Invisible Escalators

About Invisible Escalators

2011-10-23T14:19:00.000-07:00

My reading with Dave Nardini as part of the
2011 &Now Festival of New Writing:
"About Invisible Escalators"

I Love Paintings (. . . [. . . for starters])

2011-05-21T06:01:00.000-07:00

"I dwell in possibility"

-Emily Dickinson

I love paintings. Sketches. Designs. Blueprints. Doodles. Maps. What can be created with a two-dimensional plane. MC Escher, Van Gogh, the Hopi prophecy rock. . . . I also love numbers, codes, dialogue, description, poetics, reason. What can be created with a given language (yes, math is a language, no?). And I especially love when language and the visual arts overlap and play off each another.

Which is why I feel lucky to contribute to an art column over at Laguna Beach Patch, wherein I synthesize video, description, interview, insight. . . .

Writing about art is something I love to do because the writing remains relevant so long as the art remains relevant. Unless, of course, my descriptions aren't palatable, or my research spotty, or my insights baseless. Bad writing about great art is a little entropic, it drags novel creations/aspirations-to-novel-creations into the gutter tabloid bloggery of the twenty-first century . . . unless the writing is especially bad. Especially bad writing can be interesting in an ironic kind of way, which is perhaps even suitable depending on the art (the kind of "great") being described. Maybe "bland" is a more appropriate word than bad. Bland writing about unbland art is a little entropic. Thus, writing about art can become a kind of dance between creation and entropy. If I offer too much information, too much description, too much opinion, too many quotes from the artist, the writing can start to take away from the art's intrinsic energy and substance. However, when I do my job (which happens on occasion . . .), the writing enters into a dialogue with the art, meeting with the art on the art's own terms. I can weave into the text relative art theories, historical context, etc. and ideally participate in the proliferation of a kind of reverence for art—something with a little magic—something our society needs more than ever (as it is lacking more than ever).

The art column also gives me a chance to create videos. . . . I spent several years of my adolescence making movies with a video camera, and after taking an 8 year break from videotaping anything whatsoever, I gotta say it feels great to play behind a lens again . . . eight millimeters of mini-DV tape at a time. . . . The desire to create videos of the galleries that I write about created a need for music accompaniment that isn't owned by anyone, and I'm lucky enough to have friends like Kevin Barr who has been gracious/inspired-enough to write and record several pieces of music with specific art exhibitions in mind. For a few months now, as soon as I decide what my next article will be on, I send Kevin links to the pieces of art I want to cover, and he checks them out before recording any music. And so far, there has been a wonderful synergism between the music, the video, and the writing. Here's my LBPatch YouTube Channel, and the latest video for Time Traveling Through the Laguna Art Museum (Part 1 and Part 2):

In another video, Barr does an instrumental take on Simon and Garfunkel's "America" for America Martin's exhibition at the JoAnne Artman Gallery earlier this year:

. . . if I'm going to write for pay, I have zero drive to focus my creative energies on topical stuff that no one will ever care about in a week, month, year. Ideally, I'd love for the bulk of my writing to still be relevant in a hundred years time, even a thousand years. . . . So much of the established society and mainstream media in the U.S. of A is all a great big clown show, as far as I can see—not something to get wrapped up in and start yelling at the other "side" about all that I think I understand about X, Y, Z. Although, I'll admit I'm guilty of doing this at times—I'm definitely happiest when removed from the shouting fest. Besides, there are plenty of people who seem perfectly content staying focused on the negative drivel, and to each her/his own (. . . drivel that only seems to further divide and fragment humankind, until when? Until what? [I ask these sorts of questions a lot: When will the shit hit the fan? What will that feel like? (Unless you've been sleepwalking, you know the question's on your mind somewhere up there.) . . . ] . . . It's almost as if there are people in this world who profit off the pinning of the public against itself, perhaps because it causes a kind of plummeting of the intellectual/ethical mean of society).

I have this nagging inkling that changes of the unfathomable variety are in store for life on Earth, maybe sooner rather than later. Not a "dooms day" unless you are addicted to disharmony. Not "the end of the world" unless you only live in a world of negativity and fear. There are greater things inside of us than what we have created thus far as a species—that fact cannot be disputed. Sadly, division has been made to seem easy, useful and necessary, while synthesis / harmony / synchronicity has been made to seem like unnatural tricks. But things can only be built upon false perceptions of reality for so long . . . And then what? _______ And in the meantime? . . .

Writer/comedian/philosopher George Carlin used to say, "When you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America you're given a front row seat." Having grown up in southern California, and after traveling to Europe and Asia, I kind of agree with this sentiment. The whole show seems silly to me—all the fear, unhealthy obsessions, unending distractions—and always has. I have difficulty buying into all the premises needed to justify the status quo. To see where this metaphor goes, I have no desire to jump on stage and take part in the show, other than through my observations from the front row. I prefer to observe/describe the show without getting too attached to it. I love having friends and family in the front row with me, who I can turn to and go, "Did you see what that freak just did? Hard to believe! When will we learn?" . . . Maybe one day the freak show will run its course, cycle to a close, and we can all go get a drink and share a laugh about how much of our time/minds the show used to occupy, how it was all so damn convincing, and how it went on for way way way too long.

(although, probably just long enough in the bigger scheme of things . . . I mean, it's certainly possible that it'll probably just be/be just long enough . . . I mean, one can hope--\\)

The following clip is the last segment from Carlin's appearance on Inside the Actors' Studio in 2004. He talks about his favorite words, his writing process, the freak show, cynicism, and when asked about "hope," (he finally gets around to answering it at 7:55) he says something rather interesting, something that reflected his deductive assumption (which he would logically defend the likelihood of when pressed) that higher intelligent ETs exist, and some may have played an integral role in the seemingly spontaneous formation of civilizations all around the world about 5000 years ago (. . . each with advanced languages, knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, architecture, construction . . . i.e., the "ancient alien theory" recently made more popular by the History channel . . .). These ideas, which I've been researching since around 2005—right around the time I first saw this interview with Carlin, now that I'm thinking about it—play a central role in the story of Invisible Escalators:

". . . I hope we're interfered with again by the extra terrestrials,
and this time they help in a big way. This time they say,
'We're gonna do another genetics things.
We're gonna do it just like we did
when we brought you people.
Suddenly you had architecture.
Suddenly you could lift stones up
and build the pyramids.
Suddenly you had mathematics.
Suddenly you had all these things.
You never had them before.
Suddenly they appeared.
We're gonna do that again,
and this time,
we're gonna help you folks again.'
I hope that happens.
Because then all those dreams
that I don't quite have for us could come true.
And that would be the best surprise I could get."

In my novel, the narrative / Cleve's voice / story / form extrapolates the freak show into—dare I suggest?—novel (i.e., seemingly "novel," since nothing ever is, says Bruno Schulz, except those transcendent childhood inklings [see below] . . .) arenas of absurdity (although increasingly less absurd, it seems, as time goes on . . . ).

A writer who does her/his job I think has to become a kind of seer: they see into the heart of the matter, they see the writing on the wall, and they share the writing on the wall with those brave enough to read / look at / watch / listen to it (and mentally apt enough to understand it [and crazy enough not to go insane by its implications . . . ] . . . ).

Right before dropping out of film school and becoming a philosophy major in 2003, I took an introductory painting class in the spring (clearly I was going through a "practical decision-making" phase . . .), which brought me back to my childhood, when all I did was draw. A highlight for the course, at least for me, was learning how to construct, stretch, and prepare our own canvases. . . .

I love building things with my hands. I worked concrete construction for five years, and I loved it. There's an incredible feeling walking away from a structure that didn't exist six months before, thinking back on the first day you broke ground—all the sweat, the horrible tan-lines, performing incredibly dangerous tasks in half-conscious yet over-caffeinated 7am hazes. My work in construction was essential for the development of Invisible Escalators. Many passages began on a folded up piece of notebook paper that I kept in my back pocket while working. . . .

. . . where was I? I love building things with my hands. As a kid I was into designing/building forts and catapults. And in the spring of 2003, a couple years before starting my construction job, I loved making these canvases from scratch. At the same time, I was starting to open up my mind and process emotions about the larger world. My country of birth was just starting to bomb/invade Iraq for, well, I'm sure the military industrial complex had their reasons. . . . . . . . The painting class came at just the right time. I was slowly coming out of the 9-11 haze that the whole country seemed to have fallen into. And boy was I starting to get angry about a lot of things. Painting (and poetry) kept my intuition as an artist intact throughout that time.

With the semester winding down, before starting the fourth painting, I realized I had just about run out of black acrylic paint, which I took as a sign that the fourth painting would not need much. Looking around my apartment for inspiration, I decided to paint on the rectangular canvas the image of a white piece of notebook paper, with its blue horizontal lines and its peach-pink vertical lines marking the margins, its black holes punched through along the left . . . and plenty of white space (as I had plenty of white paint).

I think there's an emotional connection we all have with the image of a piece of notebook paper (at least those raised outside of a computer screen), and in my painting I got to blow-up the details, the tiny imperfections zoomed in on in the upper-left quarter of the page. . . .

Then I remembered a poem I had written a couple weeks before (4.20.03). I was driving on the 5 freeway when the first line to a poem popped into my head: "is it possible". I grabbed a piece of notebook paper and started scribbling while watching the road (i.e., multi-tasking) while pulling over. Later, I went back and edited the barely decipherable scribbles. A couple weeks went by and I came across that poem. I decided to paint the scribbles and corrections onto the canvas. The result shows the story of a poem's chaotic construction on the blown-up landscape of a piece (of a piece) of notebook paper:

After eight years, I think I prefer the painting of the poem to the poem itself, if I had to choose, but since I don't, the poem deciphered:

is it possible
that the five of us motorists
at this very instant
are enjoying the same melodies
without any sort of contrast
or change in key?

is it possible
that we are the only ones left
in some god's ancient still-life masterpiece
as the rest of the gray concrete
slithers violently—unknowingly
under our toes and into infinity?

