“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
– Doc Brown, Back to the Future

Perhaps it hit me when Time Magazine named their 2006 person of the year. You. It was so simple, so obvious. The decision must have been based largely on the runaway success of YouTube. By that time, many considered a night of watching “viral videos” and bootleg concert footage to be more rewarding than flipping channels on TV. Much else was changing about the ways we communicate and spend our free time and energy. But even that simple switch from passive to active media consumption was one that, I felt sure, would forever transform our society.

Since first getting an AOL account around 1995, I had – without conscious planning – been using computers to do an increasing amount of my interpersonal communication. Society generally lamented this phenomenon. “They won’t develop normal social skills,” we were told. “I used to just pick up the phone and call someone – or even go over to their house – if I wanted to talk to them.”

My personal favorites expressed concern about escapism. “How are they going to get by in the real world if they’re always avoiding reality.” In fact, if my generation shared anything collectively, it was a reluctance to embrace the version of reality presented to us by institutions, marketers, advertisers and editors. We couldn’t quite see the irony forest for the sarcasm trees when we were younger (e.g., “Beavis and Butt-head was making fun of us?”). But we knew something irreversible had happened when our comfy, cozy ‘90s world passed into a dismal post-9/11 era. We knew suddenly what before we had only felt vaguely: that there’s a horrible flaw with a human “reality” that can create such suffering and disaster. In short, we wanted to know why – all the whys: why 9/11 really happened, why we’d been brought up in a fabricated reality, why those who came before us were content to let their hearts turn to coal, etc.

Many of us began looking for answers and connections on the World Wide Web. While at first Facebook was designed only to unite students at the same college (groups and events were among the first features offered), MySpace’s main strengths were its blogging platform, music pages for bands, and the ability to search for people by geography and keywords. This allowed for all sorts of unprecedented connections, from pen pal-like friendships based on similar tastes in movies or music, to meet-ups with semi-strangers for casual sex (well… not all the connections were advances in human communication).

Meanwhile, back at the MySpace blog forum, people were pouring themselves out to total strangers. A certain amount of anonymity remained, but the openness and honesty in much of the writing was astonishing. During a difficult personal time, I found myself keeping a sort of journal on my MySpace blog and receiving regular support (via comments and messages) from people I had never met in “reality.”

That was in 2005, and then by 2006 we had entered the lo-fi world of chocolate rain and candy mountains. The media hailed it as the year of “You,” but that wasn’t the whole story. We had begun to discard “I” and “Me” for “You” and “We.”

Just before then, a site appeared under the name We Feel Fine. It searched the Web for recent use of the word “feel” in an attempt to gauge the current emotional state of the world (at least, the portion of the world with Internet access). Little colorful dots bounce around the flash application; click one and it brings up the sentence that contained “feel,” after which you can link to the original article. This led to a sort of epiphany for me. Whereas Descartes posed, “I think, therefore I am,” perhaps our generation would embrace a new definition of existence: I feel, therefore I am not alone.

However embarrassing it sounds now, I’ll never deny that my MySpace blog contributed to my self-realization as a writer. It wasn’t the same as typing in a Word doc, clicking save, and filing it away on my hard drive, not knowing if it would ever be seen by other eyes. It felt good to let people know what I was experiencing. It also felt good to read about their lives. I felt…less alone…and, maybe, more human. Because of technology. Because of computers and the Internet. Because the “real world” kept letting me down.

A personal milestone came in 2006, when I realized that a large portion of our culture had been totally invisible to me. I now know that it was due mostly to the aforementioned advertisers, marketers and editors, who hoped to keep the public reality tunnel pointed directly at buyable goods. I didn’t completely understand my gut feeling about it at the time. I just needed a career change, and, therefore, a second degree. After some career counseling, I decided to get a masters of journalism, return to Detroit and start an online music publication. Though before I finished my MA in 2008, ad revenue dropped so much that online entrepreneurship seemed nearly impossible.

Yet even now we are witnessing exponential growth in experimental publishing ventures, mostly of a journalistic nature. Reality Sandwich is just one example. The original social networks have either vanished or been ravaged by media conglomerates hoping to make the sites “profitable.” The newer publishing projects have trouble taking off unless they have significant funding or unusual luck in the URL lotto game of Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. And journalism experiments have faced the most attacks. Since the Year of You, every effort has been made to spin “civic journalism” and “citizen reporter” into dirty words. The journalism industry couldn’t diagnose its own cancer, and instead of getting innovative, they put on their editor caps and started pointing fingers.

In other words, the Ron Burgundys of the world rang their warning bells. “But… who’s gonna read the news if there are no professional journalists?! It is anchorman, not anchorblogger, and that is a scientific fact!” It didn’t stop there. Editors suggested that nothing short of mass chaos would ensue if their long-standing take on fact-based, “objective” journalism were to fail as a business model. Not one of them admitted or understood that a conflict of interest is inherent in a for-profit journalism organization – one that is automatically more committed to publishers, advertisers and stockholders than to the audience, the citizens who need information in order to uphold a democracy (nevermind that the U.S. is barely a semi-democracy). And their goal to this day has been to find a way to make us pay for content using traditional consumerist hierarchies, despite the glaring fact that our entire economic system must now endure a complete overhaul.

Information does have to be synthesized into “truth,” so the editors tried to convince us that they were the only ones capable of presenting the real truth. But blogs and journalism start-ups continued to flourish, sometimes gaining bigger online audiences than traditional media groups. After all, an independent website costs little to host, and contributors can still work a day job. The editors, running out of options, kept repeating that without newspapers there would be no watchdog to keep a public record of daily occurrences. “We know what information you need. We know how to get it to you. Trust us. You are safe in our hands.” Something about it seemed eerily familiar to government propaganda, which Bill Hicks used to mock in similar terms: “Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again.”

