Interview with Samuel Moss

minimalism, mystery, math

Samuel Moss has written a novel that is just as mysterious as he is. It’s a great novel, too, one that readers in every genre (including the multiple genres within the larger genre of literary fiction) will love, even while some purists will be offended by the book’s fantastic experimentation.

His novel? The Veldt Institute from the meticulous and otherworldly folks at Double Negative Press.

Samuel is also editor of the beloved ergot.

Here’s what old Sam had to say for himself:

If your dentist asks you what The Veldt Institute is about, what do you say?

The most compact, if not most accurate, description we’ve landed on is, “If the Institute from Thomas Mann’s ‘Magic Mountain’ was run by Gerald Murnane and located in the Zone from STALKER.”

Most dentists don’t know Mann, Tarkovsky or Murnane so I usually go with ‘An unnamed narrator finds themselves at an Institute in the midst of an apparently endless Veldt. As the narrator undergoes a course of treatment - which seems more like a philosophical or arts education - things get increasingly wonky.’

For the most part though, as a writer, the best policy seems to just not bring up writing or publishing to anyone who isn’t a dedicated reader.

What about Kafka? Are we in Castle territory?

Kafka’s ideas and work have certainly been central to my own understanding of what fiction is and can do.

Paradoxically, most of the writers who have significantly influenced the ideas and style I pursue (like Kafka, Borges, Beckett, Lispector and others) are not writers I ‘enjoy’ reading, at least relative so some other writers. It’s a strange thing, but reading their work is often a challenging and uncomfortable experience. Only when I have put the book or story down do the ideas seep in and grab hold, influencing what I end up producing.

I haven’t actually read ‘The Castle’ yet. It has, of course, been on my list of books to read for many years. I do however enjoy reading about ‘The Castle’ and have built it up (though descriptions from others) in my mind. There is this worry that, if and when I do read it, it will be less than the book I have built up in my mind, so I keep pushing it off.

Where are you from?

Generally speaking, and like most of our generation: sterile suburbs. I was born in Virginia, but moved to the Pacific Northwest early on and feel that it forms the majority of my origin.

Most people are familiar with the dark, dreary, rainy forests of the PNW, and that is certainly where I feel at home. But there is the whole part of the PNW (east of the Cascade rain shadow) that is a very different landscape. Out there are expansive grasslands, and it can be very dry. I’ve only experienced that side of the PNW fairly recently. The feeling that one knows their home, only to find that - not far away - is a world (ecological as well as cultural) that is very different is an unusual experience and one that formed some of the seeds of ‘The Veldt Institute’.

Taking the ‘where’ in its broader - more cultural and intellectual - sense, I’m from what David Leo Rice would call ‘the city Jews’. Reading, music, thinking and debate were a big part of my upbringing. Having Family members casually introduce me at a relatively young age to works like ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Zen Flesh Zen Bones’, ‘Music for 18 Musicians’ and things like that certainly set a certain cultural baseline. While Seattle might not be a cultural powerhouse like New York or LA, the Japanese, Chinese and Korean art and culture as well as the Brutalist architecture, land art and experimental art that forms the Psychogeographical bedrock of the area certainly had a big impact.

What would you say is the genre of The Veldt Institute? Does genre matter to you?

I’m not really concerned with genre, no.

If there is a literary genre into which the book neatly fits, I haven’t heard its name. ‘Innovative literature’ might be the best bucket, but that avoids more than it says. Rather than a specific genre, we’ve connected it to other authors and books that are similar to, or influenced, it like Dino Buzzati, Thomas Bernhard, J.M. Coetzee, Ben Marcus, Marie Redonnet, Christina Rivera-Garza as well as sculptors, architects and sound artists.

If anything sound and sculptural descriptors - drone, ambient, megalithic, minimalism, Surrealism, Brutalism, Land Art, abstract expressionism - that seem to fit better.

Were you inspired at all by Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt"?

Bradbury’s story came up while we were editing ‘The Veldt Institute’ for Double–Negative, which is to say fairly recently. I haven’t read the story itself, but there is a wonderfully campy, 70’s sci-fi short film based off of it that is worth watching:

Beyond the titles there doesn’t seem to be too much of a connection between the two.

Bradbury was definitely an early influence, though. ‘The Illustrated Man’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’ were read and enjoyed during high school, though luckily not for class.

