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.

Clifford D. Simak: The Architect of a City of Myth

Let’s talk about myths, in a broad sense. Wikipedia, that vast conglomeration of human brain tissue and arthritic, keyboard-pecking fingers, has this to say about myths: “A myth is defined as a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form, within the field of folkloristics.” I’m sure there are plenty of scholars that would debate the subtleties of this definition versus others, but I’m not concerned with specifics here. Generally, myths can be said to bridge past and present. Not the past like last month or last year or last century. Rather, an unknowable past, a past so distant and unfathomable that it looms like midnight mountains that cradle giants, like ravens as big and forever as the horizon. Myths take us from point A, a place of which it is impossible to know all the details, to point B, the here and now that is, if not totally understandable, at least substantial and immediately relevant. 

But what of the future? Like the past, we cannot grasp it and feel out its shape, whether it stands just beyond the fingertips out of reach or at the end of Infinity Road. For the first few centuries of civilization, most people set their sights no further than the immediate future, and as time wore on looked a bit further ahead—a year, maybe five at the most. This was because technology arose that made even more advances possible, and human beings, endlessly curious and inventive, made it a point to foresee those possibilities and make them reality. But as technology becomes even greater, the potential for the future becomes greater as well. Now at the start of the 21^st century, humankind is looking further and further down the road of time, so monumental is the potential inherent in the new science. As human concern catapults from the present decade or century to millennia in the future, we find a mirror image at the end of infinity of that same blackness that shadows our and our universe’s beginnings. Faced again with the unknowable, it becomes necessary and expedient to create a new set of myths, one that connects point B, the present, with point C, the future, whether that future has a finite end or endures ceaselessly. 

In his 1952 novel, City, Clifford D. Simak writes myths for the future. Myths that are urgent, not for the future they spell out, but for the implications for humanity: the beauty and danger of man’s aspirations, the decisions man makes when faced with epic prospects. Myths that are haunting, because even if man did endure into infinity, in our secret hearts we know that even this would suggest the ending of something that is essential to life as we know it right now—even if we continue on, we will die to our old homes, loves, and relationships as the universe evolves and forces us further and further away from what we know, with nostalgia alone left to cloud the in-between spaces of stars and thoughts. 

Both in structure and in tone, City reminded me of something by Isaac Asimov. Structurally, the novel is more of a short story collection with continuing themes rather than a novel, which is true of Foundation and I, Robot. There are eight tales that each present a time further and further in the future. The tales are told by dogs sitting around campfires in a bizarre and unexpected future, one in which dogs evolve to inherit man’s position on earth. The stories they tell are legend: humanity’s future is the dogs’ past. The canine myth-weavers tell of the Webster family and Jenkins, their loyal robot servant, they tell of the fall of the city as humans abandoned the huddling places for the countryside. They tell of Jenkins's life as he moves down through one generation of Websters to the next, until the Websters and the rest of humanity have retired from Earth to a new weird, weird destiny on Jupiter. They tell of the first dogs learning to talk, of the first experiments that led to ants becoming creatures of great intelligence and malice. They tell of the cobblies, the boogeyman-like beings that travel between parallel worlds. They tell of the ultimate fate of all involved, of humans, robots, dogs, and the industrialized super-ants.

Each story is preceded by commentary that explores the origin of the myths, the ambiguity surrounding them, and the various scholarly approaches to the historicity of them. From these stories and the commentary they are placed in like bubble wrap, arises a narrative of meditation and adventure. Simak deftly melds deep wells of wisdom with a sense of child-like wonder that again brings Asimov to mind. It occurs to me that City is really a story about apocalypse. Maybe so, but the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it sure is fun when an imagination like Simak’s is the one reporting the myths from the edge of infinity back to us.

Books About Books!

So what could make a reader like me happier than books? Books about books!

Such is the nature of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. This novel puts the reader in the front seat with a second person narration that opens up to a meditation on reading as a process and personal experience. A novel with one character would hardly have any plot to speak of, and, thus, you the Reader are accompanied on your journey through the corridors and anterooms of fiction with an Other Reader. You and the Other Reader become acquainted at a bookstore where both of you are trying to exchange defective copies of Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. You both had been looking forward to the novel for some time and were disappointed to find that only about thirty pages in cycles of the same pages begin to repeat themselves, a printing mistake that leaves you hanging just when the narrative has hooked you. You and the Other Reader exchange information, and you go home to delve back in to your new, non-defective copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler. But immediately you realize it is not the same book, but rather a novel called Outside the town of Malbork. 

And so begins a strange odyssey through literature, the publishing industry, and visions of apocalypse hinged on truth and falsehood. You and the Other Reader set out on a quest to find a complete and non-defective copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler, but every time you think you’ve found it, you’ve only found a portion of an entirely different novel which also trails off without finding its end for one reason or another. Things become more complex because you grow engrossed with the novels masquerading as the original one you seek. You become so engrossed that you must track each of these broken novels back to their original source so you can find a satisfactory sense of closure. 

With the Other Reader at your side, you discover a conspiracy of vast proportions with the translator Ermes Marana at its center. Marana started up the Organization of Apocryphal Power, the purpose of which was the dissemination of false books. Over time, the members became divided in their ideals and turned against Marana, forming the Archangels of Light and the Archon of Shadow. The Archangels of Light believe that supreme truth can spring from the crisis of falsehood, while the Archon of Shadow are obsessed with the idea of ultimate falsity in literature as being ultimate knowledge. 

As you and the Other Reader cautiously undertake this epic quest, If on a winter’s night a traveler becomes a multiplicity of books in one: every novel you track down that is completely different from the manuscript you seek (there are 10 altogether), as well as the story of your quest and the conspiracy you become enmeshed in. Fiction layers fiction, and it is difficult to discern where the story ends and reality begins.

This novel is fantastic: a reader’s dream. What reader wouldn’t want to read a book about books? There are so many things here to marvel at. There’s the structure, which alternates chapters between the many novels and the Reader’s outer world of conspiracy, uncertainty, and personal reflection, all of which gives rise to a metafiction that rivals Pale Fire in its complexity and brilliance as a mode of storytelling. There are the novel fragments themselves, which transport you the Reader into worlds that are somehow at once both mundane and magical. There’s the conspiracy of false books, which is as beautiful and sinister an idea as I’ve ever heard. And then there are the Borgesian gems that pop up regularly: the Homeresque Father of Stories that tells tales without end, narrating away every minute of eternity (at times he’ll narrate an entire novel years before it has even been written or published); the computers that can effectively “read” books by tallying up the words that appear most frequently in the text and making logical connections as to the plot and style. And so on.

Prior to this novel the only thing I’ve read of Calvino’s is Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities was wonderful, and I think If on a winter’s night a traveler tops it.