maps of endless things, or myriad mirrors made from Iceland spar

This is one of those posts sparked by Against the Day that is itself so potentially Pynchonian that, even before I have written it, I suspect no one in their right mind will want to read it.

As one is told to do in classes on expository writing, I had better try to express its thesis right up front, though to provide a comprehensible condensation may prove impossible.

The most fatuous way of putting it could be mistaken for a jejune statement about the relationship of fiction to reality. Namely, that the thrust of cultural studies in general for the past few decades has been that we live in a systematically imposed fiction. Society is distorted in directions meant to be beneficial to those who pull its financial levers; however, sources of information are not just manipulated to provide a specific sort of spin. Instead, that spin itself, that choice of words and ways of thinking, generates a universe of discourse in which dissent becomes, not impossible, but certainly implausible. The fact that dissenters often really are deluded lunatics helps reinforce the prevailing model. If They can get you to ask the wrong questions, They don’t have to worry about answers, as Antonio Gramsci said to George Orwell. (Joke; look up Gramsci’s main theses in any number of sources, and everybody knows Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not everybody knows the Proverbs for Paranoids in Gravity’s Rainbow from which that quote is actually taken.)

This is not the whole story, but it is the story they (the other they) tell.

The mirror image of this idea is the one I have also floated in these digitally encoded Livejournal pages; the notion that not just social reality but all of reality is distorted for the benefit of…well, that is what the systems that assert this do not agree on. Including whether it is for the benefit of anyone or anything at all, but simply distorted from what those who set out to construct it originally hoped and intended.

Whether the catastrophe is a conspiracy of the willing or a simple failure of engineering is the plotline of many lunatic narratives that set out to explain the world. Whether it is even a catastrophe, given the fact that it is we who define what a catastrophe is, is…well, you get the picture. You can pretty well map out the starting presuppositions on a grid. Where you end up at the end of the story depends on many variables, including whether you have the slightest notion of what we would call standard logic.

We have gone through that one several times over on this blog, too, and most recently it has been the topic of an attempt to construct a syllabus for a Yale class in fantasy fiction. Cultures that share very few of our starting points tend to tell stories that meander in directions that make sense to them, but not to us, sometimes so much so that our own notions of what constitutes a good story become unsettled. (Cf, the student to whom Clifford Geertz so successfully opened the Azande’s imaginative universe that the student began to believe that maybe the Azande were right.)

It has taken 500 words for the introductory precis, so I think I shall condense the body of what otherwise would be an even more unreadable post than usual.

One of the sudden plot hinges in Against the Day is the Chums of Chance’s adventure in Venice in which they are sent to locate the alternative to the Silk Road that Venetian tradesmen mapped and linked by alternate outposts across Inner Asia. The route, however, is mapped by anamorphic distortion (think of the smear in Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors” that becomes a skull when viewed at the proper angle).

“The author of the Itinerary imagined the earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the optical arrangements for whose projection onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer indeed. …we have a sort of anamorphoscope, more properly no doubt a paramorphoscope because it reveals worlds which are set to the side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world given to us. … The Itinerary … was encrypted as one of these paramorphic distortions, meant to be redeemed from the invisible with the aid of one particular configuration of lenses and mirrors, whose exact specifications were known only to the cartographer and the otherwise hopelessly insane artisans who produced it, plus the inevitable heirs and assigns , whose identities are even today a matter of lively debate.”

Pynchon’s lovely conceit brought me up short because it takes the basic contention of René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue and translates it via the assumptions and chief metaphor of The Tower of Myriad Mirrors…a whacked-out Chinese novel about the journey through Inner Asia of a Buddhist monk. His whole journey involves improbable adventures that turn out to be one more turn of the world’s systematic distortions.

Now, I find it unlikely that Pynchon would have read this footnote-novel to The Journey to the West. Few enough ever get around to reading The Journey to the West, much less this engaging side trip. Had it not been translated by my friend Larry Schulz, I would have remained unaware of its existence.

And yet Pynchon’s paragraph immediately preceding this anamorphic-mirror metaphor deals with the fact that politicians and metaphysicians were obsessed with Inner Asia circa 1908, but for opposing reasons, such that the former could exploit the exploits of the latter explorers. This suggests that he has read at least the recent books on the overlap of the journeys of spies, mystic seekers, and archaeologists, the latter of whom not only brought Buddhist texts back to Europe as the monk of The Journey to the West brought them from India to China, but sawed a few frescoes right out of the Dunhuang caves and brought those back too. The real stories Pynchon doesn’t incorporate into Against the Day aren’t there because they are too unlikely to be the stuff of good fiction.

But that brings me to my point, or the only one of several I feel like making at the moment: The trajectories that define fiction are, as we have long realized, arbitrary constructs designed to fulfill emotional needs for beginnings, middles, and ends laid down in a structured, comprehensible sequence. The systematic distortions of society also satisfy these needs, and are every bit as fictional, providing imaginary solutions to real problems.

