about the book
A boy loses his hand in a terrible accident and grows into a man marginalized and offended by a world keen on masking its brokenness. Embracing his division seems like the only true way to live, until he is tempted with an option that seems too good to be true, an option which can make his wildest dreams a reality.
Hologram Heroes is the story of the regaining of what was once thought severed forever, and the price of wholeness in a world entranced by the mirage of more. Who would have thought, in the world of the broken, the worst thing to achieve is perfection?
Hologram Heroes is the story of the regaining of what was once thought severed forever, and the price of wholeness in a world entranced by the mirage of more. Who would have thought, in the world of the broken, the worst thing to achieve is perfection?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I was, and am still, a man wading in the passions of a stormy sea of existence. The darkness that once surrounded me was cold. The sea, raging. My struggles against it, futile. Words became saviors, paths to signify the squall of emotions roiling from the deep. They were my escape, an outlet to express and, in some way, subdue the surrounding waters. The liberation they promised was like a lighthouse, guiding me home.
But the more I followed them, the more I found they betrayed me. At first, they lured me into believing that they could, in fact, grasp the ungraspable or explain the unexplainable. They made me feel like the hole where the perfect word was to be inserted, the word that would finally articulate the situation with exactness, could be found in the dictionary of words at my disposal. They tricked me into believing the saturating event of life could be expressed in understandable terms. But as I reached out to hold onto them, they slipped through my fingers like the amorphousness of the waters. As I became frustrated and tried to strike them, they absorbed my blows with imperviousness. They contained an excess beyond themselves that had a way of overpromising yet invariably underdelivering. As I tried harder to swim towards their light, their meaning pointed away from themselves, towards other words who’s meaning did the same in a web of disillusion. It was all a contradiction, unmatched by any I’d uncovered, swirling me in a whirlpool of severance.
Nonetheless, I continued to wrestle, unrelenting, and their contradictory nature began to reveal a deep and elaborate hoax: that the whole world is like this. It promises salvation through substantiality, yet, its undercurrent is insubstantial, indescribable, unconditional. It screams the answers from the hilltops, yet its undertone is silence. It is full of charlatans, beacons on an infinite horizon, coaxing us all into swimming in one direction or another, yet, brilliantly making us believe our direction is our choice. But I realized that following the lighted promise of these commodified perfections leads only to endlessly swimming under the will of someone else’s authority.
So, what was I to do? If the choices I make are governed by societal and biological, or, in Johnny’s case (Hologram Heroes protagonist), robotic determinacy, then how is it possible to have free will? If every choice I make is a hologram, appearing real, yet only my imagination of someone else’s ideas, then what can I actually consider my choice? Who are my heroes or role models if they are all just promising an artificial solution to the hollow I feel inside? What does freedom mean at that point? To find a way to live freer from the world’s masked manipulation I needed to better understand the concept of freedom. This book became a child of that analysis.
My conclusion: Conscious choice is never free from influence. Although it is what many of us hold as our dearest trait, it is always governed by our past and controlled by our symbolic identities. But all is not lost for freedom, because, paradoxically, we are fortunate to be broken creatures, and, as such, we are more than our easily manipulated conscious self. Emancipation is found in exactly the place that feels out of our conscious control, within our unconscious. That division I feel, disrupting the unsettled waters inside, is not contingent, it is fundamental. The core of humanity is not wholeness, it is brokenness; the dictionary does provide fairly good guidance here.
Human: a being susceptible to weakness.
Synonyms: flesh and blood, fallible, imperfect, vulnerable, erring, flawed
But there is no need for despair from this inherent internal imperfection, for the incompleteness that is suggested from imperfection provides the path to experiencing the beauty of the world and the cure for our conscious slavery. It is hidden in plain sight, in our capacity for being aware of and embracing our internal contradiction. We are severed inside, alienated from pure identity. Frustration in articulation comes from the fact that, although our conscious desire is always driven to best articulate our state, we are metaphorically, dis-articulated.
Disarticulation: the separation of two bones at their joint, either traumatically or by way of injury or by a surgeon during arthroplasty or amputation.
This separation inside us is freeing because it disrupts the determinant chain of causality. It is not influenced by the latest trends, or what everyone in our entire life has told us we should be. There is a part of us that our conscious self cannot see or influence directly, yet it insists, interrupts, decenters, traumatizes, and enters in from where no one can touch it. And it is the divide from which every concept that creates meaning in the world originates.
The problem is that this division feels to us like emptiness, so we become easily ashamed of it. It appears like trauma, so we are easily frightened by it. And like a phantom limb or an empty room, we feel it is missing something. We feel its lacking contents. And, in response, we translate this feeling within ourselves as dis-content, dissatisfaction, grief. So, we cannot help but want to mask this estrangement and distract ourselves from it by finding our part to play as people.
Person: a character in a play or story.
And as people, our aims so often involve dressing up for the part, hiding our antagonisms, and engaging in what Johnny would know in the acquired amputee community as cosmesis.
Cosmesis: used to describe the outer, aesthetic covering of a prosthesis.
