099: The Spire to Heaven

I was sitting at the Borders at the corner of Michigan and Pearson in Chicago, the Water Tower Chapel rising up behind me, about a month ago. Off to my right behind the steel-clad Water Tower Plaza is the immense black rock of the John Hancock building. I went up to the top the previous nightt and looked out as far as I could see. It's a thousand feet or so in the air, not quite as high as the Sears tower, but it is high enough that you can see all the way to Michigan on a clear day. It's a somewhat meaningless accomplishment--"Hey, I saw Michigan today. Well, I think it was Michigan; it looked like any other stretch of waterfront land."--but it is a sight which we, as two-meter bipedal animals, don't normally see. You can see the stretch of mankind's accomplishments from a thousand feet up.

There are spiders at that height. I shared every view with a handful of them, dark fat spiders who have gorged themselves these last few weeks on the plethora of bugs which have blown through the city. Apparently, spiders are very common at the top of skyscrapers, and I wonder how they get there. Do they scale the entire structure to reach this pinnacle? Is that the extent of their lives: climbing the side of a man-made structure? They climb, they feast, they breed, they die. All within a hands breath of Heaven.

Is that what we tried with the Tower of Babel? Did entire generations live, fuck, and die on the ramparts of that tower? Were there children who never touched solid ground, their entire lives spent among the raised stones and the scaffolding of Man's abortive attempt to reach Heaven?

I have a friend who has recently discovered base jumping--the sport of jumping from a fixed point and parachuting. He would jump from the top of the Hancock building in a second if the winds were right. He would leap into space and freefall for a second or two before he turned himself into a bird and soared through the raised pillars of steel and stone.

There is a Frank Lloyd Wright sketch at the observation deck at the Hancock, a conceptual drawing of the Mile High Skyscraper. A structure that Wright believed would have nuclear-powered elevators to get the thousands of daily visitors up and down this metal spike.

I'm down on the ground where everyone travels horizontally, their faces fixed forward. No one looks up. No one wonders what the spiders are doing, no one looks for the shadow of a giant bird soaring through the jungle of tall buildings, no one dreams of standing on the top of the high tower and stretching their hand up just to see if they can touch the edge of Heaven.

098: Dodging Research

I've bumped up against a point where I need to have some research done to properly write the next section. Of course, since research distracts me from actually writing, I'm probably going to leave a marker in the text and come back to it later. At least that was the plan. Unfortunately, it is a bit that is somewhat important: how Grandpa codes the notebook. There's another question floating in the wings: who is the intended audience for the notebook? Up to this point, I've been operating under the assumption that the notebook was a working book -- a volume which Grandpa updated regularly and referenced as he continued his work, and the trouble confronting me with that was the idea of a coded text which would be usuable as a reference manual while in its coded state. Grandpa would have to be able to convert the code on the fly in order to randomly read the notebook and use it. While not entirely impossible -- da Vinci had his own code to conceal his efforts from the eyes of his contemporaries -- the conceit is complicated by the fact that Grandpa was a spy during WWII. He knows how code systems works and, more importantly, he knows how they are broken. If he really wanted to write something that would be uncrackable except to those who knew the key, it would probably be a bit tougher than a straight-forward substitution code.

It's a minor point to get hung up on and maybe I'm letting it distract me too much. Maybe Grandpa's notebook isn't much more than a diary written in a simple substitution method based on the Enochian tables. The trouble with the tables is that the alphabet is scattered throughout the table and even a substitution cipher is a bit of a mental puzzle. At least for my pee brain. Doing the switcheroo change-up from memorized versions of the tables is even more of a stretch. Not impossible, just complicated.

I'm trying to avoid a complicated solution to a very simple problem. Most of us don't go all complex for the simple things, really. Occam's Razor and all that. When I bump against a wall, I don't always just keep bumping at it until the bricks come down; sometimes you have to rethink the problem, consider why you're at this wall and if you've arrived here by accident or design. If by design, is your design the right one? In the case of Grandpa's notebook: what function does it serve in the story?

Well, it's the dying orc actually. It's the piece of paper which draws a map for our heroes and says, "Bad guys over here." Well-- and here's the design flaw -- not really. It's the impetus for Grandpa's death and for Jack's fixation on the numbers stations. Maybe it's not the codex, but rather it is a series of light clues which point towards the bigger conspiracy. And here's what has been nagging me about this all along: why would Grandpa write all this shit down? Why would he write a notebook for his family to read and decode? Especially when he knows that the content may very well be deadly to him. Would you do that to your family? No, if the bad guys were coming to get you, you'd want to protect your family as much as you could. You wouldn't want to leave a trail for them that says, "Hey, kids, here's the way to the monster's lair."

