Leaving the High Castle
Mar. 27th, 2010 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonLike a lot of young writers I once labored under a form of literary pareidolia, seeing in the fictional exploits of a beloved character a reflection of myself that bought inspiration, if not solace to the lonely weekends and quiet summers. Of course I know I'm not the only one. I've certainly met more than my fair share of self-tortured Holden Caulfields, earnest Billy Pilgrims, sardonic Yossarians and gruff Ignatius J. Rileys. There was a Great Gatsby who was close to me once and I still take comfort in the occasional dispatches from his life in the 'orgiastic future'. I even had the good fortune to know a Dean Moriarty who, naturally, had never even heard of the guy. Me however, I always thought I was Hawthorne Abendsen.
That would be the titular 'Man in the High Castle' from the Philip K Dick alternative history masterpiece.
Briefly put, it's about a parallel universe where the Axis powers won World War Two with America being ruled jointly by the Japanese and the Third Reich. It follows the lives of various individuals living in this occupied America as they gradually come to realize they live in the 'wrong' universe (all with a little help from the I-Ching). In this universe, however, there is an author, Hawthorne Abendsen, who has imprisoned himself out in the midwest and has written a popular science fiction novel about a parallel universe where the Axis lose World War Two.
This of course is classic Dick Brain-Fuckery, the ontological equivalent of being on the receiving end of some seriously bad Hentai. A prime example of what Borges labeled the 'work within a work' (according to his four tropes of 'fantastic literature'), one where the author has created not so much a doppleganger of himself but rather the very narrative he weaves. What's interesting is how the details of Abendsen's novel ("The grasshopper shall be a burden") don't match up to how the War actually went in our reality. Instead it ends a few years later than it should have and under completely different circumstances. It is through this small flourish in the story that our reality becomes merely a "reality" (an insight I wouldn't fully come to appreciate until years later after discovering Robert Anton Wilson).
So that would be me then... a reflection of a fictional author who in himself was a reflection not of another author but rather of an allegory on the multiplicity of reality. Prone to a melancholy introspection (or Scanner Darkly if you will) I began to figure out that I was in the 'wrong' universe (where all the miracles are buried in history and the sky is absent of streaking primary colors). Through my art then, clumsy as it may be, I would create a better world to inhabit... one that would act as an defiant insult to the one in which I lived. I wanted to create a vast middle-finger to existence made out of adventure and sex and magick and mystery.
But this year (forgive my vanity, my year long introspections come not on the eve of January but rather on my birthday) has been rough to say the least.
The rejections that came scrawled back on the query letters from bored editors, enough to bind into a small novella of indifference. You could smell the coffee breath wafting from those envelopes, each sealed with a post lunch hour sigh. That was rougher than I thought it would be. Losing the Witch House as well, where I eventually had to pay the tab on quitting my job to 'follow my bliss'. Bill leaving back to Jax, his private Arcadia put on the market and his family relocated. Right now I really, really miss him. I could so use his stoic council and Spartan resolve. This week I helped my other friend, Auntie Bellum, pack up her life into little boxes as she prepares to move back up to North Carolina.
Mainly though it was Grandma's passing that hit the hardest.
And yet something happened today. Quite suddenly and without even a stray thought's precedent. I was riding the Southbound train to the airport, there to meet and escort my cousin Chris back to my folks. I was reading this biography on the French artist Delacroix and it mentioned this technique he used on The Barque of Dante (one borrowed from Ruben), where to create an illusion of wetness on the bodies of the damned emerging from the waters of the River Styx, he used tiny slashes of primary color that, at a distant, would converge into a unified glistening sheen.
Then it occured to me: I'm not living in the 'wrong' universe at all but rather the only one I got. I'll be honest with you... I don't know what that thought has to do with painting techniques but it's what fired when the trigger pulled.
So anyway, maybe it's high time I left my high castle. Took a good look around and while I have no intention of abandoning those worlds opened only by the written word, there is much to learn in the one I'm at now.
That would be the titular 'Man in the High Castle' from the Philip K Dick alternative history masterpiece.
Briefly put, it's about a parallel universe where the Axis powers won World War Two with America being ruled jointly by the Japanese and the Third Reich. It follows the lives of various individuals living in this occupied America as they gradually come to realize they live in the 'wrong' universe (all with a little help from the I-Ching). In this universe, however, there is an author, Hawthorne Abendsen, who has imprisoned himself out in the midwest and has written a popular science fiction novel about a parallel universe where the Axis lose World War Two.
This of course is classic Dick Brain-Fuckery, the ontological equivalent of being on the receiving end of some seriously bad Hentai. A prime example of what Borges labeled the 'work within a work' (according to his four tropes of 'fantastic literature'), one where the author has created not so much a doppleganger of himself but rather the very narrative he weaves. What's interesting is how the details of Abendsen's novel ("The grasshopper shall be a burden") don't match up to how the War actually went in our reality. Instead it ends a few years later than it should have and under completely different circumstances. It is through this small flourish in the story that our reality becomes merely a "reality" (an insight I wouldn't fully come to appreciate until years later after discovering Robert Anton Wilson).
So that would be me then... a reflection of a fictional author who in himself was a reflection not of another author but rather of an allegory on the multiplicity of reality. Prone to a melancholy introspection (or Scanner Darkly if you will) I began to figure out that I was in the 'wrong' universe (where all the miracles are buried in history and the sky is absent of streaking primary colors). Through my art then, clumsy as it may be, I would create a better world to inhabit... one that would act as an defiant insult to the one in which I lived. I wanted to create a vast middle-finger to existence made out of adventure and sex and magick and mystery.
But this year (forgive my vanity, my year long introspections come not on the eve of January but rather on my birthday) has been rough to say the least.
The rejections that came scrawled back on the query letters from bored editors, enough to bind into a small novella of indifference. You could smell the coffee breath wafting from those envelopes, each sealed with a post lunch hour sigh. That was rougher than I thought it would be. Losing the Witch House as well, where I eventually had to pay the tab on quitting my job to 'follow my bliss'. Bill leaving back to Jax, his private Arcadia put on the market and his family relocated. Right now I really, really miss him. I could so use his stoic council and Spartan resolve. This week I helped my other friend, Auntie Bellum, pack up her life into little boxes as she prepares to move back up to North Carolina.
Mainly though it was Grandma's passing that hit the hardest.
And yet something happened today. Quite suddenly and without even a stray thought's precedent. I was riding the Southbound train to the airport, there to meet and escort my cousin Chris back to my folks. I was reading this biography on the French artist Delacroix and it mentioned this technique he used on The Barque of Dante (one borrowed from Ruben), where to create an illusion of wetness on the bodies of the damned emerging from the waters of the River Styx, he used tiny slashes of primary color that, at a distant, would converge into a unified glistening sheen.
Then it occured to me: I'm not living in the 'wrong' universe at all but rather the only one I got. I'll be honest with you... I don't know what that thought has to do with painting techniques but it's what fired when the trigger pulled.
So anyway, maybe it's high time I left my high castle. Took a good look around and while I have no intention of abandoning those worlds opened only by the written word, there is much to learn in the one I'm at now.
