Balloons as a base

I suppose I feel it is time to put an end to this whole charade. I had intended this blog to be a fictional context for both the Napoleon story and Hindu Zombie Fever. I thought I would extend the meta elements of these pieces into the severnspoon character as author. Not only was this an anxious bit of bullshit, but I feel certain it was unsuccessful. So I have two choices, actually start a blog that’s not bullshit, or just retire this whole thing.

As well though, I feel like a learned a lot about digital identity and the role it might play in my life. I created this persona as a way of buffering myself from any sort of direct engagement with the world. I wanted a filtered reality, one with certain fictive assumptions. What I found is that the fictive is always present online. There is no point in an online forum where the fictive cannot arise. Whether from boredom, malice, marketing, or cons. Here’s my roundtable of what I learned:

Hindu Zombie Fever
Hindu Zombie Fever was written in 5 days at a pace of 40 pages a day over a vacation trip to the woods. I was at Morningstar and had an idea for a book that derived from a poem. Here’s the poem:

Green butterflies coughing coins

In my hindu zombie novel
there is a princess
who gets no rest
on the great palace balustrades
where her father once grew monkeys and tigers
but now only tea
and dread.

One day the sky went strange
and green butterflies flew over
coughing coins into everyone’s upturned faces.

Her father was blinded
and dashed to the ground
and only rose again
changed
as if his dreams had come true.

In my hindu zombie novel
it’s as if the undead were really men
broken by despair–
arriving at all hours
to marvel at the princess.

I got distracted
when I set out to write it
and wrote about the sands instead.
And every time I sifted,
the sands fell back clean,
unblemished by meaning.

There was only so much to say
about sand after awhile.

In my hindu zombie novel
everyone is dead
in part
and also part alive.

It’s told from the perspective of a princess
whom everyone adores

and it’s full of zombies
like lumbering power tools
stuck on
to shimmy the floor

in search of love
or brains
or brawn.

It’s true
that I’m like her father in some ways,
sifting sand from hand to hand
like a tired and broken hour glass
to find some flake,
some frank forbidden fragment
of myself that could save us all.

And it’s true
that I am the princess
who may not exist,
who must be hidden
so no one discovers
whether she exists or not.

And it’s true
that all my dreams are
scattered patterns of sand
dulling everything to shapes
against a dark sky
and I stumble in shadows
hungry and alone

and the sand is blowing everywhere anyway
and great dunes of sand
are belched from the sea for some reason.

In my hindu zombie novel
I keep losing the story.

There were butterflies, green butterflies
that flocked the sky once
and their coins were like blows
raining down promise

and everyone was dead
but still hungry
for the dull shapes of things.

Everyone held their arms outstretched
like a troupe of desiccated birds
dreaming of flight.

And I am trying to dream them
from the sand, but my hands are empty
because everything is too dry to clump
and the forms are too dull to signify.

There’s only this mound
wanting that mound
and another mound between them
that’s no different than any other story.

So my hindu zombie novel
is nothing more
than an idea I’ve been toying with
and the green butterflies coughing coins
are just some stupid ideas people get sometimes.

They fly over me every night
and I dodge their missiles
uncertain of their commerce.

Will the princess get to love a living man?
Will the king throw open the palace doors
to a shambling horde of zombies
and stagger among them
drunk on the coins of green butterflies
who are not real,
who may be the stuff of legends
in the clouded minds of the undead.

They tangle with each other
as they cross the great hall
like a many-armed god of hope
offering death
and protest
and peace.

And I just want to write this book
where a man can love a woman
and they can live
happily together.

Instead,
I dream of sand
so things can be simple somewhere
even if that means they’re meaningless.

That zombie horde weaves,
more in love with the idea of the princess
than any glimpse of her.

She just wants to be left alone.
She’d rather be sand
and drift on the wind
and pepper their eyes with sleep.

My eyes
most of all.

No one wants to read this hindu zombie novel,
they’re all too busy
dreaming of princesses
that are themselves whittled by wind
down to their most beautiful parts
which must exist.

Palaces are thrown open
and their treasures are scattered in the street
as if all things were equal but one.

Horizontal planes
crash into vertical planes
in geometries too powerful to comprehend.

Sand-scarred winds burn
to tease and plummet presumptuous birds,
to baffle the trees,

until a man stumbles upon a doorway,
thrown beyond himself by the simple revery
of one foot
and another.

In my hindu zombie novel,
all the human burden returns.

He’s a man still,
though his heart is a ravaged padlock
scarred by crowbars.

The door is locked to him.
His greeting is hoarse and sticks in his throat
and the door is locked to him.
Far from the heaven of a kind word,
the crisp turn of a smile,
or any other remnant of the ancient world,
the door is locked to him.