Of course, if I take away the reason for the notebook then I take away the reason for the push to find Jack's mother and get the key from her. Actually, this means that Jack's mother can give them a different clue. She can point them towards the Army Corps of Engineers and the occult secret of their mission in Europe at the close of WWII.

Shit. Talked myself out of one bit of research for another. I'm not going to be able to escape it.

097: Beaten To The Punch By Evolution

There is a species of parasitic wasp that lays its larvae in the body of the orb spider. The spider is stung by the female wasp and is paralyzed while the egg is laid. Once the poison wears off, the spider goes about its business while the newly hatched wasp larva feeds on it, sucking its very lifeblood in order to nourish the new life.

In about 14 days, the young wasp is ready to wrap itself in a cocoon and pupate into a full adult. However, it's just a larva -- just a piece of jelly with teeth -- and it has no way of making its own cocoon. Fortunately, mom has provided for her youngster and a delayed chemical payload goes off in the spider's brain and the spider spins a completely different web one night, a web that has only one purpose: providing a cocoon for its parasitical companion. The tiny larva waits until the spider is done, kills and eats the spider, and then crawls off into its new home and pupates.

Fucking hell. The orb spider not only carries the little bastard but he weaves a web for it and then patiently returns to be cut up for chow. William Eberhard, who first wrote about this in Nature, discovered that, if the larva was removed before it could kill the spider, the spider would live its life as if nothing had happened.

As if it hadn't be reprogrammed for one evening to build something completely alien to its nature.

The brain, when you get right down to it, is just a series of chemical interactions. Signals come in, signals come out. It's all a matter of formulae, signals and responses built and coded by something we like to call "consciousness." But it's just code, right? Anyone can write code and, if it is inserted properly, can you really tell if it is viral or just your own signal?

The wasp venom inserts a chemical payload that recodes the spider to the wasp's bidding for one night of its life.

And to think that I thought the whole idea of reprogramming the brain through the use of some primal linguistic tool was far-fetched. Turns out it's old news in the natural world.

[Thanks, Dad, for pointing this one out.]

Undine

Whether comes the untrammeled power within water? In a jar or glass, it is nothing, just molecules collected into such proliferation that they cannot move swiftly, that they gel into liquid, that they stick to one another and propagate motion with fluid elegance. Hydrogen and oxygen combined in the most simplistic manner, the primal coupling so easy, so basic, that our world is covered with it, that we are filled with it. Old stories speak of undines, spirits who inhabited the liquid ether and, by vibrations, could control the watery element. These stories speak of storms created from the fury of undines aroused, of inexplicable drownings on dry land from the spite of scorned nereiads, of pools made reflective by the glassy precognition of mermaids, of rain made sweet by the evaporated tears of kelpies. In each case, water is nothing but motion made by the echo of the heart of the undine. When you stand on the edge of a rocky shore and feel the ground tremble beneath your feet, when the spray lashes against your face and hands, and the slippery grasp of the fading wave tries to drag you back into the sea, you have to wonder what brought this motion to you. Was it love or anger?

096: How Our Tongues Split

It's funny -- well, maybe not so funny in the end -- when you don't get enough sleep, how sleep becomes an obsession. Or maybe it's just the way Hypnogogia pursues you during the day, tugging at your hair. If I had an infinite amount of time, I would be reading up on dream symbols today, trying to learn about the core symbology which resonantes in all of us. I think I've touched on it briefly before at opi8 (back in February actually) and, in my sleep-deprived state, I'm relooping on unfinished conversations in my head. You know, those bits of memory which are still labeled "active" and "open," waiting for some resolution so that they can be filed away.

Anyway, symbols. Dreams and symbols. The reoccuring point in my thought processes is the possibility of a single human language -- the core mode of expression that rises above regional dialectic differences, above cultural and religious lines. Is there something akin to species knowledge? If you took monkeys from one region to another, would they be able to communicate with other monkeys of the same species whom they've never encountered before? What about dolphins and whales? Is there a species-wide language among them all?

Funny thought: Do whales have regional dialects in their songs?

What drove us to different tongues? Babel and our hubris of reaching for the sky? It's a religious metaphor -- well, I guess that depends on what you do Sunday morning; it's a metaphor around my house -- a myth and, like all myths, there is probably some kernel of truth to it. At the very least, it is an attempt to explain the way that the world works. If so, then are we just not evolved enough to understand the true reason for the diversification of tongues? (In much the same way that primitive cultures believed that the sun died every night and was reborn again in the morning because they were too ignorant to understand the physics of planetary rotation.)

