The Long Bright Dark: Allusions in True Detective

During the last episode of season four of True Detective, some cheered and others groaned when Raymond Clark said “time is a flat circle,” repeating Reggie Ledoux and Rustin Cohle’s line from season one. OG creator and showrunner Nic Pizzolato himself did not appreciate the homage to the original. Allusions as such can go either way.

At their best, allusions add layers of meaning to our stories, connecting them to the larger context of a series, genre, or literature at large. At worst, they’re lazy storytelling or fumbling fan service. It feels good to recognize an obscure allusion and feel like a participant in the story. It feels cheap to recognize one and feel manipulated by the writer. They are contrivances after all: legacy characters, echoed dialog, recurring locations or props—all of these can work either way, to cohere or alienate, to enrich the meaning or pull you right out of the story.

[WARNING: Spoilers abound below for all seasons of HBO’s True Detective.]

The spiral as seen in season four of True Detective: a motif smuggled out of the mythology of season one.

Our experience with a story is always informed by our past experience—lived or mediated—but when that experience is directly referenced with an allusion, we feel closer to the story. Allusions are where we share notes with other fans, and they form associative paths, connecting them to other artifacts. So, if you recognized Ledoux or Cohle’s words coming out of Clark’s mouth, or if you recognized all of them as Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, you probably felt a closer tie to the story. As he wrote in The Gay Science (1882), “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” For Nietzsche, this is all there was, and to embrace this recurrence was to embrace human life just as it is: the same thing over and over.

Rust Cohle and Marty Hart in season three.

Moreover, in season four we got the ghost of Rust Cohle’s father, Travis Cohle, a connection to the vast empire of the Tuttle family, and the goofy gag of recurring spirals. Season three had its passing connections to season one as well, as seen in the newspaper article in the image above. Given the pervasive references to it, season one may have been the show’s peak, but my favorite is still the beleaguered second season, the only one so far that stands free of allusions to the other seasons of the anthology. Perhaps it is the most hated season of the series because of its refusal to connect to and coexist with the others, yet—riding the word-of-mouth wave from season one—it’s also the most watched.

It should be noted that in addition to its lack of allusions to season one and any semblance of interiority, season two also lacks any sense of the spiritual. There is only the world you see and feel in front of you, no inner world, no adjacent beyond, no Carcosa. As Raymond Velcoro says grimly, “My strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve.”

Bezzerides and Velcoro share a moment of quiet contemplation.

Season two continues the gloom of the first season, moving it from the swamps of Louisiana to the sprawl of Los Angeles. Like its suburban setting, season two stretches out in good and bad ways, leaving us by turns enlightened and lost. Though, as Ian Bogost points out, where Cohle got lost in his own head, the characters in season two—Ani Bezzerides, Paul Woodrugh, Frank Semyon, and Velcoro—get lost in their world. The physician and psychoanalyst Dr. John C. Lilly distinguished between what he called insanity and outsanity. Insanity is “your life inside yourself”; outsanity is the chaos of the world, the cruelty of other people. Sometimes we get lost in our heads. Sometimes we get lost in the world.

Rust Cohle in his storage shed in season one.

To be fair, season one isn’t without its references to existing texts. Much of the material in Cohle’s monologues is straight out of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press, 2010), where he quotes the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (even using the word “thresher” to describe the pain of human existence), and the dark-hearted philosophy of Nietzsche, of course. The writings of Ambrose Bierce (“An Inhabitant of Carcosa”), H.P. Lovecraft (Cthulhu Mythos), and Robert W. Chambers (“The Yellow King”) also make appearances. Daniel Fitzpatrick writes in his essay in the book True Detection (Schism, 2014), “Through these references, engaged viewers are offered a means to unlock the show’s secrets, granting a more active involvement, and while these references are often essential and enrich our experience of the show, in its weaker moments they can make it seem like a grab-bag of half thought-through allusions.”

“One of the things that I loved most about that first season of True Detective was the cosmic horror angle of it,” says season four writer, director, and showrunner Issa López. “It had a Carcosa, and it had a Yellow King, which are references to the Cthulhu Mythos with Lovecraft and the idea of ancient gods that live beyond human perception.” The hints of something beyond this world, “the war going on behind things,” as Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle put it, pulled us all in. “That sense of something sinister playing behind the scenes, and watching from the shadows,” she continues, “is something that I very much loved.”

