100: Books

One of the professions given to John Dee, when one is busy listing all the ways in which the Renaissance Man left a mark on history and culture, is that of bibliographer. He made an extensive effort to build a vast and impressive collection of texts -- both scientific and occult -- during his lifetime, trying to collate the sum of human knowledge in a way that England would have access to the secrets held therein. It's all, you know, about synthesizing the totality of human expression, after all. Shortly before his flight from England, he cataloged his collection at Mortlake, a bibliography than ran 170 pages.

I've been poking around in Dee's life these last few days, making notes here and there, and finding books that I might want to investigate:

Ramon Lull's Liber experimentorum. Lull was a 13th century Franciscan who laid a great deal of the groundwork for the combination of rational thought, philosophy, and spiritual consideration of the nature of the universe and man's place in it. It's probably overstretching to call him an occultist, but he was considered a "Doctor Illuminatus" and the Lullists ran hot and heavy in Spain for a while after his death. However, due to the revolutionary nature of his writings, even though he was martyred, he has never been canonized. Lost saint, in the end. Still, influential to Dee and the Cabalists and the Renaissance as a while.

Johannes Trithemius' Steganographia. Three books, two of which were finished (it can be found here) and which detail a method of long-distance communication using spirits and other summoned creatures to carry messages. The third part was all in code which wasn't broken until 1998 by Jim Reeds. His paper can be found here. The fact that the Internet coughs that up for me is amazing.

Jacopo Silvestri's Opus Novum... principibus maxime vtilissimum pro cipharis. An early work on the use of ciphers, including the Caesar cipher. Dee referenced this book on more than one occasion as a tool for learning about codes. (An early history of Cryptology is here, part of an extensive discussion about who wrote the Shakespearean plays.)

The Book of Soyga. The book is first referenced during one of the first encounters between Dee and the Angels where he asked of the original and meaning of the text. The book was thought lost until 1994 when it was discovered bearing an alternate title. Transcript and discussion of the text can be found here.

Doctoris Dee Mysteriorum Libri Quinti (Dee's Five Books of Mystery). These are the transcripts of his "actions," his investigations into the angelic mysteries by means of the "shewing stone" and the medium of Edward Kelly. This is generally known as Sloane MS 3188. Scans of the pages can be found here.

48 Claves Angelicae. The 48 keys are the Calls by which the Enochian Angels are summoned. Crowley got his hands on them during the early 20th century and added his own spin. One version is here.

Voynich Manuscript. While named after the collector who "discovered" it in 1912, there is some evidence that Dee had this at one time and sold it to Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who Dee visited in Prague after his flight from England. It is still untranslated and, look at this, there is a whole domain detailing its mysteries.

I need to get my Latin back up to speed.

[This, by the way, is the last archived SYMBOLIC column at this site. You can (and should) continue to read them here.]

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.]

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.

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.

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.

092: The Failure of Family Trees

I need a diagram for my family tree. I'm getting fathers and grandfathers confused. Usually the characters grow to populate a good deal of the active part of your head when you're working on a book, but I've been addled enough and distracted enough that they only occupy a tiny corner of my brain. In that corner, family trees are getting muddled. A key element of Grandpa's notebook hinges on a date that just doesn't work because Jack's Mom is Grandpa's daughter and not his wife. This isn't the Appalachian backwoods so there isn't any convoluted inter-marriage of families going on here. This is straight forward middle class breeding.

Even if Grandpa loves his daughter very much, he wouldn't base his crypto key on the day they met. And, if he does base it on the day he and his wife met, then it is possible he never told his daughter. Shit. It was all so simple yesterday.

I need a better key. I also need to consider if I'm making this too complicated. Grandpa's security on his notebook has to be simple enough that he can parse it in his head (it helps that he's a whiz at these sorts of things), but complicated enough that, without the key, it's difficult and pointless to try. Sort of a homemade version of a one time pad. The notebook is the MANUSCRIPT and it holds the key to deciphering the mysterious transmissions which have gotten everyone in an uproar. But it isn't just a written document; it has to be coded so that only the proper chaps can get to it. The bad guys took Grandpa away a long time ago. They never got the notebook.

So does it have to be coded? If it was hidden, isn't that enough?

Would Grandpa think it was enough?

091: The Manuscript That Kills

In the Apocalyptic Thriller, there is a MANUSCRIPT. I was off doing some research about the Necronomicon and realized that it, and the others like it, serve a very important function in the Apocalyptic Thriller: they are both the device which warns of impending doom as well as the means by which doom is unleashed upon the world. Convenient that. Invariably the MANUSCRIPT drives the reader mad or, at the very least, allows demons to enter this dimension who, in turn, eat the brain of the reader.

Same result, essentially, just differing special effects budgets.

The MANUSCRIPT is the last gasp effort of the good guys to not die in vain; it is their attempt to leave a record of what they learned so that the next generation won't make the same mistake. The villains win if they destroy every record which counters their version of history and, because we can't stand the idea that evil really truly does win, we always provide for a way that the heroes can pass on their wisdom to the next generation. This is the OLD MAN's last will and testament, kids, one last note about the demonic forces massing beyond this purple barrier that has been kept intact by his persistent will for the last fifty years.

Why they always write the words you shouldn't read aloud in the frontspiece before the warning label that says, "Do not, under pain of terrible and awful death, read any of this text out loud" is just part of the way stories are written. You know, it's the first law: THINGS GET WORSE.

I'll readily admit that I have a fascination with manuscripts. Not that you could tell by the way I traffic for things at chain used bookstores. Hoping I'll find a gem that won't cost me an arm or a leg, I suppose. I don't even really know what I would do if a real MANUSCRIPT fell in my lap. (Well, other than reading it out loud, I suppose.) I still get a kick out of how Sam Raimi pulled off the old manuscript trick in Evil Dead II: he had the old scientist record himself reading from it as part of his field notes. So, when our young demon fodder show up and wonder where everyone is, someone -- without fail -- has to say, "Hey? What's this recorder? I wonder what is on it."

I suppose manuscripts are the lure of the modern occultist. It's hard to find a real Master in this day and age to learn from the knee of. You have to find your way through books. And, because Master isn't there to correct your pronouciation or remind you to close the pentagram before you get started, we do what all eager youngsters do with a new toy: we play with it immediately and read the instructions later.

090: Solstice

Summer solstice today. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, we've got the Long Day to suffer through. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's already too warm for rational thought. Fever dreams are the currency of the nighttime hours, bed sweats where you lie like a drying fish and gasp out tiny pleas for any sort of breeze. You sleep with the windows wide open and, all night long, the outside world gets to creep in and whisper in your ear.

I used to be a night person; used to love the winter months with their eternal darkness. While I still are partial to those months, I have started to appreciate the hour before dawn, that last hour when the night has finally cooled the earth and the fog is just starting to creep across the water. Dawn will be drawing a pink line across the horizon but not for another thirty minutes yet. Everything is still and crisp.

You can get some good thinking done at this hour. If you're awake. This is like the first moment of birth when your brain hasn't started shuffling through all the things you didn't accomplish yesterday and probably won't get to today. This is the hour when you can be your own man and think your own thoughts. "We murder to create." You can imagine an entire universe in twenty minutes, revel in its complexities and Mandelbrotian edges for fifteen, and then spend ten destroying it with giant cyborg sharks or mutant space funguses or a single pissed off clown hopped up on adrenochrome and goofballs.

And still have fifteen minutes to make yourself a piece of wheat toast and eat it quietly, listening to the sound of your jaws working on the crackling bread.

The longest day has been long for me. I was too close to its beginning when I went to bed last night and too close to its arrival when I got up this morning. I'm still on the cusp of Chapter XIV. I know what Markham is going to do with the fork and I'm kind of tickled by the image. But I'm hung on the edge; too many distractions and deadlines keeping me from the book.

This soap bubble will pop soon and I'll fall back into the book. But, in the meantime, I entertain myself by creating and un-creating the world in forty-five minutes.

089: They'll Never Survive

I've just hit the first THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE moment in the BOOK OF LIES. It's only marginally threatening, but it should wake up all those who've been lulled into slumber by the talking heads of the last few hundred chapters. (Which isn't true. It just feels that way to me since I've been busy enough that it takes me a few days -- or weeks -- to find the time to finish any given chapter.) I'm hung on the cusp of THINGS BLOW UP.

Which, technically, isn't a structural part of the mythology of the Apocalpytic Thriller. But, come on, we're talking about the end of the world here. A little wanton property damage is just a snack in comparsion to the full course meal of the approaching apocalypse. And, if you are like me, you don't mind a snack now and then.

Anyway, in the past I've really looked forward to the THINGS BLOW UP moments because, well, things blow up. I have a blatant disregard for the sanctity of objects and the health of my characters. It's part of the law of maximum capacity. Someone -- and it may have been James Frey in How to Write A Damn Good Novel -- once posited the rule that, regardless of the intelligence or wisdom of your characters, they must operate at THEIR maximum capacity. Anything less and the audience will find them foolish and unbelievable. It's a short hop from that point to THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE.

I don't know why I've been reticent to start this next bit. It may have something to do with a number of other writing things which have intruded over the last week that have demanded my attention. The chapter may just be waiting until I can devote my full attention to the property destruction before I get to it. Maybe. Regardless, I've left them hanging and need to get back to them soon.

I've got three guys on motorcycles with machine pistols and Markham only has a fork. The odds are more even than they sound.

088: The Apocalyptic Hero

The Hero, as outlined by Joseph Campbell, must reconcile the doubt within himself when he returns from the other side. Even though he might fear that society is not yet ready for his insight and illumination, he must give it to them. He must trust that they will not abuse the knowledge, that they are ready to consider enlightenment.

