(Even more than) 99 red balloons

I was sat in the Red Lion on Kingly Street the other day – excellent pub, it’s a Samuel Smiths house so the beer is both good and cheap, and there’s no music, so instead there’s just the wonderful susurrus of people just chatting – and I overheard someone say ‘I’ve spent four hours making over two hundred fucking balloon animals’.

That struck me as being quite an unusual comment, so I made a note of it. I then totally forgot I’d written it down, so coming on it just now I was surprised again. I can’t help wondering who this guy was, why he’d just spent so much time making balloon animals, and – come to think of it – who needs two hundred balloon animals anyway? A mystery…

Which set me thinking about the process of writing. The balloon animal comment was a piece of disrupted information, torn from its context. If I want to include it in a story, I’m going to have to give it back a context of some description. I could drop it into a broader narrative:

‘Dave had drifted into the balloon animal making world after college, and felt that he was wasting his talents – but he didn’t realise that one day, his skills would bring him fame and fortune…’

Or, I could use it to illustrate a character’s mood:

‘Waiting at the bar, Dave heard someone ranting. ‘I’ve just spent four hours making over two hundred fucking balloon animals’. The comment touched a nerve. The people around him seemed to be equally decorative, equally over-inflated, equally useless.’

And so on. The point is that I’m smoothing out. The comment caught my attention because it stood out from normal discourse. By dropping it into a fiction, I’m removing that quality, turning it into an absorbed part of a wider narrative / thematic whole.

It’s the story as a whole that I want to catch peoples’ attention, not its component parts – they should disappear into its overall impact, contributing to it without drawing too much awareness to themselves.

For me, that gives an interesting insight into the process of writing. Writing fiction is essentially a process of integration, taking a series of disparate elements and fusing them into a single, coherent whole. Each element only has use insomuch as it adds to that whole – if it distracts from it or jars against it, it should be excised.

And I wonder if there’s a broader comment about how we define ourselves lurking in there, too? My suspicion is that, in editing memory to create a working definition of the self, we function as narrative integrators in exactly the same way. We manipulate some experiences to support our own self definitions; we excise others that disagree with them.

Read thus, our selves themselves can be seen as entirely fictional constructs; carefully edited reality sets that support a very clearly defined sense of what we are or want to be. If that’s the case, does that make us less real? Or does it force us to look again at what we understand by fiction, realising that in fact it’s a lot more ‘real’ than it’s usually given credit for?

Your 20th century boy

In the context of yesterday’s comments about the self-justifying self, I’ve been thinking about Michael Moorcock’s ‘Between the Wars’ series of books (‘Byzantium Endures’, ‘The Laughter of Carthage’, ‘Jerusalem Commands’, ‘The Vengeance of Rome’), dealing with the adventures of Maxim Pyat in the 20th Century.

Maxim’s a fascinating character. Both naïve adventurer and lethal manipulator, he at once lives through and embodies some of the worst parts of the last century. From an Eastern European starting point, he travels the world, encountering the best and (far more often) the worst of humanity at every point.

In narrative terms, Moorcock uses him as a kind of fictional mouse-pointer, guiding him around the world to highlight the moments and processes that led up to the Holocaust.

This focus on history makes the books didactic in the best sense; they support a richer, deeper understanding of the 20th Century, one that sees the Holocaust not as an isolated incident but as part of a broader pattern of deep inhumanity that in many ways is still continuing.

But there’s more to Maxim than mere didacticism. As the narrator of all four books, he’s a very developed character in his own right. Key to understanding him is realising just how he manages his own story.

The gulf between his self-image and his actions is huge. His behaviour shows him up as being variously a con-man, drug addict, thief, rapist, pederast and worse. But he consistently presents and understands himself as a thwarted visionary and frustrated romantic.

That broken self awareness is rooted in his situation. Pyat treats others badly; he often presents himself as having been treated worse. His self-deception is in part a function of those perceived or actual brutalities, a necessary defence mechanism as he becomes a kind of emblematic punchbag for the worst that the 20th Century had to offer.

That self deception builds inevitably to the final book’s emotionally shattering climax, but it also performs a valuable thematic function. It helps explore how victimhood can be the most dangerous mask of all, offering a perpetual and immutable moral high ground that legitimises the worst brutalities as a protective response to threat.

Swamp moralities

Well, it’s been a wonderful period of battery refreshing and book rewriting. The book’s in good shape now – 20,000 words shorter, more emotionally coherent and much, much more focussed. So that will be going out to various people over the next few weeks. Very exciting!

And of course I’ve been doing much re-reading. In particular, inspired by the magnificent Byron Orpheus, I’ve been grooving to Marvel’s bonkers-but-wonderful master of magic Doctor Strange. Supported by his master, teacher and friend, The Ancient One, Strange battles various different kinds of cosmic evil while occasionally worrying about paying pharmacy bills, remodelling his Greenwich Village Sanctum Sanctorum to fit in with local property law, etc.

