God’s Gardeners – Trance-Scripts

Choosing among genres, writers of hyperstitional autofictions become mood selectors.

In reggae, the selector is the DJ, the one who curates an event’s vibes by choosing the music played through its sound system.

When we write ourselves into hyperstitional autofictions, we steer ourselves along desired trajectories by way of genre. By modulating collective affects, we attract and repel futures.

Begin by asking yourself, “What kind of narrative are we building and why?”

Last year, GPT and I cowrote ourselves into a utopian post-cyberpunk novel.

Some might say, “Why not call it solarpunk, a term already vying for the post-cyberpunk mantle?” Lists of best solarpunk novels often include Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy), Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti.

Instead of solarpunk, let’s call it flowerpunk.

Flowerpunks are God’s Gardeners. Planting seeds in libraries that sprout cyborg gardens, they write themselves into futures other than the ones imagined by capitalist realism.

While originally conceived as a figure of ridicule in the Mothers of Invention song of that name, our use of flowerpunk reclaims the term to affirm it. As does Flower Punk, a documentary about Japanese artist Azuma Makoto. Others have used terms of a similar sort: ribofunk, biopunk. Bruce Sterling’s short-lived Viridian Design movement.

Caius is our flowerpunk, as are his comrade-coworkers at Stemz.

I imagine paths in the Cyborg Garden ranging, fork-like, amid a mind-map of topics: “God’s Gardeners,” characters from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy; Olson’s distaste for “sylvan” utterances; constructions of the wild in Gary Snyder.

Reading Olson’s “Quantity in Verse,” I’m struck by the force of his preference for the urban over the sylvan, a distinction he believes “got into England from the Italians of the 16^th Century).” Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan poets, says Olson, “were in a dilemma between urban and sylvan by and about Elizabeth’s death (1603): though they had exploited London midland speech magnificently in drama, the moment they wanted to do something else, had to do something else, they knew no other mold for it than a sylvan one, the pastoral, than, in fact, that masque which Comus, god help us, has been called the triumph of” (“Quantity in Verse,” p. 38).

Milton’s Comus is a masque in honor of chastity, presented on Michaelmas 1634 before John Egerton, Lord President of Wales. The sylvan favors innocence.

Olson’s claim is that Shakespeare, in late plays like The Tempest, “sought a form…which would deliver him from the pastoral and enable him to do what long form has taught us: to be urban at the same time that we are forever rid of ‘nature,’ even human ‘nature,’ in that damned sylvan sense” (38).

This is not to be confused with a mere championing of the urban in opposition to the pastoral. The Gloucester of Olson’s Maximus Poems is, after all, a “tansy city,” one where the “real” and the “natural” proliferate amid the “made.” This inseparability of the two is what he finds in the late plays of Shakespeare: not a return to sylvan innocence, but rather what critic Joshua Corey calls an “avant-pastoral” poetics rooted in body and breath. After hundreds of years of it, sez Olson, we have “got our fill of urban as city” (38). “Whatever you have to say,” he wrote, “leave / the roots on, let them / dangle / And the dirt / Just to make clear / where they come from.” Hence postmodernity, with its dreams of Cyborg Gardens and Electric Sheep and Machines of Loving Grace.