“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.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
double up.
Listen to this song when you read this blog. I listened to it while I was writing it. It asks the question that I want to ask. It doubles back on itself as I will double back on myself before your eyes right now. The song itself is a classic love story. Guy likes girl, but can't find the words to tell her. how can he say what countless others have already better stated? In the background of the song, we also have this great, echoing "yada yada yada."
“Why should I say
what’s already been said
better a hundred times before?”
“ya-daaaaa”
Somebody once said:
“Fuck this noise”
Well I say, fuck that. The only people that get to complain about things are the people who can do something, but have to question whether or not it’s morally correct. And I honestly do not think that’s the case here. If you can do something about it, and it’s morally correct, then go do it. If you can’t do anything, complaining won’t help. Shut up. Soldiers get to complain, so do murders and prostitutes. College students? rarely. Unless of course we just want to express disgust towards something, but leave it alone so that we’ll always have something to be disgusted with. Do we need that? Maybe, but do we really have to leave old things alone to mix and fester with the new?
Q: “Does he not see the hypocrisy?”
A: I see the hypocrisy that you see, that you so kindly took a photograph of, but when I look for it; it runs, hides, and shits itself. Really.
Some set of people I vaguely know joined a face book group the other day called something along the lines of “I’m only friends with the weird kid so he spares me when he snaps.” The first thing I thought was, “well if he sees this, your brilliant plan is foiled!”
But then I thought, I can’t complain about this.
You say:
“I'm not asked to coffee
I'm not challenged by you
I'm not asked to coffee
I'm not asked to coffee”
Well then I say:
I’m not challenged by you
I’m not challenged by you
I’m not asked to coffee
I’m not challenged by you.
By mirroring the quote, I try to balance it, to give a clearer picture of how we can interact with other ideas. In a simple sense, we can either fight them or work with them. To "ask to coffee" (as often as it's used) is the offer to collaborate. To challenge is the honorable way to begin a battle. I think we need a bit of both if we want to get the most out of ourselves.
But as luck would have it, I am challenged by Joe, somewhat at least. He doesn’t ask me to coffee, but that’s fine. And then I do find myself wondering at the placement and repetition of those two phrases. Then I decide how it looks when I take off my glasses and that’s what I come up with.
“damn! that is some stuff” And then I laugh to myself at how people can say something without actually saying anything. And then I laugh again because it happens all the time. Then I double over on myself and start to cry because I am, of course, laughing at myself. We just want to be careful that we don’t become the eight-ball, and if we become the eight-ball, we better really fucking pray that “ask again later” doesn’t come up too often.
So then I have to try and challenge you back right? You challenge me sir and must answer.
“If you can bring them up--and there are more--in the conversation, you get bonus points. That is-- you get intellectual recognition. You're listened to, you're perceived, you're on-it. Which is kind of laughable. A person can hide behind big words and small parasites”
I would tend to agree with you but I hope you don’t think that this is the case for the class you are writing this for, for the class that you give examples for. If you don’t give us any credit of having any real intelligence, at least give some to Tony. Also, aren’t there usually reasons that these “buzzwords” are around? Aren’t they more relevant then say, describing your standards to make-out with someone at a party? Again, I fold in one myself, but a little bit less than the last time.
There most likely is a selfish reason for everything we do, but still we aspire to something more. Just, try not to write this off right away ok?
So why should we say what's already been said? Because old words can get new meaning. Now go out and get the girl.
If you wonder about all this, listen to the song again. I’m not kidding.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
still pushing them parasites...
I made it to the Olympics last weekend. It was something else, and now I feel the need to describe it. Originally a buddy from high school and I were planning on seeing three events: the luge, the ski jump, and the biathlon. For some reason, that turned into alpine skiing and the luge. Alpine skiing was postponed. All we saw was the luge. Three events down to one, so I was a little disappointing right off the bat. The Olympics were heavy. I don’t know how else to describe them; actually, that’s not true. The Olympics were messy, The Olympics were getting places too early, The Olympics were exhaustion, the Olympics were unbelievable amounts of people, the Olympics were consumption, and last, and definitely least, the Olympics were athletics. All in all it was a hell of an experience, and it’s not one I’ll be able to repeat anytime soon, even if I really wanted to.
