There was no such female I had run into back then, so it could be possible this is one of the first times that what I wrote to help me connect with people would later be lived out. I also start getting more flowery with descriptions, and the anger towards the Bush era conservatism begins to fire up. The entire book ignites here and starts a serious fire.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Starbucks Female Connection - First example of pre-cognitive/self-fulfilling writing
Still out at the rest stops, in my head at least, and now an interaction with what would be the first vague female character in the book. She works for Starbucks and is symbolic of two girls I would come to know at the one on 2nd & 9th in the East Village. Three and half years after this was written I would go back to college, undergrad program at New School, and would almost always eat an old fashioned donut and down it with a large iced coffee with shitloads of sugar. Emily & Claire were almost always there, if not at the same time. I was just coming out from under my roommate Jared's shadow and they were friends at my local Starbucks. (And yes, I know, Starbucks, but after I did a stint living in Jersey with some friends who worked there I became addicted.)
There was no such female I had run into back then, so it could be possible this is one of the first times that what I wrote to help me connect with people would later be lived out. I also start getting more flowery with descriptions, and the anger towards the Bush era conservatism begins to fire up. The entire book ignites here and starts a serious fire.
There was no such female I had run into back then, so it could be possible this is one of the first times that what I wrote to help me connect with people would later be lived out. I also start getting more flowery with descriptions, and the anger towards the Bush era conservatism begins to fire up. The entire book ignites here and starts a serious fire.
Monday, February 18, 2013
Man, was I depressed nine years ago.
Nine years ago I was in the throws of major depression. Starting the book was a good boost, posting weekly chapters, but nothing was progressing, or at least not by any measurable standards. I was alone in a way that I can't even relate. I made sure of that. Reading it now, I still struggle with all the same social anxieties and worries about connection, but now I don't take it as serious, having seen that we're all lost, that we're all depressed and trapped within ourselves. Until we learn to write our own story.
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 5 - Lost Among the Lambs (edit)
Sunday, February 17, 2013
The End Before It Begins.
Short and sweet. I just had to get something down even if I had no idea where to go with it. I wrote this during one of my first proper magickal rituals as from The Inner Temple of Witchcraft by Christopher Penczak. I see now that I was trying to reinforce the bond between my real self, and this new fictional one I was creating, imbuing it with all my wildest dreams and desires. This is where I told myself the ending.
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 4 - The End (edit)
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Rest Stops & Self-Awareness
Here is a bit more explanation of my experience where I was lifted out of normal reality and for lack of a better term, my astral form was enriched by some otherworldly energy. Also I let my main character here discover that he is but a fiction as I supposed I learned of my own life at the time. Writers can change things, see the patterns of story structure, and if we're all just living a story we tell ourselves, well what does that say for the potential of writers?
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 3 - Fictional, Untruths, Lies (edit)
Friday, February 15, 2013
This is where it gets weird
Just five days after the first chapter, I was compelled to put down another, though this is where it becomes a bit more scattershot, the language more overly verbose than necessary, trying to capture the feeling of sitting in my papasan, stoned and staring at the ceiling, listening to Sigur Ros, having my first, and really only, out-of-body experience, and combining that with the feeling of liberation I felt every time I would grab a meal at Roy Roger's along the New Jersey Turnpike while driving to comic book conventions.
At the beginning I started playing with the idea that this fictional version of myself was somehow born whole and intact, but as a pseudo-amnesiac secret agent on the run. I could then subject that version of myself to various trials and feel the effect upon myself, and vice versa. Well, it wound up working a hell of a lot better than I ever could have imagined. As I type this my life has gotten so weird it's got to be true, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down.
If only I could somehow let me know nine years ago how it would all turn out. But maybe I already have.
At the beginning I started playing with the idea that this fictional version of myself was somehow born whole and intact, but as a pseudo-amnesiac secret agent on the run. I could then subject that version of myself to various trials and feel the effect upon myself, and vice versa. Well, it wound up working a hell of a lot better than I ever could have imagined. As I type this my life has gotten so weird it's got to be true, and it's not showing any signs of slowing down.
If only I could somehow let me know nine years ago how it would all turn out. But maybe I already have.
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 2 - Control (edit)
Thursday, February 14, 2013
the Tower of Brahma - Beginnings & Inspiration, Isolation & Desperation
I wrote that prelude and then nothing for four months. This is the first time I felt that irresistible compulsion, that sad sickness, that overwhelms me when I don't write another chapter. It would increase in intensity and frequency over the next six-and-a-half years. This is when the changes really began. I had gone back up to New Paltz, which I had visited twice when I was seventeen as a prospective college. Instead, I stayed local and went to Nassau Community with my friends. This was always a major regret and what would ultimately determine the rest of my life.
I was stuck on Long Island. At 26 I was living down the street from my Junior High School, Packard, and so unhappy that nothing would have made a difference. My parents were separated, my girlfriend had her family and our pugs, and I had no friends, except for Chris Chua, the artist on my graphic novel LEGEND OF LIQUID FURY that we had just begun hocking at conventions, but he was down in Pennsylvania, only seeing him when I'd drive down the East Coast to some comic convention.
