Scarborough Bluffs (Beyond the FluTrucksKlan)

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Scarborough Bluffs. 

The Power of the Dog, or The Power of the Gods

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The bible is a powerful text that has shaped a large portion of humanity's understanding of both itself and the world. The emergence of monotheism in humanity's history has been a force matched perhaps only by the influence of technology and its uses. I am not, however, a technological determinist in the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and others. I much prefer the network theory of Bruno Latour. McLuhan has a point about the subconscious influence of technological innovation; however, his scope is too narrow and leaves little room for role conscious, creative innovation plays in the relationship between technology and humans. For McLuhan, television and electricity changed human consciousness irrevocably, thus giving objects power over the subject (the human). For Latour, humans interact with both the environment, non-human organisms, and objects in mutually productive ways. Monotheism itself was a kind of technology in human history. It was an understanding of the world that shaped, and continues to shape human behavior and endeavor. It encompassed a way of making that influenced art. The religious taboos against idolatry was a proscription of a certain kind of representation. In Islam, the taboo against representation has shaped its arts; that's why geometric and other non-figurative forms play such a large role in its arts and systems of representation. 

We do not necessarily have access to the first text of monotheism,  as it is axiomatic that our knowledge of the past is incomplete, relying on documentation, which in turn relies on the technology of writing or inscription. Despite that, we generally credit Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian king, with presiding over the earliest known instance. The people of his kingdom worshipped Aten, a sun-god. The Jews, enslaved in ancient Egypt, were liberated by Moses, and another instance of Monotheism began, although this chronology is not necessarily this linear. Their Torah, which in Christianity became the "Old Testament" began, as most epic poetic traditions do, as a repertoire of oral poems, told and retold by specialists in their communities. This group of texts is among the most fascinating I have ever read. As a sidenote, another fascinating book that explores the beginning of Judaism from a quasi-anthropological perspective, is Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism. 

Let's first be clear: I'm agnostic. However, I have some esoteric interpretations of Genesis in particular that clearly support the book's claims as prophecy. It seems to me that the general philosophical maxim of "Know Thyself," attributed to Socrates, has always been more about the journey than the destination. Genesis encapsulates a kind of profound, but ultimately unconscious, self-knowledge of the human species such that it embodies the past, the present, and even the future. 

In the beginning was the word, and it was good. The seed of language became the source of fruitfulness. No argument here. Over seven days, God makes everything. There have been fascinating critiques of this creation story coming from Indigenous North American communities with regards to the absurdity of attributing all of creation to one entity, and their creation stories tend to reflect this with much more collaborative practices. It was the creation of humans that I find particularly prophetic, despite that very valid critique. God makes us from dust, dirt, mud. In the historical process of coming to know the world through science in the last few hundred years, humans have "decoded" material reality to enable them greater and greater control of that reality. One of the things we've learned is that silicon is the second most abundant element in the earth's crust, and that 90% of this crust, the part of earth we inhabit, is made of silicate minerals. This includes the aforementioned dust, dirt, and mud. We were made from silicate minerals.

Do you know what else is made from silicate minerals, especially in the last seventy years? Circuit boards, computers, artificial intelligence. Hell, the global hub of computers, their software, and artificial intelligence, until recently, is called "Silicon Valley." We were made by God of silicate minerals (not precisely chemically accurate, but bear with me); we made artificial intelligence out of silicate minerals. Is there not an uncanny resemblance between these stories, one from the Torah, and the other the human history of technology? This story has perhaps always lived in our unconscious. The implications of this interpretation for time as a phenomenon itself are immense, but I don't have the time or the will to explore that right now. 

Another part of Genesis I have a heterodox and esoteric interpretation of is the fall. God gives us one rule in the garden of Eden, by this account a paradise of plenty. One rule. Compare this to contemporary situation of nation-states where only a small group of powerful people use jargon to hoard their knowledge of labyrinthine legal systems and wield power in the form of wealth derived from this specialist knowledge. We have thousands of rules now, and even different interpretations of those rules as they have been written, because of course, consciousness changes over time, and so does language. One rule: don't eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

But of course, Lucifer, that fallen angel whose English name has etymological origins in the Latin word for "light," takes the form of a snake in the tree, to convince Eve to eat the fruit. The anthropological analog to Lucifer in some Indigenous North American creation stories is Coyote, who is always throwing some kinks into creation. However, these stories are not nearly as catastrophic as the fall in Genesis: going from plenty to scarcity, ease to difficulty, innocence to shame. Rick Roderick has claimed that Lucifer's conversation with Eve represents a turn to interpretation, away from the "word" as transparent, direct communication. Lucifer eggs Eve on to interpret God's rule, and introduces doubt into her mind. Thus begins the hermeneutics of suspicion, which we still are struggling with today. 

If you take a step back, however, and consider what the Torah is as a whole, is it not a handbook of moral conduct? What is moral conduct if not a consideration of what counts as good and evil? Does this not make the Torah itself analogous to the fruit of the tree (it's written on paper, the skin of trees) of good and evil? Could this episode be a hidden message of God's to humans to ultimately disregard his messages? Or, in my agnostic interpretation, a message from our own collective unconscious to go, in Nietzsche's words, beyond good and evil? 

The background of skipping pebbles (by Trevor Cunnington)

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Round pebbles can be skipped

over the surface of water

whether a lake or a river

is not really the question. Rather,

we should be asking the rate

at which the pebble sinks

when it does,

after skipping.

 

Question the pebble

surface when water

sinks, it does, skipping

after asking a certain record

river of round when rather

than whether or not weather

co-operates, the bee

can fly over the water’s surface;

it slides down into the riverbed.

Spider Face (Drawing by Trevor Cunnington)

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Ibises in the Tree

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A Solar System (painting by Trevor Cunnington)

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Fungi in Gatineau Park

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Warping light

I was going through some old photos and I found this one. I have always been fascinated by pattern, and I love how the glass of the wine goblet warps the light. 

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Artificial Intelligence

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Kasparov, young and cocky 

from last year’s match

sits down at the knotted wood table 

on which the flat chess board 

sits, tessellated with white and black 

space

and the pieces glower in anticipation.

a man sits across from him, a cypher 

carrying out the instructions of a machine – 

Deep Blue – a black tower with silicon chips 

inside

that pulse with coded information. 

move, countermove. again. a gain. 

hundreds of millions of possibilities 

course through the computer’s circuitry. 

then, Blue forces Kasparov into a bad move. 

a shadow flickers across his face, a twitch 

he cannot be aware of. 

he sees it, the mistake played out 

in quadratic lines blurred by time. 

the recognition contorts his face; 

he can’t believe what he’s seeing. 

he pushes the table away in frustration 

and stands up, walks away: one fluid motion. 

the people watching open their mouths; 

History has been made today. 

soon human dominance will fade

today chess, tomorrow the novel, 

the next day brain surgery. 

humans will have to stake their claim in a world that 

doesn’t need them 

any more.