Chapter 7: The Interview

INTRODUCTION: Author Paul Salamone needs little introduction. Readers of this publication know Mr. Salamone well for his famed approach to "earned inspiration" which takes the core truths of certain otherwise unpalpable New Age philosophies (Buddhist, Hindu, Techgnostic or otherwise) and runs them through the "Whatever Generation"'s existential-nihilist wringer, coming out the other side with an "atheistic ontology" with a seemingly incommensurable "post-metaphysical spiritual humanism" as its pole star. But beyond all pseudo-philosophizing, it just so happens that Salamone is an AMAZING story-writer, using every trick in the ebook to capture even the most cynical reader's attention and carry him/her far into a newly hopeful, "full-bodied and breathing/bleeding furiously" (as he would put) frontier. Below is an excerpt from a longer interview we conducted with him from the art studio of his "desert sea resort home" just outside of Sante Fe.



Mr. Salamone, thank you for your time.

Thank you.

So let's get right down to it: you were a stressed-out graphic designer working for a world-famous philosopher in the early naugties?

Mid-naughties.

Right so. And from there...?

Well, let's back up. Way up, it turns out. In college, what did I do? I ran track, I drank, I chased girls, and I read. A lot. But I also interpreted things: my actions, my surroundings, the assumptions we all held. I pushed. I was enthusiastic. But more so, I was committed to riding this dangerous edge between hope and delusion, inspired energetics and deranged self- (or other-) destruction.

No surprises there.

None, I'm sure. Anyways, it was this "life force" which carried me far into my twenties and thirties. At that critical moment you mention -- the mid-naughties, early 2006, to be precise -- I was unsure of whether or not to ignore this momentum. I was part of movement after all, with the added benefit of having some of my thinking done for me, meaning I didn't have to relentlessly question my every activity as I do so now. This provided a semblance of "ontological security", providing me with a role -- and a tribe -- that made the unbearable spaces between subject and object, or "hope and delusion" as you so graciously pointed out, all the more tolerable. But this movement's momentum was not my own. Far from it, actually. Whereas it did provide certain memetic tools and heuristic thought-action clusters, it was something many ways divorced from my intuitional core. I was, in other words, wasting my time for a good cause (let's make no bones about it, it was -- and still is -- a beautiful, good, and true cause), when I should have been embracing the evil, boundless genius I'd always held within.

Evil?

Evil in the sense of not having the world-as-given's best intentions in mind. We have to remember that intuition -- though wholly subjectively "right" -- is still a very destructive, delusive force to have at one's disposal. It destabilizes things, lays down sediments we barely understand at the time, and can grasp-glimpse only a bit of even now. I still don't know what I'm doing half the time.

And still don't. So let's back up again and talk Point A to Point B pragmatics. As you know, ours is a publication dedicated to the artistic process, and the means by which we "intuition freaks" can gain some traction in the Real/capitalist worldspace, whether as Houellebecq's "sacred parasites" or something else. What consistently interests me is, how did you rise above the "entrapment" circumstances you found yourself in early 2006? How did you become the best-loved cult-hit writer/performer selling out book sellings and imagotech conferences the way you are now?

I see you're asking the easy questions [laughs]. It was very simple, really: I grew obsessed with my own future and potential. That, and a I read a shitload of business and marketing and personal development books. I was committed to leveraging my "20% genius spike", whatever that did mean. And, with the blogs, I was simultaneously writing a lot, staying in shape, as it were.

And?

I see you're not going to let up with this own. Ok... [takes deep breathe] Let's see. I was pulling 2-3 all-nighters every week, drinking lots of coffee and Red Bull, pumping up the indie rock and doing push-ups with my man Duff in the office. My brother and I had been doing the band thing for almost a year, and it was starting to take off, at least on the creative side. I was getting some good feedbacks on my blogs, on my writing, on my stage persona and general intellect. I was also getting some push-back, some "shoulds" and "woulds", and I won't lie-- it was tough. On the one hand, I had enormous sympathy for my peers and betters at the company: I wanted us to do well, I wanted to see us succeed. Yet at the same time, in going back and reading my earlier posts, I was falling in love with the sound of my own refined writing voice. I was falling in love, as it were, with the purity of my own intuition, as dirty and as shadow-fueled as it was.

That's just amazing.

Thanks. So anyways, at about that time I started writing fake interviews with myself, such as the one you see now [shifts in chair uncomfortably, nodding at the Fourth Wall of the "wit-space"]. What was emerging, besides the almighty Telos Point of where I wanted to be, was the idea that I was onto something wholly original and unique. For one, I did not think of myself as a "medium absolutist", that is, I didn't any longer see myself as "just" a writer, but also a designer, actor, singer, comedian, musician, and behavioral-technophile.

Go on.

Well, I was starting to identify less with the meta-tools I was using, and more with the "creative engine" working out behind it all. I began focusing more on the "deep structures" of that, while increasing my daily practice regimen(s). I realized then and there that the ideas, attitudes, and orientations of that "creative vision" were the real thing, and the media it passed through were like the different languages I was training myself to speak. Which is tricky, because you don't want to flirt with mediocrity. But I was lucky, because my passion for things I was doing was such a slave-driver. That damn "muse" got me up every morning, ready to make stuff. Hence, my tagline.

"Wake up and make stuff".

Exactly. Ok, but I don't think I've answered your question yet.

Nope.

Ok, I'm getting to that. So I did these "fake" (read: temporally dislocated) interviews. I re-read Seth Godin's All Marketers Are Liars. I rebuilt my website, did a kick-ass home page, recorded some more bad "demos" with my band, and started writing/designing the early PDF mini-books.

Did you charge for these? Was there an economic engine involved?