We didn’t fall for the scam, and by 2008 it was obvious that Twitter alone could spread news updates worldwide without the help of professional reporters and editors. Though even by the end of 2006, thanks in part to an internship at a lifestyle magazine in Chicago, I had started to wonder, “Who the fuck are these editors, and why are we letting them control our cultural discourse? Is there a way we can eliminate them from the process altogether – not just in journalism, but in all of publishing?”

On the other side of the publishing fence, the book industry reps hid in the cellar while the storm tore through the journalists’ camp. And book publishers were running similar spin cycles at full capacity. “Self-published books will never be as good as those endorsed by a publishing house,” they said. “Trust us to present you with the best writing out there.” That is, the best writing that can be sold for a profit – using payola to get visible bookstore placement and high profile book reviews – by authors who are willing to wear a monkey suit and bang cymbals on Oprah’s stage.

A diminishing budget allowed book publishers to sign much fewer writers for expensive or long-term deals. And those struggling to publish a book started to wonder if it was worth the fight, given the bleak odds and generally stale nature of contemporary literature (not to mention all the paper resources wasted in their distribution model). In modern times, public recognition and artistic credibility have generally become mutually exclusive. Now the book industry is mobilizing to control the way e-readers are used. Kindle and iPad are both wet dreams for publishers who want to tyrannize digital distribution and pricing, despite the fact that certain peer-to-peer networks have appeared that feature e-book trading alone, and that these torrent networks are usually more comprehensive and efficient than any established commercial distribution system in history.

Periodically I’ve even submitted material to literary journals to be considered for publication. But admittedly, I can’t discern a purpose for those publications other than to dam up the river of human creativity. They are little more than MFA nurseries, intent on playing border guard for the land of literary respect. Every time I get a form letter rejection, I have to quell the urge inside me to locate the editors and choke the arrogance out of them. My sense is that hordes of other budding writers feel the same. We’re all wondering who admitted these bastards into the Editorial Knighthood and told them they could judge creative work with so little tact or transparency. Why would the opinion of one editor be more valuable than feedback from a group of peers? Has literature ever been so static that it could be weighed based on established criteria? (No, of course not!)

After all, there is great value in the personal creative struggle that constitutes the path of self-realization. But it seemed to me that the individual should have more control over that path, instead of falling victim to the powerful leaders of yet another institution. For too long the creative instinct has been bottled up to make human beings into consumer robots. I see now that I wanted to break the mold, while helping existing robots (myself included) regain the optimal path.

* * *

All of these subjects – social networking, creative expression, journalism, the search for truth, advertising, marketing, book publishing, literary journals, e-readers, etc – stirred in my mind during grad school. I reflected on the reasons that I started writing. Some strange balance of Freud and Kerouac had convinced me that writing was self-therapy and a way to better understand myself and the world. It followed that heightened understanding would result in a happier, more fulfilling life, which – if practiced on a wide scale – might increase the probability that the human race would achieve its full potential (i.e., would not self-terminate through atomic warfare or some less intentional means). So I took Freud’s suggestion to explore my subconscious mind. I studied Kerouac’s dedication to writing in a way that is simultaneously confessional, improvisational and musical. And I knew vaguely that I’d have to revive the concepts of honesty, openness and humility.

I drew from other visionary minds when building my personal philosophy. Hunter S. Thompson was largely responsible for breaking down the barrier between journalism and fiction. He demonstrated that truth is subjective, that this is the reason why we’ve always valued fiction, and that the writer is inextricably tied to the story being written. Even though I had essentially learned in Physics class that truth is relative to the perspective of observation (i.e., why Newtonian physics works at human scale, but not on the scale of the universe or an atom, which both require quantum mechanics), it took a while for me to understand the truly universal application of that concept. What I mean is, everything is relative – all truth, morals, ethics, etc – and that’s the primary reason why human society can be so hypocritical and paradoxical. Furthermore, it turned out that mass and energy are interchangeable. It seemed to me that we needed to make these truths part of our living philosophy, and not just a lesson in school.

A moment of providence came in early 2008 when I found a Henry Miller quote that solidified my resolve. In his 1959 Freudian study Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown quotes Miller (from his book Sunday After the War):

“The peoples of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. [...] Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it.” (1)

Suddenly Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power seemed a bit more clear. I wondered if that really was the only guiding principle in human history, the effort to dominate and subdue. I immediately applied this to my goal of online publishing and wondered if it would be possible for a magazine to function without any editors. (The United States was even founded with the goal of providing checks and balances on power, in order to prevent tyranny. Apparently the founders didn’t see that tyranny springs forth from the individual, with or without a government to enable it.)

I immediately read Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and learned that his goal had been to attain ultimate freedom of expression. That seemed crucial to me, because the concentration of power was antithetical to the pursuit of expression. I also took from Miller (and partly from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) the concept of rising above our terrestrial existence through a species-wide creative evolution. Soon I decided on a final project to complete my masters program. I would create an experimental online magazine for people to self-publish any type of creative work. I decided on the name Supraterranean to convey the idea of meeting on a metaphysical platform above the earth, and I created a starry website banner to reinforce the symbolism.

I launched Supraterranean.com on June 23, 2008 in Traverse City, Michigan, where I was spending the summer for an internship. A month later I devised the slogan “Freedom Is Expression” by twisting the First Amendment of the U.S. I hoped to arouse some speculation in the audience – e.g., “Is freedom really expression? What is freedom? What, for that matter, is expression?”

The site only had one absolute condition. Instead of using an editorial selection process, all submissions that met basic guidelines would be published. I knew from the start that the website would use a Creative Commons license, to protect the intellectual property of contributors while promoting creativity and rebuilding the public domain. At first I used a five-star rating system to feature “top rated” content on the home page. Now it’s a “recommend” button that generates a similar list in the sidebar, since I stopped feeling comfortable with the casual judging of creative work (even YouTube has made a similar switch now).

