SEED
BEARER
Soon
will come to pass
the
beating heart,
small
footprints in the sand:
Such a
welcoming start
for
the day’s long journey.
Where
once by
shores
were changes,
and words—
ones
meant,
and ones meant to rearrange.
Just
how? Oh, who can say?
For
each breath spins
each word’s story.
And each word's weave tells
how
each began
and
how they may yet end.
But first,
and last,
comes the pulse,
again
and again,
that
tells the heart
the story of the
coursing
of its blood, and of
its heat,
and its start.
NEWS
OF THE WORLD #11
What was it that spaceman once
told us?
“One Small Step,” seemed almost
religious.
Soon we’d be expat-indigenous!
But we had to stow away our
lives.
Those letters we wrote begged
forgiveness.
They were meant for those who’d
outlive us.
But our children all want to shiv us!
You can hear them sharpening
their knives.
News stories these days just
confuse us.
Those typhoons at sea still
amuse us.
And headlines all want to excuse
us—
Who said writing on walls would
be fair?
Those raiders in Mali include
us.
By God! They’ll no longer
exclude us.
Along pipelines they will
extrude us.
Until we’re flowing out everywhere.
That Syria is searing our brain.
We keep watching it circling the
drain.
Though we scrub and we scrub at
the stain,
it’s so hard to keep everything
white.
We pretend that we know what to
do,
that we’re smarter than average,
Boo-Boo.
But when the foot doesn’t fit
the shoe—
Cinderella will have a bad
night.
…..
How those boomers all cry doom
and gloom,
as their fat children drive by, zoom-zoom!
Their architects still build
them glass tombs.
It’s past time we start throwing
some stones.
Now, they tell us our pie will
be crumbs.
that we need to keep sucking our
thumbs,
as we march to the tune of
their drums,
they keep pounding with their
sticks and bones.
…..
To bake bread is much better
than land.
And our crops, they'll grow better by
hand.
But kid’s castles are made out of
sand
and the waves will crash over their
heads.
…..
Will we stand round just to shake
and bake?
Do we just wait for that final
quake?
It’s the one with the bloody, great
stake,
meant to keep us living from the
dead.
POINT OF VIEW
I
do not think
That
I'll agree
With
all that which
You’ve
come to see.
PERSPECTIVE
“GET ON!”
roars Elephant.
"HEY! GET OFF!”
warns the Ant.
Seems only
one will see
That which
the other shan’t.
I THOUGHT I DREAMED
"A sleeping
giant
can be a
feast
for a
single spider."
MEAL PREP
Wizards
winnow
grainy
truths
from impatient
husks,
until wisdom is served
like potage
for our meals.
THE OTHER DAY, I READ FROM JOHN
CROWLEY’S SHORT STORY COLLECTION, Novelties & Souvenirs, a story
called “In Blue”. It’s set in the future where a world-wide heterarchy*
has been established and where history no longer has any relevance. Life is
ordered and subsumed under “the work” collectively performed by the state’s
blue-uniformed cadres in their never-ending business at perfecting the
never-finished “Revolution.” I think the reader is to imagine an end-state communist
system, triumphant, self-perpetuating and all encompassing. Nothing is
outside—everything, every thought, action, and event, can be accounted for and
incorporated into the Revolution’s theoretical framework, it’s world view—in a
kind of social physics, known as the “act-field”, that is both
terrifying and beautiful in its scope and totality. It is truly the end of
history and the triumph of state equilibrium. Stasis is maintained in a society
where everyone is equal.
Hare (or Haree?), the
story’s protagonist is, like the rabbit and his fellow cadre members, docile and
tractable, his life and understanding of the world grounded in an unquestioning
belief in the Revolution. Hare is a mathematician familiar with the theoretical
architecture of his world, its foundational laws, and the computational
formulas of the all-encompassing act-field theory. His work1,
each day, is to reinforce those constructs underpinning his society. There can
be no doubts, no questioning of its principles; for Hare, they are as real as the walls
and floors of the dormitory house he shares with his cadre, known collectively as the "Blue".
YET HARE, SUBTLY AND UNCONSIOUSLY, has become aware of the realness of other walls, other
foundations, as he explores the derelict buildings of the inner city where his
cadre’s dormitory and workplace are located. It should be said of those who are
among the ranks of "the Blue” that they are the front line and administrative
class of the Revolution, dedicated party members, all working on their endless projects to shape the physical
and social constructs of the world and its people, the majority of whom are
non-Blue proletarians.
