Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 11

The Swill Of Corporate Swine

When I was in my final years of high school, I came to realize that I hated corporate culture.

There were current songs on the radio that I liked, a few current movies, and even a few TV shows, but more and more, I began to smell garbage -- a reeking stew of cynicism, laziness, and contempt for the audience. More and more of it seemed the flakings of a small heart, of a smaller head, and all designed to scoff at human feeling, to diminish human thought.

Because I hated what I saw and hated myself for wasting time with it, I became drawn without intention to works of the past. I listened to symphonies on CBC radio, watched old films on late-night television, read books and plays, poems and essays by writers no longer central in the public eye. All of this was purely by accident: I would encounter something that grabbed my attention, and this, in turn, would lead me down obscure pathways to other music, other stories, forgotten by many people but alive in ways that current offerings were not. What motivated me was neither a backwards-pacing need for some non-existent "golden age," nor a fake nostalgia for something I had never known, but a thirst and hunger for meaning. I wanted to be taught, challenged, and above all, kept honest.

The lesson, here, is that no one forced me to choke down the gruel of corporate commerce. No one forced me to wallow in the puddles of the Zeitgeist. I was free to seek out meaning on my own terms, and if this meaning lay in works of the past, then I was free to love what I love no matter how many centuries might have separated me from the source.

I made use of this heritage. Anyone can.

When You're Strange

Social isolation has a tendency to distort subjective impressions of exterior phenomena, and this is not limited to perceptions of facial physiognomy; indeed, related phenomena can also be perceptually distorted, and this would include the qualia of non-same-sexedness and transport medium fitness.

For any given individual with tendencies beyond the socially-accepted range of performance and/or state of being, facial perception begins to seem a function of precipitation. Indeed, it can be stated that codes of personal identification become progressively non-optimal, when you're strange.

I Dream Of CD

Click for a better jpeg.

My dreaming mind has a sense of humour -- or, I should say, it thinks it has a sense of humour. Just before I woke up this morning, it tossed a stupid joke at me:

In the midst of our pandemic, I had a task to perform. From a pile of CDs in jewel cases, all of them symphonies by Anton Bruckner, my job was to put the CDs in order of composition, from Symphony No. 00 in F minor, to No. 1, to No. 0 in D minor, and then all the way to No. 9.

That seemed easy enough at first, but every attempt was complicated by a bunch of semi-identical CDs with a cartoonish black wolf on the white cover of the jewel case. Whenever the regular CDs appeared to be in order, these "cartoon wolf" CDs would show up out of nowhere to mess up my efforts.

I was getting frustrated: what the hell was going on? Finally, a voice in my dream told me that these disruptive CDs were the Bruckner variants....

Then I woke up, and thought, "Come on! That was awful."

Lonely Mitochondria

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I worry about the endosymbiotic hypothesis of mitochondria. It keeps me awake.

Without mitochondria, the chemical reactions within cells that make multi-cellular life possible would not exist. The endosymbiotic hypothesis puts forward the idea that mitochondria were once individual cells living separately, that were somehow ingested or parasitized by other cells, yet survived, reproduced in their new environment, and provided a great source of energy for their hosts.

If this hypothesis turns out to be true, then here on Earth we have mitochondria by accident -- an incredibly lucky accident. How often could this accident (or any similar endosymbiosis) be repeated on other planets? How many planets are full of thriving bacteria, but with no multi-cellular forms?

Given the sheer size of the universe and the likely number of planets, this lucky accident might have occured many times, but on worlds far apart from each other, so far apart that interstellar contact would be impossible within the lifetime of any civilization, or of any species.

Either way, the implication here is that we live in a universe of planets bulging with life, but not with multi-cellular, intelligent life. And this idea nags at me: we might be alone, or so isolated by chance and by distance, that we will never learn if anyone else is out there. We will never know.

Ad For A Martial Arts Course....

...In one of my dreams last night:

"Book reviewers, why wait? Attack writers NOW."

Vague Suspicion

When I find myself shouting PISS OFF AND DIE at every third sentence, I should ask if I might have chosen the wrong writer.

