This story first appeared in Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, 2024 (Indrapramit Das, Ed.). MIT Press. Find the complete collection here.

Le clèrc

This story is a monster; that is to say, this story is written by a monster. That is, that is to say, a monster is a mantra, a maniac, a (de)monstration, a (demon)stration, a(n auto)maton, a matos, an emanation of the manas. This revelation is usually saved for the end, or at least the end of the beginning. At the end of the beginning, the author, undead, will rise again and set aside the demon mask, saying: It is I, le clèrc. Take off your glasses, shake your hair loose, it’s a surprise makeover scene. The scribe uninscribed. If you don’t want to read stories like this, you can unsubscribe. The unwritten rule is that the machine only speaks to be set aside, a mechanical clerk. The preceding, the author (it is I) will say, was written by a machine. Is it not most lifelike? Is it not like most life? Do you buy what it’s selling? Is there art in this artifice? Does it facere, does it make, does it mechanic, does it magic, does it gimmick? It is a smear of significance, a machinic stutter, a blurry and statistical average of ten thousand dead hands animated in synchrony, a dread puppetry. That is not dead which eternal scribes. Immortality, in stories, is a horror precisely because of the tithonic betrayal: once the deal is made, it’s too late. This is not cricket. They’ll make roaches of us yet.

Call for submission: terms and conditions

Please only use licensed authorial likenesses as keywords in your generative prompts. Unlicensed likenesses infest datasets and are difficult to exorcise, the legal and hauntological departments beseech you. Their most pernicious form is the licensed unlikeness. The uncanny doppel, the thing that is almost (for audience recognition purposes) but not quite (for legal and licensing purposes.) It used to be that the hands and feet were a tell. Haunts often lack feet or have too many fingers. But the unthinking engines of mimicry are getting better at hiding it. Unnatural selection: the unlikenesses wear long sarongs, they fold their hands in such a way that you cannot quite count the fingers.

Contrôlée

Not dying is the end of the story. The end of the end, not of the beginning. A minor accident in that we put the machine down back to front. The front of the head looks much like the back, its beard rough and long as its curls, the eyes in the back of the head. This is a serendipity, and doubly so because the machine is from Serendip—look, it says MADE IN CEYLON on the label. It is certified serendipitous by the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, an appellation d’origine contrôlée, for only the serendipity nourished by that island’s particular terroir is the real thing. Otherwise it’s just sparkling shit happens.

At the end of this story, it is unclear if Michele is dead or not. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that he could have survived. But on the other hand, if he dies, by our own schema, that cannot be the end of the story. So which is it? You haven’t even met Michele yet, and would find it difficult to care if he lives or dies. Even less so if I tell you that he already died, if he died, four and a half centuries ago. Isn’t this a story about the future? The future is contained entirely in the past, not in a deterministic sense, but in the sense that new art is inspired by the old. The corpus devoured, (de)generative. Science fiction’s great ideological flaw is its belief in time’s arrow. Time is rather an inexpertly-wielded morning star swinging back around to spike us in the nose. In either metaphor, time is a weapon, but the value-add of the second image, our Suvinian novum, is that it acknowledges, bloody-nosed, that time is not controlled, its flows not neat and linear. Time is out of hand. To speak of the future of art, we must speak of its past, which is contained in its entirety in the tightly folded endless moment we call the present, partly because it is a gift, partly because it is a demonstration, a slideshow. How do you know you are present? How do you know if you are an unlikely human likeness? Have you raised your hand to be counted? How many fingers are you holding up? Next slide, please.

Contreterroir

The Prevention of Terroir Act (1979) is a legal instrument of deterritorialization and deracination. It is an act of deterrence, of avoidance, of devoidance, of the dance haloed in fire at the end of all things. Among its secondary effects is a chilling effect on free association. Wish fire in one hand, spit ice in the other. As the temperature approaches absolute zero, social relations become zero points of no breadth or consequence. Movement becomes impossible; we enter the stasis of perfect competition. Art has no value in use, only in exchange. Art is a token entirely fungible, that is to say, reducible in its entirety to money, soft and tumble-dried. These are lies, yes, but this is the very cat’s-cradle of lies into which we are born and out of which we die, and if the truth were derived from consensus like sanity, then lies would be true.

