Tag Archives: creativity

Gutenberg-Punk

“Gutenberg-punk?” you ask. It’s not a well known genre category—I Googled it and got precisely nothing. Perhaps that’s because, to the best of my knowledge, only one work in all of literature fits it. I’ll get to it shortly

In my post of December 10, 2012, I mentioned certain historical catastrophes that heralded the end of civilization, including poetry slams, back-of-the-book indexes, the death of Levon Helm, the Internet, and even writing itself. I conspicuously didn’t bring up the introduction of the printing press to Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in the fifteenth century, which was perhaps the most notorious catastrophe of all.

By spreading literacy and information indiscriminately among the formerly ignorant, Gutenberg’s machine spurred the Reformation, unleashed the ideas of Copernicus, encouraged vernacular literature, and in myriad other ways provoked universal social chaos. The religious and political powers-that-were weren’t the only folks who were terrified. Philosophers also raised cries of alarm, among them the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) who fretted over the “confusing and harmful abundance of books” that Gutenberg’s gadget had turned loose.

But getting back to the title of this post …

Gargantua and Pantagruel, by the humanist priest/physician François Rabelais (1494-1553), seems to be the world’s sole example of Gutenberg-punk. Now Rabelais was no technophobe, and he had no fear of the printing press. I would even say that his entire encyclopedic novel—carnal, spiritual, cruel, compassionate, heroic, cowardly, vulgar, and sublime as it is—is really a celebration of the unfettered intellectual liberty and evolutionary potential let loose by Gutenberg. As one of his title characters puts it,

The elegant and accurate art of printing, which is now in use, was invented in my time, by divine inspiration; as, by contrast, artillery was inspired by diabolical suggestion.… I find robbers, hangmen, freebooters, and grooms nowadays more learned than the doctors and preachers were in my time.

Indeed, far from fearing technology, Rabelais seems to have had no fear of anything. For as the Russian critic Mikhail Baktin (1895-1975) put it in his own wondrous book Rabelais and His World,

this is a work in which fear is destroyed at its very origin and everything is turned into gaiety. It the most fearless book in world literature.

Not surprisingly, Rabelais found that timid humans wouldn’t do for his cast of characters. His protagonists had to be giants, preposterously huge in their appetites and curiosities, their very bodies containing vast and unexplored worlds and civilizations. Concerning a young giant’s education, Rabelais tells us,

As you may well suppose, Pantagruel studied very hard. For he had a double-sized intelligence and a memory equal in capacity to the measure of twelve skins and twelve casks of oil.

And then there’s the mysterious wonder-substance called Pantagruelion (a fanciful word for good old-fashioned hemp—make of that what you will!), so emblematic of the printing press in its capacity to unleash transhuman possibilities:

In a … fright the gods of Olympus cried: “By the power and uses of this herb of his, Pantagruel has given us something new to think about.… Perhaps his children will discover a plant of equal power, by whose aid mortals will be able to visit the sources of the hail, the flood-gates of the rain, and the smithy of the thunder; will be able to invade the regions of the moon, enter the territory of the celestial signs, and there take lodging, some at the Golden Eagle, others at the Ram, others at the Crown, others at the Harp, others at the Silver Lion; and sit down with us at table there, and marry our goddesses: which is their one means of rising to be gods.”

Arrogant and obnoxious? Certainly. Hubristic and profane? Without a doubt. Gross and scatological? Unless you’ve read it, you have no idea. But above all else, Gargantua and Pantagruel paints a picture of world overcome by a tsunami of pure Story, and it’s a genre unto itself—a Gutenberg-punk masterpiece. It evokes a crazed giddiness that many of us feel in the infoworld, that unchartable terrain that Pat and I once described as

an infinite ocean of uncut metaphor, a neuroelectric realm containing the absolute essence of literally everything.

And oh, for an equivalent cast of outsized monster-heroes to lead us into the dizzying evolutionary heights of our information age!

