Magnum Opus
I have been woking on this idea, this novel, Paradox, Then, since I dunno, 2005. I first had the idea when i was sitting in the back of a 18 wheeler, my co-driver driving us into Death Valley, while I was reading a L.A. newspaper about Courtney Love's legal problems and trying to find anything about the upcoming funeral for Hunter S. Thompson being held the next day in Woody Creek, Colorado. I wanted to be there or at least be near there. So, it had to have been August 19, 2005? There had to be some kind of redemption arc for all of this fucked up timeline. If it didn't exist, I would write it into existence. Somehow.
My thoughts were generally, "What if there was someone out there making deaths looks like suicides to change history?" It is not a new idea generally in my mythos, as I was writing this theme into "The Traveller" stories about this as far back as 1995. It wasn't until recently that I really refined this idea, refined these people doing this kind of nefarious business, offing the important people in history so that it stays the way they have it "planned," their back story, their history, their motivations, etc. In doing so I uncovered a lot of real history behind something... More recently I had been doing research into classical composers (something that one of the main characters in the novel, Angela, is into, talking about classical composers and how they all died. She runs a music store in the novel, btw) - most of them were literally posioned by their doctors, doctors who all worked for the crown, who were extensions of the Church. Was their music silenced to keep people faithful to the Church?
But my idea then, sitting in that truck flying through the desert and then winding through the majestic California mountains in those days, was "What if I could write a novel about this?" What if I could write a novel that tries to break rules about novels? What could I get away with in service to telling an interesting story? An outline started forming in my head of the most absurd things, but it made sense to me. Actually, the more absurd the novel was, the more I could get away with telling the Truth, right? The more absurd the novel the more people might want to keep reading to figure out how it ends, right?
Another inspiration for the novel, from this same trip probably, was this statue just hanging out in the middle of the Salt Lake Desert, a statue by Karl Momen, called Metaphor: The Tree of Utah. It references, on it, the work of Beethoven, specifically the Ode to Joy by the poet Schiller in the 9th Symphony. (Supposedly, it was an Ode to Freedom before it was changed to 'Joy') This also kind of references a major theme in my surrealism. A tree standing in the desert for no reason, along with a random door just hanging out there in the desert. A door that I put in a lot of my surrealist works in high school, and beyond. Maybe it is something inspiring? But there were inconsistencies in my past with people that might never be resolved, and I put that into the novel too, in some way. Things I never got to do or say, I put that in there, in case someone ever read them, they would understand. Maybe the novel is just filled with a lot of regrets about things I was too timid to do or to try, but understand I have done everything I possibly could in my life that no one else is brave enough to do sometimes.
Not long after my driving jobs that constantly screwed me over and left me more broke than i started, I was working in a DVD factory, thinking about the entropy inherent in the closed systems of capitalism, and how to solve that problem, when I outlined the book generally, and left the ending vague and unresolved in order to make it interesting when i did finally resolve to write the novel. How does it all end? What happens to the main characters? The big concert at the end of the novel, what does it all mean? I left it open ended so that I could have some freedom about writing the ending of the book. And a lot of stuff has changed over the years. Character names, plot points, dialogue, all morphs and becomes better and more nuanced. There's a lot of symbols in the book that mean more than what they are. I connected each chapter in some way to different Tarot cards, I connected things to ancient gods and goddesses, to important animals. There are 4 parts to the book that mirror the four parts of Beethoven's last symphony, the 9th Symphony. There's all kinds of things like this throughout the whole book. References to things that other writers have written, like Philip K Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, or William S Burroughs, for example.
So, generally I've been working on this book, on and off for about 17 years? Or more? I have added so much to it, so many stolen ideas from so many places. Characters that reference older and better novels than this, probably. That is supposedly what great artists do, right? Steal from so many sources that you have something completely new? My inspiration comes from everywhere. I am always finding new things to connect to and ingest and put into the novel. Literally everything I find connects to it in some way. Maybe it is really too personal to even write, I don't know. Maybe it doesn't even matter. A lot of the things I had predicted in 2005 or 2006 when i first wrote the outlines have already pretty much happened in real life. For example, the main character travels back to L.A. to try to stop an assassination that he knows is supposed to happen. This character was an analog of a lot of then living grunge musicians, especially Scott Weiland. What if some of them knew the truth about what happened to people like Kurt Cobain? (Weiland did spend some time with Courtney Love at the Chateau Marmont, right? What if she told him something and he wrote songs about it?) Anyway, we all know what eventually happens to Weiland, to Chris Cornell, to others... Is there really a conspiracy happening in real life? Or, like the main character, am I just really just good at seeing the patterns in history repeat themselves? Or did I uncover something, and write it into fiction?
Even weird phenomenon gave me this good idea for a video game, where the main character changes the past of a small town by changing the memories of the people in a novel he is writing, and thus can alter the town by writing things into existence. There are limits to this little power of his, but it was an interesting idea for a video game, where you don't shoot things or run from scary monsters, but literally write and change the world around you. A lot of my surrealist writings in high school reflected this kind of alteration of memory, by writing things that didn't happen or weren't supposed to happen, into existence.
But this is not unsurprising to me, as I have discovered that there is a density to things, a spectrum of density from the spiritual, the highest vibration of things, to the physical, the most dense of things, and that language and symbols and memes are metaphysically speaking MORE DENSE than physical reality (at least to our stupid minds) and thus can guide our actions within it, through belief. This is literally how magick works. Words are drugs, those drugs affect our neurochemistry. Our neurochemistry is how we act and react to our environment. The words of the novel were affecting reality because words have density. Which is weird because people have not read my novel, only I know what is in my novel right now. So words that do not affect people or words that people do not know about somehow have the density to affect them. Even now, these words might infect you with some sort of curiosity or wonder about what the hell i am even saying. Who knows?
Even moving to Ohio this year was important, because the main character lives here at the start of the novel and me, myself, I had never actually even been here before this year. So I had to come here, and experience it. But I think it is time to go, before I end up like the main character in my novel, right?