Two years have passed since the last blogpost. Much has happened: authors must grieve the twin deaths of Alice Munro (May 2024), the poetic genius in short format, a writer of nostalgia for lives we never lived, and Paul Auster (April 2024), the textual illusionist, meandering through subjectivity and identity. If writers are distant friends, if books are their letters, must we not be sad at loss of such genuine correspondence?

Little must be written here, much elided over. Perhaps there will be time to return to Munro’s provocations, her controversial life and storytelling. Here, we have Auster: Auster who penned the private eye/I, the subjective singularity that engulfs his characters, his plots, his cities, his readers, him; Auster who was a kaleidoscope within his own stories of so many different personas: the Rothesque ghostwriter shadowing other artists, the archivist copiously chronicling his own cities through his own characters, the detective of imagined crimes, the seer and seen, the author and authored. To read Auster is to see New York differently, like it is to read Joyce and see Dublin differently. The mechanism, however, is different. Joyce presents a measured profligacy; Auster presents redundant minimality. Auster sees the world as if from a pinhole camera and then redoubles the blurry edges over, and over, and over, until the contours of a story emerge.

My relationship with Auster has been tenuous. I had always held him at a distance — his evocative premises, fixation on language and misinterpretation, error and frailty at odds with the scale of life I concerned myself with. Except, Auster beckoned me to look at the oddities even in this scale, in its repetitions, its frictions and its slippages. In the previous post, I had mentioned that I would implicate Auster when discussing our engagement with speculation. It is odd, remembering someone one day and finding them departed the next.

It is also odd to open an opinion piece on speculative fiction with literary fiction authors. Colour me biassed. I would love to speak of similarities in the mathematical worlds of Abott and Lem, of cultural distinctions that we routinely draw in these genres, of time and its evolution through time. But there are times when one must view the earth from the moon, when one must assay a country from another, when genres appear suddenly warped from another. That is the idea.

In his famed New York Trilogy,¹ Auster speaks of truth, detection and detectives. Unlike conventional detectives, a Sam Spade, a Sherlock Holmes, a Miss Marple, characters whose shadow pervades the plot, whose larger-than-life identity provides solid ground on which you are willing to bet the truth, characters who linearise time: from not knowing to knowing, each chapter an increment, a nugget of wisdom, Auster’s detectives are diffuse, anonymous (and thus autonomous). There is a sense, in his works, that time is playing tricks on you, that the past will face you at the next intersection as your future, as your alter ego whose life is on a different trajectory.

Strewn throughout his works, therefore, are indicators of an identity that do not cohere. A detective watches a mark even as he feels watched, a wretched cog in an absurd game of waiting, not acting. A horde of identities seem to erupt from the page: the detective, sometimes Daniel Quinn, sometimes Paul Auster (the character? the author? the pseudonym?) seem to speak simultaneously. A man involves himself with the life of Hector Mann, actor in silent movies, whose life on camera he brilliantly recalls in remarkable detail. Always, there is the idea that one life has been trapped by another, caught in a web, where in all directions what radiates is yet another strand of a life that one seems to be distantly living. Therefore of being under perusal from this distance, an inability to walk in your own skin as your own person.

In such a complex field, the ‘I’, argues Auster, is a sinkhole. It is at once the authoritative Investigator, the intimate Subject and the roving Private Eye, and the attractor for all such identities which entangles with yours. Through desire, through imitation, through surveillance and consumption, through comparison, the ‘I’ repeatedly contracts the other, measures up against it and then sinks it. I call this idea the ghost: a way of living that takes you on a collision course with somebody else’s life. As Brockmeier says: “It would take so little. Why didn’t it happen?”²

To live as a ghost is to live on the knife-edge of absolute subjection and absolute freedom, a curious phantasmic life indeed. It is a virtual unity of contradictions, a life where saying: how can I be other than what I eventually will be? is to simultaneously declare yourself free from the clutches of your own future. Every action is lent significance in the future; each passing desire, each obligatory act — are we not always susceptible to being looked back at in ten years, with a future us saying: this is not so; it was never meant to be so. Read Carloff (Time Heist), who writes about the present being continuously botched up by knowledge that things will reset. Or McCaffrey (Central Time), for whom the present is inundated with constraints. The horror of time is thrown open to us precisely when we let ourselves be determined by the future; should we not instead declare that the future will be what it will be, and thus declare ourselves free? An empty freedom indeed! But the ghost reminds us that all freedom is, in the final analysis, empty, a declaration sans creation.

