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: it doesn't make for a good base from which to draw characters. Christ, it's a good thing I never liked Morrissey's voice otherwise I'd be trapped in a cycle of reoccurring Cthulhu heroes who have an affected fascination towards playing Russian roulette with rusty 19th century six-shooters.

Georges -- who has been reduced to just "G." at this point -- is the fun character. Let's be up-front about that. G. is an aged nonogenarian who survived the Resistance in WWII and came to America knowing something that he shouldn't. Thirty years in an asylum has left him with some answers and an exceptionally heightened sense of paranoia and just how invasive the threads of the Cabinet Noir are in modern society. He's got one mission in life: stick it to the shadow elite before his ticker gives out. Yeah, G. is a fun character. He's also about a hundred and three and, well, I'm just not that keen on a geriatric action hero. It would be like Die Hard XII starring Hume Cronyn or Richard Farnsworth. (Both of whom have already shuffled off to the next iteration and, fortunately, will never have to suffer the iindignityof getting a phone call from their agent concerning such a project. There's still time for Bob Hope, though, he can get himself hooked up to a mobile IV drip and "Yippee Ki-Yeah Mother Fuckers" us from terrorism and high-tech, international thievery.)

I needed a younger protagonist. One who could hold his own against gun-toting grandpa. Someone other than James Van Der Beek perpetually pouting over how the Emmy judges have, once again, overlooked the depth of his soul-searching and tormented angst on Dawson's Creek. Because -- first lesson for the writer -- if you aren't having any fun writing it, you can be sure the audience will hear that same sucking sound when they read it.

For the last eternity, I've been making up homunculi in my lab and turning them loose in slightly uncontrolled environments. For your entertainment, here are my lab notes from these experiments:

1. Jack Maratre, the troubled outsider. First generation Jackie Boy is the one running around the movie trailer posted back in the beginning and who survived the 50,000 word march of last year. He held together fairly well and there are some qualities of him which I will probably recycle and use again. However, his environment was glacial. 50K worth of words and I was barely getting to the fun stuff. I wasn't exactly hooking the readers in and, while a certain amount of that still has some use, it isn't material anyone really needs to see. I needed to truncate the mess and get to the meat of things more quickly. The trouble there was that the back story Jackie Boy was lugging around was too laborious (and ultimately too coincidental) to work. I shaved that hump off him and he collapsed. The body is still good; there just isn't enough soul to keep the spine stiff.

2. Jack Maratre, the action hero. I've got five chapters of this one, including a fairly solid house raid opening. There's even a chapter where Felix has a run in with the border patrol at the Canadian border. This was all written during the opening days of the Iraq conflict and was colored by my reactions to the emergent iimperialist dictatorship of the Shrub and his Inner Circle of Nazi Toadies. I had an idea about a world colored badly by all this and this vision was influencing the direction of the character and draft. In fact, the narrator of Entry 31 is Jack, thirty years after the events of the BOOK OF LIES.

Was it Chekhov who said that if you use a gun in the third act, it had better be on the mantelpiece during the first act? If the BOOK OF LIES works, then there are eight other books to be done before I come back to Jack. And the world may have turned the way he sees it in that discussion by then. Or not, but it can't hurt to lay groundwork just in case I need to come back to it.

But, in the present, Jack as an action hero was the wrong sort of character to be drawn into this book. Too many of the other characters -- G., his incessant desire to get his hands on a gun notwithstanding, and the members of the modern Lunar Society -- were non-combatants in the traditional sense. This turns Jack into muscle. Which makes him secondary.

I liked the house raid opener. I may mark that up and throw out a link to those two chapters. It won't be used, but it might still have some entertainment value.

3. Jack Maratre, the disgraced cop. Pulling the action closer to the front, I've got G. coming out his comatose state and making some noise as he leaves the Belmont Psychiatric Institute. There's information to be had at the Institute (as well as some threads which will lead back to the Cabinet Noir) and, with the fierce blackout of information which happens following the arrival of the Feds, I needed someone who could still have access. A Homicide Detective seemed handy. Until I got to the part where the action moved to another state and I ran into the slight problem of just how a police officer would take himself to another town to pursue a case on which he wasn't currently assigned. A number of other procedural issues raised their heads and it felt like I was trying to jam an entire pig into a three-inch section of sausage casing. No amount of grinder action was going to make all that pork fit.

4. Jack Maratre, cub reporter. More mobility with less responsibility. He could leave town easily, but he won't have any access to the Institute. Too outside with no way in and, with his credentials, he would probably be politely asked to crawl up his own ass and die. No help there.

5. Jack Maratre, listener. Which brings us to Stuttering Jack, Junior Marconi. A number of other aspects of the back story (Jack's family history) suddenly become useful again and I feel like I've found a key to the door which has been previously locked. There are some coincidences to write past, but the climax of Seven is nothing but a tower of coincidences so I figure if it gets flashy enough, no one will care. Or, they'll work themselves out. They usually do.

There you go. I've been looking for a main character who has some meat to him and I think I've finally got him nailed down. Progress.

symbolic 52: marconi's radio

In 1894, Guglielmo Marconi reads an obituary of Heinrich Hertz and sees something which opens a door in his head. Prior to this event, the budding scientist had been drifting along, dabbling in the sciences, but afterward, he is fired by the idea of wireless transmissions. Two years later he's in London, filing a patent for his method of transmitting signal, and, in 1898, he's demonstrating the device to the aged Queen Victoria, allowing her to talk with her ailing brother at their Isle of Wight estate.

Four years later, he's crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the steamer, the SS Philadelphia, with a Marconi wireless device in his cabin. He had managed to send and receive a signal across the ocean the previous year, but there were still skeptics. During the boat ride across the ocean, Marconi remained in constant contact with his wireless transmitter in England, maintaining a consistent signal for nearly 2100 miles. The skeptics can't avoid the truth: Guglielmo Marconi knows how to send and to receive invisible signals.

The world just became a smaller place.

Marconi is also a shrewd businessman and over the next two decades, he forms a number of companies that are still with us today. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America eventually becomes the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and when wireless broadcasts become ubiquitous in England, he and a number of his competitors form the British Broadcast Company (the BBC). Marconi understands the importance of keeping knowledge secret and, during the early years of the integration of wireless into the framework of communication, he keeps a strong grip on the spread of the secrets of the wireless. Ships which are outfitted with Marconi devices come with a Marconi operator as well -- these people are the only ones allowed to operate the machinery. They are the only ones who can send and receive the invisible signals.

Now, a century or so later, we've got invisible signals everywhere. The Hertzian spectrum has been carved up like a roast pig. The ether is thick with noise. If you are even listening, how can you know what is worth hearing?

The BOOK OF LIES is becoming populated with listeners. There's Felix Shiers who has always had the sobriquet of "Casper" attached to him. There's crazy, paranoid, reefer-smoking dude. There's Liz Kimbrel, distant siren voice calling out to them through the radio. There's Daniel Caretti, bitter and twisted and looking for a reason for his father's death.

And now there's Jack Maratre. Felix's nickname may not be one that he picked out for himself which meant I needed one that he could use on Jack when the need arose. Something quicker off the tongue than "Jack." Something like "JM." Which has a wonderful two-fold echo. Most think it is a shortened version of Jack's full name, but Felix is thinking "Junior Marconi" when he says it.

symbolic 51: aphasia

I've been reading up on aphasia, the mental condition wherein your language centers are fucked. Usually brought on by a stroke or some sort of physical trauma to the head (specifically the left hemisphere), aphasia is a breakdown of the signal between the processing sections of the brain. Those suffering from Global Aphasia are good and truly separated from language. You cannot produce recognizable words and you have no ability to comprehend written or verbal language. On the short end of this stick is Anomic Aphasia where you’ve just got this persistent inability to find the right word to describe what you are thinking.

In between is the land of Broca and Wernicke. Paul Pierre Broca (1824-1880) discovered that if you remove a small area about four square centimeters in size, you can destroy a person’s ability to speak. Maps of the brain label this little square “Broca’s Area” and also lent his name to this manifestation of motor aphasia. Broca tumbled to this area during research with a test patient named “Tan” because, while Tan’s ability to recognize speech was intact, the only sounds he could produce in response to any stimuli were “tan-tan.”

Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) was a German neurologist who had some influence on Freud and whose monograph on aphasia came several years after Broca’s discovery of motor aphasia. The syndrome described by Wernicke is now known as sensory aphasia and is marked by an inability to understand speech. Additionally (or rather, in more extreme cases), this inability also extends to the patient’s ability to speak as their discourse descends into incomprehensible gibberish.

Wernicke also discovered that different areas of the brain were affected in the case of either syndrome. Now, I’m not about to pull out a map of the brain and draw little ‘x’s where things go bad, but the interesting thing to note here is the movement of thought and speech through the brain. Broca’s area is in the frontal lobes just above the lateral fissure, just in front of the cortex. Signals from this area go directly to the motor sections of the brain so as to move the muscles of the jaw and throat in speech. Whereas Wernicke’s area lies further back in the brain (in the left temporal lobe beneath the lateral fissure) and is adjacent to the primary auditory cortex, which is the terminal point of auditory input into the brain.

You whack these areas hard enough or damage the connective tissue between the language areas and you get all sorts of disconnection syndromes. There are a number of fun names for them, but my favorite is “pure-word blindness.” Patients with pure-word blindness can function normally; they just have no comprehension of the written word.

Think about that one. It’s not just being illiterate. There you can at least realize that what you are seeing is some sort of language. No, this is a state where you can’t even understand that you are looking at language. It’s not just weird symbols on the wall which you can’t fathom. You don’t even realize that the impressions on the wall are symbols.

Now, let’s look at the other extreme. Could you be “hyper-word sensitive”? This question skates into a larger question of what is language and how much of it is learned and how much of it is something that is, well, genetically ingrained. Because, when you get right down to it, what happens to you when either Wernicke’s or Broca’s area gets whacked? You don’t forget “language,” rather your ability to make the connections between what you hear and what you mean to say and the language warehouse in your brain are severed. What would it mean to have the language centers of your brain be hyper-aware?

symbolic 50: dee's enochian evocation

Book 5, Chapter 2.1: "We instruct and inform you, according to this Doctrine delivered, that which is contained in the 49 Tables. In 49 voices or callings, which are the Natural Keys to open those (not 49 but 48, for One is not to be opened) Gates of understanding. You shall have knowledge to move every Gate, and to call out as many as you please, or shall be thought necessary..."

Book 5, Chapter 3.3: "In these keys which we deliver, are the mysteries and secret beings and effects of all things moving, and moved within the world. In this is the life of MOTION, in whom all tongues of the world are moved, for there is neither speech nor silence that was or shall be to the end of the world."

Book 5, Chapter 4.1: "Thus you see the necessity of this tongue, the excellency of it, and why it is preferred before that which you call Hebrew. For it is written that every lesser consents to its greater. Our wisdom shall prove Rhetoric. In this language, every letter signifies the member of the substance whereof it speaks. Every word signifies the essence of the substance. The letters are separated, and in confusion: and therefore, are by number gathered together, which also signify a number. For as every greater contains his lesser, so are secret and unknown forms of things knit up in their parents. Being known in number, they are easily distinguished, so that herein we teach places to be numbered, letters to be elected from the numbered, and proper words from the letters, which signifiy substantially the thing that is spoken of in the center of the Creator."

Book 5, Chapter 4.2: "Even as the mind of man is moved at an ordered speech, and is easily persuaded in things that are true, so are the creatures of God stirred up in themselves when they hear the words with which they are nursed and brought forth. For nothing moves, that is not persuaded; neither can anything be persuaded that is unknown. Without this language, the Creatures of God understand you not."

Book 1, Chapter 3: "Being as dumb, and not able to speak, Adam [having been cast out of the Garden of Eden] began to learn (through necessity) the language which you call Hebrew but not in the form which is now Hebrew among you. Adam uttered and delivered to his posterity the nearest knowledge that he had of God and His Creatures. From his own self, he divided this speech into three parts: twelve, three, and seven. This division yet remains, but the true forms and pronunciations are lost. Therefore Hebrew is not of that force that it was in the original divinity; much less is it to be compared with this language that we deliver, which Adam verily spoke in innocence and which has never been uttered nor disclosed to man since, until now. In this language, the power of God must work and wisdom in her true kind must be delivered."

[Quoted from Geoffrey James' edition of Dr. John Dee's manuscripts. (Llewellyn Publications, 1994)]

symbolic 49: voices from beyond

In the late 16th century, Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly composed one of the greatest tracts of occult mythology. Dee, who was a scientist with a certain amount of cachet in the Elizabethan court, became convinced of the existence of angelic spirits. What he sought was the ultimate grimoire, the text which would unlock for him the secrets of the Divine. Like the other prophets -- Solomon, Moses, Abraham -- he believed that God would reveal Himself to the spiritually devout.

And, while Dee was prepared to be the receptor of such divine intelligence, he found that he did not have the sight. The scrying stones -- the objects in which the angelic hosts appeared -- were dark to him. He required the presence of another, someone more properly attuned to the vibrations of the scrying stones, in order to transcribe the tongue of the angels. He required a charlatan. He got Edward Kelly.

Kelly was nearly illiterate, a drifter who wanted nothing more than his palm filled with silver and a hot meal in his stomach. He didn't care for the spiritual possession which came over him when he looked in the magic stones. He didn't understand the full import of his divinely-channeled speech. Or, as some will argue, he understood all too well and his relationship with Dee was strictly that of a con artist working his meal ticket. Kelly is, then, either a fool with an open pathway in his brain or the most brilliant inventor of nonsense history has ever seen.

Your choice. It's all a matter of what you want to believe.

Dee believed him. Dee fervently believed that what Kelly saw and spoke of was the presence and message of an ancient and spiritual host. Dee heard the voice of angels from Kelly's mouth and learned of their desire to resurrect the true art of Magick which had been lost to man. The angels wanted to teach us about the true nature of the universe and how to shape it to our will. They wanted to teach us the barest fraction of the power of God.

