“I AM WHAT I AM.”
GOD
The Bible
Exodus 3:14
The act of writing
is an act of creation. An author writes from the sum of his or her experiences,
not only as a particular creature of a particular culture in a particular time,
but also from the experiences they’ve absorbed through reading the words of all
the other writers they’ve read. Yet the act of reading is an act of creation
too. Each time a piece of fiction is read an entirely new thing is
created: the writer's words are filtered through the mind’s eye of this new
reader, who interprets the words and underlying ideas as they will, a
particular creature of a particular culture in a particular time, with their
own unique experiences. Authorship clashes with ownership when it comes to
residence in the mind. The ownership of this newly created thing, made up
of all sorts of ideas and mixed with all sorts of experiences, is really the new
readers alone. The only place it exists is within the mind that creates it, and
it will stay for a long time if it’s worthwhile, living with the reader as a
genuine, valuable experience of their own.
Note that none of this
has anything to do with image, beyond the formation of letters into
sentences on the page. The weight of a piece of fiction comes from the
supremacy of the ideas inside, not the appearance of the writer. The
durability lies within the strength of the message. And the craziest part
is that it’s all in our heads.
For the great majority of
mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities, and are
often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince, 1513 AD
Florence, The Republic of Florence, Earth
We
live in a world of image over substance. It’s a world of manipulated
appearances; an overly managed public spectacle of stunningly wide range
not only wired directly into the televisions in our living rooms, but
intertwined in just about everything we see—from the photoshopped women staring at us from every checkout
line everywhere, to the stuff we’re looking at on our now hand-held
phone/computers. Such an onslaught! And on a daily basis, hundreds and hundreds
if not thousands and thousands of messages. Yet what do we learn that is
useful? Not much. It’s frequency over amplitude, message without meaning. All
of these forces are conspiring for our eyes and our attention—our precious time
on this very planet—simply because money is to be made from it.
People constantly want to convince us of things. . . The
media wants to sell us to their advertisers, who try to coerce us into buying
this or that. Celebrities and corporations alike want us to love them, everyone
and everything concerned with Brand®. Image is prime, in all of these
messages that bound all around us: in the glitz and glamour of our beautiful
people, in the scary words of our ugly politicians, in our ADHD for-profit news cycle; all of it swirling
around planet Earth at the speed of light screaming out for our attention. This stuff—almost
all of it based on a set of carefully curated images—calls to us from all
possible angles, yet if you give just about any of it even one iota of thought
you realize how worthless it really is. And while there’s plenty of thought
going into all of this stuff—the behavioral psychology behind pushing us
to think a certain way, to like this person and hate the other, or to want to
buy this or that—not much thought comes out. That’s because there’s so little
actual substance. Making it worse, we’ve been trained to love the spectacle:
political pseudo-events where the politicians insult each other but say
nothing of substance, the self-celebratory award shows for just about anything you can think
of amidst the rest of the lineup of must-watch TV—and all of it now available
24/7, streamed into the palm of your hand (as long as you have phone service)! Yet
the celebration of image over substance extends even deeper than the spectacle
of television, our modern equivalent of the Roman circus,
beyond the obligatory (and seemingly rapidly proliferating) Hallmark™ holidays
that fill up our social calendars. In an era of profound narcissism, “the
cult of the self”—Greed is Good, Yolo and
selfie sticks—we’ve become hedonists. Yet it's a strange juxtaposition. We see
all of this glitz and glamour everywhere we look, the obscene pageantry of
flaunted wealth and excess all around us, but most of us plebes can also feel the
creeping dread that something is just wrong here—that the land is covered in a
darkness that can be felt—yet more and more people are looking at themselves
first. We’re self-obsessed ostriches, burying our heads in the desert sands
of Tweets and Facebook updates and fantasy sports and “news” tailored
just for us. And even if you do manage to pull your head out of your ass, stand
up, and try to figure out this crazy fucking world, the truth is hard to find
in a place where everything is so manufactured and language so distorted. It’s
very hard to know what's what. Indeed where does one even start?
It should … be borne in mind, that the
enforcement of public opinion depends on our appreciation of the
approbation and disapprobation of others; and this appreciation is founded
on our sympathy, which it can hardly be doubted was originally developed
through natural selection as one of the most important elements of the social
instincts.
Charles Darwin
The Descent of Man, 1871 AD
Kent, England, Earth
Charles Darwin’s
true genius was in being able to see how a species could adapt to its
environment over the long course of time. This required a shift in perception
coupled with a very long view—not something we human animals are necessarily
wired to do. Yet the process of evolution is the very same with societies, too.
