A Newer, Faster Ocean (The Problem is Godzilla)

I've been corralled by a friend of mine to write a myth story relating to the ocean, for use by her band, which is working on an album drenched in ocean themes.  Something involving creatures of the deep: giant squid, Kraken, octopus, or some such.  I'm certainly flattered by the idea that someone would turn to me for myth, and the project is exciting to me.  And yet I'm stumped and flustered.  I have so many ideas about it that I don't know how to choose, how to narrow things down to just one story.

I've settled on the idea that it should be something contemporary: a story of a sea monster which feeds on the plastic and other waste we dump into the sea every day, or something along those lines.  There are so many possibilities for mutation in this day and age that it's hard to pinpoint exactly which thread to follow.  The problem is Godzilla.  Particularly given the recent/ongoing Japanese nuclear reactor disaster, which is resulting in massive quantities of radioactive material pouring into the ocean, it's hard to imagine a fate for the seas which doesn't involve mutated monsters rising from the waters to crush a modern metropolis in revenge for the damage we've done.  Perhaps this is the most likely scenario.  Godzilla therefore becomes less myth and more speculative fiction.  He/it is too obvious, too predictable in response to the current ecological scenario, and therefore loses power as a basis for myth.

Perhaps, rather than a mutation myth, the story should involve an endangered animal and its struggle for survival then.  A last-of-its-kind adventure, a navigation of the perils of the 21st-century ocean: the pollutions, ecosystem devastations, and pollutions we conveniently can't penetrate the water's edge to see.  A kind of overcoming, uplifting but sad.  The last of its kind, alone, destined to fade into memory or be forgotten completely.  But therefore poignant, taking in the small details with an urgency that's lacking from our day-to-day lives, which we assume will carry over into another day, another year, another generation.  When the existence of an entire species is on the line, the stakes of each and every moment are magnified.

So perhaps this is the answer.  The specifics will come out in the end.  A rethinking of the ocean itself is central though, I think.  As our society accelerates and digitizes, becomes more and more borne on the light arrays and digitized wireless signals that carry the tiniest particulars of our worlds everywhere, the ocean, itself a medium for information, travel, life, keeps pace.  What does it mean to have a faster ocean?  That is the next question to ponder, one that I think will help me to see my myth more clearly.  I think my creature will have to adapt to this accelerated environment in order to survive, and thus will become something fundamentally different, something unique and greater than it was.

Navigating Eternity From the Suburbs

My current time/space coordinate is 2011 Lynnwood, WA, USA, just before the Autumn Equinox, on approach to the Libra New Moon.  Planet Earth, in the solar system sometimes identified as Sol.  My brother has a telescope with which he watched the full moon a few days back from the second story back deck of my family's home.  The house is a standard-issue late-1970's suburban house, white, with a cracked cement driveway leading to a two-car garage, half of which has been taken over by storage.  There's a rotting basketball hoop overhanging the driveway.  The house, which my parents have lived in since I was an infant, is wooden, with aluminum siding, and is situated near the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet suburban neighborhood.

The neighborhood is comprised of several housing developments: the one my family lives in is the oldest, 30-odd years old now, while up the hill is a slightly newer development consisting of perhaps twenty or thirty single-family two-story homes, all of them of essentially the same design, though not identical.  The rest of the immediate area used to be undeveloped forest, except for a creepy old abandoned church with a large clearing in front of it at the top of the hill, which everyone avoided and naturally assumed was haunted.  That church was torn down long ago now, along with most of the surrounding trees.  In their place are more developments: completely identical houses which, though probably about the same in terms of square footage, are more compact than the older houses, taller but more cramped, with very little in the way of yard space.  Behind my parents' house is a ten-foot green belt along which squirrels, birds, and the occasional raccoon still roam, but beyond that is more new housing, each house more identical to the others than the others.

This destruction and homogenization of the surrounding lands continues as one leaves the immediate neighborhood: what were once expansive lands of pine and fir trees are now strip malls, car dealerships, Costcos and Starbucks and Targets.  The same as everywhere.  This tale of bland suburban expansion is hardly unique -- it's happening everywhere, at least in the United States, 2011 Earth, third planet of the Sol system.  What is fascinating about all this isn't the sameness of it all, but rather the capacity for uniqueness in this, the least interesting of all possible scenarios.  This expanding suburban nightmare is eternal and necessary to the completeness of the universe, yet fragile and fleeting, as all moments in space and time are, and in this realization we can find beauty, hope, and deep and profound meaning.

