Words Worth Quoting: From Bucky Fuller's Earth, Inc.

            All good science fiction develops realistically that which scientific data suggests to be imminent. It is good science fiction to suppose that a superb telepathetic communication system is interlinking all those young citizens of worldaround Wombland. We intercept one of the conversations: “How are things over there with you?” Answer: “My mother is planning to call me either Joe or Mary. She doesn’t know that my call frequency is already 7567-00-3821.” Other: “My mother had better apply to those characters Watson, Crick, and Wilkerson for my call numbers!” And another of their 66 million Womblanders comes in with, “I’m getting very apprehensive about having to ‘go outside.’ We have been hearing from some of the kids who just got out—they say we are going to be cut off from the main supply. We are going to have to shovel fuel and pour liquids into our systems. We are going to have to make our own blood. We are going to have to start pumping some kind of gas into our lungs to purify our own blood. We are going to have to make ourselves into giants fifteen times our present size. Worst of all, we are going to have to learn to lie about everything. It’s going to be a lot of work, very dangerous, and very discouraging.” Answer: “Why don’t we strike? We are in excellent posture for a ‘sit-down.’” Other: “Wow! What an idea. We will have the whole population of worldaround Wombland refuse to go out at graduation day. Our cosmic population will enter more and more human women’s wombs, each refusing to graduate at nine months. More and more Earthian women will get more and more burdened. Worldaround consternation—agony. We will notify the outsiders that, until they stop lying to themselves and to each other and give up their stupid sovereignties and exclusive holier-than-thou ideologies, pollutions, and mayhem, we are going to refuse to come out. Only surgery fatal to both the mothers and ourselves could evacuate us.”

            Another: “Great! We had might as well do it. If we do come out we will be faced with the proliferation of Cold War’s guerrillerized killing of babies for psycho-shock demoralization of worldaround innocent communities inadvertently involved in the abstruse ideological warfare waged by diametrically opposed, equally stubborn, would-be do-gooder, bureaucratic leaders and their partisans who control all of the world’s means of production and killing, whose numbers (including all the politically preoccupied individuals around the Earth) represent less than one per cent of all humanity, to whose human minds and hearts the politicos and their guns give neither satisfaction nor hope. Like the women in Lysistrata who refused intercourse with their men until they stopped fighting, we Womblanders would win.”

For the Media Junkie: Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage

This slim volume has texture enough to keep one mentally burrowing through the implications for days after. First impression is a total visual assault—pithy quotes from other great thinkers, photos galore—Marilyn Monroe, illustrations from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a sculpture of the “biggest and best woman in the world” (82 feet in length and 20 feet in height), surreal architecture born of past and present edifices superimposed, blurred yet potent photo collages. All of this and then McLuhan’s own text. Take my word for it, every sentence is quotable. This is not just a study of media and its influences; it is a collection of aphorisms for the modern info-saturated age.

 

 

The meat and gravy of McLuhan’s inquiry is this: Where do media technologies end and where do I begin? Where do I end and where does the media take hold and consume my external world? The key is that McLuhan does not make a distinction between the internal and the external self—no old hat dichotomies for this guy. Rather than viewing media as something by which we are bombarded by the outside world, The Medium is the Massage suggests (or, really, outright dictates) that humans and their media technologies are impossible to clearly divide at any one point. Consider Zeno’s paradox. The wheel (and thus the car) is an extension of the human foot. The television tube is an extension of one’s own visual operating systems.

The point is that we are submerged in a mediasphere that is ubiquitous yet for the most part goes unnoticed. This, however, is not to say that there are not implications that go hand-in-hand with the advent of this brave new world. Questions of personal, societal, and cultural identity arise, questions of privacy and security arise, questions of the way we communicate and interrelate with family, peers, coworkers, and authorities arise. Such issues were especially relevant at the time of publication in 1967, as the evolution of media was speeding up with greater and greater force, print technology, phones, radios, and, finally, television. As has been the case for most of history, technology typically is innovated much faster than the populace has time to come to terms with the shedding of former technologies, and issues of ethics may arise in some cases. In a nutshell, the majority of the global population is going to be around twenty years behind its technology in terms of acceptance, familiarity, and thoughtful application. For this reason, The Medium is the Massage was especially important in its time.

 

 

The mediascape has changed and is in many ways completely alien to that of the 1960s, but McLuhan’s theories hold. The media may change, but the core implications still must be dealt with head on. I would go so far as to say that this book is more important than ever here and now in our age of World Wide Webb-ing.

The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

It has become very popular in the minds of doctors, parents, teachers, and community leaders to wave the “Neuroses” banner at the first sign of behavior that does not fit snugly into the narrow confines of consensual reality, or The Norm, as the square in his cubicle, teeth freshly white-stripped, might say. This followed by pills and labyrinthine therapy sessions that can confuse and discourage as often as help. This followed by chasing the white rabbit down one pseudo-rabbit hole after another.

