The Book of Fluids
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Understanding The Book The Book of Fluids can, like a well-placed stop sign, be read at many dizzying levels and impossible angles, with many spectacularly different results each time. Every time someone looks at that stop sign, they have to think, But what does it truly mean? Surely, the redness must symbolize something truly unique here, given this setting, the juxtaposition of light and dark, the eighteen-wheeler coming--oh fuck. Anyway, before I was derailed, so to speak, let's go back to that other train of thought involving the Illuminati... no, wait, let's try the Kabbalah one--or was it the one about Revelation? Oh, heck, let's just pick one random thought from each... Now, are any of them necessarily wrong? Maybe. Should we necessarily care? Perhaps if we could condense our thoughts into a unifying summary-reference-paragraph, perhaps our questions might be a bit more pointed? They are, after all, themselves merely words... . With all due apologies to Jennifer Reitz, whose Understanding Unicorn Jelly is my primary rip-off source for all this (in fact I'm looking at the page even as I type this up)... Pus Level The Book of Fluids involves a bunch of freaky guys with neat powers who go on an adventure with lots of spaceships and big battles where lots of stuff gets blown up! And then they fight with swords and fireballs and claws cuz some of them turn into werewolves and they eat people! Oh, and those werewolves keep calling one of the big main guys like their king or something. The story throws a lot of sappy love scenes and skeery ghey stuff at us but you know after you slog through the slow stuff Irwin writes Joe's gonna stage a cool fight or Tred or Vae will come back with new cool ways to blow up the universe! Me like Vae for friend have! He's my Die Hard III!Bile Level The Book of Fluids is about a group of supernaturally endowed heroes each on their own personal quest to make the universe into a better place. On the way, they meet considerable opposition in the form of civil wars, corruption, hostile aliens and, in some cases, evil incarnations of oneself. Each character somehow feels themselves to be disassociated from their world somehow, but they are inevitably driven to work with it, forming and breaking ties in an endless circle of being that... is. Sorta like real life, but with dragons and spaceships and wanton and gratuitous violence... .Blood Level "Reason is a mistress I do not court, she and her little sister Common Sense. Ling/Logick is a different matter... As is my dear SophiaScience. Though she is a little idealistic." The Book of Fluids is an allegory for our society today. The characters, places, and themes reflect a world that has forgotten its past and is obsessed with a future it cannot see. Going by the axiom that the future resembles the past, we forge on with this assumption and ourselves realize the process of "history repeating itself." We have created the Ourobouros and it is ourselves. Not only must we ask the scientific-paradigmatically obvious, But how can we prove it?, and its aesthetic-paradigmatically necessitated corollary, And what good or ill would that do us either way?, but also: How can we take the proof, and the value that goes with it (which we can only determine afterwards), and incorporate it into the model of what we already have, to make it work even better? Or would it doom the system and have it uncoil to consume us all?Brain Goo Level Metaphor and myth in the Book of Fluids represent, or stand as, icons of the implosive collapse of our contemporary social environment. The Book stands as a historic critique simulacrum. It does not as much represent anything, or convey meaning, but mostly it hides that there is no layers behind it, and in this, it is a mockery of all pre-post-modern signifiers. The secret of non-secrecy spins around itself as a dog chasing its tail, and from the movement, a new order emerges, an order of raw, hyperrealistic appearance. In appearance lies seduction. The Book seduces the reader into a limbic Irrealis where the dialectics of rationalism and its corollary of dialectic rationalism are simultaneously taken, turned on their heads and driven off the cliff of ad absurdumness, and ultimately negated because reduced to a subjective, relative fallibility that cannot stand the test of the surreal. It takes an old contextual-textual paradigm into an even older contextual-sexual one, at the same time transcending all context and grafting itself in and from the denied archetypal unconscious of the Seeker-figure, attempting thus the "fluidity" perceived in the pre-rationalist paradigmatic dynamics of the idealized ancient mode, but at the same time rejecting all it stands for in favor of the transcendentalization of the immanent, the orgy of semiotics inspired by the pleasure one derives from the emptiness of all symbols caused by their own over-existence. The over-intelligence perceives the paradox and is thusly semantically isolated from traditional 'coherence' patterns, doomed to contemplate in melancholic awe a new mythology that, by meaning everything, anything and nothing, is the only accurate depiction of Reality. All of it is, of course, futile.Protoplasm Level Once upon a time, a pagan pharmacologist, an atheist philologist, a futilitarian lawyer and a christian art director all came together and made something dreadful. In fact it was so dreadful that it slowly began to eat away their souls and turn their collective insanities to work for its proliferation, tapping into their mytho-narrative cores for memetic form and sustenance. Eventually they went so insane that they created this site. And if I don't stop reading maybe I'll go insane and follow this dreadful beast too, and perhaps rot myself dry in its unspeakable evil maw oh god the horror the horror... oooo, spaceships.Quintessence Level Dude, these guys are so going to get sued if they try to publish this crap...At Quint you probably understand whatever message could be said to be behind whichever part of the Book you're reading, either because you've read the original material we were "inspired" by or you wrote it yourself. Either way, a summary explanation here would be quite useless to you. |