I could have cropped out JRR’s window, but I think his window is important.
You see, in many ways, Poe is my Main Man of American letters. He’s his own topic all by himself in my writing life. Trying to keep the reality subject clean, I left him out of the Reality posts here. But as I was figuring out how to describe the powerful attraction I had to Tolkien, I kept running into Poe connections, not point to point in most instances but thematically overwhelming. It was Poe who led me ultimately to the mysteries of archaeology and the study of dead languages as a code to be broken that made me so receptive and, well, sucked into, the semi-reality of Tolkien’s Middle earth. Impossible as it was, I wanted some way of at least half-believing that it existed somewhere in the aeons of prehistory we simply haven’t yet dug deep enough to find. Where it starts to touch on the concept of languages as a holographic tool for creating reality from a keyboard, which is what Tolkien did. By creating quotable excerpts of the language of the Elves, for example, he is giving us a hologram that looks like a few lines of poetry but inferentially must contain a much vaster whole. There’s an ancient, complex world behind the one-line artifact of “Elbereth, Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriel…” (No, I didn’t have to look that up. Still in there, along with the complete ring poem, word for word.)
I didn’t need Poe for the nuts and bolts part of the Tolkien reality question. Why I wasn’t going to get into the Poe part of the equation despite the temptation. Keep it clean. But the title talks about my tricky process.
For a completely different reason, Poe popped his head into one of the topics I’m preparing a post on for Instapunk Returns.
[Deep breath]
The political violence fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome is escalating very rapidly. It’s time to make an issue of the very real mental illness that is likely to result in a catastrophic Presidential assassination within the next two years. My post-in-progress is about the gravity of what I’m calling ‘Monomaniacal Mass Hysteria’ (MMH). Both monomania and mass hysteria are considered superseded terms by the psychology profession, though not because they are phony ailments. Both are still symptoms of potentially psychotic episodes described and treated under different labels. Typical. When I was collecting background and historical material for my post, I encountered this odd pop-up at one of the Google AI summaries, from the “More…” section of the Monomania overview:
There he is, the Main Man. Still considered more insightful about it than today’s pill merchants.
Take a look.
The article argues that Poe understood monomania was not simply a ‘partial insanity’ but a more profound and pervasive illness in which specific fixations infect the entire personality and its thought processes.
Helpfully, Poe wrote at least three stories showing us what the full-blown mental affect looks like:
No, I’m not trying to drag you into that discussion. I’m showing you a typical process issue for me. What do I do first? The slog of the mental illness post at Instapunk Returns or the next part of the Reality Divide? The MMH post might get Poe out of my system so I can do the ‘clean’ version of Tolkien’s pedagogy about reality creation. Or it might further reinforce his centrality to the larger question of why I care about turning fiction into something much closer to what we like to call reality.
I run into dilemmas like this all the time, and I’m handling it the way I always do. See what app I open and start typing into. Trust the process. That is the tricky part.
Here’s what I’m going to do. A limited detour into the Poe-code-archaeology fixation, followed by a description of what I learned about method from Tolkien, given my interest in Middle Earth as an an alternate/parallel/antediluvian reality.
As it happens, I have an old YouTube video specifically about Poe and codes.
This led me to read, then reread and become obsessed with the archaeological quest for decoding the mysterious writings and art and architecture of the past. The book had been a boyhood gift from my godfather ‘Uncle Herb,’ a character in his own right, and I didn’t dip into it right away, only when Poe made the back cover blurb seductive.
Yep. Climbed to the top of the Pyramid at Chichen Itza in person and
stared into the murky waters of the Well (i.e., sinkhole) of Souls.
I have even performed my own homage of transliterating Egyptian hieroglyphs for use in pages of the Vennich Manuscript…
There is actually a schema for a system of codes used in Vennich.
Unfortunately, it has to be reconstructed every time I want to use it.
Vennich, of course, is a play on the Voynich MS and its elaborate text
and image codes, never yet broken, though there’s always a pet theory.
Just one more quick footnote on motivation for Tolkien obsession. These books I got very young and reread often. My first literary love was Ivanhoe’s Rebecca.
These are the actual editions I imprinted in. The Door in the Wall
was the subject of my first book report in 3rd grade. I was 7.
I inherited The Hobbit from my mother’s stack of paperbacks. It was written for children and seemed like it. I had a strong negative reaction about his use the word ‘goblins’ as something that just felt wrong to me. Too cartoon somehow. When my mother passed along The Fellowship of the Ring, I told her I wasn’t interested. She said “it’s better than The Hobbit. You’ll like it.” I was 11. The goblins were gone. Now they were Orcs. I fell in love with the Queen of Loth Lorien. I was hooked. Very intense experience of reading. All three books. Wanted it to be true.
