I've been
feeling alarmingly scattered lately, so this post will likely be less coherent
narrative and more drunk sorority girl wandering into the nearest McDonalds and
puking all over the bathroom walls.
Not that I am either. Drunk or a sorority girl, that is. The McDonalds's thing?
Never.
Right. So there was that Borges piece, The Lottery in Babylon, from Iocus Severus. About people who
have invited chance into their lives to the level of absurdity, to danger and
death and beyond. And then I was reading Random Voodoo's thoughts
on the piece, and his mention of dice reminded me that Urfe's journey in
The Magus begins with the roll of a die. **A loaded
die** (That there's a spoiler, for those of you who haven't yet read the
book.)
There's plenty more from Borges that relates, even more directly, to Neurocam:
In many cases the knowledge that
certain happinesses were the simple product of chance would have diminished
their virtue. To avoid that obstacle, the agents of the Company made use of the
power of suggestion and magic. Their steps, their manoeuvrings, were secret. To
find out about the intimate hopes and terrors of each individual, they had
astrologists and spies. There were certain stone lions, there was a sacred
latrine called Qaphqa, there were fissures in a dusty aqueduct which, according
to general opinion, led to the Company; malignant or benevolent persons
deposited information in these places. An alphabetical file collected these
items of varying truthfulness.
Neurocam appeals
to most of us because we're bored with our lives. It introduces an element of
chance, and -- with communications from both "official" Neurocam
representatives and not, a somewhat personalized experience. And speaking of
those non-official communiqués:
The orders which it issues
continually (perhaps incessantly) do not differ from those lavished by
impostors. Moreover, who can brag about being a more impostor? The drunkard who
improvises an absurd order. the dreamer who awakens suddenly and strangles the
woman who sleeps at his side, do they not execute, perhaps, a secret decision
of the Company? That silent functioning, comparable to God's, gives rise to all
sorts of conjectures. One abominably insinuates that the Company has not
existed for centuries -- that the sacred disorder of our lives is purely
hereditary, traditional. Another judges it eternal and teaches that it will
last until the last night, when the last god annihilates the world. Another
declares that the Company is omnipotent, but that it only has influence in tiny
things ‑ in a bird's call, in the shadings of rust and of dust, in the half
dreams of dawn. Another, in the words of masked heresiarchs, that it has never
existed and will not exist. Another, no less vile, reasons that it is
indifferent to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing else than an infinite
game of chance.
Neurocam (the Company) is everything we believe and are told to believe about it; Neurocam is nothing we believe and are told to believe about it.
And all these
names and addresses and conflicting reports of billboards, company longevity,
leadership, etc?
Furthermore,
there is nothing so contaminated with fiction as the history of the Company. A
palaeographic document, exhumed in a temple, can be the result of yesterday's
lottery or of an age‑old lottery. No book is published without some discrepancy
in each one of the copies. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, to interpolate,
to change. The indirect lie is also cultivated.
Even the element
of pure chance is something of an illusion (see Magus spoiler):
Let us
imagine a first drawing, which decrees the death of a man. For its fulfillment
one proceeds to another drawing, which proposes (Let us say) nine possible
executors. Of these executors, four can initiate a third drawing which will
tell the name of the executioner, two can replace the adverse order with a
fortunate one (finding a treasure, let us say), another will intensify the
death penalty (that is, will make it infamous or enrich it with tortures),
others can refuse to fulfill it. This is the symbolic scheme. In reality the
number of drawings is infinite. No decision is final, all branch into others.
Ignorant people suppose that infinite drawings require an infinite time;
actually it is sufficient for time to be infinitely subdivisible, as the famous
parable of the contest with the tortoise teaches.
In a more focused state of mind I'd like
to think I'd be capable of some truly scintillating analysis, here. But you work with the
scattershot brain you have, not the brain you want.
I miss being an alcoholic stoner.