Like the site itself, I expect that the mission statement will be in a constant state of flux. But the list of goals I posted at the beginning remains basically unchanged to this day:

• To explore the artistic potential allowed by the Internet and associated technologies.
• To provide a “writers circle” type environment where aspiring and established artists of many disciplines can get constructive feedback on their work.
• To break down categorical barriers between journalism, literature, poetry, music, film and art.
• To emphasize the importance of personal experience and expression in all of these media.
• To showcase the artistic and cultural advancements taking place all over — from Michigan to California, from Germany to Australia — and transfer online interaction into real world networking.
• To connect creative minds around the world who were meant to live, work and play together, but who have been prevented by geography, language and other barriers.
• To encourage the excessive use of material in the public domain or partially protected under Creative Commons licenses.
• To promote fair use of copyrighted material to the extent that is legally allowed.
• To transform, remix and recreate culture in a way that suits the expressive needs and desires of modern society.
• To evade the pretentious nature of existing literary journals.
• To lessen the selective editor role in publishing (for journalism, literature, etc), and return control to those who create and consume culture.
• To undermine the power of major content corporations who distribute most of the media to which people are exposed.
• To fight the disease of anti-intellectualism rampant in the U.S. and around the world.

I admit that there’s a certain soapbox tone to the list. But I knew what I hoped to build would seem alien and confusing to many people, since I didn’t fully understand it myself. I could think of no other way to communicate my intentions.

* * *

Over the last two years, I’ve worked an average of about 30 hours a month to keep Supraterranean running, while paying for the web hosting costs myself and simultaneously working a part- or full-time job. I’ve also continued reading and learning to clarify the fuzzy notions in my head.

I set Freud aside when I found his veritable successor, Carl Jung, whose concept of the collective unconscious posed a valid argument for the underlying connection of all human beings. I felt that my own alienation from society must be related to mankind’s alienation from the collective unconscious. I began to see this after consuming psilocybin mushrooms in August of 2006. But later I turned to science and evolutionary psychology to avoid relying on a mystical viewpoint. I needed a functioning arsenal, not a new belief system. In short, I realized that forces hidden below the conscious level direct the human race to the same extent that the personal unconscious directs the individual.

A massive reintegration will be required to move beyond this state of mass schizophrenia. But Jung proposed that this all depends on the individual, who must doggedly explore the unconscious to reveal his or her own creative nature and true human potential. The quest is made more difficult because we’ve all been programmed to fear psychology. After all, psychological awareness is a direct threat to the current power construct of the “real world.” The entire fields of public relations, advertising and marketing were developed by using psychological awareness against us, and we now live in the most unreal world that has ever existed.

Reading Jung helped to explain my motivations in creating Supraterranean. I had envisioned a website – part magazine, part community – where contributors would leave a record of their creative path for others to study and learn from. If the experiment worked, editors would no longer be able to bleach out the true nature of existence and creative evolution. For so long we have been manipulated into playing the consumer role, to keep us kneeling submissively at the bottom of the power pyramid. Soon we will have to assume the roles of creator and self-editor, opting to reveal our true nature instead of hiding within injured (and injurious) social roles.

You can imagine my sense of glee, then, upon finding the following Timothy Leary quote – which speaks directly to the purpose of Supraterranean – after a few excruciating years of truth-seeking:

“Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love… The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear.” (2)

Despite the window of anonymity permitted by the Internet, people are generally still afraid to open themselves up. We remain convinced that human beings are absolutely incapable of relating their personal experiences or feelings through words, written or spoken. And thus we shy away from awareness of any kind, opting for a shallower kind of existence.

For society to move forward, we’re going to have to build better safeguards into our organizations to protect against authoritarianism, secrecy and decay. Otherwise even a somewhat progressive website like Supraterranean would eventually become a restrictive, conservative force. To me that means never denying anyone the ability to present creative work to the world, and preventing power from accumulating in any one position or person’s hands. I want to eradicate the entire tendency towards top-down, hierarchical control. Then the system will evolve at a natural (and ever-quickening) pace, instead of getting constipated in the tradition of all oligarchies.

In his book Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson helped explain these ideas through the work of Dr. Ilya Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for physical chemistry:

“Any organized system, according to Prigogine, exists in dynamic tension between entropy and negentropy, between chaos and information. The more complex a system, the greater its instability. [...] …the more unstable, the more likely it is to change – to evolve.

“All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between self-destruction and re-organization on a higher level of information (coherence).” (3)

I admit that, until early 2010, I could see only chaos in the universe, with “order” and “disorder” being no more than illusory labels that humans applied to the chaos. Now I’m convinced by this concept of negentropy. As Wilson explained earlier in the book: “In living systems…negentropy (information) steadily increases [...] Life is an ordering, selecting, coherence-making process.” (4)

I’ve started to feel like most human energy is currently spent in a way that is contradictory to evolution – to actively prevent evolution. Negentropy happens, and human beings try to stop it with all their power. It’s not really their fault though. They’re still dominated by more ancient evolutionary circuits that mistakenly see progress as a danger. They’re still entrenched in the materialism of Newtonian physics, even though relativity and quantum mechanics should have made that paradigm obsolete many decades ago.

There’s a related notion I keep coming across lately, which Wilson put this way: “Mind and its contents are functionally identical. …there is no division between ‘me’ and ‘my experience.’” (5) In other words, reality is not limited to or dictated by our physical bodies. It never has been; it just seemed that way. In fact, we can extend our reality beyond our bodies. It follows naturally that there is no division between ‘me’ and ‘my creative work.’ My attempts at creative expression are extensions of my mind propelled into the universe. Then the work exists just as much in the observer’s mind as in my own.

This lends another dimension to Supraterranean, and really any creative portal on the Internet. The Web allows people to project their mind in endless directions, at an unprecedented speed and distance. It’s a collective out-of-body experience that lets us share in each other’s daydreams – a new map of time-space to help to navigate the inner and outer cosmos. On Supraterranean, we are all connected by the creations that people share with the community.

