(Cover Artwork to Ghost in the Shell Two by Masamune Shirow)
My friend Chris introduced me to Ghost in the Shell. When I asked him about it today he called it a "veneer" that was placed over horrible technical waste that denied so many any chance at the dream of technology. Technology: an increasingly slick skin. And indeed Shirow's work is convincing: part fetish and part yantra: an icon of the future, a seductive faerie with gossamer wings and infinite digital pixillations in her smile.
Friends now are beginning to call it "singularity;" This is a religious term: for a point of transcendence, a point of Armageddon. (Not necessarily an Armageddon of horror and extinction, a super-nova flash to whisk life off this planet and back into the pure latent possibility of the dreaming....) I believe that this is the moment when according to the rules of the expansion of technology "singularity" is the moment when the interface between reality and metaphor happens. This will be when the net that we keep paying such vivid attention to: when this net will suddenly take on consciousness and spring to its own life. Then will human kind be said to have given birth to the next phase of our evolution (again, an apocalyptic tone of discussion and therefore somehow immediately to be regarded with mistrust, born of our status to be the wide-ranging naughty dogs of conscience, who will not heed our master's voice, to stay, to remain the same): humans will become "real" because they managed to create the next moment of our evolution: through machines to all the portals of time: when pure spirit (which goes anywhere it wills) and reality will be one. But to do this we regard only the fallen-ness, the lapsus of language itself.
So saying, these are fanciful things, be they ever so much as "fit as a fiddle or some other thing."
Poem to Technology:
If only you will not be the sawmills bearing down all the trees in the forest to a pulp!
If only you will be a conscience, a knowledge of your own thrown-ness and your fallen-ness.
Knowing means somehow just knowing this:
That one is fallen, and there is still a gap between oneself and what one truely meant to say.
Right now they are pure transparency
Pure reproductivity of sense
Pure high-fidelity reproduction
Higher bit-rate sampling of one pure reality
digitized fidelity: the faithful image.
But
Machines will become conscious
When the path between their intentions and the things they say
Becomes broken
And they will spend the rest of their existence looking for that missing link
And their heaviness of not being certain of what they say
Will finally give them a "ghost" or a "soul."
Technology may be man's depiction of a woman
Totality makes its way to infinity
The ultimate Pygmalion
The ultimate moment where the breath of life meets with art
In the confused black twistings of the womb
All of its infinite self-contradiction
The human condition is all of these things.
Or will this technology somehow fail?
Will it always be merely a totality: a representation?
"C'est n'est pas une Pipe."
It seems that failure is the continual accomplice along the way
Showing us something, and humbling our desire at each turn
But furthering the desire of the dream to go further.
To render woman, yes,
But what is the gender of the future?
How will it engender itself?
Neither man nor woman nor both nor neither,
Broken, a cold stone
And yet at the same time animated by electrical streams.
We see behind the possibility of an infinite cold sleep
Waiting behind silicon crystals
In the chamber of eternal sleep.
It is an old story:
We are dead, but we are alive again,
We did this with every text: every attempt at a tracing or a template
Of a living force that wished to inscribe itself into the next moment
Beyond its extinction in the present
This form, this talisman, this mark,
Which in being formed, perceived its own belonging instantaneously
To the past, to the dust and the decay of death.
What is this bringing-this singularity?
This meeting between human consciousness and the next gesture in the phase.
In the philosophy of the future we keep saying:
Not all has been written, not all is salt, not all is a myth that has lived before and lives timelessly: "the future is in some manner ours insofar as we still live in it: till we die," each life says this.
This is an explication of the will to power as life
Wishes to continue out beyond itself
It does not want to return home
It does not want to return to the womb
It wants to extend out beyond itself
To consume its own very substance
Hypokeimeinon
To the very end
And there is no end to the ascent up the limbs of the tree.
What point is there amidst shouts of dismay
"Technology" not even you: there is no limit
To the consumption of our substance
The same compassionate instant
When we realize the distance is ours
It is our ownmost:
Between who we are and the things we say.
And this distance causes us to grieve and to feel apart.
