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.

Letters on the Night

Another night and no sleep, the black winged heat beating the skull into reticulated and endless queries. That trembling line between ritual and addiction, this humanity of angels, or the angelization of certain people at times to aid our desperate prayed for needing.

Reading Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Intriguing. After many fancy flips between the odd literated chapters, I suddenly realized I was reading, not just the ideas or narrative, but the flow of language as its own content. A thread of meter and assonance I had not picked out before, not completely in Cortazar's court, as I've been reversiting a faerie-tale I haven't wrote on in ages (Itelf a gnarled romp of synchronated cryptomorphoses). Honing gist to the mill of microphonal pages, I wanted to dream tonight, and write them out before work. Instead I get letters and rhyme schemes and for the third time should just go to bed.

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.

uncertain joys of the mind

"I too was happy, because I exist. I left the house with a great goal, which was, finally, to get to the office on time. But on this day the very compulsion of life participated in that other good compulsion which makes the sun shine in the hours stipulated by the almanac, according to the longitude and latitude of the places on the earth. I felt happy for not being able to feel unhappy. I walked down the street in a leisurely fashion, full of certainty, because, after all, the office was a known factor, the people in it known factors, all certainties. It shouldn't be surprising that I felt free, without knowing what I might be free of. In baskets set on the sidewalk along the Rua da Prata, the bananas for sale under the sun were of a grand yellow.

It takes very little to make me happy: that the rain had stopped, that the sun is shining brightly in this happy South, bananas that are more yellow for having black spots on them, the people selling them because they talk, the sidewalks of the Rua da Prata, the Tagus in the background, blue streaked with green turning to gold, this entire domestic corner of the Universal system.

The day will come when I will not see this any more, when the bananas on the side of the street will outlive me, the wisecracking women who sell them, and the day's newspapers, which the little man has spread out from one side of the corner to the other. I know very well that they will be different bananas, that the women will be different, and the newspapers will have, for anyone who bends over to look, a date different from today's. But they, because they do not live, last, even if they are different, while I, because I am alive, pass away even if I am the same.

I could make this moment more solemn by buying bananas, since it seems to me that all of the day's sun is projected into them as if it were a spotlight without a lamp. But I'm ashamed of rituals, symbols, of buying things on the street. The women might not wrap them properly or sell them as they should be sold because I don't know how to buy them as they should be bought. They might find my voice bizarre when I ask the price. It's better to write than to dare to live, even if living is nothing more than buying bananas in the sunlight, as long as the sun lasts and there are bananas for sale.

Later on perhaps... Yes, later on... Another man, perhaps... I don't know..."

from Fernando Pessoa's "The Book of Disquiet"

heroes of the imagination

In response to the criticism of my last entry, it was not meant to be a well thought out essay as much as a rant or ramble just to get out some thoughts that had been building up in my head. With my eminent return to school in the fall I've found myself reading more and thinking more and needing to express my ideas, even if they are not yet coherent (certianly that last entry would not be a very good school paper!) nonetheless, feedback of any sort is always welcome. I've found that I can best articulate myself by "thinking outloud" and having others say, no, that's not it at all.

