The Man in the High Tower

A buddy of mine has just moved into a vast, top-floor loft in downtown Denver along the river. He's a struggling writer seeking to synthesize a lot of influences within a single graceful stroke of his pen, something with world-historical influence and philosophical portent, and this loft is just the place to do that. With a compass rose of views, he can see the full sweep of this fulcrum city's infrastructure, including the river, a major highway, several bridges, two sporting arenas, a train artery, the main Boulder-Denver bus route, and beyond all of this... the mountains. Ironically enough, in leaving the place today I ran into a group of Dutch urban planning students, who were kicking off a tour of the US's infrastructural highlights, of which Denver's award-winning systems rank high overhead.

My thesis: that his new view is more than just a lifestyle enhancement-- it's can be an actual change in the way he thinks, in his, I hate this word but I'll use it, consciousness. I've speculated before on the metaphysical implications of moving across town, and here the results are even more plain. Colorado is already infused with an austere clarity, a lightness of being which accompanies life in the mountains surrounded by high-tech glass, big boxes, and massive earth-moving projects. To literally "sit on top" of what is already the top of the continent, a synthesis of Eastern and Western, Red States and Blues State, nature and technology, ancient geological history and next-level futurism, should add no small level of input to one's writings. To one working on a novel unifying the world's many fragments, inhaling a unitary view upon waking each morning is a practice more profound than any amount of caffiene, self-study, mentor-consulting, or drug-taking. Breathe in city/rock, breathe out city/rock.

Anyways, it all reminds me far too much of the Philip K. Dick novel The Man in the High Castle, which depicts an alternate post-WWII reality where a victorious Japan and Germany have divided the former United States in two and are now rattling their sabres at each other across the Great Plains. The story follows numerous threads as various denizens of the occupied territories, all of them influenced by the decisions of the I Ching (which Dick himself used to write the novel) seek to scratch out a living. One of these plot threads follows a woman named Juliana's search to locate the mysterious Hawthorne Abdensen, author of the banned book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a book-within-a-book depicting an alternate alternate reality in which the Allied powers have indeed won WWII. And, it turns out, Abdensen lives in a tower somewhere in Colorado!

Now to further confuse matters.

Let's just say that my friend succeeds in his implied mission to write what is essentially an alternate future for humanity, rather than the path of division and snow-crash we seem so ready to follow. It is of course concievable then that someone named Juliana would seek out his consul once this masterpiece is written. She would take the long elevator ride up to his tower, only to find the loft empty. All furniture stripped out, fixtures dismantled, paintings undone, shades and blinds pulled into their protective sheaths. Essentially, it would be a 3000-square foot blank space, with light streaming in from all sides, a blank space at the literal center of both the continent and the most influential culture on the planet. Given that this space more or less created, or gave rise to, the level of consciousness which allowed the book in question to be written, Juliana has essentially stepped into the author's head, Being John Malkovich-style. Yet, as in the movie, this awareness would be input-only -- she wouldn't be able to author new experiences, only to perceive them.

She would sit passively, locked in this high loft with sunlight streaming in from all directions, watching the award-winning infrastructure unfold, watching the mountains come in and out of view as smog levels vary, watching suffering and accidents on the highways, homeless people scoping out sleeping surfaces along the pipes of the river, kids bleeding upon skinning their knees at the skatepark, drunk Rockies fans beating the dirt outside of Coors Field with their bare knuckles, meatheads in ribbed turtlenecks and tailored shirts spitting at each other at the LoDo bars. Occasionally, the roar of a Broncos touchdown. The hiss of an iron snake passing a city's worth of coal-fuel through the Heart-land of Denver County. The incessant activity of cranes developing the landscape from the foundations upwards. The growth of meat and muscle around this Still Point loft space, armor and entertainment for the blank spot she's willingly trapped in, like a fishbowl looking out.

Would it be too much to argue that she is literally seeing our world through the eye-windows of the possible world? That is, instead of so much yuppie horror and unsustainable real estate schematas, could she conceive of Denver's meta-constructive upchuck as the groundwork laid for a trans-dimensional launch into another, outward reality? Are there actual physical spaces in our cities where the long-rumored parallel dimensions bleed a bit through? And, would sitting down to simply and accurately depict what one is seeing -- expensive lofts being constructed in 360 degrees -- already itself be an act of fictionalization? Can this mirror suck in Truth, convert them to Lies, and use the Lies to build an even newer Truth? Or are downtown loft spaces, new constructions everywhere, more like architectural worm-food, the spongy substance that some future mega-being -- ten suns wide and 8 billion moons deep -- scoops up with his mega-fingers, enjoying a nice light Rocky Mountain Snack on his way to play galactic stickball with Mars as the ball?

Is my friend's loft, then, just a privileged perspective on said "wormfood", a keyhole glimpse into our mundane human petrie dish? Bookmark this link to find out....

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