H4. The Final Presentation involves several final presentations. Dan presents himself to Beatrice with a gift from Faith, and Dan provokes Leo into presenting his swastika tattoo for the party-goers. It’s the longest section so far, and it will probably be the longest in the book; it was originally a whole chapter, but I decided to condense it because no one wants to read a whole chapter about a guy with anxiety trying to go to a party.

Dan’s moments with Beatrice reflect the Beatific Vision, the direct religious revelation. In the commentary for B2 I discussed how the poet Dante Alighieri loved a woman named Beatrice but she married another man and then died young. Dante never stopped obsessing over Beatrice, and wrote her into his vision of heaven in the Paradiso. It’s said Dante once had a dream that God made Beatrice eat his flaming heart, which is fucking metal, but also wonderfully symbolic: Dante Alighieri filtered his lustful human heart through Beatrice as if to absolve himself of that lust. Beatrice eats Dante’s heart to purify him for God.

In Akayama DanJay, Dan and Beatrice smoke a cricket. Beatrice waits for Dan to inhale, then kisses him and pulls the smoke from his lungs, and blows the smoke toward the moon. Instead of eating his heart, my Beatrice inhales Dan’s soul and exhales it in the direction of ultimate truth, represented by the moon.

My version of Beatrice is generally associated with the moon: when she appears in the afterlife in section D3 she looks like a pure polished moon. She grows wings like a weird bird, and birds are associated with celestial bodies. She likes rabbits and bunnies, which live on the moon in some mythologies.

Who gave Dan the cricket he shares with Beatrice? Faith! Faith tries to seduce Dan on the balcony, but even when she licks his teeth he’s only marginally interested. Remember, Faith cured Jay of the Teeth that Shriek in D3; Faith has power Dan dismisses. Relating this to the poet Dante (and preferring symbolic clarity over historical accuracy), Alighieri’s obsession with Beatrice was disrupting his faith. His only solution was to unite the two, which he accomplished with The Divine Comedy. In Akayama DanJay, Dan is preoccupied with Beatrice and Faith gives him the cricket he needs to break the ice with her.

During Dan’s “Beatific vision,” the person we know is Leo but who calls himself Henry busts into the room. When Dan and Beatrice indicate they do not want him near, Leo sits between them and shares their cricket. Recall, Dante Alighieri never really got his Beatific vision except in dreams and poetry; Dan can’t be allowed narrative satisfaction. When Leo leaves, it is ultimately Dan’s urge to follow him which cuts short his meeting with Beatrice. Dan’s desire to be near the person who angers him reflects the poet Dante’s preoccupation with hell and his political rivals, whom his poetic counterpart confronts before entering heaven.

Once Dan gets Leo thrown from the party, Faith isn’t happy with him. She tells Dan to sleep on the couch and leave as soon as he wakes up; he’s lost his chance to be with Beatrice because of his ire.

Still, there are other expressions of ultimate truth. Dan’s dad references the Bhagavad-Gita, in which the warrior Arjuna is gifted absolute insight into the divine form of his companion Krishna.

I’ll see you next week. I have no idea what the commentary will be!

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In H3: Leo in the Library Dan goes too far. I’ve talked previously about how I’m trying to handle references to swastikas with a sense of cultural tact, but in this section I’m deliberately transgressing those boundaries. Dan, shaken by his father’s suicide, won’t hold his tongue while Leo flaunts his swastika tattoo.

And rightly so. After Faith and Beatrice kiss in front of him, Leo says he wants to round up all the gays and shoot them. Leo’s ideology is mostly based on whatever suits him at the time rather than any actual brand of Neo-Nazism, except perhaps modern internet-bred branches; he’s more of a wannabe Neo-Nazi than anything else. (Someone in middle school once told me the “shoot the gays” line in total honesty. He always wondered why he ate lunch alone.)

But Dan doesn’t just stand up to Leo. He says, “Anyone who admires Hitler should bite a bullet in a bunker.” Dan’s got suicide on the mind, of course, because of his father, but telling people to commit suicide is generally frowned upon. Later Leo says, and Dan replies,

“What, you want me to go full Waco?”

“You mean kill your family in a fire? Yes, please. Do the world a favor.”

which provokes Leo to clobber him in the jaw.

In 1993, in Waco, Texas, a religious group called the Branch Davidians had a search-warrant issued against their compound alleging sexual abuse and illegal weapon violations, prompting a fifty-day siege by federal and state government. The siege ended in a fire which killed 76 people. The government claimed the Davidians lit the fire, but some blamed the military. The controversy was so great that some asshat blew up a preschool in a government building, killing 168.

