.: The Absent Narrative :.

With the quickening of the contemporary world, the new technologies and paths to knowledge that make it possible to witness everything under the sun and beyond before breakfast, it may seem we are in an age where everything is new. And yet even a brief survey of the contents spilling across the page-screens of today reveals that all the entertainments and conflicts that enchant us are still the same ones that have enchanted humankind since the beginnings of history:

Feline Antics – Egyptian worship of Bast
People doing Absurd Things – Petronius’ Satyricon
Artificial Life – Grecco-Egyptian Hermetic texts
Hunt for Cryptozoological Lifeforms – Greek histories from Pliny onward
Racial Hatred Masking as Religious Fervor (War) – Vedic myth justifying conquer of native populations
The Coming Apocalypse – Just about every culture based on linear time
What’s in Space and does it Effect Us? – Assyrian and Mayan astronomers
Sports as National Pastime – Roman Colosseum and Mayan ball-playing
Diet and Healthy Living – The Hippocratic Corpus/ early Chinese Medicine/ Yoga
Cosplay – Greek Tragedy/ Japanese Ko/ Australian Initiation Rituals (and other performance of heroes)
Wariness over New Technological Mediums – Plato (on writing)
Celebrity Exploits/ Superheroes – Classical and World Myth/ History
Murder/Crime – The Hebrew Bible
The Unstable Economy/ Free Trade – Early Expansion of Trade Routes (viz. mercantile documents)
Does God Exist? – Most Ancient Cultures and the History of Science
What’s Beyond Death? – Ancient China onwards
Graffiti/ Street Advertising – Rome (and didn’t PK say we’re still living there?)
Cultural Mashups – Greek Historical Texts
Fashion/ Design – Just about all Ancient Cultures

That’s just off the top of my head, but I imagine if you take any random concern of today you can find an ancient analogue. Though Google doesn’t want to admit history exists before the 1800s (and does it really?), there are perhaps centuries-old top ten lists, how-to manuals, get rich quick schemes, and bad one-liners. Oh humans and our world that is still the same world it always was! Nothing may be truly new, but that we can keep finding endless enchantment in even the oldest stories says something (to me at least) about the indomitable human spirit, or at least our will to entertainment and wonder beyond the concerns of day-to-day life. So laugh at your cats like an old pharaoh and keep dreaming!

Every so often I’ll nose around local message boards to take the pulse of my community, occasionally finding amidst the name calling and amusing Surrealist rewrites of Tubthumper something worth thinking about deeper. Today it was a thread on statements that invalidate arguments, most of which were expected, but a number of people seemed to vehemently agree that bringing up Hitler not only invalidates any argument but also warrants never talking to the person who mentioned Hitler again. Thankfully I’m already far enough beyond circles and sides to not care of becoming further ostracized, so I’ll admit that from time to time I will actually bring up Hitler for sake of arguments, and feel it is sometimes necessary to do so in the context of the atrocious misuses of ideological and symbolic power. But when I do, the responses I most often get are people changing the subject, harping on smaller or grammatical-type issues to avoid the main point, or, one time, being flat out called a Nazi (though this was admittedly from a close friend who didn’t mean it). Now there are a thousand bad and amusing ways to talk about Hitler, the endless youtube remix videos of him and his cronies for instance, but it seems any serious mention of the man, outside and even sometimes within an academic context, creates an anxiety response similar to most people’s kneejerk reticence to discuss their deepest nightmares.

Now this metaphor may be entirely apt; Hitler is like the nightmare of history, the shadow of the collective unconscious, still lurking in the hearts and minds of humanity. The extreme horrors he perpetrated, while nearly 70 years past, still haunt us today, having never been fully reconciled. And though many frown or ignore it as evident from the message board, or even, somehow, disbelieve the Holocaust ever happened, that potential toward evil still resides as part of the Human Being. Even the most enlightened person contains the seeds of a führer in their soul. From internet flame wars to racial tensions in my neighborhood, from Jr’s ideological rhetoric of Freedom waging war on Iraq to corporations controlling desire through sigilic logos, while not as extreme by far, are continuations of negative methods and currents epitomized by the fascist mustache. When I read of the rage over the planned “mosque” near the once world trade centers, I imagine Tea Partiers penning a little crescent and star on the chest of every Muslim. World War II may have ended, but hatred via ideology has not, and it doesn’t seem likely to as long as we can’t own up to the role it’s played throughout history. As they say about those who forget the past…

Though he’s the greatest example of this horror condensed in one man, Hitler was not the first to act in these currents. In fact, he based the National Socialist mythology off the original Aryans, the Vedic tribes who centuries earlier invaded the Ganges River Valley, attempting a genocide on its native population. The Vedic myths describe these enemies through a similar ideological means, by a word that stood for both dark (as in skin) and demon. A similar atrocity is seen in the Crusades and Inquisition (just try cornering a Christian about this nightmare), perhaps more people have been killed in Jesus’s name than under Hitler’s rule, but so much good has been done too that Christ is on the whole rather ambiguous, whereas Hitler is a clear figure we can point to and say, this is how dangerous symbolic power can be. Discussing this with a friend recently they said, but Hitler lost, his use of symbols not as effective as he intended. This is thankfully true, but who else lost? Millions of Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, artists, and thinkers. And though it seems the age when this could happen is past, I feel that if we do not face such nightmarish shadows of our history in ourselves today, it is still possible for equal and further horrors to occur tomorrow.