Thinking about the endless expansionism and destruction of ecological richness which typifies the present-day world often fills me with a deep and paralyzing depression.  How can we, as a society, as a species, hope to survive, if we relentlessly pollute and destroy our environment, at a pace rivaled only by the meteor strike which we assume was the cause of the last great "extinction event" on this planet, some 60 million years ago?  When we willingly and intentionally choose this extinction?  When the mechanisms we've established to support our day-to-day lives are tantamount to the rape and murder of the planet which supports our lives?

Well, perhaps we can't.  That's the answer I keep coming back to, and from my current subjective perceptional viewpoint, the vast American Suburbs, which are rapidly losing their plurality and becoming The Suburb, an enormous strip-mall without border or end, it's hard to argue otherwise.  And yet, would the utter collapse of our society be such a terrible thing?  In the short term, of course it would, of course, of course, of course.  Panic, pandemonium, famine, death, misery.  How many people are on the planet now?  Six billion?  Seven?  Eight?  I can't keep track.  The count increases every time I look away.  In a true civilization-collapse scenario, how many of those would die?  Half?  Three quarters?  More?  Billions, in any case.  Unfathomable despair.  We're running out of drinkable water.  As we cut down more and more trees, which are the lungs of the planet, we run the risk of running out of breathable air.  And yet.

In untended parts of the suburbs, the pavement cracks.  My parents' driveway hasn't been maintained or repaired in a very long time.  Weeds sprout between the cracks.  Green things.  As more species become extinct by the day, pigeons thrive in the inner cities.  Cockroaches, rats, mosquitoes, fruit flies: these creatures we see as disgusting, even hazardous, teem and multiply.  And the smog over the cities refracts the light of sunsets in the most brilliant way.  If one believes, as I do, that each instant is an eternity, complete and whole in itself, these broken instants of our failing civilization are cause for celebration.  Touch your lips against the rusting metal of an abandoned train track.  It is forever, as are we, even as we fade into memory.  Whose memory, I don't know.  But catalogued in the annals of existence, fragments of a universe which, if it is everything, must be comprised of all possible eventualities, even pre-apocalypse Lynnwood, Washington, USA.  It's ok.  We're all here together, in that eternity.  Hold onto your loved ones, but not too tight.  We're all fading away, and never will.

On the Nonexistence of Unpopular Blogs

A blog page, perhaps containing bits of poetry and fiction, exists in the bowels of the internet, yet no one sees or reads it.  The page is updated regularly but is only ever seen by the writer.  Does it exist?

This is a little bit more complicated than "if a tree falls in the forest..."  A book, a journal, a scrap of paper: these are physical things.  They have a distinct form and time/space coordinate.  They can be touched, held, eaten if one so desires.  If no one reads these pages, they may not be part of any particular subjective experience, but they still exist as phenomena which can be perceived, can be apprehended by a human sensory mechanism.

A blog or web-based literature, however, does not have a comprehensible form until someone chooses to look at it.  That is, it may exist as coding in a computer network, but it will not manifest as a text until someone specifically looks it up on the internet.  Until that point, it is merely a potential text, a literary electron which exists as potential and probability, and does not have a fixed location in time and space.  Once the text is located by a web browser, it will cohere on a screen as a grid of visible energy, without distinguishing auditory, olfactory, or textural characteristics.  It can be said that all objects in our perception are fundamentally nothing more than energy grids (for example, a human body is made up of over 99% empty space -- we perceive each other as solid objects based on the energy fields created by the particles we are composed of), but digital information is unique in that it is a projection of data which maintains its physical characteristics even as its contents change.  For instance, when text is viewed on a computer screen, the screen itself does not change.  The weight and texture of a Kindle will not change depending on what text it is displaying -- a five-page essay will have the same heft and feel as Infinite Jest or a 100-year-old edition of Les Miserables.  The only difference in the device will be the slightly different quality of light traveling to the reader's eyes from the screen.  Further, if the device is turned off or the text is deleted, the device will not be changed in a noticeable/sensually-perceptible way.  It will weigh the same; it will smell the same.  The device itself can be altered, damaged, destroyed; however, this modification is distinct and separate from the life of the text(s) it displays.

