TE 3

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.”
- Zhuangzi
“What's in a name?”
- Romeo
In My relatively short life, I do not think anyone has asked that question better then Romeo. Of course, did he ask it, or did Shakespeare? Did Shakespeare steal it from someone else? The question of a name is a question of originality; it is an attempt to figure out what level of narration you are in.
For my part, I have gone by several names over the past two years of my college experience: Billy, William, Will, Bill and Williamnot. Then there are nicknames (other less common derivatives of William) as well as people I have been mistaken for. (Wriver). At the beginning of the year I decided to begin formally practicing something that I had been doing informally for quite a while; to let people decide what name to call me by on their own. So far my success has been pretty limited. The name that I introduce myself as tends to stick. Those that I have told my ideas to tend to be skeptical, usually choosing to use the name they most commonly hear, or else demanding that I specify a preference. This disappoints me somewhat since I personally view my project as a way to inject creativity and significance into an otherwise mundane activity. Eventually I came to realize a common viewpoint of our age: that which is not named ought to be named, and that which is named ought not to be renamed. The performative, it seems, is touchy. People assume that I must have a preference and that because it’s my name, that my choice must be best.
While introductions may be insignificant to our everyday lives, I do understand that names tend to be considered as significant things. I am a pretty firm believer in this. Giving something a name can be a difficult thing. Giving someone a name tends to be even more difficult. I guess I can understand why people tend to have trouble with my experiment. If anything this has been the live part of my thought experiment. To explore names.
The next part involves poking around in the story that I wrote for the last thought experiment. His name is Clayton Miller. It took me forever to come up with that name. So I guess it has meaning. And I was kind of sad when he turns up dead. I was sad that I didn’t get to know him better, sad that things didn’t turn out better for him. Is this really what I think happens to high school dropouts? Does that have meaning too? I am pretty proud of the concept of the story, but it isn’t really long enough to get its message across very well. I thought it might be interesting to write a story about trying to cope with understanding and misunderstanding. At some point in the writing process I realized that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, thus, Clayton must die at the end. “He found nothing, because there was nothing. He falls. He couldn’t cope. He dies in much the same position he was in that night at the train tracks.” So it ends the same way it began. I didn’t really learn much from the experience, despite that I enjoyed it, and that I am proud of the writing. Maybe coping is just being able to accept misunderstanding. By the time we die, it may be too late to realize this but Clayton can teach me something.
Clayton isn’t the only character though. The narrator, maybe even the main character, is the parasite. The parasite saves Clayton’s live. (or does it?) It wants what is best for him. I tried to make it into a socially desirable parasite. I wrote a blog about them once. A mild summation of my ideas might be, “What we are getting into here, I feel, is the idea of hiding in plain sight. This is how the socially desirable parasite must operate. There is an important distinction between invisible, that of the un-desirable parasite, and unrecognizable, that of the desirable parasite.” Within myself, I am arguing whether Clayton’s parasite is unrecognizable or not. It does admit to being a parasite, but is its presence beneficial enough to allow it to remain within a host for as long as it wants? Is it more of a parasite, a negative, harsh thing in modern society, or is it more of a symbiotic partner? In the end, Clayton decides that it isn’t worth it, and goes after the parasite, but since it doesn’t actually occupy a physical space, does that make it unrecognizable enough to survive? This scene is a culmination of my ideas from the first thought experiment that without the host, the parasite does not exist. “Without the host, the parasite dies off, or rather, whatever is acting as a parasite can then no longer parasite. Without nearness, neither the host, nor the parasite exists.” So I guess since one can’t exist without the other they both die. Can anyone cope with their own death?
Where am I going with this? Inspiration, the greatest inspiration for my first thought experiment was Serres, and for the second was Welsh. Two narrations, one is the biography of the parasite, the other is its autobiography. Do I recreate that notion in my works? In reality, I’m not sure where I am headed with this. I’m not sure where my life is headed either. Nanotext died and then I wrote a short story where the characters die at the end. I am wondering what the life span of a fictional character is. How can we escape a level of narration without killing them off, or does that even do it? More than their deaths though, I was wondering about their life spans; Nanotext was killed. Was he killed before he was ready to die? Was Clayton ready to die?
