Tag Archives: science fiction

COME VISIT
 
“We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.
We struggle to make contact, but we’ll never
achieve it.” Solaris, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky (1972)
 
You asked me to come visit. However, you neglected to tell me what I need to pack. So let me just attach here, the letter that I wrote, in the hope that when you read it you might understand the situation a bit better. The trip will be almost instantaneous, you say, but its millions of light years away. So there are a number of things for me to consider. I can try to explain it in rational tropes or terms, but it makes no sense given the questiion of special relatvity and the unbelievable distance involved. .
 
For instance, I did not get any unambiguous feedback on whether I can breathe in your planet’s atmosphere, and survive under the force of your planet’s gravity. Just to remind you: I am an oxygen-breathing carbon-based life form. Bipedal, but with nagging and somewhat debilitating arthritis in my right knee. And the space-folding technology: will that mean that I find myself squashed up in a confined space for any length of time? I have to warn you I am horribly claustrophobic.
 
As for the selfie you sent me — from detailed scrutiny, viewing it from every angle, I am not able to really conceptualize the nature of your biology. It would be hard for me to explain to you how radically different it is from my own. Somewhat worrying too, is your “strong recommendation” that I willingly agree to undergo a process of reconfiguration, reconstruction and reorientation, which you see as essential for the two us to procreate, producing interspecies hybrid offspring, in which process the traditional human divisions between paternity and maternity would be, as you put it “transcended”. You say that it is crucial we do indeed go ahead with this union, because of the particular nature of our quantum entanglement, neither of us can adequately be said to be real and truly exist unless through act of bonding we mutually establish and confirm each other’s existence (collapse from superposition into joing consciousness and pure flow).
 
Oh my friends, this story is going to take us into a very dark place indeed. So you have been forewarned, but I doubt whether you will consider yourself forearmed. In my story there is a man not very much unlike me. Let’s call him “Damien” or “Damon” or “Jon”, or even “Damon Jon”, for want of a name that might suit him better. I see him in his office talking to Mpho. Mpho is one of his best students. He is also unmistakably, since not just open, but quite ostentatious about it, hugely and imposingly gay. Damon, or Dr Damon as he would prefer to be known, all protocols observed, does not mind, for though he is straight, and white, and so-so as a lecturer, somewhat liked by his students, including Mpho. He would say, rightly or wrongly, that he is not at all homophobic or racist. That he cannot even think of himself as such, but of course he sometimes thinks the anguished thought that he might well be mistaken. It is not for him. or a jury of his peers to judge. Best we cab say is that he is trying to fight the good fight and be stern with himself when he feels he has laspsed, regressed, or let his guard down. Married to, but now separated from a local village woman many years his junior. If he is honest with himself, he might care to ask himself more often how sure is he in his heart of hearts that he is able to separate the sexual fetish of the socio-cultural other, from what is genuine human bonding, and indeed, love. Wife’s name: Modiegi,
 
But the conversation between Mpho and Dr Damon is regrettably, not going well at all. Here we are, two figures on opposite sides of his office desk. His pokey little office desk. Spassky/Fischer. What could look more confrontational? Scruffy, untidy, tiny, pressing in from all sides. But counterbakanced by the great pressure of all the books, centrifugal and thus pushing outwards. An office that could not be a stronger visual metaphor for the inhibited psyche. No wonder the airing of grievance, the settling of a dispute, arguing this vociferously is bound to feel the verbal equivalent of trench warfare. Hand-to hand,
 
The argument has already become quite heated, and, of all things, it revolves around Damon’s assertion that according to the Myers-Briggs psychology test he took at a university academic management training getaway, he is an ENFP, the first letter E standing for “Extrovert”. He didn’t get to explainingwhat the N, F and P stood for. Mpho tore into him immediately challenging the truth of this assessment. Telling him he couldn’t possibily be even marginally extrover, that he “does not have an extrovert bone in his body at all.”
 
 Damon does not respond, just let’s him continue with this diatribe. But those who know him know from that look that this is damgerous territory into which Mpho, misreading the radical, subtextual body language being expressed before him, is ill-advisedly heading. An old wound has been openened, and the blood that is pouring out there, metaphorically speaking, was forged ten to twelve centuries ago, alongside a Norwegian fjord. From his earliest memories of his parents they had misread him, got him wronmg. Had indoctrinated him into the self-belief that he was the very definitionof an introvert dreamer, insufferably shy, useless in the real world, scared of his own shadow and unable to connect with people. And now this was being throuwn back in a totally uncalled for, totally unfounded way. Every minute that Mpho rambled on a thousand red lines were being crossed. And yet. And yet. He sailed on. For Damon discovering that he was nothing like how his parents had, for their own sick interests, pegged him, that he was an extrovert, was nothing short of a self-liberating vindication of all his bitter resistance to their attempts to create him in their image, mould him according to their sick, aberrant need.
 
Damon tells him bluntly that he is tired of this conversation and frankly deeply offended by what he has had to say. Adding an in the circumstances of whjat was to follow within a month, an oninous warning that he sincerely hoped that Mpho would never experience such a reprehensible misreading of someone as he seems to be so shameless in subjected someone else to.
 
