Insomnia 13 May 2019

Frequently I'll wake up in the middle of the night and lay in bed for an hour or two just thinking. I have heard this happens to old people a lot.

Mostly my thoughts are negative. This is probably not a good thing, to be stewing in your hatred in the dark like this for an extended period (or at all).

But it is sort of a bad and a good thing. Being all alone in the dark like that reminds you of the base state of life: inaction, solitude, emptiness. It is almost a religious state.

I hated it when this happened what I had a job: it meant I would wake up in the morning and still be exhausted but would have to go through all the motions of the day, push through the commute and work and small talk on reduced rest.

Now - when this insomnia happens - it is still offputting, but I can work with it.

I'll put down some of my thoughts here, thoughts that I had while in that state.

No claims that they are interesting. I figure it is sort of like looking through a kaleidoscope in an unlit room.

A short Essay on Horror and the Environment

         The wilderness is undoubtedly a place of immense beauty. This beauty may be found easily in a bloom of wildflowers or by watching an eagle soar overhead, but it also comes in a more gripping and challenging form in that sense of grandness and awe generated in us when we experience it in a deep and untamed way. That sense of awe is ineluctably tinged with the edge of fear, with the sense of our utter insignificance and fragility. It is only natural then, that some of the great works of horror fiction take place in wilderness and bring to the fore that sense of fear, seminal works of Cosmic Horror like Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’, Jeff Vandermeer’s fantastic Southern Reach trilogy along with folk and environmental horror cinema like ‘Stalker’ , ’The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘The Ritual’. 

Generally the source of the horror in these works is one not just located in definable monsters or murderers, not just in creaking mansions or derelict asylums, but in the very land itself, in the gravitas of the landscape and the indefinable characteristics that it holds, in a simultaneous sense of emptiness and immanence, and the precarious place that we have among the landscape. Death does not loom so much as the feeling that, just underneath the surface, just over the next hill or lurking just beneath the water a terrible understanding may reveal itself. Another understanding occurs, one which is immediate and tangible: when we set foot in a place where no human structure may be seen, no easy convenience had, we see that our artifacts, from the buildings we inhabit to the languages we use, the societal rules we follow and the measures we use to mark time are feeble to the point of evanescence. To stumble across something as simple as an animal freshly deceased from no cause discernible to our eye provides inescapable evidence that our own rules and our own rule may end without cause at any moment. 

Over the past two decades the use of public lands in the US has skyrocketed. Hordes of giddy city dwellers have flocked to these places to to escape the suffocation of sedentary life, many of them ill-equipped and with little understanding of  those hazards to be found in the outdoors, even those common ones. As we sink ever further into the horror of the mundane we seek out these far places in order to find some escape and instead face the horror of the unknown, the horror of the immense and unthinkable. Some, confronted with the immensity of nature, retreat immediately to what they know: some cocoon themselves within massive air-conditioned RVs; others take endless nature selfies, confining their view to the four square inches of their smartphone screen. For those able to face nature head on the thrill of experiencing the wild is invigorating and life-giving but with this increased use has come an increased number of injuries, deaths and disappearances, some of which occur in circumstances so unaccountable that the supernatural seems the only possible source.

We are in the midst of an exiting and terrible time, where out concept of nature, as something to be revered, respected and - to the extent our meager efforts are capable - protected and restored, are rapidly evolving. Parks and educational centers at the edges of these wildernesses do a wonderful (and sorely under-praised) job at showing the public those aspects of nature which are easily digestible: the plants and animals, the geology and history. But the true heart of nature lies within and beyond these places. No park Ranger is going to attempt to teach a class of children about the thousands of acres of wild land that churn with terrible life beyond the edges of the interpretive trails, no pamphlet can contain the millions (or in some cases billions) of years of tumultuous and violent history that formed these places. Even most adults choose to pass through our public lands in the safety of their cars, not setting foot off of pavement, taking the same pictures as thousands of others, rather than walk a few yards into the park to see it up close and gain a true sense of what these lands hold. Gazing up at the stars at night can be a fun and educational pastime, until one understands (as Lovecraft did, and attempted to convey in his work) that the celestial dome we see is not some flat projection just beyond the edge of our precious air but a theater of such staggering depth that the mind reels when attempting to process it. 

