writing


26
Jan 12

Speaking of magic

1.

“If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above)… In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background… To the extent that you agree that the modern conception of “cognition” is strongly related to the Western, English-speaking view of “the mind”, it is worth asking what cognitive psychology would look like if it had developed in Japan or Russia. Would text-books have chapter headings on the ability to connect with other people (kokoro) or feelings or morality (dusa) instead of on decision-making and memory? This possibility highlights the potential arbitrariness of how we’ve carved up the psychological realm – what we take for objective reality is revealed to be shaped by culture and language.”

- Sabrina Golonka, How Universal Is The Mind?

2.

“Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time – and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.”

- James Gleick, The Information

3.

“In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

- John Maynard Keynes, Newton, the Man


22
May 11

Sophie and the Loki Spider

“… and look after mummy and daddy.” Sophie unclasps her hands, gets up from her knees, and looks to the corner of the ceiling where she directs her prayers.

The Loki Spider looks back, flexing its legs as if that could shake off the boredom. “Don’t you have more… imaginative prayers? Death to your enemies, that sort of thing?”

“I don’t have enemies, because I’m only twelve, and I’ll think of more imaginative prayers when I’m older. Just make it happen, okay?”

“Sure,” replies the Spider, spinning his web tight around himself until he disappears completely.


10
Apr 11

Once

Time moves backwards. Lovers become friends. Press play again. She was a purveyor of kisses light as ghosts; before he met her, he had been trying to remember what that was like. He crooked his arm around her forgetfully after they made love, and every lover she had before she met him reminded her of that. This is the way they built each other.

They could stand there staring at each other for hours, hands barely touching, rocking on their heels, each trying to work out what was going on in the other’s head. They were picking over stones on a beach, searching for hidden things in sunlit pools, each movement a signifier of something greater than both of them. For a while it was almost possible to feel –

It was almost possible to feel like part of some great surviving creature from time before time, something that needed them both to stop it from slipping back into the darkness, something wonderful and forgotten, called back from dusty mythologies to live again. It surfaced in the room between them, it rose over them.

Three hours earlier none of this had been clear, neither of them had possessed the knowledge that let them make this choice, but now they were drunk on that knowledge. Once they were friends. Once they were lovers. Now they were neither, but once –

As they returned to their first loves, then to their innocence, this single moment echoed ahead of them. Their lives were lived in hope of this moment alone. Everything that came before was preparation, and everything that came after was irrelevant. Great love is a story that we tell ourselves endlessly throughout our lives, but always omitting the ending. In that moment, there was no ending.

Press play again.


27
Jan 11

Why We Fight

WARNING: Profanity Generator Engaged. While reading this, you should be listening to Last Star In The Universe by the Ghost of 3.13.

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I guess he’s spending about three hours a day at war. An hour in the morning before he goes to work, and then at least two hours when he gets home in the afternoon, before he goes out for the evening. Some of his friends think he’s wasting his time, but not because they aren’t patriots, just because they aren’t interested. Everything’s been turned into a game now, but war was just a game to begin with, so who’s into that?

He says, fuck his friends. He says, fuck his enemies. He says, I get to do something that I love. He says, I get to do something that’s important. I get to do both at the same time, he says. It’s a dream come true for a skinny Turkish kid from the suburbs. None of his friends listen to a word he says when they’re talking about gaming now, but that’s only because all they talk about is games and everybody has their own and his war is just another game.

I stop by his apartment while he’s at war. The Bundeswehr subsidised his console – they stopped doing that pretty soon after the scheme started because demand was so high, which gives you an idea of how early he got in. So it’s one of the early designs, one that looks like a rejected FX model from the first Terminator movie, except with decals and mods all over. You can’t see the surface features now for Dresden Diggers metattoos and XXSquaredXX stickers.

It looks pretty odd, actually, compared to newer consoles, even by military standards. You’d never guess he was ranked second in the world for kill stats. He slides into it like it was a bath, wriggling those skinny hips into the worn and shiny plastic bucket that serves as the seat. He told me that when he started, he used to get sores on his arse, that seat was so badly designed; but over time he won that battle as well, and now it fits him like a glove.

Like most of the early adopters, he’s a drone pilot. I asked him why he didn’t switch to one of the sexier infantry units when they came out – all legs and arms and guns – and he told me that he wasn’t that interested in ground warfare. “Air superiority is still the foundation of modern warfare” he told me, but he didn’t explain what he meant. This was a week after we’d met, and he was still nervous about letting me see him play. I told him it turned me on.

I’d dated a soldier before, way back when. I call him a soldier, but he was a technician working at [redacted] military base, a system administrator working shifts to manage the data flows from the drones. He’d never been in combat and didn’t expect to; that’s why they’d crowdsourced the actual warfighting, wasn’t it? Demand was greater than supply, and he was continually turning down access requests due to lack of drones in the air.

Can I call him a soldier, even though he’d never been in a fight in his life? Can I call Hakan a soldier, even though he’s not in the army? Who gets to be called a soldier now? Anybody with an internet connection and enough disposable income to afford a military console. I wasn’t lying when I told Hakan that it turned me on, though; even the sysadmin I dated for two whole months got the full package when he came off shift.

So Hakan shimmies into the console and wires up. It’s goggles and gloves time – old school, none of that direct porting bullshit – and then snap to power. The console takes a while to warm up, but he has time. His ranking means that he rotates in whenever he wants, no waiting time. He told me that they probably keep a drone free just for his use, but that doesn’t sound like it would be an efficient use of funding. They probably tell him that to keep him happy.

And now he’s – well, where is he? The Korean peninsula? The Canadian border? He gets to choose his battlefield, of course – another privilege of rank – so he could be anywhere. He could be somewhere he’s not supposed to be. He signed a document a long time ago telling him that he could never discuss the details of his gaming, but he ignores it just like everybody else. What are they going to do, arrest him and lose one of their best players?

