Right. so. All I have to do now is figure out how I do this thing I want to do.
Do you ever have on of those realizations where you find yourself, quite unexpectedly, caught in the crosshairs of every choice you've ever made? For better or worse, you have one of those great cumulative moments at the apex of Life Thus Far?
In his signature way of inserting self-conscious commentary into his own narratives, Kundera describes his stories like spiderwebs, strings that pinwheel out into the big picture and meet at the core. When you tell a story you aren't inching along a straight line, you're following those strings back to their center, one at a time until you've traced the entire web, or most of it.
Isn't it funny how people perceive Death as a conclusion? As if all points in a human's life are only plot devices building to that final moment of resignation. As if every street taken and every choice was ultimately to resolve life as one violent end, or one quiet end, or one pitiful end, or one abrupt end.
If I walk out of this building right now and get squashed by a falling scaffold (as one neurosurgeon was crushed in that exact place three years ago), is that what my life meant? How I die is no summary of me. In a way, this is a malignant feature of linear narratives. If life imitates art, then we have accepted that each day overrides the last, and that the final day overrides all other days.
Life is in the web, I think. This is more and more how I see time. When I die I want people to dissect me downwards from the future to the past, so that I die young and tinted orange like a photograph from 1986.
And believing as I do in a vaguely greater order of things, I've followed my instincts down their natural paths. I've been disappointed, I mean existentially disappointed when my efforts seem fruitless. How am I supposed to think, to behave, when the things that felt right turned out not to be?
But I realized lately, all things considered, even my failures were right. Everything I've tried, every person I erroneously thought myself to be, informs who I am now. I don't mean this in a sentimental way, I mean that this was...part of the web. The only way I can describe it is by using a bad movie reference, so forgive me, but it's like Signs. I'm looking around and suddenly glasses of water are everywhere.
Things I did with little thought are suddenly so serendipitous. That renews my faith in magic...just a little bit.
Friday, March 27, 2009
You Can Write, but You Can't Edit
My favorite thing about writing Vaganto will be the total lack of linear progress.
We are moving out of our apartment this weekend, and when we do I sincerely hope to find the moleskine Vaganto notebook I'd been keeping. It was a lot of interesting stuff in there, toward the building of a future world.
My challenge to myself is, what would the world look like if half the citizens in it actively undermined the notion of a geopolitical states? So many sparks came out of that simple premise - to have an entire class of people who do not even know where they came from, who were, in most cases, born into a life of travel, of vagrancy, basically living like gypsies. Unlike gypsies, though, they have a certain amount of political swagger due to sheer numbers and thus aren't necessarily criminals. But that's not even the whole story.
There are new political factions even within the vaganto, a whole mess of problems resulting from privitization of public services the gnarliest of which being transnational transportation. In this world, he who owns transportation owns the world.
They have reduced war, but war has gone corporate. Imagine for a second if it wasn't Israel or Palestine, but Pepsi and Coke. That's just pulled out of a hat, of course, Pepsi and Coke are kind of irrelevant.
But the nature of this book is the cross section of a new universe, told through fragments of myth, newspaper articles, the journal entries of Tempest 42, transcripts and new religious texts. Totally something I can treat like a series of small stories, which I've always wanted to do.
But right now, sadly, what I need is for some cruel overlord to crack a whip over my head and make me revise Mirror Men. Urg.
We are moving out of our apartment this weekend, and when we do I sincerely hope to find the moleskine Vaganto notebook I'd been keeping. It was a lot of interesting stuff in there, toward the building of a future world.
My challenge to myself is, what would the world look like if half the citizens in it actively undermined the notion of a geopolitical states? So many sparks came out of that simple premise - to have an entire class of people who do not even know where they came from, who were, in most cases, born into a life of travel, of vagrancy, basically living like gypsies. Unlike gypsies, though, they have a certain amount of political swagger due to sheer numbers and thus aren't necessarily criminals. But that's not even the whole story.
There are new political factions even within the vaganto, a whole mess of problems resulting from privitization of public services the gnarliest of which being transnational transportation. In this world, he who owns transportation owns the world.
They have reduced war, but war has gone corporate. Imagine for a second if it wasn't Israel or Palestine, but Pepsi and Coke. That's just pulled out of a hat, of course, Pepsi and Coke are kind of irrelevant.
But the nature of this book is the cross section of a new universe, told through fragments of myth, newspaper articles, the journal entries of Tempest 42, transcripts and new religious texts. Totally something I can treat like a series of small stories, which I've always wanted to do.
