutionary who upsets everyone’s simple lives and is banished to Siberia before everyone flees the pogroms, my family fleeing the pogroms in Russia centuries ago and me becoming an anarchist, the growing police state here and the war everywhere else, people asking for prayers that Hurricane Katrina doesn’t destroy New Orleans and everyone’s lives there but no one mentioning that it could destroy the oil and gas pipelines in the gulf that supply thirty percent of the country’s fuel, making new friends and wondering what their lives are like when I’m not around. Do these things matter, is their some subtle thread that connects them? Yes. No. Maybe.

Nothing is true unless we want it to be, everything is sacred unless we choose to ignore it, we are the only ones who can give ourselves permission to think or feel or act in any certain way. We are the authors of our own lives after all, and as some famous writer once said, what makes a story is not the plot or characters but the specific details that the author finds important enough to include, and the connections they make between them. What is important to the party and festival hoppers whose faerietale lives consist of getting drunk and laid as often as possible? What is important to the middle class Americans caught up in working to survive and wondering how come they are not rich and famous and important like all the politicians and pop icons? What is important to the artists and revolutionaries and all those who pay enough attention to the world that they feel driven to change it, even if in some small subtle way? What is important to you? Are you the hero of your own epic world-shaping story, or just a minor character in someone else’s cosmic barroom joke told so many times that it’s not even funny anymore? There is no such thing as fate, only giving up control and succumbing to random external events as if they mean nothing.

What adventures do you choose to live, what dreams do you choose to make real? When you reach that dark night at the end of your life will you be able to look back in satisfaction and say that it was the greatest story ever told? What about at the end of the day when you lay down to sleep, will all the trials and triumphs of a lifetime be crammed into those waking hours, crammed into just one hour, crammed into every single moment? This is your life after all. Are you living it?