Today, in my lucid dreaming state, I like the idea that it was done on purpose. Our tongues were scrambled to make us less homogeneous, less unified. Scatter these tribes, mar their tongues, keep them from looking at the stars. Keep them from realizing the potential of a unified group-mind.

You can blame the Old Ones, if you like.

Excrescence

There are goblins, sprites and dark woodfolk in the forest, the other children would whisper on the playground, peering fearfully towards the black wood which crouched at the edge of the village. Every year there was talk in the Council to burn back the forest, and every year someone would remember the last time there was talk of pushing back the forest: how, on the night following the day of torches and axes, the burning eyes came into their sealed houses and touched their babies, leaving red welts on necks and arms which gradually formed pulpy excrescences, marking those children. On their fifteen birthdays, these children all wandered into the woods , branches growing earnestly from their raised warts. The children rooted themselves in the cleared spaces near the edge of town and covered themselves with thick bark, growing taller and more slender with each year, their branches growing into an interlocking umbrella of dark leaves as if they stood silently with their heads bowed and their arms stretched out, clasping each other's hand.

095: The Sleep of Reason

Apropos of nothing other than the title of the preceeding entry, I'm thinking of Francisco Goya this morning. The Spanish painter -- known for the manner in which his painting descended into madness -- always had a bit of darkness under the edge of his brush. If you go back to his early portraiture done for the upper class Spanish families, there is an undercurrent of terror and bruised madness in his subjects. You can see the whites of their eyes and, to this day, I remember those terrified eyes when I think of his work. These are people who, whether they admit it or not, are frightened. It may be nothing -- the world may be a perfectly sane and normal place -- but somewhere in their heads, a cancer lurks.

Goya, on his deathbed, said (and this may be entirely apocryphal): "Open the window, please. Let the darkness in."

There's a detached violence which writers have to be capable of. It's not something they like to talk about but, on some level, you have to be cognizant of the destructive impulse and be able to approach this dark cancer of the brain. You don't have to take pleasure in it, but you have to be able to approach it with a stick and scrape off a bit of the black blood that covers it in order to write about some of the evil that men do. (Or not, it all depends on your genre, really.) Goya used this vile blood in his paintings; he just vomited it up on the canvas and worked it into the spread of his oils.

Sometimes the cancer devours you. Sometimes it lurches across your brain and touches the thick stalk of blood vessels that circulate through the skull. It infects your blood, leaching its putrescence into your veins where it flows out of your brain, down your spine, and back into your heart. Your spine goes cold and the vertebrae shatter, chips of bone serating the clusters of nerves. Your heart seizes, tightening up in involuntary spasms as the vile shit pools in your aerota. The cancer spreads, the light behind your eyes goes out, and, when it spreads to your lungs, you start coughing up darkness.

I've been listening to several chapters of Objective-Subjective's 12-part soundtrack to the Alan Moore's The Watchmen. Two of the three chapters released so far are filled with the specter of Rorschach, Moore's unhinged take on the DC Comics character, The Question. Rorschach's violence is spawned by the hate and bloodshed that he sees around him -- he is the product of his society -- and his response is a coldly primal one. An eye for an eye isn't enough. And yet, in the end, Rorschach is the most uncomplicated one of the bunch. His solution is a simple one -- eat the cancer before it eats you -- and, even though he becomes irrevocably tainted by his act of sin-eating, he remains a sympathetic character because of a core precept of his altered philosophy: hurt only those who hurt others; the innocents must remain innocent.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Dark birds are on the wing.

Apropos of nothing, really. Just wandering through the corners of my brain this morning, thinking about the shadows.

Eidolon

The lost eidolon of Eventine began haunting the Quickie Mart out at the Four Corners sometime last winter. It may have been the weekend of the Great Snow of '02 when the world went white and we all stayed indoors, huddled next to our precious wood-burning stoves, covered in three layers of blankets, waiting for the ice to break. It was a hard winter, and all manner of creatures and persons got lost in that blizzard. Including one spook. He's an old one, probably uprooted during the construction out by the Mall where they've been digging down to the bedrock for the new parking garage.

There was a series of hauntings when construction of the Mall first started, and the historian from the State Museum finally scrounged up some old records from the early homesteaders and pointed out to the architecture firm that they were building 68 shops, three anchor stores, and a 17-screen movie theater on top of the original settlers. The Architects, adherents of the Neo-Logos Movement, scoffed at the possibility of conflict between the old world and the new. Digging continued and, in the bleak hour of night, dump trucks filled with broken shards of cedar, old bones and moist earth were trucked out of town to an undisclosed location. Shortly thereafter, the spooks came.