The implications of the Olympics being a parasite are obvious –we already heard in class about one of the programs being cut to fund it. But every city wants to host the Olympics. It must be one of those socially desirable parasites. A parasite queen that summons hordes of innocents, only to send them on their way with souvenirs and autographs, “hey, I wish the Olympics would come to our town.” Whatever, it’s still not a big deal. Cash flows in, cash flows out; the parasite spends our money (or is it its money?) and then makes us/it some money.
Does age and repetition disguise the parasite? Master Serres (my go to expert on all things parasite, aside from Tony) us that noise must not be continuous to continue to be a parasite, but what about rhythms? What about the regular that is also irregular? I’m thinking of things like traffic, alarms, speech, echoes. It would be pretty tough to completely oust the Olympics, but they’re only around once every four years per variety. Traffic (mostly) goes away at night, or when you get out of town. Alarms get turned off. A parasite that hides in crowds, that blends in? Again, Serres is my guide.
“He becomes invisible by making, on the contrary, a lot of noise. One can hide by being too visible or too perceptible. The parasite hides behind the noise and to-do of the devout.”
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. The socially desirable parasite must be uncanny, and the uncanny must be, will be, visible. It cannot be invisible, lest the observations of its uncanniness become impossible to make. Furthermore, when the undesirable parasite becomes visible, it will cease to be a parasite. The socially desirable parasite can remain a parasite visible, but would fail if it became invisible (no longer socially desirable)
Then there’s the fever, the parasite is not the fever itself, but that which causes the fever. Here we find another difference between the interaction of different parasites and their hosts. The undesirable parasite will try to get its eating done without making a sound –without causing a fever. If this occurs, the parasite must flee, to remain invisible, or it will fail. A socially desirable parasite also causes the parasite, but then it disguises itself as the cure. “Fever” or “frenzy” are both words used to describe something that is inexplicably desirable. “I’ve caught the iPad fever” “tourists are in a frenzy to get to Vancouver”. We know that the fever is a defense mechanism of the host, but the parasite, as it has before, and will continue to do in the future, has invented, and reinvented itself, in order to make use of this as well
The implications of the Olympics being a parasite are obvious –we already heard in class about one of the programs being cut to fund it. But every city wants to host the Olympics. It must be one of those socially desirable parasites. A parasite queen that summons hordes of innocents, only to send them on their way with souvenirs and autographs, “hey, I wish the Olympics would come to our town.” Whatever, it’s still not a big deal. Cash flows in, cash flows out; the parasite spends our money (or is it its money?) and then makes us/it some money.
Does age and repetition disguise the parasite? Master Serres (my go to expert on all things parasite, aside from Tony) us that noise must not be continuous to continue to be a parasite, but what about rhythms? What about the regular that is also irregular? I’m thinking of things like traffic, alarms, speech, echoes. It would be pretty tough to completely oust the Olympics, but they’re only around once every four years per variety. Traffic (mostly) goes away at night, or when you get out of town. Alarms get turned off. A parasite that hides in crowds, that blends in? Again, Serres is my guide.
“He becomes invisible by making, on the contrary, a lot of noise. One can hide by being too visible or too perceptible. The parasite hides behind the noise and to-do of the devout.”
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. The socially desirable parasite must be uncanny, and the uncanny must be, will be, visible. It cannot be invisible, lest the observations of its uncanniness become impossible to make. Furthermore, when the undesirable parasite becomes visible, it will cease to be a parasite. The socially desirable parasite can remain a parasite visible, but would fail if it became invisible (no longer socially desirable)
Then there’s the fever, the parasite is not the fever itself, but that which causes the fever. Here we find another difference between the interaction of different parasites and their hosts. The undesirable parasite will try to get its eating done without making a sound –without causing a fever. If this occurs, the parasite must flee, to remain invisible, or it will fail. A socially desirable parasite also causes the parasite, but then it disguises itself as the cure. “Fever” or “frenzy” are both words used to describe something that is inexplicably desirable. “I’ve caught the iPad fever” “tourists are in a frenzy to get to Vancouver”. We know that the fever is a defense mechanism of the host, but the parasite, as it has before, and will continue to do in the future, has invented, and reinvented itself, in order to make use of this as well
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
ugly rat stopped dead in its tracks.
“Imagine if you will a world where women, rats, men, and children live in peace and harmony.”
Could such a place ever exist? Serres doesn’t seem to think so.
“The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it with information. He obtains roast and pays for it with stories.”
