"Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee"

(quote: The Judge, video: Black Moth Super Rainbow)

I'm submitting a proposal to the Modern Language Association for their annual conference in Philadelphia. The topic is the "Evolutionary Origins of Narrative". This subject represents the confluence of much of the extracurricular study I have done over the last two years, and upon suggestion by a professor multiple thesii immediately jumped to mind. Basically, evolutionary psychologists, philosophers of art, and kids with nothing better to do, are trying to understand what function art serves from an evolutionary perspective. If it is in fact a functional adaptation, in what way does it aid reproduction? There are generally about 5 theories that I am familiar with. Steven Pinker suggests that art has no evolutionary function, that it is a mere byproduct of complex brains. Others suggest that art is simply the effort of individuals to become appealing in the eyes of the opposite sex. Others proclaim that art is a survival strategy that benefits either social cohesion or mental organization. A fifth theory suggests that art began as a means by which to share attention. None of these is quite complex and holistic enough for me. None of them answer the fundamental four questions required to identify an adaptive mechanism (or in Pinker's case, show how art does not meet some of these requirements). The four questions for adaptation, as formulated by Niko Tinbergen are: 'What benefit does the adaptation provide for reproduction?', 'What is the mechanism by which this adaptation occurs?', 'What is the origin of the adaptation in human evolutionary history?', 'When does the adaptation develop in the individual human?'.
Any theory for the evolutionary origins of narrative or art will be forced to handle these four questions. My proposal is to synthesize a new theory focusing on narrative specifically. Essentially, a sort-of anthropology or genealogy of the "Narrative Mechanism" in human behavior. In evolutionary psychology, every definable behavioral phenomenon comes from a 'mechanism', a system of actions, feedback, requirements, problematization strategies, perspective, and subconscious analysis. My paper would, more or less, begin to define the Narrative behavioral Mechanism. Essentially, I believe that narrative as a meme in cultural evolution have worked so well because they are aligned with the way that we sort information already. All of our myths are in narrative form, and the most efficient way to convey some idea is generally to have an accompanying narrative (anecdotes work better than statistics, even when they are misleading). It is a result of our biological understanding of time: we think everything begins, develops, climaxes, and dies. The world around us does this through the seasons, our bodies do this, most phenomenon that we observe seem to behave along the archetypal pattern of narrative. This way of thinking met up with the burgeoning survival value of symbolic language. As we became more complex philosophically, eventually narrative was used as a means of approaching existential anguish (an affliction that may be the true separation of man from beasts). And now in the bourgeois world we occupy, where survival is a given, the role of narrative has been displaced. The art and it's artist have been alienated from their homeland, the Pleistocene. Anyway, much more on this later . . ..

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I've developed a new hobby. I put a draft of something I've been working on in my jacket and walk the mile downtown and deposit myself on the worst lit chair in all of 10th Street Tavern, and I drink whiskey and make red marks on the paper until something adequate becomes something good. Then after a couple hours, in the dark, I walk back home. I take the most circuitious route possible, with something disjointed and beautiful on the headphones. Look for fences to climb, buildings to surmount, etc. The other night I . . .well, I'll keep that moment to myself. It was wonderful to just be cold in the dark alone. Seeing the life that we avoid with our houses and streetlights and televisions and cars.

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"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings"

(quote: Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian; video: trailer for Synecdoche, New York)


