Right, it may seem very crass of me - maybe even a little egocentric and shallow - that I'm about to write a small blog post on one of my short stories.
Planet Zhelanie is my favourite piece I've written to date. That's not to say that it's the most well-written. Nor that it's without its flaws. (The whole piece might just be seen as a flawed experiment.) But it's dense, seamless and ambitious. There is far too much going on in all departments. At the very least, this should be a novella, not an eight page short story. This is why I am very eager to develop it into something bigger.
The afterlife as a parallel universe
I don't adhere to any religious creed. I am Agnostic, which I think is a very healthy position to take. All imaginative visions of the afterlife have struck me as so tawdry and simplistic that it's clear that they are man-made explanations.
First of all, why does the afterlife have to take place in some kind of spiritual sphere? Do we carry souls? Are we monitored by angels? Angels?
The thought that the afterlife could take place in a parallel universe has intrigued me. (Please be aware that this is a creative conjecture, not something I seriously espouse.) The laws of physics in this universe are always the same. But in a parallel universe, could they be different? If the laws of physics functioned differently, perhaps time might as well. Let us imagine that there are a multiplicity of worm-holes etc., which might cause us to experience the same situation time and time again (with slight or drastic variants). And if time functioned differently, perhaps our cognition might be different as well. We might perceive that only a few days have passed, when in fact thousands of years have elapsed.
The nothingness of the self
"Personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality."- J. L. Borges
I was very influenced by an early essay Borges wrote called 'The Nothingness of Personality.' In this essay, Borges rejects the Romantic notion of an artist being a palpable presence in the text. Instead, the text must be a series of clearly defined symbols with no traceable progenitor.
The fact that I disagree with this is beside the point. (From my own experience, any piece of writing you commit to paper will have some aspect of your personality in it, even if Borges claims that the very idea of a personality is illusory!) The idea of an erased self, though, is very interesting.
I read up on Aristotle's take on the afterlife, which I'm sure Borges had read (after all, he had read everything - especially classical literature!), and which strongly relates to one of the central ideas of the piece. The Platonic doctrine, which was inherited by Christianity, maintains that you have a soul etc. and that as long as you live your life altruistically and have done good deeds, you will go to Heaven. You still have a clearly defined personality and it is this component which is transposed into a heavenly celestial plane.
The Aristotelian view is that, when you die, your personality and ego is completely extirpated. You must lose all aspects of your personality in order to subsume yourself into this celestial body. This is how Planet Zhelanie works. You must lose your ego and become a kind of cipher with no identifiable soul, character or personality. Your success on this planet is dependent on the degree to which you reduce your ego.
Great literature and Russia
Though this planet I imagine in this piece may accommodate itself to whichever individual that enters the it (in a rather cheesy way, I describe this in the story as something like 'through concentration and application I managed to crack the codes of this ambiguous planet'), the central character is an aspiring Russian writer.
Russia is a very complex country with a very rich literature and history. (Along with Aristotle, an epigraph I would like for the expanded version would be a quote from Dostoyevsky saying that no foreigner is capable of understanding the complexities of Russia.) There is a real breadth and scope to the novels of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. They have now attained canonical status. As the character develops in the planet, the greater writer he becomes, even becoming the author of both War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov.
Hazardous wishes
This idea of wishes degenerating into chaos was influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker and, to a lesser extent, Solaris. This idea might seem a little trite. But, as for Tarkovsky, it is a starting point for a number of other themes and interests.
The character's wishes include meeting his deceased father, becoming a masterful novelist and meeting his deceased wife. As explained above, he only attains any of these wishes by eliminating his selfishness and egocentricity.
Borgesian themes
The whole piece is very Borgesian. The most palpable aspect is how 'a circular temple is engendered' which produces a series of children who study a massive tome the writer has written. I guess this is a little nod-of-the-cap to the story 'The Circular Ruins.' There are also two episodes where two characters, who are each others' double, in a room surrounded by mirrors. Suggesting infinity, rather than duality.
Time
As mentioned above, time works differently in this planet. How so? In the case of this planet, time is circular. The structure of the story is episodic. There are a series of episodes where the character is under less control, followed by episodes, under the same setting, where he has more control.
Subservience, salvation and love
The character is named Igor, which I guess could be a nod to Frankenstein and symbolical of how meek and mild he is. (In fact, I chose the name because it's Russian, I only realised its significance when someone else pointed it out.) The character begins in the story as a child. He is small, weak and frequently trodden on. As he becomes older and reaches old age he practically becomes a God in the planet after writing a literary work and having fathered a whole school of progenies as a result.
After been subservient to others (other writers, his father and a double who ridicules him), Igor finds salvation through love. (That does sound lame!) So, just as in this meaningless universe where things work when love is in place, so it does in this one. He finds his salvation by meeting his wife Isla. (Spanish for 'Island' and thus connotative of salvation.)
If you'd like to read what I would call a draft version, email me at simoncangas@hotmail.com
I'd also like to point out that, if you are one of nine people to own my Confronting Reality book, that is not the current version as there are a few errors as regards wording.
Below is a 8.15 minute audio excerpt of the story.
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