But right now, sadly, what I need is for some cruel overlord to crack a whip over my head and make me revise Mirror Men. Urg.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Eternally Now
One of my favorite literary characters of all time is the dragon in John Gardner's Grendel. She's a time philosopher in the same fashion as Dr. Manhattan or the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five or Faraday in Lost (SIGH). At one point she argues with Grendel about the future. Just because she knows the future, she says, doesn't mean she can change it, and doesn't mean she necessarily had any pivotal role in its execution. Even knowledge of the future, even actions taken with the intent to prevent it, are all part of the vast unchanging loop of causality. For in no universe, in no instance did the poor, hapless protagonist not know his fate.
Kundera took the notion a bit more literally in Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which history repeats itself over and over again, and all things will happen have happened already, and at the end of time, as the universe collapses in on itself, it creates again an unwitting embryo of all things to come.
I tend not to believe in fate, or even in a destiny. But I do believe that life comes with a sense of should-be, and that somewhere in the subconscious of the individual and the collective human race, we perceive a future ideal, a great shining conclusion to the story of planet earth, and those desiring to be good people strive toward that ideal their whole lives, like tiny ants pulling a boulder across the Sahara.
Once in a car in Michigan Ep told me about some theologian or other who believes that all things are Eternally Now, that everything happens always, and that it is only a function of human limitation that we should perceive time as happening one instant after the other. Basically, that the future informs the present as much as the past.
I like this idea too, generally enough to believe in it. I think our ability to reasonably predict the future is just as significant as our ability to faultily remember the past. I think that knowledge of causality and nature, in couplet with instincts, is the future's way of communicating with us.
I believe very strongly in trusting your instincts. Our instincts press toward the future ideal (if you listen to them and are not evil).
I stood in line at Starbucks. Starbucks has made a trend of fair-trade, which is a bit like Madonna making a trend of Kaballa, but there are more harmful things in this world to quibble about. John had just called me to tell me that the company where he interviewed decided not to call him back for a second interview. It's been three months since he graduated. Three months of no income.
We had decided that this was it. We've tried so hard to find work, we've given up our passions to make a living, we've strung our guts out across Mass Ave. and still no fruit. So this job was it. If he didn't get it, we were moving to Washington D.C. at the end of April, after his installation went up.
In the line at Starbucks, after John called, it occured to me that there was a contradiction in my two beliefs: 1) the Future Ideal acting on our desires and 2) all things being Eternally Now. Because it's highly unlikely that the Future Ideal will actually happen, how can the future (probably quite a sad, violent, dystopian one)really inform the present? How can we feel the presense of an ideal conclusion that will probably never happen?
I had an epiphany. Of course! It's not just one future that informs us, it's infinite variations of the future that informs us. And will every successive decision we eliminate more of those variations. But perhaps we don't elimate them from existence, we just eliminate them from our own lives. Perhaps somewhere, in some alternative dimension, we live the decisions we never made.
I bought John a London Fog as a consolation for not being hired. But the thought of moving to D.C. brought a feeling of immense relief. I'm not happy here. I want to be happy, but I've become a brittle survival machine, a tired sack of life. D.C. feels right to me, and maybe Boston has become so impossible because that alternative future doesn't exist for me. Maybe it never happened.
The days are longer now. The late afternoon sun shines through the windows of the train. I have daylight on my side again.
Kundera took the notion a bit more literally in Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which history repeats itself over and over again, and all things will happen have happened already, and at the end of time, as the universe collapses in on itself, it creates again an unwitting embryo of all things to come.
I tend not to believe in fate, or even in a destiny. But I do believe that life comes with a sense of should-be, and that somewhere in the subconscious of the individual and the collective human race, we perceive a future ideal, a great shining conclusion to the story of planet earth, and those desiring to be good people strive toward that ideal their whole lives, like tiny ants pulling a boulder across the Sahara.
Once in a car in Michigan Ep told me about some theologian or other who believes that all things are Eternally Now, that everything happens always, and that it is only a function of human limitation that we should perceive time as happening one instant after the other. Basically, that the future informs the present as much as the past.
I like this idea too, generally enough to believe in it. I think our ability to reasonably predict the future is just as significant as our ability to faultily remember the past. I think that knowledge of causality and nature, in couplet with instincts, is the future's way of communicating with us.
I believe very strongly in trusting your instincts. Our instincts press toward the future ideal (if you listen to them and are not evil).
I stood in line at Starbucks. Starbucks has made a trend of fair-trade, which is a bit like Madonna making a trend of Kaballa, but there are more harmful things in this world to quibble about. John had just called me to tell me that the company where he interviewed decided not to call him back for a second interview. It's been three months since he graduated. Three months of no income.
