It's About Damn Time...

[And no, this has nothing to do with Akronic/Clevelandia's ex-favorite son's quote.]

This item caught my attention: Public Officials in Maine and Miami Take Steps Against the Zombie Apocalypse.

We're getting ready here on the East Coast. What about you?

Is This How It Begins?

My kids are freaking about this one: On Monday, Miami police shot to death a man who was eating another man's face.

"Dad, it was a straight up zombie," said Wisdomie calling from his Pacific dive paradise—cordoned off by thousands of square miles of ocean from the non-swimming undead. "It's all a big cover-up," quoth Wisdaughter, who claimed she hasn't slept well for the last two nights.

The yutes are all atwitter: this, they fret, is the beginning of the Zombiepocalypse.

Apparently, the only reason to eat another man's face is so you can get to the brains—which, as everyone knows, is what zombies yearn to eat. Really.

And that bit about 'bath salts' (the street name for a meth-type drug) being the new LSD. "That's bullshit," they say. "It was a zombie." The cops shot the attacker several times in the arm, and he just growled at them. "Everyone knows you have to double-tap zombies to the head. That's the only way to kill one. And that's what the cops ultimately had to do." One report says they had to shoot the attacker 12 times to stop him. And that's with police weapons.

Needless to say, I told them about the era of Dahmer, Gacy, et al. They were, necessarily, impressed, but no less worried about their futures.

Shockingly, the CDC has taken down its Zombie Preparedness guide from its website. That, my friends, is indeed ominous. An NGO blog, however, seems to have taken its place for all your zombie-related pre- and post-apocalyptic needs. Bookmark the Zombie Preparedness Initiative now! I urge you.

And it may not be too late to audit the Michigan State summer class: SW 290 Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse: Catastrophes & Human Behavior. It will be online.

Our polite friends in British Columbia are taking no chances. Last week was Zombie Preparedness Week in BC. Click the link for some serious tips and how to protect you and yours in case of ... well, you know. At least they'll be ready. In fact, the whole of Canuckland seems to be uniting on surviving the ZA.

I've said it before, quoting friend BDR, metaphors abound. Fear of zombies, it seems to me, represents a fear of being dead inside, of having no humanity, no human fellow-feeling, a fear of being merely a product of unconscious (often violent and destructive) drives. The recent (let's call it) hysteria among our youth about zombiepocalypse, in this regard, gives me some hope for our future. But what do I know? To them, this might be real.

And, as teh kidz say, that's what's up.

Zombies

Driving home the other day, I did something I almost never do (except in the case of baseball): I listened to AM radio. This time to get the traffic report for Atlanta. What I heard gave pause: traffic around such-and-such is backed up for several miles dues to...wait for it...ZOMBIES!

Yes. Zombies have invaded the ATL. Apparently, the AMC TV show "The Walking Dead" has chosen our area to film, and they've blocked roads to do it. I bet your city doesn't have traffic tie-ups due to Zombies. Just sayin'.

If you're worried about the undead, there's no need to fear: your Government is on the case. Indeed, the Centers for Disease Control has published the official manual for surviving a Zombie Apocalypse. "If zombies did start roaming the streets, CDC would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak. CDC would provide technical assistance to cities, states, or international partners dealing with a zombie infestation." I feel better already.

The CDC site may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's for a good purpose—overall readiness. Wisdomie and Wisdaughter, the college kids, have both confessed to all-night dorm conversations (you remember them, don't you?) about the reality of zombies and how to deal with the coming zombie apocalypse. Their friends are worried. Are zombies real? Could a zombie apocalypse actually happen?

There has been at least one scholarly work about how, theoretically, a person could be zombified: PASSAGE OF DARKNESS: THE ETHNOBIOLOGY OF THE HAITIAN ZOMBIE, By Wade Davis. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press. 1988. (reviewed here)

And Cracked magazine once examined the "5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen." Decide for yourself. But be prepared.

The previous generation worried itself about vampires. Vampires are all about the erotic and a desire that is greater than our selves: too much passion. Fear of zombies has to do with the fear of sleep-walking through life, merely eating and aggressing with no true fellow-feeling; fear that others are merely urge-driven: too little passion.