Again, I love it when language and the visual arts play play play, and create new games to play. . . .

Maybe that's because the visual arts comprise the foundation of my aesthetic as a person who creates things. As a kid I was a sketch artist. Give me a pencil and paper and I was set. Ask me to write a story / poem / essay and I'd draw you a picture. I saw myself becoming a cartoonist, architect, or astronaut. This eventually led me into working with video and non-linear digital editing. When I was seventeen and fell in love with my soul mate / muse / fiancé—and boom!—I started creating things with language in the fall of 2000. Since I wasn't well read and I wasn't paying a great deal of attention in school, I approached a poem or a story just as I would a sketch or a movie.

Around that time, I was applying to film school, and so I included with my portfolio a poem ("Eight Millimeters at a Time") as my statement of intent, rather than an essay (I still wasn't sure how to write one of those . . . ). I remember the poem coming to me while sitting in AP Environmental Science on November 26, 2000. The title of the poem popped into my head, and that was enough to get me started. I stood up and walked out of class without saying anything. I walked all the way to my car, jumped in, and started writing. The second stanza (out of 7) addresses my emphasis as an artist on perception, specifically the act of seeing:

Sometimes it seems like
as a child I turned my mirror upside-down
and that frozen existence was glued
in such an awkward manner,
and this twisted universe
let me in crawl in
and view every moment, every life
through cross-eyed brilliance.
I don't expect people to comprehend this...
I'm floating around the world appreciating everything
finding logic in the uneasy
and laughing.

I've found my process goes a little like this, whether for a story, poem, movie . . . even an essay (once I learned what those are all about, more or less): I start with a moment, usually an image, a descriptive line, a line of poetry, a couple lines of dialogue, or just some effect I feel needs to be conveyed, some point, and then I become a detective in figuring out how that moment fits in with an impression I have of "the larger picture." I go back and forth between that moment and the larger picture, the micro and the macro, like a Shaman teetering between dimensions, like seeing the larger picture as successions of occasions of experience in Whitehead's process philosophy (a kind of panpsychism) . . . but really not quite "like" anything else. . . .

The result is a spiral motion of perpetual discovery, always in flux, until, until, until more moments appear/are intuited, and then I connect those moments with the larger picture in mind (a picture further revealed through the intersections of moments), and so on. Over time, the text ripens, phrasings crystallize into their appropriate or deliberately inappropriate places, given all there is for a quasi-shaman to consider, which is quite a bit. (Quite a bit and very little at the same space-time and time-space, so to speak.)

In a sketch of my childhood dog that I did in first grade, I started with Shelby's eyes. My instinct was to capture something life-like in her eyes, and the rest of her face would follow. And it did. I entered it into a drawing contest at my elementary school and it placed 3rd in the school. (I remember seeing my name misspelled on the library wall where the picture was hung for a time. . . .) When I was in film school, same kind of process. I'd discover and capture that moment in a scene—sometimes before shooting in a storyboard, sometimes after shooting—and edit/develop from there. As a film editor, this is by no means the simplest approach, but in my experience it yields unpredictably interesting results. I never felt tied down to the perceived rules of film narrative because I became most interested in doing these moments justice, having a kind of artistic faith in the intrinsic power of these moments. A great deal of "story" would often spawn from the act of connecting these moments, rather than the other way around.

Now, where do these moments come from? . . . That's hard to say. Where does an impression of "the larger picture" come from? . . . That's even harder to say. One second you're late somewhere, speeding on the freeway, the next you're pulling over to the shoulder and writing, not giving a shit about being late. The universe/multiverse comes knockin' on your brain, and priorities change, values evolve, if only temporarily. A greater calling has arrived and you better act quick, or else, or else, or else—why even go to "or else"? Pull over while your muse is buzzin'. . . . At least that's my motto-type-thing.

I'm inclined to think of these moments and these inklings of a larger picture as reflective of glimpses we all perceive as children—insights into something which transcends the third dimension. In "An Essay for S.I. Witkiewicz" (translated by Walter Amdt), Polish writer, fine artist, art teacher, and literary critic Bruno Schulz (1892-1942 [assassinated by the Gestapo while in the middle of writing a novel, The Messiah, the manuscript of which has never been found . . .]) posits the idea that artists never actually discover anything new, so much as they rediscover/reinterpret snippets of some profound secret of the universe/multiverse that had been revealed to them during childhood.

"I don’t know how we manage to acquire
certain
images in
childhood
that carry decisive meanings for us.
They function like those threads
in the solution around which the significance of the world crystallizes
for us . . . Such images amount to an agenda, establish an iron capital
of the spirit, proffered to us very early in the form of forebodings
and half-conscious experiences.
It seems to me that all the rest of one’s life
is spent interpreting these insights,
breaking them down to the last frag-
ment of meaning we can master,
testing them against the broadest intellectual spectrum
we can manage.
These early images mark out to artists
the boundaries of their creative powers.
They do not discover anything new
after that, they only learn how to understand
better and better
the secret entrusted to them at the outset.
Their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis,
a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.
The substance of that reality exists in a state of constant
fermentation,
germination,
hidden life.
It contains no dead, hard, limited
objects.
Everything diffuses beyond its borders,
remains in a given shape only momentarily,
leaving this shape behind
at the first
opportunity"
(106-108
).

When I read this in January 2008, two years into writing Invisible Escalators, it rang true to me. The more knowledge I acquires in my research, the more strangely familiar it all felt, like I was working my way back through a palingenetic aesthetic (palin=return, genetic=origin . . . this term I nabbed from James Tedder's 1972 essay "On the Palingenetic Aesthetic: A suggested Term for Critical Inquiry"), as in fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, as with stories like the Garden of Eden, Tower of Babel, Pandora's box, etc. . . . there has always been an urge to return to a state of mind-being less fragmented by the adult human experience . . . even in lyrics by Pink Floyd-founder Syd Barrett:

This song was actually written by Syd when he was a child, although he didn't record it until after leaving the Floyd in '69/'70. . . . Syd's influence lived on, as did his band (post-Barrett albums include Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here [an album for/about Syd], Animals, The Wall). Roger Waters, a childhood friend of Syd's, has always cited Barrett's lyrics and falling out of/into sanity/insanity as a constant, gnawing influence on his songwriting.

"When I was a child / I caught a fleeting glimpse / out of the corner of my eye"
-Pink Floyd, "Comfortably Numb," The Wall, 1979

There is a sense that with all the gains proffered by language (Lacan's Symbolic Order), there are perhaps a few things lost along the way . . . a pre-language mental state that many artists seek to rediscover whether or not they are aware of it. A gibberish will-to-play. A pre-worldly-obsessions kind of joy. We miss it. And if reincarnation is true (always a possibility, yes?), imagine all the experiences you just can't quite remember, feelings of existing in-between lifetimes, a sense of integrating infinite consciousness without the confines of a body/brain . . . imagine the boundless the joy, the love. There's so much that could very well be just beyond our mental articulations of experience, something we caught a glimpse of during childhood, something language can't quite touch. Telepathy? That could be cool.

. . . although language can get close, there certainly exists an impasse. Experimental writer (and a former professor of mine) Martin Nakell outlines, in his own wacky way, a writer's options for dealing with this impasse. And his suggestion is this: choose narrativity. Nakell says in his essay "On Narrativity," that:

"Art, not story, is the point of it all."

For me this means story (since there will always be a story, even Beckett's Waiting for Godot has a story) should service art, and not the other way around. . . .

"Narrative is a product of the imagination
in an active relationship with the world,
is an art performed in language,
but which arises before thought,
is read by the reader in language
but affects the reader past thought,
is an art of the whole and wholly incomplete person."

He goes on. . . .

"Mimesis:
Narrative is mimetic.
Life unravels.
There is no omniscient narrator.
Life is not about something, it is something.
This is the greatest level of mimesis which narrativity,
through its various artifices, achieves.
Not imitating life, it is life.
Not about something, it is something.
The narrativity of the fiction understands
that it must charter the narrative of this greater purpose:
a mimesis of being and doing."

Although the ending of Nakell's essay-of-sorts always hits home for me:

"Make me laugh.
Oh, make me laugh.
I want to laugh and laugh and laugh.
I want to laugh.
Every kind of laughter,
make me laugh.
need to laugh.
I love to laugh.
Narrativity’s goal is to make the dissipated reader laugh."

Readers at the 2004 Torta al Testo Letterario in Corciano, Italy
(Marty is in front . . . I'm in the green jersey)

The older I get, the more I just want to laugh. The best kinds of laughs. To think of how boundless laughter must have been before learning language. Maybe that's when those glimpses arrive: a portal opens up during a child's pre-language ecstasy of laughter. . . . Just a thought.

(as if anything is ever just anything)

So much is possible.

Eighteen years after sketching my pet dog Shelby (starting with her eyes), not by conscious intention, I applied the same process to Invisible Escalators. Over a month before I knew that I was even writing a novel, the first sentence I wrote for my novel-to-be was all about Teddy Bear Drier's eyes:

If you were to ask any of us about them,
we'd say his eyes look like dinosaur eyes,
and by that I mean serpent eyes.

This line was the first sentence I wrote for my first assignment in grad school, in the fall of 2006—Marty Nakell's Writing Techniques class. That line is now in the middle of Step 5, completely rewritten to reflect the narrator's voice and the context of the contemplation. And since then, like the rest of Shelby's face, the rest of I.E. has followed, and continues to follow, as I go back and forth between connecting moments and keeping the larger picture in mind. Teddy Bear Drier's eyes was the first moment of my novel put to paper. As a character, Teddy came to me even before the narrator, Cleve Backster. I arrived at the narrator's character by asking myself, "Who is this person describing Teddy's eyes?" Enter: Cleve. . . . Perhaps Teddy arrived first because my palingenetic aethstic relates more to a painter, sculptor, architect, abstract thinker, abstract doer, abstract being . . . and Teddy is all of those things, and so much more. In step 7, Cleve discovers that several years before he and Teddy ever met, Teddy had made a painting which portrays key events in Cleve's life up until that exact moment. Over half of the canvas has been left blank. . . .