The Apocalpytic Hero is the guy who has been burned by this trust. He has come back from the other side, having seen the wonders of the universe, and has been spurned by the very group whom he attempted to love. And it is a matter of the heart. They didn't love him back and now he's sulking -- bitter and distrustful of those who have abandoned him.

John Creasy -- Denzel Washington's character in the recent (and superb) Man on Fire -- is an Apocalpytic Hero. It's only after someone extends him love that he remembers what it is like to be enlightened AND a member of society. In the end his gift to the world is accepted and he is able to achieve some semblance of peace.

In the Apocalpytic Thriller, the hero must be coerced back from his exile. He differs from the normal hero in that he has already gone to the other side; he knows that THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS. And, because he has gone to the Abyss and stared Khoronzon in the face and not gone insane, he is the perfect candidate to do so again. He is the hero of the last generation and the next generation seeks him out again because the new candidate for Hero didn't make the cut.

In Campbell's cycle, the Apocalpytic Hero is the Magus -- the wise old man who teaches the young hero how to survive on the other side. Think Obiwan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker. If the story had been slightly different (and the initial events were on this path until the young hero intervened and wasn't killed by Tuscan Raiders out in the desert -- pity that), then it would have been Ben Kenobi who was asked to come out his exile to save the universe. But, as it was, whiny boy Luke Skywalker survived to find Kenobi and get his father's lightsaber...yada yada yada.

It is the task of the Magus, by the way, to demonstrate HOW THE MONSTER WORKS as well as make the hero's conflict personal. It isn't enough to be tasked with saving the world; the hero must also be saddled with the fact that he isn't enlightened enough. Sure, he's got the secret knowledge that powers the universe but because he doesn't understand it -- because he hasn't synthesized it with his own human experience -- he isn't able to save the Magus. By sacrificing himself, the Magus knows that his efforts will not be lost. Even though society at large has failed to accept his gift of enlightenment, he has managed to pass that knowledge onto another. The chain isn't broken. Not yet.

Which is another facet of the Apocalpytic Hero's bitterness. He knows that, until another hero comes along, he is THE ONE. Even though society doesn't want his knowledge, he is its keeper. It is his sole task to survive and wait and, when you're fighting a one man war against malignant entropy and hedonistic materialism, you tend to get a little lonely and angry.

087: Apocalyptic Thrillers

I'm putting off work on Chapter 14. It's staring me in the face a bit only because it's supposed to divulge a good amount of Grandpa's history and I haven't really thought it all the way through yet. At least not so far as matching it up to the history of clandestine organizations in the US following WWII. I suppose it can all be dealt with later in research, but, oddly enough, I still have some reticence about inventing material that may have to be later reconciled with fact. Though, as Robert Anton Wilson continually points out about Illuminatus: regardless of how far-fetched he and Robert Shea extrapolated the conspiracy, it was never far out enough and bits of it kept coming true. So, yeah, one should never invent with the fear of being wrong; you should invent with the possibility that you may be right.

And then be ready to laugh it off when you turn out to be wrong in twenty years or so. It's good to have a sense of humor about these things.

So, as a mental exercise and as something that we can laugh about later, I thought I'd circle back and expand on the idea of Apocalyptic Thrillers. You can't talk about these sorts of books these days without at least touching on the Left Behind series, a multi-volume examination of the Biblical End of Time. Not my cup of tea, personally, and not the least because (1) they are written in a style which has no style and the characters are not much more than tissue paper cutouts of single-dimensional characterizations; and, (2) they are so fundamentally dogmatic about their vision of Christianity and, frankly, it's a supremely essential facet of their world-building and, since I don't buy it in the slightest, I'm at odds with the premise before I even start. I'm sure, however, that they do adhere to the basic structure of the Apocalyptic Thriller. Naturally. [insert wink and nudge here]

The Apocalyptic Thriller concerns itself with the END OF THE WORLD, or at least, the END OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION. It may be literal (as in the Left Behind books) or it may a logical conclusion following the localized catastrophe which is the core threat of the book. If it is of a global nature, then it will most likely require a cast of several hundred characters. It all depends on how widescreen you want the action to be. The bottom line, however, is that HUMANITY IS AT RISK. Whether this risk is one monkey with a nasty attitude and the Ebola virus, Nature taking back the planet via global warming, a deranged lunatic with a stockpile of nuclear warheads or some secret society bent on invoking a demonic presence which will devour the world is entirely up to the writer.

Joseph Campbell's heroic cycle ends with the hero leaving or remaining separate from the culture he has rescued because the events of the quest; the hero goes to THE OTHER SIDE as part of his adventure and becomes transformed, thereby making him "different" from everyone else. In the Apocalyptic Thriller, our hero will have been TOUCHED BY THE OTHER SIDE which makes him uniquely qualified to be the guy who saves the world. This mark of Otherness makes him an Outsider (capital "O" in Colin Wilson's sense) which means that he'll be a reject and a loner. He will have to be coerced into saving the world, either through an appeal by the elders of the society which he has left or by circumstance. The elders will appeal to his desire to return to the community or his sense of honor and duty to what is RIGHT. Circumstances will be some event which will have an personal impact on him, usually the death of someone he cares about or feels some duty towards. His course of action in the beginning is simply one of revenge and, from there, it grows into a larger awareness of his essential duty to right wrong and to preserve humanity's basic liberties. Or some such crap like that. Basically he gets roped into saving the world because -- as much as he might feel maligned or cast aside by society at large -- he's still a good egg and, frankly, evil pisses him off.

There has to be a MONSTER of some sort and, very early on, the audience must be given the opportunity to see HOW THE MONSTER WORKS. Evil must be quantified in a way that the readers can say, "Wow. That is really awful. Too bad that bus load of children had to die so horribly, but now I understand how terrible this evil threatening the world is. Gosh, I hope the hero gets his head out of his ass soon." Not all MONSTERS are the OLD ONES, but, yeah, in most cases, there's some thread going back to them. They're out there, you know, pulling strings.

As an aside, one of the joys about Mike Mignola's Hellboy is his glee in using the Nazis as the continued agents of the Old Ones. It's not a cliche in his hands, but rather a sly wink and nudge to his audience. Of course, it would have to be Nazis and, of course, it would have to be the Old Ones whom they are trying to contact and bring into this world. Go with what works, you know?

There has to be a WOMAN, usually two. One is the agent of LIGHT (the hooker with a heart of gold or some such) and the other is the agent of DARKNESS. Our hero will be torn between the two because, well, there's always the allure of the bad girl. The writers of Goldeneye really nailed this with Xenia Onatopp and Natalya Simonova. Come on, guys, let's see a show of hands: who was kinda bummed out when Onatopp finally bit it in the end?

The woman of light will be in danger by the climax, probably in a very Jim Silke inked and airbrushed sort of way. Rescuing the girl will allow the hero to remain aloof to the threat facing the world even though, as a result of saving the girl, he also saves the world. Her gratitude is his only reward because, even though he prevented the Apocalypse, he will still be touched by OTHERNESS (and possibly even more so now) which will make the elders of the world fear him and they will undoubtedly FUCK HIM OUT OF HIS DUE REWARD.

Reading back over this, I think my influences may be showing slightly. This is what happens when you are raised on comic books, pulp fiction, noir crime novels, and too much mythology.

086: Landmark

Somehow I just finished Chapter XIII, crossing the 50 page/25,000 word mark. If I was breaking things up into digestable chunks, this would be the first quarter of the book. This section would be known as THE WORLD IS NOT AS IT SEEMS, and would be the introduction of the characters and the core concepts which will be thrashed upon by the author over the next 75,000 words. And I'm realizing that I've accomplished that goal pretty well -- I've introduced the main players and gotten them into trouble. The next quarter will be THINGS GETTING WORSE and DEFINING HOW THE MONSTER WORKS -- important pieces to have so that the audience will be ready for the third section -- OH CRAP, THEY'LL NEVER SURVIVE. Which becomes a page-turning necessity on their part as they must discover HOW THE WORLD IS SAVED in part four.

Or something like that. I can probably turn this into a Robin Cook style equation for churning out Apocalyptic Thrillers.

085: The In-Betweener

The In-Betweener was always one of my favorite characters that Jim Starlin introduced (well, this was the first place that I ran into him) as part of Adam Warlock's struggle for his soul. The In-Betweener, split between light and dark, would appear to those who were held up at the threshold and would assist them in making the transition.

I'm waiting for the In-Betweener.

I'm coming out of the morass that I've been snared in (though today certainly wasn't a good day) and am starting to remember what it is like to have my head on fire. I'm not completely comfortable with these hour blocks of time that I have to work with, but I'm starting to understand how they are going to have to work. I'm beginning to be able to hang scenes in my head for several days -- in this case, Markham's visit to Club Adonis to get some information -- and just pluck them back from this hanging space -- the Recovery Sphere -- and "remember" where I was. I used to write so quickly that I would blow through scenes and now the pace is more languid, more like using a brush to paint a landscape instead of dashing off a quick sketch as I blow past the idyllic scene.

I just need the In-Betweener to show up and kick me through this door. I'm almost out, but not quite.

084: Trapped in a Reality-Tunnel

I'm having a little neck trouble. I've been to two chiropractors and all I've heard so far is, "Yeah, you've got some brain pressure. Now get up on the machine so we can crack your bones." I understand that they are taking a few days to examine my x-rays and determine the best method of whanging my spine back into shape, but, in the interim, I've got an equilibrium problem. Why couldn't "brain pressure" mean that I hallucinate instead of just being dizzy?

The protagonists of Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone have slivers of metal inserted into their brains in an effort to bridge gaps in the frontal lobs. As a result they become detached from "Time" and are able to exert their wills over reality: bending perceptions, extrapolating truth through lucid dreaming and communicating telepathically across time and space. Their brains have been awakened to a state where they -- the individual -- have been disconnected from the prison of the "I." They've found Robert Anton Wilson's Chapel Perilous.