In regards to my relationship I was obsessed with the idea that I had followed my dad's example to a T, and yet played it out emotionally like my mother. I was stuck and ignored, emotional and lonely, and barely able to venture outside with my crippling social anxiety, taking both negative halves of my parents. By the time I got into the car to drive upstate to check out the school, I was fiercely trying to escape the suburban prison of my own creation.
I went up to the mountain just outside New Paltz, sat on the side of the cliff, stared out into the dead trees and skyline, stolen magic stones from a New Age shoppe in town in my hands, and begged for the life I wanted so desperately, one I imagined was so far beyond me.
This is where Agent Fenris began working on the Tower.
THE TOWER OF BRAHMA: Chapter 1 - Escape (edit)
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
the Tower of Brahma - an Agent Fenris novel
Between October 2003 and June 2010 I wrote the following memoir that reads like a scattershot action conspiracy thriller. From essays to poetry to prose explosions upon the page, it was whatever was happening to me, what will continue to happen to me, and how I die. A self-emulating delusion of pure panic attack purity, written while downing beers, smoking, dancing, fucking, lying face down on sidewalks, curled fetal in pain, sweating and swearing, loving as hard as I fucking could in the East Village. I climbed a mountain, got tattoos, went back to school, and saw the inside of a psych ward.
But when I started, I was 27 years old, depressed in a long term relationship, had self-published a graphic novel of cult status, but had no friends outside the comic circuit which left for long, lonely hours in a dark, basement apartment, smoking and watching Asian Cinema and whatever insanity Netflix held within it's disc library (pre-instant queue, imagine!), and I dove back into a screenplay I had written in college. Robert Rodriguez was my hero, and so I slapped onto the page two tough guy Tarantino black suited badasses thrown into a dark buddy secret agent throwdown to end the world and let it sit.
Six years later, I returned to the scenes I had written, and re-imagined it as an action thriller prose pulp novel as written by a lost Beat poet. The first chapter below is where it all began. And when I started writing, I found that I'd become physically and spiritually ill if I didn't continue. Tragedy would befall me until I staved off absolute calamity once more with words channeled from brazen drunken enlightenment. Everything changed and I became fictional. If you've known me since I moved to the city, well you're probably in here under guise of archetypes, and this was what was going on in my head as we rambled from bar to dance floor and back again.
the Tower of Brahma - Prelude
written October 16, 2010
But when I started, I was 27 years old, depressed in a long term relationship, had self-published a graphic novel of cult status, but had no friends outside the comic circuit which left for long, lonely hours in a dark, basement apartment, smoking and watching Asian Cinema and whatever insanity Netflix held within it's disc library (pre-instant queue, imagine!), and I dove back into a screenplay I had written in college. Robert Rodriguez was my hero, and so I slapped onto the page two tough guy Tarantino black suited badasses thrown into a dark buddy secret agent throwdown to end the world and let it sit.
Six years later, I returned to the scenes I had written, and re-imagined it as an action thriller prose pulp novel as written by a lost Beat poet. The first chapter below is where it all began. And when I started writing, I found that I'd become physically and spiritually ill if I didn't continue. Tragedy would befall me until I staved off absolute calamity once more with words channeled from brazen drunken enlightenment. Everything changed and I became fictional. If you've known me since I moved to the city, well you're probably in here under guise of archetypes, and this was what was going on in my head as we rambled from bar to dance floor and back again.
the Tower of Brahma - Prelude
written October 16, 2010
New World: Order (a prelude) [edit]
Back at the old dive bar from seven years prior. New phone I'm typing away on but the same old words appear. Maybe they'll make more sense this go round, but I'll be damned if I know what they mean.
I'm still alone, by choice I now know, orchestrated and designed by some mis-alignment of DNA or programming by my upbringing in a broken home. I see it all much more crystal clear, just how murky the depths of my parental interactions were. Or really, all my connections to humanity and every thought I've ever had.
I struggle every day with whether or not I'm damaged goods, whether I'm tainted by evil or just god damn born bad. I feel wrong. I've meet some others with bad wiring or just way off, somehow skewed from the norm perspective by an event too traumatic for interpretation. I look to the times spent in this basement bar, drinking and crying, fighting and lying. What was it all for? What had I learned?
You write a book, you better make sure you do either of two things: please yourself or please others. In my world there is no overlap, or very little anyways. Any collaborative effort that's led to a creative endeavor has gained me some semblance of understanding and acceptance, but my own work, the disembowelment of my singular self, sees nothing from the work put into it.
When I put this word before that word, linking them together in a steady flow, my world makes sense and all is right. I am channeling the divine within and it is beauty incarnate, the absolute truth and unwavering sublime communion with everything. But when you read it, when I read these words to you and they mean nothing, not to say they are nonsense, that much I know, but to say they make no impact on you other than a silent ingestion...
