Resolutions

I spent New Year's Eve in a hospital room at Tacoma General. The sound from the TV is shunted into a tiny speaker in the callbox attached to the bed, and the noises it produces are poor accompaniement to the explosions of light and color about the Seattle Space Needle. The window of the hospital room faces north, looking out over the top floor of a parking garage, and the lead-colored sky doesn't reflect any of the Tacoma-based pyrotechnics. I can feel them -- thump thump thump -- against the cold glass. "This is how 2003 ends," I tell my son.

He doesn't say much. He's barely twenty-four hours old. '03 -- as he'll write it innumerable times over the course of his life -- has a fading, tenuous grasp on his life.

The Space Needle explodes with a Shakespearean sound and fury, and I tell my new son the first words of 2004. "I'm sorry," I say to him. I'm sorry that I'm going to have to explain anthrax to him. I'm going to have to tell him to be cautious of the mail, to be alert to what comes out of envelopes and packages. He's going to have to be careful how he breathes and to be aware of how others breathe near him. He'll need to know other words like penicillin, doxycycline, and ciprofloxacin. I don't want to tell him about the others, but I have to be thorough: botulimum toxin, aflatoxin, ricin, VX gas.

I'm sorry that acronyms like WMD exist; we use the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" so frequently that we've shorthanded it. There are other phrases to explain as well: "collateral damage," "ethnic clensing," "racial profiling." I'll have to explain to him the concept of doublespeak, and I will have to tell him that Orwell's 1984 was once considered fiction.

I'm sorry that I will have to define "pedophilia" to him. I would rather the day never comes when I have to tell him to be wary of strangers, to be cautious of accepting gifts from person who pretend to know him. I don't want to tell him that if he is frightened, he should run home. Run, my son, run as fast as you can and don't stop until you are in my arms. It's an impractical suggestion, but I don't know what else to tell him. I don't know what other assurance I can give him that he'll be okay.

Some day he's going to ask me why; he's going to ask why I brought him into a world like this.

I will do two things. I will take him to the Point Defiance Zoo, and I will show him a polar bear named Boris. It was snowing on the night you were born, I will tell him. This white bear, whose natural habitat is colder climates, has been, for many years, in a place where there snow never falls. On the night you came into the world, he experienced winter for the very first time. I'll also take him out into a wide field where there are no lights and point out a tiny red dot in the sky. That's Mars, I will tell him, and on the night you were born, a small spacecraft that we built was sending back pictures from the surface of that planet. We named the tiny craft "Spirit" and we sent it those millions of miles to Mars.

We make resolutions at the beginning of a new year, you see, we make promises that we try to keep, and every year we get another chance to make those promises again. For every awful and terrible thing that I have to prepare him for, I have to show him something amazing and wonderful in turn. I have to show him that we can excel just as grandly as we fail. I have to. Otherwise I will have no answer for him when he asks why; the only words which will be there for him will be "I'm sorry."

I said them once. I don't want to say them again.

« « little fictions || 01.27.2004 @ 09:02 AM

A Song of Solomon

I devour music. It's a constant presence in my life; different styles of music are always playing in each room of the house, and to wander through the house is a bit like traveling through an aural history museum. I cover the twilight genres for an online magazine called earpollution.com where I get to use terms like "glitch" and "micro-house" and "power electronics" and "rhythmic noise" when I talk about music. I hear things that could be the wailing sound of quasars imploding, the static pop of electrons colliding, the groan of industrial machinery eating itself, or polyrhythms mimicking the sound of your internal organs as they gasp and wheeze. I hear all these things, and I call them "music."

Today, I'm thinking about lullabies. My son, Solomon, isn't quite a week old. We've been home for a few days now, introducing him to our environment and, naturally, beginning to introduce him to our music. One of the adages which invariably fall upon new parents is that, at some point, your child will do things to annoy you, and oftentimes this behavior exhibits itself by listening to music that you -- the doddering old fool from the last generation -- won't appreciate or understand. How is my son going to rebel in his musical tastes? What's he going to say if I shout, "Solomon, turn that noise down!"

"But Dad, it's a Merzbow CD," he'll say. "I got it from your collection."

