proprioception's shifted
in uncanny valley, a quantum tweak
is a fool's mirror
whose beast is it ?
man's god's made,
or mine, sick as it seems
empathy's the killer here
appropriation's fake
that's the sick soul of an alien
that is
shift
it
god
i don't want it
in this instance
please
don't
love it ? not canny
god though you walk in the valley
get out of those fucking eyes
I want to begin in the present, so if it seems at times too far away remember this : My present is not your present, yet here we are.
And I want to begin in a place we did once and might yet call home, a place still shaped by our basic human needs, desires, instincts, including that of intellect and the artful manipulation of culture. How basic is that? Tribal hierarchies, communal constructs of will constantly manipulated and maintained, or dismantled, abandoned, left to decay. All our marks are there in the lines and shapes of this place. You cannot yet discern them because it is still night.
But look, in the dark there is a lighted room where a girl sleeps at this and that moment and she is both light and dark to our eyes like the pulse with which she seems to sing herself a name, Alala. Perhaps when she wakes a phoneticist might, in due course, glean particles of substance in the sounds she makes. Atoms. Molecules. The grammatical building blocks of meaning, a syntax ascribed, imperfectly as ever, through the semiotic lens of our perception.
But the phoneticist has not yet started her shift, for now there is just the young doctor, the hospital chaplain, and the girl who sleeps and breathes alala to the translucent shell of screens arranged about her bed ...
Some kind of activity, you say?
Some kind of, yes. Look at the read-outs.
Ah yes. So what does it mean?
I'm not sure. That's why I called you in. Now look at the girl.
She seems peaceful enough.
That's an awful lot of activity for one sleeping girl, wouldn't you say?
On the read-out? I'll have to take your word for that.
An incredible amount. The thing is, I don't think that's her. Not just her.
Doctor you're losing me.
She's never quite there, it's as if my eyes are always trying to catch her up.
Yes, that is curious, a trick of the light perhaps ? I still don't understand why you called me here...
Neither do I... but it's almost like... I can't define it...her. I can't define her.
Have you taken a break lately?
How was the world saved?
We looked to ourselves.
What if we did more than that? What if it we, they, went further than that...
I don't follow you.
...all the way and beyond.
You've lost me.
I don't think that's... her.
Then what are we looking at?
All that's left for us to see.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You think she's an illusion?
Not an illusion. More like an event horizon.
Doctor, I really think you should get some sleep.
Let us go back, and home, to the time Alala was born. Where are we?
Ah yes. In somebody else's country.
You want me to accept that? How can I ever? It's my land, my mother's and my father's and their mothers' and fathers' before that. How can you care so little?
How can you care so much?
History! Recorded, provable, rightful fact. How can you deny it? Centuries under the yoke... they spat on our heritage... trampled, denied...our language, our culture, our home...
That's your history?
The one they imposed on us when they tried to rub out ours, yes! We're nothing without it, nothing.
Some might say speak for yourself. Subjugation is a state of mind.
You can't sit on the fence on this one.
Too true. I do realise that.
So that's where you're standing?
You put the fence there.
Don't be a traitor.
I'm the one betrayed.
You betray your own blood.
And where will that lead us, that accusation, that mother of metaphors for a lucid and brutal denial of genetic parameters? To the notion of a brutal self, for a cut has been made and it is self-inflicted, the accused has chosen his mark of Cain. There is no delusion here, struggle as we might to assign a cause, no petulance or hot-headed catharsis to explain the act away. Each understands clearly the meaning of the other, each is deliberate, each cares only that their testament is this : I am not ashamed.
One conversation. Among how many? Tens of thousands perhaps, in that startled hour and that country, as the quantum dissemination of difference opens chasms in the most intimate constructs of social fabric. Doors slam on marriages, daughters perceive death over the breakfast table, gods split into shards and make dark altars of the lives of men. In a place of learning fate follows the Fool of the Tarot, steps over the edge, and ...
Wipe that stupid grin off your face, boy! Because, you, boy, have just woken up to Hell!
Sorry, Sir.
Write this down one thousand times : I am void.
I am void?
I am void!
Yes Sir!
... the flying board duster narrowly misses the boy's right ear, perhaps because he flinches, perhaps because the teacher realises, too late, that his heart is leaving with it. It hits the nose of a girl full square on the septum, she cups her hand to hold the pain but it seeps out between her fingers. The shock of it sucks the air from the room.