According to Wilson, Alfred Korzybski suggested that “the passing of signals from generation to generation…was what distinguished us from the other primates.” (6) It occurred to me recently that we’ve been trying to perfect that signaling function for all recorded history. That’s why Henry Miller’s dedication to perfect expression seemed so captivating to me. That’s what I myself am seeking as I work out my own creative drive and progress towards self-realization. But there’s a difference between the passing of facts and the passing of truth – a difference between work we do for money (bio-survival) and work we do because of an irrepressible urge to create and share.

Thus far in the human story, I don’t think we’ve done a satisfactory job of passing on information, let alone creative signals. There’s no way to embark on an open and free future when the basic details of the past are still imprisoned, malleable, or open to argument. Computers and the Internet will allow us to collect information in a way that cannot be distorted by future agendas. It’s agonizing to be patient, or to consider the possibility that the human race still isn’t ready.

And regardless of what system we aim to build, it’ll always come back to the individual. Evolution doesn’t happen at the individual level, but it does depend on individual adaptation or mutation. The adaptation required now could involve a transformation from a preternatural howl to a superb elucidation of thought and feeling. The last hurdle may be the self-sacrifice required in true expression ­– the fact that the ego must be symbolically crucified, or at least reintegrated with the vast invisible realms of the human psyche, before we can collectively move on to the next stage of our evolution, propelled into a higher state of existence.

It seems immense and immeasurable, I’m aware. But above all else, that’s what I hope Supraterranean will foster for the world.

This essay was originally published on Reality Sandwich on 7/16/10.

NOTES
1. Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. p. 305
2. Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. 2007. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon, 1983. p. 243.
3. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 258.
4. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 112.
5. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 219.
6. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 110.

View A Supraterranean Manifesto at Supraterranean

Taken with a Nokia Coolpix on August 14, 2010 on the island of St. Kitts.

View Procession of Billowy Titans at Supraterranean

I walked outside with my duffel bag, my eyes squinting though the sky was a pale overcast. The steady din of the highway crept between the buildings of the dense apartment complex. It was around noon on a Thursday in early December, and for the past hour or two I had been pacing through my ground level, two-bedroom apartment, gathering necessities for a long weekend trip.

As I set down the bag, I heard a faint noise coming from nearby. At first it was only discernible as a human utterance; I thought it might have been a baby squealing. I moved back towards my entry door and heard it again, in the first floor apartment just north of my own. And now the source was more clear: a woman moaning, loud enough to recognize on the sidewalk outside.

I rushed back through my apartment door and turned into the bedroom, not quite confident in my own auditory acuity. I shut off the oscillating fan and slowly, cautiously, put my ear against the north-facing wall. Already my heart was pounding, as if the vague possibility of hearing a woman in that state had triggered an automatic biological response within me.

And there it was again, a soft, drawn out “ohhhhhhhh,” undeniably the result of sexual arousal. I could see how that might be mistaken for a baby’s cooing. There are obvious parallels between the two – both are powerful, alarming, consuming, but also vulnerable, angelic, transitory. Wars break out over this noise.* It grips men by the throat, explodes their sensibilities – so men try to dampen it, cover it up, or lock it away.

I remembered my animal behavior classes in college, when we studied certain species of monkeys and apes that gather information about sex by watching other individuals in the act.

After all, I was completely controlled by the hormones flushing through my system as a result of these sound waves crossing the drywall barrier. But I liked it, so I kept listening. I’ve been so disconnected from the social realm. Suddenly I felt close to people, admitted into their most private moments. I was startled by the excitement! I heard more from the woman, a repetitive call of “yeah, yeah, yeah, ohhhh.” The man, he was quieter, so I could only hear a low moan behind the more invigorated female calls.

I imagined how they might have been situated. From the frequency of the cyclical clapping sounds, I thought she must be propped on hands and knees, with the man kneeling behind her, thrusting. I remembered my animal behavior classes in college, when we studied certain species of monkeys and apes that gather information about sex by watching other individuals in the act.

Our evolutionary ancestors must have used auditory information as well, I thought to myself. Why else would I be listening to my neighbors have sex?

While thinking about that I began to feel ashamed, partly because of my prudish upbringing – especially the various times I was disciplined over sexual matters: pornographic photos in seventh grade, an explicit story in eighth grade, the single condom in my wallet in tenth grade. I also wondered what my girlfriend would think if she came home from work and saw me this way. Maybe she’d be thrilled, too. If she had come home I would have used telekinesis to dissolve her clothes. I wanted to hear those same noises within inches of my ears, to feel, at the same time, her warm breath on my neck.

So I felt ashamed, but not guilty. It did, however, make me wonder if people have listened to us through the walls – the walls we shared with three other apartments. More than that, I wondered what we sounded like. This sex seemed better than any I’ve had, but I do have what experts might call an “overactive imagination.”

Maybe I should close my eyes more often, and just listen to the sounds, I thought. I wonder if that alone could intensify the tactile perception.

In neuroscience class, I recalled, we learned the vast biochemical differences in sensory processing. That must be why each produces such a distinct kind of stimulation. But this isn’t why most people close their eyes or turn off the lights. Too often it’s an attempt to imagine being with somebody else…

I began to wonder why I wasn’t masturbating. It seemed like other people would have done that. Perhaps I was too frozen, trying not to move in the dim grey light of the room, as our two dogs watched me in confusion from their kennels. Suddenly the woman next door became louder, and her calls shifted in tone to something sharper, a more agitated scream.

It brought to mind my short time living in Chicago three years earlier. Sitting down to eat lunch in the living room on a Sunday afternoon, I overheard my roommate and his girlfriend producing the same clamor in their bedroom. That was the first time I heard other people having sex. It was strange, like the barrier between me and pornographic videos had suddenly been broken. My trauma was worsened because I hadn’t felt the intimate touch of a woman in almost a year.