“What we fail to realize is that it is not some external entity that has made this technology.” Too true, we hardly ever think about these things dying off at all and even less so why it happens. The facets of a human are just as fragile as the human in its entirety. But how are to interact with these changes? With deaths and births? While the style in which nanotext was mourned was not a classic mourning in any sense, it seems fitting that there was such an outcry. The underlying question seems to be: was it necessary? I feel that it was, in the sense that the old must make way for the new. But maybe that isn’t even the proper question to be asking. We have power over these aspects. To fully realize that power allows us to use them in new ways. Serres might have called it “abuse value” but I’m not entirely sure.
In the style of Murr, I tried to give my parasite a contemplation of its own existence, but in the Style of Filth, I tried to do it in relation to the host. “This is the human condition as I understand it: always fighting everything to maintain their own ideals of normalcy, but never succeeding.” And, “‘I don’t know how to handle this… this is all so strange… why me?’
Ah the other classic trademark of the human condition.
‘There is no why Clayton. You were dying, I found you, now we both live.’”
By describing his take on the human condition, the parasite also describes itself. He also makes attempts to inform Clayton that this lifestyle is ultimately unsustainable. Since the parasite is ultimately inseparable from Clayton, it follows that neither of them can survive the other. It maybe that I need to amend my earlier ideas, though I still believe the parasite cannot exist without the host; I also believe that they do need to be distinguishable from each other. Did Clayton pull that bullet out of his own stomach? I guess you could say that. To live is to be normal, but to have a talking parasite living inside you is not. In the end, Clayton’s quest for normalcy fails.
Story has two changes in narration; the shift into the parasite at the beginning, and the shift out of the parasite at the end. I had intended for the shift to be a subtle one, so that it would be difficult to tell when he comes and when he goes. The movements of the socially desirable parasite must be slight and quiet. I was hoping to catch people off guard by doing this. It may not have been completely successful since Reading Murr, but I felt I had to reflect on the way this class has challenged our assumptions of narration. Primarily, that Narration does not have an end, you cannot get outside of it. Personally, I don’t see much of a point in considering it a hierarchy either. Are we at the top? As long as there is no god, but who made god? Who made us? Actually, forget the maker, is evolution our narrator? What happens when you write a biography? Some people seem to want to hold on to what they have created, to claim ownership to those things. This is only natural, but what I am interested in are the ways that thinking like this can be restrictive. What do your characters become if you only let them behave a certain way? In this sense, society has become our narrator, telling us what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. But I think I need to make a distinction here, the narrator isn’t always the creator, and the creator isn’t always the narrator. Sometimes they are crossed however, as I feel is the case for humanity. We create ourselves (at least partially) and then we present ourselves as creations. In the end, I don’t really know what happens to the parasite in my story, nor do I know who the narrator is when the parasite isn’t around. In fact, I don’t really know what say at all about my story. I had planned to write most, if not all of my final thought experiment analyzing it, but now I am sick of Clayton and his imaginary parasite.
I am sick of being my own narrator too. Maybe that’s why I want people to come up with names for me. I’m tired of carrying myself so I’m trying to shift weight to others. What do you want to call me? Who am I to you? What do you think I should do? I’m I not taking enough responsibility, or does everyone else take too much? Of course, if everyone were more like me, everything would balance back out. So I parasite you with my whining and wishing and then there has to be a host for me to parasite off of. I need somebody to read this paper after all, and yet, no one really needs me to write it. Maybe myself, but maybe not, I could survive without it. Everybody wants to carry their own weight. No! They want to get stronger and carry more weight, gain weight and carry more weight. Is it strange that I want to be more like Lester Burnham? Maybe it’s just the attitude of a college kid. I’ll be dammed, but I don’t have the answer.
I’ve enjoyed the class. I figured that I would. I’m going to stick around next quarter for 202 and then 335 next year. Even if I don’t know who I am (did I mention that?) at least I feel like I’ll have somewhere to fit in. in the first blog that I wrote for the class, I said that I was hoping to get to be a stronger writer so that I could spend more time doing it. I think I’m getting there. I still play video games quite a bit, and I still think of it all as traveling to new places, every time. The social commentary in this experiment on the experiment itself isn’t something I’ve ever done on at this magnitude. I guess it’s another part of the experiment, because narration is involved in these things just as much as it is in any story I write.
What’s left? The quote at the beginning of the paper, why is it there? Well I love that quote, is that enough of a reason? No, no, I can wrap it in. I love the quote, but I disagree with the last line Butterfly to man, and man to butterfly is more than the transformation of material things; it is the transformation of all things. It is a change in the level of narration, a change of names, an acceptance of misunderstanding, and role reversal all in one. Without our dreams we wouldn’t be free whatsoever. Why choose butterfly or man? Why can’t we be both? Why not both at the same time? Parasite then host then parasite then butterfly then whatever. Even if our freedom is an illusion, at least we can learn to live to the fullest extent of that illusion.

