Judith's Shadow

Author note

Judith's Shadow is a book about meaning and the interpretation of that many faced abstraction. What one reader may gloss over, another reader may notice as a reference to another book or painting or song or film. These can be pin points to a memory or another world. And that person may realize, with enough of these little references, that what they are in fact reading is a simulation and those little references are the portals in and out of Judith's Shadow.

The structure of Judith's Shadow is that of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Every city in his book is an interpretation of Venice. Every simulation in Judith's Shadow is an interpretation of the first reality city of Veridiction. Veridiction is a Foucauldian neologism for regimes of truth. The authority of truth. So what constitutes truth? I think truth is built of political and scientific and ideological and religious authority. The panopticon in your head and the Althusserean Ideological State Apparatus. We are subjugated to the mask of truth. And sometimes we can imagine what exists behind the curtain in the Emerald City. Baudrillard's hyperreality. Plato's allegory and Foucault's retort that there is no cave. Kant's noumenal and Foucault's retort that there is only representation of the thing in itself. There is no "thing in itself." There is only the shadow and not what casts it. Does this sound familiar? Is there truly a first reality in Judith's Shadow or is it just what that particular simulation refers to itself as?

Everything is a simulation. I find myself walking into different rooms in my house and thinking, have I just left my world for another? How can I ever know such a thing if the differences between the two worlds are so slight that they are undetectable? I then find myself looking at ordinary things a lot more and wondering, was that person in that picture on the wall really smiling exactly like that the last time I noticed? How can I know for sure? I don't think I can. Maybe I'm in the labyrinth and I have been all along. Maybe Judith is her own shadow and the shadow is his own Judith.

Speaking of Judith, she is a bit more spicy than Jane. "Motherfucker." I adore her. She is violent and smutty and protective and caring and strong and damaged and in love. I find myself talking like her and not realizing it. She is addictive. And her wordy dialogue, for me, gives her a creative personality. She notices the catastrophe of words and finds an art in saying her piece. And then there is her nudity. She wears her birthday. Her lack of clothing comes from the idea of a person who doesn't exist in society. She is naked to it. She lacks the ideological covering that everyone else wears. And if she exists outside of society, that means she doesn't exist within it. She is in the garden. She hasn't eaten of the fruit. Is Judith tempted to do so? Certainly. But in order to be tempted, according to Kierkegaard, she has to have already eaten the fruit. She is an antinomy. Judith is my interpretation of the ultimate savage in relation to Foucault's barbarian, I suppose. Her's is a brave new world.

I would like to thank you for reading this wordy sequel to the girl from the mire. I hope you've enjoyed it enough to tackle the third book. The Alive: the story of the first reality.

Special thanks to J A Fabroa and Onyx_Saito and Tsoni1994  for the wonderfully intriguing, thoughtful and heartfelt comments. I truly appreciate them. I would also like to thank The Lotus Awards and The Witchwood Awards.

This cover originally by Jo Fab