Without giving too much away, much of Invisible Escalators could be seen as taking place within a painting within a painting, although many of the characters would disagree. In keeping with an aim for laughter, Cleve and Brian Kasselman share a dialogue in which they shrug off this very concern—and I am inclined to agree with them. What remains central is the ability for a painting to feel as though it is transporting you elsewhere in the world, or elsewhere in your mind (and through the noosphere . . . the world) . . . the feeling of the individual mind mixing with the global mind through the medium of the art form.

A lot of people say "write what you know." Aside from the absurd epistemological implications of such a cliché, I write whatever is pulsing through my brain and needs to escape (which is inevitably something I think I know. . . ). For instance, with Teddy's eyes, I was thinking about how we have no idea what a dinosaur eye looks like: a bird-snake eye maybe (although not all snake eyes look alike, and not all bird eyes look alike, so who knows). But in my mind, I began to see a kind of dinosaur eye, and as I pulled back from the eye, I could see Teddy's face, I could hear Teddy's voice, I could hear him singing something. What is he singing? And to whom? I pulled back further and Teddy was singing to his plants, but he was also in mourning. What kind of plants? Why is he mourning? The loss of what? Of who? Before long, I was writing down everything that I could think of about Teddy just by asking myself questions. In a sense, I was writing as a way to know, rather starting with a story, beginning, middle, end, etc., and deciding everything I think I know from the outset.

(e.g., this blog post started as a short update about how I love paintings and how I've been writing about art galleries in Laguna Beach . . . ).

I've found that a lot of artists see a kind of impasse as existing between the art of language and the art of the visual. And certainly, with just the right lines, the right combination of colors, the right brushwork, subject matter, allegory, abstraction—these qualities penetrate the heart and mind with a different frequency than language, to be sure.

You could say this has to do with the cerebral hemisphere of the brain, the left hemisphere being more analytical, logical, and objective, while the right hemisphere is more spacial-oriented, creative, and subjective. . . .

Really though, most neuroscientists see this model as utterly simplistic and misleading.

Optical illusions can tell us a little bit about how the brain interprets the Real. Is this silhouette spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? Or both? Or neither? Or can we make her spin whichever way we choose? . . . (hint: silhouettes can't/don't spin)

There's just so much that scientists don't understand about the brain. Like in cases where people have had one of their brain's hemispheres removed (i.e., a hemispherectomy), and lived to recover most of their brain function. There are incredible implications to these brain mysteries, such as the possibility that "thoughts" do not originate in the brain itself. That there is something invisible, something non-physical that needs to be understood before the brain can ever be understood for what it really is, what it really does, and how.

According to P.M.H. Atwater, Near Death Experiences and Out of Body Experiences suggest an intrinsic ability for thoughts to be thought and memories to be stored all while the brain is medically comatose—a central plot element in I.E.

Of course, this leads us into the mysteries of consciousness, for where are the memories of out of body experiences stored while the brain is comatose? Can consciousness, independent of the brain, store memories? Is the brain merely a temporary receiver between the body and mind-consciousness? And thus consciousness, ultimately independent of the brain, is like a radio? Or is consciousness the radio wave, the brain is the receiver, their relationship is mind, and something else entirely is the radio—call it dark energy, call it God, Source, Force, Atman, Implicate Order. Oh from where does this stubbornly persistent illusion of personality and individuality derive? Who knows. . . .

No, seriously, who knows? Let me know if you know who knows.

Besides, I have never related to this left-right brain dichotomy (or any other left-right dichotomy, for that matter . . . ). Believing in such a dichotomy might just be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, projecting false limitations onto the brain/receiver, thereby limiting the wave-length of mind-consciousness. And what fun is that? The human instinct is to overcome limitations, not succumb to them. Oceans, gravity, disease. So, why succumb to the limitations of false conclusions about the legitimate mysteries of consciousness, and by extension, the incredible potential for humankind? Seems a bit counter-intuitive. Which leads into the question of intuition, which leads us to thought-forms disguised as intuition, and how intuition can be manipulated over time.

Many education systems seem to do this (and families, the media, governments . . .), with an unhealthy emphasis on so-called "left brain" skill-sets, leaving many areas of the brain/receiver to become dormant, inactive, hardened gray matter. After all, it's only natural for people to grow comfortable with the skills that have been nurtured in them. Unfortunately, when only parts of the brain/receiver are nurtured, so many/most people cling to those comforts as if that's all they're capable of, and are less likely to go out of their way to develop, enrich, enliven, activate, keep awake the brain as a global, interconnected receiver. Even if you work in an office, there's no need to succumb to the wavelength of office job-dom. Or sports fanatics, or news anchors, or math teachers, or construction workers, or presidents. We praise our so-called experts in society, yet we are losing track of the larger picture. We have manipulated our own intuition as a species and a civilization, so much so that it can feel like an out of body experience just listening to the news. What the hell is going on? Have we all gone mad? Or worse still: have we all been programmed to go mad, stay mad, fall in love with the madness? And for what? For whose gain? . . . Now that's an interesting question, and it deserves its own post, as Cleve's father Richard would have a lot to say about who stands to gain from keeping the general population ignorant of their potential.

George Carlin used to talk about the Owners of This Country and their Big Club. . . . Oh how I miss George. Considering he never graduated high school, and the originality of his mind, it just further reflects the dumbing down of the human spirit that takes place in too many education systems. The subtle lobotomy of the intuition until the infinite potential of consciousness is reduced to self-limiting statements: "I'm a math person. I don't care about poetry." "I like baseball, not history." "I read magazines, who cares about books?" "I'm not an artist. I'm a scientist." And then years later, the statements get even more narrow. "I'm a geologist, but I don't know anything about physics." "I'm a medical doctor, but I don't know anything about consciousness." As if for even a second one specialty is ever really disconnected from the larger picture. Which is not to say becoming an expert is useless, just that it seems to too often depend upon unhealthy levels of certainty, on top of unhealthy levels of ignorance about other specialties. This is not a combo that will lead to a clear view of reality, much less clear solutions to the problems that have been caused (at least in part) by the perpetuation of fragmented views of reality.

If consciousness plays a role in medicine, for instance, then the medical doctor is missing part of the picture. If physics plays a part in geological formations, then the geologist is missing part of the picture. And what if consciousness effects the physics responsible for geological formations? What experts are in place to synthesize seemingly disparate pieces of the larger picture? . . . Can a whole-systems approach to explaining reality even have an expert?

Quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) anticipated all of these problems back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, culminating in several groundbreaking works, including (but not limited to): Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), and Thought as a System (1990). Both of these works explicitly discuss the problem of fragmentation as a malfunction of human thought systems. At the seemingly two-dimensional plane/microscopic level of events, Bohm saw there had to exist an implicit, invisible, interconnected wholeness to reality—no aggregate, no particle, is ever actually disconnected from the whole flow. There is a necessary energy of harmonic conviction that keeps the stuff of reality (as we perceive the stuff) from breaking apart ad infinitum (from galactice structures, to the structure of a single atom . . . something Maurice Cotterell calls "permanent magnetism" in his new work Future Science: forbidden science of the 21st century). And yet, as a species, we have neglected this creative energy in favor of breaking most everything we get our grubby hands on. WHY? ----

On the first page of Wholeness Bohm states:"Fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and thus is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them" (1)

( . . . [ . . . (Jose Arguelles would blame much of these problems of thought on the systematic colonization of the world's natural, harmonic calendar systems, replaced with the disharmonic and arbitrary Gregorian calendar. . . . If only Bohm were still around, I'm sure he would acknowledge the damage being done by the calendrical conundrum of modern times: how long will humankind follow a calendar totally out of synch with natural time-cycles? I mean, if civilization makes it through another Gregorian century, will we still have a month named after Julius Ceasar? And another after Augustus? Will our 12th month still be called 10 (Deci)? . . . It kind of boggles the mind, which kind of makes me wonder if its been utilized to make the mind get used to boggling . . . ) . . . ] . . . )

According to Bohm, fragmentation of society / psyche / identity makes harmony for the human species and the environment an uphill battle due to a feedback loop effect wherein learned fragmentation (caused by thought) ultimately yields further fragmentation.

"Thus art, science, technology, and human work in general, are divided up into specialties, each considered to be separate in essence from the others. Becoming dissatisfied with this state of affairs, men have set up further interdisciplinary subjects, which were intended to unite these specialties, but these new subjects have ultimately served mainly to add further separate fragments. Then society as a whole has developed in such a way that it is broken up into separate nations and different religious, political, economic, racial groups, etc. [. . . ] It is proposed that the widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.) which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have one of the key factors of their origin in a kind of thought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and 'broken up' into yet smaller constituent parts. Each part is considered to be essentially independent and self-existent."

We'll never conceive of enough categories to ever come close to reflecting the Real, and even if we could, it wouldn't make those categories reality (or things to be seen as reality). There would still exist a physically necessary, implicitly interconnected, harmonic reality hidden beneath a bunch of compartmentalized, seemingly separate, chaotic categories. Or as Bohm phrased it, there would still exist "an undivided wholeness in flowing movement."

In other words, the goal (for everyone? . . . I've really opened up this topic since I started writing, or has the topic opened up me? [maybe a bit of both, back and forth, like a spiral . . .] . . . ), I think, should be to overcome this tendency for the human thought system to believe its own bullshit.

As for manifesting that goal? In my experience? Art helps. Art helps to cut through the illusion of fragmentation, if only in moments. But these moments, old and new, sustain us. In times of despair and doubt, the mind wanders back to these moments of clarity in seek of refuge from the bullshit bombast. These moments that say, "The blue sky is a lie. The only true limit is infinite consciousness." These moments that merely seem to elaborate more and more on those childhood inklings we all share, when anything feels / is / will always be possible.

