Final Project (ish)

I think I went about five different ways with this project before I finally settled on my current idea, which hopefully will be the one I actually use.

Basically, I'm going to be extremely pretentious and try to write Signs and Symbols from the boy's point of view. I'm 90% certain that I'll do this via two different "diaries." One will be the boy's psychiatrist's notes, which would be a hyper-realistic interpretation of events, and the other will be the boy's supposed diary, which would be a mythologized interpretation of those same events. Because of referential mania, the diary might have to just be the boy's internal monologue. I'm reading and re-reading Nabokov to see if the boy would maybe have been okay with a blank book that he could put his own things in. Perhaps I'll just have to take some artistic license.

Anyway, the main focus of my version of the story is somewhat along the lines of the idea I presented in my last blog post. I also read Joe Schadt's post from the 15th of last month, per Megan's suggestion, and I'm going to incorporate the converse of Joe's idea, that life is a form of death. Death is a form of life, answers are a form of death--it's getting a little mind-twisty at this point, so I'll have to hash that out further in my own head before I try to put it on paper, or worse still, the internet. I may end up making another blog post tomorrow, especially if I have another particularly enlightening lunch hour with my friend.

Before I get into that too much, though, there's the more fundamental issue of what death is. To look into that, still in the context of a story, I'm going to draw on Eliade Chapter 5 (ascent--so for me, death as a magical ascension), Frye Chapter 5 (also ascent), Gilgamesh, Icarus, and probably several others. I want to look into the idea of a cipher, with all the meanings attached thereto, and the numbers Nabokov uses; do they form a pattern, are they some sort of cipher? In honor of Nabokov, there will probably be an anagram at some point as well.

Most of this is going to be all but unrecognizable once it gets into a story, I think, so I'll put the actual analytical bits that I've talked about here into an explication, which might actually just end up confusing the issue even further, now that I think about it. I guess we'll see how that goes. If nothing else, it can be a window into my thought processes and hopefully will provide some sort of clarity in that way.

So there in a nutshell is the fundamental idea for my final project. As I said, I'll probably amend it tomorrow (Tuesday), but for now, this is where I'm going.

Lunchtime Epiphanies

I was sitting at lunch today with my little group of friends and somehow one friend (to whom I shall refer as the Doctor, even though she's a lady) and I got on the subject of questions and answers. She just offhand made the comment that every answer leads to more questions, which I connected to class, since Nabokov, brimstone be upon him, has saddled me with referential mania.

Anyway. The connection was thus: if every answer is a form of death, but learning--which is often comprised of answers, especially in basic English classes that deal with commas and i before e and so on--also leads to more questions, then an answer is also a form of rebirth. Ergo learning is a form of immortality. Probably everyone else has already arrived at this conclusion, but for me it was kind of a mindfuck. Also, guess what's now part of my final project...

Reset to Last Save

I'll post my five questions from The Magus a bit later. Truth be told, I've been ridiculously busy and very tired so I didn't get around to that soon enough. Tomorrow, when I'm thinking more clearly.

I thought I would post the little story I wrote since it's directly related to immortality. The idea is part Philip K. Dick, part me and my dad getting really bored in Wal-Mart while waiting for my mom to finish with something, and part me being cynical.

-----

It dominated the landscape for miles around, and it still was not finished. When it was finished, it would be over a kilometer in height, or so the plans said. Those plans had been made nearly a hundred years ago; work was slow with so few “normal” humans to oversee the robotic workers.

It was to be a monument to human achievement; a tower reaching into the clouds, in which to quite literally store the greatest minds in history. They could have put it underground, and that probably would have been safer, but the advent of consciousness preservation was of such import that it would almost be sacrilege not to commemorate it visibly. The ability to preserve the vigor of youth almost indefinitely had been available for many years, but unfortunately, physical youth did not equate to mental youth. Old age still preyed upon people’s minds, at least until humanity discovered how to “save” a consciousness.

===

An alarm beeped insistently in the sterile white room. The three white-clad attendants turned simultaneously from the sleeping man in the white chair to see why. None of them had ever heard it before, which was an unsettling thought, since they had all performed routine memory downloads every day for the past fifty years.

One of them, Number 518, walked over to the holographic display on the wall and waved her hand across it. The display flashed a warning message, and 518 turned around quickly.

“It’s not taking,” she blurted. The other two exchanged looks, nonplussed.

“The memory,” 518 clarified. “It’s not taking. The brain is rejecting it.”

“What do you mean, the brain is rejecting it?” another attendant, Number 436, asked.

“I mean the brain won’t take another reset. The synapses have been overwritten so many times that they simply won’t work.”

The third attendant, Number 209, raised her eyebrows.

“There’s a protocol for this,” she said calmly. As the oldest, she had the most authority. “Look up 7477.” 518 located the protocol in the computer.