So Dan’s retort to Leo to kill his family in a fire is a salty jab at the buttons of the domestic American terrorist. Whether the Davidians or the government lit the fire is irrelevant; Dan just wanted to provoke Leo. If I’m to let Dan go too far, he’s got to make it count with a controversial and inflammatory image which ties together the themes of my story.

Remember, Dan dies in the first section by stepping into a furnace. Dan hoards guilt for situations which aren’t his fault. I imagine he replays this conversation constantly, sometimes wondering if he should have held his tongue, sometimes mentally reaffirming his quips. But in the end, he’s the one who sets himself on fire. The thematic implication is clear: anger can consume us, even righteous anger directed at irredeemable assholes.

On the other hand, Jay maintains his composure with regard to Henry/Leo. His snark defuses Leo at every turn. Jay’s approach still makes it clear that he disapproves of Leo, but without intentionally provoking him. Since Dan and Jay are the same person reincarnated back in time, Jay is Dan with an additional lifetime of experience. Reborn and renewed, DanJay can temper his temper.

Anyway, that’s all for this week. Keep eating your worms!

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In H2: The Essentials Dan tells Jay about the time his Dad jumped out a window. Just before his death, his father gives Dan some books and claims they hold the secrets of reality. He calls these books the Essentials, and says they’ll help Dan understand that all religions are prescriptive and reality is what you make of it, and what you make of it will be in line with the inescapable Supreme Plan. Then Dan’s dad jumps out the window. Bummer.

Let’s examine the books he recommends to Dan. We’ll start with Godel, Escher, Bach because I can comment on popular sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty, and that’s sure to drum up some page views.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book by Douglas Hofstadter examining, among other things, mathematical theorems by Godel called the Incompleteness Theorems. The Incompleteness Theorems, in layman’s terms, if I understand them correctly, state that no formal logical system can be both complete and consistent. For any useful system of logic there will exist statements which cannot be proven true or false. For any system of logic in which any statement may be declared true or false, that system is useless because it contradicts itself. (Think about the phrase “This sentence is false.” Attempting to assign a truth value to that phrase—especially in some formal mathematical way—would just be a headache and a half.)

Hofstadter approaches the examination using allegorical interludes of dialogue, self-referential artwork like that of Escher, and self-similarity featured in musical fugues, in addition to theoretical computer science. The work as a whole comments on the nature of consciousness, although Hofstadter admits this commentary on cognition isn’t as clear as he’d like. (His book I Am A Strange Loop is much more direct.) I interpret the subtitle, An Eternal Golden Braid, as indicating that the views of Godel, and Escher, and Bach, and likewise works are all circling the same idea. If people have lifelines, history is the braid they make.

One of the later allegorical interludes (starting on the page labeled 630 of the pdf linked above) features dialogue from the warrior Achilles, a turtle, a sloth, and a crab watching football on television. The crab’s television picks up mysterious channels which broadcast every conceivable hypothetical situation for viewing. They watch a football game in a reality with four spatial dimensions, where the touchdown line is actually a 2D plane. Eventually it turns out crab had no such TV after all; the scenario was a hypothetical situation. I mean, of course it was: the whole dialogue was a hypothetical situation. All fiction is. That’s Douglas Hofstadter for you.

I’d like to compare that to the Inter-Dimensional Cable episodes of popular sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty. In these episodes, Morty’s mad-scientist grandpa Rick uses a fancy cable-box to watch snippets of TV from different dimensions. They’re usually short, improvised nonsense.

In contrast to Godel, Escher, Bach, Rick and Morty don’t seem to have any control over what they watch. They watch a channel until they get bored and then they flip to another at random. Meanwhile Hofstadter’s Crab can show off pretty much any reality he’d like, and the group uses the chance to check out the epistemological foundations of reality. I suspect that if the characters in Rick and Morty had the option to watch anything they wanted, they’d find a way to ruin it for themselves. Nevertheless, I always wonder if R&M creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon knew about GEB when they planned these episodes.

Even if they didn’t, depictions of infinite TV demonstrate the different ideological perspectives of Godel, Escher, Bach and Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty uses the infinite TV to tell us how pointless reality is: it’s just one pointless distraction after another in a random order. There are infinity universes and they’re all dumb, and ours is the weirdest (by virtue of containing all the universes of Rick and Morty but also Szechuan-Sauce-based riots). Godel, Escher, Bach uses the TV to show how the mind’s ability to simulate situations doesn’t allow the mind to conjure impossibilities from ether. If we could really imagine a TV which displays literally anything, we would close our eyes and instantly discover the secrets of the universe; the closest thing we can achieve is our own stream of consciousness, the ‘surround-sound television’ we can never turn off and only marginally influence. The end of the dialogue in GEB mocks the reader for expecting a satisfying answer to the question of consciousness:

Achilles: I’m all confused. If you didn’t win the Subjunc-TV after all, Mr. Crab, then how can we have been sitting here all afternoon watching it? It seems as if we ourselves have been living in some sort of hypothetical world that would have been, had circumstances just been ever so slightly different …

---

Announcer: And that, folks, was how the afternoon at Mr. Crab’s would have been spent, had he won the Subjunc-TV. But since he didn’t, the four friends simply spent a pleasant afternoon watching Home Team get creamed, 128-0. Or was it 256-0? Oh
well, it hardly matters, in five-dimensional Plutonian steam hockey.

