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.