Oh my God.
Sir?
Oh my God.
The girl makes the noise of the incredulously wounded, the teacher clutches the heart he forgot. Blood is once again betrayed. She stumbles from her chair, putting out a hand she steadies herself on the blank page of the boy's workbook, stamping it red.
I'm sorry.
The boy cannot reply, he is watching his teacher's crash to the floor as his teacher watches him and each sees only that the other has rounded his mouth and eyes into perfect Os, as each is deafened by the shout of his own blasted heart.
Somebody screams.
The girl runs hunched and bleeding from the room.
Who will ever be ashamed? The teacher, perhaps, although if he dies now, if no-one fetches help, he may go beyond that. The boy? Not while he grows, not while he has that vast expanse of void to consume with that furious assertion of self that is rising in him. The girl then, yes, you might think so, shame follows her and floors her in the corridor but the fear of it, of being ashamed, hurries her to her feet. The child shifts in her womb.
Back in the here and now the doctor takes a last look at his patient ...
They say fortune favours the will to survive.
Amen to that.
What if they were none of them fools, yet the Fool lived in them all?
Alala, who was entire in the way of a singular notion, is beginning to unravel.
Originally this was to be a journalistic piece, but it wants to be a fairy story...
Those Crazy Protesters
There was once a crazy woman who lived in a place that didn't matter, and she had three sons, two of whom were crazy just like her. The woman and her two crazy sons were the favourite talking points of the country there abouts, which was a sensible land otherwise populated by entirely sensible people. "There she goes, that crazy woman," they would say, "with her two crazy sons, off to town to see the Mayor again with their shoes on backwards. Oh, that poor man! How he must suffer!"
Now the mayor did indeed consider himself unduly burdened by these crazy people, for he was the third son. All his life he had earnestly devoted himself to the task of disassociating himself from his crazy family and emulating instead his estranged father, whom all agreed must have been a thoroughly sensible man because he had left them. The third son spent his childhood learning to ease himself away from their influence, putting his shoes on the right way round before he reached the school in the mornings and in all things following the lead of his sensible classmates. By the time he reached manhood he was the very picture of common sense, so much so that the townsfolk kindly forgot his crazy beginnings and voted him into the Mayor's Office.
Once there, and with the very best of intentions (for to his credit he never did anything he did not think was for the best) he began to take sensible precautions against ever relapsing into craziness, beginning by making a point of being out whenever his mother visited. He sought the advice of a famous doctor and was assured that craziness is not hereditary but a condition brought on by disreputable nurture, and that he himself was proof. The doctor's diagnosis was that in him the condition was totally defeated, he had examined him with a range of tests both physical and psychometric and had found no sign of backwardsness or even a twist to the side. As further proof the doctor offered the case histories of other children in other towns who had turned up at kindergarten with either their feet or their heads on the wrong way. The doctor himself had led a team of health and education officials who developed an effective early intervention strategy which, through targeting those in need at an early age, had successfully and permanently integrated those victims of bizarre circumstance into the mainstream of life.
The mayor was impressed and immediately instigated a similar program in the town schools, which within months had identified and begun to process a surprising number of children of all ages who showed symptoms of craziness. But many parents were not so impressed and before long the mayor began to receives letters of protestation, some disputing the diagnosis placed upon their child, some claiming that their children had been contaminated by undue exposure in the classroom, and some wishing to inform the mayor of candidates for reform that the system had missed. Someone even called a public meeting on the Rights of the Eminently Sane, a crucial component of the constitution which could indeed be used to question the legality of diverting such a large portion of public funds to the insane. Anxiously the mayor called the doctor, who told him to explain to the townspeople that they were fortunate the scheme had been implemented when it had as clearly they were on the brink of an epidemic, and that only by committing themselves to it's eradication could they secure for future generations a truly reliable and sensible world. This the mayor did and the families of the town, seeing the sense in his words, agreed to cooperate. Most took the sensible option of volunteering to be tested alongside their children, and if the doctor happened to find any trace of a crazy thought or lopsided action they sensibly and dutifully registered on the database of possibly contaminated persons and waited at home for help.