That said, on the subject of how children play, Sophie and I have been talking a lot about this recently, recalling from our own childhoods how we would take whatever movies or games we were exposed to and recreate them in our own play, rewriting plots of "labyrinth" or "star wars" in order to place ourselves into the action, which listening to descriptions of modern kids playing World of Warcraft seems like is a continuing tradition. How many times have you read a book and said, I really wish I could have been there? Despite the content, or perceived lack of content, in modern play, what remains essentially the same is the use of cultural plotlines in order to offer a jumping off point for the imagination. Whether reading old mythology or playing video games referencing that old material, a child might imagine themselves in that world, in any world that is more interesting than the one they daily live in, and if this kind of play is carried out through their lives could foster a deeper internal reality later accessible for artistic excavation. Indeed that is what I've found to be the case for myself. I watched Star Wars close on a hundred times growing up, and even though the specifics of the "arthurian space cowboy" aesthetic have lessened over the years, the deeper mythological themas have continued to hold importance in my psyche, even as a framing device for other stories. I imagine that Jung and Campbell were not trying to write out specific plot lines for others to follow exactly, but to find common themes that humanity has dealt with in its attempts to create coherent narratives over the centuries, which is what made Star Wars so successful in the first place (as well as the lasting resonance of punch and judy, or tom and jerry, or whichever two antagonistic figures are swinging sticks at each other on tv these days). At heart what is present is a conflict between forces, ideas, family, the need to find a place in the Universe or a sense of meaning to one's actions. It's not so much that today's media spectacles are meaningless in a world where things were once meaningful before, but that there has never been any meaning outside of what we have given to our experiences. The fin de secle writers in France decried a similar lack of meaning at the turn of the last century, which they addressed through various surreal, existential, or symbolic means, but each one an attempt to give personal meaning to modern life.

It is not surprising that superheroes and law-detectives have become the modern culture heroes, they are the figures that people can relate to, they are the legends that strive to rise above the Everyday and take real action in the world. Even if they don't exist, their possibility is enough for some even one kid in some small town to say, I could do that one day, I could do better than that. Or we see books coming out, on the other end of the spectrum from "the Da Vinci Code," where the heroes are intentionally irreal, mythical beings and monsters, who even more than the culture heroes address real human issues of the 21st century. Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red" retells the myth of Herakles and Garyion, as if they were a homosexual couple going on vacation together, with all the monster's issues with being red, winged and unable to address the world except from behind the lens of a camera. Or Cary Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town" (which I heard about last night), whose main character is the son of a mountain and a washing machine and has a set of nesting dolls as brothers, and is trying to install free wireless in Toronto (Doctorow is a large proponent of Copy Left). Despite the element of the postmodern and absurd, such characters serve to focus the attention instead on a deeper psychology or perspective of what it is to feel different in an increasingly homogenized world. That in an increasingly wired existence where everyone has a voice, and every voice sounds about the same (like a large buzz from the vanishing bees), we are all still unique, and dealing with the same sense of existentiallity that earmarks such ancient mythic texts. Indeed, the classical gods ran around drunk and fucking each other more openly than the modern culture heroes do, and were worshiped for it.

The Vienna School vs. the Postmodern playground

Yesterday after packing the car to leave tomorrow i spent the afternoon reading Herbert Silberer's "Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts," which I picked up synchronistically at Caliban's the other day. Silberer was part of Freud and Jung's set in Vienna, and his work with alchemical symbolism predated and influenced Jung's own mounmental theories. The book is an intepretation of an old alchemical parable, called the Parabola, through Freudian dream interpretation and then integratively through alchemical and spiritual symbolism, showing how the analytical pshyco-sexual interpretations can not do justice to material that seeks at its heart to rise the spirit above the gross matter of the individual mind.

Perhaps more interesting than the material itself is the ease with which Silberer refers to a variety of world mythologies, and almost takes for granted that the readers (his intended audience being Freud's set), are already familiar with the process of deconstructing the texts of mythology and folk-lore as if they were the dreams of an individual, including referencing the quote that "dreams are private myths and myths collective dreams" to someone else other than Joseph Campbell and predating the esteemed mythologist! Despite the continuation of this process in Jung and Campbell's work, the idea of interpreting cultural texts as exemplery of the collective psyche seems to have fallen into disfavor (if it was ever in favor), and psychology chooses to focus more and more on the depths of the individual psyche, leaving cultural criticism to the literary critics. This work however points to an older use of this technique that predated psychoanalysis as the aim of the Vienna school, that collected stories, myths, folklore, whether by the Brother's Grimm or adventurous anthropologists, in order to deeper understand the human psyche on a whole. Indeed Freud could not have given such prominence to the Oedipal complex if he was only looking at one person's (or his own) psyche, and not the preponderence of such themes in world mythology surrounding the dismemberment of the parent/ god figures.

