Code Name: The Icon

This morning I sat down to write the first chapter of the second part of a novel I’ve been working on. In this part I intend to introduce a character whom I variously think of as Tyler Misch, the Underground Man, and the Portalist. He is, as they say, shrouded in mystery, having disappeared without a trace some years prior to the time frame in which the story unfolds. Is he dead or alive? Is he transnational tycoon or Mafioso, CIA or revolutionary, genius or madman? Whoever he is, it’s important that he have a Secret Project, the scope of which seems to be enormous. This Project might purport to save the world from Apocalypse, or it might push the world over the edge. I want the nature of this Project to be revealed gradually, enigmatically, in a series of letters he writes to a daughter whom he has never seen.

So, in Chapter One of Part Two I wanted to write the first of these revelatory yet obfuscatory letters from Tyler Misch. What should be the tone of this letter? In what oblique ways might he begin trying to describe the Project? Here, drawing on my extended engagements in the theory blogs, is what I drafted this morning. Some of you who are still stopping by might get a kick out of the allusions.

*   *   *

PART TWO, CHAPTER ONE

Its code name is the Icon. When up and running, the Icon would serve as a nexus. Multiple vectors or trajectories converge into the Icon; from it others diverge. An omnibus portal, a grand central station.

Of course the Icon would not be installed in a single centralized location. It would need to be distributed across an extremely wide area. Not just wide, but also deep and tall. Not just on the surface, but above and below. Earth and sky and sea. Separating the three vertical levels of the Icon’s installation should be regarded more as a matter of linguistic convenience than as an absolute or relative distinction within its material reality.

Speaking of its material reality, critical to the Icon’s subtle elegance is that it seems not to be there at all. It is assembled from real components to be sure, but these components consist primarily of ordinary materials and objects. Or should I say they seem so to consist. It has been proposed by some of the Speculative Realists that the essence of any and every object always withdraws from every interaction. In other words, every thing is always more than it seems. If these theorists are right, then all objects hide not just from human perceivers but also from one another. They hide even from the universe as a whole, a part of and yet apart from the larger Reality in which they are embedded. As a consequence of this principle of withdrawal the Icon’s essence would remain forever covert, occluded, occult, impenetrable by the most sophisticated and impersonal devices that have been invented or that ever will be invented by human or artificial or alien intelligence. More: objects withdraw not only from one another but from themselves. Therefore, no matter how sophisticated the Icon becomes, it can never become aware of its own essence, can never reveal itself to those who would seek to corrupt or destroy or exploit it.

Trajectories passing through the Icon may continue unchanged or they may be deflected. They may be terminated or merged into other trajectories. They may be altered in quantitative and qualitative ways. Most startlingly, some trajectories become something else altogether, evidently without passing through any sort of transformative processes or intermediate stages. When it operates in this way the Icon functions as a creator of Absolute Difference.

Love to you and your Mother,

Dad

Brainytown USA

I just found out that we live in the brainiest city in America.

Here’s a link to the BrainiestBastions table, which displays each US metro area with 200K+ population and its corresponding “brainpower index,” based on a weighted combination of percentages of residents who have completed various levels of schooling. Perched at the top of page 1, Boulder proudly proclaims its brainy cred: 32% university graduates, plus an additional 26% with advanced degrees. Ann Arbor Michigan places a fairly distant second with 24% and 25%. The rest of the top ten: Washington, Durham NC, Fort Collins CO, Bridgeport-Stamfort CT, San Jose CA, Boston, Madison WI, and San Francisco-Oakland. Dredging the bottom is Merced California with 8% bachelors’ degrees plus 3% masters’ and above.

Maybe living in Brainytown is what makes me discount the value of the “stinking badges.” I’d probably change my tune if I lived in Merced.

D’oh!

About ten feet from where Homer was sitting grew a large eucalyptus tree and behind the trunk of the tree was a little boy. Tod saw him peer around it with great caution, then suddenly jerk his head back. A minute later he repeated the maneuver. At first Tod thought he was playing hide and seek, then noticed that he had a string in his hand which was attached to an old purse that lay in front of Homer’s bench. Every once in a while the child would jerk the string, making the purse hop like a sluggish toad. Its torn lining hung from its iron mouth like a furry tongue and a few uncertain flies hovered over it.

Tod knew the game the child was playing. He used to play it himself when he was small. If Homer reached to pick up the purse, thinking there was money in it, he would yank it away and scream with laughter.

– Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, 1939

 

Anomaly

Ever since early September, when I stopped writing new posts and turned off the comments function, traffic on Ktismatics has gone up. According to the automatic stat-counter, October was the busiest month ever, both for unique visits and for views of individual posts.

Off The Air

Yesterday one of my neighbors told me he was gnostic, and another neighbor gave me a radicchio. Those of you following along with the recent discussion threads will appreciate the coincidences.