For those who have read it, Murnane’s ‘The Plains’ is brought up as ‘TVI’s undeniable ancestor. I’ll readily admit it was a significant influence, though it’s kind of embarrassing because ‘The Veldt’ pales in comparison to ‘The Plains’.

Everyone at The Veldt Institute is progressing on a course of treatment that I assume is intended to lead to something like enlightenment. One of my favorite lines in the book is, "I am getting nowhere, but that is exactly where I want to be going." Where are you going, Sam?

It’s a great question. I’m not sure whether I can give a good answer for myself, but one thing that has become clear, especially with creative pursuits, is that our one’s judgement of their velocity at any given time is almost always wrong.

At the Veldt Institute, Dr. Mellinger II says not to tell others your dreams, because they can't be interpreted collectively. Their meaning is entirely personal. Is this true?

I’ll dodge this question by expanding it to one of the central questions of the books: is anything the doctors say ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘helpful’ or ‘harmful’

As far as I can tell, all the doctors at the Institute are - each in their own way - mad and you shouldn’t take what they say too seriously. Of course, that doesn’t mean that what they say isn’t true.

If you were a doctor at the Veldt Institute, what would your treatment be?

I’d write a book about the Veldt Institute from the viewpoint of one of the patients, then prescribe each of my patients to read that book.

What do dolmens mean to you? Are they anything like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Most important is the dolmen’s ability to avoid rational, objective meaning. Dolmen were raised by cultures all around the world, many of whom had no contact and arrived at the practice independently. Only maybe one or two of these cultures are extant and can be asked ‘why’ they raise the dolmen or ‘what’ they mean.

Because of this, any meaning we apply to prehistoric dolmen are just guesses. We can argue that they are about fertility or the afterlife or some god or spirit. There are surely some who have spent an entire lifetime arguing over these kinds of questions. Of course the dolmen was there before the arguments started and will be there after the arguments end, unchanged. All the talk amounts to very little as far as the dolmen is concerned.

There is a lot of beauty in this. We’ll never know ‘what’ they meant to those cultures, ‘why’ they were raised, and, in many cases, ‘how’ they were raised.

What is indisputable is that the dolmen (among so many other things, like nature and art) are beautiful, important and have impact whether or not they are loaded down with rational or effable meaning.

Our world, and our current culture, can be so overdetermined. We’re always searching for meaning, creating meaning, arguing over meaning, applying meaning. But to what end? If anything, the dolmen is a reminder that we could benefit from a little less of this. Nihilism isn’t the key. There are plenty of things that do, and should, have meaning but let’s remember to leave some space for mystery, absence and silence.

One of your epigraphs is by Andrey Kolmogorov, a mathematician. What does math have to do with anything?

I’ve noticed among some creative types a distaste, fear even hatred, of math. Considering the state of math education in the US, this isn’t surprising though it is a little unfortunate.

After reading a little about higher mathematics, about research mathematicians and befriending a few people who studied math seriously, it’s striking to hear how mathematicians talk about real research math. It’s very different from how teachers talk about it in the classroom. Mathematicians will often talk about their pursuit as a creative act, a struggle on the forefront of knowledge and a search for beauty. Though I’ll never be able to participate in serious mathematical pursuits directly, I can’t help but find links to some literary traditions.

For a little while I’ve thought of some writers as doing work in the qualitative realm of imagination that is analogous to what mathematicians are doing in the quantitative realm of imagination.

Many of the writers that you and I admire are those who did, or do, work at the forefront of what is possible in literature. They set out with a question or just in a direction of the imagination, and see where it takes them.

There are even more explicit connections: Fields medalist June Huh wrote poetry before switching to math, some of Borges stories anticipated developments in information theory, Murray Gell-Mann (founder of the Sante Fe Institute, another major influence on TVI) might have taken the name for the quark from Finneagan’s Wake.

The quote from Kalmogorov is a great example of this intersection: sure he was a mathematician, but the quote itself could be just as easily applied to a work of visual art, poetry, the spiritual or just life itself. Through the pursuit of the quantitative realm and its methods and concerns he came to a beautiful truth that many of us can appreciate.

You hear that folks? He’s not going to tell us what it all means, so you’ll have to read The Veldt Institute for yourself and let me know what you think. Even dentists will eventually have to do this. I strongly recommend this book! Many thanks to Sam!