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Two Fragments from Eschatology of Reason [a few hundred draft lines of a work ascending]
The Allegory
Of Objectivity
Has diminished us
By its goodness.
In place of faltering intimacies
Ciphers emerge,
Osculating at the speed of light.
Our abacus of syntax appears commutative.
Mathematical palindromes operate as time machines;
"...[T]he bogus appeal to science..."
That put western hegemony
"In the realm of necessity."
And through "objectivity, "value neutral",
"The abdication of responsibility"
When "destruction and carnage
Is set in motion."
To abet communication,
Filaments are bundled in parallel,
Like the lustful, denied one
Another for all eternity.
The bonds of intention are immaterial;
Intentions are 'other' matter
And, despite the Nobels,
That mother,
Nature, has never broken
Under interrogation.
The commerce between Leeuwkop,
Socabaya and Pelican Bay
Advertises the intimacy
Of the information highway.
By comparison
The telepathy of
Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen
Seems absolutely nurturing.
The perspective of irrational numbers
As f/x for immortality
Becoming infinity's weathercock.
Communications Theory
Where the medium is everything
By which the correspondents
Are urged to insubstantiality.
As the enlightenment accelerated,
It encrypted the landscape.
The g's slurred speech,
Favoring banks of ordinals;
Circuits of stacked, iterative inference.
Warehouses of corrugated frequencies.
As the culture slips deeper into technology,
Cryptography insists upon the emergency
Of an essence
Of that 'other'
In vacuo;
An habituation where
Right repairs to wrong,
And pity engulfs it.
Where the physical world
Is tailored to
A theory of essence,
Time becomes a palindrome,
Restoring a vista as though it were
An algorithm with a couple of
Evolutionary variables missing.
A nostalgic and remorseful ecology
Tolls for the tribe.
With fashions soaked in sun block,
Irony veils the consequence
Of a technological immodesty
That evolved
Upon fitting an abstraction
With a body.
Historical continuities
Compound historical misunderstandings.
And corresponding times are tropes.
And with the trope of mathematical immortality,
An infallibility docked
To wager everything.
The satellites saw
The vast offspring
Turn
From the cold teats
Of the Antipode.
Empathically turn
Toward India, the Andhra Pradesh,
Where the people burn,
Weeping itself into the sea.
The re-animism of all beings required
By the soul's convection to machines,
One dying part rushes to embrace another.
Reckless dislocations that
"Abandon all hope"
To bond at the bewildering parallels
Of information theory:
"Specifying in advance
All the features of a problem"
With'genetic algorithms'
That 'eliminate' variables
By implying that evolution
With its "undirected mechanism"
Expresses a strong teleology.
Hegel's negative 'positivity': that the object
Sizes capital's essential 'goods-ness.'
Mankind through A.E., A.I., A.L.
Has become another glorious consumable.
Remember me?
Point p at time t?
After all, there's other things
To 'reflect' on me now.
And that brief epoch
Where out of hope of profits,
Against all reason,
For the sake of A.I. all existence was personified
As little antagonists of the "bad infinite"
"For which the end keeps delaying
It's arrival;"
Quantum to Chaos
& complexity.
Nano-robotic proteins.
Genes' self-organizing rapaciousness?
The strategy of incorporating
Guesswork into the process
Terminates judgement, evading
The accumulating failures of praxis.
The process survives 'uncertainty',
Thermal k
And preserves "ruthless un-accountability"
Along the way.
The mall,
All terra-formed,
Selling those colorful, secular veils
That the ubiquitous melanomas entail.
A Looney Tunes neotony
Of technological optimism.
Against the 'asteroid'
Hurtling out of the world's core
Full bore.
To the rest of the world
Increased aneurism in western man
Is a cure.
Turning and turning
The widening bit;
The falconer waits in his Falcon
Beyond regret.
Things fly apart
Bombed from across the world.
Market's global reach.
Do the margins dare hold?
The blood-soaked tide
Is loosed, and everywhere
Even the fish
Have been drowned.
The 'best' should be convicted.
While the 'worst'
Are silenced for their
Passionate precision.
