the city paranoiac

in thomas pynchon's writing, specifically gravity's rainbow (because obviously, i am currently attempting to power my way through this book), he comes up with a concept that i find innovative in its application, even though we have proven examples of it in some different areas of life. this is not to say that nobody else has come up with this concept before....i think there is a solid chance that this is, while obscure, still a running theme in many notable works of fiction. pynchon describes what he calls the 'city paranoiac'....it isn't a city-dweller who constantly checks his six either. granted this is only my first exposure to what is probably a running dialogue in this book, but i found the following interesting and would enjoy sharing what i think it meant to my mind. initial exposure:

"if the city paranoiac dreams, it's not accessible to us. perhaps the city dreamed of another, enemy city, floating across the sea to invade the estuary . . . or the waves of darkness . . . waves of fire . . . perhaps of being swallowed again, by the immense, the silent Mother Continent? it's none of my business, city dreams . . . but what if the city were a growing neoplasm, across the centuries, always changing, to meet exactly the changing state of its very worst, secret fears? the raggedy pawns, the disgraced bishop and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversibly lost, are left out here, exposed and waiting."
~ gravity's rainbow

what this means, at least to me, is a conglomeration of consciousnesses. a sliver, gleamed off of each inhabitant....these spirit-structures drifting apart; committed to the person, the original owner, and yet coalescing into a collective organism which feeds off of the life bustling within it. in this way you could imagine it somewhat akin to a human body, or human mind itself. atoms, cells, distinct and yet working cooperatively and with some uncanny and not-necessarily acknowledged sense of unification. the greater consciousness, the thriving organism, the paranoiac city, scrapes biopsies from each and every one of us, building database upon mathematical database, wavelengths cluttering our airspace like radio signals, endlessly clashing with one another but, if tuned just correctly, surprisingly clear in their intricacies. these are checks and balances of a more natural order; a return to the nature of the social organism for those who still have ears to hear it. this is why cities find distinction from one another, why they are unique and their particular styles bleed into and out of the personages who populate them. our governments, governors supposedly control these equations, and allegedly speak for us. but who is to say that the city does not have a voice all of its own?

now, we know that humans do work on these levels, psychologically. we bond covalently, both giving and taking in like kind, gaining something which probably used to be shrouded in mystique but which now, thanks to psychoanalysis and such mental tools (don't get me started on using the mind to dissect the mind), has been elucidated for, ironically, our understanding of ourselves and our placement within these structures. the city gives back to us what we understand life to be; it is similar to a monastic experience. one gives their work, their money, their attention, their time and energy, their emotions.....and in return, they are initiated, accepted; they learn and experience what they find to be most relevant to their existence. but this relationship, which it could not be called anything but, assumes an 'other', a significant. this other is the relationship, it is the shire, the farm, the town, the city, the metropolis. it is the marketplace and the stranger's gum which sticks to your shoe on the subway steps. it's....

"It's the caffeine, the nicotine, the milligrams of tar
It's my habitat, it needs to be cleaned, it's my car
It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain
It's the cat box it needs to be changed, it's the pain
It's women, it's the plight for power it's government
It's the way you're giving knowledge
slow with thought control and subtle hints
It's rubbing it, itching it, It's applying cream
It's the foreigners sight seeing with high beams, It's in my dreams
It's the monsters that I conjure, It's the marijuana
It's the embarrassment, displacement, it's where I wander
It's my genre, It's Madonna's videos
It's game shows, It's cheap liquor, blunts,
It's bumper stickers with rainbows
It's angels, demons, gods, it's the white devils
It's the monitor, the soundman, it's the motherfucking mic levels
It's gas fumes, fast food, Tommy Hil' mommy's pill
Columbia House music club, designer drugs and rhyming thugs
It's bloods, crips, fives, six
It's stick up kids,
It's christian conservative terrorists, it's porno flicks
It's the east coast, no it's the west coast
It's public schools, it's asbestos
It's mentholated, It's techno
It's sleep, life, and death
It's speed, coke, and meth
It's hay fever, pain relievers, oral sex, and smokers breath
It stretches for as far as the eye can see
It's reality, fuck it , it's everything but me"
~atmosphere - 'scapegoat'