Of Dragonflies and Pepper Pods

220px-MatsuoBashoChusonjiIf you’re serious as a writer (or sculptor, painter, composer, fishing-fly maker, or anything else that involves creative work), you can surely remember some lesson from a master that had a lasting impact on your work. I was just re-reading Harold G. Henderson’s classic book An Introduction to Haiku and ran into this anecdotal gem about the Haiku master Matsuo Bashō:

One day, when he [Bashō] and [his young pupil] Kikaku were going through the fields, looking at the darting dragonflies, the boy made a seventeen-syllable verse:

Red dragonflies!
Take off their wings,
and they are pepper pods!

“No!” said Bashō, “that is not haiku. If you wish to make a haiku on the subject, you must say:

Red pepper pods!
Add wings to them,
and they are dragonflies!”

Apocalypse and Rumors of Apocalypse

RUPERT GILES: It’s the end of the world.
SCOOBY GANG (in unison): Again??!!

Pat and I dearly loved the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For one thing, we could relate to the show’s perpetual threat of apocalypse. Just about every other week, poor Buffy had to wrangle the demon hordes of multiple hell dimensions, keeping them from rising up and overtaking the earth. Typically, her direst obstacle to saving the world was being grounded by her mother.

Pat and I have been married and writing together for a quarter of a century. Like Buffy, we’ve seen lots of apocalypses come and go, although most of them have fizzled out without the Slayer’s heroics. Back in the latter half of the twentieth century, nobody expected civilization to make it through the 90s. At the very least, America’s great coastal cities would be destroyed by earthquakes, and much of the country would be underwater. Then came the millennium itself, with technology promising more trouble than all twenty-two chapters the Book of Revelation put together. Remember that computer glitch that was supposed to plunge humanity back into the stone age?

And now we’ve got the so-called end of the Mayan calendar looming, just a couple of months away. As it happens, Pat and I have done some homework on the subject. We recently published our Living Now Book Award-winning novel Mayan Interface, which meditates on both ancient Mayan traditions and today’s headlong rush into cyberreality. The story is set this very year. And believe me, I’m not spoiling the plot in the least by revealing that it does not feature an apocalypse.

The whole end-of-the-world scenario stems from a widespread misinterpretation of the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan calendar—specifically, the date 13.0.0.0.0, better known to most of us as December 21, 2012. It’s really the end of a cycle, not the end of the world. Mayan calendar dates for the future include one that’s still 41 octillion years away—a time that I, for one, have no idea how to even think about. Besides, the ancient Maya considered cyclical completions to be cause for celebration, not dread. A big party might be in order.

So the world is not going to end on December 21, 2012 …
… and people need to get ready for it.

Pat and I are alarmed at how unprepared the world is for this calendrical non-event. Human transformation is an everyday occurrence—or at least it needs to be. If people think they’ll be relieved of all responsibility to grow and learn by some cosmos-obliterating cataclysm, conscious evolution might stop dead in its tracks for a critical mass of human souls by the time the sun unexpectedly rises on December 22. And that’s a catastrophe worth worrying about.

Of course, New-Age-ish spins on this date predict something more benign—a kind of extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution. But as far as we’re concerned, this is scarcely less scary than the end-of-the-world scenario. It proposes that something out there is going to suddenly do our own job of personal and cultural transformation. Our very lethargy becomes a sort of solution to the world’s manifold problems.

Pat and I are not in the business of saving humankind from its own laziness. So what can we neofoxes do to keep this non-event from throwing a massive kink in the realization of human potential?

This may not sound like much, but …

 … we can tell Story.

As the protagonist of our novel puts it, stories “re-write the mind.”

And we think that Mayan Interface is a dandy Story to mark the end of the 13th b’ak’tun.

Llixgrijb: The Story that Got Away

By the time we’d published a few issues of The Jamais Vu Papers newsletter, we’d talked with several brilliant and open-minded people, posing nosy questions about the nature of reality, Story, and just what we think we’re doing in this tangle of phenomena that we call a universe.