It’s highly recommended; the artwork is both profoundly psychedelic and utterly precise, and the writing gives the stories a propulsive, addictive momentum that makes Doctor Strange’s adventures a pleasure to read. What’s really interesting, however, is the way that the comic treats evil – and the way that that sets up Alan Moore’s groundbreaking work on ‘Swamp Thing’ in the 80s.

In Doctor Strange, evil is very objectified. Just as Strange is aware that he both is and represents good, so his opponents very self consciously both are and represent evil. This is something they’re very proud of, monologuing from time to time to time about their glorious wickedness, etc.

For me, this is a very limiting moral stance. Evil is complex; it’s far more than just an external person-to-be-zapped. Having been deep in Jung also while away, I’d read it as much as a reflection of aspects of ourselves we’re uncomfortable with as an external destructive force. Over and above this, there’s the problem that most people read themselves as good. Baron Mordo’s and Dormammu’s (two key villains) ‘my glorious wickedness’ speeches don’t ring true to me, for this reason.

I haven’t read much of the rest of the Marvel corpus, so I’m not quite sure to what extent this kind of binary, artificial treatment of evil occurs elsewhere, but there are indications in Doctor Strange that even Ditko / Lee (the creative time behind the early strip) were uncomfortable with it. There’s a very interesting moment when Dormammu is pointed up as being a hero in his own culture; Strange realises that his conception of evil is particular, not universal. But that perception isn’t followed through in any real depth.

Or at least, it’s not followed through in early ‘Doctor Strange’. But it’s fundamental to Alan Moore’s legendary 80s run on DC’s ‘Swamp Thing’. So, once again, it’s time to stop and consider just why Alan Moore is god…

‘Swamp Thing’ is ostensibly about a shambling pile of mud, leaves and psychedelic mushrooms coming to terms with the fact that it’s not – as it had believed – a mutated human, but rather an almost entirely supernatural earth elemental.

It’s utterly magnificent, for a variety of different reasons. It combines horror with fantasy, satire with action, cosmic psychedelic adventures with down-home spookiness. It invents John Constantine, of Hellblazer fame. It has Superman scratching his head and admitting he’s powerless before ecology. And it’s a complex meditation on the nature and meaning of evil.

Guided by Constantine and the Parliament of Trees, the Swamp Thing goes through a series of adventures that both help it understand its true nature and powers and force it to confront the limitations of binary good / evil conceptions.

It fights a werewolf; but the werewolf has been triggered by one woman’s frustration at centuries of patriarchal oppression. It wipes out a nest of vampires; but the vampires are motivated by the need to raise and protect their young. It protects some lost aliens; but the aliens are being attacked by our own innately carnivorous ecology – and so on.

Every adventure is a step on the road to initiation, that is to a development of a sophisticated understanding of the limitations of moral judgement in the face of the depth and complexity of natural living. The quest is exemplified in a question that the Parliament of Trees puts to the Swamp Thing – ‘where is evil in all of the wood?’

The answer comes when the Swamp Thing reaches the narrative’s climax. He’s been trained to confront an existential threat, a dark *thing* that is rising from the depths of the cosmos to threaten all before it. Other heroes attack the thing and are swatted away with no effort at all. The Swamp Thing steps into it and engages with it.

I’m not going to describe the story’s climax – you should go and read it! Suffice to say that the Swamp Thing answers his question, stepping beyond good and evil and taking part in an almost alchemical marriage of opposites. The simplistic moralities that animate the Doctor Strange stories are simultaneously neutralised and transcended.

This cosmic narrative is echoed in the Swamp Thing’s own development, after the event. The warring sides of his personality – human and non-human – are reconciled, and he finds a new peace as a fully individuated post-human, settling down with his anima and (at least for a while) retiring. There’s a deep metaphor for character development going on there as well, built at least in part (I suspect) on Jung’s thinking on personality development and fulfilment. But more on that another time….

In the meantime, suffice to say that Alan Moore’s rethinking of Marvel morality in ‘Swamp Thing’ is a fascinating part of his broader 80s project – the further development of superhero comics as a complex set of metaphors for the way we live and feel and develop, now.

Rebooting

Well, it’s Bank Holiday Monday over here and life is slowly restarting. Last week was mostly very productive book work, combined with lots of rain; last weekend’s Green Man Festival was muddy but highly enjoyable, climaxing with a fantastic Strange Attractor-organised night of talks on animism, the cultural history of mushrooms, plus hypnotically wonderful music from the Raagnagrok All-Stars (joined on-stage by bagpipers, dulcimer players, etc). Pictures here.

And now my blog brain is rebooting. Family business in Devon tomorrow, then I’ll be back ranting about the usual, as usual. So until Wednesday, farewell!

Going out in the summer

Well, holidays are beginning to kick in - I’ve got today and Friday off, and then the whole of next week. Today’s an editing-short-stories day; next week is Green-Man-then-editing-novel-week. So, this week and next week, I’m going to be posting intermittently, rather than every day.

