Brute Press

Letters to the Past

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

Oct.1st, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/Download this article in PDF format

Read/download this article in ODF format

Dear 1959 (or thereabouts),

Somewhere across the limited expanse of your body, the poet Jack Spicer was mailing and receiving letters with James Alexander. He thought of them as poetry. Maybe Alexander was a lover; maybe the poems were published during his lifetime, or perhaps not. I would be someone knows the answers to these questions—someone still alive. Or it even could be written down some place. To my edition of The Collected Work of Jack Spicer there is a lengthy introduction. Maybe it says there, but I read the introduction several weeks ago, and I cannot remember now.

But I read letter #5 in this edition just now—what do you mean, what “just now”? When? Just now. I don’t understand your question. But this is some of what it said, if I may reproduce it here for you:

It is not the monotony of nature but the poems beyond nature that call to each other above the poets’ heads. The heads of poets being a part of nature. It is not for us to make the lines of nature precise. Because of their fatal attraction for the lines of nature, for our heads.

We proclaim a silent revolution. The poems above our heads, without tongues, are tired of talking to each other over the gabble of our beliefs, our literary personalities, our attempts to project their silent conversation to an audience. When we give tongue we amplify. We are telephone switchboards deluded into becoming hi-fi sets. The terrible speakers must be allowed silence. They are not speaking to us.

Don’t you see, dear friend, 1959? You know so much! So much happened during your brief, single year life. You are an epoch unto yourself. And you were in the age of letters, my friend. Letters. And yet—so much!

I don’t need to tell you everything that occurred across the expanse of your skin. You know already. But Jack Spicer was sensing it. He was in it, friend, just as he was in you. The idealism within us, sending up poems like rockets into the even more idealistic heavens. But free from our gravity, the poems were still tied to our constraints. Poor natural us, stuck within our beliefs and our personalities. We could only aim upward, and fire away. It’s only natural. Our heads refusing to rise above our headstrong selves. As if we could be such a revolution of stereo.

You know the story, don’t you, friend? You’ve sent your share of letters, written your share of poems. Like any year, such a poet you, you let fire forward, trying to hit us in the back, and maybe remind us. The shooting gallery of history of course, no harm intended. Back in your day, when you mailed a letter, you had to believe—you had to take it on faith that it would get there. You had to write ahead of time to land your language missiles in the present, and more likely than not, when they got there they would too late, and land in the past. From one personality, to the next, you addressed your letters, and some times they got there. Sometimes not.

It must have been a hell of a time, friend 1959. I can’t even begin to imagine. But I got your letter, written via Jack, and I just wanted to touch base, and say, yes—I got it. I hope this reaches you well, wherever you are.

Love,
Adam

PS. A better way to reach me might be on my… actually, never mind. Forget it.

Dear 1977 (or maybe it was 1976, though my letter wasn’t translated for another ten years),

You had a hell of a life, didn’t you my friend? I’m sorry that I can’t quite recall your name, but this was about the time things were getting complicated. They perfected packet switching back then, and letter writing was going to change significantly. It’s leaving me a bit confused, to puzzle over it. But we’re still friends, aren’t we? I think I can call you my friend. I’m writing you this letter, and I only write letters to my friends.

I’m not the only one who is (was?) confused. Look at Jacques Derrida, puzzling over it himself in The Postcard. Direct mail, from the master of letters himself:

You give me words, you deliver them, dispensed one by one, my own, while turning them towards yourself and addressing them to yourself—and I have never loved them so, the most common ones become quite rare, nor so loved to lose them either, to destroy them by forgetting at the very instant when you receive them, and this instant would precede almost everything, my envoi, myself, so that they take place only once. One single time, you see how crazy this is for a word? Or for any trait at all? [ ] Eros in the age of technical reporductibility. You know the old story of reproduction, with the dream of a ciphered language [ ] Want to write a grand history, a large encyclopedia of the post and of the cipher, but to write it ciphered still in order to dispatch it you, taking all the precautions so that forever you are the only one to be able to decrypt it (to write it, then, and to sign), to recognize your name, the unique name I have given you, that you have let me give you, the entire strong-box of love supposing that my death is inscribed in it, or better that my body might be enclosed in it with your name on my skin, and that in any event my own or its survival or your own be limited to the life of—you.

Do you see what I mean? Such paranoia of the subject, we were forced to write in code just to get away from ourselves! And what does it mean, and what does I mean? Are we any closer to the truth? With all this semiotic packet-switching, the exchange of meaning through into high gear, played out upon the wires, and still, written one letter at a time, just like we always have.

And even with one of the best languages out there, with the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, Derrida was tripped up in the complexity, in the polymorphous perversity of our language, unable to do something as simple as send a letter from one person to another without becoming lost in the pathways of desire. From the unconscious, to our heads, and up in the air in a brilliant Spicer Rocket, and down again—without any improvement in targeting. Our desires, beliefs, personalities, and egos, all of them clinging to the unchained beauty of our poetic language even as they try and set our poems free. Trapped in the bureaucracy, the academy of letters, our meaning certainly knew its form, but because a twisted mass of substance. Perhaps if Jacques knew about packet-switching—but then, such things were secrets back then.

Secrets, secrets, secrets! The ultimate in letters, such clear and concise poems of meaning, composed and sealed, signed, and delivered to the eyes only. These are not poems to be read to an audience, and allowed to bounce around the heavens. They are directed speech, expressed to one and one only. And afterwards, after communique has been carried out, that one recipient is to destroy the message. The one, the I, must hear those fatal words, “this message will self-destruct.”

If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything, and nothing would have arrived. I mean on the contrary that something ineffaceable would have arrived, instead of this bottomless misery in which we are dying. But it is unjust to say that you did not listen to me, you listened closely to the other voice (we were already a crowd in that first envelope) which asked you not to burn, to burn in order to save. Nothing has arrived because you wanted to preserve (and therefore to lose), which in effect formed the sense of the order coming from behind my voice, you remember, so many years ago, in my first “true” letter: “burn everything”. You had answered me the next day, and this is how your letter ended: “The letter ends on the exigency of this supreme pleasure: the desire to be torn by you” (you are the mistress of the equivocal and I liked it that you left it to me to attribute this desire to the letter, and then you added) “I am burning. I have the stupid impression of being faithful to you. I am nonetheless saving certain simulacra from your sentences (you have shown me them since). I am waking up. I remember the ashes. What a chance, to burn, yes yes [ ].”

Yes, yes dear friend, the tragedy of memory, which we all at some time forget. Luckily, fidelity to our promises has a way of being broken, and secrets have a way of getting out. The tragedies that have arisen throughout our history because of letters misdelivered, or misread, or worst of all, not delivered in time, will eventually be forgotten with everything else. Most the encyclopedias will be forgotten, many of the histories if not all, and we will forget some or all of our letters. And by this I mean, my friend, the small letters: the pieces torn from the larger letters, those individual signs, which we tear up and forget, and then build up and re-send, forgetting that we have already received such meaning.

Those were the times, these frantic mailings, and these dispatches from our own memories scribbled on the back of dirty postcards we came across among more scholarly books. There is a certain charm to them, don’t you think? Something poetic about the search for meaning, about the drastic expressions we fired out of the tops of our heads, only falling back to earth to hit us, and leave us stunned.

But I fear I must go, because the future is calling me onward, and because time keeps a-ticking away, as it does, doesn’t it my friend? Yes, indeed! Good luck with your letters, and with those early attempts at packets. Do a good job, because we’re counting on you in the future!

Love,
Adam

Dear Cyber-Time,

Hello! How I’ve looked forward to writing you this letter! You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork I’ve had to deal with today, and now, finally, I can get on to the pleasure of correspondence.

But then, you know that, don’t you, dear friend? You’ve seen my letters to my friends 1959 and 1976, because in the present, letters work a bit differently than they used to. Do you mind if I… no? Good. Yes, I’ll explain a little bit for anyone listening in.

You see dear friend, (and I hope you won’t mind if I continue to call you this, though I don’t actually know you. No? Good!) we don’t write letters anymore, do we? Now we send email, and instant messages, and a myriad other things I haven’t even bothered to learn about yet. There is no more waiting for the infinite slowness of physical space, for pieces of paper to wind their way around the world, and through a slew of different D/T time zones, to finally reach another person’s hands. Now our letters are packets, and they are switched instantaneously, or nearly so, and continuously, meaning all kinds of things most of us don’t even begin to understand. There are new languages and new technologies evolving almost daily. But the good part is, they easily replicate our old languages, so we can write up all those old beliefs, feelings, personas, and egos into tiny packets as send them whizzing off with the light, even faster than a rocket, these photon poems burning continuously, singing all kinds of things you could hope to know and more, across a brand new body of time—the body of time that is instant, and infinite in size. You’ll never end, will you, Cyber-Time? Well, maybe. Probably. But I won’t know a thing about that until it happens. No happy new years to you.

What we shoot out of heads does not launch on a doomed parabolic, a Cartesian acceleration we only hope will hit the mark. Now there is no “late”, “undeliverable”, “missed connection”, or “buried desire”. It is all thrown upward, where it hovers infinitely in a stasis of meaning, a giant unconscious of networked letters, which can be delivered at any time, forever. We still call it “mail” sometimes, out of nostalgia, or because we haven’t bothered to come up with a better word. Maybe we don’t think about it enough. But one thing is for sure—we sure aren’t licking stamps, or visiting a post office, or remembering addresses.

But where is Jack? Jack? Are you there? Our telephone switchboards are no less deluded, my friend. Our typewriters think they are networked minds, but they are really no more than speedy telegraphs with really good memory. Better memory than us. We still send our poems out into the Internet, and don’t even remember then when they are half sent. We are still clouded with our own unconscious, forever human, as we are. We still seek expression, and though our letters are unlimited, now unconstrained by space and time, we might never find the most perfect composition. We will probably never write that most perfect love letter, and James Alexander may never return to San Francisco. Oh, you rockets of desire! Is there any missile gap you can overcome? Probably not. Probably not, my friend.

And Jacques? What about Jacques? Who will understand all the fibers behind our new paper, and figure out the true meaning of all of those picture postcards we hopelessly write? Will the elimination of time, and the reduction of history to a constant, repeating unconscious exchange of memories amongst ourselves finally solve the problem of the longing for the perfect relationship with that ineffable one, the subject, who tempts, sucks, and squeezes our desires out from us, in the watery flow of ink upon the page, or in the pure difference between black and white as found in our pixels shimmering photons? No, my friend, most likely not. Whether in truth or in secret, there is nothing we could say that would dispel the darkness, purify in flame, and reduce the mystery of existence forever.

So what is there for my two dead friends, 1959 and 1976? Is there any historical justices for my friends, which will finally give them the answers they seek, and satisfy the desires within them, burning them in a constant flame of poetic pain? No, most likely not. The tragedy of Cyber-Time is that it is no freedom. The end of the play makes it no less tragic, because after all, the design of acts makes them only ever follow after each other. Things are different now perhaps, and we send a sort of letter we never would have desired, because we never believed it possible. History now looks all about the same—as far as I can remember, anyway.

Well, as you always say, dear friend, until then!

Love,
Adam

By Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/download the story in PDF format here

Read/download the story in ODF format here

On Fire

As it streaks I wish it was on fire with a certain part of my mind. It’s the part of my imagination that wishes for everything to be ultimately epic, majestic, soaring across the sky with an infinite grace of timely artistic endeavor—the sort of swelling of symphonic brass and strings that carries a piece of film into more than the perception of motion brought by the rapid acceleration of light through the tinted layers to screen, the fingers of the gradients tracing hot music on the pure white wall, making a crashing aircraft into sculpture for the audience.

Yes, I wish that car was on fire, smoke trailing in the thin black veils of clothing, flying off of it as it readies itself for the sexual abandon of the asphalt beneath it, gripping the oily flesh of roadway beneath nails under tension, clawing its way forward, rubbing against that cushion of air forming underneath it. And I know the driver wishes it was as well. I can hear it now in how he presses the pedals, pushing gears into each other at those spinning high speeds, letting the turns of the grade be felt in the shifting shoulders of the suspension, perhaps a bit looser than they should be, as if plied by intoxicants into a willingly bent roll in the sheets of this humid night.

And the flames would lap up the paint, towards the windows full open, heating the driver and his passenger with the temperature that doesn’t cause sweat, at least not yet, because that sort of heat is the one they are running from, and this sort of heat is the one they take with them, chasing up their legs towards their stomachs, pinching them in their muscles, as they hold the interior like they will hold each other.

They’ve been driving for an hour now, across the city first, before breaking away and into the bottoms of the hills, the grid lines beginning to twist suggestively, mentioning it, before lashing out with the steeply rising cliff faces, to which the road adheres, running up the sides of the inset valleys, under the complacently attractive physics of control. Nothing more than it’s capable of, and this is its attraction, the fantasy of driving, exactly what we expect.