We had decided that this was it. We've tried so hard to find work, we've given up our passions to make a living, we've strung our guts out across Mass Ave. and still no fruit. So this job was it. If he didn't get it, we were moving to Washington D.C. at the end of April, after his installation went up.
In the line at Starbucks, after John called, it occured to me that there was a contradiction in my two beliefs: 1) the Future Ideal acting on our desires and 2) all things being Eternally Now. Because it's highly unlikely that the Future Ideal will actually happen, how can the future (probably quite a sad, violent, dystopian one)really inform the present? How can we feel the presense of an ideal conclusion that will probably never happen?
I had an epiphany. Of course! It's not just one future that informs us, it's infinite variations of the future that informs us. And will every successive decision we eliminate more of those variations. But perhaps we don't elimate them from existence, we just eliminate them from our own lives. Perhaps somewhere, in some alternative dimension, we live the decisions we never made.
I bought John a London Fog as a consolation for not being hired. But the thought of moving to D.C. brought a feeling of immense relief. I'm not happy here. I want to be happy, but I've become a brittle survival machine, a tired sack of life. D.C. feels right to me, and maybe Boston has become so impossible because that alternative future doesn't exist for me. Maybe it never happened.
The days are longer now. The late afternoon sun shines through the windows of the train. I have daylight on my side again.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Milan Kundera
I've fallen prey to my same old habits in book-reading. I start a hard book, some heady non-fiction thing, and I read about 3 pages a day. It takes me that long because, honestly, I'm not smart enough to get them on the first pass. I have to take notes, usually, or at least read the same thing several times. Especially when it's freaking Baudrillard who picks up the same unfortunate habit of obfuscation that I've seen in every intellectual dude except Jung and Chomsky (so far). Once I figure out what he means I could easily have rephrased it to be intelligible. It's just bad writing. Does not impress.
But Anyway! Sometimes I like to read when I am sleepy, before bed, or on the train in the morning when my body still hates me for waking it up and thus refuses to feed any blood to my brain. So, for those moments, I pick up something funner, and fictionaller.
Like Life is Elsewhere! I love this book already, love love love it. I think, in fact, that it confirms my general suspicion that Kundera is one of my favorite authors ever. I hope that my writing eventually takes influence from his. High school English teachers always say you should show and not tell. I disagree, at least with how absolute that sentiment is. My favorite books are ones that tell. This style introduces a meta-person that goes above and beyond the diegetic characters. The narrator is in his/herself a character who flavors the entire narrative, though they are never materialized. The narrator isn't always the author, but in Kundera's case I see the invisible man in the armchair, some old scruffy dude under a yellow light with a cigar.
Other authors that tell instead of show: basically every British author before the 20th century, John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vonnegut sometimes. They all create a sense of distance from the characters. It's paradoxical though, because at the same time we are privy to their most intimate thoughts, things they would never confess, things kept secret even from their own psyche. And at times - Kundera does this a lot - suddenly the reader is yanked back because the narrator pretends innocently not to know the character at a given moment. Or either, the narrator skips over natural facts because they are deemed irrelevant. The reader is kept in the universe of the story teller. They aren't allowed really to descend into the story, but the tradeoff is that the reader gains omniscience.
Anyway, another reason I really love Milan Kundera is because he - more than anyone I know - is able to weave together philisophical abstractions with standard plotlines without sacrificing either. I've tried and failed. Well, maybe not. Mirror Men is like that, but the plot is still subservient to the philosophy and that's my biggest problem in the second draft. It's hard!
I have a secret bias toward Kundera too - He's Czechoslovakian. When my folks crossed the pond, they left from Czechoslovakia, which of course doesn't exist anymore in that incarnation. Of all of my ethnic makeup, I'm most fascinated by being Czechoslovakian. I'm German too, but Germans are Western European and thus too familiar. My father's heritage is muddy at best, and what I do know of it (Scots-Irish, Cherokee) is well-worn in American bloodlines. It's Czech culture alone that remains mysterious, aloof. People hardly pay any attention to Eastern Europe anymore.
And I see it in my features. My full-Czech grandfather is the only person I really recognize myself in. I only know him from pictures, and that may have been a blessing. He never became human to me. He was only a distant, frozen expression locked in sepia. He looked handsome and troubled. He had my nose. In real life he drank his way to early death. He couldn't hold a job and couldn't stay away from pretty women and babysat my tiny mom by dragging her to bars with him. Not unlike a Kundera character, actually.