In his book on suicide, The Savage God (1970), Al Álvarez writes, “For the great rationalists, a sense of absurdity—the absurdity of superstition, self-importance, and unreason—was as natural and illuminating as sunlight.” By the end of season one, Rustin Cohle seems to embrace the eternal recurrence of his life, the spiral of light and the dark—including his own daughter’s death. At the end of Night Country, Evangeline Navarro seems to do the same, walking blindly into extinction, one last midnight, a lone sister, fragile and numinous, opting out of a raw deal, lost both in her head and in the world.

Kiss Destroyer

We met halfway. For the first time since meeting her, I knew definitively that she was with someone. She was engaged. The wedding was a few months off. We talked and we drank and we danced and it felt like it always felt. I was overwhelmed. The only thing that kept me grounded was knowing that in a few months, she’d be married to someone else. And I’d be gone.

I leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “this is nice.”

She stopped, stunned. She flashed a withering look and edged away from me through the crowd.

“Wait!” Hearing me behind her, she hurried on. I caught her in the bar. “I meant that it felt nice knowing—”

“No, I feel the opposite,” she turned and said. “It doesn’t feel nice knowing. It feels awful!”

“Well, I was speaking for you. I thought—” She put her finger on my lips to shush me. She was definitely angry but seemed ready to recover.

“Want some?” she asked, pulling a flask from her purse.

“What is it?”

“Have some or don’t,” she said over her shoulder, walking out onto the balcony.

“I didn’t think—” I said as she drank.

“You always knew.” She handed me the flask. I downed a gulp of sweet liquid. It tasted the way antifreeze smells, perhaps a flavored vodka of some kind. “I always hoped, but I never knew.”

“Is that why you’re here now, hope?”

“Yes.”

“Well, all of your hopes are here, and they’re all shit. Sorry.”

As I took another swig, everything took on a fog, soft around the edges. I felt anger and disappointment sharpening in me. “Then why are we here? What is this?”

“Let’s dance!” She said, draining the flask.

“I don’t want to—” She grabbed my arm and dragged me inside. She kissed me deep, hard, obviously feeling the drink, and then pulled me onto the dance floor.

The music and the bodies blurred. We were together, then apart, then together. One minute, we were blended into one, the next, we were on different planets. Other bodies remained distinct, but ours melded and folded and separated like taffy. The music was one, long song, and it was always exactly the right one.

The melding continued when we finally made it upstairs to bed. I’m not even sure we had sex, but we were one many times over before we slept. We fell in and out of love over and over, fighting, folding, fucking. I wish I could remember it more clearly.

“Every time you make a decision, it’s like destroying a whole other world,” she told me earlier that evening. “I never wanted to destroy this one.”

Advance Praise:

“Working the borderlands between philosophy, sci-fi, and ultra-contemporary social critique, these stories illuminate our strange cusp moment in a deeply humanistic and bracing manner. A sharp, propulsive, and canny collection.” — David Leo Rice, author, Drifter

“In Roy Christopher’s inquiring, voracious tales, memory is a form of energy, and worlds emerge out of slippages, of which—ouch, there’s another—there are many more than we like to admit.” — Matthew Battles, author, The Sovereignties of Invention

“The stories in Different Waves, Different Depths showcase an impressive range of voice and style. They challenge without being difficult; evoke nostalgia without feeling rote. A fantastic collection.” — Joshua Chaplinsky, author, The Paradox Twins

“Hard-boiled strange loops in a froth of weird.” — Will Wiles, author, Plume

Other Excerpts:

Many thanks to Patrick Barber for all of his amazing work on putting this thing together, making it look so nice, and getting it out there. Thanks to Jeffrey Alan Love for the cover illustration, to The Little One for the title, to all the previous publishers of these stories for their support, and to you for reading.

Get your copy now!

Different Waves, Different Depths is dedicated to the memory of Kelly Lum.

September 1, 2023October 8, 2024

Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori

The Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is a 163 page paperback book, with an accompanying soundtrack! It’s a conceptual collaboration between cult Japanese author, Kenji Siratori, the Canadian electro-acoustic duo Wormwood, and a host of well known academics, writers, and other members of the Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds, including me!

The Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is an AI-generated, xenopoetic “glitch novel” of sorts, with a good portion of the book also given over to a randomly written and ordered set of strange and beautiful footnotes that were submitted by the 60+ members of the Ministry. This is a futuristic work on all fronts, and in order to contrast with the digitally obtrusive writing, and to play into our belief in“technological mutualism”, our packaging design and visual aesthetic is of a more analogue and DIY, old school cut and paste nature. What we have here then is a work of art that bridges past and future, but is firmly embedded in the NOW!