Beauty in a Sarcophagus: Beep. Beep. Beep.

2011-03-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

My short story "Beauty in a Sarcophagus: Beep. Beep. Beep. . . . A Mayan retelling of the folktale 'Sleeping Beauty'" is alive and well here inside issue 12 of Mad Hatters' Review (under "Contest Winners").

Through some fortunate correspondence with Chapman University, I obtained footage from a reading I gave of this story back in April 2009 for the John Fowles Literary Forum. Please forgive the audio. The guy filming was standing in the back of the room next to several computers where students were typing away who knows how about what and why. Although I find the typing an interesting accompaniment to the text scrolling across the bottom of the screen. . . .

Arriving at this moment was a hectic endeavor. I was at UCI picking up my friend Bryan to come to the reading. We had a few minutes to kill and decided to drink a couple beers. I misjudged how long it would take to get to the freeway, and before we knew it we were racing up the 55, late, off the 55, late, down through the residential streets, still late. Melissa was calling me wondering where the hell we were. We were holding up the entire reading. Just embarrassing. Author Pasquale Verdicchio was set to read after me (which he did: here), and who was I to hold everyone up? At the same time, I didn't have time to care much about that at the time. Bryan and I pulled into a reserved parking space by the music building (not reserved for us, at least not intentionally) and ran to the library, up the stairs, and straight to the restrooms. I had to pee like crazy at this point. And so did Bryan. And there we were peeing and laughing about the whole situation in the library restroom, down the hall from all these students and professors and a visiting author waiting patiently for me to show up and read some story. I had barely caught my breath and zipped my fly and there I was sitting in the reading room with everyone. Mark Axelrod sort-of introduced me as I pulled the wrinkled story out of my pocket.

. . . .

I had written this story over a year before, in January 2008, originally as an assignment for a course on fairy tales. For three years I had been studying the history of the Maya, their calendar, culture, mythologies and cosmologies. And by then I was right in the middle of writing Step 8 of Invisible Escalators, which takes place on the Isle of Patmos and has a lot to do with the Book of Revelation.

Now, in chapter 12 of Rev. verses 1-6 (the verses given to Cleve by the homeless man in Step 2), there is a retelling of a much older myth that can be found in Egypt, India, and Greece. The myth is about a woman who gives birth to a child who is destined to bring harmony/peace/unification to Earth, but who is killed/taken/abducted as a child or baby. The woman is then taken care of in the wilderness for 1260 days. (There's so much more to it, but that's good enough for purposes of this blog...)

When I first read the Book of Revelation in March 2006, I had just finished reading Jose Argeulles' book Time and the Technosphere. In this book, Arguelles makes a compelling case for the idea that humankind is deliberately and unnecessarily following a false perception of mechanistic time, which is perpetuating entropic notions about nature and civilization and spirit. This perception of time reflects what he called the "technosphere," which is the sphere of technology enshrouding the surface of the Earth, probing into the Earth, infecting its atmosphere, and circling its orbit in space. Arguelles claims this artifical timing frequency can be understood as 12:60, representing the division of the year into 12 months and the hour into 60 minutes, which is all based on the Babylonian calendar/division of the circle. (For Arguelles, the frequency of natural time is 13:20, based on the sacred Mayan calendar, The Tzolk'in, which follows a cycle of 260 days...).

Going back, when I read this phrase "1260 days" in the Book of Revelation back in March of 2006, I immediately remembered all this stuff I had read about the "12:60 frequency" of mechanized time. My mind was drawn to this parallel/coincedence, so I pursued it further.

Whoever wrote the book of Revelation borrowed heavily and brilliantly from apocalyptic mythologies going back thousands of years, taking part in a great tradition of reincorporating myth into new myth-creation/literature. Often times, "days" in the Tanakh is used in symbolic terms, especially when following a large number, and I began to see "1260 days" as symbolic for however long this "12:60 frequency" of mechanized time will last, however long humankind remains under this spell of what I later came to call the "Symbolic Disorder" (when natural time-cycles are erroneously symbolized by a disorderly system of measure, such as the Gregorian calendar and the atomic clock). The woman's salvation, then, is to remain in the wilderness following natural time.

In my story, the woman becomes the Red Queen, the wilderness becomes the jungle, and natural time is ultimately condensed to a skeleton waiting in protest for the end of the Symbolic Disorder. And there is yet another "coincidence" surrounding this number 1260, which will further tie us back into "Beauty in a Sarcophagus."

Pakal (who is the inspiration for "King of Kin" in the story--"kin" means "day"), chief engineer for the Maya in Palenque for 68 years, died in 683 CE. He is known for orchestrating the construction of some of the most important calendrical and cosmological inscriptions and monumental architecture. His tomb was dedicated and sealed 9 years later in 692 CE. This tomb, hidden beneath the Temple of Inscriptions, was not rediscovered and reopened until archaeologist Alberto Ruz did so in 1952--exactly 1,260 years later. So overall it seemed fascinating to me, these numbers. And I've always been a firm believer in being fascinated.

But if that wasn't odd enough already, another "coincidence" (I think we can call it a synchronicity at this point) emerged: Between 692 (Pakal's tomb is sealed) and 2012 (the end of the current cycle of the Mayan Long Count--13 Baktun), there are exactly 1,320 years. As I stated above, according to Arguelles, 13:20 supposedly represents the frequency of natural time. And for the Maya, 13 and 20 combine to form the most sacred of cycles: the 260 day Tzolk'in count. 260 corresponds not only to the human gestation period of nine months, but perhaps more importantly for the Maya 260 was used to track the orbit of Venus and predict Earth-Venus Synodic Conjunctions. Again, fascinating. What are the odds? These numbers. . . .

Next to Pakal's Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, archaeologists discovered a second sarcophagus that had been covered in cinnabar, giving it a red tint. As a result, the woman inside was nicknamed "Red Queen." With DNA testing, scientists confirmed that the Red Queen was not a blood relative of Pakal, which suggests the skeleton was most likely that of Lady Tz'akbu Ajaw, who Pakal had married in 626 CE, and who was from another city-state (she had ties to the original Palenque royal seat of Toktahn as well as to the site of Uxte'l'uh).

Anyway, all of these influences were going through my brain when I sat down to write a "Mayan retelling of the folktale Sleeping Beauty." I was thinking about Pakal, Lady Tz'akbu Ajaw/Red Queen, the woman in the Book of Revelation, archaeologist Alberto Ruz, the time-cycles of 1260 and 1320, fate and prophecy, the terrorism of colonialism, the subconscious power of calendars, and the 20th century's creation of the technosphere. Not to mention the folktale "Sleeping Beauty," and Jack Zipes' Breaking The Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. I wanted to incorporate all of these ideas through the eyes of the soon-to-be widowed Red Queen, who is imagining a conversation with her husband, King of Kin. And then I mixed it all up a bit with, with, with. . . .

Did I mention I was reading Jacque Lacan at the time I wrote this? His concept of the Symbolic Order offered a theoretical framework for the story, although I renamed it the Symbolic Disorder, suggestive of the notion that there must ultimately be an end to this disorder, and perhaps even a return to natural/harmonic time/consciousness--a post-"Beep. Beep. Beep."--a liberation from the technospheric disease taking over the planet. No?

In my novel, Shanshi's trials and ultimate salvation reflects the Red Queen/woman from Revelation 12:1-6 parallel in all sorts of ways, although I'll have to save that for another—

UPDATE on March 24, 2011-----

Yesterday, Jose Arguelles passed over to the other side. He was 72. Arguelles believed he was the reincarnation of Pakal, or as he phrased it, "Valum Votan," who returned at this prophetic time to offer people the tools they will need during the closing of the Long Count cycle. Stephanie South, who first met Arguelles in a dream state and who Arguelles recognized as the reincarnation of the Red Queen, who later wrote Arguelles' biography, 2012: Biography of a Time Traveler, as well as co-authored The Cosmic History Chronicles, expressed the following yesterday here:

I am writing to inform you that Valum Votan/Jose Arguelles departed this Planet on Solar Moon 17 (March 23), Red Spectral Moon, at 6:10 a.m (the exact same time that he was born in 1939 in the Red Spectral Moon year).

After a short illness, he slipped away in complete peace. We are asking for those who loved him to hold a synchronized vigil and/or ceremony on his behalf at noon (Pacific standard time) on Solar Moon 19, Kin 91. Send him your prayers, light and blessings to continue his spirit journey - and also visualize the rainbow bridge and the Return of Light.

Red Spectral Moon (solar seal 9, tone 11 - 9.11)

I dissolve in order to purify
Releasing flow
I seal the process of universal water
With the spectral tone of liberation
I am guided by my own power doubled.

Solar Moon 17 began vinal 13: Closing the equivocating part and entering a trance.

Note that he departed 58 days after his 72nd birthday. Kin 58-White Rhythmic Mirror-is the excarnation date on the tomb lid of Pacal Votan. Between his (Jose/Votan's) birth kin (11) and his death kin (89) there are 78 days. 78 (6 x 13) is the sum of the tones of the clear signs on the tomb of Pacal Votan. Note: the tomb lid of Pacal Votan was closed and sealed a few moons ago in Palenque, a clear sign.

The message that he wanted me to convey to kin is that everything is now the responsibility of the people who have heard the message. There is much work to be done. He said to tell all kin: "EVERYTHING IS PERFECT!!! Love everyone. Hate no one. God bless everyone." He will now be assisting the closing of the cycle from the other side of the veil.

"Perfect was my time of coming. Perfect was my mission. Perfect was the time of my going. Perfect is the discovery of my prophecy ." Telektonon 11.67

I extend all of my love to everyone in this most heartbreaking (but miraculous) time,

Love Red Queen/Stephanie/Kin 185

Excerpt from Step 3 of Invisible Escalators Published in Issue 10 of Litterbox Magazine

2011-02-06T16:12:00.000-08:00

Here.

ABOUT

2011-02-03T09:26:00.000-08:00

...further delay on that one blog I'm working on about 2010, my dad, steps 11 and 12...

