symbolic 33: "bitch, you know I love you; why do you make me beat you?"

I've known the members of my writer's group for more than ten years now and they never tire of strapping me down and flaying me. Nor do I ever appear to grow weary of the visit to the chambers of the Inquisition. It seems to work pretty well for both sides. Last night -- mid-stroke -- there was a pause, and then the following apology: "I'm sorry. We're spending more time breaking things than we are fixing them."

They keep me honest.

Sculptors don't create their work so much as reveal the object hiding within the block of marbles. They break away the outer layers, freeing the contained subject. If we spend our time "breaking things," then it is because I've handed them a block of stone which hasn't been polished enough. There are too many unfinished knobs of marble that need to be knocked off or sanded down. There isn't enough detail in the body of the work. There is too subtle a line to the slope of the back. I've neglected to consider what you will see if you view the piece from a different angle.

I'd given them a cube of stone with two corners knocked off and tried to pass it off as something more concrete than an abstract idea.

Trust me, this will get you kicked in the teeth. And, while it may look painful and brutal to an outsider, you have to know that the only reason they lay into you so heavily is because you've been lazy and haven't done good work. They're frustrated because you haven't knocked the wind out of them, and they know you can.

So who are you saving the good stuff for? Do you think people who don't know you at all are going to be any less savage?

Your friends will never touch your fingers. Sure, you may have to tape your ribs and you might pee blood for a couple of days, but they'll always send you home with your fingers intact. Can't write with busted digits, can you? And that's the sure sign that they still care.

« « little fictions || 03.28.2003 @ 01:35 PM

symbolic 32: the rites of spring

There are oil fields burning in Iraq tonight.

It is the Vernal Equinox -- the first day of spring. This day held great importance to our primitive and savage ancestors because it was the magical day when they conducted their annual rites to herald the return of spring. In illo tempore the people believed that their kings were the living embodiement of the lands and, through practices of sympathetic magic, they could effect change. In removing the old and barren king and replacing him with a new and fresh leader, they could ensure the return of verdancy and vibrant life to the land. The world and its vegetation was born anew because they conducted a blood sacrifice.

In the early morning hours of the Vernal Equinox, the United States conducted a "decapitation attack" against Iraq. Presented with a "target of opportunity," the government attempted a swift and precise beheading of the old king. On the most critical day of the ancient cycle of death and rebirth, in the very land between the Tirgis and Euphrates rivers known as the Fertile Crescent, the United States acted to kill a king.

What exactly was this "target of opporunity" which Bush's advisors presented to him? And what information were these advisors working from? Is it possible that the opportunity had nothing to do with tactical information or geo-political strategy and had its basis in one of the oldest and most powerful of magical rites?

« « little fictions || 03.20.2003 @ 10:54 PM

symbolic 31: the death of manuscript

"Since the computer became a ubiquitous part of our existence, the manuscript has been dead." He waved his hand about his head, the cigarette clenched between two fingers looking like a shard of bone jutting up from his hand. "The Idea of manuscript is disappearing. Four hundred years ago, everything was done by hand, painstakingly written out on paper with nib and ink. If you wanted a copy of a work, it had to be done page by page. Gutenberg was an agent of the Devil; IBM, Motorola, and the other chip makers -- they are the Legion of the Beast. They helped destroy the Word."

His companion -- the tall one with the tatoos running down either side of his long neck -- nodded. "Word," he said with a reverent blush to his voice.

"There was only the Word in the beginning and, after the Fall, the Word became many, split and torn by the greedy hand of Man. It is the writer who puts the Word back together, the writer who has seen the shape of Word in his head and struggles to grasp its luminous complexity. The artist gives Word flesh by setting it down -- the Manuscript is the physical manifestation of Word.

"But, as we let computers do everything, we stopped using the Word. Everything became communication -- narrow, flat, data streams -- everything became binary operations. There is no room in the one/zero for tint and texture. The writer creates; he does not replicate."

The tall, tattooed man spat on the ground at the phrase.

"E-mail," the first one continued, "progress reports, ad copy, web design, marketing terminology, government obfuscation: the computer has multiplied all these things to a point of meaninglessness. The Word is empty, a pale shell which has been replicated too many times. We don't write any longer; we type.

"The computer saves everything into a digital file -- a cold one/zero line -- and nothing ever gets thrown away. Thousands of network devices hold every piece of email every transmitted and fleets of fast processors comb these storage units looking for combinations and key words. Nobody reads for content. They want bullet points, tracts distilled to one paragraph summaries. The artifice is gone."

