I found myself struggling to find some new and innovative way to remix a page from Ubik. I wanted to essentially destroy Joe Chip so that I could rebuild him as a new character, one lost in an entirely surreal environment built around the mechanized climate of the original story. At first, I tried to go about it by picking a page I felt held particular meaning to Ubik as a whole, or one which would be easy to translate into some sort of philosophical and psychological exegesis. Ultimately, I felt that being allowed to choose what I could write about would detract from the project, as I'd simply be reworking an important scene into another. I realized what I was trying to do was improve on the novel rather than amplify some aspect of it. I had to change my approach in order to highlight what made the original stand out for me.
In keeping with the discussion threads that move about the wiki, I decided to pick the twenty-third page as the one I would remix. I chose this page in order to create a new sort of synchronicity. I wanted to pull some external meaning into the choice, one which might be discovered by the reader. Though the page would have no intrinsic value to me, it might represent something beyond just a simple coincidence to someone who came across the page at random. Twenty-three has especial value to Robert Anton Wilson, and I've always found the Discordians' understanding of the “23 Enigma” to be a fascinating theory. This was my intention crystallized: to create something out of nothing. By picking this page, I can claim that random element while tying the remix to the general flow of the wiki atmosphere.
I began by utilizing a more fluid writing style than I had previously employed in my blog posts. I wanted to recapture the moment in Joe Chip's life as a stream of consciousness dialogue between machine and man. There is a certain beleaguered poignancy to the man's life, in that he is beset on all sides by automation. The artificial has slowly replaced what is real in his life, and he finds himself lost and confused amidst the crush. In order to explore this dissemination of the self, I decided to steal from James Joyce and Henry Green, both lauded writers within the modernist literary school of the early twentieth century. I tried to find the immediate futility inherent to Green's characters and setting along with the choppy dialoguing throughout novels such as Living, which essentially deals with the plight of the working man in an industrialized England. Joyce, on the other hand, had an uncanny knack at capturing the emotional weight of random moments in his characters' lives. Both Ulysses and Dubliners study the figures involved in a way that involves the audience intimately while simultaneously keeping each separate from the other. Each writer explored the nature of man with strange dialogue, deep introspection, and narrative epiphanies that I felt could be brought forth in Ubik.
I morphed the conversation between Joe Chip and the machines into something anomalous and confusing by removing all definite articles and standard punctuation. To me, this creates a discordance which seems both vulgar and poetic. The only separation between the two voices is the spacing, which I feel is more than enough to pull one from the other and yet keep the reader wondering. The narration mingles with the dialogue so that at times, they become one indivisible whole. This was my attempt to mimic the joining of man and machine in constancy, where the words wrap around both as they reach for singularity.
The machines in Joe Chip's remixed world seem almost sinister, sterile and unfeeling in their admonishments. I did not want to transform them into monsters, and yet they ended up as such. It is hard to say whether or not Ubik attempts to push the same imagery, even though there is this sort of menacing undercurrent throughout the novel. I feel that within the story, everything is objectified as both human and machine interact as things rather than entities. All form and function become intertwined, where life is no longer meaningless or meaningful. In such cases, humanity has to be re-established through a repudiation of old standards. Meaning has to be earned and defined, otherwise it finds itself extinguished by the machinations of empty models.
I feel as though the passage I have created is indicative of how I perceive that biological and technological synergy which sustains itself in this world of objects and machines. It's interesting how a random choice as to the page I would remix was so blatantly affected by one of the many reality tunnels I'm always looking through. This I fear is my own personal Total Perspective Vortex, where all aspects of my world are affected by the self I have established. This remix was my attempt to break from my traditional methodology, my traditional outlook on the world, and yet, I still managed to incorporate much of what defines me into this work.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.