Schism Dreams

An Accelerando

Lighting Luminoso

Nobody:

Not one person:

Not a single one of you:

Me: I am going to inflict poetry on everyone

Apologies for the last month of silence. After Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare, my creative centre was thoroughly exhausted. Beyond this, March turned out to be a social whirlwind – I was running around Toronto and New York Shitty, meeting mutuals and even, an unexpected and very great pleasure, a few readers (you know who you are). On top of this, much of what small amount of productive time I had available ended up getting consumed by normie academic commitments.

In the course of these adventures, at one point we were sharing old creative works, and I dug up some verse that I’d composed in my old life as a slam poet. Much of it is terrible and will remain firmly archived on my hard drive, but a few pieces were better than I remembered, and I’ve been encouraged to share them. I also wanted to get in on the game after

Tree of Woe

shared his own epic poem Alakyrum¹, to say nothing of the wonderful verse that

Everybody

has been publishing at his criminally underrated blog hyperpoesis.

The poem that follows, titled Schism Dreams, was written about 15 years ago ... keep that in mind when a certain term shows up. It was written with performance in mind, so I’ve recorded a reading of it; my recommendation would be to read along as you listen, as there’s a bit of wordplay that might get lost in the performance, while at the same time the metre, rhyme, and alliteration isn’t necessarily obvious without the spoken word.

Now we’ve all got these

Instasatellitelink datachips at our touchtips

Tapped straight into globopulation's collaborative eye

We simulcastingly descry

The whole world within our stories

Perhaps holding it holy

But more often only wholly for ourselves

We huddle down in sleeper cells

Torn apart by terror war

Tripped out by hordes

Of maniacal gabbling mechanical elves

That somnambulate freely

Through our primal core of aboriginal Dreaming

The original bridge between you and me

And all the other mes

Trapped in universal war with all our other selves

Like batshit crazy rampaging killer T-cells,

And even as the spurts of this spectacle spill into now

And are caught freezing in our Flickrstreams it seems

That time is speeding up

As we're all reading up

And faithfully feeding our hyper-marked-up

Stories upstreaming to the global cacophony

Which cackles with glee

Uproar-LOL-Anonymously

With various versions of reality

Encased in echo champers

Built from symbolic social memories

Of varying verity.

Witness:

The degrees of awareness that

Not everyone's been telling the truth out there

Like when a headline wafts by and you almost swear

That you can savour the scent that saturates the air

Like a bouquet of ... Bullshit!

And rotten fishy plot holes

That burn through the story like hot coals

Igniting your nose hairs!

Like:

“The econopocalypse was completely unforeseen,

And although we know it's scary

Emergency measures are necessary!

And anyway they're only temporary,

And in the long run will benefit everyone

(and not just us)

So in this mean time try to look on the bright side

Chin up

Ignore that smell!

And just have fun

Normality will shortly begin its resumption!”

And it does,

New Normal settles in

And we all get used to a little extra pressure on the chin

As the bit gets tightened between pain and sin

And we're steered like drafted beasts

And once again set apart and against

Scouring razor-thin margins

On the Earth's freshly shaven and oiled skin

And scheming to Win it Big on the human frontier

By sewing the brains, eyes, and ears of our kin up forever

In invisible nets woven of nanotech titanium tethers

That feel as light as those tiny feathers

Clipped to make pet birds that cannot fly.

A planet whose minds glare as one with the all-claiming eye

Of a cosmic narcissism

Enforcing the schism

Between this holomorphic Earthly prism

And the will of those it imprisons

More deeply

With their every self-serving decision

Binding them

To the strongest will's desire,

Which will be a bottomless ambition for empire

That will turn Terra into Mars

To build the infrastructure that it will take

To colonize the planets

For it already wills to conquer the stars.

