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Paul Lafolley, It Came from Beneath Space, 1993
We are fortunate that the collapse of our culture entertains us.
We might otherwise not pause to notice it at all. In a different
mode, we give form to the future through our fears, by what we
do not do as much as what we do, by our belle indifference when
presented with a series of ultimatums. Our psyches are jagged.
Whole periods have gone missing. As crises converge, our refusal
to act is a testament to the scale of the coming upheaval.
We finger the rigid outlines of our scars, as if they belonged to
someone else. We shape the future by our under-the-skin sense
of all of those things we know but go out of our way not to think
about: that reserves of oil will almost certainly run out in our
lifetimes, that a solar flare could wipe out all of our I.T. systems,
that the U.S. does not manufacture much of anything anymore,
that each day more methane burps from the permafrost of the
Arctic, that the ocean is no respecter of our coasts, and that there
is not enough locally grown food to sustain most cities in a real
emergency. There are many things that it seems better not to
know. The future is one of the better places in which to store such
unasked-for knowledge.
It is always possible that the march of progress will indefinitely
continue, that “someone will think of something,” that our way of
life will require only a few small modifications, that windmills
and solar cells will save us. As ancient souls, we know this is
absurd. The problem is, of course, to separate and categorize
these alternate versions of the future—in simplistic terms, to
discriminate between the more false than true and the more true
than false. We can see the details but somehow miss the pattern;
we can see the pattern but somehow miss the details. To see
clearly we must see from more than one location, from all of the
360 degrees of a circle, from the vantage point of a presence that
may see the future in retrospect.
Max Ernst, Painting for Young People, 1943
If we are the simultaneous inhabitants of the present, the future,
and the past, we may not physically occupy these spaces, or,
conversely, we may occupy them all without inhabiting any one
space in particular. As our mouth pronounces the word “present,”
where does this word go? Is the present even present as we
normally understand it? This present, in that it vanishes at the
very moment that we grasp it, may be just as difficult to enter as
either the future or the past. To the past’s inhabitants, the past is
just as present as the present is to us, just as, even as we turn the
concept in our minds, we have moved into a future that was just
now theoretical. If we do, on some arcane level, live in both the
future and the past, if both of these are just alternate versions of
the present, there is a gulf between what we embody and what we
think we know, between what we are and what we have been
allowed to see.
Sadly, there are laws that prevent our switching out of “power
save” in order to reactivate the full scope of our senses. The art of
remote viewing is no longer taught in schools. Bilocation is now
seen as unscientific. There are industries devoted to the
proposition that a human being has less predictive power than an
algorithm. The age of the tool has passed and the age of the
prosthesis is at hand. We see what is put before us; we do not see
the long shadows that stand behind our backs. We now see with
our eyes; we do not believe that it is possible to see with the solar
plexus.
From their underground bases, speeding all ways at once, like
boomerangs, and with superhuman stealth, suspect forces play
games with the horizon. Fear and hope pump out a kind of
metaphysical fog, crackling with static, which makes every level
of the process difficult and tests our ability to translate the first
hieroglyphs that we wrote.
As light can manifest as either a particle or a wave, or both, but
not at the same time, so too the future both is and is not there. It
is there for those beings with a panoramic view, as it may be for
us at the moment of our deaths, but it revolts against all functions
that we would force it to perform. It is present in those flashes
that it chooses to transmit; it does not see fit to instruct us as to
the gaps in our methodology, through which we will fall.
We want to believe that each year our systems are moving a bit
closer to perfection. How accurate this is. Yet we forget that
“what is perfect will soon end,” as it says in the Tao Te Ching. The
language spoken by the future both is and is not similar to that
spoken by the present. Floods of information are provided, yes,
enough to create the appearance of a world, but too often
disinformation is more attractive than the truth. Trolls and
gremlins are among us! Fear forces us to misjudge the location of
our navels. We dread the constant vigilance that is imposed by
the Ideal.
Zidzislaw Beksinski, The Tables Turned, 1982
Through the years, and especially in the early 1990s, I have
sometimes found myself projected into the future, both in terms
of specific images and through wider visionary overviews. These
experiences felt urgent. On the skyline, threats had massed. Spent
technocratic protocols had clogged the lines of energy. There
were also invitations—invitations to which we had somehow not
bothered to respond. I felt seized by the hair. I felt yanked out of
my skin in order to bear witness. I felt called upon to test the
boundaries of my language, to rethink my aesthetics from scratch,
to find some way to speak of what I saw.
These experiences made demands on me, yet they also, to some
extent, seemed almost pointless to report, even if I had been
more visible than I was. Why did I waste so much time in
torturing my language? For whom was my message intended, and
was there any way that my vision could be shared?
Before a crisis, few would have any reason to pay attention to
such overviews, and afterwards, reading poetry would be way
down on the public’s list of priorities. I was able to see certain
details as well as certain patterns. At first, there was no good way
to present these as a narrative, any more than an ocean consists
of a series of steps. How is it possible to tell the story of an ocean?
The traumas that had possessed us from the time of the Younger
Dryas were nonetheless starting to make sense. A finger to my
lips, I have spent years keeping secrets. I pretend, when asked, to
know much more about football than I do.
In retrospect, certain passages stand out, as having started in one
world and then ended up in another. What began as vision had
some tangential relationship to fact. For example, references to
the destruction of the World Trade Towers popped up three or
four times in poems from 1992. “A monster stalked his head
through the air vents of the World Trade Towers. He could not
find it, for the towers themselves had disappeared.” “The World
Trade Towers for a fourth time fall; their shadows stand.”
There were other lines from this period that possibly pointed to
the BP Gulf oil disaster: “Not one leaf stirs. The sea has met its
death by accident. The tree Yggdrasil has been hacked at the
root.” And to Fukushima: “You have thrown a wave at the
reactors of the Nephilim. Rods overheat, and the whole of the
ocean is not enough to cool them.”
There were dozens of references in my books To Akasha: An
Incantation for the Crossing of an Ocean and The Preexistent
Race Descends to the idea of a “mile-high wave.” To Akasha was
structured around this image, and it was a phrase that I never
expected to hear in the evening news. But, during the BP Gulf oil
crisis, reporters began to speak about what would happen if the
vast lakes of methane under the Gulf were to explode. One
consequence of this would be a mile-high wave that would rise up
to wash over two thirds of North America.
If such images proved nothing, if they were no more than
suggestive, well, such is the nature of poetry. From the standpoint
of vision, what was real was that our way of life was far more
fragile than we thought. The complexity of our systems was a
liability rather than a defense, and, the more complex these
systems became, the more out of touch and vulnerable we were.
What we called “facts” were a way of keeping our eyes fixed on
the foreground.
“If there is a foreground,” I said to myself, “then there should also
be a background.” Delusional though it might seem, I felt that
some ancient audience was observing me from a distance, that
they were presenting me with cues and challenges and tests. I
referred to this body as “The Assembly Beyond Space.” If this
body did, in fact, exist outside of time or at some tangent to it,
what possible interest could they have in my experiments with
language? If, on some level, the events in our world had already
taken place, what more could a poet add?
If I was not entirely content to be anonymous, neither did I want
to become more public than I was, not if this required even the
smallest amount of effort. How should I transmit information
that I barely understood? There was nothing that I could do to
change anyone’s behavior. Should not a mystic be silent? “Silent,
yes,” I said to myself, “but lazy, maybe not. Perhaps I should see
my attempts to speak as a kind of ritual action, as a way of
pointing to the arcane geometry that joins one world to another.”
Some few noticed, here and there.
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