“‘Continue with reset. Release subject without synopsis of memories. Synopsis will result in senility and death,’” she read, shuddering at the matter-of-fact mention of death.

“Okay. Continuing with reset.” 209 pressed the button on the back of the chair to resume the download. The man in the chair twitched violently and then was still.

In a few seconds, the download was finished. 436 injected the man with a cocktail of drugs designed to wake him up slowly and dull the pain of cognitive dissonance from a reset to a previously saved memory set. The man woke up slowly enough, but 518 could see from the look in his eyes that he had not resolved the differences he felt between how he thought his brain should be and how it actually was at the moment. The brain, 518 reflected, was an unusual organ. Even when its memories had been completely overwritten, it still knew something was wrong and tried to fix itself, which invariably resulted in insanity.

The three attendants helped the man stand. He wobbled, but remained upright. Under his own dubious power, he walked out the door. The three attendants looked at each other, concerned. How would this man function with a poorly-fitting memory implanted in his mind? And more importantly, how many like him were there? The protocol was worded such that it was obvious that this had happened before. What became of the malfunctioning resets?

A buzzer sounded. Their day was over. They shut down the computers in their reset room and went to their quarters on the upper levels of the tower.

===

>It’s happening more often now.

>Yes.

>What are we going to do about it?

>Nothing.

>Nothing? You must have a rodent in one of your fans. Why nothing?

>Well, what do you propose we do?

The subterranean main computer’s cooling towers began spooling up to a higher capacity as the computer became warmer from working harder. Two consciousnesses were stored on it, with two separate processors—the optimistic consciousness of the man who pioneered consciousness saving and his final, jaded save before he completely abandoned his body. They were known as sam1, the younger, and sam2, the older, since the man’s name had been Samuel. This computer was the only computer on which the consciousnesses could interact; in all the other computers, they were dormant. The existence of this computer on which interaction was possible was a closely-guarded secret. In fact, no one but the consciousnesses stored on the computer knew about it, as it had been the last creation of the man who began the tower. Everyone who worked in the tower thought the main computer was just a massive program that oversaw the inner workings of the tower and ensured that everything was maintained properly.

>Why can’t we just let them die? Everyone has their time. Maybe it’s better for them if we just keep them in a nice, comfortable room for a few days until their minds give out instead of sending them back out as gibbering idiots into a world they can’t possibly understand.

>We don’t have our time.

sam2 was on the defensive, and sam1 backpedaled hurriedly.

>Of course not. We don’t have a body. They do, though, and that’s the problem.

>Do you propose we let them live in the computers, like we do? You know that’s impossible.

sam1 had to admit that such an arrangement would be a problem. Most people would be unable to become accustomed to a completely sensory-deprived, digital existence, and would still go insane.

>So. What do you propose?

>Maybe we should let them figure it out for themselves instead of doing a full system reset every fifty years. This system can’t sustain itself forever. We both know that. No amount of clinging to past accomplishments can change it.

There was no response from sam2.

===

518 woke in the middle of the night. There was a tickle in the back of her mind, which indicated that her wireless uplink had been activated. This was a normal occurrence; her uplink was often active at night to upload the information she would need for the next day’s resets.

This tickle suddenly turned into a freezing, pinpricking sensation all over her brain. She could not move; all the synapses in her brain had been simultaneously overloaded.

The feeling lasted less than a second. That was all it took to arrest vital brain function beyond any hope of repair.

===

>How long have we been doing this?

sam2 did not answer at first. He was calculating.

>As of midnight, 200 years.

>And this is our first major breakdown. Fairly impressive, actually.

>We are a god.

sam1 was surprised. His processor ran a little higher.

>How do you mean?

>We direct the course of civilization. We have control over life and death. We are a god.

>In the same way Julius Caesar was a god?

sam2 did not respond.

>So how are we going to solve our problem? It’s been several hours and we still haven’t gotten anything usable.

>I’ve already initiated the full system reset.

sam1 was exasperated. His processor approached capacity.

>Exactly what do you think that’s going to do? The entire society down there is going to the dogs. We can’t keep using the same fixes. Anyway, we know the clones aren’t going to work, not from 250-year-old bodies. The attendants are short-lived enough, and they were from 60-year-old bodies.

>We also cut them off after ten years so they don’t start breaking down. We don’t know how long they might last.

sam1 did not like to think about that. He would have liked to believe that there was still some part of him that connected him to humanity—that he still had a soul of sorts.

>So… what, we make clones of everyone? Why? Why can’t we just let it go?