These angels have been on earth before. Genesis 6:4. "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown." It is the presence of these giants -- the Nephilim -- and their sorcery which led to God's decision to wipe the slate clean and start over.

In 1582, the silver-tongued angels come back. And this time they're talking to men instead of the ladies. They are impregnating the men with ideas.

symbolic 48: sleep

Sleep is a funny thing. Well, not so much when you're not getting it, but, as a necessary part of our existence, it certainly runs counter to an animal's need to stay alert in order to survive against stronger predators. Maybe it is because we have walls and doors and guns and laws and police to protect us that we can relax enough to talk about "getting enough sleep."

I was doing a bit of reading about dreams and sleep yesterday, just a little googling around, thinking about my current state of partial sleep-deprivation (long weekend doing a network backbone upgrade). I discovered an argument that sleep (or, more specifically, REM sleep) is imperative to the learning process. REM sleep is the time where your brain tries things out, where it tests new ideas, new practices, before putting them into play. REM sleep is where you learn, where things are shifted from short-term to long-term storage and where certain other behaviors and learned patterns are dismantled. REM sleep is the time where your brain optimizes itself, flushes cache, and otherwise reorders itself in order to be focused and receptive to new material.

So what happens when you don't sleep? You get dull. Not just in that sense which drives people away from you at cocktail parties, but also in the way in which your brain can't absorb new information and in the way in which your imagination curls up and dies.

I had a sleep study done about a year ago. I suffer from what a goodly number of us "heavyset" lads have to deal with: airway obstruction while sleeping. When you sleep, your body relaxes, a lot of your muscles take some time off -- put their feet up, pop a beer, watch some TV sort of chilling -- and, in the case of round boys, this includes the muscles in your throat. Your air passage closes off and oxygen stops making its way to your brain. Your brain hits the panic button and beer gets spilled, the ottoman gets knocked over, and the muscles hit the fire pole like they're responding to a four-alarm blaze. Oxygen gets in, the brain calms down, and everything relaxes again.

You can see how the cycles works. In my case, my brain was slapping the panic button every minute or so during the night. Which meant I never got to REM state; I never really slept. And, worst of all, I didn't dream.

You can survive without dreaming. But it is such a pale, colorless world compared to the technicolor eruption of full-on REM sleep. I'm a junkie for the good sleep now; it had been so long that I had really forgotten what it was like to have my head burning. I had my "war on sleep" during college and the successive years, trying to shave off minutes from my sleep time in order to get more things done. Sure, I was awake more, but I wasn't really aware as much.

The people at the sleep center and at the medical supply house who gave me the Darth Vader mask I sleep with now talked a lot about "paying back the sleep bank" and how I would sleep more when I was actually sleeping. I did for a few weeks, but certainly not enough to pay back a ten year debt. No, I slept a little more each night because I was having such a good time dreaming. And, like all optimization and reorganization processes, at some point you are done. Your brain has finished processing yesterday and you are ready for tomorrow.

Apparently birds are the only other creature which dream as much as we do. Do they dream of flying?

symbolic 47: the zodiac ciphers

I was doing some research for a throwaway detail about Jack's backstory over the weekend and ended up at www.zodiackiller.com. The detail -- Jack's uncle was a investigator based out of San Francisco during the time period that Zodiac was playing his games with the press and police -- was intended to color Jack's history enough to give some versimilitude to Jack's arrival at the Institute. What I stumbled upon was this: there are some ciphers from Zodiac's communications which still haven't been solved.

Now, I'm not interested in getting side-tracked in trying to figure out what is going on with the uncracked messages -- folks much brighter and more focused than I have been working on them for more than thirty years -- but what caught my attention is the fact that Zodiac used a substitution based cipher for some of his letters to the press, and one of the still-unsolved ciphers is the answer to the question: "What is my name?"

The longer ciphers were fairly straightforward symbol substitition. Anyone with enough time or processor power can crack these and, in fact, it took a school teacher and his wife just a week to crack the long ciphers. And I'm sure the sequence shown above is only enigmatic because investigators haven't decided which of several thousand possibilities that they've determined are possible is the right one. Even with a one-time pad (which this isn't) has multiple solutions. The trouble is always knowing which answer is the right one.

Why go to all that trouble to give us a clue which we can't ever solve? There are a couple of reasons probably: (1) As long as we can't figure it out, he'll know something we won't and can thereby claim superior intellect -- everyone likes to be the smartest kid in the room; (2) the name is a delicious red herring, ultimately rrelevant and only meant to confuse us; or, (3) names have power. You know someone's true name ("Ged" versus "Sparrowhawk," for example) and you have power over them. And, as Zodiac taunts in more than one letter, if you know his name, you'd know who he was.

Georges has spent thirty years locked in the Institute, putting his head back together. The names of things have become important to him. The patients at the Institute have been reduced to their case numbers and, in Georges' case, that is the only reference they have to him any longer. As Jack investigates the break-out at the Institute, it won't be the only strange thing he finds.

And Georges? I don't think he'll tell Jack his new name. Not yet.

---

The picture above was lifted rather unceremoniously from http://www.zodiackiller.com in that sort of "see it, copy it, paste it, use it" fashion which makes the Internet go 'round. My apologies to Tom Voigt for disrupting his presentation of the material and, if you have any interest in the history of the Zodiac killings, I would hope that you'd spend a little time at his site.

symbolic 46: scene i, part ii

...Gardner’s right leg buckled and he fell awkwardly to his knees. His hand came up to his face as if he was just beginning to feel the wrongness in his skull. The drop of blood grew darker, spreading out on his cheek.

Ruiz dropped the clipboard and rushed back to Gardner. He checked the portal to Patient 178’s room and didn’t see anything in the glass, didn’t see any breaks or fractures or holes—nothing to indicate what had caused injury to the other man.

There was a white spot in Gardner’s field of vision. It was flat and had square edges and it took him a few seconds to realize the shape was Ruiz. His depth perception was gone; everything looked like it had been reduced to basic geometric shapes. As Ruiz leaned in close to his face, he could make out the other man’s features, but only as a series of triangles and circles.

His hand was wet and his face burned like a hot shard of metal had lodged itself in the corner of his eye and was dripping molten tears onto his cheek. He opened his mouth to tell Ruiz, but all that came out was a thin whine.

Ruiz stood on his toes and quickly peered into the room, ducking his head up and back quickly. He did the motion a second time before reaching for the keys attached to his wrist by a rubber strap.

Gardner tried to grab the right angle corner of Ruiz as the other orderly slapped his key into the lock of the door. Don’t open the door, he thought, the words refusing to go all the way to his lips.

The lock turned heavily and Ruiz pulled at the door, swinging it wide. It looked to Gardner like he was lifting aside a sheet of green paper. Ruiz’s flat shape stepped in front of Gardner, blocking the view of the room.

When Ruiz’s form began to shiver and lose its outline, Gardner spun away from the open room and began to crawl across the floor of the hallway. The panic button was a tiny silver dot on the wall, so much smaller than he remembered it being. He collapsed at the base of the wall and stared up at the distant button. So far, he thought, when did it get so far off the floor?

He reached for it, stretching up against the cold wall. His fingers had almost reached it when a hand touched his shoulder. He pressed his good eye to the wall, refusing to look behind him. The touch was firm, insistent, yet still gentle. He felt an exhalation of breath next to his ear. He squeezed his eye shut, his other eye only feeding lines of red fury into his skull, trying to shut out what came next.

There was a chattering sound in his head, a magnified thunder of a thousand crickets...

symbolic 45: scene from the institution

...The last door on the right belonged to the oldest resident on the wing. Thompson -- one of the psychiatric nurses -- had been at the Institute twice as long as Gardner and Patient 178, as far as she could remember, had always been in this room. Gardner checked the chart mounted next to the door.

“He’s been in all day,” Ruiz said. “Morning staff said he didn’t want to come out for breakfast. Wanted to stay indoors today, I guess.” He laughed, a small wheezing sound like air escaping from a balloon or, in Ruiz’s case, a deviated septum.

Standard policy was to keep the doors of the rooms locked when the patients opted to not come out of their rooms. Some days they wanted some privacy—there almost wasn’t any chance for solitude in the arrangement of the common room in the North wing unless you remained in your cell—and, after making sure they hadn’t managed to smuggle in an object with which they might hurt themselves, the staff was happy to comply. Still, the staff was supposed to make regular checks through the portal to ensure the safety of the patient. “When was the last time someone looked?” Gardner asked.

Ruiz checked the sheet and was silent. He shrugged finally. “Sometime early afternoon,” he said finally.

He doesn’t know, Gardner thought. He shook his head. The day and swing shifts always looked to the graveyard shift to catch up the paperwork, citing the constant interruptions of the regular hospital staff and the constant need for supervision that the patients required during their waking hours as excuses for why the finer details of their jobs were missed. Issues found during the graveyard shift—when there was more time to be careful and exacting—always become the graveyard’s problem. Never mind, he thought, that we’ve got three-quarters the staff they do.

He flipped up the hatch to Patient 178’s room and peered inside.

Ruiz checked 178 off his list and had turned back down the long hallway before it occurred to him that Gardner hadn’t said anything. He stopped and looked back at the taller man. “Hey,” he said.

Gardner flinched at the sound of Ruiz's voice and moved his head away from the tiny portal. “There’s writing on the walls,” he said. His voice sounded distant as if he was shouting from the other side of an immense cathedral. There was an emptiness about his expression as if he had just lost something and couldn’t remember what it was. A tiny dot of blood had crept from the corner of his right eye and was tracking towards the edge of his cheekbone...

symbolic 44: what familiarity breeds

The logjam was caused by family ties. Or rather, a perceived need for familial ties. Georges begat Serena who begat Jack. Serena was a plot device intended to bring elements of the story together, a means by which I could bring Jack -- an outsider -- into the story. Since the underbelly of this world is strange and different, I needed someone who wasn't part of that to be drawn into it. Jack was to be my foil, the uninitiated soul who would ask all the questions which the audience would have, and I could then lecture as necessary to instruct the audience about the world view.

And, frankly, the idea seemed rather pedantic. Sermons can, without effort, bore the audience in a second, driving them out of your narrative. The attention of your audience wanders and they start thinking about all the things they should be doing instead of being harrangued by your prose. John Galt's epic speech near the end of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is an extreme example. Is there anyone out there who has actually read all of this 90-page speech?

If Jack was an outsider and was part of family (i.e. Georges' grandson), then how would he get involved? If his grandfather has been locked away in the looney bin for nigh 30 years does Jack even remember the man? How would his grandfather know enough about Jack that he'd want to bring Jack in? Unless it was just an attempt to keep Jack from getting snatched by the bad guys. In which case, why would he bother involving the Lunar Society? Why wouldn't he just contact Jack directly?

I hate these sorts of questions. They nag me; they cause logjams in my brain. And I end up sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, waiting for some solution to come to mind. And, eventually, I end up at Orisinal playing games instead of working. If I'm just going to play games, I might as well bite the bullet, get an X-Box, and vanish.

Doesn't sound very satisfying. So I remain at my desk, staring out the window and thinking things to death. Used to be that I would just start writing, start flailing away and getting the words down. I'd worry later about plot and story and other contrivances. The trouble with that method is that I end up with lots of words that ultimately peter out because I've run into another logjam. It's a litany of logjams, my metholodgy, and it isn't a good way to work. I end up with lots of fragments and nothing ever finished.

So I'm trying to figure out something better. Well, something different. I'm not sure it is much better. And I'm not sure that I need to have everything worked out before I get started either. That may not be the way that I work.

Michael Ondaatje (the fellow who wrote The English Patient) has a book that is a collection of conversations he has with Walter Murch (Coppola's go-to film editor who also edited the film version of The English Patient). One of the things that Ondaatje and Murch discover is that they both have an abundance of material when they get down to work. Both come to projects with the task of creating a final product out of a wealth of material. They find their stories out of the unconnected threads strewn about. They cut and trim and move things until a cohesive vision takes shape.

You've got to have pieces in order to put the puzzle together. I hate puzzles. But maybe it's time to get over that.

symbolic 43: breaking the logjam

I've got a head full of logs. They've all come down from the foothills where they've been harvested and have jammed up the river right above the sawmill. I've got a full crew at the mill, ready to work. The equipment has been oiled and refurbished and sits, gleaming with carnivorous glee. The crew stands around on the dock beside the expectant mill, smoking endless cigarettes and glancing up river at the logjam at the mouth of the bay.

The lumberjacks, either oblivious to the plug in the river or uncaring about the stoppage, continue to harvest trees. Their saws and axes continue day and night to pull down trees. They have quotas to fill: this slope by the end of May, the southern slope by early summer.

Some of the logs in the river bump against each other, the hollow knock of their contact a persistent foreign sound in the wilderness. Down at the base of the jam, the logs are pressed too tightly together to move and all you can hear is the wood groaning from the incessant pressure of water and wood.

The foreman is out on the pile with a specialist who has flown in from Corporate. They've strapped spike strips to their boots and are clambering across the wet logs. The foreman is trying to explain to the man from Corporate the problem with the logjam. "Too many logs," he says, waving his arms across the expanse of water-logged wood. "This is a choke point," he explains, nodding towards the swerve of shore which juts out into the channel. "Always has been. But, as long as we've kept the logs moving, it has never been a problem. As long as we had a rhythm..."

The man from Corporate nods. He understands about rhythm, about the ebb and flow of materials through a channel. He is the troubleshooter for the company; it is his job to analyze blockages -- logs, paperwork, network traffic, lines of communication -- his expertise lies in removing obstructions.

He walks along the rim of the jam, his feet sticking and pulling in the ridged edges of the logs. The foreman follows, nervously waiting to hear the prognosis from the man from Corporate. The stranger stops, looks down at a particular log near the base of the dam, and says, "This one."