We, our group of human beings living together in a (supposedly) mutually
beneficial society, changes over time as a result of everything going on around
us: from the conditions of our environment and the food that we eat, to the
images set forth for us to watch and admire and thus become. The fabric and
nature of a society can change over time, depending on how the people react to
the conditions imposed on them. The Dark Ages was a closed Europe controlled
with ignorance and fear, while the High Renaissance was a blossoming world of
curiosity and wonder. The philosophy of abundance underlying the Roaring
Twenties in the USA was quickly wiped away by the hardness of the Great
Depression and atrocities of World War II. The ocean of human
consciousness seems to move in tides; the civics and ethics and values and
traditions of our tribes constantly sweeping back and forth, back and forth,
in the constant battle between darkness and the light. This is because we forget the
lessons of the past.
In
terms of a Darwinian analysis, the most significant recent development in human
culture is the extent that technology has influenced how we can communicate
with each other. It’s a relatively open world when it comes to information, and
that is a very good thing. Yet the largest mass of today’s global
communications are corporately funded, celebrity fueled advertisements cranking
out a huge part of what we consider our culture, almost all of it designed to
steal our time and our money (which really is our time). And while it’s easy to
become nostalgic—to long for times past—that can a dangerous thing because it’s
so easy to do. Yet with that being said, most would not deny that a
drastic sociological change has taken place in the matter of a generation or
two—my generation, and all those behind me. In the relative blink of an eye
from an anthropological stand point, we’ve grown far more narcissistic than
we’ve ever been. Is this because of our technology? Is it because of a changing society? Whatever the case, we’re certainly far more distracted, living in several different
fantasy worlds, replete with magical thinking, and seemingly incapable of facing any number of realities.
We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages
simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.
Buckminster Fuller
Cosmography, 1992 AD
Los Angeles, USA, Earth
How
about a prime example? Our image driven society has re-invented the word
celebrity itself. Now, the celebrities of my parent’s age were truly celebrated,
famous for good reason because they were remarkably good at what they did.
We’re talking Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays, Elvis, Chuck Berry and The Beatles,
Neil Armstrong, Muhammed Ali, and JFK. [Note that there were far less of
them, too.] They were famous because they actually deserved to be, because
of what they’d accomplished. When I was growing up our celebrities were
truly celebrated, famous people, too: Michael Jackson and Sylvester
Stallone, Michael Jordan, Michael J. Fox, Madonna and Oprah and even Bill
Gates. They were famous because they actually did something to deserve it. Yet
today is suddenly a very different world. A mutated strain of celebrity seems
to have taken hold. Prime Example 1A: Kim
Kardashian. Can somebody please finally explain this to me—what exactly can
Kim do? She is well-manicured and photogenic, and connected to so many other
famous people. But why? What’s her point? It all only seems to be one thing: look
at me. The formula is easy enough too, oft repeated: somehow get yourself on
television (and Youtube counts now too!). This makes you a small celebrity: getting you
into other forms of the media like talk shows, or the tabloids, all of it building to make you an even bigger celebrity, getting you on television even more.
Perversely, scandals are usually good news. Meanwhile, our culture is drowning,
being sunk under the weight of all of these meaningless messages.
This new profession, “celebrity," is lucrative as hell.
TV is chock full of examples, though the pervasive effect of celebrity-driven
culture encompasses far more than that: from all the leaked celebrity sex tapes on
the Internet, proving every crowd has a silver lining, to our particular brand of personality politics, all the way to
the lapdog deference to authority of former print paragons like the New
York Times. Especially given the ease of production and ubiquity of the Internet,
combined with the proven sensibilities of reality style TV, all you have to be
is a crazy and/or different enough to get enough other people to watch you for
a while, then you’ve got the job. Even you can become a celebrity! There
are housewife celebrities, cooking celebrities galore, pawn shop
celebrities, New York City real estate broker celebrities, survival
celebrities, religious freak parents having WAY too many kids celebrities.
