Entry 2-Aye, And Gomorroah

'What will you give me? I want something,' I said. 'That's why I came. I'm lonely. Maybe I want to find out how far it goes. I don't know yet.'

        I think this story is so unique, and groundbreaking, because it feels different from anything I've ever read. I can best understand it is as a hybrid. The story combines the most outlandish science-fiction-y, surreal portrayal of the future with a writing style, tone and theme most comparable in my mind with Hemingway's work. There is something distinctly modernist about the loneliness of these characters (and something distinctly Hemingway in the writing style). It wasn't actually until I started writing this post that I recognized just how true this is.
        The above line in particular, chosen because it exemplifies, in my mind, the central struggle of the protagonist, could be in any "normal" work of American modern fiction--while I see it more specifically in a narrative of McCarthy or Hemingway. When I read the quote, I myself feel confused. The first reason is that I don't understand the meaning of the line "how far it goes". It could be an ambiguous vocalization of this nameless character's desire to desire, wanting to know what that feels like, or it could be something less figurative that I completely missed the meaning of in the first reading (and second skimming) of this piece.
        But for my purposes it doesn't really matter.
       The other aspect of confusion that I feel is less literal. The entire line of dialogue is confused, exudes confusion, because of the tragic confusion at the center of this person's perspective. The person (he/she/it) wants to know what desire feels like, and maybe can't even desire this completely. He/she/it feels empty, feels like a part of him/her is missing because of this emptiness--this thing that everyone else gets, but he/she cannot. The girl that he/she talks with, the frelk, equates her "complex" to necrophilia, and calls the protagonist a "corpse in free fall!", unabashedly associating this person in front of her with a dead body. The protagonist's lack of desire, of sex, of identity means to the society, or to this girl at least, that he/she is without life. There is a serious complex, then, involved in both of their states. Both are the outsiders of the society, neither seem to really understand the nature of that they want, and both feel isolated by the society for being who they are, or trying to.
       If this isn't modernism, than I don't know what is. And if it's not also something more, by the very nature of it's new and create perspective, then I suppose I fundamentally am misunderstanding the genre of science fiction. Because this is what the genre has to offer, at it's best. Recurring, timeless themes, ideas and attitudes from a point of view that takes one out of the existing social norms and the extent of "realistic" perspective and into a point of view from which these ideas can be seen through fresh eyes, through new eyes. Through much cooler eyes.

Entry 1-The Lathe of Heaven

           Orr stood up, but didn’t head for the door. “Did you ever happen to think, Dr. Haber,” he said, quietly enough but stuttering a little, “that there, there might be other people who dream the way I do? That reality’s being changed out from under us, replaced, renewed, all the time—only we don’t know it? Only the dreamer knows it, and those who know his dream. If that’s true, I guess we’re lucky not knowing it. This is confusing enough.”                                                                                  pg 71

            Reading this passage it became clear to me that, while George Orr personally struggles with issues that are unique to his anomalous situation, his perspective reflects, in many ways, the same efforts that all of humanity undergoes at one point or another to try and explain the abstract concepts that make up our reality. Marked next to the above passage in my book is a quick scrawl of a few words, barely intelligible, which express what I was thinking with the initial impact of this speech. “Rethinks the nature of reality,” I had commented. I have no doubt, looking back, that the understood subject I had in mind was Orr, but these words actually reflect the thoughts that ran through my head at the time. I was rethinking, along with Orr, the nature of our collective reality. What does it mean to live in a world where the very essence of your life is defined by this abstract thing we call “time”?  This is often enough to think about without the variables to the accepted scheme that are presented in this story. And yet, by looking at the world through the perspective of Orr’s ethereal blue-gray eyes, we have the opportunity to think about our human condition in a different light. Does it really matter how my reality is created? Do the means define then end, or is reality defined purely by what I believe to be true? All of these essentially human suspicions arise in my consciousness as I ponder Orr’s situation, but this time they are presented with a new twist—the perspective of someone who is intrinsically connected to the process of creating reality. Would any of these questions have answers if I knew that there was a man or woman with George Orr’s ability in existence? Probably not. But, as my mind floods with new possibilities that will likely never amount to any resolution, I cannot help settling on Orr’s final words, “I guess we’re lucky not knowing…this is confusing enough.”

Introduction

            When I think about the act of “blogging” I think about Tumblr (and Julie and Julia). More specifically, I consider the memories I have of my best friend, Grace, sitting me down on the mini (“work out”) trampoline next to her computer and proudly pulling up her personal Tumblr page. In the hour that follows these occasions, I invariably witness many things that I have never experienced before. A giraffe that has been photoshopped into obesity, a clip of Tom Felton (Warner Brother’s Draco Malfoy) attempting a Jersey accent during an appearance on Jay Leno and there’s always a demonic looking kitten with a caption such as “What you lookin’ at foo?”. As she scrolls through the endlessly long thread of reposts she has made in the past week—her focus spurred by the harmlessly intended question I had asked her earlier that day, “what’s the point of spending so many hours copying and pasting things other people have said or created onto  'your' page"— I think more about myself than the pathetically chunky giraffe. Do these things amuse me? Yeah, sure. So why don’t I get it. As she scrolls, I imagine millions of other tumblers scrolling through their own versions of this page, each site only slightly differentiated from each other. These pages are defined by the decision every tumbler makes to click on something he or she likes and choose it as part of his or her online identity—I like it, and now people will know “me” by it.

            Like so many things that I fervently begin to write, believing that the instantaneous seed of inspiration has everything to do with my assignment, my personal experience with what I understand to be “blogging” (see convoluted contemplation above) has not really panned out as the introduction to me that I excitedly anticipated it to be. In fact, in all honesty, my initially fruitful little seed of thought stopped germinating about halfway through the above passage, and many of the things I claimed to recall in the past I only came up with minutes ago.  What I intended to convey is that my relationship with the blogosphere is at once complicated and shallow. I have avoided the inception of my own blog for numerous reasons, all revolving around my defining capacity to over think everything that might come out of my mouth or, to an even greater extent, be written down by my hand. Because when I have control over exactly what people hear from me, or think of me or believe I am thinking, I’m going to pursue the opportunity to be as precise as possible. You might understand at this point that the common app essay was the most stressful assignment of my life.

            Now imagine a person like this attempting to make regular, informal declarations to the cyber world. I figure I'm giving you a pretty real sense of what that would look like.

            My posts are often going to be unnecessarily long, and so might my sentences. More than likely there will be times that, in an attempt to be clear, I’m going to effectively isolate every person out there who can’t possibly understand exactly what I’m thinking. But, despite all of this, I’m excited to begin my uncommon(place) blog because of what I didn’t understand about blogging and what I still hope to learn from the process. While I might never fully appreciate the specific genre of blogging that is Tumblr, it turns out that I have more experience as a blogger of sorts than I previously had imagined. For years I have written down things that I found beautifully worded or unequivocally true or simply defining of life. These quotations and words appear on post-it notes stuck to my walls and bed frame, in the digital notes section of my iPhone and even on the desktop of my computer, written on virtual post-its of all sizes and colors. T.S. Eliot, Gandalf, Ayn Rand, Julian Assange as well as characters from TV shows as diverse as Firefly, Criminal Minds, and (of course) Doctor Who, all have places on the commonplace book that I’ve been keeping for a significant portion of my life without even recognizing it. Looking forward at the semester of blogging activity ahead I really don’t know what to expect of myself, you’ll just have to bear with me and we’ll figure it out. But what I most hope as I attempt to share the things that make me happy and excited about learning in our class and on this earth is that this blog becomes something that is anything but common.