The Architects brought in a company from New York, a team of six who cleared out the ghosts in the space of two nights. The first night was terrible, the nocturnal hours filled with shrieks and moans and the dreadful crackling noise of the arcane devices of the ghost hunters. The second night was silent as every ghost that survived the first night was in hiding. As was the entire community. We all hid under our beds and in our closets, barely daring to breathe the whole night through.

In the morning, the ghosts and the hunters were gone. The Architects offered the township a blessing on the new Mall, freshly consecrated for the Gods of Consumerism, and crowned the buildings with the battlements of the New Word.

There no more ghosts until the winter when William McCready -- the first prospector of Eventine -- rose out of the ground and got stuck in the shadow of the Quickie Mart.

094: The Dreams of Consciousness

"Dreams are imperfections of sleep; even so is consciousness the imperfection of waking. Dreams are imperfections in the circulation of the blood; even so is consciousness a disorder of life."

We are strange monkeys in that we can dream, we can confuse reality with an imagined reality which we entirely construct. There is the age-old Zen-like paradox: is our reality but the dream existence of a slumbering god? Are we but imperfect phantoms made real by the hyperactive imagination of a child deity? Are we the molecules -- combining, dividing, splitting and coming together -- of someone's big toe? Hard to say. Hard to say.

But the dreaming bit. There is no doubt that the function of dream/consciousness -- call it the biochemical awareness and continued percolation of our brains -- is not entirely under the control of our active Id. There's about six people arranged near me on the train right now who are all sleeping. These are twenty minute cat naps on the way to Seattle and they aren't long enough to really engage in deep dream states, but even in their hypnagogic states, their brains are still working. They don't just shut off, reducing activity to a very primal state -- basic survival functions only, thank you -- the mind continues to process, store and collate the data streams.

They -- that elusive "Them" -- always say: You can achieve your dreams. Is this a functional statement that we can shape reality? If I dream that all dogs are blue and shit candy corn, would it become true? Probably not. So, is the "achievement of dreams" a conditional statement? Can I achieve only those things which the remainder of the waking and conscious world agrees upon? Are the limitations of my dreaming existence predicated by the consensual reality we all have created?

If we all became enlightened tomorrow, we would all cease to exist. We would become the Dreaming God and reality would be whatever we imagined.

The cults then -- the hive-mind organizations who have come together because of a shared focus and direction -- want to be the dominant voice in the Dreaming God's head. They want to be the ones who actively direct the formation and realization of reality. They want their reality, made firm and flesh through the collective power of all of our dreaming minds. They don't want our contribution. They just aren't interested in blue dogs that crap candy corn.

093: When In Doubt, Insert Explosion

Not much work on the novel last week. I had a weekend getaway where I managed to spank out nearly 7000 words recently, pushing me well into Chapter XXII. The first third is wrapping up: the mystery is fairly well exposed, our brave adventurers have discovered the first key clue which will aid them on their quest, and a couple of things have been blown up. All in a day's work.

It's still strange to come and go with this book. The events of the book start on a Friday and it's now just Tuesday for them while I've seen almost a hundred Tuesdays since I started. I think they're ready for Wednesday -- hump day -- which, now that I write it, is almost like the peak of the book. It's like the chaos of the work week: we don't know what the hell we're doing until Wednesday when we suddenly chill and remember how to do this and the rest of the week is an accelerating slide towards the weekend.

No? Must just be the way my week runs, then.

Anyway, the first third is wrapping up. It's probably not an literal third; I imagine the last part will be shorter and tighter. The first part of the book is the hook where you set the metal barbs in the reader deep enough that they can't wriggle out. It's all mysterious and exciting and thrilling so far, but now -- yes, now -- we're going to sit down and talk. And we're going to talk about deep subjects, topics you've never wanted to face before because their very existence frightens you. This is the section where the author takes his liberties and gets out his soapbox and, at least in the Apocalpytic Thriller, tells you why the end of the world is nigh.

Or maybe more shit will blow up. Joel Silver's entire contribution to the action film will be remembered as: when you think the audience's attention is starting to flag, something must explode. You can always tell how bad the script is by how often things -- in a very non-sequitor stream of consciousness sort of way -- explode.

I've got some history to invent. We're going back to WWII in this next bit when Liz and Markham learn about what it was that Grandpa Maratre was doing during the war and what he heard that so freaked him out for the rest of his life. We're going to get our first glimpse of the Cabinet Noir and all the idle bits of research that I've been doing over the last two years are going to start to come together. Ah, that's always a nice feeling.

And then, rest assured, things will start exploding again.

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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