*Meso (Simile, myth, dream, fiction and plurality)
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*“We are like the spider. We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream…”[11]
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*                                                -Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
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*“…but who is the dreamer?” [12]
*                                                -David Lynch
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*Take a break from reading, contemplate the quote, how do you feel?
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*In his book Catching the Big Fish (2006), David Lynch quoted a phrase from the sacred Hindu Sanskrit scripture, the Upanishads. He then used this quote in his series Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017 and added on to it with the ominous question: “…but who is the dreamer?” In the sacred text, a simile is used. Similes are magical literary mechanisms that allow one to relate itself conceptually, physically, materially, spiritually to something else. By way of this process —a non-literal comparison— one gains wisdom about itself or something else; they float toward a dialectical exchange with another one-thing. Let’s go through that again: through relating oneself to another subject (object, animal) or vice versa, a clearer understanding of who one is and how one is, comes to be. It is specifically non-literal and indirect. ‘We are like…’, similar to not different to, as the emphasis is on the likeness. Does this help us empathize with the world around us? Pointing out similarities as opposed to differences? A simple and giddy “yes” would suffice but there is something important about this little tool regarding the power of mythology: the capacity to dream intentionally; to go out of one’s way to dream; to create through dreaming; to evolve through dreaming, to indirectly, non-literally caress, create or understand something out of merging. To dream is to combine unlike elements, relate oneself unusually to other things. Like Donna Haraway stipulates that “myth and tool mutually constitute each other”, non-literality and catharsis are powerful engines for fermenting critical and reflexive thought[13]. After all, we do tend to ask: ‘how does that seem to you?’ Seem, not is. An evaluation based not on how something is but how it isn’t quite.
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*David Lynch is an artist that creates through dreaming. His oneiric approach to filmmaking and painting is uncanny. Everything is familiar, he uses archetypal characters, cities we know, words we understand, yet something is very much out of place. Something isn’t quite credible, just like folktales use magic realism to heighten the sense of awe, shock, interest. Therein lies the allure of his work and his subsequent following: we like to be tricked and know it. We’re transfixed by the impossible, the improbable coming to life before our eyes. It’s magical. It’s the unexpected, the out-of-placeness that dazzles our senses. This is a similar sentiment to Vilém Flusser’s urge for the production of improbable images which in turn will inform and advance our society, diversifying our visual landscape gives way for the production of inclusive and progressive references[14]. But why is this trickery only acceptable in certain places/practices? The very out-of-placeness that mesmerizes us in one circumstance can also be the trigger for immense bouts of discrimination in other circumstances (a conundrum I will explore later on). Going back to magical happenstances, dreaming adheres the same phenomenon of wild and improbable image production. Cinema, folklore, poetry and dreams all bend and twist time and space, they detach our firm anchor on reality and visually possibilize bizarre configurations and combinations of bodies, feelings, sensations, memories. “…but who is the dreamer?” Lynch’s interrogative addition to the sacred text is interesting because it seemingly implies a kind of search for a sanctimonious origin. Who is the original subject from which the dream effuses? Who is the magician behind the curtains? Who is the mad scientist concocting the cyborg? Yet Lynch never intends to reveal the magician or any aspect about his work. Let’s look at it another way. It is deliberately an impossible question, a non-question, an anti-question. It’s missing the point about th
*e sacred text by changing the focus from the simile to a seemingly pragmatic inquiry. It’s almost nonsensical. I would argue, though, that it augments the experience of the text. The question has a mysterious, brooding ring to it: it provokes thought, it massages the haunting, mystic quality of the sacred text, inspiring you go back to it and scan through it as if you missed a clue. It simply makes you return, ponder and meditate on the text, as is intended in Buddhism. You’re unsure about what you’re reading; the question is a hand that beckons for you to come closer. “…but who is the dreamer?” This interrogative device loops you back into the sentiment, not letting you go with simply reading it once. It’s as if Little Red Riding Hood ended with: ‘…but who was the grandmother?’ It displaces the focus on the narrative, meaning and moral of the story and urges us to go over it again, to look for details we may have missed, but more so, to hone into how we feel about it. 