Surely some legislation is at hand.
Surely the Second Chance is at hand...
The Second Chance!
No more are those words out
Than a vast cloud
Out of Nevada
Eats out my eyes:
Somewhere in the silos and derricks
Of the desert, a shape with the body of a Titan
And the head of a Kahn;
A gaze blank and pitiless
As the sun
Is moving its slow thighs
While all about it
Reel the shadows
Of extinct desert birds.
The darkness stirs within;
And now we see
That two centuries
Of sated sleep
Were vexed to nightmare
By a sudden assault
And what crude, sutured beast,
Confirmed in its calling
Leaps to Armageddon
To be born?
"The 'hot' issues in environmentalism"...
"Exist only because of,
And specifically as
Products of science."
An admission of guilt troped in a statement of defiance.
"Ruthless un-accountability"
That "2,000 management students,
Organized into corporate boards"
Favored the same murderous actions as Upjohn.
The lethal synthesis
Of the human and material
Products of science.
The "moral evasion" of scientific management
And its "ability to mask power relations."
Leave the Inuit, like Goethe, to predict "cold....
When the woodpecker's beak moves fast."
Pesticides, power grids and crude
Have out-moded that observation;
It's 'perfect sense'
That is Sinn against Nature.
The manufacture of time
Counts time as tailings.
But Mother is the cradle of time.
Every day is Mother's day.
Mother does not use indoor plumbing.
Mother does not drive the family wagon.
Mother does not seek investment opportunities
Or attend international conferences.
But being inequity itself
Mother is sensitive
To when she's being fucked over.
So Mother plots from the ocean floor;
Plots from the sun;
Plots at the earth's core.
Mother plots from Alpha Centuri.
And in Huallaga
As once in the Sierra Maestra.
In Toba Kakar
As once in the Annamites
Mother Nature is plotting along the border; in the bush;
The townships; the mountains; the prisons;
The rivers; the classrooms; the jungles;
The caves; the shanties; the barrios.
Mother Nature is attacking in the shale;
The sunlight;
In the cell;
In the atom; in the DNA.
The expanding desert is Her right arm drawing back to deliver a blow.
The oceans rise in Her throat.
The air has become
Her garrotte
Of mass destruction.
Every dam liberates Mother to her purpose;
She snaps the bonds of every road,
Every power line, pipe line, cable.
She sweats out every vaccine;
Spits out every antidote.
Shits macadam and depleted uranium.
Squats and pisses out
Every recommendation from Kyoto.
Mother throws off every prosthesis.
Dances on no legs.
Sings with no mouth.
Every power plant increases the capacity
Of surprise of La Terra-ista;
Every technology is an opportunity
To take root in its ruin.
The Khmer Rouge tried to dance the reality of Mother;
The Hukbalahaps and Sendero.
The Phoenix with its 2 left brown Oxfords
That mistook Mother,
As their kind still does,
For a conundrum of a mad pattern.
Mother bores into the formulas;
Shits in the equations;
Drops her brood in the programs.
Mother is the radical; the root.
Mother slits the throats of her children
To be Mother.
Mother drowns her children like vermin.
Picks them out of her scalp with fire.
Freezes them. Asphyxiates them. Buries them alive.
Destroys them with each other.
Mother does anything to be Mother.
Mother cannot be forecast
By anything of her.
She is what her enemies as Her admirers
Want to reinvent in themselves
And already are.
"Coffee for the breakfast table."
O Lucky Man who can
Vaporize the red-eye
Into the dead-I
Waking to the victors version
Of the narrative of the planet;
Twelve chalices
Of ground blood
To site the ambivalence
Of the observer in the world.
"Method, Cur?
I don't see any method at all."
"The replacement occurs
In the equations,...,
Not for a fermion or boson
In the real world."
Never has the imaginary
Acquired such currency.
"[Q]uaint, ceremonious village
Of puny demigods on stilts"
As Einstein described the I.A.S.
Insecure enough to hazard everything.
Yet so inured as the observer
As to believe they will be exempt.
