The Lightning Room with Dolan Morgan

Welcome to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work. Dolan Morgan’s story “Euclid’s Postulates” appeared in our April issue. Simon and Dolan talked about looking forwards, backwards, and down paths of no return. Dolan’s first book, That’s When the Knives Come Down, is forthcoming from Aforementioned Productions in August 2014.

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1. “Euclid’s Postulates” is about, among many other things, the tenuous tracks of our lives compared against mathematical principles, and probably inevitability. Bearing this in mind, can you respond to this hypnotizing gif?

Yes, please, let’s talk about this hypnotizing gif. Now, for those who haven’t clicked through, I’ll save you the trouble: the gif includes a rotating green cube. Innocent enough. Familiar shape, calming tone, gentle rhythm. Great. But soon we see a new shape, interrupting our tranquility. A blue pentagon obscures part of the cube, immutable and irrevocable. Why? We can’t say. Then another, and another: blue pentagons definitively overtaking the cube like so many feral umbrellas – jesus, when will it stop? – until the cube itself is entirely subsumed, devoured and disappeared, such that we see clearly now, with a terrifying certainty, that a dodecahedron can be – and in fact has been, right here and now, you can’t deny it, it’s really happening – formed around this simple cube, and that it in fact was always there, waiting to be realized and made manifest. And of course, there is the inverse realization too: that beneath every dodecahedron has always been lurking this cube, mocking in its simplicity. The past is undone in an instant, one life swapped for another. David Foster Wallace has written of this particular kind of horror, wherein a person realizes that what scares us is not only here, but that it has been here all along, that even when we felt calm, safe, and secure, we had no grounds to feel this way. Take for example my sister’s one-time fiancé, Doug, who struggled to find employment. Fortunately, he landed a seasonal job working at a Christmas tree farm owned by a family friend, Eric. Every morning, Doug and Eric would head out in a truck through the trees, getting things ready for the holidays. Now, Eric noticed something peculiar each time they embarked, something that just couldn’t be ignored or denied, try as he might. So, one morning in the truck, Eric said, “Doug, I know you’re pooping.” Turns out, every time they got going, Doug would defecate in his pants, right there with Eric next to him, in the truck. Eric had hoped it wasn’t true, but day in and day out, the facts presented themselves, the irrefutable pentagons slowly formed on the situation, and Eric had to accept and confront it: “I know you’re pooping,” he said. Doug denied it. “No, I know you’re pooping. You’re doing it right now.” Doug again denied it, mid-movement. Eric gave him an ultimatum. “If you don’t admit what’s happening, I’ll have to fire you. You don’t even necessarily have to stop, you just have to admit it. Meet me halfway.” Doug did not. And I can only imagine Doug’s mortification – all that time he thought to himself that he was getting away with it. That no one knew he was pooping. He had a job. He had freedom. The brisk, early mornings. A hard day’s work. But he was wrong, and was forced to understand he’d always been wrong. These are the facts. Or take Gene Hackman: in Coppola’s The Conversation, he plays a surveillance expert who faces a moral quandary after discovering that the people he’s surveilling are targeted for murder – by none other than his own paying client. The people he spies on are concerned, sure, but ultimately unaware of the imminent danger, and it would be a breach of professional integrity for Hackman’s character to confirm their suspicions. Still, his silence makes him complicit. He jeopardizes his otherwise renowned career by finally attempting to intervene. Yet, at the crucial moment, he learns quite viscerally that he misinterpreted the conversation: the people he spied on were not concerned about being murdered, but in fact were plotting a murder. Mr. Hackman’s character must accept not only the horror of this current moment and the finality it entails, but must also contend with each prior moment he misconstrued. He too is being surveilled, has been all along. Everything has been reversed. His life is in shambles. It was never a cube, but always a dodecahedron. One thing becomes another, and in fact was never anything else in the first place. I know you’re pooping. At any moment, a single fact or series of facts, can present itself, such that whole swaths of our lives are swept away, people/places/things, to be replaced by something alien, something new. What we took comfort in up to now was never us at all, and this new alien thing, this unfamiliar thing: that has always been us. There’s no denying it. That’s why I am scared of this gif and will never look at it again.

2. I’m curious about the genesis of this story – how did it start? Where was the kernel of an idea that bloomed into this piece? Did it begin with one of Euclid’s laws, a car, or something else altogether? (I like origins.)

