Under the Influence

I've been traveling a lot the last couple weeks - France last week, back in Pennsylvania for a couple days and now in western Canada for a friend's wedding. Between the time zones and work thoughts I can't really tell whether I'm coming or going; without downtime to meditate on anything in particular I've been taking things more at face value, navigating life one moment at a time. Which is nice. Travel is about the closest thing I've found to true therapy for my affliction, because whenever I can take my daily situation for granted I immediately do; once stimulus is down I give my thoughts permission to wander off in richer pastures of their own. Which is also likely why I seek stressful work - it keeps me present. But with travel, all this travel - it also means a lot of airport and train time, and in those interstitial moments I've been fully enmeshed in the mythology, careening haphazardly through it as it touches off of bits of the landscape fleeting by the train window. I'm so deep in it right now that I couldn't even encapsulate it without signing a three-season sixty-episode contract, so I'll focus instead on something a little less indulgent (at least a tiny bit less indulgent).

My thoughts have still been swarming around the idea of a TV show, a serialized story about people in an office and the weird things that happen to them. The show takes place at an indeterminable point in the future, and though it starts innocently enough it invariably ends (about three seasons later, mind you) with one man at the center of the earth confronted with the controls to the planet. But I haven't been focusing on the whole arc recently, just the initial setup, the first few tactical movements that get the plot moving in an engaging direction, making it familiar-but-captivating enough that my hypothetical audience will track its inevitable path into weirder territory.

I'm going to get into the non-indulgent part in a minute, but first, how's this for a setup? In the intitial half-hour we establish that this show takes place some time in the future (when exactly isn't clear, nor is it vital), and that there are interesting, normal-seeming characters working together at the large and ambiguously motivated Spigot Corporation in some big city. Some are more motivated than others, more entrenched in the office politics of making and selling competitive and cutting edge hand-held electronics, worried about the overseas and youth demographics, worried about streamlining the interfaces and functionality of devices so that they can create a seamless work experience for the consumer, etc. Others are more focused on making their colleague's lives less pleasant and/or finding love in the cubicle across the aisle. Others still are hotly debating the course of government, worried about the larger scale issues of the world that can't be immediately felt in the daily grind of the office. This is normal life in the twenty-first (?) century. And then, suddenly, there are explosions, and lights going off and on, and network-tv sparks flying from computer monitors. People are running around and screaming and hitting their heads on the fluorescent lamps, and when everything finally settles down we find out that everyone is basically okay, but they are now trapped in the building. What's going on outside is unclear - it's political and societal, but by and large it's out there, and in here the lights are still purring and the walls are still intact. And for at least the first season, the Spigot Corporation's employees remain trapped in their sprawling work complex, living together and eventually even continuing their work. And the tensions of close-quarters relationships ensure enough melodrama for at least a 35% crossover audience with Grey's Anatomy, while I slip weirdly mythological science fiction material into the B-plot (and eventually the A-plot) of each episode. I could sell that, right?

But here's the deal. I'm not concerned with the structural padding of the show, only the themes that I'm able to introduce along the way. Among these are all the things I've mentioned earlier in this blog and countless more - the jungle, Internet spirituality, the forms, time travel, all of it. Even a space-adventure TV show fabricated from the unconscious workings of one employee's mind (though help me, I'd never explain it like that). And with all of these things, I'm completely convinced that I've hit upon original ideas never before imagined by the unsuspecting TV audience. While I know statistically that there really are no original ideas left (and philosophically, that original ideas aren't even a desirable goal), I still can't shake this obsession, firmly attached to the mythology that it is, that these characters and settings and plot-points are my own and no one else's. I don't think the ideas behind them are, or even the general themes, but there's still an undercurrent of elitism here that I would just as soon nip in the bud and get on with getting over myself.

So with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to a couple protagonists from the show, and then tell you about the blatant literary influences that informed their creation in my mind.

The main character - let's call him Jack, because he's played in my mind by the same actor who plays Jack in Lost (whose season finale I'm pretty friggin pumped about). Jack's a higher-up middle manager at the corporation, in charge of overseeing the activity of many divisions. His mind is torn in so many directions by his work that he can no longer keep track of the chronological narrative of his life. Like the protagonist of Quantum Leap he wakes up every morning in a bed in some strange city and tries to piece his life together by the commitments on his schedule and the meetings he's reminded to attend. The only fabric holding him together is his own internal narrative of relationships and personal themes; otherwise he's one of the first true victims of post-time, moving back and forth through the time line of his life according to the dictates of his mind, and oblivious to the essential problems or exploitable opportunities of such a skill. I have all kinds of justifications for how this works, but none as evocative as the absence of justification in Slaughterhouse V. For all extents and purposes, Jack has become unstuck in time. So it goes.

