FACTS aka Things I Know - A Tower of Brahma recap

12/27/11

My name is Charles Crown. I wrote a book. I reluctantly describe it as a novel, for the adventures contained within those pages actually happened, despite what physical evidence tells me.

I ran away from my old life, trapped in a relationship where I humiliated myself into staying. I saw it as a prison, though I knew it was of my own creation. On the inside I got strong enough until I had to begin to type. And once I did start, I could never stop. I'll be writing away my whole life, checking over my shoulder to see what's coming after me.

But no one did come after me as I tore off in my sports car, driving from rest stop to rest stop, but never resting. Losing contact with those around me, as if I had ever possessed that ability before. Had I gone mad? Was I enlightened but not initiated? I did activate myself with experimental films, ambient music, organic highs, tossed into a chaos magick stew.

I had become unhinged, wandering the highways, seeking myself through losing myself. It made some things make sense as I wrote chapter after chapter, emailing the text from my smartphone. But I also felt angry. At my girlfriend for shattering my self-worth, my father for corrupting my mind, and all of mankind for taking the easy way out time and time again.

I returned home with a sliver of understanding, a glimmer of light piercing the darkness depression cast over me. Things felt different, less constricting, ideas formed making everything more malleable. After spending a few weeks training, I went to California for the first time. When I returned I found I was defeated in the most liberating manner.

Whatever it was that I wanted to do with myself, well it didn't matter, my writing didn't matter, except somehow it now mattered more. The words I put down and sent off into a collection of electronic data, they changed me, and therefore all of life around me. Scenes with dramatic discourse began serendipitously appearing all around me and so I ran off to the big city.

That's when I saw that the whole game was rigged, that the prison of my former suburban, office-drone existence was greater than I ever dreamed. Every interaction was planned and purposefully laid before me beneath the giant gray dome that they were selling me as my great escape. I just went from one lockdown to another trap.

This is probably the time where I lost my mind, but I'll never know for sure. The first year of my life in NYC was spent in a perpetual blacked-out state of unconsciousness. Photos show me face down on the pavement, stories of me saying un-characteristically insane things; the random and chaotic scrawls on paperbacks told me what I should have guessed.

I created two personalities for my new life, a duo that would come and save me when my soul was in peril, or when my life was stagnant. Dark obsession and carnal desire consumed me as I leaned on Agent Spider's sinister direction. But the other one, he was me, or I was him, and neither one of us knew what to do. Agent Fenris was born.

A thinly veiled auto-biographical character, and the author himself, sitting and waiting for some purpose or direction. In their dialogue a path was laid bare and they walked it, talking to myself all the while. I writhed in pain, desensitized my overly emotional core as Spider, the poisoned and venomous aspect of my personality lashed out, wrecking and smashing with total abandon, embracing morality-free life...for both, I mean, all of us.

Until I, as Fenris, grabbed the reins and tried to be the gentleman, the lost soul, boy poet I knew was the real me underneath it all. But the conflict brought with it intense feelings of bitterness and guilt, two things that were never meant to be brought to a boil next to one another. We went truly into the dark cave and tried never to leave the apartment.

I created another character, taking a page from the failed college screenplay that I had pulled Fenris and Spider from, and introduced their adversary, Gallows. He was power and influence, a potential publisher or death incarnate. I was writing a novel it seemed, but how did it come together? I tried my best to write things as they happened, emailing reports from drunken nights at strange girls' apartments or while running amuck in the streets. Was someone compiling this madness?

I read it. It was the basis of a book, it seemed, even if it was all over the place with poetic prose, essay disseminations of social interactivity, or mad violent action segues. I wrote this? It was heavy, and yet light-hearted. It was exactly the kind of frenetic energy I wanted from a book.

So I took some classes at New School. Read classic literature, crafted some specific chapters, and hung out with fellow writers. It was weird. I was so happy out of (what I thought) was my element. Peers, practice, accomplishment. Who was I? Wasn't I just the old loser from Long Island still? I'd flash back to that guy and sit in shock at where I was as I entered my thirties.

I began to flounder. Nothing was adding up suddenly. I was hitting another wall and so I destroyed it with the weapon I knew best: complete utter fucking chaos. My heart was broken while studying Descartes, she was a fantasy made of science. My career dreams were dashed during writing class as I saw the best case scenario was to be a hustling scholar as in the case of my burnt out teacher.