The sounds from the other apartment quieted down, and in a way I felt disappointed. Listening to the two of them was utterly invigorating. I felt absolutely alive, pulsing with an energy I hadn’t known in some time. Leading up to this, the forces of the world had started to become really overbearing. I’d recently finished grad school, yet had no job nor any real friends. But this was a fresh shot of life!

I heard the shower turn on, and I figured one or both of them must have engaged in this act right after waking up. Then I heard someone open their apartment door, followed by a car door. I lifted a single strip of the venetian blinds and was surprised at what I saw. The woman, who looked to be about 5’3” and in her early twenties, wore jeans and a red pea coat. This brunette looked rather normal, not at all the sexual predator I had conjured in my mind. She lifted a small suitcase out of the trunk of her sedan and walked back towards the door. Winter break had just begun for colleges, so I figured she must be visiting her long-distance boyfriend; hence, the explosive vocalizations that come with delayed gratification.

I tried to compose myself, to finish packing for my own trip. I breathed deeply and reveled in the awareness that such a strange experience had injected me with a new sense of optimism, something I’d been lacking for half a year. More than anything, it made me look forward to the future.

* This sentence was unconsciously adapted from a line in the book Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac. I realized the similarity only after publishing this short story. Still, I felt that an acknowledgment was in line.

View Noises Through the Wall at Supraterranean

The following essay is the introduction to the first Supraterranean e-book, “Seeking the Upward Spiral” – a collection of early works by Nick Meador. The e-book will be available as a PDF on the Books page via a “pay what you want” system beginning on Tuesday, July 6, 2010.

No one has ever really asked me why I write, yet I constantly find myself attempting to answer that question. Every time it happens I inevitably start talking about certain authors or books that have inspired me. Anyone who has read an article on my Refractor blog is probably very familiar with this trend. Maybe it was a symptom of my not being able to answer that question ­– the one that was never posed to me. A part of me must have felt like I’d need to answer it before becoming a “real” writer.

Of course, no other author (or group of authors) is the only reason that I write. A few lit firecrackers under my feet until I danced wildly enough for their tastes. But they were only slightly more effective in that regard than film directors and musicians. The creative drive is translated into myriad different forms of human expression, which are not as divided as it often seems. And nothing created by others can generate the sustained energy required to detangle one’s own creative urges.

I suppose the work you’re about to read is a survey of my subconscious attempt to answer the questions of why I write, how I want to write, and what I want to write about. On the other hand, maybe I never had a choice in the matter. I often think of the creative process like the old game Battle Tops. All the tops have different kinds of potential energy – from external inspirations or internal drives – and the kinetic energy is unleashed when the tops collide and interact. Both my laptop and my notepad have become battlegrounds for ideas, styles and experiments.

Really the theory was an altered version of a broader belief: we all have an enormous amount of unused creative energy, and that energy is finally starting to boil over on a mass scale.

As for choices, I guess I did choose to let it flow naturally, instead of continually stifling the urge to express myself. Even so, I had to figure out how to express myself. I hated the feeling that I didn’t understand myself, why I acted certain ways or said certain things. I felt that there were forces at work in my life over which I had little to no control. While that was undoubtedly a factor, my attempts at writing came in response to a very mysterious calling, one that to this day I don’t fully understand.

Until 22 years of age, I considered both reading and writing to be abhorrent activities. As far as school went, I always considered myself first and foremost a student of science. And after school I was content to repress my budding need for a personal mythology, and surrender my psyche to movies and the increasingly fascinating world of video games.

I remember my 12th grade AP English teacher asking us to compile a list of everything we’ve ever read, in preparation for the college application process. She scolded me after seeing that my list contained almost nothing but required reading from classes. I thought, “Well, what the fuck do you expect? If those last 12 years of English, literature and composition courses were designed to make me like reading and writing, that comes as a total surprise to me!”

And I did try to make the best of it… at least, I’ve convinced myself that I tried. I stuck it out through five years of advanced English classes before that 12 AP class. I even enrolled in a private reading program in 10th grade to try to build my reading speed and comprehension.

My mom tried as well. I know I used to enjoy our trips to the youth wing of the Troy Public Library, even if, after playing that old floppy disk computer game that let users create a face, I usually came home with only a Reading Rainbow-approved book and a hand puppet (we were really into puppets). And my mom tells me that, as a child, she couldn’t stop me from reading. I just read and read and read. I even read to my little brothers. Hearing that lends a near-tragic air to the present story of my life.

Scattered throughout my memories of English class are stale composition formulas, tiresome busywork exercises, and forced observation of symbolism without any meaningful interpretation. In elementary school we studied grammar and syntax like it would someday save our lives. In sixth grade I was asked to write a story about the future, and all I could think of (all that seemed relevant) was a Christmas list of futuristic toys. In seventh grade I was told that a paragraph starts with a topic sentence, continues with three to five related sentences, ends with a summarizing sentence, and transitions well to the next paragraph. In high school I learned how to compose a variety of verses, yet gained no commanding sense of what made something poetic. And in 12 AP I read Dante’s Inferno without ever getting the impression that it was a reflection of individual psychology. It seemed to be an outdated description of the horrific place to which naughty little Catholics would surely be delivered (so much for separation of church and state…).

The first dim beacon of light came in middle school, when we started the nationwide program known as Wordmasters. It was some kind of sadistic system designed to prepare us for the S.A.T. test. We literally studied lists of words, looked up definitions in clunky dictionaries, and then worked through analogy sets. And while that sounds painful (it…was…very…painful), I somehow came out of the experience with a newfound love of words – mostly long, complicated words that I hadn’t heard people use in conversation. Of course, when we were told to look for those special words out in real life and then report them to the teacher, I first found “imminent” in the film Return of the Jedi. (The Emperor says something about the “imminent demise” of Luke’s rebel friends.)