And this is why the driver headed towards these hills, out from the city, though he did not know the way. He knew what he would find, and his passenger did too, it was why she suggested it, and why he said yes with nothing more than the steering wheel, no signal, no speech, but just a turn from the boulevard out along a thin double lane. A roar of the engine, and towards the sky they went, lighting sparks on the rear fender, and fanning the flame.

They’ve been on the road for hours now, as I watch from above. First it’s business, as it is every evening. I ride above them in the wake of their airstream, as they head out from their apartment building, spinning tires against the concrete as they leave the garage, this sugar-blocked bedding place for vehicles, keeping them close at hand, pins drawn across gears to keep them still in a twisting square of perpendicular ramps. All the trapped energy takes them out and down, into the street. Their music thumps, quick beat of the early twilight, as the pitch of the light shifts. They stop at the lights, they take the turns. They accelerate and they break. They are making something with these motions, something that most will never see, without my vantage point. They spin around the blocks, and make the phone calls, and meet the people. The computer on the dashboard tracks the journey as I do, but they pay more attention to the radio. They pay attention to what matters.

They meet a customer, a young man, no older than they. At a corner the car screeches to a halt, and he gets in the back seat. He doesn’t fasten his seat belt, but they have theirs clicked securely. It is the law, after all. A quick conversation, and a simple exchange. They’ve driven once around the block, and they are back again. The passenger is dropped off, and the car drives away. The exhaust is a smell complacent with the city, an element of it, like water over the rocks. The headlights start to come on around the city, and the cars talk to each other in the beams.

And it’s a quick dodge onto the highway, a shuffle of the suspension, and faster now to meet the flow of traffic. The small red car races across the city, underneath the streets, with the rest. I watch their dot move in the reddening sun. And off again, up the avenue, and around the block. One way streets are a spiral, a dance move, a quick trip and flare of the wheel, and we’re back again, picking up a new customer.

I don’t know where they come from. I don’t see them being made. I have tried to watch, tracking the newer cars from the lots, back to the well-lit zones where they all seem to have driven from originally. And I see them off-loaded off of trucks, arranged in the lot like vegetables on a cart. They are driven away and replaced, driven away and replaced. I have followed the large trucks back to the freeway, back out of the city, and away. Where they come from, I don’t know. Even I have my limits—the finite extension of my interest, and where I’m willing to go.

They’ve left the customer and continued, spinning up the avenue, navigating the lanes like ladders, back and forth, across the scaffold, swinging around other cars, and pedestrians. Through the traffic lights, and their headlamps shining back—I feel that the all the lights communicate, they work together, keeping the vehicles buoyant and alight. They are a giant network of spider’s web, spanning the intersections, the lights of the buildings and the parking lots, neon powering, the sodium-vapor defusing, and the little gaps between the white headlights and red taillights spinning together in machiniac concert like the thousand grooved wheels on a train.

But they flip, and exchange, like an automobile conversation in the dancing street riot of the traffic. They switch, and they turn, and they pass, and they follow. Acrobats on the wire, always an inch away from collision. They move in slow motion, passing cars at incredible speed, crawling past them now, as they both pass others. They travel in the same direction, they pass each other going opposite ways, they accelerate into stillness and reverse into the slots between other cars on the road, disgorging people and swallowing them up, moving and standing fixed in space. I grow dizzy, and take up my observing position far up in the sky, where I can hopefully take it all in.

They are the insects of mass communication, mass transportation, and mass integration. They are the weapons of war, passing each other in the sky, mindless of all but the thin wisps of vapor they leave in their wake, a displacement of air, a change in pressure only I can feel. They are so numerous that it cannot be any other way—these are the spinning gears of a massive machine, and without the others there would be none. Each car is a piece, and they look to the others for the rule. They look to the commercial, to the billboard, to the newest models roaring out into the street. They dance the cultural dance, which is not as much learned as it is ongoing, never to stop and probably never having had a definitive start, and least as nothing I have seen, waking as I did one day in my cloud and looking below me to see these insects alive and digging across the face of this earth.

But they are all so different, each and every one. They have little spirits whirring beneath their hoods, and I love them each for their own reasons, as they stay still and drive on, as they whiz past each other and everything else, leaving their spinning columns of air to suck dust and throw it up into my breath, and as they collide with each other, as they do from time to time, crumpling plastic bumper and steel frame alike, sending their contents pitching and flipping through the air, and into all kinds of deadly places. The fast spinning pieces touch and break apart, sending their fragments exploding outward through casing and hood, their attractive auto glass turns opaque in a nest of impending shards, letting the wind flow through as they fall end over end, into pavement and light post, into plate glass and into person. Only when they have come to a stop, and the smoke or flame begins within the hulks, the others come to a stop and surround to watch—only then to the thin streams of red flow out of the cracks, from those fragile little inhabitants, who ride in these cars with such abandon to all they know of nature, of the world, and of their own flesh.

And yet, I can’t help but love them, and some more than others. Like my little red car, depositing a last passenger by the side of a street covered in houses, as the sun begins to set. It is the time now, when things start to happen inside these vehicles that I don’t understand. She mentions the destination to him, and he agrees wordlessly. Now they are flying out of the city, up into the hills, and I see them below, and that part of me wishes its sacred, secret wishes. I wish it looked the way my mind imagines it as it speeds, hurdling, reckless within its own control, through the darkening sky. I wish it would stand out with destructive glow against the background of the street and the trees, now fading indistinguishable with the night. I wish it sounded like a terrible army, galloping through the night, translating the music coming from the interior speakers into the timeless terror we all can hear, that resounding wish for the acceleration towards death, the pleasure of pedals bent deep into their arc, to the point of pain, the universal pain, on fire within its chambers, the thermodynamics of matter releasing energy, never to transform back again.

As they circle upward, towards the ridge on the edge of the cliffs, the feeling inside the car only grows. I sense this well enough, as the sound and the warmth of the interior continued to billow out of the windows, open even in the cool of the mountain evening so as to partake in the air free of those city inhibitions, and those daily business issues, to expell nothing more than the mundane repetition of routine as the car circled round those endless streets, tracing gridlines again and again as if they might one day be marked permanently into the earth, as if such a thing was possible, and as if this meant they would not need to travel them again. And now they reach the top, following the course of the road along the top of the ridge, and finally dipping over into the plateau beyond, stretching endlessly into the night that had fallen over them, a night that no doubt blankets the city within its warm shawl of closed awareness somewhere behind them, and meanwhile hides the shape of the land in front of them. They continued onward, their tank filled with gas, driving ever faster on the now straight road, following the only light available in their headlights, reflected in the moon. They accelerate—always accelerate.

Perhaps they are holding hands within the small red car. Perhaps they stop looking forward to glance at each other in the dark, the soft glow of the instrument panels illuminating their wet eyes just enough to see. Perhaps they shut off the music and listen only to the sound of the engine and the tires on the road. The tires on the road hum with the vibration, and the spinning of endless circles in orbit around the axle. It is a song without melody. And it simply plays, sung by no one, and listened to by few. It is a song that I can hear. I listen to it now.

Perhaps in the morning they will stop somewhere, pulling the car over to the side of the road, engage the brake, and turn off the ignition. The motor will click and hum with the heat that has built within it, now allowed to dissipate. They will open their doors and step out into the chill air, feeling the strange warmth of the land beneath their feet, heated by the frantic pace of their passage. They will walk, testing their legs again, to see if they remember how it works. They will look at each other, and look at the car, and perhaps think about how far they have traveled. Perhaps they will think about how far they have to return to the city.

But no—this will not happen. I do not wish for it to be this way, and this is a wish that does not require my imagination. My mind is not unlimited, and yet, certain things must happen. As they speed down the road, heading straight along the asphalt, spinning tires towards infinity, the suspension gets a bit lighter. The headlights, now raised to a higher height, shine a bit further down the darkness of the lane in front of them. Now the tires lift off the ground. First free of the friction and weight of the vehicle, the engine races, but then drops its revolutions, and is quiet: hot, but quiet. No longer on the earth, the steering and the brakes are useless. The red car is hydroplaning—not on liquid, but on my wish alone.

They continue to look ahead now, staring into the moon, as they rise from the road. As they pick up speed, driving as fast as they can, the curvature of the earth begins to fall away beneath them. Finally they reach a rate of progress fast enough, and the color of the paint begins to blur, left in the air behind them like rubber on the pavement. They peel away, and the vehicle grows dim. Rocketing away from the earth, the man and woman in the car become invisible, fading with that repeating hum of the rubber, out into the night. They will leave it all behind, taking nothing, the last tread of their tires a streak of flame across the night sky.

They write songs about imaginations like this. About cars, and boys, and girls, and tires, and roads, and trees, and cliffs, and the air, and the light, and the moon. That is not what I want. I just want them to drive. I want them to drive their car together. I want them to drive on fire.

By Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/download the story in PDF format here

Read/download the story in ODF format here

As the Man Said

At the park there is a bit of a hill, one side quite steep. This is where they sit, just over the lip, legs hanging down the hill in the long grass. They can’t mow there, on account of the steepness. There’s four of them, two guys, two girls. They’re high school, maybe college age, but dressed different. The two guys are in suits, a bit ratty, cheap. Girls wearing bright dresses in an old style, quite short. Maybe it’s a fashion I’m not away of; maybe they’re in a band.

They’ve got a bottle and are passing it around. They’re paired up. It’s very clear. Body language is everything for kids that age. Girl in the red is with the guy in the light, and the girl in the yellow with the guy in blue. Girls are sitting next to each other, shoes off on the hillside. The guys are flanking them, like bookends. The bottle keeps going around.

Guy in the light suit keeps getting to his feet, pacing back and forth on the steepness, performing a bit for his friends—for the girls, mostly. His friend keeps trying to jump in on the lines, but not succeeding. Light suit’s red tie matches his girl’s red dress, and its waving in the breeze, as he gestures with his arms. His friend’s blue tie matches his girl’s blue dress. Maybe it is a fashion of some kind.
He says:

“But to have one’s voice given a certain respect! How does one attain this respect? To begin with, there are the things one can do, to further the process. Practice a certain craft of speech, of course—to ensure the dignity of the words are not compromised by error or awkwardness of phrase. And to keep a definitive form to one’s speech as well, not only free from error, but maintaining a style, a hallmark, and a trait that is not necessarily aping the tendencies of the most eloquent, revered, and respected talkers, but distinct in and of itself so when one opens the mouth, there is no possibility of rhetorical trademark infringement.”

He seems to have given this a bit of thought. It’s not the first time he have given the speech, even if only to himself. He pauses to take the bottle from the girl in red. He stands in front of her now, looking at her, maybe at the dress. The girls giggle, a nervous, bouncing intensity. The kid reacts in the way one would expect, tightening, and accelerating down on his course.

“It is easy to mock those who speak with such deep inhales, as if to gain further gravity from an inflated weight of the lungs. The Shakespearean actor’s overplay into paradigmatic seriousness is now a trope, and just as it is always expected that couplets are delivered with a heavy iambic stomp, it is contrarily a sign of overbearing pretension to add the same to any common, or off the cuff address.

“But I believe the times are changing! We are young, no doubt, and have plenty of time on our hands. We can pursue of frivolous things because we have time to waste. Capriciousness is not only our adjective, but our motto, which we accept with the same vigor as everything else we do. But why need it be simply so? Why should we not take advantage of the loose stance others take when confronting us, and step forward immediately, to knock them off balance? Are we necessarily as clumsy as we are light and fleet of foot? We have time on our side, and therefore have no time to waste! Our voices are bold, and this is an important feature. We have the ability to gain weight…”
He takes a swig as he says it, providing the girls another opportunity for laughter. His buddy makes a comment about the inopportune pause as well. He widens his hands, palm down and gesturing with the bottle.

“Tell me honestly, fine fellow and fellowesses: do you enjoy being treated as minor characters in the narratives of the day?”

His eyebrows raised, he waits for response. The girls pay rapt attention, shaking heads, and his friend does as well.
“Then why not claim the terrain of respect, which should rightfully be ours? Are our elders less erroneous than we? Is their experience ever utilized efficaciously? Or is it merely excuse for a preponderance of pontification? A pithy opportunity for pretense! A pestilence of petulance! They are given all the respect, and what do they do with it but waste it, cashing it in, via their oligarchical opportunism. They care little for the power behind the respect given to the spoken word, and more for what it can get them. Well, friends, I submit to you that it is time for a change. I say it is time we speak up, by talking down to our elders and so-called betters, to put them in their linguistic place by partaking in the craft of speech, of which we are quite capable.”

And now with a flourish of the bottle, and a little bow.

“For it is only when we have stood upon our own two feet to speak our minds that we can be said to have made up our minds for ourselves.”