"What about it?" asks the foreman.

"Take this one out and it will all flow free," the man from Corporate says. "It won't be an easy flow -- not at first -- but give it some time and it'll find its rhythm again." He climbs down and lays his hand on the long log in question. "But this one has to go."

The foreman squints down from the top of the dam and, as he follows the course of the log across the bottom of the jam, he can see how it is jammed against the bank. As he stares at the log, the problem becomes obvoius to him. "Yes," he agrees, lending a hand to the man from Corporate as the stranger climbs back up to the top, "I can see it now." The foreman shakes his head. "I don't know how I missed that."

"You're too close," the stranger says, "You've been staring at them too long. You needed a different perspective. You needed to show the problem to someone else."

symbolic 42: staggering under the weight of memory

I know nothing about NLP -- Neuro-Linguistic Programming -- and, since there's a whole subtext to the BOOK OF LIES about language and how the brain processes language, I figure I should at least check NLP out. So I fight my way through a couple of websites, getting the basics down and wrestling off the strong urge to nap, and eventually realize that I want to talk about NLP even less than I want to read about it. However, there is something which slips into my brain and takes up residence.

Every piece of memory data in your brain has two attributes associated with it. First, there is all the raw information -- the empirical sensory record of that instant of time -- which is a simple data snapshot. This information is the "unobserved" data; this is the information that any recording system (with enough processor power and storage space behind it) could capture and store. It is just a series of points and values which could be reduced to a matter of binary information. The second attribute is your interpretation of that data.

Sensory data (be it visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory or kinesthetic) flows into the appropriate primary area of the brain that is devoted to this type of data. Nerve fibers run from the primary area to a corresponding secondary area and, in fact, this is the only connection the primary area has with any other section of the brain. The secondary areas are interconnected, allowing information to be dumped into yet another section -- the associative regions of the brain -- and here it is that the collected information is ultimately processed. A value is placed on this block of data, and it is marked by your brain as having some context within the larger volume of your mental space.

Say, for example, that you are sitting on a park bench and an animal hops up onto the bench next to you. Your brain takes in all the information about the arrival of this mobile object: the sight, sound, smell, and possibly contact, of this creature. This raw data is distilled down in your brain to a nugget of data which is then compared against the entirety of your memory and found to match previous elements in your memory container. In fact, there's a label on this container: "squirrel." A tag is now attached to this new data that says, in effect, this memory block is another example of "squirrelness" in case you ever require more than one block of historical data to make comparisons against.

Now, I want to tell you about this experience and I say, "I saw a squirrel today." Your brain immediately matches the pieces of that sentence to the appropriate data containers in your head and constructs meaning from that series of words. But you don't know that I was sitting in Wright Park and that the bench was a worn picnic table with metal legs and a wooden top. You don't know that I was there because I was eating a Subway sandwich or that the sun was over my right shoulder or that two red cars passed in quick succession in the street beyond the park. You don't know any of these things from my sentence, but they all exist in my head because they are all indelibly linked as part of the sensory data which accompanies the construction "I saw a squirrel today."

What's running in your head right now is the associated data from the last time you saw a squirrel. Unless you've never seen a squirrel, in which case you have no idea what I am talking about.

I could also have said, "J'ai vu un écureuil aujourd'hui." That sentence builds the same picture in my mind, but may mean absolutely nothing to you. But I've just altered the association tags in my memory. I haven't touched the sensory data -- that remains the same -- but my understanding, my comprehension, of it has changed. Now, my associated links spiral off into other associations I have with the French language (including a bit from Eddie Izzard about "le singe" being "sur la branche").

The amazing thing about the brain is that it isn't just a recording device. The brain is a vast muscle which continually evaluates and re-evaluates the data it has access to. Do you suppose that if you left the brain alone long enough and let it crunch away at the data residing within that it could eventually fabricate its own system of classification and taxonomy? Language, whether it be French or English or Urdu or Chinese, is a communally built system of classification and communication. If you weren't bound by such a system, would your brain eventually invent its own language? Or would it rediscover one that it was genetically predisposed to that exists below social constructions?

And now, because my brain just took off on a series of associated links, I'm wondering what really happened at the Tower of Babel.

symbolic 41: the numbers stations

The most widely available history lesson of the Numbers Stations is the Conet Project, a four CD package released by Irdial Discs. The project contains a good overview of what the stations are in their extensive liner notes as well as the actual recordings of the transmissions which make up the four CD collection. The Stations are shortwave transmitters -- and some have actually been found -- that, on occasion, spark to life and spit out streams of numbers. And, as you can hear on the CDs, the numbers have presence: someone, somewhere, is reading these sequences of digits. To whom? And why? Well, that's the question no government will answer.

The Stations operate without any apparent licenses or support structure. They can be there one day, bleeding regularly into the airwaves, and then gone the next, silent for years before starting up again. The British Government, when finally cornered about the existence of one of the stations emanating from the island, relented and said that yes, they knew about it, but the rest pertained to national security.

The transmissions are most likely some type of one-time pad encryption. One-time pads, if used correctly, are still the most low-tech and unbreakable cipher code system there is. Most cipher systems over the years have been broken because of human error or because the opposition has gotten their hands on a copy of the codebook or key word which enables them to get a handle on the permutation of the cipher. But one-time pads, by their definition, are used once and discarded. And, if you don't have the same combination of letters and numbers, you will never know what the translated text truly is.

The only person who will know is the listener who has their own copy of the one-time pad and who can reverse the substitution. So who's listening? That's the beauty of the shortwave transmission. It could be anyone with a radio tuned to the proper frequency.

They've been running since World War II. People have been talking behind all of our backs for over fifty years. Wonder what they are saying? Georges Maratres and the Lunar Society wondered. Most of them are dead now and Georges has been in a tiny room for several decades, putting his brain back together. And the stations are still talking.

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76798 66932 85786 86982 32877 37676
end

symbolic 40: the lunar society

Liz Kimbrel is a member of the reformed Lunar Society, though they don't call themselves by that name. The actual Lunar Society was formed in secret during the Cold War. You see, it plays out like this:

Georges Maratres was a member of the French Resistance during WWII and, due to some specialized background, was deemed useful to an American organization which was following the troops as they took back Europe. This organization -- we'll call it ACE for now -- was tasked with determining just how much occult influence there was in the Nazi regime and whether or not it was something creepy and actually effective or if it was just a brutal and misinformed hobby of the guys in charge. With the end of WWII and the dissolution of any Nazi-based occult organization, ACE returned to the US and brought with them a number of the useful tools which they acquired during the retaking of Europe, both material and personnel.

Georges got a job with the US government and did basic signal intelligence work for them as he settled down and started his new life in the States. Probably a decade or so went by before he started to tumble to something which gave him pause. Something which he had worked on in the Resistance was the interception and deciphering of Allied transmissions. Some of these weren't part of Enigma and were never cracked, deemed either too inconsequential or inconsistent to be worth time and effort or they were exceptionally careful and utilized one-time pads as they should. Either way, Georges has stumbled upon the Numbers Stations which are broadcasting on shortwave bands in the States and recognizes them as the same transmissions which they couldn't break during the war.

He tells his supervisor about his concerns and, a few weeks later, is told to ignore them. The Numbers Stations are part of the jurisdiction of the CIA and other national security agencies and are nothing which he needs to concern himself with. Georges, no stranger to the bureaucratic brush-off and the informal warning which is imbedded in such a "don't worry your pretty little head about it" mandate from management, nods and keeps his suspicions to himself. He starts to listen in private, spending hour after hour in his attic room scanning the shortwave bands where he discovers that there is more than one Number Station.

After a few years of quietly keeping notes and his ears open, Georges discovers that he isn't the only one who is wondering just what in the hell these strange transmissions are. Other members of the private sector are also listening and, unlike George, don't have the same security clearance concerns which he does. They're talking to one another. The core group call themselves the Lunar Society and refer to each other with code names taken from names of lunar geography.

It is a few years before Georges is able to gain their confidence enough to meet some of the members of the Lunar Society. And, once they learn who he actually works for, they begin to consider the possibility of a more active agenda: using Georges and his access to governmental data to figure out what the Stations really are.

This is, of course, where things go wrong. Someone on the other end doesn't want to be found and, as these amateur sleuths start turning up where they shouldn't, the people who know react. The members of the Lunar Society are systematically hunted down and killed.

Georges has no idea that they've been removed. Not yet, at least. He's been trying to get his head together these last thirty years. Trying to dodge the radical treatments, the frontal lobotomy, and the pharmaceutical recovery options. Georges has been locked in a nuthouse for three decades, and he doesn't know that he was the link that got the Lunar Society killed.

Nor does Daniel Caretti. His father was "Tycho" of the original society. He was young enough that he didn't really remember his father's death, but he does know that his mother has always believed there was a larger conspiracy afoot. She pined and died eventually and Daniel came into possession of his father's belongings which included a sealed trunk. Inside the trunk were all of his father's notes about the Lunar Society.

When Georges gets out of the insane asylum and tries to contact his old friends, it is Daniel who recognizes the call sign.

symbolic 39: liz kimbrel

I'm living with these people now. The characters of the BOOK OF LIES having taken up residence in my head and are starting to peer through my eyes. I can hear their voices during the day. I'm the guy sitting on the bench in the park having a full conversation with himself. They're starting to talk through me, which is that delightful schizophrenia in which writers get to revel.

I mentioned Liz briefly in the last entry, mentioned her as being attracted to the ideal space of a hotel in downtown Seattle, and probably did so in such an off the cuff manner that it didn't occur to me until later the next day that not everyone may be as familiar with Liz as am I. Maybe it is time to introduce some of my new friends to the world. We'll start with Liz. Here are two bits from the earliest draft:

"Her hair was short and curly, a brown darker than the rich earth piled next to the grave. Her face was full and round and the dark sunglasses hid her eyes from Jack. She wore a long black coat, open at the throat to highlight the large stone suspended at the base of her neck. It looked like a piece of polished glass."

"They were hazel, her eyes, a light green fringe around the darker center, and her minimal makeup accentuated the distaff coloration of her irises. She had a solid smile, make unique by the protruding shape of her lower canines. The rest of her teeth were straight and white, but the two tearing teeth were slightly thicker than the rest. Her lips were never quite closed. Any other time, Jack would have been quite taken by the persistent hesitation which adorned that mouth."

I had a secret about Liz; I knew something about her which no one else -- not even she -- knew. Now I find that my secret may actually be one of the lies. I don't want to spill it quite yet, I may still use it and I'd like to have a few surprises for you, but if it is an untruth about Liz, I realize that I don't know her as well as I thought. In fact, the above two quotes may be all that I know about Liz too.

Regardless, this is Liz. She may wander in to the conversations.

symbolic 38: dream chic

It's 7.00am and I'm sitting in a comfy chair at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. The place is done up in modern chic -- all dark woods, chrome, simple geometric designs, and primary colors. The music is charmingly downtempo and Brazilian in flavor, and there is just a whiff of smoked turkey in the air (though that may be from the banquet setup in the next room). The architecture is tight and cozy, very articulated, and yet without sharp edges, and it wraps around you and clearly partitions you into a nested space.

It is quiet at this time of the morning. So quiet I can hear the HVAC system whirring in the ceiling. The thick burgundy curtain next to me is drifting in the breeze. In fact, all of the velvet curtains on this side of the room are dancing, gently shimmying like elegant ladies in tight cocktail dresses who consider a twitch of the hip to be full-tilt boogie.

I'm not sure I would be able to find my way out of here again, even if I wanted to. But not in that "fucking hell, get me out of this maze!" panic that is the nightmare labyrinth of IKEA. The embrace of the W Hotel whispers that you shouldn't think about the rest of the world. They don't want you to worry about leaving; when it is time, someone will be round to escort you to your vehicle. Until then, it is just you and the simple geometry and the swaying curtains. It is a place of carefully calculated atmosphere. It exudes serenity and sex and alcohol in crystal glasses. It is a place that says, "I am more sleek and graceful in my Sterile Deco design than you can ever hope for, but I will accept you anyway." It is a place that -- if you are plain -- you can disappear; and -- if you are dazzling -- it will be your adoring backdrop.

This is the place where Liz Kimbrel dreams of staying.

I wonder what the rooms are like.

symbolic 37: a whore for that special rhythm

I am a music whore. Such a pronouncement shouldn't surprise any of you, but I need to say it aloud once in awhile to remind myself. Though today the phrase which came to my lips was: "I'm a music bastard." When I'm not daydreaming about the novels that I'm not working on, I'm speed-slamming music. I did the math a few years ago and realized I have enough music on the shelves to go 24/7 nearly two months and never repeat a disc. It's a statistic that I say with embarrassment and befuddlement rather than with macho "I got more stuff than you" pride. The reason: it isn't enough. New records come out on Tuesday here in the States and I've already given thought twice to which CD store I could hit over lunch to check what's new. It's not that I'm looking for anything; it's not that I don't have a stack of discs on the shelf back home that I haven't listened to yet. What drives me to these thoughts and actions is the idea of something NEW.

And this is why I am a whore. I devour music. I crack jewel cases when I open them; I lick liner notes, sniff the tray inserts on the off-chance that they are scratch-n-sniff, and listen to the CD with my finger fidgeting near the 'track advance' button. Why? Because I so desperately need to have my life completely altered by SOUND. I want to have my brain imploded by a blast of distorted drums; I want to fall in love with a singer's voice. I want my crotch to explode with yearning for that wild and innocent guitar howl. I want lyrics that will make me think that poetry is a living serpent whispering in my ear. I want to be transformed, transfixed, and transported. I want a lot, frankly. Sure, what whore doesn't? Who doesn't want the blushingly innocent rapture of their first joyous orgasm all over again?

This doesn't apply to just music, you know. It could be anything: movies, clothes, books, online fori, websites, fetish gear, japanese anime, transhuman modifications, military hardware, young virginal boys, whatever obsesses you. The need to touchtastehearsmellswallow becomes so strong that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of your obsession. Enjoying it is for some other monster; you've just got to HAVE IT. All other considerations are extraneous.

