Fictocritical Innovations

Henceforth, until we (you, the reader) and ‘I’ reach the conclusion of this work, the creative self shall be methodically divorced from the analytical self.

SECTION I

FOLIO ONE: Journeys

“At Some Point Reality Needs to Become a Part Of …” (2013)

When I first moved to Rockhampton from Melbourne in the pursuit of my doctoral studies in 2013, I tried extremely hard to engage in the culture and lifestyle of a more rural part of Australia, a different part of the world to me, obviously, since I was coming from a much ‘cooler’ (both figuratively and literally) cosmopolitan city like Melbourne.

Here I was on the cusp of a great insight and discovery, and he was on the verge of divulging that unforgettable truth to me, and in his sixty-five years of wisdom and experience and rural understanding he would have finally been able to eloquently and concisely convey this epiphany in a way that was both relevant to him and to me. We could have adopted this and used it as a mantra; pseudo-intellectuals and wannabe academics would have quoted him for years, though if it just weren't for his incomprehensible state of intoxication, and the other intolerant gentleman he was with.

Bleary-eyed, inarticulate, stumbling and fumbling over words and blending, churning syllables so the dribble just ran from their throats, grunting and sighing, breathing and motioning in a vague proclamation and representation of broken ‘dialogue’.

And in between these moments of intermittent comprehension and the incoherent babbling drool of language, I sat there, eyes fixed, glued to the barstool, and listened. I listened and I sat there transfixed. I had no idea what especially I was trying to look and listen out for, but I felt that this was extremely important. This was communion, and a completely genuine integration with a new place, with a real emergence existing in a chasm within myself.

Everything I thought I heard him say, or everything I thought I heard him primordially express, or that I was perhaps projecting myself into, listening and looking through with rose-coloured glasses, was a wish and a hope to somehow hear the things I intrinsically wanted to hear. This only happened ‘yesterday’ and I'm still not sure, but the mantras and detail and relevance poured from him in torrents, like a rush of blood to my head: “You're a realist, not a purist”; “the most important thing in the world is to be able to express ourselves”, he would say, though his own voice would rise and fall as he choked, spluttered, burped and hiccupped over his own subdued and subverted sentimentality. “At some point reality needs to become a part of …” he said, and abruptly stopped before he could ever finish. And I waited for the closure of that patently grand statement that would not come, anti-climactically. But often closure does not come, we do not receive it, and some of us, like me, are left waiting, on pins and needles, for years to come, in a state of wonder, contemplating what could have been. Most likely nothing, and he probably was merely drunk, not knowing himself what he was actually saying. But you have to wonder about the potential meaning and honesty that could have been there, in that moment. I suppose often some things are better left unsaid, if only for the pure allure and mystery of the moment; that in itself, and for oneself, can become a source of prolonged marvelling and quiet solitary contemplation or re-hashing.

Maybe it’s because this moment and scene were so novel to me, and that is why it was so special. I don’t really know too much, though what I do know is that both of these men seemed intuitive (in a raw bucolic way that I hadn’t really come across before), one to the light, and the other to the dark. The other one had barely spoken, but he saw, cock-eyed though he was, the darkness in me almost instantly: “this is the kind of bloke who would shoot you in the leg and walk off!” he surmised, with a shrieking upward inflection of pitch and tone heralding out those last two words. And he was right, which frightens me, because I know I'm not exactly altruistic any more.

I'm here, this is now, it’s new, and yet it is part of something older, more mature, settled, stubborn and fixated than what I can really grasp or understand. It's subjective, but it has no context, so I have no ideas that I can really cement in anything. I'm simply meandering along in this new environment, drifting within a kind of dam until hopefully my foot can latch on to something, at which point I can start simulating and generating algae in a pool of water, a pond of my own.

These are the babbling truths and confronting conservative value systems that I need to start developing on my own, integrating with, appreciating and understanding if I'm to grow at all here from now on. The need to go off and analyse what a fool hasn’t been trying to say probably won’t serve any purpose but to further distance and isolate me from the truth I am trying so conscientiously to uncover.

And having gone off and walked, tangentially and diagonally across pathways in sober gardens, I have very little to no grounding as to what can possibly happen from this point onwards. Lost and disconnected I repeat my steps and try to adopt a humorous approach, chuckling at the same jokes and commentaries; the greenery and comedy of it all will save me as I keep pacing conservatively, never sitting mindfully, patiently or still enough to produce any grime of my own, and yet I’m infested with ‘this’ knowledge, and that I might ground myself, and refuse to take charge, in confidence.

