Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Body Fractals

First Published on Opera, Sat 27th Mar, 2004

I've been having a bit of trouble with a fractal I posted in my last entry. The fractal had the title 'Can-o-Worms',and seemed to me an example of fine synchronicity. My novel, The Sex Life of Worms, has been very much inspired by fractals. In fact, I don't know if it's a cheesy thing to say in cyber-space, but I'm helplessly fascinated by fractals. And since the one I posted in my last entry, at least when viewed with my browser, appears to be on the blink, I thought I'd use it as an excuse to post loads of fractals with this entry.



I was reading an article in Strange Attractor, and the author mentioned fractals in connection with H. P. Lovecraft. I have long thought fractals to be somehow Lovecraftian, and was pleased that someone else thought so, too. But there is another writer/artist with whom I am coming to associate fractals, and who has also been an influence on, yes, my novel, The Sex Life of Worms. That artist is Masamune Shirow. Since I've been a little peripatetic in recent years my hobby of collecting comics got put on hold until lately when I started buying the Ghost in the Shell 2 series, by Shirow. Some of the artwork, I found in my comic-fetishist way, to be quite exquisite and even breath-taking. I noticed a preponderance of fractals and fractal-like designs, particularly in the climax to the series, which had a real Space Odyssey, science meets religion sort of feel to it. I'm not going to expound here on the significance of fractals. I think the context in which I am placing them is enough.



I'd like to talk a little, instead, about Shirow's work. First of all, although I read all eleven issues in the series quite keenly, I'm not sure I understood a word of it. The characters are given to spouting lines like, "I need time on the Decatoncale to take on some e-thugs...And I can't afford any competition for CPU cycles, so can we cut a deal?", to take some dialogue at random. This is a fairly light example. That's not the only thing that makes the story hard to follow. I was pleased to learn by reading the letters page that I was not the only fan who could not make head nor tail of the story. (Maybe it didn't help that I didn't read the issues in order). However, there is something intriguing about this. It creates an anxiety-ridden texture of futurity which threatens the reader with his or her own obsolescence. It also has the artistic properties mentioned by Momus in that interview, of delay and ostranenie. This kind of alien texture was something I was already working on in parallel with Worms. Another aspect that is parallel is the future fragmentation of identity into a network without a centre. In other words, in Shirow's work, some of the characters have a computer-like identity, which is piece-meal, subject to additions of software, links to other identities, and so on. This is an idea I am using in a biological - not technological - sense in Worms. This, in both Shirow's work and in Worms, leads to a diffusion of sex into obscure areas of the network, so that the sex act is no longer such a focus for sex. Well, I think this particular idea is much more explicit in Worms than in Ghost in the Shell, and perhaps partly my own interpretation in the latter case. But I do think - and I am fascinated by the fact that - Shirow seems to treat his main female character as a piece of fetishised hardware, like a motorcycle or a computer.




I am always fascinated when I find my own emerging ideas in another person's work. Maybe this is an example of convergent, or diffusing, identities. Maybe a fractal is a visual representation of synchronicity.