...And now for something completely different...
It's pretty late, and I really should be getting to sleep, especially as I'm going to be waking up early in order to get some work done (I've started trying to take advantage of the fact that it's much easier for me to keep my focus early in the day than it is at night), but I've got to talk to somebody about my brilliant idea, and if I don't do it now, I probably never will. So here it goes:
I want to write a novel.
I know, I know, I know, it's a horrible cliché for some pretentious pseudo-intellectual dirtbag like myself to go on about how he's going to write the Great American Novel - or some such claptrap - someday, he just needs to get his act together, or go through the right amount of personal growth, or whatever. But, y'see, I've got a really good idea for a novel.
It all started while I was reading House of Leaves (by Mark Z. Danielewski) over vacation. If you're not familiar with that particular book, it's a surrealistic, experimental, Joycean, hyper-postmodern, and trés hip Gothic horror novel about a family that finds a strange, geometrically impossible corridor in their house. This corridor leads to a strange labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors, doorways, and stairs, an almost featureless infinity of repeating chambers as barren as the Antarctic, and uninhabited save for the possibly imaginary Minotaur that lurks malevolently within. It's a damn fine book, and if it doesn't live up to its own hype (it did not, for example, drive me into black pits of existential despair about the ultimate meaninglessness and inhuman horror of that incomprehensible beast we so glibly call Reality, but that might just be because I've already been there, done that, and got the goddamn T-shirt) it did pretty well establish itself as the single best literary definition of the "postmodern ethos", if such a thing can be said to exist*.
Over the course of the novel, the inhabitants of the titular house hire some professional adventurers - y'know, National Geographic type guys - to explore this strange labyrinth that has so mysteriously appeared inside their house. They go in equipped with mountaineering gear, food rations, scientific instruments, all-weather clothing, etc., etc. They are highly organized and well-trained. And, of course, the house defeats them utterly, driving the expedition leader so insane that he tries to kill all of his team mates, and then devouring him. Although much of the symbolism of the novel is baroque and incomprehensible (and deliberately so!), this whole sequence pretty unambiguously represents the perceived failure of rationality and science to truly understand the truest and deepest mysteries of Existence.
Except...well, I'm pretty well-versed in the literature and history of exploration. Over the years, I've become familiar with the rhetoric used in discussing all those grand adventures: the races to the poles, the exploration of Amazonia, the European conquest of North America and Australia, etc., etc. And all this talk about how "there are some things which will always be beyond then ken of mere Humans; there are some things which are so far beyond us that they defy our pitiful attempts at conquest."** - this is the sort of talk that would be trotted out after the early failures, sure, but eventually it always proved to be pretty hollow. They said it about Antarctica; they said it about the Amazon basin; they said it about the highest peaks of the Alps and Himalayas both; they're still saying it about the oceans sometimes, though you'd really think that people would have learned by now. But, later expeditions would analyze the mistakes of their predecessors, learn from them, refine their techniques, improve on their organization, and try again. These later expeditions wouldn't always succeed immediately, but eventually, once enough ingenuity and organization was applied to the problem, they'd make the goal. And so it came to pass that now there are several permanent manned bases in Antarctica, and we worry more about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest than about the fate of the various research groups regularly sent there by the Smithsonian and other such institutions.