but in this spatial oddity, is there something residual left over, after all the energy has been tussled about and exchanged between us? i submit that i think, it being just on the edge of my mind, that there is. the 'city'...as pynchon describes it perhaps the 'city paranoiac', is a nebulous consciousness which is dictated in small part by each individual component, adding up to a ridiculous equation swayed at least (if in some infinitesimally small way) by each nuance that we grind into it. if something is understood even by the few, then the city could be said to understand it....the memory is in the molecules, and they are infectiously similar throughout the whole. the 'city' can be more than a mental projection....it can be considered with the instincts and attributes of a person. just as a corporation is, for all legal purposes, a concretized citizen of the united states, with rights and liberties all its own (look into it if you are skeptical), i think it is entirely possible to view a city....or for that matter a nation or world, or campfire-ringed friends, as a real, legitimate, and entirely existent collective consciousness which, in some very esoteric and self-generative way, begins to act, and desire, and fear, and think, and...well, overall the shock of the matter is that it feels, and generates its own volition.
remember that ish~

matches out.

full moon

"he had, had, this was of removing all excitement from things with a few words. not even well-chosen words: he's that way by instinct. when they would go to the movies he would fall asleep. he fell asleep during nibelungen. he missed atilla the hun roaring in from the east to wipe out the burgundians. franz loved films but this was how he watched them, nodding in and out of sleep. 'you're the cause-and-effect man,' she cried. how did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open?"
~ gravity's rainbow

granted, this is just a passage from a book of epic proportions. granted, there is a lot of context, a lot of precursing, weaved into these words. but one of the things that i enjoy most about literature is that, in general, sentences and paragraphs are sometimes almost works of art all their own, and have a tangible value set apart from the rest of the work. maybe even these things wouldn't have been possible, perhaps they never would have been imagined, created, unless the author had all the previous stepping-stones to skip around on. but in turn, sometimes i write entire pages of crap that turn out to be worthwhile (in my mind) just for a scrap....a sentence, a word in new light; maybe even just a feeling.

doesn't it see impossible, to piece together the fragments that we see only while our eyes are open? let's take this at its most literal, in its hardest granite form. you are asleep, and something significant is altered. a pet dies. a significant other cheats on you. anything. waking, your world has changed....but it is completely lost to you in a temporal gap, a sliver of thought between cognizance last and cognizance next, and it has affected so much that direct impacts you. now your time, your actualization of the event, becomes borrowed time - you attempt to catch up with the world, but can one ever really break stride with something that marches persistently on, never stopping for a breath? we are perpetually out of sync with the sequences of photographs flying in front of our faces. our lives, as we know them, cover some 70, some 80, some 90 years. how much of that can we call our own? can we own a war, in our lifetime, if we do nothing to influence it, nothing to disarm it? if it exists outside of our spheres?

let's tumble worldviews off of the table, however; what i would really enjoy digging into is how this structures a personality....or, more accurately, how a personality filters the utter bombardment of experience that the world is constantly pitching (now a fastball, now a change-up) directly in our faces. step outside your door; take a brisk autumn stroll in this full moonlight. grab a notepad to take along with you. come back and, what did you see? what did you think? were those things correlated to one another? if you mapped it out, somehow, would it be intelligible; could you dive headfirst into it and explain, logically and soundly, how you progressed from square one to whatever ecstasy or depression you were mired in when you returned? a mind, isolated, reveals its fundamentals.
but i doubt you could explain all those hops. rarely, it seems to me, do we check our thoughts.

but here i stand, supposedly, offering you a vibrant storyboard of all your brainwaves, all your free-flowing associations and tangential interruptions and fortitudes and anxieties. can you tweak them; can you turn a dial, slightly, in photoshop-blur fashion, and alter something - can you turn this dial in my storyboard as easily as you can turn your head during your moonlight stroll? does that accomplish the same thing? do you ever choose the low road, simply because you know the high road so well? and the point is: what has that changed?

