& Now For A Bit Of Exegesis
In the last week I’ve finished two books by authors I’ve never read before: American Gods by Neil Gaiman and VALIS by Phillip K. Dick. (SPOILERS for both). Over the former I’ve been mulling a great deal of ambivalence—both the conceit and its execution came in clutch and the prose was simply masterful. i enjoyed reading this book a lot, i found it philosophically and emotionally compelling. the twists were for the most part surprising, or at least i didn't anticipate most of them until just a little before the occurred. I really thought (and honestly would have preferred) it was going to be the cop who was killing those kids. Even if he wasn’t the god, Hinselman had help getting those kids right? It was strongly implied that some sort of authority, possibly the whole town, was engaged in an ongoing sacrifice—that was the deal. In fact, the lack of critical exploration of the relationship between the gods and and the more visible/mundane/politico-cultural processes was one of the major failings of the novel. This could be related to the idea, initially alluded to and then stated without any satisfying elaboration, that America was simply a bad country for gods. Wait, why?
Hinaelman's origin story was one of the best parts of the book; in this vein, I would have liked to see more God origin stories—for the most part Gaiman restricted his showing to the gods’ deaths. I also wish that the lakeside narrative had been built up more and I would have liked to see more detail concerning Shadow's trips to meet with other gods had been fleshed out. I am shocked that the earlier edition was even shorter—if anything this one felt like it needed at least a hundred pages of set up and another hundred post Wednesday's death but before the battle for the narrative to get out from under the all-father’s shadow. Indeed, I got the vibe that the reader or Shadow or both were supposed to care about his death. (Personally I was thrilled when he got killed off, didn't like him one bit.) We also get the sense that Shadow's loyalty to the old gods and Wednesday especially is supposed to be significant, which would explain the signficiance of the death, true, but here too there is none of the requisite follow through. Shadow refuses to even listen to the new gods mostly it seems cause they are rude and don't impress him. He makes friends with a couple of the old gods, but his loyalties, while they are central to his story, constitute a dead center.
As for VALIS, what an absolute masterclass in metatextuality! Fat is a compelling, relatable, and thoughtful working of a mystic-psychotic, a trope which is very easy to fuck up. the other characters--especially Philip, Kevin, and the mental health workers--were developed richly and beautifully. I did find the last quarter or so of the book—basically from when they meet Mother Goose onwards—to be kind of a letdown. The fact that this coincides with the vanishing (“healing”) of Fat goes to show the degree to which PKD's alter-ego forms the palpitating heart of the novel. I have begun the second in the series (The Divine Invasion) and am now rather desperate to get my hands on Dick’s Exegesis. I’ve already begun re-modeling my current journaling system in response to Fat’s notes and have found my writing invigorated by the process.
Aspects of Fat’s cosmogenesis which I’ve found resonant with my own work:
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(The Empire never ended.)
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For some years now I’ve been working on various projects which attempt to describe persons who are constituted by multiple bodies, or by multiple persons, experiencing reality from several bodies and lives at once. Though organized differently from the Fat/Phillip/Thomas arrangement, I found the way Dick worked these motifs (reincarnation, resurrection, multiplicity, intrapersonality, ontopolitics, the use of G-ds as characters, etc.) pretty enlightening, giving me a chance to draft out a number of ideas by parallel contrast.
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Something I had recently begun researching through this YouTube channel.
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The maxim which states that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is stupid. It is powerlessness which corrupts communities, societies, communities and persons by provides occasion and opportunity for exploitation. Introducing a frame in which it is Fat who is the authority in a kind of hermeneutical-pedagogic sense at the moment of his liberation from the psych ward and his retainment of functionality vis-a-vis his own ends precisely illustrates the meaning of my intervention against the simplistic (even positivistic) one to one formula of power and corruption. I hope to use VALIS to illustrate this point in my forthcoming essay, Of The Bleeding Text.
Besides reading a lot, today I had my most productive day in months in terms of academics, successfully writing more then seven pages of material I hope to include in Of the Bleeding Text. A Section Header from todays work and the alternate title of this post: Start Counting From Zero. Hope to type this section up and post it along with a couple other components of the thesis, and of course I hope to publish the piece in its entirety as soon as its workable, tech gods permitting (how the fuck do you do footnotes in Squarespace???)
I’ve also coined a few new terms in the past few days.
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IT•ro•VES•sence. noun. see also itrotation and itrability. the quality of having it-ness, of being/becoming/behaving/performing, et cetera, et xeno, "an it" or "It." Even as Zanders was being tagged Sebastian, the former tumbled into Riley who immediately had his hand around Sebastian’s ankle; sometimes itrovesence is a fleeting quality.
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Meanwhile, but for transcendentally constructed temporality. A concept I’ve been working on while my thoughts orbit two books—VALIS and Imaginary Communities, which I am still working on. From the former I have the figure of the super-temporal lamination across personas and lifetimes; from the latter I’ve drawn Anderson’s descriptions of the ways nationalism reworks temporality under the influence of print capitalism, such that the otherwise disparate readers of newspapers and characters in novels are clocked according to a shared now, a common moment discursively defined. See also the dialectical corellate , the pre-national conflation of cosmogyny and history.
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An aesthetic framework which prioritizes the construction and execution of conceits, possibly to the exclusion or severe restriction of linear narrative. See many of the shorter works of Borges, wherein the story presents itself primarily as the vehicle of a thematically rich Idea.
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The production of new sacraments, rituals, theosophies and sacred spaces; with regards to the later, a school of analytical and creative architecture.
In the last year I’ve realized that my aesthetic habits and needs, from my shorthand symbology and organize my writing spaces to the way I process daily events (driving, going to work, listening to music) tend compulsively towards systems of sacredness. Neosacramentalism is one of several terms I’ve been playing with to express this mode of life. Its also one I want to develop further in my various projects.
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From eschatology, cosmogenesis, and exegesis. Relating to the hermeneutics, politics, and subject-engendering activities, processes, techniques, apparatuses, etc. by which we construct our setting as the End of the World. possible examples include projects meant to outlast the existence of humanity, such as efforts to secure nuclear waste into the deep future; conservation of humanity’s attributes, accomplishments, and self-understanding in the face of contact with xenomorphic lifeforms (aliens, AI, etc.); or the abolition of a totalizing order of things (cosmos) in favor of something Else.
And that’s about it. This post is one of the least cohesively organized one I’ve written yet, which is after all a good sign—the point is to use this space as a public sounding board, so why not let it lean into the assorted mess of motifs and influences out of which I derive all my texts, not least the account which I call my life?