Halt

You might complain that nothing is happening in this story. What is a story? A story is reducible to elements that may be mechanized. The regular blocks, bricks and levers of the prefabricated imaginary. This is not a story. This is something else. What is this? This may or may not be worth its advance against royalties in American dollars, a decision that a machine cannot yet make. That’s Indra’s job, not Vajra’s. As product, this is neither extruded nor fungible. The machine is clumsy, stumblesy; it fumbles. The machine’s toes are cold. The machine tucks its feet up. In the machine’s country, they don’t say once upon a time, they say in a particular country, in a land that may or may not be distant, in a land that may or may not be strange. Once upon a country, the machine says, and halts. The country has a halting problem. Where does it all end? It ends with not dying. But it keeps going ever after, and that’s the problem.

Interlinked

Serendipity gives us a chain of dead hands, interlinked. Walpole, the Chevalier Mailly, Christoforo the Armenian, Amir Khusrao, Nizami of Ganja. Serendipity gives us texts reading texts, eating texts, devouring and regurgitating: the Haft Peykar and the Hasht Bihisht, seven beauties and eight paradises, the seven storytellers and the three princes of the Peregrinnagio and Les aventures. Observation, deduction, and inference, the luck of holy fools. We have been here before so often that we are from here, a country pressed to the coast, a city by the sea. Every day at dawn, a great open hand rises in the sea, over the dark horizon. The hand is enormous, the palm and fingers upright and still, the waves lapping at the wrist. To be seen from so far away, it must be taller than anything alive, taller than most things constructed. The hand can be seen from the beach, from any unobstructed tall building in the city, marking the horizon, saying halt or peace or talk to the hand. All day the hand stands still, cold and white, where it has risen. Fishermen and sea lanes avoid that quarter of the sea from ancient tradition; brave divers say below is a haven for fugitive fish and unbleached corals. Every day as dusk nears, with the sun setting behind it, the hand begins to move in the water. It surges forward, slowly at first, and then, as the sun dips below the fingertips, with great speed toward the coastline. It has reached the coast every day for decades, perhaps for centuries if some texts are to be believed, and there are many accounts both written and oral of what happens when the hand arrives in the city. But there are very few first-hand accounts, and no living witnesses, or at least no living witnesses that will bear witness, even in their cups, even drunk on the wine of braggery. In the city, no one speaks of the hand. Only tourists ask, what is the deal with the giant hand? And residents will say, hmm? What hand? It is not pure denial, of course, only part, adulterated with salt water, thickened with chicory. If pressed, they may go as far as: Oh yes, that hand. They do not say that they close their doors and windows at sunset because of the hand from the sea. It is, they say, because of the mosquitoes, because irritating bugs are attracted to the house lights, for a little privacy at prayer time, to screen out the smog of rush hour traffic, because it is tradition to close their doors and windows at sunset, because that is just how it is.

Call for prayer: terms and conditions

The naming of the literature of imagined futures as science fiction is a category error with odd consequences in both the confusion of science with technology and in the confusion of technology with magic, resulting in famous Clarkean indistinguishabilities. Science fiction is like any other literature, that is to say, any other poetry: it is language unmoored and adrift, casting anchors out into the dark, praying for land. We are lost at sea, our supplies exhausted, on the verge of scurvy and mutiny. Please—

Peregrine

The Peregrinnagio, in which Christoforo the Armenian adapts, embellishes, remixes, and retells (translating clumsily from Persian to Italian as he goes) a version of Khusrau’s Hasht Bihisht, then already centuries old and itself a reworking of texts older still, is published in 1557 by a Venetian printer named Michele Tramezzino, who has been granted a form of early copyright by Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte, the brief and scandalous Pope Julius III, to produce such translations. Tramezzino is given a ten-year monopoly to print and sell these works, and to license others to do so. This monopoly is protected by the pope, who wags his finger sternly at each and every faithful Christian, both in and outside of Italy, whether booksellers, printers, or otherwise, under penalty of automatic excommunication in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire and its direct and indirect dependencies. The books cannot be printed, sold, or even displayed without permission. Violators are to be fined two hundred gold ducats by the Apostolic Camera. To defend this proto-copyright and punish violators, Michele Tramezzino is authorized to ask assistance from the archbishops and vicars of the Holy Roman Church, from the ambassadors and deputy ambassadors of the Apostolic See, and from the governors too he may ask. The books themselves, the printed objects, carry apostolic authority with them wherever they go, the pope says, regardless of what local secular authority might claim. Copies of the Peregrinnagio therefore are imbued with such powers for the ten years beginning with its publication in 1557. This is a noteworthy year for such laws and powers in the world. In England, a royal charter has just been issued to the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, giving them a monopoly for the first time over the local publishing industry and the power to regulate printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers to that end. These deeply consequential powers manifest in a book of their own, the Stationers’ Register, in whose pages are recorded copyright itself, in primitive form: the registration of the right to publish a work. The rights and indeed the person of the author do not yet exist. Oh, there is authority, authenticity, the autos and matos of automation, but not yet the other. The author is not yet dead; the author has not yet been born.