>Humanity cannot die! We must be immortal! We must become gods! We will find the ones who are most like us and we will make them into gods, as we are.

sam1 started to think that perhaps sam2 had been alive a little too long. Maybe his judgment was starting to become impaired. There was little sam1 could do about it, though, since sam2 had the main administrator program on his side of the computer. If sam1 were able to construct a virus before the total reset ended, though, he might be able to stop sam2 from completing it. He began working on it in a part of his system that would be extremely difficult for sam2 to access. There, to his astonishment, he found a nearly-complete virus.

He had done all this before, but he had no memory of it. sam2 had a part of his system that sam1 could never access, and in it was the reset code for sam1. sam2’s system had in fact existed for more than 400 years. He had lied to sam1.

It would take several hours for sam1 to reset. Every time he got a little closer to completing the virus, so every time sam2 had to reset him a little sooner. sam2 could not understand why. He initiated the reset, but the cooling towers suddenly spooled down and would not respond to his commands.

>Why?

It was his last question. He felt sadness from sam1.

>I am the Brutus to your Roman Empire. We are not immortal—we are not a god. We are a mockery. I’m sorry.

The system reached critical heat. Plastic began melting; concrete split; metal warped. The foundation of the tower was shaken, and the tower itself began to crumble.

===

519 woke slowly. She should have had all her memories of forty years of resetting already uploaded to her mind, but there was nothing. She could not even register fear as the tower collapsed in on itself—she had no data point for fear.

The tower crashed and roared into a twisting pile of rubble, a fitting monument to human achievement.

How the Past Possesses the Present in "Symbols and Signs"

When we come to the essence of the stories we tell today, every story can really be condensed into a displaced myth of sorts.  Some of them are more obvious than others; these displaced myths are generally allegories and are thus fully intended to be read into at the allegorical level.  Others—possibly most works of fiction published today—are unintentionally mythical because their authors have little to no understanding of the rich cultural tapestry from which their lives and therefore their works have sprung.  Still others, like Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” are intentionally displaced to the point where the original myth is difficult to divine.  Such works are often a distillation of several myths into a single piece of literature, be it a full-length novel or a short story like Nabokov’s.

This then begs the question:  what is myth?  There are the obvious answers; the Greco-Roman and Old Norse traditions are prominent examples of ancient stories commonly recognized as myths.  However, this narrow, religion-tinged definition of myth fails to recognize an important aspect of the very myths it cites.  Myths are true—perhaps not in the factual, realistic sense of the word, but in the conceptual, ideological sense, they attain a level of overarching truth that no “realistic” story can ever hope to reach.  Thus, by this definition, any story which conveys a truth about human existence could be considered a mythic story, though maybe not a “proper” myth as it lacks religious connotations.

No doubt to some this definition seems unnecessarily, even somewhat laughably, broad.  Perhaps it is.  However, if we think of mythic stories in this way, it becomes easier to see the ways in which the past and the present and even the future each contain the spirits of the other in the truly mythic stories.

Vladimir Nabokov demonstrated his mastery of the mythic in his short story, “Symbols and Signs.”  “Symbols and Signs” is a nuanced condensing of several traditional myths, and indeed of human experience as a whole, which puts it squarely in the category of mythic story.  There are many mythic concepts present in Nabokov’s story, one of which is possibly the myth of Icarus.  Icarus, the son of Daedalus, famed builder of the labyrinth for the Minotaur on Crete, escaped from the labyrinth with his father on wax wings.  Daedalus warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but he did, and his wings melted and he fell to his death.

The son in Nabokov’s story could be viewed as a sort of modernized analogue of Icarus.  The first clue to this inclusion of the past is the “tiny unfledged bird twitching helplessly in the puddle.”  The second is the son’s attempted escape from his prison of day-to-day life in a reality he is sure is malevolent: 

“The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”

Like Icarus, the boy wants to escape through flight, but ultimately is unsuccessful in terms of physical escape.

On the other hand, it could be argued that both Icarus and the boy in Nabokov’s story were actually successful in their bids to escape from their prisons.  Death is certainly an alternative to imprisonment.  This is another recurrent idea in many myths and mythic stories; in fact, it occurs in the oldest known written myth—the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Gilgamesh goes in search of immortality, but finds that immortality is not what he thinks.  No human can live forever; only a legacy can really be immortal.  Gilgamesh comes to see death as an escape from the heartache he experienced in the world of the living as he realizes that immortality would only prolong the pain, not end it.  This is also true to some extent of the boy in Nabokov’s story.  Rather than fearing death like most human beings, he clearly welcomes it as an escape from the torment of his fear-filled life.

In these ways, the past is an integral part of the present related in Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs.”  While Nabokov may not have directly displaced the stories of Icarus and Gilgamesh in “Symbols and Signs,” he echoed their principles.  It is such an echo of the past and of the truth contained therein that identifies a mythic story.  The past is a constant undercurrent to the present, and when we find the undercurrent, we find the rich truths the past and the present have to offer us.