Bowen and Ballard, Condensed

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Reading Elizabeth Bowen's "Summer Night" for the second time in five years, and wondering, once again, what the hell to make of it, I suddenly realized that one possible key to understanding is to recognize that it never was a short story, but a 26-page novel.

Suddenly, the shifts in perspective, the changes in tone, the drastically separate responses of the main characters, all began to make sense. These things are expected in novels; here they are in "Summer Night," compressed in startling ways.

J. G. Ballard would later develop compression methods of his own for the stories collected as THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION; his book, along with "Summer Night," could teach writers to craft better stories in fewer words.

Fascination and Bafflement: Walter de la Mare

"All Hallows," by Walter de la Mare, 1926.

After all of these decades, I've come to accept that I might never understand most of de la Mare's fiction, but this helps to make his work fascinating: a sense of layers beyond my comprehension.

Even so, I feel especially conflicted over this one. It combines de la Mare's gift for expressing the uncanny and for leaving me baffled, all at the same time.

Right from the start, the strengths become apparent:

"It was about half-past three on an August afternoon when I found myself for the first time looking down upon All Hallows. And at glimpse of it, fatigue and vexation passed away. I stood 'at gaze', as the old phrase goes -- like the two children of Israel sent in to spy out the Promised Land. How often the imagined transcends the real. Not so All Hallows. Having at last reached the end of my journey -- flies, dust, heat, wind -- having at last come limping out upon the green sea-bluff beneath which lay its walls -- I confess the actuality excelled my feeble dreams of it.

"What most astonished me, perhaps, was the sense not so much of its age, its austerity, or even its solitude, but its air of abandonment. It lay couched there as if in hiding in its narrow sea-bay. Not a sound was in the air; not a jackdaw clapped its wings among its turrets. No other roof, not even a chimney, was in sight; only the dark-blue arch of the sky; the narrow snowline of the ebbing tide; and that gaunt coast fading away into the haze of a west over which were already gathering the veils of sunset."

But then frustration sets in: the narrator broods on and on and on, takes forever to reach the front door.

Once he finally manages to get inside the building, the story comes to life:

"I looked close at the dim face in profile against that narrow oblong of night. 'It is so difficult to be sure of oneself,' I said. 'Have you ever actually encountered anything -- near at hand, I mean?'

"'I keep a sharp look-out, sir. Maybe they don't think me of enough importance to molest -- the last rat, as they say.'

"'But have you?' -- I might myself have been communicating with the phantasmal genius loci of All Hallows -- our muffled voices; this intense caution and secret listening; the slight breathlessness, as if at any instant one's heart were ready for flight: 'But have you?'"

Again, frustration sets in: de la Mare hits the oldest writing speed-bump on the road.

"What appeared to represent an eagle was perched on the image's lifted wrist -- an eagle resembling a vulture. The head beneath it was poised at an angle of defiance -- its ears abnormally erected on the skull; the lean right forearm extended with pointing forefinger as if in derision. Its stony gaze was fixed upon the stars; its whole aspect was hostile, sinister and intimidating. I drew aside. The faintest puff of milk-warm air from over the sea stirred on my cheek."

You can toss around adjectives like "hostile" and "sinister" as much as you'd like, but unless your object behaves in a hostile way, or becomes vividly sinister to the reader's eye, your adjectives are a waste of time. "The faintest puff of milk-warm air from over the sea stirred on my cheek" -- this evokes a definite response; "hostile" and "sinister" evoke nothing.

But in contrast to this empty vagueness, the forces at work in All Hallows are much more bizarre:

"'There was a sound like clanging metal -- but I don't think it was metal. It drew near at a furious speed, then passed me, making a filthy gust of wind. For some instants I couldn't breathe; the air was gone.'

"'And no other sound?'

"'No other, sir, except out of the distance a noise like the sounding of a stupendous kind of gibberish. A calling; or so it seemed -- no human sound. The air shook with it. You see, sir, I myself wasn't of any consequence, I take it -- unless a mere obstruction in the way."