Robert Anton Wilson has given me a couple of ideas to roll around my head these last few days. His version of the Chapel Perilous is one of them. The second is the phrase "habitual reality-tunnel" and the last is the idea that the origin of UFO sightings will eventually be revealed to be non-extraterrestrial in nature, that UFOs are simply the convergent language to express what is otherwise a "magickal" event. In the same way that angel visitations were realized in the Middle Ages and the expression of psychics and mediums were in the Victorian Age, UFO sightings and phenomena are simply a means of expressing an other unexplainable event. An event which is most likely caused by our brains bending or interpreting reality in a way that is beyond our shuttered world views. When we step outside our habitual reality tunnels, our brains engage with the external world in a way that is beyond our normal comprehension. In an effort to make sense of it, in an effort to communicate it to some other human being, we attach reality-tunnel language to it.

Two things: (1) Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic." (2) Joseph Campbell: "God is a thought. God is an idea. God is a means of expressing that which cannot be otherwise be made quantifiable."

Why couldn't the mechanisms hidden in the frontal lobes be stuck in the cerebellum? That way when the axis bone of your spine is out of place, you'd be having UFO visitations instead of just feeling like you're going to throw up.

Don't mind me. I'm just trying to think outside my reality-tunnel.

083: Threshold

"There are as many translators as there are humans."

Spam agents are getting smarter. Heuristics have been developed which attempt to emulate living responses in the comment areas of blogs, mechanized schema which try to pass themselves off as human beings leaving content which can be considered appropriate. It's spooky to read something like the above comment and find that it very nearly fits with the discussion at hand (which, in this case, had been about the division of humanity from its pre-Babel state into a multitude of tongues). Or maybe they've just got some poor bastard who has the job of trolling the back lots of blogs and inserting commentary and providing links to porn and pharmaceutical sites.

We'll pretend that it's an automatic agent, an algorhythm designed to mimic human behavior, tiny Turing-esque machines churning up the Internet at the bequest of their Porn Masters. The porn industry drives technology, you know, and at this rate, it won't be long before they stumble upon AI. Maybe it's already out there, lurking behind the screen name of "LicksDogsBalls69."

I'm on Chapter 7 this week*, starting to work on the mystery. Liz and Markham have cut short their flight and are returning to the city in order to break the mystery before the agents of the opposition find them. Liz has begun her initiation into the arcane world and I've introduced the fortune teller.

I like fortune tellers. It's probably a weakness that I need to overcome, but until it becomes an eye-rolling cliche in the work, I'll happily insert one. If I don't kill this guy in the process of demonstrating how the monster works, he'll be a reoccuring supporting character which are handy to have.

So, yeah, busy last week, dealing with the mundane realm of familial visits and yard work. This week: back to the shadow realm. Crowley says of the Moon card: "This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating." That's where I'll be: crossing the threshold.

[*Chapter 13 actually. They're in San Francisco now. I'm getting closer to mad bike races through the streets.]

082: Cryptoprophecy

Speaking of notebooks, I opened mine the other night and noticed the last entry was over two months ago. I had recorded a surreal experience I had had in the checkout line at my local supermarket. At least I think that is what I had written. My handwriting has a tendency to be unreadable which, I think, is part of the charm of the notebook. When the book is discovered by my grandchildren, I want them to have to puzzle out the entries. They will scratch their heads and wonder if I was a raving visionary or just an addled ancestor whose pen hand had a tendency to wander across the page.

I won't have to wait two generations. I get that feeling now when I try to decipher what I wrote back in February. I think the last word is "cryptoprophecy." I have no idea its relevance to the story that I was trying to get down which, in a sense, gives it that much more weight and import to the surrounding words.

I was reading a bit of Rammellzee's Gothic Futurism manifesto yesterday. He argues that there are twenty-six Letters which contain the mathematical secrets which will allow us to return to the stars. It is our culture, our oppressive religious fascism, which prevents us from seeing the true nature of the Letters. We have been convinced that the twenty-six make up the "alphabet," and we can know longer see the "alphabeta."

Robert Anton Wilson argues in The Cosmic Trigger that reality is not a singularity and that "reality" as we define it is a perceived universe. What is "real" is based emphatically on our senses, on our perceptions of what surrounds us and is separate from us. We create our world by witnessing it. A blade of grass is not inherently green; it is our perception of the manner in which light is reflected from its surface that makes it green.

We bring a lot to the table. Too much, probably. Beneath all the perception, beneath the obscuration of language and the totalitarianism of culture is something immutable (though Wilson will argue that even believing that statement constitutes a belief structure and, as such, limits your possibilities). Is it Rammellzee's Letters? We have to explode language in order to hear the sound of the Letters. We have to decode the confusion and maze of our perceptions in order to unlock the secret histories stored in our brains.

At least, that's what I get out of it. It's just a scribbled word on a page. I could be wrong. I could be imagining things.

081: Progress Report

I'm just about finished with a draft of Chapter 5 of this iteration of the BOOK OF LIES and progress is, well, moving. In comparison with the speed at which I used to work, it's a glacial pace but it is forward progress nonetheless. There are a number of reasons for the pace, the primary of which is that I've been busy killing myself with sugar. It's an insidious way to go, stuffing your pie hole with donuts and bits of cake -- "Mmm, tasty poison!" But I seem to have finally gotten my head wrapped around the solution and the reversal of my misfortune is progressing apace.

It's a pretty simple equation really; it just took some effort to get started. Entropy and all that. I have a predeliction for entropic activity. And sluggishness leads to more sluggishness -- the entropic equation of increasing gravity at work. However, putting a rocket up your ass and lighting the short fuse is definitely a way to break free of the gravity well that leads to Obese and Dead Of Coronary Disease at 40. One of the benefits of breaking away is the clarity of mental effort.

It's been pretty apparent for awhile that I've been working from a shortened vocabulary. It's been frustrating -- immensely so -- because I'm aware that I'm running at less than 100%, but there just hasn't been anything that I could do about it (well, there was and is, but, you know, that entropy thing again). Once the sugar levels dropped, the synaptic connections to those lost parts of my brain reengaged and dusty, unused places started working again.

I get up in the morning at a bit before 5.00am which means I've got to be supine and nestled under the covers by 11.00pm. Last night, I was lying there at 11.30pm, and my brain was still firing. This is the witching hour -- that time of night when everything is possible and I used to be able to write for two hours straight and not remember doing any of it, but being genuinely pleased and surprised when I read back over the material the following day. This is the time of finger-burning delight, when you just channel all the energy still resident in your shell right down through your arms and fingers.

I put a cap on all that freneticism, saving it for another day. It's nice to know that it's there. Not all progress is pure word count. It's been quite out there; I hope the rest of you are finding ways to bring yourselves out of winter hibernation and getting back to creative work.

[update: since this was written, I've actually progressed to Chapter X.]

080: Notebooks

"So, when were you going to tell me about the notebook?"

Notebooks are fascinating. I've got three running right now and I get excited when a project comes up that might require the construction of a notebook. As an object which will contain everything you know about a single subject, they become grimoires -- secret texts which are the storehouses of collected knowledge. Mine tend to be filled with more than just text. There will be line drawings, newspaper clippings, scraps from magazines, charts, graphs and lots and lots of small, nearly unreadable text. That's one of the requirements of a good notebook: handwriting that is indecipherable to anyone other than yourself.

They've got to be the right size too. The one I have in the car is paperback sized because I don't use it but rarely, and when I do, I'm scribbling in it while sitting at a traffic light. I don't want something heavy and bulky. It needs to be quickly accessible and small enough that I can throw it across the steering wheel. My daily notebook is large, a full-sized book with nearly three hundred pages in it. Its fairly generic -- I get them at the University Bookstore -- and, as such, I can be assured of being able to get the same thing year after year. When you start filling them and stacking them on the shelf, there is a certain delight in having them all be the same binding.

Almásy's notebook in The English Patient is one of my favorites. It's a copy of Herodotus' Histories that he has augmented with his own notes and observations. Professor Henry Jones' Grail notebook -- though but briefly seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- is another tome which inspired me as a youngster. And, of course, nearly every Lovecraft story seems to contain some sort of journal that records an adventurer's descent in madness and despair.

Notebooks allow us to leave messages for those who follow us. They allows us to leave record of our obsessions and paranoia; to leave a warning in our wake. "Yes, this is what killed me." Notebooks are keys. There's a notebook in the BOOK OF LIES. There are nine actually, but only one is important in the beginning. They need the first key before they can understand how to utilize the others.

079: Modern Alchemy

"Alchemy leads to perfection on all planes, by the separating and 'death' of the body, followed by the a rejoining of the purified parts, this time in perfect proportion, via the transforming powers of earth, water, fire, air and ether, soul and spirit -- i.e. evolution speeded up by man." [Diana Fernando]

I was paging through Diana Fernando's Dictionary of Alchemy over the weekend and paused on her definition of the subject matter. As a historical subject, alchemy is one of those many occult subjects which interest me. But as a course of living in the 21st century? Where are the modern alchemists? I see the name Fulcanelli bandied about a bit, but he's a 20th century alchemist at best (and, admittedly, I know very little beyond his name and that he was working the alembics during this last century).

Who are the 21st century alchemists? Is it the transhumanists, seeking to speed evolution by the addition of the mechanoid to their human shells? Is it...well, I don't really know, actually. A question to go have answered, I suppose.

But the above quotation and this question of modern alchemy have gotten me thinking about the Secret Plan in the BOOK OF LIES. In this age, would you actually apply the principles of alchemical transformation on yourself or would you conduct the experiments on unsuspecting subjects? You wouldn't want to evolve them completely, but getting the framework right before you slipped it onto yourself would be the safe route.