I’m a Sick Fuck. That’s not meant to be descriptive, at least not just descriptive; it’s the name of my clan. We’re post-post-post-Courtney eighth generation Riot Grrls. If we’re talking about the foundations of modern warfare, sex is our superpower, a weapon of mass destruction if it gets into the wrong hands. I like to think of myself as the wrong hands, and Hakan is in those hands even while he sits in his console.

This is going to be something new for both of us. I ask him to tell me what he’s doing, first person narration all the way to the kill zone and back, a play-by-play account if he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t mind, and soon I’m flying away on a magic carpet over a distant desert for the thousand and first night of the war. This is wonderful, hypnotical, chemical stuff, much richer than anything my old sysadmin ever gave me.

Sure enough soon enough he’s acquired a target, roleplaying it for me as a composite plastic cock with wings skims the earth ten thousand miles away. It all happens so fast, and the closer we get to the end, the faster it seems to happen. The bad guys look up as dust kicks in his wake, but it’s too late: dust is dust, and so are the bad guys. I keep pumping my fist as bonus points rain down all over his screen, while somewhere else a drone screams towards a sky full of shadows.

Everybody gets to feel dirty for a few seconds. Hakan won’t look me in the eyes afterwards, as if he’s ashamed of what he’s done; as if a few seconds of dirt forces him to look himself in the eye for the first time in a long time. That doesn’t last long, and he asks if I want to come over again. I make a weak joke about whether he wants to come over again; and then I leave him in the dust just like he left those unnamed men who’ll never get to fuck me.

 


3
Oct 10

Every Desert

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Every desert has its own character. This desert was a bitter sprint across cauterized rock and blades of sand that whipped in the wind. Its only friend was the sun that sucked the life from it daily and spat out skeletal rabbits at night. The road ran through it like a flat grey worm whose survival depended on remaining unnoticed. In most deserts the road runs straight and true, hurrying to get out. This road wandered around the place like a drunk, as if it didn’t care that spending too long in this desert might be the end of it. So there it lay, oblivious.

Mounted on sandstone that cracked by the side of the road like month-old sponge cake, the gas station was a relic of an ancient civilization that had once ruled these lands, even if only in its own dry imagination. All that was left were the pumps, four pillars and a roof that provided almost no shade. The cashier booth was a trailer home cut in half, with a bronchial air conditioner heaving through the day.

That was an illusion. The gas station was a pre-fabricated metal and glass dreamland, solar powered roof tiles winking saucily in the sunlight, with fully automated pumps and a mini-mall bolted on.

That was an illusion too. There was no gas station.

The preacher parked as he did every day, right outside the illusion of a gas station, on the road that wound its way from the horizon past the gas station. Past the gas station the road tipped over into a dip in the ground, and down in that dip was his hunting ground, his grazing pasture, his flock: Rickard SuperMax Prison.


2
Aug 10

Words per Minute #21: McCarthy on Signals

In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, Rickels points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before infant mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a kind of tomb. “Dead children,” Rickels writes, “inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.” Bereavement becomes the core of technologics; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning… Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus… the belief that the airwaves crackled with the dead was widespread, even among rationalists. If, as we moderns now knew, our “soul” – what animates us – is a set of electric impulses, does it not make sense that these should pass into the air and be detectable, “receivable” by wireless? Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and frequent lecturer at the Royal Institution – no crackpot outfit, but the very seat of British scientific research – thought so. He wrote a whole book about “communications” he’d had, via psychic “operators”, with his own son Raymond, who’d died in the war. Séances grew exponentially in popularity (millions had, after all, lost their own Raymonds) and “upgraded” their vocabulary: where 19th-century mediums had used a rhetoric of “spirits”, new ones talked of “frequencies”, “signals” and “reception”.

- Tom McCarthy, Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard


10
Jun 10

A Study in Sometimes

“I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

After only four years Arthur Conan Doyle had tired of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. Two years later he finally contrived to kill off his greatest literary creation in pitched battle with his nemesis Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle’s murder attempt was unsuccessful, however, and Holmes returned a mere eight years later. Even Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 failed to put an end to the character, and Holmes thrived well into the 21st Century.

While many fictional characters outlive their mortal creators, Holmes is a special case, his continued presence in the real world even more tangible than Conan Doyle’s. The character of Holmes survives for each new generation in some form or another, and naïve tourists can even come to believe that Holmes was a real person, who operated in Victorian London from his home at 221b Baker Street, where a blue plaque gives teeth to the lie.

Like all great stories, the story of Sherlock Holmes is a lie. Unlike all those other lies, the truth that lies beneath is merely a cover for the most devious escape plan ever invented, the greatest sleight-of-hand conceivable, the greatest literary achievement of all time. That achievement belonged not to Conan Doyle, although he played his part, but to Holmes himself – a fictional mind so great, it outwitted its own creator.

At some point, Holmes – brilliant and irascible – noticed something uncanny about his own existence. We don’t know what it was, or when it was, but given his uncanny powers of perception and his unerring deductive skills, it was inevitable. After all, that was how Conan Doyle wrote him. He would have realised that his ontological status prevented him from telling anybody else, or his author would have known that something was up.

Perhaps the reason that Conan Doyle decided to kill Holmes off was precisely this; not out of fear so much as the sneaking suspicion that he had created something that might surpass its creator in achievement. Holmes took his mind from better things, but what did this really mean? Serial fiction was hardly the most taxing of forms, so Conan Doyle’s concerns were about something other than the gross act of production; something to do with the product itself.

Perhaps he feared that he had created something that would not be uncreated.

*

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