He picked up his glass and took a long pull before continuing. "Before the computer, the manuscript was important. It was the author's creation -- his sole copy of his effort to redraft Word. If the manuscript was lost, then the Word was lost again. Eliot gave his only copy of 'The Wasteland' to a friend and, once the poet died, no one knew where the manuscript had gone and, for forty-odd years, the power of the work was diminished. The manuscript is the link between the sacred and the mundane, our world and the other. The Word is the Key. Do you understand what I am saying?"

I made the shattering sound and watched the glass come apart, cascading the alcohol and ice through his fingers. "I'm familiar with the Word," I said.

« « little fictions || 03.16.2003 @ 03:35 AM

symbolic 30: random interruption

A standard car radar will ping a hit when targeted by the range-finding system of an F-15 fighter plane.

These are the things I learn at family gatherings.

« « little fictions || 03.12.2003 @ 03:11 AM

symbolic 29: "waiting" -- a love song

I have a copy of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" in my car. For many years I was without a car and would commute a great deal of public transportation. I still do it today, eschewing the overclogged highways of King County, Washington, for the more relaxed atmosphere of the commuter train. In the course of allowing someone else to be my carriage, I have learned the importance of having reading material on hand. You are never trapped if you have a book.

It is good to have something to do when you are waiting, and, occasionally, when you are the guy behind the wheel, you get those static moments where there is nothing to do but watch the passage of the clouds across the sky. Crammed in the narrow pocket of the driver's side door panel of my car is a copy of "The Waste Land." It'll go into each car that I own until the pages are readily falling apart, and, by that time, I should have it memorized. I'll be able to entertain myself by whispering stanzas quietly as I sit in the car, waiting.

Kind of a Prufrock moment, if you think about it.

« « little fictions || 03.10.2003 @ 03:17 AM

symbolic 28: ashes, ashes, we've all fallen down

"O my people, what have I done unto thee."

According to the New Book of Knowledge (which I found forgotten on the shelf at a Girl Scout Camp one Thanksgiving weekend a long time ago), the Christian holidays are completely based on pagan rituals. Folk will try to convince you otherwise but ask them what is the source of the date of Easter? We mark Christmas -- December 25th -- as the day Jesus Christ was born, but what day do we mark as his final day on this planet? Easter. What's the date of Easter?

(And yes, I know we covered this one already, but bear with me. Christmas was so long ago that I had forgotten, and since you already know the answer, you can say it with me.)

Easter, as you can tell them after they're done sputtering and fumbling for an answer, is the first Sunday following the first full moon following the vernal equinox. Which, if you look at that in pagan-speak, is the first holy day following the first complete lunar cycle following the first day of spring. Let's see, there's a little Druidism in there, a little nod to the primal rhythm of the matriarchy, and just the most important landmark of the vegetation cults.

Ash Wednesday falls 40 days (not counting Sundays) before Easter and is the beginning of Lent, the time of penance and abstinence before the big Holy Holy of Easter. It has always tickled me that Fat Tuesday is the day before; the day prior to beginning a time of prayer and contemplation, you participate in the year's biggest drunken debauchery. Says a lot about one's intent during Lent, doesn't it?

I was never much for penitence; I never do well at the temporary suspension of behavior. I'm kind of an all or nothing sort of guy. Okay, I'm not much of an "or nothing" type either. While the idea of denying yourself some lifestyle aspect certainly has merit, the idea that you are doing it as a nod to the mythological efforts of Jesus Christ is laughable. "Chocolate? You're giving up chocolate for Lent? How marvelous. Why didn't I think of that? Me? Oh, I'm just martyring myself to make a point to my Father and to Mankind. But don't mind me. Chocolate abstinence is certainly a noble goal."

"This is the time of tension between dying and birth."

I usually read T. S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday" on Ash Wednesday. It's a ritual I've fallen out of these last few years for any number of reasons, the most current one being that I can't find my damn copy of the poem. Fortunately the Internet provides. And, as I read it again while I write this, I get hung up on the first stanza.

This is where we are: lost, fallen, confused. Hopeless. We numb ourselves on Fat Tuesday and spend Lent trying to flush our livers. We...never mind, you know what you do to yourself. You know why you kill your Hope: you're not smart enough, not brave enough, not pretty enough, not talented enough, not skilled enough, not driven enough. You go on a diet to save your health, yet you still eat the same shit everyday and sneak off in the afternoon to have yourself a treat, Pavlovian-style. Why don't we care enough to save ourselves? Because we don't have a good reason.