About six years ago I had a dream that I would write a novel called Staring at the Sun from Underwater, about a young man trying to escape from the horror and routines of everyday life who begins having vivid and seemingly prophetic dreams, and then gets stuck in his dreams and must struggle his way back to real life, a new reality that transcends that question of what is real and what is a dream. Now, I’ve always had intense dreams – some of my earliest memories are childhood nightmares – dreams that fall into the category of big or epic dreams, that seem prophetic or at least concerned not just with personal life but with cultural fates. Thankfully I was an avid reader, and discovered early on certain narratives touching on dreams, McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and perhaps most influential Lovecraft’s Dreamquest of the Unknown Kadath (and much later the movie Waking Life), stories that showed me it’s possible and important to not only explore my own dreams but also represent them narratively so that others might see what is possible in the world through their subconscious and imaginations. The first time I attempted to write the novel however it was ironically too dreamlike, trapped in a shifting fantasy reality that, though a rough expression of my internal dreamworld, was not realistic enough to portray a real world from which the character flees into dreams and back. And I kept having more dreams that would trouble the plot.

Now at the same time as I was dreaming, in waking life I was involved in a radical music/arts/writing/poetry/circus scene, in which my friends and I discussed intentionally living our lives as if they were a story (and stories as if they were our lives), that is, to push ourselves to the most extreme experiences in order to record them in our novels, experiences that would have made the Beats jealous, for, not just content to record reality, we were trying to make our wildest dreams come true, even if those dreams were always somehow thwarted. The second time I attempted to write the novel it was more heavily grounded in this actual reality, but failed again because it was unable to reach toward that magic of dreams, and I kept living new experiences that would trouble the plot; between the dreams and experiences I kept finding I hadn’t lived or dreamt the story fully enough to write it yet, and then life would take hold and I’d get too swept up to write.

Eventually one of the characters, who I’d dreamt of meeting for years before and that meeting would be one of the pivotal scenes of the story, actually came into my real life, proving that to some degree dreams really do come true. This gave me renewed courage to return to the dream novel, and I spent a year typing up and sorting every one of my recorded dreams, cataloging symbols, plotting eventlines, attempting to take the sprawling mess of my internal world and organize it into the plot that had always suggested itself to me (as the dreams were dreamt out of sequence). This process was frankly one of the most intense and magical I’ve put myself through, leading to increased epic dreams and the experience of active or incubated dreaming that resolved many of the lingering dreamplot lines, a process of the experience of the breaking of reality into dreams and dreams into reality that I wanted to represent for my readers.

But as much as I shuffled dream scenes I kept coming across the problem that, though potent in themselves, much of the true meaning and effective significance of dreams would be lost if not connected to the dreamer, to those waking experiences of which the dreams are a continuation or remix. How to show dreams can really come true if there’s not someone for whom they come true? So as much as I wanted to avoid it I had to start placing into the story some of my own life and experiences, albeit fictionalized, rewriting memories to add the necessary lived context. At the time I had returned to school for writing, but was troubled that whenever I read a realist story it struck me as being entirely fake, seeing too much what goes into creating fictional worlds that I couldn’t believe in realities that aren’t actually real. And once again this attempt at the novel fell into that problem too.

Eventually I had to decide that in order to portray that intersection of reality and the imagination, I had to represent reality as close as humanly possible to the actual real world, setting the story in a historical context and in short turning it into an autobiography (but a fictionalized one in the diaristic genre, told not as truthful reminiscence but the uncertainty of living through the experiences), giving the same amount of lived veracity to both waking and dreamt experiences alike. And this has worked, and over the last year I’ve written a good 700 pages, further than this project has gotten before and the end clearly in sight. Granted, through all this I’ve come to realize a lot about how we experience reality, that there are no clear lines, that real life is always tinged with narrative, memory always tinged with imagination, dreams always tinged with the real and or mythic, so that, as much as we long to, we writers may never be able to represent a true reality or a true imaginary without finding some bleedthrough between the two. But then again, as a dreamer I’m more comfortable in ambiguity than not, but the final irony is that in order to escape from everyday life I had to become its biggest proponent.