Even the finest pictures and paintings of an unlimited desert plain, or a documentary film of a mountain ascent or benthic dive fail to capture the reality of these places. Factual accounts of wilderness and nature are of great importance, but the true heart of our relationship with nature exists in our symbolic and mythical conception of it. As our literal and existential distance to - and our correlating ‘recreational’ use of - these lands grow so will our need to process them, to analyze them, to make some sense of them. Fiction - the transcendent capabilities of the imagination and the words which spur it on - serves as an unusually efficient method to pass on that feeling of being stranded on a marshy island in the midst of a wind storm or among the world shattering crevasses of an antarctic sweep, to document and describe the ineffable qualities of nature, like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. As with all things that we fear and fail to grasp fully, the sense of horror - and the existing and potential methods we use to express horror - serve as among the most worthy tools we posses to process that ineffable part of nature. It is up to the brave, the ill-advised and the truly honest thinkers to step out into these places, to fully grasp their terror and awe, to step beyond the comforts of the cozy cabins and OHV tracks, and to return with some truths: that there is something out there and that it doesn’t give a damn what sort of fun we want to have on our long weekends, that as we push out further and further the bounds of our technological hubris we are playing under the nose of a sleeping deity who may awake at any moment and swat us like the flies we are, that the true heart of nature is not kind or cute or logical but acts on a set of rules we could never hope to comprehend. It is up to the myth makers of the present and future to, if not save humanity from the illogic and devastation of wilderness, as least offer a clear-eyed account and warning of its capabilities. Somewhere along the way we lost these useful myths and need new ones to fill their place.

Should the average person hold an irrational fear of a wide open or wild place? Should they be afraid to spend a night in the backcountry or (god forbid) drive a few miles to take a walk in their local state park because they read a horror story or saw some sensational account on the nightly news? Certainly not. But a healthy fear, that is: a genuine understanding of the true nature and depth of the wilderness and a respect of those qualities, is sorely lacking in many people who visit these places. Perhaps a more accurate sense of the horror and power of nature could serve to do the best thing we could possibly do: keep us at a respectable distance from it. We do not agitate that which might destroy us. We do not attempt to conquer or subdue that which we fear. A reverence and respect for something much greater, much older and much more powerful than not only the individual but the totality of the human race (and its artifices) could only serve to make these places better for us all and help avoid the sort of catastrophe that prevents us from visiting them forever.

EarthWorks Sounds: A series of field recordings of monumental land art in the US

I am currently working on a series of field recordings of monumental land art in the US.

This project will be ongoing for at least the next year but I will be uploading recordings as I make them which can be found as a sound map on Radio Aporee 

So if you ever wanted to who what it is like to lie in the middle of Robert Morris' 'Johnson Pit #30' (distant jet engines and car noise) or Michael Heizer's 'Levitated Mass' (cars honking and teenagers taking selfies) then you are in luck.

I originally conceived of this project as a way to structure visiting these works. It has (sadly) turned into a study of encroaching noise pollution and the loss of the serenity and solitude that many of these works once held. Nevertheless, as bad as the anthropogenic noise in these recordings is now, it will almost certainly get worse and worse as time goes on and hopefully these will serve as some sort of documentation of what these works are now.

Short story 'The Plague Victim' forthcoming in Nightscript V

I'm excited to announce that a short story/novel excerpt of mine entitled 'The Plague Victim' will be published in Nightscript volume V.

Nightscript is an excellent annual anthology of original literary horror fiction produced by C.M. Muller. It is an honor to have my work included.

'The Plague Victim' follows an unnamed traveler as he confronts rumors of a macabre plague in a rural village and witnesses a fatality caused by it. 'The Plague Victim' is a stand alone excerpt from a novel length manuscript I have been working on for the last few years tentatively titled 'The Traveler'.

Nightscript V will be released this October in paperback and e-book formats. The previous volumes of 'Nightscript' are certainly worth checking out in the meantime.

Listing

For about three and a half years I wrote every weekday, every morning for about twenty minutes. My benchmark was to write at least five hundred words.

I did this because I read that the key to becoming a better writer was to write every day.