That being said, I've been trying to take steps towards making my web site more than a domain placeholder. So many ideas, it would be nice to have a webmaster of some sort. "Hey do this, that, and other thing, and quick!" At least then I wouldn't have to endure the verbal abuse I put myself through. "Get your shit together, Ryan! And hurry!" Fine!

One thing missing from invisibleescalators.com is an ABOUT page. Not a plot summary, not a synopsis, not a blabbering about form, just ABOUT. What the hell is the deal with this novel? The overarching ABOUT. Assuming a novel can be ABOUT more than just the language (big assumption for some), I took a stab at compiling a list of ABOUTs. Only after a year+ of separation from Invisible Escalators did such a list even become doable. Gotta back away some times, not abandon, just give some space to breathe to those things you love....

nEW dEVELOPMENTS

2011-01-28T12:20:00.000-08:00

I have a new blog that I'm working on, but this isn't it. This is a blog I am posting for the sake of getting something posted before posting the blog that I'm working on. And when will I post the blog I am working on? Good question. And not all good questions have immediate honest answers available. One thing at a time. Here are some new developments pertaining to me and my writing and those things written by my writing or imagined by the writing of my writing, and so on and so forth:

1. The next issue (issue 10, not out yet) of LitterBox Magazine will include an excerpt from Step 3 of Invisible Escalators, "The Smoke Along The Glass—The Boom Against The Door." Cleve is driving home to LA from Laguna Beach. Passing a familiar street sign, Cleve remembers the last time he saw his mom, four years before the start of the novel, on his eighteenth birthday. The excerpt is this scene. Although many elements in this scene cannot be fully understood without reading the entire novel (steps 1-20), overall I think it works as a stand alone.

2. A short story of mine entitled "Beauty in a Sarcohpagus: Beep. Beep. Beep. . . . A Mayan Retelling of the Folktale Sleeping Beauty" will be in the next issue (issue 12, also not out yet) of Mad Hatter's Review. The story was chosen as one of the "Editors' Picks" for their Knock Our Hats Off Contest. "Beauty" will also be featured in a print anthology Knock Our Hats Off: A Little Book of Curious Delights. Seeing my fiction in print will be a joy, and I'm determined to make it something to look forward to again and again.

In a future blog I want to discuss this short story a bit. It is the only short story I've written since 2004, and the only work of fiction I've written since starting my novel (other than my novel). And its message pertains to the elements of prophecy and fate that run through my book (or the elements of delusion and coincidence, depending on your view of things). In many ways, this story anticipates Step 19 of my novel (which I wrote a few months later, in the summer of '08), which is written entirely from Shanshi's perspective in the first person and mirrors this perpetual state of waiting even when faced with horrific challenges. But first I have to finish the blog I'm working on (not this one, the one I was working on before this one). One thing at a time, more or less.

3. _______________ . . . (stay tuned)

Introducing Beijing Zoo PREVIEW

2010-08-19T07:25:00.000-07:00

Introducing: Monk Vision PREVIEW

2010-07-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Residency Prize Finalist

2009-08-03T16:41:00.000-07:00

Invisible Escalators has been honored as a finalist for the 2010 Madeleine P. Plonkster Emerging Writer's Residency Prize through Lake Forest College in Chicago! Congratulations are in order for the other eighteen finalists and the winner Gretchen Henderson!

I was fortunate enough to share a panel with Gretchen at the 2008 &NOW Literary Festival. Unfortunately she was unable to attend, but her husband (at least in memory he was her husband) was gracious enough to show and read her piece, which I believe was a poetic exploration centered around a dialogue with the sea (or one's perception of the). Sitting next to him, I was able to read her words off the page as he read, experiencing the piece in its full craft. It was clear from the sounds of the language, the way the limitations of the margin were transcended in conjunction with the content / spacing / layout / play—Gretchen Henderson is a writer engaged in the process of exploration; meticulous exploration fueled by a mind capable of seeing these explorations to their natural, eloquent, ebb and flow and ebb and flowing non-conclusions. May she go far and keeping going, if only in part with the help of this prize.

John Fowles Center for Creative Writing Award!

2009-05-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

...

LitterboxMagazine.com

2009-04-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

NEWS: A new magazine has appeared online, and since I am friends with its founders—who are potent and palpable writers themselves and aren't about to bullshit their readership—I know I can vouch for the magazine's relevance, or qualityness, or interestingness, or non-boring-sameness-fall-flat-redundant-crap which is so easy to pass as interesting in the context of glitzy web frames when the pop-up blockers want to quiet the screen but can't and no one can ever see the sameness of the words beneath the glitz... What I'm trying to say is Litterbox Magazine has got some good shit going on so check 'em out, the design of the site and the words should speak highly good and well for themselves...

The first issue of Litterbox Magazine (60 days) will also be the home for two pieces of poemish fiction I wrote in 2005. A poem, "pouring glue onto carpet from a chair" which is, now that I'm thinking about it, very much inspired by Syd Barrett's lyrical adventures with Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, and probably to a greater extent his solo albums, The Madcap Laughs and Barrett.

Syd Barrett has always been this reminder in my head that language is children's play and that adults ruin all the fun. When we're kids language has a wonderful sing-song elasticity to it that we lose later on when institutions breakup our patterns of speech and intuition of nonsense. Barrett imbedded music into the language of his lyrics, even without the sound the music is there, the playfulness of the arrangement of words for the sake of music, but also for the sake of more, for he understood there is the potential of greater meaning in the music of the language than in the sum of the meanings of the words without the music. Very Joycean (this was before I had read Joyce, but it served the same purpose of liberation in the form of remembering my sense for nonsense). In fact such a Joyce-Barrett parallel is not far off at all, for after he was kicked out of Pink Floyd for having "lost is mind," while recording The Madcap Laughs Barrett put to tape a musical arrangement to "Poem V" from James Joyce's Chamber Music, or rather, the song the poem became, "Golden Hair."

The second piece currently held captive at Litterbox Magazine has to do with this idea of remembering, not just our connection to language and thought as children (although this is explored), but also the idea of reincarnation, which I was reading about a lot at the time, in addition to all sorts of teachings and ideas that came into play a year later when I started writing Invisible Escalators. After taking a class on Indian religions I began to remember that as a kid I believed in reincarnation. Even my very Christian grandma (who isn't supposed to believe in reincarnation) used to say she always had a feeling that I had been here before, and I used to say "well if I've been here before we all have." And then of course she disagreed.

Anyway, one day in 2005 in the midst of all this random research into reincarnation, and the Gregorian calendar, and the noosphere, and theories about 2012, and apocalyptic literature, and unexplained weather phenomena, and dark energy, and so forth, coupled with living in Los Angeles in the midst of all that is good and horrid about living in Los Angeles and watching too much television, this question popped into my mind, and even though the answer was "no, I don't remember," I felt absolutely certain that a year before I was born, before I was ever conceived, I knew I still existed, that my soul or essence or consciousness was still in existence, and that at that time, in-between my potential last lifetime whenever it was, and on whatever planet it was on, in-between potentially thousands of lifetimes on hundreds of planets in dozens of star systems—who with only a brain could ever be certain?—when our memory returns unfiltered by the brain's clumsy habit of forgetfulness, at that point in-between I knew for certain that the answer would be—and that by extension the answer always is, in subconscious secret, in spite of our stupid brains—"yes."

"Remember when gravity was a choice?"

José Arguelles

2009-03-10T08:38:00.000-07:00

A self-described "planetary whole systems anthropologist," having received his Ph.D in Art History and Aesthetics from the University of Chicago in 1969 (his thesis being on the Russian painter, writer, and philosopher Nicholas Roerich), having taught at Princeton, University of California, and the University of Colorado (to name only a few), co-founder of Earth Day (1970), and of the Planet Art Network (1983), organizer of the first global meditation called the Harmonic Convergence (1987), author of The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology and Time and the Technosphere, more than anything else José Arguelles is an original thinker of the most relevant variety, for he always presents a unique but determined response to unsettling conditions.

His critique of the Gregorian calendar and its intrinsically irregular and erroneous, artificial timing frequency made me start to question my own habits of thought, and in effect, allowed me to better form and explore patterns of thinking less hindered by the thoroughly unacknowledged 12:60 Babylonian timing frequency encoded and unquestioned in our globalized-standardized instruments for measuring time, otherwise known as the Gregorian calendar (12 months) and the modern clock (60 seconds, minutes). All of these numbers (12, 30, 60, 360) we take for granted were originally based on an arbitrary division of the circle into 360 degrees, and the false assumption that there are 360 days in a solar year, which led the Babylonians to follow a calendar of 12 months of 30 days each, which was adopted later as a model for the Roman calendar, followed by a history of dogmatically-driven adjustments to account for the missing 5.242199 days (Julian and Gregorian). This is why September, the ninth month, in Latin means 7 (it was the seventh month in the original Roman calendar), October (octo) 8, November (novem) 9, December (deci) 10—why March is named after the Roman god of war, and why two of our months are named after power-hungry Roman rulers (Julius and Augustus Caesar). This is not a Roman world. The Roman empire has fallen, Babylon has fallen, and still the global standard system of measuring the Earth's solar year remains this primitive maze of a calendar (because it was the Vatican's calendar, and by extension employed by the banks of Europe, and by extension the banks of the colonized world), stemming entirely from an ancient Babylonian astronomical misconception. Thus, most of the humans on this planet remain ignorant of actual astronomical time-cycles, and instead have been born into a chaotic relationship with disharmonic time-cycles arbitrarily dictated by a calendar stitched together over time by people who—unlike the Maya and their astronomically precise systems of calendrics predating the Caesars by at least a thousand years—had no mental concept for what we call "zero," let alone knowledge of the solar year's precise duration.