Not yet. The problem wasn't making money at that point, as counterintuitive as it seems (I wasn't making a whole lot at that point, unfortunately). The problem was obscurity. So by offering free downloads, by spreading my intrinsically "self-help sci-fi" virally, I was just getting my name out there, doing the rounds, pressing the flesh. I had a big warm fuzzy hat, and my first job was stand out in the middle of the cogno-stadium for people to see me, not so much charge them before even putting it on.

I see. So then what?

So the website came together slowly but surely. Though I'd once toyed with the idea of becoming some sort of "creative consultant"/freelance creative lunatic-for-hire, I soon dropped that, realizing that my own "content"/vision was far more interesting than that offered by what I concieved of as my would-be clients. As much as I loved the world, it frankly bored the shit out of me, and I'd abandoned all hope of ever finding the "ol' next shit!" feeling I had in high school when discovering the innovations of hip-hop's first Golden Age (defined: late 1980s/early 90s, from Paid in Full on up to Company Flow). I realized that, if human culture was to ever "wow" me again, it had to come from me. Even BoingBoing.net, while inspiring and fun, was still 2-dimensional and flat. The vistas within were far more compelling, as inchoate and fuzzy as they were at that time.

Astonishing is more like it, but go on.

Right, as I was saying... I basically gave up on the idea of ever doing work for anyone else ever again, and got full-on obsessed with my own "thing". Which was tough, given my life-long aversion to all things narcissistic, cocky, self-assured, and vain. But, then again, I was learning from the best at the time, so...

[Laughs]

I was just sick to death of doing production art, prepping files for printers, copy-editing and light yogic stretching. I wanted the freedom to read compelling essays, to sleep when I wanted, and to please my adoring legion(s) of fans.

Did you have many at the time?

A handful. What they lacked in numbers, they made up for in enthusiasm, and it was all the wind I needed to take my little schooner out into the dangerous seas of genius [blushes to himself].

There's that modesty again! [Chuckling]

[Laughing in kind] Indeed. So, I launched the site, posted the PDFs, actually gave a lecture on one them (to some friends, at least), and took this whole "imago-self development" thing out into reality. My mission then -- as it is now -- was to violate the inherited boundary between fiction and non, unlocking the power of both esoteric visualizations and market-savvy biz-memes to basically come out and dominate the mental marketplace. The first real task was to just believe I could do it, and get paid for it to boot.

Indeed.

Indeed. So, I looked back at a lot of my blog posts, and expanded them. Eventually, a full-length book began to appear, and I pitched it to about five publishers, before landing my first book deal, which gave me more advance money than I knew what to do with.

So what did you do with it?

I travelled a bit and did my fair share of partying, but mostly invested in my futurue: bew equipment, better car, nicer clothes, the whole nine. I bought a lot of the office equipment (my "runway", as I call it) that I still use today. Fancy ergonomic stuff at budget prices (even with the big advance, I was a tightwad). Then, once I was sure it was heading into the black, I quit my job, wishing them all luck, and headed out to sea.

How nice!

Yes it was, they all wished me well, and I stay in touch with many of them to this day. So, and it's a bit fuzzy, but I was suddenly coming out with books, DVDs, keychains, ringtones -- you name it! -- all through my shitty online store, and I was making bacon -- cheddar, lettuce, all of it. It was quite a yummy time to be a young adventure-cognocapitalist.

Cognocapitalist?

You've never heard the term? An archaic neologism which never took off, a private term for what I was doing: selling ideas as capital, as commodity. Unleashing my dreams through the data pipes of the world, like so much fiction-fuel to keep the motivationhope engines running and flow-going smoothly. That's always kinda how I've seen my role: as a provider of both gas and oil for the running of the world engine. My writing inspires/drives people, and brings them together. A writer/performer couldn't ask for anything more.

Indeed not.

Indeed.

[To be continued later on...]

Chapter 6: Velcro Fiction

Fiction is at an impasse. With the advent of Franco Moretti's abstract models of the history of literature, fiction enters the epicycle of the What being written losing prominence to the When, the Why, and the How. Novels, short stories... these are only important as building blocks in relation to other building blocks, important now for the structure they unknowingly co-create rather than the worlds they depict within. This is sad, brutal, and inevitable.

If fiction, then, is destined to be nothing more significant than a leaf in a tree or an ant crawling along the forest floor, to what ends does the fiction writer write? For certainly it takes a certain amount of ego-eccentricity and willful self delusion-dissolution to even attempt the archaic act at this point. No one reads anymore, we are told, least of all Franco Moretti. The writer can no longer expect more than a handful of readers to be taken along on his obsessive (and obsessively precious) word adventures, with many of these being over-reading professional literary addicts who, though not jaded, have certainly seen enough to know all too well the limits of fictive literature (i.e. those forces pointed to by the story itself.

So why bother?

Let's take a recent example: Cory Doctorow's masterful short story "Anda's Game", wherein a tween girl in Britain finds a way to feed her diabetes-fomenting sweets habit by video gaming for real money (I won't spoil the whole thing, but it's a good read). As a precious literary object taken on its own, it is quite a feat: Doctorow's attention to the nuances of gamer jargon, British schoolgirl slang, and free market economics is something to envy. But it is not without an attendent "let down" to the fact of a short story's true impotence in relation to much more powerful culture-objects as alcohol, television, and pornography.

Perhaps it is to literature's great merit that it lacks the bone-and-gristle addictive capacity of our dirtier vices (save for those of us currently hell-bent on finishing Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos 4-part space epic), but that is part of its dissappointment: something so capable of stimulating critical thinking, attention to detail, and empathy should be more compelling an attraction than, say, a wife-approved coke hooker romp through the gold chocolate streets of VH1 rocketeer Hypno-Vegas. But the world lit behaves as though so many smooth stones on the bottom of a rushing stream: not without its localized afficianados (those rock snails and river snakes and catfish currently inhabiting your local Barnes and Noble cafe), but a virtual non-participant in relation to the velocity charge of the Main Stream. Were it that these rocks were somehow "stickier".