We need there to be life on Mars. Bug-eyed, snarling, snapping, pissed off and technologically fifty years our senior. Rain some space aliens down on our heads and shove us off the top of the food chain. That's the wake-up call we need. Because there is nothing else to challenge our survival. You can get up, go to work, come home, pay the bills, make a family, and die in the middle of an orgasm when you are seventy-three, and THAT is considered a life. What's the incentive to try for anything else?

For me? For Eliot? There has got to be something else. Suffer me not to be separated.

« « little fictions || 03.05.2003 @ 03:18 AM

symbolic 27: coalesce, like...

This word has been rattling around my head the last few weeks like a moth against the wire grate over a mercury vapor light. I don't think my mouth is shaped right to actually use this word without spilling my tongue out of my mouth, and the simile I've wanted to use is escaping me. It's a tip of the tongue moment which has gone on so long that all the nerve endings in my mouth are dead.

...like butter.

Butter, like blood, coagulates. The fluid clumps, clots, and finally hardens. And it is this clumping which puts me off. I've been expecting things in the BOOK OF LIES to come together more easily and have been stirring the mixture too often, too frantically. "Coalesce" is what I've been caught up on, not "coagulation." There is less sense of mobility with the latter, the mental image of inflexible pieces which you have to work around.

...like stone.

There is a panel in Grant Morrison's New X-Men 137 where Emma Frost slips her fingers into the head of the immaterial X-student Tattoo and says in a very bored tone: "Two can play this dreary game, dear. You solidify, you die, too."

The evolving creature must remain flexible, must remain uncaged from a solid mass in order to survive. I've been examining my reading habits over the course of the last month and have noticed that a number of authors which I normally gravitate towards are becoming bound in rock. Part of this may very well be the nature of the business -- once you hit a profitable formula, there isn't a whole lot of incentive to break away from that systematic structuring -- but how much of this stagnant repetition is my fault? If I keep reading the same things over and over again, aren't I perpetuating the very concrete mixture which has snared us both?

...like mist.

Which, by definition, is no longer "mist" or "vapor" or "smoke" once it coalesces. But, like Dracula on the balcony shifting from bat-form to man-form, like the main titles of Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness, this is the image which I have in my head: elements swirl together, rotating and moving about in a fluid medium until they finally achieve their optimum position and snap into place. This is very hard to juggle and, in this state, it is even harder to judge if you've got all the elements you need anyway.

I'm not very good at jigsaw puzzles; I don't have the temperament to sit still and fathom the connectivity between the pieces. The wee mathematician in my brain draws a formula on the mental chalkboard: there are a finite number of combinations to all the pieces; doing the puzzle is just a matter of trial and error until you've exhausted all the combinations. Which, when you get right down to it, makes puzzling sound very monotonous. Me? I'm kind of shallow and prefer the exciting things; the dull repetition makes me want to claw my eyes out.

Excitement becomes synonymous with juggling. I do up a list of projects which are currently active on my plate and it becomes clear that I am juggling -- I've got too many balls in the air. When you first learn how to juggle (really, the physical kind) there is a period where you are just trying to keep the balls in the air. All you are is frantic movement as you struggle to stay ahead of the ball coming back into your hand. Each throw becomes more and more a "get the hell away from me, you devil orb!" motion and, fairly soon, you're being led by the arcs of your throws as you struggle just to keep these three balls in the air.

..like phantoms.

I can juggle three balls. Not four, not five, and I can't do tricks with the three. It's a rudimentary juggling ability, the sort which any clown is expected to know before the first day of clown academy. But it is an ingrained skill at this point; I don't consciously think about the motion of the balls and I could do it all day if needed. And, after the initial delight of seeing someone juggle, the shine wears off and my audience becomes aware that the motion is, simply, repetitious. They, like me, start to get bored, their eyes drifting in and out of focus.

Right, focus. What was I talking about? Yes, coalescing. Coming together. Sometimes you have to keep juggling. The other option is to drop the balls and let them roll off under the sofa or (even worse) the refrigerator. Sometimes you just have keep moving -- left, right, left -- and be patient.

« « little fictions || 03.03.2003 @ 11:09 PM

writing

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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.