Okay. Easy. I woke up early, I fought against any distractions. I stayed diligent and disciplined.

Some days I would write something 'interesting'. But most days I would just complain or spew some stream of consciousness nonsense. For the last two years of this period I worked on a novel every morning. The structure of the novel was pretty simple: is was a series of journal entries from a doctor living in Russia around 1860 as he leaves 'the capitol' and travels east into Siberia. A hopeless misanthrope he casts aside all luxuries and ruminates on his hatred of the well bred socialites he left in 'the capitol' as well as the coarse and ignorant peasants of the countryside.

I wrote three or four draft of this but it never really went anywhere. I was hoping it would be a sort of Chekhov through Bernhard with maybe some abstract folk-horror thrown in, but it just never came together.

I stopped working on it in February and moved to writing short stories. I had taken a short story class and figured it would be easier to work on (and publish) short stories. I aimed to write one short story a month. I think I got three short stories together but these too just sort of fizzled out into nothing.

It felt so shitty because I figured if I researched something and worked on it regularly for a long time it would come together. Isn't that the formula for this stuff? If I do all of those things and nothing substantial comes out of it then what does that mean? Does it mean I am an inherently shitty writer? Does it mean that I will never be able to produce something significant and whole?

So then I moved and was busy with other things so I stopped writing.

I basically haven't written much since then, so about three or four months.

There was one day where I got a good idea for a way to finish up a piece. I wrote pretty frantically for a few hours but then there was this pretty significant gap in the middle of the piece, and I couldn't get it all together.

It just wouldn't resolve unless I forced it, but I knew that that wouldn't work.

So I guess this is one question that comes up: if I am not writing that am I still a writer?

For a long time I had this sense that my only meaning in life was provided by the fiction that I wrote. That the only record of my existence, the only semi-permanent mark of me being here was what I wrote down. That the creative act justified my place on this planet and justified me consuming stuff. It set me apart from others who just go through life with no purpose, who work and consume and leave no trace and are subsumed by the black tides of time to be forgotten years or month or even days after their death. It made me better and more interesting. It elevated me and made me more than just human.

That was the idea.

This feeling, and thus the work, was born out of a sort of anxiety and existential flailing. But now that I am not writing my existence is not producing anything, so my existence is pretty much meaningless. But I don't really have this anxiety anymore. It is a strange feeling.

I just like don't care. It's like 'I'm not writing but it doesn't matter because all of these ideas I had about writing were just delusions. Like I'm not the sort of person who gets off on craft. I just want to make something so that some other person can forget their self and interface with the divine for a little while. And if I can't achieve that (and I have not been) then there is no point in writing.

So it's not that I don't really feel unmotivated to write. Not any more or less that I ever really did. It's just that I don't see the point, I guess. If I worked every day for nearly four years and in fact published less than I did when I was just writing occasionally, then why was I writing every day?

Why put in the work? Why wake up early? Why feel this anxiety?

I guess I wonder why other people write and if I lack that drive or that work ethic or creative aspect that they have. For others it seems so effortless, just a natural extension of their being. Maybe I am idealizing this. But then why is there such a struggle for my own work?

I am trying not to complain but rather putting these questions out, rhetorically.

And what would it mean (and I hope this isn't the case) if I were to never write again?

Previously I worked best when I had literally nothing going on. I was fortunate enough to have months of time where I could just spend all day reading and writing. And I got a lot done. Finished  novels. But I can't expect that those sorts of situation will happen again. It's like only eating when you have free pate de foie gras or whatever. You will starve if you don't eat bread and cheese most of the time. But I don't know. I just can't do it (?) And I am not sure why.

It isn't writer's block. I have never had writers block before. I even have ideas that I could write down! A decent amount of them. I have a story that is two-thirds finished right now. I just need to finish it up. But I just don't see the point. I just don't understand why I would. It would add nothing. I would just be another piece of piss soaked garbage placed on top of another piece of piss soaked garbage.

I want to think that I can dig myself out of this whole, write something that someone else finds interesting. Write ANYTHING that is worthwhile, or that even just I feel is interesting.

