Invisible architecture

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Daisy Alioto talks with Geoff Rickly about his forthcoming book Someone Who Isn’t Me.

Some reviews of Geoff Rickly’s novel Someone Who Isn’t Me (Rose Books, July 2023) will probably focus on the parallels between the book and Rickly’s biography. After all, the narrator and author share a name. Like Geoff, the main character works at a record label in Greenpoint, used to front a famous emo band, broke his nose onstage, had dealings with Martin Shkreli.

All reviews will mention the central resemblance: which is that Geoff, the character, treats his opioid addiction at an ibogaine clinic in Mexico through a supervised psychoactive trip that defies description–though Geoff Rickly, the author, has put pen to paper regardless.

The result is a multi-structured journey through the narrator’s memory and consciousness that sometimes resembles a skyline and other times the smallest domestic spiral. Within Someone Who Isn’t Me, time and interiority have their own structures, and Rickly’s interest in the built environment jumps off the page.

As his friend, I wanted to ask him about architecture and the inspirations that constructed such an invisible city of a book.

Daisy Alioto: One of my favorite aspects of the book was the layered architecture. Was there a “room” or episode that you built everything around?

Geoff Rickly: I felt strongly that the ibogaine part should be all present tense. I wanted to give the reader an experiential thrill of “being there,” strapped in for the ride. But it complicated the first section of the book, Inferno, which is closer to natural realism. Having too much memory or reflection in the first part (especially anything in the past tense), made the non-sequential second part so confusing. So we largely stripped memory out of the first part and made it an aspect of the character’s addiction: how can he reflect when he’s constantly lost in withdrawal, getting high or lost in desperation for the next fix?

Instead we had to find a different architecture for memory. It occurred to me that the dichotomy could also be viewed through the lens of internal life vs. external life. That’s where I started getting interested in architecture. What are the different forms that I might be able to build as my interior life? I wasn’t interested in the “memory palace” device that people use, I wasn’t worried about retaining information. Instead I became hyper-fixated on the idea of a “dream house” as a place that I might build inside my character as an interior space.

I thought about a lot of your writing that I was reading at the time. Not just on architecture but on the concept of luxury, I understood finally that luxury isn’t always about buying something lavish but about the dream that we all carry with us for free. Anyone who’s ever gotten what they wanted has understood that the desire was where the power was. So I really started thinking about this dream house space: how I desired an interior that was the house of my dreams.

As for the actual structure of the dream house, I went with a series of nested circles. Feldman Architecture, roundhouses, even early settlements based around round fortifications…these were the shapes that made sense to me. And I patterned this idea through the rest of the book: tree rings, chandeliers, children’s mazes, as well as sound waves in the form of echoes.

DA: Tell me about the impact Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities had on the book.

GR: Invisible Cities was a formative text for me. I read it my first year in college and it opened me up to the possibilities of fiction—I used to dream about someday making a comic book out of it. I’ve always been obsessed with the high-brow/low-brow collision. Pedro Almodvar is my favorite director. I like things that are serious about play and playful with matters of life and death. Calvino is a big part of that sensibility.

When structuring the episodic “flashback” sequence that grows increasingly surreal in the ibogaine section, I kept thinking of Invisible Cities—gesturing towards the boundaries between reality and fiction, as well as the past and the present, Calvino gave me a road map: what if Marco Polo was exploring his own interior world, instead of the vast corners of a kingdom? That was my starting point for the final chapter of the ibogaine section.

DA: Is it possible to embrace invisible architectures without dissociation?

GR: I struggled for years with a way to dramatize the experience that I had when I took ibogaine. Every new scene that I wrote felt like I was grasping for a language that didn’t exist. No one writes about ibogaine. Even Michael Pollen’s How to Change Your Mind (the hallucinogen omnibus) mentions ibogaine only as a footnote. It truly is too out there for even the most experienced drug user. So there was a process of building concepts that needed to predate my characters and plots. As the character explores the boundaries of their identity, the thing I kept returning to was: we all have hidden rooms inside of us, and those hidden rooms have magic wardrobes that lead to hidden worlds.

I remember when I was really struggling with my own addiction, I told my mom “I don’t even know myself.” And she said, “Oh honey, none of us really know ourselves.” I think that is so true. It’s not that I “know myself” now… it’s just a matter of known unknowns.

DA: The problem of trying to describe the ibogaine trip is really the old problem of ekphrasis, multiplied. And it’s perfect to me that you include a section about Gaudí because every new architectural language requires a new critical language to describe it. The "invisible city" was really the precursor to the virtual environment and everything that contains, and how it can externalize the “known unknowns” of the human brain, including the cathedral of the psychedelic trip.

Memories have their own architecture and “Geoff” travels through them while lying in bed. The body is passive, but the brain is its own traveler. In a way, this is what writing has always been, but we are crushed under the pressure to be linear, to be legible. Not to gesture to too many competing architectures at the same time: character’s consciousness, author’s consciousness, book’s consciousness, reader’s consciousness, collective consciousness.

GR: The idea of ekphrasis in works of fiction has always seemed a bit insufficient. We need more than a translation, more than a simple transliteration. I think the work ‘critiquing a nonexistent architecture’ as you so brilliantly put it, requires a kind of transubstantiation: where the elements not only stand in for their platonic counterparts but take on a kind of generative holiness.

So many of my concerns, whether in music or fiction, revolve around the spiritual problems of a post-religion world. Where currently we may be speaking of grounding the inner world of the self in an architecture that stems from the “real world”, we may as well be speaking about building the Internet or the metaverse or whatever virtual spaces we are imagining. All of reality seems to be at a crossroads, trying to decide where the dream belongs, what our new limitations are and what possibilities they open before us. In this way, the collective godhead seems realer than ever, more immediate and more consequential.

When you mentioned all the competing narratives of consciousness (character’s consciousness, author’s consciousness, book’s consciousness, reader’s consciousness, collective consciousness) you hit on one of the major obstacles of writing this book. I didn’t ever want the reader to feel like they were doing the hard work of keeping these threads separate. I wanted them to just instinctively navigate through the maze. I only think that is possible because of the Internet.

The Internet has undoubtedly changed our brains. And I think that has given me a framework for an inner architecture that feels less academic and more instinctive than some of my other sources. The collaborative power of the web (and especially the current web3 iteration) takes the human experience into a place that honors oral traditions while giving it the staying power of the written word.