Rich Amtower and I were talking about music this morning and he was sharing with me some of his thoughts about Mago's Definitions of raw moments from a different perspective. We both took home copies of it from the same show less than two weeks ago. Rich has been listening to it, breaking it down, picking it apart -- enjoying it -- since then. Me? I've already forgotten that I bought it. It's still in the plastic wrap on my shelf. I've moved on.

Yeah, "bastard" is the correct word. The monkey is not on my back; I am the monkey.

We, in the West, know Kali Ma more as the Goddess of death and destruction -- as the devourer of worlds. We forget that she has three faces: creation, protection, and destruction. We see only the end and forget the beginning. If you spend all your time running, you never realize that the world is indeed curved and that you can't run away from the beginning, you can only get to the end faster.

"So rested he neath a tum tum tree / and stood a while in thought." No wonder Buddha got off the road.

symbolic 36: recovery through ancient ceremonies

I am in need of a regenerative ritual.

These past few weeks have knocked me out of my comfort zone. I took this last week off to coincide with my wife's spring break vacation and we had planned to get away for awhile, see the sights, and generally not think once about all the things in our lives which were piling up. Plans didn't work the way we would have liked: a recent decaffeination has left me sluggish and tired, the day job called mid-week and needed to see me, and our cat, Ernie, got squooshed by a car. It's Friday and every time I have plunked my ass in front of the keyboard, my fingers have curled up like sun-baked earthworms and refused to work.

I guess you could call this writer's block.

In the past, I just haven't felt like working and have stayed away, knowing that anything laid down during these times was going to be shit and not worth keeping. You might as well spend your time building balsa wood airplanes or learning how to bake pies. But this feels like there is a huge plug in my skull which is keeping everything from flowing. There are words in my head which want to come out, but the internal editor has lowered a grate over the entrance and quarantined my creative process. It's like part of my brain has been diagnosed with SARS and it can't play with the rest until the antibodies kick in.

But what do you use to dissolve this mental block? What antibodies are there for rescuing the sequestered portion of your brain?

I'm listening to This Morn' Omina's 7 Years of Famine right now, an explosive piece of ritual music. Part techno, part industrial, part ambient, and part rhythmic noise, 7 Years of Famine is a spiritual whirlwind of these genres along with Middle Eastern and African rhythms, everything spun into a orgiastic nocturnal ceremony. It shouldn't work, and even as I describe it, it sounds impossible. But this is what This Morn' Omina is all about: making ritual music with any element they desire. They don't cling to conventions; they laugh at genre boundaries. They are building powerful ceremonies to forgotten pantheons, striving to shake the sand from buried statues and to ring the heavens with their sound. They want to release the bound and captive energies of mankind by striping away pretense and self-imposed limitations.

I've tracked down and ordered their entire back catalog after hearing 7 Years of Famine. Sure, it is a junkie's reaction, but only because I have this desperate faith in what music will do for me. I have to. The walls are coming down, one way or another.

-----

This Morn' Omina website: http://www.hegira.be.
7 Years of Famine is out on Ant-Zen.

symbolic 35: holes

Ernie became part of our household nearly three years ago. A dear friend of my wife was moving to Alaska and was told that the wilds of the north aren't the best place for small felines. We were living in a tiny apartment at the time with barely enough room for both of us and the stacks of books I hadn't bothered to read yet, and I wasn't quite sure what was missing from that mix was a cat. Still, we drove out to Ellensburg one Sunday afternoon to meet our friend and pick up the cat.

Ernie cried the whole way back. New car, new people, all his old faces and places gone. He was terrified. He didn't stop making noise for three days and, even then, only took it down a notch. "It's the Siamese in him," I was told, "Siamese cats are talkers." "He's orange," I said, "and this isn't talking, this is bitching." Ernie never stops talking and, three years later, I talk back. Full conversations because I know what he is saying.

When we bought a house, we made the decision to allow him to be an indoor/outdoor cat. We thought long and hard about the choice and worried that, having had his front claws taken out, that he would become the neighborhood bitch. During the first spring, he got into a tussle with the yappy dog next door and came home with bloodstains on his head. We called him "Massive Head Wound Harry" for a month. He would sit in the corner of the room and flick his freshly notched ear at us.

The first time we went away for a vacation we worried that. even with a friend who dropped by twice a day to see him, he would not deal well with us being gone. As it turns out, Ernie waited for about an hour after we left to make sure we were really gone before heading over to the other neighbor's house. He moved in there while we were away, coming back twice a day to be around when the cat-sitter dropped by in order to soak up as much pity affection as he could sweat out of her. The neighbor told us that more than once she would wake up in the morning and find Ernie on her couch. "What?" he would appear to say as she looked at him. "You forgot to let me out last night."

I don't know the people who live behind us, but I've heard them talking to Ernie when he walks the fence line and wanders into their yard to see what they are doing. He falls over when you look at him; the easier it is for you to rub him. Everyone loves Ernie because that is all he ever asked you to do.

And when he got hit by a car last night, it was the neighbors who turned out to take care of him. We came home to find out that they had taken him to the local animal hospital where the vets had to tell them that there wasn't anything that could be done for Ernie. His back was broken.

I've got to go to the animal hospital in a little while and pick up the body. Then I have to go to Home Depot to buy a shovel. Shitty reason to buy a shovel. What I have in common with my neighbors now is loss. Shitty thing to have in common with your neighbors.

I wish I could buy a shovel to fix the hole in my chest.

Miss you, Ernie.

symbolic 34: show, no telling

I'm not inked. As a rite of passage, I burned an ankh into the back of my left hand on my 21st birthday. I used a fork and a votive candle, and it took awhile to get right. If the light is good, I can see the mark on my hand now. The scar which has no care of the light is on the underside of my left forearm. It's a two inch mark from where I sliced myself with a hand saw when I was 12 or 13. The mountain ridge running across the top of my right foot is the reminder of the surgery it took to find the toothpick which had been lost in my flipper. (Bare feet, quarter-inch pile carpeting, toothpicks: bad combination, let me tell you.) These are the marks I have on my skin.

I worry that a tattoo will fall into the same category: a reminder of rushed action. I point to my flesh and say, "Look, this is where a saw slipped." Or, "This is where I was toppled by a sliver of wood." I don't want to have that same reaction to the ink which has been inscribed into my skin. They are powerful symbols -- tattoos. They tell stories about you that don't require you to speak. They are micro bursts of information. Stamps of personality.

I want to know about your initiation. Go the forum and post me a picture of your first tattoo. Flash me with the first symbol that you had speak for you.

And later you can tell me why.

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

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

They keep me honest.

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

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

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

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

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

symbolic 32: the rites of spring

There are oil fields burning in Iraq tonight.

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

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

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

symbolic 31: the death of manuscript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

symbolic 30: random interruption

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

These are the things I learn at family gatherings.

symbolic 29: "waiting" -- a love song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

symbolic 27: coalesce, like...

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

...like butter.

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

...like stone.

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

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

...like mist.

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

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

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

..like phantoms.

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

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

symbolic 26: masonry

Plots are built like Lego projects: you draw pieces out of a pile and assemble your tower by interlocking the pieces together. Each piece, by itself, has no shape or form and only works as part of a larger structure. Did you ever play with Legos as a kid? I did. I spent hours fabricating and refabricating war ships. It took me awhile to figure out the trick. I could make tall, spindly ships bristling with guns and extraneous wings; I could make flat vessels like airborne flounders that had absolutely no grace to them. Slow and solid. I had a hard time making the vessels that were strong and graceful. I would spend a few hours and would eventually come up with something that would work, but never anything that I fell in love with and left assembled on my shelf for months and months.

Plots are like Legos. I took my apart over the last few weeks. There have been a number of holiday distractions and, when I returned to the BOOK OF LIES, I was struck by the gracelessness of what was there. In fact, I started to obsess about some hidden flaw in the design which would come out at the most inopportune time and bring everything else down when it erupted on me. I took the whole structure apart and laid the pieces out on the floor. I left them there for a few days and, when I returned, I started to piece them together again. In fact, I put a number of them back in the bucket and drew new pieces out.

The thought which had sent me along this path was that I wasn't quite sure what I was building. You know that moment when you've started to snap the pieces together? Just what the hell have I got in my hands? Yeah, I had one of those moments. I took everything apart, mixed up the pieces, and put it all back together again.

I was building a rocket ship. It looks much like the previous one did, though fatter around the back end. Stronger boosters is my guess. Escape velocity is a bitch after all. I'm still not quite sure what sort of craft these boosters are taking into space -- I'm still tinkering with the deployment vessel -- but the body of the ship seems much better. I'm not nagged by the possibility that I've forced two pieces together which weren't meant to touch. I can bang my knuckles against the side of the craft and feel pretty good that it isn't going to fragment.

This one needs to be strong, you see. I've built enough rockets and war planes and medieval castles to fill a thousand Sunday afternoons. And, at the end of the day, the pieces all went back in the box. For a change, I want to leave this one on the shelf.

---
A new year and a new design lends itself well to a quick recap for those who might be just wandering in. The on-going journey charted here in SYMBOLIC is the progress of a novel started last November as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge: write 50,000 words in one month. 50k wasn't enough to get the story out (nor was it ever really planned that way) and SYMBOLIC continues as I thrash out this book. In addition to discussions and observations of the authorial process from the first word on the page to the last signature penned at the inaugural book signing, we'll be looking at the nature of symbols and how they affect us.

I'm the monkey in the glass cage, picking up things that I find interesting when I'm not banging on the typewriter. You should feel free to throw odd trinkets over the wall if you like. The truly fascinating thing about symbols is how they facilitate and obfuscate communication.

symbolic 25: 25 degrees

From my astrology chart generated by alabe.com: "Neptune is in 25 Degrees Scorpio. You are extremely interested in anything deep and mysterious. You will explore and idealize the benefits that can accrue from the study of the occult, healing and psychology..."

The 25th Degree of the Masonic hierarchy is the Knight of the Brazen Serpent. According to Biblical legend, during the Exodus some of the folk began to complain about the length of the hike. God sent serpents among the people, biting the whiners. Moses, after getting a mental clue from God, made a bronze serpent and wound it around a staff. Those who had been bitten and were suffering looked upon the staff and were healed. The symbol of the Masonic degree is both this staff (reduced to an ankh for simplicity) and the serpent biting it own tail. Ouroboros.

[An interesting aside because, as you know, these things fascinate me: the snake biting his own tail was an image I took and modified for the logo of the first web-presence I did for myself. The details of the 25th degree I didn't know until I went to write up this entry.]

The 25th Enochian Aethyr is VTI, a winged angel who represents the Voice of Silence. He is usually pictured standing on a large rock which is nearly submerged in a thrashing sea, and he symbolizes the emergence of the intuitive nature through the troubled waters of the intellect. He is the small voice which we all have down in our guts, and his full robes symbolize the mysterious and hidden nature of this mental process.

25 is the square of 5 which, if you write it out in mathematical notation, is one of the few equations where you utilize the same numbers on either side of the equal sign. 5 is the PENTAD in Pythagorean theory. It is the first number which can be achieved through the addition of an odd and an even number. It is the third prime number. The third prime squared is 25. (3, 2, 5. It gets out of hand.)

The Gematria of the first Hebrew word in the Bible, "let there be," is 25.

If the first six numbers of my cell phone are added together, the result is 25. Those two digits added together make 7 which happens to be the seventh digit of my cell number.

25 is my favorite number and has been for years. My earliest memory of the infatuation goes back to the days when the quarter could actually buy you a comic book. I would put my hand in my pocket and feel the shape of the single coin, knowing that I could go the racks at the supermarket and buy anything that I wanted. Usually it would be Conan or Beowulf because I was going through a swords and sorcery pulp phase, or even a Marvel Spotlight if Son of Satan was starring. Twenty-five cents used to be worth something -- 22 pages of pulped paper, covered with ink -- and now the sole reason to carry quarters is to feed the parking meters.

But, for some reason, the mystical importance of the number sticks with me and I find myself alert to signals imbedded in the presence of the number when it arises. The reason may simply be because Neptune had moved 25 degrees into Scorpio on the moment of my birth and all the occult influences swirling around at the moment I first had conscious thought separate from my mother may have imprinted that number in my brain. My fascination with the number may be a product of planetary alignments and celestial positioning. It may be the harmonic frequency on which I am most likely to be attuned. It may be the number of transmigratory lives I have had prior to this incarnation.

In the end, I am somewhat disappointed that my subscriber number at the local comic shop is "26." Cosmically, this seems somewhat unfair.

symbolic 24: villainy

Two things merged in my head over the weekend. First, Gangs of New York. Martin Scorsese builds experiences; his are films which swallow you. While he is in fine form for Gangs of New York, it is too bad that the same couldn't be said for the script. With a little prejudicial editing, the film could have been salvaged from a hollow-eyed revenge tale hung on Leonardo DiCaprio's sulky single-expressioned take on the character of Amsterdam Vallon and turned into a ripe character study of the film's single engaging character. If this had been William Cutting's story instead of a sad bleating of "you killed my daddy," Scorsese could have savaged the audience, leaving us emotionally devastated by the death of William Cutting: the erstwhile villain.

[As an aside, for as much shit as Daniel Day-Lewis has taken along the way for how he prepares for his roles, I hope that his entire acceptance speech for the Oscar is just two fingers to everyone who took a shot at him. Unlike the rest of the cast, Day-Lewis disappeared on-screen. There was only Bill the Butcher and, for the three hour duration of the film, Bill was alive.]

The second thing: an infomercial drones in the background as I make breakfast Sunday morning. They're pushing the Miracle Blade III. "These blades never dull. They can cut sheet metal and still slice a tomato. Cutting your own bread has never been easier. Sixteen different blades all for only $39.95. Call in the next ten minutes and we'll throw in a free gift."