It doesn't make much difference whether the texts in question are stored on the device itself or online.  Since it doesn't manifest as a phenomenon which can be recognized by human senses until it is called upon.  Thus, the question: does a blog which isn't read by anyone exist?  Perhaps as a potential, but not specifically, and not now, in this distinct time and space, which is a foreign corner of the universe to most of us, in which graspable, killable, fuckable objects are rapidly giving way to potential holograms, maybe-worlds, ones and zeroes which are flickers of electric light within microchips, patterns which may never be accessed but lay imbedded, microscopically, as bits of code in silicon.  Not only some wayward soul's web journal, but The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Leaves of Grass, The Odyssey, shrunken from their original grandeur until they can fit a million times over in the space of a human thumbnail.  The world in a grain of sand.

Whir

a rooster’s crow at midnight

the sullen near sea

the way down muddied by goats

dolphin pods survey the coral

survive passage of cruise 

ship rotors

taunt the skipper

awe the camcorders

a trail arcs toward paradise

sullied by a carpet of kukui nuts

& red, 

red like the rust undersides

of old Dodge vans,

behind, miles ago

volcano loam

frigate birds

mosquitoes perpetuate 

where the stream slows

there

in the sky

thin whir of helicopter

there

at her feet

two hundred meters

and coral

the vastness

is only out

the cliff wall 

chips her back

red

and only green

above

Eyeball Parable

  His eyeballs kept falling from his head

      made popping noises

corneas dangling from stalks

     he tried to shove them

     back into their sockets

    & was alarmed that they wouldn’t fit

      they had grown larger

   to take in the wider world

       unfettered by lashes

  as if the eyeballs

whites & irises & all

were pupils unto themselves

Feedback From a Too-Close Amplifier

I was knotted up inside.  I couldn’t tell her.  I thought of her as a friend, but I thought of her as something else.  She never indicated she was interested in me, but she never suggested she wasn’t.  I waited for her.  I couldn’t wait.  She loved someone else, though she wasn’t in love with him.  He neither loved nor hated her.  They lived together.  They didn’t sleep together.  Yet they were a couple, though they split up from time to time.  They neither fought nor made up. 

            She drank too much.  We all drank too much.  I drove myself home each night, though I shouldn’t have.  The distance was too far to walk, but there were nights that I did.  The alcohol electrified us.  We remained static.  He stayed, I couldn’t leave.  I never ate, but seemed immune to hunger.  I was sustained by the sight of her.  She invoked a thirst in me.  I couldn’t drink without a filter, couldn’t speak without a filter.  The alcohol wetted my lips and thickened my need for hers.  I didn’t react when she leaned close.  I died and died and smiled.

            I sat on the couch and pined.  If  strangers were to walk into the room, they wouldn’t know the two were lovers.  I was friends with him, though I didn’t know him very well.  I neither sought nor avoided his company.  I sought hers.  She didn’t mind.  I was frustrated, though I didn’t mind.  In my mind, she was neither a divine creature nor merely human.  She was a separate kind of entity.  I couldn’t classify her.  She was ideal in her flaws.  I couldn’t sit silently and watch her, though I couldn’t act on my desire.  So we talked.  I didn’t say what I was thinking.  I communicated without words.  She neither indicated she noticed, nor moved away when I sat close.  I appreciated her friendship.  It tore me into tiny pieces.  I both longed to see her and dreaded it.  “A process in the winter of the heart.”

            He was leaving her.  He didn’t know when.  He was ready to move on, but he wouldn’t go.  She wasn’t happy with him, but she didn’t insist he make up his mind.  She tolerated him.  I couldn’t take it after a while.  I was helplessly drawn to her, but the situation repelled me.  I neither hid my attraction nor made it apparent.  It went on like this.  It couldn’t.  Something had to give, but it didn’t.  I couldn’t give her advice or refuse.  So I told her the truth I saw.  Not the deeper truth.  Not the truth about me; the truth about him, about them.  Neither wanted the other; neither wanted to say goodbye.  “That’s where I spend most of my time these days, back in the middle of nowhere.”

            An old friend arrived.  She didn’t recognize the situation.  She slept on the couch, and strands of light came in through the blinds.  There was no distinction between one day and the next.  She neither improved the situation nor degraded it.  Or she improved things by not degrading them.  In this frozen house, stability contented us. 

            “It is disastrous to be a wounded deer,” Corso says.  I wasn’t wounded.  I was caught in the headlights, and couldn’t close my eyes.  I neither dodged my oncoming destruction nor welcomed it.  The traffic dodged me.  The spotlight stayed put.  I couldn’t blink.  Once I started speaking, I couldn’t stop.  “Why regret an everlasting sun, since we’re hell-bent on discovering divine light?”  I said so.  She didn’t notice.