Then there's the "other" main character - let's call him Locke, for the same reasons listed above. He works in the coding pit, exploring and defining algorithms of wireless connectivity and intuitive usability. His job is to make devices that will work the way that people expect them to, and even intuit what the consumer will want before they know they want it. According to the statutes of network TV stereotyping, this means that Locke is really into math and patterns (but unlike the statues of network stereotyping, he's more casually philosophical than humorously nerdy). In the course of his duties he's recently hit upon a very specific pattern that's been coming up repeatedly. It comes up especially whenever he's been able to distill certain complex functions (such as, "what people want") down to their basic formulas. Yes, just like the protagonist of Pi, Locke has discovered the "ultimate sequence" that holds within it the secret to life. And yes, just like in Lost, it can probably be expressed in a series of numbers, or at least some kind of wave pattern, that occurs repeatedly throughout the show.

I've also been thinking about a kind of "other world" that the characters of the show discover and explore through most of the first season. It's kind of like a virtual reality, kind of like the Matrix, kind of like a culmination of the Internet's potential, kind of like a half-dozen episodes of Red Dwarf, kind of like the spiritual world, kind of like a lot of things that probably aren't as connected as they are in my head.

En Francais

I'm in France this week, filming a promotional video for an exchange program our college has with the University of Bordeaux, and doing my best to play the role of a jet-setting photog type. I think I'd need one of those ratty Turkish neckerchiefs to do the part justice, maybe some chest hair and gold-rimmed sunglasses. Oh well. C'est la vie.

I've found that the mythology usually recasts itself significantly while I'm traveling. The worlds I create in my mind are like a strangely-wrought defense mechanism; they help me contextualize the events of my day in a way that I can process without constantly overturning my foundational beliefs. Though the parts generally stay the same (with periodic additions), the construction of the whole mythological world is always shifting to accommodate the needs of the moment. I'm inclined to think of this as a weakness, an addiction even, because it means I'm often not really taking things at face value, only selectively digesting those useful to my secret project. But it also may be a bit of a wash - I'm not convinced that anyone can fully embrace other cultures without some filtering through their own, and if my system doesn't lend itself towards hasty judgment of others' actions and beliefs than I could probably be doing a lot worse. This is my first time in the land of the frogs, so naturally my addictive self has been on the lookout for new mythological fodder.

Last night Sean (my colleague) and I attended a speech at the Bordeaux museum of modern art. It was being simul-translated by our correspondent with the University here, so we were there out of respect to her, not knowing ahead of time anything about the actual presentation. The subject was utopian architecture, focusing on a post-modernist "anti-architect" from the 1950's by the name of Yona Friedman and his gang of like-minded anarchist buddies. The work itself consisted of a series of crude geometric shapes overlaid on crappy photographs of Paris. But with each variation of that theme, with each minute change in sloppily applied color, the presenter had prepared a lengthy and exuberant discourse on the pure bliss of Friedman's genius. It was really about the most pretentious thing I've ever experienced, and I don't say that with disdain as much as with bemused wonder that the speaker could deliver the whole thing with a straight face. What looked to be a five-year-old's scrawled rendition of the planet became a prophetical journey into the networks of the future, an environment-creating machine, a discourse on the horizontal and vertical ideals, a land of dreams created by dreams, a confused, uncertain meditation on desire, private property and sex.

And the room was pretty full - and people were listening to the French translation through their headphones, enraptured. Sure, it was interesting in a removed, intellectual sort of way, but I was wondering the entire time how this phenomenon could have spear-headed an entire movement, when none of it, literally not a scrap of it, even existed. It wasn't even style without substance, but simply nothing. There were no buildings, no plans, no output. This man had devoted his life to the absence of a concept. Some lines on paper, and the words dream and architecture volleyed back and forth in every permutation available. In my professional opinion, we were listening to a lengthy justification of one man's creative reaction to his own personal experience of the world around him. And because we were doing that, his work existed a little more than my own mythology does. The difference being, this guy's life-long dedication to self-indulgence made him a hero (at least, in the eyes of this largish French audience).

I'm not jealous, if that's the reaction I seem to be getting at. I doubt this Friedman guy is very happy, after being allowed to delve this much for this long into his own disconnected psychological musings. What I am wondering, is whether someone like this could achieve the same level of fame now. In the 1950's I think trends were probably easier to pick up on. Mass media was still a debatable concept, and culture was more localized, more easily manipulated by some especially charismatic figure. By contrast, culture no longer faces a glass ceiling of exposure. The internet means that every idea in the world is equally available to everyone at any given time, and people can hop on and off of thought-trains on a whim; there's no scarcity of culture to drive the demand. It also means that people can wholly invent their own culture, which I think I've more or less done.