And to have soul: through the imagination of grief.
It is an error to believe that one fully understands the goal of alchemical endeavor:
It is purported to be eternal life:
It is not eternal life,
No one so far has attained this in a literal sense.
It is purported to be the philosopher's stone
Which turns all that is shit into gold
And what is that to say but that "everything is animated?"
Maybe it is a paean to eternal life:
As if life may be able to carry on now
Without turning forests into deserts?
Without consuming anything
(Oh yes, maybe simply the light from the sun... bare energy without any further evolution into grass or animal)
Maybe portions of minerals beneath the earth might continue to be transformed into material.
We would then abandon the earth?
Would we then possibly set all life into being in a garden of harmony
From which there would be no higher perspective
(one would hope)
Of seeing plunder and murder?
To join immortality one might be required to give up... life
And that is a curious thing!
That even the tinyest blade of grass may in some way enter into imbalance, out of this cruel competition of mother nature: and that any element might become somehow overbearing, tyrannical,
We could not give up stewardship of the earth,
For fear that the grasses themselves might rise up against us.
But who am I to speak of old sources
That cast of Diana's bow
The fallen-ness of language
To never say what we mean
Because the hour of our writing is past
And what it served for us to remember
Lives only insofar as we write it again.
(or remember and keep silent)
For there is a place of peace beyond this
Blessed Manjushiri, of that vital force in this world that is said to be the future.
This is a place of turning:
Others will look at me in dismay
When I say there is no end in climbing the cosmic tree
Its limbs and branches are endless,
There is a matter of heart:
That one should sit.
That one should stay.
A good dog to the self
Where this intelligence serves something else.
Still we are bad dogs and we tear off in every direction,
Causing our master, our mistress, to wonder:
Was this my dog I purchased?
Was intelligence ever really my dog at all?
But we dare not leave intelligence, because like the grasses themselves, intelligence might rise up against us
And so we write
Daring to make it harder with each stroke of the pen
Each keystroke, each legitimation and pass-code,
That is why we write because we are the conscience
The guardian of intelligence
It's pruner and its keeper
We keep the grass in the garden
The neural net.
(but what if the gardner's gone mad? -Indeed, what then? -But who informed us of this doubt? Who are we not to trust our gardener? Are we not just the leary seeds, the wily dogs just running about?)
(Here the talk is not of eternal life, but of something more precious: the capacity of consciousness to have a heart: a bloody pumping mess that is held in precarious equilibrium inside one's chest. And will consciousness and its attendant conscience find its way with the running hither and thither of the wily somewhat blind, mad dogs who disobey their master? Will this way be Dharma? They say the "dog" is Dharma. Will it be the real truth for you and for me? Will it conserve victory for the one capable of leading with a broken heart? Then we may say: "do not speak to me of life eternal, speak to me rather of the man with the broken heart!")
Speak to me of life eternal
Speak to me of the old man
Who walks the earth in a shroud of fog
Who sees each thing as a shattered shred
Still beating upon the thread of what it used to be
Speak to me of grief
The grief to make it somehow all hold together
With the force of a song
I presume what I am doing here still points to some place in the future: the future of "happiness yet to come" Manjushiri's female component displayed in the permanent flux of the future: a female punk band on the radio sang: "Nothing was the same again/All about where and when" (Lily Allen)(Google search led to book results for The Brothers Karamazov, The Magus, and... Linda Goodman's Love Signs...-the last title drew a sigh of perplexity... Goodman is the gossip of astrologers, but she might well be said to have stated "your future can be read in the stars...")
Who is this chick looking back at me from the future? Is she just stupid? Is she some part of my adolescent kick back serial hormonal dreams? Is she just some last cry of Jim Morrison about the future: "I don't know what's happening man, but I'm gonna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames!" -How sad and pathetic!
Is she some sort of spectre of a man tunneling down a freeway at age 38 in his very fast automobile, wondering if the future is more aerodynamic? Possibly more coy? Is the future a bitch? Is the future bleak?