My point is that the "fundamental incomprehensibility of the Universe" is a philosophical concept that doesn't get very much support from actual human experience. I mean, hell, let's take modern Physics, the discipline most frequently pointed to by academics as justification for their use of this particular rhetorical device. According to the standard story, the Victorian belief in Reason and Progress was shattered by the work of Planck, Heisenberg, Gödel, et al., who conclusively showed that the universe is unstable, subjective, irrational, and dream-like. Said academics and intellectuals have been operating under this assumption (and the tacit secondary assumption that this is depressing - see here) for the past eight-odd decades. Meanwhile, the physicists have been going on to quantify, with greater and greater accuracy, just how unstable, subjective, irrational, and dream-like the universe is, and the engineers and computer scientists have been finding ever-more powerful ways of taking advantage of the universe's instability, subjectivity, irrationality, and dreaminess so as to better serve Civilization and Capitalism. No, what the evidence suggests, my Dear Readers, is that even such things as the fundamental incomprehensibility of the Universe are no match for the ingenuity, organization, and ability to learn from our mistakes of us xenocidal plains apes.***
And that's what I want my novel to be about. I want it to be a sci-fi novel, about a group of explorers investigating some truly strange artefact that seems completely incomprehensible, and completely inimical to human life, much like the house of Danielewski's novel, or the endless realm of Stairs of that strange little surrealist story I wrote in high school.^ Or Arthur C. Clarke's enigmatic spaceship Rama, from his fabulous Rendezvous With Rama - one of the great classics of science fiction. Or Borgés' mocking "Library of Babel". Or H.P. Lovecraft's Antarctic "Lost City of the Old Ones" from At the Mountains of Madness. Countless other expeditions have been mounted to explore it and understand its secrets before this one, but they all tried and failed - or, more commonly, tried and died. The object has been given up as a lost cause, as a Moby Dick-like symbol of the enigmatic, inhuman strangeness of the universe - and of our own incomprehensible minds. It drives people insane and devours them within its uncaring self. It is a whispered object of terror throughout the civilized world (or solar system, or whatever).
But this latest expedition is different. Like Amundsen's successful journey to the South Pole - the first in history - this expedition is planned as unromantically as possible. The organizers have learned from the past, and are as thoroughly prepared for the insanity-inducing strangeness of the artefact as possible. If it has any secrets, they will uncover them. And if its secret is that it has none - well, then they'll uncover that, instead. With the dull thoroughness of a CPA, they will categorize the impossible, measure the inconceivable, and chart the subjective. Like the Red Queen, they will do six impossible things before breakfast every day, until they have become thoroughly bored with mere impossibility.
On the flip side of this obsessive utilitarianism will be the artefact itself^^. It really is as grand and imposing and enigmatic as all that, and it not only provides a serious challenge to the expedition and a source of High Adventure, but it also provides a source of deep fascination as well. After all, just because the Amazon rainforest didn't prove to be as "unconquerable" as previous generations made it out to be doesn't mean that it's not completely awesome. Because it is. And this artefact should be completely awesome, too; something that draws one in with its otherworldliness, its beauty, and its scientific interestingness.
To emphasize both sides, I'd like to tell the story primarily through curt dispatches from the expedition, reports of scientific findings, technical briefings, "captain's logs", and other such material. The book itself is to be a reflection of the obsessiveness that drives scientists to collect and collate all of these great masses of information, out of the belief that real understanding comes, not from just dicking around talking about things, but from just shutting up and doing the goddamn maths. It should reflect the belief, so common among scientists, but so hard to explain to laypeople, that for those of us who have these obsessive drives, "shutting up and doing the maths" can lead to experiences of beauty at least on par with the highest flights of the poets.
So, what d'ya think, Gentle Readers? Am I as full of shit as I sound to myself? Or do you think it's as interesting, as fascinating, idea for a book as I do? Of course, I'll in all likelihood never write the damn thing, so the question is purely academic, but nevertheless I'm posing it to y'all.
----
In completely unrelated news, I've got a bunch of Spring Break pics, short stories, and Tree write-ups to share with y'all, but the nonexistent gods alone know when I'll actually get around to posting them. As proverbialpulp wrote a little while ago, I suck.
Shutting up and doing the goddamn maths since 1986,
--mark
*Look, I already called myself a "pretentious pseudo-intellectual dirtbag", OK, so you can't say you weren't warned that there'd be sentences like this in this entry.
**Not an actual quote from the book. I just dig on melodrama.
***Of course, the Universe will probably still kill us all in the end (unless we kill ourselves off first). But the point is, that it's far from a foregone conclusion, and anyone who boldly states that X is "forever beyond us" had better be prepared to eat his or her words, no matter how far-out that X may be. Hell, we've already reached the point where we've got more to worry about from ourselves than we do from any other force in the universe. One might even speculate that all of the existentialist and post-modernist nihilism is a reaction to the terrifying prospect, brought on all sudden-like by industrial civilization, of humanity's fundamental POWER. But I'll leave more on that particular piece of middlebrow commentary for another time.
^Which I keep on meaning to re-write. Given my life expectancy (50 more years, and that's assuming no major advances in medical technology - hah!), there's probably a 50/50 chance I'll actually do that someday.