How does the rat survive? He does not produce; he cannot properly steal or threaten (intentionally). So he picks up what we leave behind. But what we leave behind, is usually what we do not intend to leave behind; we don’t what rats in our homes or in our trash. A parasite is born. And yet, the rat still lives in the margins of society. Humans will hate him where ever he dwells. (Didn’t anyone tell them that in order to see eye to eye with humans that humans would first need to see eye to eye with each other?)
We blame the rat, the rat blames the flea, the flea, I am sure, would blame the Black Death. I’m sure the Black Death would blame something else as well, maybe the infected, for not being touch enough to survive it. Maybe not, maybe something else. The trail goes down the line and then back up, the parabola.
Of course, now things aren’t so simple. If the producer gets tired of his parasite, and gets his hands on some information, his only choice is to become a parasite himself. He has to chase off the rats, or poison them, set traps. He has to get inside the mind of the parasite. He must also invent a new interruption.
Serres also tells us why the producer will not be able to remain a parasite in definitely:
“The balance of exchange is always weighted and measured, calculated, taking into account a relation without exchange, an abusive relation. The term abusive is a term of usage. Abuse doesn’t prevent use. Abuse doesn’t prevent use. The abuse value, complete, irrevocable, consummation, precedes use- and exchange-value. Quite simply, it is the arrow with only one direction.
Abuse value, it seems, is how far up one side of the parabola you can get before you fall
back down and start going up the other side.
Serres loses me here though. The parasite invents, and yet the producer is the only alternative to the parasite. Can you produce and yet not invent? Serres also claims that to reproduce is to not true production. He has a nasty way of building and building on ideas as he writes. I may have missed part of the architecture, or just not seen enough of it yet.
Could such a place ever exist? Serres doesn’t seem to think so.
“The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it with information. He obtains roast and pays for it with stories.”
How does the rat survive? He does not produce; he cannot properly steal or threaten (intentionally). So he picks up what we leave behind. But what we leave behind, is usually what we do not intend to leave behind; we don’t what rats in our homes or in our trash. A parasite is born. And yet, the rat still lives in the margins of society. Humans will hate him where ever he dwells. (Didn’t anyone tell them that in order to see eye to eye with humans that humans would first need to see eye to eye with each other?)
We blame the rat, the rat blames the flea, the flea, I am sure, would blame the Black Death. I’m sure the Black Death would blame something else as well, maybe the infected, for not being touch enough to survive it. Maybe not, maybe something else. The trail goes down the line and then back up, the parabola.
Of course, now things aren’t so simple. If the producer gets tired of his parasite, and gets his hands on some information, his only choice is to become a parasite himself. He has to chase off the rats, or poison them, set traps. He has to get inside the mind of the parasite. He must also invent a new interruption.
Serres also tells us why the producer will not be able to remain a parasite in definitely:
“The balance of exchange is always weighted and measured, calculated, taking into account a relation without exchange, an abusive relation. The term abusive is a term of usage. Abuse doesn’t prevent use. Abuse doesn’t prevent use. The abuse value, complete, irrevocable, consummation, precedes use- and exchange-value. Quite simply, it is the arrow with only one direction.
Abuse value, it seems, is how far up one side of the parabola you can get before you fall
back down and start going up the other side.
Serres loses me here though. The parasite invents, and yet the producer is the only alternative to the parasite. Can you produce and yet not invent? Serres also claims that to reproduce is to not true production. He has a nasty way of building and building on ideas as he writes. I may have missed part of the architecture, or just not seen enough of it yet.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
thought experiment 1. the place of the parasite.
To what lengths do people go to remove parasites from their bodies and from society in general? How do we determine if these parasites are threatening or not? How did these parasites get to be where they are? All these questions have a common thread, and that is: what place does the parasite occupy, both physically and imaginatively? My roommate and I just watched Schindler’s List; this of course got me thinking about World War Two and the Holocaust. We can say that Hitler did what he did, in part at least, because he thought that he was removing a harmful parasite from the planet. The common argument would be to say that his error was thinking of a cultural group as a parasite, and not as people. I would like to shift this somewhat by suggesting that his error was not in mistaking a group as a parasite, but rather, in thinking that he was justified in attempting to kill off a parasite group. At first glance it might seems offensive to refer to Jews as parasites, but if we take a look at the bigger picture we find out that this really is not significantly harsh view of humanity. The Nazi’s were also a parasite, both to the German population, and to Europe as a whole. The allied forces also, all parasites to their respective countries.