Mpho leaves, his exit falling in character somewhere between being forcefully ushered out, to being hustled out in no uncertain terms, just falling shy of the use of actual physical force. .
 
This is the last time Damon will see or ever speak to Mpho again. The chance for an open discussion on what went so wrong here. amd thus the possibility of reconciliation being lost forever in the most horrible way you might be able to imagine
 
Enough of all of this. Of Damon and Mpho and their stupid spat and why what happened there can never be put right.That story is going nowhere. My turn now, and here I am in plain view and full focus waiting for “the manual of interspecies cosmic love for hugely disparate biologies” to be beamed down to me. I remember a better time shared with Mpho — I was with him when Damon told him he had “killed” the question on Lemonade (later I was to see him signing some of Beyoncé’s songs with some of the would-be members of that singer’s hive dancing and singing in the student cafe totally indifferent to all onlookers), Running through their favorite songs from that album, if well can one call that multi-media music phenomenon an “album”. Yes, I was there when Damon him the did indeed “slay” that question, bearded the dragon in her den, and as a result had, when the nitty-gritty addition and division was done, obtained a distinction in the third year module on popular culture.
 
Oh, is that all the Mpho and Damon story I get to tell? So now we switch to someone else? This is getting really muddled. Too much head-swopping, each bringing its own crazy shift in point of view and perception. How can any poor reader be presumed to be able to keep track?
 
OK. So here is our reader, the poor reader I have in mind, listening to an audio of a story by HP Lovecraft. As per usual, some portal had opened, and the cosmic terror just started to come shining through. This is how it is in this genre. What was that tag-line?: if you build it… he will come. But not the ghost of his father as in the sweetly patriarchal Kevin Costner baseball movie, currently to be seen playing to an audience of zero on his laptop screen on the other side of the room. As for Lovecraft, how much of Cthulu stems from his rabid, racist fear of the Other, complete projection of his shadow? If you build it …
 
If a dark portal, a mind-altering singularity suddenly appeared in the centre of a major town or city, or out in the sticks beside a rural village, what would the experts be saying about it? What socio-cultural or psycho-analytical meaning would be ascribed to its coming into being? How do we give a spiritual grading to physical events, even when much of that physics remains somewhat hypothetical, impossibly abstract and threfore barely understood?
 
Where did evil begin? What dark world gave it birth?How did it first manifest, make its presence undeniable? Could be our ideas about its origin are sadly inadequate. Perhaps the evil in us refuses to let itself be lucidly seen. Maybe it is evolving before our very eyes,
 
Ah, there will always be darkness and evil and love and consciousness. Players forever wandering up and down the stage forgetting their lines and what role they just so happen to be playing this evening. Tripping up, falling over the edge. And the edge of the stage is the edge of the world, and the edge of the world and the edge of the universe are metaphors or metonyms for each other. Whatever!
 
Talking of singularities and altered states, And altered universes such as the one in which I never met you, poor reader and the one where we turned out so sexually compatible it was as if we were steel riveted or welded together. In this alternate universe where it all went wrong at the beginning yet every ten years we contrive to communicate with each other, I dreamt I was being driven by you, sitting in the passenger seat of your old beige (drab beige) Datsun 1200 that you drove back in the mid 1970s. But in my dream this vehicle became utterly transmogrified. In the history of the cosmos no ride has ever been so absolutely pimped, in ways cyberpunk and also spicily afrofuturist. Here, back in some other future, we were G-force thrust back into leather bucket seats design to comfortably swallow, and you full formula one or Le Mans behind real mccoy racing steering wheel. What was a tinker-toy 1200cc engine was now a Ford Mustang V8 with turbocharger and Star Trek hyperdrive and Star Trek control panel to match. Eat your heart out transformers! Here, as you screamed through the gears we left our old stuffy sweet alma mater way behind us, turning out onto De Waal Drive and screaming through the Woodstock bends and chicane into the city itself, the number “72” suddenly shot into view in huge explosively scarlet-red beaming, glowing neon numerals, hitting hyperdrive whereupon the dream did end.
 
When I had the dream of flying across the Cape Town skyline in your souped-up car, it would have been incredible if we had actually been on the same page, having the same dream. Would have been truly synchronic but it just didn’t, couldn’t happen. During that dreamtime, you were off on your own dream business, in headspace somewhere else. And I gather that your dream was no slouch, but a juicy apocalyptic basket of horrors as you looked up to a sky fatally criss-crossed by holy thermonuclear host of ultimate ballistic missiles, some arriving, some departing, bringing the equity of death. And not to be outdone for surreal: you sat pouring tea for King Kong and Jack Ripper, as the kettle went full . “Dr Strangelove” element incandescent, everwhere white light and more than a hintof explosion. There was a kind of ballet to everything, or a dance macarbe where ballet and chess find themselves dragooned into romance and impossible marriage.
 