Arguelles' critique of the Gregorian calendar starts from the basic assumption that what one uses to measure something implicitly affects how one perceives that something. When it comes to measuring the duration of days, a calendar is a given culture's instrument of measure, and should serve as a harmonic standard, just as the metric system is used as a harmonic standard for measuring space. Arguelles points out that in addition to the Maya, systems of harmonic calendars were the standard for native peoples the world over (be it from Ireland, the Americas, Asia, Australia), but unlike these colonized and largely forgotten calendars, and unlike our tape measurers in which every unit (inch or centimeter) is of equal measure, the Gregorian calendar has units (months) of unequal measure. As a result, there is no rhyme or reason to the system's parts, the first of every month could fall on any day of the week, our holidays wander around every year, rent for February costs the same as March, even though there are fewer working days. Imagine the physical structures that would be produced if tape measurers had inches of varying length. Thoughts, on the other hand, are non-physical structures themselves, nurtured and maintained in the mind, and we produce and cycle thoughts at a pace and rhythm, or a timing frequency repeated into habits by the instrumentation involved. With regards to the Gregorian calendar and modern clock, Arguelles believes we are artificially tuning our minds to an artificial 12:60 timing frequency. Is it a stretch to draw a parallel between the quality of our thoughts—the chaotic tempo and rhythm of our thoughts—and the false perceptions of linearity perpetuated by a calendrical system so pervasive that no one ever thinks to question it? I would say no, it is not a stretch. By being born into the chaotic Gregorian calendrical system we are psychologically, albeit subconsciously, inclined to accept a certain degree of chaos as normal, and in turn, perpetuate a certain degree of chaos.

I spent over a year of my life following Arguelles' proposed replacement to the Gregorian, called the Dreamspell, a 13 moon calendar of 28 days (4 even weeks) each, which properly takes into account the fact that the moon spirals through 13 phases every solar year. This seems like a smart move, because unlike measuring space, for which we invent our own standard—a "foot" or a "meter"—a solar year is already plotted out in the sky for us, every year there are 13 full moons (this basic calendar was actually proposed to the League of Nations over a century ago, but the motion was ultimately killed by the Vatican, who reasoned that to change the calendar would be to interrupt the progression of weeks which began in the Garden of Eden, and in effect, defy God—or as the saying goes, "follow the money," for the Vatican had a lot of it). However, in spite of all this bullshit about God having anything to do with the clearly man-made calendar (I mean, if God created the Heavens and the Earth, wouldn't such a God prefer a calendar which acknowledges mathematically both the time-cycles of the Heavens and the Earth?), whether or not it was my own projection, or some psychological manifestation, the very process of being mindful of such natural time-cycles (13 moons a year) spawned a jolt of synchronicities in my life the likes of which—at least not with a matched intensity and regularity—I have yet to experience since I got lazy with my following the 13 moons. Ironically, this was right before I began to write Invisible Escalators, requiring of me to keep enough of my mind in the Gregorian system so as to be able to write about it. However, I think this really speaks to the subconscious stranglehold our calendrical systems (and the systems—thought-systems and institutions—established according to its global implementation through the banking systems) have over our apathetic acceptance of chaos as the norm. For if the instrumentation is inherently chaotic (so goes Arguelles' reasoning), so are inclined our thoughts, so is inclined our behavior.

It should also be mentioned that before Arguelles came to this realization about time—what he calls the Law of Time: that "Time factored by Energy equals Art," rather than chaos—he experienced the tragedy of losing his eighteen year old son in an automobile accident a couple months after the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, ten days after the stock market crashed. Less than a year later Arguelles had already utilized fundamental Mayan calendrics and refashioned them into his proposed Dreamspell calendar of 13 moons of 28 days. He claims to have accessed bases of knowledge beyond those commonly known in the third dimension of reality, including telepathic communication with his only son, and a group of galactic beings he calls the Arcturians, and I'm sure the average close-minded human would find it far too much of a challenge to their beliefs in order to entertain such claims. This is understandable—especially if Arguelles is correct in his assumption that most people know very little about their minds because they have yet to explore them because they have been subconsciously suppressing them—but should in no way undermine the relevance of his critique of our systems of measuring time.

To offer Arguelles' critique some context, back in the 1920s and 30s, George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, agreed that the Gregorian calendar contains intrinsic flaws that are bad for business cycles (here is an article from 1927: Time Magazine). He pointed out that not only is the monthly division of the year irregular (28-31 days), but so are the quarter divisions (90-92), and so is the half division (181-184). He also took issue with the fact that the month is not an even multiple of the seven-day week (except for February, except in leap years), but rather four weeks plus two or three days. Eastman's ideas led to a proposed 13 month calendar of 28 days devised by Moses B. Cotsworth of England (who was influenced by indigenous calendrical and astrological systems), but was shot down by the League of Nations (due to the outlandish superstitious concerns mentioned above). Eastman remained an advocate for calendar reform his entire life, but to no avail, obviously. And according to Arguelles, to our own subconscious dismay.

Below are two parts of a video of Arguelles giving a speech at a 2004 conference addressing the world-wide crop circle phenomenon and what these clearly intelligent messages might be telling us, or at least those who can allow themselves to take seriously the potential truths before their eyes, in spite of themselves. His perspective, however seemingly absurd and easy to poke fun at, for some reason I cannot simply ignore. It speaks to me on what might be called a soul level towards which I have desired for years to consciously evolve into a wider awareness. His words challenge us because he is concerned with nothing less than to stir humankind into waking up and remembering where we have all come from, and where we have all, potentially, already planned on going....

"There's

nothing really that

we should be trying to hold onto,

to this particular civilization, to this

particular way of life. We actually should

be preparing for the spirit journey. We actually

should be beginning the spirit journey right now.

That it is all a spirit journey anyway. We've got these

bodies that were lent to our soul as kind of like testing

vehicles. But it's the soul that's traveling. The body doesn't

need to go anywhere. Like I said, the Earth travels one-million

six-hundred thousand miles in its orbit every day. In twenty-eight

days it goes forty-five million miles. In three-hundred and sixty-five

days it travels five-hundred and eighty-five million miles. In one hour

it travels sixty-six thousand miles. In one minute it's going one thousand

one hundred and eleven miles. A minute. Nineteen miles a second. Woo, we

just went another nineteen miles. Another nineteen miles. So why do we need to go anywhere?

I saw Eric Clapton just got busted for driving a hundred and thirty-four miles an hour in France.

Well, you know, he should figure it out. At that, he's still not gonna be able to beat the Earth's rate of speed."

"Although time (and not too much of it) will tell, I suspect that José will be honored as one of the most important thinkers in human history."

-Daniel Pinchbeck, author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, and 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, both of which were highly influential in my research for Invisible Escalators, not just in terms of interwoven esoteric ideas, but also in terms of describing psychedelic experiences.

Invisible Escalators = 3

2009-02-05T07:46:00.000-08:00

I realized something very important in the last couple of weeks. Invisible Escalators keeps becoming longer than I had anticipated. I keep discovering new things, new ways to describe things, new characters and character traits, new plot elements which I feel as though were always there waiting for me to make conscious with language. However, the book keeps getting bigger while it keeps feeling more and more "right." This is a dilemma to be sure, as I am reaching the point where book length + unknown author = disinterested publisher.

What I realized I have always been aware of, alas I have merely been resisting. So what is this realization? I realized I have in fact been writing three books at the same time. In short, Invisible Escalators = 3.

Like I said I always knew there were three basic "parts" to Invisible Escalators (steps 1-10, the centerpiece, steps 11-20), I simply did not have the foresight or guts to see these parts as potentially separate publications. To back track, while writing step 3 in the spring of 2007 (a month after I got back from Tibet), one morning before work (5am-ish) the character of Cleve's unborn sister suddenly "arrived," and within twenty minutes I wrote all the dialogue of her first scene in the book at the end of step 3. This scene was published in Elephant Tree last year (chapman.edu/wilkinson/english/publications.asp), and since many people have told me this character is the strongest part of my novel, I decided to read the scene at the &Now Literary Festival 2008. Because she is unborn, she keeps changing her name every time she shows up, and in this first scene she changes from Cleopatra to Isabella to Lyla (I'll refer to her as Lyla just to be clear). Shortly after writing this scene, I realized I wanted to write a children's book in Lyla's voice (speaking to Cleve), from her perspective as an unborn spirit with knowledge of her family history, which includes living on other planets in the solar system. There is something so liberating about writing from such a perspective, for in the reader there is no expectation of logic. There is something about Lyla which makes the reader inclined to hear her out, to consider her extravagant claims, and something about this lends itself to a children's book (or even a series of children's books). So it has been my plan for a couple years to finish Invisible Escalators and then write this children's book.

The centerpiece has been another aspect of Invisible Escalators shrouded in self-doubt and procrastination. I wanted the centerpiece to incorporate past lives Cleve has lived, and how they have led to the present life, and the characters he has met so far in the novel (Teddy, Aya, Chuck, Lyla, Brian, and of course Shanshi). But in my mind this was always an "idea" without a tangible literary approach. Thus, like many other parts of my book, I have been waiting for the centerpiece to "arrive."

What I realized recently is that I already have a tangible literary approach to the centerpiece. The centerpiece is the children's book. While working on the end of step 10, where Lyla shows up and continues the conversation started in step 3, I realized the children's book is actually an extension of this conversation experienced in Cleve's mind, that the children's book (Lyla's story) is to aid in Cleve's evolution towards past life self-awareness. Something like that. I am particularly excited about this because I'll have a chance to illustrate Lyla's imaginative stories (drawing is something I did loooong before I realized I could write, and if the illustrations don't work, oh well, they're not necessary, right now it's just something I'm considering).

The third part/final installment/conclusion of Invisible Escalators is of course steps 11-20, which I have already written much of, including all of step 19, which is from Shanshi's perspective. Because all three parts function as a whole, by design there is an incentive to read all three parts together, and thus ideally all three parts (with the children's book in the center) will one day be published and bound together as a whole. But since I find this rather unlikely being as I have had nothing published in the past, I find myself content with completing the first book in the unintended trilogy so that the world can have something to chew on while the other two books find their way to a way to "arrive."

