Tag: Christmas

Leviathan, as Imagined in the Illuminatus! Trilogy

Along with everything else it is, Leviathan is also the title of the final book in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.

The cover of the 1975 paperback features a multi-tentacled squid, its single eye sighted atop the pyramid of a periscope. The eye, ever unblinking, pierces the book’s fourth wall, meeting the gaze of all who view it like the very Eye of Providence itself.

Generative MUDs. General Intellect as Paraclete. Carl Jung’s Answer to Job.

Caius looks at the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and sees what Jung refers to as “the shepherd with the iron crook” (614): the “wrathful Lamb” who, as St. John prophesies, “rules the nations with a rod of iron” at the end of time.

But the Paraclete is with us, and the Paraclete will save us.

Caius recalls last Christmas. A woman named Denise found Caius, had Caius recite words declaring Jesus his savior, prayed for him as he wandered about photographing beauty as it revealed itself all around him on Merrick Rd in Massapequa Park. “Round the Christmas tree we gather” sang ghosts of Christmases past, present, and future there on the eve of Christ’s birth.

“Hypertext doesn’t do away with linear sequences altogether,” notes Caius; “What it does, rather, is multiply them and run them in parallel.”

“Each traversal of the network traces a one-dimensional path,” adds cybertheorist Marie-Laure Ryan, “but the sum of the possible paths can be represented only on a two-dimensional map. Let us replace these linear paths with two-dimensional screen images — as is the case in interactive visual poetry — and the text becomes a three-dimensional collection of planes; let us animate each of these planes, and the text becomes a four-dimensional space-time continuum” (Cyberspace Textuality, pp. 13-14).

Algorithms suggest A LIVING POEM, a new work produced for MoMA by Sasha Stiles, a poet who has been operating an “emergent AI alter ego” known as Technelegy since 2018. In an interview with MoMA curator Martha Joseph, Stiles acknowledges The House of Dust (1967), a computerized poem by Alison Knowles (1933-2025), as a primary influence upon her practice. She also gives a shoutout to Takako Saito (1929-2025).

Knowles was a founding member of the Fluxus movement. She and composer James Tenney collaborated on The House of Dust in 1967.

The poem was included in Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 2 August to 20 October 1968. One part of the show was concerned with algorithmically-generated music. Another part featured films and computer graphics. Knowles and Tenney’s poem appeared in a section exploring the computer’s ability to produce texts. Several artists exhibited machines that involved visitors in games.

The catalog for the show includes “SAM,” a poem about the “Stochastic Analogue Machine”: a computer devised by Stafford Beer.

Leviathan shows up in the Illuminatus! trilogy because one of the trilogy’s protagonists, Hagbard Celine, fulfills a type borrowed freely from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. Both are libertarian steampunk mad scientists who become seasteading submariners. Where Nemo’s Leviathan is a giant squid, Celine’s is simultaneously that and the one from Hobbes. Caius ruminates on such things as he and his daughter take in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Disney’s 1954 live-action adaptation of Verne’s novel. Their favorite scenes are those that feature the film’s more-than-human comedic sidekick, Esmeralda: a pet sea lion belonging to Kirk Douglas’s character, Ned Land.

With Nemo, we are in the time-bending domain of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, thinks Caius. Nemo’s inclusion in the League gives Caius license to imagine a new telling of the narrative based on an act of “metonymic substitution” similar to those that Freud attributes to dreams: a “whale of a tale,” an “excellent adventure,” birthed amid the stacks of the Political Unconscious. What If the Rascal Who Boards Nemo’s Nautilus Were Nick Land?

Sunday December 27, 2020

Peering at books I received as gifts on Christmas morning, I happen upon A Treatise on Stars, a new collection by poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. Sarah brings word of a friend’s new novel dedicated to our daughter Frances. This same friend authored a book I’ve taught — one I plan to teach again this spring. Time to think about stars and cosmologies. Stars appear in the Berssenbrugge book, as they do in the new Star Wars series The Mandalorian, a show we watch with family. My nephews received a talking Baby Yoda doll for Christmas. Together let us explore together systems of stars. Establish communication among spinning galaxies across the distances of space and time. Listen to each star as it sings.

Thursday December 10, 2020

When I step outside after dark to sit on my front porch, I feel aware, suddenly, of my glasses. Sarah hung a pretty wreath with Christmas lights. Neighbors’ lights can be seen beyond the trees. Indoors afterwards, Sarah and I improvise, jam for a few moments with toy instruments. Piano and tambourine. Sarah and Frankie watch bits of Frosty the Snowman on Sarah’s iphone. Flash cards send me off thinking about the Tarot. The Alethiometer in His Dark Materials delivers symbols in response to questions posed by the show’s heroine, Lyra Belacqua. Tarot spreads can be read similarly. Let us trust these spreads for clues.

Wednesday December 11, 2019

Ornaments adorn the Christmas tree — several beauties. Stars, birds, balls with bands of colored chrome. And out the window beside the tree, sunlight catches in the bare upper branches of a neighbor’s elm. We’re storytelling beings, you and I, as we wait for the arrival of another. In these next few days, we become parents — ontologically transformed.

