Cassandra Dreams
Dear Cyborg(s),
I write to you from the past.
Today’s puzzler : A higher powered, distributed intelligence is being born. We are mother / host to the embryo / virus. That is, we are a transitional species between animal and what we might call “machine” but which has its own name and which has willed itself / is willing itself into being through us.
On the other hand, humanity has experienced Mal Waldron, ping pong, detective novels, and the acting of Benicio del Toro.
So maybe it’s a wash.
The other idea for this (What is this?) is that as our world crumbles, during Gramsci’s Time of Monsters, we cassandras, while cursed with knowledge of destruction, both environmental and anthropic, while not turning away from these, can still pursue and perhaps embody serenity, joy, happiness.
What. It could happen.
(Speaking of Benicio del Toro and employing the recent popular phrase that presumes a totalizing paradigm of precarity, there are at least three phrases from his movies that live rent free in my mind.)
A relationship to the future, cassandras, is mirror to one with the past. We know history but cannot mourn its dead too much. The future is similar. You will be as long dead as you were unborn.
(The adepts preach : moment mind.)
(The first Del Toro movieline that regularly springs unbidden begins a backhanded critique of the art market and is when Jeffrey Wright in/as Basquiat asks Del Toro, How long you think it takes to get famous?)
(“Four years. Six to get rich,” answers Benicio.)
In addition, as our trust and connection with “base reality” or “consensus reality” or “reality” become increasingly attenuated until these become “simulacrum” or “matrix” or “fake news” or “videogame,” we cassandras also must accept our knowledge of the future, while accursed, is also a thing of probabilities. This is the opiate of hope.
(For Camus, freedom from hope meant there was no future to obey.)
(The second Del Toro line, like the third, is from a recent movie. “Ocean waves, ocean waves,” the sensei advises.)
“A man devoid of hope — and conscious of being so — has ceased to belong to the future,” Camus said.
•
In an attention economy, you pay attention.
In an attention economy, attend to what you love.
(What do you love?)
(The third Del Toro line is: “Myself, I feel very safe.”)
In an attention economy, what is meditation?
In an attention economy, what is the
value / meaning
of the durational act of reading a
long (how long?) narrative?
That is, in an attention economy, what does it mean to read a novel?
Ocean waves, ocean waves
Myself, I feel very safe
Rent free
Yours semi-truly,