Anyway, Dan’s Dad also gives him The Inferno, a sci-fi twist on Dante’s Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. This is honestly a great book; I’ve told people about it who scoff and say it’s a travesty to use the greats as a springboard like that, but I think all writing is written on the shoulders of giants.

Dan’s Dad says the book demonstrates that religions are just written down, giving it the legitimacy of ‘real’ religious texts. People who believe the content of certain religious texts would disagree, because those religious texts claim they are the only legitimate texts. But that’s the point: Dan’s Dad is observing that any old thing can be written down and called legitimate. That doesn’t make it true, false, or even something else, because GEB points out such labels are fundamentally ill-defined. The sci-fi retelling of Dante’s Inferno is just as ‘true’ as the ‘real’ Inferno because they are experientially true in the duration they are read and imagined, just like all texts.

Dan’s Dad gives him a physics textbook. This is the book which an atheist might say is ‘true’ in the most fundamental sense, but we’ve established there is no such thing as being true in a fundamental sense. Things can only be true in the mind, and the mind is illusory.

Finally, Dan’s Dad gives him books from Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. I mention them in the same breath because, first of all, the reflected initials CJ and JC might remind the reader of the initials of Dan Jones and Jay Diaz-Jackson, DJ and JD-J.  At the same time, Campbell’s idea of the monomyth (a story-structure which occurs in many cultures’ most important stories) relates to Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious (the idea that archetypes appear in every culture and even dreams because they serve some purpose in cognition). Dan’s Dad argues that understanding these ideas is the key to real freedom.

Then he jumps out a window. Dan blames himself, but all the books his father gives him are meant to absolve him of that guilt. His father tells Dan that reality is an illusion with no absolute or objective meaning. ‘Don’t feel bad for what I’m about to do,’ he says. ‘I’m a drop in a cosmic ocean and my death is irrelevant, as are all phenomenon.’

That’s pretty bleak. Now maybe readers can understand why Dan acts the way he does, self-destructive and constantly in need of self-cleansing. Readers might also be more forgiving of Dan’s transgressions in the next section.

Either way, see you next week. Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub, keep eating your worms.

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You can probably guess what happens in H1: Faith is Struck By Lightning. This is the third time I’ve announced the death of a character in a section title, the others being A1: Dan is Immolated in a Furnace and C4: Beatrice is Hit By a Bus. Other writers might name these sections something else so the deaths are a surprise, but I don’t see the point. Reading is about the journey, not the destination. Besides, we’ve seen before that death isn’t really a handicap in Akayama DanJay.

More importantly, I think it’s funny. There’s a dark humor in knowing Faith is about to die, and waiting for it to happen. Let’s talk about dark humor, or black humor, and how I’m trying to make readers laugh as terrible things happen to characters they like.

The line between humor and horror is thin. The way we tell jokes is the same way horror directors get us to jump out of our seats. Careful maintenance of tension and expectation leads the reader on a mental journey. Just when the reader is most susceptible to emotional whiplash (either laughter or shock), the skilled artist relentlessly drops the punchline, or the scare.

So I knew I had to kill Faith at the end of the section, when the reader might have forgotten the section title. Letting her dodge a bus just before her death reminds readers of Faith’s impending doom mere moments before it happens, inducing a sense of hopelessness. In my best case scenario, the reader is filled with hope and then their hope is dashed.

Of course, someone just being struck by lightning isn’t black humor. If an orphan was adopted and then struck by lightning, that would be black humor. Such humor requires that the reader feels guilty just for hearing the story; then they can laugh to relieve those negative emotions. Before I let Beatrice get hit by a bus, I let the reader know she was a nurse who worked at a religious hospital, pumping up her purity.

Likewise, I made sure that Faith is extra friendly this section. Beatrice was her girlfriend, but Faith copes with Beatrice’s death by helping Dan cope with Beatrice’s death. Faith offers to buy breakfast for Dan and Jay. Jay notes how happy she looks, just in time for Faith to be blasted into ash.

Dan and Jay are just as important to wringing the most emotion from this situation. Dan and Jay must be attached to Faith so her death affects them. Dan’s last conversation with Faith shows how much he depends on her friendship. Jay isn’t dependent on Faith, but he bought souvenirs for her and wanted to tell her about Virgil Jango Skyy’s story.