My novel was seeming to be borderline incoherent. I must have had something wrong with me, or maybe it'll always be off. Nothing made sense anymore. My new liberating life had just led me to desperate loneliness. I realized that my entire reason for being was to connect to someone, quite literally anyone, for if I could pull that off, then all hope for me was not lost.

I wrote the end of the novel, trying to name names while making them iconic figures, dragging it out for as long as I could because I didn't know what would happen when it ended. I gave it a happy ending prologue, but as I finally tried to end my life just a few chapters from finishing, someone, a friend, intervened and stopped me. They didn't save me, but I thought falling in love had.

After giving in to my suicidal feelings after the better part of a decade, finally I gave up on trying to end my life and tried to begin again. I wanted to live, to love, to know myself. Then she came into my life and everything made sense. Jasmine 'Jazz' Jones was everything I wasn't, which began to feel like she was all the good in the world personified. I basked in her glow and my life was enriched beyond my previous dreams.

Enter the chaos. The addiction to channelling emotional surges into destructive impulses. The relief when a sharp object caressed my wrist. Then that's when I saw it. I was the problem, I was the prison, I was the hate and the love, Fenris and Spider, and yet, in all brutal honesty I am none of those things. I knew myself as the one true enemy.

A fucked up child of teenage parents, lost in his own head since day one, snared in a dog's clenched jaw at two years old, dead for three minutes at age four. Son of an alcoholic and a mentally abused mother. A disconnected symbiont assimilating social culture. Words popped in the head easily enough that it garnered attention, which felt good, like I imagined love to feel like.

So I wrote and worked out that the big bad is me all along. I loosely used two archetypes to battle it out to end the world. And so they did. My world is ended once more. A crack in space and time has separated me from Jazz, the woman I love. Do I have the strength to fight, rather than run from cell to cell? With words it all should be possible.

This is all I know. Now, read it and make a plan goddammit.

Happy trails, to you...until, we meet, again...

Tower of Brahma. Chapter 64. One Last Thing. (edit)

11/21/10

And the happy ending we all want. The book was a process of negativity removal through the churning of notions across the page, mostly written in dark moments in dive bars, a few whiskeys in, and alone in the universe, but never giving in, just writing it down, and making it make sense.

This happy ending is what I'd still like, and though it seems further from me now than ever, I am more hopeful than ever. That is what I'd like to say is the Human Condition. Faith at the Furthest Reaches, the instinctual knowing that it always works out.

In the end, I wrote this book to change my life, then finished it to save my life. Now I finish editing it and contemplate self-publishing it to put forth into the world. It's as weird as I would have liked. It's timely with this new Century upon us, all written on a smartphone while galavanting all over NYC. Now, I must return to the sequel, of which, the chapters I have written up til now will be published with the Tower of Brahma, along, hopefully, with the earliest drafts of the screenplay & lost short story!

Thanks for reading.

Everything else that happened to me from '95 to 2010.

The Tower of Brahma - Chapter 63 Pt.2 - My Life Til Now (edit)

6/20/10

Phew, well, that's everything, up to mid-2010 anyways. I may have to change some names in there. What a long, strange trip it's been.

I don't know what it all means, other than the fact that I hold on to things, or did, but now this is all over and behind me, and the fallout was another beast entirely.

Every system crash reboot is better than the one before it. There's the hopeful ending.

Every memory I have for the first 19 years of my life.

The Tower of Brahma. Chapter 63. Fire Over Water. (edit)

6/21/10

Wow, this is pretty much every memory I had of my entire life up until I began a life online, just before my twenties as I prepared to go down the darkest existence I could conjure up for myself that is just now coming to a close.

It pretty much speaks for itself. I left out names to protect myself mostly. But it was a good life, I was happy despite feeling so internally dark and twisted. I was always laughing and smiling and getting other people to as well. People liked having me around, and I have never had friendships like that again in my life. Whether it was jumping through backyards, or never leaving the basement, it was the best of times.

There is some admission to sexual issues here, but I think my existence has been warped by alternative life experiences. Poor white boy with rich black friends, a rejection of girls yet a dependency upon them, always seeking for the best, while focusing only upon the worst. I'm sorry Freddie, Karen, and Grandma. None of you wanted me to punish myself for as long as I have. I'm happy now.

Dark endings for nihilistic novels

Tower of Brahma 62.i Solo Inferno (edit)

6/14/10

And then I, that being Charles Crown, the author of this tale, the fabricated persona developed to drive the devil from me, dissolved into nothingness. This is how it ends on a personal level. A flash, mash-up of life experiences and things that seemed so important, now just melting away with the mysteries of the universe realized at the moment you become part of the ecosystem on a molecular level, showing that the only good thing the brain has done is distinguish itself as something other.

