A Conspiracy of Twistedness
Since it's my birthday and I'm too sick to go outside and too concerned about contagion to be around healthy folks, I figure I'll make myself useful by putting down a stream of thought that has been nagging at me all week.
It's about Chuck Palahniuk. Or, at least about a couple of his works.
Anyone who knows me for a real length of time knows how I feel about Chuck, or at least about two of his most famous books, Fight Club and Choke. I quote Tyler Durden and the rest of Fight Club all these years later because my feelings for the work haven't dampened. Like the wearing of black clothing, it wasn't just a phase. My feelings about Choke are even more personal and fresh, to the point that I don't know the book by chapter and verse so much as by walking around with it under my skin.
The first problem I had with Choke was when Chuck wrote that "nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it." At some point in the past, I know I would have believed that to be true, probably without question. But I've lived just long enough for several things to have blossomed beyond even my reckoning; I've experienced more than one moment that was even more powerful and perfect than I had imagined in my many fantasies. Those are the moments compressed into imperfect memories, rendered in broken and hazy images and sensations because they were so intense that there was no other way to capture them. It's like the malfunctioning of camera equipment too close to a nuclear blast. The circuits get overloaded, but you know how incredible it was by how deeply they were fried.
So it begs the question: Are my fantasies too simple, or is my imagination just weak?
On the one hand, there are always times and ways that our fantasies are simple. There are favorite scenes that we construct just enough to bring satisfaction, and they're not meant to be Shakespeare; they're just meant to be gratifying and to get the job done. Working-people's fantasies. The scene in the porno tape that gets watched again and again and again until it wears thin and more ghostly lines flicker over its faded thread. ( Okay, so maybe that was too archaic for the younger audience. I mean, how many folks out there never had much to do with VHS? Their numbers are only growing.) It's happened with just about every media we've used for fantasies. The pages of your favorite book become worn and creased, the magazine will either fall open more readily to the best pages or refuse to reveal them entirely. Only digital media leave no real physical traces of our returning. Do the same habits prevail in cyberspace, with bookmarked sites and videos replayed from 3:57 minutes onward?
Regardless, I don't know that many people would describe me as a person of little or poor imagination. I know some people felt I had too much of one, especially while I was growing up and fantasy was what helped me survive. I spent half my days zoned out on my own, or spurred on by music, books, and television. That was the only way to cope for a while, and when I had reached minimum safe distance from childhood, I yoked my imagination into the terrible work of making sense of it all. Recollection can be a horrible thing when your mind does you the courtesy of playing your life back in surround-sound smell-o-vision. But you have to have some kind of imagination to weave a new pattern from that ugly mess. I like to think that, whatever else, I managed to do the good things I have done because, even at my worst, I imagined that life could be so much more than yelling and scraping and loneliness.
This is why I love Chuck. I don't have to agree. But at least I know that I believe that sometimes - if you are very lucky, or perhaps very unlucky, depending on how you look at it - reality can outstrip your dreams. Moments can come together better than you could have achieved in the private theater of your mind, and when they are done, they will leave you changed.
So onto the thing that stuck in my craw this week. It occurred to me while I was reading Rant (mostly while seated on the porcelain throne) that Chuck seems to like to weave almost casual conspiracies of like-minded people into some of his books, notably Fight Club and Rant. And it's a very nice fantasy, to watch his main characters stumble into comrades who already understand the twisted desires of the soul, sometimes without having to be told. The rules of Fight Club hardly seem necessary, considering that the first two are made to be broken, and the others are needed so the purpose of the club can continue to be served.
Because the goal of Fight Club or Party Crashing isn't to destroy an enemy. The goal is to express that inner emptiness and to survive the physical expression of someone else's wounds. To touch the live wire of life by courting harm and adrenaline and even disaster. To take some control even while you give it up. To wake up from your mundane job and body and life just enough to be glad you are around for any of it. You come out of Fight Club feeling stronger because you are still alive, and because you have more people surviving the pain with you.
A brotherhood of discontent, bound by its scars. A family chosen not through your job or your race but through your broken places.
I've experienced a bit of that, but never so quickly, and rarely to such a depth. And I'm not sure I've ever quite had it with such an unspoken understanding. It is, of course, something that I have deeply yearned for, probably my entire life. I would have loved Chuck anyway, but maybe this fantasy, this shared desire is one of the reasons why.