All that being said, I’d like to present you with an excerpt from the novel to come, the first dream scene of Staring at the Sun from Underwater (please keep in mind this is still a rough draft):

***

8.23.00
Imagination make this immediate, but already it is fading.

The feast laid out on the hill above the battlefield, our large table draped in white cloth, banquet laden with silver dishes, and in the center my great granduncle and namesake JWB’s two tarnished candlesticks: foolish men with their feet in the sunflash, trying to balance a burning world that any moment might topple and engulf the repast. I am not jack to be nimble but William B. Bright, and there were no flames to leap over last night, that I can remember. We were all over; my family, Phoebe Zeitgeber and her family, all our friends from back home, as if it were only a goodbye party after all, all of us eating, every imaginable and exotic recipe, subdued under the flat blue sky of my earliest memories, the walls of our childhood bedroom on Wolff Street, feathered with clouds that only looked like the painted idea of clouds, stenciled on and lit by that Humpty Dumpty lamp, and in the distance a church bell tolling gentle vespers while we ate. It was rather picturesque really, like a nursery rhyme verse, which only makes the rest more chilling because it lulls you in before the dark shredding chorus. When the plate lids were removed, would enormous roast carcasses steam in the light? Despite not eating meat for years I wanted a bite. Positively salivating. It would taste of dill and eternity and something else I couldn’t put my tongue on.

But that imagined flesh is not what woke me, screaming and struggling out of the deep feather mattress into the sick morning light that reflected off the walls of Phoebe’s Grandma’s row house. Empty of all generations, the woman left alone treading the carpets clear to the floorbones. Those walls, moldering and green, I noticed before falling asleep, have too many angles, as if they might maze in on themselves, hiding some Lovecraftian horror behind the peeling wallpaper. Or the California Raisins, singing their sick Marvin Gaye canticles through the grapevined gardens of my earliest nightmares. Phoebe rushed over at once but I could barely explain to her what I’d seen. Our Father raising a toast, I don’t remember to what, but I felt it was the most important thing I’d ever hear, maybe one of his recipes, when suddenly, or maybe it happened gradually but we all became aware of it at once, a dark wind began to blow over the brittle grass. The sky scrolled back to reveal a stricken purple, like a bruise lit with distant flashes, lightning or searchlights I couldn’t tell which. Like something out of a videogame, like taking out the garbage as a teenager and staring up at the orange city-glow in fear that an alien mothership was about to swoop down, again, at last, but that didn’t happen either, at least not yet, only Mome saying have you set the table yet? The church bells grew atonal and discordant, the food sour, the tablecloth wilted to dust. As one we all put down our forks and stood up, and began nosing across the down like scared rabbits before the final plow.

Phoebe told me, but only after much hesitation, that her grandfather had died in that bed, I was the only person to sleep there since, and that maybe I had seen what he saw, some vision beyond the pale of death. I told her that was nonsense, I’ve never seen a ghost, not like my younger brother, Alex, not my twin, and besides, it was so personal, how could this nightmare be anything but my own? At the edge of the field stood crumbling ramparts, a forgotten fort from the Revolutionary War. We played there as children, Nim and I running along the crumbling edges, always too frightened to explore one of the darkened doorways, like tombs we thought, that would always stay dark and cold even when our Father swept them with his flashlight. I haven’t thought of that in forever, all those years running along the battlements, wearing history to dust under little twin feet, as though it were a game that was already lost, no matter how many times we played. As if it would vanish unless I keep saying it, as if this is what must surely come to pass:

We prayed through this darkening world towards an endless line of people, all in pairs, waiting along the ramparts. Phoebe and I held hands and stepped right in, all of us moving towards the distance, where at the horizon the violet sky itself furled back to reveal an immense beam of light shattering the earth with the force of the heavens. It was like the Book of Revelations, the closest I can describe it; I expected choirs of angels heralding trumpets and vials before some ineffable bearded face flaunts It. But God did not appear, I’m not convinced He even exists, never answered my prayers, this lovelorn loner adolescing along the riverbanks? The Alpha and Omega can go shove it. And everything remained silent still, except of course for the cursed tintinnabulation of the bells. No, it wasn’t like John’s vision at all, nor like Ragnarok, those Wagnerian beasts and undead warriors the Germans failed to emanitize. Did the Greek gods ever snuff it? I don’t remember. All to dust then, all the familiar apocalypses of my youth, worn in at church and the undusted books of the school library where I tried to hide from the other children. Like secrets I thought, those stories, so I adopted all the pantheons and heroes. Which only makes this more terrifying, because it felt true, beyond mythology, well, truer than this wandering around the row house trying to write it all down before breakfast. Blessed is he that reads this, for the time is at hand, I don’t know if I can make it any clearer: the world is ending, not with a bang, or even a whimper, but after dinner, when we all go home. Except we weren’t going home, we were setting out into our future. It doesn’t make any sense. I clutched Phoebe’s hand as we trembled towards that baffling lightshow, a doorway like a tear in the veil of reality itself, and found myself wondering, not what was on the other side, nor when we might find out, but why we couldn’t finish eating first.