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*Talking about Lynch as a contemporary folktale weaver helps understand his work. It’s almost as if he’s saying, ‘even reality is a dream, it’s all myth, and we’re still living in it as if it weren’t’. After all, the lurid Twin Peaks is simply about “the little girl who lives down the lane”[15].  After all, the impenetrable Inland Empire is simply about “a girl in trouble”[16]. After all, the operatic Mulholland Dr. is simply about “a love story in the city of dreams”[17]. I bring attention to his method of storytelling because it is, as a whole and as a creative mechanism, a kind of simile. He compares our world to another world: ‘we are like Diane and Camilla, we fall in love with the dream, become the dream and then tragically wake up.’ The unfortunate love story has happened to us all; not that way exactly, and not in that exact order. But our love story is like their story, similar to their story, which in turn awakens catharsis: the feeling of being seen and understood by a creative medium which guides one to emotionally understanding their own personal situation. There is great dialectical strength in mimesis. A simile, a film, a poem, though its assimilation to us, invites us to reflect on our own feelings and existence which, in turn, leads us understand things not in their literality but in their alienness. How often do explanations and descriptions further complicate and entrench situations in their own muck?
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*It is no surprise that poetry and folklore make heavy uses of similes as a way of emphatically heightening our understanding of a concept or event. The simile opts for a non-descriptive route in the literal sense: a simile does describe, but indirectly. A simile moves around the subject of focus to describe it while descriptive writing penetrates the subject or remains on its semiotical surface. The magic is lost with literality, the myth becomes reified and dull with obviations, like a strong, probing lamp in an interrogation room that wants only the blinding facts. The appeal of art, mythology, folklore and cinema lies within their capacity to bend our limits of what is possible. Again, they thrive off of possibility, not probability; and similarly for speculative fiction, they feed off of potentiality, not actuality. These dream spaces are responses to the unknowability of our world and its subjects. They take a circular, spherical, environmental approach to storytelling, whereas science, biology and physiology opt for more literal, direct routes and claim to bear witness to truth; a sanctimonious correctness, a provable authenticity, a genetic historicity, a domesticated analysis, a taxonomic accuracy, a pious archive, a devout specification, an unwavering veracity. Undeniably, science and biology have brought on great technological advances and contributed to the understanding of our health; indeed, physically-centered outcomes exclusively. Science, through chemical, material and anatomical investigation, produces knowledge about the flesh, about the within. What about the around? What about the in-between? What about the felt? Poetry, mythology and any fictive creative medium have a deftness for unfolding these kinds of inquiries. In Anna Gibbs’ essay “After Affect; Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication” she comments on “the ‘passionate fictions’ of writing, and art [that] more generally, seem[s] to offer a way of working in both dimensions simultaneo
*usly, and contemporary theoretical writing is increasingly borrowing the techniques and methods of fiction to this end, interlocking sensation with story and in the process recreating the essay as a heuristic for innovation”[18]. Like stated before, art, poetry and mythology shimmer with similes, while science defers to descriptions. Poetry and mythology conceive new abstractions, science works to discover and demystify. Poetry and mythology caress the mystery spherically, science intends to conquer the mystery to pacify our confusion. 
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*What does this have to do with affect? Can science work affectively? Provoke feelings? The discovery of some kind of scientific truth may provoke awe, surprise, excitement, fascination. Yet wouldn’t these feelings veer closer to reactive responses and not emotive ones? I am not vying for an elitist hierarchy on various responses. Just because science produces reactions versus emotions doesn’t make it ‘better’ than fiction. The issue lies within the emphasis and importance being unbalanced. People put their faith in science more than they do in affect. Affect is more abstract, and the question of ‘what can affect do for me and my health’ is sure to arise. Yet, affect, as a concept, exists. It has been theorized about. There are studies and professions worldwide that deal specifically with emotions, our relationships with ourselves and other subjects. There are occupations that deal with aesthetics which require we ‘feel’ about things and how they change and contrast and compare and decompose and recompose. And then there is poetry, philosophy, cinema, art. Therefore, there is a place for affect as it is a required sphere in creative practices. The omnipresence of affect is undeniable, just as anthropologist Kathleen Stewart comments on the basic-ness of affect as it “is the commonplace, labor-intensive process of sensing modes of living as they come into being…It stretches across real and imaginary social fields and sediments, linking some kind of everything…Everything depends on the dense entanglement of affect, attention, the senses, and matter”[19]. An all-encompassing, circluding everything that swarms around all one-things and nudges us forward in the gelatin of possibility along with potentiality.
