Large Pokemon Collider
suffer the little foxes to be smashed together at the speed of light, their wonders to perform, amen, go team, hooray, we winCrosspost: On Influence: Pucchini, Nabokov, Salinger…And Ray Bradbury
Throw in Arthur C. Clarke and Edgar Cayce while you’re at it, Zane Grey and H.G. Wells and Pauline Johnson and of course the place where any trail of influence, no matter how loopy it is, always ends up…
With me, of course.
And…
So I used to know this New Age hippie-type woman, always going on about “Spirit” and “walking the land”, and of course (since it was Bowen Island) the famous Indigo Children…a new name for a rather old idea, and you know I’m quite happy I brought it up, because if Augustland is about anything it’s about the collision of David Bowie and the pastoral.
You may well laugh. But it’s true.
In the old days they did it like this: when you went out into the wilderness you met the monsters and the fairies and the spirits — the deeper and darker part of life, the hidden source of pattern. And there you learned the most important of all lessons: do not screw with the deeper and the darker parts of life, if you know what’s good for you. Except if you’re going to do something successfully heroic, that is…but just because you go into the (symbolically) northern wastes doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to return home with the treasure, the princess, the title, the magic. It only automatically means you’re going to find out if the hero’s journey is really your journey, or if your journey’s actually something else. In other words: it’s grim up there, so watch out! Danger lurks behind every tree, in every shadow. Ghosts, goblins, and gods. It’s messy and lossy and scary, so if you’re going you’d better have a damn good reason…but whyever you go, and however it turns out, you can be assured of one thing: that you will meet up with the mystery of the hidden pattern of life. So, you know, at least that’s something. You’ve got that going for you, anyway.
So that’s how that (arguably) worked, for a pretty goddamn long time.
And then came Ray Bradbury!
Who (in my opinion) was your number one guy for turning the deep dark mystery of the fairy or haunted or otherwise magical wilderness, into the bright silver mystery of the science-fictional one. Saucers setting down in the woods outside of town, spied on by Atticus’ children: that’s Ray’s work. Although I don’t know if you can really lay it at his feet that the aliens always pick up their cows and people way out in the countryside, exactly…but wouldn’t it be great if that was all down to him? Somehow it always seems like such an American thing, that alien abduction business. It must’ve started somewhere. Ultimately in folktales of the stripe of Thomas the Rhymer, a giant step back to Pwyll of Dyfed, another giant step back to God-knows-whom, and on and on in funhouse reflections to the dawn of time no doubt…sorry, I don’t know how this “year in the Otherworld” stuff works in other countries, but anyway America’s got a whole lot of English in it, right?…but in mainstream American culture those old indigenous-spirits thing just won’t fly (though some folks do try to fly them, fairies among the Micmacs and all that, but it all ends up a bit like Leila out dragging her kite), for reasons just about as obvious as the reasons why stories about the actual indigenous mythological spirits of America won’t work for that purpose either. So instead, you get…hmm, maybe Rip Van Winkle, as a substitute? Not nearly as good as being spirited off underground by kobolds or something, but it’ll have to do until Ray comes along! Whereupon we get aliens, thank goodness, well it’s about time. Just like Brian, he makes silos into rocketships, makes Alberta alien and puts aliens in Alberta at the same time, puts Grover’s Corners on Mars and makes it creepy…and it’s still the countryside, the wild places, that get to be the intersection between this world and the other one; it’s just that the other world is now Mars or Venus or something. Rather like Christianity’s genius for making connotations into denotations? Well, America is a Christian enough place that it’s easy to imagine people someplace in it greeting each other with a hearty “Jesus is comin’!” instead of a simple “hello”…and you certainly don’t have any trouble finding people who believe that, yep, that Jesus he just flew up right into the sky, look where I’m pointing, that’s where he is, just…there!
Or maybe you do have trouble finding those people; after all, that’s an awfully crazy thing to think. Where is Jesus really hiding up there, after all? You can’t get that answer from Christianity at all, too much is known about the celestial sphere now for any Christian answer to make any sense…you have to fully go to Gene Roddenberry to get any comprehensibility now, fully you must go to the Ray strategy of science fiction: that puts Jesus behind the Sun, like Counter-Earth…
But back to my digression: you ever hear the one about the Grey Aliens, those hairless little runts with the big spooky eyes? And how their images can be found in ancient cave-paintings all over the world? Don’t believe it; but of course if you did believe it I think you’d have to be a bit alarmed at how suspiciously those aliens resemble human foetuses, wouldn’t you? Ah, here we are at the Childhood’s End stuff, but don’t think we’ve come full circle just yet, because we’re only here for a minute (though in the outside world a year and a day may pass!) (don’t eat or drink anything!), we have business elsewhere, we can’t stop for long…just long enough to note how the fairy changeling becomes the Midwich Cuckoos over time, and if you want to believe in Grey Alien cave-paintings well then there’s the reason it’s possible to believe in them…as in Clarke messages from the past become messages from the future, messages from space, all together and (according to GR, anyway) basically all one, as homo sapiens outgrow their use…
Although I always thought that lyric should’ve been “how those shapely hands have outgrown their use”, instead…in fact it’s probably because I can’t go back in time and change the “real” lyrics that I keep wanting to write more songs in the first place…but no matter how many I write they will never fix that one…!