In my hindu zombie novel,
everyone’s always reaching beyond himself
towards a fire
that isn’t strong enough to save him
but saves just another night,
just the next breath of life.

And the princess comes alive again
like a fire,
like she always does.

He calls to her,
promising tiaras.
He pleads with her to reign.

We are always asking for the right things
even at the wrong times
with the wrong people.

In my book,
they look at each other,
this man and this woman,

despite everything,
despite her undead father
lying slain between them,
despite the green butterflies crossing the sky
dropping their golden coins
in tireless brigades,
despite being written from the sand
against their will.

They ask “why?”
until the answers are good enough
to quiet them,

then life goes on for some reason.

I had read the poem backed by Blue Nebula at Hugo’s Mexicans without Borders. I was very pleased with how everything went and the feedback I got was that people would love to read my Hindu Zombie Novel, but the truth is there was no novel and there was never any intention to have one, it was just a poem that was playing with a sort of meta quality that I was beginning to enjoy.

So I went to the woods and decided to write this book. I bought some Ben Gay, some ibuprofen, some Ginkgo extract, some green tea, all the things I thought might be required to write a novel in 5 days. I had no idea what to expect. I just sat down and did it. I wrote myself to exhaustion for five days straight.

The results were about 180 pages I think. I added the beginning and ending later based on feedback. I don’t know if it works. It’s all just an experiment to me. I wanted to explore certain narrative possibilities, but then there was the predicament of what to do with it once I was done. The solution seemed to be around the corner:

SXSW
My work is in web development. They were sending me to SXSW interactive in Austin, Texas. I’ve been to conferences before and I know they are swag fests, so I thought I would armor myself with something. I created this page. And thought I was very clever. I printed out a bunch of them intending to distribute them in a clandestine way at the conference. But first I needed to get the book typed in and fast. But I needed it to be more than just a mad dash, so I came up with:

Code Poetry
I decided that for this experiment to really hold, I must do it with intentionality at every level, so I fabricated a number of artificial constraints for myself. What I called code poetry. It was not art if it was not intentional was my guiding constraint. So I refined the HTML and CSS. I polished them to a high sheen of unnecessary aesthetic outpouring. For no good reason other than to distance myself from the unsophisticated puzzle of coding. I wanted a greater constraint so I was forced to choose which characters to type for more sophisticated reasons. So I had to be resourceful with both clever formatting and a tight knowledge of the languages involved.

If I could accomplish this, then the facade was complete and the thing was art.

The Structure
I’ve always wanted to write a book of fragments, like Evan Connell’s Notes found in a bottle on the beach at Carmel or a few others I could rattle off. The truth is, I love decontextualized narration. I love found pieces and sketches of overheard conversation. I love the jolt my imagination gets when it tries to place something. What I wanted was a book that could be read with a sort of voyeurism. A book that could be snuck around. A book you could dive into anywhere. I’m not sure I accomplished this, but I came up with a code as an organizing principle: 1.2.3.2.1, etc. The idea was to provide a wayfinding device within the narrative. A minimalist method of organization. If you knew the code, you could find your place within the whole system. Learning the code would be a matter of discovering who is speaking and their relation to the other characters and their place in time, etc. It was a riddle:

Riddles
I love riddles. I love their dense poetry. Riddles crop up throughout Hindu Zombie Fever, the primary one being: What is it? For a while I thought Hindu Zombie Fever was a symptom of this identity crisis I was feeling online. Who am I if you can’t see me and this is my only interface to you? I’m a fiction. What do I do while you are not thinking about me? What do my personas do when I do not inhabit them? They are like the hour glass cursor, spinning and spinning, awaiting some release. But the real seed was a sort of emotional vacancy that has taken over various people of my acquaintance for various reasons in my life. Some people just stop living and that’s a fact. Hindu Zombie Fever strikes. Asking why and what has been a major guiding pursuit in my life.

I always wanted to be a doctor as a child. That I ended up a writer doesn’t dissolve my desire to cure certain pathologies. I want the larch cure for those I love.

SXSW again
I thought I would fabricate this elaborate deception. I thought it would somehow matter that it was a sort of art prank. The truth is, one valuable lesson I’ve learned is that the deception is seamless with reality as most people find it. There is a conscious filtering of information for the level of deception it contains. We suppose that whatever we find online is a lie to some extent. Even Wikipedia tolerates a degree of false information. It’s the only choice we have. People seem to have flocked to deception as soon as they were empowered with information.