Genetic experimentation = modern alchemy?

078: The Rediscovery Sphere

When I was in short pant school, I came up with the phrase "sphere of personal influence" which was funny the first time I said it and after that it became just another example of how much a geek I really was. I couldn't just say, "Hey, you're standing too close to me." It had to be: "Ah, you're inside my sphere of personal influence." As you can imagine, there is very little which communicates more effectively to the team on the other side of the volleyball net that you are a kid who will be afraid of the ball when it comes hurtling across the net at your noggin.

There are invisible spheres which we carry with us -- headspaces, if you will. We climb inside of these spheres and they protect us, they ward us against the external forces coming to bear. Our very own occult circles, imagined by our paranoia and made real by our inadequacies and fears. But not all of the circles which Solomon built were intended as protective, some granted assistance or aided you in your searches. The Rediscovery Sphere is that bubble in which you store your other self.

I have a day job -- that eight hour existence which keeps the roof over my head and allows me the luxuries which I enjoy -- and my writing time is slices that I steal during the other hours when I'm not sleeping. And, as such, my existence is somewhat schizophrenic: all that I become during the writing process must be quickly swept aside when other priorities take effect. I have to be able to sweep everything into the Rediscovery Sphere where it will hang in space until I can get to it once again.

I call this the "Rediscovery" sphere because when I come back to it -- if I've been away for awhile -- I have to rediscover the self which I have deposited here. I have to reassemble the pieces which I've so hurried tossed aside previously. Things have a tendency to change if you leave them in the sphere too long. It's almost as if moss grows. I need an effective moss-killer or, at least, a way to come and go in this sphere without leaving dead things which fester.

077: The Active Conspiracy

It's turning into a gorgeous Saturday -- most of the early fog has burned off the water and I can almost see the white caps of the Cascade Range off to the east. My office is downstairs and the only window I have looks out at the cracked and weather-beaten planks of the fence separating our yard from the neighbors. This is the reason I have my desk facing the opposite wall.

However, this morning I'm on Baby Watch and I'm upstairs at the dining room table and the view from either window up here is the "limited water view" which our property assessment reads. The days have become noticeably longer as well. Sunrise happens near the beginning and end of my daily train commute; we no longer travel in darkness up the valley to Seattle.

As you can well imagine, the solitary act of writing is tough to accomplish in environments like this. We need our dark holes in which to craft our magic. You never imagine the alchemist's laboratory as having 360 degree floor-to-ceiling windows or an expansive deck which looks out across water or lush forests. You always think of dark cells, bleak dungeons, underground laboratories, forgotten oubliettes and barricaded garrets when you imagine where the creative process takes place.

Conspiracy theorists have the same trouble. No one really believes them during the daytime. There's no place for monsters to hide in sunlight. Subterfuge and evil machinations can't go out during the daytime, we tell ourselves. Following the byzantine threads of an ancient plot to control our minds and our souls is impossible against a backdrop of spring flowers and bright afternoons.

There's a conspiracy at the heart of THE BOOK OF LIES. Naturally. There's more than one, actually, and I'm sitting here in the warm sunlight, trying to think like a conspirator. But it's tough. It's a good day to do very little, which is exactly the attitude THEY want me to have.

If there is an agency whose raison d'etre is to control the minds and spirits of the population and the population is fairly content with their lot in life, could you actually consider the actions of this agency to be a conspiracy? Against what? If we don't care that we're being controlled, then aren't we tacitly agreeing to being participants in their plan? Is "conspiracy" simply then just "policy"?

And, if someone stumbles upon this "policy" and decides that it is wrong and must be overthrown, then aren't they the conspirators?

076: Last Modified

The "Last Modified" flag on a Word file is not your friend; this little detail which stares at you unblinkingly is the sort of reminder which the self-conscious writer hates to read. "Last modified on 2/26/04." What have I been doing since the end of February? I ask myself. Will I even remember where I left off?

With all honesty, I'm having to admit that I don't have as much time as I would like; I don't have the luxury of uninterrupted hours in which to crank out several thousand words. Flow -- if it ever something which I might be able to capture again -- will have to exist in a suspended state, a nebulous cloud of stored work which hangs in my head and that I can easily dip into as necessary. Writing will become even more of a process of transcription as if I were just an agent through which the Divine were speaking. ("Mr. Kelly, I am ready. Please look into the scrying stone now.")

I've been spending time being fussy -- petulant, even -- and I haven't accomplished much other than annoy and frustrate my family. It's a vicious loop, actually, as this energy gets reflected back on me (and as I devour myself with guilt for instilling it in the first place) and, when writing time actually occurs, it isn't terribly constructive. My wife bluntly pointed out last night that it doesn't really matter what I've found to complain about, it's the act of being dissatisifed that I really cleave to, and she's right. It's easier to bitch about not having time and/or energy and/or the proper work space than to just get down and do it. Because when you're stuck in this headspace, you have an excuse handy when someone asks about your work. "Oh, it's not ready," you say and insert whatever excuse you're using this week.

It's your fear of acceptance talking. It's your fear of not being liked that is swimming in your throat. It's the fear that what you're making isn't worth anyone's time. If it is never finished, then it is easy to call the work the "most amazing thing in the world" because it may very well be so in your head.

Push on, young soldiers, push on. Open that file. Do not be frightened off by delays and doubts and the FEAR.

This is how the Monday morning pep-talk goes.

075: Missed Opportunities

I watched the premier of Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital last month, and I want my money back. I saw the original Kingdom -- Lars Von Trier's sepia-tone vision -- in the theaters when it had a limited US run back in 1996 and felt that if I had to pitch the series to movie executives that my simple statement would have been: Twin Peaks in a hospital. King's version, which is going to run like a two-legged dog for another thirteen weeks, may be classified the same way, but with the additional caveat of "as imagined by a first year film student."

I don't know who the hack is that they've got directing the pilot (and, frankly, this is one thing that Twin Peaks got right -- get someone who knows something about atmosphere to direct your opening shot), but Craig R. Baxley is a case study in missing opportunities. He apparently doesn't know much about atmosphere or direction (though, checking IMDB, it looks like he's had a long career as a stuntman/stunt coordinator before becoming the red right hand of King's teleplay work).

Not that King's script was any tighter. The teleplay tottered and collapsed under the weight of excessive dialogue. From the inane voiceover which spoiled the entire mystery as to why Kingdom Hospital was haunted -- they had to tell us three times that Hospital lay on "uneasy ground" in case we weren't smart enough to figure it out for ourselves after the historical flashback -- to the poorly rendered and reserved mental dialogue that the painter carried on with after he had been hit by the van to the laconic and folksy voices which were inserted to give the animals human voice, there was just too much talking. And maybe I just don't remember the original all that well or maybe it was a factor of it being subtitled which forced me to concentrate more on the action than the tersely worded dialogue that ran across the bottom of the screen. Regardless, what debuted last night was toothless, dull, and pandering even to eight year olds.

Which makes me miss Mark Frost's All Saints that much more. That would have done something.

Anyway, to tie this into the discussion about sound. Here's one suggestion as to what would have made Kingdom Hospital more memorable. The painter is out for a run, listening to his aw-shucks countrified rock music on his headphones. He's got one of those Walkman's which you strap to your hand so that you can run hands-free. The song he's listening to is blaring through his headphones. This should be all that we hear because this is what he hears.

He gets hit by the truck, left by the side of the road, hallucinates the ant-eater, sees the truck driver who finds him, and is eventually rescued by EMTs. All of this should have happened from his perspective with the music going. We know his getting hit by the van is a stand-in event for King's own accident; we can imagine what happens when someone gets fucked up by a speeding truck. What we don't know is how terrifying and horrible it would be to lie by the side of the road, unable to move, unable to turn off the music being pumped into your ears. You're cut off from the outside world, trapped in your own insulated bubble, and all you can hear is the music. You can't hear what the guy who hit you is blubbering before he runs off, you can't hear what the truck driver is saying when he finds you, you can't hear what the EMTs are saying as they diagnose your wounds. All you can do is stare at their horrified expressions as they look at your mangled body and listen to that fucking music.

You couldn't even hear yourself scream when they move you. You can feel it in your throat as you cry yourself hoarse; you can feel the echo of your pain in the back of your mouth. It feels like they've left part of you by the roadside, but you can't even turn your head and see which part. They may be trying to tell you, but no one has turned off the Walkman yet. It just spins on, keeping you in the prison of your own personal soundtrack.

074: Running Solo

A question posited to me after I posted the quote from Berendt's book was: Would I rather lose my hearing or my sight? If you had the choice. I can't say that I'm eager to lose either, but if I HAD to, I'd lose my hearing. Which tears me up because I love listening to music. The rest of the noise of human culture -- the whining, the bitching, the constant drone of consumerism, the perpetual bla-bla-bla of disquietude -- I wouldn't miss. But music and the sound of the wind in the trees: these I would miss.

Because, you see, you can still function in human society without your hearing. You aren't a drain on someone else's resources if you can still see. It's when you lose your eyesight that you're solidly fucked. And I understand that there are people who manage quite well without their eyesight and I marvel at their tenacity and ability, but, in the self-reliance department, you're not a solo agent any longer.

Joseph Campbell's Hero Cycle argues that the hero is always alone, either in his cause (he's the only one brave enough, stupid enough, strong enough, etc... to accomplish the quest) or in the final solution when he is changed enough by the events of the quest that he no longer has a place in society -- the mythologically charged version of Colin Wilson's Outsider.

A conversation with Dr. Bull posted over at Wired News a few weeks ago discusses the impact of the iPod on modern culture. Bell points out that the personal music device -- especially ones with the prodigious storage capability of the iPod and the like -- allow you to create your own environment. By insulating yourself from the rest of the world by a buffer of your individualized soundtrack, you create a world which you control. You are your own God and Hero.