Reflections In Dust

I’m trying to write about a mirror.  It’s a specific, physical mirror, not an abstract concept.  I want to write about this mirror, but it’s difficult to get to, because it’s situated in a specific time and place, and, without an understanding of that time and place, the mirror would just be a mirror, but it’s not.  And a proper discussion of that time and place would take hundreds of pages.  But it’s the mirror I want to get to, so if that time and place make their way into the discussion, I’d like to think of them as reflections in that mirror, interior to it as these memories are to me.  And the important thing about a mirror is the reflections in it, after all.    
        The mirror was in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from me.  I drove to it without knowing it was there.  To the desert, to camp naked.  I knew the desert was there.  I came to it from where I was.  A place devoid of all life, of cacti, insects, birds.  Cupped by mountains, flattened by liquid.  It had been a lake, when rivers were still in the process of carving canyons south and east.  A place can dry up.  A time, too, can dry up, though slower.  The dust, alkaline, absorbent of all moisture, reduces a man to a husk of skin.  The least breeze turns the air into a sifted solid object, a vision of opaque white.  Is it possible that through this blindness, this swirl of nearsightedness, a city, a civilization, a land of blue and pink lights could emerge?  Could emerge and dissolve in a specific time frame, a Brigadoon containing a dust-covered mirror, risen from nothing, disintegrated to nothing?
How can a place devoid of life, abandoned by water the dust drank, bloom so suddenly, and vanish?  Sustained by trucks of non-potable water, to make the dust heavy and so keep it stuck, to leaven the air and the ground to maintain them as separate things.  An importation of moths by hitchhiking.  A body is a canteen of sorts, a vessel for the dust to sip.  One would expect to see earth among the stars in the night sky, and distinguish east from south by its location.

This is the Black Rock Desert, but it is not the Black Rock Desert.  It is a reflection.  Except it occupies a larger amount of space than a mirror can contain.  Some concepts, some spaces, are too vast for that.  The mirror can, however, contain me.  The space of me, though not the concept.  I am, perhaps, too vast for that.  This is Burning Man, except it isn’t, or it isn’t what I’m trying to get at.  Even in reflection.  I’m trying to lead you through the crowds of fire spinners and women dressed as glowing green-and-yellow snakes and cars disguised as Cheshire cats and gladiatorial pirates, to a small camp surrounded by other small camps, in the center of it all.  It took me years to find it, to know I was looking for it.  And when I did, at the end of August of 2006, the year of “Hope and Fear” by the Burning Man calendar, I was so inebriated and sleep-deprived that the mirror at this camp made me seem both small and vast all at once.

It was very early Friday morning, or very late Thursday night.  In the 36 hours since I had last slept, I had boarded what had once been a bus and was now a Spanish galleon sailing across the playa1, had danced to house music inside a giant wooden structure known as the “Belgian Waffle”, had watched a friend compete in a contest called “Dance Dance Immolation”, and had tequila shots with a clan of garish oddities who referred to themselves, collectively and individually, as Zardoz.  I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the timeframe here.  I might have only been awake for 32 hours at that point.  I might have visited the Belgian Waffle on Friday night and not Thursday night.  Time can dry up.  The point is that I was delirious, at a place beyond and saturated with exhaustion, and my head was filled with strange and fascinating images. 

Ghosts in the darkness that themselves were exhausted and dragging their footprints, who scattered into dust when I looked at them directly, as if maintaining themselves as solid objects took a force of will greater than they could conjure.  Armored men with fiery whips dancing and pounding drums, a vast plastic orchid garden illuminated in soft white.  A woman with tall red hair, painted half-silver, handed me the King of Coins from a tarot deck, said it would represent me starting at sunrise.  And the deeper into that bright night I wandered, the further from me the sun was.

The point is that I was trying to get to my camp, to sleep a while before the sun came up and made sleep impossible, and I was lost.  I was trying to find my blankets so I could stave off the ice, so I could rest a moment before the furnace.  I wanted to soak my blistered feet, to eat, to find new water, to resuscitate my soul.  And instead, I found the mirror that night or morning, when I was furthest from myself and unsure that I would ever find my way home.  

My home was at 7:00 and Chance, and I had been steering myself in that direction for hours.  The problem was that every time I started walking that way, I became instantly distracted by some strange and wondrous and beautiful thing, some sound or sculpture or woman, and two hours would vanish.  I had already lost my bicycle, and my feet were beginning to blister.  I made full use of the assorted couches and huts that were scattered across the desert to provide comfort and ease for wanderers such as myself.  I stared at the Cubatron for long enough that I didn’t feel any time go by at all.  By the time I reached Center Camp, I was so weary I couldn’t feel my body anymore -- I was a mist or ghost, a thing without legs, hovering an inch above the ground and propelling myself by sheer force of will.  One of those disappearing ghosts I had seen out in the deep empty spaces of night, returning to dust.  Since my will was variable and wan at that point, my traversal of time and space was also variable and wan.