Then I make them watch Faith dodge a bus. Dan must have had a flashback to Beatrice’s death, and he’d barely have enough time to catch his breath before Faith is struck by lightning.

Be cruel to your characters. Whether you’re writing horror or humor, forcing characters to overcome obstacles is the basis of storytelling. In this case the cruelty I show to the trio is, in my mind, comical. I hope you got a laugh out of it, even if it was a nervous one.

Anyway, I’ll see you next week. Keep eating your worms!

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G4: Riding the River is the end of a story arc. Jay has finished his tour through Sheridan, and next Chapter he’ll be back in LA. I’ve done my best handling loose story threads: the Chinese couple, Eva, and Lilly share a moment of closure, while Leo/’Henry’ will appear again; I’ve dangled him on purpose. Let’s examine this ending to see how I try to wrap things up and provide a satisfying conclusion.

First, ‘Craig,’ ‘Suzy,’ Eva, and Lilly share their last moments ‘on-screen.’ Conjoining the endings means I only needed to write one effective scene. If I wanted to address ‘Craig’ and ‘Suzy’ and Eva and Lilly separately, I’d have to write and balance multiple scenes and that sounds hard. It’s more expedient to roll these characters together and finish them all off at once.

Second, ‘Craig’ and ‘Suzy’ tell Eva and Lilly their real names, Zhang and Li Ying. This rounds out the message conveyed in sections E4 and F1. People associate themselves with names and symbols based on how they want to be perceived and how they interpret their surroundings; ‘Craig’ and ‘Suzy’ gave English names because ‘Henry’ kept asking Michael to translate their Chinese. Now that ‘Henry’ is gone, Zhang and Li Ying can reveal themselves.

Third, I use the bird statue to bring closure to Michael’s arc. In previous sections Jay was told the statue was a shrine, but Jango told him it was a mailbox. Jay tells Michael what he learned, and Michael admits he made up the shrine story years ago because tourists didn’t care about mailboxes. Even the locals started to believe it, and they lit incense and candles in the box. This means no mail gets to the monastery, so Michael needed Jay to deliver his letter. Michael’s lackadaisical treatment of religious icons separates him from his lost nieces and nephews. Maybe he doesn’t even realize this.

So that’s all our minor characters wrapped up. When Jay returns to LA, the reader won’t expect Zheng and Li Ying to reappear. Eva and Lilly have had their time to tell the reader a story, and now we move on.

To further signify the closing of an arc, the last imagery of the chapter suggests the end of a journey. Readers have followed Jay from island to island, over hills and up mountains, all the way to the monastery; now Jay reverses direction by riding down the river in an inner-tube. In comparison to the long hike up, the return is effortless. He speaks with the other tourists, but the river separates their inner-tubes and he finds himself alone for the first time since E3. Fish swim under him while he floats under bridges. The river becomes timeless, the ocean becomes infinite. For a little while, Jay is at peace with the universe.

Of course, Akayama DanJay isn’t over, so that peace must be short-lived. Next week Jay’s world must be shaken. Let’s hope the lessons he’s learned in Sheridan help him out in Los Angeles.

Keep eating your worms!

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A lot happens in G3: The Great Stand so I had trouble choosing something to comment on. We’ve already talked about giant robot anime, Japanese, and non-linear storytelling. I eventually decided to just review some of the motifs I’ve used so far, and explain why I’ve included them. A motif is a “distinctive feature or dominant idea in an artistic or literary composition,” says Google, and noticing them is key to understanding a writer’s intentions for their work.

I didn’t start writing with motifs in mind. I wrote what I wanted, and noticed motifs later. There were a lot of mountains and a lot of worms. Now that I’m rewriting Akayama DanJay for publishing online, I can put intention behind the imagery.

In Akayama DanJay, height represents spiritual knowledge. The first paragraph of the first section shows Jango on a mountaintop looking down on two small islands, while contemplating an even larger mountain, THE Mountain, in the next eternity.  The main island of Sheridan, the holiest place on earth, is shrouded by clouds so mere mortals aren’t overwhelmed by the height of its peak. Monks in Sheridan must acclimate to the holiness of the main island by practicing on the hill of the smaller second island. Faith meets Virgil Jango Skyy in the Bighorn Mountains. Jay travels to Sheridan via airplane, like he’s being carried by a bird.

Jango says he was born in Kansas. Kansas isn’t actually the flattest U.S. State, but it’s often thought to be, so this represents the spiritual barrenness Jango felt before coming to Sheridan. His brother Jun has lived in Kansas all his life. Now Jun lives in a basement, rejecting spirituality and elevation.