Thought Experiment 2

At some point in our short lives we are all forced learn to cope with difficult things. Exposure like this is almost always an uncomfortable experience, but for Clayton Miller things seemed to have hit stone cold bottom. In some unnamed industrial yard in some unnamed city, Clayton was laying sideways in fresh mud beside rusty tracks. Clayton was now learning to cope with one of the most difficult things imaginable: Pain, but Clayton was lucky to know exactly what kind of pain he had to cope with. The pain of a thirty eight caliber bullet shot out of a revolver from about fifteen feet into the left side of Clayton’s belly. At this exact moment Clayton was also learning how to cope with the most difficult thing imaginable: the inevitability of a quickly approaching death. One angry bullet and one sour drug deal.
I came to him from a horse, a horse inside a horse. I had grown tired of the horse. It was fed the same thing every day. How do you expect it to taste? Humans have, by far, the farthest ranging appetites, although not quite as far reaching as my own. It was in this state of mind, having abandoned the horse, that I happened upon Clayton. I watched him get shot, and watched his friends drive off without him. “Poor man,” I thought, “you do not need to die like this, you and I could share so much.” I decided to establish communication as quickly as possible.
No sooner had I begun this endeavor, without even breaking to take in a snack, Clayton managed to get to his feet. Of course, no single direction was any worse than the others, so Clayton started stumbling along the tracks, but he wasn’t really going anywhere. I spoke up, “Where are you going Clayton? You’re dying.” Clayton spun around.
“Hey! Help me! I’ve been shot. Where…?”
“Look down, you’re dying, I can help.”
“What? Oh goddamned little blood-sucker leave me alone, I need this stuff right now!”
“Well that’s mildly insulting, but don’t even try it. I’m pumping numbing agents and antiseptics into your blood as we speak”
“I’m hallucinating now? Have I lost that much blood?”
“No , but you’ve lost a lot. There’s something dead inside you, something that was never really alive. Dead things like that are only good at one thing, making living things dead too.”
Clayton fell over at this point. Am I that difficult to talk to? I suppose I am.
“Look my friend, if you’re hallucinating you will die anyway; I can get it out of you and give you chance to get out of here.”
“What’s the catch?”
“You let me live inside you, obviously. You won’t even know I’m there.”
“Fuck it, I am dying. Why not?”
Clayton screamed in disgust as I followed the bullet hole into his belly, and then screamed in pain as I pushed it out. He had already passed out when I started to clot up the blood in the opening. I took what I needed, but not more than was necessary. When he woke up six hours later as the sun was coming up, he went through the usual process of denial: wondering why he was there, if he dreamt it. He got pretty shook up when he found the bullet on the ground. Eventually I had to speak up.
“Might want to head home Clayton. You could still die out here.”
He looked down at his gut in surprise.
“I’m crazy aren’t I? I imagined some parasite crawl into my belly and pull this bullet out me and now I’m hearing voices and now I’m not talking to anyone!”
After saying this he just got up and started walking. I asserted my presence several times but he did not react. He walked for a couple hours, found a highway, and hitchhiked back into the city. He rode in the back of a pickup.
We didn’t speak again until he got home. This treatment isn’t really new to me.
“I’m not going to go away just because you’re ignoring me Clayton. I’m here to stay, and as you very well know I’ve also established communication. I don’t intend on being silent even if you do. You’re not even crazy you know, you made a life saving decision by letting me help you. Now you can go on living. Am I really that much of a burden?”
“You’re in my head, you speak directly to my brain… how can you be real? Leeches can’t talk.”
“It’s the only way I can talk to you Clayton; just think of the fact that you can’t ignore me as good manners. I’m not incredibly chatty, but it’s impossible not to communicate once you learn how.”
“None of this proves you’re real. Why is this happening to me? I only sold the drugs; I never used them, as if getting shot wasn’t bad enough.”
“You want proof fine.”
I wiggled just a bit in my lodging, not enough to hurt Clayton, but enough to make him uncomfortable. He yelped.
“What are you?! Some kind of alien? A government project gone wrong? What do you want from me?”
“I just want to live, Clayton, that’s all. I will have no noticeable effect on your physicality. I evolved on this planet just as your species did. I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of the parasite that talks to its host, that sort of thing is quite frightening to your kind.”