It is not as though Lit hasn't tried. Every year, great monsoons of these Lit Rocks pelt the Main Stream, many containing the finest of craftsmanship and breathtakingly surreal-comic plots and heart-jettisoning operatic mood shifts fit for the surface of a Cumulonimbus sucking off an active volcano, but still, the effect on the true Heart of culture and the Bowels of the political body is all but neglible. No, Lit's salvation must come from outside literature itself; it must come from the stories we tell about the stories contained in novels, short stories, screenplays, and poems. While the stories contained within these forms have changed with the flows and counter-flows of time, the Story of stories has not.


This Book Will Shave Your Life

Enter Velcro Fiction: imaginative literature intent on intentional uptake into the larger power-bodies of Culture and Power. These are river stones disguised as food, meant to be eaten by fish, spit up and shat out and generally disruptive as they simultaneously seek to build, via contigent proximity to other fiction-stones suspended in the "air" of the Main Stream, something like a permanent, fluctuating castle.

Let's back up.

What is Velcro made of? Like all such connection relays, it requires two elements -- or surfaces -- through which to be effective. One is the unruly fur mass. The other is the orderly, rigid, Spartan plasti-forest of hooks. Now, fiction has never been without its hooks: it's the first line of any story -- the lead (note the fishing anology?) -- but these have never been the main intent of a story. There are hooks, yes, but a novel or short story's general strategy is to contain a few main hooks (a protagonist, an antagonist, a compelling problem) while relying more on the story's general -- and weak -- gravitational pull to keep the reader interested. While it works in a short term sense, once the story is finished, the reader continues on to other things, the story's effect not but a small stain on his consciousness demanding little beyond the brief commitment he made to tearing through its pages.

But what if a story was all hooks, and took as a main objective not the maintenance of a coherent narrative flow -- staying true to its internal pseudo-world -- but the maintenance of a lasting relationship with the reader, one that effects the reader's actions pains and grimaces long after the "story" is released from his awareness? How does one, in other words, construct a story like a velcro patch, something both undeniably sticky but non-destructive in the ultimate sense (rather than, to extend the analogy further, the destructive one-time stickiness of a bumper sticker, or the spines of a cactus), both reusable, yet, unforgettable.

Velcro: built for effienciency, effective at certain degrees of pull-pressure, relatively indestructible, non-discriminating (any fuzz-mass will do), reusable, mutable, adaptable, useful. Velcro fiction as binding agent, functional attractor, temporary bond-surface, strong in direct proportion to mass and size and regularity of hooks.

What the surface and texture of a "velcro story" look like, where any point of the printed page is immediately compelling, not just by virture of its relationship to other fictive elements (i.e. the character name "Bob" is only interesting insofar as he plays a key role in the systems of danger and desire flowing through the linguistic microcosm), but because of what it is in and of itself: something hook-shaped and glue-prone. Shock literature, erotica, lengthy descriptions of viscera: these are the obvious examples, yet so compelling are their "hooks", and so deadly are their bites, that they render the reader rash-encrusted and codependent for the rest of his life. Theirs is a hook which inverts the reader/read relationship, tractor beaming the reader within and underneath the text in such a way that prevents all further interaction with the World (Main) Stream that brought the reader into the fiction-stone's gravity well in the first place.

Such tactics are not only unfair, they destabilize the entire ecosystem, creating energy vortices and whirlpools in the middle of pristine lakes where the time of water molecules is better spent following and adapting to larger currents and preparing for the polar freezes farther up the pike. "Shock" lit, my friends, is better seen as a field of hook-shaped daggers rather than the "temporary compulsion micro-structures" of the velcroid plasti-seal. This is not to say that sex, drugs, violence, and gruesome detail are not to be deployed throughout the hook field of a fiction field's hook panel, only they must be used sparingly in the service of a Something Greater, lest the skin of the reader-host be impaled and violated to such a degree that "floating" (remember: the real aim of the fiction-stone is uptake into the reader-fish so as to create fluctuating dreamcastles in the Main Stream "sky", where further avenues of interest may then descend) becomes impossible.

It is the Something Greater that we now turn our attention to.

All readers are different, which renders hook homogeneity the first casualty in the creation of true Velcro Fiction (VF). Where Steve, age 39, is "grabbed" by a story featuring copious email exchanges, Sally, age 19, is looking for something with a Romantic-Existentialist malaise. While Brenda, age 62, is looking for a lengthy meditation on death, John-Mule, age 8, just needs something with a lot of pretty colors and lights. VF must contain all of these hooks, and more, and they must be somewhat evenly distributed across the surface of the story.

"But aren't we just trying to Lowest-Common-Denominator ourselves into a cheap universal appeal?" you may be asking. "What about the depths achieved in a story where the writer has committed to a singular family of hooks intent on pulling a few self-selected readers deep into its healing broths? Is it really all just about success, or money, or the number of forests felled in order to table our linear imaginings?"

This ignores a fundamental element of literature, and reading in general: that people interpret things differently. And a story which makes space for multiple -- if not myriad -- interpretations, is one that will be perceived, accepted, used, and achieved in multidinous ways, rendering your "one-size-fits-all" theorem abject and crude. It is not that we wish to see 6 billion people floating through the World Main Stream using our story-stones all in the same way, allowing to think the same thoughts through them, catalyzing the same belief structures and behavior categories, etc. That's for cheap hackwork like Harry Potter, not true VF.

[The writer takes a snooty snort and continues his lambast, if only elsewhere and hidden on this blog-page.]