In his explorations of the
old city (and, it must be said, such wanderings2 were
considered by some in his cadre to be an eccentricity), Hare comes to
admire its structures and complexities, and in particular, the beauty of an old
cathedral he visits, where he often sits to sketch its details and stonework, and the
great, soaring arches of its ceiling. He comes to understand that its construction was shaped and
guided by geometries and mathematical calculations as precise and rigorous as
his own act-field theorems. The church’s walls and ceiling—how old he cannot
tell in the eternal day of the Revolution where history is in the “background” and
the Revolution is the figure ever cast in the “foreground” of his mind—shows Hare a world
beyond his own, one that, earlier, his lover Eva had left to discover.3 AND SOON, HE CAME TO DOUBT the all-encompassing nature of the Revolution’s
"act-field", resulting in a crisis of faith and a nervous breakdown, after which
he is hospitalized for a time. It is when he finally leaves the hospital, and
the ranks of the Blue, to walk among the people and places of the old city that
he discovers, to his surprise and great joy, something that had been there all
along:
“Hare walked through the old
quarter of the city, not feeling the thin rain soaking through his shoes. He
seemed to himself to be naked but warm, to be already not in Blue, and walking
in the world for the first time, as though his feet created it step by step:
the world he had fallen out of, the world into which Eva and Boy had gone. He
laughed, in fear and hunger for it.
His
desire was not what he had thought it to be: his desire for history, for Eva,
for Boy, none of it was what he thought it was. He knew nothing, nothing of the
world he walked in; but he might learn…. Hare, for the first time, yet not as
though for the first time, but as though coming to remember some commonplace
thing of enormous, of vital, importance, saw the act-field. Still; calm; with
no face, not kind, not cruel, not anything. He reached out with his mind to
touch it, but everywhere he touched it, it parted, showing him spaces,
interstices, emptinesses formed by the edge of himself facing the sparkling
edge of the world.” (“In Blue”, 275)
I INCLUDE THIS BRIEF SYNOPSIS of
Crowley’s story because it reminds me of the dystopia-bent nature of some of
our own “act-field”-esque adventures, for example, our deepening and
ever-increasingly involvement in a digitally-moderated world, where not
everyone is equal and where there are real winners and losers.
TO THAT END, I’ll be doing a
follow-up post on Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism because her analysis helps (me at any rate) to focus on where we’ve gone
off-kilter in our economy and society, with the unprecedented surveillance
powers of Big Other; the growing ubiquity of the “Internet of
Things” AI, robotics, et al, and other developments that are just as
wack as Crowley’s Revolution and its “act-field” nirvana, but which are real
and ultimately more dangerous.
Stay tuned, Jake.
_____________________________
* “A heterarchy is a system of
organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical)
or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different
ways…
Socially, a heterarchy distributes privilege and decision-making among
participants, while a hierarchy assigns more power and privilege to the members
high in the structure.” (Wikipedia)
1. When we meet Hare, he has been
assigned the task of writing an introduction to a textbook about Revolutionary
act-field theory. There is the suggestion he had been demoted and deemed no
longer competent to continue his work as a mathematician studying act-field
theory and analysis. (Not that he feels he has fallen to a lower social rung;
everyone is “equal”; there are no hierarchies of superiority in the ranks of the "Blue", only those doing
the all-encompassing “work” of the Revolution.
We learn Hare had in the past a relationship
with a woman, “Eva”, and they had a son together, the bleakly-named “Boy”.
Their relationship was somewhat unorthodox and pushing the boundaries of
communal standards practised by his project’s cadre (which might be the reason
for his ‘demotion’). Most “Blue” members are celibate, for example. We learn shortly after the birth of their son, that Eva had left Hare to work on a truck farm
outside the city. During their time together, she repeatedly told him she
wanted a life beyond being a “Blue” cadre member. Hare could never understand
how she could conceive of life beyond the Revolution’s act-field. For
him, there was no outside; everything was contained within its theories
and philosophy and social constructs.
2. I kept expecting a black van
to drive up behind Hare when he was out on one of his walkabouts, followed by a
quick kidnap-and-hooding, then off to a black ops site where he’s fitted with a
rat's cage. But that sort of thing mostly happens in our own world. In Hare’s
future “utopia”, those who supervise his project, and the various party
officials involved in his case, are patient and caring for his precarious mental health, as they try their best
to curb his eccentricities and outlier behaviour. They provide him
with support and treatment, though he is seen as something of a lost cause. After his hospitalization, he
is 'rehabilitated', or at least patched-up and reassigned to do less-demanding
Revolutionary work. No need for gulags or renditions, or "rat's cages" in Hare's world; even heresies like his
are subsumed under the all-encompassing act-field of the Revolution.
3. Crowley uses the analogy of
the figure/ground visual illusion to illustrate the all-encompassing nature of the
“act-field” whereby every act or “figure” (every person, action, thought, event, etc.) is
encompassed within the whole of the field's revolutionary "ground", as illustrated in the above black and white drawing, where the vase is alternatively both figure and ground .
But, what Eva saw or intuited earlier, and what Hare now sees (and
perhaps Hare’s new, unnamed supervisor, who he discovers is a childhood friend, sees also),
are the spaces in between the figure and the ground where life and the rest of the world lay.
Crowley, John. Novelties &
Souvenirs: collected short fiction. New York: HarperCollins. Perennial.
2004. Print.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE and STEVEN DONZIGER
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