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*To return to one of my questions, why have creative ambits solely been reserved for spaces where one can dream? can succumb to abstractions? can inhabit mystery? can yield to affect? It’s as if these dream spaces have been used as havens or outlets, where one can seek solace in scapes of metaphor, lands of simile, islands of dissidence, oasis of rarities, caves of future conjugations, cradles of fiction, vessels of irrealities. They allow us what biology and science conceal and distract us from given that these two fields of study limit polyphonous and queer configurations, making “science [pay] a price for recoiling at its relational limit”, according to Brian Massumi[20]. Dreaming and creating both turn our heads to a Harawayan-elsewhere and radically reconfigure the mere ontology of limits[21]. Dreamland’s sphere is made of gaseous affect, and is naturally constituted and informed by the spheres of potentiality and possibility. Dreamland is a kind of implied sphere; non-literal, a figurative envelopment that constantly unfolds and self-produces. We tap into this sphere when we bathe in the mystery, when we let ourselves create, when we feel.
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*Take a break from reading, who is the dreamer?
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*The sphere of fiction enters here. It is a sticky and agglutinating sphere that amasses diverse imagery and fierce abstraction to form the platforms in which magical and mythical stories are told. It is the antithesis and antecedent of historicity; a medium that leaches onto veracity and traceability, like an oppressive genetic test where one is found out via biological or in this case circumstantial proof. ‘What is your real, actual, true race? What is your true biological sex? What really, actually, truthfully happened that day in July?’ Fiction disobeys this leachy, judicial fixation that unsurprisingly uses a futile past tense or modal conjugation system: ‘exactly what did happen, exactly why it happened, exactly who she was and no longer is, precisely what they must have done’. Historicity is a dart with self-appointed accuracy. Its unwavering conclusions miss the point as they are indeed too obsessed with a point (a point bound by horse blinders, that is monocolored and charted with spacetime coordinates). A brilliant exercise on fiction’s elastic and elusive nature is Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell from 2012[22]. It introduces itself under the guise of the label ‘documentary’ when it is in fact a theatrical essay on fictive storytelling, myth weaving and tendencies to miss-the-point. A family of storytellers retell the story of the late matriarch of said family, who piece together not a precise portrait of truth but a winding and folkloric tapestry of layers that don’t resolve the mystery of the subject but complete the mystery in the words of e e cummings[23]. They continue the mystery, embellish it, contribute to it, exaggerate it, thus culminating in a loosely constructed theater work that subverts the documentarian agenda —to show the truth through visual accounts and interviewed witnesses that are combined to make a claim about what actually happened— and uses the label ‘documentary’ to make us believe, beforehand, that what we are seeing is in fact what
* we think it is, when truly, most of the film has in fact been constructed with actors. So it is like a documentary, but isn’t. Yet it is not a mockumentary: the film is really about exploring the mystery of the late matriarch who did in fact exist by interviewing her family who also does in fact exist. The focus is completely disobedient to that of a documentary as it seeks not to reveal but to slowly unfold and then scamper off or recoil. Like the vespertine moonflower whose pedals only make themselves apparent in the half-light and abscond with the blaring morning, the film gives you secrets in the form of sun-lighted truths only to then be moonly mystified once again right on time for vespers. It gives and takes away exactly what it has given us; a contemporary myth, a play on narrative mischief and make-believe. The questions bellow from the film: ‘can we really get to the truth about someone? Is that the point? Why so obsessed with truth? Isn’t the mystery enough?’ 
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*The sphere of fiction perfuses over its subject or focus like a simile does: like but unlike. We could even say fiction is like a simile and a simile is like fiction… It’s like reality, but just isn’t quite. Like a wisely grinning facsimile of a world we claim to know that sits in our peripheral view just waiting to come into focus, fiction intervenes with our narratives and redirects our attention to potential happenstances, occurrences, could-be’s and, indeed, could-have-been’s. In the sense of the latter, fiction can navigate potentiality and/or articulate past modal conjugation possibilities, lost opportunities and unrealized potentialities. Therefore, it can be used negatively, like a weapon, it simply depends on the user and how they use fiction. It must be clear: lies are not fiction, they use the framework of fiction as a device that twists a circumstance for the benefit of the lier; an abject kind of fiction that uses a past tense ‘this-is-what-happened-according-to-me-that-benefits-me-but-actually-didn’t-happen’. 
