Organic Fiction


I originally set up "Shuffle Play" as a category where I could repost past blogs.  Then I started writing a couple of experimental Ash Fork's from the point of view of a clone, and then I tried to move them and crashed.  While Linda rebuilt my computer I was with a strange computer, and it was exciting at first, but then there were things missing and the screen was always dim, complaining about how wasteful it is to leave the lights on.  I kept doing more experiments with the clone character, and now I've sort of started another Ash Fork Series.

The problem I am facing is that when I write about current affairs my readership jumps.  So I feel the urge to move toward more writing about things happening in the moment.  And then I stop and remind myself that if I do that all the time, or even most of the time, I will get involved in the arguments themselves instead of the mechanisms, and the only thing that can allow us to make conscious decisions is to see the unconscious decision, and understand something about navigating our own ship.

There are two basic groups at odds with each other in the current social construction.  One group operates on faith in what is given to them to have faith in.  These people tend to operate from religions, and because they invest their belief together, they form larger life forms, the way a grove of Aspens is actually one large root system with the appearance of many individuals on the surface level.  The other group operates on faith also, but the faith is invested, a la, "I may be just an old chunk of coal, Lord, but I'm gonna be a diamond someday."

The faith is not in something external, and thus not in power.  This person will not have a power god, but an all knowing god.  As the French say, "to understand everything is to forgive everything."  So at least in the French Quarter, it's also a forgiving god.  But this god is underneath your feet, literally "under standing."   Those who seek this god like songs such as, "Blue Suede Shoes," and, "Run Run Rudolph." 

This god is relatively new, because personal freedom is relatively new, and the old power gods are always out to kill him and get the genie back in the  bottle.  An interesting look at that theme can be gleaned by watching Tennesse Williams' "The Fugitive Kind" and then David Lynch's "Wild at Heart."  The same snakeskin jacket represents personal freedom, and it passes from Brando to Nicholas Cage.  That snake is in touch with the earth.  

This is the condition of the body.  There is one brain in the gut, which deals with all the shit the other brain doesn't want to be associated with.  It's above all that.   The body feels pain and pleasure, and it bleeds and when it is gone, everything goes with it.  There is an empty vessel.  And on the one hand maybe that animating spirit went somewhere, and all you know about the place is that it is more subtle, or abstract, than the physical plane. On the other hand, maybe that's a way to deal with knowledge of death while still bothering to put out the good china for company.

That is the dividing line between imagination and truth.  On one side of it there is experience and observation.  For example, if you smash a bug, is it rational to think that a little spirit bug squirted out and into eternity?  Then it becomes a matter of scale except for the variable of imagination.  Then the question becomes one of the nature of the imaginal realm.

I remember reading once about people who had been clinically dead, and then they were brought back.  And there was one guy I remembered best, who had been ensconced in cowboy mythology.  He'd loved westerns, and imagined himself inside a cowboy code of behavior.  In other words he had imagined himself abstractly inside the parameters of a mythology.  What happened when he was dead?  A rider came for him with a saddled horse.

The easiest explanation for this is that millions of neurons firing in one last Fourth of July celebration of having been alive, naturally enlivened this image because of all the neural pathways it shared with other data.  But think about the charge that went into that image, and of his identification with his own ultimate realization of himself.  it was at least an effort toward a conscious evolution into the abstract.

These are the considerations underneath my playing around with Ash Fork, and now with Shuffle Play because I haven't yet been able to move them, and now am disinclined to do so.  What I am inclined to do is simply make Shuffle Play a new series and just continue with it as an evolving category that I can play with when I feel like writing fiction, as I can play with this one when I feel like stepping back and taking a look at what I'm doing.

What I see is my clone being set free from control by a "Priority Chip."  He was created by $omaCorp, and so the chip gives the creator the ultimate control over his destiny.  This is a way of demonstrating the movement from essentialist to existentialist thought.  So long as one is based on a faith in one set of pre-existing beliefs, then the ultimate perfection of the individual is forming to what came before as exactly as possible.  Existentialism, on the other hand, is like this cowboy, who, when he dies, finds that his faith at least attempts to bring him his reward.

My interest is in watching a line of thought that I was exposed to during my life, and which has been presented as an alternative to conservative religion, which I was born into.  This line of thought has to do with attempting to take as rational a look as possible at our situation, and try to find a path to freedom.  To do that requires evolving, and nothing evolves without adapting to new information and shifting circumstances.  In other words, never underestimate Dr. Who. 

My personal exercise in writing this has been to use it as a reflecting pool, in which I can at my option practice biofeedback or narcissism, depending on the planned activities.  The only rules I have set for the fictional writing is that from where it begins to where it ends, it is done in one take, like Dogme film.   That doesn't mean I can't cut out sentences if they are redundant or improve on something if it is unclear and I can clarify it.  But other than the basic copy editing, I don't shift things around or throw anything away and start over.

I generally write exactly the same way on political or social essays, or anything else, really.  If I wanted to mess around with it I'd be at the computer all day long.  

I haven't started putting Ash Fork together yet because I don't yet feel like sitting down to it.  It's still cooking.   While it's cooking, and hopefully while it's coming together, I'll just use Shuffle Play to stream organic fiction.  When I think back about it, spontaneous storytelling has been my central interest.  When my daughter was little she would give me a title and I had to make up a story.  I ask a blessing on her from a god with bare feet who feeds the birds part of his bread.

Posted: Wed - June 27, 2007 at 08:10 AM