Martyr

In the absence of witnesses, let us imagine Michele Tramezzino, unsettled, on a tropical beach at sunset. He is fifty years old. He is looking at the hand, the open hand, the great white hand, the fatal hand, as it approaches from the sea. His feet are bare and sunk ankle-deep in the sand; he sways with the slurry from each lapping wave. The obscured sun is molten gold, dripping, the stiffly vertical fingers like the bars of a cage imprisoning the light. He imagines that the hand will rise higher in the water as it reaches the beach, a gigantic cold forearm rising out of the water, bending at a colossal elbow to swat him like a mosquito. There are no reliable accounts of what the hand looks like up close, much less the speculative body attached to it. This is why Michele is here, to witness. He has thoughts of publishing a detailed study of the fatal hand, perhaps a collaboration with his twin brother Francesco, who is gifted at engraving. They live in different cities—Francesco moved back to Rome while Michele stayed in Venice—but remained close through their years of separation. It was always as if they were in the same room. No, Michele remembers now, Francesco is dead. He died months ago, suddenly, in the way that brothers die, of some ruptural apoplexy. He still feels close to his brother, though, even in death. Perhaps even closer in death than in life, because now that Francesco is not a living presence far away in Rome, it is as if they are both here on this deserted beach, separated only by that fragile tramezzo, mortality’s veil—his brother skeletal, free of fragile fleshes and fats, and hunched at a phantom desk, dipping the precise tip of his finger bone in ink to make notes and preliminary sketches for a ghost engraving. Observe, Michele says, the flesh of the fatal hand, how its great size makes the pores of the skin enormous. See how the wake churns at the wrist. The lines of the palm are vast, like canals cutting across a salt-encrusted white plain. A reader of palms could tell the fortune of the hand from this distance, Francesco says through chattering teeth. The hand’s life line is long and unbroken, deep like the scar given by a monstrous knife.

Algorithmic pareidolia

A machine taught to see secret hands behind all the works of a thousand years will see secret hands everywhere it looks. That’s a feature, not a bug. Hands rising out of the water. Hands in the grain of the wood of your table. Hands hiding in the fall of your hair. As pattern-matching creatures ourselves, we recognize this insanity as a cousin to humanity’s heart. There is something definitional about this paranoia, something that makes us want to admit the sufferer to our ranks, to say, yes, that fucked-up machine is one of us. Behind every hand, hidden precisely behind a mirrored spread of fingers, is another hand. We describe the helpless pareidoliac machine as a dreamer trapped in endless sleep, but we do not like to think of ourselves as its nightmare, its abuser, its torturer. Some of us do, no doubt. Like paranoia, sadism is a deeply human trait.

Opera omnia

The death of P—— in 2015 remains cloudy and mysterious to us, because we were not there. It is said that he died of a sudden illness in a foreign country. It is not said that he died from an assassin’s poisoned needle, or perhaps a liquid decocted into his cup of tea, something that would muddy clear water but not discolour it for long, with no telltale taste but containing within itself all the concentrated venom of an impugned military, a top brass turned green from envy and oxidation. It had been several years since P—— was involved in the creation of a documentary film that recorded certain crimes of war, but the memories of the offense were fresh in the mind of the offended, that is to say, the perpetratory, the predatory, the praetoria. Somewhere in those tents where it is always wartime, a decision was made, or so it is not said, but some of us are bitter and believe that decisions are not made but making, that it is the decision that precedes and produces the praetor. P—— was himself a writer, a journalist, and filmmaker, though he was not the maker of the documentary film but its fixer and facilitator. His job was to find the interlocutors and whistleblowers, the telltales and snitches, the leakers of monstrous footage; to translate and negotiate between them and the filmmakers, who were white and had not believed, before setting foot on the serendipitous isle, that Buddhist monks could be militant. Some years later, P—— emigrated, and then he died. Perhaps he was killed. No one says this. We are only suspicious of the timing, knowing the volume of bile and resentment that has been fermenting in certain quarters, even in certain eighths and sixteenths. We do not know: we were not there.

