About “Lies Curated”
“My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words. She never learned to read and write, but somehow she knew the good of reading and writing; she had learned how to listen and delight. She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being. She told me stories, and she taught me how to listen. I was a child and I listened. She could neither read nor write, you see, but she taught me how to live among her words, how to listen and delight. ‘Storytelling; to utter and to hear…’ And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society. There is proof of that, I think, in all the histories and prehistories of human experience…
“…In the white man’s world, language, too—and the way in which the white man thinks of it—has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language—for the Word itself—as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.”
–From House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, 1966
I’m the only customer here in this East Nashville coffee shop on the morning of the July 4th, 2019. Pleasant music wafts from the overhead speakers, the staff is chattering happily amongst themselves and I am enjoying the weight of the empty room alone with my breakfast, Momaday in hand. I’m watching the fire and police departments set up a parade blockade just outside on Woodland Street—the real “Woodrow Street” from my working novel, Lies Curated. It’s odd to observe this urban strip in the early morning, to consider the duality of its daytime and nighttime personas. Right now, even before 9am, the sun has baked everything in a flat, white-yellow cast, and various all-American family-friendly events are waiting to take place. I’m sipping my coffee in a bright, completely alternate universe from the darker, neon one that blanketed the block not six hours previous, reading N. Scott Momaday’s treatise on the power of language, feeling the magic of the book course through my body and reawaken my inner mind’s eye.
There is a duality to this magic. For not only is Momaday here describing a version of today’s online culture from all the way back in 1966, he has also given me a vessel through which to reintroduce myself to the completely different person I was when I first read the book, when I first felt enchanted by this mantra on the power of language as a young college senior, completely oblivious to the digital revolution that was about to take place. Maybe it’s just me, but I believe that books, in analog, give us the power to both traverse through time and to access the existential undercurrents beneath all things. This, I decide, encouraged by the buzz from my coffee, is a most appropriate introduction to Lies Curated: Part 1 of The Immortals series.
The protagonists of Lies Curated are far from noteworthy at the outset; they simply want to feel a connection. But when they find themselves face-to-face with The Immortals, cornered by supernatural beings, the protagonists begin to see themselves for who they really are, beneath the lies they've been telling themselves all their lives. It is this awakening that sets off their journey through the chaos, deception and isolation of modern-day America in search of something solid to cling to: something True.
Duality permeates this, too: not only are their quests in search of good, evil, and the Truth behind both, they are rooted in the primal need for belonging and affirmation in the fractured and individualistic society of early 21st Century America. Uniting these two roads is the drive to truly know one’s self: to break through the realm of the conscious and become familiar with the deep, pulsing subconscious. This theme is a terrifying one, as I can personally attest.
I began conceptualizing this story in 2014, during a bad breakup, writing just as much from a place of objective bewilderment as from one of loneliness or isolation. It was beginning to feel almost impossible to keep up with old, dear friends, even something simple enough as grabbing a quick beer or a bite to eat. Was it just me? After a midnight encounter in a drinking establishment on Woodland Street during the height of summer, experienced in the book by Cal Cox, it started to occur to me that maybe my subconscious was purely base—an animal’s appetite with a scientist’s cold empiricism. Shaken, I threw myself into the writing of a story of demon-possession that was to culminate with the entire neighborhood of Five Points, East Nashville, burning to dust and sinking into the open-throated pit of Hell itself, its inhabitants screaming with glee.
Life occurred, and I was unable to see such an ending through after falling in love with my partner and settling down with her to raise a child. The sun rose. My hours changed from dark and neon lit to bright, early and golden. The book sat halfway incomplete. Becoming a parent, though, came with its own unique social challenges. It seemed then almost harder than before to buy someone a beer or share a meal with them. New-parent life was an easy scapegoat for a much larger and deeper-seated problem surrounding my generation’s lack of community. Rediscovering some old journal entries—the magic of the scribbled words coursing through my body and reawakening my inner mind’s eye—was all it took to remind myself that American friendship was plenty weird long before the change, major though it certainly was, took place. When I recognized this simile of scapegoats, blaming the internet vs. blaming parenthood, I realized I was in the perfect place to pick the story back up and finish it. And the fear and dread all simmering just under the surface…what if rather than all this, the problem was, just, me?
Lies Curated is not a alarm against online culture or a warning of the advance of everyday technology. (I loathe the idea of being mistaken for yet another of those writers.) While social media surely amplifies our weird, vastly far-reaching isolation (it’s becoming clear that it was specifically designed for it, designed to give us all an infinite reflection pool and a never-ending pat on the back for staring into it), it certainly didn’t birth it. No: Lies Curated sing in tune with my generation’s total and complete disorientation in the midst of a powerful, unprecedented new order.
There has always been something damagingly individualistic about America’s community in general. The elders echoed me: Momaday knew it and described it in his sterling literary works of the 1960s. Anaïs Nin recognized it and wrote about it tragically in her WWII memoirs, during her involuntary exodus to New York City. Edward Bernays seized on it and made a killing in the 1920s and beyond, transforming our entire economy in the process (the bastard…). I do not see mine anywhere near these names. But, as a victim of the giant technology takeover (born in 1984, I was of the first generation to be forced to both navigate adolescence offline and learn social media to get a job after college), it is my duty to utilize my awe and perception to swiftly deliver my own interpretation of all of…this…to the world. To you.
Today, there are more stories being written and published than there are hours left in your life to consume a mere percentage of them, even if, like the Immortals, you could live for over 500 years. So why should you read Lies Curated online, let alone become a Patron to help create the hard copy? I wrote and completed this story for you as your servant. I spent months undertaking the Artist’s Mandate: pulling the energy from my personal fears and insecurities born of our culture’s isolation and transmuting it into something universal, something eye opening, something enchanted. I was able to step back and see the story as you would want to. I hope my reverence to the supernatural spirit of language is apparent: believe me when I declare I am also a servant to you, the universal reader. This combination, I’m sure, has led to create a sterling storytelling experience.
The central vein of Lies Curated asks if there is any real reason to live well, to be good, or at least to try. Within and without the book, this dilemma is more than somewhat dependent on whether or not “Truth” is relative. I neither know nor can words begin to answer. Nonetheless it’s undeniable that we all build and cling to our own truths, and all truths rely on the stories we load, aim, and shoot unerringly into the world. Truths spring from the magic that possesses us, and stories continue to deliver this pure elemental form to others, even in spite of our screen-lit culture’s infinite onslaught of words upon words upon words. Stories inspire their devoted readers to establish a new, powerful Truth of their own, to package it up and send it out into their own worlds via their own unique vessels, to begin the cycle again.
My vision for Lies Curated has always been one of a neat paperback novel you could soak up, perhaps early in the day, as the analog light of the morning sun sets the pages aglow through a nearby window, the steam from a fresh cup of coffee floating up and awakening your senses. It was absolutely written to be a concoction of bound paper, glue, and ink that the reader holds and whose stained pages become more and more familiar over each revisiting. Inevitably the story must exist in a digital format as well, but I am dedicated to putting this story into print no matter how long it takes. Help me spread the truth that books are still the most effective format through which to transmit magic.
-Art Robin