Quantum Errors

 

For all my complaints about genre, I have only published sparingly in it. With the exception of poetry, and articles and columns which, in brevity, I earned enough in commissions to merely supplement disability insurance, not compete with nearly any of my previous salaries in relation to  it, I managed to nibble the etch-a-sketch around subsistence, after my minimal white collar dalliances. Some of those dalliances failed due to my significant disappointment at not joining the ranks of collegiate instructors, an indolence of ego. I spent all that time in college learning how to think to join a press clipping service, which involved manually clipping clients company logos out of newsprint. I wasn’t there very long, still don’t really understand the utility of the organization as a contractor, and then lasted in accounting firm proofreading a little longer. I did not live at Riverside at the time, and ironically, if I had, commute stresses would have been easier. By my early forties there was a glut of PhDs on the market. This in no way indicated that it was incumbent upon me to close the door on teaching. If I couldn’t handle special needs students who could, after all?  But I was never entirely comfortable around the myriad guises of human deformity, my skeletal ligament contortions included, and there we have it. A new generation of the disabled community is coming forward, and I do not even know what my mission entails anymore, rather like Philip K Dick’s Isidore crafting a very vivid image of kibble for the mentally slow androids on a post nuclear Earth. Dick’s work, beneath the surface, is less about science in speculative fantasy, and more about biological depreciation. It doesn’t translate particularly well on screen, though the Amazon Prime hires from Hollywood diversifying the long dead, or decades dead, studio monopolies, make an effort to validate Dick’s humanoid organisms ultimately overwhelmed by defeat. Indeed, The Man in The High Castle is grand theater as an Original, but it is not Dick’s original story. Couldn’t be and still be a series, although Amazon does better with Electric Dreams.

When we compare these to contemporary parables like Domain or the overly ambitious series Counterpart as conceived by Justin Marks, what we see is an alternate reality, transposed from individual, tortured psyches, into the macro reality of the digital age. As a throw away forget our troubles DVD knockoff, Domain was better than it had to be, manipulating its audience, deflating the gravity of the surely soon to be dystopian end of ourselves into a finger wagging cautionary tale about outsourcing the most malevolent American criminals we’ve delineated into types, within our ever evolving psychoanalytic maturity. The two women in their pods, the usual space milkshake providing nutritional supplements, were the family annihilators, and the men? Spree killers, slashers, doxed into yet another sociological experiment, conceptually worse than the brutality which inspires it, ever advancing on A Clockwork Orange , which was actually written as an absurdist morality tale, engaging readers with its vibrant anger at Western mores and not knowing what to do with the tribalism to which we’re beholden still in our evolution. I loved Counterpart, and praised Marks accordingly from the other side, despite Baldwin’s décor lesbianism, and the softball black botanist included as one of the origin managers for an unforeseen quantum error. Are we all in an alternate time space continuum, happy or less happy elsewhere? Do I try sucking tits and thereby, with Google’s approval, earn a secure living? I barely have the requisite training to comprehend the elegant computations and sign language of physics, but Greene’s affability notwithstanding, it all seems a little too convenient, a more rational juxtaposition of heaven and hell, so that we have a more palliative olive branch to restrain ourselves from vengeance, like turning on the cruelty of the oppressed. For nearly 12 years, Trudy Richardson tormented me, carte blanche, for how I dealt with my bodily needs, and the only thing she achieved by dragging my now widowed father into my tactics and methods, was virtually ensuring I will have to be disposed of like toxic waste. I consider the death of this woman to be a matter of political self defense, and I am hardly a seventeen year old who may be the penultimate libertarian of our age.

Miserere, A Traduce of Jimmi Shrode

 Like anyone else, radicals will fail.-- Alfred Kazin

A little research indicates Justin Marks adapted Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book for Disney’s reboot against its animated film version, which may be considered a classical rendition of sentiment, and provides a bit of a brace to explain “Counterpart” and the essential weight JK Simmons carries in it. What Marks role was over that of Amy Berg, who was the series writer for season one, mystifies those of us not paying into guild dues to understand how to meld original narratives into contemporary molds, but as the man with the key responsibility for the concept, Marks clearly knows how to bring fabulism to life on television, a fabulism with an inherent allegorical bent; as crisp as critics found Counterpart to be, its dramaturgic roots reside in Medieval morality plays, where the characters are direct symbols. The Iago of the curled mustache being the Vice, or Falstaff as the fool of Appetite, most of Counterpart’s characters are archetypes of this sort. Some are more complex than others, like Howard and Emily Silk, and how their choices define them, or James Cromwell as Yanek, yet another master manipulator whose misguided focus impacts the entire species. Others are easier, like Stephen Rea as Alexander Pope, the mission oriented creator of black mirror assassins, very clever compact irony there, to name a rogue agency manager after the most renown British poet of mock epics. In and of itself, the twenty episode allegory isn’t complicated. The writers sprinkle a bunch of clues, Karl Marx and the pernicious attraction of his political philosophy, the mention of a Prime world Holocaust survivor, obvious allusions to the Berlin Wall, a weaponized biological agent injected into what we might consider to be the “Eastern bloc,” which the “original” Western world denies occurred, but what Marks ultimately wanted transfixed viewers to take away from all this is more elusive. I ate the convoluted story line up like candy, right up to the implied black widow sex and death associations, particularly as it related to the marginally drawn homosexual composites, but the intensity of this melodrama isn’t for everyone, and it rarely takes its foot off the gas pedal. A rare exception, toward the denouement, is when the FBI agent Temple’s husband says raising a disabled child is akin to a detour in Holland, and Clare’s more tortured spouse rejoins with, “Italy has too many tourists.” Touche, in the same vein, the disabled community has too many fractal patterns to succeed. Setting aside my excoriation of the integration models of my generation, Jimmi’s obituary to his partner lacks the balanced restraint most trained journalists know to offer readers. When Jimmi writes Erik came to University of Pennsylvania to seek treatment for numbness in his hands, this is a tell. A better way to phrase it: Dr. von Schmetterling was unable to complete his internship due to illness. Such reticence offers the decedent just that much more respect, something poor Mr. Shrode cannot affix to his own person. Despite his claims of advocacy for the meek and enslaved of the passive with spittle in the crevices of their lips, Jimmi buckles when the going gets rough. He caves, fearful of righteous anger, transformative, much like Clare as “Shadow,” as her admirers point out, she eliminates a more effervescent Other to run a crew with as much ruthlessness as Emily Silk, on the other Housekeeping end. That Mr. Marks seems more linear minded in his progressive sensibilities disappoints me. I expected a less binary perspective, especially as the left has scored all its major victories. Eradication of divergent views isn’t going to change how adversity inflicts itself on the acknowledged dread of the expendable.