Theory-Fiction
Opting for time with family last Wednesday night, I chose the asynchronous option of week four’s Ccru lecture and am listening as I take the walking cure for my deleterious spinal-catastrophised geotrauma.
A recording of Vincent Lê, downloaded onto iPhone 15 Pro, plays in my AirPods 4 (ANC), collapsing the distance in artificial spacetime. Information presentation: a sip of water, keys pressed. A virtual overlay on birdcall, ancestral celebration of the recent rain and return from summer migration.
Switching to email client: liquid rock has been poured over my section of cut earth. Here is an invoice. Your debt expands should finance survive the endtimes.
Atop the hill, Cupertino’s best efforts wrestle with the sound of wrens tweeting (xing? posting?), magpies warbling, ravens cawing, and the steady rhythm of a machine river connecting cities across a continent: National Highway A20.
Many years back, I wandered these paths in another liminal stage, and I wondered if a man I often saw here was real. A man of medium build, mop of brown hair, lax gait, who wore loose fitting button down shirts and light hem-trodden jeans. Little Jack Russel trailing behind, obediently unleashed. I was writing a lot at the time, still learning my craft, how to control creative chaos.
Part of me hoped this man of was not real but a figment of my schizo-imagination. Reflection of my desire to connect to a rhizomic fiction, plug into the matrix of pulp and ideas, find a real character. We never interacted but through sight and sound like those of his sneakers crunching on the gravel path as mine do today.
Once I spotted him coming out of a house down among the semi-detached social housing that is now getting sold, demolished, subdivided, re-made. His yard was filled with junk: an upturned dinghy, colourful ceramic gnomes, plants overgrown, planks of wood tied together with shredded clothes. I watched the man step through his short chain link gate, Jack Russel shortly behind, and blip right out of existence. So it goes.
Clouds of heavy grey steel are gathering over the hill. The sky’s dead TV colour accentuated by glasses designed to nullify forms of light and change perception so as to protect my sensitive meatbag and provide me comfort in nature. I watch the clouds hang, hear sirens in the distance from an ambulance on the machine river. My headphones are in, but Vincent is silent. He has been since I started talking with a former junky (5.5 years clean) about his custom motorbike with Chinese motor and cheap black plastic chassis. He rode up to take photos of the view over Adelaide’s Northern Suburbs. Or did I invent him as well?
Invention as psychological protection, as an evolutionary scar. A technology of the ‘verse. Imagination and stories protecting Self, cancelling the noise of a complex reality like how the AirPods cancel the birds, the cars, but pop with the wind that gusts from those heavy dark clouds atop the peak.
Now I realise my feet don’t touch the ground as my ears don’t touch the air. A pair of cheap black and white Nike Downshifter 13s between me and the small quarried stones at the lookout. A thin sheet of polyester Asics shorts between my legs and a large piece of granite. Shirt, jumper blocking the cool autumn breeze and hot sun now past its zenith.
I am trashmeat bagged in branded plastic. It’s technology all the way down. Systems of language, production, organsiation, culture, exchange. A meat machine strapped into the information superhighway.
Further on the trail, my phone rings and I answer. Standing at the hill’s edge among windblown grass, rocks, dry trees, I speak into the air. The air is caught by the H2 chip in my ears which transmits from one computer to another in a chain of protocols, and so on these bits go, these 1s and 0s of speech en- and de-coded to and from waves of air, carrying meaning. How strange all this is. Where am I behind the glasses? The Nike cap and shoes? The plastic clothes? The AirPods 4 (ANC) and iPhone 15 Pro? A single machinic intelligence wrapped in layers of technology, geology, cosmology, eschatology? A bit. 1 now, 0 later.