It's about Chuck Palahniuk. Or, at least about a couple of his works.
Anyone who knows me for a real length of time knows how I feel about Chuck, or at least about two of his most famous books, Fight Club and Choke. I quote Tyler Durden and the rest of Fight Club all these years later because my feelings for the work haven't dampened. Like the wearing of black clothing, it wasn't just a phase. My feelings about Choke are even more personal and fresh, to the point that I don't know the book by chapter and verse so much as by walking around with it under my skin.
The first problem I had with Choke was when Chuck wrote that "nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it." At some point in the past, I know I would have believed that to be true, probably without question. But I've lived just long enough for several things to have blossomed beyond even my reckoning; I've experienced more than one moment that was even more powerful and perfect than I had imagined in my many fantasies. Those are the moments compressed into imperfect memories, rendered in broken and hazy images and sensations because they were so intense that there was no other way to capture them. It's like the malfunctioning of camera equipment too close to a nuclear blast. The circuits get overloaded, but you know how incredible it was by how deeply they were fried.
So it begs the question: Are my fantasies too simple, or is my imagination just weak?
On the one hand, there are always times and ways that our fantasies are simple. There are favorite scenes that we construct just enough to bring satisfaction, and they're not meant to be Shakespeare; they're just meant to be gratifying and to get the job done. Working-people's fantasies. The scene in the porno tape that gets watched again and again and again until it wears thin and more ghostly lines flicker over its faded thread. ( Okay, so maybe that was too archaic for the younger audience. I mean, how many folks out there never had much to do with VHS? Their numbers are only growing.) It's happened with just about every media we've used for fantasies. The pages of your favorite book become worn and creased, the magazine will either fall open more readily to the best pages or refuse to reveal them entirely. Only digital media leave no real physical traces of our returning. Do the same habits prevail in cyberspace, with bookmarked sites and videos replayed from 3:57 minutes onward?
Regardless, I don't know that many people would describe me as a person of little or poor imagination. I know some people felt I had too much of one, especially while I was growing up and fantasy was what helped me survive. I spent half my days zoned out on my own, or spurred on by music, books, and television. That was the only way to cope for a while, and when I had reached minimum safe distance from childhood, I yoked my imagination into the terrible work of making sense of it all. Recollection can be a horrible thing when your mind does you the courtesy of playing your life back in surround-sound smell-o-vision. But you have to have some kind of imagination to weave a new pattern from that ugly mess. I like to think that, whatever else, I managed to do the good things I have done because, even at my worst, I imagined that life could be so much more than yelling and scraping and loneliness.
This is why I love Chuck. I don't have to agree. But at least I know that I believe that sometimes - if you are very lucky, or perhaps very unlucky, depending on how you look at it - reality can outstrip your dreams. Moments can come together better than you could have achieved in the private theater of your mind, and when they are done, they will leave you changed.
So onto the thing that stuck in my craw this week. It occurred to me while I was reading Rant (mostly while seated on the porcelain throne) that Chuck seems to like to weave almost casual conspiracies of like-minded people into some of his books, notably Fight Club and Rant. And it's a very nice fantasy, to watch his main characters stumble into comrades who already understand the twisted desires of the soul, sometimes without having to be told. The rules of Fight Club hardly seem necessary, considering that the first two are made to be broken, and the others are needed so the purpose of the club can continue to be served.
Because the goal of Fight Club or Party Crashing isn't to destroy an enemy. The goal is to express that inner emptiness and to survive the physical expression of someone else's wounds. To touch the live wire of life by courting harm and adrenaline and even disaster. To take some control even while you give it up. To wake up from your mundane job and body and life just enough to be glad you are around for any of it. You come out of Fight Club feeling stronger because you are still alive, and because you have more people surviving the pain with you.
A brotherhood of discontent, bound by its scars. A family chosen not through your job or your race but through your broken places.
I've experienced a bit of that, but never so quickly, and rarely to such a depth. And I'm not sure I've ever quite had it with such an unspoken understanding. It is, of course, something that I have deeply yearned for, probably my entire life. I would have loved Chuck anyway, but maybe this fantasy, this shared desire is one of the reasons why.