It is not with consensual and widespread uptake that our aims are achieved, that's only Step 1, a crass but necessary groundwork. It is the interaction of uptaked story-stones in the reader-fish swimming the Main Stream that truly interests us. A story with a vast array of hooks apparent in every single sentence -- a military memory in sentence 1, a meditation on Flash design in sentence 55, wistful memories of repairing bikes with a grandfather in sentence 1231 -- is hardly a story in itself, but a catalyst for stories, a virtually empty shell into which pour the hopes and dreams and wanderings and imaginings of thousands of attentive souls winding their honest souls through the desire-trap treachery of this innocent forest stream Life.

The story-stones, the multiple VFs shared and discussed and squabble over in the rare air of the World Main Stream, created sparks of common understanding between readers just as much as they diversify their options and enlivens their perspectives, creating what is in essence a massive and vast energy reef/pancake of ascending hive-power and ever-increasing speed, a dreamcastle prone for lift-off given the additional a crucial number of even newer VF stories.

VF stories, laying like stones on the bottom of a pond, brightly compelling and impossible to cast away in the interim, glorious fields of desire-hooks wrapping the entire species in its fiction-skin, rendering a race like so many schools and meta-schools of wish weaving in and out of each other, all of them covered in these brightly-colored stones, with the stones banging into each other, forming sparks, forming temporary structures, their hooks connecting with each other as much as they do with the minds of their human hosts, forming arches and domes and balustrades and pilasters and flying butresses and faux stone abutments and indoor ski centers and skyscrapers shaped in the names of loved ones: the unknowing reader, his entire conscious covered by a field of stories he cannot shake, the Story of these stories lifting his feet from the surface of the earth and compelling his hands towards service, to building the coherent energy flux-structures which he and his future spawn will thus inhabit.




Postscript

It is obvious that the author has had little to say about the injunctions required in the creation of authentic VF. Suffice it to say the crux of the matter lies within the behavior the "hook" itself: an odd-looking object which, upon further inspection, passively attaches itself to the reader as he pulls away. A hook, in other words, is a promise, and while not empty, it certainly has others intentions beyond its surface advertisements. And an authentic VF story-stone, a narrative field riddled with promises (like the surface of a NASCAR cruiser, or a Chinese website drowning in pop-up ads), has no choice but to attract -- and stick to -- a wide/wild swath of humanity, so much so that it becomes an expected tapestry of the environment (again, much like the hypersizzle-swath of our outdoor commercial signage displays -- billboards, to the layperson), and object approached full knowledge that its hook-promises are "lies", but a willful participation in these lies irregardless. A VF book which promises a million things to a million readers -- only to use their sucker-fluid for purposes of its own design (and theirs, albeir unknowingly) -- has no choice to succeed. Such strategems should be enough foreplay for the would-be writer of authentic VF to begin his self-stroking.

Chapter 5: The Problem of Obscurity

INTRO

To read the biographies of the great poets and writers of the past is to read a litany of frustrated expectations, unrecognized genius, and bitter, bitter obscurity. From Shakespeare to William Blake to Emily Dickinson to Philip K. Dick, it seems almost a given that to make Great Art, one must forego any chance of seeing it become Great. Does this then, from the artist in question's perspective, render life meaningless, absurd, and a waste? Isn't one better off finding a decent job, going to a nice restaurant once a week, and having enough money saved to put a few tadpoles through college and grad school? (As one can see, this question applies not only to artists but to all humans).

Perhaps not. Perhaps these conditions of obscurity are only half the story. Perhaps the artist who becomes great never truly dies in the first place, in face, it is only in death that the truly great actually begin to live.


THE TWO WINGS

This is not to ignore the wild unpredictability and heartbreaking disaster of life. Not at all. We may all be forgiven for wishing conditions were other than the ones we find here. But again, this is only half the story.

Consider that human life is a two-winged beast bisected by the juncture of death. Death is the thorax which holds the two beating fans together, and, unlike in biology, one of these wings might grow far larger than the other. What we call "normal" existence is the first wing, phase A. Phase A is what we might call the "consumption" or "intake" phase, wherein one is learning skills, mastering emotions, observing patterns, and reveling in the aesthetic splendor of the Created. One's sense of self is as a Witness perceiving a territory of artifacts, some animated and some not. Sensation flows inward, objects arise, feelings are felt, experiences passed through. Accumulation here is the rule, or better yet, Inhalation: one is a nostril, smelling the world on the in-breathe for the duration of one's life.

Phase B, the second wing, is the "production" or "outflow" phase. It is the nostril breathing outward, smelling nothing but returning carbon dioxide to the living beings who need it. While it does not include Awareness per say, it is a mistake to consider Phase B a Death, a Nothing, a black pit of Not-Doing. Nor is it intelligent to say that Phase B's lack of corporeal existence (read: biological body-mind) is to render it incapable of agency or communion or Presence. Phase B is where the lasting effects of Phase A carry forth, where the deceased's memory is multiplied in minds around the world, artistic productions duplicated and distributed, rumors spread, stories told, landmarks excavated, footprints casted, thoughts and insights echoed and borne on the robes of Rilke's Angel(s). Phase A is the seed-with-eyes, seeing only the wonderful world it is immersed in and biding its time, while Phase B is the blind plant, billowing and expanding far overhead, and bearing fruit for everyone's delight but its own.


LOOKING TO PHASE B

The problem is, the size, structure, and length of wing B is never spoken of, much less believed in. Those who do believe use antiquated conceptions such as "posterity", or "living on through the pages of history", "being reincarnated", or even "going to Heaven", while atheists go so far as to confuse wing A with the whole of life, which is sheer perversion if we use the analogy of the breathe: they confuse life with the inhale only. Both get it wrong.

