Words&Dirt

“In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages.  The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us.  They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips.  ‘The human world is made of stories, not people,’ writes David Mitchell.  ‘The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.’  Margaret Atwood writes: ‘As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before.  Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.’  Nearing death, John Updike reflects on

A life poured into words––apparent waste

intended to preserve the thing consumed.

Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981: ‘In the beginning there was information.  The word came later.’  He added this explanation: ‘The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.’  Now we might add, thanks to Dawkins, that the transition was achieved by the information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms.

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants.  But they are not ghosts to us––not anymore.  We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once.  It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception.  We are aware of the many species of information.  We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies.  We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms.  But we cannot own them.  When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 322-3

“During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time, The King in Yellow.  I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop.  I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred gate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight.  If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up, my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing out of the coals and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet.  This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask.  I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth––a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.  When the French Government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course, became eager to read it.  It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists.  No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged.  It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in The King in Yellow, all felt that human nature could not bear the strain, nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked.”

––The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, pg. 2-3