IV
– Vienna 1912
This,
almost Unremarked upon, is important.
Come down the day,
and crest forgotten wishes
that believe some other sun to.It
Night remembers Nothing
that you came from
Nothing is so strong,
you knew it all all along.
Black birds in flight to ravens
sing of fright, that trees twisted
barren
and the snow comes, white.
Fires all alight.
Cry that sullen sinking site.
It
ends as it began, a rather, it ends with a different note then it
started. it's not as if the tonic chord is the one that called all
other courts in two being, because there were no other tonic chords
at all, and instead Apollinaire had no tonic chords at all. but they
are was something in the field of Vienna which would rip out all that
one new about tonality. Mahler, whom was the most outrageous of
Imperial court musicians, had died working on a piece that may or may
not have had a tonal first movement. it would be his 10th, but he
would not finish it. the band of Schoenbergeins would rouse their
view numbers for a twisted reality, not call in it atonal, because
that word was to forbidden. instead the leader insisted on calling it
suspended tonality, because it is least was saying that there was a
something there to.
Then
in the darkness of Vienna, a poem translated from German from what
sounds like Czech, or Russian, you don't know which it is from,
because you have forgotten both of those languages since the stroke
happened:
In a light mist, transparent
vapor
Lost afar and yet distinct
A star gleams softly.
How beautiful! The bluish
mystery
Of her glow
Beckons me, cradles me.
O Bring me to thee, far distant
star!
Bathe me in trembling rays
Sweet light!
Sharp desire, voluptuous and
crazed yet sweet
Endlessly with no other goal
than longing
I would desire.
But no! I vault in joyous leap
Freely I take wing
Mad dance, godlike play!
Intoxicating, shining one!
It is toward thee, adored star
My flight guides me
Toward thee, created freely for
me
To serve the end
My flight of liberation!
In this play
Sheer caprice
In moments I forget thee
In the maelstrom that carries me
I veer from thy glimmering rays
In the insanity of desire
Thou fadest
O distant goal
But ever thou shinest
As I forever desire thee!
Thou expandest, Star!
Now thou art a Sun
Flamboyant Sun! Sun of Triumph!
Approaching thee by my desire
for thee
I lave myself in they changing
waves
O joyous god
I swallow thee
Sea of light
My self-of-light
I engulf Thee!
it
is badly translated from whatever language it was from, to broken
English which runs through your head. It is not your
translation, because you would translated not word by word, but words
that sound like the root of the melodious shadow in the native
language.
Soon you remember a different
Rendering of a different onomatopoeia:
Genrepunk are
those fields of speculative or fantasy fiction which take as their
"point of departure" – capital among pretension in
literary phrases, why not the word "start" – the
conventions of a particular technological era, most especially
associated with its energy basis, and ask the question of the nature
of consciousness in that genre. The intersection of energy and
consciousness is particular, though not peculiar, to a moment when
our old energy sources is now overburdened, and our once hopeful
technology of computational networking is showing that it cannot
deliver a more efficient world.
The original
genrepunk was cyberpunk, the intersection of computers as faerie
realm. Neuromancer, Tron, and Mona Lisa Overdrive form the three
early lighthouses, and <i>Snow Crash</i> an influential
libertarianization. Note that libertarianizing anything makes in more
popular, in the same sense that old mass media is always trying to
find an evangelical Christian angle to anything – it is a large
rootless religion filled with people who will consume voraciously
that which appeals to their religion, and not when it doesn't. As
marginal consumers, they are very powerful.
What "punk"
replaced, as a literary idea, was spiritualism. Consider the
transporation of John Carter in Mars, first written in 1911, and in
CS Lewis, in his influential Narnia series, and in a host of others,
including John Norman's Gore. But this was related to the Gothic
novels, which implied ghostly or spiritual movement as well. This
spirit, not mind, is what matters to the previous examination in
speculative and horror fiction. Spirits move, and are incarnated, and
then having been incarnated they have the existential question as to
how a spirit from one age and place can function in another.
The punk genre, by
replacing spirit, a romantic-realist concept, with mind a modern-pop
concept, changed the essential ground rules, in that in a spirit
based universe, the continuity and integrity of the individual is
assumed, because that is the quality that "spirit" has.
Whatever happens to the spirit, it is still what it is, even when it
changes. There are no lower levels of spirit.
Mind, by contrast,
has unexplored or unvisible, as opposed to invisible, aspects. Mind
is often at the mercy of the emergent properties of its lower level
functioning, and this forms the essential element of the "punk
mind." The punk mind is the attempt to maintain coherence of
self, in the face of emergent drives and persona that come from the
workings of what supports mind. Just as the user of a computer is
often at the mercy of the workings that come out of the applications
and operating system, in order to keep the main power of the computer
directed at the ends that the user wants. The will, then, is in
conflict with the apparatus that allows the will.
One could make a
detour into Schoppenhauer here: the world is will and representation,
and productively examine the punk mind as the conflict between the
self, which is composed of the free and bound will. One could also
make a detour into the sociology of the development of modern
computing, and see how the creation of mentally describable places,
and the ability to execute unplanned, but still clearly artificial
operations, began to seem like the presence of "mind."
This is why
"musclepunk" remains un-named, because in the
pre-mechanical, there is nothing to present as a mind, except, a
mind. However punked the consciousness of Umberto Eco's <i>The
Name of the Rose</i> is, it is not punk, because there are no
minds but human minds. The same is true of his <i>Foucault's
Pendulum</i> because despite the presentation of an occult
system which begins to display the properties of a mind, and the use
of a computer to create connections, the computer is never the source
of mind.
