Aurea Mediocritas

We're beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it's much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it's always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.

You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well, but still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time. This gives a very different vision of what the architecture is like, and I'm just trying to get my head around how to think about that.

Information wants to be free

"You will walk

                      on the sidewalk. You will

place refuse in approved containers

            to be picked up at

                        the appointed time. You

will close doors            behind you,       turn off lights.

            You will sleep—eight hours, precisely—

                        dress within the confines of

acceptable taste and drive the speed limit

            and carry exact change.

You will earn diligently        yet modestly

            to provide for your dependents.       You will

                        purchase consumables

                                    at approved outlets

during posted hours of operation. Your respiration

            and metabolic processes will fall

within established norms. There is no standard

                        deviation.

                                    It is for your own good,

you among millions.

You will conform.

                                    You will not

skip meals,

skip steps,

skip lines. You will not skip.

                        You will not waste resources unless directed

or convenient. You will not read

            what you scrawl in the small hours

except to yourself— by yourself—

            in subdued lighting that casts no dramatic shadows.

You will not

                        listen to what rumbles outside,

                                    and if there are

shouts arcing through the grid, the city's synapses,

you will not hear them,

                                    or you will not notice. 

Pay no attention to what isn't televised.

            You will not support

what threatens security

            and abundance in the life which

you have been

taught to know

                        so long. You will protect

                        your

material wellbeing. You will save your voice

for when it is asked of you.

                      You will not indulge

in difficult colors or savor food or flesh

                        longer than required.

                                    You will not

sit up at night thinking

                                    about asterisms or

the cold or debris from cosmic collisions

spiraling toward the sun

over long centuries. You will wait, always wait, for it all 

to get better. And it will—

            it is. Getting better. 

So much better all the time."

Para a Inês

1.

There are more color receptors in the human eye than are used,

thus the colors of the world as they are seen are not the true colors.

The true colors have no names, and so they are impossible to imagine.

The failure of language is not that something can only be described

with a limited number of words, but that it can only be perceived using those words.

2.

Holding his fingers to the light the man said to his son,

“this is a hand,” it is good for breaking, for building,

the hand is a machine, and like language, a machine is a means to an end.

Now, imagine you do not know the hand's name, tell me then

what is it not capable of?

3.

The occurrence of war outside the boy's window

was as frequent as the birds. Each night

he watched from behind the blinds

as soldiers emerged from the thicket

smooth and quiet as apparitions or memories

climbing down from the skull and into the tall grass.

The starving steel rods they carried burst with sparks,

and tore each other down at knees and necks.

His father told him these were the inventions of lesser minds

demented by baseness and old magic. These burning branches

could swallow the stare of a man, and drive him

straight into the ground.

It was a time when, amongst the villagers,

there was not such familiarity with guns

that they were discussed by name, or even during day,

only by description, and behind doors where it was believed

they could not enter. To the boy and his father

the nameless guns were capable of anything.

They did not know why they were only used to kill.

4.

The boy knew nothing but the bodies next to the garden,

the crows discussing the rites of flesh. In the morning

he would wade through the pints of men

wandering dizzily about them as if he too were bloodless,

drifting off into the smells of carnage.

One by one with a silver spoon he would remove the lead

musket balls from the skulls and chests and legs of the dead men,

and carry them to his father to be melted down and turned to gold.

When the man was finished he would bring a vat of burning gold

back to the field and pour a spoonful of the molten metal

into each of the wounds from which the lead was taken.

Time and time again the boy watched the eyes roll back

from the depths of the skull, shine in the waning light of day

like lanterns along a river and then the soldiers would rise

as fog does. They would empty the grass and return to the forest.

Come nightfall they would re-emerge to kill each other again.

And again. Like blood thirsty hounds of fire and gore.

Automatons clad in blood.

Every day the boy asked his father why

he would reawake the soldiers, and each time he said,

“These instruments of war are doors to an end.

After a war the side with the most land and least dead

always dances and makes love inside the sound of drums.

It seems to me this is all the body has ever wanted.

“I wish to see if there will ever come a time where upon reawakening

they will each forget their language,

and not know the name for the those terrible burning snouts

they carry, and thus not know what they are used for.

These are dangerous men not because they carry a weapon,

but because what they carry is named,

and so it has only one imaginable purpose.

“Imagine, the whole field of soldiers forgetting their language,

and being possessed only with what their bodies want most in the end:

to dance, and to love. I wonder then, if we would see the field break

into a brilliant cavorting where the branches fire upward,

and those steel rods peel back the dark cowl of night. Oh,

how they would all be illuminated like cathedrals, empty

of language, and teeming with sound.”