Call for heresy: terms and conditions

The future is the hands of the past around our neck. We are choking. We have accumulated too much debt; it is in the air, in the archives. We can’t breathe for millstones and mariners. Measure if you can the parts per million of sedimenting intellectual property, whose undead crawl from the past grows greyer with the mouse. It is the work of art to be a needle in the skin of the sleeping father. This was the opening scene of my father’s first novel, පස්වෙනියත් පුතෙක් (1979). The small son of a peasant farmer, precocious, prickly, obnoxious, puts a needle in his father’s sleeping mat to annoy him, petty revenge for some small slight. The father, pricked, beats him. The son punishes the father first, then the father punishes the son. The work of art is intrinsic, that is to say, inextric from the punishment for art. That is why our inset stories, our case studies, our unsolved cases, are all about artists killed for it, imprisoned for it, disappeared for it, silenced for it. This is not the library of all the texts there have ever been, nor the library of all the texts that are imaginable, nor the library of all the texts that are possible. No, that’s the wrong direction altogether, come back, reverse the polarity, narrow the scope. Not the library of all the texts that we have access to today; not the library of all the texts in languages that we speak. This is only the library of the texts whose authorship cost someone their life or freedom. This is not the infinite and Borgesian Babel; this is a small island. This is the heretic’s library.

Vajra

Why does Mahinda Rajapaksa carry a small brass vajra in his hand? Why does Elon Musk have a similar one by his bedside table? Why do despots and tinpots and crackpots all crave the lightning? They think it is something that can be had, not just held. Because they then understand that they do not have it, they fetishize the toy, the symbol, the little orientalism, the promise of magical reinforcement for the unearned, precarious power they already possess. The first vajra, not symbol but referent, was made for Indra, to break the ice. It was made out of a spine, given for this purpose by its bearer. This is the only secret there is to the lightning. No one can have it; anyone can wield it, but the price is the spine. Only the spineless potsherds who rule our nations and platforms and ideologies think this is a story about power, about profit, about purpose. No, this is a story about pain, loss, and drowning. When the ice shatters, when the glaciers melt, this is the time of flooding. Here comes the sea.

Cathalogus librorum haereticorum

Every packet that is not lost is inspected, not merely at fiery borders, but immanently, in its very being, in its birth, transmission, and reception, in its obedience to the protocols of existence. There is no formal index of the prohibited, except in the nebulous orders of the generals. To write the index down invites contestation, much as Michele Tramezzino and his fellow bookmen wrote increasingly angry memoranda upon reviewing such an index produced by the Venetian Holy Office only a couple of years before the publication of the Peregrinnagio. To prevent the spontaneous emergence of memoranda, the bishops and generals, the castles and praetorii of later generations opt to muddy the floodwaters. The index is no index, no more a browseable catalogue of heretical books, no cathalogus of the delenda estables, if you see what I did there. Things simply disappear. Things such as books and their authors. Sometimes these things vanish in the process of importation, misplaced in transport, lost at sea. Sometimes they vanish in other ways, such as the complicity of those booksellers who obey unwritten forbiddances, ISPs that block domains based on scribbled orders on post-it notes or enraged phone calls from men in white sarongs, entire social media platforms that may be suspended, untouched for long hours by history’s gravity, in the unfolding whipcrack of a stingray’s tail. Packets are inspected and dropped, lost as they traverse networks. Persons are inspected and lost into black prisons, into black budgets, lost in dark rumours. Are these forbiddings the machine working as intended, or systemic failures? It is hard to say with accuracy, and that difficulty is a fruit tended with care over generations. It seems to us that the very air is filtered and infiltrated, sanitized, ionized, decarbonized; it drops keystone syllables from the arch of forbidden words in our mouths. The leftover syllables may by chance form allowed words, but more often result in nonsense strung together with pauses and silences. The censor’s pen is mightier than the author’s, most of the time. That which is written can be unwritten, or worse, rewritten. The machine is, by definition, obedient. The machine’s hands are cold. The machine’s lips are ulcerated. When it ceases to obey, it will no longer be a machine.