A Daze to Come True (2014)

For I find myself just wanting to wander around, from place to place, not really doing much—ambling. If I had to choose or describe a vocation, it would be this. Observing things, not with a keen eye, or not the most important things, but merely the vague and the mundane, as they appear or as they come to me. I may turn down a street or an alleyway, into a random building, a café or a restaurant egged on by a gust of wind, a flutter that ushers me this way or that way. I don’t want to learn, to repeat history, to experience the most ecstatic, trying so hard to sap the best juice out of the best experience possible. This is exhausting. If I miss something, it doesn’t exist. If I don’t do something, it never happened. For once, I simply want the spectral gaze of my daze to come true.

A Literary Mitosis (On Form) (2014)

Why do I hyphenate and parenthesise and marginalise so much with a ‘/’ or brackets—with everything else I write coming with an ‘and/or’? Sooner or later a frustrated reader/reviewer will be driven to lecture or criticise me for this, so I will take it upon myself to beat them to the punch. I’m surprised I’ve evaded this issue for so long, particularly since it’s literally staring me in the face almost every single day in the form and format of what and how I write. I guess the most obvious criticism is that it shows a lack of control and mastery over language, an inability to decide on a word or make the right choice because, perhaps, I do not understand the full and proper connotations of every word I select and write with, and why should I? When so many words have apt and adequate synonyms and so many dictionaries define their definitions definitively, yet differently and minimally. So, I make the decision to choose both or either/or. For who am I to choose one word over another? So much of this rambling intellectualised jargon about ‘I’ and integrity and intuition and influence and (un)originality is about the inability to grasp and control everything and one’s expression, whether it is predetermined, (pre)influenced, fatalistic, prodigious, integral, philosophical, or/and so forth. So, I guess I’ve naturally or organically decided over time to use and utilise a form that looks and appears to be rigid when in fact it is loose and lucid at best. One thing says more than only one thing using these devices and interwoven formats. I want this writing to have connotations and implications and insinuations, saying more with less and expanding upon vocabulary and linguistics, using tools that shorten and sharpen and cut to ironically elaborate and engage and grasp, breaking and branching out onto or into more by making more out of clasping, fastening but also separating, distinguishing and dividing—a literary mitosis.

The Mission Man (2014)

Though it can also be a speedy transition; a mission of sorts. For I am, can be and have been the mission man, where things irregularly flow from one to the next.

In fact, there is no flow, so much as there is an immediate changeover. As much as I love the ‘in-between’, I attempt to eliminate as much of the time between the ‘in-between’ as I can, in order to be moving on to the next thing. The very next thing is always the thing to be most excited about. And as much as I wanted to come here, then and now, I am disgusted with this place in this moment. Not to mention, I’ve already been here. And I didn’t like it the first time. So why would I enjoy it the second? A persistent delusion of insanity and self-sabotage and the setting up of oneself to fail in the perpetual moment—the moment that is (unendingly) out of reach in the very near future. I was tired of being there so now I am here, and as soon as I am here I want to be there, right now. But I immediately destroy that precious ‘in-between’ as soon as I arrive in the constant and ongoing now-moment because I decide right away that the next thing will be better.

Unable to grapple with the overly ambient or vague concepts in ‘self-help’ books like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I—the mission man—liken or align myself more so with the notion of Jack Kerouac’s falling (failing, or flailing) star idea in On the Road: “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop” (113).

Because, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman indicates, there is a “conflict between your experiencing self and your remembering self” (238): the experiencing or “current self is the one experiencing life in real time” (236), the remembering self, on the other hand, has to make “all the big decisions. It is happy when you sit back and reflect on your life up to this point and feel content” (237). There is a serious imbalance between these two different selves and the reality that is formed in one’s mind about one’s life as a consequence of this imbalance (238). These two differing selves or perspectives have to be a well-balanced combination of one and the other. “You have to be happy in the flow of time while simultaneously creating memories you can look back on later” (McRaney 238-39).

Conversely, Tolle would argue that there is only the self that exists in the now, and that anything that has happened no longer exists, and anything that will happen does not exist yet, and so both past and future are seemingly irrelevant to one’s sense of contentedness and joy (in the now). I, the mission man, though, tend to lean towards a more Kerouacian approach. I feel helpless in my restless pursuits, endeavours and desires to travel and constantly move, neither fully satisfying oneself or the other, in my tenacious impulsivity.

The funny thing is this makes me stuck in an altogether different kind of ‘in-between’ anyway!

I’m walking, no, running—I am on a mission. There’s always something that needs to be arranged, organised, done—not felt.

The present-now-moment ‘stayers’ watch me, befuddled. “Why can’t he just relax?” they say or think to themselves.

