I studied literature because I liked it. The contrivance of setting, of the sequence of actions, and the “depth” of characters, all rote for storytelling, seemed to rest upon arbitrary ideas propped up with murder, getting booty, and good old chaos. You needed a time and a place to host plays and sell seats. This is mirrored in the stories. You have exposition, action and resolution. You need a limited amount of people to focus upon capering about the cleared area, nay, raised area, and word spread. You had to limit the characters in a play. In society, you have limited resources, managed by a power structure, but, unfortunately, within the function of a role resided a human being who liked to play, to love, feel, remember, to make art and ceremony, to get booty, and even punch and kick and bite one another.
Word spread. The presses began industrial. Flakes of vellum, of pulp, of ink and binding arts fell beneath a new sky. Thank heavens our world shrank to accommodate the egos that claimed it from one another. They battled, wrote their legacies in the blood of the naked and the dead.
The ages become distilled into compact forms, stackable. It became necessary to pull the camera back. It became to invent cameras that could see the dirty corners of every charmed quark. It became necessary to begin to destroy the page. It became necessary to scale the architecture to the atomic scale.
Feudal society glommed onto dramatic structure because the citizenry, the hive lived in a “great chain of being”. It was so bound to the pursuit of everything “proper” and “good” that it did not see itself as a link in a chain clasped and looped onto itself, a noose. They, these civilizations, swayed on up, like hillbillies to the jug house, drawn like worm grunted from warm loose forest earth, moving into the tempest of its mortal coil. Religion kept the beacon bright. Philosophy, the valiance behind the shield and gavel, gave chase to perpetuity.
They, these other nameless souls, they buried their dead beneath stones with words carved to outlast other names. Names for every moment. Names for every person, every worm that turns it back to earth. Names for every atom, every quantum string. Names for every part of each of all and many. It’s absurd to live within a tree that has infinite levels and no branches. That’s a ring. A name for every ring. And yet, each book claimed for itself a forest. For each epigram, the calumnity of a wit took license to devour a small grove of woods. It asks for this infinity, but we have only this one small world.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Think of characters as having abilities and constraints. The lesser characters have very little to do other than provide an action or word or nudge of event, whereas the protagonist and antagonist feel more and do more. No one wants anyone else to have dimensions that do not aid in self-preservation. Everyone doing the same fucking thing, tiresome.
Egocentric. Our dramas revealed the egocentric constraints that our leaders distilled within our social artifice. Our arts, our religion. This is so difficult for me to describe. The middle ages would have menageries, and we have libraries, but as for brick and mortar, nothing more. Revolution is coming. It will have the shape of the verbs it cannot control with banana smoothies and whirlpools.
In some society, the importance of roles can all but rule a group. It is simulation of a human idea, a way of marshalling forces. A character simulating an action is hobbled by his experiences and proclivities. Say, limiting abilities in number and largesse to the heft of ones ones purse would determine the range of actions. Success and intelligence are not as mutually exclusive as one would think, if one were judging by the current administration. Some people are exceedingly good at hiding from idiot rulers, going rogue, wrecking society.
A name for every scrape, every wound. A name for every relationship, sticking to everything like static electricity.
Quartz and silicon and tourmaline and titanium and copper and hydrocarbons and everything else moving through my empty spaces (intervals of time bound to memories).
The pyramid. The hierarchy. The many supporting the few. These were stories. We built things made of stories. These stories began to communicate through intercultural expressions. International symposiums explored our existence. This has granulated to universal dimensions. Society could not function in a state of anarchy. You needed law and order, with law being interpretations required to understand concentrations of power. Class systems perpetuated these forms. Children were tracked and trended. Adult life was predication of blunt economic forces and childhood effort. Ideal candidates were intelligent and compliant tools.
I still think that preconceptions about human beings are reflected in the topics used to stimulate young minds.
I still think that people are verbs, but it is not in one’s nature to fully define actionable consequences, so it is hard to “name” an individual’s particular complex distinctive way of being which can be assigned a collection of variables, but it is sort of tenuous to assume that every simulated intelligence could act together cohesively at any given moment in an organic way people could perceive. We get pieces of the whole. We have brains, and brains have unknown biases.
What will humanity become through cybernetic evolution? How will it manifest?
Fifty State Banana 