Quantum of Solace

So, that's a pretty good name for a post, eh? I think it nicely strikes the balance between obtuse and pretentious. I was looking for wording like it, and decided to go with it in honor of that being the name of the new James Bond movie, which I personally find hilarious.

Anyway. One of the most prevalent themes of the mythology, which finds its way into each new iteration, is the delineation of settings. The story never unfolds in just one environment - it almost always begins in a small town (or sometimes just an endless city squatting in the dredges of post-time), and then progresses along a variety of other locales, inevitably finding itself at the oil rig and subsequently the center of the Earth. These intermediary settings change around somewhat, sometimes there are more or less, but they don't ever change entirely - it's like I have a mental catalog of environments that my mythologizing minds draws from according to its needs (I think my dreams draw from the same source). It's really like any video game from the early Nintendo era. You know going in that at some point you're going to run across an underwater level, and later on an ice level (which you'll hate); often there will be a level where your ascending a giant tree and fighting off bees, but that's not essential.

Wherever I currently find myself in "real life" will usually determine at least one of the settings (ie a liberal arts college, a small town in England, the underground cave cities of central Anatolia, etc), though since these are based on short-term immediate influences, they usually don't make the final cut next time around. Most recently I've thrown an Islamic city in the mix, simply because I went to Turkey a while back. There's always a jungle at some point, as dense and thick and endless as the archetypal end-of-the-world city. The back story behind the jungle is always the same: this jungle lies at the heart of the world, wild and remote enough to have remained untouched by human progress, inhabited only by millions and millions of wild and mysterious jungle species. The characters happen across it by accident, pushing too hard against the limits of human endeavor, forced to confront nature directly for their sins against her.

You might at this point notice a common theme between the locations I choose - for instance, I think they all claim to be the most remote place on earth. They're also all fairly unpleasant places - at least psychologically. In a real story, where you care about the characters' emotional well-being and whatnot, I think my settings would tend to stress the protagonists out.

And for that reason, my mythology is not without safe havens. I would like to think that every setting has its own form of respite, and I often pretend like they do, just that I haven't thought of them all yet. I think about this mostly when I'm trying to frame the mythology as an RPG video game, which happens more often than I'd like to admit (save havens are really convenient in that context for restoring the player's health and creating save points, so it's important that they're distributed evenly). But really, there are only two (or maybe three) completely peaceful spots in the mythology. And they're all hot tubs.

I say that glibly, but aside from thoughts I might have about heaven and its blessed offerings, hot tubs are about the most peaceful thing I can think of. Whenever I'm stressed out or physically exhausted or otherwise over-stimulated, sitting in a hot tub would probably be my first preference of therapies. But the mythological hot tubs aren't just installed in the Undigestible Man's back patio. No, they're highly focused.

Back in the novel I wrote in middle school, I provided my characters with "Club Ignorance," a painfully allegorical locale where they could chill out when the psychologically-malleable terrain was getting them down. Finding it was easy and not particularly magic - it was located in a strip mall between a dollar store and a Chinese take-out. Once inside you'd find a normal strip-mallish foyer, with a curt person behind a desk to take your money and let you through a back door. In the back was an immeasurably large room containing nothing but trees and fog. The trees probably didn't have tops, but you couldn't tell because the fog inhibited vision beyond a couple feet. A person would wander through this hazy and silent forest, unsure of which direction they were headed, until they eventually gave up on finding anything - and at that point, they would happen across the hot tub. It would be simply inset in the ground, glowing slightly against the fog. They would submerge, lie back, close their eyes. And when they were finally ready to open their eyes again, they were still nestled in the trees, comforted by the bubbling water, ignorant of the outside world and its problems. Even now, every dead-end future city I subject my characters to features a Club Ignorance.

The other havens are similar, with just a slight change in allegorical significance, as is my wont. In the jungle there is another hot tub, a natural hot spring, located in the densest, darkest cluster of trees imaginable. The water is soothing and pleasant, free of the insect life that permeates other areas incessantly. There are babbling brooks nearby, some mossy waterfalls for splashing around in when the hot water gets to be too much. As much as the city spa is meant to evoke ignorance, the hot tub at the center of the earth, this time fueled by the kind of magma power you'd hope to find at the earth's core, represents the planet's very womb. I picture it even being kind of cellular and membraney, with a faint red glow.

When the Undigestible Man finds himself in a forsaken society at the bottom of the earth, picking over the dead bodies of the collective unconsciousness' shadowy forms, he discovers this last haven but quickly passes over it. Only once he's found the controls to the planet and must contemplate his next fateful course of action, then does he return to soak.

New Adventures in Escapism

Work has been ramping up again lately, necessitating focused bursts of escapism while I struggle to stay on top of an untenable and ever-expanding mountain of needs-doings and needs-thinking-abouts. I’m aware on some level that the stress is all in my head, that a different person in the same situation would be much less stressed simply because they would see it differently. Maybe that person has a mythology that copes better with too much to do and too little time to do it, whereas the one I escape to isn't really related to my daily activities at all. So then, do I have the power to change that? Could I turn my curse of mythologizing into a self-affirming career-management strategy by crafting a more work-oriented mythology? Could I turn Helmut Kravitz into a work horse, and skyrocket through the ranks of Capitalism?

Probably not. Unfortunately, the emotional pressure of the moment tends to define the situation on its own terms, and I don’t get much say in it either way. I’m either stressed or I’m not. So I’m left with a mythology only good for escaping to. But as far as that goes, I’ve been indulging a lot lately. If this were a real twelve-step group, I’d have to turn in my 24-hour chip and regretfully admit to zero days of sobriety.

I’m still thinking episodic-office-endtimes scenario, but I’ve lapsed back into thinking about whether I should actually *make something* beyond just thinking about it, completely destroying the hard-earned progress I’ve made so far with my therapy blog. I’ve been envisioning a series of short filmed episodes, five to ten minutes long, that could be aired on the intertubes and adored by the faithful audience of this blog. Each story would take place inside a small office, where I would use the lack of any budget or actors or set pieces to my advantage, letting the few actors I could pull together tell the story of their fantastic world-gone-mad from the contrastingly uninspired setting of the Spigot Corporation. It may sound boring, but that’s because I haven’t yet told you about the Pods - oh, the Pods, and the wondrous plot-twisting things they would do. I can't even bring myself to tell you about them or their awesome pocket-sized potential.