The moonlight routed in strings of dewdrops,
The shaman hurtles through the scrub
Colliding with the spiders' webs
Dancing the silk around his breast for
The Ghost Dance shirt.
The difference between a Kevlar vest
And a Ghost shirt
Is eschatological,
The latter having dreamed
The former's destiny.
But that was then.
And this is then.
"One out of 30 people in all of Indochina ended up dead."
The fact behind "the myth of mass guilt
Which denies the connection
Between power and responsibility."
But "The American people as a whole are...responsible"
Because they did not hang
Their Kissingers, Helms, Bundys and McNamaras
Or turn them over
To the Lao, Cambodians and Vietnamese.
The West owes a great blood debt to the planet.
A blood sacrifice, a transubstantiation whereby
The world of things is
The unaccountable.
The West cowers in its machines;
The epiphany that Mother
Has chosen them;
That they are the pyre
Upon which she will purge herself.
Having exalted their arrival,
She rejoices in their coming..
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Jeff Haas's theosophy,
A god among programmers
From that Valhalla
Of clip-on ties and
Huckster prophecy:
"A super-god
Who created other gods"
In a computer game.
With Von Neumann as pensioned Kronos,
Deemer of self-reproducing automata.
And middleman; both father and son.
Lord and savior. Autocrat
Of the automat. Feedback
About as reflective as Oedipus.
As Jeff Haas thunders: "I once heard
An avid civilization player
Boast that he overran the other society
With stealth bombers
While they were still working on chariots."
Like the back slapping over Afghanistan, except
Al Quaeda had stingers, kalashnikovs and Toyotas.
While "...playing SimEarth
And other god games
We...get a feel for what it is like
To parry with autonomous vivisystems."
Dungeons and Dragons for the Pentagon.
'Vivisystems' a far worse epithet than "sand niggers"
And a far more credible threat,
From the Programming 'gods' who can't divine
The existence of the "global arms trade" or
The purchase of 50 SUV's
After it was front page in the N.Y. Times.
The globalization of
Technology and markets
Escapes the calculations
Of the Lethiads of Networking
Even as they cash its checks.
While down the hall
In the artificial life tank
It's all
"Connectedness, connectedness."
Worlds so isolated from each other
Could only exist in the delusions
Of our SimEarth-playing gods who,
Hearing voices, are
"A few bold man-things
[That] have had a recurring dream:
To do as Yahweh
And make a model of themselves."
"Turn me into something incorruptible!
Turn me into something mathematical!"
To make a model
Of themselves,
They must first make
"[O]f themselves," a model.
"Playing god," the stuff
Of everyone else's tragedy.
"...[W]e were experienced.
We had fought such engagements
Six times before in complete battle simulations...
It was no different than practice."
Except for the dead.
"A real tank gunner in a real tank
Reclines in a tiny windowless burrow
Tucked into the bowels of
A multimillion-dollar steel capsule,
Surrounded by electronics and dials and LED readouts,
His only portal...a tiny TV monitor;
His only link to the rest of the crew...his headset.
[A] simulation. For all he knows,
The numbers on his dials,
And the picture on his screen,
Even the image
Of the explosion
His missiles generate,
Could be fantasized by a computer.
What difference does it make for his job
Whether the one-inch-tall tanks on his monitor
Are "real" or not?"
"For all he knows"
Its Yahweh on the headset.
And only the pathology is not simulated.
The white noise of the computer tower
Hums over the noise
Of the Bee Gees.
Andy Gibb croons,
"Lonely days. Lonely nights.
Where would I be without my woman?"
Producing in the ten year old next door
What feedback of inchoate desires?
"The most dangerous thing that could happen
To nanotechnology
Is sex."
Amor vincit omnia!
"We can define what we want
Narrowly enough
To breed for it."
Imagine as in the cathedral on Easter Sunday
Rows of parallel computers
Evolve their god, the "Ant [who
Has] distributed parallel systems
All figured out", even though
"Not a single ant has ever lived
That knows [figured out]
How to regulate temperature."
No, Froude. No longer does, "The superstition of science
Scoff[]
At the superstition of faith."