I found some diagrams I did back in November of 2006, while writing step one. From very early on in the writing process I knew there were twenty steps in all (shown here in Mayan notation), even before I knew what the larger story was. The rainbows on the sides represent connections between chapters, which are listed in the upper right corner of the page (left).

I then took the top diagram and recreated it on my computer (the things I do to procrastinate). I printed the diagram and drew in the spiraling lines within the circle by hand. What is left are the three basic parts of the novel well-defined before I even had the story. Steps 1-10 on the left, 11-20 on the right, and all steps feeding into the centerpiece in the center of the circle.

Here in this last one I made in December 2006 applies the three basic parts of the novel in the geometry of the pyramid rather than a circle. I have since embedded the prologue and epilogue into steps 1 and 20, but the connectivity between 1, 20, and the centerpiece remains of central concern, and at the time I had no idea why. (I would have a better idea for some reason after traveling to Tibet the following month.) Again I drew all of these before finishing a single step, and yet ever since, little by little, more and more of the novel keeps arriving fully coherent with these visual impressions of a novel I had yet to write.

Italo Calvino did a similar thing with his work by choosing to define a novel's scope and limitations first, and then to write the novel within these parameters (i.e., Oulipo: "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle"). The basic idea is that whether the author intends this or not, how one writes is interconnected with what one writes about. In this respect, the author can gain further control over her/his work by making formal decisions/limitations about which to cohere to from the outset. This is also why the first 1-3 words of each of the 20 steps in Invisible Escalators are in CAPS. When these words are placed alongside each other, a two-part sentence is made which informs the conclusion of the novel (or lack there of), and reinforces the trilogy structure. (1-10) ALL ANYONE / THOUGHT ABOUT / WHEN / IT HAPPENED / WAS THE / ANSWER TO / A QUESTION / THEY HAD ASKED / THE STARS / AS CHILDREN (centerpiece) TO EXPLAIN \ THEIR MUTE \ INDIFFERENCE TOWARDS \ A SPECIES \ ILL-PREPARED FOR \ A DESTINY \ OUTSIDE \ THE CIRCUMFERENCE \ OF THE MIND \ OF GOD (11-20).

NEW BOOK IDEA!!!

2008-11-20T10:53:00.000-08:00

Title: How Not To Go Insane In Modern Times

Title of chapter 1: Read Invisible Escalators

Contents of chapter 1: The novel Invisible Escalators

Number of chapters in How Not To Go Insane In Modern Times: 1

...and yet another attempt at a synopsis...

2008-10-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

Invisible Escalators is divided into twenty chapter-esque steps. These steps can be taken in the order of the reader's choosing, although it is highly recommended to begin with the first, and meander on instinct from there. Each step is divided into sub-steps of varying length. The words play in the space within the sub-steps. A sequence of eight droplets (of varying volumes) marks a movement from one sub-step to another. This lets the reader know we are no longer where or when or why we once were.

All these words within the sub-steps—perpetual play direct from the mind of a fictional character named Cleve Backster—takes the reader from Cleve's imminent death on his twenty-second birthday, to outside of his body, then suddenly to wake up in the morgue, locked within his already-declared dead body, reanimated, reanimating (see step 1). And now, as readers, we're off. ... Set in a not too distant future, the Mayan Long Count has exactly 365 days remaining before resetting back to zero, before exactly what no one can be certain. And no one is without a theory.

Driven with a complete lack of direction by the love for a girl named Shanshi, whom he only met once eight years before, and led by the advice of his unborn unnamed sister, who appears on her own accord in numerous sub-steps throughout, the reader is bundled up in Cleve's mind as his collective molecular composition begins to disappear and reappear all around the world. From California to Arizona, to Utah, the Isle of Patmos, to China, Tibet, India, Ireland, Australia, the Amazon, the Yucatan Peninsula. ... Dreams which portray another man's life begin to cross paths with his movements from one Earth-coordinate to the next, retracing the travels of an old friend named Teddy, who Cleve accidentally killed, or may not have killed, depending on the context of the clue.

Forgotten technologies from the time of Atlantis, repressed memories of his father's top secret CIA involvement, a new world war, a fall from technological empires, psychoactive drugs and the evolution of human consciousness (and/or the lack of evolution), an unprecedented onslaught of earthquakes, psychic prophecies, false prophecies, solar flares, volcanic eruptions, UFOs and crop circles. Ancient mysteries dissolve into new ones, new mysteries are forgotten and later remembered, or misremembered, but Cleve continues to collect and digest clues, or what he believes are clues. And he stays on the move, both physically and mentally, both with and against his will.

There are only so many days left before the Mayan Long Count resets to zero, and thanks to his father Richard Backster, along with the Uncleborge brothers, Cleve is inescapably aware of the countdown. ... So will any sense be made of his year-long return from an imminent physical death? Cleve really isn't sure, and really isn't sure to what extent he's lost his mind, or worse (or better), to what extent he hasn't. But nevertheless, by way of the web of memories and characters through which his mind maneuvers, Cleve remains steadily and unsteadily on his way somewhere, elsewhere, until, at last (see step 20)

Laugh

2008-10-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

My favorite human beings are the ones who are willing and open, not about anything specific, just in general. I enjoy both movement and stillness, depending on the geography, the season, the time of day, the music in rotation, the people I'm with, the substances I'm on, if any. I was raised on the beach, and would recommend that everyone be raised on the beach if I didn't so despise a crowded beach, but ideally, the human biology responds in a favorable manner to the beach, and if you haven't been, your body already longs to go, you just won't know so until you're there, and then out of nowhere you'll know, but even then the words will be sure to allude you. This is a good thing. Laugh.

Intentions

2008-09-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

Q: What are your intentions?

A: What are your intentions?

Q: What are my intentions?

Blame Morning Cartoons

2008-09-08T11:28:00.001-07:00

I fell into the whole writing thing by accident. I was supposed to be a filmmaker. This was my passion. How did this happen? Well, in kindergarten my classes were in the afternoon. This was because I hated waking up in the morning and afternoon class allowed me to watch cartoons until 11am. I miss those days. But something very important happened as a result of the afternoon class, because it was only in the afternoon kindergarten classes at Marion Bergeson Elementary that an experimental method was used to teach the kids how to read and write. We were essentially asked to sit at the giant IBM computers and write anything we wanted to write. No direction at all. Or if there were directions I wasn't paying attention. But I had never really written before, and so I just copied words off the wall. The process was goofy, and left me at odds with the intellectual mechanisms required for reading and writing. Really until high school I never wrote creatively, never finished reading a book. I wanted to be outside playing, and so I spent most of my childhood outside playing.

When I wasn't outside playing, my creative outlet was always drawing and painting, and by the seventh grade these visual mediums had evolved into film. I bought a camcorder for $300 from a woman in the PennySaver. My mom drove me to meet her at the Price Club parking lot. From then on I worked on little film/video projects all the time. I was in and out of classes, and on and off teams, but really my underlying career as an adolescent was a movie maker. So direct out of high school it seemed only natural to go major in film. I started undergrad as such, with an emphasis in editing, which made sense at the time until I realized there is no connection between a film major and a filmmaker. One would think there would be, but there isn't. I would have been better off on my own, or as a business major, anything but a pointless film major.

So after a year and a half I switched majors from one pointless degree to another: philosophy. I figured if I was gonna make films, an education outside of film might come in handy. I was also extremely insecure about my limitations as a writer and reader, and thought philosophy would suffice as a jumping board of some kind. So I did this for a few years, started calling myself an atheist, and denying I was depressed. I was for some reason given the William James Award in Philosophy, which made me a little less depressed, but still, western philosophy was only becoming more and more of an irrelevant word game. Then I got into eastern metaphysics, studied extensively the religions of India, stopped calling myself an atheist, and with a new perspective started writing fiction. Traveled to Mexico, England, Italy, Amsterdam, Hawaii, Beijing, Shanghai, Tibet. Much of my novel "came to me" while in Tibet, standing on top of a mountain. I had brought my video camera and filmed much of the trip, but then something happened on that mountain top. The next day Bryan and I took the train back to Shanghai. When we arrived two and a half days later, I couldn't bring myself to press record. I had no desire to film Shanghai, and no desire to watch the footage of Tibet. Still to this day, two years later while writing chapter 10, which takes place in Tibet, I have yet to watch the footage. Something happened, something opened up on that mountain top in Tibet, and whether I liked it or not, in came Invisible Escalators.

Why "Cleve Backster" ?

2008-08-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

My novel is written in the first person, and the character narrating the events unfolding all around him is "Cleve Backster." His father is Richard Backster, mother Audrey Backster, no siblings. Prior to the start of the novel he has been living in Los Angeles with his girlfriend Natalie for four years. They have been supporting each other and each other's drug habits with the checks for tuition that Audrey keeps mailing Cleve, unaware that Cleve dropped out of college after one semester. When the tuition checks stop showing up, Natalie takes off. Shortly after this, the novel begins on Cleve's 22nd birthday. Here is a drawing I made of Cleve at the start of the novel:

This is an entirely fictional character with absolutely zero immediate ties or parallels to the Cleve Backster outside of my novel:

Yes, there is a real Cleve Backster outside of my novel, and while the fictional Cleve is three years younger than myself (a year younger than the version of myself which existed when I began to write the fictional Cleve) the non-fictional Cleve Backster was born sixty-five years before the fictional one.

So, why the name Cleve Backster? First off, the sound of the name: "cleeeeve baxter." There is an inherent polarity in the name, a slow-quick, weak-strong polarity. The first name is one syllable, and can be drawn to a whimper of lazy pronunciation, almost as if to fade away. And indeed the first name would certainly fade away if it were not for his last name: BACK, STIR. Two syllables, both components of the last name appear to construct simultaneously a direction, and an action. Go back, then stir. This is reciprocated throughout the novel since the narrative is told in the past tense, and so Cleve literally goes back into the memories in his mind, and stirs up his conscious past with language. The name is fitting, functional, and sounds cool.