I wander out of the kitchen and watch for a second. The guy pushing the knives is a wearing a white chef's hat and looks like the most work he's ever done in the kitchen is to use a utility knife to separate out his dosage of amphetamines. He's got an obsequious co-host, a fawning sycophant whose entire existence is simply to act amazed and astonished when the Miracle Blade manages to slice cheese.

You know what would really sell knives? William Cutting. Put Bill the Butcher on that table-top, crouching over the fawning assistant who has been strapped down and had an apple shoved unkindly into his mouth. Watch Bill the Butcher with his wild steely eye shout at the camera, "Loin or shank, the Miracle Cleaver is the perfect instrument to carve up a good piece of meat. Bone or sinew, the Miracle Cleaver never loses its edge. You can carve up steak all day and never feel it in your arm. Look at how this separates the meat from the bone."

Yeah, the phones would never stop ringing. We love a good villain. They're Men of Action and Conviction. We get so little of that in reality these days. Too many weasels and back-biters. Too many Mr. Tweeds.

I miss Bill.

symbolic 23: extortion

I had a dream last night about strippers. There was some sort of truck stop style strip shop that I was familiar with, and this time I was specifically after some sort of take-home style magazine. And this place catered to that sort of shopper, though the whole place was laid out like a convenience store at a highway truck stop -- all the items were scattered on low shelves with little or no organization and I distinctly remember getting annoyed that I couldn't find the basic nudie magazines.

Wandering throughout the shop were the working girls and I knew some of them by name. Evidently I was that sort of regular, but not regular enough that I spent any sort of money on the live entertainment. There are five women clustered around the display rack where the magazines I'm looking for are stacked and there may be a couple more on the next aisle over. I politely decline the constant offers for some private fun -- I'm just after a magazine I can take home after all -- and I say hello to the two ladies that I know.

Suddenly I note they are all holding two liter containers of Coke product (apparently this place really is a truck stop) and, as I'm trying to figure out which magazine I want to buy, they all start to shake these bottles of soda. I know what is going to happen and shake my head and decline the experience of watching them all hose each other down with high-pressured foamy Coke products.

Ah, too late. I hear them laughing and giggling behind me, accented by the whoosh of pop shooting out of the pressurized containers. I feel some carbonated beverage splash on my sleeve. It's going to be a wet, sticky mess. I'm trying to put some distance between myself and the event, but no luck there.

Mr. Big and his enforcer are waiting for me at the front counter. He wants to talk about my bill. "What bill?" I ask. He nods over my shoulder. "The soda splash," he says. "You think the entertainment is free around here?" I know it isn't and say as much, trying to point out that I made several attempts to decline participation in the visual entertainment. I just came in for a magazine, I tell him.

He jerks his head towards his office. "Step inside," he says, "Let's talk about this." His enforcer cracks his knuckles. I go, meekly, my magazine left on the front counter. Inside his office -- all done in leather and walnut with video monitors arranged on shelves behind his chair -- he sits down in his big seat and starts fiddling with a pencil on a pad of paper. His enforcer is standing close behind me. "Seven girls," he says as he works out the math, "at $79.95 a pop. That's what you owe us." There must be some sort of state luxury tax that gets included because the whole total comes to $598.00.

I wake up when he says the number. I wake up and think: No, that's not how it would play. It's 3:30am and I'm lying in bed, my mind rapidly starting to edit the scene which just played out.

I've been reading Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. In their first conversation, they banter back and forth about the basic editing process, about taking the entire lot of raw material that has been collected for the work and starting to cull it for the precise bits which you really want to keep. Both admit that the work (film or text) is an amorphous object at this point, a vast and overwhelming collection of dense matter. It takes them longer to edit the work than it did to generate the raw material. The shape of the final work is unknown. There is a metaphor of the sculptor which comes out of the conversation, the artisan who molds and shapes the basic material until some form emerges.

I hate editing; I find it tedious and dull. I must not be doing it correctly. I've not worked on the BOOK OF LIES for several weeks now, having been distracted by other things and numerous familial visits over the holidays. This morning, as I'm lying in bed, recutting the scenes from the truckstop strip shop, the word which comes to mind isn't "editing" but "negotiating."

It's time to get back to work.

I rerun the conversation between myself and Mr. Big a few times, tweaking and shifting the scene, until I get to a bit of mental film where I stand firm on $200.00 and two lapdances from "Sue." He smiles and agrees. We both know it is extortion, but it is a price that is acceptable to both parties.

I don't remember what happened to the magazine, but it's not important anymore. The intent of the scene has changed. These things happen when the editing starts.

symbolic 22: hanging, suspended in space

I'm in the airport on New Year's Eve to pick up family flying in the from the East Coast. I've never seen Sea-Tac Airport so empty at 5pm. There is no one queuing up to the counters. Most of the shops are already closed, and the scattered people waiting in the airport all appear to be here for the duration. No one is moving; everyone is waiting. I pass a threesome playing cards. Next to them is a couple who've already gone to sleep in their stiff chairs. Over half the world has already made it to the new year; we're still waiting for it to arrive on the West Coast. Who waits longer than us for the beginning? I wonder. Alaska. Hawaii. Some tiny atoll out in the Pacific. We're not the edge of the world, but you can see it from here.

The plane from Detroit is delayed. It's the end of the year and there is nothing to do but sit and watch the clock. There is a punk girl sitting across from me, all decked out in tiger stripes and cheetah spots with dark-rimmed glasses, thigh high black boots and large hoop earrings. There is a bouquet of flowers sitting next to her. She projects attitude: both "look at me" and "what the fuck are you staring at?" When her friend arrives, she squeals with delight and leaps into his arms, all pretense gone. But that's thirty minutes into the future. Right now, like the dark-haired woman with the scarf standing behind her, she's waiting. We're all on hold.

Aleister Crowley talks about the Moon card in the Tarot as being the last moment of darkness, the final instant of winter bleakness before the resurrection which comes with the Sun. "This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating." The end of the Julian calendar is subjective; it is the West applying itself to the passage of time. The Egyptian calendar ends with five uncounted days in August. The Chinese New Year is in February. I'm not sure when the Mayan new year begins, not being clever enough to work out the Tzolkin and Haab markers. But in the West, we draw the shroud on December 31st.

6:15pm. The New Year is over the Atlantic somewhere, winging its way towards the East Coast of the United States. Times Square in New York City is already full of revelers. They are still partying in Paris, firework smoke off the Eiffel Tower has dispersed across the Seine already. In Tokyo and Australia, it is already dawn. I'm still waiting for the plane. It has landed, but none of the passengers have made the trek from the distant gate to the main terminal. I'm in a Schroedinger-ean fugue state: the passengers don't exist until they come up the escalator and I see them. I don't actually know the plane is here either. There is just a single word on the monitor -- "arrived" -- and a cluster of people waiting next to the gate. The rest of the airport is still and quiet. Even the maintenance crews have the night off.

This day is an arbitrary marker. A more personal cyclical marker is your birthday, but we've agreed that we will all celebrate the passing of one year into the next on January 1st. Mythologies celebrate the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next with instants of fire and destruction -- the old world being swept away to make way for the new world. The adherents gather around the pole to Heaven -- the axis mundi of their cosmology -- and wait to be remade in the fire of reoccurring Big Bang. They wait for that moment of light which burns away the past and fills them anew. And, in those final dark minutes of yesterday, they have a few moments to think about what they were and what they can be.

Tomorrow the airport will be full. The lines at the counters will be long and the lines through the security gates will be longer. All eighteen of the espresso stands will be working double-time to smother hangovers with caffeine. Someone invariably will try to board a plane with a six-inch knife in their pocket and will be outraged when they get pulled aside and strip-searched. Everyone in line will be hoping the fellow gets a good fisting for keeping them all waiting. There will be missed connections, children crying, and lost luggage. People will be moving again, traveling vast distances and multiple time zones as they circle this planet.

But right now, everyone is holding his and her breath. The escalator is droning, its teethed steps curling into the casing. An airline employee is looking down the moving stairway as if something has caught his attention. Two young women are uncurling a "Welcome Home!" sign in anticipation of the arrival of their friend. She doesn't know about the sign and will be embarrased as she arrives, turning red as her friends scream and cheer when they spot her. The punk girl has put her hand on the bouquet of flowers, the purple plastic crackling.

Time is so subjective. It is molded and bent around our globe. The sun is beating down on the oppositive side of the world. Are they a half-day older than me? Are my relatives getting younger as they fly west? We make our time, we make our rituals. We impose our structure on the cycles -- the 60, the 12, the 24, the 365 -- and that is the basis of our civilization. The sun doesn't care; the rest of our solar system doesn't care. The frogs, the squirrels, the lizards and the elephants on this world don't care. Time is ours. We hoard it, we obsessively count it, we grow restless waiting for it to pass. Another hour, another day, another year.

We're dying every minute, they say. Our bodies are counting down to zero. Every second is one that we can't have again. We hate waiting because it is time lost.

But time is arbitrary. We can't lose it. Our ritual cycles are arbitrary. We don't have to wait for them. You want to be reborn? It can happen on a Tuesday in the middle of the month, right after lunch. You don't have to wait for the end of the year. Your cellular time is all yours. Spend it as you want. Don't wait for anyone else.

symbolic 21: christ mass

I was watching Eddie Izzard's new DVD, Circle, the other night and he does this bit about God and Jesus where Jesus is sent down to earth to bring mankind back to the one true religion. Jesus, as the joke goes, screws things up at the Last Supper where he introduces both vampirism and cannibalism through the ceremony of the wine and the bread. To top things off, Jesus plans his resurrection on a very pagan ritual cycle: Easter Sunday, which is the first sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

Anyone remember the pagan gods? How about Attis and Adonis? Attis was the son of Nana, a virgin who conceived the lucky lad by placing a ripe almond or pomegranate on her bosom. Attis was adored by Cybele, one of the great Asiatic fertility goddesses. There are a couple of different versions of how Attis died -- either gored by a boar or bleeding out under a pine tree after he had hacked off his own pearly bits -- and, in the early spring, his priests would cut down a pine tree and carry it to their sacred altar where, during a ritual festival celebrated in March, they would sanctify the tree with their own blood in order to bring Attis back to life. The return of spring and the budding of the trees was the symbolic return of Cybele's favor to those who had resurrected her slain favorite.

Adonis was worshipped by the Semitic peoples of Babylonia and Syria until the Greeks appropriated the practice some time in the seventh century B.C. Adonis is actually the Greek version of his name; they misunderstood the titular name of "Adon" which the local people added to the name of Tammuz. Either way Adonis, as he came to be known in the West, was a young lad beloved by Ishtar, the goddess who embodied nature. After Adonis' death, Ishtar journeyed to the underworld in order to find him and, while she was away, the world passed into shadow and everything became cold and still while we waited for her return. After some verbal wrestling with the Lord of the Underworld, Ishtar returned with her lover and -- as you can guess -- spring came to the world.

These are the pagan rituals of the seasons; these are the basis for the celebration of the corn gods and the deities of vegetation wherein the kings who represent them die and are reborn every year in observance of the passage of the year. In a number of cultures in Africa, the king of the new year would either slay or eat the old king in order to pass the wisdom and knowledge on to the next generation of ruler. Pharaohs in Egypt were equated with Horus, the Son, and became Osiris, the Father, when they passed away.

You don't have to go far to find parallels to the events of the Last Supper or the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus.

Sam Raimi introduced an entire generation of girlfriends and children to Spider-man this last summer. He didn't set the story during the era when Stan Lee and Steve Ditko introduced comic fans to the web-slinger; he set Spider-man in the here and now. I remember when Frank Miller wrote Batman: Year One and I even remember when John Byrne did his re-imagining of Superman. None of these guys invented anything new; they just redrafted what was there in new language, in new clothing, in order to find an audience among a generation which had no connection with previous era and time. Marvel is doing the same thing now with the Ultimates line: they're looking for new readership, reaching for language and visual stimuli which will bring a new audience to the gates.

Jesus Christ is the Catholic version of the corn god's origin story. They were just looking for a new audience and gave them something in a language and symbolism which they could understand.

It's been two thousand years. Don't you think we're due for another revision of the origin story for the first superhero? Where does the death and rebirth of the corn god fit into the globalized, computerized, bio-mechanical 21st century?

Or are we done with the old and finally ready for something new?

symbolic 20: crawling

"Nothing is true, everything is possible." This is an old adage of Hassan I Sabbah, the mystical Old Man of the Mountain. It was co-opted by William Burroughs for his own ends, and it has been rolling around my head a lot this week. Both of them used it to delineate their understanding of space and reality (and, in some instances, morality), decrying that man was his own instrument, his own agent of divine intervention.

I've been thinking about fact versus fiction. I wrote a short throwaway piece a week ago, sequestering myself down in the office late Friday night while I banged out words on the computer. The task assigned to me was the piece could be either fact or fiction and, as the story fell off my fingers, I started to realize it was both. It was a complete fabrication, but every detail was true. Nothing and everything, you see.

I'm rolling around in my fictionsuit, culling details from my own life to color the written world. The shape and position of the furniture in the room was the layout of my old apartment down at the bottom of the hill. The sirens running past as an aid car came down from the fire station on the corner of 50th and Roosevelt was what I heard on Friday nights. The texture of the carpet -- dark brown shag nearly a thousand years old -- was lifted straight from the sensory records of my feet across that surface. My fingers are wired directly back through to my brain and each word writ is tainted with reality.

Stephen King talks in his Afterward to From a Buick 8 how his near-fatal slip into a swollen stream gave him an integral scene for the book. There are parts of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum which are lifted straight from his university days. I'm sure you can list a couple examples of fiction being a thinly disguised variation of the writer's reality without any trouble. Grant Morrison almost killed himself when he let the distinction between page and reality slip. How many second novels pale beside the first because the writer realizes they used up all the reality they had in the first 100,000 words?