The story was prompted by the pre-recorded voices that constantly call me offering free Caribbean cruises (“Toot, toot! You’re a winner!”) – and by the artist Jessica Mack. Jess created some fantastic illustrations for another piece of mine about how to have sex on other planets. We used them during an elaborate PowerPoint presentation. Pleased, we wanted to work together again and were both inclined to play with math. By then, incorporating numbers into stories had become a sort of preoccupation of mine, so much so that at first we even toyed with building a sort of Math-Fiction website/journal, where one might find stories, poems, and essays all built in some way around numeracy, functions, equations, or any other similar starting point, in the spirit of classic science-fiction mags like Analog. (Something in me thinks that we never got that project off the ground in part because it was so difficult to find a phrase as simple as sci-fi for our genre. I find some solace in the fact that the original term for sci-fi was actually an awkward combination of scientific + fiction: scientifiction. Yikes.) As we stewed a bit over what to do next, Jess became smitten with Euclid’s postulates, excited about the visual opportunities there, and she suggested I build a story around them. I jumped at the opportunity and planned to take each of the five as a starting point for different sections. Now, I never know where a story is going to end up when I begin, and after responding to one postulate, I was feeling somewhat self-conscious about this all being a terribly foolish/forced project. Incidentally, while editing the first chunk at a coffee shop, a man next to me was hard at work on some kind of proof. He was very excited about numbers. Much gesticulating. He noticed too that I was browsing through geometry PDFs and struck up a conversation. He fumbled through one unfounded, completely insane notion after another. He was convinced that his work was on the verge of a turning point and he needed only to wiggle his arms in the air a bit longer for the final idea to come to him. He was eating a bagel. The ideas he spouted were basically garbled versions of grade school algebra: “If a squared plus b squared equals…then the angles are congruent!,” and so on. This in turn reminded me of a boy I went to high school with, Dana, who transferred to our town, struggled at first to make friends, and attempted to leverage a particular brand of eccentricity as his new-guy calling card. During one lunch period, Dana informed me that after much deduction he’d invented a time machine. In all seriousness. He produced a notebook from his corduroy sack and proceeded to point to all manner of diagrams and arrows and intersecting lines. Something about infinity, something about mass, bla bla bla. “We can go anywhere,” he said. I too was guilty of this type of thinking: I remember believing as a child that I’d established a new branch of mathematics that involved equations that are so wrong they’re right. Ha. It was nonsense, all of it, but that’s not what struck me then, and it’s not what strikes me about the man in the coffee shop on the verge of greatness either. As insane as these people might be, or misguided or misinformed, myself included, there’s something intriguing about how this could happen to them, to any of us. What is it about numbers and proofs that make people feel this way, that they are at the edge something important and bigger than themselves? What is it, in fact, about anything that makes us feel this way? People look at trees and feel things. People look at each other and feel things. Events coalesce in a lattice-work of intention. Dana looks at the impossible social structure of American schools and thinks there is a device that can move him magically through time and space. The man in the coffee shop considers his bagel and knows that there is more to life than that which he’s been offered. Everywhere there is a sense of imminent beauty, of a type of awe or wonder just beyond our grasp, of a world beneath the surface; this is entirely unfounded and ridiculous – and yet endlessly persistent. This mix of the absurd and the sublime, the futile and the fantastical, the romantic and the meaningless, is the bread and butter of what inspires me to write in the first place, and so this, then, was the kernel of the story: a kind of surface tension between lived experience and the often foolish feeling that more is at stake, more is at hand, that things can ever add up to anything at all. In other words, I can see in my stories that I’m still trying to write equations that are so wrong they’re right.

3. Midway through the story, the narrator – perpetually thwarted on his way to a funeral – decides that, drawn out in this continuous straight line of moving forward without really going anywhere, of choice without choice, that he’ll accept the stasis, the ceasing to make decisions. What do you suppose this says about our inability to cope?

I’m terrible at supposing but I do like to talk about movies. In the film adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross, Al Pacino asks a client what part of sex he remembers most vividly. Pacino suggests that it’s rarely the point of climax. Rather, he says, people much more often retain some moment immediately preceding or following. Maybe a gentle caress, a curve or a rhythm, even a slow cigarette. Pacino then adds, speaking generally, that there is no Now. He says there is only looking forward and back, in sex and everything. As in, people aren’t doing anything at all – they’re constantly coping with being about to orgasm or having just done so. There’s so much coping going on that I get a little confused about distinguishing coping from not coping. Maybe there isn’t anything else. Just coping, eternally. In the James Bond film Casino Royale, Vesper tries to help Bond cope with his profession after he’s choked a man to death in a stairwell. She says to him that “just because you’ve done something doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it.” This is true (thank goodness! Imagine if everything you’ve ever done you were committed to continuing indefinitely), but I might also suggest to Vesper that having done something does mean you have to keep having done it. You can’t, as they say, unring a bell. Yet, so often it feels quite different from that. As if we had nothing to do with what we’ve done but are saddled with it anyway. Likewise, the narrator in Euclid’s Postulates remarks: “I have the feeling that I’ve woken up in this moment without ever having lived before, that my whole life has appeared suddenly before and around me in a bathroom stall, like a burst of light at the edge of a field. Like a sound.” Ding, ding. This is the purest kind of coping: we arrive at each moment in our lives hostage to the moment previous, entering one instance after another like a stranger into a room – a room where some previous version of ourselves has just clanged a bell. The ringing is incessant. And the whole fucking room is just filled with more bells. Waiting to sound. Waiting for you to arrive again. But from where? Al Pacino might be right. Probably there is no Now and probably we’re in it.