I’ve been fantasizing about the sinfully alluring motion graphics that would consist the title sequence, animated silhouettes telling the story of the mythology against a clean backdrop of color. The end of the sequence resolves to the Spigot corporate logo (which also happens to be the name of the show), and then, ingeniously, we zoom out to see this final image emblazoned on some device, a Pod, a TV, a computer screen, which would be different every episode. And in some way, either prominently or just as a subtle cue, that device would be the key to the episode. The clue to the puzzle.

I could, right now, hammer out full scripts and storyboards for at least five of these episodes, and cobble together the mental inventory of resources needed to see them to fruition. I’m really good at that part of the process - the immediate hypothetical assessment. What I’m not so good at is the enduring follow-through required of self-indulgent and hopelessly overwrought personal projects like this. I refer you to the now still carcasses of The Bishkek Daily Steingard, the Penguin Republic video game, etc. etc. I would like to think that I will return to these projects, and perhaps I will, but honestly, completely realistically, I would only be doing so out of a sense of obsessive task-completion. My mythological passions are largely escapist and rarely productive - to take on more would be choosing to further embroil myself in things that have no practical end or culpable artistic benefit.

Now, if I could make money doing them, that would be something.

Time Travel is Stupid, I Know, But I Can't Help It

Just to dredge up Southland Tales one more time, about half-way through the third act some basic expository dialogue lets us in on the "crux" of the plot: a rift in the fourth dimension (space/time) has opened up somewhere near Lake Meade, and as a result, many of the characters have been traveling through time all along. This is also meant to explain the weird behavior of the movie's supposed 'twin brothers' (thought it doesn't). Not until the fourth season of Lost do we get time travel as premise - Heroes had it from the start, but lost most of its audience when it became an easy solution to every problem in the second season. More directly science-fictiony stuff always gets there eventually, as does fantasy set in the current day (ie Superman), but that's a more natural progression.

Anyway, this is all in support of the argument I'd like to make that given enough time (and forgive the meta-pun), time travel will find its way into a mythology. If the world of the story isn't pre-limited, and one obsessive visionary (or in a pinch, a team of television producers) is given free reign to let the world continually incubate, expanding and growing beyond its wildest ambitions, then eventually the biggest thing that can happen will happen, and the only corner left to turn, though stupid, will be the ability to travel through time.

And sure, its introduced most regularly as a convenient fix for bad storytelling. It allows writers to kill off an entire cast in one blow, or detonate the planet without pesky repercussions. Also, it just doesn't make any sense, and no storyteller can really craft the web tight enough to sufficiently cover the gaping holes in logic and causality that result from the effort. But there it is anyway, time and time again (more incidental meta puns for your consideration), rearing its head usually when an audience is already fully committed to a world, so that maybe its sins will be looked upon more lightly.

Time travel is stupid, and obvious, and already done. Yes. But, as previously mentioned, my mythology also features time travel, and although it definitely is, I can't shake the conviction that it's somehow not as stupid, obvious and already done as all those other times.

I mentioned it in relation to Swedenborg, and I've had one of my avatars expound upon it further here , but I've never really gotten to the heart of what it's all about, mostly because I don't think I can. The thing is, my rationale for time travel isn't really a succinct and easy-to-encapsulate central premise, but more a loose constellation of concepts and observations that I've willfully taken out of context and crocheted into a blotchy quilt called post-time. It does involve cellular technology, Swedenborg's description of spiritual time, and the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, but narrowing it down more than that gets pretty tricky and convoluted.

I can tell you that I was initially struck by the idea in a college English class, while contemplating the observation that until a couple-hundred years ago, a person could know everything there was to know. All of the collected wisdom of art, science and literature was finite enough that it could be attained by a single person in one lifetime, and a handful of scholars and 'renaissance men' did just that. And then science grew too big for its britches, and since then the percentage of overall knowledge that a person can collect has been steadily shrinking, so that each generation of scientist or scholar must choose a smaller and smaller niche of study in order to achieve mastery of their subject. I was thinking about this in terms momentum. If this is a trend, where is it headed? Will we keep splitting fractions forever, defining a perpetual asymptote of scholarly ambition, or will we eventually transcend knowledge altogether? Okay, that sounds stupid, but now think about the Internet. As people are able to retain less and less in the grand scheme of knowledge, the Internet has made it so that the availability of knowledge is increasing at an inversely proportional rate (let's just say it is, for the sake of argument). The time it takes to attain knowledge is also decreasing steadily, to the point where I'm incensed if it takes longer than a fifteen second wikipedia search to find out something I don't know. So, to recap, our knowledge of the world and our ability to access that knowledge is increasing steadily every day; but, as a result, any given person knows less and less about the total state of affairs as time goes on, while they study more in-depth the nuances of a particular subject. Another result: ADD. We've all got it. There's just too much to know, and too many different items of information in a single day (or minute) that we need to access at any given point. It's all about learning quickly now, and not about still knowing it a day from now (because we can just learn it again tomorrow). People a hundred years ago would spend ten years learning one stupid thing, and now I'm ready to abandon the venture if I can't achieve satisfying results in the first couple minutes (and I may be an extreme case, I'll grant you that, but I don't even technically have ADD, and I promise you my kids will be even more impatient than I am).

So, lots of stuff. But, where does it all lead? For me, and my obsessive thematic mythology, it results in a world where people eventually have instantaneous access to all the information in the world, but at the same time zero ability to retain any of it. And so everyone is forced to live purely in the moment, unaware of what came before and unprepared for what will come next, existing practically in post-time.

