Where Seas and Fables Meet (7 page)

I troll along the edges of the electronic sea, inundated by emotions and effects.

The currents of electromagnetic waves roll in, carrying our depths.

Aspirations, desperations, memories, and feelings: they ripple over my beach, which is the shoreline of my room. I take daylight walks, twilight walks, nocturnal steps, morning steps, and yet I hardly move.

I experience what I never was, I visit where I never was. This is the mainlining of the source.

Walt Whitman had his “leaves of grass”; other travellers of the soul, their forests, their seas. I have my satellite dish, the oceanic media, the sea of images, the flood and heat. No shuttered rooms now, but un-shuttered space.

You can explore in solitary and yet connected meditations, call them mediations, on the edges of the electronic commune, which has its shapes, signs, symbols and forces, all that appears in the way a tree sways, the tall grass undulates in the glen, the creek bubbles in its flow, the sunset casts its red glow. The cosmos alive with evolving forms – never the same from day to day, night by night, some of them human made – and we, in our spirits, imaginations, emotions, and intellects, are their responses.

Make yourself into a fire...

Mirroring the fire –

Adding to the burn –

Mainlining the cosmos...

This is what happens when your stark self suddenly extends into many zones at once. You're storied with metaphysical dimensions. You're addled with roaring talk, what the angels cry, when the other side begins its impress. It may leave you haggard, drained like a junkie after an involuntary withdrawal from the precious connection. It will leave you deepened, maybe gouged, like a furrow in fertile black soil. This is when the depths call upon your depths.

On extension: extending the texts of Nature and super- Nature: extending the texts of your mentors and guides, the wirings and influences.

Technology is extension – of our bodies, and of our nerves. This is the crux: mechanical technologies extend our bodies; electronica extends our minds, nerves, spirits and souls. (Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan)

If all technologies are extensions, then all extensions must be entanglements.

If you see technology in terms of imposition – what is done to us – then this allows alienation to continue its hold.

Extension means greater complexity – more webbing, more texts, more entanglement (involvement), deeper immersions, more being added to what we know and feel.

Extension means an expansion of networks, a greater opportunity for openings. This is why political protests – web organizations – are outstripping systems' leadership. The old empires of knowledge and centralized power are dying. People have entry points now, communication rallies.

It doesn't matter if everyone is wired in or not. 30% to 40% of global citizens calling out for change constitute a seismic shift in consciousness. No revolutionary movements in the past ever had such percentages of popular support. Most revolutions, from the American to the French to the Russian to the Chinese, were driven by impassioned minorities.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS), the Arab Spring: these movements have in part been driven by the perception – widely shared – that democracies are not democratic enough.

People involved in OWS have used their nomadic electronic status to stay ahead of police.

This is the convergence of Twitter, Facebook, Blackberry, YouTube: networks rising.

The demand is for the end of representative democracy and the rise of participatory democracy.

Revolutionary expression for our evolutionary needs...

The surplus and flow are moving through this new form of citizenship.

The Structure reels back, threatened: tyrannies everywhere quake and react with draconian legalities and state- sanctioned violence. This is why the effects and reach of the Structure have never been more visible.

You will see the mark of the Structure in leaders (political or corporate) who have to be programmed to appear human. These are called “photo-ops.” Translation: make an image where the leader looks capable of feeling, of experiencing joy or delight. He or she will appear to be sharing. This, too, is a sign that the Structure is threatened: its spokespeople become replicas of the human, miming the ideals of a just, sympathetic society.

“We are not backing down!”

This was the slogan of the student protest mobilizations in Quebec in 2012. They were protesting what happens when a society – the Structure – goes to war on its children.
The Hunger Games
(books and movies) are parables of this war on the young: Saturn eating his children.

The children began to push back.

The students were rising in Montreal and Quebec City streets with a demand for new meaning. The iBrain generation (supposedly unfocussed and self-absorbed) found focus in the cry against calcified thought.

Online flash gatherings – the students were beginning to

create their messaging streams through cellphones and blackberries. At any moment they could call upon fellow protestors to appear. (The riot police eventually snatched up these techniques, too, radaring in on the messages, the rebellion's points of mandala gathering. This inspired the protest organizers to move even faster.)

By creating their own dataflow, the student protestors used social media to flame the fires of activism.

The student mobilizations spell the obsolescence of the daily newspapers and Big TV. They're perceived to be the mouthpieces for the Structure. The students are making moves to become the news themselves.

Small screens are small beginnings: seeds.

Can you see the light's effect on the weight and pressure of the Structure?

Try this.

Darken your room. Make it black, utterly black. Feel the weight and presence of the dark. Light a match. Just one match will do. Watch how the darkness recoils, rolling back, roiling off into corners, losing its substance, becoming shadows. The darkness will look agitated because of a single light. All it takes to churn up the darkness is a lit match. The match serves notice to the dark: much more light will come.

You're a match and a single light.

You can strike a light at any time.

The match may waver and sputter out, but there will always be more.

Many lights and matches together form global city illuminations.

There are more matches being struck now than at any time.

Whenever I come close to being discouraged – this shows up in me through fatigue and melancholy – I perform this exercise. I do it in my mind or I do it for real. I think of others doing it, too. The darkness seems less daunting, almost frightened.

Imagine multitudes lighting candles in vigils.

