Thu, 19 May 2005

the richter goldberg psychiatric institute: an introduction
[This was my second Process Engine article, which was basically a bit of turd-polishing as to my Richter-Goldberg project and the rules behind it. I’m not sure if this one even made it online.]

“Cursed be the one who makes a carved or molten image, the work of the hands of an artisan, and sets it up in secret.” -Rabbi Shim’on, Zohar 3:127b-128a

I’ve been putting this off, mostly because I’ve been lazy and haven’t really gotten the project in shape, haven’t slogged through the backend work and pulled together money and moved to Iowa City and set up the server and all the things standing between today and that long-distant point where (I tell myself, now) the project will have taken form, an empty box (kara-bakos) which will be ready to fill. I started this website at the very end of 1994, at which point it was basically a place to put up stories I had written. Unfortunately, I’m of a mindset where I constantly add little miniature pieces to a general locus rather than develop a standard narrative-arc novel, which means I’m basically fucked as far as publishing goes. As time went on, it became clear to me there was a soft taxonomy by which I could arrange the pieces I was writing. One was a semi-realistic storyline about a group of characters in a midsize Midwestern town dealing with memory and forgetfulness and one’s inability to change. There’s a few primary stories which snake through here, including the story of the rerisen, which I tried to shoehorn into a book. This stuff varies from hijinx stuff to rural depressionism pieces, and is usually the stuff people like, if they like any at all. The other stuff I call the Biomorphic Abstraction stuff. This is the stuff I have the most fun writing, and which I feel is technically my best work, even though it’s hard to get into. It’s the work where all my interests find a place: puppetry, automatons, cryptography, game-structures, butoh, false histories, symbolic alphabets, experimental technologies, and more than anything what Ballard called the externalization of the human nervous system. I sat out to build Richter-Goldberg as a means of organizing and facilitating this material. My first experience with mnemonics as a discipline (and not just the Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge kind) came from Borges, and like everything I learned from Borges, the idea stuck in my skull and crystallized, taking on an unearthly glow. In 1993 (I think, it was around then) I read Douglas Cooper’s excellent first novel Amnesia, in which he credits Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory. I tracked down a copy a couple years later and was hooked. This, I realized, was the skeleton for my Biomorphic Abstraction device, as I began thinking of it. I did research on museums, on wunderkammern, on architecture, all the while collecting notes on this building where this group of people desperately connected research in order to avert some distant event, some hidden current seeping unseen through history.

The building is three stories high. Each story has 25 rooms. Each level has a hidden room which is not accessible by standard entrances, forming a hidden spine. If we read the rooms as letters of the English alphabet, that means each level is a lipogram. This makes for a total of 78 rooms. At least one symbolic reading should be immediately apparent (and yes, there are cards to match). The Kabbalah is based on the Hebrew alphabet, which consists of 22 letters, all of which double as numbers allowing for gematria; attempts to translate this material into English fail at their source as they lack the specific structure necessary to make such conjectures relevant. The influence of Kabbalistic practice is readily apparent all over RG, but I’ve deliberately strayed away from any literal readings, instead finding translations of the actual constraints in English and perverting them to my own ends, the idea of a core text being in essence a starting point for extrapolations outward into strange secret places. I’ve made attempts to learn Hebrew, just as I’ve tried to learn everything else, but so far I have fallen so short as to make any gain a pittance. Certain characters see divinity as a nemesis to humanity in RG, and from that I can understand why certain readers have felt offended by my treatment of certain concepts. Anyway. In the Kabbalah, there are ten Sefirot, which are numbers as living entities, emanations which, when combined with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, form the elements of all creation, (In this sense, English can be seen as a corrupt language, which is certainly how some of the characters feel about it.) RG is designed according to a base 5 system, as each of the three floors are 5x5 panmagic associative squares (the sums of each playing a pivotal role deep in the text), so that here there are five Sefirot, only that’s bad terminology, as they are here absences, voids, collectively known as The Cult of the Yellow Sign, practicioners of the Fivefold Erasure System. That the appearance of the five absences on each floor, when joined directly, form the five points of a star, and that the hidden spine of the building is located in the center of the inner pentagrams of these stars, is worth some, but not too much, consideration. That the absences mirror the vowels in the alphabet of rooms is far more suggestive.

The plans for the RG backend have developed as my abilities have grown; initially it was little more than a collection of pages-as-rooms loaded with goofy javascript. For reasons I no longer understand, I ended up separating the script/noise into its own thing as the Infernal Salt Codex, which is a retranslation of the core materials by an AI named Aqaraza (which is an old Scrytch reference). Later this became some CGI/database stuff which mangled emails, so that I could add to it from public terminals while I was computerless. Now it’s xml/xslt stuff that I still haven’t finished. A number of people are actually developing interesting online narrative structures which actually work, so lately I’ve been taking notes and mostly just been collecting all the material, which is taking a suprisingly long time. The structure basically forms a scaffolding for nested narratives, it is what John Barth would call the Arabesque. It has a particularly strong tie with Raymond Roussel’s work Locus Solus, both in structure and subject, and if I do it right, it will feel endless withouth actually being endless.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/processengine] #