But perfects the intentions
Of the aracana of the inanimate,
By John McCarthy:
"My thermostat has three beliefs.
It's too hot in here.
It's too cold in here.
It's just right in here."
And the prescient poet
Cursing his machines
In the absence of their makers.
Apparently Cardinal Newman was wrong.
Faith IS operative.
Hegel's 'positivity': "that norms
Have been imposed
Solely as outwardly
Authoritative..."
For all the familial 'goodness' of humankind
Has been transposed
Into the into the promise
Of the artificial mind
Though present denials
Favor bloodier fortunes.
"After all "...[I]n an [artificially] evolving system
We have to give up some control."
"But when it falters
It will heal itself."
"I would rather fly on a plane
Running software evolved by a program..."
And after a crash,
Demonstrate for the court how the error
Evolved within the software
Long after the programmer,
Had disinherited
His Cain.
And who are you, poet,
To question the gods' calculations.
"Only evolution can handle
The complexities we are creating,
But evolution escapes
Our total command."
"Perpetual change means persistent disequilibrium."
Its never a matter of
Redemption in our
"...permanent semi-fallen state."
"There only words;
And words are all I have
To steal
Your heart away,"
Until we "expand the space
Of what people recognize
As computation."
"'Dogs don't do math,'"
"[Y]et dogs can be trained
To predictably calculate..."
A function of the new machinery.
One way to prevent the Luddites
From smashing the machines
Is to grant the machine
The same human rights
That we imagine for
Human beings.
Destruction of property
Becomes assault;
Or homicide. A deterrent
To dissent
Because again "the Weavers"
Can be hanged in clusters
"Round the Manufactory".
Parallel computing hypocrisies.
When human property was freed
It was heavenward
Launched from the limb of a tree.
"A strange and bitter crop."
Robots and their corporations
With their rights as individuals
Yet infallible in matters of numerical doctrine
Though 'individuals', cannot be charged as human beings.
The metamorphosis that does not rot
From the poplar trees.
The mysterious discrete electron
Smug about its physical ambiguities.
"Sims 'dipping in at random'";
Dipping into his "equation-genes...
'Small self-contained logical units
Of a computer language...'
"Landed him in the middle of art."
"...[Y]ellow orbs with a misty horizon..."
"...[S]harpened waves with a horizon of blue..."
"...[C]ircular smudges of
Pastel yellow
Reminiscent of buttercups."
"In an hour, thousands of stunning pictures...
Roused out of their hiding places
And displayed," the way alpha particles
Might have scored graceful traces.
"Like watching over the shoulder
Of the world's greatest painter..."
An "evolving logic"of the 'artist'
As a Rembrandt of "sheets of icicles
Backlit by an arctic sunset"
That conversely "could have been
Painted by a weekend artist."
The incoherence of thought
Preordained by the undetected limitations
Of the method.
The logic programs of evolution
Being incomprehensible,...
Generating "code that only an alien
Would write."
As mathematics in absolute parallel
Is alien to Nature.
"If biologists could 'rewind the tape' of evolution..."
In the apocalyptic shuttle of commutability,
"They would have a full ensemble"
And somehow only incrementally.
And since "Embryonic cells are just robots in disguise"
"Humanity is thus...a mere passing station...
A critical gateway to the open-ended universe."
Predestined "to create its own successors"
Already "out there waiting."
"Other forms of life,
Artificial ones,
That want
To come into existence."
His business card reads,
"Larry Yeager, Microcosmic God."
Eschatological fallout
From the algorithmic romance with immortality.
The void will not record that
Life was fumbled in the hands of such mediocrity.
All science is "the science of last things."
The instrument of extinction.
Consciousness has been but the waiting pavement.
Artificial life is a flashback to the fall
And literature has snapped back literal.
"Dead things could behave as if they were alive!"
"Everyone could see that the flocking was real.
Here were artificial birds really flocking."
Not aware that "Life is a verb."
"...Adam gave names...to the fowl of the air."
"But then biologists will merely redefine life."
"Assembling it from pieces"
Or one piece, if flocking is
To be a bird.
Yet who hears this mocking
That is to be
The mocking bird?
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