So, lullabies. There is an musique concrete group from Canada named Coin Gutter whose last record, All Your Dreams Are Meaningless, contains a track called "Lullaby." It has a piano melody drawn straight from the dark corners of a tattered carnival and an operatic singer who is going to expire from melancholic consumption when she hits the last note of this song, and the two of them perform a soothing duet -- point, counterpoint, call and response. It's uncomplicated and poignant -- two emotional melodies circling one another. The rest of the instrumentation, however, is digitized bursts of white noise, loops and tones which drain and moan across the aural landscape, and manipulated effects which cause the singer's voice to stutter and loop back on itself. It is, in my mind, a lullaby for the 21st century -- a song suited for a child who will have no concept of archaic devices like the 8-track player and the cassette recorder, who may not be able to understand the distinction between a real instrument and a digital sample, and who may never quite be sure that what he hears or sees hasn't been digitally altered.

I'm going to teach him; it is my understanding of the world which is going to be imprinted on him. I am going to have to tell him how the buzzing static woven through this song is like a field of cicadas on a hot summer night, how the squalls of white noise are like lightning bursts across a gray and articulated sky, and how the skipping unreliability of the singer's voice isn't just the machinery breaking down but also a metaphor of how the voice carries emotion beyond and beneath the words. I'm going to have to teach him how to listen.

The baby monitor is on the desk next to me. My wife is up there right now, singing as she feeds him. The monitor whaps out a regular pulse of noise that lets me know it is working and there is some interference which puts an underlying burr of static. My wife's voice is soft enough beneath this constant thump and sizzle that her song sounds like I'm picking up some radio transmission from the South Seas which has been bouncing around the ionosphere for a few decades. Occasionally he will make some squirrel noise that spikes the readout of the monitor. I want to record what I'm hearing; I want to get an hour of it on CD and give it all of my friends. This, I will say, this is the music of my son's room. And, for a number of them, it will just be random bits of noise. But what I really want to do is play it back for my son when he's old enough to start learning about music. This, I will tell him, this is what music is all about. This moves my heart and that is only criteria that matters.

« « little fictions || 01.27.2004 @ 09:02 AM

Belial

Belial, one of the fallen angels ennumerated by Milton in Paradise Lost, argues for patience at the first meeting of the dark ones following their respite from the lake of fire.

"Our Supreme Foe in time may much remit
His anger, and perhaps thus far remov'd
Not mind us not offending, satisfi'd
With what is punish't; whence these raging fires
Will slack'n, if his breath stir not their flames.
Our purer essence then will overcome
Their noxious vapour, or enur'd not feel,
Or chang'd at length, and to the place conformed
In temper and in nature, will receive
Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain;
This horror will grow mild, this darkness light,
Besides what hope the never-ending flight
Of future days may bring, what chance, what change
Worth waiting, since our present lot appears
For happy though but ill, for ill not worst,
If we procure not to our selves more woe."

He's the final angel to rise up from the burning lake and Milton gives him this description:

"BELIAL came last, then whom a Spirit more lewd
Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood
Or Altar smok'd; yet who more oft then he
In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest
Turns Atheist, as did ELY'S Sons, who fill'd
With lust and violence the house of God.
In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns
And in luxurious Cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towers,
And injury and outrage: And when Night
Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of BELIAL, flown with insolence and wine."

« « little fictions || 01.24.2004 @ 11:32 PM

Door In The Wall

I've been reading Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

"By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies -- all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." (pp. 12-13)

Huxley quoting Dr. C. D. Broad: "The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening elsewhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge..." (pp. 22-23)

"The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant than the world beheld by [William] Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary and plastic symbols, what he has seen." (p. 46)

"The outer world is what we wake up to every morning of our lives, is the place where, willy-nilly, we must try to make our living. In the inner world there is neither work nor monotony. We visit it only in dreams and musings, and its strangeness is such that we never find the same world on two successive occasions." (p. 46)

"To be shaken out of the rut of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large -- this is a experience of inestimable value to everyone..." (p. 73)

"We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. we must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction." (p. 74)

It is very easy to go from here to William Blake's observations about innocence and experience, and, even more readily these days, to wonder what it is that Solomon sees when he stares rapturously at the Klee print we have on the wall. And not just there, but everywhere he looks. He hasn't been taught anything, so he has no "generic lables or explanatory abstractions" to attach to what he sees. He just sees.

I was reading some magazine in the waiting room at the doctor's office a few weeks ago and I stumbled across an article about a man who, after 43 years, was getting his sight back. He had been able to perceive very general shapes and colors, but nothing distinct for his entire life and now he has partial sight in one eye. He tells the story of the first time he flew in an airplane following the final operation. As they were coming in to land, he leaned over to the person next to him and asked, "Excuse me. Could you explain to me what I am seeing out the window?"

« « little fictions || 01.21.2004 @ 01:32 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.

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