The greatest works of fantasy fiction imagine instead what it would be like to provide real solutions to imaginary problems, and by a sort of anamorphic projection, real solutions to real problems. They are a type of distorting mirror that gives us the vague feeling that somehow, in projecting unreality, they provide glimpses of a reality that is neither that of the fictional world that realist novels create nor that of the systematically imposed distortion we call ordinary reality.

Probably this too is just a side effect of the emotional needs that are met differently by so-called realist fiction. It’s for sure that run-of-the-mill fantasy caters to no more than the usual increases in various body chemicals that otherwise accompany sexual arousal or the mingled emotions stirred by carnival rides.

But certain novels, and longtime readers of this blog know which ones I mean, stir the vague sense of uneasy cognition best summarized by the cliché for that kind of disturbance, “Wait a minute….” --- a sense of dizzying realization that usually, but not always, dissolves when subjected to analytical reason.

At the very least, such novels provoke readers to wonder whether, like René Daumal, the writers have created worlds in which they clearly do not believe, in order to provide a distorted reflection of a world in which they at least halfway do believe. Sometimes these half-beliefs arise in the course of producing the novel; like some Pynchon character, certain novelists creating a total fantasy have been led to think, “Oh, crap, I’ve stumbled onto a real explanation while I was trying to make something up.” Which does not mean that it is a real explanation; but such vertiginous cliffs of fall are what makes Thomas Pynchon an anamorphic projection of some people’s everyday reality.

Robert Anton Wilson? everything else but

My other post of today (an egregious sin, I know) was written yesterday morning. After finishing it I opened the New York Times to find the obituary of Robert Anton Wilson. (If I allowed myself an internet connection at home, I would be on the Web immediately upon awaking instead of paging through books by my bedside, so I am happy I have pursued the path of delayed information. Reading Wilson’s obit online would have derailed my entire other post.)

I have never read more than a few lines of Robert Anton Wilson, preferring the other tri-named Wilson (Peter Lamborn) when it comes to chronicles of strangeness. But the obituary reminded me of a relatively recent post on a local listserv by Robert Cheatham that seems curiously relevant to Wilson’s life-long enterprise.

Cheatham directed us to a bibliography of studies and essays regarding the DMT experience on a site called The Brainsturbator (I think; will check this when I get online, see foregoing paragraph). Yes, www.brainsturbator.com, with links all over the place.

The studies reinforced my happiness at never having taken hallucinogens of any description, or even had a visual or auditory hallucination. Closest I can come is the visual category mistake in which one sees (in someone else’s example) a piercingly lovely wall of cascading tropical flowers and then sees that it is actually a horrendously rusted metal door with a cluttery vine growing on it. “Does the actuality negate the powerful aesthetic experience of seeing the flowers?” was the other person’s question, and I wish I could remember which writer it was; it wasn’t a philosopher, it was a nature writer like Edwin Way Teale. Well, of course the majority of powerful aesthetic experiences depend on making us see some well-arranged layers of pigment on a piece of cloth as the Wedding at Cana, or whatever.

This sort of category-mistake hallucination is also implied by Yeats’ line “Sixteen apparitions have I seen; the worst a coat upon a coat hanger,” though there are many other possible readings of those words. (That is why Yeats is a great poet.)

Owen Barfield suggested that this kind of experience was indicative of the participatory nature of all of reality. As an anthroposophist, he insisted that we collectively (not individually) co-create the world, because we are not individual beings, anyway, but linked to larger forces. He believed that the withdrawal of the projections which earlier centuries believed were literal beings would lead to comprehension of the full dimensions of this realization, which founder of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner interpreted in terms of a…well, let’s not go there, shall we?.

One could produce a materialist interpretation of all those assertions, if one wanted to, and I’m sure Walter Benjamin would have tried to do it. Certainly Barfield’s metaphysics reflect the biological reality that we live in an interlinked physical environment in which our very perceptions depend on the condition of the biochemistry of our bodies, which in turn is influenced by the air we breathe, and, literally, the ground we walk on. Too much of this, too little of that, and we fall into irritated reverie, or have vivid inner visions just before passing out.

Barfield used a piece of nonsense verse to illustrate his point (I quote it so comment-writers will have something to focus on other than the ideas here). He used it to make the elementary point of “He thought he saw” being negated by “He looked again”: “He thought he saw a banker’s clerk / Descending from a bus; / He looked again, and found it was / A hippopotamus.”

Barfield, longtime readers of this blog will recall, later wrote an allegorical novel, Unancestral Voice, in which the implications of his beliefs were put into the voice of the disembodied Meggid (a name Barfield distorted from a Kabbalistic text to make clear he was talking about a different sort of internal revelation). The Meggid explained how the other world has to use pathetically inadequate vessels to communicate with this one via internal voices, not least because those who would more coherently serve as intermediaries wouldn’t believe an external revelation if, in the words of Thomas Pynchon, it came up and committed morsus fundamenti. (Pynchon actually writes morsus fundamento, a coinage worthy to sit alongside “Attenzione al culo,” a few pages later.)