Phoebe says don’t worry, it’s just a dream, but it’s going to gnaw at me all day.

Oh won’t you take us up
Like Bowie’s glittered starmen,
And save us from our paranoid
Oil-soaked governmentals,
And though maybe just hallucinating
Or a bad B movie costume
I’m still telepathing the Roswell Blues

[Warning: Potential Spoilers Below!]

Last year when the reimagined Battlestar Galactica came to an end, there was a wide ranging response mostly peaked by WTFs at the deus ex machinas, Baltar’s referral to God or gods as an explanation of plot events, and, perhaps more agonizing, the impossibility of knowing whether Kara Thrace was really an angel, cylon, or something new. Personally I felt that ending worked, it was novel, daring, and tied together many of the show’s mythological elements and “big questions” while still leaving the nature of such supernatural agents as unknown as we in real life don’t know. A year and a rewatch later, I’m now struck that the whole inclusion of spiritual elements relies less on the existence or explanation of supernatural beings (granted we bought from episode one that there were intelligent robots) than on human actions, on people acting from the heart no matter what they’re made of. But nonetheless, at the time it was perhaps easy to write this kind of belief-oriented story off as a fluke, an ineffable ending falling to the periphery of the cultural black hole despite the show’s otherwise significance. People could still think this was a mistake.

And then last night Lost ended, after years of people asking how could this show possibly end and what will or won’t be revealed, and once again, viewers are left not with no answers, but with the sense that answers may not be something that we can ever truly have. Personally I was pleasantly surprised in the last ten minutes to find that my theories (and most other theories) about the flash-sideways universe and the nature of the island itself weren’t right: Everything that happened to the characters on the island was real, and the alt-universe was, not an afterlife, but a place for the characters to resolve their personal issues and finally find themselves and each other before going to the great beyond (a sort of wish fulfillment that worked much better than a mere do-over would have). Once again expectations are thwarted; we may never know what the island originally was, but the show ultimately wasn’t about the island’s mysteries as much as the mysteries of the heart and how characters who are in all ways lost might one day be found. The struggle between Jack and Lock ended up not being a struggle between logic and faith in the world, but of logic and faith inside of us, a struggle in which both sides won.

That these two shows both ended on notes of not being able to know all for certain, and that they met with such popular success during their runs, suggest that BSG and Lost may herald a new kind of genre, one that is aware of the need of expectations and explanations and the impossibility of meeting either. Both shows could be considered science fiction, but I’ve heard the term “faith-fiction” used, and I would call them spiritual mysteries (Some like Terry Pratchet might lump Doctor Who into this category, as it also does not rely on scientific explanation but on human and universal possibility and the Fantastic as a way of framing such possibilities). The mystery elements are integral to these shows, BSG asking the viewers to ask who are the final cylons and what is Kara Thrace, Lost asking the viewers to ask what is going on/ what does it all mean. Unlike simple who-done-it style mysteries, the mystery elements of these shows was geared at deeper issues, of faith, survival, humanness, otherness, love, issues bordering on the spiritual rather than scientific, the viewers demanding revelations that no logic can give. One might even say that, in the original meaning of the term, these stories fall into the genre of apocalypses (literally, revealings), symbolically hinting at possibilities for understanding ourselves in the the real world. Both shows also played heavily upon their own mythologies, creating internal myths that set up the meanings of their final moments early on and drove the characters and plots when all else failed or ceased to make sense (like good myths playing on the repetition of central themes as “fated”).

Personally I feel this works rather well. Many viewers will not be satisfied though, feeling sold short by the directors or writers who couldn’t keep up with audience demands for revelations, but at this point the shows are done, and are perhaps better read in terms of their cohesive wholes and what these say about the world and cultures we live in. My take is that, despite the continued grasping of the old-world religions, we live in a world now primarily dominated by logic and science, a world in which we expect that every mystery has a solution. But this has never been and is still not the case. What these shows’ finales demonstrate is that even in an age of logic, logic can not answer everything. There will always be those aspects of reality, whether spiritual or psychological, that are unmeasurable, ineffable. Though we can count the stars we cannot count the gods, though we can objectively test electromagnetism we cannot objectively test love and loyalty. Science and its attendant genre of science fiction/mystery can not answer these questions, really faith can’t either, but faith (itself or as a genre) isn’t supposed to answer questions either but instead pose possibilities that resolve the anxieties that lie in each one of us, the kinds of existential and spiritual anxieties that are ever more endemic in our rational world. Shows like Lost and BSG may not give all the logical answers, but they raise the right questions, pose the greater possibilities, and ultimately allow us to find ourselves.