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.

The Common Theme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple enough, right?

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

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

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

The Bottom of the Ocean

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is The Undigestible Man?

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

So, yes, the Undigestible Man.

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

It feels good to get that off my chest.

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

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

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

Anyway.

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

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

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