Then an entity named Llixgrijb turned up in our story.

We thought we were making him up.

We were wrong.

Here’s the premise:

Living in a reality of which we know nothing, an entity named Llixgrijb becomes trapped alone in an extra-dimensional cave-in. The entity is faced with the inexorable prospect of untold purgatorial eternities of infinite loneliness and boredom. What would you do if you were Llixgrijb? We ventured a guess:

“You’d create worlds in your imagination, worlds within yourself. You’d create universes with exotic dimensions no one ever dreamed of before. You’d become strange creatures, and share the company of other such creatures. You’d try to make these realms and beings so real you could completely forget the horror and boredom of your real situation.”

So Llixgrijb created a world—our world, in fact. Real though we may imagine ourselves to be, we are nothing but intricately flawed manifestations of Llixgrijb’s imagination. Our reality worked out nicely for Llixgrijb—an entertaining distraction from its cosmic plight. But Llixgrijb had one worry. The entity knew that if any one of us illusory mortals should become aware of its existence, the splendid fantasy would vanish. So how could Llixgrijb keep this from happening?

The answer was so obvious that you’ve probably guessed it already:

“It created a character so obtuse, so unimaginative, so dull and mechanistic that it could never figure out its own true dilemma.”

That’s right—Llixgrijb had to incarnate in the form of a college English instructor. Thus was created Llixgrijb’s alter-ego, Professor Joseph Xavier Brillig, the most obtuse academic in the histories of a bazillion universes. Having no idea of his true identity, Brillig joined our cast of characters.

We were a little worried about Llixgrijb. Was the whole idea too silly for reader consumption? Would our newsletter be scoffed out of existence? Or to the contrary, might the very concept of Llixgrijb put reality itself in perpetual danger of unraveling?

It seems that the latter was the case. We started getting the message when Wim visited physicist Fred Alan Wolf, hoping to interview him for the newsletter. Wim warily started telling Wolf all about Llixgrijb, bracing himself for a reaction of impolite incredulity.

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me about Llixgrijb,” Wolf said. “I’ve known Llixgrijb for years. Let me tell you all about Llixgrijb.”

The National Book Award-winning physicist then went on to describe Llixgrijb in intimate detail. Thus was confirmed the independent reality of a creature we thought we’d invented.

Llixgrijb escaped from the story. It wandered away and remains at large today. Decades after we first created (or discovered?) the entity who dreams our reality into being, Llixgrijb continues to crop up in the infoworld. We’ve come across Llixgrijb …

… writing a blog …

… playing music …

… tweeting …

… offering to be a pen pal …

… answering questions …

… playing chess …

… and appearing in various adaptations.

The lesson is this: Never underestimate the power of Story to alter the nature of reality. Alas, the lesson came with dire consequences. With so many mortals aware of Llixgrijb’s existence, how can our reality—time, space, matter, energy, mortal consciousness, the whole enchilada—continue to exist? Llixgrijb might zap us out of existence at any second.

Indeed, that outcome seems all too probable …

… perhaps even inevitable.

CLICK for prints of Coyote/Llixgrijb and other illustrations from The Jamais Vu Papers.

Living Story

Even while we wrote about Story for PragMagic, we were living it for our newsletter, The Jamais Vu Papers.

Updating material from Brain/Mind Bulletin for PragMagic put us in touch with fascinating people. We began to contact some of them along with friends about appearing in the newsletter. Issue by issue, we learned how to incorporate the interviews we did into our story. Soon, the story began turning around the interviews. We were learning about story as a living experience and we’ve been thinking about it ever since.

What is Story?

What is a story? What effect does Story have on those who tell and those who listen?

What is Story to you? What is it, what does it mean to tell one, what effect does it have in the world? How much of life, of the world, is story, and nothing else besides? We welcome your comments.