In J2: Sheridan Jay drags Dan to the town in Wyoming where Faith first met Virgil Blue. Faith’s Uncle Bob asks Jay for a frozen-slush-drink-thingie from a gas-station. Jay brings him a blue one instead of an orange one.

I don’t pay conscious attention to details like color when I write my first drafts. I try to use a variety, but I don’t go out of my way to use colors with special meaning. Meaning is a second-draft concern, when I can recall all the colors I intend to use, and mix them and match them.

Akayama DanJay is about the unity of opposites. Blue and orange are famously opposite; movie posters use blue/orange color contrast to get people’s attention all the time. We often think blue is the opposite of red, but most color wheels disagree.

Dan wears orange robes and orange shirts (he briefly wears blue in mourning after his father’s death). He meets Jango’s Virgil Blue, who wears blue (obviously). After Virgil Blue sends him to the afterlife and Dan meets Anihilato, Dan becomes Jay (or Jillian), who is associated with the color purple. This symbolizes Dan’s internalization of Virgil Blue’s lessons: orange and blue make grayish, but it’s close enough to purple (blue and red) to get the point across. Even though Jay does not totally remember his past life, its indelible impression remains.

Leo wears red. Red is close to orange, and red is associated with strong emotion. So, Leo is shown to be angry and passionate and irrational, and Dan is shown to be not much better. Jay’s redness is tempered by the wisdom of blue.

The Heart of the Mountain is also blue, but it shows the different kinds of blue available. There’s sky-blue (which Jango wears) and dark blue (which the previous Virgil Blue wears).

The Heart’s dark blue parts are harsh: they are binding tentacles and limbs. The sky-blue robes hide the harsh reality. Jango’s Virgil Blue is a kinder version of the Virgil Blue before him, who is cloaked in navy.

The Heart also has yellow and green. Yellow reminds me of the sourness of lemons and the painful brightness of the sun; the Heart’s hard, sharp beak is yellow. Yellow and blue make green, so the Heart’s green eyes combine an unpleasant burn with wisdom and understanding. God’s glare of judgement is penetrating and scrutinizing, but compassionate and accepting.

Faith is white, symbolizing purity. Whatever happens to Faith she escapes unstained. Beatrice is also light-colored, but her texture is cloudy. She’s more distant and reserved, but just as pure as Faith, if not purer. Combined with the rest of the Beatific imagery, we understand Beatrice to be a figure of supreme spiritual power in the universe of Akayama DanJay. But she is clouded and opaque; none may view her from outside. Dan’s only path to Beatrice is through Faith.

Inside the Mountain, the yellow and blue skies mix into green.

In LLS-TA, there are robots of every solid color, just like Sheridanian Big Birds.

I hope this color-commentary seems intriguing, because I’m not totally sure where I’m going with it. I just want to make sure colors have enough meaning to allow for some apotheosis by the end.

That’s it for this week. Keep eating your worms!

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In J1: Uncle Featherway Jay interviews the conspiracy theorist with tinfoil lining his fedora. Uncle Featherway’s impression of Virgil Blue happens to involve space-aliens and cargo cults, just like the grand unified theory he outlined for Faith in C1: The Sheridanians. Like he tells Jay, sometimes we see what we want to see.

Jay doesn’t seem to take Bob Featherway’s conspiracy theory too seriously. Jay humors Bob by saying things like “huh” and “hm” and “how insightful.” But as I said in this commentary, I find the idea of an objectively true philosophy philosophically unfounded. As Jango says, there are no coincidences; maybe Bob’s onto something with his aliens.

So let’s talk about conspiracy theories.

In a broad sense, everything we think we know is a theory. When you’re trapped in Plato’s cave you have to guess at the form of some so-called ‘reality’ based on your sensory perceptions. We assume there’s something called an ‘I’ because we have to assume something at some point, if we want to say anything about anything. This relates to Hume’s problem of induction, which calls into question our ability to ‘know’ anything in the first place.

That’s not to say that everything is a conspiracy theory—just that everything is, in a philosophical sense, unproven. A conspiracy would require some agents behind the scenes acting to fool us. So, in the case of whether sensory perceptions can be trusted to assure us of our personal existence, we have to ask who could possibly be pulling the strings.

Rene Descartes said Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. He reasoned that even if God or some all-powerful demon tried to deceive him into thinking he exists—well, he’d have to exist, in order to be fooled.

