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.