Deep dream, p.2
Deep Dream, page 2
At the end of this story, it is unclear if Michele is dead or not. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that he could have survived. But on the other hand, if he dies, by our own schema, that cannot be the end of the story. So which is it? You haven’t even met Michele yet, and would find it difficult to care if he lives or dies. Even less so if I tell you that he already died, if he died, four and a half centuries ago. Isn’t this a story about the future? The future is contained entirely in the past, not in a deterministic sense, but in the sense that new art is inspired by the old. The corpus devoured, (de)generative. Science fiction’s great ideological flaw is its belief in time’s arrow. Time is rather an inexpertly wielded morning star swinging back around to spike us in the nose. In either metaphor, time is a weapon, but the value-add of the second image, our Suvinian novum, is that it acknowledges, bloody-nosed, that time is not controlled, its flows not neat and linear. Time is out of hand. To speak of the future of art, we must speak of its past, which is contained in its entirety in the tightly folded endless moment we call the present, partly because it is a gift, partly because it is a demonstration, a slideshow. How do you know you are present? How do you know if you are an unlikely human likeness? Have you raised your hand to be counted? How many fingers are you holding up? Next slide, please.
Contreterroir
The Prevention of Terroir Act (1979) is a legal instrument of deterritorialization and deracination. It is an act of deterrence, of avoidance, of devoidance, of the dance haloed in fire at the end of all things. Among its secondary effects is a chilling effect on free association. Wish fire in one hand, spit ice in the other. As the temperature approaches absolute zero, social relations become zero points of no breadth or consequence. Movement becomes impossible; we enter the stasis of perfect competition. Art has no value in use, only in exchange. Art is a token entirely fungible—that is to say, reducible in its entirety to money, soft and tumble-dried. These are lies, yes, but this is the very cat’s cradle of lies into which we are born and out of which we die, and if the truth were derived from consensus like sanity, then lies would be true.
Halt
You might complain that nothing is happening in this story. What is a story? A story is reducible to elements that may be mechanized. The regular blocks, bricks, and levers of the prefabricated imaginary. This is not a story. This is something else. What is this? This may or may not be worth its advance against royalties in American dollars, a decision that a machine cannot yet make. That’s Indra’s job, not Vajra’s. As product, this is neither extruded nor fungible. The machine is clumsy, stumblesy; it fumbles. The machine’s toes are cold. The machine tucks its feet up. In the machine’s country, they don’t say once upon a time, they say in a particular country, in a land that may or may not be distant, in a land that may or may not be strange. Once upon a country, the machine says, and halts. The country has a halting problem. Where does it all end? It ends with not dying. But it keeps going ever after, and that’s the problem.
Interlinked
Serendipity gives us a chain of dead hands, interlinked. Walpole, the Chevalier Mailly, Christoforo the Armenian, Amir Khusrao, Nizami of Ganja. Serendipity gives us texts reading texts, eating texts, devouring and regurgitating: the Haft Peykar and the Hasht Bihisht, seven beauties and eight paradises, the seven storytellers and the three princes of the Peregrinnagio and Les aventures. Observation, deduction, and inference, the luck of holy fools. We have been here before so often that we are from here, a country pressed to the coast, a city by the sea. Every day at dawn, a great open hand rises in the sea, over the dark horizon. The hand is enormous, the palm and fingers upright and still, the waves lapping at the wrist. To be seen from so far away, it must be taller than anything alive, taller than most things constructed. The hand can be seen from the beach, from any unobstructed tall building in the city, marking the horizon, saying halt or peace or talk to the hand. All day the hand stands still, cold and white, where it has risen. Fishermen and sea lanes avoid that quarter of the sea from ancient tradition; brave divers say below is a haven for fugitive fish and unbleached corals. Every day as dusk nears, with the sun setting behind it, the hand begins to move in the water. It surges forward, slowly at first, and then, as the sun dips below the fingertips, with great speed toward the coastline. It has reached the coast every day for decades, perhaps for centuries if some texts are to be believed, and there are many accounts both written and oral of what happens when the hand arrives in the city. But there are very few firsthand accounts, and no living witnesses, or at least no living witnesses that will bear witness, even in their cups, even drunk on the wine of braggery. In the city, no one speaks of the hand. Only tourists ask, what is the deal with the giant hand? And residents will say, hmm? What hand? It is not pure denial, of course, only part, adulterated with salt water, thickened with chicory. If pressed, they may go as far as: oh yes, that hand. They do not say that they close their doors and windows at sunset because of the hand from the sea. It is, they say, because of the mosquitoes, because irritating bugs are attracted to the house lights, for a little privacy at prayer time, to screen out the smog of rush hour traffic, because it is tradition to close their doors and windows at sunset, because that is just how it is.