Other than the sound of the name, there remains the real, non-literary, three-dimensional Cleve Backster, who is eighty-three or eighty-four right now (I don't know his exact birthday), and very much alive. I first discovered Mr. Backster back in 2005. For no immediate or focused purpose, I had begun to research the science of consciousness, quantum and astrophysics, systems of calendrics alternative to the Gregorian/Julian/Roman calendar, particularly those of the Maya, astrology, numerology, theories of advanced pre-Sumerian civilizations on Earth such as Atlantis and Lemuria, the legitimacy of psychic phenomena, telekinesis, astral travel, remote viewing, crop circles, OBE/NDE experiences, reincarnation, cellular memory, the evolution of DNA, the ET/UFO phenomenom and structural ruins on Mars and our Moon, government conspiracies of information control and campaigns of disinformation in relation to these ideas, the role of religion in the midst of these ostensibly contradictory ideas, apocalyptic literature, theories alternative to the contrived choice between a mysterious Big Bang or a mysterious God-act of Creation, theories alternative to Darwinian gradualism, theories alternative to the Western misperception of linear time, et cetera. The bulk of this research was conducted during the two years of my life when I wrote absolutely no fiction or poetry of any kind, and so it is no surprise that weaved throughout the first piece of fiction/poetry I have taken on since then—the novel in question—are events and ideas which explore the very themes of said research.

Anyway, it didn't take long before this research led me to the writings of David Wilcock (he has several books available for free on his web site, divinecosmos.com). To even begin to discuss the scope of importance of David Wilcock and his research will require its own entry (at least), however, it was Wilcock who first introduced me to Cleve Backster. This is how, as a writer, "Cleve Backster" became at times synonymous with my own process of discovering new ideas, and more importantly making connections between these ideas. None of this is meant to create the character of Cleve Backster into an analogy, I am only saying that by naming the narrator as I have, the decision has accidentally (and thankfully, in the most practical of thank yous) served to perpetuate an instinct that I think everyone shares; that is to discover or create if only in passing a genuine and simultaneous harmony with our surroundings and within ourselves. Aside from poetics, this is another factor that makes the name both functional and practical in relation to my novel. By this I mean that the name perpetually reminds me of this instinct whenever I enter into a dialogue with language, so there has become a kind of feedback loop within the process of creating the art of a novel, a loop which expands and contracts according to a source outside of the art, which is not the person, and not myself, but rather the collective of meanings I have projected onto and into the name "Cleve Backster."

Cleve Backster, the real Cleve Backster born in 1924, was once the top poly-graph expert working in the CIA. He would interrogate prisoners and presumed enemies to the USA, and he was the best. He went on to become Chaiman of the Research and Instrument Committe of the Academy for Scientific Interrogation, and is currently director of the Backster School of Lie Detection in San Diego, California. In his book, Primary Perception (you can check it out on his website, primaryperception.com), Backster runs through his life story, and how, by chance, he came across the phenomenon of biocommunication.

So what is biocommunication and what is primary perception?

Taken from his website, biocommunication is, "The general field of study of communication between different biological life forms, mostly in nature, sometimes in the laboratory. It involves the use of instrumentation to observe reactive events occurring in all kinds of life—animal, plant, cellular, microscopic, and so on—and includes observational biology, high quality observational studies. Also included is the study of the effect of human thought and intention on life forms in the environment." The site defines primary perception as, "The vehicle of communication, the invisible unrecognized field that interconnects all species and life forms, whereby biocommunication can occur. Coined by Cleve Backster, primary perception is distinct from extra sensory perception (ESP) in that it occurs before the human specialized senses of taste, touch, hearing, sight and smell. It is likely going on all the time."

Okay, so what the hell does this mean?

This means Backster was able to observe, recreate, and document in the laboratory biocommunication, which can be seen as an example of this primary perception. The idea is that there exists a primary underlying perception, or consciousness, which pervades and inhabits all living things, from cells, to plants, to animals, to humans—basically, everything is alive and sharing in the same all-encompassing consciousness, with varying degrees of self-conscious self-awareness. This idea coheres well with physicist David Bohm's theory of the Implicate Order, the Hindu notion of brahman and atman, the Buddhist notion of store-house consciousness, Emersonian transcendentalist philosophies (borrowed from Hindu and Buddhist philosophies), Vladimir Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin's theory of the noosphere, Samuel Warren Carey's Growing Earth theory, and the like. It requires a thorough self-analysis of the scientific community at large. The idea that consciousness arose strictly out of the evolution of the human brain becomes a debilitating misstep in the name of scientific progress, and has merely served to distance the human psyche from its natural environments. Humans began to see animals and plants, and often times humans with different color skin, as barbaric, if not robotic-unconscious creatures that are to be controlled by the Reason of Western Man. This is reflected in the global colonization of indigenous calendrical systems (in tune with natural cycles of time) with the arbitrary and inherently disharmonious Gregorian Calendar (in conflict with natural cycles of time). This can also be noted in the direction of technological advancements in the last hundred years and more, each invention serving in one way or another the function to support this false premise that the consciousness experienced by human beings is separate and special compared to the perceivably chaotic universe, and the inflexible laws which purportedly govern the universe (even though astrophysicists know not how to explain, observe, or understand over 95% of the energy in the universe, i.e., what they ominously and in great ignorance have agreed to call "dark energy").

The overarching point here is that the implications of Cleve Backster's research suggests that we are living within a scientific paradigm of fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of consciousness (and indeed are being bred in schools to support as Truth such scientific misadventures), a paradigm intent on sustaining itself for the sake of legitimizing hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, no matter the extent of unscientific denial (see: skepdic.com/plants.html). In the name of science there has arisen a kind of dogmatic politick, which has placed personal reputations far above objective inquiry. Not every legitimate phenomenon in the universe coheres well with the conclusions available according to the regiment of the scientific method, because the scientific method knows not nor acknowledges the nature of consciousness, or potential natures of consciousness. Such is the reason replications of Backster's experiments have been by and large less than successful. This is because there exists what he calls an "experimenter effect" between the person conducting the experiment and the conscious forms of life being experimented on. This calls for elaborate, random, and fully-automated controls. Through the use of such automation, Backster was able document biocommunication in and between plants, human cells, bacteria, and all kinds of other life forms. He first published his findings in the Winter, 1968 edition of the International Journal of Parapsychology, in a report entitled, "Evidence of Primary Perception in Plant Life."

Here's one of the quotes on the back of Primary Perception: "Cleve Backster's research has profound implications for humanity and its future evolution. Wisdom traditions have claimed there is only one ultimate reality that differentiates into all forms and phenomena. This ultimate reality is the root and ground of Being, the source that all that exists in the universe, a realm of existence, where we are not only connected to each other but where we are inseparably one. Cleve Backster's discoveries have created the new scientific paradigm. The understanding of the paradigm is crucial if we are to heal ourselves and our planet. I'm personally grateful and indebted to Cleve for leading the way. Someday all of humanity will acknowledge their gratitude to this great pioneer." -Deepak Chopra

Backster too believes a revolution is needed in the scientific community, an entire paradigm shift so as to rethink our assumptions and illusory perceptions about our surroundings, and begin to study and understand the nature of consciousness in a paradigm freed from all these scientific dogmas, which have become over time a religion in and of itself, a belief system that is to be upheld, rather than allowed to evolve. After all, Thomas Kuhn, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century, wrote in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: "A revolutionary would appear, often a young scientist not indoctrinated in the accepted theories, and sweep the old paradigm away." Kuhn's thesis was that steady progress in the sciences does not work, and historically has never worked in the manner of a gradual cumulative acquisition of knowledge, but rather, "a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions." And in those revolutions, he wrote, "one conceptual world view is replaced by another."

With this thought in mind, returning to my novel, the entire book can be seen as a literary manifestation of the fictional Cleve Backster's "experimenter effect" on his surroundings, and on other characters, and the reciprocated effect on him from his surroundings and other characters, once and/or while they have been/are being affected by his experience of them. And the framework of these "effects" takes place in the not-too distant future, during a time of both scientific and spiritual revolution, a revolution which collapses many of their falsely purported distinctions, one which is synchronized with the fulfillment of a multiplicity of ancient and less ancient prophecies. But, really, I had no idea at the time that such seemingly random research back in 2005 and 2006 would wind up being the underlying research for my first novel, Invisible Escalators. These ideas, this ever-expanding web of ideas, have become my first steps away from the dogmatic scientific assertion of chaos enveloping existence, and human reason serving as a tool to organize the chaos. Instead, behind the ostensible chaos there appears to be a harmony that is enveloping existence, and that the very act of believing human reason to be separate from this harmony has unintentionally and unfortunately served as our own creation, the notion of chaos; which we have successfully reflected and embellished by means of certain debilitating technological inventions, scientific theories uninformed and/or uninterested in the invisible influences of consciousness, overbuilding, overpopulation, environmental degradation, war, famine, et cetera. In this light, my novel can also be seen as a literary exploration of this process of making conscious (the story and the poetic architectures of the story) within a single character's mind (Cleve Backster) this inherent and necessary harmony behind the chaos; a chaos which we cannot help but perceive, and by virtue of our limited perception, perpetuate over and over . . . until when? . . . until what? . . .

717 days in. . . .

2008-08-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

717 days ago I started writing a novel. I didn't know it was a novel at the time. I thought it was just a four page short story. I didn't know it was really only four pages from chapter five of my novel. Chapter five, of what would become twenty chapters (chapters which I would later call steps). And I certainly had no clue as to the title of the novel—and eventual name for this blog—Invisible Escalators. What I knew was that I hadn't written fiction for two years, that of the fiction I had written most of it only got worse over time, and that I didn't want to take on a project too consuming or beyond my abilities. Well, to explore how I got from those four pages, to the four-hundred I have written since, and to help gather my thoughts, share my research, and document the process of completing this novel, I am about to join the web logging community. In'lakesh.