Which is all really a lie. The acceptance of all things, the going with the flow, the striking a balance with nature is what is essential to humanity, but we will always fight that, such is the human spirit's drive towards the unknown. There must be a pinnacle of existence, and for me, that is this book, if not specifically these final chapters. This is what I needed to do. How it all needed to work out. It was an apocalyptic novel from the get-go.

And so, the universe I created with Agent Fenris, the recruit, Agent Spider, the mentor/sidekick, and Charles Crown, the writer, the creator, the fall guy that I sent into another dimension to let me know how to master this one. Only it all backfired. Less than a month after I wrote this chapter I would write a suicide note, post it online, and attempt to disappear into the East River. Friends at the time saw it, kept me on the phone, until someone could come get me. That was my ending.

The is the end my friend.

Tower of Brahma. 62h. Hell is for children (edit)

6/7/10

And this is how it all ends. The final moment for all of humanity, the death of 63 souls follow my own into Hell, or perhaps Heaven, though they already picked their team when the Rapture came.

And then the Devil plays one last trick, he lets me judge my older self's soul.

The world ends in 2036, sixty seems like a good age to go, though maybe 64...

Tower of Brahma. 62G. God's Not Home (edit)

5/31/10

And so, I send myself to Hell. The last two people on the planet and they're both me, though battling out virtually. In the end I had to see myself for who I was, or who this future version of myself would become, and what the path to good intentions had created. More alone than ever, atop the food chain, and isolated, pretending the connectivity of wi-fi and A/V could provide was enough to keep the whole human race going. But it could never be that way.

And so, I hope to bury Pride. I like to think I have, not realizing that it was my deadly sin after all. The others are disposed of easily enough, but it is the Ego that fights to stay afloat when the times are hard, and the task seems impossible. I want to believe I am special, that this journey I'm on is important, and that this book somehow will matter to someone, somewhere, at some point in time. And in the end, it is important, life-changing, to me.

I became a better person, a more sane and whole person, after writing this book. I see that all these chapters are written just at the very end of who I thought I was, and who I was about to become. That a new adventure was waiting beyond the curtains drawing closed on the Tower. I had successfully destroyed the prison of my own design, but then quickly began following the path of tormented sadness and the steady climb back to being a healthy and happy human being.

What if you were given free reign to create endlessly but had to do so alone?

Tower of Brahma. 62f. Over & Over (edit)

5/24/10

A further exploration of the bubble hivemind that was the final remnants of humanity. This time getting closer to what I feel like my intentions are towards writing, or at least a theme that ran through this entire novel, and my entire life: destruction of archaic ideas.

By processing all of humanity's achievements, marking a timeline of anthropological creativity, in calculating all that has come before and seeing what it was all about, in that way the meaning of life could be distilled from the collective consciousness. In the final days we all put out exactly what we have within us, and in that moment we shine.

I was just tired of repeating patterns in my life, though I see I am still circling the tower, and perhaps always will be. That seems as true an existence as life has presented to me so far. Keep creating, keep consuming, feeding that unseemly beast we call the human spirit. But surely there had to be an end to it all...

The Heaven/Hell of our own design

Tower of Brahma. 62e. White Lie Like the Devil pt.1 (edit)

5/17/10

With each chapter I wanted to focus upon one aspect of the future and explore each part of what this world would be like in my vision. Sixty-four people remaining, in a safety-bag cocoon, each one a prisoner of their own design. A metaphor for how we can all get caught up in our head, losing ourselves to our passions, but they're not real. It's all an illusion and distraction from tangible interaction. And once that is lost, isn't the essence of humanity ultimately lost as well?

There's a lot of meditation on prisons, cells, traps, reality, virtual reality, heaven, and hell within the pages of this book, and in the end all I can say is that real human connectedness exists, however fleeting it may be. And it's all that matters. Everything else is a distraction from the flow of time, a shadow of our dreaming brought alive by our hands. How much experience is sufficient for a human being? What are the heights of self-indulgence? What is the outcome of it all?

I suppose we see, we observe, calculate and gamble, and the not knowing the next move, no matter how premeditated, is what we are all waiting for. The unquantifiable sum of all actions crashing into eternal possibilities. The logistical equation working itself out until the very end. All I want is to see the whole picture and interject my words right where they're needed most. I suppose that's all we can ask for.