I would like to proposition you. It is rather more a matter of my offering up something gratis than it is any sort of clumsy and/or dastardly importuning. I am going to trace for you the outline of a flash fiction, flashier than flash. Flash fiction is a whole veritable market these days. Feel free to take it and run with it, perhaps sell it to Tin House, whatever thou wilt. This is the story of two identical twin brothers born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, however many minutes apart, in October of the year 1980, descended from inauspicious Rhinelanders but, because of the enterprising spirit of their scruple-free father, situated to grow up as privileged members of what we would call the upper middle class, quaint as this posited class striation may strike us with regard to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, an obvious backwater. The two identical twin brothers look, of course, very much alike, but from the ages five to fifteen they increasingly come to represent divergent paths, doubtlessly a matter of a core differentiation immanent to their respective natures. We might say that one brother, excelling at maths and sciences, already by fifteen fully grasping some of the more advanced mechanics of commodities speculation et cetera, represents the Apollonian, while the other, into baroque music, Symbolist poetry, and the films of Jean Cocteau, represents the Dionysian. Between the ages ten and fifteen the identical twin brothers grow further and further apart, following their own hearts, though each obviously hoping to follow his heart well away from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, as soon as opportunity should present itself, which is all but certain to happen, the boys happening to both be brilliant, if from the standpoint of opposing orientations. At the age of fifteen something funny happens. The identical twin brothers are so completely spiritually and intellectually opposed to one another that they hardly ever communicate any longer. It were almost as though they have come to occupy two separate worlds altogether, even if this illusion is itself hard to maintain fully in a community where neither feels at home and which neither can stand. One night the boys get to talking, commiserating if you like. It has been a long time since they have felt connected in even a perfunctory way, their being all but physically identical a mere shared (and further alienating) humiliation if anything; this sudden openness, this mutual outpouring, can largely be explained by the fact that the two exasperated boys have decided to get drunk together in the large and empty family home (their parents out doing whatever, wherever). Though they could, again, hardly be more thoroughly unalike, the identical twins, inebriated, make a remarkable discovery: they have each for many years harboured the same exact fantasy, shared with no one, in which they each individually urinate and defecate all over the furniture of their parents’ lavish home and then commit suicide in the most grisly manner imaginable, leaving their horribly abused bodies (individually in each case, but these are identical twins) to be discovered amid the pageantry of malefic destruction they have themselves created as a shrine to the crowning act. The twins are astonished and even giddy to discover they share this fantasy. They go on each to live busy and satisfying lives, elsewhere (or rather two separate elsewheres). What this parable demonstrates is the power of identification as well as that of the unusual manifestation of a profane correspondence. The great scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has spent much of her later career conceptualizing a social sciences pedagogy that might aspire to be adequate to the displacement and scramble of global capitalism. This often has to do with thinking through the problems of institutional instruction in terms of an “inter-literary” homeopathy beset by the double bind of Plato’s pharmakon, i.e. the medicine is also and can at any point become a poison. In her essay “The Burden of English,” Spivak frames her pedagogical pharmakon in terms of the “interpenetration” of the “professional theatre” and the “private sphere,” two domains that I am sure most of us will agree are easier to separate abstract-conceptually than they are practically. The “professional theatre” and the “private sphere” are themselves like identical twins linked by a nebulous unconscious dermis, and whether the negotiation of these overlapping spaces will heal or poison doesn’t ultimately have much if anything to do with the raw content we will unearth there. I believe it was Milan Kundera who averred that literature helps us learn to read our lives, sensitizing us in such a way that we will be better able to discover there motifs analogous to, say, the train stations in Anna Karenina. Of course there is the psychedelic or psychonautic dimension to consider also. Robert Anton Wilson, writing in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati: “Many other scientists have agreed with Carl Jung’s opinion that the number of startling coincidences in ‘the Net’ increases sharply around anybody who becomes involved in depth psychology or in any investigation that extends the perimeter of consciousness.” This becomes relevant here because I took a lot of drugs between the ages of roughly fourteen and twenty-four, the period during which the phenomenon I am interested in getting around to analyzing was most prevalent: a tendency to discover in books and movies the unambiguous implementation of ideas for books and movies that one has already themselves had. As a undergraduate in the late 1990s this happened to me twice with the films of Christopher Nolan. This may be all the more unusual in that I do not especially like nor have I ever really liked the films of Christopher Nolan. (If 2014’s Interstellar, for example, is not the stupidest film I have ever seen, it is quite likely the most agonizingly stupid.) I had the idea for a film very much like Memento in the two years leading up to the release of that film, no knowledge of which I possessed or would have been in a position to possess up to its actual release; it was just in my mind that somebody could or should make a film about a person who wakes up every day with amnesia and has developed a system in order to function adequately or semi-adequately within that basic problematic. Eventually I became aware of Following, Nolan’s debut feature, which appeared to be about stalking people from a safe distance. Another uncanny correspondence. In high