Upon which note I must tell you what I have been holding back since we began here: that sadly, horrifically, Mpho is dead. Did I not warn you that something very dark, horrific and quite terrible was going to happen in this story? He was visiting a village in his little car and some of the inhabitants did not appreciate the visit. They cut him up with knives and axes, locked him in the boot of his car, doused the vehicle with petrol and set it alight burning him alive. Were thet three individuals, or something that melded into one three-headed monster. Either way, they are serving life sentences/it is serving a life sentence. When the car was burning, before it had burnt out completely, a huge plume of grey-black smoke rose into the sky above the village, looking like it was a statement of some kind, or maybe even a sacrificial tribute. Bleak tribute to nemesis such as out of an Auschwitz chimney.
 
Not a sight, it must be said in much mitigation, you could see and make head or tail of from even the fringes of outer space. Talking of outer space as metaphor: it seems the village did not ask him to come visit. Unless it did but for some inexplicable reason, three figures willing to assume the role of all-powerful gatekeepers were kept out of the loop, not being y not fully apprised about the invitation, and the rules of hospitality and humanity that go along with it. Or they were told and said to themselves “fuck that, there is stuff here that needs to be preserved.Stuff integral to our identity”. And so a sweet little became a death star, found itself turned into a hostile planet.

I am here. As you no doubt have guessed (and give yourself a high fiveif you have!)I am light years away already. I don’t know, it could be hundreds, thousands, even millions of light years away. How long have I been here: please give me an idea all you Einstein professors of relatvity out there! Not so easy tremember all that is human, to still consider yourself when you can barely remember our homeworld, and alien absorption has brought about near unfathomable change (to fit three-dimensional being into four dimensional hole).
 
She says she saw my story before I even thought it, never mind wrote it. Saw it in my eyes, read my mind: uploaded all our deepest archetypes of death and transcendence, across all our horizons laterally, longditudinally from surface to core. Will she weaponize me? Set me to work as her android, her mechanical tool? How do I find the words to even talk about her, so beyond the limits of my language, Creature of the sublime. thing from beyond the other side of the mirror. Vessel of darkness, synonym of the Real that is everything that contradicts what we believe to be real. Yes, such an encounter with other intelligence, other consciousness could well prove to be the breaking of mind and identity into a billion pieces. On the other hand (tentacle) it could be the redemption beyond all belief.
 
After such exhaustive analysis, maybe story dies, maybe story, our story, is over. . Perhaps it can no longer hold.The roots have gone and when the cosmic winds appear it will all just get swept away. Seems to me, viewed from this perspective, it’s not a thing worth the expense of care. Viewed from this perspective, it hardly makes sense any more. Trying to explain it to the universe: as the bomb flash freeze-frames us. Beyoncé in marigold dress, turned baseball bat wielding full virago. Or monster trucking every parked car, taking out the CCV cameras with their distinct view of history. Or Mpho’s life, what it meant, what was lost, and why this musical creation struck such a shord with him.
 
What words is one meant to use? What metaphors, tropes, themes, images and all that other paraphernalia will serve to adequately expressthis? Express anything? Give us our portal, build us our bridge. Find a way that we might connect. Come make our visit. And then ever thereafter we are consequentially foever head and tail exchaning venom, devouring each other, one perfectly drawn circle of forever completeness.
 
Am at your mercy; you tell me. Leave nothing unsaid that we must conjecture, somehow go figure.
 
Spell it out as it dawns on you.. And do it quickly. You have, by my reckoning, just a few minutes spare after we are done here. I am both reliably told and saw it myself prophetically.
 
Everything disintegrates. Saw this with Modiegi. Roadside picnic. The strange and uncanny imagined on the outside will find its way in. As it did with her. Changing the pattern one way or the other, question is can you live with it/ Can you adjust?
 
I am completely integrated now. No holes, no gaps, no shadows. Am totally alien to what I once was, what you still are. And now transformed as I am I begin to think seriously, but differently about the nature of life, existence, and of course consciousness. Is it a prison? A thing that cannot be separated from the anguish of time?Is it the power that creates everything, or is it an illusion, a false representation of some inner biological process that isn’t very important at all? Ghost in the machine or soul of everything? And how can consciousness be good and yet end up evil? Are there no answers. Is consciousness something determined to hide from itself? That thing that looks into a mirror hoping to see something, but then becomes not just the reflection but the mirror itself? Mirrors mirroring each other but always just a fragment, a fraction of the big picture. Holding up the mirror, Mr Hamlet you have become what you yourself mirror. Exactly! We are all sweet Princes in our own fatal, fractal, tragic, comic dream.

So, spim a coin and call it: the universe in which we never met, or the universe in which we became lovers. If we ever meet again. If I ever find myself in your bedroom again.

If the film of that old script finds itself being played again, projected in the same old cinema maybe we will find something diffetent, guided by what we have learnt. Guided by our futures (O, hot shot driver of your souped up extraterrestrial  car).

Greys etched against blues;  painterly sky this morning. Could be on Earth right now. Could be on its entangled sister planet God knows how many billion light years away.

You asked me to come visit; I could not be more here.