Thought Experiment 3

Thought Experiment #3,

Or,

This is the Big One

By Austin “Savagenapkin” Bridges

First Movement: The Memo Line

Yes, boys and girls, here we are at last. The End Times are come. ‘Culmination’ is partially the concept behind this last experiment, but as our thoughts and experiences progress, I can’t help it from being likewise progressive. Where am I right now? Where have I come from and through what terrain have I traversed? I suppose in order to keep going somewhere, I need to know the answers to those questions. Notice I’m not stating a precise destination, because most often the destination is irrelevant. We as humans applaud motion for the sake of motion. Moving forward, moving backward, as long as we’re going somewhere, it seems like everything is fine and dandy. Sometimes we pick up hitchhikers and stowaways as we move, and I decided to take a class about that.

I (and the class as well) went from the initial exploration of parasites and how they function as interruptions like noise, and silent puppet-masters like Toxoplasma Gondii that may or may not be influencing the things we like and what we are drawn to. We (because it’s always a ‘we’ even if it’s only a single person) might have gone a little too far out with the thought that everyone and everything is a parasite, then reeled in a little bit and focused on one specific type of parasite, the Vampire. We examined the Vampire as a sexual being and a compelling outcast that draws people in as much as it seeks people out. We reached the limits of our tolerance with Filth, allowing ourselves to sympathize with a parasite, letting us figure out who the hero and anti-hero is. In what seems like ages ago we looked at how we could do things with words, and discovered the life and opinions of a very intelligent tomcat. We wrote blogs and Waves and Plurks and thought experiments, digging, questioning, affirming, seeking, disproving, complaining, interrupting and babbling. We are here to study, think and to write on the context of Parasites.

So where are we now after these last nine weeks? What has this Tony guy done to us/allowed us to do? This is not the kind of class we can look back and say we memorized all the state capitals. We don’t take any tests for knowledge. There is no way we can simply come up with the wrong answer unless we have no answer at all. That too is also sometimes okay. We challenged the notions of what it is to be the teacher, the student, and even what it means to have ‘attended’ class. Not only with constant participation on Waves and Plurks, but also with two class times that bled into one another and had their own meta-progression. On one occasion half the Tooth Hurty class went outside in the sun to discuss vampires and quite curiously the other half (Tony and Low included) insisted on staying indoors and out of the sun. So, that’s what we’ve accomplished. That was English 203: Writing in Context: Parasites: 2:30: Winter Quarter 2010. Normal methods of understanding and quantifying a classroom experience cannot be employed here. A lot of classes center on the back and forth between teacher and student where work, under rigid guidelines, is constantly being submitted, then corrected and altered for improvement. On this level, progress and therefore a proper use of our time and money, is being made. We are then free to leave Starliner Towers. I’m not really trashing this method, it’s ingrained into me and I find it to be familiar and comforting. The first couple of times when Tony decided not to speak, I wasn’t sure quite how to react.

So yeah, it’s a different kind of class. We get that. I’ve had trouble all quarter trying to derive some kind of Meaning out of this class. I know what we’ve done, but I don’t know quite yet what I’ve gotten from the class in exchange for time, money, etc. Let me immediately accompany that statement with a follow-up: Saying “I don’t quite know yet what I’ve gotten” is not equivalent to “I didn’t get anything”. I don’t know if it’s even possible to “get nothing” from something. I’m going to say no. But this is why we have final cumulative/culminating/progressive/circular/crazypants whatever Thought Experiments to summate our experiences. It’s kind of a shame that we have to feel compelled to quantify an experience, because lord knows we could all benefit from “letting it be” without assigning an inherent worth and value to it. This is not the age we live in, nor will it probably ever be an age we live in. Life is short. Time is money, and we’re always short on both. So if I make this check out to ‘English 203: Parasites’, what goes on the ‘Memo’ line? For one thing, the assigned readings are always eye-opening and beneficial in any context. Reading makes you a better writer. That is something I can grasp onto. Additionally, this was all seriously challenging material. Either it was dense and highly referential to other works (The Vampire Lectures), slow-moving and dry (Tomcat Murr), just plain crazy (The Parasite), or Scottish (Filth). In grappling with literature I think we are much more inclined to make Brechtian disassociations with it (whether the work is doing that intentionally or not) and pull apart how the particular author was able to Do Things with Words. So literature is for me a quantifiable experience. Also I still largely enjoyed those books. The largest portion of the class though is wild, free, intangible thought that is constantly being stimulated and stretched through our discussions and readings and rantings and films. There isn’t necessarily a grand, universal Parasites secret to discover that rewards our experimentation and permanently ferries our thoughts from one bank to the other without losing any oxen. Therefore our thought processes can be cyclical, all over the place, or even completely inert, not changing hardly at all since the quarter began. My thoughts have been superbly stimulated throughout the quarter, and just this fact is worth the price of admission. Like an enthralling game of chess, it doesn’t matter who won or how many pieces were left on the board. Merely the sport of it all, the wild exercise of stimulation or our natural craving for intellectual pressures can be far greater than the high score of a test denoting accomplishment. That’s my memo line- “For the wild exercise of stimulation”. I’ll let the bank people figure that one out.

