Introduction II

The Floating Stage - Opposites & Mirrors - Nightingales

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The Floating Stage

A universe with infinity in both directions — toward worlds in a grain of sand, and toward worlds stretching past every star — may seem like an extreme scenario, even an absurdity. By absurdity I don’t just mean a meaningless exaggeration, but also the type of absurdity Camus writes about: a universe in which we want coherence and meaning, but can’t find it. I’d add this to his existential notion: the more expansive the universe, the harder to find meaning, and hence the more absurdity. This isn’t just where philosophy meets sci-fi. It’s where subatomic physics and astronomy meet the human urge to craft an explanation or narrative that explains it all and brings it all together.

Yet how to bring it all together when everything keeps slipping further and further away, at the end of our microscope or telescope, and at the end of our nation’s shores, our philosophy’s reach, our religion’s ken? Camus said that the meaning of our self slips through our fingers like water. I’d add that meaning itself slips even further, like angstroms and galaxies through our brains.

Comparative studies — in biology, astronomy, culture, literature, religion, etc. — help us initially, because we can place what we know next to what we don’t know. We can place what we can understand next to what appears alien. Yet when the things we can compare ourselves to multiply, like a continuous line that continues to supply us with new perspectives, at some point we have to submit to the greater space, call it The Allspace, the Kosmos, Mother Nature, God, or just plain Infinity.

Zhuangzi put this admirably about 2300 years ago:

The Penumbra asked the Shadow, saying, “Formerly you were walking on, and now you have stopped; formerly you were sitting, and now you have risen up: — how is it that you are so without stability?” The Shadow replied, “I wait for the movements of something else to do what I do, and that something else on which I wait waits further on another to do as it does. My waiting, — is it for the scales of a snake, or the wings of a cicada? How should I know why I do one thing, or do not do another?”

“Formerly, I, Kwang Kâu, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Kâu. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Kâu. I did not know whether it had formerly been Kâu dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Kâu. But between Kâu and a butterfly there must be a difference. This is a case of what is called the Transformation of Things.”

This is the basic concept of The Fractal Heart. It has multiple structures and it creates meanings, but it also points to the structures beyond the ones that have been created. To put it in terms of theatre: there’s a stage, but the stage noticeably extends to the posts beneath the boards, and to the scaffolding above the painted scene. And the stage-lights lose their focus: they light up haloes around the heads in the front row, and cast moonbeam streaks onto the gilded curlicues that caper along the ceiling.

On this page I explain how my stage is constructed, and also why we can’t help hearing people talk in the lobby. We hear the intermittent sound of glasses clinking at the bar (late-comers keep opening the door!) and cars are honking in the street.

To make matters worse, my stage refuses to stay put! Instead, it floats up from the posts. Its ruffled skirt curtsies to the plaster cherubs on the ceiling. The cherubs hold arrows in their pudgy little hands. The arrows are brightly tipped with gold, and point to an invisible Cupid in the sky.

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Opposites & Mirrors

While my romance novel expands all over the place — from between angstroms to beyond universes — there are several ways in which it comes together. To start with, I often use the expansion and contraction of fractals, which are often linked to opposites. For instance, Algotodo’s quest to penetrate the dimension of Time takes place on the fractal planet he created, and Algotodo is himself a fractal. His quest is mirrored darkly by his opposites: the Ferridian Priest Cagnazzo and the anarchist rebel Antonio. Cagnazzo and Antonio try to find the hidden planet of infinite infractions — not to extend its bright candle of life, but to harness its energy, or to snuff it out. Antonio is also the opposite of his wife, the angelic Beatrice.

We also find opposites in New York, where the aesthete Curtus presumes to incarnate the best, and attempts to ignore the worst, of his collapsing nation. Occasional Cortez on the other hand does the opposite: she doesn’t give a damn how beautiful she is (although everybody else does); she aims instead to stop the dangerous nonsense of a President who promised no more wars, yet helps Putin in his war against Ukraine, and then starts a war against Iran.

Mirroring is also key to three characters, who are mirrors or refractions of their author: me. One of these characters is Albert, who is like me in that ❧ he’s from Alberta, ❧ he’s deeply influenced by French culture, ❧ he struggles to combine existentialism and religion, and ❧ he’s fascinated by the roots of language and culture, especially by the way Mesopotamian civilizations prefigure and destabilize the narratives of Judaism and Christianity. While I differ from Albert in that I haven’t dated a gorgeous Franco-Alien who gives me a magic ring of cosmic connectivity, a boy can dream.

The second of my blurry reflections is Matthew, who is the only first-person narrator in my romance. At The University of British Columbia (one of my alma maters), Matthew writes his final exam paper on The Epic in Literature (I wrote my doctoral comprehensive exams at UBC on The Long Poem and on Indian Literature in English). The pressure of prepping for the exam leads Matthew to his own epic journey — from Greece & the Trojan War to Iceland & Ragnarök. Overwhelmed by the diveristy of his material, he tries to calm his nerves by sitting in his bathtub — like Snorri Sturlesson, the famous compiler of Norse myth, whose bath, the Snorralaug, still exists in Reykholt. Matthew’s feet slip and slide in the soapy water beneath and between the smooth legs of his girlfriend, a student of environmental science who warns him of the coming apocalypse.