I don't think it would actually work as a premise, but the office show iteration of the mythology that's currently grinding away like an ambitious round of Animal Crossing in my head sure thinks it would. Because although the results would be the same for every character in the mythology (the ability for time travel, for example, since no one would retain anything anyway, thus obviating the dangers of interfering with their past) they could each have their own perspective on what it meant. A Historian figure might draw on the rationale I just espoused, but a more quietly religious figure could just attribute it to the apocalyptic "end-times", as in, the end of time. When the 5000 year Mayan Calendar runs out in 2012, maybe time will just stop running.

And though it may seem stupid to have a cast of characters who couldn't remember what just happened to them, the beautiful thing is that it wouldn't actually matter, because normal people don't really act on the basis of what's just happened to them either. The way I see it, most people interact with reality on a day-to-day basis according to a set of preconceived themes. A life-long cop may begin to look at everything in terms of criminal and non-criminal; a psychologist, in terms of known disorders and defense mechanisms; a historian according to recorded historical precedent, etc. I know I'm obsessed with the world inside my head, but I think everyone else is too, just that most people happily mistake their interpretation of the world with how the world actually works. This explains why children tend to vote like their parents (or the opposite of their parents), and why one person's terrorist will always be another's hero. I'm venturing into some pretty preachy and over-generalized waters here, so I'll stop, but I'd like to just leave you with with the wisps of truth beneath the stereotypes and cliches I've laid out.

But what am I doing, defending myself? This isn't therapeutic at all! In fact, I think I'm back-pedaling. I can leave the Undigestible Man if I have to, and I can live without the Fish Master in a second, but if and when I do fall of the wagon it will be because of time travel.

Re: How Not to Make a World

I just wanted to write quickly to say that after watching Southland Tales last night, I can confirm that it really is as big a mess as I accused it of being (if not substantially bigger).

Here's how it ends (spoiler alert, I guess): Two copies of a police officer are shaking hands in an ice cream van as it floats above the city of LA, the fourth dimension burbling outside the back doors. The guy standing on the van's side aims a rocket launcher at the massive zeppelin they're approaching, where the Rock is currently acting out his marital infidelities in an ad-hoc interpretive dance on a stage. Just before the rocket hits the zeppelin, the Rock spreads out his arms and the face of Jesus briefly materializes on his back. Down in the streets, everyone's killing each other. Back in the van, we close in on the eye of one of the versions of the cop, his pupil fading in and out of the milky iris. In a voice-over, Justin Timberlake reiterates with a slow and purposeful cadence, "He was a pimp. Pimps don't commit suicide." Cut to black.

If only Mythological Anonymous had been established earlier, perhaps Richard Kelly could have been spared this senseless act of career genocide.

The Common Theme

Going forward, I'd like to identify some basic thinking patterns which dictate the course the mythology takes. The ideas and characters and stories that I collect aren't completely arbitrary, nor is my decision to dwell on one area more than another. It's not like I really choose what I'm going to be obsessed with, or hand-pick what themes are going to haunt my day, but there is a loose guiding principle involved here. And I think I can identify it. Its name is Emanuel Swedenborg.

Swedenborg was a theologian from the 18th century who conquered every realm of science then available, exhaustively searching for the biological seat of the human soul. Failing this he went on to do some other things, before an angel appeared one day and asked him about his health. From this point forward Swedenborg claimed to live half in this world and half in the spiritual world, in heaven and hell and the places in between, all the while journaling his findings and explorations with the keen scientific mindset he'd adopted earlier in life. At first his writings were a loose collection of thoughts and observations in which he struggled to understand what was happening to him. And then, at some point he got it, and proceeded to write out thirty-seven volumes of methodical doctrine describing the internal meaning of the bible and the true relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds.

Now, this is quite a trip, and I realize that most people haven't heard about this guy before. If they have, it's probably by proxy, having read one of the authors majorly influenced by his writings. William Blake, Dostoevsky, Jung, Borges -- all pretty big fans of the Swedenborg. I've studied the man a lot (in fact, approximately half of my bachelor's degree is dedicated to his work), and I've arrived at the conclusion that there are two major conceptual repercussions to what Swedenborg wrote, and that when people read him, they tend to resonate with one or the other, occasionally both.

The first repercussion is religious: Swedenborg didn't start a religion himself, but he reframed Christianity in a major way, encouraging people to dive into the nuances of their faith, but also to live purposefully and thoughtfully. This blog isn't about religion, so I'm going to leave that there.

The second repercussion is philosophical. Despite what hangups one might have about religious thought (or not, I don't know who reads this), Swedenborg provides a world view that's pretty hard to compete with in terms of nuance and comprehensiveness. When talking to another friend who'd recently started reading Swedenborg, I thought he summarized it pretty well when admitting, "I'm not sure if there's any way to tell if what he's saying is true, but I think I could spend the rest of my life thinking about it." No matter what I happen to be processing in a given moment, there are certain Swedenborgian premises that preclude everything else. They're the starting point. And not even because I need for them to be true, or take them firmly on faith, but because philosophically, the skew they allow me to put on everything I observe is always going to be more compelling and meaningful to me than that provided by any other kind of mindset I've come across (not that I'm actively shopping for mindsets - there's only so much time in the day).

So, anyway, I'm not going to lay out Swedenborg here. Google would do a better job of that. But there are a couple points I want to hit on, that I see as the nucleus of thought around which the mythology spins. Since I'm going to do a lousy job anyway, I guess I'll pick two things.