But Jun has a spotlight, and lighting in Akayama DanJay has been used to represent realization or clarity of mind. In the first picture Jango’s head is framed by the sun, giving him a halo. Anihilato lives in the deep, dark underground. Leo wears sunglasses even at night. We discussed fireflies in the commentary for section G1. So even though Jun rejects spiritual influence, he sees to the heart of things.

Worms are gross. No one wants to be a worm. But Faith says in section A2 that she “usually reign[s] in regular old lost souls, like earthworms and stuff. The Zephyrs meet people like [Dan] themselves.” It seems most people turn into worms in the afterlife. In my mind, death forces humans to be humble. Turning people into worms expresses that. Some worms are larger than others, and Anihilato is the largest. Anihilato rejects humbleness; if he’s to be a worm, he’s gonna be the biggest worm.

Meanwhile, birds eat worms. The Biggest Bird gathers worm-souls and brings them to the Mountain. Beatrice is a thing with wings when she enters the afterlife, so she must be special. In particular, Beatrice has wings with no beak or claws, so she expresses only a bird’s romantic qualities and none of the dangerous or harming aspects.

How about eggs? An egg represents the potential for life. The Sheridanian Big Birds hatch from fist-sized eggs tended and laid by an enormous matriarch. Anihilato has eggs, as well, but he uses them for warmth and for battle. The Sheridanians have slightly egg-shaped heads. The first time we see Faith made of snow, she balls up into an egg-shape to keep her cold surface from the hot sand.

Faith herself is an odd case. She’s a human in life, but in the afterlife she’s a fox made of snow who can turn into a cloud. Clouds are important in Akayama DanJay, representing that which cannot be grasped, and cannot be destroyed. I think that fits ‘idyllic spiritual faith’ to a tee. Foxes are often tricksters in folklore, and Faith certainly has a mischievous playfulness. Foxes also eat birds, so Faith is naturally attracted to the bird-girl, Beatrice.

Finally, let’s look at giant robots. I’ve already waxed quite a bit on the subject, and Jango explains his own interpretation to Jun in this section. Fighting robots represent places and people, so to combine robots requires those places and people to be in harmony. As a metaphor for the power of societal change, giant robots are perfect.

Anyway, next week I’ll have some notes on writing endings and conclusions. Keep eating your worms!

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In G2: The Kid from Kansas Jay meets Virgil Jango Skyy, an old monk with an odd disposition. Jango tells Jay he met Faith Featherway not just in Section C2 but also ten years prior to that, and under strange circumstances. Akayama DanJay has a non-linear story meant to drip-feed information to the reader.

Telling a linear story is difficult enough: a writer must choose which scenes to show, from whose perspective, and at what pace, in a whole parallel universe they made up. If you allow yourself non-linearity, the gloves come off. You’ve got the whole time-space continuum to edit, and you have to tease out some one-dimensional string of text. For inspiration let’s read some notes in American Indian Myths and Legends.

The introduction to Erdoes’ and Ortiz’s collection of American folk lore tells us,

To those used to the patterns of European fairy tales and folktales, Indian legends often seem chaotic, inconsistent, or incomplete. Plots seem to travel at their own speed, defying convention and at times doing away completely with recognizable beginnings and endings.

But this is a feature, not a bug. The efficient style is a product of the reason these people tell stories, and the manner in which they tell them:

Spinning out a single image or episode may be the salient feature of—indeed, the whole reason for—telling a tale, and tales are often told in chains, one word, character, or idea bringing to mind a related one, prompting another storyteller to offer a contribution… Rather then being self-contained units, they are often incomplete episodes in a progression that goes back deep into a tribe’s traditions.

I don’t want to post whole stories from the book, but take as an example this opening from the Maidu:

I imagine a group of people sharing stories over a fire, and one mentions a butterfly. Another person is reminded of Tolowim Woman and Butterfly Man and tells it afterward, like an ancient version of queuing songs in a playlist. To make these story-weaving sessions possible, ‘modern’ story structure is eschewed for a sense of timelessness. Each story stars an iconic cast like Coyote, Gray-Fox, Mole, Turkey, Deer Hunter, and other such immediately-identifiable names and animals whose personalities would be well-known to the audience. Protagonists are often said to be “out walking one day” when some inciting event presents itself, so the story can be imagined to have taken place at any time. The place of a story in the timeline of creation mythology may be unclear until the end, when characters are suddenly revealed to have been the Sun and Moon, or constellations, or famous landmarks, or plants. More often a concrete time-period is undisclosed, so the stories can be told in any order.

Akayama DanJay isn’t as non-linear as barely-connected stories told over a campfire. The character DanJay provides a near-continuous through-line for readers to follow. Sections lead fairly directly into one another, and Chapters represent contiguous story-arcs mostly in one setting.