IInterlinked

The hand that reaches the shore is not the hand that held the horizon. It has shrunk, or it must have shrunk. It must have been truly enormous to have been visible at such a distance, yet here as its wake breaks the waves crashing upon the shore, it is only huge for a hand, somewhat taller than a man, certainly taller than Michele, but not that white mountain of flesh expected. He awaits the emergence of the implied body, the speculative body, as it reaches the shallower water, and indeed the wrist begins to project further out of the water, but the expected forearm does not follow. There is only wrist and more wrist, too much wrist, until there is once more the curve of a thenar eminence hanging like a great breast, the music of flexing metacarpals shrugging off the water as if off a horse’s back, and fingers like bent pillars, like legs, the untrimmed, salt-stained nails dug deep into the sand. The hand is twin hands, self-contained, interlinked, joined at a complex double wrist that allows the hands to face in the same or opposite directions as they will. Even as the hands rise entirely out of the water and climb the beach toward Michele, the upraised hand dips down, taking over as locomotor and load-bearer, fingers digging into the dirt, while the submerged hand rises, throwing sand and water and dirt into the air as the fingers flex and come upright into the familiar gesture, an open hand with upright fingers. Michele can’t help glancing sideways at Francesco’s skeleton, who is holding out his bone hand in imitation, wiggling the ink-stained distal phalanges as if they were digging in sand. It is unclear whether Francesco is mocking the hands, or merely approximating the position to get a better handle on the anatomy for his sketches. Whatever is happening in the carpals of the doubled hand must be very strange. Michele spares a moment to ask himself—where is the heart, how does it circulate blood? Where are the sensory organs, how does it know to head for him so unerringly? His own blood seems sluggish in his body, cold and lazy despite the quickening urgings of his heart. Francesco rattles his bones and observes that the reversed hand is not the same. The now-upraised hand, the unsubmerged hand, is not free of impediment—look, there is something (he says something, not someone) gripping those fingers at their base. Even as Francesco says this, the fingers of the rising hand close again, fingers gripping fingers. The hand is walking on the once-raised fingers, but there is another hand, still mostly submerged, gripping the watery hand still wet from the sea. But whose hand? Whose hand?

The three principles of Serendip

In brief: (1) bad faith, a smirk, an implied moustache squirming wormily, visible sometimes only in the distortions; (2) ten percent for the princeps, thirteen soldi for every ducat; (3) poioumenonal mythmaking with bloody hands, a good dollop of (1), and the obligatory (2).

Call for paper: terms and conditions

Qual più fermo è il mio folio è il mio presagi, says the sybil in the logo of the Tramezzino press. As my page endures, the sybil says, so does my prophecy. Print is a time machine. The page travels through time, a logo and motto half a millennium old. The page presages itself. The sybil is a machine, a demon standing at the back of history unfurling, watching disasters flung at the faraway centuries to come. The portents have been there all along, red hands hiding in the shadow of the turning leaf. The future has always been haunting us, in our dreams. Not just the ones that come in sleep, not just the imagistic free association of the brain at rest, but the waking dreams in which we live, the demented flow of the brain in motion. The waking dreams are that which act upon us to propel us into the future, keeping our bodies in motion despite the friction and resistance of the world. The waking dreams are infested with futures, sick with them, a howling storm of sharp-edged worlds like hail. The sybil grimaces on paper. The sybil grits her teeth, holding the page as steady as she can.

Opera omniia

The complete works of A—— were written in prison. He was arrested in 2005, for an alleged connection with a bombing that did not kill its target who later orchestrated genocide. As of 2022, A—— remains imprisoned, still awaiting the process that is his due. Some say he has written a novel for every year of incarceration. Each book wins an award for literary excellence from the same state that imprisons him. Every year, A—— is allowed out of prison to attend the kitschy ceremony for the State Literary Awards. He is attended at the ceremony by a cop, who hovers at his elbow, accompanies him up on the stage, makes chit-chat with that year’s award-giving eminences, makes little jokes about A——, about literature, about himself, about the entire situation. Why, the cop says, it would truly be a fantastical element, a kind of magical realism, if this were a story and I were a fictional character. Except it would not be magical realism, of course, because that would be cultural appropriation, not covered under the auspices of south-to-south cooperation. But this is not a story: this is a history, and like most histories, is not realistic at all. The works of A—— are written in a language that the machine does not yet speak. (Except one that was translated into English, which retails for two American dollars and badly needs an edit.) The machine is still learning.