So did J. R. R. Tolkien. Why he made himself document so much of the history and language artifacts in appendixes to bolster the reader’s sense of documentation rather than fiction. Fictional proofs one could suspend one’s disbelief in. The ‘goblin’ misstep was all the evidence needed to demonstrate that he was learning as he went, becoming more obsessed with his created fiction of a world. The Silmarillion proved it. No one needed that book as much as Tolkien did.
Conan Doyle did not deliberately set out to make Sherlock Holmes real. The audience did that. Tolkien was different. He was systematic in what he did. He was letting his imagination run away with him and putting it in harness as it ran. How I built Punk City in my head.
Thank you, Professor…
Why Punk City is organized more like a case study than an anthology. All the content is selected for its utility as evidence. The editors are not inclined to assign value to punk writing except as a dysfunctional sociological phenomenon. It’s up to readers to reject the easy dismissal and believe that something important and very secret was happening on South Street for the seven years from 1978 to 1985. Everything is data of one kind or another. Here is the gang slang they used. Here is the computer equipment and the software they used. Here are their weapons. Here are their stories. Here is the Tarot-based religion they used to find a way of believing in meaning, even though their lives were hard and short.
Because the editors won’t stoop to taking the writing seriously, the tacit challenge is to the reader. Why do they dwell so much on their own origins, and why do they seem to have a hard time remembering what happened? Why do their versions of what happened contain so many contradictions?
Where I went Tolkien one better. He had to be the narrator, the Homer of his epic prose poem. Despite my byline (wink wink), I removed myself as the presiding narrator of Punk City. The punks don’t remember well what happened at the beginning because none of us does. All of everything sought out by human curiosity is part of the quest to know who and what we are and why we’re here at all. It’s the ultimate philosophical and literary question, and the punk version of it is very specific, very local, very complicated. Perhaps all the accounts are true and Punk City is a blur because multiple timelines are spinning “out of the blue” simultaneously, overlaying and intertwining with one another. Perhaps none of the accounts is true and all of them boil down to the last punk piece published within the community, Tabula Rasa by The New Yorkers (formerly, the Epissiles); it is a blank page inside a frame, fiction finally emptied of the pretense of meaning perpetrated by the use of words.
When you create your own world, you have to abide by your own rules, which means knowing what those rules are. The first big challenge of my premise was figuring out what a bunch of barely conscious, wholly ignorant “punk writers” would have to write about. Which led to three major lines of development: and 1) They could focus on targets of opportunity, like the Yuppies who went slumming for drugs and sex on South Street; 2) They could explore the mystery of their own origins referenced above; and 3) They could develop some mechanism for learning what they’d been missing all their lives.
They did all three. Their software was powerfully, enabling them to call on databases that would provide ‘voices’ for them to write in. Why I had to provide a case study exhibit on the software documentation for the Prose Upgrade and Narrative Collation application. Why I had to show what some of the hardware might look like:
Surviving Plot Synthesizer
I’ve said that the book Punk City is a case study. More precisely, it is a first report by explorers resembling Hiram Bingham, III, ‘discoverer’ of Macchu Picchu in Peru. Natives of the region told him it was there and led him there. He did not have anything like all the answers when he first published his findings. There are gaping holes in the punk writer story. That was deliberate-um-necessary because I did not know how to take the next technological step in the excavation of what they’d left behind. Just as Bingham had his expeditionary team and native bearers, there was already an actual archaeological dig underway in the South Street area at the time the book was released. But who’s been in charge of it? Who can be trusted to tell the truth and show the real evidence? We don’t know. Yet. Mysteries abound.
There is also a verifiable record of suppressed attempts to publish more than is currently available. Some odd, debatable pics of underground memorials to punk writers past.
So, much of the later history of Punk City is still in question.this can, of course, be filled in by participants who desire to work like the original punk writers. Conjuring their own version of events in the reigns of Kobra Jones and Cadillac Mope as their interactions with their own digital devices produce mystery solutions that suit them. Who knows what stories, videos, AI reenactment movies, and other works will arrive to bring the truth out into the open at last.
More is known about the end days of Punk City than has been permitted to remain the public eye by the powers that be. This is where the rubber hits the road in the Reality Divide. Which will, of course, have be dealt with in the next installment of this saga.
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