But although we must assume symbolic identities to function in the world, we should not hide the hollow parts of who we are, or deny the inherent split of our identity, for it is the emptiness between the notes which turns them into music. It is only lack itself that is free from external control. It is how things like love, justice, and truth arise – words that are free from accessible meaning, yet somehow bring meaning into the world. These are things that we cannot choose, but call to us. That’s why, as contradictory as it may sound, trying to fix my brokenness leads only to endless fix-ation, while embracing it leads to freedom.
But the more I followed them, the more I found they betrayed me. At first, they lured me into believing that they could, in fact, grasp the ungraspable or explain the unexplainable. They made me feel like the hole where the perfect word was to be inserted, the word that would finally articulate the situation with exactness, could be found in the dictionary of words at my disposal. They tricked me into believing the saturating event of life could be expressed in understandable terms. But as I reached out to hold onto them, they slipped through my fingers like the amorphousness of the waters. As I became frustrated and tried to strike them, they absorbed my blows with imperviousness. They contained an excess beyond themselves that had a way of overpromising yet invariably underdelivering. As I tried harder to swim towards their light, their meaning pointed away from themselves, towards other words who’s meaning did the same in a web of disillusion. It was all a contradiction, unmatched by any I’d uncovered, swirling me in a whirlpool of severance.
Nonetheless, I continued to wrestle, unrelenting, and their contradictory nature began to reveal a deep and elaborate hoax: that the whole world is like this. It promises salvation through substantiality, yet, its undercurrent is insubstantial, indescribable, unconditional. It screams the answers from the hilltops, yet its undertone is silence. It is full of charlatans, beacons on an infinite horizon, coaxing us all into swimming in one direction or another, yet, brilliantly making us believe our direction is our choice. But I realized that following the lighted promise of these commodified perfections leads only to endlessly swimming under the will of someone else’s authority.
So, what was I to do? If the choices I make are governed by societal and biological, or, in Johnny’s case (Hologram Heroes protagonist), robotic determinacy, then how is it possible to have free will? If every choice I make is a hologram, appearing real, yet only my imagination of someone else’s ideas, then what can I actually consider my choice? Who are my heroes or role models if they are all just promising an artificial solution to the hollow I feel inside? What does freedom mean at that point? To find a way to live freer from the world’s masked manipulation I needed to better understand the concept of freedom. This book became a child of that analysis.
My conclusion: Conscious choice is never free from influence. Although it is what many of us hold as our dearest trait, it is always governed by our past and controlled by our symbolic identities. But all is not lost for freedom, because, paradoxically, we are fortunate to be broken creatures, and, as such, we are more than our easily manipulated conscious self. Emancipation is found in exactly the place that feels out of our conscious control, within our unconscious. That division I feel, disrupting the unsettled waters inside, is not contingent, it is fundamental. The core of humanity is not wholeness, it is brokenness; the dictionary does provide fairly good guidance here.
Human: a being susceptible to weakness.
Synonyms: flesh and blood, fallible, imperfect, vulnerable, erring, flawed
But there is no need for despair from this inherent internal imperfection, for the incompleteness that is suggested from imperfection provides the path to experiencing the beauty of the world and the cure for our conscious slavery. It is hidden in plain sight, in our capacity for being aware of and embracing our internal contradiction. We are severed inside, alienated from pure identity. Frustration in articulation comes from the fact that, although our conscious desire is always driven to best articulate our state, we are metaphorically, dis-articulated.
Disarticulation: the separation of two bones at their joint, either traumatically or by way of injury or by a surgeon during arthroplasty or amputation.
This separation inside us is freeing because it disrupts the determinant chain of causality. It is not influenced by the latest trends, or what everyone in our entire life has told us we should be. There is a part of us that our conscious self cannot see or influence directly, yet it insists, interrupts, decenters, traumatizes, and enters in from where no one can touch it. And it is the divide from which every concept that creates meaning in the world originates.
The problem is that this division feels to us like emptiness, so we become easily ashamed of it. It appears like trauma, so we are easily frightened by it. And like a phantom limb or an empty room, we feel it is missing something. We feel its lacking contents. And, in response, we translate this feeling within ourselves as dis-content, dissatisfaction, grief. So, we cannot help but want to mask this estrangement and distract ourselves from it by finding our part to play as people.
Person: a character in a play or story.
And as people, our aims so often involve dressing up for the part, hiding our antagonisms, and engaging in what Johnny would know in the acquired amputee community as cosmesis.
Cosmesis: used to describe the outer, aesthetic covering of a prosthesis.
But although we must assume symbolic identities to function in the world, we should not hide the hollow parts of who we are, or deny the inherent split of our identity, for it is the emptiness between the notes which turns them into music. It is only lack itself that is free from external control. It is how things like love, justice, and truth arise – words that are free from accessible meaning, yet somehow bring meaning into the world. These are things that we cannot choose, but call to us. That’s why, as contradictory as it may sound, trying to fix my brokenness leads only to endless fix-ation, while embracing it leads to freedom.