But the breaks in between might bring Dan back in time and make him Jillian, or throw him into the afterlife as Jay. Time-travel and alternate universes are a lot for readers to swallow. Even with DanJay’s almost unbroken plot-thread, I need to make stylistic choices which help readers cope with the shape of my story. That’s why I’m taking notes from American Indian folklore; I hope the lessons in timelessness will help me soften the transitions from timeline to timeline.

I hope to teach readers to recognize my character’s names like American Indians recognize their folk heroes. Seeing the name Dan or Jay or Faith at the start of a section should immediately ground the reader in the world of the book, just like saying “Coyote was walking along” might prime an audience for a classic tale. Most of my character names are five letters or less, and longer names like Beatrice have meaning which might make them memorable.

Although I start each section by introducing the setting and relevant characters, I try to do so quickly with only a paragraph or two. Then I introduce tension. I hope this propels readers from section to section because they want to see what the next conflict will be, just like American Indians might begin with a single line of action before an inciting event, to get to the good stuff.

I also try to revisit the same images in new contexts, as discussed in the commentary to Section D2, to make events echo and reverberate across time. Jango tells Jay the story of finding a monk smoking in a mailbox, and Jango tells the monk he once smoked a cricket in the monastery furnace. These both echo Dan’s immolation. Even Lucille climbing into her giant robot is reminiscent of the furnace scene. No matter how strange Akayama DanJay might get, it consistently circles the same ideas.

When we make the choice to present a story in a non-linear way, we should do so with purpose. For the rebellious non-linearity of Akayama DanJay, doubly so. So why did the American Indians adopt this form of storytelling?

Tellingly, many tales tell of heroes braving the land of the dead and returning with boons. Stories with such elements assert control over the world around us. It unites families with their ancestors and their progeny. Death is permanent, but timeless stories will be applicable and strengthening for generations. They can never become dated and irrelevant.

In Akayama DanJay that sense of unity with the people who came before us, and the people who came after us, and the people alongside us, will manifest into a giant fighting space-robot. That’s not so different from Coyote turning wolves and bears into the Big Dipper, in a cosmic sense.

Thanks for reading. Keep eating your worms!

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In G1. Fireflies Leo joins Jay on the path to the monastery of Sheridan. Leo is abrasive as always, but he finally leaves to wander the mountainside alone. I’d like to talk about Leo in this section, as I’ve given a lot of thought to his portrayal. (This is probably the commentary I edit most, because I’m still not completely sure what Leo’s deal is. I think it’s difficult for him to represent anything in particular because he has no values at all, but he’s willing to pretend to have any value when it’s convenient.)

If I’m doing my job as a writer, I can make people believe anything. I’ve already thrown my protagonist into the afterlife using hallucinogenic centipedes, and that’s pretty fantastical and surreal, but ultimately harmless. That’s the kind of journey which makes it worth building a magic circle and inviting people inside. But over-indulging in the vileness of an enemy is propaganda. Leo gets to restrain himself (for now).

As outlined in the commentary to E4, Leo represents the recent swell of ultra-toxic ‘politics’ in the American cultural subconscious. He’s a coward who hides his intentions behind feigned obliviousness, but shows his true colors when he thinks he’s among like-minded company. In this section he’s astounded that Jay is actually visiting monks and not just using the monastery as an excuse to steal drugs to sell back in America. Leo argues his drug-smuggling is an extension of a family tradition of smart business decisions, and sets off to steal centipedes even though Sheridan has made quite clear that centipedes are of vital cultural and religious importance. He swears using language too colorful to print.

Allowing Leo to hide his intentions from the audience as well as Jay is a courtesy. Eventually Leo will have another chance to explain himself, and then he may show more of his unsavory side. Until then, I’ll try not to look like a bad political cartoon.

Leo claims to be a self-made man because he climbed the mountain without a lantern. Perhaps he says this to deride Jay for his friendship with Michael the tour guide, as Michael gave Jay his lantern in return for his friendliness in comparison to Leo. But Leo’s claim of being a self-made man doesn’t ring true: he had a jar of fireflies to light his way, and he didn’t even collect the fireflies himself. He even expects Jay to help him carry his luggage up the final ledge, and still claims to be self-sufficient. Despite the claim, he’s quick to blame others for his life’s difficulties, as he bemoans the trouble he’ll have finding centipedes after Jay frees his fireflies. (Remember, he blamed his wife for dragging him to Sheridan. He can’t even be responsible for his own alibi.)

Speaking of fireflies, the image of jarred bugs flailing for air is a disturbing one. People aren’t normally so squeamish about dying bugs, but fireflies have a romantic connotation. Also, crickets and centipedes are associated with religion in Akayama DanJay, so trapping fireflies for light seems like abusing religious doctrine for personal gain. Freed fireflies lighting the trail to the monastery signifies the power of natural religious illumination to guide humanity to knowledge. Trapping fireflies to steal centipedes signifies the potential for religious power to be perverted by those who wish to warp the natural order to suit their whim.