After that it was clear that words – certain words, arranged in a certain way – do have a power and music that were previously hidden from me. Through all the textbook bullshit I endured, the power and music were revealed only a handful of times, in The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Those aren’t the authors or books I’ve credited repeatedly for fueling my inspiration, and they certainly weren’t present in my conscious mind when I started to write. But they were the only evidence I had until the age of 18 that writing and reading could be worthwhile – that there was some purpose to “literature and composition” other than to provide boring schoolwork.

In other words, the institutionalized public school system had allowed no way for me to develop my right brain – the more innovative, “artistic” side of the brain. The schools do cultivate in us a hunger for creative development, for the first six years anyways. Kindergarten through 5th grade are chock full of crayons and Elmer’s glue, cotton balls and popsicle sticks, story time and sing-alongs, and recess, recess, recess. Then you arrive in 6th grade and they start the process of specialization, of robotization, of personal industrialization. Students aren’t allowed outside to run on the playground; they remove the playground altogether! You have to go to six different classes per day instead of remaining in a single room with a surrogate mother. Music, art and foreign language classes become “electives” which are not required curriculum. Even my family’s trips to the youth wing of the public library stopped around that time.

It hit me recently that this education method creates a fractured psyche in the individual. We experience creative bliss – organized at school, spontaneous at home; indoors with video games, outdoors with nature; sometimes by ourselves, other times with friends or family – but then it is forcefully removed. In this way society is designed to withhold a great resource from us, akin to the removal of foreskin in circumcision. The tribe gains power by taking joy from new recruits, shoving them into pre-designed roles, and convincing them that suffering is the path of the righteous. This makes the individual more vulnerable to manipulation as an adult, and more likely to believe that the creative bliss can come from an external source. Hence, why so many people try to buy the bliss, steal the bliss, pray for the bliss, gamble for the bliss, etc. All the while we have an aching feeling that we’ve been duped.

By the mid-2000s more and more people were spending their spare time producing creative work using computers and the Internet. Traditional media organizations saw this and asked, “Where do they get the time?” Well, the average American still watches six hours of TV per day. Chipping away even one or two of those creates a lot of time for spontaneous daily productivity. It seemed that this boom of blogs, YouTube videos and even Facebook applications coincided with an increase in concern over what was happening in the world and how that affected people at individual level. Maybe that was why I wrote a research paper in grad school based on the theory that creating anything online would lead to greater social participation or civic efficacy.

Really the theory was an altered version of a broader belief (later rounded out by the ideas of Clay Shirky, who has now written two books on the subject): we all have an enormous amount of unused creative energy, and that energy is finally starting to boil over on a mass scale.

These early works are the result of just such a boiling over. In 2005 I kept a consistent online journal on a MySpace blog. In 2006 I started a music blog at Blogger.com and wrote album and concert reviews. In 2007, upon arriving at MSU’s School of Journalism, I started the MusicEdge section at Spartanedge.com and tried my hand at being a music reporter. I attempted to freelance write for magazines and alternative weeklies in Michigan and Chicago. Behind the scenes I worked on fiction, since that was always my long-term goal in writing. I’ve included two fictional stories in this collection which were previously unpublished (they were rejected by various literary journals). The first part here, entitled “Sowing Supra Seeds,” is comprised of those early sputters of creativity.

The questions and yearnings left unanswered by an institutionalized science education have lingered with me far longer than my one-time desire to become a doctor.

That part is so named because I felt like I was tending a creative garden, patiently watering saplings and pulling weeds. And then in June of 2008 the giant beanstalk took to the sky when I launched the experimental self-publishing magazine Supraterranean.com. The second part, “A Prolonged Case of Indigestion,” begins there and runs until December of 2009. It contains stories, essays and poems that I self-published on Supraterranean, and also articles from my Refractor blog (originally called the Supraterranean Admin blog) and MusicEdge blog. This phase was essentially a test of what I had been telling myself since 2005 – that it was worthwhile to write no matter what came of it. Of course, it wasn’t until recently that I realized nothing can come of writing unless it’s a byproduct of some other development – a means to the ends of expression and development. Those seeking to “be a writer” as an end in itself seem to be swerving headlong into a brick wall. It’s the whole career mentality that we’ve been brainwashed to endorse. It’s hurting our artistic potential!

The second section also represents my battle to quell the gastric acid accumulating from constant immersion in an absurd world. By 2008 I found that my four basic food groups had become Prilosec, Zantac, Pepto Bismol and Metamucil. I might have called the section “A Prolonged Case of Depression,” but depression isn’t something that happens to your mind and your gastrointestinal tract. (I also could have used the title “A Prolonged Case of Residing in Ann Arbor” – but that didn’t have the same ring to it.)

* * *

While this collection embodies my attempt to figure out why I am compelled to write, it also marks my process of catching up. In order to write or speak, one requires an adequate grasp on vocabulary, grammar and syntax. If one lacks these skills, one is also severely limited in thought. Considering that the school system directly contributed to my ignorance and poor vocabulary, I had quite simply been kept in a state of mental retardation. They killed the will in me to learn and create, and it took a long fucking time for me to resuscitate it.

Whereas I had read four books for pleasure before turning 22 in December of 2004, I’ve read about sixty books in the time since. (I realize that’s still slow by most standards. I now read more quickly, but I’ve developed the time-consuming habit of underlining and taking notes with pencil). And while I had focused on science, Spanish language and psychology in school and college, my independent studying has consisted largely of Existentialism and the fictional work of American iconoclasts. Each year I’ve worked to build up my reading speed and comprehension, not to mention my vocabulary – because doing so allows me to work faster and gather more information. These pursuits also make the writing process more efficient, and advances in thought flow from there.

A third way to describe the period these writings come from is that it was like an alternate dimension into which I had accidentally slipped. In 2005 I had just taken a senior seminar class to finish my Zoology program at the Lyman Briggs School of Michigan State University. The seminar topic was “Nature vs. Nurture,” and we discussed concepts as various as intelligence, language, race and religion – each time trying to discern whether genes or “environmental factors” play a bigger role. I wrote my final research paper on the potential influence of facial imprinting and odor preference in human mating. That same semester I was rejected from veterinary school for the first of two times.

