Great Britain is now officially working on a database tracking sytem recording all vehicle based transport of its residents. Basically, give it a name and it will tell were that person was 24/7. Starting from next year or so. Year after year. There’s some protest but it’s hardly heard. Anti-terrorism. Doris Lessing wrote this would happen 30 years ago. Most dystopian literature is wishful thinking anyway, a perverse relishing in the cynical vista’s of a prepackaged identity, pre-emptive strikes of the imploding ego on its bursting bubble. You don’t need Huxley. It’s always gonna feel different.
In a continuous universe of contained information one can assume as a workable hypothesis that any seemingly random encoding wants to be meaningfull. A tendency of reversed entropy over time. Units once functioning as meaningful code turning stony, alienated of their original systems of meaning attribution, obliterated into fast floating pseudo random fragments, colliding with other planes of consistency, attracting the noise of what passes through our stratified webs of meaning. A natural garbaging cycle of meaning.
Time has given the Heraclitus fragments more meaning then they possibly could have had in the coherent textual unit they supposedly once were. Translating them is like translating names in Harry Potter texts, you need to find equivalents including their origin and what they amount to in the story. Only the ‘story’ here is that of humanity. I once considered writing up a Lucilian philosophy based on the fragments of the early Roman poet Lucillius, whose work probably somewhat resembled an uncut version of one of Jay Leno’s late night shows.
Otherwise, yesterday i kept thinking how to build a machine that could be up to the task of rewriting Sylvia Plath’s poems in such a way that most of the absolute power in the texts would be kept, turning the negative in an equally positive amount of energy. It wouldn’t be poetry anymore, that’s not necessary, there’s plenty of real poets around. The application could be used as a textual equivalent to the musack playing in railway stations. Commercially, one could generate a reasonable income from it in advertising.
Dying is an art. One should practice it every day.
Ridiculous thoughts. Writing, like giving names to places and peoples, is quite pointless. Yet every word is a decision: a view on the world in its resolution. Resolution in both its senses. The movement of words is a regular one, together they offer us what Ponge dreamt of: a human resolution.
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