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Lying to Tell the Truth
I’ve been having some fun with this new Conspiracy Fiction site of mine. Posted today are two new pieces, one by JP about time running backwards, and another short story type-thing by me about satellites taking over the earth by means of broadcasting spurious news segments.
Overall, it’s a fun project. I am getting into this whole fiction-writing thing as another avenue to explore weird esoteric sorts of truth. I’ve been finding more and more in my personal research that you end up hitting a certain wall when you’re looking for the truth. A big part of that is that mystical truth or whatever you want to call it is ineffable. You can’t quite capture it with words so much as you can sort of set up words as a sieve for it to pass through. And in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter if you use the platform of fiction or fact as your vehicle cause you end up with similar results.
Intentionally working with fiction though seems to have a neat, almost magickal, effect. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but maybe it has to do with seeding something with your intention, which then pulls in all these other elements which support it. Almost like how molecules of dust in the air end up forming clouds around them. I’m still kind of experimenting with the whole thing, but I’m enjoying it a lot.
Anyway, now that I have all these various sub-sites running off this main one here, I am needing to find a better way to manage them for other people who want to keep abreast of them. I think I will be trying to set up an aggregator site for my various side projects in the near future, so you can sort of look at that and see all my latest postings scattered across the almost ten or so websites that I have running concurrently at this point. More on that to follow though.
- The Goverment We Deserve?
- Madeleine L’Engle on Facts & Truth
- Lack of Coherent Truths?
- Jesus Christ…
- Spiritual Bungee Jumping
- Prev: Spiritus - Psychic Theatre
- Next: FeedBurner Nixed
June 13th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Yeah Tom, I definetly am going to write some for Conspricy Fiction. I think one of the oldest human impulses is to tell stories, every kid has told hyper-exagerated stories to test their friends gullibleness (is that a word?). I have plenty of ideas, and will submit them as soon as I write them down, which hopefully will be soon. Hopefully.
June 13th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Another thing I wanted to add to this sort of jumbled train of thought… A friend of mine was talking about the difference between writing fiction and the kind of weird speculative nonsense that I usually churn out. He described fiction as like having to actually *wear* an outfit that you made yourself, and see how it fits and holds up to wear and tear. Whereas the stuff I normally do is more just like the actual making of the clothing without ever necessarily putting it on… I thought that made a lot of sense
June 13th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Tim, (this is in regards to yesterdays post)
The way you speak of Seattle makes me quite envious. I am tempted to move there simply because of things such as - the way the light shines on the buildings downtown in the morning, the hammering man outside of the art musuem, the empty and broad expanses of road on Sunday’s on the lower west side of town, salmon, beer and Dungeness crab, the bowling alleys and bed and breakfasts on the college side of town, because the coffee seems to taste better there and of course, a tatooed psychic named Faye and things like psychic theater.
Please, please read some Tom Robbins. You are doing yourself a near disservice by not reading some of his work. Faye the Tatooed psychic is a character right out of his work and right out of Seattle, apparently.
You could start with Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas or Another Roadside attraction. My personal favorite is Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Please?
June 14th, 2006 at 3:15 pm
That’s a good analogy…the cloth/clothes one. I think what’s fun about fiction is that you can break any and every rule that you’d normally have to follow when (honestly) exploring something like conspiracy theory. In the general public’s eyes, conspiracy theory is nonsense. But at the same time, in the conspiracy theory community, things are often accepted with very little speculation or investigation….even when the opposite is claimed. So you’ve kinda got this group of people that might as well be reading fiction in a way.
Earlier today I was reading your entry on self directed learning. You mentioned that you felt that the number one problem with conspiracy theory today is that it’s essentially a self-directed learning program undertaken by people who have not been trained to learn like that. You also mentioned that the focus is always on connections…that you’re always trying to figure out the who/where/what/when/why of it all.
I’m sure you know as well as anyone that a lot of times in conspiracy theory circles the “connections” end up going something like, “Oh shit! Guess what?! Some crazy-ass just tried to cross the Mexico/California border carrying 15 bloody, gore-encrusted machetes and a garbage bag full of dead babies!!!”
“Wait wait wait!!! Did he have a…..MILITARY RECORD???!!!”
“……YES!”
“Oh shit!”
“Not only that, but he was a NAVAL OFFICER!! You know what that means!!”
“Fuck yeah, I do! ‘OFFICE OF THE NAVY’!! Which everyone knows doesn’t actually exist!!!”
“You know what else that means?”
“Miiiiiiind controllllll!!!!”
“MKULTRA!”
(Actually the connection points would probably look more like when someone on one of the conspiracy forums figures out that the guy carrying the machetes and the dead babies had an uncle that was in the CIA back in the 60’s.)
Does it make a real connection? not really. We have no way of knowing what that uncle did in the CIA. He could have been a typist for all we know. It’s a connection in that it anchors the balloon strings of these common aspects of conspiracy theory, (dead babies, murder, military records, the CIA, etc) to a central iron ring on the massive Fisherman’s Wharf of conspiracy theory, but beyond that it’s meaningless.
And then the balloons just kind of float up there for a while, not really doing much of anything other than causing common citizens to glance at them, and the common conspiracy theorist to obsess over them.
Then when the balloons eventually lose air and come back down to earth, the common citizen forgets and the common conspiracy theorist obsess even more over the inevitable cover-up. (….which of course was initiated by a gunman hiding in Coit Tower, shooting the balloons out of the sky with a long range rifle that had been perversely and magickally “blessed” by Michael Aquino during a horrific ritual involving kidnapped children wearing grey rubber alien suits.)
My point is that I often wonder if the bulk of conspiracy theorists (myself included) wouldn’t be happier and more productive and have a better chance at carving out this new reality everyone’s always saying we need, if they’d write fiction rather than partake in the endless bong hit of conspiracy theory. I think a lot of people forget (I know I sure do) that their ability to gorge on information from prison planet or whatever is dwarfed by the power of their own imaginations.
June 14th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
[…] A reader named Magic Grubb left a really awesome comment on a post earlier about conspiracy theory. And that comment reads (in part): a lot of times in conspiracy theory circles the “connections” end up going something like, “Oh shit! Guess what?! Some crazy-ass just tried to cross the Mexico/California border carrying 15 bloody, gore-encrusted machetes and a garbage bag full of dead babies!!!” […]