It's a no-brainer really. When we are playing God, wearing our fictionsuits, we have to draw details from somewhere. The obvious choice is to mine our own brains. It's a rare writer who can look at their work and honestly claim that nothing from their own personality is in the book. We don't write what we know; we write what we are.

And because none of it is true, we can utilitize everything. All our fears, our dreams, our fetishes and our desires, our inconsistencies and our passionate truisms are available. We splinter ourselves in order to populate the world.

Has God done the same thing? Does being made in His image only mean that we contain a tiny piece of His essence? Here we are, each with our own tiny bit of Godhead, all wrestling and fighting with each other, completely oblivious to the fact that we are all tiny flashes of memory or bursts of momentary sensation experienced by the vast Creator. Poor players, cast upon the stage for our hour, and all that. Any stab at complete enlightenment will only come from recognizing our fragmentary nature and cleaving back to a whole synthesis.

Anyway, caught up in the fictionsuit where I'm creating reality by dropping tiny pieces of myself into the work. Imagine the viral implications of text, if every piece of myself that I dropped had actual DNA content -- a fully realized, genetically complete self wired with its own instructions and payload. By reading these words, I've inserted myself into your brain where my nanomene unloads its viral agent and propagates through your synaptic core.

It's already happened. Hassan I Sabbah did it to Burroughs; Burroughs did it to me; I've just done it to you. A chain is being formed as all the individual moments of Godhead are getting back together. We're crawling towards enlightened synthesis one word at a time.

symbolic 19: sharks in the water

Takeshi Miike is a shark. He has to keep moving or he'll die.

Sharks make us nervous. We prefer the comfort of being in the water with dolphins or very large tuna. Sharks, with their dead, flat eyes, have hidden agendas. You never know how a shark is going to move in the water. You follow sharks at your own risks.

Anyone who has seen Miike's film Audition has their own story about the ending. Audition was my first Miike film; I saw it at a packed theater as part of the Seattle Film Festival. I took my wife. She may have forgiven me but I don't really know for sure, we don't talk much about those last twenty minutes of film.

I hear that his films play for two weeks at only one theater in Tokyo before they disappear to video and DVD. His audience lives in the underground, passing fervent whispers of his latest work through their Internet networks. By the time a film sees release on video, he's already got three or four more films in the can. The man doesn't stop.

Do you ever wonder what pushes such a man? It can't be the commercial success, because there isn't any. It can't be the wide-eyed adoration of his scattered world-wide audience. It's got to the process, the creative delight of putting something on film which no one expects. Harrowing physical torture, ultra-violent Yakuza gangsters, killer women with armed vaginas, a rubber-suited "superhero" whose powers come from the depths of his fucked up psyche, a ghost story musical even. And needles. Always with the needles.

Christ, he gets under my skin.

Not because his films make me squirm, but because he's got access to the deep pit of nightmares. He knows how to stain a scene with the ichor of the night terrors, to imbue his films with moments which will force you to breathe uncontrollably. You've got to be dead to not be affected by his films.

I've no desire to return to those last twenty minutes of Audition. But I can't forget them. All this talk of epiphanies and illuminatory moments has made me think about that night in the theater again: the stream of people leaving the theater, my fingers clawing at the armrests, my wife with her hands over her eyes. There was no air on the room, everyone still seated was gulping oxygen. On one hand, our brains were trying not to watch what was happening on that twenty-foot screen in front of us, but with all that oxygen we were sucking in, our synapses were sizzling with fuel. We were all quite alive, flush and fervent.

Some nights I lie awake and think about the end of Audition, and I realize it wasn't that bad. It's much worse when I think about the images, when I start to add to them.

Is this what drives Miike?

symbolic 18: k.i.s.s.

I just finished Breakout, Richard Stark's new Parker novel, last night. I sat up for awhile afterward thinking about simplicity. Stark's Parker books aren't weighty tomes by any means and therein lies a great deal of their charm. This latest probably doesn't add up to more than 60,000 words, nor does it need to. Parker's entire existence has been spent giving people only the information they need and Stark's writing style reflects this sparseness. Story is the motivating factor of the work and the lush turn of phrase isn't part of the necessary framework. Stark breaks the book down into four sections and puts Parker in a situation in each section where he has to break out of something. He links these four events together and bang! he's got a book. It's deceptively simple and works because Stark doesn't try to be too clever.

Back in the days when I was younger and Richard Marcinko's Seal Team books weren't such an exercise in ego onanism, I used to enjoy his over-the-top exploits. The books were always exercises in how shit can go wrong and, throughout them, Marcinko urged his teams to adhere to the basic rule: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Over planning leads to paralysis and all that.

Breakout is simple. Take characters A, B, and C. Put them in Situation X. Add complication Delta. Stir. See what shakes out. Survivors are added to Situation Y along with complication Beta and character D. Stir. Shake.

I don't over plan; I think that much is woefully obvious. But I'm pretty sure I over extend myself. I take on more elements than I need. Events become too dramatic, involving too many characters and too much history, and they end up spanning huge chunks of physical space. I should write a book that takes place entirely in an elevator car. Nicholson Baker's Vox is an extended phone conversation and one of its amazing accomplishments is that it manages to pull that conceit off.

As a deity, I'm over-taxed. I'm Atlas, trying to lift the world myself, when all I really need is a fulcrum and a lever. Or, in this case, a knife.

The connection to Area 51 and UFOs? Gone. The plane in the lake? Gone. The sonic weapon? Gone. The events of the prologue? Gone. The complicated personal history of Jacob's that I put in place to distance him from his family? Gone.

This feels really good to do, by the way.

This is a story about family history and about secrets. It's doesn't need to involve the world. Play it close to the chest, one hand at a time. Characters A, B, and C: Jacob, Liz, Travis. Situation X: Serena's death. Complication Delta: Jacob's father. Stir. Let's see what shakes out.

symbolic 17: doing something

Wrapping up a few threads while I try to find the spark missing from the Book of Lies.

Religious structures are wrapped around those initial moments, the instances where the Sacred pokes through and presents itself to us. These epiphanies are the moments when God (or however you prefer to name the Divine "Greater Than Us" entity) is revealed and we become aware of a super-natural realm which is very separate from our everyday existence (you know, the dull profane space). These epiphanal moments are the ones which we cling to, which we circle back and try to re-imagine again and again. The world moves in cycles not because it is convenient, but because we have imposed our need for purpose on it. If the world is created anew (the cycle beginning again), then we can be part of that initial transformative spark.

We gather about the spots where the flame breaks through because it is warm, because the light disturbs the darkness, because it creates a separation between what is and what is not, thereby creating reality.

The groups mentioned last time who were Doing Something are trying to circle back. They're trying to recreate that first epiphanal moment when they were touched by the thing on which they are focused, they're trying to recapture that first instant of glee and heart-stopping joy which came over them at their introduction. They circle back so long and try so hard to create the Big Bang again that they've become obsessed, they've forgotten about the simplicity of the joy which held them fast in the first place.

They have become trapped by memory. The slavish devotion to the corporate icons of the comic industry, for example, is all about nostalgia, not for a "better and simpler time" but for that moment when we all realized it could be possible to be more than the simple sum of our meat parts. We want to be dazzled again.

Those who are Doing Something are active participants in the ceremony of the epiphany, they are drawing the circle closed, trying to make their own way back to what Mircea Eliade called in illo tempore -- that previous time. They are Doing, but they aren't Making.

The difference? I'm not trying to recreate epiphanies, I'm making new ones. I am God.

symbolic 16: mod fiction

A modified Honda Civic idles at the stoplight while I stand in line at the local coffee stand, its back end pulled towards the ground, a thick fender curving around its tail and extending along the door panels like a sheath of shark skin, a proud peacock tail of a spoiler rising off the trunk. The muffler is a fat mouth and it shivers with excitement as the driver flutters the gas pedal. He wants to be seen; he wants everyone to notice the proud lines of his chariot.

Dude, it's a Civic. I've got one myself and, while functional, it certainly isn't a hot rod. Though, the point of modifying such a car may be just that: Hondas are plentiful -- parts are cheap and accessible -- and not very expensive. There isn't much point in modifying a Lamborghini (okay, that's a silly analogy 'cause they come pre-modified) or a BMW because the expense involved in the acquisition and upkeep of such a vehicle prevents idle tampering. So why the bother? The car isn't build for speed and all the slick aftermarket modifications in the world aren't going to make the car outperform the basic limitations of its engine. Why go through all the bother to make something look fast?

It's a creative outlet. These are the guys who enjoyed auto shop in school, who know the difference between a crescent and a socket wrench. They're just a different bunch than the group who delighted in the command line prompt and who spend all their spare time building mods and customizing levels for the first-person shooting games. And, on the other side of the hall, are the kids who grew up to devote their time to fan fiction.

On a cross-country plane ride, I once sat next to a guy who was working on a fantasy novel. Feverishly. As soon as the plane reached cruising altitude, the yellow legal pad came out and he started scribbling away. He had fifteen more of them at home -- yellow pads -- all filled with the book he was writing. It was his Thing, and it filled his spare time. When the book was done, he was going to transcribe all of the pads and send the manuscript off to a publisher. He wrote with the assured knowledge that his Thing was going to be published when he was done.

I caught a few words on the page as he was wrote. I saw "Uruk-hai" and "Hobbits" and didn't have the heart to tell him that no publisher in the world was going to invite a lawsuit from the Tolkein estate by publishing a piece of fan fiction. Regardless of how many yellow legal pads worth of lengthy plane flights had been devoted to the project.

As the light changes and the Honda drops into gear and speeds away, I want three seconds of time back. Reverse me three heartbeats so I can run up to his window and ask him why. He's got to know the truth. So why does he do it? Why does he spend the time and energy?

Because he -- like all the others mentioned here -- he is alive when he is working on it. He is Doing Something.

symbolic 15: the reality of character

I love the word "fictionsuit." I don't know if Grant Morrison invented it, but I discovered it while reading The Invisibles and have been fascinated ever since as he toys with the limits of reality and text. Neal Stephenson gave us "avatar" with Snow Crash and that word only took a decade to become part of the accepted Internet-savvy vernacular. Now that the Internet allows us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves daily, both words have become necessary parts of online interaction. Online role-playing games even warrant their own acronym -- MMPORPG -- as the gaming industry tries to facilitate the fantasy of living in another's skin.

This is old news to writers. We put on fictionsuits every day. Some are more auto-biographical than others, but the process of putting words on the page requires the fabrication of that other persona -- the character which inhabits the story. In first person narrative especially, we become what we write. We have to in order to make it believable.

One of my characters for the Book of Lies is Jacob Maratre and, as a fictionsuit, he doesn't fit that well. I've been struggling with the cut of his cloth -- he pinches in the crotch and just isn't wide enough through the shoulders and chest for my liking -- as I try to get the suit to hang well on me. He may never fit properly which will be a small catastrophe since he is the main character of the narrative. I've been tempted to force myself into him, to seal the suit tight by dropping into first person, but the trouble with that solution is that you can't take the suit off. You introduce other problems by trying to wear more than one suit when you've committed to a first person model.

The book I was working on last year stuttered to a halt when I realized the best fit was the suit belonging to a secondary character. She was the one with the story to tell. The main character was a stuntman who really preferred to not be involved (sometimes you mistake character traits for signals they are trying to give you) and I never felt comfortable in his skin. I've still got her in the closet and I know the trick to working the buttons up the back. I'll get to her eventually. A good fictionsuit never rots.

NaNoWriMo finished up over the weekend and I had been pushing so hard to get the word count up (which I did, clearing the goal by a few thousand) that I remained oblivious to the struggle with which I was putting words on the page. 50,000 words into a book and I hadn't gotten to any of the material which really interested me. I can only imagine how bored the reader was going to be; how obvious it would be that I was talking through a mouth which didn't fit. Everyone would see through my disguise and know that I was Orlando.

I took Jacob off on Sunday and I'm putting him aside for a few days. He's hanging out in the garage, looking like a pair of shriveled nylons hanging from the nail in the ceiling. I've put a couple of heavy stones in the bottom of his feet to try to stretch him out. I pulled an older 'suit out of the closet (I hang them right next to the bunny outfit) and tried to squeeze back into it. I've put on a few pounds since the last time I wore this 'suit, but that didn't seem to matter. It fits just fine.

symbolic 14: the quiet bomb

"MGM? Yeah, this is Pierce Brosnan. I've just read the script for Die Another Day and I'd like to execute the clause in my contract where I phone in my performance. What? Everyone else is doing the same thing?" I can image everyone involved in the film having a number of conversations like this one. The actors, director, and crew all lining up for their paychecks, trying not to feel like complete whores as they took the money. Meanwhile the marketing machine rolls on, touting Die Another Day as the second coming of the action genre, the 20th outing of the world's most respected franchise wherein the producers point and exclaim, "Look! There's still life in this body!"

Which is the same statement Dr. Frankenstein made after running several million volts through an assembly of reconstructed tissue.

The pitch for Die Another Day went something like this: "Like License to Kill, only with DEADLY SCORPIONS and ENDLESS WATER TORTURE as motivation." "Like Dr. No, only in SLOW-MO WITH MORE TIT SHOTS." "Like Goldfinger, but WITH MORE LASERS." "She'll kick ass like Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies except with AN OSCAR IN HER HANDBAG." "We'll throw them out of a cargo plane just like The Living Daylights but in a FREE-FALLING HELICOPTER."

Opening weekend numbers were $47.1 million in the US alone, a number the producers will claim as a mandate to pump out more of the same recycled material for the next twenty years. Audiences will line up because we've shown a predisposition to be happy with the same thing over and over again. Hollywood is beginning to understand the maxim by which McDonald's and Starbucks have taken over the world: the audience doesn't want variety, they want the simplicity of perpetual regularity. But SUPER-SIZE it, make it a VENTE, because damnit! we want it LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER.