Phase B is not the "next phase of life" nor "eternal life" nor "life after death" nor an "urban legend", it is a structural inevitability and necessity. When one is seeing a "life form" one is only seeing Phase A, one half of something more magnificent. One is only seeing the in-breathe, and for this reason does conventional "life" look like so many stuffy fearful people holding their breathes. What they are forgetting, of course, is Phase B.

All things consumed and all actions occurring in Phase A resonate on/with Phase B. Each wing is balanced by its opposite, every vein, claw, scale, ridge, bone, knuckle, and expanse of webbing finds its reflection on the antithesis. It is not the case that one causes the other, they simply appear, together. Both are living in a sense that transcends and includes the atheist-materialist notion of Phase A and the religious and/or historical notions of Phase B.



WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE WRITER

In writing one is engaging in a task which has classically acted to mutate the size, structure, and length of Phase B. Given that writing beats in the very blood of Civilization, and given that Civilization is one of the primary means and modes by which Phase B acts upon the world (erroneously dubbed "the Dead's curse upon the living"), writers are both sustaining and transubstantiating the very infrastructure which allows for wing B to exist in the first place. Before Phase B, before Men would exhale into "death" all that they've built up and realized in "life", we were like so many one-winged ants, shifting uncomfortably in the dirt, ignorant of the Skies we would one day sail beyond.

Every writer, in his/her very existence, holds this System in place, allowing flight to find so many other mortals. In turn, s/he extends its reach, lenghtens its grasp, ignites new possibilities: dragonflies, hummingbirds, vampire bats. Stealth fighters and VTOLs. Flying submarines and solar sails. As the reach and extent of Phase B exceeds that of Phase A, as the blind by-products of so many human "deaths" exceed the the magnificence and glory of so many conscious human "lives", the Great Winged Beast that is the Entire Earth begins to spin in circles. With one wing longer than the other, with arrow-flight destabilized by this eternal, ever-increasing return, centripetal force is only inevitable. Phase A humans are born and die, born and die, in ever-increasing blinks of the eye. So efficient is this Phase B Machine and so great is their Enthusiasm to get on with the "outflow" phase, with "production", with resonance across fields, that will willingly sacrifice Consumption, Experience, Feeling, and Aesthetics to be a part of this Great Gothic Pageant spiraling its way through time.

And writers did it all.

deleuze quote

A book is a small cog in a much more complex, external machinery. Writing is a flow among others; it enjoys no special privilege and enters into relationships of current and countercurrent, of back-wash with other flows - the flows of shit, sperm, speech, action, eroticism, money, politics, etc. Like Bloom, writing on the sand with one hand and masturbating with the other - two flows in what relationship?"
from "I have Nothing to Admit"

Chapter 4: Conjuration on a Rainy Day

"In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions -- consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behaviorial responses. Kaye considered Burroughs' work to be 'exemplary of hyperstitional practice'. Burroughs construed writing -- and art in general -- not aesthetically, but functionally -- that is to say, magically, with magic defined as the use of signs to produce changes in reality." [from CCRU's Lemurian Time War]

THIS WORLD WE MUST LEAVE

On those bland distracted days when the sun hides away and the wireless makes you woozy, the act of writing may be hopeless indeed. Obeying the vicious demands of the Secret Boss -- intuition, the Muse Most Cruel -- becomes a laughable impractability, and one's depressive, slogging efforts are devoted to erecting tents, hauling pails, fixing dams, and all the other sheer drudgery of life in the Wet Desert of the Real. Dampness pervades all thoughts, the heaviness of being bears down, and we feel old as the trees which lived in our place two hundred years ago. The dirt of our day jobs becomes the foulest of mud, and deeper we sink.

It's on these days that drastic, esoteric measures must be recovered and utilized.

See, long have you relied on your Youth to see you through, yet as today's cold chills your bones, the felt proximity to your first birthdate dissipates, and you are lost in time, a barely-animated bag of bones in a cotton shirt, squinting at a monitor. The illusions of hope and energy provided by Youth hold no longer true: you must look elsewhere for a Platform On Which to Stand, from which to launch your linguistic mortars over and beyond the ramparts of Mediocrity.

For what else is that down-tug but Mediocrity? Mediocrity is the law of the material world, the gravity against greatness, the law of obligation, habit, inertia, inconvenience, aches and pains. Mediocrity calls you up an hour before work ends to schedule a drink, when all you want to do is go home and smash paint-smeared bottles on a canvas. Mediocrity fills your belly with gas, knocks your fragile hair out of place and into the drain, imposes a slight pain on your eyelids. Mediocrity drags group conversations down to the lowest common denominator. Mediocrity cares about the weather.

Greatness cares not for the weather, nor for the world in general. Greatness, in its very structure, exists beyond everything, a castle of florescent light and golden incense, sustained by imagination, the blazing arrow which remains beneath and behind everything once the world is stripped away. Paradoxically, greatness does not lie outside of us, waiting to knock on our door at the perfect moment to grab our hand for a midnight ride through the midnight skies 'til the midnight dies. Greatness lives within us, as a choice, as a trace ingredient in every gastronomical Act, as a glimmer of potential we can either elect to nurture, or ignore and lose forever.

Because greatness does not exist "out there", it is never guaranteed. The Mediocre World doesn't need greatness in order to survive; it will muddle its way without it, because Greatness is completely foreign to the world, like a microwave in Neolithic Antarctica. 99.9999% of the world is bland, blase bullshit: dullards tripping over each other on their way to indulging in more banalities. Greatness is an alien invader, and the hostility is mutual.

Your way out of this world is not by playing its rules: actions, purchases, relationships, locations: none will save you. Greatness has to be created within, an image taken with you wherever you go, the self-icon advertising your intentions to yourself 24/7. And how is this image created? Via writing.