I even seen a vague resemblance in Kundera himself. It's hard to describe. It's less in the particular features and more in the holistic composition of the face. The full lips and strong checkbones, the squinty eyes, I don't know. But Kundera makes Prague feel like a place of narrow alleys and wide wooden lofts, and his generation was one of artistic - if not nihilistic - abandon, of sexual exploration and political unrest. I've been to Prague - it's as gorgeous as everyone says. But Kundera is one who shared with me the spirit of Czechoslovakia. Otherwise, I never would have known.
But Anyway! Sometimes I like to read when I am sleepy, before bed, or on the train in the morning when my body still hates me for waking it up and thus refuses to feed any blood to my brain. So, for those moments, I pick up something funner, and fictionaller.
Like Life is Elsewhere! I love this book already, love love love it. I think, in fact, that it confirms my general suspicion that Kundera is one of my favorite authors ever. I hope that my writing eventually takes influence from his. High school English teachers always say you should show and not tell. I disagree, at least with how absolute that sentiment is. My favorite books are ones that tell. This style introduces a meta-person that goes above and beyond the diegetic characters. The narrator is in his/herself a character who flavors the entire narrative, though they are never materialized. The narrator isn't always the author, but in Kundera's case I see the invisible man in the armchair, some old scruffy dude under a yellow light with a cigar.
Other authors that tell instead of show: basically every British author before the 20th century, John Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vonnegut sometimes. They all create a sense of distance from the characters. It's paradoxical though, because at the same time we are privy to their most intimate thoughts, things they would never confess, things kept secret even from their own psyche. And at times - Kundera does this a lot - suddenly the reader is yanked back because the narrator pretends innocently not to know the character at a given moment. Or either, the narrator skips over natural facts because they are deemed irrelevant. The reader is kept in the universe of the story teller. They aren't allowed really to descend into the story, but the tradeoff is that the reader gains omniscience.
Anyway, another reason I really love Milan Kundera is because he - more than anyone I know - is able to weave together philisophical abstractions with standard plotlines without sacrificing either. I've tried and failed. Well, maybe not. Mirror Men is like that, but the plot is still subservient to the philosophy and that's my biggest problem in the second draft. It's hard!
I have a secret bias toward Kundera too - He's Czechoslovakian. When my folks crossed the pond, they left from Czechoslovakia, which of course doesn't exist anymore in that incarnation. Of all of my ethnic makeup, I'm most fascinated by being Czechoslovakian. I'm German too, but Germans are Western European and thus too familiar. My father's heritage is muddy at best, and what I do know of it (Scots-Irish, Cherokee) is well-worn in American bloodlines. It's Czech culture alone that remains mysterious, aloof. People hardly pay any attention to Eastern Europe anymore.
And I see it in my features. My full-Czech grandfather is the only person I really recognize myself in. I only know him from pictures, and that may have been a blessing. He never became human to me. He was only a distant, frozen expression locked in sepia. He looked handsome and troubled. He had my nose. In real life he drank his way to early death. He couldn't hold a job and couldn't stay away from pretty women and babysat my tiny mom by dragging her to bars with him. Not unlike a Kundera character, actually.
I even seen a vague resemblance in Kundera himself. It's hard to describe. It's less in the particular features and more in the holistic composition of the face. The full lips and strong checkbones, the squinty eyes, I don't know. But Kundera makes Prague feel like a place of narrow alleys and wide wooden lofts, and his generation was one of artistic - if not nihilistic - abandon, of sexual exploration and political unrest. I've been to Prague - it's as gorgeous as everyone says. But Kundera is one who shared with me the spirit of Czechoslovakia. Otherwise, I never would have known.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Housekeeping
Two Things:
The first, if you are in Boston you should definitely check out the Motion Graphics Fest this weekend. I'm particularly psyched about the Realtime Performance Showcase on Friday night at the Brattle. We're also going, on John's behest, to the Installation Showcase at the Axiom (you have to scroll down to see that one). The Axiom is just down the road from where I live, attached to the Green St. Stop.
John wants to submit his installation to the MG Fest in Austin, which, if he got in, would be a tremendous streak of serendipity because my friend's wedding will also be in Texas, about a week later, and we were planning to take a trip there anyway.