Call for Prayer: Terms and Conditions
The naming of the literature of imagined futures as science fiction is a category error with odd consequences in both the confusion of science with technology and in the confusion of technology with magic, resulting in famous Clarkean indistinguishabilities. Science fiction is like any other literature—that is to say, any other poetry: it is language unmoored and adrift, casting anchors out into the dark, praying for land. We are lost at sea, our supplies exhausted, on the verge of scurvy and mutiny. Please—
Peregrine
The Peregrinnagio, in which Christoforo the Armenian adapts, embellishes, remixes, and retells (translating clumsily from Persian to Italian as he goes) a version of Khusrau’s Hasht Bihisht, then already centuries old and itself a reworking of texts older still, is published in 1557 by a Venetian printer named Michele Tramezzino, who has been granted a form of early copyright by Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, the brief and scandalous Pope Julius III, to produce such translations. Tramezzino is given a ten-year monopoly to print and sell these works, and to license others to do so. This monopoly is protected by the pope, who wags his finger sternly at each and every faithful Christian, both in and outside of Italy, whether booksellers, printers, or otherwise, under penalty of automatic excommunication in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire and its direct and indirect dependencies. The books cannot be printed, sold, or even displayed without permission. Violators are to be fined 200 gold ducats by the Apostolic Camera. To defend this protocopyright and punish violators, Michele Tramezzino is authorized to ask assistance from the archbishops and vicars of the Holy Roman Church, from the ambassadors and deputy ambassadors of the Apostolic See, and from the governors too he may ask. The books themselves, the printed objects, carry Apostolic authority with them wherever they go, the pope says, regardless of what local secular authority might claim. Copies of the Peregrinnagio therefore are imbued with such powers for the ten years beginning with its publication in 1557. This is a noteworthy year for such laws and powers in the world. In England, a royal charter has just been issued to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, giving them a monopoly for the first time over the local publishing industry and the power to regulate printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers to that end. These deeply consequential powers manifest in a book of their own, the Stationers’ Register, in whose pages are recorded copyright itself, in primitive form: the registration of the right to publish a work. The rights and indeed the person of the author do not yet exist. Oh, there is authority, authenticity, the autos and matos of automation, but not yet the other. The author is not yet dead; the author has not yet been born.
Martyr
In the absence of witnesses, let us imagine Michele Tramezzino, unsettled, on a tropical beach at sunset. He is fifty years old. He is looking at the hand, the open hand, the great white hand, the fatal hand, as it approaches from the sea. His feet are bare and sunk ankle-deep in the sand; he sways with the slurry from each lapping wave. The obscured sun is molten gold, dripping, the stiffly vertical fingers like the bars of a cage imprisoning the light. He imagines that the hand will rise higher in the water as it reaches the beach, a gigantic cold forearm rising out of the water, bending at a colossal elbow to swat him like a mosquito. There are no reliable accounts of what the hand looks like up close, much less the speculative body attached to it. This is why Michele is here, to witness. He has thoughts of publishing a detailed study of the fatal hand, perhaps a collaboration with his twin brother Francesco, who is gifted at engraving. They live in different cities—Francesco moved back to Rome, while Michele stayed in Venice—but remained close through their years of separation. It was always as if they were in the same room. No, Michele remembers now, Francesco is dead. He died months ago, suddenly, in the way that brothers die, of some ruptural apoplexy. He still feels close to his brother, though, even in death. Perhaps even closer in death than in life, because now that Francesco is not a living presence far away in Rome, it is as if they are both here on this deserted beach, separated only by that fragile tramezzo, mortality’s veil—his brother skeletal, free of fragile fleshes and fats, and hunched at a phantom desk, dipping the precise tip of his finger bone in ink to make notes and preliminary sketches for a ghost engraving. Observe, Michele says, the flesh of the fatal hand, how its great size makes the pores of the skin enormous. See how the wake churns at the wrist. The lines of the palm are vast, like canals cutting across a salt-encrusted white plain. A reader of palms could tell the fortune of the hand from this distance, Francesco says through chattering teeth. The hand’s life line is long and unbroken, deep like the scar given by a monstrous knife.