Perhaps the closest we come to such "collective psychology" today is found in movie or book reviews, and then only in mortification over the snarkiness and self-referentiallity of the post-modern paradigm (I was wholly disgusted by a recent review of Shrek the Third in the New york times, which could only comment on how the movie was a parable for the ongoing battle between Disney and Dreamworks). Even modern myth-makers like George Lucas, whose original Star Wars trilogy was an homage to his friendship with Joseph Campbell and based directly off Campbell's writing on the hero's journey, have fallen prey to cutesy characters and in-jokes designed solely to hook a young crowd that can not relate their experiences to a deeper mythological spectrum than pop-stars and punch-and-judy style pratfalls. Many of the children in Sophie's after-school program talked incessently of World of Warcraft, which though like Harry Potter and Narnia are fantastic in scope, and many older RPG video games like the Final Fantasy series referenced mythological names and themas, this kind of mythology is only a surface aesthetic, and further removes children from looking closer at the deeper themes and dramas of the original source material. Pretending you are a sword-swinging elf does not replicate the psychological depth implied by the heroic labours of Hercules (and not the Disney version) nor Theseus's struggle through the labyrinth, which are in themselves only metaphors for rising above the twisted and dangerous depths of the individual mind.

lightning, trains, and dreams

We got to Sophie's house in a choir of lightningbolts, always my favorite force of nature, and ran inside to find her back door wide open. Thankfully nothing was missing, nor strange lurkers about the house, and we sighed, thinking it could have only been one person, her naive but well-meaning housemate, Mr. Crowe. Shortly he came in, woozy from an acupuncture session, and with no clue about the back door, but carrying a painting he'd seen at the Shadow Lounge of a silhouette image over a starry sky of a figure jumping between the cars of a train. On being asked about it he said it reminded him of a dream he recently had of running along the top of a train to escape a werewolf, until dawn broke and the wolf reverted into a man he could tackle, while an old dorky boyscout chum who he hadn't thought about since his childhood looked on. Immediately I thought of the series of train dreams I had last summer, upon moving back to Bloomfield where the trains howl through the night, particularly the one, after watching Dead Man for the first time, in which my twin brother and I were riding on top of two parallel trains, like the sandworms in Dune, in the old red and green overalls of the Mario Brothers. We reached out our hands and gleefully pulled the trains in to each other, causing them to crash and fall into a wooded ravine, followed by a daring escape from the law in the coffin of my anima's dead grandfather. Mr. Crowe thought it interesting the whole death/ rebirth theme in my dream, which comes up quite often, and went on to explain how he can often tell how he's doing in his life by the appearance of dogs in his sleep, and how he reacts to them, as he had once been mauled by a canine when he was a child. In all my years studying dreams I hadn't heard this theory, of how one reacts to images of one's primal (primary) fear in dreams being a gauge of their power, but I certainly can see that in relation to my own dreaming. For all the years of watching the world end in endlessly horrible ways, I've reached a point where in the dreams I accept it, and upon waking reach quickly for my pen, excited for the new material that is infinitely more interesting than dreaming about work.

flash of momentum

It's been awhile again. life takes hold and suddenly i forget that the internet ever existed. let's see... i got into school, starting august 23, and realized just how much work i have to get done on my own projects before i won't have time to work on them. so i've been writing, for 3-6 hours a day, typing up every single dream i ever had, and then deconstructing all the symbolism; places, characters, objects, actions, shades of ligth and color, impedences and other strange psychological effects, so that i can begin seeing exactly what my psyche contains and how to put it all back together into this novel. beyond that continuing madcap research, deconstructing the occult symbolism in jodorowsky's "holy mountain" for a friend's disertation, inventing new techniques, recording more of my past, playing music, being in love. every day shows me so much, i am learning at such an incredible rate, about how i work, what things mean to me, what it means to be in love again, to be a friend and son... and i'm not even in school yet. suffice to say that it is hard to find time or desire to post here, since the work i'm doing is very different than that which is just updates of my life for other people.

perhaps you'll hear from me later...