WORDS ON KHAN
"I think that we must accept the fact that art is not inevitably benign, that it is potentially destructive." -- Glenn Gould
"I love food and I feel that it is something that should be enjoyed." -- Tyra Banks
We writers all too often mistake the solitary pursuits that see us stranded at our keyboards late at night as acts of creation. But we do not create so much as use words to make convenient rearrangements. We are fed by the world as the scarabs are fed by dung, and we merely have a compulsion to rearrange chaos into expedient narratives.
These long strings of symbols unravel meaning and beauty, at least in some arrangements, and perhaps only by other authors. And some linear sequences of words are to be considered sacred and not to be messed with, like the precise order of names between the endless begats in the book of Numbers in the Old Testament. There is something important in the actual names between the begats that we just shouldn't alter even for the sake of euphony or dramatic emphasis.
The words in this article are tasked with explaining how I came to create the word movie Immortal Khan. The words that comprise Immortal Khan follow one after the other in a conventional order that makes these words a narrative, a story. But Immortal Khan, the word movie, is just a convenient synthesis of meaningful and meaningless events that occurred over centuries extruded into a stream of literal symbols for that part of your mind that is so attached to the process of reading. I write to hold your attention, and to hold it in a way it longs to be held.
But there is another sequence of events, a chronology -- seemingly unrelated, or at least intricately intertwined, but from the real world -- that holds the key to the creation of the work. If I were to make notes of these events, and arrange them into their own timeline, they would look like this:
| 900 AD |
Gunpowder invented in China. Used for signals and fireworks. With all that sound and fire, why not utilize for weapons? |
| 1791 |
Mozart dies at age 36. |
| 1909 |
Harley Davidson introduces its trademark 45 degree V-twin engine. |
| 1947 |
In Australia, there is a terrible drought. The leader of one group of aborigines plays the ancestral chant of his tribe in his head backwards. Using this as a travel guide, they successfully journey from watering hole to watering hole back to the wellspring. He learned the chant from his immediate chanter ancestor who instructed him not to alter one little detail. But he could add to the ending if he wanted to. |
| 1962 |
I'm nine years old when I witness one of the most spectacular fireworks displays ever staged. The entire neighborhood gathers on the sidewalk in anticipation of the event. Eight hundred miles away and 248 miles above the surface of the Earth, a device 20 inches in diameter and 54.3 inches long explodes with the force of 1,450,000 tons of TNT. When it detonates, it's as though God has taken a picture of the Earth with His brand new flash camera. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast overloads circuit breakers, and even stops some cars dead in their tracks. It's awesome. Beautiful. We watch the lingering fireball for 15 minutes. Boy, what a wonderful world it's going to be.
Canadian concert pianist Glenn Gould records part of Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita in D Major. He is seriously contemplating giving up live performance.
|
| 1963 |
Glenn Gould completes recording the D Major Partita.
In Los Angeles, Gould gives his last live performance. He performs Bach's Partita in D Major.
|
| 1973 |
Tyra Banks born. |
| 1974 |
In the article, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould," Gould maintains that, "every aesthetic decision can be equated with a moral correlative." |
| 1979 |
Glenn Gould, 16 years after leaving the concert stage, rerecords Bach's D Major Partita for Canadian Broadcasting. |
| 1981 |
Bob Marley dies at age 36 |
| 1982 |
Glenn Gould dies at age 50.
Art Pepper dies at age 56.
Victoria's Secret founded.
|
| 1991 |
Miles Davis dies at age 65. |
| 1993 |
In the movie, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, the Gould character comments, "I don't know what I would have become if I hadn't become a musician." |
| 1995 |
The French resume nuclear testing in the Pacific. |
| 1998 |
Some pissed-off, hungover, gray-haired old bastard peers at me from the mirror. Where did I fritter away all those years? It wouldn't be so bad if humans could live more than a 1,000 years. Taoist wizards have always claimed that this is possible. |
| 2000 |
What if Glenn Gould were a Taoist immortal and Tyra Banks were a rocket scientist? Well, with some help, I think they'd get along just fine. |
When I look back at this timeline, it's clear to me that the writing of Immortal Khan was an inevitability, and I can travel backward through Immortal Khan to the wellsprings of my own being to that distant point far before I even began to exist.
I'm sorry, this is all too cryptic, and I will end this writerly indulgence immediately. You will not have to continue reading these words, for when words end, there are no more words to read.