As I’ve written before, if I heard an internal voice, I would go to a doctor, and I’m obviously favorably inclined towards examining these topics.

This returns us, finally, to the topic of the DMT downloads (for an astonishing quantity of stuff is provided via links to the Brainsturbator webpage, including downloads of entire books).

The DMT investigators (who, like Daniel Pinchbeck of whom I have written previously, seem to be participatory investigators) reflect extensively on the data that most people taking DMT have the experience of talking with extraterrestrials, who look just like the ones described by Whitney Strieber and such. But one informant assures them that if the drug is taken in more serene surroundings such as a riverbank in the countryside, one will chat with forest fauns and other beneficial beings. Pinchbeck, if it was indeed DMT that did this to him among the multitudinous contents of his pharmacological array, saw hordes of cartoon leprechauns off the Lucky Charms cereal box. He took this as the other world’s judgment on his pedestrian imagination and perennial flatfooted skepticism.

I am reminded of the story Andre Gregory tells in Louis Malle’s film My Dinner With Andre, of how the founder of Findhorn was out walking in Scotland one day and was accosted by a faun, who eventually introduced him to Pan.

But I am also reminded of Carl Jung’s reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which he interprets that extremely minor text of Tantric Buddhism at length. (It would take us too far afield to discuss the history of European reception of the Tibetan Book of the Dead via Evans-Wentz, thence to make its way into…no, like I said, let’s keep moving.)

Jung makes much of the notion that the decedent being counseled on the ways of post-death experience will see his or her personal deities if he or she has failed to realize his or her actual unity with the Clear Light. Jung says that of course this text has to be read in reverse, lower to higher levels of conscious awareness, and that the visions of personal deities are the projections by which we ascribe to physically perceptible gods the functions of the invisible unity out of which the hallucinations of gods arise. Thus, Jung asserts, do Christians have visions of Christ and not Krishna or of Quetzalcoatl.

Now, this returns us to those DMT documents. One writer suggests that a simple test could be devised wherein subjects would be recruited who knew nothing of prior DMT narratives. These subjects would be told to expect a symphony of color changes and rushes of intensified emotion, but nothing else. If these subject all reported similar experiences of conversations with extraterrestrials, why, QED. Or at least strong evidence that more people have heard about the experience and forgotten hearing about it; I don’t know how you would find subjects who wanted to take hallucinogens without knowing something about the topic.

But this writer adds the subordinate clause that of course it’s possible that DMT, which occurs naturally in tiny quantities in our bodies, simply acts on a segment of the brain responsible for storing figural memories.

I have had, in lieu of hallucinations, those annoying days when an aesthetically dreadful song gets stuck in my head on endless inner replay, and the occasional moments near sleep when coherent thoughts are invaded by silly, long unthought-of phrases and images from childhood. The brain clearly has some default position based on early childhood experience (cf. Freud on this one) and a preference for really simple, repetitious sound patterns, as linked to primary emotions as possible.

It’s why, when a sophisticated work of art such as Kate Kretz’s “Blessed Art Thou” (see my recent post on this) uses imagery that appeals to the primary emotions, an emotional storm gets kicked up. Most folks are rather attached to those levels of the brain, and obviously, I am too. We all are, just some of us admit it when pressed for information. Most people haven’t a clue,but Mr. G. was wrong when he warned that knowing too much about the topic might interfere with a man’s ability to revel in his favorite steak dinner or voluptuous redhead. G. himself obviously both enjoyed himself and knew the ignominious sources from which the enjoyment came; the toasts to the levels of idiocy in those last get-togethers in Paris are best read on a quite literal level. But since the disciples of Mr. G. tend to get rather testy when the master is interpreted heretically, I decline to write out his name for search engines to locate.

Anyway, DMT probably works on the brain’s capacity for hallucinating figures that are shaped by its own preferences and cultural conditioning. Its preferences are not those of our working consciousness, so there would be surprises, sometimes unpleasant ones.

This does not explain the occasions on which such hallucinated beings communicate information that the subject cannot possibly have had previously, such as accurate observations regarding future events in the manner of a precognitive dream.

I’m not sure how many such experiences actually exist. I’ve documented the trivial or meaningless cases of precognition and coincidence that seem to beset many of us (and I’ve found a few more in blogs in recent days). I’ve never heard of more than two or three intuitions that turned out to be uncannily on target, and far more that weren’t. But the ones that were on target often involved levels of complexity, each level reducing the probability; not like the simple and highly probable occurrence of an editor thinking in general about writers from New York, and a writer from New York telephoning at that moment.

The longwinded nature of this linked rambling illustrates why it is far more fun just to put these speculations into the mouth of a fictional muddled alcoholic, as I did twenty-some years ago in a poem that was published in a national magazine. Who the hell wants 1700 revisionary words cluttering up their LJ Friends box?