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*Fiction, thus, can help us reconfigure anything: “we are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.” Just like a simile, or cinema, or mythology, anything can happen, anything can be constructed through assimilation: making something seem like something else to illustrate a relationship or a commonality. Thus, the sphere of fiction effuses into a dreamtool, a possibilizer, where one can experiment with limits, with outcomes, with possibilities, with potentialities, all without restrictions (other than those we put on ourselves). Going back to the quote from the sacred text, we can dream up a potential body, for example, and by process of dreaming about what it can or will be, by fictively conjuring up a future-facing, desired possibility, we can envision how we want to evolve and mutate and then act on it and morph into that body (live in that dream). Just like magic, we dream it and right before our very eyes (at different rates), we shape-shift, altering our immediate or intimate appearance, form and function. Fiction is by definition made-up; a cheeky verb construction used in English. Fiction, translated into word or thought, is literally a constructed medium made up of varying bits and dollops and morsels of what-can-be-if… A synonym for fiction is make-believe: it magically makes us believe something is possible, it evades probability with a loving staunchness and then it pushes through the stubbornness of the past modal, as we near the ever-expanding threshold of glowing imminence, like electricity passing through wires, it is constantly moving forward. It is an in-between as well, neither past nor future, neither real nor fake, neither there nor here but swarming around the two, swirling to and fro, and through and out of; it is another emittance, again, constantly moving forward with its glow. I am describing the healthy, helpful use of the sphere of fiction. As stated before, fiction isn’t always used this gracefully. Fiction can be reformatt
*ed to mean ‘cognitive manipulation’, brain trickery, gaslighting, sensory deception, depending one the user of this sphere. 
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*Take a break, what does fiction mean to you?
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*A simile is (like) an in-between, (like) a process in motion, (like) a fluttering oscillation that is neither the flutter nor the oscillation but the momentum that produces the action. A simile is unbothered by its lack of aim or intention of conquest. In other words, a simile is not preoccupied with an ending, a final point of victory, a coordinated coup d’état, as ending its process would be missing the point. A simile that has ended its process is a description. Like fiction, the simile gently effuses back and forth, and up and down, through and back, over and under its subjects, whirling in this in-between. Side note: If the antithesis of a simile is a description, the antithesis of magic is science, the antithesis of mystery is explanation, the antithesis of mythology is historicity, the antithesis of poetry is revealing, and so on. The former terms are different spheres or mediums have no problem succumbing to the unknowability of circumstances, happenstances, objects and bodies without callously and slyly brooding in a dark corner, hiding some secret from us. They are more receptive or willing to produce Flusser’s improbable and therefore informative images, or Lynch’s homeless people, woodsmen and electrical wires. We could even think of these in-betweens as facilitators (like a carrier or a vessel…). Both Flusser and Lynch in talking about or creating improbable images is in fact a way to be productive via an indirect route. A facilitator, though, isn’t necessarily focused on an ending or a revelation; it can be more of a conductor to, naturally, conduit new thoughts, queer visions, odd perspectives, bizarre possibilities, future-facing narratives. They fuel imagination. Like Flusser’s suggestion: new improbable images = more informative images = open, receptive imagination of new possibilities, configurations = taking action, reconfigurating, reconjugating and possibilizing. A very queer reading can be done of Flusser’s reflection: when dissident, unknowab
*le and queer (improbable) bodies and gender expressions publicly present the way we must, we are indirectly and in many cases unintentionally informing society by bringing to the table references for younger generations, by visually possibilizing new gender configurations and, albeit a bit corny, we inspire society to be more bold, dare them to be themselves.
