Maze of Sound
A is far away. Beneath the crosshatch gazes of the satellites and above the maze of sound, seahorse clouds exhale a glaucoma haze before they are absorbed into surveillance footage. The haze rolls along the curvature of the yellow-green plane on which he is standing.
At the horizon the sky is in piles.A thinks: It's like my skin. I am getting older.
A is far away. He stands on a yellow-green plane among strange muffin-shaped plants. They are concentric rings that seem to issue from an apex. The rings leak slowly downward, expanding as they travel. He imagines that the circles continue moving underground, growing smaller by degrees until they are absorbed into a second apex and sent back up through the system. They are objects and modalities. They are their own diagrams.
A is looking around.
He thinks: The fragmentation of imperial power seems very far from here. The picture world does not recede behind imperfections that impose themselves between me and the elements in the space that I organize.
From where I am, I still project space and position. I divide the world into here and not-here.
I am a mobile present. I divide time into past and future. I map this onto space: the future is in front of me: the past is behind.
Maybe the fragmentation of power is a net that disappears as it falls.
Maybe it is a parameter that is invisible simply because parameters do not appear within the systems they shape.
Or maybe it is a pressure, imperceptible but continuous, that accelerates the movements of everyday life and reveals itself through distortions. But distortions relative to what? I move with them.
A's attention wanders back into the maze of sound. Trajectories made from rattle and buzz and birdsong tumble and dissipate, some near, some far.
He is the mobile center of a silence. The maze is everywhere he is not. It is real but he cannot see it.
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Author's Note
Edge Effect no. 83.
From my 100 Days Project.
http://100edgeeffects.tumblr.com/
The idea of the whole series has been to make maps of the collapse of the American Empire. I think we're living through it...but I'm also pretty sure it's not as dire as it sounds. Think Hapsburgs.
Because it's playing out across an ideological crisis or sorts, it's linked to a kind of cognitive paralysis.
I wanted to make the maps from a level quite close to the ground, which made the project quite open-ended. Sometimes people perform it directly. Mostly, though, they perform it indirectly or through avoidance or lack of awareness and go about their lives, dreaming and falling in love and everything else but in a particular and strange environment.
I've been trying to catch some of it. I can't tell if it's succeeded because I'm in it too. And it's hard to talk about problems of a frame of reference when that frame of reference is yours.
Anyway, sooner or later in the piece I had to lay out the schema behind the piece as a whole. This is what I came up with.
Other stories by stephen hastings-king
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Having read your work before and appreciated it, Stephen, I also appreciate this. It calls for a far more erudite response than I can deliver. My response to the fragmentation of empire is a kind of Sartrean nausea that cowers and angers but cannot find its voice.*
interesting aspect of your 100 day work, stephen, which i've followed and appreciated. i like this, too, especially as it provides backstory to the story. im also concerned with the fragmentation of power. i wonder (forever) if a more philosophical, abstract form is better than the direct, visual, plotted form when capturing the riddle. it remains a riddle about a riddle whichever way you approach it.
thanks for the reads, comments and faves...
not sure this is the space, but a couple things about the approach...
i have been thinking about philo, the registers it works with and the kinds of sentences it uses for a long time. the dominant mode of writing philo/theory is critical/exegetical and the sentences serve an integrating function---so problems are knit back into a version of the same, which is the neutral or transcendent rationality that informs the observer's viewpoint, which is outside what is being written about, looking. it's a form of spectatorship, really...if anything about the collapse of empire thesis/frame is accurate empirically (and i think it is, manifestly, even as the outcomes are not yet determinable) then writing about it in sentences that integrate what is written back into the a neutral or transcendent rationality (the space created by the sentences, the viewpoint of the observer) is a Problem. because it is the neutrality of that position that is, in a sense, the issue insofar as it is a reflection of an ideological position...so just as domination becomes visible as the capacity to exercise it is undermined, so with these sentences and the rationality they enact.
there are other aspects, other problems (e.g. what would a way of writing/thinking about social being or becoming look like that's symmetrical with what it's talking about? or would be formally consistent with dynamical systems models of being/emergence etc...)
so i've been working with more open-ended forms, experimenting with ways to tamper with the relation of the general to the specific with minimalism etc. i think it's a way of making fictions and philo at the same time, moving sometimes more in one direction then another.
what i haven't quite figured out yet is the extent to which moving into more explicitly theoretical mode excludes a readership that the more fiction-centered writing invites, and vice versa. one of the things to be learned about in the doing.
thanks again for the reads, though. much appreciated.
Nice work, Stephen.
"A is looking around.
He thinks: The fragmentation of imperial power seems very far from here. The picture world does not recede behind imperfections that impose themselves between me and the elements in the space that I organize."
I like the form of the piece. Especially like the possiblilties with the closing here - "the mobile center of a silence". *
Stephen, cream cheese!
Fave.
P.S. I taped Amelia last week and it airs on Aug 26th! I hope you enjoy it.