^^I keep calling it just "the artefact" simply because I have no idea what it will actually be. Although I've been heavily inspired by all the sources I named above (Danielewski, Clarke, Borgés, and Lovecraft), I don't want to crib from any of their stuff too much.
I want to write a novel.
I know, I know, I know, it's a horrible cliché for some pretentious pseudo-intellectual dirtbag like myself to go on about how he's going to write the Great American Novel - or some such claptrap - someday, he just needs to get his act together, or go through the right amount of personal growth, or whatever. But, y'see, I've got a really good idea for a novel.
It all started while I was reading House of Leaves (by Mark Z. Danielewski) over vacation. If you're not familiar with that particular book, it's a surrealistic, experimental, Joycean, hyper-postmodern, and trés hip Gothic horror novel about a family that finds a strange, geometrically impossible corridor in their house. This corridor leads to a strange labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors, doorways, and stairs, an almost featureless infinity of repeating chambers as barren as the Antarctic, and uninhabited save for the possibly imaginary Minotaur that lurks malevolently within. It's a damn fine book, and if it doesn't live up to its own hype (it did not, for example, drive me into black pits of existential despair about the ultimate meaninglessness and inhuman horror of that incomprehensible beast we so glibly call Reality, but that might just be because I've already been there, done that, and got the goddamn T-shirt) it did pretty well establish itself as the single best literary definition of the "postmodern ethos", if such a thing can be said to exist*.
Over the course of the novel, the inhabitants of the titular house hire some professional adventurers - y'know, National Geographic type guys - to explore this strange labyrinth that has so mysteriously appeared inside their house. They go in equipped with mountaineering gear, food rations, scientific instruments, all-weather clothing, etc., etc. They are highly organized and well-trained. And, of course, the house defeats them utterly, driving the expedition leader so insane that he tries to kill all of his team mates, and then devouring him. Although much of the symbolism of the novel is baroque and incomprehensible (and deliberately so!), this whole sequence pretty unambiguously represents the perceived failure of rationality and science to truly understand the truest and deepest mysteries of Existence.
Except...well, I'm pretty well-versed in the literature and history of exploration. Over the years, I've become familiar with the rhetoric used in discussing all those grand adventures: the races to the poles, the exploration of Amazonia, the European conquest of North America and Australia, etc., etc. And all this talk about how "there are some things which will always be beyond then ken of mere Humans; there are some things which are so far beyond us that they defy our pitiful attempts at conquest."** - this is the sort of talk that would be trotted out after the early failures, sure, but eventually it always proved to be pretty hollow. They said it about Antarctica; they said it about the Amazon basin; they said it about the highest peaks of the Alps and Himalayas both; they're still saying it about the oceans sometimes, though you'd really think that people would have learned by now. But, later expeditions would analyze the mistakes of their predecessors, learn from them, refine their techniques, improve on their organization, and try again. These later expeditions wouldn't always succeed immediately, but eventually, once enough ingenuity and organization was applied to the problem, they'd make the goal. And so it came to pass that now there are several permanent manned bases in Antarctica, and we worry more about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest than about the fate of the various research groups regularly sent there by the Smithsonian and other such institutions.
My point is that the "fundamental incomprehensibility of the Universe" is a philosophical concept that doesn't get very much support from actual human experience. I mean, hell, let's take modern Physics, the discipline most frequently pointed to by academics as justification for their use of this particular rhetorical device. According to the standard story, the Victorian belief in Reason and Progress was shattered by the work of Planck, Heisenberg, Gödel, et al., who conclusively showed that the universe is unstable, subjective, irrational, and dream-like. Said academics and intellectuals have been operating under this assumption (and the tacit secondary assumption that this is depressing - see here) for the past eight-odd decades. Meanwhile, the physicists have been going on to quantify, with greater and greater accuracy, just how unstable, subjective, irrational, and dream-like the universe is, and the engineers and computer scientists have been finding ever-more powerful ways of taking advantage of the universe's instability, subjectivity, irrationality, and dreaminess so as to better serve Civilization and Capitalism. No, what the evidence suggests, my Dear Readers, is that even such things as the fundamental incomprehensibility of the Universe are no match for the ingenuity, organization, and ability to learn from our mistakes of us xenocidal plains apes.***
And that's what I want my novel to be about. I want it to be a sci-fi novel, about a group of explorers investigating some truly strange artefact that seems completely incomprehensible, and completely inimical to human life, much like the house of Danielewski's novel, or the endless realm of Stairs of that strange little surrealist story I wrote in high school.^ Or Arthur C. Clarke's enigmatic spaceship Rama, from his fabulous Rendezvous With Rama - one of the great classics of science fiction. Or Borgés' mocking "Library of Babel". Or H.P. Lovecraft's Antarctic "Lost City of the Old Ones" from At the Mountains of Madness. Countless other expeditions have been mounted to explore it and understand its secrets before this one, but they all tried and failed - or, more commonly, tried and died. The object has been given up as a lost cause, as a Moby Dick-like symbol of the enigmatic, inhuman strangeness of the universe - and of our own incomprehensible minds. It drives people insane and devours them within its uncaring self. It is a whispered object of terror throughout the civilized world (or solar system, or whatever).