Is that a conspiracy theory? It’s sort of a mathematical proof which obnoxiously proves a point without providing a satisfactory reason. It shows that we exist because, for contradiction, if we didn’t exist, but we believed we exist, then the thing which is believing is the thing which exists, which we can call “I.”

Can “the thing which is doing the believing” be called a conspirator? I don’t see why not. It’s the thing which convinces us we exist, whether or not it is our self. If “I” exist, the conspirator convincing me I exist must exist as well.

So in order to keep up the illusion of a self which exists, we must add things to its definition. Things become self and non-self. Our nose? Probably our self. Our feet? Yeah. The food we eat? Maybe, while it’s inside us. Our heritage? Of course. Our religion? Equal to reality, which we call the self. Our ideas? Well, what else could be called self?

But once our ideas become self, other ideas become non-self. Suddenly every theory you don’t believe is a conspiracy theory by virtue of its propagation by the “other,” the “outside.” We form social circles like cell walls to maintain the integrity of the ideas we associate with ourselves, which has suddenly become a group self. We cease to be individual organisms and become amoebas of ideas whose pseudopods are all our bodies, and whose sense organs are all our minds, and whose interstitial fluid is media distributing rhetoric.

Maybe this is what Krishna meant when he spoke to Arjuna of the science of uniting the personal self with the universal self. Or maybe this is what Krishna meant for Arjuna to avoid, in associating with a particular group instead of with the whole. Or maybe both are the same.

Personally, I’m a trivialist. I believe all things are true. I understand there are a great many arguments against trivialism from brilliant philosophers through the ages dismissing the idea as “absurd” and “pointless,” and I totally agree with them. I agree with everything; everything is true. Everything is also false, and every other possible state, and in a super-position of all values at once, because all categorization is meaningless, including meaninglessness.

Relating this back to the sense of self, surely I exist. I also don’t exist. I am realized and derealized. I’m a non-sentient automaton and the one true God peering through everything’s eyes at once, and any other statement you’d like to label me with. All comparative statements are tautological.

But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

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In my commentary to H4 I discussed the Beatific vision. The Beatific vision is usually meant to represent the ultimate divine revelation, but not quite so in Akayama DanJay. In Dante Alighieri’s dreams, his unrequited, courtly love Beatrice Portinari ate his heart to purify him for God. In Akayama DanJay the Beatific vision is understood to be preparation for the ultimate divine revelation, not the thing in itself.

In I4: Inside the Mountain Dan walks along a wide white path. This is the reader’s first glimpse of the inside of the Mountain.

Close readers will remember that the white wing which becomes Dan’s path belongs to Beatrice; when she’s hit by a bus, she appears in the afterlife as a giant Zephyr. The Heart of the Mountain said no one should enter the Mountain unless they never hoped to emerge; somehow Beatrice’s wings allow Dan and Faith to enter the Mountain and return.

The inside of the Mountain represents some kind of ultimate reality, outside of life and death. Dan follows his path and quickly determines how to walk it in a way which satisfies his senses. Then he finds a goal, the sun. His path doesn’t lead to the sun but another path does. He changes paths.

The character ‘DanJay’ is associated with the number two. DanJay has two lives, once as Dan, once as Jay. Jay opens an egg with two yolks. Here Dan walks two different paths.

The second path nears the sun, and Dan is hit in the head with an egg. The egg orbits the sun, which the Heart of the Mountain claims births reality. If the egg merely orbits birth without moving further from it or closer to it, it must be stationary in its life’s progression. Also, the bird looks exactly like the bird Anihilato presents to Dan. (As the Heart of the Mountain says, even things outside the Mountain are in the Mountain.) Anihilato’s eggs are not things which are utterly obliterated, they are things which are held in stasis.

The Biggest Bird, the Heart of the Mountain, wraps its wings around Dan. Perhaps this movement is affectionate, but maybe the hug is to hold Dan back from the sun, lest he lose himself to devotion.

Dan says reality is shaped like a high-dimensional torus, and describes that shape as a circle swept in a circle swept in a circle. A torus is like a donut.

In the Paradiso, Dante Alighieri describes heaven as a series of concentric circles. The highest circle is beyond the material plane and is the abode of God. Here Dante understands predestination and comprehends the full glory of the divine trinity.

Ezekiel describes wheels within wheels like gyroscopes which are the chariots of gods, encircled with eyes.

For research I subscribe to r/Psychonauts, a subreddit where people describe psychedelic experiences. In that link they describe cognition and reality as a torus.