There’s even a millionaire redneck celebrity dynasty . . . and this
is all only like three channels—we could go on! Every professional athlete can become at least a local celebrity if they so desire, since sports is a huge
news/entertainment complex, literally spinning off into untold galaxies of
fantasy worlds (especially on Sundays!). It may sound a little crazy at first,
yet consider this thought: striving to become a celebrity may
be one of the very few places in America where the American Dream still exists! Getting
yourself on TV gets you paid in all sorts of ways! It’s the ultimate rags to
riches journey for everyone else to see. And if you’re crazy and/or cool enough,
you never have to leave! Once you’re a celebrity you can go on one of a million
talk shows, or they’ll teach you how to dance the Cha-Cha. Or you can
co-“write” a book, or you can even swap wives. Or, you can get fired by an even
BIGGER celebrity! And if you’re a true celebrity? A miraculously emotive
actress, or melodious songbird, or a spectacularly gifted athlete, truly
deserving of our love and admiration? Well God-fucking bless. In today’s world
our celebrity megastars are the new Gods; irreproachably successful cultural
paragons, lifted into the untouchable pantheon and worshiped, basked in
immense admiration and wealth. The 15-minute celebrities are our
demi-gods, forced to constantly fight to maintain their oh-so precarious spots
in the golden, gift-bearing constellation. And behind it all sit the enduring
leviathans of consolidated corporate power creating most of this stuff: thousands of decision-making
wizards lurking behind plush curtains, pulling all sorts of levers trying to do
all sorts of things, yet all of them really puppets themselves. Celebrity
culture is both a function and a byproduct of the ceaseless economic warfare
being performed on us all of the time.
In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
Andy Warhol
1968 AD
NYC, USA, Earth
The
problem with all of this is that it’s based on manipulated imagery and mostly
devoid of any but the most trivial of meanings: watch me, like me, buy me. The
content delivered to us by our mass media is edited and filtered to suit any
number of agendas. Yet the very nature of a system based on doctored imagery is
that in order to survive the content must get more and more
adventurous, abhorrent, or scandalous in order to continue to have an appeal—to
be new and different enough to keep us watching. Our reality stars certainly
know they’re getting paid to do crazy things on TV, creating a positive
feedback loop of crazy behavior that only gets more and more debacherous and debased. Many politicians are rewarded in the exact same way. And of course there is that old adage: monkey
see, monkey do. We are designed from infancy to emulate the behavior we see around us. Yet
the consequences of the widespread manipulation of image is even worse when
examined from an even larger perspective. Originally a corporate term, “public
relations” is the management of propaganda in the form of high art: shaping
words to no longer mean what everyone thought that they had once meant, or inventing
new jargon altogether to somehow try to fool us that new means better. The blueprint of
passive mind capture has been applied to nearly every aspect of modern life,
completely distorting the newfound experience of human connectedness through
our technology. Endless streams of information are now available through the
Internet—a very good thing. Yet the stream of knowledge is being diluted and
diverted, even intentionally poisoned in parts. And so much of it is worthless
crap, created with the express purpose of stealing your time on this planet. Is
it worth it? For them it is, whoever them is, exactly. Where is this
going, though? And is it worth our collective sanity?
It’s
clear that today’s world is a world of constantly changing meanings. As I
suggest, the meaning of the word celebrity seems to have changed. It’s not
simply a dilution, either; a cheapening of the word. This change in meaning is
deeper, symptomatic of much more significant cultural trends. This evolution in
meaning—from celebrated for good reason by virtue of what you accomplished, to
merely appearing on television—shows cultural priority. It shows cultural
priority towards becoming famous for being famous’ sake, to becoming a GOD,
showered with attention and wealth and everything else that comes with it,
further propagating the deeply systematic cycle of narcissism. It shows a
priority for easy, quick, sensational content over thought-provoking work. And
it buttresses the priority towards passive consumption—watching others instead
of acting yourself. We, my friends, live in crazy times indeed. It’s no wonder
so many people are out of touch and cannot deal with reality.
Yet
here is my thesis, or as close to one as I’ve got:
Books are kryptonite to an appearance obsessed society.
This is because of a very particular characteristic that
reading affords that other mediums of information delivery cannot replicate.
When we process words they travel through our eyes into our brain and are filtered
through our mind’s eye as we perceive their meaning. The process
of understanding these words is part cognition, but most of it is imagination.
You’re forming memories in your brain of things that are decidedly not real.
It’s the most magical when we’re kids, when we’re at our most imaginative, our
most open. You’re instantly teleported into a different world inside your
own head, made up out of the author’s words trying to harnesses your imagination,
where you live and learn along with the experiences of the
characters. None of this is about appearances in any way—yours, or the
author’s, or even what the outside of the book looks like. It’s about that precious
link between the words on the page with another open mind, creating this whole new
thing made from the readers idea of what they think the words build,
refracted by the prism of their unique experiences and perspective. But the
instant the ideas behind those words are in another person’s mind they belong
to them as well, mixing in with all of the other experiences, impressions, and
ideas already in there—real OR imagined. And if the ideas are worthwhile,
they’ll stay there. I know Atticus
Finch still lives somewhere inside of me, just like my father does. So do a lot of
other people and things, real and imagined.