And thus began a long, difficult process of figuring out who I am, what my greater purpose is, and what I intend to do with the ever-shrinking amount of time I have in life. The questions and yearnings left unanswered by an institutionalized science education have lingered with me far longer than my one-time desire to become a doctor. After college I spoke with a “life coach” who explained his belief in an underlying order to the flow of the universe, which I could only interpret as some watered-down ode to a singular, omnipotent god. But he also stated that human beings can gradually ascend into an upward spiral. Only recently have I begun to understand that concept. Currently I think of it as the deconstruction of instinctual life patterns, which result in so much needless suffering. That helps explain the title of this collection, Seeking the Upward Spiral. It’s been a long, painful search that more often felt like navigating a dark tunnel on hands and knees, with an occasional mudslide of despair.

In the process of piecing together the various puzzles, I eventually found myself returning to the study of science. Or more precisely, I stopped letting myself think my background in science was a disadvantage – as if I should have devoted myself to a single field in order to be more successful. It’s now clear that the problem was not mine but society’s, for relying on rigid over-specialization when human beings are capable of so much more. I could no longer afford to stifle my creative potential, and the same will soon be true for people worldwide. On the horizon there are no boundaries between science, culture, technology, history, psychology and philosophy. Those are the topics that have dominated my writing over the past few years, and those are likely the sources I’ll draw upon when synthesizing information in future works.

I realize it must seem a strange idea to self-publish a collection of early works before releasing any primary works. But that is one of many ways in which the realm of publishing will likely change in the coming years. Previously most books weren’t just written; they were molded from a manuscript by a gaggle of editors and literary agents. It seems that this trend worsened in the second half of the 20th century – one of the primary reasons for the withering of literary prowess in the English-speaking world. There’s far too much power concentrated in the publishing institution, most notably in the great fortress of the American Empire: New York City. Now we must once again take full responsibility for our writing. Now we can edit ourselves, if the editing is indeed necessary in the first place. Now we will get to take full creative control over our own creative works.

Still, an early works collection is customarily released later, often only to accentuate whatever the author has done later in life. It’s almost a pat on the back that says, “You’ve improved – good job!” Mine may someday demonstrate how I have transformed as a writer or as an artist. I certainly included some pieces that are far from what I consider to be my best work. My real goal here is to provide an open and honest account of my personal creative evolution. For now it also stands as a challenge to myself to keep learning, changing, growing – and then to watch in wonder as new and unexpected developments arise, perhaps in the form of words.

I myself have thoroughly enjoyed gathering and sculpting the work for this collection. And I expect that it will say much about the path I am going to plot in the years to come.

For more information on the e-book “Seeking the Upward Spiral,” please visit the new Books page.

*Graphic created using the image “Realization of Mind” by GollyGforce on Flickr.)

View The Self-Directed Initiation of a Writer at Supraterranean

(photo by van_mij on Flickr*)

As the country continues to battle the Great Repression in hopes of reinvigorating the economy, the most enlightening recovery efforts could come in very unexpected forms. And Michigan, the country’s “poster boy” for economic failure and civic chaos, may be more open than some states to experimentation. In November 2008, 63 percent of Michigan citizens voted in favor of allowing the use of medical marijuana by patients who have been approved by a doctor and registered with the state. Eighteen months later, the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) has approved more than 17,000 patients and 7,500 caregivers for registration cards.¹

There’s still a notable taboo to overcome, but the speed at which medical marijuana is becoming a normal, accepted treatment is thrilling to me, a baby of the War on Drugs (a “war” that has actually been going on for 95 years, since the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914). The sudden overturn of mass opinion is, I think, the most interesting thing about this development. It seems to be the first instance in my lifetime when so many people have decided for themselves, disregarding mandates and overcoming brainwashing long dished out by the federal government.

The notion that the government can and should take care of everything might finally be losing its longtime dominance.

Perhaps we as citizens started to recognize too many parallels between the drug war and the ongoing “War on Terror.” Both are absurd political measures intended more to control a population than to achieve any social goal. These “wars” create far too much collateral damage, make criminals out of innocent people, and compromise the rights we are supposedly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

What’s even more notable is the indication that people don’t believe the federal government will get us out of this mess. The notion that the government can and should take care of everything might finally be losing its longtime dominance. As the eminent psychologist C.G. Jung explained in his 1957 book The Undiscovered Self, in a culture of mass opinion,

“…individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible… The State in particular has turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.” ²

The irony in that statement is that communism has now been made into a dirty word, when in fact the psychological effect of the American executive mandate is little different than what occurred in the failed communist states. What we assume to be a free society, the celebrated home the “free market,” is actually a highly controlled system run by politicians, religious leaders and corporations – with advertisers, marketers and lobbyists playing supporting roles.

What’s Changing

In January I attended the first ever Caregiver’s Cup at a hotel and conference center in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The “medicine judging” contest was canceled due to legal concerns, but the two days of seminars were carried out rather successfully.  For a mere $25, anyone could hear lectures by lawyers, MDCH representatives, professors and activists; one could sit in on classes with master growers, hydroponics experts and electrical engineers. I was blown away by the willingness of attendees to exercise their right to gather peacefully, educate themselves, contribute to the discussion, and help one another. In fact, it was the exact kind of thing that, a few decades back, would have given nightmares to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The fact that we live in a post-ideological world has not yet made itself known to all, but it’s telling that so many people are beginning to use their own power of reflection and choice. Many individuals at the January conference had a fresh clarity in their eyes – as if they had just shed years’ worth of propaganda from their lives, like layers of fur not shaken off after many winters. It reminded me of the documentary Jesus Camp, which follows Christian children on their parent-enforced path of indoctrination. Throughout the process, one can witness a flicker of incredulity in their eyes, an undeniable gut feeling that they’re being fed pure bullshit – that each is being molded into a clockwork orange.