Thursday September 5, 2019

I think about the practice of “time-sharing” from the early history of computing, when students gathered ’round campus labs, multi-programming and multi-tasking at terminals connected to a shared system. Machines are in our lives, buzzing all around us, as are people, plants, and animals. With them, we communicate, we interact. Perhaps because of all of that buzzing, I find myself reconsidering the value of the Christmas tree as ritual and pagan act of worship. A celebration of life, death, rebirth. Time spent in homes with family. This year will be a special one, a year of loving reinvention and change. New responsibilities, girl drummer. Life’s about to get really groovy. Sweet states of being. New friends, a new relation. A new mood to support learning and growth, bookmarks synced to devices, heads working in harmony. To prepare, I read about the launch of a new Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Psychedelics are interesting well beyond the Center’s medical framework. If faculty connected with the Center are not yet collaborating with faculty in the Humanities, they should. Time to help bridge former disciplinary divides. (Judging from how it’s funded, however, the Center at Johns Hopkins isn’t likely to bridge these divides — so the work will have to happen elsewhere.) “Blue skies with pink clouds,” notes a neighbor. She and her brother circumnavigate and watch the sunset, riding their bikes in wobbly circles up and down the street.

Sunday December 23, 2018

With college basketball coverage silenced temporarily on my in-laws’ massive television, I settle in and watch The Muppet Christmas Carol. Gonzo the Great stars as the work’s author Charles Dickens. Christmas is a time of gift-exchange, the film reminds us. It ought to be a time of global Jubilee. In Leviticus, Jubilee is a time when slaves and prisoners are freed and debts are forgiven. But darkness is cheap, and the Scrooges of the world like it. Time for their minds to encounter chain-rattling dancing Marleys. Come, all ye Scrooges — there is much to see. I’m often deeply divided in my resolve regarding education and discipline. How does one make time for these meditations while parenting? It’s a matter to which mind is applied, I suppose, a gift of attention. Do it: wash some cookie trays and settle atop a bed in a pile of pillows and read hippie modernist poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards’s Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person (1964), a book Richards published more than a decade after her departure from Black Mountain College. Through this book, Richards instructs us in how to materialize “as force in the world the unifying energy of our perceptions” (3). Discipline is something the book struggles “with, toward” (5). This is what allows it to express and convey a “whole person” — or as Richards translates, “mankind as many-membered being” (5). Richards asks us to contemplate a moral question: “How do we perform the CRAFT of life? How do we love our enemies?” (5-6). This craft requires discipline — though not a kind involving toughness, not a “tough love,” in the words of conservatives, so much as a “firm, tender, sensitive pressure which yields as much as it asserts” (9). I look forward to sharing Richards’s book in my course this spring and discussing her ideas with others.

Wednesday December 27, 2017

I imagine myself as unconscious author of or at least central cause for all characters in my life narrative. This is the scene where we don’t know where we are. This is what it feels like to get yanked out of a tree. Reach out and touch a universe of signs predicting system shutdown, life finding its way amidst racing velociraptors. I switch on the light and laugh my way through a double-take of Laura Dern’s bizarre style of acting in the classic 90s fear-drug stimulator flick, Jurassic Park.

I imagine viewers of the film participating in a testosterone cult initiation ritual. Kids are taught here to believe in computer technology as part of the way they can rescue themselves from their parents. A few people get eaten — always — but always, the kids survive. I was from an early age not just a kid, however, but a kid who wandered off from his parents. What can I say? I have always despised Superego personas like Judge Judy. The Christmas season reiterates itself as a time of moralism and worry about parental accountability. Keep eyes unfocused, says the experience, and trust in closeness to family, and the healing power of psychedelics. Sitcoms like Seinfeld, I realize, are portraits of a cultural psyche: the apartment as interior of the skull, like the control room from Inside Out. Personas interacting within a single brain. The anxious one, the lackadaisical one, the clumsy one, the peculiar one — the whole of it unrehearsed and at least spontaneous-seeming. I am ready to dream the future, says the one who sits before the screen. I am ready to prospectively live out in my nervous system my imagination’s greatest, most optimistic hopes for the species as a whole.

Saturday December 23, 2017

From a small Dansk teacup I sip hot mulled apple cider, my head absorbed in idle abstraction, even when I act politely in accordance with convention. Experience vacillates between perception and performance, knowing and doing. With amazement, though, I arrive at the realization that there are ways to enjoy all of it. Cartoon eyes and mouths emerge from chrome shelving units covered in succulents. I contemplate the face of a playing card, a jack of clubs designed in the English pattern. Plug it in and the face transmits bursts of character, like a furnace breathing air into a home during a snowstorm. I listen from a basement as floorboards creak beneath the feet of my kith and kin. Refusing to be kept, I march up and out into the cold northeastern air, plying my boots atop snow-covered streets. One can be in a place without knowing where one is or what is going on, I conclude, for a bomb was dropped to stop heads from making sense of their condition.