Einstein is laughing at us. Sooner or later we're going to bump up against a theory of his and even the insatiable human thirst for consumption isn't strong enough to overcome his theory of relativity. We'll try anyway and that may very well be the ultimate alien invader which breaks us. "Brought down by physics." That'll look good on our collective tombstone.

I was in the theater this weekend. Yes, I was voting for more of this crap with my dollar and if it makes you feel any better, you can blame me for the state of movies coming out of Hollywood in the next year. I was sitting in the theater, watching the pyrotechnics, the product placements, and the actors as they tried to squeeze some dignity out of their dialogue, and I was bored. I was thinking, "Did I leave the gas on? Are my socks all lined up in vertical rows in my drawer? Why does my cat lick his ass so constantly?"

I was also thinking: "Is the corpse worth saving?" Populist wisdom says there are only seven unique plots available to the writer and, with the action genre, that number is probably reduced to one or two. Even the most ardent fan is going to eventually realize that the spoon being shoved in their mouth has just come directly from their ass. Bond is being strangled by his own mythology. He teeters on the edge of self-parody, unable to escape the Saville Row mannequin into which he has been sewn. He poses, he preens, he blows things up: this is the extent of his character description. The characters in the film recognize their own stereotypical nature and comment on that nature as if the self-evaluation can be passed off on the audience as sharp psychological insight.

The inherent problem facing the Bond franchise is the same issue which Marvel and DC are trying to distract you from: boredom. James N. Frey in How to Write a Damn Good Novel talks about the concept of "maximum capacity." Characters must act at their maximum capacity in order for an audience to sustain a belief in them. They don't have to be paragons of their niche, but they have to operate at the peak of THEIR ability. Bond, like other superheroes, faces the problem that they are unmatched in their maximum capacity. Effective operation at that level would reduce film time to about ten minutes, leaving you with eighty minutes of commercials and naval gazing. The moment a character goes stupid on the audience is the instant where their attention wanders.

Quick! EXPLOSIONS. NAKED PEOPLE. RABID DOGS FEASTING ON INNOCENT CHILDREN. MORE EXPLOSIONS. SEX. SEX. SEX!

We're simple, really. It doesn't take much to distract us.

Writers need to do two things as well: operate at their own maximum capacity and know when to get off the stage. You don't have to outdo Shakespeare, but you've got to be able to look your audience in the eye and say, "Yeah, those are my words." And you need to know when to take the residual checks for foreign editions and call it a day. Take up gardening. Kill your genre character and start over, if that is what it takes.

"LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER" is intended to beat the audience into submission. One day we'll wake up from this S & M fantasy and the loudest, faster, hardest film will be playing to an empty theater. We'll have realized what is missing from the rollercoaster in which we have strapped ourselves: the sense of wonder.

It is an epiphany, the sensation of the sacred intruding itself into our mundane world. Cyclical religious structures (and aren't they all?) hold at their center the recreation of this primal moment when we first touched magic. The craze for nostalgia -- the continuing acceptance and queuing up for "more of the same" -- is just our attempt to circle back and find that initial moment again. Except we've built up so much scar tissue that we believe we need the recreation to happen -- you know it -- LOUDER, FASTER, HARDER.

We'll be saved by the quiet bomb. We need the mushroom cloud to be hand-held and personalized.

symbolic 13: the daily regime

I spent part of my lunch hour staring out the window at the leaden water of Lake Union, thinking about writing. Also thinking about the lack of exercise in my life and the two threads started to run together. Sure, it's an old adage of the trade that you have to put words on the page to get anywhere. Raymond Chandler once said that you've got a million shit words that are dying to get out and there's no point in trying to avoid them. I'm thinking about writing and exercising and realize I've never taken the metaphor seriously.

Here I sit, a guy who is spending all of his time working his biceps, and I'm completely neglecting the rest of my body. It's one thing to pour all my energy into putting words on the page, but I'm going to end up looking like a Venice Beach librarian--bulging at the top with no back or lower body support and no endurance. The other parts of the body -- or, in this case, the mind -- need their workout time too.

Let's call reading "cardio" and revising/editing the "lower body workout." You're supposed to alternate days, aren't you? Lower body on even days, upper body the odd days, with a little cardio every day is how I think the regimes are intended. I don't want to tear anything or to fry my synapses too harshly.

It's been awhile since I made regular trips to the gym, but I can remember that first week. I couldn't lift my hands to the top of my scalp to get the shampoo worked into my hair. I couldn't walk up and down stairs without feeling like I was hauling a sack of anvils. Riding the bike for a half hour just plain sucked.

But it got better. I even started to look forward to the workouts, relishing the fading sensation of the upper body burn when I moved the weights around for the lower body workout, feeling my legs loosen as I fell into the rhythmic motion of the bike. It was a month or so before I started to notice the changes. They weren't immediate, but they were there.

Reading. Writing. Revising. Full workouts only. No skimping.

---
Final week of NaNoWriMo. I'm not even sure where my word count is, but I am sure that it is woefully short of 50K. Not that it matters, 50K isn't anywhere near the end of the book. After about a quarter of the way, I can usually nail the final word count pretty accurately, but I'm afraid I have no idea right now. Feels like 120K, but I know there is a whole lot I haven't done yet.

I've left the outline as well. I just started Chapter 15 and, let's see, what is supposed to be happening there? Oh, "Sex." Huh. You can stick it anywhere I suppose and it works.

This is where the process gets interesting. The NaNo safety net disappears in a week and the only impetus to finish will be my own. I've got a number of unfinished books in the file drawers which speak ever so highly of my success rate. The distractions of the holiday season are endless. There are any number of reasons to put off working on the next chapter.

And one reason to keep working. You only need one.

symbolic 12: déjà vu

I’ve written the beginning of chapter 11 before. It is a strange sensation to have my fingers moving on the keyboard without any mental effort on my part -- automatic writing thrown up by the lizard part of my brain. Déjà vu is an experience which never fails to feel like cold goose feet on the base of my spine. Especially when I write.

Everything we see and do is grist for the mental mill. Every conversation during the day can be mined for gold; everything overheard while riding public transportation or sitting in a coffee shop is fair game. We are wallflowers with binaural mics and digital lenses and terrabytes of storage for all the audio and visual that surrounds us. We breathe it in, synthesize it, and breathe back out again.

Remembering the difference between the imaginary and the concrete can be complicated. The distinction becomes ever more distorted when your dreams are continuations of the work which is consuming your waking hours. I’m dreaming again -- which always happens when my brain is actively churning through a project -- and the dawn turns the nocturnal firestorms to stinking pits of hoary ash in the morning. But the fires which have burned during the night have left marks on the dome of my skull, streaks of soot which are inverted still frames from the mental journeys, phantom negatives which are indelibly captured in my head.

Déjà vu. Am I recycling reality or remembering a dream? The act of creation is beginning to get away from me; this creature is starting to breathe without aid from me, starting to flex its own muscles, rattling the bars of its prison.

I’m starting to wake up. I’ve remembered the secret: reality is fiction too.

symbolic 11: cake

I'm watching my wife fall asleep. It only takes her a few minutes and then her breathing becomes regular and her hand falls away from mine. I give her another minute to fall off the ledge and into deep water before I slip out of bed and creep downstairs to my office.

I can steal three hours a day. Two during the train ride commute and one after everyone goes asleep. This hour at night is the one where I get to have all the reference books and the Internet at my disposal. This the hour when I can focus a bit more on getting out of the prose tar pit. Of course, this sixty minute window happens at 11pm when I've been up for nearly twenty hours and most of my synaptic connections are firing with the accuracy of a 30 cent water pistol at ten feet. But it is an hour that is all mine and I take it.

During the day, my body is in this same position, staring at the computer screen. But I'm not doing the fun stuff; I'm wading through emails from people who think I exist to catch the glorious shit that is going to fall from their ass and save the company; I'm reiterating the same instructions a hundred times over to the same people who couldn't be bothered to read the how-to the first fucking time I sent it to them. I am, in short, an office drone. 8 to 5, my creativity drains down into my heel and tries to escape out the iron hatch. I am dead until 5pm.

It's 11.30pm. I've been waiting all day to kill the two men in black who have popped up in the kitchen. I've got a fun plan that involves an explosive package under the car in the driveway. I can't wait to get them out there. Just a few more lines. Give them that phone call. Come on, pick up the damn phone.

---
The blonde man listened to the phone, the muscles in his face relaxing. "Yes," he said again. His eyes drooped and he started to sway. He nodded once more and put the phone down on the counter.

"What—" the dark-haired man started to ask.

The other man's eyes snapped open and his hand darted into his coat. The hand returned with a pistol, and he pointed the weapon at Liz. She froze, staring at the small mouth of the silencer, her mouth dry. The blonde man blinked, reacting to something he had heard, and moved the muzzle away from her.

He fired twice, put the hot barrel of the weapon in his mouth, and pulled the trigger a third time. His body hit the floor at almost the same time as his partner's.

---
It's 11.45pm. I have to get up in five hours for another day being a worker bee. My characters have just elected to skip the car bomb and take themselves out in the kitchen. I have been surprised.

This is why I do this.

symbolic 10: use a knife

I wrote 700 words of shit today.

I'm not going to look at that section again. I'm just going to highlight the first fecal-stained letter, hit 'page down' twice, and make it all vanish. Actions contrary to the basic tenet of 'write till you die' month, but I can't just leave them there. These words smell bad and they aren't going to suddenly expectorate some olfactory effervescence.

This is the throes of week two: when you start second guessing every word. Actually, it is the weak moment of every day at the keyboard. Some days none of the words seem right, they all lie crooked and askew on the page as if arranged by blind amputees working with their tongues. They are your words, though. They came out of your head; they fell from your lips and fingers to the page. You gave birth to them. They are your responsibility: the hideous truth.

They will never grow up straight. Some of them will never achieve any sort of homely luminance. Some of them will never be a suitable framework on which you can hang a glittering idea, hiding their crooked limbs and tortured skeletons with the radiant majesty of your doctrine. Some of them will just be ugly.

Kill 'em quick. They'll only poison the rest of the page. Use a sharp knife and cut them out. Toss them out back and let the night animals have their fill.

Listening to King Crimson's Disciple tonight.

"Frame by frame (Suddenly)
Death by drowning (from within)
In your, in your analysis.

Step by step (Suddenly)
Doubt by numbers (from within)
In your, in your analysis."

symbolic 09: soundtracks

I like building soundtracks. Music is a consistent part of my daily life; I think the only time I haven't got something playing in the background is the half hour between waking and breakfast. There is some color and rhythm around me all day. It's only natural that I think about the soundtrack to the book as I write it.

I used to pick music for each chapter as well as finding theme songs for the characters to help me delineate their attributes. I've got a CD-R somewhere which is a 70 minute summation of a book lying in a drawer. Listening to that mix reminds me a great deal of where my head was when I wrote that book.

You also have to be careful what you listen to as you write. Too much White Zombie that year definitely lent a pallor to the text which contributes to its accelerated sense of age. Too much sensitivo indie pop will result in characters that will be played by Ethan Hawke. An abundance of ambient music will result in your readers zoning out as they tumble into the mantra-chant of your letters.

I tend to listen to records that I know very well while writing. I want the noise, but want to be able to ignore the details. I want lyrics that I know well so I'm not distracted by the clever phrasing or the patter of their dialogue. I want their strength but not their influence. A number of writers I know prefer soundtracks while they are writing. Energy, but no words, keeps the distractions to a minimum.

I had my head turned by a sample once. My fingers were stuck, the events on the page having caught me fast, and I couldn't quite figure out the solution to my problem. I'm was listening to Front Line Assembly and a sample from the film Falling Down popped through the mix: "Heat seeking, shoulder firing, and fucking disposable." My fingers start moving. Two guys in a convertible with a portable rocket launcher have just driven up.

The soundtrack should present solutions; it should give you direction.

What is being poured into your ears while you type?

symbolic 08: first quarter report

Seven days into the process and I still have all my hair. I've only launched my cat across the room once so far; he gets the hint pretty quickly when I growl at him from the computer. I had hoped for a jump start by setting aside a large chunk of time at the beginning. It took two days of rather random letter arrangement on the page before the cleverness kicked in.

To hit the magic number, I should be doing 1667 words a day. A little math tells me that after seven days I should have 11669 words. Word count a few minutes ago gave me 10925. It's not a terrible number, but it certainly isn't the barn-burner I had been hoping for. I'm happy the gap isn't larger. I'll be giddy if I'm only off by this margin come November 28th.

I'd be ecstatic if I actually thought this book was going to be finished in 50,000 words.

I can't see the end yet. I know the last two chapters, but how I'm going to get there is still murky. The one thing that NaNoWriMo doesn't allow for is the luxury of figuring things out. You've got to get your groove on early and keep it there. Having the plot actually hang together is a bonus. The point of this mad dash isn't necessary to get the most exquisite words on the page, but rather to get something down. You can edit and fix later. You can argue about the curtains and the furniture once you've got the house built.

Of course, the house has to be built on a solid foundation. I'm trying not to fixate on that detail.

In the meantime, I've got holes to fill. Gaps in my research continue to haunt me. I want to spend a few days in the woods up past Snoqualmie Falls and actually wander around where I've placed the town of Fall Creek. My map of Washington state says the Tolt Reservoir is closed to public access, which has done little to assuage my desire to climb that dam and stand on the top where Georges Maratre meets Mr. X again. I know nothing about radio and my lack of knowledge is putting cramps in my fingers. I need a crime scene report from an auto accident to get the terminology down. I need to know how to operate a police scanner as well as the bigger radios they keep in their stations. I don't know enough about hypnotic suggestion.

I need to know a lot of things. But there isn't time for all that; I've got to keep writing.

symbolic 07: seeing patterns

I just saw the premier episode of "24." I was supposed to have been planning the novel, but needed a little distraction. As I'm watching the show, I realize that they are walking through the process of introducing the main character -- they're setting up the mythology.