In my senior thesis I describe the De Bruijn Hypertorus, a combinatorial object in discrete mathematics which contains every possible combination of binary elements with length two in any finite number of dimensions.

There is divinity in the donut. Even Stephan Hawking considered the possibility of a donut-universe.

So, the idea of a high-dimensional torus representing the ultimate conception of reality presses a surprising number of buttons. It’s consistent with multiple conceptions of the religious ultimate including the entheogenic. It relates to concepts in topology and mathematics. And it might just be the shape of the universe.

But anyway, who knows. Keep eating your worms.

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In I3. The Agony is Over Dan sculpts himself from froth. I had considered joining this section to the one before it. Both sections are barely 1000 words, and relatively little happens in them: Dan says nothing and hardly moves twenty feet. Most of these sections are devoted to disturbing imagery.

In a narrative sense, these sections could be considered a waste of time. They hardly move the plot forward even if they explore Dan as a character. We don’t learn anything new about the afterlife, as we’ve been there twice before. If these sections are a waste of time, should they be shortened or cut?

Maybe. But I like these sections as they are. Here are a few notes in defense of wasting time.

1. The reader needs time to process.

Not every chapter can kill a main character, kill a main character’s dad, reveal secrets about an antagonist, and propose a cognitive explanation for religious experience. This is a chance for the reader to lean back from the heavier fare of Chapter H and enjoy an unadulterated glimpse at the Teeth that Shriek.

2. These scenes let me experiment with our thematic imagery.

Dan is initially an amoeba, a formless mass, tabula rasa, a blank slate. But Dan’s feelings of anger and guilt manifest as the Teeth that Shriek. Once he collects himself he decomposes into a puddle of water and a pile of worms. Faith carries the worms away and the puddle recreates Dan entirely. If worms represent the physical aspects of human existence, the puddle is the intangible aspects.

Dan is an allusion to Dante Alighieri, the poet, and Dante, the character in The Divine Comedy (as it’s not clear the author meant his character to literally be himself). Dante, the character, is something of an allegorical everyman. His journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven is a tour for the reader of the possible outcomes of life. My Dan is also an everyman; he’s a specific person, but he represents man’s mortal nature.

His experience building himself out of water shows that man’s nature is not based on his raw physicality. When the worms are gone, some water remains. From the foam of this water we sculpt ourselves.

3. This is necessary for Jay to know, to provide tension.

The character ‘DanJay’ begins as Dan, dies, and is reincarnated as Jay with hardly any memory. Jay is not the mortal everyman like Dan: Jay has transcended death in his reincarnation. If death isn’t an obstacle, where is the tension in Akayama DanJay?

When Jay hears about Dan’s experience with the Teeth that Shriek, it must be like remembering trauma buried deep. Jay was Dan. He knows precisely what’s at stake when he messes with centipedes and the afterlife. If Jay has a bad trip, or if he dies and wakes in the afterlife, he might be trapped forever in a ball of shrieking teeth. Could he save himself again, or was Dan’s reconstruction a lucky fluke?

Overall these scenes might not move the narrative forward, but they contribute something invaluable to the narrative anyway. Every story benefits from breaks in the action, thematic clarity, and high stakes. In Akayama DanJay the worst possible ending is eternal, self-inflicted torment.

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In I2: Ten Thousand Earthworms Dan gives the reader a closer look at the Teeth that Shriek. The last time we saw the teeth, I explained that they represent panic and anxiety. Today Dan consumes himself with terrible teeth in some sort of psychotic breakdown. On psychoactive, hallucinogenic centipede-dust, this breakdown manifests as a living nightmare.

I have a history with horror. As a kid I watched horror movies knowing that the scary images would be burned into my mind. I knew I’d lie awake imagining monsters in my closet. And yet, I couldn’t look away. Nowadays I enjoy watching horror movies, especially surreal flicks like David Lynch’s Eraserhead and practical-effect showcases like John Carpenter’s The Thing. If a scene lingers in my mind, that’s just the mark of a well-made movie.

A common thread in many of those movies is body horror. The Thing mutilates people and shape-shifts into awful monsters. Eraserhead‘s supposedly human child is an inhuman shape inspiring morbid curiosity. As humans, we have a mind-map of our body. The idea of altering that mind-map is disturbing. The thought of uncontrollably becoming something wretched is terror of a fundamental sort. Compare to Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Torture-porn movies like the Saw franchise try to ground this terror in reality (sort of). I prefer abstracting that terror to the rules of the subconscious. In David Cronenburg’s Videodrome, the main character’s firearm is fused with his flesh; in deciding to kill, he binds himself irrevocably with the concept of killing. Tetsuo the Iron Man has a character’s penis mutate into a power-drill which kills his girlfriend.