Ahem. But pardon me.
Anyway, “Face At Summer’s End” is pretty much Bowie cut with Richard Brautigan in “Trout Fishing In America“, cut with life at Bowen Island (where the Indigo Children grow towards the End Of Time as trees grow towards the sunlight) cut with the general conceit of, well, if you can collide science fiction and the fairy wilderness why can’t you collide SF rock operas and alt-country songs? And throw in a bit of pastoral psychedelia too: Son Volt does Skylarking in 1972 with David Bowie fronting, all lip-gloss androgyny and William S. Burroughs and yes: Childhood’s End.
In a way it’s perfect.
But not, of course (surely you guessed!) the point.
Anyway, the woman at Bowen Island…she was a big believer in cosmic purpose. Everything happens for a reason, all that stuff. She kind of talked to me quite a bit about it, sometimes, ’til eventually I had to confess:
“You know what you think is so cool about everything happening for a reason?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s how I feel about coincidences happening, for no reason. That’s my kind of spirituality.”
“Oh!” she said. “Well that’s okay, then!”
And then she very carefully didn’t bend my ear about it anymore.
And I guess you’re wondering why I bother to mention this?
Well, basically it’s because influence is a funny thing. Recently I went and saw Madama Butterfly, and was shocked to realize just how thoroughly Broadway and Burbank and Hollywood had plundered Pucchini’s music — to the point where little snatches of pilfered score have accrued a sense of dramatic or comedic punctutation in much the same way that Carl Stalling’s music for Warner Bros. cartoons have seeped into my brain as the noises produced by the natural movement of cartoon animals walking up stairs, being hit on the head by anvils, realizing their jet-shoes don’t work…down deep at the joint between music and language and perception, little flint-knapped motifs like “hwah-HWAAH…!” have come not just to stand for but to really be textual additions to the action, and so watching the opera I felt my brain jolted by little cultural electrode-zaps about six times a half-hour, catapulting me into a programme of meaning that didn’t belong to Cho-Cho San so much as it belonged to Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, or the wrinkly-headed guy from Beverly Hills 90210, or Gilligan and the Skipper. Odd? Doggone right it was odd. I mean, for someone who’s charted camera-work from Orson Welles to Will Eisner to Spider-Man to Star Trek: The Next Generation already, you might’ve thought I would’ve already been all over the historical value of Madame Butterfly as Original Text…but I wasn’t. I was only expecting to recognize arias from my mother’s records. I was NOT expecting to recognize my own pop-cultural musical shorthand.
But I did…and then something else happened, too.
Which was that I read Pale Fire, by Nabokov…and Jesus, how did I miss this too? So many books I’ve read that set themselves up as puzzle-boxes, unreliable narratives, little think-pieces for the Eng. Lit. guys wearing the black turtlenecks at the charades parties…and they always seemed to be lacking something, to me. But little did I know that what they were lacking was being Pale Fire, little did I suspect that they were just so many copies of copies of copies! I mean I thought it was all down to literary trends, not to genetic drift and problems with cloning! Shame on you, ambitious literati! I thought. Make up your own stuff, for God’s sake…!
And then, maybe worst of all, I finally read Franny and Zooey. And, holy cats, if I’d thought there was anything wrong with the Pale Fire copiers…! I mean, they were only like the comics-loving kids who’d devoured knockoffs of homages of copies of Will Eisner’s encounter with Citizen Kane…and then gone into TV production, but not really knowing their influences, perhaps not really caring but that’s the worst you could say about them. Incoherent, but that’s only because they weren’t familiar with the proper uses of their tools: they just thought they were toys. Well, it’s a long way from educated musicians knowledgeably sneaking bits and pieces from the opera they loved to jam into Leave It To Beaver, but it’s still more cute than culpable…however, the Salinger devotees (who all somehow never managed to learn any more about the Upanishads and the Sutras than Salinger had told them? But that’s impossibly wilful, surely), they were actually guilty of theft, I thought. So many crap Little Epiphanies on the NYT bestseller list that were simply ripped off from Franny Glass’ existential disaffection with her teachers and her boyfriend. I felt like I was reading something I’d read a hundred thousand times before. I could barely evaluate it. Nausea might be what Salinger intended to simulate, but he could never have imagined he’d succeed so well through the efforts of other people, could he?