Second Movement: Interview with the Parasite

In preparation for this thought experiment, I sought out a deeper understanding of the parasite. This search led me to a candid interview with MARK, a tapeworm living inside the gut of a catatonic elderly man. We sat down at a Starbucks and had the following discussion.

AUSTIN: Hello, Mark.

MARK: Good afternoon, Austin. It is afternoon, correct?

A: Hahaha. That’s right Mark. It’s almost two o’clock.

M: Two? I’ve got places to be!

A: Really?

M: I’m just joshing you, man. I’m a tapeworm, remember?

A: Hahahaha Mark, you crack me up. So enough chit-chat, let’s get down to the real interview here.

M: Fire away. I’d love to help you out for your class in any way possible.

A: That’s what I like to hear. Okay, first question should be kind of easy to start us off: What is a parasite?

M: Great question, Austin, and actually more complicated than you might give it credit for. I would say that a parasite, in my defense, is simply a hungry guest. We seek to consume, Austin, and our hunger is never sated.

A: Interesting. Hunger for what, exactly?

M: Take your pick. Just about anything you can be hungry for. If you can think of it, someone or something else has it, and you’re going to take it. We all do it, man. You, me, this dump of a barely-living body I’ve been squatting in does it too. Of course we get the bad press about it because that’s pretty much our only function. We’re not pretty and we can’t create art. Gimme a break here, all I can do is eat. At least I stay so skinny.

A: Michel Serres talks about parasitism as an interruption. You didn’t mention that in your description. Any thoughts?

M: An interruption? I mean, I guess you could say that. But everything is an interruption of something else- sound interrupts quiet and vice versa. Sound interrupts more sound, and then what’s to say is even interrupting anymore? I think that definition gets too messy for my liking. I think it all comes back down to food. As Stephen Sondheim quite wonderfully puts in the musical Sweeney Todd, “The history of the world, my sweet/ is who gets eaten and who gets to eat”!

A: I never knew a parasite could be a passionate fan of musical theatre.

M: I have ears, don’t I?

A: Do you?

M: I’m not actually sure. Next question.

A: Okay. Umm, let’s see… okay, here’s one: Why do you think someone decided to make an English class about parasites?

M: Why parasites? Well, for one, your professor is a genius. Secondly, because one-hit-kill predators get all the attention. Lions, murderers, tyrannosaurus rexes, the obvious threat is so overdone and so boo-ring. Parasites are both personal and foreign, and much scarier and more interesting, am I right?

A: Yes, you’re right.

M: Seriously, what was scarier in Alien, the facehugger or the actual giant creature?

A: The Fac-

M: Of course it’s the goddamn facehugger. We’re an untapped goldmine of equal parts compulsion and revulsion. Oh- I just remembered- thirdly, are you reading Filth?

A: I just finished it a little while ago.

M: You won’t believe this, but guess what? I actually knew the tapeworm in-what’s-his-face, Bill Richardson?

A: Bruce Robertson?

M: Yeah, that’s the guy. I knew his tapeworm. Name was Brian. Crazy Scottish little bugger. Sorry about how they both ended up, though. I take that back. It’s actually a pretty dignified death for a tapeworm. I probably won’t go out that well. I’ll probably just die in a nursing home toilet somewhere. Anyway, we met at a party when my host went to Scotland. Those were the days, when he used to TAKE ME PLACES AND DO NICE THINGS! *Sigh*. Whatever, I’m cool. Hosts, right? Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.

A: Here’s a question I was really hoping you could answer.

M: I hope I can answer it too.

A: Do you know any Toxoplasma Gondii, and can you tell me if they control human brains?

M: Yes and unfortunately hell yes. The Toxo’s I know are total jerkwads, but they know how to mess with your head. And it ain’t just Toxoplasma in your gut, noodle, and anywhere else. We are legion, my friend. You know that show Jersey Shore? Mind-controlling parasites are the reason that show is on the air. But infected or not, you guys all love watching it, that’s what I can’t figure out.

A: We live in a weird world, what can I say. One more question, Mark.

M: Please.

A: Team Edward or Team Jacob?

M: Are you serious right now? Totally Edward. Gotta back up my bloodsuckers.

A: It’s been a delight, Mark, thank you for all your help.

M: Eat well, Austin.

A: You too, Mark.