In a broader sense, I think the internet means that everyone must invent their own culture, that this activity is no longer limited to nihilistic post-modern artists. For example, living in France doesn't necessarily mean that you subscribe to French culture, except for maybe the stereotypical trappings clung to tightly by tourist bureaus: cheese, duck-fat, chain-smoking, etc. There's no reason that a person in France isn't wearing American jeans, watching Japanese TV shows and drinking Chilean wine. In fact, I think that's exactly what French people are doing. Or some of them, anyway. Others have chosen a different mish-mash of cultural elements to call their own. As is everyone else in the first world, choosing the bits of culture that resonate personally with them. This is one of the things I'm most obsessed with, and it feeds directly into post-time.

Now, what I'm suggesting here hasn't yet been fully realized. There are still swatches of culture that can be pinned down pretty neatly to certain geographical areas (like, for example, the fame of Yona Friedman, on a night when Grey's Anatomy was probably on). But I think that's where it's headed, and I defy anyone to come up with a convincing argument that it's headed some place else.

Overthinking the Interwebs

"Mythology creep" is a big issue for me. I spend most of my time fostering a massive internal mythology, and this process is largely flavored by my current environment and activities; the world around me seeps into my brain's deeper mechanics and the mythology-of-the-day paces itself by this rhythm. These days I work a lot with media; my job is really just the ongoing process of funneling media, diverting it off the main reservoir and redirecting it along a series of more focused streams and riverbeds. This means that I spend about eight work-hours a day in front of a computer, in addition to two or three hours of computer-based personal activities (including my twelve-step therapeutic regimen). So when I tell you that technology has played a prominent role in the mythology the last few years, you'll understand the emphasis with which I use the word 'prominent.'

Right now I just want to talk about how the internet figures in to the whole thing. Like most of my thematic obsessions, its tied directly to The Common Theme - the Swedenborgian concept of a viscerally graspable underlying spiritual reality. I hate trying to articulate the concept itself, because its exactly the sort of thing that language is really bad at, but here goes. The gist of the matter is that my thoughts are never coming directly from the physical world - that's obvious, I can't see them or taste them. I can however choose to do stuff in the physical world, and these actions will inevitably direct my thoughts down a certain path (diverting them off the main reservoir and down a series of more focused streams and riverbeds). I can also choose to focus on certain thoughts, or recall something lodged in recent memory, and what I dwell on is going to greatly affect my mood. There's a mechanism at work here, between the choices I make and the thoughts that I have (and vice versa), and the 'underlying spiritual reality' concept is just one description of how that mechanism might work. A description which I happen to think is true. While I'm walking down the street in Omaha, having a hypothetical argument with someone in my head who rubbed me the wrong way, my 'spirit' is simultaneously wandering amongst a society of hateful spirits, and it's their thoughts, their love of resentment, that is fueling my current mental fuming in Nebraska. I'm actually in hell in that moment, and in that moment hell is inside me.

I like to use this example to encapsulate the whole thing: when I was more of a teenager, every once in a while I would find myself in a conversation about the occult. Someone has a ghost story that happened to their uncle, and that reminds someone else of the actual haunted house they heard about where a dozen people or more have seen the same apparition of the dead woman in the floral spring dress. This goes on past dark, and at some point there's a discernible change in the room's atmosphere. Ghosts stop being this weird intellectual thing and become more of a remote possibility, and at any rate people are now looking over their shoulder every five seconds and will likely have a harder time going to sleep that night. I like to think about the spiritual reality mechanism here - that people have been talking about evil creepy spirits, and suddenly it feels like they're all around. Because, on a spiritual level, they are all around - they've been invited in, and are whispering gross nothings into everybody's ears.

So, the Internet. I was going to talk about that.

The thing with the Internet is that it provides (for me) a really conveniently excellent model of this spiritual reality business. Or, for that matter, the collective unconscious. In both cases, you've got this huge nebulous ocean of seemingly infinite possibilities. You can't index it or track its size, and yet to fish anything out requires only the will to do so (and a quick Google search). In one moment you could not have ever been aware that something even exists, and in the next you're presented with reams of information about it, web portals devoted to its preservation and forums to its discussion and encouragement. You can check something out once and leave it forever, or you can then adopt it as part of your regular internet routine, becoming an entrenched member of its community. And like the spiritual world, doing so requires very little more than simply the sheer act of curiosity. My internet browsing experiences are very much like this, and sometimes, depending on my mood, I end up in some pretty weird places.

Just to needlessly bring the two worlds together, I like to picture that some websites actually are hosted by ethereal servers in the spiritual world, that there are little pockets of hell with demons learning javascript and pumping out Flash ads.

I keep coming back to the idea that modern psychology is defined by the computer, which provided a mainstream analogy for component-based neurology to gain traction (different brain clusters process information differently, much like a CPU, RAM and hard drive, etc.) Before computers we were stuck explaining everything with tubes and steam, and had no use for things like the prefrontal cortex or limbic system. Does the Internet help explain the spiritual world in a similar way? Maybe it just confuses the issue. In my mythology the Internet always serves as a physical analogy to the invisible web of influences that connect humanity, but I might just be weird like that.