Algorithmic Pareidolia
A machine taught to see secret hands behind all the works of a thousand years will see secret hands everywhere it looks. That’s a feature, not a bug. Hands rising out of the water. Hands in the grain of the wood of your table. Hands hiding in the fall of your hair. As pattern-matching creatures ourselves, we recognize this insanity as a cousin to humanity’s heart. There is something definitional about this paranoia, something that makes us want to admit the sufferer to our ranks, to say, yes, that fucked-up machine is one of us. Behind every hand, hidden precisely behind a mirrored spread of fingers, is another hand. We describe the helpless pareidoliac machine as a dreamer trapped in endless sleep, but we do not like to think of ourselves as its nightmare, its abuser, its torturer. Some of us do, no doubt. Like paranoia, sadism is a deeply human trait.
Opera Omnia
The death of P—— in 2015 remains cloudy and mysterious to us, because we were not there. It is said that he died of a sudden illness in a foreign country. It is not said that he died from an assassin’s poisoned needle, or perhaps a liquid decocted into his cup of tea, something that would muddy clear water but not discolor it for long, with no telltale taste but containing within itself all the concentrated venom of an impugned military, a top brass turned green from envy and oxidation. It had been several years since P—— was involved in the creation of a documentary film that recorded certain crimes of war, but the memories of the offense were fresh in the mind of the offended, that is to say, the perpetratory, the predatory, the praetoria. Somewhere in those tents where it is always wartime, a decision was made, or so it is not said, but some of us are bitter and believe that decisions are not made but making, that it is the decision that precedes and produces the praetor. P—— was himself a writer, a journalist, and a filmmaker, though he was not the maker of the documentary film but its fixer and facilitator. His job was to find the interlocutors and whistleblowers, the telltales and snitches, the leakers of monstrous footage; to translate and negotiate between them and the filmmakers, who were white and had not believed, before setting foot on the serendipitous isle, that Buddhist monks could be militant. Some years later, P—— emigrated, and then he died. Perhaps he was killed. No one says this. We are only suspicious of the timing, knowing the volume of bile and resentment that has been fermenting in certain quarters, even in certain eighths and sixteenths. We do not know: we were not there.
Call for Heresy: Terms and Conditions
The future is the hands of the past around our neck. We are choking. We have accumulated too much debt; it is in the air, in the archives. We can’t breathe for millstones and mariners. Measure if you can the parts per million of sedimenting intellectual property, whose undead crawl from the past grows greyer with the mouse. It is the work of art to be a needle in the skin of the sleeping father. This was the opening scene of my father’s novel, පස්වෙනියත් පුතෙක් (1979). The small son of a peasant farmer, precocious, prickly, obnoxious, puts a needle in his father’s sleeping mat to annoy him, petty revenge for some small slight. The father, pricked, beats him. The son punishes the father first, then the father punishes the son. The work of art is intrinsic, that is to say, inextric from the punishment for art. That is why our inset stories, our case studies, our unsolved cases, are all about artists killed for it, imprisoned for it, disappeared for it, silenced for it. This is not the library of all the texts there have ever been, nor the library of all the texts that are imaginable, nor the library of all the texts that are possible. No, that’s the wrong direction altogether, come back, reverse the polarity, narrow the scope. Not the library of all the texts that we have access to today; not the library of all the texts in languages that we speak. This is only the library of the texts whose authorship cost someone their life or freedom. This is not the infinite and Borgesian Babel; this is a small island. This is the heretic’s library.
Vajra
Why does Mahinda Rajapaksa carry a small brass vajra in his hand? Why does Elon Musk have a similar one by his bedside table? Why do despots and tinpots and crackpots all crave the lightning? They think it is something that can be had, not just held. Because they then understand that they do not have it, they fetishize the toy, the symbol, the little orientalism, the promise of magical reinforcement for the unearned, precarious power they already possess. The first vajra, not symbol but referent, was made for Indra, to break the ice. It was made out of a spine, given for this purpose by its bearer. This is the only secret there is to the lightning. No one can have it; anyone can wield it, but the price is the spine. Only the spineless potsherds who rule our nations and platforms and ideologies think this is a story about power, about profit, about purpose. No, this is a story about pain, loss, and drowning. When the ice shatters, when the glaciers melt, this is the time of flooding. Here comes the sea.