Imagine multitudes in protests holding up the emanant lights of their iPhones – that gleam so much like a single candle or a match, except the light doesn't sputter out, it waits for you to shut it off.

A theory of fun is no joy.

On Steve Jobs: being inventive – he created employment opportunities and opportunities for editorials and commentaries. Jobs made jobs.

The magic in a name: Bill Gates opened gates.

Only the shallow never judge by the screens appearances.

Memorable overheard remarks:

“She was my life-partner for six months,” he said.

“The rumours of his life were greatly exaggerated.”

“The only exercise I get these days is from shopping and sex,” she said.

“He's been dead for a long time. He just doesn't know it yet.”

The maxim of a corrupt politician: “Once bought, stay bought.”

A tense negotiation between businessmen: “Are you screwing me in this deal?”

“Why would you think that? Why do you ask?” “Because if you are, I want to be there to enjoy it...”

The sign of maturity in a young person (they say) is when you stop blaming your parents for everything. The sign of maturity in a parent is when you stop blaming your children for everything.

“I read all the book half the way through” – Sam Goldwyn

Those on the left wing should wake up each day and consider that God may be a fascist.

Those on the right wing should wake up each day and consider that God may not be a fascist.

Those in the secular centre should wake up each day and see if there could be more – much more – at play.

A cynic's review of political actions:

“The right wing will screw you because they enjoy it. “The left wing will screw you because it's for your own good. “The liberals screw you to develop a make-work program for their cronies.”

(Interesting test: which line did you smile at first?)

Unity without diversity is totalitarian. Diversity without a unity of souls is incoherence, segmentation slipping away into isolation.

Imagine a society without kings or queens, without a court, without nobility, without inherited privilege – where eminence is achieved by intellect, effort, imagination, skill, spiritedness, will and diligence. Privilege will shudder over great experiments in social mobility and the cry for more democratic participation.

Remarks and questions for the global guerrilla theatre: We are suffering from an outbreak of truth –

Truth is breaking out everywhere –

Does anyone believe that people would voluntarily dine out at a food-bank if they had alternatives?

What would happen if another international crash occurred and we'd dismantled the policies of protection and care?

Globalization is capitalism on steroids –

Flash occupations are temporary rebel zones –

The democratic snob: he condescended to everyone.

The interpreter's dilemma: take a three minute pop song or 30 second infomercial, or a half-hour sit-com or a piece of pithy ad copy, and write volumes on it. Maxim: A blurb needs a long interpretive essay.

Power in the hands of your friends is no guarantee that you will have any access to that power.

This dull leader: he was a good argument against evolution.

His eccentricity was taken for vigorous intelligence and independence of mind.

“You're reading too much into what I say,” she said.

The writer replied: “But my dear I have to read too much into things. It's part of my job description.”

Art, literature, scholarship, reading are useless activities. When I'm asked about teaching poetry, I reply: “I teach something useless.”

But reading, like poetry, is neither pointless nor worthless.

Poetry won't teach you how to repair a car or fix a leaking faucet. It won't show you the easiest way to paint a wall or how to make a rocket escape earth's gravitational pull. Poetry will tell you how the stars sing, and speak of the dream where a single lotus becomes a great city. It can show you tears on the clock's face, happiness in a handful of atoms.

Useless, then, but not pointless...

My neighbour – an electrician – while fixing the battery in my car, said: “Everyone has their own way of contributing... I couldn't go into a room and talk about Shakespeare.”

I start my classes with the declaration: “If you continue with your studies in poetry, in literature, prepare to have your income earning potential slashed in half. Prepare to have your parents and possibly even your friends ask: ‘What's the practical purpose for this course of study?' And be prepared to reply: ‘There is none... I'm learning how... to see a world

in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, eternity in an hour...'”

To my astonishment and delight, most students stay.

Re-reading Dante's
Divine Comedy
in Allan Mandelbaum's translation... At the moment I'm stuck in Hell.

Nine weeks later, now in Purgatory: things are looking up.

Arriving at last in Paradise: it seems too late... Is paradise an acquired taste? Soon it starts coming back to me. I remember being here, once, long ago.

Then the book becomes light.

Observation: the only character in all three volumes who is alive , who isn't a shade – not one of the damned, not being purged by fire or one of the blessed circling in the singing radiance – is the poet-pilgrim, Dante. And therefore, can we say, outside the story, along with Dante, you – the reader, and in the case of the English versions, the translator, too? The pilgrim reader, the pilgrim re-visionary... To be a re- visionary means you can learn to have second-sight...

On reading Dante with my students:

His certainty of belief is matched by the certainties of their disbelief. Is theirs a true scepticism, which could rigorously undo their disbelief? That is, is theirs an iconoclasm strong

enough to turn on itself and see what the result would be? Do they recoil from his certitude because the pattern of his narrative, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, resembles the raptures of evangelists who seek to condemn the modern world?

I strive to remind them: Dante is first and foremost a poet, not a theologian. His faith is in his rhythmic implacability, the authority of the beat: it is the sound and pace of a poet devoted to capturing the unfolding integrity of his vision. His poetic dreams have the intensity of the visionary, and the beauty of a finely shaped fictional line.

The irony is Dante's visions have transformed our visions of the otherworld. We may try to separate the poet from the eschatology, but it's hard to do because Dante successfully altered our imaginations to include his images, and the imagination will revise reality at every chance it's given.