Once again, this follows from phenomena recognized decades ago by Jung (among others in psychology and literature). “The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.” ³ Of course, if you tell people they should do something, that they must fulfill their personal responsibility, what happens? Well… Rage Against the Machine is what happens.

But with this medical marijuana law, the people of Michigan have a chance to do something because they decided it isn’t wrong, and it could actually be a positive contribution to society and a way to help neighbors and communities. Michigan hasn’t yet seen the opening of dispensaries, and that possibility has created concern among those who hope to work independently as patient caregivers. After all, part of the excitement behind this law is the potential to turn around the state’s dour economy by decreasing unemployment.

The people of Michigan have a chance to do something because they decided it isn’t wrong, and it could actually be a positive contribution to society and a way to help neighbors and communities.

Yet non-profit dispensaries – which would allow patients safe access to medicine and provide tax money to communities – might be a more stable option overall. As prominent Detroit lawyer and medical marijuana specialist Matthew Abel suggested at the Caregiver’s Cup, we have the choice to either follow Los Angeles, which has no system of organization or regulation for its hundreds of dispensaries, or Oakland, which has an established district that contributes to the betterment of the surrounding neighborhood and the city as a whole through taxes.

Furthermore, in November the citizens of California will vote on a ballot that could legalize cannabis possession and cultivation for adults over 21. If that passes, commercial sales could provide the state with tax revenues in the range of $1 billion.⁴

This movement suggests that much more of what happens in this country should be decided at the local level. Regular people – some with very little education and most of whom previously felt a lack of social efficacy – are realizing how much they can do as individuals. The “cannabis colleges” offer short programs in the ballpark of $500, but most people can get by with advice from a grow supply store and The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible by Jorge Cervantes.

Through this process, many will become fluent in hydroponic growing techniques, a current focus of NASA and others who recognize the terrible inadequacy of our agricultural system. The very same methods for growing medical marijuana in one’s basement will likely be used in the future for growing food crops year-round, instead of just as a backyard summer hobby. Throughout American history, this kind of self-reliance has been celebrated in theory but not often practiced. The cheapest setups require little more than pots, soil and a high-pressure sodium light fixture. And all the detrimental effects of mass-scale agriculture (i.e. animal waste, overuse of fertilizers) and food transportation (i.e. air pollution, costly middlemen) are completely removed. The next step could be an aquaculture system where the plants clean water for fish, which in turn provide nutrients (as bio-waste) for the plants – all happening within your own home.

Additionally, this shift coincides with a growing distrust in the medical institution and pharmaceutical industry. Year after year, these companies pawn off dangerous substances on an unsuspecting public (after testing them out on people in third-world countries) because they have a proprietary monopoly on the socially acceptable drugs. But cannabis is a natural substance that can be grown at home, is often more effective than the pharmaceutical option, and has zero adverse side effects or possibility of overdose. Whereas prescription drugs are implicated in approximately 32,000 deaths in the U.S. every year, marijuana has never been the primary cause of a single mortality.⁵

Actually the one known side effect is uncontrollable gut laughter, which is appropriate if one considers the implications of this movement. Here we have a way to fight against the invisible power structures in our society – a tactic that many desperately search for day in and day out. Yet it’s not a resort to some worn-out or violent concept of revolution (like jihad, for example); it’s a consummation of our American freedom and the duty of individual responsibility that was always supposed to accompany it. (It makes me laugh, at least.)

And Michigan isn’t alone here; 13 other states have passed some kind of medical marijuana law. As the middle class lifestyle quickly vanishes and no sign of relief appears on the horizon, we will all gain a new sense of what role the individual plays in society. The old conception of top-down Capitalism as the guiding force, the best possible economic system, is irreconcilably dead.

How wonderfully appropriate that one of the first manifestations of this burgeoning New Way is based around an ancient plant – the natural embodiment of growth and productivity – which for so long has represented a rejection of that cold, rotten system, a system which implicitly denies the very ideas of the individual freedom, responsibility and growth.

In short, we asked for medicine. Nature has provided it. We would do well to follow her lead.

NOTES:
¹ “Medical Marihuana Program.” Michigan Department of Community Health. Accessed on 6/6/10. http://www.michigan.gov/mdch/0,1607,7-132-27417_51869—,00.html
² Jung, C.G. The Undiscovered Self. 1957. Signet: New York, 2006. pp. 15-16.
³ Jung, C.G. The Undiscovered Self. p. 12.
⁴ Gonzales, Richard. “California Voters Could Legalize Pot in November.” NPR. Accessed on 6/6/10. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125184608
⁵ “Annual Causes of Death in the U.S.” Drug War Facts. Accessed on 6/6/10. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/30

*Click here to see original photo.

View Medical Marijuana as a Force for Individual Responsibility at Supraterranean

The classic animated film Alice in Wonderland crossed with the Aphex Twin album “Chosen Lords.” This is part 11, featuring the track “Fenix Funk 5″ (the album starts over). More parts to come.

View Aphex in Wonderland, pt. 11 at Supraterranean

The classic animated film Alice in Wonderland crossed with the Aphex Twin album “Chosen Lords.” This is part ten, featuring the track “XMD 5a.” More parts to come.

View Aphex in Wonderland, pt. 10 at Supraterranean

Flying over the Bahamas en route from Miami to St Kitts. This shot looks like a river current under the ocean surface, or like a giant dripped sand to make cool sandbar patterns.

View Bahamas Flyover #2 at Supraterranean

Flying over the Bahamas en route from Miami to St Kitts. This one reminds me of those sand art office decorations from the ’80s.

View Bamahas Flyover #3 at Supraterranean

Flying over the Bahamas en route from Miami to St Kitts. The thin island in this shot reminded me of a crack in asphalt. I also thought the clouds were standing on posts over the water, or hanging from a blue ceiling.

View Bahamas Flyover #1 at Supraterranean