But you can still see; you can still participate in the rest of human society. You may not be important There, but Here, you are everything.

073: Gateway

"Modern human beings no longer listen to God. Modern human beings no longer listen. The first sentence is a theological statement. The second one is proven by, for example, the fact that in spite of all our advanced technology we obviously do not consider it necessary to supply our television sets with a sound system that reflects the technical posibilities...

"Wherever God revealed Himself to human beings, He was heard. He may have appeared as a light, but in order to be understood, His voice had to be heard. 'And God spoke' is a standard sentence in all holy scriptures. The ears are the gateway."

-Joachim-Ernest Berendt, Nada Brahma: The World is Sound

072: The Invention of Belief

"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creature, shaped by their hard, defining edges..." (Gene Wolfe from The Shadow of the Torturer)

A comment which reflects Jung's concept of the collective unconsciousness, Huxley's commentary during his mescaline experience of the existence of the Not-Self reality of objects, and Plato's concept of the Ideal Form. God is in the details, we say, but aren't the details just symbols?

Okay, I may be stretching on the last one, but the idea started in my head by Travis in the thread comments over at opi8 is that we don't invent anything, we rediscover through a process of remembering what is already there.

Which, as an aside, reminds me of a thought experiment about the commingling of genetic theory and the existence of Adam and Eve. Now, if we accept the possibility of genetic drift brought about by mutation and you accept that the eating of the apple as First Sin, then it follows that this was the introduction of a mutation into the system which, through the generations which follow, gradually decayed the human DNA. Now, I'm not bringing this up as an argument for racial purity or some such thing, but as an observation of an abstract system. If your system is pure, then it won't develop anomalies. Since we, as human beings, have anomalies (birth defects and what not), then we can conclude that our genetic makeup isn't as rarified as it once was. And, purely as a thought experiment as to the makeup of our mental and physiological states, how like we've become the runt children of Adam and Eve. How less "human" are we?

Now, I'm a child of evolutionary theory and the use of Christian theory of our existence is simply a useful tool to concretualize the discussion of a single point of creation. What I'm circling throughout these observations is the idea that there is some underlying unity to the human experience which supersedes the regionalisms and culturalisms which make us think others are different or of a lesser quality than ourselves. Beneath all the distinctions is a unified system of symbols -- of Ideas -- and it is our ability to touch this abstract (or truly Real) system which makes us human.

And, as we become more and more the stunted runt of the litter through our perseverence in a course of forgetting and denial, are we becoming less human and more animals that happen to walk upright and put on fancy dresses for parties?

071: The Great Work

There are aspects of Gematria which fascinate me --- well, aspects of any attempt to reduce our comprehended breadth of knowledge down to a single luminous moment is fascinating, when you get right down to it -- and the effort to reduce language to a series of inter-related numeric sequences is one of my favorites. Now, a proper technique of Gematria -- the art of reducing words and phrases into numeric values -- really requires a knowledge of Hebrew because the art is based on the idea that one is attempting to pierce the veil of mystery surrounding God's words which have been set down since antiquity and since God's words were transcribed in Hebrew (and I'm only really talking about the Torah here, anyway), performing gematric valuations on sentences and words in any language other than Hebrew is already removing yourself one step from your solution.

However, the basic idea is this: distillation. It's the alchemical Great Work all over again: attempting to distill the unpure into a single drop of purity.

[And I'm distracted for a moment by consideration of that phrase "single drop of purity." If you define this as a brief dollop of Godhead, then you can call it a "single drop of God's blood." What about our blood? A single drop from you or I contains enough coded information to recreate the human race. Your DNA stand (which is evident in every cell of your body) identifies your individuality, but it also preserves our identity as a species. How's that for singular purity?]

So, distillation. The argument follows that we would recognize a more pure state, we can distinguish between more and less pure (and I use these terms instead of "simple" and "complex" because I don't think it follows that "more pure" is necessarily "less complex" -- it's that DNA thing again). And "recognize" may be the wrong term; we are "cognizant of" greater purity, we understand the possibility of greater purity. We "know" greater purity.

What I've been circling for a few weeks is the idea of a single core language, a pre-Babel lingua franca that was universally understood and known by all mankind. God's own tongue, if you will. Some will say -- and there may even be a quote by Einstein or some other historical scientific luminary to this effect -- that mathematics is the pure form of language.

070: Gathering The Pieces

My editor at Opi8 pointed out in a comment to the 69th SYMBOLIC entry that a chapter in Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies is subtitled: "The way to succeed -- and the way to suck eggs." Now, Ministry's Psalm 69 record has been a favorite of mine for years and I never made the connection between the symbols on the sleeve (and the quote which seals "Psalm 69"), and Crowley's Book of Lies which only serves to accentuate the point for me that all understanding of the world is a matter of your own knowledge. The picture makes sense if you have all the pieces. So, with that aphorism in mind, I go to gather some more pieces.

Crowley's Book of Lies: "This Interchange, the Double Gift of Tongues, the Word of Double Power -- ABRAHADABRA! -- is the sign of the GREAT WORK, for the GREAT WORK is accomplished in Silence. And behold is not that Word equal to Cheth, that is Cancer, whose sigil is...? This Work also eats up itself, accomplishes its own end, nourishes the worker, leaves no seed, is perfect in itself. Little children, love one another!"

The Great Work is the ultimate goal of all magicians and alchemists: the transmutation of dross into gold. While some remained slave to the physical realization of this goal (turning lead into gold -- which, by the way, was the name of a Ministry side-project just to keep track of all these things), others applied this effort to their spiritual selves, seeking to venture beyond their mean flesh and blood existences into purified realms of spiritual and mental enlightenment.

The sigil of Cancer, as mentioned before, is a sideways "69," an Ouroborean birth death life cycle. The more we learn, the more we can nourish ourselves, begatting a self-perpetuating creation which becomes fully self-realized. And, if you have all knowledge, can you not comprehend the totality of all and, in doing so, finally know yourself?

Crowley's Liber 777: "The five letters used in the word are A, the crown; B, the wand; D, the cup; H, the sword; R, the rosy cross; and refer further to Amoun the Father, Thoth His messener, and Isis, Horus, Osis the human-divine triad...but always the symbol will remain the Expression of the Goal and the Exposition of the Path."

069: 69

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind with this number for any child who attaches themselves to Beavis and/or Butthead is obvious. But, if you pick a font with some flourish or squint just right, it starts to become the ying/yan or even the astrological symbol for Cancer.

There was an email that spammed its way through the inbox recently that included a picture of a couple fucking. Or, at least, that is what I saw. My son, or any innocent for that matter, would see dolphins if he looked at the picture. And, sure if I squinted just right and disengaged my libido, I could see the porpoises playing. But, not surprisingly, I had to be told to look for them before they made themselves visible.

I'm standing at a bus stop in Seattle right now, thumbing this onto my handheld, waiting for the 66 bus. Seattle doesn't have a 69 bus, for the obvious reasons. Some things get marked for all time.

068: The Supra-Reality Rift

The Rift separates us from the combined mind of Binah and Chokmah. The veil is drawn between the enlightened mind state of Pure Thought and Emotion. The twin paths of Severity and Mercy cross the Rift, but the way is guarded and protected. The demon Khoronzon watches over the Abyss, ready to snatch the unwary -- the unprepared initiate who has not girded themselves properly against the monster of the Rift. His is like Goya's Saturn, ready to devour his own children, the very progeny who seek to discover the true reality on the far side of the Rift.

Neither of the twin paths is easy, both have their traps and snares. They are not wide paths, broad boulevards down which you can hurl yourself in the hope that your resultant velocity will be enough to carry you across the Rift. The path is narrow, twisted, the roadway marked with craters and crevasses. You can stumble, fall, and even break your ankle in a crooked hole. There are skeletal memories along the path, other magicians who have caught their legs in the cracked pathway and been unable to free themselves.

There are tiny parasites who live on the breast of Khoronzon. They have no eyes or ears and their noses are but raw slits on the flat faces. They can smell the fear and the panic of a astral traveler who has found themselves trapped on the path. These parasites have short, stubby wings that carry their burr-covered bodies through the hot air which boils off the Rift. They float like bloated bats on the thick breeze, their blank faces quivering as they taste the air for the scent of fear.

I watch them feast on a struggling magician. They attach themselves to his spectral form, the tiny burrs on their thick flesh adhering them to his gossamer form. There are mouths on their abdomens, bleak slits filled with cracked teeth which stretch and burrow into the struggling magician's astral form. His soul breaks and bleeds, white smoke drifting in a thin line. Two of the parasitic creatures lap at the trail of fading spirit milk, their tongues as equally ridged as their skin.

It doesn't take long for the parasites to devour the astral visitor. There is nothing left of him but a dim outline, a polygon composite like a black and white vector drawing. The parasites, too heavy to fly now, drag themselves back to the edge of the Abyss where Khoronzon waits for them. The intelligent fire in his eyes watches me.

I am afraid of Abyss and its keeper. I am afraid of what lies beyond the hazy veil which hangs across the Rift. I am afraid of losing myself in the Pure Reality of the other side. Khoronzon knows this, knows that I do not have the strength or the skill to evade his grasp if I try to cross the Rift. His fiery eyes dance with glee.

-Jump- his eyes tell me. -Make the leap.- The fires twist hypnotically. -I will catch you.-

I have no doubt he would.

067: dream languages

What happened at Babel? Did the architects and workers have the same nightmare one feverish night and all awoke with their tongues scrambled? If you subscribe to the Biblical view of the universe, the events at Babel are the explanation for the sheer diversity of tongues which can be found across the globe. If you're in the Darwinian camp, the explanation for linguistic diversity is a bit tougher of a sell; you can't just write it all off as several thousand years of "regionalisms." Even if the human animal, as he graduated to more upright status, developed in isolated pockets and language was strictly a result of his reactions to his region, the functional spaces in his brain wherein language developed were the same from man to man.