Well, and it's something else that I have always dealt with, and maybe other writers do to, although I never seem to hear them talk about: you worth as a writer is dependent on how much your publish and what others say about your work. Good writers get publication and acclaim, bad writers do not. And if you just write for yourself, then what? You just write for yourself.

I guess I just envy people who can write a story for themselves and just enjoy it and the process and can feel good about whatever they come up with. I am really jealous of those people who don't feel the need to show their stuff to someone else and get a thumbs up and a gold star and a publication in some obscure internet journal that will only be read by the Editor (god bless them). I am jealous of those people who don't get jealous of those who get awards and fellowships and book deals because I am not one of those people.

If I am going to be totally honest I just look out at those who get published and feel furious. I get pissed. I just don't understand it. But then I guess at the end of the day they are working harder than I am, have worked longer than I have and are getting the rewards.

I look at other artists, people who are making really cool stuff, or at least stuff that gets picked up and published and reviewed and I figure that there must be some fundamental difference between them and me, some attitude or vision or understanding that allows them to create great work while I can do what I have done and still remain mired in nothingness. I am not sure whether this is right or not but this is the first thought that comes to mind.

The rewards of publication have always been paltry for me. I don't know what I expect will happen but what has happened in the past is that the piece goes up, I look at it once or twice, I put the link in my blog and then? I can put the credit in my bio for the next twelve month.

I feel like a boat listing. Or just on its side.

And I am not sure what to do.

Add onto this that I have this sort of curse. It is the other thing that pushed me towards writing, but not like a good push, more like the prick at the end of a spear: I have this unshakable delusion that I will do something great. It is like this thing you get when you are a teenager or whatever - I think a lot of people get it - that you want to be famous, but then most people grow out of it pretty quick. I figured that I would have gotten out of it by now but no, it is sort of always in the back of my head. I think fifty years ago it would have been diagnosed by an analyst as a superiority complex but now I think everyone just keeps quiet about it.

Around the age of nineteen I just figured that I would have to be an important writer. Like there was no question about it, it was just what needed to happen. And so this pushes me on, or rather, by not fulfilling this I will fail at my life. It is not a goal, it is a default failure condition and it is immensely frustrating. Maybe everyone has this and they never talk about it. But it is stifling, because this ties into my inability to do something just for myself, to write just for myself. I need that thumbs up, I need whatever paltry gold star can me thrown my way to feel good about myself.

I guess it is sort of addictive and you get a little reinforcement as a kid and then you get focused on it for the rest of your life. Or at least I do. Did.

Dream/Writing

I just woke up from a long, detailed 'plot-driven' dream where I was struggling with dropping out of medical school.

Did my dream scripts get mixed up last night or something? Like who writes this shit?

(I have never, ever considered going to medical school. This is literally...from the day I under stood what being a doctor entailed - sometime in senior year of high school - I knew I absolutely did not want to be a doctor, so this isn't some case where I am like dealing with some long repressed desires or current angst or anything like that)

And it's not like this dream was surreal or strange in any way. I was pretty much just going around campus, attending small classes, talking with people. There were three separate incidents where I bombed an assignment. I literally drank from a water fountain at one point (that was sort of funny because the water fountain was next to a computer or something and the librarian thought I was on the computer and she said something about how the computer was broken (but it was something technical and related to the computer - like 'the disk drive is broken' or something) and I tried to make a joke about how the water fountain was broken in the way the computer was broken and then AND THEN: she didn't hear me. And I had to repeat myself. I just want to point out, again, and for emphasis, how banal this dream was: I made a stupid joke and I had to repeat myself because I didn't say it loud enough the first time (probably because I knew how stupid it was).

Jesus. I need new dream writers or something.

I guess there was one cool part: At the end, after I had pretty much decided that I was going to drop out the next day I needed to finish up some task. So it was dark, and a little drizzly and I was walking around campus and I went to this very tall building on the medical campus. It had this high speed elevator, sort of like a pod. When it ran you could feel the g's pulling on you. And I went to what I  assume was the top floor which was this very futuristic, quiet, dark lab setting, and I laid these four or so glowing orange parallellograms into a pool. That was it. Then I descended the elevator and walked around a bit more. There was a research building which advertized that they were 'Verifying the claims of Apple 3.1' or something, which I wondered around in the dream but I guess it mean that apple set out these claims for one of their OS's and this research group was like checking these claims which I guess was a full time job and very important in that world.