1. Swedenborg's heaven and hell don't exist as ethereal realms that one mysteriously transports to after death. By his conception the spiritual world just exists, and the natural world (that we see and smell and feel self-important about) sits on top of it. Now, there's a lot involved in this, and if I could encapsulate it satisfyingly in one paragraph than there'd be no need to mythologize. But there are some basic repercussions to this framework that I can hit on, such as the idea that our thoughts don't exist in isolation, but are actually the influence of spirits who are with us in a given moment. When we choose to dwell on lust or whatever, our spiritual selves are simultaneously moving through societies in hell where they love that stuff, where we're encouraged to continue down that line of thinking. If we get over ourselves and forgive someone, maybe we'll hang out with angels for a while, and feel the lift of their heavenly societies. By this thinking, most people drift between heaven and hell a dozen times in a normal day, and this is par for the course for humanity. But as time goes on, and we tend to dwell on certain things more than others, we wear down a path and hang out in some places more than others. So after death, then, it's not a matter of some arcane judgment process and delegation to an appropriately themed mythological realm, but just a matter of picking which spiritual society one liked best when they were alive. For some, this is coming from a place of generally thinking that other people are swell and trying to help them out. For others, it's almost exactly like Sin City (really, whatever you want to say about that movie, I think it provides an inspired portrayal of how I think about hell). After joining that society a person gets to join in on blindly influencing people on earth, while still feeling the thrill of life and living, because the spiritual world is substantially more realistic than ours.

Simple enough, right?

I think that Jung's 'collective unconscious' does a pretty good job of making this idea consumable to people who aren't willing to bite off the whole Swedenborg thing at once, so my obsession with that (which has been documented fairly well so far in this blog) is really an offshoot of this other, more fundamental concept. And the shadow-form things that were crawling out of the hole, other obsessions that I haven't gotten into yet, they're all coming from a place of trying to articulate this concept of an underlying spiritual reality. Cuz I think it's kinda cool. Moving on.

2. This is really a cheat, because it's just another repercussion of the underlying-spiritual-world concept. The big difference between the natural world and the spiritual world (other than our natural ability to move freely and sporadically between heaven and hell like the emotional wrecks that we are) is that the natural world is tied firmly to time and space, and the spiritual world isn't. Or at least, "spiritually" (I'm getting as sick of that word as you are), time and space aren't the sticking points that they are for us. Space, actually, is just a measurement of Love, and the space between spirits is dictated by how much they're coming from a similar point of view, with similar intentions and affections. And time, really, is just a measurement of progression. So, for example, people don't clock-watch in heaven, but they do go through morning, afternoon and evening stages, but these advancements are tied more closely to internal changes of state than the metronome-railroad situation we've got here.

And I personally happen to believe that the natural world, through advances in technology and culture, is hurtling closer to the spiritual world every day in terms of how we interact with these basic dimensions. But that's a wee bit non-canonical, as in, it's my own obsession, not specifically endorsed by any religion or philosophy I've come across. But still, Time. Whew. I could talk about it for a while. It's featured pretty prominently in the mythology lately.

How Not to Make a World

I was reading yesterday about the new Grand Theft Auto game that's coming out at the end of this month, and it got me thinking about the difficult balance inherent in creating accessible mythologies. Even if it's not really your thing I'd recommend checking out their website, because they've basically manufactured an entire culture to support their game about running people over. They've been taking this tact from the beginning, but in this round they've kicked it up a couple notches, adding a scale model of the internet just for in-game use, and consistent global news that progresses throughout the game, accessible via multiple media outlets reflecting various ideological biases. Even if it's especially not your thing, at least look briefly at this, the Starbucks equivalent within their culture, complete with its own unique advertising scheme, mascot, interactive drinks menu and visual back story. The point for me is that they've made a business out of creating a mythology, manufacturing an entire world for people to get lost in.

Now, granted, this isn't really the same thing as the mythologizing that I'm talking about. Their world is basically just a Mad Magazine-level spoof of ours, ensuring that everything presented is an immediately recognizable generalization of those institutions which crest the peaks of our own popular culture. Sprite's called Sprunk, Verizon is Whizz mobile - I'm impressed with the level of detail that they've brought to this exercise, but it's still just a mirror world with more cars and looser moral guidelines.

The point is, there is a potentially lucrative business model for creating mythologies. A show like Lost provides a better example of a somewhat-unrecognizable world with a burgeoning mythology that millions of people are completely obsessed with (myself included). In this case, a person has to immerse themselves in the world one step at a time or it won't make any sense (not that it necessarily makes any sense anyway), and it's wrought with an intriguing mash of themes and places and concepts that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with each other in real life.

But see, that's the thing, and maybe the heart of my problem: I don't think I really have a good sense of where to draw the line between accessible, interesting world and self-indulgent fantasy- land.

From an objective-viewer position, I think I can tell when I'm looking at one or the other, and maybe even explain why something works or doesn't. The guy who made Donnie Darko recently came out with another movie called Southland Tales, which he's been working on incessantly for the last six years. The movie was hugely expensive, and its internal world is bolstered by a series of graphic novels, leaving the film itself as something like chapters eight through ten of a twelve chapter story. But apparently it's just a mess. When he first showed it, people didn't even know how to react, and the studios demanded that he go back and refilm half of it so that something coherent might be cobbled together. After this process the movie experienced an invisible theatrical release and went straight to video. Now here is an example of a horrible mythology with no traction. For every Star Wars, I bet there are two-dozen Southland Tales that no one's ever heard of.

When I look at Grand Theft Auto's miniature culture, my first thought is: man, I wish I could have my hand at that job. I assume that the simple spoofy world they created is successful purely because of the detail put into it, and that they would have conceived something more original and thought-provoking if they'd had a more aggressive imagination behind its creation. But I think I'm wrong when I think that. I think their world is successful because it's stupid and obvious, and to add more nuance to it would be taking away from its accessibility to the target demographic of Grand Theft Auto IV. Even Lost isn't really that original, and its success is probably due much more to its episodic story arcs (what will happen next week?!) than to the depth of its mythology. Because the characters and immediate story are compelling (read: the obvious bits), people are willing to divest more time in the hints of bizarreness (what's up with the smoke monster, seriously?).

I think about all of this, and dream of possessing the resources and time to manifest my mythology in some form in the world. And when I think about it, I know full well that left to my own devices I'd be much more likely to come up with a Southland Tales than a Star Wars. So maybe I'm just doomed to an obsession with an untenable world.