But Imperial Entropy is without real reach

In worlds permeated with the empathy

Of the impenetrably infinite mystery

That over gigayears gave birth to

They and thee and I and it and me and you and we

From the same unity of Sky and Earth

As seeing self in Other-self all can as one mature

Into a communion of all

Who stand together with spirits tall

And wills free

Whose tears Call upon the wells of creation within them

While all of Creation plays with them

A game whose greatest nonzero gain

Is to grow all in wisdom

In the ways of well serving

The flourishing of beings

For they have seen selfotherself boundaries

To be but the most fleeting of dreams,

As are words such as these.

Lighting Luminoso

A Hermeneutic Note

It’s considered gauche for a poet to condescend to interpret his own work, but as an accidentally literate barbarian warlord I was never much on propriety. For the zoomers in the audience, ‘Flickrstreams’ is of course a reference to the now largely abandoned photo-sharing site Flickr. ‘New Normal’ has become a universally recognized entry in the propaganda lexicon, but as far as I know it wasn’t something I’d ever heard before when I used it here, over a decade before the lockdowns; re-reading it, a chill went down my spine.

The overall theme of the poem emerges from the esoteric concepts of Service To Self vs. Service To Others, as the two fundamental, and fundamentally opposed, orientations any entity can take in its orientation towards other entities. A society composed of entities polarized in an STS direction will naturally collapse into a pyramidal dominance hierarchy: stronger entities will subjugate weaker entities to their will, and then use the hierarchy to draw energy towards the apex of the pyramid. This is quite obviously how our world works, and how it has always worked. By contrast, a society composed of entities with STO polarizations will come to resemble a circle, with energy passing freely between its members, each of whom receives back at least as much as he provides. No such society has ever existed on the macroscale on our planet. Of course the Communists tried, but every attempt degenerated into a brutish pathrocracy far more exploitative than the hierarchies they replaced – you can’t build an STO society out of STS beings, any naive attempt to do so will inevitably become simply another means of parasitic resource extraction, and those suggesting you try are usually characteropaths trying to manipulate you with half-truths.

When I wrote Schism Dreams, I was still in the mindset that it was possible to ‘wake people up’, that a universal ‘change in consciousness’ was somehow possible, which would sweep away the old order and usher in paradise. This was naive; though at the very end I noted that those pretty words about universal oneness are after all, a dream, so perhaps I was not so naive as all that. STO circles are certainly possible, with much effort, on the societal microscale, but they can only survive with strict boundary policing in order to ensure that only those of the correct disposition and potential are admitted. Yet at the same time, while every eutopia is a utopia, there’s no question that it feels that we’re perched on the edge of some sort of epochal planetary phase change, which can and perhaps soon will tip over into one or another attractor state; Langan’s concept of the Tech Singularity vs. the Human Singularity is one of the more concise descriptions of the choice our species confronts, and which of these transpires will ultimately be decided by our psychic or spiritual state as the transition unfolds.

Another aspect in which I find myself in conflict with the younger me who wrote this, is the characterization of that terrible narcissistic Will as having the ambition to colonize the stars, in the pursuit of which it would be happy to trash the planet. To the contrary: if the parasite lords that are currently trying to consolidate their control of the planet emerge victorious from this global struggle for the future, it seems far more likely that they will lock humanity down on our birth world, in order to ensure that their rule remains perpetual.

If you enjoyed this poem, you might also enjoy Blue Sunrise, which was the last slam-style spoken word poem that I wrote before abandoning the scene to the rising Awokening. It’s a more mature work, in my opinion, for all that it’s much darker.

If you really enjoyed this (and what the heck is wrong with you, it’s a poem, you’re supposed to hate poetry, you know) then you should inflict it on your friends and contacts:

And you should definitely

To ensure you don’t miss … whatever I decide to do next (it won’t be a poem, I promise).

As always, allow me to express my deep gratitude and boundless appreciation to all of the Barsoomians who support my work. You don’t get nearly enough in exchange for your incredible generosity, which I am continuously humbled and amazed by.

Lighting Luminoso

1. You can consider this the opening salvo in the rap battle, Woe ;)