And it’s just this, I realized, that I encountered with the Spirit-loving land-walking teacher of the Indigo Children on Bowen Island. A weird mash-up of hearsay and appropriation and inheritance, crazy crowded stuff taken from everywhere, for the desperate purpose of purpose…a shivering, shuddering mess, and yet what she was doing and what I am doing are the same thing, really. We’re branches on the same tree; it’s just that I like my branch better, because I like to know where my influences are coming from. Pucchini: I mean, it doesn’t all begin and end with “Face At Summer’s End”, and it doesn’t even just go as deep as needing to play with cliche in order to make a pop song that’s comprehensible as a pop song…because we’ve got a couple songs fooling around with other people’s tunes that have become “iconic” (as they say), and that’s perhaps some dirty work at the crossroads, trying to stream what’s become their public meaning into a private message… Which is an extremely peculiar sort of line to choose to walk, but then I can’t explain the guy who did the music for Bewitched, either…and didn’t even know we were trying to do what he had done, because I’d never encountered the Original Text, and so didn’t know the nature of our own efforts.
Similarly, Nabokov: imagine, all this formal play swirling around my head for a couple of decades, and I never knew who first made the annotations part of the narrative, and made all the parts loop on and depend on one another. Didn’t know where my urge to do clever formal loops began, how the idea even got into my head! And then Salinger, scrupulously left unread by me for so long: wow, but I just couldn’t've anticipated what prime-cut Grade-A Original Text it really was, could I? For years I’ve loved embedding mythological story-cycles into the stuff I do, but invisibly, secretively…loved it, and wondered why nobody else was doing it. Now I find out Salinger anticipated me in 1960, in two stories unimaginably beloved as influence by (it sometimes seems) every major American writer of the last fifty years…and still no one’s doing it?
They’re just repeating the same myth-cycle, over and over again without knowing what it is?
Well, I should talk: Augustland copies Ray Bradbury heavily enough, doesn’t it? And that’s an old, old, old idea.
But at least I knew it was old, going in!
Which I think may be more than the hippie woman did. So I’ve got that going for me, anyway.
Aw, I don’t know where I was headed with this, anymore. It’s just interesting, that’s all. Everything’s got all this stuff in it, and if you don’t know what it is you’re at its mercy — the curse of the Lit major, we can quote and cite everything, but we hardly know anything. The bookshelf looms over there in the corner, and…
Oh my God, it’s full of stars!
…Which will have to do for now.
It says “Rambling” on this, right? Good.
Why Pokemon Matters
You may think it’s nothing at all, but it isn’t. My friend Ed watched this show in the mornings before going to work, said one day “God help me, but I think I learned what Pokemon Doctors do today”. My friend Leila proposed the notion that the world of Pokemon is a world without animals, a world where only insects and birds exist alongside humans — it could be a wry ecological fable, this Pokemon stuff. What would we do with animals, if we’d never seen them before, but then suddenly found them? What if they were all as rare as argon…but no rarer?
Obviously we’d collect them all, and then pit ‘em in trials of combat against one another, to see which one was the best.
You know that’s actually what we’d do, right?