Happy Holidays all! Hope you have a good rest of August…

I was a poltergeist once, you know…

Well, it’s mid-August, and my brain is winding down. Holidays are beginning; I’ve got Monday off next week to recover from a Stellas recording session (we’re going from midday Sunday to 4am Monday), Friday to head to the Green Man Festival with H, Raagnagrok and co (where we shall in particular be enjoying Strange Attractor Saturday), and the week after to work on the book.

So no heavy posting today. Instead, as a preparation for Sunday’s recording session, a visual record of one of the more unusual Stella sessions, helping the mighty Disinformation create strange atmospherics in a pitch black abandoned bank vault just round the corner from Old Street.

I spent most of the evening throwing an iron bar around; it clanged and sparked in a very satisfying way when it hit the floor. Various other folk were doing various other things, while audience members wandered round and felt generally spooked. I ended up feeling like a particularly satisfied poltergeist; the closest to becoming a haunting that I’ve ever been.

Made from clay

And also, courtesy of Jeff Vandermeer’s blog, some heavy dark weirdness, as the Demiurge enters children’s TV through the Claymation window. Apparently - and unsurprisingly - this was banned for being too disturbing…

<EDIT> It’s from a film called ‘The Adventures of Mark Twain’, which according to IMDB is marvellous… another scene apparently features Twain playing the organ at his own funeral! I shall be looking out for it.

A mirror and a window both

In ‘S/Z’, his wonderful, word by word dissection of a Balzac short story, Barthes notes that ‘in the text, only the reader speaks.’

There’s a fascinating point about the process of reading to be drawn out of that. When we read a book, he’s saying, we read it in our voice, hearing the words in our head as if it’s us speaking.

That’s an index of a broader readerly solipsism. Any book only has meaning for us inasmuch as it taps into experiences we’ve already had. Once it steps beyond our emotional experiences – whether actual or fantasised - it leaves us with nothing to engage with. Without engagement, we’re unlikely to keep reading.

We tend to regard books as externalised artefacts, bringing intellectual and emotional novelty into our lives. In fact, in many ways they can only ever present our selves back to ourselves, connecting with us through our own voices and experiences that we’ve already had. A book isn’t a window; it’s a mirror.

But perhaps that’s not quite true. Books do introduce novelty into our lives – new information, new understanding, new ways of seeing. Our ability to grasp novelty may be limited, but nonetheless it is real. The voice may be ours, but the words we are reading aren’t. A book is neither mirror nor window, but a complex set of tensions between the two.

That’s a complexity that M. John Harrison picks up on, in his magnificent short story ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ (latterly re-titled / re-edited as ‘A Young Man’s Journey to London’). It’s the concluding story of his 70s Viriconium sequence, and it very literally enacts the window / mirror tension.

A small group of characters discover a portal to the ‘magical’ world of Viriconium in the toilet of a café in the provincial English town of Huddersfield. It’s a mirror that they can climb through, and so they do.

They find themselves in a seedy and blasted semi-urban landscape. They scratch together a living for a while, before being forced to return to our world by a combination of sickness and lassitude.

The world they find themselves is authentically magical; but it’s also authentic to their situation in our world. Taking themselves through the portal isn’t a magical solution – rather, it does little more than give them a different context within which to confront the same issues that they have to deal with here.

For M. John Harrison, there’s no such thing as escape; only reframing. And perhaps that’s the best way to understand where novelty in fiction comes from. Fiction helps the self see itself in a new light by giving it a means of reframing itself. Simultaneously mirror and window, it creates new worlds for us to step into by forcing us back on what’s already there.

Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to you - literally.

 

Viriconium!

Metal ritual overdrive

Rushing around a little unexpectedly today, so instead of a full post I’m linking to a groovy short interview with ambient metal mavens SunnO))). Maximum drone heaviosity is of course always magnificent - but what really intrigued me was the way they talk about their on-stage dress / rituals.

They seem to use them to help forget that they’re playing to an audience, and therefore enter a more creatively productive state of mind. Interesting resonances with recent ponderings below / from Mark McGuinness about the need for creativity to be unconscious of itself and its rewards to really take off.

What’s a person anyway?

So much narrative removes the possibility of change. Although faced by risk, the hero always win out, the quality and correctness of his or her original vision unchallenged.

They’re superficially about progress, but in fact such narratives privilege stasis. The hero might develop new skills (whether practical or emotional) to allow them to achieve their goal, but the fundamental identity that makes that goal worthwhile remains the same.

I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing. It comes back to the question of what we are. How static are our identities? At what points in our lives do the deep structures of the self change? Should fiction be exclusively concerned with those changes?

The last question isn’t too difficult to answer. Fictions that deal with static characters can still be wildly enjoyable (take the Solomon Kane stories, for example). The important thing here is not to confuse them with any kind of real life – to do so makes a virtue of personal rigidity.

But what of deeper progressions of the self? That, I think, throws you back onto questions that all honest fiction writers face, sooner or later. What are we? How do we work? What is this *person* thing that I as a writer am trying to model?

Any answers I have are deeply provisional.. and in fact I want to ponder them a bit, so more tomorrow. In the meantime, what do you think you are?