Third Movement: My Own Best Friends

So that little excursion was pretty fun. As you might have guessed, I did not actually conduct an interview with Mark the tapeworm. In reality, Mark was busy and unavailable to meet. But it reminded me why we like doppelgangers and fracturing our psyche. As Mark, I was able to write from a different perspective and my thoughts and discoveries were able to change as a result. We like to write consistently most of the time, because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. It’s uniform, and our one voice keeps us going on a set path. We have many voices in our heads, though, and it’s liberating as a writer to break out of the single voice. It’s still us no matter what, but the ideas fall out slightly differently. I was able to play a version of myself and yet another, surprising myself all the way through. Mark said that “parasites are both personal and foreign” and I think that really represents our relationship with our hungry guests. It’s both the Self and the Other, a truly dangerous combination. What does that mean? What can I pull out of all that? The notion that we are never alone. We are always joined by voices, worms, words, organisms, advertising slogans, interruptions, and all sorts of hungry guests at our table. As a writer, as one studying English and looking for something more to derive from this wild exercise of stimulation, I think I know it’s that I’m never alone with me. If I get writer’s block, any of the rest of me would love to have a stab at it.

Eat well, my hungry guests.

El Blogo

And out of the chaos came order. Or, in this case, more chaos. Chaos is good though, it makes me oddly happy and allows me to feel purposeful. I just finished weeks and weeks of awful, busy, also incredibly fun and rewarding hell in the form of Reefer Madness the Musical. We had a great run and I made a lot of friends. I'm also dealing with significant point losses in all of my classes as a result. My second thought experiment was hammered out fairly roughly in between runs of the show last week. I got a D+ on my last German test. I get A's and B's on German tests. I almost fell asleep during an ESCI 101 test last week. I got a 35 out of 55 on it. I've lost days of sleep and I'm more fatigued then I've even been before. This is without question the busiest nine weeks of my life. And I have also had a great time. In the last couple of days since ending our run, namely Monday through today, I've had a lot of free time. Well, of course it could be and has been spent on homework, but I mean relatively, I have a whole asston of free time. I bought Assassin's Creed 2 for the PC and have been clocking serious hours into that. Am I happier? No, not really. Now this isn't like some rant about life and happiness, or at least I don't intend for it to be, but rather about interruptions, the spice of life.

Welsh's Filth imagines a scenario where the tapeworm is more of a hero than the actual main character. I've been in a scenario where work is often more fulfilling than play. Work is the parasite of free time, or is free time a parasite of work? Is work actually our default position and free time the interruption? Who is doing all the god-damned interrupting around here? Either way, I've been interrupted a lot lately. Work and free time must therefore be as crucial and symbiotic with one another as any other parasitic relationship. I don't believe there are levels of parasitic benefit and loss. Every parasitic relationship must inherently be exactly the same, if we are to use the umbrella term 'parasitic'. Work and play cannot exist without the other, and if we translate that to the wondrous workings of the human body, 'we' certainly wouldn't exist without a whole lot of others who are hitching rides and digesting our food and telling us to like cats. The lack of a sliding scale means every host and parasite pairing is just as gravely serious and comically trivial. We're all eating at the same table, whatever the food might happen to be. Blood, skin, candy, time... mmm. Candy time. Anyway, work makes me happy and also crazy and keeps me from other work which I'd work on if I had more free time. Hmmm. I think this is the part where the fickle walls of philosophical thought begin to crumble because I guess I've arrived at the old "there is no such thing as free time, everything is just a different kind of work, continuously interrupting itself until we die" kind of thing. That's simply grand. So once again, how do we bring that back to our friendly neighborhood tapeworms, toxoplasma gondii and blood flukes? Well, that means the notion of self is a lie perpetuated by the brain to make sense of the random mishmash of organisms and parasites that make up the human body. It's Hote-Hote in here: there are no such things as parasites because there are no such things as hosts. Life is pretty balanced, and to give certain constructs an absolute hierarchy or implied roles is a defiance of the great "impalpable greyness" of it all.

Wow, this is not where I planned to end up at all.

Um, stay classy? And, uh, everything is wrong?

I need to get some sleep. Time to go to work.

Thought Experiment 2

Alternate Title: A Way That the Star Wars Prequels Could Have Been Better

At the end of my last thought experiment, I was left with the discovery that I needed to eventually find a thesis, but it’ll take me entire papers to reach it. I find that extremely interesting because it’s the exact opposite way I’ve learned to write papers all throughout high school. First you find a thesis, then you write a couple pages about how right you are. Of course, by the end of those papers I’ve reached a completely different level of understanding; the mind needs time to work though something, winding and wending its way through dead ends and false starts until it finds the cheese. It’s a different task entirely to start with cheese and backtrack. Often you’re just stuck in a maze with rotting cheese. Having said all that, let’s completely forget about it. I’m not going to pick off from my last experiment because I don’t remember what I was talking about and I don’t really want to open the file and read through all of that shit. I got things to do. Instead, I have a rough goal. I want to find something by the end of this paper. I only have no idea what it will be. I’ll find my questions by starting with answers. Answers, the easiest of things mankind can provide, will mostly stem from thoughts of the vampiric. That has been a popular topic in class and culture, as well as personal interest. To instantaneously narrate my own process of discovery, that last statement was an answer, leading me to a basic question that I feel can never be sufficiently answered in any capacity of human effort:

Why?