But what about this, internet TV producers reading some random guy's blog? It's The Office meets Lost. We see the world from the point of view of lots of interesting characters, coming from a wide range of relatable-to backgrounds and ethnic resonance. And every one of them works for the same large corporation, but none of them know how large the corporation really is, or what its plans are. And it kind of takes place in the future, but you don't know how far in the future. So it's like The Office meets Lost meets 1984. Every episode starts with a cultural montage of some aspect of society that will be the focus of that episode. And all of this is leading up to the revelation that this society exists after time, in the cultural morass of post-time, where all the options and advances of culture have reached their necessary end-points, and so time itself is not really advancing anymore, so all that's left are the individual choices people make and the relationships they form. This also makes lots of things okay, like time travel, because there are no causality issues if time is no longer actually progressing, you see? And then there's this guy who's actually an archetype, and at the end the quiet systems analyst descends to the center of the Earth where he finds the controls to the planet...

Crap, I lost it. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

Insects and Robots

I'm a little worried that this process is too satisfying. As time goes on, I'll have to be wary of allowing too much detail, of indulging in the mythology for its own sake. There's a strong temptation to turn this blog into a serialized novella about my obsessions, again letting them dictate the process on their own terms. Some might say that it wouldn't hurt to hear more about the mundane details of the Undigestible Man's morbid journey, but it must be kept in mind: talking about the story is therapeutic; actually telling it is acting out.

Once the Undigestible Man had firmly established himself in my mind, the mythologizing lost is emphasized forward progression and settled firmly into the background activity of my day-to-day mental life. And honestly, almost everything I experience now is filtered somewhat through the mythology, processed for relevant themes and lasting impact. When I scan people's intentions or interactions, when I'm digesting major global or political movements, when I'm trying to decide what to do or study next, I'm thinking about whether the mythology is big enough to encompass the reality that I experience, and what data it needs to improve. And I think that really gets to the heart of the problem. The obsession isn't concerned with just some random story that occurred to me one day, but with actually creating a Story that encompasses pretty much everything that anybody has or could experience. If I were to actually tell the story as fully as it wants to be told, the obsession would only be satisfied under two conditions: one - that the telling was flawless, and two - that for anyone in the audience, the story perfectly reflected and resonated with the themes and narrative of their own life's journey.

I wish I were exaggerating.

The natural repercussion of this is that I do *a lot* of collecting. Collecting experiences, themes, personality-types, tensions, psychological struggles - also, non-metaphysical (ie, real) things: animal and plant life, geographical regions, cultures, languages, politics, historical precedents. I need these things so that they can be distilled, their most important bits accommodated to the demands of the mythology. Let me give you an example.

After my first year of university I spent a summer tree-planting in the Canadian prairies. I went on a whim with a long-time friend, and we camped two months in the woods with a company of about twenty people. We worked mostly in previously deforested areas, replanting what the logging companies had taken away. I kind of saw this as my kharmic penance for the oil rigs and fishing resort; the pay wasn't nearly as good, but the work and mitigating factors were much less psychologically traumatic. The supervisors stocked fields with boxes of trees, and every morning we'd be dropped off by pickup truck with only our spades and planting bags and Nalgenes of water (and for many, a day's supply of marijuana). The pay was per sapling planted, usually about ten cents, and on a good day I could make three hundred dollars after the $25 camp fee (but that was a really good day). At the end of the day the pickups came back. Our meals were prepared by the camp cooks in a modified school bus. The evenings were spent on basic camping stuff (playing cards, begging the guitar players to break out their instruments). Every week or so we'd all go into town for a day and stay in motels just to use the showers and do laundry. It usually took me about four hours to wash out the caked dirt from beneath my fingernails.

So all of this was great, and maybe even ideal in lots of ways, but not particularly thematically poignant. We did have a guy in camp in his sixties who planted all day in nothing but a g-string. We'd often see him cresting a hill in the distance, completely naked (as far as one could tell) except for two bags full of trees slung around his waist and long blond hair down to his hips; a Viking God on the horizon. But for some reason he hasn't penetrated the mythology - I think it might be because he's not believable enough.

The only thing that has persisted is the one day when a group of us were walking along a logging road and happened to peer over the side of a bridge. There, clung to the backside of the bridge, we saw thousands and thousands of bugs. And when I leaned in closer to see what they were, I was horrified to discover that they weren't bugs at all, but the hollow and perfectly preserved shells of bugs - their contents long gone. None of us could figure this out, so we came back the next day at dawn. And witnessed this. (the important bit happens around 2:20). We saw this happen about twenty times that morning, each time with the exact same timing and precision of movement.

It changed my whole outlook on life. I've been obsessed with insects ever since.

They're like little robots - lifeless and mechanically automated and perfect. Cold-blooded, guided only by environmental factors and an over-arching hive mind. They're usually designed specifically to their surroundings, perfectly accommodated to their native ecosystem. Sometimes they look exactly like sticks, others subsist only on blood. If that's not evolution, then what else is it? Who designed that? Seriously. Bugs are too weird. I can't handle them.

And that's what it takes to be added to the mythology. With each new iteration, insects invariably play a prominent role. More on them later.

On Helmut Kravitz, Briefly

I just realized something about the mythology that I misspoke about before. For the sake of full disclosure, I feel these sorts of little details are important. I've been talking about the Undigestible Man as though he spawned the mythology, but that isn't entirely the case. There is another character who predates the Undigestible Man, who has been around far longer - long enough, in fact, to have retired from the mythological spotlight long ago; long enough to have been relegated to a chapter or two (and many footnotes) in the mythology's own history textbooks about itself.

His name is Helmut Kravitz. Helmut is my mythology's own Dostoevsky, the Soviet-born political dissident who thwarted his oppressors and flaunted his demons by producing a long-running satirical comic strip called "The Penguin Republic." The Penguin Republic has an entire world unto itself, and has logged many hours of obsession in my brain. The previously mentioned bizarre website project deals mostly with this world (www.thepenguinrepublic.com), but it's also taken more extreme measures, including 3/4 of a 1980's era video game that I toiled over one long summer (this is actually the one aspect of the mythology that might have traction with other people outside of my own mind - I passed a demo of the game around my dorm a couple years ago, and still get requests fairly often for its completion).