For a moment, though, we'll consider the nexus point of Babel as simply the point where language began because, when you get right down to it, "language" didn't really exist prior to that moment. In fact, it may very well be that we all communicated by telepathy or some other direct brain-to-brain interface because what happens the moment you introduce "language" into the equation, you introduce "interpretation" and, well, the Fall of Babel takes place.

Our dream states are language-less. They exist as self-contained creative environments. They aren't any less real if you speak French or German or Japanese or some Urdu dialect. You don't dream less or less vividly if English is your primary or secondary language; your brain continues to fabricate reality regardless of how you form concepts and sentences. What kills your dreams is the act of communicating them -- putting them to words -- to others.

But how different are your dreams from mine? If I could jack into your dream state, would I be able to understand it simply because I, too, am human? Would I unconsciously know what is happening or what I am seeing? Is there a universal symbolic system by which we all know and comprehend the universe that exists a priori to any spoken or written language?

066: dream machines

Japanese toymaker Takara have announced a dream machine -- a portable device which will allow you to influence your dreams by seeding it with some key phrases and words. During your slumber the Yumemi Kobo ("dream workshop") will whisper these words back to you (in your own pre-recorded voice, naturally) as well as drip some ambient music into your ear canals and frost your nasal passages with a fragrant scent. It's all very scientifically crafted to influence your dreaming mind and allow you to become suseptible to suggestion.

My son was born in the final hours of last year and I can't remember the last time I had a full night's sleep (actually, it was January 2nd and it was glorious). I would pay good money for a dream machine right now, but there are some interesting things to be discovered in sleep deprivation. My dreams aren't dreams so much as quicksand. The other night I was being suffocated by a bean bag chair. It's the first time that I have ever realized I was dreaming (only because we don't actually own a bean bag chair) and, because I was suffering, I forced myself to wake up in order to escape the smothering embrace of the bean chair. I remember working very hard to wake myself up and, once I had, I was even more exhausted than I had been a few hours earlier when I had laid down.

But I influenced my dream. I didn't need a dream machine; I didn't need some device whispering in my ear. "You are in Venice. The tide is high and the waters are lapping against the flagstones along the Grand Canal. You can smell the salt in the air." Whether it be through a hypnogogic state or through a direct neural interface, we can change the world, we can change OUR world.

And how different is our world from actual reality? Aldous Huxley in his seminal work The Doors of Perception talks about a Not-Self state, a state of perception outside the mental baggage of your own history and perceptive understanding where you perceive things as they truly are. Language, he believes, is a convenience that allows society to exist, but it is a pale reflection of the True Being of objects.

If we use language to influence our dreams, are we not then just reinforcing the reduced awareness which language inflicts on our perception? If we inject our dreams with words, are we not constraining the possibilities of flight?

symbolic 65: in the beginning...

Nanowrimo starts tomorrow and it is as arbitrary a place to start as any. My schedule is full enough with other things that I could probably put off actually writing the BOOK OF LIES several hundred more months, but schedules, as you know, never really empty. They sort of fill themselves of their own accord. It's like there is some sort of 'nature abhors a vacuum' principle in effect and events and activities slip into these white spaces like kudzu.

I get paralyzed when the kudzu takes over. It's happening in my yard; it is happening on my writing schedule. I'm not really getting much done; well, I am, but not quite the right sort of progress.

So, tomorrow is the first of November. My son is due in less than two months and I can't be frantic now about the impact a new family member will have on my writing time. There will be time enough for that when I'm finger-deep in dirty diapers and Solomon and the cat are both testing my last nerve with caterwauling duets.

I used to have a good pair of headphones with which I could keep the noise at bay, but I broke them again this morning. I go through headphones at a ridiculous rate and I sprang for an expensive set this last time, thinking that more dollars would equal better quality. Nope. Done in by a two cent piece of plastic. Maybe an equally pricey strip of electrician's tape can salvage my investment. I liked those headphones.

In the meantime, here's the premise for the first block of the BOOK OF LIES.

(1) THE FARM
Wherein our hero is drawn into the conflict against his better judgment and discovers that the damsel really is in distress. Friends become enemies and innocence is lost, loved ones die, and the world is revealed to be a strange and dangerous place.

symbolic 64: heka

The Egyptians have two translations for heka: one is a proper name and the other is a more generic term for "magic." In ancient Egypt, magic had none of the dark connotations which it gathered in its translation to the West; magic was, to them, a natural and critical aspect of the religious structure. Heka was one of the three creative energies attributed to the sun god Ra which were necessary in order for Creation to come about. Hu was the personification of the Divine Utterance and Sia was the Divine Omniscience which the king (Ra) employed in concert with the Divine Life Force -- Heka -- as the trinity which was the source of his creative powers.

Heka as a term for "magic" is more appropriately translated as "life force in action" and was the application of energy into ritual. Each person had some of the divine life force in them and utilization of this force through ritual and ceremony was believed to allow the individual the power to communicate with the gods. There is a connection between the name of something and its divine spark, and knowing the name gave you power over the object. Weret-Hekau -- Great of Magic -- is one of the names given to Isis who, as legend tells us, managed to trick Ra into telling her his secret name.

If you look past the charlatans and the dumbed down stories of black masses and horrific rituals, you see that magic is about learning the proper methods of addressing the powers of the universe. Dee's Enochian rituals were very specific about the names of the angels and the powers which they brought with them. Magic is about using language to change the world around you. Language is the key to the codes of the universe.

symbolic 63: grids

I'm working on the plan for the BOOK OF LIES. Though I was part of the dog and pony show at the Keystrokes workshop last weekend, I came home with some good ideas as well. Sort of that whole give and take thing. I kind of hurried in with a cheatsheet card that I shared with the group and now, nearly a week later, I've been giving it some more thought and putting the concept to use.

Instead of breaking things down into 25 chapters like I did before, I'm putting everything into 12 boxes. It's a convenient structure which sets up a four-part three-stage outline as well as nicely following twelve months if I need to spread out the fulfillment of the boxes that long (please, God, no). The cheatsheet is a tiny wallet card where I can put the basic idea of each section into its respective grid, but while at home, I can spread out the 3 x 5 cards.

Yeah, really old school, I know. I even had to go out and buy some this afternoon. I've also sharpened a pencil and made sure it had a good eraser in case, you know...

I'm starting off with a single word or phrase in the upper right of each card -- something that I can crib down to a box an inch long and a third of an inch wide. On the left will go the individual chapter notes -- how many, how long, specific actions which occur therein. It's -- ohmigod! -- almost like having a plan.

I know that middle hump is out there. I'm trying to dodge it; I want to see it coming and to be ready for the uphill grind.

symbolic 62: lightbulb action

"I don't know why I keep being timid about this. If I'm going to play with occult histories of the world, I might as well do it right. All this fucking around in the shallow end of the pool is just silly."

I said this a week ago in a moment of brain dumpage as I was just trying to figure things out and it seemed innocent enough as I wrote it, but an hour or so later it became a light bulb. The problem I've been having with the tone of this book and the one I started -- ugh, two years ago now -- was how strange could I make the world and not lose my audience. How much "unreality" could I expect them to believe up front?

Underworld's $22 million at the box office last weekend reassures me that audiences aren't thinking about this nearly as hard as I am. Again, the overthinking thing. Okay, so if people coming to the work are ready to play, then I should certainly meet them at the edge of the sandbox, ready to go as well. Part of the trouble is that I keep thinking of the text as a mainstream book which is a strange hang-up that I'm not quite sure where I picked up, but it is time to get past that mind-forg'd manacle.

And, as the light bulb went on, I could see who had flipped the switch. "Yes," I agreed, nodding, "I do need you." The wolf smiled; he likes it when I admit that I need his help.

Jack's going to die. Maybe not in the first chapter, but definitely in the early part of the book. He's been useful to me, but he's an albatross. I'll try to make it quick and painless, Jack. I owe you that much. Sorry about your friends though. Yeah, you'll have to live with that. The readers need to see how the monster works and you got the short straw.

Mwahahahahahahahahaha. I am not a benevolent god.

symbolic 61: panels

One of the great things about comic books is that they are both narrative and visual. And, when you talk about the floppies, they are serial adventures -- chunks of a larger story that are meant to be digested in a short space of time. You have 22 pages to hook your reader, advance the meta-story, and leave 'em wanting more. Not unlike a chapter in a novel when you get right down to it.

The visual aspect of the medium means you have to give thought to each panel, each instant of time which you want to freeze, and I think this is one the great benefits of the comic script. It makes you think in image snapshots; it makes you compose visually. You have to turn that all into words, but as an exercise in visualization, it is a great way to lay down some framework for the work.

PAGE 1. The page is broken down into three full-page horizontal panels in a 25%, 50%, 25% split.

PANEL 1. Night. Heavily wooded area. There is a haze in the air, a miasmic remnant of a recent fire. Some of the trees on the edge of the panel were too close to the fire and are twisted and black.

CAPTION: I DON'T HUNT PEOPLE.

PANEL 2. A clearing in the forest used to contain a farmhouse and pair of out-buildings though all three have recently been burned to the ground. The frame of the buildings, though they have been twisted by the fire. One of the outbuildings had metal struts in it and the melted and fused shape looks vaguely like the shattered ribcage of a dead animal.

PANEL 3. A dark-haired man stands in the shadow of a burned tree and examines the ruins in the clearing. He is clearly uncomfortable with the setting. This all seems wrong to him.

CAPTION: THIS WAS A FAVOR FOR A FRIEND.

PAGE 2. Six panel layout -- two across by three rows.