Anyone who has ever poked around into parasitism will probably be quick to tell you that parasite comes from the Greek “Parasitos” meaning “near food”. I could stop there and say that anyone or anything that is not starving is a parasite. This method of deriving definitions is a poor one, in my opinion; it’s outdated, vague and lazy. I am going to try to expand the context a bit, one of the definitions turned up by the The Oxford English Dictionary, is: “A person who lives at the expense of another, or of society in general; esp. a person who obtains the hospitality or patronage of the wealthy or powerful by obsequiousness and flattery; a person whose behavior resembles that of a plant or animal parasite; a sponger. Chiefly derogatory.” Now instead of “anything that is not starving is a parasite”, a parasite can be just about anything. With this multitude of available interpretations, “parasite” becomes much more significant as an action rather than as a thing; keeping in mind of course that humanity comes up on the roster before any other, seemingly more conventional parasites, such as a tape worm.
Not only do the above definitions give us an idea of the vastness of potential parasite has as a verb, but they also hint at where the parasite will always be found. The parasite is chiefly concerned with sustenance, often food, but not always; and since it does not produce its own it must remain near to the host. 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. The imagined threat of a parasite is also greatly mitigated over distance, as we see in The life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Lothario is only threatened by, and only poses a threat to, Murr when in close proximity. Here the parasite-host relationship does not hold well, instead we have a battle over who will be the dominant parasite. “The brute will become a lecturer, receive a doctorate, will end up as a professor of aesthetics lecturing to students on Aeschylus! ... -- Oh I am quite beside myself! – that cat will root about in my own entrails…” (111) In this section we find a Lothario worried that Murr will rise up and claim his job. Each thinks the other to be the inferior parasite, but neither is a threat to the other when separated. Parasites, it seems, have a competitive nature over hosts.
Similarly, hosts also would appear to compete over parasites. This is derived from the intimate relationship that a parasite and a host share. I am by no means the first to realize this, no here is where the flea gets its truest poetic justice:
“Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.”
Donne, with poetic panache, cuts right to the heart of it. The flea, as a parasite, is intimate enough to represent sex without the loss of virtue on the part of any one of them. Not only does the flea get to take in part the act of Donne’s desire, but it is also pampered by this act, the parasite, it seems, is allowed enjoyment. The flea is also protected, partially at least, by being a vessel for a sacred mixture of blood. In “Puce” Barry Sanders gives us some history to Donne’s metaphor, “The events in question unfolded in the most innocent way. One particular evening in the summer of 1579, Monsieur Étienne Pasquier, a lawyer and distinguished man of letters, made a call on Madame Madeleine Des-Roches at Poitiers, and, to his surprise, noticed a flea on the bosom of her daughter,” The men at this get together, we are to understand, did not know what to make of this. The flea has had centuries of negative connotations attached to it, but at the same time, how could they kill the well positioned fellow without embarrassing both themselves and the young mademoiselle? Instead of taking action, the men did a rather French-y thing, and all wrote poetry about it. Donne’s sexually charged flea was born. These Frenchmen did more than just create a witty metaphor however; they were perhaps the first to discover a parasite that is socially desirable. Now we have iPods and iPads, and we shell out big money for these things, and then even more money for applications and songs to fill them.
If anything is to be gained from this thought experiment thus far, I hope it is that parasites are everywhere, and that quite a few of them are not too bad to have around, or are at least tolerable. This, however, is all still built into a society that usually has an aversion to parasites, or as OED puts it, their use is “Chiefly derogatory” we have also know that people will go to great lengths to remove what they perceive to be a parasite from themselves and from society. As I have hinted at earlier, this is not so much derived from any notions of superiority, but rather from competiveness stemming from instinctual systems. To become a parasite contains a set of desires, the want for more, for improvement. For the last piece of this puzzle, I want to take a look at Shivers as the ultimate representation of where lies the parasite. The parasite’s relationship to the host ends up being so intimate, that competition is ruled out almost entirely amongst the infected population; it seems likely that the parasite only wishes to spread to increase the population, not to become more powerful than any other individual parasite. Within the Starliner itself, the parasite’s transmission is always evident, but aside from the transmission, its origin and destination are much vaguer. Take Dr. Hobbes for instance, we are led to believe that he first engineered the parasite at first to replace livers, but then we are told that he made them into a combination of a powerful aphrodisiac and a venereal disease in order to let humans go back to their animal instincts, to live lives less burdened by social constraints. Finally, although at the beginning of the film, we see him kill off his test subject in an attempt to also kill the trial parasite. This seems to confirm my ideas that a parasite without a host is a vague notion at best, and also that you cannot really know what sort of relationship the two will have until the point of actual exposure. Also raised is the question of what will the parasites ultimate victory look like. Suppose it takes over every human, will the parasite still be considered a parasite, or will the world’s population just gain a characteristic. In order for a parasite to exist, do we not need a norm with which to compare the host-parasite relationship?