As he gets closer to 8 AM (when his exam starts), a drowsy Matthew looks out over the dangerous currents of the North Atlantic. He’s completely unaware that the boxy pink aliens, the Baulians, are amassing their gigantic invisible warships in the upper atmosphere. Snorri’s Prose Edda is wobbling on the tap while his eyes close and his bathtub launches itself from the coast of Iceland. With Loki and Hel working the sails, they make land at l’Anse aux Meadows, attach a drive train beneath the tub, and roar across the prairies — over the mountains and through Hell’s Gate, down to the wide stretch of highway that leads into the city of Vancouver. Amid the totem poles and collapsed bodies of fentanyl addicts, Matthew sees the giant snake Jörmungandr and the Devil himself turning the campus to flames. Orange beams streak across the sky, and the machinery of Hel thunders in the air.

Yet just as a man and a woman survive Ragnarök in the trunk of a magic tree, so Matthew and a French maid find themselves still breathing. The Baulians have sliced the planet with their orange beams and done their Orwellian work of purifying the planet. Yet Matthew doesn’t remember a thing. The Baulians know how to make people forget inconvenient truths. He smells the coffee that’s drifting up to his nostrils. He sees beneath him an intricate keyboard, curiously carved and flickering with colours. Ahead of him is a wall-sized computer screen.

For an Apocalypse, the whole thing seemed to be going rather well. What he once knew as the Web stretches its filaments outward, making him feel like Whitman’s “noiseless patient spider,” who marked “where on a little promontory it stood isolated, / Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, / It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, / Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.”

Matthew is visited daily by a Baulomorph, an alien soul in the body of a French maid. She lures him into the brave new world outside his dark cave on the 307th floor overlooking Burrard Inlet. She’s tempting, yet she’s also a distraction from his obsession, which is to write a Gospel of his times, the first page of which is the first page of this romance novel: Times New Roman.

Yet things don’t go according to plan: just as he sets a sure narrative course through the vacant vast surrounding, a news bulletin pops up on his screen: Trump, Putin, and Xi Declare Global Triumvirate.

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Nightingales

The third smudgy mirror is Ragor le Clerc, who lives in the small Alberta town of Black Diamond, across the street from the Fallarian anarchist Antonio le Triste. Ragor was born 200 years too late, for he would have been happier living in the world of Shelley, Byron, and Keats. He would have travelled with them to the vineyards of France and sat with them drinking coffee above the glossy stones in the old town of Syracuse. As a consolation, he sits in his whirlpool and drinks himself into Keats’ famous poem about the nightingale who sings so beautifully that he no longer feels the pain of life. Ragor longs to escape with that song, on its live wire of mysterious words into the deep forest. Yet, unfortunately for him, he was born in the foothills of Alberta, a less poetic place a poet has never seen.

Ragor’s name rearranges the letters of my own name, Roger Clark. Clark at first appears to be a downgrade from my aspirations to writer and poet, since it derives from the English clerk. The English still pronounce it clark, and Google only makes it worse: “In contrast, American English preserves the rhyming pronunciation with jerk.” Yet these roots themselves find roots in Old French and Latin, where they burrow down into the soil of cleric & scribe, even to the rich aquafirs of scholar & priest!

All of this appears to fit nicely with the notion that if you dig deeply enough you’ll find what you want. Ragor’s problem, however, lies deeper than that. And AI doesn’t help! According to Google, the Latin clericus is borrowed from the Ancient Greek klerikos, which derives from kleros, which means lot, allotment, or inheritance. The Indo-European roots of this are unclear, yet “some tentative connections link it to roots meaning to divide or cast lots.”

In other words, his name comes from a writer of ordinary or divine status who, were he to look deeply into himself, would find that he’s just casting lots, just throwing dice! What at first seemed so reassuring (scholar & priest!) now seems ambiguous and flimsy. Like the solid statue of Ozymandias, which had clear words written on its pedestal (“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”), Ragor’s name takes on a second meaning, pours red dye into the marble grooves, and tumbles into the sands of time.

Ragor is a Blue Dreamer, tasked by the Blue Dream Alliance (a sect of The Universal Church) to document Earth’s transition to Baulian rule. Ragor often yearns to dissolve his fragile identity into the arms of this Universal Church, where suffering is only temporary, only an illusion, here in the best of all possible worlds. Yet it gets harder and harder to escape since the big pink cubes have taken over the Earth, and are putting their finishing touches on what Orwell calls pacification, transfer of population, rectification of frontiers, and elimination of unreliable elements.

Ragor is given a great deal of latitude by the Blue Dream Alliance, so he starts ignoring the news. He slips into a Keatsean fantasy of nightingale songs, opium charms, and beakers of the warm South. He gets lost in the nightingale’s song, which he imagines to understand, and in his memories of travel in distant lands — the rice paddies of Luzon, the hill tribes of Yunnan. Yet he’s required to write weekly reports to the Blue Dream Alliance about what’s going on in the real world, which has always been the source of his troubles.