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*In Twin Peaks, electricity is used as a simile. Electricity in the series can be interpreted as the substance that makes things happen, that possibilizes, exerts, pushes forward and later informs. It magically sparks a happening, a collision, which in cinematic narrative terms is called a plot device: something happens that is a product of something that happened before it which pushes the narrative forward. So what exactly pushes the narrative? What happens between one event and another? Electricity, or the whirl from the in-between, or the improbable vessel that carries one event from one state to another state, thus facilitate the production of another event. Similarly, a simile is a literary device which pushes forward and facilitates not only in terms of narrative but in terms of understanding and approximation to other facets of other subjects. As I said earlier, when we compare something to something else, we understand it not in terms of its physiological literality but in its meta-haecceitic properties; its beyond-other-thisness; its extended-comparative-different-sameness. A simile is a non-direct approach to getting a feel for a subject. Indeed, it’s another echo: not what it is but what it is like which again, opens up the possibility to delve into and explore the subject in new ways, look in unorthodox places for information and open up the possibility for dialogue and empathy. Instead of looking to or questioning someone’s genitalia as a way of ‘finding them out’, why not change the focus from revealing their gender identity to simply dialoguing with that person, feeling with that person? Instead of dissecting an object’s material or chemical composition, why not question how the object affects you, why it is in your life and what it can do? Why is smalltalk always hovering on the surface of things?
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*The simile is by nature plural and multi. Literal language, or descriptions, seek to reveal the subject, as we’ve explored. It leaches on to factuality and exactitude like a combat drone honing in on its illusive target. Descriptions are also solely focused on the subject. The simile prefers to caress its subject and invite other participants into the conversation with a comparison to one or more subjects. Through a relational mechanism, it dynamizes how we come closer to a subject, again, not through lineal evaluations of a subject’s artifice, but by avoiding a judicial obsession with truth, historicity and memory. The simile is, therefore, a constructive device that does not reduce its subject to its literality but expands it, opens it up and situates it relationally and chorally in the cosmos of other subjects. It choreographs an inclusive, webbed cartography of analytical poetics in which subjects that exist similarly to one another orbit freely. The simile is recognizing the you in me, and the me in you. Describing a simile as an opener could imply that it contains something, or it releases something contained within its subject. Could a simile be a vessel? A place of fermentation, incubation, transportation, oxidation? A simile pushes things forward, foments and possibilizes polyrelational potentialities; a description halts things (or at least slows them down), pinholes them and hones in on the singular here and now, taking the frozen one-thing and keeping it frozen as long as it can like the intention of a photograph. If a simile moves its subject, lets it sprout, or decay, can it be described as a carriage, as a flowerpot, or as an urn? I think we have a vessel. A simile scoops up its subject and processually facilitates its transformative capacity, its magical core. It transports. A-one-thing, the subject in hand, moves on fluidly in the gelatin of potentiality when related to other one-things. The simile-vessel maternally caresses and cradles its host, al
*lowing a-one-thing to socialize with other one-things. Through comparison, through poetically hinting at similarities, a-one-thing becomes more empathetic to the world, and humans become more empathetic towards a diverse range of subjects, both biological and objectual. 
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*‘The man was working so tirelessly in the fields, his sweat-glistened arms looked like lubricated pistons, jolting forward and backward without rest.’
*‘Out of fury, she mashed and mangled the kettle on the floor to the point it was nothing but a crumple, like a face battered by a fist to a point beyond recognition.’
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*By letting the biological subject and the objectual subject engage in intercourse and to be transported by a simile, the human is informed by the object and the object is informed by the human. We simply learn that we are all subject to the great spheres of change and process. Maybe Nelly Furtado comparing herself to an avian subject does indeed help us understand her more; how she is and less what she is[24]. To close, a work by Kate Bush:
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*Sorry
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*Only you can do something about it
*There's no-one there, my friend
*Any better?
*I might know what you mean when you say you fall apart
*Aren't we all the same?
*In and out of doubt
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*I can see angels standing around you
*They shimmer
*Like mirrors in Summer
*But you don't know it
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*And they will carry you o'er the walls
*"If you need us, just call"
*Rest your weary world in their hands
*Lay your broken laugh at their feet
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*I can see angels around you
*They shimmer
*Like mirrors in Summer
*There's someone who's loved you
*Forever
*But you don't know it
*You might feel it
*And just not show it
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*Maybe Bush’s angels —the creatures that carry subjects over walls, just like similes carry their grammatical subjects over into plural dialogue, just like vessels carry liquids across borders— are the electricity, the simile, the magic.
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