My discoveries are thus: the parasite cannot exist without the host, and by that rule, nothing is a host without a parasite. If the parasite leaves the host, or the host removes the parasite, the relationship is also void. The parasite only sometimes seeks the host. The host sometimes seeks the parasite. By these rules, parasites often compete for hosts, hosts often compete for parasites. More intimate parasite-host relationships can sometimes negate this competition. The place of the parasite is the host; the place of the host is the parasite.
Anyone who has ever poked around into parasitism will probably be quick to tell you that parasite comes from the Greek “Parasitos” meaning “near food”. I could stop there and say that anyone or anything that is not starving is a parasite. This method of deriving definitions is a poor one, in my opinion; it’s outdated, vague and lazy. I am going to try to expand the context a bit, one of the definitions turned up by the The Oxford English Dictionary, is: “A person who lives at the expense of another, or of society in general; esp. a person who obtains the hospitality or patronage of the wealthy or powerful by obsequiousness and flattery; a person whose behavior resembles that of a plant or animal parasite; a sponger. Chiefly derogatory.” Now instead of “anything that is not starving is a parasite”, a parasite can be just about anything. With this multitude of available interpretations, “parasite” becomes much more significant as an action rather than as a thing; keeping in mind of course that humanity comes up on the roster before any other, seemingly more conventional parasites, such as a tape worm.
Not only do the above definitions give us an idea of the vastness of potential parasite has as a verb, but they also hint at where the parasite will always be found. The parasite is chiefly concerned with sustenance, often food, but not always; and since it does not produce its own it must remain near to the host. 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. The imagined threat of a parasite is also greatly mitigated over distance, as we see in The life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Lothario is only threatened by, and only poses a threat to, Murr when in close proximity. Here the parasite-host relationship does not hold well, instead we have a battle over who will be the dominant parasite. “The brute will become a lecturer, receive a doctorate, will end up as a professor of aesthetics lecturing to students on Aeschylus! ... -- Oh I am quite beside myself! – that cat will root about in my own entrails…” (111) In this section we find a Lothario worried that Murr will rise up and claim his job. Each thinks the other to be the inferior parasite, but neither is a threat to the other when separated. Parasites, it seems, have a competitive nature over hosts.
Similarly, hosts also would appear to compete over parasites. This is derived from the intimate relationship that a parasite and a host share. I am by no means the first to realize this, no here is where the flea gets its truest poetic justice:
“Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.”
Donne, with poetic panache, cuts right to the heart of it. The flea, as a parasite, is intimate enough to represent sex without the loss of virtue on the part of any one of them. Not only does the flea get to take in part the act of Donne’s desire, but it is also pampered by this act, the parasite, it seems, is allowed enjoyment. The flea is also protected, partially at least, by being a vessel for a sacred mixture of blood. In “Puce” Barry Sanders gives us some history to Donne’s metaphor, “The events in question unfolded in the most innocent way. One particular evening in the summer of 1579, Monsieur Étienne Pasquier, a lawyer and distinguished man of letters, made a call on Madame Madeleine Des-Roches at Poitiers, and, to his surprise, noticed a flea on the bosom of her daughter,” The men at this get together, we are to understand, did not know what to make of this. The flea has had centuries of negative connotations attached to it, but at the same time, how could they kill the well positioned fellow without embarrassing both themselves and the young mademoiselle? Instead of taking action, the men did a rather French-y thing, and all wrote poetry about it. Donne’s sexually charged flea was born. These Frenchmen did more than just create a witty metaphor however; they were perhaps the first to discover a parasite that is socially desirable. Now we have iPods and iPads, and we shell out big money for these things, and then even more money for applications and songs to fill them.