They applaud him madly, and gesture for the bottle. He gives it gladly, and sits next to his girl. There’s more talk. It’s more of the same. His friend, the girls each take a turn, gesturing and repeating, echoing and clapping. Other conversation as well, carried out with heads bobbing close together. Hands on hands, on shoulders, on thighs. The boy in the light suit leans in, and whispers into his girl’s ear. I see her smile from where I sit. She tugs a bit on the edge of her dress. He kisses her, on the ear. They lie back and look at the sky. They are still talking, all of them all at once. The sky is brilliantly blue, lit incandescent by the sun. Three lines of contrails curve, crossing across the azure dome, seemingly just out of reach. Boy in the blue suit kisses yellow dress on the lips, and light suit has his hand on red dress’ leg, underneath it maybe.

I hear the sound of a cell phone ringing, across the hillside. Boy in the light suit pops to his feet, putting the hand in his pocket. Putting it to his ear, his other hand covers the other ear, blocking out the loud speech of his fellows. He walks quickly a few paces away, to cause a distance, and then slows, walking in aimless direction as he speaks. He says nothing for some time, staring into the grass, phone to his ear. His face grows darker. Much darker. His mouth closes.

His friend in the blue suit is paying attention to the girl in the yellow, but looking at the girl in the red. Red ignores them, looking at the back of the light suit. The suit is a bit small for his frame, though he is not a large person.
He has taken the phone away from his ear. It rests in his hand, on his thigh, by his waist. He is still looking at the grass. I cannot tell, but his head might be shaking back and forth, just slightly. The phone falls from his hand, and he bend at the waist, slowly, over. Both hands are on his knees. His head is definitely shaking now, his eyes wide and gray. His elbows bend, saplings in the wind.

With a roll to his spine he lifts his head and lurches it forward. Out of his mouth comes a stream of vomit, pale brown, solids and liquids. He leans past his shoes instinctively, into the roll of his stomach. He stops, and saliva drips from his lips, wide and quivering. His eyes are closed, watering. Another lurch, and again.

His friends have stopped talking and look, but do not get up.

He bends lower and lower, to let it all out. There isn’t any more. Still, one more time he lurches. Nothing comes out but sound—low, guttural. A bit more saliva. His eyes open, red, weary. His breath is ragged, in fits and starts.

The cell phone lies, uncaring, on the long grass, propped up by chance upon his motionless brown, leather shoe.

The Sci-Fi Speculum

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

July 15, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/Download this article in PDF format

Read/download this article in ODF format

Today I had a vision—in it, Sci-Fi was dead.

Alright, so I’m feeling a strange essay coming on. It’s still a little hot from the soaking fever of the day, and I have a gin poured, but I’ve been reading, so things are not quite back to normal.

I’ve been reading a James Blish novel, about a first contact scenario. I also rented a few movies, for what it’s worth. But furthermore, I’ve been working on this writing thing.

The writing is not precisely what I want to talk about—not directly. Not right now. There could be more on that later, all of it clearly involved.

But when you start writing, like not just to link the words together, but to actually attempt at crafting a product, you start to realize a few things. For one, almost all dialogue is complete trash. I have yet to find anyone who is able to synthesize an actual conversation. This is because nobody would want to read an actual conversation. With all the “uhh,” and “buts,” and “likes,” etc. And forget it if they are a little drunk. This is not want you want to read.

This is an old problem, or at least it seems so for me, because I bounce over it again about every week. How to balance what is real, with what should be, with what needs to be, and so on and so forth. Don’t write fiction? Don’t worry about it. Just keep buying them books.

The writing aside, the balance between form and content, what is “true” and what sounds good, is the heart of the issue in the special case that is SF. Now, just so we are clear, by SF we are talking about “speculative fiction”, which is not entirely the same as “science fiction.” We can trace these revolving lines to a similar source of course, from the pages of pulp Pop. Mech. mags, to the pulp alien books, to the hard-backed metaphysical SF collections of today, which find better company with Borges than with the moon men.

It’s not such a long road, surely, between building a crystal radio set, to imagining a home reactor or personal helicopter, to taking enough drugs to imagine ordering a home-gnosis kit, delivered by those spirits already haunting the gaps between the frequencies you were so fascinated by on that crystal radio. Those who are curious, know where to look. And they always find what they are looking for.

SF then, is about the speculation, more the production process than the act. The speculation is going on all the time, racing through the road-like circuits inside your insipid home appliances, visualizing itself in between the dot matrix lines of your ASCII print out, or simply “above”, “beyond”, “within”, or “inter”, depending on the prepositional disposition of your generation. The fiction, is just a business. Write it, move it, print it, sell it. It wouldn’t be a magazine, if there weren’t people to buy it.

It started with science, of course. Because science is what was there, and ready to be sold. Religion was mostly a closed book. Even sex and love were pretty much figured out. The career, the money, the motion, and the color was coming from the plastics industry, from string theory, from this crazy new email bullshit, and from iPod Nanoscience. Sure, religion can still be a pretty big seller. Vampires, right? Eat of my body, drink of my blood. That’s hot. Even the New Agers have themselves a cottage industry. 2012 is big, disaster flick money. And crystals, man. What a scam. You don’t even need to write a book—just hand the hippie a pretty rock and lay a thin, thin coat of eastern syncretism over it, and you can charge money for shit you found in the ground. But science—I tell you what. Those zombies are coming up with something new, like all the time. Walking around in the corpses of people, animating them with gadgetized, recycled open-sourcisism, flashy freako-apocalyptonomiconimation. Hook up to the API, and maybe we can all get paid. Yeah, at least you’re involved.

I don’t mean to sound blase, or act like there is nothing to like about sci-fi, or SF. I love it, actually. I talked about it a few posts ago on Welcome to the Interdome. Herbert, Dick, and LaGuin, etc. These folks could really lay down a creative line over top of this techno-fantasy. The fashion steampunks, the Star Wars re-enactors, the MMORPGs, the Make-for-Sake-of-Makers, and even the flash-fan-fictioneers aren’t the same, but they don’t really bother me. We’re not going to lose the creativity. This is the great thing. There are any number of “skilled” people out there, doing any number of things. Everybody’s got to have a hobby. But then, there are also the really creative people, who don’t have to predict the trends, because they just keep throwing out good stuff. Imitators are the ones who define trends, because they have to make sure it stays the same. Ursula K. LaGuin is still at it, writing science fiction and teaching people to write, and I bet she could care less about vinyl Star Wars toys. Who knows what some of the others would be doing if they were alive, but you better believe they would be doing something.

So, SF—the speculative act of fiction, will continue going on, because the creative, crazy, don’t-give-a-shit-about-trends folk are going to keep speculating, and probably keep writing fiction, if that’s what they like to do.

But Sci-Fi—that’s a whole different schematic. Some of ‘em will probably fall into the gears, getting run over before they can keep their fantasy-action going, because even going retro isn’t enough of an innovation to keep their pulp Pop. Mech. from becoming a back issue by the time it’s been published. And these are the ones that survive the great publisher purges of the 21st century. Science, as an area of speculation, has pretty much had it. The venture capitalists are reading science fiction, the science fiction writers are reading economics (either for fun or for profit), the economists are reading the liberal blogs, the liberal bloggers are reading the gossip bloggers, and the gossip bloggers are trying to figure out what VC-backed communication medium will still allow them to consider what they do a job. Everybody is happy, singing the odes of the Age of the Aquarius, as we tumble into a virtual world of Hollow-Earth inspired concept art.

I should probably let you know I’m on my second gin, and I’m thinking about re-introducing the term, “cyber-time.”

Cyber-time! So here’s the deal: we are entering an topology of informational territorialization that no longer requires either space or time as its dominant metaphor. As easily as we once sailed through “cyber-space” in our sci-fi concepts of the informational domain, we are now able to fold “cyber-time”. Trains of thought, canons, logical extensions, and causality, which once required a plausible conception of a time dimension to explain its interaction, is no longer necessary. We are “traveling without moving”, informationally. Whereas once knowledge could be lost, hidden, buried, and built, furthered, sped up, and progressed, one day everything that can be said to “exist” or “ever have existed” will be available instantaneously, if at all. How would you know Homer is not a blogger in Tehran? I mean, his Twitter “timeline” is updated, like every hour. Is it just a loop? Who knows. I’ll DM George Orwell, and see if he knows.

No, no, NO! I know it sounds like a really interesting sci-fi concept (hey I’m SMSing all these big names from history while chasing after the Magic Device and there’s a hot chick who wants to get to know me! Movie this summer! Trending topic!) but it is not. It is the end of sci-fi. As this does happen, sci-fi is dead, and not just because all devices that could ever be envisioned will either be launching their websites, or showing off their concept art on a dedicated genre chat site. It is something far more sinister.

And this is the point I’ve been feeling all this time. It’s not the technology aspect. The form of sci-fi is the issue here. Technology, running away with itself, is a problem. But you know what is really dead? The form of sci-fi that relies upon the novel.

Think of any sci-fi novel, or film.

-Act One: It is ___ Century. Life is pretty much how you expect it. There is a guy who could probably be a protagonist, but he’s busy with the boring aspects of every day life, of the kind we might read sci-fi novels to escape in our time.

-Act Two: Enter crazy object/character/event, who does something so totally out of character for ___Century, that even Typical Maybe Protagonist guy is a little confused. But what about his daily life? Too bad, crazy o/c/e calls, and sets a plot in motion.

-Act Three: Turns out, that crazy thing was even more crazier than expected! Now Typical Guy is running, jumping, and chasing all kinds of plot elements all over the ____ Century. Thankfully, there is at least one good looking chick introduced, which gives us something normal to grab onto.

-Act Four: Oh no! All those plot elements are converging! Plus, the crazy thing whipped up the BIG SECRET, which is why is probably the reason it was so crazy to begin with. Where’s the hot chick? Oh no, too late, we only have ___ much time to get ___ to the ____!

-Act Five: Whew! The plot pieces all knocked each other out. Oh, and the time crucial thing? That went okay too. But while the hot chick, who is suddenly a relationship prospect, slowly massages our wounds, let’s just pause to reflect on the ramifications of that big crazy thing, and how the ____ Century world will certainly never be the same again.

Okay, I took a little bit of liberty with that. It’s true: sometimes there is actually not a hot chick. Sometimes it is a really awesome sword, or gun, or spaceship.

Don’t worry—I like cheap thrills as much as everyone else. Plus, there are many authors out there that can take a format like this, and actually make it a really enjoyable way to pass the time, and exciting to boot. Hell, I would probably watch Total Recall every weekend, if I could see it on the big screen.

My point is more about how this sci-fi format affects the SF. Look at it again.

-There is a basic plateau of reality established.

-Rising from this plateau is a spike, which draws our attention to an area of the plateau, and makes us consider it differently.

-The spike defines expectation, and alters the plateau into a three dimensional shape.

-Our awareness slides down this three dimensional shape towards the void at the edge of the plateau, or perhaps right in the middle.

-When we have fallen off, the shape flips, and we find ourselves sitting on another plateau.

The plot, the setting, and the characters are often nothing more than plateaus by which the physics of “conceptual reality” can be tweaked. This is the speculative framework of the story. Even the hot chick is not so much the DD appeal to the demographic she might seem to be—she is actually a tug upon the line of desire in the unconscious of the reader. She’s a way to get the audience to buy it, even as everything else is thrown upside down. Look at PKD—the chick is in almost every book without fail, and especially the real head-trip ones, because if the reader couldn’t trust the sexual desire of the main character, then there would be almost no ground to stand on. Why do you think teenage girls like vampires? Because vampires are hot, ageless boys dying to suck on their necks! Something so easy to represent, like sex, is an anchor, allowing the rest of speculative spaceship to swing free.

So here is what I’m thinking: our cyber-time relationship with our culture makes problems for the technology of sci-fi, but what’s worse, it is altering our relationship with the form of the book. It is making it more difficult to write a plot.

Don’t misunderstand—it’s easier than ever to write a plot. Just follow my diagram above. Hollywood knows this. They have a storage locker at a nondescript health club in LA that is filled with diagrams like the above, marked “teen comedy”, “bank heist”, “car movie”, “sports”, or “biopic”. The keys are kept by a small, but ever widening cabal. Imagine a world, very much like our own. A man looks in the toilet one day to see that to his uncanny surprise, his bowel movement looks exactly like the one he made the day before. Not simply consistent to his diet, but exactly the same. He goes to the doctor, who refuses to see him. Running up back alleys after black market medical equipment, attractive female nutritionist in tow, he finally makes the horrific discovery for himself–he is not a man at all, but a script writer!

We lost the originality of plots when we lost the originality of the formal concept. Proposing a radical departure and reformation of the plateau of our reality isn’t really speculative anymore. The Fight Club, the Memento, the Sixth Sense—these unconventional sorts of plots are now their own tropes. What sci-fi has lost is its speculative edge. Everything is already like something, which someone has probably already seen, or something else just like it, before. On the Internet. Cyber-time doesn’t just inhabit our world of facts, or objects—but our notions of plausible reality, explored through speculative mediums. What is the Internet if not a huge manifold of all the writing in the world that is even a little bit speculative?

The loss of speculative aesthetics to the Internet is not such a big loss, compared to the loss of form. Anybody can invent a slutty-punk trope; but it takes an author to sell it. The problem is, as good as authors are at selling the concept, there is only one way to do it. This way has been called science fiction. And science fiction is dead. Speculation has moved on.

Cue the suggestion to go to video games, or concept albums, or Twitterized Serial crap. No—this is different from the “death of print”, and in my opinion, the true media problem. We have exhausted the speculative power of the form, because the vast assortment of stories at our disposal makes plot superfluous. It is not a dying industry to sell a book simply because you can get the same book online. It is a dying industry to sell a new book because you can get every other book that has ever been written, in print or online, twenty-four hours a day. Not only is science fiction dead, fiction itself is having palpitations. True, there are a million timeless stories out there, that will never die. But this is exactly my point. If a story is timeless, how are you going to write another one? Oh, add zombies. Better yet, make it porn. That is a great business model—the porn-misappropriation-of-mainstream-films. Because maybe some people will see a crappy movie. But definitely some people will see a crappy movie if its re-made with hardcore sex. And new hosts are born every week.

Now, according to the pseudo-futurist rant formula, this is the part of the plot in which I unveil what is not corrupt, and what has the potential to save us all. Too bad. Nothing will save science fiction, or the plot-novel, or even plot as a form. They’ve outlived their usefulness and ceased to function, and this is the lifeblood by which all things die. (Except zombies, which I totally expect to see, both in subject and literally. Zombie fiction, and fiction-zombies. Surprisingly hard to kill.)

But speculation, on the other hand, is something resolutely human. As is language—the bare material of fiction: words. Fiction, in the sense that it is writing that is not precisely true, is alive and well within our minds. I bet some of those truly speculative individuals will continue to write it down, working it, shaping it, and making it drive our urge to speculate. You may not recognize it. You may not be able to buy it in a store. It may be digital, or it may be on paper. It may involve technology and science, or maybe it won’t. Maybe it will seem like a plot. Maybe it won’t have characters. Maybe it will be hard to read. Maybe you read it without realizing it. Who knows? Imagination is the future. Everything else you should have looked up five seconds ago.

Around Me, Dark Tentacles

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/download this story in PDF format here

Read/download this story in ODF format here

The bubbles I exhale precede me, clearing my path through the waters up the ladder towards the positive pressure of the diving hole.  As my head breaks the surface the heavy steel helmet gives force to gravity, pulling me back toward the depths of the sea.

I take off the equipment, and let it drop to the deck. Enjoying the return of humidity to my air breathing lungs, I fly up the passage ways through pressure hulls, using my heightened muscle ability to reach her as quickly as possible.  Her treat, she said: an unusual visit to my quarters.

As I reach the door way, I can see by the slight sheen of slime upon the deck that she is already here, and I hear a faint gurgle from my small sleeping space that confirms it.  She has turned off all the lamps but one, and in the germy florescence of the protazoan-bulb I can see her in her defensive posture on the bed.  Her tentacles twitch gently, and she smiles underneath her sea-mask.  Her skin is showing a warning shade of deep purple, and the rushing of liquid within her mask betrays excitement.  I pop the seal on my personal suit, and let her suction take me in.

Deep within the throws of passion, my own vocalizations block the subtle popping of the stations crepuscular air cavities, and I do not hear her screams until too late. My first and last sign of her distress is the jerking spasm of her tentacles, which I know all too well as a point along the line towards death that cannot be retread.  I only have time to see the panic in her single eye, blood shot, as she slips away and the rushing of water in her mask stops.  The Queen is dead.

It is acid, mixed into her water, to slowly cauterize the oxygen intakes of her gill assemblage.  I can see the lipids pulsing from her slick skin around the edges of the mask.  I know who did this. They are still on board.  I grip my air pistol in my fist.

As I run through the station, across catwalk and over pipe-encrusted ceilings, I think of the last strain of tension in her suckers, as they raked across my back.  I think of all the moments, in her wet world and in mine; I remember the space of shells we shared, and the contact of flesh upon flesh.  I will avenge her for the sake of the Pod, and for my own honor. But this war is over for me.  I love the Queen of the deep, and they have taken her salty skin from my grasp.

I burst into their guest chamber, and they know why I am here.  The two guards by the door fall to the floor, skin from their necks bubbling away as my gun’s charged pulse blasts through their cell structures.  I feel a harpoon laze past my shoulder, parting the fibrous membrane of my suit before it impacts the wall.  Two more of the blowfish come at me from down the passage–two more bursts of air send them gasping to the deck.  I charge forward, to the back diving hole, where I know he will be.

An assistant is helping him on with his suit.  I take off from the steel deck, and as I cohere with the skull of the lackey, my pistol barrel stabs through to his inner ear.  Slamming it home with my fist sets off the last compression shot, and his eyes burst onto the stunned face of my target.  Letting the corpse fall to the floor, I give him a look of hungry hate before leaping, and we both splash into the watery hole.

He struggles, both against my arms and with his utter terror, as his heavy equipment pulls us down into the abyss over which the station hovers.  He tries to close his eyes against the pressure, but I keep mine open, staring directly at him.  We will join each other in death, but I am going to live for one more moment than he, to see it.  I feel my brain grow dark, and I release his body to drift away into the depths.  As it slips into the shadows, I close my own eyes.  She will join me here, when her people send her body to her sea. I feel the heaviness of her tentacles around me, and water fills my thoughts.

“With Due Warrant”

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/download this story in PDF format here

Read/download this story in ODF format here

With Due Warrant

“You!”

The voice was a shot, fired outward across the dry land into the wind needlessly, in a place where sight traveled much further. For the past twenty minutes both men had singularly witnessed the slow progress of the lower man’s approach up the ridge towards Division, who’s eyebrows now flexed in the speeding air. To the idiot shout he made no response or acknowledgment, continuing to watch as his uninvited companion fought to press his weight upward against the steep scrub and rock surface. The shadows suddenly seemed to grow by inches in the setting sun, and the wind whipped over the ridge, sending a new chorus of buffeting shakes down the long, ancient chain-link fence running its length. Division stood with his back to the fence.

The oncoming man did not speak again so wastefully until he was almost to the top of the ridge and only a few rocks lay in the vertical distance between himself and Division, roughly ten paces away. There he stopped and took a breath, raising his head to allow the wind to cool his neck, bathed in sweat despite the low temperature of the ridge. In his gloved hand he held a folded piece of paper.

“You… you, Division.”

Perhaps the utterance was meant to be a question, but if so, the rising inflection was cut off by the additional quest for oxygen. By way of response, Division nodded his head once, dipping his chin briefly to the level of his parka, before bringing it back up to a level position.

“Then sir—it is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest.”

He held the paper in his hand outward from his body, about at the level with his waist. He gripped it tightly, but only with his fingertips, keeping a steady, dagger-sort of balance on the object. Division said nothing. The wind blew past over the ridge in another gust, buffeting the paper. He did not withdraw it.

The man spoke again to punctuate, his heavy, stock-issue coat hiding most of his body language. “You are under arrest, on the orders of those whom I’m sure you know.” He glanced up, avoiding looking directly at Division, instead inspecting the bit of ground between them, which was quite bare except for the few rocks—it was black, crusted, wind-burnt dirt. The terrain displayed no reaction.

“So… you will come along with me now, then?” This was meant to not be a question, but perhaps this statement had inherited the rising infection lost from the earlier statement. Lowering the paper to his side, he moved a quarter-turn downhill.

“I want you to read it.”

The man froze. He opened his mouth, but then closed it. Looking upward, he was met by a direct gaze. Gravity pulled him backward against his balance, but he fought it, digging in his heels in a martial act of stability.
“You want me… to read it to you?” Now he held the paper almost behind his body, as if eclipsing the document from Division’s sight.

“I want you to read it to me.”

Below, the man’s immobility was a dance of nervousness. Division saw several of the black shadows leaping in mockery, blowing with the wind, leaping back and forth in front of him through the shaking diamonds of the chain-link fence.

“But—you know what it says.” The gloved fingers around the paper procrastinated, gently rubbing the two folded halves together.

Neither man spoke. The wind pulled at everything on the ridge in rapid tidal gusts, first one direction, than the other. The lower man looked up to the other, his eyes uncomprehending.

“Look, Division—just come back with me now. I’m sure, once we return, anything you want to know about…”

“You must read it aloud.”

“Only if you request…”

“I request it.

Glancing down at the paper in his hands, the man looked for a way out of the situation. Below, the dry valley spread out indefinitely, a vacuous source of solace. To either side, the ridge simply continued, the fence curling away with it until disappearing from view over the next rise.

“It’s just that…”

“Read it.”

There was no other option. He raised the paper, and as he could delay no longer, he quickly unfolded it, holding the top and the bottom with either hand against the motion of the air, which at any moment could have taken the paper outward into the void behind him. Division stared down the distance between them. The shadows swung out at them now, like small birds swinging on the branches of a grove of trees under gathering clouds.
“Let it be known that here, on this twenty-fourth day of the month, the court has saw fit to call Mister William Division before it, so that he might present his sworn testimony for the benefit of the body…”

His voice had staggered as he started, but gained balance as the rhythm of the familiar legal language acquired its cadence. His eyes, following the shapes of the letters joining into words, did not notice the edges of the shadows beginning to separate from the crags the earth and the fence.

“…so that they might better judge the evidence in question. Whereas, Mister William Division, as a reputed witness to the matter at hand, might be solely capable of a providing information pertaining to the case…”
The first shadows spread their wings, and launched outward from the fence, single black wings gliding in a wide arc before narrowing into tightening circles around the two men on the top of the ridge. As the dark shapes fell over the uneven terrain, their passage animated the other shadows clinging to rocks the undersides of the dry branches of the dying bushes, and even the small pits in the surface of the bare earth. These small entities scattered through, waking many of their cousins in turn. Excited by their new found freedom, it took several scampering seconds before the swarm turned round, drawing onto the scent of their goal.

“…all of which, quite by necessity, is most crucial to the overall mandate of this court, burdened with the task of determining truth from falsehood. It is thereby ordered that any and all agents of the court expediently pursue the matter laid out herewith, so that the process can be dispatched with speed and accuracy, and all reasonable actions pertaining to the case might be carried out…”

The shadows now began to gain and evolve in form. They sprouted additional wings; they grew hair and unsheathed claws; saliva and mucus filled the deepening orifices; they stratified themselves into packs, flocks, and hordes, filling the air and covering the soil with a sub-sonic chatter of bug congress. They itched and scratched at their chitinous shells and drying membranes, struggling to tune a harmonic ligature of flesh to bone in these new-found bodies. Some found this balance and raised themselves up upon tightening legs; others remained trapped in physiological discord and quietly turned the pain inward, searching out such crawling, wriggling, and squirming forms of locomotion as would express their mis-fit.

Suddenly the man noticed the shapes approaching, in the corners of his eyes not fully absorbed by the paper. Fear reached him with a sudden gust, buffeting his stature as well as the small slip in his grasp. Overcome, he stuttered in his recitation. His head snapped from side to side in disbelief of the species he saw bearing down upon him with the unmistakable inertia of their various viscous entropies, that dark terror born upon the fuming, stalking, swarming, creeping, and the sharp infectious deaths they were all too anxious to be delivering. As the shadows drew nearer, there was no escape. In either a last resort or a retreat to neurotic habit, he turned back to the paper, held quaking before him in double unsteady hands, his voice rising in pitch, attempting to be heard over the grunts, groans, and shrieks of the animals surrounding him:

“…and so, we command that William Division be placed under arrest and transported to the location of the court so that, at which time as it occurs, he can be put to question and inquiry for the…”

The rest of what he might have read was drowned from the raucous wind by the snarls of the beasts, drawn over him like a dark blanket, swallowing up the remaining light from the setting sun. Their howls and screams swelled, fed by group satisfaction in tasting their quarry. Wings flapped the air into torrents, and rocks were set rolling down the ridge by the scratching and digging of tooth and claw. The black, writhing mass collapsed in upon itself, sending the shadows exploding outward in a suddenly expanding pool of water released upon rock, and a sudden splash of dark blood into the dry ground. The shadows slowly sunk, shapeless now, seeping back into their inset holes and depressions. As they re-attained their natural sense of light and darkness, the fence and the surrounding hill gleamed in bright contrast to the sky for a single moment, before fading into deepening dusk.

The man who remained bent forward to pick up the piece of paper lying those few steps down the hill, before the breeze could carry it off. Division raised his eyebrows, but thinking better of it, placed the document into his pocket without unfolding it. He stepped forward, continuing his journey across the ridge, into the darkening twilight.

Just in Time for Cyber-Time 

By Adam Rothstein 

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press 

May 1st, 2009 

www.brutepress.com 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. 

Read/Download this article in PDF format 

Read/download this article in ODF format 

Just in Time for Cyber-Time 

Neo: “Are you saying I can dodge bullets?” 

Morpheus: “I’m saying that when the time comes, you won’t have to.” 

Today, the government appointed a “cyberspace czar” to oversee National Internet security. In using the word “cyberspace”, the government made use of a term coined by SF author William Gibson, which he used to describe a virtual realm of information in his 1982 story, “Burning Chrome”: 

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” 

Meanwhile, on the Internet (or perhaps more accurately, in other areas of the Internet) William Gibson has lately been riffing on the concept of time via posts to his Twitter account, a timeline microblogging service. (@greatdismal – presented in reverse chronology, as is standard Twitter format) 

The most intelligent 21st-century fashion strives for a radical atemporality. Probably because the digital is radically atemporal.6:31 PM May 25th from web 

Your bleeding-edge Now is always someone else’s past. Someone else’s ’70s bellbottoms. Grasp that and start to attain atemporality.6:28 PM May 25th from web 

Otherwise, result will be “now-bound”. Or, actually, for me, a non-starter.6:22 PM May 25th from web 

When I look for collaborators I look for atemporality, whatever relevant kinds of historical literacy, and fluency in recombinance.6:20 PM May 25th from web 

Less creative people believe in “originality” and “innovation”, two basically misleading but culturally very powerful concepts.6:15 PM May 25th from web 

Very creative people get atemporal early on. Are relatively unimpressed by the “now” factor, by latest things. Access the whole continuum.5:39 PM May 25th from web 

Elsewhere in the same place, Gibson mentions his current work in progress is titled, “Zero History”. One might infer that the author responsible for visualizing the spatial concept of our information network still used as the official, dominant metaphor, is now moving further into metaphysics, exploring concepts of “cybertime” as relates to history and our informational conceptions of past, present and future. What he refers to as “atemporality” seems to be an ability to move at will across the historical dimension as we have envisioned it, violating its continuity for the benefit of participants, much as his cyberspace was envisioned and the Internet is used, as a sort of plateau or group of plateaus through which those clever enough to grasp the concept might manipulate the real world, or the intersections between this plane and the real world. 

SF investigations about speculative concepts, such as Gibson’s work, are often tinged with an idea of the “future”: a world existing in a different temporal existence from the one in which we live. The temporality of “the future” is a trope we utilize to explain how, via these fictions, familiar concepts can be seen in an unfamiliar way, or how some unlikely or impossible features of the world might exist when they currently do not. The fact of it occurring specifically, further down the flow of history is not so crucial as it’s occurrence out of the familiar temporal flow of the world as we know it. By imagining a fictional scenario to be in the future, we can extend our knowledge of the present temporal world into a related, yet fictional mode of existence still connected to our current times, yet not literally existing now. “Now”, as a state of immanent temporality leading into the past as well as the future, is a measure of existential possibility. To keep track of the difference between what exists now and what does not, yet potentially could exist in a modulation of the present, the exterior, spatial environment of our “now” world is crossed with an interior, time-based conception, giving our world temporality of past, present, and future, allowing possibility to give dimension to reality. Without this temporality, we would have trouble understanding ideas more speculative than objectively existent. 

This abstract aspect of interior conception which I’m calling “temporality”, allowing the understanding of possibilities of radical change in our exterior world, is often far more relevant than the exterior differences itself-for example, the notion that faster-than-light travel might be possible is more important to many SF projects than the actual description of how it works. Therefore, SF doesn’t necessarily require future innovation to explain its possibilities-it can just as even look to an “alternate time” in our present world, or to an “alternate history”-though future innovation in our current technological climate is often the most readily-available trope. Just as easily as one might be inspired to create a work of SF by current technological trends, one could look to ancient or archaic forms of knowledge and technology to begin constructing an interior universe, in which the exterior plot devices might make sense and be imaginatively compelling. And, many authors have done so, expanding this internal view to encompass possibilities not conceived externally. It is easy enough to call this imagination, and have done with it. But perhaps, metaphysically, there is more going on in the relations of these perceptions. 

Time and space, two concept Gibson is exploring, are not only the grounds for inventing new SF, but also meta-concepts, necessitating a certain play in order for the speculative work to take place, as he alludes to in his Twitter comments about atemporality and the creative process. Imagination seems to rely upon temporality as a possibility of its abstract thought. Additionally, Gibson is hardly the first to be interested in the creative interplay of time and space, now, or in the past. 

Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, explores these concepts in detail in the first part of the book, “The Transcendental Aesthetic”. It seems to me, that not only is Kant’s exploration of the concepts quite fertile in terms of metaphysics and speculative philosophy, it also sets the ground work just this sort of temporal reflection upon our relationships to the past, present, and the future that would help the process of SF, or creative atemporality in general. The metaphysics of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism doesn’t go so far as to speculate about an connected network of information supported by electromagnet radiation some three-hundred years in the future-however, it does provide a structure for understanding the Internet in terms of our consciousness, and our sense of time. It seems, if one is convinced by Kant’s arguments, that there is actually no such thing as “cyberspace” at all; instead, we are actually in the midst of a growing “cyber-time”, a radical atemporality, now expanding out from our mind’s interior over what we previously knew as “past” or “future”. The Internet did not develop exactly into Gibson’s vision of cyberspace-there is no “flying” through the information. But on the other hand, his comments on atemporality are much more to the present point-large-scale infrastructural and cultural elements still understand the Internet and the information it composes in terms of spatial metaphor, but the folks who really understand what is going on, and can see where it is going, now and in the future, look to the radical conceptions of time like those explored in the Transcendental Aesthetic. Through an understanding Kant’s time-relations, we can view the Internet, and in fact our entire worldly lives as an expanding interconnectedness of cyber-time, through which we move seamlessly, our own creativity and capacity for abstract thought our only obstacles to existence “across history”. Metaphysics and SF join together in this concept, digging deep into the structure of time, space, and our consciousnesses, to forge new understandings of existence between ourselves, our imaginations, and our technology. 

Now I should say that I’m a pretty strict materialist. However, I’m coming from the perspective of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, himself referred to as a “transcendental materialist”, as a way of a ironic reference to his equal affinity for the philosophy of authors like Kant and Marx, who otherwise are considered to be at odds over ideal or material metaphysical structures. I’m not going to attempt to justify Transcendental Idealism in this essay; not only has it been argued for and against in much better terms than I can provide by many authors in many, many arenas, but I am coming at this from a speculative perspective. Therefore, I am considering as given Kant’s method and logic, and merely extending conclusions from his own conclusions. Additionally, I only got a B+ in my graduate course on the First Critique, so you can take that both as a caveat and as a limit of my own horizons. 

But something must be said about empiricism, if we are going to make any headway at all. Empiricism works from the standpoint (in general terms) of trusting the perceptions over the mind’s thoughts and intuitive abilities. This may seem materialist; however, I believe Kant’s breakthrough is looking for the fundamental intuitions of thought that allow us to have perceptions in the first place: a sort of productive relations of perception, if you will. More materialist than thou, in other words. Whether his logic holds or not, the Transcendental Ideality is composed of just these sorts of metaphysical relations regarding consciousness that define its existence; i.e. intuitions defining the nature of the mind. I think this is a pretty important part of materialism’s efforts, and one which conscientious materialists do cover as well. Hence, we will seek to look at what sort of concepts are necessary to perceive anything at all: to have consciousness. 

What sort of concepts are necessary prerequisites for consciousness, and therefore, perception? Time and space. Let’s cut the build up, and get right to the point. Now-we all think we know what we mean by time and space, but it is important to understand what Kant thinks they are, because only in his exposition do we see how they really function so crucially. Kant begins with Space, so we will as well. To do this as expediently as possible, I am going to quote the Exposition of the Concept of Space, and insert my editorial explanations in italics. You can’t really beat Kant when it comes to his writing, so I won’t try. However, his language is a bit dense, especially when reappraising these concepts for the first time, so I’ll bastardize them in this format to make my case as we proceed. 

1. Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences. For in order that certain sensations be referred to something outside me (that is, to something in another region of space from that in which I find myself), and similarly in order that I may be able to represent them as outside and alongside on another, and accordingly as not only different but as in different places, the representation of space must be presupposed. [If we think about space, by abstracting spatial things (I can imagine the shirt in the store window on my body, even though I have never worn it) then we must admit that space is not simply what we see, but a representation of space in our mind. Space itself is not as important as our ability to think of space abstractly.]

 

2. Space is a necessary a priori representation, which underlies all outer intuitions. We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects. It must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent upon them. [Furthermore, even space devoid of object is still "spatial". We think of all things in terms of dimensions, whether they are full or empty. So, any object we could ever imagine existing needs the idea of space, otherwise we could not imagine it. Before any perception, we must already understand what "space" means.]

 

3. Space is not a discursive, or, as we say, general concept of relations of things in general, but a pure intuition. For, in the first place, we can represent to ourselves only one space; and if we speak of diverse spaces, we mean thereby only parts of one and the same unique space. Secondly, these parts cannot precede the one all-embracing space, as being, as it were, constituents out of which it can be composed; on the contrary, they can be thought only as in it. [This basically means space is all-encompassing, because of two facts: first, because although we can think of multiple objects existing, we cannot think of two concepts of space existing simultaneously. Other "dimensions" are precluded in this understanding, because that is saying there is additional, universal space in which two spaces may exist. You can assume as many dimensions as you like, but for them to interact, they must be part of the same continuum of the concept of space. So the second part follows pretty easily: if there is only one space, nothing can be thought of as outside of it or before it or after it. For the concept of space, there is only "in" space, and nothing else.]

 

4. Space is represented as an infinite given magnitude. Now every concept must be thought as a representation which is contained in an infinite number of different possible representations (as their common character), and which therefore contains these under itself; but no concept, as such, can be thought as containing an infinite number of representations within itself. It is in this latter way, however, that space is thought; for all the parts of space coexist ad infinitum. Consequently, the original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept. [I've been referring to the concept of space, but this is not really accurate. Concepts can be thought of iteratively, as the abstract of an infinite number of actual situations. However, we have just said that all understandings of space do not occur in an infinite number of situations-space is an underlying characteristic of any number of concepts. We can come up with hypotheticals, but space underlies them all, and is not represented by them. This is the crucial difference. So space is not a thought, but an intuition: a given of our very ability to think.]

 

Space is Ideal, simply because we can’t think of anything else. My graduate course members came up with about fifty “what-ifs” and “but-imagines”, all of which Jay Bernstein (our professor) easily shot down. Bottom line: you have to understand space as an intuitive concept to even think of a way in which there might be no space-and therefore, space is a a priori intuition. 

However, space only applies to our external world-yes, our thoughts of the external world, but still the external world. What about feelings, or other sensations? These internal things don’t take up space, though they may refer to it. Enter the other sibling, time: the Cain to space’s Abel. Now, the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Time: 

1. Time is not an empirical concept that has been derived from any experience. For neither coexistence nor succession would ever come within our perception, if the representation of time were not presupposed as underlying them a priori. Only on the presupposition of time can we represent to ourselves a number of things as existing at one and the same time (simultaneously) or at different times (successively). [This probably sounds familiar. Similar to space, if we can think of what happened yesterday as different from what happened today, we must have some sort of continuum. Things can exist at the same time, or different times, and so we must have an understanding of time as an underlying and prerequisite concept to our perception of something happening "now".]

 

2. Time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove time itself, though we can quite well think time as void of appearances. [Again, quite similar to space. We can think of something happening in time, or something not happening in time, but we cannot think of something happening outside of time. Even if we imagine a different continuum of time, it still must be "timely", for lack of a better adjective. Time is "the universal condition of the possibility of appearance".]
3. Time has only one dimension; different times are not simultaneous but successive (just as different spaces are not successive but simultaneous). These principles cannot be derived from experience, for experience would give neither strict universality nor apodeictic certainty. [Okay, Sfers: you are in a unique position to understand this better than others. Think of time travel. You might be about to change time, right? Yet you cannot have two simultaneous times. John Connor cannot both kill the T1000 and be killed by the T1000. Even if you can travel through the continuum, you must still abide by the rule of not-simultaneousness, by the nature of what time is. Kant would hate that example, but it still holds the point. No matter what the future holds, and regardless of cat's in boxes, nothing is actually in two different temporal states at once. (More on Schoedinger in a bit.)]

 

4. Time is not discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts of one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object in intuition. [Time is the possibility of a continuum. This is just like point 3 about space; any part of space must be part of the same space, and all concepts of time must be part of the same unified continuum of time. If you are still confused about the time travel bit, just wait, because I'll come back to it.]
5. The infinitude of time signifies nothing more than that every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it. The original representation, time, must therefore be given as unlimited. [Congruent with point 4 about space; Time is Ideal, because if there can only be one indivisible continuum of time, any possible concept of time requires time as a prerequisite intuition.]

 

So you might have noticed we ended up with one more point about time than we did about space. The extra is step 3, the limit of time to one dimension. Kant notes after the exposition that space, in certain ways, relies upon time, as in motion. Whereas the capacity of space is in a sense larger, allowing the possibility of many objects both similar and different distributed throughout space, time is more limiting, because every object in time must be unique along a single temporal axis. Because time is a single dimension, the three dimensions of space actually require time as its own prerequisite intuition. Things can only exist in a point of space because they exist singularly in time. 

We’ve been taught to think of time as the fourth dimension, but in this way it is actually the first. Things must be able to exist, before we can say where they might exist. As Kant puts it, 

“Space as the pure form of all outer intuition, is so far limited; it serves as the a priori condition only of outer appearances. But since all representations, whether they have for their objects outer things or not, belong in themselves, as determinations of the mind, to our inner state; and since this inner state stands under the formal condition of inner intuition, and so belongs to time, time is an a priori condition of all appearance whatsoever. [...] Just as I can say a priori that all outer appearances are in space, and are determined a priori in conformity with the relations of space, I can also say, from the principle of inner sense, that all appearances whatsoever, that is, all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in time-relations.” 

Anything that exists in the world must exist in space, but anything, whether it exists or not, must first exist in time as thought-and so, all thought both in the world and in our minds must be in a certain relation of time. Time-relations… kind of sounds like “relations of production”, doesn’t it? We’re not that far away from materialism. 

To perceive anything, we require the inner sense of time. This is to say, by jumping straight to it and cutting a lot of discussion, that consciousness is reliant upon this sense of time. What would the consciousness be without perception? Even illusion, to the extent that it is not in the external world, still is a perception, and therefore must be oriented in our time sense for us to perceive it. 

So what of this time-sense? The time-relations? It is a one dimensional, primary intuition. But what is it really, even if we understand it is crucial to consciousness? 

The time sense is precisely what we said it was (clear as mud, right?): an infinite extension of magnitude, found within a transcendental intuition to unify any concept derived by it. In other words, it is an infinite dimension, but only a single dimension. To put it bluntly, time is our capacity to think of a line. If we can think of two points, connected by a line segment, we must be thinking of time. It is a subjective necessity. Consciousness is a point-from there, to extend to anything else, we must be able to understand a different point and connect the two with a line. Self-consciousness is not a singularity, but an extension of the original point into a second point. The vertical line of the I is the motion of time-from top to bottom or bottom to top, to signify the self there must be the understanding of simultaneity, and of succession. Henri Bergson, who explores the concept more deeply, calls this “duration”: our ability to exist in time, by extending in its dimension. To exist now, or to exist from now until any other time, both rely on this unifying principle. It’s existential, its metaphysical, and its transcendental (or as people say now, simply, “meta”). It is not something vs. nothing; it is the possibility of the simultaneity of something/nothing. 

Space, as it turns out, compared to this dramatically existential dimension, is merely a bit of a distraction caused by the outside world. All those objects and shapes are very interesting, almost convincing us that our consciousness is less important than that big, physical world. But to place the world secondary to its perception is not solipsistic. All our observations, dependent on time-relations, lead us to logically believe the world would continue to exist if and after we were to disappear. But if these logical apprehensions disappeared, or had never existed, there certainly be no way to conclude the existence of the world. We can also logically believe the world existed before our perception, by the very nature of our ability to perceive it now. Are you starting to feel the magic? The world might exist before or after as well as during our consciousness; but what are all these words? They are time. Only by virtue of the world being linked in a time-relation to the solitary line of the “I” can it be said to do anything understood as “existence”. 

Now we can see the fallacy of Schroedinger. In his riddle of the cat, he is relying on a spatialization of time, that is, in two diverging “paths” of an outcome, he is trying to convince us that two exclusive time-relations are existent and simultaneous; or at least this is how the problem is popularly understood. Two different worlds may exist in our minds at once. But these worlds only exist as concepts, and it does not duplicate, fold, or double the infinite intuition of time. When we project these possible worlds, we are imagining two different futures-not actually observing the present. If we never open the box, we haven’t conducted the experiment. When we open the box, one world will evaporate, and the other will be real. But neither is real until they are real, and only then are they unified in this reality by the unity of time as an intuition. To believe that the spatialized possibilities of the future or the past are all real, floating out there waiting to exist (note the spatial metaphor of “floating in space”), is to treat time as we treat the world. We can look at a forking path in the woods and know it leads to two different places, but on looking at a closed box containing a cat, we do not actually see two cats, but one temporality extending into a single future, in which space will change, but time will remain continuous. Time cannot offer extra dimensions, because it is only the primary dimension. Because we have put one cat in the box, there is only ever one cat in the box. History and temporality, in the past, present, or future, is never the fact of what we speculate. It is the possibility of perceiving when it is perceived, and is limited to being the intuition of this existential dimension. This is all a very complicated way of saying what we already know: we cannot perceive everything at once, whether it be the the past, present, or the future. We can only say that what we perceive, we perceive. Schroedinger’s cat merely points out that we have the ability to speculate about the future. Pretty disappointing, perhaps. No zombie cats-only us, the world, and the possibility of a cat in the box. 

So a time-line itself and things speculatively plotted along it are not real, because time-relations are not spatial relations, but a single, infinite, metaphysical and existential relation. Of course, we spend our entire lives wandering around in a spatial world, so it is by far the easiest metaphor for us to understand things, and therefore we use it often. We bump events “up or down” a time line, we remember “back and forward”, and we “look” through our memories to find facts. It’s no wonder then, that the Internet was originally conceived in spatial metaphor. Surfing, highways, and pipelines all help support our impression of massive quantities moving at speed, which in the universe of non-digital information is the factor we seek to improve. You get a telegram delivered faster than a letter, and you get an “e-mail” “delivered” to your “inbox” even faster than that. Speed itself is a spatial metaphor, relying upon derivatives of the Cartesian plane, treating time as yet an axis to give us a spatial representation of one time as opposed to another. Sixty miles per hour is not twice thirty miles per hour, because neither are actually things. They are an understanding of space in relative relation to the infinite intuition of time; one is only “twice as fast” to the subjective notion of stillness. This is basic relativity theory: nothing is really moving except in relation to an observer. We measure, in space, the relative relations of all manner of objects, but in time as a general intuition, all things are equal. 

It would be nice to think of our messages flying along the tubes, as fast as light, just as it seems cool to think of us flying through the tubes all around the world to connect with all our pen pals. But when do you actually fly on the Internet? On Google Earth, which is a spatial visualization of data. There are other visualizations, of thesauruses, or of data networks or wikis or hyperlinks, all of them straining your computing resources to provide you with a cool-looking visualization-a spatialization of data. The data isn’t actually located in any particular locality, it is simply visualized as such to aid a certain way of understanding it; just as Schroedinger used the uncanny image of a live/dead cat to teach us something about the exactitude of probability. 

In fact, when we think of what the Internet actually consists of-electromagnetic pulses, magnetic or molecular sectors involved in infinitesimal state changes-we realize there is almost nothing spatial about it at all. It may behoove the government, a Nation-State with a certain reliance upon another outdated spatial metaphor, to continue to convince the public it is guarding a certain place or thing. But what is it really protecting? It is protecting a vast number: a particular, ever-changing arrangement of ones and zeros that has meaning only in relation to its observers. A one or a zero is no different than the presence or absence of a single, solitary line; and what we value about these data is their capacity to represent a world for us, by existing or not existing in any particular time when we apprehend them. Data are a new exteriorization of our consciousness, and in this sense it is a space-but this space is dependent upon that ultimate, primary dimension: time. 

Even though time is infinite, this does not mean it is static and beyond our control. Cats continue to live and die in time, and the time-line, though only a metaphor, is a powerful intersection between space and time. This temporality, when considered as the multiplicity of space viewed through the singularity of time’s intuition, can be quite useful for manipulating space. If you don’t want the cat to die, pull him out of the box! By noodling through Kant’s most boringly simple observation, that we can only perceive that which can be perceived in the way it can be perceived, we now have the ability to begin to manipulate our perceptions-which in the end, might even more powerful. Temporality, understood as a fallacy proper to our consciousness, is a real tool for using our consciousness to its fullest extent. The ability to manipulate temporality in our minds is what we have called creativity, or a capacity for abstract thinking. 

There are people who are already skilled at manipulating space, and they do so by manipulating time. Having the data in the right place, and moreover, at the right time, can make a material fortune, in these days when value is only another vast number formed from algorithms, either visualized in property (or lately, visualized suddenly as nothing). If you show the right information to the right people-at the right time-you can change the world. When did so-and-so consciously apprehend such-and-such? Minds in time-relation want to know. You can manipulate consciousnesses on a global scale, and through this altering of perception, create any number of changes in the trivial, “real” world. As information quickly becomes divorced from the material which held it back, it becomes instantaneously accessible, and all the more powerful to manipulate our understanding of time. Information wants to be free, and by this we mean accessible, readily timely, across a number of hypothetical temporal states. Books don’t want to be free, dollar bills don’t want to be free. The information does, because information is data in its immediate and timely apprehension. The easier information can access you, the more real it is. 

The “nowness”, the living, breathing, existential substance of the world as we perceive it, is a box not limited to constraints of space. If we know how to work it right, we can fit two cats in the space of one. We can bring back ghosts from the past, or create ghosts for the future. We can slide across the continuum of spatialized time with ease, raising armies of knowledge from the dead, or birthing them from thin air. Spatialized information tuned to the apperceptive immediacy of our existential consciousness could be a weapon more powerful than any we have ever known, because it would not be dependent upon space, and could therefore violate the time-line, cybernetically jumping through time at will. 

SF is on the forefront of this process, defending information, spreading it, and priming our minds to apprehend as much of it as possible. Of course, this cyber-time-the constant re-imagining of our conscious time-relations thanks to cybernetics-is not as easy to understand as the spatial metaphor of cyber-space. It is much easier to understand the power of a bullet flying through the air than the correct information instantly at hand. This is because humans have been dodging bullets for some time now, and have only recently needed to hone their information dodging skills. But think: if you knew a bullet was coming, it would be a lot easier to dodge, wouldn’t it? Better yet, if you could stop the trigger from being pulled, you wouldn’t even have to dodge it. We’re not there yet-but the span of the present is growing significantly. The present, the relative space we control on the timeline, can possibly encompass more today than it ever has, and is reaching out ever further into the past and the future. Time, in its ability to immediately apprehend the world via our minds, is extending itself into the gaps of these spatializations of “past”, “present”, and “future”. Where they might be exist on the number line is not important, because we are discovering that it is all equally accessible. When time travel eventually occurs, we won’t see “the future, today”, or “visit the past”. Instead, certain aspects of the past will disappear from the number line. The present will extend for an entire week before the future really begins. Our conscious apprehensions will continue to grow. We won’t feel much different. We’ll still strive for the future and the past, just out of reach. But the space of our cyber-time will continue to grow.

by Adam Rothstein

Published by Brute Press

http://www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/download this story in PDF format here

Read/download this story in ODF format here

Simon Alleverde stood in place, as if he had been moving and suddenly come to a stop. He was standing before the bridge, and below it, a massive drop he could not see.

When one approaches a large, unfamiliar precipice one often attempts to peer downward, in order to inspect from a safe span both the steepness and to ascertain how far one might possibly plummet before reaching that bottom distance. What sort of a rift is this, and on what scale can one judge its abyss? Simon Alleverde, upon the occasion of approaching this promontory, did not. He did not investigate ahead, but turned to look backward over his shoulder.

But this may be forgiven, or if one prefers, forgotten; the difference between what he might have done and what Simon Alleverde did do are of no consequence here. He was not on a hike, as he was often wont to do, nor any other particular journey that would involve decisions of location, cardinal directions, and paths not traveled. Oppositional to such a pleasure stroll, his arrival at the bridge was absolutely nothing less than the pivotal moment of a universal journey; as such, his response so characteristic.

Simon Alleverde had, in fact, arrived at the end of his worldly life. Like all of his species thrust into this situation of death, he first looked backward, as he had been trained since birth. He put his hands in the pockets of his trousers while he looked over his shoulder.

Behind him was not a fog, but simply his life, much as it had occurred, free at last from the metaphysical friction of fallible memory. It, as a whole, existed-just as it once had been, in all of the color, odor, and warm vibrating aesthesia of living. Behind him was his child, his school, his mother, his uncle. They did the things that they had done in one grand scene played out as he watched; the things that he had come to expect during his life, living one day to the next, happened behind him with not one aspect missing or forgotten. These episodes knit the many objects and places into events through their clever semantics, like so many words and phrases into stanzas and paragraphs; this unfurling of time was always a clever surprise of course, but it never infringed into the absurd. His job, his garden, his kitchen, his car, his dog: after the grease of the first he puttered in the bright blooms of the second, using the dusty fourth to acquire materials for the dirt-smelling third, on the floor of which lay the warm fuzz of the fifth. An adjectival analysis could not really bring them to life-not in the way that they had lived for Simon. ‘On the page one dances in verbal acuities, only to stumble through life with vague circuities,’ as Simon had often said. There-he could see himself saying it, back in the course of his life. He had said it in a bar, there in the bath, and in the library, muttering quietly over the privacy of a book. There was none of the epic nicety of the well-formed couplet here in death. The man looked backward and saw only everything. In it was the same static worthlessness, the same disappointing lack of narrative and epithematic finality as in a room that one has just exited, upon turning to view it again from just outside the doorway. All he had known as life simply remained. It survived him-which was to say, ‘it was past,’ just as it was when he had lived it. His neighbors, his bank, his books, and his lover, were properly just as they were. Ah, his lover-Simon gazed into that past that lay behind him: his lover washed dishes, then he was kissing Simon in bed, then he was yelling at the newspaper, then he was making them tea. Then, then, then: his lover was now forever entombed in that vacant preposition of time-space. It was the same past that Simon, like all of us, had always had to view over his shoulder, only now there was nothing else. This was the experience of death.

Simon felt a breeze. It blew from in front of him, out of the empty space over which the bridge was sailing. It was warm, and lapped at the tails of his jacket, spinning his tie playfully in a flapping lap against Simon’s round belly. He took a step forward toward the bridge, unable to reach any conclusions about what had been behind. In truth, he felt a bit betrayed at being taught in life that some sort of important derivative would be drawn up at this point-a sum, or total of some kind-but he decided to let it be, for now. The ground was rocky and his loafers crackled against the volcanic stone, shattered into shards by infinite tectonic speed. The sound of it was like crockery.

The beginning of the bridge began thirty feet before the edge of the cliff. He approached the transition, laying his rough, workman hands on one of two tall stone posts. It was carved with glyphs, or symbols, or cuniform; he wasn’t quite sure which the proper term was. He couldn’t glean any significance from the markings other than that someone had intended to mark the bridge in some way. It was very old. The surface of the span was wide, cobbled in a stone that was not at all like that which made up the substance of the cliff. It was smooth, and lain nicely without gaps. On the edges of the bridge were short walls, concreted of the same stone. The span was wide enough for several vehicles to travel abreast, but from all signs, none ever had. The stones were worn evenly across, not in ruts or lanes, but as if in a long, steady drag: thousands upon thousands of individuals over time, trickling alone in separate paths.

The best way for Simon to inspect what it was that lay beneath the bridge was clearly from the bridge itself; its construction appeared sturdier that the loose slag of the precipice. With his one hand brushing around the pillar lightly-a hand gently rubbing against the tree’s bark within reach to ease the descent of a ragged slope-he stepped out. Simon Alleverde lifted one brown trouser leg and extended it outward in the direction of the hazy, far-side of the bridge. He put his weight down upon his foot, pressing into the bridge stone. He began crossing.

His heels made a quiet scuff-clap sound as his long strides moved the distance. Breeze lifted the air, scattering his hair into his eyes as he approached the beginning of the real bridge, where the edge of the land dropped. The blown air pierced through his clothing, lifting heat away from his skin. The light shining through the mist and clouds was surprisingly bright in the opaque air, but it was hollow, giving no sense of radiated heat. If there was any chance of it, he might have desired that this was a valley near a northern seaside, or even an overlook upon a high mountain road. It might even have been played host to such an exciting sensation as the smell of approaching snow. But there was no possibility of these at all, and this could not be mistaken. All was belied by the lack of any growth. There were no bushes, no wooden life, and not even sparse grass could be found among the rocks on the cliff flanking the rising causeway of the bridge. Despite the shade the walls provided and the cool clouds of moisture carried upon the breeze coming up the side of the chasm, there was not the smallest fragment of moss in the chinks of soft cobbled stone. This was not a place that was anything like anywhere else. It was only what it was, and nothing else at all.

The wind whistled around the jointed manifold of the land and the bridge. The abrupt drop of the igneous stone descending away from the cobbled brickwork resembled a lip, or perhaps more of an elbow. Maybe it was even a chin. Simon Alleverde drew each side of his jacket about him and fastened the large knit-leather button to keep the fabric from buffeting in the air. He brushed his hair to either side of his face, and pulled down the brim of his hat before realizing to his surprise that he was not wearing his hat. It had not blown off; it simply was not there. He wondered what had happened to it, or where it might be. Instead, he stuck his hands into his trouser pockets, and continued down the left-center of the bridge, towards a place where he might be able to gaze over the side.

He did not want to look over the edge-not yet. It would be best if he walked a bit out from the edge before attempting to look. It would yield a better perspective. Twelve paces out would be enough to view downward as well as back towards the walls of the cliff, or canyon, or whatever it was. But every one of twelve paces over an unseen abyss is each possibly an infinite plunge. Achingly, he tried to continue forward, but his attention and course arced slowly towards the side of the bridge. After only about five paces out into the empty space, he decided that the shrewdness of patience had been satisfied. He skipped up to the wall with quickness uncharacteristic of his manner, and gingerly placing each palm on the foot-wide wall, he bent over at the waist to peer downward.

The cliff broke away sharply, as he had imagined. But not only did it drop in a very steep, near vertical angle, but some hundred feet below the bridge, the cliff seemed actually to retreat to a negative angle, dropping away and out of sight negating its original edge, as if the land from which he had just departed from was only a crust on top of a giant hollow. Through the haze he could only make out just two or three hundred feet of the rock wall behind him; after that, what lay below was only as far and firm as the mist, not unlike the grey clouds that formed the low sky over his head. This, however, was not the most startling thing that he saw.

Underneath the bridge upon which he stood, protruding out from the cliff, was another bridge, like a symmetrical shadow of the one on which he stood. Its curvature was opposite: hanging downward rather than arching. It could have been a double of his, but for this fact. He thought for a moment that perhaps there was water beneath his bridge, and the mirrored image was literally that. No bridge he had ever seen had such a supporting span below it, without some sort of cable or trellis connecting the two. Each echoed the other, as if by specific design. His span led from the top of the cliff, and the other began at the very lowest point at which he could see the rock wall, after which the mist blocked vision in its imposing gray cloud. Simon Alleverde was no engineer, and could not account for what strengths such a physical puzzle might hold.

Bereft of alternatives, Simon Alleverde continued across the bridge. From a different angle the bridge might yet make itself clearer. Each leather-bound foot was placed in front of the other in the time honored fashion, and he looked back once more, over his shoulder. He walked a calm, dragged step: each shoe pulled forward beneath suited shoulders, head turned backward, still looking the life over. Life in all its strangeness was much less mysterious than the bizarre structure on which he walked. He gazed fondly at its familiar vignettes. In that past he watched his child grow, again and again, from the moment of conception until the very last visit in the garden. The baby was a child, then a boy, then a man; he learned to speak, to write, and to think. He watched his dog run, play, die, and be buried. Now, from this vantage point, he observed all the other mundane et cetera that he had not really thought about at the time when they had occurred: his soup grew cold in his bowl while he read bad literature at the table; his urine circled the toilet as it drained away while he whistled; his hair, day by day, came out in small pieces upon his comb and he noticed no difference.

His strides slowed, and Simon let his worn, smooth soles slide a bit more against the cobblestones, twisting the ball of his foot with each step. The shoes were thin, and he could feel the cool stone in the palm of his foot. The wind had begun to howl a bit as it blew twisting over one side of the bridge and back down again. Simon’s trouser legs buffeted about him in the moving air, chilling him and causing the old hairs that grew in thickets upon his legs to stand on end, but the pressure of his weight pushing against the soles of his feet was familiar. The flat at the bottom of each step was almost like a little friendly pat, he thought. He balled his fists in his pockets and pulled elbows in tight to try and keep his warmth. His lover had loved to indulge in giving him a little pat-an intimate, regular little tap with the four-ply tips of the fingers-on his bottom as he stood shivering in nakedness, toweling off from a shower or a swim. Simon had always been a bit peeved by it; the way his skin bounced, wet and a bit too soft, reminded him that he wasn’t as in shape as he used to be. But it gave his lover pleasure. His lover’s lips would glow with delight, and he might twist his mustache a bit; the mustache that he grew to hide just how much light there was in those lips. He would lie back on the bed, staring up at Simon, hands behind his head. Simon shaved while he would watch from the bed. Simon would play at great bombastic throws of annoyance as he pretended to be concerned with the time, saying that the reservations were for nine, and why wasn’t he ready? They weren’t attacks, those little smacks on the bottom and words of admonishment. Each was a kiss. There were so many, many kisses. Some involved lips, some made use of other parts, and some were only words, or less.

The wind roared, and Simon Alleverde wondered what the hell he was doing standing out on this bridge. He went again to the side, and looked over. Everything was the same as before, but the lower bridge was even further away, the symmetrical arcs orbiting apart on their parallel ecliptics. He looked back towards the… but that was odd, he couldn’t see the cliff behind him any longer. He had walked further than he had thought. How long had he been thinking, lost it thought? He had never been good at keeping time. Was he simply facing the wrong direction? His eyes sought outward through the wind that obscured the view through its noise and turbulence. He couldn’t see anything but the bridge in either direction; below there was still the other bridge. Was he on the left side of the bridge? He crossed to the other side and peered over. Maybe this was the left side? Which way had he been walking? Simon Alleverde could not be sure.

As he pulled his head back from the breath of the wind that roared up out of the chasm, he could have sworn that he saw something on the lower bridge, and dodged his head back quickly to look again. Nothing to see, except for identical stones. He kept walking, looking downward over the edge. A fierce gust blew by, causing him to pull his head back and shut his eyes. But was that it again? He stopped, and forced his eyes to look down, scrutinizing the other bridge for anything out of place. But wait, there was something! It was a face! Incredibly, there seemed to be a person looking up at Simon, from the bottom of the lower bridge, a few hundred feet away. How was that possible? Was it hollow, with windows in the sides? He leaned over as far as he dared, but saw nothing but a band of stones in a span just like the one upon which he stood, with a face peeping over the edge, as he did.

He looked at the face below, trying to make it out. At first he had barely discerned that it was a human face, but now he was beginning to recognize features: brown hair, the top of a suit jacket, brown, with shirt and tie, no hat. Simon walked from side to side, examining this inverse person. The person below moved as well, almost as if he was walking on the underside of the lower bridge. The strangeness of it did not alarm Simon, who only wished there was some way to pass between the two bridges, so that he might speak to this man. What would he say to another man on another bridge? He had no idea, but he was sure that conversation would take its meaningful cues if only they were close enough to exchange words. Simon continued fifty feet further down the span, no longer sure in which direction, or in relation to what he was moving. The other figure proceeded as well, first in the same direction as Simon, then back the other way. Simon turned and walked back too, then his colleague turned again. They past each other on their own bridges and continued walking. Then Simon reversed direction again, and his companion did the same. The man below had certainly seen Simon, and seemed also to be studying him. Simon then stopped, and so did the other man. He bent forward, and shouted downward to the man, but the wind was too great. The other also bent over his own edge, and might have been shouting too, but there was no way Simon could have heard.

Simon turned back to the center of the causeway. The air moving around in the sky had reached the level of a maelstrom. The button was ripped open on his coat, and his tie whipped about like a broken arm of machinery. Simon Alleverde sat down in the middle of the bridge, crossed his legs, and pulled the jacket about him to try and shelter himself.

He tried to peer around his shoulder, longing suddenly for something familiar. There was only fog behind him. He looked both ways down the bridge, but could not remember in which direction his life lay. He stared off into the distance, sitting up a bit straighter to peer over each wall that bounded the bridge, but he found himself simply alone. He knew of one certain thing from that life, which he desperately wanted to remember at this moment. It wasn’t in his head, but in the pit of his stomach, sagging a bit within his suit; there was something there inside him that he wanted to grasp. What was it called? They called it a…a brief… a small… a passing… a what? What did it feel like? It was a glance of the body, it was intimacy…. But what was intimacy? Was that inside his stomach or outside? His torso now felt hard like a shell, hollow, and fragile. He couldn’t be sure if the thing was wet or dry; warm, maybe, but it could be otherwise. Maybe the thing was outside the flesh. It was some electrical contact, there and then gone soon again: an embossing spark of the moment with raised, rough edges. It was something like that. Some thing, little, dark hole, folding all the body’s desire into it: doing it again and feeling it again. He almost had it in his mind’s grasp, but it slipped away every time. He couldn’t remember. His mind had been getting old for some time now, aging along with his body. One day his back hurt more, and the skin around his throat and shoulders hung down a bit more than usual. Then he had misplaced things, and forgotten some of the faces. It all seemed so distant now. Getting old was something that used to happen, back there… but it had been there the whole time, this “aging”; it was always present even in the intervals between its blurred, infrequent communiqués-mailed with postage due, naturally-always arriving when least expected. But this was a different hole, a very definite thing-gone-missing, not a thing-misplaced. And now he couldn’t remember, couldn’t remember that, couldn’t remember…

Staring off into the wind, his eyes watered freely. He tried to remember exactly what it was that he was trying to remember. He was… Simon was an old man. No, it was a different man, two men…. There was a man. A man had touched this man… maybe only a hand offered to another, one of so many during one’s life. No! It was more that that, more important. How would this man have touched, how would he have been touched? And why? Why did anyone touch anyone else? And this man, touch this man? Men so rarely touched each other these days, and when they did, the shape, the touch, and the attention of those touches were not the way that they should have been. But it must have been. But why must it have been a man?