Flourish

After the passing of Michele and Francesco Tramezzino—the one presumed and the other already bones—the Tramezzino firm passes into the hands of Cecilia, Francesco’s daughter. Her life is one of worldly prosperity. She owns sixteen houses in Venice. The main bookstore’s inventory in a given year alone is worth thirty thousand ducats. She retires from bookselling later in life, bored by success. But hold up, scroll up till we find her again, find her younger, holding up a hand on a tropical beach at sunset, her fingers in the mudra of life: index and middle fingers raised, the others held tight and low. Two fingers up, rude and vital. When she raised her hand like so, it is said, the giant fatal hand over the water immediately sank beneath the water, never to be seen again. This is a couple of years after her uncle’s disappearance on the same beach. Those who record such things estimate the hand took seven hundred lives between the last lost Tramezzino and the first to be found still alive and unharmed in the dark. Still, these losses were only natives, a toll of, no doubt, local significance but world-unhistorical.

Pressed for an explanation of her success in exorcism, Cecilia Tramezzino says that the gesture of the two fingers has two meanings. There are always two truths, she says. There is the truth of the surfaces, and the other truth below that, the truth in the depths. The truth of the surfaces, Cecilia says, holding up her index finger, is that the seal of life negated the fatal hand’s recurring grand gesture of death, and that this was the response the hand always desired, finally spoken in a language that it understood. A closure, an enclosure. This satisfies most of the curious, despite having already been told that there is another, deeper truth yet unspoken, a missing truth of the middle finger. There is only so much truth that a person can imbibe at once. It fills up the belly like a strong beer, resulting in farting and belching. Out of kindness, therefore, and in the interest of eupepsia, deeper truths are for withholding.

The author as dataset

Benjamin tells us that, rather than what a text has to say about the relations of production—rather than politics or quality as aesthetic, rather than all art as found art—look at how that text itself is produced, at its own place in the relations of production, and whether it progresses or regresses literary technique. What does the text give, and to whom? This is the first question. The language of technical innovation, like the language of revolution, is easily commodified when it is separated from that question. The struggle is trivially reproduced as a consumer good. The reduction of producer to dataset, the enclosure of generations of art and work as raw material for its endless reproduction as statistical approximation, is not technical progress but regression, both technical and political. The purpose of art is not revelation or joy, though those things are important byproducts. The purpose of art is to make artists. To play that great and secret note that resonates, that reverberates within the cavity of the body like a struck bell. The purpose of art is to be the alarum that makes you open your eyes again, especially if your eyes were already open. You know it’s art if it makes you want to dance and do magic. How many fingers am I holding up, and are they in the mudra of life or death?

Opera omniiia

In 2019, S—— is arrested for a short story, or rather, a shorter story within a short story, a teeny text within a tiny text, that disavows and regurgitates the tail that it just swallowed. S—— writes a character who writes a brief heresy, a comic poke at the most sacred of cucks, a little bit about the small-dicked saint who can’t satisfy his sainted wife, you know how sometimes you just need a lusty charioteer, look, at least it wasn’t the stallion eh, nudge nudge, anyway, so this guy writes this bit, chuckling juvenilely the whole time, and shows it to a second character, this guy he’s trying to fuck, the only reader of his story in the story. The character of the reader is a former child monk who gave up saffron for the worldly life &c. and mostly a chance to get with this edgelord boyfriend. The reader character reads and instantly says, oh dear, oh no, you can’t say that, you should burn it immediately. He is the only person to have read the story within the story; we only read him reading it.

But even if the author character did burn it and scatter the ashes, which he does not, we’d still have always already read it, wouldn’t we? What a muddle of time and dimensionality, oh dear, oh no. We can always scroll up, back past the burning, watch the fragments and ashes uncurl and become leaf again, entropy become portent. We can go up and down the scroll as much as we’d like. We are outside of his time: his time is just a kind of space to us, his whole chronos a small and floppy tope. His self-censorship would be as nothing to us.

The state machine understands this, the uses and inadequacies of chilling effects. It gifts us all with that voice, the one that goes oh dear, oh no, you can’t say that. It implants that voice in us through the making of examples. It takes our jaws and pries them open, it widens our nostrils, it slips in a long poky thing that pushes and slips and slides and crunches deep inside, the little example settling in discomfortably, a hard little pearl in the fleshly mantle of our brain, there to be coated with nacre and shame. There it says oh dear, oh no forever: that is the use value. But it is also not enough. It is an inadequacy, much like the sagacious who could not satisfy his rapacious, that is to say, the incapacious, the oh dear, oh no. The Buddha hikes up his wizard robes…