I censor Leo’s final swears for three reasons. First, it lets the reader imagine what cultural boundaries Leo is transgressing. Second, it keeps Leo from being too much of a straw-man; I’m not pinning an egregious phrase on his character just to decry him for it. Third, it shows that Jay has stopped caring about what Leo says.

Anyway, I hope this commentary speaks to my writing process. I think everything in a book should line up. Next week I’ll share some inspirations for the lecture Jay will hear in the monastery of Sheridan. Keep eating your worms!

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In F4: The Main Island of Sheridan the tour hikes around the mountainous main island. In the end Jay continues hiking to the monastery of Virgil Blue, joining only the oldest birds still climbing through their life’s journey. In this commentary I’d like to talk briefly about the birds, their life-cycle, and the religion I built around them.

Real-world birds migrate. They have wings and eat bugs, so they’d might as well live anywhere they want. And somehow they know exactly where to go! Seeing migration through the lens of religion, birds are pilgrims who travel long distances guided by their faith.

At the same time, some birds have cultural significance. Owls are called wise even though they barf up bones. Eagles and hawks are honorable and patriotic. The Sheridanian Big Birds aren’t really so dignified, as they look like plump penguins, but penguins have good press lately. People like penguins because they’re devoted parents who protect their eggs at all costs, trudging miles across Antarctic ice. Wizened old tropical penguins would be the perfect pilgrims. The Sheridanian Big Birds spend their whole lives on their feet, starting from birth.

As far as I know no bird requires religious adoration to lay fertile eggs, as Michael describes, but it’s convenient from an allegorical standpoint. Taking successive islands of Sheridan to represent gradations of spiritual truth, the birds are so pure they can only be born on the second island. There the fledglings enjoy a lengthy, cherubic adolescence. When they grow large enough they swim to the main island to lounge on the beaches, mating.

They’re the only birds who mate for pleasure, joining humans, bonobos, dolphins, and I think elephants. (As an aside, how do people tell whether animals mate for pleasure? Every time I ask a wolverine I just get bit.) When the birds mate they begin with spread tail-feathers and a coy, knowing glance. They also pair off “mate to mate” and “egg-layer to egg-layer,” without concern for reproductive capability, and in a squawking heap, without shame.

I hope this reflects Paradise Lost, John Milton’s vision of humanity’s first sin; before temptation, Adam and Eve mate in a ‘pure’ and ‘innocent’ way. Here’s a passage from book four:

…So spake our general Mother, and with eyes
Of conjugal attraction unreprov’d,
And meek surrender, half imbracing leand
On our first Father, half her swelling Breast [ 495 ]
Naked met his under the flowing Gold
Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight
Both of her Beauty and submissive Charms
Smil’d with superior Love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the Clouds [ 500 ]
That shed May Flowers; and press’d her Matron lip
With kisses pure: aside the Devil turnd
For envie, yet with jealous leer maligne
Ey’d them askance, and to himself thus plaind…

Here’s a little more, where Milton explains why he thinks Adam and Eve had sex in Eden:

Strait side by side were laid, nor turnd I weene
Adam from his fair Spouse, nor Eve the Rites
Mysterious of connubial Love refus’d:
Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk
Of puritie and place and innocence, [ 745 ]
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to som, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain
But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?
Haile wedded Love, mysterious Law, true source [ 750 ]
Of human ofspring, sole propriety,
In Paradise of all things common else.
By thee adulterous lust was driv’n from men
Among the bestial herds to raunge, by thee
Founded in Reason, Loyal, Just, and Pure, [ 755 ]
Relations dear, and all the Charities
Of Father, Son, and Brother first were known.

The birds are meant to echo the purity of sex in paradise. Until the birds give up their days of frolicking, they mount each other as they please and lay infertile eggs.

(The spread tail-feathers of the mates are “like a flaming curtain.” This is like a mandala, a pattern often placed behind Hindu and Buddhist icons. The more pseudo-religious imagery surrounding these birds, the better.)

When the elder birds tire of mating and decide to climb the mountain, their real pilgrimage begins. They hike until they die, the lifelong pilgrimage marked by a porcelain egg beside the trail. When a tour passes by, the birds hide behind trees, which strikes me as a humbleness in their devotion. Above the treeline the surviving birds can’t hide like this, so they must be fearless and unabashed in their conviction.

I think that just about covers it for birds. I’ve got one final note on pilgrims: one of the first instances of the English novel is The Pilgrim’s Progress, detailing a man named Christian on his way to the Celestial City. It’s an excellent instance of allegory, even with its heavy-handedness: Christian (get it?) meets characters like “Evangelist,” “Pliable” and “Obstinate,” “Legality” and “Civility,” “Ignorance,” and my personal favorite, “Mr. Worldly Wiseman.” Compared to these, “Faith Featherway” isn’t so ridiculous, is it?