“I… but… you’re in my head that’s not fair. I can’t handle this. I’m going to the hospital. They’re going to kill you.”
The nerve and dishonesty of some humans! I could have left him for dead by those horses, but instead I saved him. Now he was running down the stairs of his apartment building to try and get someone to kill me.
“I saved your life Clayton, we made a deal. If you did not understand the terms then it is your fault. I understand that this situation is not uncommon among your kind.”
Clayton hailed a cab and got in.
“Take me to the nearest hospital… hurry.”
“I see you aren’t bluffing Clayton, well nor am I, I have power over you. I will kill you before you reach your destination. I’m releasing a powerful toxin into your blood right now, soon you will start to feel sick, stop this or I will increase the amount to lethal levels.”
It wasn’t but a few seconds until Clayton was puking in the back of the cab. He ordered the driver to go faster so I released a bit more of the toxin into his blood stream. Soon he was on his side in pain, retching, but still he ordered the cab on. I was now getting close to lethal levels. I didn’t want to kill this man, but I was not ready at all to die. Why did he have to drag this on? This is the human condition as I understand it: always fighting everything to maintain their own ideals of normalcy, but never succeeding. I won out with Clayton, of course. I was just about to give up on mercy when he told the cap driver to pull over and stop. He fell out of the cab and onto the street and cried out.
“I give up! You win; get it out, make it stop.”
I complied at once, as I had no real desire to make the man suffer.
“I am releasing a neutralizing agent, Clayton; you will begin to feel better soon. I apologize for bringing such pain and discomfort to you. I wish to live peacefully, but I must defend myself when necessary. I hope never to have to use this power again.”
When Clayton was feeling better he got up and had the cab take him back to his apartment. He spoke up when we got there.
“I don’t know how to handle this… this is all so strange… why me?”
Ah the other classic trademark of the human condition.
“There is no why Clayton. You were dying, I found you, now we both live.”
“I don’t know… I need to call my boss…”
Clayton called the drug boss after a few minutes of silence. As it turns out, the drug deal he was involved in went very poorly, apparently the buyers had made off with all the money and all the drugs. The boss was so upset over this that he killed the other two who ditched Clayton after he got shot. Then the boss told Clayton that he should be dead, but since he had got out of there alive that Clayton didn’t deserve to die again. His debt to the group had been paid, but the boss also said that Clayton no longer had work with them. A good survivor but a bad pack horse. I thought this was a compliment. Clayton just seemed depressed. He went to sleep. And then that’s all he did for a few days. He hardly ate or did anything but sleep. I tried hard to be understanding; he had been through what humans commonly refer to as “a lot”, but they taste so bad when they sleep all the time, when they don’t eat and when they do eat, they eat the same thing over and over. I had to help him out. I wanted to push him in a direction that would be better for both of us.
“This lifestyle is not sustainable for either of us Clayton. Why don’t you try to find work or better food or friends?”
“You don’t pay rent, you little shit. Why should I listen to you? Are you going to poison me again? I’d be dead without you or I’m dead with you. What’s the difference?”
“I don’t want to hurt you Clayton, I just want us to live, and I want a chance for us to grow.”
“There is nothing for me here. I’ve been running drugs since I was thirteen and now I have nothing. I will run out of money soon and then what? I never even graduated from high school and I’ve been declared dead to my only friends. Cut off. All I have is you. Do you know what it’s like to be cut off? I bet you don’t. You’ll just use me until you can’t anymore and then once again I’ll be left for dead; well… let’s get something to eat.”
Clayton walked into his kitchen
“I’m glad Clayton, you’ll see, everything will work out.”
But instead of getting food, Clayton got a knife out of a drawer. He looked at it for a minute and then looked at his guts. He paused for a minute. He tried to cope. He tried to comprehend that for perhaps the first time in his life he was about to do something that was noticeable to the naked eye. He looked at the knife again. He looked at himself looking at himself. The knife was clean. The pause passed quickly, seeming to take exactly as much time as it actually did. Seven seconds. The knife was in the left side of his belly where the scar was and then he pulled it to the right. Clayton fell to his knees. Odd at this of all times he was totally silent. So was the parasite, even odder. He watched his guts spill to the floor. He even put his clammy hands down into them felt them like on the floor like moldy fruit. He found nothing, because there was nothing. He falls. He couldn’t cope. He dies in much the same position he was in that night at the train tracks.
Life. Pain. Death.