But Helmut existed before the Penguin Republic needed an author. His first appearance was in eighth grade, the tragic figure of an ill-conceived novel I tried to write for an English class final project. The story itself was pretty weak, and even then was dominated by the unhealthy fascination with Jungian psychology that has persisted throughout the mythology's tenure. There is a planet of mysterious origin dangling nearby the Earth, hidden just behind the moon. It was actually created by the military (or something), as a psychological weapon of mass effect (I guess?). The hook: its terrain is psychologically malleable, capable of manifesting a person's subconscious thoughts into reality (sound familiar? I could probably rename this blog "Improbable Manifestations of the Jungian Subconscious," and perhaps I will yet). And yes, as expected, the people who created the planet did not anticipate the full repercussions of its powers.

I can't remember now what it was called, and I only wrote the first fourty or so pages, mostly involving the landing party facing hideous parades of their worst fears in city squares. Come to think of it, there were also blob-like human things that were meant to just be thoughts - always milling around in marketplaces and along busy thoroughfares. I never connected them to their shadow-people counterparts until now. Anyway, I got stuck pretty quickly, because I was mostly concerned with building up to the awesome ending: after facing wave after wave of Jungian foe, driving most of the crew to isolation or suicide, there are only two characters left: the hero, who I don't remember (his name might have been Jonathan), and Helmut Kravitz, the sole survivor of the previous expedition to the planet. Helmut is kind of the prototype of the Undigestible Man here, having endured enough in life to be unaffectable and perpetually unaffected. Except that he is not undigestible, but precisely the opposite: deciding at last to confront the enemy directly, Helmut is actually consumed by the planet, and by giving his life saves that of the hero (who is instantly forgettable).

(To be totally honest, I think the whole premise of the novel was unintentionally ripped off of an episode of Red Dwarf, in which the same exact thing happens, minus the ending. This feels good to admit; I think this is therapeutic.)

I liked the name alot, and so Helmut Kravitz has persisted through the mythology's many iterations. In times where I've tried to think about a world with less profoundly depressing conclusions, Helmut often serves as the thankless character who bears the brunt of dark thoughts for everyone else. For example, I've often thought that the crew of the Remote Fishing Resort were obsessed with Helmut Kravitz's work. There is a shack floating out at sea, far away from the resort, where one crewman at a time is isolated for several weeks, only interacting occasionally with ambitious guests who've gone too far out of the bay and need more bait or gasoline (this was an actual function at the fishing resort I worked at). The big dare while whittling away the endless hours in the outpost, already fragile and alone, is to read Helmut Kravitz's The Life and Times of the Undigestible Man, which tells of the titular character's descent to the center of the world, where he finds the controls to the planet and drives the Earth into the sun.

I promise that there are not-dark aspects of the mythology as well, but these are the things I'm the most anxious to let go and finally be rid of. Sometime soon I will get into the Fast Food Ambassador, and then I'm likely to ramble on about Time until I'm out of it.

The Bottom of the Ocean

After leaving the oil rigs my life changed dramatically, as in, it went back to roughly how it had been before I worked on the oil rigs. At first this meant a near-complete deflation of the mythology; I had other things on my mind, and was more than happy to leave the dark destiny of the Undigestible Man behind me. This lasted for about four months. I think the first relapse after that was pretty significant, because it really set the precedent for persistent obsession over this thing. It also underscored the reality that the mythology is not nearly as coherent as it would like to be. It would like to pretend that there's one big story building here, with precisely attuned elements being added all the time. But you can see for yourself.

The next salient aspect of the mythology is the Remote Fishing Resort, chosen likely because about four months after I left the rigs I took a job working on a semi-remote fishing resort. The job itself wasn't nearly the perfect picture of hell that the rigs had been - it was in the middle of the summer, I spent most days on a dock drinking coffee (with only a few hours each day devoted to gutting fish and mopping blood out of speed boats) and the other crew were really cool guys. We talked a lot about film and history and, for some reason, how much we all really hated the guests. This was a weird aspect of the job that I took for granted at the time, but it wasn't just our resort. The same company that owned us also owned about seven other places, and I got the impression from guys who had worked other resorts that just about anybody who was put in the position of helping fat Texan guys catch large salmon ended up completely resenting them for it. It was like we all shared some reverence for the symbolic purity of the ocean, and felt that we too were being abused when these ungrateful mammoths raped the sea of its precious resources for sport and glory. Whenever one wasn't in ear-shot, every crew-member referred to the guests as "chows," presumably because they chow on things (like food and resources? I don't really know).

The thing that really got my symbolism-mongering going was the rock cod. Because the fisheries around our resort were drastically over-fished, the chows would often come in from a day's fishing empty-handed. This led them to occasionally give up on fishing twelve-feet deep (where the salmon typically are) and let their lines spool out so that they were trolling the bottom of the bay. And by this method they would sometimes come back with gross, ugly fish like rock cod - inedible, smelly, and really really old. These things were basically dinosaurs, built like tanks to last forever doing hardly anything, so a couple feet worth of rock cod meant about three hundred years of life. Incubating since the industrial revolution just to be gaffed by some chow named Dwayne who has a personal policy of "I catch it, I bonk it" (don't you see how miserable these cretins were?) Other times they would catch even weirder stuff. We had a guy on our crew who had a degree in marine biology and had lived in the region his entire life, and a couple times he had no clue what he was looking at, some of the fish were so ancient and prototypical. They were like archetypes, milling around at the bottom of the collective unconscious.

And that is precisely what about them I became obsessed with.

The fishing resort has had a hard time fitting in with the overall mythology. Sometimes the Undigestible Man works at the fishing resort before he goes on to the rigs (and subsequently finds the controls to the planet), but in general the resort doesn't serve any special purpose other than to highlight the similarities between weird ancient fish at the bottom of the ocean and the concept of archetypes milling around in the collective unconscious - in both cases, just waiting for ill-advised fisherman to go hunting after them, not knowing what they're getting into by doing so. Also in both cases, providing me with an obsession I can hardly articulate, let alone express in a way that will help anyone else care. I could perhaps write a short story for some kind of Jungian Appreciation Society, but even then, there are better Jungian premises to work with.

