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.

On Helmut Kravitz, Briefly

I just realized something about the mythology that I misspoke about before. For the sake of full disclosure, I feel these sorts of little details are important. I've been talking about the Undigestible Man as though he spawned the mythology, but that isn't entirely the case. There is another character who predates the Undigestible Man, who has been around far longer - long enough, in fact, to have retired from the mythological spotlight long ago; long enough to have been relegated to a chapter or two (and many footnotes) in the mythology's own history textbooks about itself.

His name is Helmut Kravitz. Helmut is my mythology's own Dostoevsky, the Soviet-born political dissident who thwarted his oppressors and flaunted his demons by producing a long-running satirical comic strip called "The Penguin Republic." The Penguin Republic has an entire world unto itself, and has logged many hours of obsession in my brain. The previously mentioned bizarre website project deals mostly with this world (www.thepenguinrepublic.com), but it's also taken more extreme measures, including 3/4 of a 1980's era video game that I toiled over one long summer (this is actually the one aspect of the mythology that might have traction with other people outside of my own mind - I passed a demo of the game around my dorm a couple years ago, and still get requests fairly often for its completion).

But Helmut existed before the Penguin Republic needed an author. His first appearance was in eighth grade, the tragic figure of an ill-conceived novel I tried to write for an English class final project. The story itself was pretty weak, and even then was dominated by the unhealthy fascination with Jungian psychology that has persisted throughout the mythology's tenure. There is a planet of mysterious origin dangling nearby the Earth, hidden just behind the moon. It was actually created by the military (or something), as a psychological weapon of mass effect (I guess?). The hook: its terrain is psychologically malleable, capable of manifesting a person's subconscious thoughts into reality (sound familiar? I could probably rename this blog "Improbable Manifestations of the Jungian Subconscious," and perhaps I will yet). And yes, as expected, the people who created the planet did not anticipate the full repercussions of its powers.

I can't remember now what it was called, and I only wrote the first fourty or so pages, mostly involving the landing party facing hideous parades of their worst fears in city squares. Come to think of it, there were also blob-like human things that were meant to just be thoughts - always milling around in marketplaces and along busy thoroughfares. I never connected them to their shadow-people counterparts until now. Anyway, I got stuck pretty quickly, because I was mostly concerned with building up to the awesome ending: after facing wave after wave of Jungian foe, driving most of the crew to isolation or suicide, there are only two characters left: the hero, who I don't remember (his name might have been Jonathan), and Helmut Kravitz, the sole survivor of the previous expedition to the planet. Helmut is kind of the prototype of the Undigestible Man here, having endured enough in life to be unaffectable and perpetually unaffected. Except that he is not undigestible, but precisely the opposite: deciding at last to confront the enemy directly, Helmut is actually consumed by the planet, and by giving his life saves that of the hero (who is instantly forgettable).

(To be totally honest, I think the whole premise of the novel was unintentionally ripped off of an episode of Red Dwarf, in which the same exact thing happens, minus the ending. This feels good to admit; I think this is therapeutic.)

I liked the name alot, and so Helmut Kravitz has persisted through the mythology's many iterations. In times where I've tried to think about a world with less profoundly depressing conclusions, Helmut often serves as the thankless character who bears the brunt of dark thoughts for everyone else. For example, I've often thought that the crew of the Remote Fishing Resort were obsessed with Helmut Kravitz's work. There is a shack floating out at sea, far away from the resort, where one crewman at a time is isolated for several weeks, only interacting occasionally with ambitious guests who've gone too far out of the bay and need more bait or gasoline (this was an actual function at the fishing resort I worked at). The big dare while whittling away the endless hours in the outpost, already fragile and alone, is to read Helmut Kravitz's The Life and Times of the Undigestible Man, which tells of the titular character's descent to the center of the world, where he finds the controls to the planet and drives the Earth into the sun.

I promise that there are not-dark aspects of the mythology as well, but these are the things I'm the most anxious to let go and finally be rid of. Sometime soon I will get into the Fast Food Ambassador, and then I'm likely to ramble on about Time until I'm out of it.