Legged Creatures

Watch now as I construct for you a complex analogy involving an octopus.

I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to whether or not something catches my interest, whether I find myself invested in someone else's mythology or not. In the end I don't think there's any one thing that I'm looking for, except maybe a balance of all the different sorts of things that typically constitute fiction. When I'm first experiencing something, my nuance tentacles (or tentacles of nuance) reach out simultaneously to explore the terrain - some are seeking out story and characterization, and wrap their loving tendrils around every morsel they find. Others are looking for backstory, narrative voice, cultural context, political satire, religious symbolism, authorial perspective, literary allusion, twists, gimmicks and clever analogies. All these things. Sometimes there's a glut in one area and nothing offered in others. Typical "fantasy" is often like this, offering volumes of blow-by-blow historical background on people and places whose names have too many k's and not enough vowels. Once my "fake history" and "character archetype" tentacles have gorged themselves (which happens pretty quickly), I find myself with about thirty unsatisfied psychological appendages looking immediately elsewhere for sustenance. There are occasional acts of artistic genius that do meet my every need, and in these times I'm never sure quite what to do with myself. Watchmen was kind of like this.

A medium I have a very tenuous relationship with is video games. By their very nature video games involve world creation and exploration, which gives them huge bonus points on my Mythological Octopus Appreciation Scale (MOAS). But they usually stop there. This certainly isn't a rule, but between computer programmers, deadlines and the attention spans of their target demographic, there isn't much pull in the video game community for characterization or subtle machinations of plot (amazingly, this was much less true of games made in the earlynineties).

I actually find myself more interested in reading about games than playing them, browsing review sites and trailers for the most recent offerings then never thinking about them again. This is a purely unconscious act, and I honestly can't explain what the draw is; surely experiencing the product must be more satisfying than hearing someone else describe it? And yet, the reviews usually score better on the MOAS. Think about it. In a review I get a summary of the whole world of the game; where it starts and what points it hits along the way. I get a sense for what the goal is, and what it was like to accomplish it. If I'm lucky I might even get some insight as to what the game means in a larger context, whether it has any importance to the industry or to the person reviewing it. By comparison, the game itself can hardly compete (I think I'm probably in a niche audience for this sort of experience, but I recently ran across a game that offered commentary on the levels as a little bonus feature. As you ran around the lost temple swinging from ledges and looking for treasure, two of the designers would periodically chime in on what they were going for in the current area - how the puzzles had been paced to produce a certain emotional experience, etc. Needless to say, I was enthralled).

In a perfect world video games would all strive to encompass this much meta data. I often fantasize about such games, and I think it would be fair to call the premises of these creations "high concept." I have about half a dozen of them that rotate through my head on a kind of seasonal basis, each one drenched in totally unnecessary mythological depth (and when I use the word 'mythological' here, understand it to mean 'things I'm personally interested in'). When I'm lost in the pleasant haze of working out all the little details I'm convinced that my games would be immediately successful with everyone who played them. But I'm probably wrong about that.

Here's one of my ideas: the game would suppose the existence of a fictional video game company that had been active since the 1980's, a giant in the field along the lines of a Nintendo. Over the course of two decades and a dozen different gaming systems, this company had nurtured a now-veteran cast of video game protaganists, all of whom had appeared in dozens of titles over the years. In recent years the company's popularity had waned, and its characters, once national icons, were now mostly nostalgia fodder as a new generation of gamers moved on to the high-intensity low-value games of the modern era. This game (the one I'm describing) would be a retrospective on these nearly-forgotten characters, a kind of "Behind the Music" biopic (bio-game?) exploring where they were now. Each 'episode' would take the form of an extended interview with one of these gaming stalwarts - let's say "Flario" in this case. As Flario talks about the ups and downs of his career we get to play a level or two from the games that spanned it, starting with the blocky arcade sequences of his initial 1987 showing and working through time, including the misstep side projects ("Flario vs. Trigonometry" and "Flario Gets Sickle-Cell-Anemia"). His retrospective commentary is running through the levels and changes as we play, chiming in with "This was early in my career move, when they still had me wearing a green hat, they were convinced that was going to be such a big deal...not that you can really tell it's a hat, it's like six pixels..." When you awkwardly jump into a pit he would add, "Yeah, shoot, I've fallen into that specific pit about a thousand times. I wasn't very good at jumping then, and they wouldn't let me grab the ledge or anything, I just had to do that shrug-and-fall-in-front-of-the-screen thing. My contract was pretty restrictive in those days." It might get repetitive over time, but the first time you played it would be mind-blowing.

I've got like a dozen of these concepts if anyone's interested in taking one and running with it; they're all about this unnecessarily involved.