Andrew Wenaus explains:

The result is a work of xenopoetic emergence: a beautifully absurd, alien document scintillating with strange potency. Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is a xenopoetic data/dada anthology that documents the activities of the artist collective The Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds. The anthology results from an experimental approach to impersonal literary composition. Similar to surrealist definitions, but on the scale of a technical document, members of the Ministry-poets, musicians, novelists, painters, curators, artists, scientists, philosophers, and physicians-were asked to offer a microfiction, poem, essay, fictional citation, or computer code, in the form of a footnote or annotation to a glitch-generated novel by iconoclastic Japanese artist Kenji Siratori; however, each participant wrote their contribution without any access to or knowledge about the nature of Siratori’s source text. After collecting the contributions, the “footnotes” were each algorithmically linked to an arbitrary word from Siratori’s novel. Bringing together algorithmically and Al-generated electronic literature with analogue collage and traditional modes of literary composition, the Ministry refuses to commit solely to digital, automated, or analogue art and instead seeks technological mutualism and a radically alien future for the arts.

Accompanied by a groundbreaking original score by electro-acoustic duo Wormwood, the anthology offers the radical defamiliarization and weird worlds of science fiction, but now the strangeness bites back on the level form. Readers should expect to discover strange portals from which new ways of thinking, feeling, and being emerge. A conceptual and experimental anthology, Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori inaugurates collective xenopoetic writing and the conceit that the future of art will consist of impersonal acts of material emergence, not personal expression. Consume with caution.

CREDITS:

Book written by Kenji Sartori.

Footnotes by the Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds: Rosaire Appel, Louis Armand, David Barrick, Gary Barwin, Steve Beard, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Mike Bonsall, Peter Bouscheljong, Maria Chenut, Shane Jesse Christmass, Roy Christopher, Tabasco “Ralph” Contra, Mike Corrao, R.J. Dent, Paul Di Filippo, Zak Ferguson, Colin Herrick, S.C. Hickman, Maxwell Hyett, Justin Isis, Andrew Joron, Chris Kelso, Phillip Klingler, Adam Lovasz, Daniel Lukes, Ania Malinowska, Claudia B. Manley, Ryota Matsumoto, Michael Mc Aloran, Andrew Mcluhan, Jeff Noon, Jim Osman, Suarjan Prasai, Tom Prime, David Leo Rice, Virgilio Rivas, David Roden, B.R. Yeager, Andrej Shakowski, Aaron Schneider, Gary J. Shipley, Kenji Siratori, Sean Smith, Kristine Snodgrass, Sean Sokolov, Alan Sondheim, Simon Spiegel, Henry Adam Svec, Jeff VanderMeer, R.G. Vasicek, Andrew C. Wenaus [Ministry Director], William Wenaus, Eileen Wennekers, Christina Marie Willatt, Saywrane Alfonso Williams, D. Harlan Wilson, and Andrew Wilt.

All music composed by Andrew Wenaus and Christina Marie Willatt.
Performed by Andrew Wenaus, Christina Marie Willatt, and Kenji Siratori.

Packaging design and artwork by Colin Herrick.
Produced by Andrew Wenaus and Time Released Sound.

WARNING!! AS IS STATED ON THE BACK OF THE BOOK:
“Loved ones of those that disappeared reported that prior to their detainment, the victims were sent an unmarked envelope. The envelope contained a letter whose contents consisted exclusively of 317 black rectangular glyphs. Due to the still uncertain nature and status of this Appendix, Time Released Sound would like all readers to be aware of this history!”

Those of you that purchase the Limited Edition version will very possibly be sent one of these envelopes as well, sometime after you have received the book, so please be careful when ordering it!

Get yours today!

March 23, 2023November 2, 2024

Building a Mystery: Taxonomies for Storytelling

My own sketchy rendering of Frank the Rabbit from ‘Donnie Darko’ (2001).

Story structure helps us recognize a story as a story, but how are there so many stories? How do they stay interesting to us if all of them have the same basic structure? I feel like another task of a good story is to overload our perceptive buffer and sneak the rest of the goods in unnoticed. But how?

In a 2005 interview with Daniel Robert Epstein (R.I.P.), Pi director Darren Aronofsky likened writing to making a tapestry: “I’ll take different threads from different ideas and weave a carpet of cool ideas together.” In the same interview, he described the way those ideas hang together in his films, saying, “every story has its own film grammar, so you have to sort of figure out what the story is about and then figure out what each scene is about and then that tells you where to put the camera.”

Now, when watching a movie or reading a book, I often find myself trying to break down its constituent parts. Also, when writing or creating, I sometimes try to establish a loose taxonomy of the elements involved in the project, a list of the salient aspects of the story. These are orthogonal to the usual concerns about structure (e.g., the three acts, beat map, midpoint, climax, etc.), but they’re as important. Necessary but not sufficient.