But the mayor soon encountered a problem when large numbers of previously healthy people started registering not just on the database but at the welfare office. It was the only sensible thing to do, they couldn't do a crazy thing like risk passing the condition on to their workmates, nor could they operate machinery or serve the public whilst doubts lingered about the rationality of their minds. The mayor couldn't argue with their logic and wondered how long they could afford to keep them fed, but the doctor told him not to worry as he was close to a treatment suitable for adults and that it would be ready in a few weeks. Meanwhile the local paper had already called for an inquiry into the funding of the schools project and, what with half the workforce being off sick, businesses were struggling and the town's economy was beginning to slide.
Worse was to come when a big TV network mentioned the town in a documentary about a little known group of subversives, the Crazy And Proud Brigade, who were rumoured to be using subtly subliminal tactics to undermine the accepted norms of well moderated and sensible behaviour. Tell-tale signs of their activities, the report announced, were the growing numbers of visibly crazy people who had always appeared, until now, to be perfectly and incontrovertibly sane. Rumours began to circulate that the mayor himself was part of some outlandish plot , a fairly sensible supposition when you consider his family history, which proposition excited further media coverage and a visit from the Chief Governmental Sanity Inspector who gave him six weeks to put a stop to all this craziness or else the town would lose all government funding and be stripped of its status as a Centre of Excellence for Common Sense. Letters poured into the mayor's office, demonstrators picketed the town hall, the manifestos of innumerable protest groups and splinter groups appeared in pamphlets that were thrust into the hands of angry citizens at every school gate and street corner.
The mayor began to panic. He called the doctor who told him he was not an expert in socio-economics, but wouldn't it be sensible to finish the job now that he had started it? The doctor's own research now suggested that there was no cure for craziness stronger than the right motivation, perhaps what was called for was the combination of a financial carrot and a legislative stick? The mayor was slightly disturbed by the odd tone of the doctor's but nevertheless he took his advice, having no-one to ask for a second opinion (never having made, he realised now, any political firiends to speak of). So, mindful of the six week deadline, he bypassed the normal rules and procedures to pass a law requiring all crazy people to attend for registration at the Town Hall at 10 a.m. prompt, where they were to be allocated their places on an intensive self-help course in return for a package of incentives including a certificate of employability and a range of tax breaks and accumulative benefits to look forward to in their retirement.
The next morning the town was gridlocked as what seemed to be the entire population marched noisily and enthusiastically from several rallying points towards the Town Hall, some led by college students waving the banners of the Crazy And Proud Brigade, some by striking workers demanding Equal Rights With The Insane, and some by a coalition of nurses and schoolteachers carrying home-made placards urging a National Campaign for Health and Sanity in the Workplace. As diverse as their passions and causes were they converged in the town square with one intention : to protest the injustices visited upon them by the mayor and to reassert the will of the people in what was, after all, their town. In short, if anyone was mad it was the mayor.
The mayor stepped out onto the sensibly low-set balcony to a cacophony of blaring horns and heckling shouts and a great hammering of placards and try as he might to make himself heard he could not carry his voice above the din. At 9.55 he asked the Chief of Police to fire above the heads of the crowd to gain their attention. At 9.56 the Police Chief ordered his men to do so. At 9.57 there was a memorable moment of silence in the square that people would talk of, with awe, for years to come - it was a moment so immaculately clear in it's implications that no-one present would have cared a hoot, if asked, about how crazy or sane they were, a moment when they all understood their part in something big. At 9.58 a scene of utter anarchy erupted in the square as the crowd surged in all directions, the police pushing back and everyone pushing into one another, then a rallying cry and a rush by the crowd towards the balcony (sensibly low). The mayor was dragged off and beaten to a pulp before the Police Chief ordered his men to aim to disable and the crowd began a series of running battles with the police that only ended when the Governmental Guards arrived with humvees and a platoon of SAS specially trained in urban warfare and counterinsurgency tactics.
When he came to he was surprised to see his mother's backward facing shoes little more than a foot from his face. He looked up at her crazy old mischievous eyes and wept like an infant. His brothers helped him to his feet, carefully turning his shoes around for him, and together they left the town.
The mayor asked his mother if she forgave him for disowning her. She replied that you can't help the way you walk. He asked if she had ever considered Insanity Therapy. She laughed hysterically at his crazy talk. "One more question, Mother, was I crazy to want a cure?" "You know that doctor?" his mother asked by way of reply, "I called to see you about him. It was the only sensible thing I ever did. You weren't in. He's your father. Batty as a fruit cake he is, always has been."
They didn't stop laughing until their bellies ached, then they cried the rest of the way home.