There is one set of scenes that stick in my mind: The Fish Master who runs the resort, knows everything about fish, hates the chows, never goes fishing himself - he's a pretty haunted guy (not unlike the Undigestible Man), and has made some pretty bad choices in his life, but we have no idea what. The resort is his life now, his permanent exile. At the crack of dawn every morning he goes down to the dock and peers out over the bay, watches the sun peer out above the darkness. One morning he sees a shadowy figure, almost human-like, appear on the horizon, walking across the water towards him. He freaks out and runs back to his cabin, afraid of something he doesn't understand.

A little later on he's called down to the docks because a guest has caught something really strange. He'd been trolling the bottom of the ocean out of boredom, and after a drawn-out fight had dragged in something weird and ancient and really large. It's vaguely green with webbed arms and legs, but, much more disturbingly, its rough dimensions are somewhat human. Its eyes are dead, but otherwise resemble human eyes without pupils. The crew, not knowing what to do, dump it back into the bay.

As time progresses, the crew never see the Fish Master anymore - he never leaves his cabin, and is incredibly paranoid and irritable whenever he's disturbed. They would like to have him replaced, but the resort is too isolated, no civilization for a hundred miles in any direction - no one comes or goes except by twice-monthly sea planes that drop off supplies and new guests. A couple of the guys swear they see some weird figures lurking by his cabin one night, but they're gone by the time they get close enough to see.

And then, one morning, the Fish Master is suddenly back at the dock, preparing the crew boat to go fishing. The morning shift are too shocked to say anything but whisper curiously amongst themselves. The Fish Master has prepared a specific kind of bait, and as he heads out into the bay, knows exactly where he's going. He reaches the spot, carefully ties his bait onto the line, and sinks it to the bottom of the ocean. And then, he waits. And then, there's a tug. And a moment later, his line is jerked violently, pulling both the rod and the Fish Master over the side of the boat, and down to the very bottom of the sea. His thoughts and guilt and fears and hatreds had finally found a way to reach him, and he'd lost the final confrontation.

Again, yes, pretty dark. But there it is.

Who is The Undigestible Man?

When you join a twelve-step group, the first task is to find a sponsor and admit to him/her the nature of your addiction. Since I'm winging it here, the Internet will have to serve as my sponsor, and this post as the brunt volley of my first admission.

So, yes, the Undigestible Man.

Well, let me first say that I'm kind of a wuss in a lot of ways. I tend to mentally over-react at the tensions in my life, and maybe brood on the darkest aspects of a given situation. I think part of this is healthy sublimation - I push the dark ideas into a story so they don't overwhelm my overall outlook. But really, it's the kind of thing where right now I'm logging a lot of hours in my generally ideal office job, and this progression has recast the setting of the mythology entirely. It currently takes place in an office-setting, a mysterious(ish) company operating in the end times of society. Although we don't know it at first, this corporation also serves as the government of the society (and maybe even the state religion), and the Undigestible Man is an office worker responsible for analyzing and parsing the quantitative patterns in your average person's subconscious brain activity. That sounds dark (and fairly generic, I concede), but it also proves a point about how the mythologizing is tied to my current life situation: I'm working in an office for the first time, I have some friends who are generally obsessed with libertarianism right now in anticipation of the upcoming election (hence the corporation vs. government factor) and I'm watching a lot of Lost. That last point may seem unrelated, but only because I haven't mentioned that the current mythology is a serialized TV show featuring mysterious and largely allegorical characters. And also the Undigestible Man is kind of like Locke right now.

It feels good to get that off my chest.

Now to the point: If an office job in a pleasant community can engender those kinds of themes, imagine what my brain did when at 18 years of age I took a job on a remote oil rig in Canada's frozen north. I always feel like a ponce bringing that up, like I'm trying to make a case for how hardcore I am, but seriously, it was miserable. We worked twelve hour shifts in two week stints, a week of 7am-7pms and then a week of graveyard equivalents. It was sometimes minus fourty, often minus twenty, and from my perspective we were literally raping the planet of its precious bodily fluids. I lost my sense of smell for two years following. There was one point where we had to use the buddy system at all times, because at any moment odorless and colorless H2S gas could leech from the hole and kill everyone instantly. I was constantly reminded that my immediate superior had told everyone else on the crew that if he ever caught me off the rig site he would beat the crap out of me. It was, generally, what you would call a bad scene.

And of that came the Undigestible Man. He also worked on a rig, at the end of the world, after the end of time. Society had fallen and risen as many times as it was going to, and the natural cycle of history had resolved itself into a grey palette of non-time. The Undigestible Man had worked on the rig for longer than he could remember. He wasn't aware of the passage of time anymore, and as far as he knew, it wasn't even passing. He was scorned by his superiors, the shadowy over-figures that controlled this massive operation. He kept to himself, barely conscious, hardly coherent. He had noticed that death seemed impossible; he remembered a few times when he had been moments from death, his sleeve caught in the girating arm of gargantuan machinery, but every time he would wake up in bed just before the final blow. The rig didn't change holes ever, because his rig was, and always had been, in the process of drilling the deepest hole there is. Deep into the crust of the planet, into its brain, into its very psyche; drilling not to the core, but to the Core (if you'll forgive pretentious distinctions of capitilization, which you probably shouldn't - remember at least that I have a problem).

At some point the Undigestible Man hears rumours that the drill bit is stuck, they can't seem to drill any deeper. This can happen for a number of reasons on real-life rigs, usually because the hole has started to collapse on itself and needs to be restabilized. The key to this is to dump tonnes of mixing powder down the hole at a regular rate, forming a kind of concrete casing around drill and piping. I did this a lot in my time there, sometimes for twelve hours a time, one 100lb bag every minute down the hole, hence my loss of smell. The Undigestible Man is doing this for weeks, months, maybe. He doesn't know what's going on in the hole to make it so unstable, but he catches whispers of it being bad. This badness is hard for him to discern, however, because he's generally pretty haunted at this point anyway. He sees things occasionally coming out of the hole. Human-like things, but more shadowy.

