in power

in power, the struggle for security. 

I'm the first to confess that I have minimal patience for the body of literature that we know as "science fiction"—having decided as a child (perhaps mistakenly, I have been told) that it was, overall, too pragmatic for my taste, too invested in construction yet, unlike comparable Futurist writing, apathetic to the ribbed skin of language itself. Science fiction seemed to me then a conduit to illumination designed for the mechanical reader, who is only too happy watching the dually-versed writer use the unholy utensils of the technic to rake the mystic's holy ground. Meanwhile, the seeds of a text’s more poetic revelations would inevitably grow moldy in the dark freeze of its life as lesson plan, being so often taken for instructive moral fable rather than as prophesy of promised lands. 

In time I've come to appreciate exceptions to these framing conditions in the work of Calvino, or Delany, or Le Guin, but even in those exceptions there arises the issue of fixing to speech imperatives not yet ready to be physically meted out, and that feel perhaps too elusive to be so crisply written down. The world will takes its time incorporating them. It is this discomfiting nature of articulation in contingency, amidst the ambiguities of a pending future-present, that keeps the conceptually open-ended but descriptively definitive "genre" conventions of science fiction both necessarily protective of new ideas, and also frustratingly intelligible. 

Proceeding in this vein, it seems accurate to observe that Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven (1971) is a popular but still underrated book, and a lucid, fittingly "predictive" representation of some essential "brain century" questions: 

What constraints should we place on cerebral consciousness, once we are able to diagram and harness its transmutative plasticity? Are there bureaucratic terms that we must give, or will be compelled to give, to energetic instantiation, to "govern" the "ungovernable" channels inside ourselves? Who has ownership over these channels' subtle, and cellular, direction?

Lathe can be an unpleasant object, it possesses an external calm that renders it odorless, a thing full of dust bunnies and simultaneously, of peremptory logic. It is what, in my fondness for abstractions, I would call "confusingly clear". So Le Guin's gooseberry style is not mine, and when I initially encountered it I wasn't yet interested in the Tao Te Ching from which she derives each chapter's aphoristic subheadings, but nonetheless, the sketch of its plot—with EEG scanning technology, a doctor takes advantage of a patient's state of somnambulant creativity to remake the world—has stuck with me since before my senior year of high school, when it was assigned as summer reading. 

Lathe is about betweenness, and controlled betweenness. About dreaming as a means of separating and re-sequencing timescales and technically mediated recursion. It's about how human it is to introduce things to existence and then wish to retract them, overwhelmed by the many valences of actioned power, power you did not know was yours, or that you could refuse to be used for.

Power as potential energy, power as sovereign will. We are sovereign over what, now? We are sovereign over however far we allow our consciousness to extend—over what we let in, and what we let out—goes the general dictate. But even in serving as mere cover, a blunt tool for that greater, hidden theme, "allow" is a complex verb, and it gets at the complexity of individual psychic permission as it conjuncts with the collective field.

Last night, I watched a recording from a teacher in which she says something like, if you think the idea of twin souls came from Plato, I can't w/ you. Meaning that twin souls is a concept integrated by Plato for human comprehension but one that was already circulating in the ether, and that might have been conveyed via any number of arbitrary messengers. Messengers are doodle-jumpers, they reach up, up, up—far into the sky—to grab at passing transmissions; through modes of translation like philosophy or simple metaphor (doodle jumping par example), or evidently, Le Guin's science fiction, a transmission becomes widely legible as "concept". 

What keeps me curious, what I continue to play at, is less the ability to grab a concept, and bring it "down" to us—something that will come naturally to more and more people over our lifetime—than the forced dichotomy that follows, the fallacy of security in power that Lathe's doctor and patient are fighting over. 

Whomever lays claim to integration will have to develop a daily practice of facing its consequences. Existence assumes shape at the frequency where lathe (resources, materials, the human as instrument) and heaven (higher order) meet. Knowing you are a person of that frequency can be slightly destabilizing—given all that you are called on to stabilize. It entails a certain kind of harmony between yes, the scientific and the fictive; the messenger and his message. To cite Abbey Lincoln's "magic words", we need both a hand to rock the cradle, and a hand to help us stand, twin poles unto themselves.