So it’s a Voltaire for the modern age, and yet there’s something else to be said about it too…there is more than one way in which it’s a Voltaire for the modern age, because it’s also a Voltaire for the prehistoric age…because as Ed saw, there’s not only the reflection of humanity there, but the reflection of science too. If being a “Pokemon Doctor” means doctoring the Doctor Animals themselves, it also means doctoring the ideas that human beings have about what is alien and what isn’t, and what the word itself means. Pokemon, being things you could treat as metaphorical “animals”, can’t help but attract a kind of in-story science that’s equally metaphorical. Considering that they have evolutionary features built into them, as creatures that macroscopically combine and fold in a gross mimickry of the way “real” organisms do at the microscopic level — one Pokemon bites another’s tail, and the added weight makes four legs come off the ground into forelegs, as the two Pokemon become a new Pokemon, with different weird combative abilities and a different weird temperamental nature — they can’t help but invite speculation on what it’s like to be a Pokemon. After all, all the other organisms can’t feel themselves changing, even though we know we’re never the same from minute to minute; and our obsession with the mystery of our own personal “causes”, that we’re constantly trying to reason backwards to from our own personal effects, in the figures of the Pokemon are pushed back to a simple “where the hell did these weird critters come from?”, rather than brought forward to a more complex “what are the interactions that create identity?” type of question…
…The very question that eternally besets us, as we besiege it. But for Pokemon it’s much more evident how the combinatorial temperamental natures work, because they happen in super-fast motion: Pokemon biology is nothing but arithmetic, the commutation and association of features within some sort of ideal Pokemon-Space that’s set apart from the rest of the physical universe. Hmm, much like we imagine our own bodies to operate in their own “space”? Except the Pokemon are all integers, and we’re all algebraic terms; the Pokemon’s mystery is how one Platonically-fundamental thing and this other Platonically-fundamental thing can be added and subtracted, mixed together and then distilled back out, like a recipe. And we’re not like that, of course: we’re anything but as alphabetically simple as that. Pikachu presents the friendly mystery of the mitochondria; Psyduck shows the character of the lymph; so, sure, these are animals that can be analogues…
…But they’re also analogies. A simplified model of biology becomes mysterious when it’s made to analogize number theory as well, all in the context of a toy you mix and match with other toys, build up and break down, swap and combine…and unexpected rules emerge. As the Pokemon thing went along, Pikachu developed such a resistance to “evolving” that he (uh…it’s a “he”, right?) eventually got retconned as a Pokemon that was already evolved, and what that says about the “number” he represents we can only wonder at. Can’t we? Well, design is one thing, but existence is another…in all those toy-based Japanimations, there’s always a hidden power lurking in the game, that only children can embrace, understand, utilize. It’s Childhood’s End with sweatdrops and speed lines, where there is no knowing but doing…and so, what, you thought maybe Pokemon Doctors had it easy? But there’s nothing harder than trying to exercise your reason on stuff that can’t be broken down, but only built-up.
So in the end, I suppose we’d be better off if Pokemon didn’t exist, at least in the sense that we’d rest easier through preserving our ignorance of uneasy questions.
But of course, unfortunately for us…they do exist.
More on this story as it develops, Don!
The Littlest Birds
Courtesy of Friend RAB:
What Steve Ditko Character Are You?
HERE ARE THE QUESTIONS, AND THERE ARE NO OTHERS:
1. Are you unfailingly loyal?
2. Are you a liar?
3. Do you have superhuman powers?
4. Do you show deference to your superiors?
5. Are you in love?
6. Did you ask for this?
7. Do you hate anything or anyone?
8. Do you know about the difference between Good and Evil?
9. Other dimensions: do you think about them?
10. Women: are they weak?
11. Can you trust yourself?
12. Do you cultivate humility?
13. Do you have a rival?
***
To know which Ditko character you are, e-mail me at circumstantialtrout@gmail.com
***
Thanks!
Crosspost: “Porn Porn”
Oh God, this is going to be the phrase that launched a thousand search-engine ships…we’ll be lucky if this ends up with us knocking around the Mediterranean for ten years. I apologize to EVERYBODY for the title of this post. This was a disaster from — wait for it, Leila — the get-go.
At least so Agamemnon thought to himself, I’m sure. “Sacrificing my daughter, that was a disaster from the get-go.”
But…nevertheless…one detects in that a little bit of extra, needless tragedy? “Sadness porn”?
You can tell I just came from seeing Madame Butterfly, can’t you.
Anyway. Today we talk a lot about “torture porn” in movies. I have actually read favourable reviews of “Saw” by reputable film critics, you know?
I think?
…But anyway we talk about it a lot, these days. “something-porn”. In superhero comics it’s “nostalgia-porn”; in movies it’s “torture-porn”. Or “action-porn”. Maybe in some movies it could even be “romance-porn”. “Rom-com porn” could be something that trades so heavily on the devices of the romantic comedy that it becomes…?!?
Or am I assuming too much.
But I mean what about that Hugh Jackman/Meg Ryan movie, what was that. And what about that “Sleepless In Seattle” stuff, that itself came out of the execrable “When Harry Met Sally”? That then spawned “You’ve Got Mail”, but not before Kevin Kline got to gleefully fog up the screen with…
…Uh, “Something about Paris”? Was that what that abomination was named? I date things by the pouty facelifts of Meg Ryan now. I’m sure she’s a very nice woman, I’m sure she needs to appear like an escapee from the necropolis for her job, but come on people. The HUMAN LOOK. We should valourize it. And we should not valourize the Kathryn-Hellmond-In-Brazil look, even though that look has been in a movie, but the movie was supposed to COMMENT ON US, not the OTHER WAY AROUND…! But for actors, maybe the KH look can be worthwhile, if our receiving of its symbolic meaning is worthwhile. I mean maybe it does constitute bravery, and commitment, and heart and soul. Or if it doesn’t, maybe it could. I am not joking, notional readers…they should re-make “Lifeboat” starring Meg Ryan. There would be some poignancy there. She would agree. If she were here.