"did you see the woman in the red dress, neo? look again."

it dawns upon me that this world is infinitely rich; far too much exists to keep track of. when i do something as simple as turning my head, i have abandoned a solid 240 or so degrees of sight, of sense, of potential influence upon my mind and its understanding of things. i know this example is absurdity because we have no other choice; i welcome this absurdity. push it forward. when i narrow my focus; when i hinge my mind upon the world such that i can apply myself fully, such as writing this or that word, here, now.....my perspective has dimmed almost to absolute darkness...i find myself looking at a 1" x 1" square, if that. i have a full sphere of rotation for my sight...standing on the surface of the earth, i choose to look at a single star. in photography, however, the smaller the amount of light you let in, the sharper your overall picture becomes. food for thought. but that is contradictory to the point so i will abandon it~

we all pretend to be these fully-aware, fully-composed beings. we absorb the world around us, but when it comes down to it, our selectiveness is absolutely, postitively absurd. the world eclipses our composition to such an extreme that it seems an impossibility to advance any further than childhood wonder~ the more i learn, the more naive it seems to me that any concept of "knowledge" is considered to be valid. i must reign my thoughts in; they flare wayward. how did he connect together the fragments he saw while his eyes were open? we develop habits, erratic pieces (peaces) upon which we choose to align our individual focus-sets and mental toolboxes. it is staggering to me, at this moment, that our concept of fludity, of a smoothly-flowing stream of constancy, can be applied to the world as we experience it today. the world is an unknown; a massive labyrinth with minotaurs roaming the grounds, and we hold tight our creature-comforts, steady the wheel towards them and try not to look back.

i'm exhausted and my mind has become somewhat muddled on the topic. i'm certain that this comes through to some degree already (le sigh). perhaps i can pick this up tomorrow...but by then a world of differences and two million possible muses will have crossed my path. one more sun.

bookmark

don't know where to begin; it has been a minute since i've written. the again-tour of colorado was phenomenal. wandering around my old home, the house, my old garden; driving those ancient streets. finding everything still in working order, clockwork whirring away, drilling into peoples' lives and experiences. even just skimming around, lightly tracing a finger over all the solidified memories; picking it up again to find a ring of dust circling one's index....this is a profound experience. i felt like an architect, unearthing fragments of a civilization now passed by and trodden underfoot, unseen. what is even more, is that i certainly would be an architect of the highest degree - a specialist in the field, as it were. i have seen pictures of all these relics in the textbooks of my memory; they communicate intimately with me as signs of something alive, a heart once beating, once merging, semiotic and symbiotic relationships calling, threshing, billowing flat-fictioned fossils into saturated realities which i can only hope to edge at with my mind, crowbar into with all the caution of someone trying to to break the antiqued wood-linings of containment. and on some level i am alien, come down to a place which i understand in some respects but which i now have so much more context to offer. i cave through intricate mines, brushing debris carefully off of time-capsules sealed with childrens' hopes. these are things, breadcrumbs, which i have subconsciously left for myself, to be discovered at a time when i had better ideas of what they could mean. they are old perfume bottles once servient as crystal balls in merlin games, spells of the mind arcing through them along lines of refracted and long-gone light.

they simultaneously mean both less and more; it is a dark struggle which i find in abundance these days. they are powerful, combinatorial, world-philosophies and ethical systems. they speak like poetry, spilling thousands of pictures and lifetimes of emotion from mere handfuls of words - and small hands, at that, perhaps covered in too-big and leathern-rough baseball gloves which may, may have a better chance at netting these monolith concepts than all our webs, all our adult intelligences, anxieties, and trivialities. the words of my childhood speak to me like thunder, booming and distant. once i was rod for them, they ripping and shredding me daily, building from the rich resources of naievete my personality, back stronger, faster, muscular....now i am mostly grown carbon, charged metal particles now diffuse and in severe scarcity, stinging every so often like licks of static electricity, occasioning an "oh, what was that?" and mere momentary disorientation. but i try, try to pan this sun-glinting metal from the stream of my consciousness....what else is all this, this here, but an exercise in precious metals? i don't know if the world agrees with my economic schemas, but this, this is my currency, this my contribution. communist if it seems so; what would one like me care for labels~ when i find my true vein, my niche; when that rush of gold erupts to the surface like stored energy, a surge of ball-lightning cracking from my fingertips to these keys, or this pen, or that soft skin, or any application potential to the sphere of influence which daily i spin in ever-wider spirals...

well, watch out - and don't hold me back.