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099: The Spire To Heaven

I'm sitting at the Borders at the corner of Michigan and Pearson in Chicago, the Water Tower Chapel rising up behind me. Off to my right behind the steel-clad Water Tower Plaza is the immense black rock of the John Hancock building. I went up to the top last night and looked out as far as I could see. It's a thousand feet or so in the air, not quite as high as the Sears tower, but it is high enough that you can see all the way to Michigan on a clear day. It's a somewhat meaningless accomplishment--"Hey, I saw Michigan today. Well, I think it was Michigan; it looked like any other stretch of waterfront land."--but it is a sight which we, as two-meter bipedal animals, don't normally see. You can see the stretch of mankind's accomplishments from a thousand feet up.

There are spiders at that height. I shared every view with a handful of them, dark fat spiders who have gorged themselves these last few weeks on the plethora of bugs which have blown through the city. Apparently, spiders are very common at the top of skyscrapers, and I wonder how they get there. Do they scale the entire structure to reach this pinnacle? Is that the extent of their lives: climbing the side of a man-made structure? They climb, they feast, they breed, they die. All within a hands breath of Heaven.

Is that what we tried with the Tower of Babel? Did entire generations live, fuck, and die on the ramparts of that tower? Were there children who never touched solid ground, their entire lives spent among the raised stones and the scaffolding of Man's abortive attempt to reach Heaven?

I have a friend who has recently discovered base jumping--the sport of jumping from a fixed point and parachuting. He would jump from the top of the Hancock building in a second if the winds were right. He would leap into space and freefall for a second or two before he turned himself into a bird and soared through the raised pillars of steel and stone.

There is a Frank Lloyd Wright sketch at the observation deck at the Hancock, a conceptual drawing of the Mile High Skyscraper. A structure that Wright believed would have nuclear-powered elevators to get the thousands of daily visitors up and down this metal spike.

I'm down on the ground where everyone travels horizontally, their faces fixed forward. No one looks up. No one wonders what the spiders are doing, no one looks for the shadow of a giant bird soaring through the jungle of tall buildings, no one dreams of standing on the top of the high tower and stretching their hand up just to see if they can touch the edge of Heaven.

Posted by Teppo at 03:32 PM | Comments (4) August 18, 2004

098: Dodging Research

I've bumped up against a point where I need to have some research done to properly write the next section. Of course, since research distracts me from actually writing, I'm probably going to leave a marker in the text and come back to it later. At least that was the plan. Unfortunately, it is a bit that is somewhat important: how Grandpa codes the notebook. There's another question floating in the wings: who is the intended audience for the notebook? Up to this point, I've been operating under the assumption that the notebook was a working book -- a volume which Grandpa updated regularly and referenced as he continued his work, and the trouble confronting me with that was the idea of a coded text which would be usuable as a reference manual while in its coded state. Grandpa would have to be able to convert the code on the fly in order to randomly read the notebook and use it. While not entirely impossible -- da Vinci had his own code to conceal his efforts from the eyes of his contemporaries -- the conceit is complicated by the fact that Grandpa was a spy during WWII. He knows how code systems works and, more importantly, he knows how they are broken. If he really wanted to write something that would be uncrackable except to those who knew the key, it would probably be a bit tougher than a straight-forward substitution code.

It's a minor point to get hung up on and maybe I'm letting it distract me too much. Maybe Grandpa's notebook isn't much more than a diary written in a simple substitution method based on the Enochian tables. The trouble with the tables is that the alphabet is scattered throughout the table and even a substitution cipher is a bit of a mental puzzle. At least for my pee brain. Doing the switcheroo change-up from memorized versions of the tables is even more of a stretch. Not impossible, just complicated.

I'm trying to avoid a complicated solution to a very simple problem. Most of us don't go all complex for the simple things, really. Occam's Razor and all that. When I bump against a wall, I don't always just keep bumping at it until the bricks come down; sometimes you have to rethink the problem, consider why you're at this wall and if you've arrived here by accident or design. If by design, is your design the right one? In the case of Grandpa's notebook: what function does it serve in the story?

Well, it's the dying orc actually. It's the piece of paper which draws a map for our heroes and says, "Bad guys over here." Well-- and here's the design flaw -- not really. It's the impetus for Grandpa's death and for Jack's fixation on the numbers stations. Maybe it's not the codex, but rather it is a series of light clues which point towards the bigger conspiracy. And here's what has been nagging me about this all along: why would Grandpa write all this shit down? Why would he write a notebook for his family to read and decode? Especially when he knows that the content may very well be deadly to him. Would you do that to your family? No, if the bad guys were coming to get you, you'd want to protect your family as much as you could. You wouldn't want to leave a trail for them that says, "Hey, kids, here's the way to the monster's lair."

Of course, if I take away the reason for the notebook then I take away the reason for the push to find Jack's mother and get the key from her. Actually, this means that Jack's mother can give them a different clue. She can point them towards the Army Corps of Engineers and the occult secret of their mission in Europe at the close of WWII.

Shit. Talked myself out of one bit of research for another. I'm not going to be able to escape it.

Posted by Teppo at 07:46 AM | Comments (2) August 10, 2004

097: Beaten To The Punch By Evolution

There is a species of parasitic wasp that lays its larvae in the body of the orb spider. The spider is stung by the female wasp and is paralyzed while the egg is laid. Once the poison wears off, the spider goes about its business while the newly hatched wasp larva feeds on it, sucking its very lifeblood in order to nourish the new life.