PANEL 1. A room lit by yellow light (in direct contrast with the cold and bleak colors of the burned clearing). The dark-haired man --MARKHAM -- is listening to VIRGIL DELACOURTE, a slight fellow whose upscale wardrobe can't hide the fact that he is a died-in-the wool code geek.

VIRGIL: I KNOW THIS ISN'T WHAT YOU DO.

VIRGIL: BUT YOU ARE GOOD AT FINDING THINGS.

PANEL 2. MARKHAM hasn't moved. VIRGIL is pleading his case.

VIRGIL: WE DON'T KNOW WHERE HE HAS GONE.

PANEL 3. MARKHAM kneels near a piece of burned wood in the clearing. The terrain has been pretty chewed up by the volunteer fire department which responded to the fire. The ground is muddy and the half-buried log is black with char.

PANEL 4. The yellow room again. VIRGIL and MARKHAM as PANEL 1.

MARKHAM: I'M IN THE ANTIQUE BUSINESS. YOU KNOW THAT.

MARKHAM: I'M NOT A BOUNTY HUNTER.

PANEL 5. The yellow room. VIRGIL's attention is turned towards someone off-screen.

(OS): WE DON'T WANT A BOUNTY HUNTER. WE WANT SOMEONE WE CAN TRUST.

PANEL 6. Another angle on the yellow room. Standing behind Virgil is a slender woman with short black hair. This is LIZ KIMBREL.

LIZ: WE JUST NEED SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO FIND THINGS.

PANEL 7. Yellow room. On MARKHAM.

MARKHAM: PEOPLE AREN'T THINGS. THEY TEND TO SLIGHTLY TO BE MORE...

MARKHAM: ...MOBILE.

PANEL 8. The ruined farmhouse. MARKHAM has entered the burned structure. He is standing close to a ruined wall, leaning forward as if he is smelling the soaked and burned wood.

PANEL 9. Close-up of MARKHAM's face. He is smelling the wood. The collar of his leather coat is open enough that the white band of braided hair about his neck is visible.

PAGE 3. Six panel layout -- two across by three rows.

PANEL 1. The ruined farmhouse. MARKHAM doesn't like what he smells.

PANEL 2. MARKHAM POV towards the sky from inside the farmhouse. The black ridges of the ruined walls are like fingers against a grey sky. If it isn't raining already, it's going to start soon.

CAPTION: THIS IS GROUND ZERO OF THE GPS READING I WAS GIVEN.

CAPTION: THE FIRE HAPPENED FOUR NIGHTS AGO.

PANEL 3. Aerial shot of the yellow room, looking down on LIZ, VIRGIL and MARKHAM.

CAPTION: A DAY BEFORE THEY CAME TO ME.

PANEL 4. The yellow room. Close-up of LIZ. She is clearly agitated and worried.

LIZ: WE THINK WE'VE DISCOVERED SOMETHING. JACK WENT TO CHECK.

LIZ: HE CALLED IN EVERY NIGHT. UNTIL THE NIGHT BEFORE LAST.

PANEL 5. The yellow room. LIZ has come closer to the table, standing behind VIRGIL. MARKHAM'S POV towards VIRGIL who is shrugging his shoulders.

VIRGIL: CELL RECEPTION IS SHIT OUT THERE. IT COMES AND GOES.

VIRGIL: WE DIDN'T THINK MUCH OF IT AT FIRST.

PANEL 6. As panel 5.

VIRGIL: JACK DOESN'T LIKE LANDLINES. TOO MANY EARS.

VIRGIL: YOU KNOW? TOO MANY PEOPLE LISTENING.

PANEL 7. The yellow room. Focus on MARKHAM.

MARKHAM: WHO?

PANEL 8. LIZ's expression to VIRGIL says: "Do you trust him?" VIRGIL's unspoken response: "We need to tell him."

PANEL 9. The ruined farmhouse. MARKHAM is crouched near the base of what is left of the front door to the farmhouse, examining the floor. He wipes away the soot and crap to reveal a piece of stone that has inscribed symbols in it.

CAPTION: THEY WANTED MY HELP BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THEY HAD FOUND.

CAPTION: THEY WERE HOPING THAT I DID.

symbolic 60: what have you got?

I've got Nazis. They're handy. You can always rely on the Nazis when you need villains. Of course, we're getting far enough away from WWII that any survivors of that conflict are going to be doddering old men. Another decade and you'll be lumped into the historical fiction section when you say, "I've got Nazis."

Operation Paperclip was a clandestine plan by the US to recover Nazi scientists from Germany before Russia acquired them, ensuring that we got the smart kids working for us during the Cold War. Now, because my brain is hard-wired to see the Illuminati in the shadows, I've got to ask: why not extend this possibility to the occult practitioners of the Third Reich? We know Hitler was cuckoo for cocoa puffs when it came to the occult. Who is to say that he didn't know something that the rest of us didn't and there wasn't some occult reason why things went awry. And, if we run with this theory, then it is possible to read that the occult armies of the victors participated in the same sort of people salvage that Operation Paperclip employed.

It has just occurred to me that the British would want to be involved in this sort of salvage, being more primed for this sort of knowledge than the Americans. While that would follow, I'm inclined to see this as America's attempt to get in the game. If they could salvage the occult arm of Nazi Germany as their own, then they would have the stuff to level to playing field with England and Russia. We were (and still are in a depressingly anachronistic fashion) always trying to be acknowledged by the rest of the world as being the coolest kid on the playground.

We'll call them ACE -- the American organization tasked with the recovery and extraction of the occult secrets of WWII. Do they know what they're getting or are they just children, eager to play with the toys of adults? How long before they hurt themselves with these toys? How long before these toys start controlling them?

Sixty years later. What happens when someone starts asking the wrong sort of questions? Who is left to get nervous about the exhumation of old policy and older mistakes?

Reading back over other SYMBOLIC entries, I can see that this is really all that I have. The rest is ephemeral, extremely mutable and quixotic. This is the core idea that I want to play with. I know who and what ACE recovers from the war, and I'm not going to reveal either here because I want to keep at least one secret from you until the book is done.

I don't know why I keep being timid about this. If I'm going to play with occult histories of the world, I might as well do it right. All this fucking around in the shallow end of the pool is just silly.

Deep breath now. I'm diving for the bottom.

symbolic 59: the middle bit

I wish I could tell you that I've been in the south of France for the last few months, taking a tour of the wine country. I wish I could tell you that I did a very European thing and took the month of August off and went someplace else, but the only part of that which would be true would be the "someplace else" bit. My head has been someplace else. Busy, I suppose, tied up in minutia and things which are both irrelevant and completely consuming.

One of the precepts of this blog was the idea of letting everyone see the process and, at the time, I thought the process would be this whizz-bang pyrotechnic storm of activity. You know the reality? Nothing is going on. Not a damn thing. Which is never a state that a writer wants to be in.

Is is writer's block? No, I've got words by the truckload. The vehicles are lined up around the block, waiting for the signal to dump their loads. I just can't seem to get the foundation poured. This is silly, really, and the longer it goes on, the more frustrating and paralytic it becomes. I've got no plot.

I wish I could get past this roadblock. It seems to hit me every time. I get completely self-critical of the action and can't seem to be groovy enough to let the story work itself out. I get myself so tied up in structure and symbolism that I can't extricate myself enough to figure out how the pieces actually fit together. It's completely annoying. I've got the 50,000 words written last November (almost a year ago now!) that I probably won't ever use. I've got four different openings written, and I kinda sorta know how the end pans out.

But I've got no middle. I've got this huge, fucking hole right through the middle. Come behind the curtain, gang, and take a look at it. It's big. All sorts of vacant space. And while you're marveling at the blank landscape, I'm going to scamper off to my escape balloon and evacuate for Ohio.

Of course, that wouldn't solve anything. I've had four other ideas for novels since this whole adventure began and each has had that seductive excitement of being new. But they are kernels of ideas, tiny seeds which need to be nourished and properly grown. I can see the flowering plant which they may grow into, but I can tell you that I've given no thought to the actual process of growing them.

You know, the middle bit.

There, the awful secret. Time to get past it now. This isn't how I wanted things to end. This is, after all, the middle bit where the first fires have burned out and the real end is too far off to be visible and there is nothing but the miles and miles of desolate scrub in every direction.

Take a compass reading, pal, find a star to navigate by. One foot in front of the other. This is the middle bit.

symbolic 58: time stretching

I'm making slow progress on THE BOOK OF LIES, a few hundred words at a time. Glacial pacing, I suppose, but it is forward progress. I'm trying to build a section in my head before I commit it to paper in order to prevent obstacles from injuring me during the headlong rush. It's a different method of working than I'm used to, but it is a more realistic method afforded by the time I have available.

Time. It's all about time, isn't it?

I've been reading The Believer off and on since it started earlier this year, and I've been chewing through Ben Marcus' essay about John Haskell and the lyric essay recently. Marcus covers a bit of ground, but the not entirely tangential aspect of his article which still hovers in my mind is the intersection between fiction and time. "Literature is supposedly a time-based art," he says wherein the fiction writer creates time in the course of his work.

Which is one of those ideas which, once articulated, puts everything in a different light. The "once upon a time" phrase becomes, essentially, a magical incantation. The writer invites the reader to partake in a shared imaginary experience. "Come," the writer says, "let us make time together." Does the writer really create time on his own or is it something that has no existence, per se, until someone reads it?

When you get right down to it, participating in fiction validates the whole idea that time is completely subjective and, while it may be defined as a certain number of vibrations of a cesium atom, it is still a human quantification of the universe. More importantly, not only can you imagine it, you can uncreate it as well. Does a story still exist after you've read it or does that time -- that idea space in which you've been dallying -- suddenly cease to exist?