I’m shutting down the blog for now; maybe one day it will come back yet again. I’ve also disabled the comments function, but feel free to email me. I’ll be in touch. Thanks for the conversations.

John Doyle

portalic@gmail.com

Urban Dreamscape

I had gone to bed early, feeling achy and feverish. After reading several pages of Proust I fell asleep. An hour or two later I woke up drenched in sweat — the fever broke, I figured. I mopped myself off and went back to sleep. I awakened again in the middle of the night, with my last dream still quite vivid in my awareness. Acknowledging that dreams are of interest primarily to the dreamer, here it is anyway.

I’m driving a car in downtown Indianapolis, on my way to a meeting. (In my consulting days our biggest client was headquartered in Indianapolis, so I traveled there often.) I park and walk along a street lined with tall office buildings. I go through the glass doors of the building where my meeting is to be held. As I stride across the pinkish-gray polished granite floor of the expansive lobby, I realize that I’ve forgotten who it is that I’m supposed to be meeting. The information is in my notebook, but I discover that I’ve left my notebook in the car.

Now I’m up a few floors inside this office building, walking along the corridor. I enter the door to an office, large and well-appointed in dark wood and leather. It seems to be the office of Hutch, or someone quite like him. (Hutch was my boss in the first job I had after grad school. He was a living stereotype: a red-faced, corpulent, loud-talking, back-slapping, hard-drinking, hard-driving businessman. Hutch and I got along great, as it turned out.) There’s a meeting going on, with three or four other men I don’t know in addition to Hutch. I take a seat at the conference table and join in. The meeting seems focused primarily on the planning of some vague and shady scheme. The discussion goes on for some time; at some point I move from the table to one of the leather-upholstered armchairs. Finally I get up, leave the meeting, and head back downstairs.

I pass by a receptionist who is evidently surprised to see me. Where have you been, she asks me; Dr. ___ has been waiting for you. Ah, Dr. ___: so that’s who I was supposed to meet. I go down another corridor looking for Dr. ___’s office, only to find myself in a locker room. Two women, partially undressed, pass by without acknowledging me: I realize that I’m in the women’s section of the locker room and that I shouldn’t be there. I find a door and walk out.

I’m back on the street. Now, however, instead of the busy downtown office-scape from which I’d first entered, I find myself entering into a carnival. It’s crowded, lively, noisy, colorful, filling the street. Puzzled, I walk back through the door and into the office building again. I find another door and exit through it: this time the street is deserted, ominous, lined with the boarded-up, ill-maintained buildings of urban decay. Again I pass back through the door and into the building. Now, though, instead of an office building it’s a hospital. I wake up wondering whether the same building has offices on one side and a hospital on the other.

What’s odd is that I’ve remembered three dreams in the past week in which I’m confused or lost and in which the world I occupy suddenly turns into something else altogether.

American Dream

“The small is, and the big ain’t.”

– aphorism attributed to Abe Lincoln by someone in my dream last night

Lime-in-the-Coconutism

The other night my daughter K and I watched Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The final credits scroll up the screen to the accompaniment of Nilsson’s “Coconut.” Why this goofy little song? Is it just one among several seemingly random 70s pop songs that pepper the soundtrack? Besides, what does the song even mean? You put the lime in the coconut and drink ’em both up, you get a bellyache, you call the doctor to see what to do, the doctor tells you to put the lime in the coconut and drink ’em both up.

After some preliminary diner chitchat the real story begins: a botched jewelry heist leaves two of the gang members dead and one writhing in blood and pain, shot in the belly. By the end all but one of the gang survivors are dead. So: through violent confrontation and armed showdown one guy gets a bellyache. He and his partner wait at the rendezvous for Joe the gang leader, who will call the doctor. When Joe shows up he accuses the gutshot guy of being the rat who tipped off the cops about the robbery. The remaining gang members are divided over whether the injured man is or is not a rat. Violent confrontation culminates in a Mexican standoff. Bang bang bang bang, they kill each other off. Cue the Lime in the Coconut song and the credits.

So basically Reservoir Dogs is a parable illustrating accelerationism, which from now on I’m bound to think of as lime-in-the-coconutism. Cause is also cure: if something makes you sick, do it some more. The bellyache will go away eventually, one way or the other.

Kilroy Was Here

In this post Dr. Zamalek observes the plaques, affixed to buildings that line the streets of Paris, commemorating sites of historical significance. He wonders what it might be like if ordinary people mounted plaques marking the inflection points in their own lives:

“The bland café table you just passed could be where someone finally figured out his or her life after years of struggle, or perhaps where they learned the crushing news of a premature death. It would add relief and drama to one’s experience of a city.”

I like this idea. Dr. Z cautions that such a project would “inevitably attract jerks,” which depending on one’s perspective might be a good thing.

