The Annihilation of the Universal

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

In the organic composition of capital, variable capital defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society.

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Isn’t it true, our fear of Artificial General Intelligence, of these radical creatures of our imaginal dreamtime futures and present unfolding’s mask our inhuman core? Our fear of losing jobs to the machines, of being obsolesced by the new conditions of society, being not only replaces but condemned to exclusion and annhilation? Haven’t we begun to realize the thing we fear most is the buried truth of our own inhumanity, that the West –…

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Mother Love

 

Some mothers are more difficult than others for the humans pulled out of their bodies. At best, if we’re honest, it’s a mutual wound that never heals.

There is an element of violence in love–that can only be deferred, or displaced, but never erased. Sentimentalizing mother love is a lie against … if not nature… truth.

That doesn’t make love less important. It makes it more so. Love is the overcoming…no, not just the overcoming, the transformation–of violence. Violence is not the opposite of love… it the mother of love.

Two months short of 30 years since my mother’s death.

The dialogs we never had, return in dreams. So often in anger–resistance. To become whole and free in the world, we need to stand up against our parents, to assert our independence. But most of that need arose when we were too young to understand it for what it was.
 
I know that anger in my dreams, is directed at myself… for not knowing… at 3, at 12, at 18. This is what we carry through our lives. Reliving… what we can’t relive. In dreams. In fantasies. In rituals of self destruction.

Goby’s Journal: Reading Emily Dickinson.

Began the day, inspecting the garden, reading Emily D… I’ve been systematically reading the whole of the collected poems, beginning to end. I skip around, read back and forth, but always keep to the sequential reading as well. Today, 564-603… 1862. A reference to Antietam… (Scarlet Maryland) in #562. She follows the news, and fuses intimate domestic scenes with distant events, the way she does with cosmic, biblical, religious references, deflating the latter, and casting a miraculous light on the everyday. Though there’s no deflation of what she has learns of the war, or human tragedy. #564 made my brain explode. I read with a dictionary at my side, and can only cover a half dozen or so a day. I write marginal notes in tiny letters with a mechanical pencil. The binding has gone the way of all impermanent things. Entropy everywhere. I should buy a new copy before I accidentally drop this on the floor, and all the pages scatter–hopeless to return them to order.


Thinking about how she follows the news… how, no matter how devoted one might be, one can only read to the last page. There’s an end to a newspaper or magazine. What would she have made of the internet? There is no end to the internet, or Facebook. One goes on clicking and clicking, until the clicks are what the ticking of a clock was for those who lived when there were still clocks that ticked… the sound of one one’s life being drained away.

My calling card… what’s in a name?

A sort of a prose poem.
Names… I had never gone by my birth name, but then I decided to sign my art with it. At first, it was to honor the grandfather I was named after–who I never knew (He died two weeks before I was born) And my uncle, also an artist, and a kind of mentor for me. But I’ve gotten acclimated to it. Accepted it for what I do. Which has become what names mean for me, and how I use them.
vistacard.jpg
Jacob Russell (Russell, being my middle name), was how I sign my poetry and fiction, and has been my go-to name for most of the last four decades. More recently–there’s, Goby. A fish that can change it’s sex. I don’t change my sex, but accepted in my late years, that I am in no way limited in my desires to the opposite gender/sex–though this is something that works out mostly on the level of imagination. A Radical Faerie name–a fantasy name for fantasy sex. And, planting beans. Planting beans, today…climbing beans… wondering if I might, when they reach the clouds, climb to the top and visit the kindly giant who lives there (his bad reputation? what you would expect from English colonizers and would be capitalists!)… so… a gardener’s name. A Magic name… when “Jacob” sounds way too serious.

A name should never be a prison. But a seed. Germinating new names, new identities. Always becoming, always under repair… and never, ever…  fixed.