KEEPS: the problem of universals.

One of the things I've had my eye on in re: building KEEPS is nominalism-- the "problem of universals".

Reading up on Kat Acker's 'My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini', I encountered this interview which just fascinated my ass:

"I was setting up the text so that all the connections were based on nominalism. [....] The book’s structured that way. I think it’s probably unreadable, but.... The idea fascinated me. I’ll never do it again. It’s as far into structure as I’ll ever go. I wanted to fashion a book out of different ways of ordering that weren’t causal."

Acker arranged the characters in 'My Life My Death' against traditional father / son relationships. Like she said, it's all but unreadable unless you're looking for it-- but the notion of creating a network of specific, seemingly illogical, acausal connections between characters resonated with me because writers like Joyce, Delillo, Pynchon & Moore repeatedly trade on similarly synchronous webs. This is, in fact, the way they generate the realities of their fiction.

(Idly I find myself wondering if part of the reason the aforementioned writers lean on this technique so heavily is that it tends to attract, or 'catch', material & solutions as they're weaving...)

The majority of Matthew Barney's 'Cremaster' cycle is organized using nominal connections, the same sort of symbolic reasoning Jodorowsky uses to plot. The philosopher's stone of the alchemists is analogous to the stone the builders rejected in alchemy because they're both the product of a process of refinement. They're not the same thing, mind, but close enough for the openminded artist and/or artisan.

Part of the fun (& a fair share of the torment) involved in scripting KEEPS has been crafting these connections. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why Olgham would take on the role of caretaker for Dade-- until my teenage obsession with Freemasony reared its pimply head and I realized a ring & an oath was as good a motive as any. From there it was a sweet step to Bierce's cynical definition of Masonry:

"An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void."

Freemasonry being at heart a hedge school, vouchsafing occult 'truths' from one generation to the next, it seemed a reasonable assumption that the varied rites would, when pared down to their pre-rational, cthonic roots, be a simple series of instructions for how to go mad & come out the other side master of that Great Secret the big old beards used to gibber about.

(Although the present build of KEEPS really began with me re-reading Crowley's 'Book of Lies' & imagining the Ritual of the Phoenix-- an official ritual of the A∴A∴, a sub-sect of the Golden Dawn --as the lead-in to an EC-style horror anthology. Four self-contained stories, unrelated but sharing the same core cast...)

Anyway. Ir-rationalizations ahoy! Now back to work.