What
an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with
flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one
glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead
for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking
clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is
perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never
knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan,
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 1990 AD
NYC, USA, Earth
This link between a writer and a reader is an intimate bond. An author can have any
number of reasons for putting words onto a page: getting a feeling out, or
making a point, or just trying to make a living. Yet, inherently, all control,
the ability to manipulate, is lost once the boundary of the new mind is
crossed. Whatever the author’s intent, each and every time their words are read
the result is a brand new creation, started in one mind and made to live in
another—and staying there if it’s worthwhile. In fact, herein lies the kryptonite. Appearance
doesn’t matter at all when it comes to the uploading of ideas into your
mind—aka READING—as long as we writers can get you to crack open our covers. A
work of fiction is by nature a transmission of ideas from one brain to another.
This bond between an author and a reader is a bond of substance, not
appearance. And today, giving the ease and ubiquity of communications, it
doesn’t matter who you are or even when you live on the planet for you to be
able to form this bond. Our world actually makes that very easy.
From
this line of thinking a very interesting idea arose: Why not use the front
of a publishing company as a pseudonym? That
way, why certainly taking on an appearance—the very particularly managed
appearance of EXO Books, with an agenda of my own—but at least it would be me,
above all else, who could ultimately control it. Interesting, you may be
thinking. It’s just a stunt, some of you may cry (and it is, to no small
extent). In any case, I demand that you hear me out before you perform
judgement. I hatched this crazy idea in 2009, just as the Kepler
Space Observatory was launched, brandishing a seeking imagination with
all sorts of new fodder. It was a bad time for me personally. My
freshly-credentialed new professional life as a patent attorney was snatched away
by the recession and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about any of it;
knocking a confident young overachiever thoroughly on his ass. I was
disillusioned and pissed off and just starting to get my head out of my ass.
Then hit Grandma’s pancreatic cancer. This idea began to creep into my head, dreaming
about the stars while I was going through some seriously soul-wrenching stuff . . . a
spaceship that leaves Earth and takes thousands of years to reach another
planet. To this day I’m still not sure why I became obsessed with this. Yet the first story
I ever wrote was The Last Day of Captain Lincoln, trying to imagine how
difficult it must have been for my brave, hard-fighting grandmother to know
that her clock was so very quickly ticking down.
“This rots.”
Grandma Helen
2009 AD
Upstate NY, USA, Earth
As I began to imagine it,
the amount of storytelling that it would take to tell the story of my
generation ship making this exodus was mind-bogglingly massive. Thinking
back on it as a student of science fiction, it was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation which I used as, well . . .
my foundation. You can tell a thousands of year long story with a collection of
smaller stories, building a careful base then branching off in many directions
from there. In that way, I guess the bible was always an example too. One day,
a seeking mind in the stars, EXO Books was born. It tied everything together.
One
seductive and ultimately always fatal path has been the development of
protective armor. An organism can protect itself by concealment, by swiftness
in flight, by effective counterattack, by uniting for attack and defense with
other individuals of its species and also by encasing itself within bony plates
and spines. . . Almost always the experiment of armor failed. Creatures
adopting it tended to become unwieldy. They had to move relatively slowly.
Hence they were forced to live mainly on vegetable food; and thus in general
they were at a disadvantage as compared with foes living on more rapidly
“profitable” animal food. The repeated failure of protective armor shows that,
even at a somewhat low evolutionary level, mind triumphed over mere matter. It
is this sort of triumph which has been supremely exemplified in Man.
E.W. Barnes,
Scientific Theory and Religion, 1933 AD
Birmingham, United Kingdom, Earth
EXO
Books exists to tell stories. With the love and support of many others, the
Company publishes the work of a single writer. He is a man who lives in New York
City, USA, Earth.
An exodus
is the departure of a people out of slavery, to a promised land. It is a
journey punctuated with peaks and valleys of joy and sorrow, through darkness
ever towards the light. Behind this journey is the idea that while we continue
to search for a better life, the search may not be fruitful in our lifetimes.
Through it all, we are sustained by hope, and love.
The
road is long, my friends. We trek on together.
November 23, 2015 AD
NYC, USA, Earth
No comments:
Post a Comment