The second thing is this article in adbusters: The Politics of Youth. I'm not sure I catch what Hardt is tossing in the first half, but I do agree with this bit:
You know, the quality of one’s enemy has something to do with making one more or less intelligent. And I think that struggling against Bush made us stupid. Because we had to struggle against the most obvious of things: against torture, against the occupation in Iraq. I hope that we don’t have to struggle against these in the years to come. My hope for the Obama presidency is that we will be able to focus on struggles that really designate a better world. That does not mean utopian aspirations for the Obama presidency, but rather utopian aspirations for the kind of struggles that can be born under, and sometimes against, an Obama administration.
That rings a bell with me, certainly. Being pitted against a creature so utterly irrational as Bush made us all frustrated, and it made us all scared. Our president wasn't listening, and didn't care, and more than likely has a case of early onset dementia, and that freaked everyone out, because people were dying for him. We dealt with this for eight years. It's like the 2000 elections were the big bang of the racing gun, amidst all the struggle and scandle we saw something ugly leap out of the gate. So sure I got angry. Everyone did, our words didn't work so we tried volume instead. Now people on the right were shocked at our behavior in the most recent elections, shocked at how viciously we maligned miss Palin. Well, it's easy to play it cool - or at least to pretend - when you're on top, much harder when you're afraid. (and god! the thought of that woman!)
Now, I may not agree completely with Bama, but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that at the very least, it's reassuring to know that he listens. I believe (not without a suspicious eye, but I believe) he genuinely wants what's best for the country, and in being that kind of president, he releases us from the anger. We don't need our brute strength anymore, we can use our reason. And isn't that nice?
I've been thinking a lot lately about Obama's new Faith Based Outreach program. It makes me squint my eyes. Thinking too a lot about the case of that lesbian who was fired (for religious reasons) from a Baptist non-profit which, incidentally, received federal funding. I believe quite strongly in separation of church and state, to the extent that it usually trumps all of my other beliefs. I think it's one of the best things in our constitution. But this particular situation is really tricky, as is the FBO program. And, of course, it's way more than I'm able to talk about tonight, when I should be sleeping an hour ago before I have work tomorrow. Eek!
The first, if you are in Boston you should definitely check out the Motion Graphics Fest this weekend. I'm particularly psyched about the Realtime Performance Showcase on Friday night at the Brattle. We're also going, on John's behest, to the Installation Showcase at the Axiom (you have to scroll down to see that one). The Axiom is just down the road from where I live, attached to the Green St. Stop.
John wants to submit his installation to the MG Fest in Austin, which, if he got in, would be a tremendous streak of serendipity because my friend's wedding will also be in Texas, about a week later, and we were planning to take a trip there anyway.
The second thing is this article in adbusters: The Politics of Youth. I'm not sure I catch what Hardt is tossing in the first half, but I do agree with this bit:
You know, the quality of one’s enemy has something to do with making one more or less intelligent. And I think that struggling against Bush made us stupid. Because we had to struggle against the most obvious of things: against torture, against the occupation in Iraq. I hope that we don’t have to struggle against these in the years to come. My hope for the Obama presidency is that we will be able to focus on struggles that really designate a better world. That does not mean utopian aspirations for the Obama presidency, but rather utopian aspirations for the kind of struggles that can be born under, and sometimes against, an Obama administration.
That rings a bell with me, certainly. Being pitted against a creature so utterly irrational as Bush made us all frustrated, and it made us all scared. Our president wasn't listening, and didn't care, and more than likely has a case of early onset dementia, and that freaked everyone out, because people were dying for him. We dealt with this for eight years. It's like the 2000 elections were the big bang of the racing gun, amidst all the struggle and scandle we saw something ugly leap out of the gate. So sure I got angry. Everyone did, our words didn't work so we tried volume instead. Now people on the right were shocked at our behavior in the most recent elections, shocked at how viciously we maligned miss Palin. Well, it's easy to play it cool - or at least to pretend - when you're on top, much harder when you're afraid. (and god! the thought of that woman!)
Now, I may not agree completely with Bama, but I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that at the very least, it's reassuring to know that he listens. I believe (not without a suspicious eye, but I believe) he genuinely wants what's best for the country, and in being that kind of president, he releases us from the anger. We don't need our brute strength anymore, we can use our reason. And isn't that nice?
I've been thinking a lot lately about Obama's new Faith Based Outreach program. It makes me squint my eyes. Thinking too a lot about the case of that lesbian who was fired (for religious reasons) from a Baptist non-profit which, incidentally, received federal funding. I believe quite strongly in separation of church and state, to the extent that it usually trumps all of my other beliefs. I think it's one of the best things in our constitution. But this particular situation is really tricky, as is the FBO program. And, of course, it's way more than I'm able to talk about tonight, when I should be sleeping an hour ago before I have work tomorrow. Eek!
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