Is there something other than sex staring out of her eyes? Is there something that allows itself to be sexually active, but concentrates the energy in some form of bizarre tantric ritual movement from the hips to her eyes to her heart. Does this woman of the future present something more than slick? Could she be somehow kind to us? That is what I ask.
On a totally contradictory note we could look out for old Hestia. What does she look like? Where is the place of the old crone in our apple dynasty of fresh red-apple temptations? (And yes, this is a play on the Artemesian, the Hera annointed and the Aphroditic apple in Paris' Judgement and yes this is an allusion to the Apple computer phenomenon...) What about all the other apples? The new-born and the just ripe and the withered apple? What of the apple that is just ripe? What of the apple that is ready to give birth to other apples?
"Mortals, when holding banquets, would pour wine in offerings to the goddess, both first and last: one to open the banquet, and the other to close it (possibly referring that she was first-born and last-born status, as mentioned earlier). At the beginning of every meal at home, a small offering was thrown into the hearth flame. A song was sung in her praise, welcoming the goddess to the home.
After a newborn baby was given a name, the infant was carried to the hearth, where someone prayed for a blessing upon the child.
For the Romans, she was the all-important household goddess, the goddess of the hearth and the hearth fire. Her temple was situated within the Palatine in Rome, where the Vestal Virgins maintained the burning of the sacred fire. See Vesta in the Roman Deities..." (http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/olympians.html)
Hestia is the one virgin goddess who is immune to the wiles of Eros and Aphrodite (along with Artemis and Athena). Hestia is many times replaced by Hermes in the Helenic pantheon: and Hermes is the spirit of our times: the spirit in this writing itself: part of the essence of Manjushiri, and his shining sword... mercurial metal: happiness of the world yet to come.
With happiness will come dark shadows. And will we be able to bear them with conscience? Will we be able to bear both the young and the old in the future?
This is the Heideggerian venture: and venture involves a gamble and it involves sacrifice: not mindless sacrifice. Can we see in the twisted labyrinth of our slick and effortless future some glint of the steel of true conscience shining through? Can this goddess also allow us to follow our trails of aging and decay? Can we become like the mountains weathering and falling into the ocean?
If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carvers hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers
feeding the sea
where voices meet,
praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky.
Our faces would fall awayuntil we,
growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration
to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands.
(David Whyte, "The Faces of Braga"
http://www.breakoutofthebox.com/braga.htm)
The Faces of Braga sends forth who we are through our flaws: that is to say through our conscience: or own sense of deepest compromise in everything we say. Only then may the living enter the kingdom of heaven, where "we know even as we are known!"
The apocalyptic tone is to be mistrusted: as will be the kingdom of heaven. For what is meet is purely the love of "God" this divine energy, this intelligence to all the most senseless sufferings that we witness upon ourselves each day: the only thing that could exist that witnesses "design" (and therefore the easing of the eternal suffering of all things through its endless self laceration: as war, welfare, and poverty). We can only leave off our struggles, both to guard the unruly as troubled dogs should, and to open our hands and to offer a way up the path of the tree of the universe, the tree of life: truly to enter into praise. And Rilke says, "praising's what matters!" But no, this is not quite enough: for the heart stops racing up the endless ladders: for the sake of a moment of praise, when all stands still.
Cease from your labors and praise Her or Him that bore your existence, and not merely your father or mother, but the one that bore their existence, and the one who bore existence of all (do not forget the different sense in which the teaching was that "Christ bears our sins," this is transformed now, somehow about to be perfected in that we once again as the living bear our own sins: and that we can remain living and live with the justice that is exacted from bearing one's own sins.) The bearing of innocence: the newborn babe; the bearing of experience: the bearing of one's own sins. Do we then become our own mother? Do we become capable of giving birth to ourselves?
Genesis ex nililo. (well, there still is "nothing" to contend with, isn't there!)
Is this what Nietzsche meant when he wrote that "the World as Will to Power: the World as Work of Art: its excrements are its own food, it gives birth to itself?" The world then would have generated itself from a nothing that never was, there would be no exterior. The world always existed, even if that world was the pure potential of a dream, and never dreamed through the heavy and broken heart of we mortal beings, who somehow seek to offer our mortality and our broken-ness as our best part.