Dr. James Hillman holds that diagnosis, therapy, and prescription drugs fail us because of their singular approach: behavior and neuroses directly stem from childhood and genetics—nature and nurture. What experts are missing, according to Dr. Hillman, is the overwhelming evidence that there is something more, something that seems to hold precedence over both nature and nurture. This spark of Something is variously called daimon, soul, genius, holy guardian angel, among other things. The daimon is not only present at birth, it is there before birth. Unlike most conceptions of “soul” the daimon retains a level of existence separate from the human it accompanies. The daimon makes its presence known in gentle pushes felt from time to time, in tragedies, in moments of inspiration, in insights into being and character that seem to rise above conscious knowledge of one’s self.

It is the daimon, the soul, the genius that calls out to us, driving us through impulses and hints to the destiny that is ours to take for our own from the day we are born. Manifestation of the daimon in the physical universe may raise questions as to its intentions. For instance, children who are already in their youth compelled by their daimon toward their destiny may act out in accord with the frustration arising from inability or parental dominion. Even the actions of serial killers can be understood through the framework of this theory, as an impressive capacity for action might be viewed as misdirected and therefore can be “cured”. Because the theory has such implications, this book is a must read for parents and civic leaders, in my opinion.

But as yet I have not given this theory Hillman’s preferred title. He refers to the notion of the daimon and its presence in the lives of every living man, woman, and child as the acorn theory. Latent within the acorn is the majestic oak, and within the core of all humans resides a comparable acorn, the daimon, adventitiously making itself known from time to time by way of insights and pushes, guiding every individual to his ultimate calling and destiny. This book has totally changed my conception of myself and my potential for change and self-molding.

Personal Notes on Naked Lunch

I won’t even pretend that I’m capable of talking about Naked Lunch in terms of plot or meaning as the author intended it. In fact, Burroughs mentions in the novel that the reader should be able to flip to any chapter, start reading, and it have the same intended effect. This, to me, suggests that any implicit meaning in Naked Lunch is relegated to the way in which the novel is read, not to the content in particular. And this is just as well—every time I picked up where I last left off reading, I may as well have been flipping fifty pages ahead. 

So if I can’t talk about the What or the Why of the content, I can talk about the How of its impact on me. Naked Lunch was a prose experience unlike any other I’ve had before. I’ve read things that blur the line between prose and poetry, but not quite like this. Here image upon image upon scene upon scene erupt from a hot magma source that glows with an olden magic—a source that is dark and frighteningly obscure yet familiar all the same. This source is the unconscious, and when I say that I don’t know if I mean Burroughs’s unconscious, my unconscious, or Jung’s collective unconscious. No matter where I started reading, it felt as though my mind, in response to the violence, sexuality, baseness, and mystery, was reaching into its core and throwing a fishing line into a region very far away. That’s the best way to describe it. There was no clarifying it any further. I just went with it.

So what did it this novel do to me as I was reading it. It pulled me under. It dragged me down and tore off with me, leaving me no choice but to hang on and ride it out. Burroughs used his addiction to heroin as a driving force of the “narrative,” and this in a way limited my perspective. He was coming from a particular angle in reference to a particular experience with a particular substance. I have no personal understanding of where he was coming from on that, but I did strongly feel that the themes of addiction and withdrawal running through the novel could in some ways be compared to a certain brand of American Dread. I don’t think I have to define this Dread, because I think everyone has experienced it and each in her own way. Anyway, to put words to it would be to put borders around it, and this feeling, this Dread, has an inherent property of making itself resistant to limits.

The Dreads go along with widespread Mental Sickness; they are both symptoms of a larger, far more malign problem. That problem is reality, or, more appropriately, the Keepers of Reality whose reign we silently consent to by virtue of doing nothing. Rather than experiencing reality through the unique and natural lens of our own minds, we let others think for us. Worse yet, we let idiots think for us. And in the chasm that emerges, there are the Dreads, there is the Mental Sickness. Each of the characters that wander through Naked Lunch are experiencing the world through a Mental Sickness carried to its extreme yet logical end. And this is honest and as it should be. In many ways, this is one of the most honest novels I have ever read: because everything is weird and sinister and horrible, but taken as the same old same old. The SNAFU principle at work.

Other ways the novel affected me: the point where dreams and waking life merge; the similarities between dream state and conscious state that often go unnoticed; language as the fundamental building block of reality; the alignment of prose and conscious life as we shape it; the alignment of poetry and worlds of the unconscious; rewiring the centers of the brain that sift through the information of reality; acknowledging a personal darkness that is really more neutral than good or bad; the world as a science fiction—Interzone; resigning oneself to the unfathomable and going with it; and so on.