Joseph Campbell wrote a book a while back called Hero With a Thousand Faces. I'm not going to go all Syd Field on you and say that Campbell's breakdown of the Hero's Epic Quest is the end-all be-all of creative structures, but he certainly managed to distill the story arc of the hero's journey into a series of five essential steps.

The POPULACE faces a CRISIS. For whatever reason, they are unable to resolve this crisis on their own and they turn to the HERO who is either RELUCTANT or an OUTSIDER. Once convinced of the necessity of undertaking the QUEST to resolve the crisis, the hero begins his journey. On the way, he usually acquires some sort of MENTOR who guides him on the more esoteric aspects of his quest. The hero must leave whatever space he is in and enter some other space. In mythology, it is usually a transference from PROFANE space to SACRED space (to crib a few terms from Mircea Eliade) and, while in that altered space, the hero must perform a DEED in order to gain the knowledge that is required to save the population. Hero returns, crisis is averted, life goes on.

But here's the kicker: Hero must then leave. Why? Because he has been to SACRED space and he is no longer completely part of the PROFANE world. He has been changed by his journey and may no longer participate in the realm of innocence. If he wasn't an Outsider prior to the journey, he certainly is afterward. The price of knowledge, after all.

This percolates through my head as I'm watching "24." Jack Bauer, cast out of CTU after last season's debacle, wanders the streets of LA. He's bearded, driving a van, wearing flannel: those symbols which our media culture uses to symbolize "outsider." A crisis emerges. The people need help. They turn to the man who helped them before. The call goes out to bring Jack back in. Reluctantly, grudgingly, Jack accepts his mission and undertakes the quest.

Two scenes at the end made me smile. Jack takes charge and delivers the line which is on everyone's lips this last week and says to his former boss, "You want results, but you are afraid of getting your hands dirty." Jack is the creature who is no longer part of the social group -- his outcast status isn't just an emotional state, but it is a mental state as well -- he is willing to act. He has gone to a realm of ACTION and has easy access to such states again. This is, partially, why the townsfolk call upon him. And finally, Jack stands in front of a mirror, having cut his hair and beard. The final shot is of the hero transformed in preparation for his entry into the mystical realm of the quest. He has assumed a different skin; he has put on his armor in order to be ready for battle.

The importance of knowing Campbell is not to adhere to the structure which he outlines, but to be aware of it. If you can see the patterns, you can know how to avoid falling into the complacency of their structure.

My main character in the novel is named "Jack" as well. [And there's entirely different discussion about how the name "Jack" is synonymous with "agent of the people."] Is he reluctant? Is he an outsider? What space will he have to enter in order to finish his journey? Who will he rescue? What knowledge is he going to bring back? I have to go find out now.

symbolic 06: the hook

I used to work at a publishing company that did a speculative fiction magazine (because we weren't just about horror or science fiction or fantasy) and one of the tasks which fell on my plate was reading the mail. The editor wandered by my desk one afternoon and asked me what I was doing. "Reading," I said.

"Why?" he responded.

I indicated the manuscript in front of me. "Because they sent it in?" Figured this was one of those trick questions.

He picked it up, skimmed the first page and handed it back to me. "Ditch it," he said. And, seeing my confusion, laid it out for me. "You are looking for an excuse to toss these. Spelling, a phrase that rings wrong, plot material that you've seen before, even if they misspell my name or don't have the right information at the top of the page. Any reason you can think of not to turn the first page is a good enough reason."

"But how will I know if it is any good?" I asked.

"It won't be." He indicated the pile of eighty or so story manuscripts on the desk. "This is the mail from today. There will be another stack just like it tomorrow. Trust me. You can read them today if you like, but by next week, you'll be looking for excuses. The only stories I want you to bump up to me are the ones that you can't stop reading."

---
Next time you are in the bookstore pick up Stephen King's Bag of Bones. Read the first chapter. Notice what he does. King sucks you into Mike Noonan's pain -- his despair at the loss of his wife. You get hints at the fragility of his current existence as well as the tragic nature of his wife's death. You feel for this guy and you're all wrapped up in his life by the end of those fifteen pages. And then he reaches under the bed...

This is the hook. This is what gets the reader's attention. In short stories you get a line. Novels have a little more breathing space. But not much.

When I'm in line at the grocery store, I check out the rack of paperbacks that are begging for my attention. I go through them one by one, reading the first page, seeing if I can stop at the bottom of the page, seeing if my interest is pulled towards the rest of the chapter. It doesn't matter if the genre is something that I'm interested in; these books are placed to be impulse buys. Of all the books in the supermarket these should be the ones that I glance at and, having done so, find myself wanting more.

They never do. The fat cats have forgotten about the hook. We can't. We don't have the luxury of name recognition. We have to lay a trap for the readers and hook them hard.

symbolic 05: to hang a skeleton

If you look at the table of contents of a Hardy Boys book -- or a Nancy Drew mystery, the process is the same -- you'll notice that the story is broken down into a series of succinctly titled chapters. "Frank and Joe Find a Clue." "Chet Falls in a Hole." "The Mystery Man Revealed." Each one is a swift summation of what you'll find in that chapter.

My buddy Tom calls this "The Hardy Boys Outline." Each chapter has its purpose, clearly defined and spelled out on the first page of the section, and, if you read down the list of chapter headings, you will have a basic idea of the course of the story. We don't need a detailed plot. If you've got character sketches and the trailer, then the ideas are percolating in your head. This is just a framework to hang them all on, a roadmap by which to orient yourself. The Hardy Boys Outline helps you see what is next so that you never get lost.

I use a sheet of butcher paper that is three or four feet long -- big enough to be readable from across the room -- and I give myself 25 chapters. If the book is going to be 50,000 words, then each chapter is 2,000 words long. 100,000 word novel means chapters are 4,000 a piece. You can break them up later, but for the time being, give yourself 25 divisions.

Start at the top. Keep it short. Write legibly. Bang them out. If you get stuck, use "SEX" as the contents of a chapter. You don't have to advance the plot during that chapter -- no one ever stops reading because there is sex on the page -- and it keeps you moving. Forward momentum is important.

And, suddenly, you've got a plot. A start, middle, and end in easily digestible segments.

---
The naming of the Hardy Boys Outline falls to Thomas J. Lindell who, while he would qualify himself as a "failed writer," still has a good idea or two in his head. You just have to wait patiently sometimes for them to fall out.

symbolic 04: two minutes

There are a couple of musical pieces that I -- and the rest of the movie industry -- find extremely useful. "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Peter Gabriel's instrumental version of "The Rhythm of the Heat." You know them, even if you can't place them right now, you'd know them if you heard them. They crop up at least once a season attached to a movie trailer. And they're there because they work.

You've got about two minutes to seduce your audience with the trailer. Modern Hollywood theory seems to cater to the idea that a movie's plot must be completely divulged during these two minutes, and that isn't a seduction as much as it is just a poorly designed info dump. It should be a series of images and ideas which catch your interest. It's a come-on, a hint of what you will find on the screen.

As for the book in progress, we've barely started. You may have a bare bones idea of what you want to accomplish in your novel, maybe even a half page of scribbled notes. But you don't know what happens at every point.

Which is the perfect time to build the movie trailer.

"O Fortuna" and "The Rhythm of the Heat" work because they give you a variety of options with pacing. They start slow, quiet strains which allow you the opportunity to craft setting and establishing shots. They grow in intensity until they are thunderous, filling the theater with their noise. You finish with a montage of images, quick cuts of impressions, split seconds of ideas or thoughts which feel like they belong in your book.

They are best written quickly, listening to music like this if possible. You don't have to use everything that you find in the trailer, but you do have to get something exciting on the page. You do have to throw up an interesting two minutes because if it doesn't thrill the audience then what is going to bring them to your work?

Or, more importantly, how are you going to sustain any enthusiam for writing it?

symbolic 03: first name basis

When I was younger, I wanted to be Steve. Not a specific Steve, just a Steve. It seemed a much cooler name than the one that I have, and, in my dreams, I was Steve. Too many years of pulp novels infected my youth and my heroes were always steely-eyed with unshaven jaws chiseled out of stone. They always managed to have their shirts torn off and were never deterred by pain. You know, "Steve."

"Mark" was always the side-kick, the short guy with glasses who knew how to do bypass complex security systems with eighteen keystrokes and could decipher ancient hieroglyphs in about fifteen minutes. They always had hair that never behaved and perpetually had at least one button that never quite stayed clasped. They moped while Steve got the girl.

Pulp heroes always have monosyllabic names, filled with hard consonants which cause the villains to spray spittle as they chew on their nemesis' name. John Carter. Dirk Pitt. Nick Fury. Doc Savage. John McClane. Clark Kent. Lamont Cranston.

Ah, that last one is an alias. See? No one would suspect that he was The Shadow. Not with a name like that.

This is how a life of pulp novels will leave its mark on a young psyche. I'm okay with my Christian name now, ever since I discovered that Mark is a variation of Mars, God of War, while Steve can be traced back to some poor bastard of a first century martyr who was stoned to death. I've never asked my parents why they chose Mark, figuring that any ulterior motive on their part has passed its expiration date by now and I'm making my own destiny with the name. And I'm not about to have a mid-life crisis and join the armed forces to realize the inherent violence of my namesake.

Our characters, however, can be molded by their names. We don't have to wait twenty years for them to grow into the history of their nomens; we get to build that legacy into them the instant we cull them from the herd. Names are important. You're going to be spending a lot of time with these people running around your head; you may even talk to them in the bathroom when you think no one else is around.

"A" names are red shirts for me. I find myself defaulting to "Arthur" when I'm on the spot for a name. Why I don't go with "Adam" I'm not sure. It may be too obvious. Characters with "A" names don't last long. My wife teaches junior high school and I hear her and her fellow teachers discussing names. There are certain names which they all agree would be horrible to name their children. They have up to a hundred kids that they teach every year, and time and again they've discovered that kids with specific names just never add up to much. Too many bad seeds by the same name can spoil it forever.

You can get about a hundred hits on Google with "baby names" and most of them use the same data. They aren't worth much of your time. This random name generator uses census data as its database. You can adjust the obscurity level of the choices and, with the flip of a button, can get a list of a hundred names. It is certainly easier than paging through the phone book. And more exotic.

Go. Find names for your characters. Find your new pseudonym. I'll be right behind you.

symbolic 02: getting dressed

National Novel Writing Month is the brainchild of Chris Baty. It says something about the explosive nature of this concept that "National" is a misnomer now. Several years ago, Mr. Baty conned several of his friends into attempting to write a novel. Aspiring scribes dream (or have nightmares) about the first book and it is one of those landmarks that writers have to confront. Baty's idea was to quit waiting for it to happen on its own. Get the damn thing on paper, stick it in a drawer, and say, "Fine. Got that out of the way."

Baty and Company decided to give themselves a month to pour everything onto the page. 50,000 words was the goal -- a short novel, but a novel nonetheless. Quality wasn't an issue. Finishing was the only goal. They picked November as the thirty days of doom and got down to business. And when they were done, some had finished, some had flamed out, and some wished they had spent the thirty days waxing their car instead. But most of them came back for more a year later.

Year two saw 128 participants, and last year the number of eager flagellants numbered more than five thousand world-wide. The rules are simple: 50,000 words, thirty days, any word counts, and you can't start before the first of the month.

Fine. But the rules don't say anything about prep time. I'm starting now. Until the first of November, I'm going to be building the framework. I'm going to knock the characters out of the rough blocks; I'm going to build the movie trailer; I'm going to do the Hardy Boys Outline; I'm going to try out several hundred names until I find the right ones; I'm going to read Vogue magazine.

I've got the fall fashion issue on my desk right now. Eight hundred pages of the clothes no one can afford for the fall and winter seasons. I'm going shopping. The characters are going to have to wear something.

Men, let's be honest, wear boots and shoes. Women wear slingbacks, mules, flats, spike heels, boots, slides, mary janes, clogs, ankle boots (yes, I know, but they're not the same), flats, loafers and oxfords. Guys? Women like it when you know the difference.

symbolic 01: introduction

We assemble every week in the basement of the local church or pub and we sit together in a ragged circle. We're here to make confessions. Hello, my name is Mark. I write.

I'm here because I've got a problem with the writing process. It's not fatal, my problem, but it certainly distracts from the act of creation. Modern psychology likes to reductio ad absurdum with the platitude that "recognizing the problem is halfway to a solution," and I'm all for clearing out the channels. The process and I have become good friends over the years; I did five drafts on my second book, three of which were complete -- and wildly different -- versions of the story. That's not a fact that I'm terribly proud of, and one that certainly lies there and stares at me from time to time, but it has certainly made me much more comfortable with the idea of starting.

It's fall and there are two things I look forward to as the year dies: rain and NaNoWriMo. Rain means you can stop making excuses about the yard work you're not doing and allows you to spend hours squatting next to the water heater with a keyboard on your lap. NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month -- is a wild excuse to undertake the nearly impossible: write a novel during the month of November. While most people take six months to more than a year to write a book, NaNoWriMo expects you to get off your ass now. For us process-devotees, this is a sweet deal.

This column is a window. I am a monkey and there is a typewriter in the cage with me. I've also got a sharp knife. Gather 'round, we're going to dissect the process. We'll start with this deep-end dive of the novel in a month. And we'll see just how much life this book can have after its accelerated birth. Along the way, we'll stop off at those points which catch our eye and put the knife to them as well.

I'm calling this SYMBOLIC: ADVENTURES IN TEXT. Whether you traffic in film, music, comics, or art at some point you bump into text. You have to deal with symbols on the page or the screen. How does it work? What structure -- artificial or genetically wired -- is in place that allows you to understand me when I say, "There is a purple cow standing next to the red barn." What causes you to argue with me that there is no such thing as a purple cow? How do the symbols work? And, more obsessively, how much of their power have we forgotten?

BIBLIOGRAPHY
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.

THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.

SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.

LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.

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