In taking stock of the world around him, he sees that Antonio, using his strange telescope, appears to have located the Soul Star! The nightingale’s song drifts, escapes into the deep forest. Ragor realizes, as Keats did 200 years ago, that “fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”

Ragor is at first terrified when he opens his eyes to everything he had glossed over. It’s as if his awareness of reality had been shrouded by a mist of dreams and ancient rhyme. Yet when he finally opens his eyes he sees all too clearly that the old threats of vengeance and the new threats of dominion and punishment are now cast upon the world, just as it has been cast on the other worlds. He’d been sleep-waking too long, been dreaming the long post-Soviet dream, only to wake up to the nightmare of real falling bombs.

Over the last several decades Ragor had worked himself into a state in which nothing really mattered, apart from the luxury of the warm water, the cool night air, the sway of the fir trees, and the beauty of music and poetry. What was the point of anything else?

Perhaps the opening of his eyes was the point. He had watched as Antonio built his massive machine of destruction. He had watched as Beatrice wept on the front porch, and as Baldric stepped out, clueless, into the world. He had seen Baldric’s travels as a comic odyssey, nothing but the fabric of an epic parody that turned a world tour into a fairy tale. But in fact Baldric’s parents were Coercion and Love. And now Antonio is at it, scratching the depths of outer space to heal his old wound. Does Ragor dare cross the street?

In a flash, like relief breaking through a doldrum of angst, Ragor realizes that the worst that can happen is that he die, which will happen anyway. Or the worst that can happen is that he will suffer, which he will anyway. And if he doesn’t suffer, someone else will. If, that is, he continues to sit in his whirlpool dreaming, imagining that poetry and alcohol is the finest of journeys. As if he were Omar Khayyam writing about earthly paradise — the ruby lip of the wine glass — while the Mongols descend on Nishapur.

Ragor knows the grim realms Antonio came from. He knows of the legions from the unholy triumvirate of the Frozen Skiff, the Grey Phantom, and the Black Pulse. Yet he also knows that in those depths there is light. He even wrote a poem on the subject:

God doesn’t just pluck the highest fruit of Eden
or skim the exosphere for angel dust.
Yet do we really want to know the whereabouts
of a Spirit that permeates both high and low —
the tubes and ducts of animals
and strange amorphic beings that drift
in the deepest ocean trenches of outer space?

Ragor has seen the coverage of the famous diplomat Farenn of Caldemar at the Kollarum Conference. Farenn may have come from the Datchau District of Fallar Discordia, one of the most brutal barrios in the cosmos, yet his eyes and words were filled with light. Perhaps it was because he had seen such darkness that he had been forced to call upon such light, Ragor couldn’t say. Yet even from a distance, he could see that Farenn had the right type of courage. He had a will so powerful, combined with a love so pure, that he could scatter light into the darkness.

Sitting in the warm water, the whirlpool blasting away all his aches and pains, Ragor reaches up to the chair on which he keeps his notebook with the green cover and the pages he refilled again and again in his travels and in writing his accounts to the Blue Dream Alliance. He flips to the back pages, which are reserved for poetry about the fall of gods, the rise of memory, and the etherial lessons of Time. With a trembling hand, he’s scribbles the following poem:

If God in far-off realms
and tracks of dark holds sway,
the light we see each morning,
rising over the dark forests
of our death and mourning
will lead the way. 

As he writes the poem he hears on his Bose speakers the rising hum of Led Zeppelin’s “In the Light.”

For the full eight minutes and forty-six seconds of the song he sits there, pen in the air, hovering above the misty landscape of sound, wondering where in all that beauty lay the darkest depths of Mordor.

The music on the Bose speakers rambles on wordlessly into the instrumental track “Bron-Yr-Aur.” Ragor recalls the lines he’d read earlier that afternoon, from The Fall of Hyperion. A Dream. He recalls the image of the goddess Moneta — Mnemosyne or Memory — standing sorrowfully as she remembers the fall of her fellow Titans, and their leader Saturn. Having entered the dream, Keats’ poet addresses Moneta:

“High Prophetess,” said I, “purge off,
Benign, if so it please thee, my mind’s film.”
“None can usurp this height,” returned that shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.” […]

“Art thou not of the dreamer tribe?
The poet and the dreamer are distinct,
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.”

Ragor presses his green pen once more into the moist paper and writes:

To John Keats

May the Divine Mother, in whatever form She takes,
Mary or Saraswati, Isis or Mnemosyne,
fill our breasts with the milk of cosmic kindness.
May She pour Her love like liquid into our chests
filling our hearts with poetry and music
so that we all — creatures great and small,
repentant and those yet to repent —
might sing like nightingales flying over the trees
in the depth of the forest.

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Next: Introduction III

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Contents - Characters - Glossary: A-F∙G-Z - Maps - Storylines