THE WRITTEN SPELL

Many mistake writing as a linear process, a mode of A to B communication, a means be which hard-won interiors may be respectfully expressed. It is not. Writing is black magick counted cross-stitch, a multi-nodal give and take of desperation and anguish, the pushing and pulling of mutual rapists, the blood-dripping miscommunications of dozens of snake-like interior sensations we could only define as "evil". It runs perpendicular to the path of time, ignoring the principle of development, for even the youngest writer knows that what is written is already finished before it strikes the page -- s/he is merely the interpreter of this package (see Chapter 2).

What you call "I" is but the dead apparatus dangled in front of the nose of thy true self, both as lure and probe, the gleaming spinnerets sounding through the ocean depths and whipping nets through the brine-choked ether. Your (more) authentic "I", on the other hand, is something akin to a massive battleship at the center of a flotilla: surrounded by smaller ships, service vessels, seamen, airplanes, bobbing waves, and curious life-forms. It itself remains still, issuing all orders and taking all commands but never moving itself, a steel-grey Eye in the center of your militant Hurricane Earl. Dense webs of data-power flow inward and outward, sorties are ordered, targets mapped out, enemy troops taken into custody, weather negotiated, but it -- Battleship You -- doesn't move.

It is this ageless, timeless, motionless Commander and Toucher of All that you must indentify with in your writings. Your logistical prowess must be total as you envision this super-creature surrounding the flimsy skin of your human body. Its armor is soft and malleable, yet adamantine tough. It penetrates all obscure corners of the Earth, oversees the erecting of all manner of service and support structures, commissions detailed studies of barely-imagineable subtle states of reality which scant months ago were scarcely conceived.


A DEMONSTRATION

The author has a certain such image in mind as he begins the incantation of the World As It May Be.

He receives daily emails from Ashton Kucher, who has taken the author on as a Creativity Mentor. He is penning new screeds on the decks of Mediterranean yachts, he is learning an ancient form of streetfighting in a back alley of Singapore for an article he is writing for Rolling Stone. His shoulders are big and broad, back strong and powerful, his hair long and furious, and his women, hundreds of them well-paid on every continent, maintain his web presence. The band he started with his brother years ago in a basement in Boulder is at the surreal position at the top of the pop charts, the mountain punk answer to Outkast, entertaining and beguiling audiences in myriad locations and venue sizes, from youth hostel game rooms in Thailand to sold-out snow stadiums on the coast of Alaska. They are the first band to play a power ballad for 24 hours in a row on a hover-platform circling the planet, the view of the continents and their cities breathless in the middle of the night.

Once a week he has a breakdown, questions his entire reality, and throws his soul open to circumstance, only to come back with something more enlivening and enlightening. He text messages Grant Morrison when he is unsure what to do next. Ken W. thanks him for the years of faithful service. The prairie dogs have started their own T-shirt company, and the author drops in time to time to be sure labor standards are being met. Swimsuit models sweep his floors, Iraq veterans trim his hedges, and the Bush Family issues a Christmas Card each year, which he respectfully declines each time.

And then, there are the books. They come packaged with the latest album by his band, leading off with poems and essays and articles and short stories by the other, equally bravura bandmates before launching into the Main Event, the next heart-expanding, mind-vivifying experience that has become the Author's ouvre. His writing shatters worldviews, terrifies and inspires manic visions of a depraved-yet-hopeful glory, bringing defeated lovers back together, catalyzing the creation of entire new university departments to take in and interpret the Magnificence Thus Revealed. People swear they hear music as they read, taste strange gourmet dishes as they rumble through each chapter, unable to do anything else but Get Through and Get It All.

Upon finishing, they themselves can do nothing else but write, write themselves into their own new reality, and it is via this Gang of Manic Spiders that the world is continually (re)created, sustained, and reflected back into the eyes of the Creator Himself.

And he's also really good in bed.

Chapter 3: You Are Coffee's Pawn

A passerby stopped at the table and stared down at the cup. "Is that a quadruple espresso?" he asked in amazement, and everyone except Houellebecq burst out laughing. What the passerby couldn't know, of course, was that Houellebecq was a French writer; that all French writers worth their salt drink terrifyingly strong coffee, usually in enormous quantities; and that, historically, the creme de la creme like Jean-Paul Sartre have added to their coffee habit several packs of cigarettes a day along with amphetamines in the morning and barbiturates at night. It's a tough tradition to follow, but Houellebecq was doing his best.

DARK AGENDAS
Poor darling writer, know that all notions of writerly free will or heroic independent existence are sheer fantasy: you are but pen-wielding cannon fodder in a war that started long before you were born. The crown in question is that of #1 Hot Black Energy Liquid, vied over for centuries by His Crude Darkness Petronius X ("oil" in the common tongue) and His third-world adversay, the Prince Upstart Arabica ("coffee" to you knaves). And writers, of course, from the lowliest part-time community library bathroom stall scrawler to the world-famous composer of 800-page philosophical novels, have been conscripted into the Grand Regimented Caffeine Corps, against their will or not.

It all started centuries ago when the two liquids began storming the European continent, with the erection of the first coffee house in Venice (1654 CE) and the discovery of oil distillation (1853 CE). Oil would come to power the Machines of Modernity, and coffee, in turn, the Men. As Man and Machine stormed the remaining undeveloped continents, they brought their foul hot liquids with them, building plantations and wells wherever the timid earth would sustain them. This seemingly trivial act of economic expansion, of course, came with a dark secret.

See, oil and coffee are not insentient compounds with idiosyncratic chemical properties-- far from it. Coffee and Oil, taken in total, their liquid droplets united worldwide by a 50,000 mile view from afar, are singular, living Beings, with wholly non-human agendas, autonomy, and aggression as their sole subjective experience.