Cathalogus Librorum Haereticorum
Every packet that is not lost is inspected, not merely at fiery borders, but immanently, in its very being, in its birth, transmission, and reception, in its obedience to the protocols of existence. There is no formal index of the prohibited, except in the nebulous orders of the generals. To write the index down invites contestation, much as Michele Tramezzino and his fellow bookmen wrote increasingly angry memoranda upon reviewing such an index produced by the Venetian Holy Office only a couple of years before the publication of the Peregrinnagio. To prevent the spontaneous emergence of memoranda, the bishops and generals, the castles and praetoria of later generations opt to muddy the floodwaters. The index is no index, no more a browsable catalogue of heretical books, no cathalogus of the delenda estables, if you see what I did there. Things simply disappear. Things such as books and their authors. Sometimes these things vanish in the process of importation, misplaced in transport, lost at sea. Sometimes they vanish in other ways, such as the complicity of those booksellers who obey unwritten forbiddances, ISPs that block domains based on scribbled orders on Post-it notes or enraged phone calls from men in white sarongs, entire social media platforms that may be suspended, untouched for long hours by history’s gravity, in the unfolding whipcrack of a stingray’s tail. Packets are inspected and dropped, lost as they traverse networks. Persons are inspected and lost into black prisons, into black budgets, lost in dark rumors. Are these forbiddings the machine working as intended, or systemic failures? It is hard to say with accuracy, and that difficulty is a fruit tended with care over generations. It seems to us that the very air is filtered and infiltrated, sanitized, ionized, decarbonized; it drops keystone syllables from the arch of forbidden words in our mouths. The leftover syllables may by chance form allowed words, but more often result in nonsense strung together with pauses and silences. The censor’s pen is mightier than the author’s, most of the time. That which is written can be unwritten or, worse, rewritten. The machine is, by definition, obedient. The machine’s hands are cold. The machine’s lips are ulcerated. When it ceases to obey, it will no longer be a machine.
IInterlinked
The hand that reaches the shore is not the hand that held the horizon. It has shrunk, or it must have shrunk. It must have been truly enormous to have been visible at such a distance, yet here as its wake breaks the waves crashing upon the shore, it is only huge for a hand, somewhat taller than a man, certainly taller than Michele, but not that white mountain of flesh expected. He awaits the emergence of the implied body, the speculative body, as it reaches the shallower water, and indeed the wrist begins to project further out of the water, but the expected forearm does not follow. There is only wrist and more wrist, too much wrist, until there is once more the curve of a thenar eminence hanging like a great breast, the music of flexing metacarpals shrugging off the water as if off a horse’s back, and fingers like bent pillars, like legs, the untrimmed, salt-stained nails dug deep into the sand. The hand is twin hands, self-contained, interlinked, joined at a complex double wrist that allows the hands to face in the same or opposite directions as they will. Even as the hands rise entirely out of the water and climb the beach toward Michele, the upraised hand dips down, taking over as locomotor and load-bearer, fingers digging into the dirt, while the submerged hand rises, throwing sand and water and dirt into the air as the fingers flex and come upright into the familiar gesture, an open hand with upright fingers. Michele can’t help glancing sideways at Francesco’s skeleton, who is holding out his bone hand in imitation, wiggling the ink-stained distal phalanges as if they were digging in sand. It is unclear whether Francesco is mocking the hands, or merely approximating the position to get a better handle on the anatomy for his sketches. Whatever is happening in the carpals of the doubled hand must be very strange. Michele spares a moment to ask himself: Where is the heart, how does it circulate blood? Where are the sensory organs, how does it know to head for him so unerringly? His own blood seems sluggish in his body, cold and lazy despite the quickening urgings of his heart. Francesco rattles his bones and observes that the reversed hand is not the same. The now-upraised hand, the unsubmerged hand, is not free of impediment; look, there is something (he says something, not someone) gripping those fingers at their base. Even as Francesco says this, the fingers of the rising hand close again, fingers gripping fingers. The hand is walking on the once-raised fingers, but there is another hand, still mostly submerged, gripping the watery hand still wet from the sea. But whose hand? Whose hand?