Des Esseintes on Poets of the Decadence

“For him, there was no such thing as schools; the only thing that mattered to him was the writer’s personality, and the only thing that interested him was the working of the writer’s brain, no matter what subject he was tackling. Unfortunately this criterion of appreciation, so obviously just, was practically impossible to apply, for the simple reason that, however much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality, and ends by relegating all the rest to limbo.”

“By diligent self-examination, however, he realized first of all that to attract him a book had to have the quality of strangeness that Edgar Allan Poe called for; but he was inclined to venture further along this road, and to insist on Byzantine flowers of thought and deliquescent complexities of style.”

“Unable to attune himself, except at rare intervals, to his environment, and no longer finding in the examination of that environment and the creatures who endure it sufficient pleasures of observation and analysis to divert him, he is aware of the birth and development in himself of unusual phenomena. Vague migratory longings spring up which find fulfilment in reflections and study. Instincts, sensations, inclinations bequeathed to him by heredity awake, take shape and assert themselves with imperious authority. He recalls memories of people and things he has never known personally, and there comes a time when he bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord.”

“These were works of which he had gradually grown fonder, works which by their very defects provided a welcome change from the perfect productions of greater writers. Here again, the process of elimination had led Des Esseintes to search through pages of uninspiring matter for odd sentences which would give him a shock as they discharged their electricity in a medium that seemed at first to be non-conducting. Imperfection itself pleased him, providing it was neither base nor parasitic, and it may be that there was a certain amount of truth in his theory that the minor writer of the decadence, the writer who is incomplete but nonetheless individual, distils a balm more irritant, more sudorific, more acid than the author of the same period who is truly great and truly perfect.”

[On Verlaine] “But his originality lay above all in his ability to communicate deliciously vague confidences in a whisper in the twilight.”

[On Corbière] “Des Esseintes, who, in his hatred of all that was trite and vulgar, would have welcomed the most outrageous follies, the most bizarre extravagances, spent many happy hours with this book in which droll humour was combined with turbulent energy, and in which lines of disconcerting brilliance occurred in poems of wonderful obscurity… this poet of the condensed epithet and the perpetually suspect charm…”

[On Hannon] “…a disciple of Baudelaire and Gautier who was actuated by a very special understanding of studied elegances and factitious pleasures…”

“Little he cared about ordinary emotions or common associations of ideas, now that his mind had grown so overstocked and had no room for anything but superfine sensations, religious doubts and sensual anxieties.”

“…Baudelaire with his thirsty, ruthless passion, whose disgusted cruelty recalled the tortures of the Inquisition, and Poe with his chaste, ethereal amours, in which the senses had no share and only the brain was roused, followed by none of the lower organs, which, if they existed at all, remained forever frozen and virgin. This cerebral clinic where, vivisecting in a stifling atmosphere, this spiritual surgeon became, as soon as his attention wandered, the prey of his imagination, which sprayed about him, like delicious miasmas, angelic, dream-like apparitions, was for Des Esseintes a source of indefatigable conjectures…”

[On Mallarmé] “…a style so magnificently contrived that in itself it was as soothing as a melancholy incantation, an intoxicating melody, with irresistibly suggestive thoughts, the soul-throbs of a sensitive artist whose quivering nerves vibrate with an intensity that fills you with painful ecstasy… The truth of the matter was that the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures it had missed, afflicted on its death-bed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering, had been embodied in Mallarmé in the most consummate and exquisite fashion. Here, carried to the further limits of expression, was the quintessence of Baudelaire and Poe; here their refined and potent substances had been distilled yet again to give off new savours, new intoxications. This was the death-agony of the old tongue which, after going a little greener every century, had now reached the point of dissolution, the same stage of deliquescence as the Latin language when it breathed its last in the mysterious concepts and enigmatic phrases of St Boniface and St Adhelm.”

“Many were the times that Des Esseintes had pondered over the fascinating problem of writing a novel concentrated in a few sentences and yet comprising the cohabited juice of the hundreds of pages always taken up in describing the setting, drawing the characters and piling up useful observations and incidental details. The words chosen for a work of this sort would be so unalterable that they would take the place of all the others; every adjective would be sited with such ingenuity and finality that it could never be legally evicted, and would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on the meaning, at once precise and multiple, for weeks on end, and also ascertain the present, reconstruct the past and divine the future of the characters in the light of this one epithet. The novel, thus conceived, thus condensed in a page or two, would become an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning.”

– excerpts from Chapter 14 of Joris-Karl Huysmans A Rebours, 1884

– painting: “The Yellow Scale” by František Kupka, 1907

Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout

“It was about people whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all or even imagine them. One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and werewolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater’s favorite poet, according to Trout. So were heaven and hell.”

– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five