Punking of genre,
of course, occurred before the publication of genre, most especially
in the questions of robotic or computer intelligence. But without the
submergence of the mind, the ability to step through and into the
faerie realm entirely, the quality of genrepunk is generally missing.
It is touched in media and in writing, even quite strongly, but the
immersive place is missing, and this is essential.
Once the genrepunk
idea is created, it is natural to project it backwards, and
"steampunk" the natural place to do this. The steam driven
world was remarkably modern in its short run in place. Since I am
writing for a non-fiction work the story of the conservative
revolutions of 1857-1873, the brevity of this age is stark, it really
only ran for 50 years, and, as such, was not that much longer than
the Cold War, and approximately of the same length as the Post-War
era. And yet, it shadows over the popular imagination, in part
because so much of our own popular culture uses techniques from it.
The next time you watch an adventure movie, realize that the idea,
and many of the means to carry it out, are from the mind of Richard
Wagner in creation of his dramas which were meant to be all
encompassing works of art.
The wall that this
era hit in the real world was the inability to deal with relative and
statistical reality, thus, in 30 years, it went from a culminating
certainty of a program of Newton, Smith, and Locke, to a cataclysm,
with its deepest notions of God, Country, and Reality, in ruins. This
isn't to be overstated: by 1920, classical physics, classical
economics, classical conceptions of art, and the Concert of Europe
were all in ruins: quantum mechanics, relativity, the “Great War,”
the destabilization of the “Classical Gold Standard,” and the
coming of mass art were all fatal to the system of thinking, along
with the rise of modern social science as a means of running
societies.
In imposing modern
information technology consciousness two areas stand out in
steampunk: one is the Vernian imposition of more effective travel,
particularly air travel, and the other is, of course the expansion of
the Wellsian consciousness of historical place. There is an
unconscious re-ordering of the relative economics of a variety of
goods and services to match the profile of consumer abundance that is
the hallmark of the modern age. While Victorian literature presented
abundance, it combined it with a conservatism to concentrate both
capital and buying power in a small number of hands. By being
ahistorical, steam punk is, in effect, violating physics to shift
genre conventions.
But it still has
the important punk-present question of whether information society
can overcome energy depletion. Strangely, or not, steampunk is the
utopian side of the question, where as cyberpunk is the dystopian
side. In the present, cyberpunk presents the answer that information
technology has too many instabilities, and in fact amplifies
disutility, and cannot, therefore, create a life of happiness that
offsets energy depletion. The mind is dark and terrible, and modern
digital computers only amplify this, and their digital spaces are
dirty. The steampunk genre is the quasi-utopian world of libertarian
swashbucklers, before the invention of the welfare state, when bold
people can do bold things. As such it is the presentation of the
apologia for empire that the cyber-punk version cannot be. One could
imagine a Sherlock Holmes being able to run an intelligence service
that would have found Osama bin Laden much more quickly. This is not
isolated, the conviction rate for crimes has gone down since forensic
science has improved. Down. Nor is it isolated militarily. A smaller
British Army, under a hodgepodge command structure, defeated the
Indian Rebellion of 1857-58, faster, and more lastingly, than a
larger American Army failed to pacify either Iraq, or Afghanistan.
Thus genrepunk is
the flip side of cyberpunk, in that it argues that in some previous
age the “smart mammals” could have overcome the “stupid
dinosaurs” more clearly and cleanly. The problem with the smart
mammals paradigm is that the smart mammals didn't win in evolution:
mammals were smarter starting around 175 million years ago, when a
focus on olfactory sensitivity caused a rapid increase in brain size.
As of 65 million years ago, the smart mammals were still running
around eating eggs. Evolutionarily the smart mammal strategy was wait
for a mass extinction event. It took 3 and 110 million years.
So why steam? Many
of the important reasons are obvious, which does not make them less
important, merely less interesting to dwell upon: the already
mentioned cultural roots, the mere possibilty: after all the 19th
century had electricity, flight, long distance travel, mass
manufacture, though not mass assembly, globalism and global
consciousness, mass media in the form of print. It also had a science
fiction consciousness that was quite real: Verne, Wells, and others.
However there are
forms and there are forms. While historical fiction set in the
Victorian has never ceased, both popular and literary, the punk genre
is a particular take on that era which is different from other novels
which project the modern consciousness backwards. In specific there
is a techno-consciousness that, as noted, projects transportation and
communication backwards. This means that while many of the important
factors in Victoriana are in play for steampunk, they are not
decisive in determining “why steam punk?” as opposed to say the
novels of <A
HREF=”http://www.amazon.com/Alienist-Caleb-Carr/dp/0553572997”>Caleb
Carr</A>, or even Harry Turtledove?
The answer lies in
the question of what is being rebalanced. Carr and other historical
fiction writers are presenting modern consciousness limited by
Victorian technology, that is, modern people with the shackles of
Victorian technology, but also the freedom of action that came with
Victorian times. There is no “back up,” no “plan B,” no
system to cover up for the mistakes of the individuals, or if it does
exist, as in Holmes, it is largely incompetent and an inconvenience.
For the alternate historians, like Turtledove, a single event is
changed, and the results are played out.
For the punk
genre, what happens is that steampunk is liberating, technology, such
as the author is interested in, is projected backwards, but without
the rest of modernity. In essence post-modern consciousness of
information liberation, is projected backwards. What is rebalanced is
that the collapse of the upper middle class as culturally central,
has not happened.
This, almost
unremarked upon, is important.
