The Thing I Can’t Do

 

First page of the Vennich Manuscript

I told you some weeks back that I had been working on a Big Thing, bigger than everything I’d ever done. I have laid all the groundwork. I know the architecture. I have placeholders in position, and text and graphics squirreled away to expand on later, preparing for the massive effort required to turn the architecture into a breakthrough work of fiction that threatens the reality each one of us clings to.

But I have run out of time. The simplest math of time is against me. I cannot, could not, possibly complete what I have envisioned, and the realities of tech economics are against me. Even if I were so lucky as to create a potent fraction of my intention, I have gambled on the Internet to provide my longevity, and the Internet is a hungry greedy thing I can’t pay for long enough. Eventually, all will be swallowed and consigned to impenetrable oblivion.

What is left to me? Only this. To tell you something of what I had in mind, so that you might consider for yourselves whether it was worth doing if I had been up to it.

I’ll get to the whys and wherefores later on. Meanings too. For now I’ll describe the work I had in mind.

The hyperlinks of the Internet are like stitches, a means of creating vast conceptual embroideries in which images and words have dimension of a kind that transforms time into a plastic thing, a malleable thing that can be worked and molded and rendered eternal. Time is everything.

Time

This is nothing new with me. The Boomer Bible, Shuteye Town 1999, and Shuteye Nation are time travel works. Not like the H.G. Welles movie where you visit past or future in a line and try to come back, or somewhere, to save the day. They are all three exercises in which time is simultaneous, all parts — past, present, and future — are aware of each other and exchanging information. Every chapter and verse of The Boomer Bible is aware of every other chapter and verse. How the Intercolumn Reference works. Everything is aware of and connects with everything else, except the punk writers of the Punk Testament of course, who are not foreseen by all the history that precedes them. They are the time marauders who infiltrate all the rest of it in order to find how it all ties together. Their Bible, and it is theirs, creates a single moment in which all the references, all the stitches, bind the whole together and can be lighted up by the mind which sees all the interconnections, simultaneously, as a living entity and presence of its own.

Shuteye Town 1999 is even more severe in its use of time. Absolutely everything in Shuteye Town occurs at exactly the same moment, the final second of the 20th Century. Why every image had to be a still. The only one with any freedom of movement is JDoe, who is moving perpendicular to the line of time, not from moment to moment but from location to location. How much can he find, learn, use by experiencing a vast number of encounters with the wide world he finds himself in? Why his videogame deaths don’t matter. He doesn’t run out of lives. Death can be a part of any moment. His job is to see as many discrete moments as he can force himself to seek out. ST99 is not a videogame. It’s a place consisting of many locations.

Shuteye Nation treats time differently as well. It acknowledges two years. Ah, the timeline reasserted with all its momentum for corruption. SN is concerned with what time does to language. Two Glossaries. Two Foreign Gazetteers. Two sets of Who’s Who files. Two years of the Shuteye Times, the Balow Star, and the tabloids and magazines. Words are already changing. All the journalistic copy is linked to the Glossaries, every word tagged with a degree sign redefined by current usage. All other links apply. How we can lose time to fad and fatuity. Happening faster and faster every day now.

The Big Thing

I wanted a work to prove there is no such thing as fiction. The reader’s acceptance of the writer as any kind of objective voice, called the willing suspension of disbelief, is a hoax. I go all the way back to the greatest American writer, Edgar Allan Poe. All writing is a performance. The writer is a dominator. I will lead you sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page to my perspective on life. All in the line of my words one after another on the page. Which is bullshit. But Poe broke that rule. His writing was so theatrical that he invited you to behold him on a stage, even when what he was acting was his own fatal heartbreak.

Why the Vennich page up top. “This is the manuscript that is writing itself.” The manuscript is not God. The writer is not God. Only God is God. The manuscript has authority over even the writer, who obeys the dictates of structure, plot, style, theme, character, the “tricks” of writing as Hemingway disdained them. Writers who are worth their salt will tell you there is always a moment in something good when the writer realizes the story, the book, the manuscript is writing him, not the other way around.

The manuscript has its own physics, its own cosmology, its own language, its own geography, its own universe of justice and meaning, or lack of same. Into this mix the writer can offer purpose. 

The manuscript knows everything the writer knows and more. Which is why it takes control at some point, issuing its own instructions and mandates. These can seem to make no sense. Until you undertake the tasks the manuscript requires. The manuscript also knows the purpose. It just has no regard for what the writer can and cannot do. It must be done regardless.

I’ve done a lot (a lot) of work on the Big Thing, not always knowing why. I have more than 50 websites, only about half that number important as it turns out. I resisted the accelerating realization that they were often at odds, even  at war, with one another. Deliberately different names for the same people, different conspiracies for things that are going so terribly wrong, different historical events unfolding in parallel, and somehow they all had to be stitched together with links and extemporaneous voice recordings and graphics and mathematical exegeses, and commentaries on verities and possibilities that are no longer discernible in our culture. And an entry path that is my own social network. Got my own Google too. Plus plus plus plus….

This on top of multiple legacy websites (and books) which were necessarily fundamental to the Big Thing. So far I have websites about the death of the novel, the execution of Donald Trump, the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno as a new all-encompassing metaphor, an alternate universe created by the apocalypse of Y2K, the mermaid conquest of mankind, the Star Trek Borg Conspiracy that has assimilated Hillary and all the female progressives in red jackets, and the unexpected main character of Daniel Pangloss imprisoned and interrogated and tortured by the new totalitarian regime arising from the shredding of our once shared timeline of history and faith into utter chaos. What do they want to know? Who is the terrorist behind the shredding of time.? They suspect the punk writers of the 1980s who killed CIA feds and made off with the quantum computing technology that can defeat them and undo the global dominion they desire.

What’s the point? Daniel Pangloss was a star of Shuteye Town and Shuteye Nation. In the moment he is on a written page he knows everything. As a federal prisoner forced to remember and account for every moment of his life, he is alone except for his drugged dreams of the author of the manuscript, in which he learns that he has no history, no real memories, only the words he has been given in the timeless paragraphs of  his performance as a fictional character inside work created by someone else. He has no memory of the punk writers. He does not know one of his interrogators is the step-daughter of Johnny Dodge, who is still alive and still mad at the feds.

But Daniel has the dreams to awaken him. It becomes his mission to transcend his own fictional existence. That’s the journey of The Big Thing. There is no such thing as fiction. On the other hand, we are all fictional characters, made of partial memories, conflicting realities perceived or imagined, and we are all ultimately alone unless we can find our way to the writer of the manuscript that is writing itself and has invented all the characters in all the plots and scenes and tragedies and comedies we regard as reality.

Meanwhile, God is doing his own thing.

And Alice is still doing hers.

Motives and Meanings

All my life I’ve been mad at the great writers who loudly tried and failed to find a “next dimension” to fiction writing. Equally mad at Hemingway and James Joyce for trying so hard and failing so utterly.

This hand-drawn graphic by Joyce of Finnegans Wake pissed me off more than I can express.

More about that some other day. Meanwhile, a few glimpses of the Vennich Manuscript. There are a lot more pages. My wife hates it. Part of why it’s the thing I can’t do….