4. What is something you’ve dragged with you so long that it’s become a line behind you, marking where you’ve been, something that you’ll never be able to erase or reverse? (You can interpret this symbolically, if you like; but that would be cowardly.)

Just the other day at work I had a piece of tape stuck to my foot. It collected dirt and strings and little pieces of paper. What a nightmare. I didn’t even know it was there. If someone took the time, I’m sure they could use that tiny tape to decipher a little bit about my day. The type of building I’d been in, the nature of the work that happens there, the cleaning habits of those who maintain it – all collected without my knowledge. If such a story can be told from just a single piece of tape and a little ingenuity, no doubt my bank card and phone, or anyone’s even, could produce a sort of indelible epic poetry. Long, boring, and marked by sudden shifts, our paper trails take on a classic tone. Somewhere there is a Verizon bill not unlike a contemporary Gilgamesh. Somewhere there is a Netflix queue that rivals Beowulf. So many of the great ancient texts include lists and ledgers, and my phone/card records are prepared to join the ranks. The places I’ve gone, the things I sought (and eventually bought), the topics which have occupied my thoughts, both important and mundane. Questions I’ve asked, people I’ve called, apps that have borrowed my time. It’s almost impossible to imagine what narrative arc these records might produce.. It’s nearly inconceivable that the trail looks anything like who I think I am or feel I’ve been, but our records, like all records, are waiting to be found while our beliefs about ourselves are not. So many religions talk of an eventual judgment, a taking of accounts. You come to the end, and your life is tallied up. A decision is made. You were kind. You were good. You were cruel. You were a waste. For perhaps the first time, this is really becoming practical. We have everything required and need only muster the organization. Imagine an agent or official, bestowed with the legal power to disperse winnings or accolades or prizes or medals, regularly dispatched to hospital deathbeds. The agent sifts through phone records, bills, internet activity, google searches and GPS trajectories. At the moment of death, the agent turns to your family members and says, “Nice man, but he took too many cabs” or “she worked hard but was overly preoccupied by her health – to the detriment of her family and friends.” Rewards are then doled out in accordance to a life’s merit. In so many ways, such an arrangement is already underway. A friend of mine, Anthony, carries a pedometer. This pedometer reports Anthony’s every step to an app. In turn, this app is linked to a web-service promoting healthy lifestyles. When stepping milestones are reached, the web-service ships free gifts to Anthony’s house. A case of coconut water. A box of granola bars. Presents. In other words, Santa might be making a list, and he might be checking it twice, but this is redundant. Santa should quit wasting his time. Santa should just shut up. Unless of course, Santa has the ability to see whether Anthony actually walks all those miles or if he just shakes the pedometer idly in his hand and waits for the judgment, for the coconut water. It almost goes without saying that a digital record has more meaning than the life that produced it, especially if there are gifts involved. And that’s why Santa is important. Because we have to believe there’s a difference between who we called and what was said, between the emails and how they felt.

5. This brings me to a related question: generally, your work is very hybridic, floating along in the slipstreams between essay, fiction, and poetry. How do you balance these elements, if at all? Here, mathematical laws are applied to statistically improbable situations – where is the rub in all of this? Who the hell are you?

I entirely reject genre distinctions and think that maintaining the distance between ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ work is lazy/limiting, at best, and classist/oppressive at worst. (The concept of slipstream seems entirely counterintuitive to me, like a very strange/patronizing meta-attempt to relegate even the resistance to genre into a genre of its own – also the name is worse even than scientifiction). However, I value constraints, and do see much merit in looking at different types of writing: ad copy, medical records, promotional brochures, website FAQs, science abstracts, movie reviews, blurbs, daily inspiration, religious tracts, pyramid schemes, self-help books – these modes have different purposes and their traditions/tropes are extensively varied. The phrasing, logic, and larger structures you find in them are often unique and inventive. I love nothing more than to be handed a pamphlet on the street, and am always looking for new forms to live inside of. I click on banner ads, read spam and speak to telemarketers. I believe that these avenues are saturated with a kind of magic, or the spores of myth, and need only be hacked at until the fairies fall out. As for finding balance, well, I consider myself in so many ways to be a kind of traditionalist. That is, whether I’m inhabiting a goofy technical form or not, I’m still always aiming for the simple things like conflict, escalation, reversal, climax, resolution. I fail constantly. And as for who I am, I have no idea, but someone asked me recently what I masturbate to. I answered, “There’s a Jamba Juice on 14th Street and University.” I think maybe that’s who I am.

6. One definition, two axioms, and four propositions:

One Definition
Currency: (n) the object of perceived value, to be exchanged for goods or services. Examples: money, time.

Two Axioms
1. Time is money
2. The rich can’t die.

Four Propositions
1. Abandon all clocks/calendars that rely on days, months and years.
2. Instead, track ‘time’ by measuring the ups and downs in bank accounts and markets, borrowing rates and growth.
3. Now, set the morning alarm.
4. Hit the snooze button again and again. We’re going to live forever.

I believe this is a sustainable business model. Wake me up when it’s over.

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.