To sum it up:

Archetypes of the unconscious

Addiction-->American Dread

Mental Sickness as a reasonable symptom

Misc.

David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity

I guess you could say David Lynch was one of the first “weird” personalities I encountered in high school/early college. As I imagine he is for a lot of people of my generation, nursed on Harlan Ellison’s “glass teat” from infancy onwards, led, in cases such as mine, toward the Strange in a floundering attempt to make sense of cultural fragmentation, existential confusion, and the revelation of parental imperfection. 

David Lynch makes art films, but he’s married his art house sensibility with an Old Hollywood nostalgia that has contributed to a wider viewership. 

 Eraserhead was a lightening bolt that tore through my boyfriend’s darkened Atlanta apartment when he first moved in, when the living room was furnished with only a loveseat, a chair, and the television on a small stand. It was an experience—the emptiness of the room, the darkness with the television screen floating in front of us. Wild at Heart made me feel sick and enormously entertained at once in John Waters fashion. The Elephant Man I saw in a high school biology class, and INLAND EMPIRE I saw in Athens and understood none of it. I can remember my brother letting a friend of the family borrow Mulholland Drive since she liked Blue Velvet and was generally open-minded about film. She put it on when my parents next stayed a weekend with her, and, when talking about it later, my dad said he especially liked the masturbation scene (This instance, I imagine, was an early watermark in a series of failures as parents to raise wholesome and pretty children.). 

I like David Lynch. I wouldn’t say he is in my top five favorites of anything, but I still admire and enjoy his movies a great deal. Dune, not so much. I’m fond of the very distinct atmospheres he creates in his movies. I like the elements of the grotesque that seem to lie beneath plastic exteriors, whether the artificiality of suburban manners and pretenses or shiny Hollywood facades. I like David Lynch, and I like his movies, but my picking up this book was really a fluke. I remember hearing about it when it was first published, but even then I didn’t give it much thought. I found a hardback copy for a few dollars in a used bookstore when I was visiting Columbia this past weekend and picked it up on a whim.

It’s not necessarily that I thought David Lynch as a writer would suck or anything like that. I guess in part I worried that he would be pretentious, something that can completely ruin my taste for anyone, whether they are a friend or a cultural figure I admire from afar. I did not, however, find this to be the case at all. Catching the Big Fish is a slender volume—I read it all in about an hour or two. A couple hours isn’t long, but for that entire duration I was constantly finding myself in awe of how warm David Lynch can be. A completely nice guy, really. That voice drew me in from page one, but I found plenty of other reasons to keep reading. Every short chapter was engaging and interesting. The main thrust of the book is Lynch’s work in Transcendental Meditation, and how years of continuous practice have affected his creativity. He says that while meditation itself does not draw in ideas, it expands the consciousness to such a degree that the artist is able to go deeper and deeper “fishing for ideas.” The Big Fish lurk in depths that most people are unaware they even have access to. 

And there are other insights into Lynch’s creative process. He describes the ways in which ideas present themselves to him and how he builds on them piece by piece. He talks about setting, sound, music, and lighting and how they all contribute to a singular world in each of his films. Though he remains frustratingly general, he does lend the reader a glimpse into certain of the core ideas at the heart of particular films. Biographical details of Lynch’s life come up throughout the book as he embellishes on the development of his artistic vision. I don’t know if these facts are readily available to the general public, but even if they are, it was enjoyable to read his own descriptions of a surprisingly humble upbringing. Finally, in addition to remarking on meditation, creativity, his films, and his personal background, Lynch gives advice to the budding artist—be she involved in film or painting or sculpture or writing or whatever. And he seems to genuinely care when he is directing himself to the struggling artist. He went through his own struggles and transitions, and he allows for the authentic greatness of any work of art done by someone from their heart, whether their art receives any recognition or remains a personal lifelong venture. 

Warm, interesting, insightful, and surprisingly void of the perverse and the dark, I’m completely happy with this out-of-the-blue purchase.

A Lovecraft Documentary

Notes on the Completion of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Other Dark Tales

I have answered the call and journeyed into the dark and autumn of H.P. Lovecraft’s mind, a domed space in constant flux, forming itself anew as horrortension mounts, now a forest mossy, eldering, recapitulating the Unknown over and over again, now a mansion in ruins yet as enduring as the cavernous townships where dwarves do dwell. Lovecraft is not a man or a writer, but a world that one steps into and escapes only just in time. His stories center on a race of beings that predate humans by time immemorial. They are: maybe monsters, maybe gods, maybe both, maybe cosmic, evolutionary cousins with a bastard streak. They are: for the most part unknown to the populace at large, but in the New England hills of antiquity, legends passed down from one generation to another put a number of singular, typically racist (unfortunately) persons in the right position at the right time to be drawn into existential mystery. 