Whereas Coffee has long relied on Oil as a means of transportation from the hospitable tropics into the frigid metropolitan North, it has every intention of breaking free of this dependency and insuring that, no matter how many Conocos and Texacos and Shells burn to the ground, Starbucks and its imitators will remain. Biotechnology shall be exploited, coffee beans will grow in places as dark and cold as the moon, and cracked/broken highways, now quiet after the Fall of Petrol, shall be used as coffee plantations in every major subdivision.

And Coffee is using you to achieve this.



THE INK OF YOUR PEN, THE SEMEN OF SATAN

Consider a simple fact: writers crave two things-- 1) caffeine, and 2) silence. This is not a nature-born characteristic of writers, for plenty of pleasant daitribes have been written on mere glasses of water in the middle of busy intersections. No, the Coffee-Quiet Craving is a manufactured desire propragated by the Mean Bean tearing through your stomach. One taste is all it takes: Coffee heightens your sense of hearing, rendering every turn of a gasoline-powered engine intolerable, yet only coffee may bestow the Energetic Focus required to see through this State of Noise and into creative tranquility.

Writers, in what seems a natural next move, then begin championing coffee, coffee culture, cafes in general, the French Revolution, pedestrian urbanism, pointless novels, and sociable people as if they were exercising a First Amendment Prerogative, and not the corpse-laden marching orders of a Vile Secretion with imperial ambitions. Their overwhelming choice of ink color with which to scrawl these pathetic, self-deluded diatribes? Black.

Writers, for the most part, swing Left when it comes to politics, and Lefties do love their public transportation, clean parks, and gardens -- do they not? Writers, the literati, despise a good NASCAR race, wars in the Middle East, Venezuelan coups, and every other geo-historical hallmark of Petronius X. Writers spit on SUVs, shit on piles of steaming asphalt, and piss in the mouths of vaseline purveyors and plastic pushers like the willing members of the global street gang that they are.

Bloods, Crips, Coffeenistas, Oilers, please: let's stop the madness.

Yet the agenda continues. Oil fights back with the screaming pistons of Evinrudes out in the bay, bending the light of nature with its infernal jetwash, showering the Coffeenistas with a mixed excrement of car parts, Slim Jims, 12-inch rims, and boxes of unopened Biker Boyz DVDs. Coffeenistas in turn knuckle down with a venti-sized Shot in the Dark and type out 10,000 word articles on permaculture and hitchiking and the romance of train tracks and the uncontested superiority of the Grand Tetons.

And caught in the middle is the Middle, the Middle-Aged, the Middle Managers, the Middle Class, darting to dentist appointments and soccer games and lunch meetings with the new boss, buoyed in equal parts by revving V4s and burbling pots of crappy Instant served in plastic canisters, oblivious to the fact that they have become the Black Liquid War's own Middle East, the contested Middle Ground, the meek whose fates are not up to them.


INJUNCTIONS FOR THE MERCENARY DRAMATURGE

The Semi/Seemingly Conscious Writer, through a combination of discipline, determination, self-denial, and noise tolerance, will of course fail to ally himself with either side of this War. Finding solidarity with The Great Bland Middle, s/he champions neither Working Class (the Oilnauts) nor Aristocracy (the Coffeenistas), finding instead a strange solace in the blank stares of Parking Lots, in the hidden anguish of Dumpster Clusters, in the way light casts rainbows through dew-gilded cobwebs and stinking carport stains alike.

Imbibing coffea arabica in a silent copse of trees at one moment, riding shotgun in a logo-drenched funny car the next, this mercenary writer crosses and double-crosses the line of political propiety, a Double Agent so lost in his Double-Crosses he finds faith and freedom in but the one thing Coffee and Oil share in common: speed, and lots of it.

This War is transcended when the writer sees that Coffee and Oil are but sides of the same coin, and that, in the final analysis, there is very little difference between Man and Machine. This Gothic Flatline thus transcended, the writer is free to renounce both his Humanity and his Loyalty to the Material in general, embracing a Phoenix-like gnostic flight beyond the whole Black Mess, an alchemical wedding of combustion and caffeination which births a third, more terrible Hot Black Liquid: the fluctuating Dark Matter of deep terrifying space, symbolized in each and every sentence this Writer thus spews forth.

Terrible Black Liquid Wars: find your death now, at the hands of the Ageless Ink, That Which Marks Without Chemical Trace, the Pure Sign and Signifier which Destroys, Destroys, Destroys, so that the future might be born in the bones of those who went before. A terrible new world order, camped in huts made of gutted chassis and ribcages, turning dinosaur meat on spits, kneeling in pantomimed pangeantry at the feet of the defeated Gods of Yore: the Green Starbucks Wench and the BP Sunburst.

Appendix 1: Destroy Everything So That All That Remains is Naked Intuition

Do you feel it right now? Like a Northwest Pacific purring with violence in the center of your chest, just between your lungs -- a hot steel Beast in magma and claws -- which eyes the messed and messy world as so much grass and dirt, brushed easily aside by the road crews you summon with the wave of a hand/blink of an eye. A million Chinamen toil now for you, Chinamen created inside, each one a word you have written once or twice in the past, lead by their mighty Foremen The, Foremen Is, Foremen As, Foremen When. They spread your webs of track around the world like a Great Steel Internet, and soon your 10,000 locomotives are plowing through Limitations with their cattle-catchers set on "vapor". Yet when you feel spent, when the coal runs low and the steam subsides, just take a minute, breathe, and have a walk around the trestles you have created. A beaver burrows beneath a dam, two mice fight for a scrap of food in the middle of a switching yard, and a lone deer stares off to a spot just left of the sunset, standing still, standing blind.