In about 14 days, the young wasp is ready to wrap itself in a cocoon and pupate into a full adult. However, it's just a larva -- just a piece of jelly with teeth -- and it has no way of making its own cocoon. Fortunately, mom has provided for her youngster and a delayed chemical payload goes off in the spider's brain and the spider spins a completely different web one night, a web that has only one purpose: providing a cocoon for its parasitical companion. The tiny larva waits until the spider is done, kills and eats the spider, and then crawls off into its new home and pupates.

Fucking hell. The orb spider not only carries the little bastard but he weaves a web for it and then patiently returns to be cut up for chow. William Eberhard, who first wrote about this in Nature, discovered that, if the larva was removed before it could kill the spider, the spider would live its life as if nothing had happened.

As if it hadn't be reprogrammed for one evening to build something completely alien to its nature.

The brain, when you get right down to it, is just a series of chemical interactions. Signals come in, signals come out. It's all a matter of formulae, signals and responses built and coded by something we like to call "consciousness." But it's just code, right? Anyone can write code and, if it is inserted properly, can you really tell if it is viral or just your own signal?

The wasp venom inserts a chemical payload that recodes the spider to the wasp's bidding for one night of its life.

And to think that I thought the whole idea of reprogramming the brain through the use of some primal linguistic tool was far-fetched. Turns out it's old news in the natural world.

[Thanks, Dad, for pointing this one out.]

Posted by Teppo at 11:35 PM | Comments (0) August 06, 2004

096: How Our Tongues Split

It's funny -- well, maybe not so funny in the end -- when you don't get enough sleep, how sleep becomes an obsession. Or maybe it's just the way Hypnogogia pursues you during the day, tugging at your hair. If I had an infinite amount of time, I would be reading up on dream symbols today, trying to learn about the core symbology which resonantes in all of us. I think I've touched on it briefly here before (back in February actually) and, in my sleep-deprived state, I'm relooping on unfinished conversations in my head. You know, those bits of memory which are still labeled "active" and "open," waiting for some resolution so that they can be filed away.

Anyway, symbols. Dreams and symbols. The reoccuring point in my thought processes is the possibility of a single human language -- the core mode of expression that rises above regional dialectic differences, above cultural and religious lines. Is there something akin to species knowledge? If you took monkeys from one region to another, would they be able to communicate with other monkeys of the same species whom they've never encountered before? What about dolphins and whales? Is there a species-wide language among them all?

Funny thought: Do whales have regional dialects in their songs?

What drove us to different tongues? Babel and our hubris of reaching for the sky? It's a religious metaphor -- well, I guess that depends on what you do Sunday morning; it's a metaphor around my house -- a myth and, like all myths, there is probably some kernel of truth to it. At the very least, it is an attempt to explain the way that the world works. If so, then are we just not evolved enough to understand the true reason for the diversification of tongues? (In much the same way that primitive cultures believed that the sun died every night and was reborn again in the morning because they were too ignorant to understand the physics of planetary rotation.)

Today, in my lucid dreaming state, I like the idea that it was done on purpose. Our tongues were scrambled to make us less homogeneous, less unified. Scatter these tribes, mar their tongues, keep them from looking at the stars. Keep them from realizing the potential of a unified group-mind.

You can blame the Old Ones, if you like.

Posted by Teppo at 08:54 AM | Comments (2) August 03, 2004

095: The Sleep of Reason

Apropos of nothing other than the title of the preceeding entry, I'm thinking of Francisco Goya this morning. The Spanish painter -- known for the manner in which his painting descended into madness -- always had a bit of darkness under the edge of his brush. If you go back to his early portraiture done for the upper class Spanish families, there is an undercurrent of terror and bruised madness in his subjects. You can see the whites of their eyes and, to this day, I remember those terrified eyes when I think of his work. These are people who, whether they admit it or not, are frightened. It may be nothing -- the world may be a perfectly sane and normal place -- but somewhere in their heads, a cancer lurks.

Goya, on his deathbed, said (and this may be entirely apocryphal): "Open the window, please. Let the darkness in."

There's a detached violence which writers have to be capable of. It's not something they like to talk about but, on some level, you have to be cognizant of the destructive impulse and be able to approach this dark cancer of the brain. You don't have to take pleasure in it, but you have to be able to approach it with a stick and scrape off a bit of the black blood that covers it in order to write about some of the evil that men do. (Or not, it all depends on your genre, really.) Goya used this vile blood in his paintings; he just vomited it up on the canvas and worked it into the spread of his oils.

Sometimes the cancer devours you. Sometimes it lurches across your brain and touches the thick stalk of blood vessels that circulate through the skull. It infects your blood, leaching its putrescence into your veins where it flows out of your brain, down your spine, and back into your heart. Your spine goes cold and the vertebrae shatter, chips of bone serating the clusters of nerves. Your heart seizes, tightening up in involuntary spasms as the vile shit pools in your aerota. The cancer spreads, the light behind your eyes goes out, and, when it spreads to your lungs, you start coughing up darkness.

I've been listening to several chapters of Objective-Subjective's 12-part soundtrack to the Alan Moore's The Watchmen. Two of the three chapters released so far are filled with the specter of Rorschach, Moore's unhinged take on Batman. Rorschach's violence is spawned by the hate and bloodshed that he sees around him -- he is the product of his society -- and his response is a coldly primal one. An eye for an eye isn't enough. And yet, in the end, Rorschach is the most uncomplicated one of the bunch. His solution is a simple one -- eat the cancer before it eats you -- and, even though he becomes irrevocably tainted by his act of sin-eating, he remains a sympathetic character because of a core precept of his altered philosophy: hurt only those who hurt others; the innocents must remain innocent.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. Dark birds are on the wing.

Apropos of nothing, really. Just wandering through the corners of my brain this morning, thinking about the shadows.

Posted by Teppo at 08:54 AM | Comments (2)