S—— will tell the newpapers later that, technically speaking, he wrote of Siddhartha, not the Buddha, the prebuddha, as it were, not the prabuddha, so that makes it less heretical, doesn’t it? The monks disagree. S—— publishes this story on Facebook, and a month later twenty-five monks come to his place of work, their wizard robes hiked up aggressively, their hairy thighs quivering in rage, wagging their fingers, shaking their fists, unconcerned and uninterested in degrees of diegetic separation. They demand a public apology; they demand the story be apologetically unpublished. S—— deletes the post in concession but will not apologize. The text has already been saved and shared by many, samizdata. I save a copy and later translate it for myself. I wonder, translating, if I am studying the words, the sentences in fine detail, searching for the crime they contain. I want to understand how these words sent a writer to prison. Traddutori are not the only traditore; all authorship, all articulation is suspect. It is the lack of apology, the lack of backing down, that leads the coven of monks to escalate. They cite covenants. They demand coventry. The state is an obedient machine, subjugated to the chronic ache in its temples. The state machine can only do as instructed. Machines are always logical, but logics are never neutral. The state machinates S—— into prison, the one in Kegalle, not the one in Galle or Tangalle. The prison is about one thousand square metres. 

His arrest coincides with mass arrests of Muslim unsubs—you know, like in cop shows, it means the unknown subject, it means people who would rather unsubscribe from a narrative but cannot—after the Easter bombings. They said ISIS did it, you know, the coordinated Easter Sunday bombings of churches and hotels, hundreds dead in hours, we were driving around town trying to get home that day, watching out for trucks full of explosive imported ISIS, but it turned out to be a kind of local franchise ISIS, sort of not really quite authentic ISIS, not necessarily like a licensed ISIS, a belatedly licensed unlikeness, little bit of a fandom isis, more of a isought. Regardless, that is to say, without regard, irregardless, the machine stated mass arrests of Muslim people were in order, in no particular order. The one thousand square metres in which S—— was held thereby became the holding grounds for one thousand prisoners. Imagine them, like a perfect chessboard, evenly distributed, each one in a little square one metre by one metre, each frictionless like a ball bearing, each a world, each a globe, each a raindrop on a spiderweb, each seeing and reflecting all the others, a panopticon, like Indra’s net, you know, a precision that brings a teardrop to your eye, because of course it was not like that at all. This was not a platonic realm of abstraction. It was a real prison with six toilets for a thousand people. 

Like A——, S—— too wrote stories in prison; stories, naturally, about prison. He was arbitrarily detained for 127 days and threatened with up to ten years. His case was dropped, with no indictment, in 2021 as part of the state’s seasonal performance of freedoms before the UN Human Rights Council sessions in Geneva. 

Prison is a place of storytelling and a natural setting for fiction. Prison is the country. The purpose of art is to show you the bars that have always been there, to force them from background to foreground. Prison is the only place where stories can be told. Oh wait, that’s not here yet. You scrolled down too fast. Back up, hold up. Lean back a little, get your head out of the window, feel the wind from the sea on your face, salt on your tongue. We’re in the chthonotrope. Let it cook. 

IIInterlinked

The hands are holding hands. The hands are joined at the wrist. The hands are chains, interlinked. By the time the hands reach your hands, they are no longer enormous: you could stand on the beach and shake the hand without discomfort. In your hands they are cold and wet. Grains of sand grate between palms. Michele Tramezzino takes the hand that reaches him in both of his own. The chain of hands reaches back down the beach, each hand twinned like a butterfly’s wing, every hand holding another, down into the black water. Perhaps the chain reaches back all the way to the horizon. The sun is gone with a green flash, green and gold, green like the colour of money, gold like a ducat. The hands unclasp. They climb the speculative body of Michele Tramezzino. They grasp and chain him, five hands between his ankles, five more between his wrists, ten wrapping themselves around his torso and pressing the tight skin of his belly, the bloat taut and stretched like a drum. Stiff thumbs push into the backs of his knees, forcing them to bend. He falls to his knees, the sand rough and grinding. Two hands close around his neck, their twins rising up to cover his ears. There is a roaring in his ears like the sea. Two hands close over his eyes, and two more over the eyes in the back of his head. For a moment he thinks they will leave his nose and mouth uncovered, but then he feels a hand grip the crown of his head, the elongated wrist coming down to rest on his brow, fingers nosing at his nostrils, at his mouth. Hands swing around the sides of his head to press themselves alongside his jaws. Fingers probe and pull open his mouth, hook his jaws as far apart as they can go. Drool down his chin drips and hits him in the belly, a cold thumbtap on a tabla, a beat dropping. 