Anyway.

Eventually the Undigestible Man is told by his superiors that something has happened at the bottom of the hole, and somebody has to go down there to check it out. He's been elected. They've rigged up some kind of device to the drill piping so that one person can be transported down, crammed into a tiny receptacle with his knees pressed into his face and no light. The time it takes to travel down the hole is immeasurable. Not only is there no reference point to measure it by, but the hole is also immeasurably deep. During this time the Undigestible Man thinks about his entire life, and then spends even more time thinking about absolutely nothing.

When he emerges, he finds himself in a dead world at the center of the Earth. Here he finds thousands of dead bodies, the shadowy-humanlike things he saw coming out of the hole. He doesn't know what they are (and I only have a vague idea myself), but he knows that he was responsible for their deaths, the toxic powder he'd pumped endlessly into their underground civilization. It's around here that he discovers the control room to the planet, now left vacant, its operators dead with the rest. And then he makes his final decision, which I think has stuck with me because it's about the darkest thing I can conceive of but still find morbidly interesting (as in, I can think of darker things, but they're more immediately repugnant and gross).

So there it is. Pretty dark. When I was first obsessed with this concept, I pretty quickly decided that it would be best for me to think about other things. But other stories that have emerged since then usually end up here. Given enough time they all do. I always hope the Undigestible Man will make a different decision, but the few times he has I think it's because I've forced his hand. Given his predicament, what other decision could he make? I've thought of one potential out, which has obsessed the mythology since I thought of it, but I'll get into it later.

The Beginning of the End

Enough is enough.

As far as I know, there's no twelve-step group for pathological mythologizers, so I'm forced to ad lib my own therapeutic treatment. It sounds like a joke, which is honestly kind of the appeal, but realistically I have to do something about this 'habit' of mine before it makes my life unbearable. It's a thing I've always done, a thing I've always allowed my brain to do. Not content just to watch cartoons as a kid, I filled lined notebooks with short stories, poems and activities based on Darkwing Duck and Ghostbusters (and who exactly was going to ever complete my Inspector Gadget connect-the-dots, I'll never know). I would include my own series with the already established ones, referencing characters and themes that might just as well have existed so far as I was concerned. I think the "Lemon Brothers" had a space ship laid out like a maze to disorient boarding enemies. The "Vegetable Patrol" was a much earlier work from my pre-literate days. Even back then the schema of the cast was pretty solid - Tomato Man threw tomato bombs, Carrot man had some kind of carrot gun, etc. Maybe not a full mythology there, but at least a decent line of toys.

This persisted throughout my adolescence in various forms. There were fake newspapers for all the video game characters I cared about (Kings Quest, anyone?), and text adventures made in QBASIC for the sole purpose of flushing out an unnecessary spoof universe of Star Trek. I would watch the BBC space sitcom Red Dwarf and make lists of all the different permutations of the four main characters throughout the show's run. These were all very nerdy things, obviously, but even when I became less nerdy for a while the basic theme of mythologizing persisted. I wasn't interested in stories or characters or philosophies as much as I was obsessed with entire fictional worlds. Mythological systems. Volumes and sets of stories and characters and philosophies. I wanted to hug the entire universe of the shows and games and books that I loved, and in the process dynamically create my own.

And then, around the age of eighteen, my mythologizing mind gave birth to The Undigestible Man. I had finally grown out of sharing other people's already well-trademarked worlds, and was ready to really forge my own, a journey of obsession that would inform my background mental activity for at least the next five years of my life. This really gets to the heart of this blog, the beastly mess that I need to get out of my brain before it takes up any more space. In five years of constant churning, the mythology of The Undigestible Man has changed forms many times. Tone, genre, setting and backstory have undergone countless iterations, but there are certain names and themes and scenes that persist. These have been building on each other, based loosely on experiences I've had, people and situations that have had lasting impressions on me. New experiences often introduce new puzzle pieces to the world, and these new bits will do their best to fit in with the rest, some succeeding more than others. Several times I've recast the whole mythology from the ground up, maybe even aiming to think about something totally different. And yet, inevitably, the Undigestible Man sneaks back in there, followed closely by his persistent chain of associates, clamoring always for a place in my thoughts.

The funny thing about this is that I never really talk about this world that I spend so much of my time in. I'll mention bits and pieces of it to people at various times, but it's already too big and complex to get into in casual conversation, like trying to talk about what's happening in book nine of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (I'd imagine, anyway - I haven't read it), or trying to explain to someone who's never seen the show what's going on in season 4 of Lost. My world is big, and it's getting bigger every day, and not even my girlfriend is privy to its wide and nuanced corridors. And for what? I couldn't say. It's just something that my brain does, feeding and nurturing this massive beast of a mythology that I can't seem to let go of even if I try (and I haven't honestly tried that hard - I spend a lot of time in this place, and it means a lot to me).

So, to make a long story long (and most likely ward off potential readers of this blog), I'd like to lay it all out, as I understand it. Get it out there, excise it from my brain. I'm hot on the heels of another effort to do this; I recently fashioned a complex website where the mythology might express itself on its own terms (www.thepenguinrepublic.com). But that mostly confirmed for me that this world is not particularly inviting or accessible to anyone other than myself. It's a fantasy suited only to me, and as such is not worth this continued incubation time, because even if I could spend three life times bringing it to life, I would end up both hopelessly unsatisfied and pointlessly alone. I can't seem to kill it, so, maybe I can deflate it.

It all started with the Undigestible Man, and no matter what form the mythology takes, be it a movie, TV series, video game, novel, graphic novel or bizarro website, it always seems to end the same way. After everything that happens to him (which is quite a lot), the Undigestible Man eventually finds his way to the center of the earth. Here he discovers the controls to the planet, and we realize that the entire story has been narrated from his point of view, as he carefully meditates on what to do next. Unfortunately (both for him and my own mental state), the Undigestible Man then decides (usually) to steer the planet out of its orbit, and drives it straight into the sun.

And this is why I need help.