In this case, the mighty “Why” pertains to the popularity of vampirism and its culture. This isn’t a final question, this is just something to get my feet wet. Or maybe I’ll run with it all the way through. Who knows? Let’s take a look.

The closest source of information on this topic is myself. I like vampires. I think the reason I like them is that I enjoy the literary and narrative concept of corruption. Seeing a character degrade and deteriorate is incredibly compelling. The most resonating moment of corruption that instantly comes to mind is that of Prince Arthas Menethil from the game Warcraft III. Arthas is a righteous young prince when, in the name of defending his own kingdom, takes up the cursed sword Frostmourne to gain incredible power. He is instantly corrupted and twisted by Frostmourne, and kills his father, King Menethil, and his benevolent mentor, Uther the Lightbringer. I will provide a clip.

This clip, and specifically the scene with the flower pedals and the bells has resonated with me for years as a work of literary brilliance. I can’t provide a complete answer as to why, but part of it at least stems from that hollowness, the emptiness. He crushes the flower pedal--a rejection of the living world, he’s above it (or below it-either way it makes him special). Such is the allure of power, and coolness. Many (myself included) would see that scene and think that Prince Arthas is a badass. An evil badass. The cool dude in black. Darth Vader is the same way. In fact, I wish that we could’ve gotten this same superb corruption story of Prince Arthas from Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. Arthas didn’t whine and throw a lot of shit-fit tantrums. We were on the same level with Arthas all the way until he made a few wrong decisions. We’re just as capable of making some bad choices. We’re just as tempted to be cool and to make a few Faustian Bargains in our lives. How often do we ‘sell our souls’? We get boob jobs and botox to look younger for longer, and all we have to do is trade away a little part of ourselves. Sounds kind of like vampirism to me. How many of us are tempted to trade away our souls to live forever, stay beautiful, and maintain power over the ignorant masses? How many of us these days would trade away their bodies to live on the planet Pandora with the Na’vi? Vampires may be frightening to us for the covert sexual thrall they could command over us (something’s often scarier when you can’t see it), but we think they’re cool because we have a lust for power (and blood). ‘Coolness’ is of course only a recent redefinition of class and caste systems. Someone wealthy and powerful, like say a Count, Prince, or Dark Lord of the Sith all look good in black. The allure of the badass, the anti-hero, or the vampire is that of wish-fulfillment: those characters must inherently be us to begin with, but corruption changes and distorts us. Physical distortion or discoloration is often a crucial part of it. Vampires are pale, Prince Arthas’ hair turned white, the Emperor from Star Wars is wrinkly and pale. As you can see, beauty doesn’t often result from it, but power is sexy (or you have the power to seem sexy), and we try to ignore or don’t see the ugly bits. Even Botox and boob jobs have extremely ugly procedures. Robert Pattinson’s Edward may have the ladies aflutter, but he doesn’t look so hot when he’s draining a rat carcass for its blood. I’m getting a little off-track here because I mentioned ‘wish-fulfillment’ and I wanted to address that. We all sometimes want to punch somebody, and these characters get to do that. Han Solo shoots Greedo first. They (and by proxy ‘we’) get to be unforgiving, cold, irresponsible, and irresistible. The most recent trend of “good” vampires seems to be about making the vampire into more of a romantic (in all definitions of the word) figure than an identifiable anti-hero. While vampires have always been about lust (for blood, power, sex, all three are the same) but now that lust has been curbed, domesticated, and straightened out. To make a few (potentially unfair and over-generalized) gender-based assumptions, the idea of the tamed, domesticated vampire is a female fantasy. Women have tamed the ‘wild man’ with his instincts and urges, to be monogamous and loyal, smolderingly attractive, and they stay young forever so they’ll never grow old and fat, nor will they ever die before the woman and leave them alone. The vampire remains powerful and tortured, with the ability to help the woman physically, yet be helped by the woman emotionally. He’s just about the perfect partner. A wild, feral vampire doesn’t quite have the same allure. Gender and vampires have a lot to do with each other. Having just spoken on the male castration of the ‘good’ vampire, many have stated that the Twilight novels are degrading to women’s rights and quite unashamedly promote Mormon values like abstinence and traditional gender roles. Having not read the books, I’m tentatively inclined to agree with them. They were still written by a woman, and I think it’s completely possible that both elements exist together.

Well, that was quite interesting, wasn’t it? That’s where I am now. These were my thoughts.