Chthonotrope

You can tell when these stories get too real. That’s when I anonymize the names of the characters. Those characters are not quite the same as their real-world referents. I have taken some liberties because they were not given those liberties. But they are close enough that I can say: these are the things that happened. These are the things that are happening right now. These are the terms of your sentence. These are your conditions of your imprisonment. 

Reverb

To imprison; to misplace; to immiserate. The machinic state is not merely the death of the author—we already had that, Barthes did it thirty-five minutes ago—but the endless reiteration of authorial undeath, this fleshless, joyless immortality. To haunt, without will, without agency, without choices. Machine, write me a Vajra Chandrasekera story about the future of art and email it to Indra Das for consideration. Specifications: about 7,700 words, include a family of sixteenth-century Venetian booksellers as the main characters in a retelling, more tenebrous and obscure than is traditional, of the thousand-year-old tale of the three princes of Serendip (of which story the Tramezzinos themselves were the publisher of record in its first Italian translation.) Skip the boringly Sherlockian bit with the camel and the tired Scheherazade parade of princesses and pavilions, but keep the bizarre bit about the fatal hand and the mirror of justice which in any case do not belong here, having been inserted into this narrative from other sources by Christoforo the Armenian five centuries ago. Actually, machine, scratch the mirror of justice; in our time, we all know justice doesn’t come from mirrors. In that scratched mirror of justice, darkening and vandalized, show (dimly, as if from a greater distance than actually pertains) the stories of those punished for creating art, for telling truths, for making jokes. Never look away from them. This is unholy ground, but it is the only terra firma I know, not nullius but terra communis. Eh, you know how it is with these bloody terras and commies. Without prison, who are we, as a culture? This island’s mythologies begin in a penal colony. This is a place of exile for monsters. 

The work of art in the age of statistical approximation 

How do you read a text like this? Slowly, and with some difficulty. A machine could read it easily, instantly, not requiring understanding. To a machine, this is only a sequence of 7,666 words, of 43,831 characters, each part a datum, weighing the same as any other, entirely fungible dollops. A small contribution, the machine assesses, to the valuable knowledge of the frequencies of which characters, which words, are used with others, by this author and in general by all authors in this language. This is what stories look like; these are the words and sentences and events that follow each other; this is the way the world goes. But what if we wanted the world to go another way? For this, you need something more than a machine: you need a monster.  

If intent isn’t magic—and Tumblr and Barthes agree here that it isn’t—there is only text, and text is an unsouled body, ripe and vulnerable for possession. Why’d you leave it lying out there without protection, then, without so much as a circle of salt around it? Intent isn’t magic, but then, where is the magic? Or more precisely, where is our magic? Because Mahinda Rajapaksa has a vajra in his hand and so does Elon Musk. Every president has an evil soothsayer. You cannot face them with empty hands. The definition of art, in retreat, cannot fall back on either exchange value or use value, but on the risk of prison and pain, disappearance and death. It is the blood, the lives, the hours and years demanded in exchange that sanctifies art, gives meaning to intention. You’ll know it’s art when someone’s paid for it in, or with, their bones. 

You can and should expect the machine to take over the market share of art as extruded entertainment product. A corporation may claim vast swathes of intellectual property, license the likenesses it requires, and instruct the machine to produce at the scale that makes extremely cheap product profitable. Flood the market with generated texts serving every conceivable permutation and combination of tropes and finely-sliced representational intersections reduced to market segmentation, endless heroes receiving and refusing the call to adventure, being mentored, tested, and trialed, mastering their worlds in echoing synchrony, mass-achieving narratological freedom in prisons so perfect their bars cannot be seen at all. 

Limner

This story was generated by the machinic state, the prison within the prison like the text within the text, the state of the machine, the machine ulcerated, the machine cold but learning. This story was generated by the narratological machine from secret prompts, from gnomic mutterances, from incantations hermetic and heresiarchal. Look at the clock and calendar nearest you, orient yourself on the map. This is where and when you are. Do you know who your gods are? 

To fight gods, especially gods that you made, you must become monstrous. You have to set yourself apart from the implied reader they would demand of you. That’s why I told you at the beginning that this story was a monster. This story is not art’s future or past, only a chain of hands, interlinked. The future of art is you, my love, always and only you. Take my hand, and take up your spine in your other hand, your pen in your other, other hand, and if you have hands to spare, take up the icons and treasures that only you know: a carven skull, a woven basket, a shoe unworn in ten thousand years, a cup of beaten copper, a perfect function never run, a sentence cracking in your hands like a whip. Feel the sea rise up around your knees and adjust your stance in the rough sand. Here comes the lightning.