The Myth of Consequence

 

We hurry through the world, speedier than ever now, in a strange landlocked imitation of flight. Even our calmer moments have an unsettling alacrity to them. Online-ready smiles. Expedient Zen, curated and colour-graded. The solutions of being seen, consumed, and subscribed. None in the West are above it, of course. Myself included. But it is strange. The readiness with which we view ourselves being viewed by others. What does it do to a human mind, when our most thoughtful, cogent companion is an AI? Endless recursion, I suspect. We need people, in all their complexity. Not code. To love us, to journey with us, and to hold us to account. I used to think I was special because I was a time-traveller of sorts. An artist and a sorcerer who could stand unbidden in the maelstrom, and make causality question itself. But now? I question that isolationism. Even when we look ahead, we're still looking back. Especially in our myth-making. Endless remakes. Prequels, sequels and requels. We have become literature at the edge of legend, yet deaf to our own needs. Pantheism in Mono. So, I suppose it's no wonder we continuously mine our own histories for alchemical gold. Reshaped, remixed, reconstituted. It seems as close to creative flight as we are capable these days. 

I'm well aware that artists have always been fascinated by hybridity. The mercurial nature of things. The creation of culture is the messy blending of disparate elements, after all. But something is different now. Something frighteningly inorganic. More and more of us accept these so-called virtual necessities. Hard copy is quickly becoming a nostalgic recreation of the past. A confectioner's digital echo of a once analogue world. We crave the inorganic more than sugar, not only in our environments but also in our flesh. Flawless skin like glass. No pores, no beautiful blemishes. Hard-bodied and shiny, like insects. Lacquered in the pre-cum of completely mercenary ideologies. Ruthless stratagems that sell us mannequin avatars – except they are ourselves now. Not proxies anymore. Now we glint like diamond-dust in synthetic sunlight, vampiric and chic. An algorithm learning not from life, but from endless iterations of itself. 

This is a terrifying place to be. A platform where we trade our kisses for kinks, our affection for affectation. “No more,” say the spirits of the forests and rivers. Nature always protests, but often remains unheard amidst the cacophony of industry. However, I am more than just a time-traveller. I'm a creature of the imagination. Aren't these votives proof enough? It's fine if you disbelieve. Not all of us here can see through the eyes of Fay. Few have the native perspectives of chlorophyll, or flight. It hurts to be human. There's no doubt about that. But it hurts even more to be a slave to a machine that eventually fells even the oldest, mightiest redwoods. All memory of true greenery washed away. Reduced to little more than a captive in binary chains, working the digital plantations of this endless corporate monolith. 

We are Rome before the fall, I think. Decadent, bloated, rotten to the core. But this time we haven't the rock of Peter nor the gnosis of Paul. Merely a panoply of child soldiers and child slaves, paid pennies and then discarded, their broken hands bleeding as they fashion a race of tempting apples and androids. Hand-held black mirrors for a new generation of cyborgs in the making. If I sound angry, that's because I am. But I don’t write these words to unsettle you, dear ones. Or to leave you dispirited and hopeless. The world is on a knife-edge right now, and a warrior worth his weapon must speak on it. Wars and rumours of wars. Genocides and famines. And yet, still we concern ourselves with the glamour of surfaces. We cry, "Fill me, cinch me, snatch me. Make me almost unalive, and pretty at last." But I promise you, the dead don't stay pretty for long. 

I understand, of course. I’m not immune to the various insecurities of the day. I share them too. And I'm no luddite either. Technology can be useful. Necessary. Even beautiful, when wrested from the talons of these dark angels and the sinister priests who honour them. The system should serve the people. The virtual should support the actual. I see none of that here. Only inversions and looking-glass mockeries. Callous Ones, do you have any idea who I am? I’m something far greater than a fairytale. And so is each immortal soul upon this Earth. We all have a spark of magic within us. A fragment of eternity. Our tongues are not Large Language Models. Our words are not remixed imitations offered up by a mechanical mind. And our hearts? They are not simply pumps filled with chambers and valves. No, they burn. And shine, like lanterns for the lost. Living temples of divine fire. The truest, realest part of each of us. No hall of mirrors or metafictions can stand against the intensity of that flame. 

I know what it's like to recall with such fondness those who've forgotten me. Other lives and other worlds. Old friends, lost to the recurrent amnesia of rebirth. It's a crushing thing, believe me. Why do you think I write these pages? For fun? I speak now not as a traveller of time, or a sorcerer, but as an anguished forest-wraith. A guardian of rivers and songs. We must find our flesh once more. Our softness, sweetness, and storytelling. We must find a balance between steel and skin. Leaves and legends. Not only the fate of our future depends on it, but the fate of our very souls. I’ve seen the havoc my mother can wield when she’s angry. She has no issue abandoning her children if they remain indolent in the face of every warning. I should know. In my dreaming flights I’ve peered into the cauldron of her igneous, and plunged into the depths of a boiling sea. Ships sink and pirates drown at just the briefest suggestion of her wrath. Entire infrastructures are swallowed. So, believe me when I say: if we ignore the divine fire of the human heart for much longer, she will pull rank on us eventually, making the ultimate sacrifice, and she will burn this entire corrupt hellscape to the fucking ground. Oh, Fallen. You still assume it will never happen, don’t you? The myth of consequence. But you are living within the strangest of dreams, and Never is a dangerous word to use.