Now, in Akayama DanJay, Dan turns into a ball of nerves and gums consumed by his own teeth. He is like a “cramping gonad” and grows an impacted narwhal tusk. It’s obviously an unpleasant experience.

Then he manages to pull himself together. As a person with anxiety, Dan has probably practiced breathing exercises before; he seems to use the technique to withdraw the teeth. With concerted effort Dan is able to retrieve even the narwhal tusk and subsume it back into his form.

Then he melts into earthworms. I’ve previously mentioned that earthworms are the souls of sentient beings; death forces humans to be humble, so it only fits that our souls are disgusting, wriggling piles. The earthworms that were Dan squirm in a puddle combining into bigger and bigger worms. When all of them have combined, the worm-thing tries to escape into the desert.

What must it look like, this worm-thing? My crude artwork notwithstanding, I imagine it looks like a human brain: a ridged, pink mass. This pink mass rejects the Mountain even though half the characters in Akayama DanJay seem to worship the Mountain as Heaven and God rolled into one. The worm-thing seeks only darkness in cool, damp soil. Even when humans know better, we seek sensory pleasure above all else.

But Faith the white fox catches the worm-thing before it can go. The Heart of the Mountain told her to take it to Anihilato in the last section, so she whisks the worms into the desert.

Anihilato eats earthworms. Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? We’ll have to wait and see. Thank you for reading!

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In I1. Salt and Alcohol Dan cleans a bong. We’ve gone full circle: the bong named Leo from C3 has now been properly introduced. I didn’t think I had much commentary for this section, but I’m watching Breaking Bad right now and I realized that Dan’s downward spiral is worth reviewing.

Breaking Bad was a TV show about a high-school chemistry teacher who starts cooking meth when he’s diagnosed with cancer. It was and still is highly regarded, not least for its grim depiction of an ordinary man whose decisions drag him deeper and deeper into a life of darkness.

Dan’s experimentation with drugs is totally different (in fact, I only mention Breaking Bad for search-engine-optimization). But Dan’s still an ordinary-ish person, and his path from normalcy to a horrifying drug-trip is illuminating.

In the last sections we’ve watched Dan watch his dad die. We’ve watched Dan’s smoldering anger stoked by Leo. We’ve watched Dan leave his beloved Beatrice to pursue that anger. Now even Faith has kicked him out. It’s not much of a stretch to think Dan would want to unwind with some substance abuse. He smoked his first cricket the previous night with Beatrice; maybe he hopes to recapture the magic of that moment by smoking some ground-up cricket from Leo’s bong.

But not before he cleans it. In cleaning the bong, Dan externalizes his desire for self-cleansing. He names the bong Leo and throttles it to further externalize the parts of himself he does not want to acknowledge. He wishes to undo actions, rewind time, and absolve himself of perceived sins; he only manages to scrub the bug-crust from his water-pipe.

Dan’s meticulousness in cleaning the bong makes it a little ironic that he doesn’t make sure the bong contains only cricket powder and not any centipede. In later sections, when Dan regains his composure but is still hallucinating, he’ll wonder if Leo purposefully prepared the bong with centipede powder to trick Dan (which is ridiculous; Leo couldn’t have known Dan would end up with the pipe). But it’s possible Dan realized there might be centipede in the bong. In Dan’s mind, he’s lost everything he lived for. If he smokes centipede, so be it.

His bad drug-trip begins so abruptly I don’t soften the transition: I throw Dan from his couch into the afterlife. Dan appears as an amoeba in unthinking agony. He has no arms or legs or sense organs; he’s built only to be torn apart by teeth. The teeth inside him mirror the jagged salt and burning alcohol he used to clean Leo.

He has no mouth but he tries to scream, a quick reference to a famous short story with that title. In that short story, a giant computer torments the last remaining humans and turns one of them into a blob which can’t scream. Eventually we’ll learn this reference is a little on-the-nose, but so far we haven’t seen any giant hell-computers in Akayama DanJay.

The Heart of the Mountain wanders by Dan and apologizes for not being able to help him. The If Dan gets out of this situation, he’ll have to do it alone.

Thanks for reading! Keep eating your worms!

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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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