Under the Influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.