So the world is inundated with bullshit and my little flyer was a lonely victim of the fray:

Jeff Boughner
The other thing that happened during all this is that Jeff Boughner died. Jeff who held me so gently in the sling of his guitar while I read of my Hindu Zombie Novel. He passed away unexpectedly. So this whole charade became tainted with the most serious of tragedies. It had to be about something more than an art prank. But I’d locked into this whole structure. Obsessions were everywhere around me. I was buried in it all and have only now dug myself free. I wrote Ghosts of Arco for Jeff and Blue Nebula, as an attempt to recreate for myself the experience of reading with them. What joy they have given me in my life. How grateful I am for their care.

Balloons as a base
I decided to start a blog to go along with the persona I’d come up with, severnspoon. I called it Balloons as a base because I was flipping through an old craft book of my wife’s and there was a project called that. I thought it was intriguing in a number of ways. I’d just begun reading about Napoleon and he brought a famous balloonist with him to Egypt. Balloons as a base worked in all sorts of ways. Implying an empty or airy foundation, impermanence, but also ingenuity, everything I thought I was doing.

My intention was to provide avenues into the story, just as I supposed it should be discovered by search engines and spammers and whoever else might stumble upon it. I wanted to be found by strangers. I wanted people I didn’t know to fall into my web. All my layers of intricate knots. I wanted them to feel a sensation very much like how I describe Hindu Zombie Fever. I wanted to blog as another person. Someone who was not Scott Krieger, but was a part of him at the same time:

Severnspoon
Severnspoon is a strange name. It is a unique name though. I am the only one in history to have ever thought of it. As a result, I don’t need to have any weird number string in my username when I join a social networking site or whatever. I can always use severnspoon. Severnspoon is composed of a number of ingredients: the spoon:

and the word Severn which recalls for me the song Venus in Furs by The Velvet Underground: “Severn, your servant, speak so slightly, Severn, down on his bended knees.” Despite the masochistic overtones, this delights me because of the coupled irony of the spoon. The spoon, gentlest utensil in the tray:

Spoon
The spoon is always surrendering
to the soup. In the school of cutlery
it’s beaten in the yard by the fork,
by the butter knife, pinned down
with tongs and teased by the spatulas.

Yet it has the oldest soul, patiently
holding its brothers in the tray like
a healer, a savior, one who gives his
warmth on a cold night to the lips,

lends a hand to his parents—the cup
and the bowl. A dutiful child, the spoon
never wanted to split its form and be
the spork, never cared to tear the melon.

He flips our faces and holds them to us,
letting us taste at our leisure whatever
is carefully freed from the can; whatever
is brewed, cherished, demanding a form.

The fork is rude, as if it could give to the world
an answer. The spoon knows what the world needs
to calm its fever, to warm its bones.

The spoon has always appealed to me. Severnspoon is what has become of the spoon online.

MySpace
I needed to have a presence on MySpace, so I evaluated the capabilities of the platform and decided on a policy for myself. I would be a praise poet. In the ancient groit tradition. If MySpace was about the currency of friendship, then I must make it a real commerce. I thought I would be undiscriminating in who my friends were. I would take all comers. I would carry my Code Poetry aesthetic with me into that whirlwind of society. I would inject my Courier New into peoples lives like a balm. It would be beautiful.

But the deception of identity was all too prevalent. How many poems can one write in praise of get rich quick schemes. I decided I would only write poems for real people. In the end, I wrote poems for my real friends and left it at that. The whole thing was tiresome.

Napoleon
Through all this, a new presence was looming. Napoleon and his Egyptian campaign. Something was going on here that was about all of this. The Napoleonic identity. Severnspoon was easily brutalized by the presence of such egos. Severnspoon became the mummy head to Napoleon’s braggart. The whole story played itself out in deepening layers of meta-ness that I’d painted myself too deeply into the picture to explain. Truthfully, the presence of Napoleon has become an unbearable thing. I want free of him because I feel like I must either give my life over to him or break it off. I’ve heard Joyce scholars complain about the unfortunate career choices they’d made. I understand this. I do not want to be a Napoleonic scholar, although I think a person could learn a lot about humanity from studying him. I need other personas in my life. I have some brewing now and I want to move on.

Crazytalk
I had begun to feel seepage. I had become unclear of just what I was doing. The deceptions were too elaborate and the dream of discovery was too fleeting. No one was going to get it. No one expected anything of the sort. The whole project was doomed. I just needed to get the Napoleon story finished and I could move on. Leave it behind.

My office
So I cleaned my office. I got everything in order and I stayed up late into the night last week and I finished the damn thing, for what its worth. I hope I haven’t ruined it in the process. It’s all behind me now and with the writing of this post, I close the book on this experiment.