symbolic 20: crawling
"Nothing is true, everything is possible." This is an old adage of Hassan I Sabbah, the mystical Old Man of the Mountain. It was co-opted by William Burroughs for his own ends, and it has been rolling around my head a lot this week. Both of them used it to delineate their understanding of space and reality (and, in some instances, morality), decrying that man was his own instrument, his own agent of divine intervention.
I've been thinking about fact versus fiction. I wrote a short throwaway piece a week ago, sequestering myself down in the office late Friday night while I banged out words on the computer. The task assigned to me was the piece could be either fact or fiction and, as the story fell off my fingers, I started to realize it was both. It was a complete fabrication, but every detail was true. Nothing and everything, you see.
I'm rolling around in my fictionsuit, culling details from my own life to color the written world. The shape and position of the furniture in the room was the layout of my old apartment down at the bottom of the hill. The sirens running past as an aid car came down from the fire station on the corner of 50th and Roosevelt was what I heard on Friday nights. The texture of the carpet -- dark brown shag nearly a thousand years old -- was lifted straight from the sensory records of my feet across that surface. My fingers are wired directly back through to my brain and each word writ is tainted with reality.
Stephen King talks in his Afterward to From a Buick 8 how his near-fatal slip into a swollen stream gave him an integral scene for the book. There are parts of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum which are lifted straight from his university days. I'm sure you can list a couple examples of fiction being a thinly disguised variation of the writer's reality without any trouble. Grant Morrison almost killed himself when he let the distinction between page and reality slip. How many second novels pale beside the first because the writer realizes they used up all the reality they had in the first 100,000 words?
It's a no-brainer really. When we are playing God, wearing our fictionsuits, we have to draw details from somewhere. The obvious choice is to mine our own brains. It's a rare writer who can look at their work and honestly claim that nothing from their own personality is in the book. We don't write what we know; we write what we are.
And because none of it is true, we can utilitize everything. All our fears, our dreams, our fetishes and our desires, our inconsistencies and our passionate truisms are available. We splinter ourselves in order to populate the world.
Has God done the same thing? Does being made in His image only mean that we contain a tiny piece of His essence? Here we are, each with our own tiny bit of Godhead, all wrestling and fighting with each other, completely oblivious to the fact that we are all tiny flashes of memory or bursts of momentary sensation experienced by the vast Creator. Poor players, cast upon the stage for our hour, and all that. Any stab at complete enlightenment will only come from recognizing our fragmentary nature and cleaving back to a whole synthesis.
Anyway, caught up in the fictionsuit where I'm creating reality by dropping tiny pieces of myself into the work. Imagine the viral implications of text, if every piece of myself that I dropped had actual DNA content -- a fully realized, genetically complete self wired with its own instructions and payload. By reading these words, I've inserted myself into your brain where my nanomene unloads its viral agent and propagates through your synaptic core.
It's already happened. Hassan I Sabbah did it to Burroughs; Burroughs did it to me; I've just done it to you. A chain is being formed as all the individual moments of Godhead are getting back together. We're crawling towards enlightened synthesis one word at a time.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.