If anything is to be gained from this thought experiment thus far, I hope it is that parasites are everywhere, and that quite a few of them are not too bad to have around, or are at least tolerable. This, however, is all still built into a society that usually has an aversion to parasites, or as OED puts it, their use is “Chiefly derogatory” we have also know that people will go to great lengths to remove what they perceive to be a parasite from themselves and from society. As I have hinted at earlier, this is not so much derived from any notions of superiority, but rather from competiveness stemming from instinctual systems. To become a parasite contains a set of desires, the want for more, for improvement. For the last piece of this puzzle, I want to take a look at Shivers as the ultimate representation of where lies the parasite. The parasite’s relationship to the host ends up being so intimate, that competition is ruled out almost entirely amongst the infected population; it seems likely that the parasite only wishes to spread to increase the population, not to become more powerful than any other individual parasite. Within the Starliner itself, the parasite’s transmission is always evident, but aside from the transmission, its origin and destination are much vaguer. Take Dr. Hobbes for instance, we are led to believe that he first engineered the parasite at first to replace livers, but then we are told that he made them into a combination of a powerful aphrodisiac and a venereal disease in order to let humans go back to their animal instincts, to live lives less burdened by social constraints. Finally, although at the beginning of the film, we see him kill off his test subject in an attempt to also kill the trial parasite. This seems to confirm my ideas that a parasite without a host is a vague notion at best, and also that you cannot really know what sort of relationship the two will have until the point of actual exposure. Also raised is the question of what will the parasites ultimate victory look like. Suppose it takes over every human, will the parasite still be considered a parasite, or will the world’s population just gain a characteristic. In order for a parasite to exist, do we not need a norm with which to compare the host-parasite relationship?
My discoveries are thus: the parasite cannot exist without the host, and by that rule, nothing is a host without a parasite. If the parasite leaves the host, or the host removes the parasite, the relationship is also void. The parasite only sometimes seeks the host. The host sometimes seeks the parasite. By these rules, parasites often compete for hosts, hosts often compete for parasites. More intimate parasite-host relationships can sometimes negate this competition. The place of the parasite is the host; the place of the host is the parasite.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
the biography gag.
What is the context set of a biography? When are they written? What accomplishments warrant them? How accurately can someone else capture all the different facets of a human personality over an entire lifetime? How accurately can an individual capture all the different facets of his or her personality over an entire lifetime? What inspires an individual to write an autobiography? What context set has that person’s life consisted of? How does one edit an autobiography or biography? What events of a life can be thrown out in the drawing room? How do these edits affect the overall biography? What, if it exists, is the archetype of the modern biography?
My best attempts to answer that last question lead to one place: the gospels, at least for western society anyway. And why not? Fact or fiction Jesus has had a lot of people write a lot about him. Hoffman’s combo of Murr and Kreisler mirror them in several ways, be this purposeful or not. At the beginning of John’s gospel we have a take on existence just as we do in the beginning of Murr’s autobiography. As an opening, the contemplation of existence seems almost overwhelming as it roped backed into the context of a single life, but we soon realize that we are not just dealing with anyone, but with a messiah. We also know that Murr dies young. I find myself asking, has he passed before his work his completed? Curiously, Hoffman himself will die before finishing his masterpiece to its entirety. It is understood that Murr was not betrayed by any followers (he lacks them for the most part) but we do witness people who want to kill him even though he poses no direct threat to them, besides the threat of potential of change. It also seems like a running joke that Murr, as both messiah and scholar, writes his own biography. This is probably because Murr would of course feel that no one else would be talented enough to write it, not that no one would want to.
Where he may be a parody to a messiah; Murr is a highly satirical character as an enlightened scholar. He is naïve and narcissistic, under the impression that his every action is improving the life of every creature he comes into contact with. He also does not have much of a theory of mind, other than that he must be recognized as a hero. Hoffman claims that Murr is only being honest, but even this is a poke at writers and enlightenment in general. Murr also cannot keep up a relationship, nor does he seem very good at make friends. It seems that the only place Murr can thrive is when he entirely immersed in his scholarly work.
