About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
|
|
Portrait of the Artist Wearing a Bib at the Dissection TableI think it was a disillusioned and bitter man who finally drilled it into my brain that most readers are secretly (or, more rarely, openly) writers, and that it might occasionally be okay for a writer to write about writing and not expect to be attacked by reader-flung showers of handy flattened squirrels or other serendipitous roadkill. This man, reminiscent of an aging Tim Allen jilted young by the Literary Joy he intended to have support him through his twilight years, operates a literary journal, which I imagine he tends like the pickled corpse of an old lover in the bathtub in the backyard utility shed, slicing off tiny pieces every now and then to sustain himself in whatever unspeakable way he requires.
Other that that he seemed like a cool enough guy. Someone to split the occasional pitcher with—if you can put up with the perpetual odor of vinegar.
Anyway.
I like to write and I'm good at it. I like to be told I'm good at it, and I like to talk to other people about what I write, so I like other people to read what I write. Getting paid for it is kinda secondary—but if I were getting paid for it, I could free up another thirty-seven point five hours per week in which I could write. Or fondle the pickled corpse of my own dead lover. Or whatever.
When I was young, I always thought I would write science fiction or fantasy, because largely that was what I read by choice. Since then I have discovered the strong, sour meat of "actual literature". I love to write literature when my stomach feels strong enough to handle it, but that isn't as often as it ought to be. Literature is as hard to read as it is to write, as a rule. So the art remains the acquired taste of those trained in the use of the dissector's scalpel, whose stomachs have grown used to the olfactory tickle of formaldehyde and alcohol and acetic acid.
Mostly I just write what I feel I have to write. That's a hallmark of the amateur, I judge. A professional writes or draws or paints to express the vision in his or her head, keeping in mind the entire time the palates of the eventual consumers. I can't do that yet. I just put stuff in a pot, boil it into submission, throw it in a bowl, put it on the table, and hope someone will come by who can appreciate the flavor.
Which unfortunately seems to classify me as an artist instead of a professional. And that is very sad for me, because that means I should buy a utility shed and scrounge an old bathtub, because the moldering corpse of my lover in my bed is never likely to be able to sustain me the way I need her to. And a little distance is probably good for me until I learn to get used to the smell.
The following is an excerpt from what I hope is a novel and not a prophecy of some kind. It's the type of thing I write when I write what I have to write instead of what I want to write. I can't tell anymore—my tastes are too warped by the flavor of vinegar—whether it's literature or science fiction. You tell me.
Don't you know my liver eats you vultures back? Decaying and decrepit thing that my liver is—failing in any way, regardless of its name, to live for me or anyone else but itself….
The fire I brought is such a sluggish consumption, and sticky, like tar. And has a semblance of being alive, like Remus's Tar Baby.
I was the first one to come down with the taint. In ancient language, I was the first human to get a computer virus.
And I say "was" because I'm pretty sure I'm dead now. It's hard to tell.
That's part of the problem.
The average joe doesn't know his real bits from his overlay bits—whatever they're calling the overlay right this minute—and doesn't much understand the difference, and I guess that's fine. I don't feel like joining the debate about what parts of a person's experience are real, especially not at this late a date, but I will. Just for thoroughness' sake.
Purchasing power is real. Therefore money has to be real, right? Even though you can't hold it in your hands anymore?
Your bank account can be sick and hungry. I guess it's up to you to decide whether that's worse than having, say, a sore throat. Especially since both can keep you awake at night.
Especially if you have the option installed that lets you feel your account balance.
And now I've gone and bored us both. Through the liver.
Anyway, now that you've snacked on my liver, you've got the fire I brought back from the overlay Heaven.
You're on fire. You've got taint. By reading this, you just shook hands with the Tar Baby. And Brer Fox? He lay low.
* * * * *See, technically I'm not writing this. Being dead. This is just an unmonitored process assembling words according to rote heuristics, like self-assembling (or disassembling) chemicals jigging around as a body decomposes. Lipids deliquesce, skin sloughs off, dynamic concepts decay into static and unchanging words....
Doesn't that seem backwards? Like ocean waves constructing castles on the beach out of sand?
That's ludicrous, of course. Entropy is the aether of the twenty-first century—or would be if it weren't for gravity. Technically speaking, the ocean created you out of sand, and then you construct the sandcastles. How much does it matter to the ocean or to the sandcastles that there might be an intermediary step?
Time's Arrow points at you, points at this message, points anywhere but forward as we used to define it. Time's Arrow is crooked and hunts the wumpus through a gray maze of twisty passages, all alike.
I am the Wumpus. Goo goo kachoob.
Given the elderly and hard-to-kill notion/virus of entropy, the only way you could exist as a living, dynamic being is if the ocean were more living, more dynamic, and more intelligent than it would ever be possible for humanity (or any other devices that the ocean's waves assemble) to become.
Given a hypothetical entropy, I certainly am a dead or dying process created by/from a superintelligent ocean (created in turn from/by a super-superintelligent universe), decaying and fossilizing myself into these words that, upon encountering appropriate conditions, will start cannibalizing their surroundings and sprout like a mighty oak from an acorn, or a butterfly from a chrysalis, or the taint from a simple freeze-dried Martian gangsta prion, until all that is left of God's infinite body are copies of this book and the dusts of seeds that would create even more copies—should any more of the necessary materials arrive.
* * * * *
And my liver? That's where the infection lives. Because my infection is more chemical than verbal—if you care to draw the line between different ways of encoding complex information. On one level, DNA and words are both just ways of encoding information, whether parsed linearly by RNA or your eye's saccades. The construct assembled using the unrolled information can be an object with any number of simultaneous (as opposed to linear) attributes. Unrolling and encoding is merely a process....
And the liver is the seat of this chemistry. Liver tissue is nearly indestructible due to the speed by which it regenerates. A cancer of the liver is tricky to fight with mere competitive code, and the liver itself is difficult to get to. Unless you're a vulture.
[*]
Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy. |