###

I guess waking up from that dream made me think a bit about my writing. I guess it made me think about how some dreams, at least some of my dreams can be very plot driven or very impressionistic. I guess I find the impressionistic/feeling based ones way more compelling and interesting. The plot based ones are generally less so (though I mean here I am, writing at length about one of them at three am, but this is an exception, and most just because I am so amused at what the mind will do). And so it caused me to reassess the sort of writing that I want to do, which is impressionistic.

I guess if I could write a story that had no plot and no characters (and maybe even no setting, though I mean this in the sense of no formal setting, but with a great deal of 'setting' in the sense of atnosphere) I would be very happy. I feel like some stories can act like programs. literally analogous to computer programs, where the sequence of words can act like a set of rules that hit just the right keys or whatever in a person's mind and elicit a feeling.

I mean maybe I am conveying this in a strange way, but this should not really be that unusual. A banal example would be this: There is a man and a woman. They come to love each other to an a significant and unusually high degree. They marry and have a child. The child has some strong physical characteristics of the mother as well as natural mannerisms and traits that come from the mother. The mother dies in a tragic accident. The child is still so young when this happens that she never really forms any memories or conception of the mother. Now when the father sees characterists of the mother in the child he is reminded of the mother and how the child will never get to see herself in her mother. The father is made very sad by this.

So a story like this would engender a feeling of sadness in the reader. Of course you need to flesh out the story a great deal, with more plot and characters and so on to really make things pop, but in this case the heart of the story would be evoking that sense of sadness in the reader, trying to convey that sadness that the bereft widower felt every time he saw his child.

But can't we strip things bare and evoke even more abstract feelings?

I admit I haven't searched super hard online, but I am surprised I haven't ever heard mention of 'abstract fiction'. I mean i guess this is what poetry is: writing stripped away from its unnecessary bits. But what would abstract or impressionistic fiction be like, fiction that uses broad strokes or stripped away features in order to elicit a feeling?

What would be most interesting would be eliciting more abstract and complex feelings, ones that cannot be boiled down to just 'fear' 'joy' 'sadness'. We can experience such a wide, subtle range of feelings and there must be some that are rarely, if every, evoked by fiction.

Time to break new ground I guess.

Temple #1

Temple #1 is an artwork to be situated in a remote place, ideally a desert or a large plain.

The primary element of Temple #1 will consist of an open structure created out of flat slabs of concrete. Four slabs will form the front, sides and back of the structure.

The structure will be oriented North/South so that light enters the structure primarily in the morning and evening and so that it is relatively dark in the middle of the day.

The structure will be approximately 3 meters high 4 meters long and 2 meters wide.

There will be no doors but only an opening in the 'front' concrete slab running the height of the slab  approximately two thirds of a meter wide (or roughly the width of a person's shoulders).

This opening will have a rectangular concrete pillar before it parallel with the front slab and around a meter and a half in width, placed about a meter away so as to prevent wind/sun et c. from getting into Temple #1.

There will be two slits about a third of a meter in width running the height of the two 'side' slabs located near the front quarter of those slabs so as to allow light into the front of Temple #1.

The floor, walls and ceilings of Temple #1 will remain bare, unpainted and unadorned aside from the following:

In the floor, located at midline and around a meter and a half away from the entrance there will be a rectangle cut directly out of the floor. It will be around a quarter of a meter in width, length and depth. This will be lined with black stone and filled with tan sand.

From the ceiling affixed with steel cable, at the midline of length and width, will be a very large set of five metal chimes. Thee bottom of the chimes will be aligned so that they hover no more than a third of a meter over the floor. These chimes will be immense, ideally a foot in diameter. The tong of these chimes should be weighted so that they ring occasionally, perhaps once a minute.

Leading to the primary structure of Temple #1 should be a path, either running curved up a hill, or straight along a straight path. The path should be about a meter wide, dug down and filled with fine gravel. At intervals along each side of the path should be planted upright a large oblong stone, white or grey, a meter in width and two or three meters in length.