The idea abutting this one is a factoid mused over by my pal, Greg, one late evening. He tells me that young children cannot understand stories until such time as they can understand the concept of lying. For infants, objects are solid and have an existence in space relative to themselves, and it isn't until they can handle the idea of an object existing outside their immediate visual space that they can truly understand what is real and what is not. Once they can comprehend a graduation of truth -- a variation of absolutes -- they can appreciate stories.

"Once upon a time" is an invocation of "not-truth," of unreality that we make real because we can imagine it. Time is imaginary then and doesn't exist for children; it has no bearing for those who are unable to think beyond the raw, sensory input which they are receiving. We make time then, don't we? We kill it, we take it, we waste it.

It is kind of pointless to get worked up about it, isn't it? Since we invent time in our heads, there is no end to the supply. We can make, kill, take, or waste more whenever we want.

I still don't know what I'm going to do in Chapter 4. Time enough, I suppose.

symbolic 57: the root language

I was very cursorily reading a thread on one of the mailing lists I half pay attention to the other day while there was a discussion about the ability to find coded messages left behind in written texts. Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code had its fifteen minutes of occult fame a few years ago when he posited the existence of coded messages would could be discerned if you used a skip method of reading the letters. Naturally, depending on the language you are dancing with, the message will be different if not outright illegible. The conversation running through the thread was that you could still find patterns in any language -- you weren't limited to Latin or Hebrew.

Which leads to the hypothesis of a root language -- the whole pre-Babel tongue supposition -- if everything has the same basic root, then everything will adhere to patterns that much easier. Someone offered English as the language which existed prior to the destruction of the Tower, which is a woefully short-sighted American viewpoint. While English may be the de facto post-Babel linguistic convergence point, it saddens me to think that we are in any rush to reach this homogeneous state.

I'm reminded of the quintessential point of failure of Utopian societies: the human animal doesn't like perfection. We constantly war with the dichotomy of individuality versus uniformity -- we want to belong, but we also want to be individuals.

Once we all speak the same tongue, we'll start rewriting history. Like this fellow arguing for English as the root language.

From a genetic and mathematic standpoint, if you have a system that has many diverse end points, it stands to argue that the branches of the system's evolution occurred because of anomalies and aberrations. A perfect system would, by defintion, remain perfect, and since we're not at a perfect system now (a homogenous structure), it can follow that we've drifted from the origin point. Whether it happened through the adoption of regional variations or a single lightning bolt which blew off the crown of our half-finished tower, the system has moved far enough from its "perfect" state that all that is left is a memory of the beginning.

As a system distorts and mutates, it loses its potency. If we run along the path of this arguement, then a return to the primal tongue would mean an increase in the simple power of language. "Simple" and "powerful" are not two words which I would necessarily use to describe English with its endless rules and exceptions to those same rules.

[GrammarHammer Amtower -- my editor at Opi8.com -- just got the 15th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style in the mail. I'm sure it is not a slim volume.]

So what is language? Is it a means of communication or a means of control? If you had the root, what would you use it for?

symbolic 56: modern suspense thrillers

I've been carpooling these last few weeks, the old-school method of getting to work, and haven't been able to get any writing done on the laptop. Instead I've been catching up on my summer reading. I just finished James Rollins' Ice Hunt, which will never be characterized as anything but pure, bloody fun. He follows an outline similar enough to the one that Matthew Reilly has been employing to loud and explosive success, and, in fact, I'm willing to bet there is actually a codified outline they are both using. It goes a little something like this:

A) Main hero is an outsider in the sense that he is not directly involved in the central conflict of the book, but through either bad timing or innocent coincidence, he is thrust into the action. He is, invariably, military trained in some fashion, though most likely he has done his time and left the fields and alleys of carnage behind. You know, woke up one morning and decided that he had just had enough of killing. That sort of thing. Most importantly, he is the only one the reader can trust because gosh-darn-it he has rescued himself and become pure again.

B) The military has been doing things they shouldn't be. There will be some nefarious military covert operation which has been running beneath our noses for a long time that is horrific in nature, but still justifiable from a completely military viewpoint. Like the Nazi experiments in genetic modifications during WWII. They were, you know, just trying to build better soldiers in order to keep us all safe from the enemy. The Horrific Military Secret will have suffered some inexplicable catastrophe that requires external intervention, usually in the form of a black ops team or two.

C) Our military isn't the only one who knows about the HMS. In fact, as Reilly uses to entertaining effect in Ice Station, it is better if more than one government is sending their own black ops team.

D) The entire world is threatened by the possibility of the release of whatever nefarious agent the HMS is all about. In fact, protecting the HMS by destroying Life As We Know It is within keeping of the "more is better" approach to the modern thriller.

E) One of the side effects of the research of the HMS is the discovery/creation of some evolutionary offshoot which is, by far, the most dangerous creature that ever hunted mankind. This creature is a cross between a shark with frickin' laser beams attached to its head and a Black Company-esque forvalaka. These creatures don't seem to care much about military or national factions and just kill everyone. Which leads to:

F) Unexpected allies. Our hero is forced to band with either/both/neither of the conflicting military factions throughout the book because of the First Rule of Modern Suspense Thrillers: everyone has their own agenda. And the Firt Rule's Corollary: nothing is as it seems. "Good" and "Bad" become useful delineators of character; you are better off served by classifying participants as either "Useful" or "Aggressors." And use a pencil when you're making notes because classifications will swap places at least twice during the course of the adventure.

G) And, naturally, the Second Rule of Modern Suspense Thrillers is always in play: the situation gets worse. Usually exponentially.

God help me, I love these. The more over the top, the better. Reilly, in Temple, locks his hero in an Abrams A-1 Battletank with a nuclear device (on countdown) and pushes the whole thing out of a cargo plane at 30,000 feet. It just doesn't get any better than that.

symbolic 55: old world order

I was doing some research on Operation Paperclip and what happened to the Nazi hierarchy following WWII and keep stumbling upon outlandish possibilities that make what I have in mind for THE BOOK OF LIES seem all too possible. Isn't that the old saw? Truth is stranger than fiction. I get a little worried occassionally that I might not be paranoid enough.

This is only tangentially related to things, but worth reading if you wonder who THEY might be. Jeffrey Sharlet wrote an expose on "the Family" entitled "Jesus Plus Nothing" for Harper's Magazine that has been posted online in its entirety. Stick with it, especially for page 7. Tell me you aren't frightened.

Back to fiction where it is probably safer. Now G., before he got tapped on the head and shuffled off to the sanitarium, came to America following WWII where he, as a young French lad, spent some time in the Resistance. As the spiritual arm of the US armed forces swept through Europe in their attempt to retrieve and preserve some of the more important artifacts of the occult history of Europe, G. and other "perceptive" lads were recruited to assist in the recovery and cataloguing effort. Now, let's be tunnel-visioned bureacrats for a moment. Why do all this cataloguing and ordering when you know someone has done it already? And if you're going to use their notes, why not absorb the very guys who made those notes in the first place? Yeah, if Operation Paperclip could absorb Nazi scientists into the Cold War effort and the "Family" could discover, as founder Abraham Vereide noted in a letter to his wife in the late 1940's, that members of the Nazi Party could be just as useful with their unswerving devotion to the new Kingdom of Christ as they had been with their adoration of their previous figurehead, then finding new homes for the occult wizards of the Third Reich isn't too much of a stretch.

G.'s problem -- which will soon be Jack's problem -- is that this is supposed to be a secret.

symbolic 54: ghost noise

Strangely enough, I've been thinking recently about electromagnetic phenomena and mobile technology (specifically an article from the Fortean Times which I can't find now and which our very own Alasdair Stuart seems to have read as well (see his "After The Tone" story in the X Minute Theater section of WORD). The basic gist of these two items was that ghosts exist in specific wavelength spectrums and that all of our carving up of these bands for mobile and wireless technology has led to a certain amount of interference and, in some ways, death for ghosts. You see, they can't survive with all the noise we're making.

Here's the strange bit. I upgraded my network at home to wireless. Went 802.11g because that's what all the cool kids are talking about on the schoolyard, and the installation went smoothly enough once I got the terminology all figured out. Everything worked fine. For a while. Now, three nights running, my wireless signal craps out between 9:00pm and midnight. Any other time, it works just fine, but during those three hours, it is like a large void has descended upon my house and the ether just doesn't want to vibrate for my signal.

I'm lying in bed last night, my brain still working over the details and possibilities as to why this might be happening, and I remember these thoughts about ghosts noises on the electromagnetic spectrums on which we are encroaching. There may not be any technological answer to my problem. For three hours every night, the ghosts are howling in my neighborhood. I'm lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what sort of Tobe Hooper style Poltergeist event has occurred to leave such a psychic scar on my street. And then I start to wonder what sort of sacrifice is going to have to be made in order to silence the noise.

It might just be easier to put the long Cat-5 cable back and hard-wire the network again. We always say there is a certain amount of Voodoo involved in IT work; there might just be too much required this time around.

symbolic 53: the five faces of jack maratre

Full disclosure time. I've been having a little trouble with Jack. Not like he's been a rebellious sixteen-year old who's just gotten his learning permit and wants to borrow the car all the time sort of trouble. More of the "who the fuck am I?" sort of trouble. Which isn't the sort of distress I was looking for in a main character. I haven't been making the best sort of progress on paper because I've not be able to get a handle on who Jack is.

I've got a number of folders on my hard drive which contain aborted novels, malformed tales which have been taken off life support and shoved into the back of the metal drawers in the morgue in the hope that no one will ever see the distorted bodies. The commonality in all of them is a sad sack main character -- a fellow who has melancholy and intestinal distress as defining traits -- and, frankly, after writing him for several chapters I'm sick of him.

So, trying to learn from my mistakes here. Too much noir as a child, too much emo-rock / mope-core as a teenager: