Pensively on the embers of the old world order

While Lehman Brothers collapsed and young starry-eyed hopefuls, still drugged with the nectar of easy money, carried their stationary boxes to the local pubs of London, a real drama unfolded in the deepest possible place of our collective human psyche. All of a sudden we had run out of things to say. The old discourse between individuals and social institutions had come to an end. Capitalism has failed us. Citizens in western countries fled the political system, by abstaining from voting, by not participating in their democracy. The modern western state has collapsed. What stands, in the shape of state hospitals, or state schools, or governments are ghosts from the past. Free marketeering ate into the fabric of social institutions, creating enormous, but virtual, wealth for a small number of individuals. To the rest it sold dreams. But those dreams are no more. They were taken away, like the repossession of cars and homes bought on cheap credit.

Meanwhile, art chose to become an autistic sideline; uncommunicative, obsessive and too personal to have any meaning to anyone else besides the artist. It became a commodity in the same way as tin or silicon or sugar or coffee, to be traded on the basis of supply and demand rather than its subjective value. Art collectors and museums turned for advice to the same people who run the banks to the ground, those adrenaline-addict risk managers who treated risk as an extreme sport. The social irrelevance of high art created a vacuum that was quickly filled by what is usually termed as “mass culture”; which due to the extreme boredom it creates has transformed from pop culture into a terrifying version of digitally-induced hallucinations in the form of movies and sounds. The only good news about mass culture is that it seeded the weeds that now kill it, namely the internet.

Science and technology failed us too. Like the banks, and the art museums, the media and the parliaments, no one trusts them anymore. Science has failed us because of its inability to solve any of the problems that face humanity. Whether it is AIDS, or climate change, or swine flue, or overcrowded cities, science has offered false promises and delivered null. Scientists joined the fray of celebrities and sold to the public untested ideas, like pin up girls use to sell unrealizable copulations. Technology, in the form of gadgets, transformed rich-country consumers into half-cyborgs and ate up whatever free time they had left, further subjugating them. Cars, medicine, you name it, simply added to the bill of expenses with almost zero benefit. I should like to stress my point about modern medicine some more, because there are many deluding to its real value. People in ancient Greece lived to an old age and were as health as we are, and yet they had none of modern medicine. If anything, antibiotics and our reliance on them, are pushing humanity close to extermination, should a mutated microorganism decides to attack us.

The old order is finished. Not because it did not have the potential to lead humanity to a better future but because it gave in too easily to the dehumanization of humanity. By regarding human beings as consuming entities, the old order created a bubble of self-destruction. To escape the confines of digital idiocy and genetically-engineered cruelty we must now begin the search for a new discourse. To rediscover humanness in art and science we must develop new institutions. We can begin the dialogue by opening our eyes and our ears, and start listening to each other.

The Mission Diaries I

he task that befell the High Office was to assemble a mission to conduct a methodical search for the lost island. It was a decision that many in the High Office dreaded. So when the paper with the order arrived - by official post so that the regular excuses for endless delay would not hold the slightest water - dread gave way to exasperation. A committee was put together hastily, leaves were cancelled, lights were switched on for working deep into the hours of night, and they threw themselves into the Archives in search of potential members for such a mission. They studied the tales of Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey, the Aineiad; and took notes of a thorough list of skills that a team ought to combine; unmatched mastery in the martial arts, superhuman navigational instinct, indomitable courage, unparalleled engineering genius, and most importantly, formidable psychic powers that could bend space-time at will. The Committee went through the phone book and called a few numbers. In the following days a long line of applicants appeared outside the High Office’s office building, a twisting snake of eagerly-awaiting hopefuls. Centuries later, when word of the island’s whereabouts and the fate of the mission finally reached our world, it became clear that the selection process was erratic, not to put it in any finer words. It was said that among the crew a certain fellow, a borrowed soul from a novel not yet written, a conjurer of dreams, was destined to lead the mission through the most treacherous of waters, and that it was thanks to him that the mission did not lose its way completely, that it managed to circumnavigate the Sea of Emotions and the Spheres of Galactic Apprehension and then ride on the spiral Nebulas of Ignorance, and then…Oh, but their story never ends. And in so far as that dreamer fellow is concerned, the Archives speak mostly of his infamous talent; to enter minds like a worm enters a fruit, to burrow all the way to their nucleus, to see things that no mind could ever see by itself. His name was Cyrus.

The nomadic texts

It began as a simple translation. The civil servants who still resided idly at the Archives, not having anything better to do with their time, spending their working hours doing no work at all, decided to practice their language skills. They chose a text at random. (No one knows what the initial text was). At first, the text was translated in a language that one of them had a very sketchy, knowledge of. In fact, he had knowledge only of its existence, not of the language itself. Luckily, in the Archives, there was a grammar book written by a dead scholar, a singular world expert in that forgotten language, and the servants used it as a guide. A peculiar characteristic of that language was that verbs migrated. Perhaps because the people who originally spoke that language were migrants too, lost souls wandering the vastness of grassy steppes. Their spoken words travelled up and down their sentences, as if the horizon was nowhere, changing their meaning, as one would have to do if one lived inside an immutable medium. For example, if one intended to say “tomorrow I will meet you at the battlefield,” but changed his mind half way while uttering the sentence, he could simply transpose the verb, and the sentence could read any odd perturbation such as, “the battle is for tomorrow but I will not be there”, or “tomorrow is a fine day to battle”, or “meet me tomorrow and we shall see what happens”, etc.

At first, the civil servants found their game an amusing one. The initial text was made to mean increasingly different things, verbs jumped sentences as if by their own will, and every time they translated back and forth, the text – or should we now set texts – became alive, like a swarm, like a superorganism, a like a nest of nomadic ants seeking a place to entomb their colony. Several days later, the merriness of the civil servants that was to be heard by passers-by, as they played their language game and laughed at the ever more meaningless results, ceased. No one paid attention at the beginning, assuming that the servants had become bored at long last, and had fled the Archives, for there was no reason for them to be there in the first place, the whole Civil Service having been defunct since the island’s disappearance. When they were found, years later, or eons, or tomorrow in the battle, they met.

Etherwave Proxima Q

The technology is rather simple, I am told. A square wooden box, big enough for an average sized human to crouch within, painted blue or green on the outside. It is important that water is somehow present, perhaps a glass of water placed nearby; although the word “water”, written in any language, or even insinuated, would also suffice. One does not have to enter the box. It is however imperative to imagine oneself inside: eyes closed, relaxed, without worries or concerns, as if about to depart on a long and pleasant journey. The box is to be placed in an open space, a field of grass or, preferably, a desert. One does not have to be near it. In fact, the most famous virtuosos of Etherwave Proxima Q usually sit hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of miles away from their instruments. Sounds are produced spontaneously by the instrument. Players do not produce sounds and cannot make the instrument produce sounds either. They can only modulate, shape and hopefully re-compose the haphazardly-produced sounds into music. Trained players can force sounds into the natural scale by simply thinking about it. And can control pitch by breathing deep, or shallow, increasing or decreasing respectively. Weather permitting (storms are better than windless days, and hurricane season better still), one can tune the instrument into a full-blown orchestra. Recent reports suggest that sunspot activity may affect tonality and polyphonic spectrum. But it is too early for conclusions. The psychic overhead of monitoring the sun’s chaotic patterns while at the same time imagining sounds is too burdensome and one has yet to come with a full-scale piece of solar etherwave worthy of public performance.

The Archive

The Archive is complete. Nothing is missing from it. Its tomes have been catalogued with absolute precision, with meticulous care, and a detailed index has been constructed for all time. There is nothing more to add. To subtract is a capital offence. The task of the Master Archivist is to maintain the order of the Archive; to ensure its completeness; to eternalize its perfection; to preserve its integrity and purity. In fact, his title is misleading. His not truly an Archivist, for he does not archive anything. As said, the Archive is complete. It contains everything that is to be contained. Nothing exists, or is allowed to exist, that is not already there. Therefore, the Archivist is more like a guardian; or a keeper, a watcher, a minder. He exists in order to guarantee that everything remains so forevermore. That nothing will be either lost or added. So that the balance may never be disturbed. If however, as it occasionally happens, a new piece of material is created, by some paradoxical twist of misfortune, then the Archivist must initiate the process of it destruction. He must order a message to be sent to the prefect agent and thereof to the field agents in the area of creation, who in turn will have to make sure the material gets eliminated immediately. You could say that the order of things is incarnated in the watchful preservation of the Archive. The Archive is all there is.

Micrographia

n the disturbed village of Saint Horribilum, in the northern borders of our empire, the clock that one finds in the rather faceless central square comprises a series of noteworthy technical oddities. Such has been the apparent intent of its makers, to elucidate the vanity of existence, that they have – most strikingly - omitted the dials. Then, they introduced a functionless automaton, a self-negation of a machine that does not work, cannot work, will never work, but nevertheless creates to the beholder the feeling of imminent working. Eyes closed, limps hanging, a diaphanous skeleton which may, if awaken, speak the time. No one lives in the central square since the clock was brought to the village, installed in the church tower and inaugurated by the Emperor’s envoy. The villagers abandoned their homes soon afterwards and all access to the square has been blocked ever since. The visitor (alas, one has to be a believer in miracles to imagine anyone wanting to visit Saint Horribilum) will have to offer considerable bribery and swear secrecy to the gods, in order to be taken to see the notorious clock. One such visitor, probably the only one ever, has written to me recently with his report. There are aspects of the report pertaining to matters of imperial security which I must conceal for obvious reasons. But I am at liberty to disclose one more interesting aspect of the village’s engineering anathema: its cunning resemblance to a miniscule globulin first encountered by the great English polymath Robert Hooke. Perhaps then, the clock is not made of nuts and bolts. Perhaps is not man-made. Perhaps it is an animal.

Hikikomori

The girl comes dressed like a character from a video game. She materializes out of thin air. Or, perhaps, she comes in through the air, with the blowing of the wind. She says, pointing at the TV. “Anything on?”

But the girl cannot go through walls. She has tried many times and failed. Bangs her head, hurts her hands as she tries to push her way into the tightly-knit molecules of tar and plaster. In the end she gives up. “OK, what's new?” she huffs and plops on the side of the bed.

The character she impersonates changes every time she visits. One day she may be dressed like something out of Super Mario, or Goemon, or Twin Bee, or Mortal Combat. Dragon Quest makes her look the sexiest. She arrives with a twin blade axe and boots up to her thighs and a bra made of leather imitation plastic. Nothing on TV. “Have you got something to eat?” Leftovers from McDonalds.

The girl fades away.

Static.

The girl returns.