Important side story:

I recently got into a spat with one of my roommates. It was over something small and got blown way out of proportion, to the point where he's not really even living in the house anymore though he's still paying rent. I've been a little haunted about the whole thing the past couple weeks, and often find myself thinking about it as I walk to work, wondering whether I'm in the wrong and should apologize, or whether I acted appropriately and am just feeling codependant, etc. Anyway, when I got home yesterday I took off my work shoes and put them on the rack by the door, like I usually do. I've only had these shoes for about a week and I don't usually think much about shoe racks, so yesterday was the first time that I noticed an eerily similar pair sitting next to mine. On closer inspection, I realized that these were in fact the exact same shoes as mine - same brand, size, color, even the same basic wear-and-tear, so that I honestly couldn't identify which pair I should take as my own. In the same moment I realized that I must have been alternating pairs all week without even thinking about it. I wondered who they belonged to, and of my two other roommates (that I'm not in a spat with), one has smaller feet than me, and the other has gone away for three months to Chicago (where he no doubt took his nice dress shoes with him). This lead me finally to a profound realization, the indisputable fact that I have quite literally walked a mile in the other guy's shoes.

I think somebody's trying to tell me something (but I'm not sure what that is).

Back from the Brink

Oh yeah, I have a blog. I guess I should update it.

I've been incredibly drained lately, and I can't seem to figure out why. I'm worried that it might be the wearying hangover of indulging too much in my bloated and unwieldy mythology. Perhaps my brain has become so saturated with the desperate impossibility of turning my inner world into a full-time proposition that the remaining gorged pink mess is slowly suffocating my will to live. Faced with no escape from perpetual escapism, I'm now drowning somehow in the epic failure of my obsessive and unforgiving imagination. Or, more likely, I was bitten by a tick and have Lyme disease. I really hope that's what it is. I'm kind of obsessed with insects, and having such an intimate relationship with one would be pretty satisfying.

Anyway, before I die (or fall asleep forever), I'd like some opinions on whether fiction is a good idea or not. I go back and forth between the two camps - that good fiction can transport you to another world of ideas, perspectives and adventure, or that fiction is fun for little kids but otherwise pretty self-indulgent and irrelevant to the concerns of money and life and stuff adults are meant to think about all the time if they hope to retire / buy a house. This isn't an especially original debate, and I could fill my gullet with it by perusing Yahoo! user-groups if I so chose, but I'm actually not really interested in that question. At all. In fact, I don't know if I really buy that that debate even exists. Sorry I brought it up. Let me start over.

Obviously there is fiction out there that's meant for kids and undiscerning escapists, and this can take the form of genre novels or TV shows or movies or whatever. People don't really read anymore, so let's lump video games in there too. I think people used to be interested in "serious" fiction as an extended thought experiment, or applied poetry - the works of the Greats are all studies in language, classical philosophy and morality. But those topics are pretty much covered now, and so modern literature, or post-modern literature, or post-literature...whatever...books written in the past twenty years that do have swear words but don't have vampires, those books are left with a pretty uncertain place in our culture. I've tried getting into them, and they tend to be about nothing, except for maybe the wisp of an experience. They're fun sometimes, but they're not very relevant to my life.

I would bet that most people read a lot more non-fiction than fiction these days because it's okay to care about it, because it actually exists. Documentaries are quickly catching up with traditional narratives in the box office, real-life blogs dominate the Internet, and Reality TV is so big and obvious that even mentioning it seems like a waste of everyone's time. But there's a catch to all of this, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and that's what I'm trying to get at. Real life isn't really inherently interesting; it only becomes interesting once you can put it into a story, contextualize it and impose on it all of the themes and arcs and plot of fiction, cut it down and carefully edit it so that the pacing is more palatable and identifiable. Non-fiction is only enjoyable once it has all the characteristics of fiction, at which point the difference between those two concepts is somewhat moot; a small quibbling difference in scripting and authorship and little else.

The reason I bring all of this up is just to encapsulate a major frustration in thinking about this mythology all the time: creating a world is pointless, because it's never going to be as good as re-editing the real world.

But here's another thing: I'm obviously not the first person to be frustrated by this, and we're now starting to see the classic process of fictionalizing non-fiction working in reverse. Follow me here, that would entail the non-fictionalizing of fiction. There are some basic examples - the whole fake documentary thing, This is Spinal Tap and The Blair Withch Project. But the process is also sublimating itself into regular narratives. The British version of The Office was meant to be a fake documentary, but when it came over here, the American producers ditched the premise but kept its trappings. The camera shakes and goes in and out of focus, it catches awkward angles and occasionally spies on people unawares between the blinds of a window. Arrested Development uses all the same techniques. Movies, too, have been doing this a lot - filming in real locations rather than back lot sets, permitting bad or awkward lighting and shaky angles. Adding YouTubey content, trying to emulate the runaway success of YouTube, itself yet another supposed nail in the coffin of purist fiction. I think glossy filming is the visual equivalent to careful prose; in both cases people instantly know that they're being sold something, that they're not just observing some version of real life. Take away the gloss and you've got something. Reality TV, if nothing else, exists at the perfect crossroads between these two approaches; at any point in time you can't tell if what you're watching is more real than it is fake - is it real people forced into unrealistic scenarios, or actors playing parodies of themselves in real life? The Real Housewives of Orange County truly is the transcendent medium of our culture. I'm glad we've got that settled.

So then, that's got fiction and non fiction squared neatly away. Now the real question: how does one de-mythologize a mythology?

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.

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.