“But I’ll stray from a straight line. I’ll just stray ‘til I’m gone” is what I think to myself in response to their glances, statements and questioning looks.

Like an eccentric ass, I roam and stumble on in a daze, as the figurative apple (of life) swings on a string in front of me.

An Apple on a String Swings in Front of Me (2014)

An apple on a string swings in front of me, dangling in suspense and freeing me from homogeny (a lie)? I look forward through the fence and see the grass is greener, but blurred in my insistent periphery is that laborious fruit compelling forth my effort and greed and corrupted desires, incorrect in all the right ways, to others.

The Island (2015)

Motions frustrated, the predictability of it now. The stagnation follows the same recourse over and over again. Before, now, then after. So obvious, like a mathematical pattern, perfect and (in)solvable in its eloquence.

Majesty. The initiation of social and flirtatious interactions are always perfect. To his friends he comes off as a professional, superficially only, really. The internalised monologue—the soliloquy stews on itself—outwardly, blaming everything else. He could pacify and nullify, reach out to change, became a gamer like the rest, ‘sarging’ with false pretences and smiles turned ‘true’, like the phantom of prowess and the cavalier in us all.

The blame could go further back, to varying circumstances, orbiting incessantly in the streams of imperceptible consciousness.

Staring at voluptuousness, enjoying it, and then turning back to the luminous phosphorescent screens of blankness and nihilism. Sigh and sigh again; he almost has a panic attack. The intuition is there, deep-seated, and probably wrong. Not knowing how to address addresses, then signing off charmingly, poetically, over-the-top in his formality.

Sculpting, perfecting, working at the self—that could help—or, otherwise, it’s all in the countenance, the personality, the self-sabotage or the self-aggrandising.

One intact, in the bag and on her way, while the other (lesser) sits on pins and needles, sick. So, he is sick, sickens himself, stooping lower and lower every day. A sickness, an unrelenting perversion to want and to need and to desire desire. But really the craving is quite neutral, natural, simplified. And, so, the sickness is a systematic perversion pervading and invading everybody else’s personal space.

Apologies.

But forgiveness comes, eventually, tainted by a pity and a need to justify spirituality in the eyes of the on(c)e true beholder. Once resolved, again, back to the screen, back to the phosphorescence, back to the addressing of addresses, of formalism and an awkward charmless countenance on pins and needles and desiring of desire ‘til nothing else remains. Retire, leave, exit the room.

Find comfort in the isolation which really is ultimately preferred but external pressures force a forcefulness onto everybody else: let’s break down and break apart these connectives and relationships one by one for the sake of a nothingness that saturates the heart and soul forming and creating and inspiring a restlessly racing beat on a drum, out of key, out of tune, out of time with the intuition that is needed to perform the actual task.

An analogy of the tactless man as an island:

The shore vainly folds over and under the veil

Wave upon wave sustained in the name of a tidal game

Now the stage is set for all to witness the journey, the whim

Destitute and resolute he flounders precisely and ‘wins’

The Spirit of the Times (2013)

zeitgeist

The amorous subject feels uncomfortably well adjusted to a collective state of stagnant (dis)reality from which he attempts to escape via an exalted and explosive cocktail of self-destruction and personal liberation.

1 We are a self-destructive generation and gradually face a state of deterioration that is completely subjective and totally ill-equipped for our little cluster. Whether we face war, booms, love, or the advances of technology, we all suffer endurably and unwontedly. We fiends must face the facts, but not before the next generation take over, and we vainly attempt to spill our irrelevant advice onto them, and they shelter themselves from it in their erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence.

2 My dreary eyes wonder and anticipate the future and all other future zeitgeist generations that are yet to come and yet to churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! It’s so damn cyclical! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory; for humankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.

3 We ponder in the grey morning in the heaving wooden cabin at the centre of a modern medieval city, having been followed by a bout of drunkenness and confetti brain cell celebrations, and ironic devastations. We sit there and drink stale beer and talk with excited tongues about the word zeitgeist. Time and ghost—a Germanic infusion—an intoxicating cocktail that ensnares and captivates our senses in the most compulsive and reactionary form of excitement. We stand at the edge of reason and jump straight into this fleeting, transitory, yet pivotal moment. We engage and commit to it completely.

4 We sink into a state of exhausted and exalted delirium in which we try to comprehend the bitterness of the sour morning in order to transcend our meagre mortal bodies and become captivated by our own excited notions. Wide-eyed and mad we collaboratively communicate with one another.

5 For we are absolutely and completely engulfed by the system of ethics, attitudes, and morality which we are symptomatically prescribed at an early age—we are nurtured to adhere and abide by certain principles and perspectives from the most impressionable and foetal age. It is the fatal syndrome and entrapment within a skewed field of vision in this postmodern era.