Overwhelming as he can be at times, Murr is not the only satire and Parody we encounter in the book. Kreisler’s interruptions mirror Murr’s quite well, only from the context of a biography instead of an autobiography. An early take on this is gained when Kreisler describes his childhood
This quote sets the tone for any other descriptions that we will get about Kreisler’s childhood, that is, one big joke. An unknown child hood, or a joke of one, is a trademark of many biographies, including the one featuring god’s own son. His mother’s laughter that breaks the lute is apparently supposed to make him an “ignoramus in musical matters” so naturally Kreisler grows up to become an accomplished composer. In a way, this is the Kreisler version of Murr’s musings on existence; the romantic joke against the enlightened quest for trust. The description of a human birth becomes ironic when we consider that the other primary character in the book is a cat.
Perhaps the greatest gag of all though, is that Kreisler isn’t even present in all the sections of his book, sometimes we just have Julia and Hedwigga, other times the editor apologizes for a lack of information on Kreisler. This brings us back to a few of my yet unanswered questions. Specifically: how accurately can someone else capture all the different facets of a human personality over an entire lifetime? And: how does one edit an autobiography or biography? The answer to both of these questions becomes quite clear in Kreisler’s case, the answer seems to be: not well. Murr’s case is a bit more difficult, as the autobiographer, he gets to choose which sides of himself to show us, and I feel that Murr has probably given this a great deal of thought.
My best attempts to answer that last question lead to one place: the gospels, at least for western society anyway. And why not? Fact or fiction Jesus has had a lot of people write a lot about him. Hoffman’s combo of Murr and Kreisler mirror them in several ways, be this purposeful or not. At the beginning of John’s gospel we have a take on existence just as we do in the beginning of Murr’s autobiography. As an opening, the contemplation of existence seems almost overwhelming as it roped backed into the context of a single life, but we soon realize that we are not just dealing with anyone, but with a messiah. We also know that Murr dies young. I find myself asking, has he passed before his work his completed? Curiously, Hoffman himself will die before finishing his masterpiece to its entirety. It is understood that Murr was not betrayed by any followers (he lacks them for the most part) but we do witness people who want to kill him even though he poses no direct threat to them, besides the threat of potential of change. It also seems like a running joke that Murr, as both messiah and scholar, writes his own biography. This is probably because Murr would of course feel that no one else would be talented enough to write it, not that no one would want to.
Where he may be a parody to a messiah; Murr is a highly satirical character as an enlightened scholar. He is naïve and narcissistic, under the impression that his every action is improving the life of every creature he comes into contact with. He also does not have much of a theory of mind, other than that he must be recognized as a hero. Hoffman claims that Murr is only being honest, but even this is a poke at writers and enlightenment in general. Murr also cannot keep up a relationship, nor does he seem very good at make friends. It seems that the only place Murr can thrive is when he entirely immersed in his scholarly work.
Overwhelming as he can be at times, Murr is not the only satire and Parody we encounter in the book. Kreisler’s interruptions mirror Murr’s quite well, only from the context of a biography instead of an autobiography. An early take on this is gained when Kreisler describes his childhood
“On the day of St. John Chrysostom, that is, on the twenty-fourth of January in the year one thousand seven hundred and some years more, around midday, a boy was born with a face, and hands, and feet. His father was eating pea soup at the time, and in his delight spilled a whole spoonful over his beard, at which the newly delivered mother laughed so hard, although she hadn’t seen it, that the tremor broke every string of the instrument in the hands of the lutenist playing the baby his latest murky,”
This quote sets the tone for any other descriptions that we will get about Kreisler’s childhood, that is, one big joke. An unknown child hood, or a joke of one, is a trademark of many biographies, including the one featuring god’s own son. His mother’s laughter that breaks the lute is apparently supposed to make him an “ignoramus in musical matters” so naturally Kreisler grows up to become an accomplished composer. In a way, this is the Kreisler version of Murr’s musings on existence; the romantic joke against the enlightened quest for trust. The description of a human birth becomes ironic when we consider that the other primary character in the book is a cat.
Perhaps the greatest gag of all though, is that Kreisler isn’t even present in all the sections of his book, sometimes we just have Julia and Hedwigga, other times the editor apologizes for a lack of information on Kreisler. This brings us back to a few of my yet unanswered questions. Specifically: how accurately can someone else capture all the different facets of a human personality over an entire lifetime? And: how does one edit an autobiography or biography? The answer to both of these questions becomes quite clear in Kreisler’s case, the answer seems to be: not well. Murr’s case is a bit more difficult, as the autobiographer, he gets to choose which sides of himself to show us, and I feel that Murr has probably given this a great deal of thought.
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