Why am I here? Jazz sits at home waiting for me, though I want to deny her my presence, somehow lingering in the present, wallowing in the past, writing with hope for the future, however, as always, I can do nothing but hate mankind. I catch snippets of conversation that makes me question how these people keep society chugging along, unless it's a beer chaser with a handful of meds.
I'm alone. By accident or design, this is truth. It is the constant. My external circumstances are nearly always in flux, but this distance between me and that girl at the bar nursing her vodka soda and stealing glances in my direction, that is beyond my own comprehension, even here at the tender age of post-Christ Complex thirty-four. Aren't I an adult who should have this worked out by now?
Or is it that I'm a writer, a shaman sitting so comfortably in the skin of everyone that I can not be within myself long enough to assimilate into the crowd, join the party, give up and buy in to consensus reality? Either way I imagine I'm fucked and now drunk and there's nothing I can do about that but buy another beer and dive in further.
I'm still alone, by choice I now know, orchestrated and designed by some mis-alignment of DNA or programming by my upbringing in a broken home. I see it all much more crystal clear, just how murky the depths of my parental interactions were. Or really, all my connections to humanity and every thought I've ever had.
I struggle every day with whether or not I'm damaged goods, whether I'm tainted by evil or just god damn born bad. I feel wrong. I've meet some others with bad wiring or just way off, somehow skewed from the norm perspective by an event too traumatic for interpretation. I look to the times spent in this basement bar, drinking and crying, fighting and lying. What was it all for? What had I learned?
You write a book, you better make sure you do either of two things: please yourself or please others. In my world there is no overlap, or very little anyways. Any collaborative effort that's led to a creative endeavor has gained me some semblance of understanding and acceptance, but my own work, the disembowelment of my singular self, sees nothing from the work put into it.
When I put this word before that word, linking them together in a steady flow, my world makes sense and all is right. I am channeling the divine within and it is beauty incarnate, the absolute truth and unwavering sublime communion with everything. But when you read it, when I read these words to you and they mean nothing, not to say they are nonsense, that much I know, but to say they make no impact on you other than a silent ingestion...
Why am I here? Jazz sits at home waiting for me, though I want to deny her my presence, somehow lingering in the present, wallowing in the past, writing with hope for the future, however, as always, I can do nothing but hate mankind. I catch snippets of conversation that makes me question how these people keep society chugging along, unless it's a beer chaser with a handful of meds.
I'm alone. By accident or design, this is truth. It is the constant. My external circumstances are nearly always in flux, but this distance between me and that girl at the bar nursing her vodka soda and stealing glances in my direction, that is beyond my own comprehension, even here at the tender age of post-Christ Complex thirty-four. Aren't I an adult who should have this worked out by now?
Or is it that I'm a writer, a shaman sitting so comfortably in the skin of everyone that I can not be within myself long enough to assimilate into the crowd, join the party, give up and buy in to consensus reality? Either way I imagine I'm fucked and now drunk and there's nothing I can do about that but buy another beer and dive in further.
FACTS aka Things I Know - A Tower of Brahma recap
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. I had been 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 was prepared 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 continuously taking the easy way out time and time again.
I returned home with a sliver of understanding, a glimmer of light piercing the darkness of 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 uncharistic 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 being 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 I 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 begin? I tried my best to write things as they happened, emailing reports from late nights at strange girls' apartments, or while running amuck drunkenly 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 made of science. My dreams were dashed during writing class as I saw a best case scenario hustling scholar in my burn-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, dragging it out for as long as I could, trying to name names while making them iconic figures, and because I didn't know what would happen, I gave it a happy ending epilogue. I finally did try to end my life just a few chapters from finishing when someone, a friend, intervened and stopped me. They didn't save me, but I thought falling in love had.
After giving in to the suicidal feelings I'd lived with for the better part of a decade, finally I gave up on trying to end my life. 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 channeling emotional surges into destructive impulses. The relief when a sharp object caressed my wrist. Then that's when I saw it. I was the enemy, 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 an emotionally 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.
That's all I know. Now, read this and make a plan goddammit.
I ran away from my old life. I had been 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 was prepared 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 continuously taking the easy way out time and time again.
I returned home with a sliver of understanding, a glimmer of light piercing the darkness of 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 uncharistic 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 being 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 I 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 begin? I tried my best to write things as they happened, emailing reports from late nights at strange girls' apartments, or while running amuck drunkenly 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 made of science. My dreams were dashed during writing class as I saw a best case scenario hustling scholar in my burn-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, dragging it out for as long as I could, trying to name names while making them iconic figures, and because I didn't know what would happen, I gave it a happy ending epilogue. I finally did try to end my life just a few chapters from finishing when someone, a friend, intervened and stopped me. They didn't save me, but I thought falling in love had.
After giving in to the suicidal feelings I'd lived with for the better part of a decade, finally I gave up on trying to end my life. 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 channeling emotional surges into destructive impulses. The relief when a sharp object caressed my wrist. Then that's when I saw it. I was the enemy, 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 an emotionally 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.
That's all I know. Now, read this and make a plan goddammit.
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