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.
Showing posts with label end times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label end times. Show all posts
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
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.
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.
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