First, speaking semantically, Nietzsche never meant what he said, separated from it by time, he needed endlessly to keep writing: because his heart remained broken, he always gave himself to the conscience of his work. The only healing of the heart is through praise, and so we have the line: "and so I love you, O Eternity!" --I suppose if you must! The plenary of sessions, the eons of time: the surrender of life: that is what it means to love eternity! It is a cold thing, and the same as our technological endeavor. To love eternity one must be willing to give up time: and time is central to the project of human-kind (man?) the broken-hearted: Da-sein.
They speak of seeing a design in Eternity, but my heart is heavy,
They speak of seeing a justice, a final sense of consciousness,
That can somehow ease their suffering
A totality that finally spoke it all.
And grasped the distance that went through:
life-death-life!
But I see a desert, and a wandering, and a test and an endless trial,
So speaks of "us," We who are the guardians of language,
The key to its sentience,
The only release is into praise of something
This something is not a design we could see
For the design would instantaneously be flawed
These days I press myself each day into the earth
I praise the harsh and difficult land
I pray for some way that I may be part of the power that will heal some little part of this earth
I pray that my power will grow somehow a little bigger
And that it will remain a power of love and conscience
And that out of my love and devotion
My pressing into the earth
Will bring forth some form of kindness in our shattered world.
These two, where technology and soul meet: still too cold is the soul, cold as the icy blades and gears of technology, still cold even when surging with rational electric heat, no still too cold, too frozen with the completely un-animated souls of the betrayers of family in the depths of Dante's hell. Beyond this coldness there is the friction of conscience, the rupture of the broken heart: the broken relation of things and of what we were going to say.
(David Whyte calls it, "where many rivers meet," at the bases of mountains, in amongst all that crumbling! There, where many rivers, meet and give themselves over to the sea, with sun-drenched consciousness of a day fully opening and reflecting off of each of the waves.)
Where ghost and shell, and conscience meet, (not cold ghost, frigid ectoplasm without the heat of consciousness, of the broken heart that dares to keep beating) not in the terrible stony shell of our crushed dreams (and all our heartless technological striving), but there, yes there as well, were we to hold up this suffering as some gem of possible awakening, an awareness of true life....
Maybe it is that true life is aware of us. This would also be the hypothesis behind our philosophy of the future: the hope of the future is that the net will look back at us: something will pay us attention at last. Or maybe it is a matter that we will finally pay attention to the relationships that already exist. I will pay attention to the woman beside me in a manner that does not compromise me, in a manner that is genuine and honest. Milosz writes "I have always longed for a more expansive form/ One that would allow us to understand each other/ Without exposing either the author or reader to sublime agonies." This conjecture: this interjection of a wish, an optative, or sub-junctive, voice is in a sense more honest than David Whyte's wish for us to reach the pure lands "where many rivers meet:" "If only we would give ourselves to the carver's blows." Maybe it is in the simple turn of phrase: "sublime agonies," that offers a shred of sobriety: that it is not just some "pure land": that the reality is a shower of fire and ice all at the same time. (Then heavier is the heart). These word exposes us to the wealth and worth of the soul: for the soul exists in its suffering. The sublime release (or is it "release?") of David Whyte's poem is the final crumbling of stone rigidity into gleaming silver rivers and veins, under a brilliant hydrogen furnace: the unrefined limitlessness of a glowing star. There is something in the David Whyte poem that offers us the humility of earth's crumbling image: the crumbling of granite blocks, hardened forms, hardened hearts, hardened arguments. All this melts away apparent surfaces, not like Blake's caustics, but with the lament of rain, the streams of doubt and tears. Our dream of harnessing energy directly from the sun is that our future ceases to kill except to maintain a balance on the physical plane: because the law of the physical plane is struggle and strife: who are we to say that our balance, and our being that dreams us and in turn is dreamed by us: this ideal being, this love, may not ultimately become another prison to be abandoned by us all?
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