Spotlight! Shamanistic Technique of World Weirding, The
Mark Teppo
Once, when my son was small, we went to the zoo, and I took him down into the fish grotto. Underground, in a small observation chamber where the faux limestone was chocolate brown and the floor tiles were uniformly grey, we looked out into the blue and green of the saltwater tank. In the distance, a white shape swam. Really white, like freshly bleached, freshly laundered t-shirt white. It came toward us, swimming around the side of the tank in a long arc, growing in size until we could make out the smooth surface of its skin, the tiny notches in its fins and bulbous head, and the staring serenity of its enormous eye. It swam right past us, just on the other side of an inch of glass, and I pointed, “Look, a beluga whale. Look!”
My son was busy being entranced by the regular pattern of the tile, by the play of light off the walls, by the color of the water, by the recessed lighting in the ceiling: everything but the whale swimming past. No matter how many times the whale swam by, or how I tried to point it out to him, he never paid it any attention. The whale, like everything else in sight, was new to him, and unlike the rest of the room, it kept disappearing from view. He had never seen any of this before, and it was all weird to him.
We stood there for a little while longer, watching and not-watching the whale and I tried to imagine what it was like to see something for the first time, something that I had no previous knowledge of. What would my brain do? Try to assimilate it into a known memetic structure–”this is blue, so it goes there” or “this has legs, so it goes over here”–or simply give up, and like the natives of the Caribbean when Colombus’ ships first hove into view, not see the object at all.
Well, the shamans could, the spirit mediums who were used to stretching their perceptions to the foreign, the alien, and the weird. They lived in worlds of shifting realities, where time and space were mutable and flexible, and where they routinely invented, named, destroyed, and built again objects, concepts, and ideas that had no analogy in the “real” world. It’s not an accident that they were also the story-tellers, the historians, the keepers of the tribe’s identity. They know how to anchor themselves in a way that would allow them to persist outside of time and space, and their greatest struggle was to contextualize their experiences well enough to communicate them to the rest of their tribe.
They were, and still are, writers of the weird, and language became the tool by which the weird was transferred from the shaman’s brain to the minds of his children.
Dr. Bradley, in last issue’s [Vol. 1, Issue 1] piece on the new weird, says:
People are the manner of their stories-for example, a story presenting the “magic” as it is conceived within the cultural ideology of colonized people represents how they conceive of existence not only narratively but in the “real” world as well. Ill defining as this is, it demonstrates that there has been a narrative anxiety about the importance of understanding the self before understanding the landscape and whatever events occur there beyond the scope of a people’s worldview (making them “magic”).
Language came about from a need to build communities, to share something of ourselves with our neighbors, our tribesmates, our immediate families, and inherent in this loosely realized toolset, is a weight of narrative anxiety. A word, in a vacuum, is simply a collection of sigils and sounds, and has very little meaning. It becomes imbued with its power–with its effectiveness–as it is placed in series with other words. The magic lies in the cultural and historical connotations that the shaman shares with his audience. The “weird”–the “numinous,” the “creatively pregnant”–is simply a phrase that has not been properly contextualized by the audience. It is, like the whale for my son, something beyond our experience, and by making it part of our vocabulary, by fitting it into our comprehension matrix, we become something more than we were.
There are two types of myths that make up the bulk of story-telling structures: those tales that seek to maintain our view of the universe, and those that seek to enlarge our comprehension. Applying this dichotomy to modern fiction, on one hand we have episodic and standardized constructs: the thriller of the week, featuring the current apocalyptic model by which the demise of our species will arrive; the heart-stirring romance, forever welded into its chrome-plated cage of Shakespearean structure; the comedy, filled with pies to the face, the hilarity of cascading coincidences, and awkward conversations concerning a lack of pants; and the familial drama, wracked with breakdowns in communication and unrequited desires. On the other hand, there is the experimental work that fails to stay within its niche, that defies categorization, that slips across the road and over the fence of convention, and that is filled with a foreboding sense of the strange.
Structure, by its very definition, is meant to anchor us, to give us a common lexicon by which to approach a story. When that framework is distorted or removed altogether, we are cast adrift, and if we are to interpret the story, we must provide our own structure. We do not have the ability to process data without attaching some measure of meaning to it; or rather, sensory or intelligent data that we intend to retain must be assigned some sort of taxonomical metadata so that we can find it again later. Our brains are still keyed to retaining data in order to keep us alive–we have not yet become pure observers–and all experience is classified in a way that will assist our future decision-making processes. Stories of the weird threaten this simple retention procedure because they defy the ruleset by which our brain store data.
So why do we allow them to exist? Why do we allow these shamans to infect our minds with these alien structures? Why do they insist on attempting to break the paradigm of information transfer? It isn’t because they are attempting to create new mythologies, but because they are trying to tell us something about ourselves, something they have seen. There are no new stories, there are only altered interpretations of them. Truly “new” stories would be unrecognizable as their divergence from the norm would be so great that we would not be able to comprehend their structure well enough to be able to retain them.
Think about that one for a second: a story so alien that, even though you could read it, you wouldn’t be able to remember it.
The human species has progressed enough that it is no longer of one mind. We have “regionalism,” “cultural mores,” “divergent records of history,” and “personal interpretations” that signify distinct linguistic comprehension models. We are old enough to be different, each one of us. The “tribe” has become too large for one storyteller to encapsulate all the variations of existence into its mythology. If our shamans can no longer effectively communicate the “historical” model of mythology, then the only option available to them is to give us meta-mythology—forward looking tales that introduce divergent pathways in our linguistic model.
It is very possible they are still attempting to communicate to the vast majority of the human tribe, but are doing so on a level that is not bound by the differences of culture, region, or historical context. A language is the accreted context of its use, and when there no longer is any context for its use, it dies, in much the same way that a myth becomes brittle and shabby—no longer sustainable by the modern mental map of text and subtext. By the use of neutropic metaphor, contextual decay, psychological key binding, oneiric symbol hacking, and a host of other illicit para-linguistic techniques, the shaman of the word seeks to trigger an eruptive expression of next-gen memetic networking. They don’t want to break your heads; they want to show you the limit of yours, so that you can step out of your existing shell.
We have stopped asking ourselves what is beyond the limits of our imagination. We have subdued the creative impulse to be more than the sum of our menial experience. We made up all the words found in our holy writings, and yet we refuse to challenge the order they have on the page. We have given up on dreaming, opting instead to have our desires attached to the fabricated stories of backward-facing caricatures invented and perpetuated by machinery that eschews the weird for the mundane. The framework of our neural modes is decided by lowest common denominator focus groups, high-definition programming share, and mass market marketing campaigns. The lights in our brains are going out, and we have grown afraid of those who wield the word. We have grown to fear our shamans, because they remind us that we have become indolent and have turned our faces ever backward.
Yet, our children face forward, adding new experiences to their mental maps every day. Eventually, they will stop because they will see that we have stopped, and they will shuffle about for a little while until they face backward as well.
But the shamans of the weird will continue to operate in the gloom. Think about it: a story you cannot remember, filled with objects you cannot fathom, extolling a course of narrative action that moves at angles you cannot follow.
I hope it explodes your brain, and even though you will try to repair it, the structure won’t be the same. There will be cracks and breaks—a new neural landscape—one the shamans of the weird will teach you how to navigate.
Mark Teppo like to invent things. Upcoming inventions are the novels Lightbreaker (from Night Shade Books) and Psychobabel (from Farrago Press). The remainder of his time is spent avoiding his lawn, moving books around in his library in a vain attempt to fit them all on the shelves, and wondering if the rain will ever stop. His website is, rather prosaically, markteppo.com.