Here are a few examples:

Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) contains the following concepts:

Animal wrangling
Hollywood context
Electronic surveillance
Carnival sideshows
Spectacle
UFOs

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), my favorite movie, contains the following:

High-school context
Pookah legend
Time-travel
Literature
Psychosis
Superhero ideology

And Aronofsky’s own Pi (1998) contains these:

Chaos theory
Stock market
Go
Migraines
Kabbalah
Computer technology

There is a limit, a rule of the grammar, of the number of elements that the average story can carry. There’s a point, a threshold, at which too many elements cause one story (or one “page,” in the design scenario) to fall apart, a line across which something else (e.g., another page, a sequel, etc.) is needed. This limit is qualitative to be sure, but it’s not hard to tell when it’s been exceeded. There are exceptions, of course (think Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Magnolia or Thomas Pynchon’s almost intractable Gravity’s Rainbow).

Though this might ultimately be an aesthetic idea, and this could be considered the outer limits of it, scientists such as Richard Feynman, Bucky Fuller, and Albert Einstein have often spoken of the “beauty” of the right solution to a problem. Fuller once said, “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” And Einstein professed, “The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.”

Calling the idea “beauty” is a bit oversimplified and not helpful, but one can see where a working theory can only contain a certain number of elements (i.e., constructs or concepts) before it becomes operationally unmanageable. And while building a theory and weaving a narrative are very different pursuits, one can see parallels in the number of elements each will afford. It’s less like the chronological restrictions we place on certain activities (e.g., you must be 18 to vote, 21 to drink, etc.) and more like having enough cream and sugar in your coffee. It’s a difference like the one between hair and fur.

I find RZA’s The Wu-Tang Manual (Riverhead, 2005) a perfect case study of how to build a modern mythology. One cannot deny the mystique surrounding the Wu-Tang Clan, and this book spells out the elements involved in creating that mystique without rendering it obsolete. When creating my own taxonomies, I will often refer to The Wu-Tang Manual to get an idea of whether or not my project possesses the proper amount of simplicity, complexity, and balance. The RZA’s is not a flawless system, but it’s damn solid.

I started doing these lists just as a writing exercise, and one I haven’t seen in any of the writing books. Along with traditional structural concerns, these lists help keep the story on the skeleton.

[This piece originally appeared on Lit Reactor.]

October 11, 2022October 8, 2024

“Hope for Boats”: A Prologue Reading

On October 11, 2022, I read the Prologue of my story “Hope for Boats” to the Rotary Club of Elba, Alabama, on which the fictional town in the story is loosely based. You can read the excerpt along with me below.

The town of Elbo was built in a crook of the Pea River. If you think that’s where it got its name, you’d be one of the many that are misinformed about this town’s origins. One of the area’s early residents was reading Herodotus’ Histories, in which he describes an island “ten furlongs by ten furlongs, built of ash and earth.” Elbo is named after this island as it was drawn from a hat before any of the other suggestions.

And if you have a joke about the Pea River, save it. From Linda Blair to urinal cakes, we’ve heard them all.

The water flowing by in that crook in the Pea River sometimes tries to straighten out, flooding the town of Elbo, but not before the area around its original downtown intersection becomes an island. The citizens have built bridges and walls, but when those two sides wish to meet, there’s no stopping them.

Two warring families settled in this area before there was a town. As there often are, a young son and a young daughter from each just had to be together in spite of their families’ differences. That young love, the fires of which have long since ceased to burn, belonged to Fannie Demer and Thomas James Hickok. Theirs was a short courtship, but a long engagement. As Thomas James was fond of saying, “I can put a ring on her finger, but I can’t make her an honest woman.” More than anyone, they are responsible for establishing what we now know as Elbo, Alabama.

Have you ever watched a bird build its nest? They gather pieces of limbs, leaves, detritus, debris, dirt, mud, and plastic—piles of the past culled for a cradle for the future. Birds put all of their eggs in one makeshift basket.

That was him.

Have you ever watched a spider weave its web? They’re as meticulous as they are calculating. Once they pick the right spot between the limbs of trees or fence posts or poles, they spend as much time as it takes building their lattice trap. Spiders then hang in the middle, waiting. The very picture of patience.

That was her.

Today is his funeral.

Today there is a parade in her honor.

Either event would halt the town for the day. Both will bury it. The lines are drawn. Sides must be chosen. Maybe it won’t flood again.

Many thanks to Courtney Pelham for setting this up, the Rotary Club for their time and interest, Malarkey Book for publishing this Prologue, and Cindy Bayer for filming.

The story remains in-progress.

Tag: Fiction