- - - - -

"And then, without the slightest warning, I became aware of a peculiar and incessant vibration. It is impossible to give a name to it. It suggested the remote whirring of an enormous mill-stone, or that -- though without definite pulsation -- of revolving wings, or even the spinning of an immense top."

- - - - -

"At that instant, a dull enormous rumble reverberated from within the building -- as if a huge boulder or block of stone had been shifted or dislodged in the fabric; a peculiar grinding nerve-wracking sound. And for the fraction of a second the flags on which we stood seemed to tremble beneath our feet.

"The fingers tightened on my arm. 'Come, sir; keep close; we must be gone at once' the quavering old voice whispered; 'we have stayed too long.'"

The effect, here, is what you might encounter while sneaking at night through a factory: all around you, the walls and floors tremble at the touch of some alien process, but what it might be, or what it might imply, are nothing you can grasp in the dark.

It's a fascinating method (used to great effect, later on, by Nigel Kneale in his teleplays), and here, it certainly conveys a mood of something detached and remote from human concerns.

But what does it all mean? You'll have to guess; I'm a stranger here, myself.

A Thought Hole in the Dreaming City

Cover by Brian Lewis, 1961. Click for a better jpeg.

We all know that a plot is a chain of cause and effect: one thing leads to another, which in turn leads to something else, on and on in ways that should seem clear -- at the very least, in hindsight.

We also know that a plot hole is a break in this chain: something happens without sufficient cause, character motivation, or explanation:

KUZCO: No! It can't be! How did you get back here before us?

YZMA: Uh... how *did* we, Kronk?

KRONK: Well, ya got me. By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.

YZMA: Oh, well. Back to business.

Click for a better jpeg.

Along with plot holes, we can also have what I call thought holes. These are gaps in the reasoning behind a story, in its concept, in its background details, or in both.

One example crops up in "The Dreaming City" by Michael Moorcock, a story based on certain assumptions:

-- Elric is the rightful heir to the throne of the dreaming city.

-- While he is out wandering in distant lands, he is declared a traitor and outlaw by his cousin, who now rules in Elric's place.

-- Elric wants vengeance against his cousin. To this end, he is willing to have the dreaming city invaded and sacked by sea raiders.

-- The point of attack will be the main harbour, which is concealed behind a maze. Elric knows how to pass through the maze, and so he must lead the attack. He must also conceal the approach of this fleet with a magical fog.

All in all, a risky plan; so much could go wrong. But consider this: a day or two before the raid, Elric, in a single boat, sails to the dreaming city to set up one of his own personal schemes:

"Elric knew that he dare not risk entering the harbour by the maze, though he understood the route perfectly. He decided, instead, to land the boat further up the coast in a small inlet of which he had knowledge. With sure, capable hands, he guided the little craft towards the hidden inlet which was obscured by a growth of shrubs...."

All of this happens in full daylight:

"On foot, Elric strode inland.... At last he came to the city."

At nightfall:

"Elric, his hand ever near his sword-hilt, slipped through an unguarded gate in the city wall and began to walk cautiously through the ill-lit streets...."

I have no head for military planning, but I still have to wonder: if I were to lead a potentially-disastrous, frontal attack on a city, and knew of an unguarded back route where a secondary line of men could reach the city in full daylight without being observed, would I not want to use this tactic, at the very least, as a diversion?

When Elric snuck into this hidden cove, he could have brought several men along with him, shown them the route, shown them the unguarded gateway, and then returned them to the raiders' fleet where they could develop plans for a back-up force. I would have done it. Hell, why not?

Moorcock never explains why such a plan could never work, because he never mentions the possibility. He sets it up in the reader's mind, but then ignores it.

A thought hole!

Not A Critic

When I lose my perspective, I can become aggressive in promoting aesthetic principles: a pointless and perhaps even offensive waste of time.

What matters is not that other people share my convictions, but that my convictions gain enough clarity within my skull to inform what I write. I will never be a critic; my reviews and comments are lessons to myself.