Or even real.
And so here’s my question.
Where is all this this going?
What is the word “porn” becoming?
I ask you in all seriousness…is it conceivable that one day we might be subjected to such a thing as — and I don’t want to sound like an old fogey here, but – PORN PORN?!
What is this word “porn“, exactly?
What has it come to mean?
Oh, if only there was an unemployed philosopher around these parts, to wax borin…nnLYRICAL about such things, yeah that’s the ticket…!
What would “porn porn” potentially look like?
It’s funny, you almost want one part of the expression of “porn porn” to signify “nostalgia”, don’t you? I mean what else could be a pornish way of looking at porn, but that? And yet it seems to make the expression “nostagia porn” redundant…
When we all know it just plain isn’t.
…Or is it?
The World Without
So…
A friend was talking about Neuromancer, one day not too long ago, and basically he was saying “forget the technology, this is science-fiction, the technology’s a metaphor — what Neuromancer is really about, is a world where the concept of “family” is absent.”
I paraphrase him slightly, but that’s the sense of it…at least, that’s what I took away from it.
And eventually, this got me thinking.
Is that what SF is, or has turned into? Stories of “a world without”? Hmm, it could be so…it’s got me thinking back to the early 90s, and all the nanotechnology-based SF fantasies. Crazy worlds where the glass and girders of a skyscraper could turn in an instant into a swaying tower of butterscotch ripple ice cream…where shoes can come alive as sapient beings, where the rivers are aluminum, the ocean is applejuice, the clouds in the sky have hurt feelings and the blood in your veins is sorrowful green…and you wouldn’t necessarily know, for sure, just what was what.
At first I thought maybe that would be a world without memory. Without history; without any knowledge firmer than light sand in a stiff breeze.
But then I got to thinking: no, wait. What if it’s more basic than that?
I suspect it was Weber who said it, though Brian seems to think it might’ve been Leibniz: that the two master categories of existence are Number, and Relationship. Two giant experiential umbrellas form they; and every other subcategory in the world is under them.
So what would it be like, how would human cognition be deformed, if one of them was removed?
In the nanotechnological nightmare-world of SF’s early Nineties, transmutation is the rule, and not the exception; and it’s extremely non-rule-based transmutation, too. Conservation of mass isn’t an issue anymore than the forbidden transactions of nuclear chemistry are, when the whole world and all its atoms are invisibly manipulated in ways that can’t — because that is the whole point of the conceit! — can’t be specified, or examined, or known in any way. So what it is, is a world without counting. Not a world without family, but a world without home-states that aren’t rooted in the epiphenomenon of human consciousness. Consciousness is really all that’s left, in such a world: or as Weber might have it, “Relationship“.
But “Number“…no, that’s long gone. Been taken out of human hands completely, run in endless trillion-per-second cycles at a subliminal level, why what good’s “Number” when one just waves a magic wand and sees things then go terminally fucked? No good at all; and rather pointless if it was any good, too. In fact that’s the point: that in such a world Number will break your heart to pieces, if you try to hang onto it. To survive, and not go crazy, you have to let it go.
But then, if you do…
…Then what do you become?
What’s a human being, when shorn of the comprehension of “Number”? Not an animal, of course: because we still have the brains that evolved to apprehend Number, for goodness’ sake that’s the whole point of the human brain…! So our intellection will still look for Number, and try to catch it out of its nest when and if we find it. But what if when we do find it, then it changes on us, from fowl to fish?
And then swims away.
I think we kind of blew it with early-Nineties nanotechnological SF, if you want to know the truth. We never quite got to what it would mean, you see. Because although we had a lot of great authors mucking around with the idea of a world that suddenly turned all subject instead of object…
…Still what with changing trends and ever-more-rapidly staledated story-conceits, they never had enough time to ask what would happen to human beings when they became “object”, instead of subject.
And so there might have been many J.G. Ballards instead of just one, if things had gone just a little bit differently…but instead Ballard remains unique. And is that a good thing? A bad thing?
I don’t know; but you could spend your time in a lot worse ways than reading this.
Chin-chin, folks.
And good night, and good luck.