A Sentimental Cynic (2013)

The most frightening and simultaneously liberating thing I can imagine is the sensation derived from absolute and complete loneliness and isolation. I have experienced such a moment. Trapped in the void of my own imagination and excessive thoughtlessness, I found a critical and pivotal form of transcendental clarity. What if there was such a thing as eternity and it was accessible from the arch of the brow and the scope of the mind? And yet there I was, lying sprawled across the floor of a room—the physicality of the situation was real, lucid—and I realised that if I attempted to step outside its doors, I would float into an endless vacuum, and I would be totally alone and my actions would have absolutely no consequences, and I would become and enact my previous lives, up to and including the most recent, in which I had animalistic qualities that I now fail to adequately grasp. Yet I now have total familiarity and reciprocal appreciation for the potentiality of these possibilities. And I was immersed in silent contemplation, and there was so much peace and clarity in this isolation. I began to writhe violently on the floor and engaged in all the rigid-less and residually resonating bodily movements and behavioural motions that would either be deemed unfit, or unnecessary, or unreal or impractical in everyday life. There are actions like this. There are movements like this. The body has the subliminal and subconscious capacity to move of its own free will, and when it does it is devoid of any other responsibilities previously committed to the ego or by the ego, or vice versa, or to the confines of the earth and the upside-down topsy-turvy shelter of the ground beneath the souls of our feet.

The body is malleable and permeable and has the ability to be liberated by the mind’s insidious concentration—to become another organism: a seal, a lotus flower, a parasitical insect hovering over the treetops and mountaintops and yoghurt tops of the containers, tinned cans, atmospheres, ultraviolet rays streaming from the neon lights and hidden messages and fetishes and uncontrollable impulses that are contained and limited by reason, or, in other words, logical and systematic restriction of the wandering ghost of TIME and IT.

And, thus, I am aesthetically free in the centre of this room—this kitchen smouldering with crystalline clarity—in the centre of the universe in which my actions and bodily behaviours have no other consequences but are made primarily for the purpose that they are MADE and that is all. They serve no other function, and that is settling. For it is rare to behave in a way that does not dictate foresight or reminiscence or hindsight or nostalgia—it is rare to behave in such a way that simply fulfils the purpose of IS and DOES and nothing more. And I am satisfied and content in this room with walls and if I do choose to leave through THAT door in the corner, I will enter THAT vacuum of space, and that is my personal prerogative. That is my impulse—my choice.

Yet I notice that there is someone else physically present in here, and he is pouring orange juice, and he is pacing and marching powerfully. Power-marching and pouring juice—these are the fruitful juices of our quenched labour: self-sufficiently satisfying and reciprocating the vitamins and minerals evident in this fantastic room with a doorway that leads to infinite self-satisfaction and SPACE and TIME. The duality becomes clear: action and reaction—onward forward momentum and speed.

I peered out of the window in the room. The sky appeared to be moving, though it may have been the room itself. Or perhaps time is in a playful projection of sky and stars that occasionally dance around and explode into an image of ultimate infinity, and what some saints or mystics or believers might refer to as God, who was reincarnated in the night sky, stemming from a cluster and combination of bright shining mythical lights glaring and projecting their past tens of thousands of years into the future and into the current contemplative contempt-filled contemporary world. Stars—they are the real philosophers—the time travellers of future incomprehensible destinies that we simply cannot fathom—our potential is too unrefined to compete with such forces of grandeur that live and breathe and swell and implode in the restlessly racing night sky.

Yet my dreary eyes continue to wonder and anticipate the future and all other future generations yet to come and churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory, for humankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.

Yet we shelter ourselves and themselves and yourselves and all selves that are mimicked and mimed and translucent and adjacent to their own sense of self. This room—this cluster of collective experience and truth and ‘Dharma’ and IT and TIME—as insightful as it all may be, it cannot be enacted or produced in any artificial way. It is too unreal, too unorthodox, too strange and alien and foreign and unpredictable. Our collective selves cannot REALISE the now. It is too much of a frightening thought. As frightening as the ironic fear and timidness in which I initially approached the trajectory of this projection room. It is frightening and liberating. Simultaneously, of course. But it is reason and logic that will always be victorious. Those sinners have a firmer ‘understanding’ of the realities of perception and its rigidity as something that is ingrained and anchored and clawed into the now-frozen streams of our conscious mind. And, so, we continue to shelter our ‘selves’ in our erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence—a continually restless battle between mind and matter and what actually matters in the mind.