But this latest expedition is different. Like Amundsen's successful journey to the South Pole - the first in history - this expedition is planned as unromantically as possible. The organizers have learned from the past, and are as thoroughly prepared for the insanity-inducing strangeness of the artefact as possible. If it has any secrets, they will uncover them. And if its secret is that it has none - well, then they'll uncover that, instead. With the dull thoroughness of a CPA, they will categorize the impossible, measure the inconceivable, and chart the subjective. Like the Red Queen, they will do six impossible things before breakfast every day, until they have become thoroughly bored with mere impossibility.
On the flip side of this obsessive utilitarianism will be the artefact itself^^. It really is as grand and imposing and enigmatic as all that, and it not only provides a serious challenge to the expedition and a source of High Adventure, but it also provides a source of deep fascination as well. After all, just because the Amazon rainforest didn't prove to be as "unconquerable" as previous generations made it out to be doesn't mean that it's not completely awesome. Because it is. And this artefact should be completely awesome, too; something that draws one in with its otherworldliness, its beauty, and its scientific interestingness.
To emphasize both sides, I'd like to tell the story primarily through curt dispatches from the expedition, reports of scientific findings, technical briefings, "captain's logs", and other such material. The book itself is to be a reflection of the obsessiveness that drives scientists to collect and collate all of these great masses of information, out of the belief that real understanding comes, not from just dicking around talking about things, but from just shutting up and doing the goddamn maths. It should reflect the belief, so common among scientists, but so hard to explain to laypeople, that for those of us who have these obsessive drives, "shutting up and doing the maths" can lead to experiences of beauty at least on par with the highest flights of the poets.
So, what d'ya think, Gentle Readers? Am I as full of shit as I sound to myself? Or do you think it's as interesting, as fascinating, idea for a book as I do? Of course, I'll in all likelihood never write the damn thing, so the question is purely academic, but nevertheless I'm posing it to y'all.
----
In completely unrelated news, I've got a bunch of Spring Break pics, short stories, and Tree write-ups to share with y'all, but the nonexistent gods alone know when I'll actually get around to posting them. As proverbialpulp wrote a little while ago, I suck.
Shutting up and doing the goddamn maths since 1986,
--mark
*Look, I already called myself a "pretentious pseudo-intellectual dirtbag", OK, so you can't say you weren't warned that there'd be sentences like this in this entry.
**Not an actual quote from the book. I just dig on melodrama.
***Of course, the Universe will probably still kill us all in the end (unless we kill ourselves off first). But the point is, that it's far from a foregone conclusion, and anyone who boldly states that X is "forever beyond us" had better be prepared to eat his or her words, no matter how far-out that X may be. Hell, we've already reached the point where we've got more to worry about from ourselves than we do from any other force in the universe. One might even speculate that all of the existentialist and post-modernist nihilism is a reaction to the terrifying prospect, brought on all sudden-like by industrial civilization, of humanity's fundamental POWER. But I'll leave more on that particular piece of middlebrow commentary for another time.
^Which I keep on meaning to re-write. Given my life expectancy (50 more years, and that's assuming no major advances in medical technology - hah!), there's probably a 50/50 chance I'll actually do that someday.
^^I keep calling it just "the artefact" simply because I have no idea what it will actually be. Although I've been heavily inspired by all the sources I named above (Danielewski, Clarke, Borgés, and Lovecraft), I don't want to crib from any of their stuff too much.