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In F3: Ferryman the tour buys seashells from a ferryman to gain passage to the main island. Aside from alluding to the river Styx (the Greek river bordering the afterlife, for whose crossing the ferryman Charon would demand two coins), this is a chance for characters to show their position in the group’s power structure. On the ferry we see those power dynamics come to a head. Subtle power dynamics can make conversations as tense as action scenes. (Have you seen the new Spider-Man movie, Homecoming? You know what I’m talking about.)

Characters are driven by their desires. In this section the ferryman wants captive tourists to buy his shells. Henry doesn’t want to pay, while the others are willing to buy souvenirs to achieve their desire, boarding the ferry. Michael wants his tour to continue without incident, aligning himself with the ferryman with snide remarks toward Henry. Eventually Henry pretends his wife bought him two sand-dollars, and the ferryman lets him through. Jay already bought two high-priced shells (partly to show up Henry), so the ferryman decides he’d made enough money to cut some slack to the man-child. His final remark to Michael shows how Henry passes at the ferryman’s mercy. Michael concurs, “Oran dora.”

But Henry thinks he won. He thinks he outsmarted the ferryman. His sense of his position in the tour group’s power structure is inflated by the concessions afforded to him by his immaturity and bull-headed ego. His confidence is so puffed up, Henry goes to break bread with Jay, his perceived comrade-in-drug-smuggling. Henry steals Jay’s passport from his backpack to return it as he sleeps, a sociopathic tactic to make Jay begin the conversation indebted to him. Henry isn’t bright but what intelligence he has is sinister.

For Jay to be locked in conversation with a drug-smuggler fond of swastikas is not a position of power, even when it’s a bumbling one like Henry. Henry doesn’t even seem to realize the aura of danger he exudes, but a trans person of mixed race probably doesn’t feel too comfortable with someone like Henry being all buddy-buddy in the middle of the night.

Jay deflects Henry’s statements (and avoids provoking him) by merely asking for clarification and making non-committal grunts. Jay lets Henry dig his own hole hoping he’ll eventually leave. But no—Henry gives his real name ‘Leo’ to make Jay reciprocate. (Of course, Leo already knows Jay’s real name, he just won’t accept it.) Then Leo mentions Faith’s cricket, which he shouldn’t know about. Saying “you only got one cricket” is like saying “you smell different when you’re awake,” in the sense that Leo accidentally reveals more information than he had intended.

In response Jay threatens to shout, reminding Leo of his low position on the totem pole. With the rest of the tour in the room, including his wife and step-daughter, Leo can’t give Jay a reason to call in the cavalry; he knows he’d be shouted at, or beaten half to death. Leo calls Jay a gaylord and walks way.

I hope this commentary demonstrates how I’m trying to make interesting interactions. Each character has a different impression of the power dynamics of the group. In each scene, the balance of power shifts.

Notice most of the tourists gave false names. Leo said his name was Henry. The Chinese couple Zhang and Li Ying gave their names as Craig and Suzy. Jay said his name was Jadie, adopting the misnomer Michael greeted him with. These are subtle power-plays. Craig and Suzy deferred to ‘Henry’ by taking names he could pronounce, and did so ahead of time signifying they knew ‘Henry’ would make a fuss and they wanted to avoid a scene. Leo usurped the power of self-introduction from the women in his family because he’s an asshole, and also so he could frame his visit to the islands as he wanted. He pretended his wife dragged him on these drug-smuggling getaways.

Why did Jay name himself Jadie? It’s an act of surly disobedience; Jay’s fake name proves to himself that he’s not playing by Leo’s rules. This connects the idea of names and titles to the concept presented with the swastika in E4: what names do people choose for themselves, and why?

Dan had his name taken from him when he was made into Jillian. Jillian discarded her name to become Jay. Jay set aside his name to become Jadie. Each of those events represents Jay’s refinement as a person. He exceeded Dan. He attained knowledge from being Jillian. The fake name ‘Jadie’ prevents his real name from being tarnished by association with Leo.

So, Jay exerts power in social situations by making friends with anyone amicable, and through malicious compliance with everyone else. Whenever Leo takes center stage as a power-play, Jay makes his own power-play by relenting that stage: Jay lets Leo dig himself into situations and curry disfavor with the tour guide.

The different ways characters assert power will result in different types of conflict. Jay is happy to subtly deride Leo for his childishness, while Leo stumbles into trouble head-on, often intentionally, but always feigning innocence to see how far he can get before someone stops him. In this section Jay has to draw the line.

That’s it for today. Keep eating your worms!

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