I knew where I was.  I was in Black Rock City.  I was at Center Camp.  I was in a human body, more or less.  I also knew where I was going: 7:00 and Chance, home, bed.  I even knew the route to get there.  And yet I was unable to comprehend the process that would be involved in walking from point A to point B.  So I suppose I had just been hovering a while, somewhere on the exterior of Center Camp, when I saw it.  The mirror.  There, just across from me, maybe 15 feet away from me.  It seemed to be just an ordinary full-length mirror set in a purple-and-gold frame, slightly scratched at the level of my shoulders, yet I was drawn to it as if by a gravitational force.  There was something odd about the reflection it cast, and it took my twenty-percent-functional brain a good while to figure it out.            

The person in the mirror didn’t look like me.  Or, rather, he didn’t look like any me I had ever seen before.  He seemed to be an autonomous being rather than a reflection.    There was something about his movements that was independent of me, and his face reminded me of mine, but wasn’t quite.  It wasn’t my ragged appearance -- my hair white with dust, my purple snakeskin-pattern pants, the blue faux-fur coat, dimly glowing.  My eyes had deep dark circles under them, yet my pupils were keenly alert, almost frantic.  This was all to be expected.  I had spent my time in this desert.  I knew.  But this was not quite right.  After studying the mirror for a while, I realized why this figure was unfamiliar to me, why he deeply unnerved me.  

All my life I had seen myself in mirrors, in still water.  All my life I had seen reflections of myself, reverse images.  If I raised my left hand, my reflection would raise its right.  When I shaved, I transferred the movement of the reflection’s razor, reversed it, to tell my hand how to move and avoid cutting myself.  I had never seen myself unreversed, as any other person who ever met me over the course of my life has seen me.  My whole experience had been based on a distorted image of my physical dimensions, a 180° flip from the way I was experienced by others, by the world.  And this mirror, the image in this mirror, wasn’t reversed.  When I raised my right hand, my reflection raised his right hand.  If I tilted my head left, so did he.  It was as if there were a hologram of myself standing in front of me, or a twin with my exact tics and habits of motion, instead of the distorted projections of myself I had seen since I was a small child.  I could, suddenly and finally, see myself as my friends and family and lovers had always seen me.  

It shook me to my core.  I was frightened in a way that I hadn’t been frightened in years and years.  I lost track of who I was, externalized myself into the image before me.  Of course I couldn’t look away.  In my semi-conscious state, I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.  Which is why the time and place is important.  If I had such a mirror in my apartment, if I saw that reflection under ordinary circumstances, I may have been charmed by the oddness of the image and gone about the rest of my day without a second thought.  But since I had arrived at a certain feeling of etherealness over those past 36 or 32 hours, and had witnessed a plethora of vast and astonishing acts of imagination in that time, my reality at that moment was extremely fragile.  In this desert, coated in a fine sheen of playa dust, parched and cold and lost, in the waning of the night, I found myself in a literal way, in a physical way, like running into an old friend on the street, a friend I had never seen face me.  I had to introduce myself, had to examine myself closely, gesture so as to watch myself gesture.  I stood rapt for a long, long time.  Then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, I panicked and ran from the mirror, from myself.  The fear focused my mind, and I was able to navigate back to my camp in only a few minutes.  I curled up in my tent, wrapped in my sleeping bag and several blankets, and, once my breathing calmed down, passed out for six hours. I’m still not sure what frightened me so much about the mirror.  I think I must have seen something in myself, something in that image of me, that I couldn’t process.  The eyes had something to do with it.  When you meet a person, your right eye looks into their left and vice versa.  In a mirror, it’s backwards.  So I think that looking into my own eyes as if I were looking at another person’s, looking into them as I never had before, made me question who I was at a fundamental level.  Perhaps I was sure before and couldn’t stand that new uncertainty, the alienness of my own eyes, especially since I was already in a mental state that could be described as “adrift” that night.  I certainly didn’t have any answers to those questions, and still don’t.  But that mirror convinced me to ask.  Remove the distortion and there is truth.  The truth that I can shake hands with myself, right hand to right hand, the way civilized people do.  The important thing about a mirror is the reflections in it, after all.