More of his hands than of his mind, he began to go through his pockets. He half-hoped that there might be something to trigger his memory, an artifact of an unknown past. His two interior jacket pockets had nothing in them, and the outer pockets were unfortunately sewn closed, and only for fashion sake. What could this man have looked like? What was it that a man looked like? Like a man? Like himself? A body, there was still a body in this suit. A body gets old after a period of time, time that cannot really be remembered. The body’s oldness is never in doubt. Old was its own gland, a supplementary organ filled with the fluid of age, growing like a callus on the heavily worked areas. It grew brown, drab, but bulbous and bursting with functioning crepuscules each secreting the cytoplasm of time, in kind with all organs, manufacturing and storing their function’s substance within their own soft, interior flesh. He was certain that a man was more that a collection of organs, but organs were the only thing that he had left.

He dug into the trouser pockets again, and turned up nothing-but there was something-a very small, round pebble. Simon Alleverde twisted the pebble between his forefinger and thumb, trying to find something similar in his memory onto which he might grasp. Perhaps there had been no man, and he had touched no one. Had he ever wished to touch? Why? What would it have felt like to touch, or to wish? Might it have felt like the pebble-small, rough, and hard, but more certainly real that anything? These questions did not make any sense. He could not think; he could not remember. He could not touch anyone or anything, and it seemed he never had. There was no thinking here, no aging body, nor memory-on this bridge it seemed there was nothing at all.

Simon Alleverde sat on the bridge with his head tucked into himself. He felt a small pebble. He felt the fear-the only thing that he was able to feel-the feeling that he might be completely alone.

The wind attacked with renewed vigor in heaving gusts, and he gasped on the air that forced its way down his throat and into his lungs. As what was left of his body turned on him in spasms and chokes, he dropped the pebble, and the wind took it. He put his palms down on the cobbles of the bridge underneath his knees: only the bridge in this world of wind. He tried to think of something, anything, but he could not. He could not remember even his name. He sat, but he did not know where. Words filled him, words that he did not know. The words spoke-shaking the bridge with each syllable, stones reverberating with the enunciation of the wind.

In wind and stone moves flesh and bone; they mint life’s treasury as breath fills the chest.

In life’s small room, bodies pay out for each move, and so to memory we gamble the rest.

Simon Alleverde pulled his head up, as the wind slacked and the ambient light shone through the cloudy mire, illuminating the bridge. He felt a bit dizzy, sitting there alone on the cobblestones. Perhaps standing and walking a bit would do him some good. Getting to his feet, he let his arms swing freely at his side. Yes, it felt much better to be ambulatory. It felt like himself. He moved quicker in the soft, warm breeze, his tie swinging with each step, heels tapping. He whistled a tune to a song that he did not know. There was a man he had known who used to sing that song-but the identity escaped him. Something about when you know that you love… but Simon thought such lyrical odes foolish. Nobody actually ever said such things, such rhyming couplets empty of everything but good intention. He continued to whistle, as unconcerned with the words as with the speaker. Simon Alleverde looked down at the other bridge below him. His double had stood up to walk as well, heading back, the way that Simon had come. Simon did not look, instead gazing ahead, and listening to the scuff-clap of his soles, and feeling each worn stone beneath his feet. In succession, each stone touched him briefly as he passed, and he felt them all. Every step was a kiss, a kiss from the bridge that spanned out through the wind-filled sky. Each was a kiss. Simon hummed the wordless melody, and walked on across the bridge.

Architecture

Nearing the Machines

By Adam Rothstein

Published in The Brutalitarian, by Brute Press

May 1^st, 2009

www.brutepress.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Read/Download this article in PDF format

Read/download this article in ODF format

When I was in New York I went to see Merce Cunningham’s Nearly Ninety performance at BAM, on his 90th birthday.  Actually, I was brought there, because Megan sometimes does this thing:

Her: I got us tickets to this performance/exhibition/gallery/thing.

Me: Okay, cool.  What is it?

Her: It’s some guy, and there are these people… I don’t really remember.

Me: Oh.  What kind of film/ballet/concert is it?

Her: Fuck, I don’t know man.  Just some shit I read and thought it sounded okay.

And then we get there, and its something I’ve really been interested in, or would obviously have been really excited to see because it involves things in which I’m totally interested.

This is what happened.  I didn’t know who Merce Cunningham is, but I am really interested in the Black Mountain College and the people involved with it (though I’m not very knowledgeable about it).  And then we walk past the “merch” area, and I see all this Sonic Youth shit, and I ask dumbly:

Me: Oh, did Sonic Youth play here recently?

Her: You idiot, they’re doing the music for the show we’re seeing.

I don’t know if she just likes surprising me, or if it is fun to keep me wandering about in the dark, or maybe its a combination of the both.  I suppose I’m more docile when I don’t really know what is going on.

But this fun anecdote into our relationship aside, Sonic Youth performed the music live, on this massive pipe-welded rotating structure, while a translucent screen between them and the dancers had video effects projected upon it. It was way awesome.

Now, I don’t know very much about dance from any sort of theoretical perspective, but I am that strange sort of person who when confronted with art, feels some sort of a well start filling within him, whether from conscious thought or from elsewhere, which builds until it overflows into his mind, and he is forced to watch, with mind racing and anxiety causing his fingers to tap against the seat, until the intermission, at which point he can run to find a pen and scribble notes of what he is thinking all over the back of the program.

Here’s a bit of that, from what I was able to get down.

The program printed this, about Merce Cunningham and John Cage:

“They came to the conclusion that the two time-based arts should exist independently, occurring in the same time and space but without supporting or being connected to one another in the usual way. Both Cunningham and Cage made extensive use of chance procedures, which meant that not only musical forms but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition-such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax-were abandoned. Cunningham is not interested in telling stories or exploring psychological relationships: the subject matter of his dances is the dance itself.”

All well and good, I thought to myself as I read the words before the performance. I had heard the same thing said about writing before-but these elements are so characteristic of our conscious thought that if we are going to interpret any sort of meaning at all, it must be in terms of cause and effect, directed motion, and by extension, human relationships. There is cut up text to be sure, but the fact that it is “cut up” shows that it had meaning, it has only been obscured or mutilated.

But once the performance began, I was surprised. Most of the dance I have seen live (the good, technical dance) is ballet. Cunningham’s choreography showed me just how much ballet relies upon cause and effect, and psychological relationships. The pas de deux is pure sex. You might, for all intents and purposes, be watching two people engaging in the act of love on stage. You can add one dancer, or take one away, but the sex remains, only the relationship is made more complicated. The male and female dance as classic male and female components, the epic duality, the cosmic pair, the A and B. You can have A, B, AA, BB, ABA, or BBBB, but one is still spelling this body-phrases with the same two letters. We are consigned to writing in the narrative of classical sex, bodies become symbols. It is the endless story, told countless times both with and without words every time a human being thinks of touching another.

Cunningham instead presents his dancers as motion. It is physics, a swarming pallet of vectors, directed in flows around each other on the stage. There is material there-it is not devoid of meaning, or blank substance. But we are no longer watching a story. We are viewing a building, reading a blueprint, or falling into a diagram. It is architectural-he presents cross-sectional images, elevation views, rotational, cartesian, angular phenomena. As I watched his performance, the video images echoed the motions of the dancers, spinning lines and angles above the stage, as the bodies performed excellently, portraying the curves, stretches, fittings, and joints of the body’s frame and range of motion. They did not move like people, who stumble, bend at the waist while sitting and standing, hold their sore points as they struggle for the flexibility they lost in an ancient youth. Those are stories, and these dancers moved in pure physicalities, in possibilities and probabilities of encounter rather than personification of what we know and are able to think.

But still-these are people, directed to act like machines. They are not an assembly line, not an automaton. They are humane, bodily machines to be sure, but their only design has been for aesthetic purpose, to depict a visual, phenomenal scene, not to build or produce unseen within the confines of a factory or site. We are still watching a stage, after all.

Isn’t this the way that we want our machines? We aestheticians of mechanics, who find beauty in the clean lines of a well-made device, or in the subtle depth of a diagram describing a physical form not yet realized. We want our machines to burst outward in exploded view, whirling upon three axes so that we can see and admire the closeness of their components’ motion, the tight fit of the gears, and the quick pace of the electronics converting our clever programs into physicalities we ourselves could never achieve. And more than that-we design new machines in our minds to fill the still-present voids. Rube-Goldberg machines of cause and effect are the easiest, taking our current machines and lining them up into narratives to complete the tasks that still weigh upon our own fragile skins. We name our devices, love them, and love to peek inside to see what they hide from us. How is it that they work? Why do they still fail us? When will the machine come about that will never break, and will do everything, looking beautiful while it whirls about the stage of our imagination?

The function of machines in our lives is always metaphor, always narrative. We do not love our machines for the aspect ratios of their gears, though we might hold these lovely measurements up as the proof of our attraction. We love them because they function; we love them because they mean something to us. Design is never an accident, never natural, and for that, we love it as we wish to love ourselves.

We can’t see the aesthetics of our machines as we would like. They are never as they appear in our minds, or on the blueprints. We want smooth transfers, gentle harmonics, rotational symmetry, and tight, tight belts. Instead we get rusty cam shafts, stuck and broken interfaces, dangerous vibration and pinch points. The male/female connectors are frustratingly non-sexual, despite our designs and naming. There is no good and evil in binary code, no matter how complex we make it, spitting lines of digits fruitlessly to infinity. The clean lines, tempting us with the narrative of non-narrative, that human fantasy of what is beyond humanity, and the repeating regression that will not find a straight line because there is no compound of quadratics able to approach the fundamental instability of emotional ebb and flow-all of these dreams will remain unfilled. Not even robots can live for ever.

There is no truth in metaphor, but still they speak. “What it is like,” is not actually what it is like, but that is the only think that it is like! The dance has music, movement, video, and no words. Still, words come from the dance to the humans who watch it. The dance is not a machine, nor completely human, but it tells a story of machines to us through its mechanical non-narrative.

And in the background, completely separated, Sonic Youth plays ambient, distorted sounds. Distortion is easy to play, but Sonic Youth are the masters. There is aesthetic to it as well, as the sounds ambulates, oscillates, and resounds through what we typically know as music. Is it music, or is it noise? Does it tell a story, or no? Is there really no pleasure in inserting a ¼” jack into an amp?

As they move around the things they refuse to describe, these art forms have an exacting form of a approximation. Definitive cuts, loose measurements, always fitting, because what they are attempting to assemble is not strictly material. The motion of construction, this design on the fly, this performance of the aesthetic principles before our very, un-describing eyes-they move close and around meaning through the means that inspire narrative within us, though not directly representing any to us. They require no symbolic narrative or psychology; they are mere machines. Aesthetic machines-making phenomena.

For us humans, the poorly-functioning, drunk poets of the machine world, this is as close as we get. We call it beautiful.

Open-faced Mushroom Blastocyst – A Novella

by Adam Rothstein

Fungus is a delicious food, but it makes a confusing way of life.  We’re lucky most eschatology is written in books, rather than in the heated course of the blood vessels in our stomachs.

Available in These Editions:

Paperback Version 2.0

This edition of version 2.0 is printed on #20 bond, with an #80 cover stock, and stapled flat, 8.5″ X 5.5″. It totals 61 pages.

OFMB is an experiment in “version” publishing–the idea is that the work is finished, but leaves open the possibility of change in future editions, hopefully with the support and remarks of readers.  You are being invited to enjoy the text, and pass on any comments or criticism you might have, to improve the text and presentation in the future.

Because we are asking your help in this process, we are taking the step of offering the current version, 2.0, for free.  All you need do in return is provide a little bit of feedback to the author about your experience reading the book.  And, throw us a buck for shipping. Sound good?

$1 (practically nothing.)

Digital PDF Format

If perhaps providing feedback sounds like a lot of work in exchange for getting something for nothing, there are also PDF copies available digitally for download here. Available under Creative Commons license, as usual.