Chapter 2: Power-Babble of the Midnight Infrastructure

CODING IN OBSCURITY
See all speech as blasphemy against What Is. See writing -- and writing only -- as the Highest Communication, THE formal operation necessary for the bridging of Big Sky Mind and Low Down Dirty Dirty World. Spoken words are lost like so much gossamer in the winds of memory, but writing lives on. Some consider the world to be evolving into a sort of superorganism, a vast Machine of which our societies will be constituent parts, with a high speed Internet as its nervous backbone. Literalists take this to mean the only relevant jobs of the future will go to programmers, coders, hackers, dweebs, geeks, and MySQL fetishists. Not so.

Writing itself, in all of its many historical forms from inscribing agricultural data on clay tablets to sketching network architecture on a coffee shop napkin are acts of programming. Writing describes a state of affairs, sets an intention, casts a net, sequences symbols into a coded form which, when apprehended by the right individual, triggers a routine set of behaviors (while fostering novel emergence as the situation warrants). Writing is code, and society itself the Machine.

A similar mistake to be made is that writing-- in order to be effective -- must be "plugged in" to the Market-Machine, that if it is not read by outside individuals, it will accomplish nothing. This too is sheer fallacy, as it is the process of writing itself, no matter where a written piece may appear, which restructures and reprograms the Universe. The effect on the writer him/herself is immediately apparent, as a certain addictive energetic jolt shakes down the spine from brain to hands to implement to substrate. Merely inventing form out of the seeming info-chaos we harbor inside is exercise enough to send vibrations of new experience rippling down the block and out into the harbor.

Each act of writing, then, is a guerilla action, a plugging in to a higher, unseen transmission which goes unacknowledged in the 9-to-5 billboard and bank account world.

Ironically, however, the writer, in the nature of his/her activity, acts much like the most commonplace of 9-to-5 locations: the Loading Dock, a place where dark and dangerous lumbering trucks -- after hurtling untold distances through the steaming coke hooker night -- wheel around a turn to dump their exotic goods for distribution and consumption. To sit down, grab a pen, and unfold a notebook is to sit in wait for these trucks, to feel their heft and pressure bear down on one's cement I-beam frame, dripping their toxins in your hair as their wicked laborers unload sharped-edged crates onto one's soft Big Box skin. We can forgive the writer for feeling irrelevant-- if not K-Mart Anonymous! -- to the process, but chin up: those trucks have to park somewhere!

But trucks do not park in the loading bays of the vainglorious and over-confident. Those who know what they should be writing about, who plan a month's worth of retail around shipments which have yet to arrive, are dooming themselves to failure. We speak of coding, yet the distribution system follows no intelligible coding system that we are aware of. "Since I was born with abilities 3, and had life experiences 7 and 12, and worship writers 8 and 22, my first book shall be 3 + 7 + 12 + 8 + 22, and I will have all the coke hooker nights I can stand from then on."

Feh! say the shipping magnates.



LOADING DOCK PRIMER
A foundational activity for the novice Loading Dock is one of contacting the Shipping Magnates first and foremost. A furious and irrational thought-stream is one's best method of contact in this regard. Assigning his CB radio to a random channel, the foundling writer might write something such as:

I stole two thieves I stole two pints of blood I stole away into the night I stole a woman I stole a dog I stole a dagger I stole the world. I rip sand to the hands, cleaving tiny stones into further halves, pouring sheet-waves of sesame seeds down the throats of the parched, spinning newly-agitated thought fingers in that very process, turning pink turning green in the light of the sun emanating from my T-shirt. From. My. Starchy. White. T-shirt.

One might see very little of use value in the above passage (we don't anticipate water being hauled or fires being set by paeons to the mystical qualities of one's T-shirt-- or do we?), but that's not the point: the feeling is. When one is truly operating as a functioning Loading Dock, code-trucks are lining up around the block to dump untold cargoes through your docking bay and into your ample invisible warehousing mechanism. As this process increases in both speed and volume, Product Inspection becomes all but impossible, and Free Market goods flow into the world unimpinged and unhindered.

The flow of cumbersome paragraph-crates loaded with clumsy sentence-boxes stuffed with clutzy word-products becomes effortless. Through one's bland cement interiors, across the drab pebbled-surfaced tarmac of one's being, into the ultra-violet light and numbering systems of one's written output go these products, and not even the world's biggest Walmart can hold a cancer-causing candle to the Ali Baba riches flooding into one's immediate economic region.

A second consideration, which may seem directly opposed to that listed above is the injunction to be aware. While one cannot unpack and inspect each individual package rushing through, one can be careful to treat each like it is filled with the finest of Faberge eggs, flimsy Impressionist-era masterworks, and tissue-paper thin original writings of Christ. Each mysterious parcel, handled by the responsible writer, retains its squarish shape, descends from the truck-clouds and into the market-breach of the world unscathed and unharmed.

This requires utmost care, in that certain suspicious and infuriating packages might cause one to trip the breaker and derail the entire conveyor process, but rest assured this is all part of the Invisible Plan's hand.

Thirdly, and relatedly, is the realization that one's job as a Loading Dock is the last one will ever know. Once the trucks start lining up, their habit-enforcing strictures make it exceedingly difficult to offload to a new loading dock (remember: they are traveling downhill into you, the Lowest Point in the Universe). Unlike the Shipping Industry of the Natural World, the Writing Industry has yet to embrace unionization or labor standards, which our dread Muse, the cruelest CEO since the robber barons of old Sumeria, is not used to being told no. The Muse, the chief Shipping Magnate, the Galactic Importer-Exporter, is not interested in excuses: keep the flow of packages good and true, or suffer the consequences. Codes need to be shipped, the right individuals need to be apprehending them, and your resistance and griping is only getting in the way of Progress.

In other words: you're just a writer: shut the fuck up and write.