school I had imagined a film about a young man who stalks people from a safe distance, also breaking into unoccupied homes to just sort of snoop around, eventually graduating to occupied homes, thereby upping the ante. My idea was to also have the antihero periodically address the camera, a breaking of the fourth wall that I likened less to mockumentary than to the direct addresses of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller. Part of the concept was to have my stalker pursue his quarry through Calgary’s Plus 15, a network of elevated walkways connecting the buildings in the city’s downtown core, later the setting for Gary Burns’s Waydowntown, which was released the same year as Memento. Though he and I have never discussed the curious correlations I have sketched here, I have recently come to know Gary Burns well and interact with him regularly, his being a co-founder of the Cinematheque on whose board I sit and whose programming I oversee. There is also the matter of the novelist Tom Robbins, whose books continually struck me as fielding ideas I had already had, starting with Jitterbug Perfume, which I read at thirteen (my being able to distinctly recall this because of the memorable correspondence of my identical twin brother Apollo having been in the hospital at the time). Every Tom Robbins novel I subsequently read as a teen repeated the trick. Is it Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that features periodic disquisitions on “pendulum time,” which was, goddammit, my fucking concept? (You know, uh, notwithstanding the publication of the novel in question about two years before I would have been so much as conceived.) The final Tom Robbins novel I ever read, at the age of seventeen or eighteen (so 1997 or 1998), was 1990’s Skinny Legs and All. I remember reading it in my dorm room at Carleton University, so it could only have been during my first year of undergraduate studies. I was bulldozed in my tiny bed by the realization that the lyrics to the song “Plans for Palmyra” by The Primrods, my favourite band from my hometown of Calgary, the track in question having appeared on a spilt 7-inch with Hamilton, Ontario’s Tristan Psionic approximately the year before (1996), had very clearly been entirely cobbled-together higgledy-piggledy from random lines in Skinny Legs. (The Primrods song “Atom Smasher” also happens to occupy a privileged position at the opening of Gary Burns’s debut feature, 1997’s The Suburbanators.) Comfortably relocated to the other end of a vast land, 1997 was the year I first started doing a lot of psilocybin mushrooms. A lot. And regularly. For years. I didn’t only see a vast array of startling connections, I saw the fibrous threads that were the systemic morphological engineering of them. And I had a couple other ideas for movies in the late 90s. One of these was for a genuine mockumentary. It was to be about a young ambassador from a small fictional nation in the former Soviet Bloc, said nation run like a highly corrupt seat-of-the-pants Ma & Pa operation. The young Canadian ambassador is son of the country’s leader, his older brother is performing the same function down in the United States. The Canadian ambassador, an utterly deranged though probably affable and certainly gregarious lunatic, could only be played by myself, or so I believed. He is reading Guy Debord et cetera, employing the film crew documenting his life, and is stockpiling supplies in his friends’ townhouse in preparation for a major transnational terrorist “event.” I had a good pitch for this movie and people enjoyed hearing it. The first thing my extremely wry cousin Glenn asked me after September 11th, 2001, was whether I was still going to make “that movie.” Another idea from this period has been returning to me somewhat regularly of late, and might well be the real impetus for this week’s column. It is based on a thing that actually happened in 2000 or early 2001. A housemate of mine had been acting pretty wild and had at some point gotten into a fight with his father and brother during the course of which somebody attempting to intervene had gotten injured. When his family discovered that my housemate was planning to leave the country (for Afghanistan!), they filled out the paperwork required to have him committed for psychiatric assessment. Asked if it was likely that my friend would resist, if he was possibly going to be violent, his family told the sanctioned authorities something to the effect of “oh, you better believe it.” They sent two tactical units to our place. And dogs. It was the dogs who caught up with my friend. After he broke through one of the tactical units. The dogs got him as he was attempting to climb from a dumpster onto the roof of a convenience store. They didn’t hold him long; turns out he was just an odd fella. Around this time, a little before or a little after, I had flown back to Ottawa from Calgary and my other housemate had picked me up from the airport, after which the two of us went to drink pints at the Royal Oak and discuss the domestic conundrum. We sat around drinking for a long time, discussing our friend and the trouble he might be in—hell, the trouble he might even pose to us—and eventually I said something like, “hey, this is a great idea for a movie, you and I sitting right here, not wanting to go home and confront our friend; it’s a reversal of Waiting for Godot, in which, you know, you are avoiding Godot.” It immediately struck me as an idea Borges would come up with, and a very strong one to boot. This is the idea that has been returning to me lately. Avoiding Godot, or, maybe to make it more vernacular, you could call it Avoiding Gordo. Or call it anything. What is interesting is that I have in the last twenty-four hours been struck by an internal “inter-literary” correspondence. Maybe my friend is me. Maybe the dangerous friend at home is me as the crazed terrorist ambassador. This is the person I—an alcoholic and a drug addict in recovery, let us not forget—need to both confront and avoid. Try working yourself out of those contortions. Three films I watched in August seem to be especially pertinent if we want to conceptualize Avoiding Godot. Two Raúl Ruiz adaptations the great Dr. Trondsen helped me acquire: 1983’s Bérénice (adapted from Racine), 1987’s The Blind Owl (adapted from Sadegh Hedayat’s legendary work of Persian literary modernism). And then there is The Milky Way, Luis Buñuel’s forking path tropology from 1969, which I had gratifying occasion to revisit by way of the recent Blu-ray from Kino Classics.
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