I'm looking forward to xmas in the mitten. Last night I sat in Boise's smokiest bar and read a poem by a friend of mine. He's a Detroiter too, or close enough to count in the MTZ. The image of a figure standing outside a Woodward bar, watching the fleeting past in oil-stained puddles. Nothing can be retrieved or even properly named. And there are absolutely times for nostalgia, as much as I've evaded it. I want to walk across that scarred parking lot behind Jacoby's and feel bitter winter wind. I want my car to spin across the flooded interstate, soaking my tribe in gasoline and overflow. I want to blow my New Year's kazoo from the roof of the Jewish Park Shelton. I want to walk between the arguing deaf in the sharp-edged morning. I want to breathe in the smoke of structure fires, etched against the emulsive sky like the whole city is in my dreams. I want to steal things in a place where property means nothing. I want to chop firewood in the shadow of anonymous wealth wasted. I want to feel nervous and excited and go rigid in the abdomen walking from my car to the place I buy beer. I want to talk to Kazakhs or Albanians through bullet-proof glass. I want heroin addicts to crash their bikes in my driveway. I want ceilings to leak and basements to reek. I want my bars so fucking dark I forget who I came with. I want to look forward to someone driving long distance this weekend to sleep on my floor with me. I want to sit on my porch all day, getting slow drunk listening to psychopaths and making plans to do it all again tomorrow. I want to see the SWAT tank rolling up Trumbull as I stagger stoned gorgeous to a classroom with no windows. I want to make burritos from canned goods with no labels. I want to philosophize until the sun comes up and I'm asleep in the chair alone. I want to come downstairs vibrating with something, and have 8 other opinions on it within minutes. I want to see OneBeLo rock the mic every goddamn weekend. All these things, as clear now as they were then. Whatever the case, in three weeks I'm home. Hopefully I can still keep up.

Saw the above film yesterday. Like every Charlie Kaufman piece, there seem to be waves of appreciation that come on as the time since viewing grows. He is directing for the first time, and I think in some ways his amateur lens shows; but from a story-standpoint it is very unlike anything I have ever really seen. True Theatre of the Absurd. Strangely, the film feels like a week long. And not due to pace, but as a result of the lifetime the film contains. It takes place over the course of at least 30 years (probably more, it's difficult to tell), and the main character (Cardin) seems to have lost his grip on time. This is The World According to Garp gone surreal, the main character being among the saddest figures I've seen in a film. The many love stories of the film are each unique and true and classically rendered. The infinite self-reflexivity of the film's ultimate project is the best argument for the post-modern aesthetic one could ask for. I already like this movie more after writing the above then I did before.


Today, in applying to the University of Minnesota, I had to write 3 additional personal statements. One on my "career plans", one on "diversity", a final one discussing my "self-motivation". The first was brief, simple. The second was mostly about Detroit. I am a white male from the suburbs, yet I think I've gotten my dose of diversity. I appreciated the opportunity to write the essay on self-motivation, I feel I have qualities and accomplishments that a resume can not depict In my two school careers I have consciously avoided most extra-curricular involvement. I have no interest in padding my resume with anything, or spending time that does not feed the revolution in my head. So I'm a member of no organizations, societies, associations. I sit around very few tables and discuss nothing. There will be no greek letters on my tombstone or yours.

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"As well ask men what they think of stone."

In Oregon there's a mushroom thousands of acres big. In reality it's neither one huge organism or millions of separate ones, but a network of function and communication. It knows if you are present, it reroutes the passage of nutrients and information when a node is broken. When conditions are right, a mushroom breaks through the surface like an inconsolable weed and sucks life from its environment. No real point here, other than I really want to stand on it and watch the puke yellow growth thinking and working and practically bubbling with activity out to the horizon.

"Sometimes you just need a two-day bender to clear your head." And of all the laws I've broken, trespassing somehow feels the best. To rework the environment to suit your needs. Not to destroy, but to undercut the very notion that we can own things and cordon them off and hold back. And so at 3am, diving from the high-board and splashing whiskey-laden into the deep-end like a gangly ape I feel both the ecstatic solitude of the village idiot and the swelling outrage of myself ten years ago clawing around for what it needs. I no longer feel that I have to justify my behavior in some teetering matrix of what would be acceptable "if every other person did it", that I only need to explain it to myself and retain consistency. Fix holes in my notions as I find them, and make up for missteps and going too far in the only way I really can.

The thing about love. Every time you've been mired in it and imagine some timeless definition of it . . .it becomes a different animal. And so you, scarred and adorned and maybe even a bit fortified and cautious, see utterly different dollar signs and cartoon hearts over things than your Sim did a decade previous when all the romance you knew was television and the only regrets were in songs.

Somewhere there's a lonely whale navigating the depths looking for his friends and family. To never find them. Cheer up, you're not dead yet.

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