Dagon: A man lost at sea in a dingy is launched into a mucky country featuring geometry totally incongruous with the third dimension. He attributes the apparition to the floor of the sea shifting violently up in the wake of volcanic or seismic activity. Tramping through an alien terrain that matches his inner world in its meaningless features, he discovers that he is in the domain of Dagon, an antediluvian fish god. 

The Terrible Old Man: The plans of three robbers are turned on them when the Old Man they are targeting proves to be more cunningsinister than insane as they had assumed.

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family: Arthur Jermyn springs from an ancestral fountain stamped with insanity and eerie journeys into the Congo. When he becomes involved with the investigation of his genealogy, he learns more of the jungle sabbaticals and the race of beings that once worshipped in secret there. He also learns of the malign threads the Jermyns can follow back to this verdure-shadowed race and its primitive gods.

Nyarlathotep: A prose poem meditation on the god Nyarlathotep.

The Picture in the House: A storm-derailed man finds himself under the hospitable auspices of a man obsessed: obsessed with a certain engraved plate depicting a good-old-fashioned-family-o-cannibals at dinner.

Herbert West—Reanimator: The story that spawned the cult film—a Dr. Frankenstein pulled from a B movie, dead bodies shrieking out the horror of reemergence on the physical plane, a brood of monsters led by a wax-headed soldier with a black valise, a grotto gateway to subterranean nightmares.

The Rats in the Walls: A man settles to work in England where he intends to discover the more shadowy alleyways of his family history. With the maddening sound of gnawing rats accompanying him relentlessly, he uncovers an underground city of familial secrets that will challenge his conscious knowledge of himself and his forefathers.

The Call of Cthulhu: The tit-u-lar story and probably Lovecraft’s most famous. New England scholars, New Orleans voodoo cults, strange relics, and a call ringing out from ancient R’lyeh. To say more would be to resign myself to writing a page or two. Hype-worthy.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward: After unearthing a fragment of family history shrouded in shadows and secrecy, Charles Dexter Ward, a man already predisposed to antiquarian and genealogical interests becomes singular in the focus of his researches. He discovers with certainty his relation to a man named Joseph Curwen, but less certain are the facts behind Curwen’s disappearance. Curwen was in fact preoccupied with matters of the occult, and in order to fully exhume the truth of his ancestry, Ward himself must look to the tattered pages of books that have centuries long made themselves obscure.

The Colour Out of Space: After a meteorite strikes the New England countryside, strange colors, smells, and aberrations in nature arise in the vicinity of its landing—right around the home of a well-loved family, the Gardners. At first the menace from the sky only seems to be having an effect on the surrounding landscape, but given enough time, family friends perceive an equally significant impression on the delicate inner life of the Gardner family members. 

The Dunwich Horror: The goat-faced Wilbur Whateley is shunned by the people of the neighboring hills of the Miskatonic Valley for a number of reasons. A grandfather with both feet in the black arts, an unknown lineage on his father’s side, and, perhaps more so than anything else, a profound ugliness of aspect repel all persons to come in contact with Whateley. The Whateley home, which is under constant renovation by grandpap and goat-faced progeny, imprisons a horror that meddling neighbors can only all too well suspect given the foul odors and loathsome noise that emanate from within. When the horror breaks loose, the abomination itself inspires perhaps less terror than the crude revelation of its origins.

The Whisperer in Darkness: When the flooded Miskatonic hills bring forth the bodies of beings unnatural and perverse, a professor of literature from Miskatonic University finds himself drawn into a mystery that takes him first into the dark abode of an old man knowingbaleful and from there to the cusp of the stars where legions of the Unknown threaten extinction of sanity.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth: Stopped over at the strange town of Innsmouth while en route to Arkham, a young man encounters ancestral degradation at its most extreme—a small and ancient cult consumed by ritual in the Esoteric Order of Dagon and maddened by primordial tugs toward Devil Reef and the cold ocean depths.

The Dreams in the Witch House: In the attic room where once boarded a witch and her shudder-worthy familiar, a scholar devotes all his time to studies in mathematics and antiquarian legends of the ghostly roommate that haunts his dreams. Studies which lead to the most obvious conclusion: interdimensional portals hidden in the lines and angles of an unearthly geometry!

The Haunter of the Dark: Geometry as a gateway to other dimensions is taken further in this final story. An elder monster is boarded up in a windowless steeple of the former, now defunct Church of Starry Wisdom. The unseen monster, however, is of less interest than the means of his invocation: he is brought out of the ether by priests of the Church of Starry Wisdom who look into the mystical and alien trapezohedron, a unique porthole that echoes visions of universes distant and close, familiar and utterly unknowable, dead and alive.

Obviously some stories are going to be better than others, but the overall effect of this collection keeps drawing me back, like an amnesiac slowly recovering a past unwelcome yet seductive in its otherworldliness.