And maybe militarism. No?

The Ghost in the Wood(s)

In "A Brief History of Consciousness," the sixth chapter of How Fiction Works, James Wood traces the evolution of fictional characterization from King David in the Old Testament to Shakespeare's Macbeth to Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The differences lie in their respective audiences: David—the god, to whom the psalms and prayers are addressed; Macbeth—the audience, to whom the soliloquies; Rasky—the readers, to whom his interior is revealed over the course of the book. It is, in other words, a descent into subjectivity.

I return to Wm. Gass. In his book Finding a Form, in the essay "The Book as a Container of Consciousness" he explains:

..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about...[pp. 348,351]

The notion of "character" is at the bottom of Wood's inquiries in this book. He believes they have some 'reality', some 'truth' somehow. Clearly, he doesn't believe that fictional characters are flesh-and-blood entities and he doesn't believe we should judge them by whether we would want to have them as friends—that may be the case with memoir and autobiography, those popularity contests that now predominate the booklists. Obversely, he doesn't believe they are merely 'men made out of words'; their reality is more substantive somehow.

Maybe, they're zombies. Maybe not, since zombies, by all accounts, seem to have bodies. They're more akin to ghosts: identities without bodies. Disembodied consciousnesses. These are the sorts of things you have to believe in if you hold any sort of religious belief. The idea of the 'soul' as some sort of eternally-existing individuated entity is fundamental to the religious delusion. The 'soul delusion' necessarily precedes the 'god delusion'.

If, like this blog, you take an agnostic approach to such matters, you find yourself in disagreement with a fundamental philosophical position of Wood. The mechanistic view of 'soul' or 'mind' is that there is no such thing absent the 'body' or the 'brain'. They are functions of complex neuronal activity, which itself is a function of genetic attributes, etc., etc. And it is the utmost hubris to assume either of the former [soul, mind] exists absent the platform provided by the latter [body, brain]. By analogy, it would seem folly to assume that the consciousness or the character or the reality or the truth of fiction—as Wood would have it—can exist apart from the form of fiction or apart from the textual words in which they are presented.

I don't want to get too analytical here, but I think it bears exploring. Now, we can say of the current President of the U.S.: "George Bush has beady eyes." All good fiction readers know how to interpret the connotations of such a statement and may or may not agree. And anyone who knows what beady eyes look like can then go to a picture of President Bush, or indeed examine the man himself, and determine for themselves whether it is true. There may be disagreement in the interpretation, but we have a way of testing that statement's truth or falsity, or at least a common ground for argument.

However, if I say of the fictional Thane of Caldor "Macbeth has beady eyes," there's no real way to verify or falsify that statement—short of a pronouncement to that effect in the Shakespearean text. The only thing we can know about Macbeth is what we are given. But, that begs the question of realism here. What is it, in fact, that we are given?

What we are given is something like a model. This model is presented to us in the same words and language we would use to describe a real flesh-and-blood person's character. It's just that the flesh-and-blood part doesn't exist. The language fools us. Indeed, it deludes us (however usefully). It makes us believe this character is real and elicits responses from us as if this character were real. We see the character in action, we see the character carrying out his/her routines, we see the character responding to certain situations, we see the character making certain decisions. Often, depending on the book's POV, we see the character's limitations, we understand his/her current state of knowledge, we recognize his/her flaws. And, with certain exceptions, we see the changes the character goes through over a period of time (or their refusal to change). That is art.

And the question of how this art works is the question Wood is proposing to answer in his book. Yet, I don't see how he can quite accomplish what he sets out to do if he truncates his analysis at the purported middle-ground of 'realism' or 'truth'. His analysis does not give us an account of the forms of fiction, of narrative (in the technical sense), of dialogue, of action, of story, of plot, or, for that matter, of dramatic structure. He stops short of showing us how these tools and techniques work together to achieve this illusion of reality, this illusion of character, this illusion of truth to which he stubbornly clings.