Auster navigates through this subjection-freedom. There is always the terminus of what one must become; the end has always been in sight. What constitutes the story is the progression towards the end, the becoming of a pure subject, the possession of the body of the other, the ticking into pure freedom.

What does it matter to us? Here, let us return to Bachelard again who writes: “… the joy of reading is the reflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader were the writer’s ghost.”³ No reader, says Bachelard, reads without trying to become the writer. To the extent that a modest reader is kept in place is by the sheer genius of the writer himself. The good writer maintains a ghostly reader, there to be possessed but resisting possession. She is the hero of every horror genre who keeps the ghost at bay, who resists every attempt on her body, on her soul. The reader, in his turn, must attempt a seizure, a subjection-freedom, a possession; that is the fulfilment of his desire.

In this curious setting, Bachelard hints at an equally curious idea. Who here is creative if not the reader? The writer, through the text, is present as if objectively. It is the reader who must move the text and be moved by it in turn. It is his gaze, his experience of the text, that is Bachelard’s central concern. The writer is relegated to the margins, the significant other. This is an inverted horror movie, one where we enter the lives of the ghosts and see them haunting the real world. The selection by the reader is the artistic act, insofar as art is the experience of expression of desire.

Through Auster then, we find what it is to be a hungry artist, continuously trying to meld with the world. In the pieces that we shall publish this year, especially the entries from our Faux Tales contest, this is what we have continuously tried to do. Which story among these would I have written; who is the author we would have anyway become if we were to become the Author?

There is, of course, a silly way of reading this entire idea as hubris. Are we therefore saying that we could have written the story in spite of the author? Are we not therefore saying that the author is a mere accident, a chancy being who got there first, planted their flags on terrain that was otherwise our manifest destiny? This is not what I mean by the ghost. The ghost does not exist without man, the reader without the writer, the editor / magazine without our authors. In the absence of the author, there is no future that we can emptily gesture towards. It is only when our authors write these stories that they bring into the world the conditions of our freedom; it is only by pointing at them, their expression, their words, that we say: there, that is exactly what I would have wanted to say anyway. There is no predestination because there is no future yet — the future will be in its own time — there is only a freedom from the future that we seek.

Consider, in this vein, Vajra Chandrasekera’s comments (The Limner Wrings His Hands) on the author-machine. Begin reading where it allegedly ends: “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… To fight gods, especially gods that you made, you must become monstrous.” End where he begins: “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.” In between, you might find him saying that the author-artist does authorship-artistry only when throws open his own subjection to the universe, only when he absolves his own subjection. Art here is not unlike faith: the artist does not make a spectacle of the prison; he short-circuits the transition between the reading of the prison and the finding oneself within it. This is the artistic function.

This is also a lesson in temporal intimacy, a coming together at every moment of our anticipation for tomorrow. Call it what you will: a textual tryst, a speculative romance, a political solidarity; these are but labels of a gnawing metaphysics of time. And it requires other intimacies, some cultural, some genetic, some interactional. The question then is who or what emerges from these intimacies, and whether such emergence may be truly called South Asian. What are the peculiarities of South Asian speculative fiction, and is there some truth to South Asian experiences that can serve as a criterion for categorizing stories?

In time, I will write about this.

Notes

1. Auster, P. (1990). The New York trilogy. Penguin. ︎
2. Brockmeier, K. (2021). Pieces of elsewhere: The horizontal and the vertical in character and fiction. Sewanee Review, 130(4), 735–765. ︎
3. Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1958) ︎

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.

Let us call this piece an interruption.

My plan was to write a series of posts detailing our criteria for selecting stories for State of Matter. I would start, as I did in the last post, with the movie Ratatouille and the problematics of time when we encounter something ‘novel’. To understand something as new, I would argue, is to understand it as a rupture in time. The next entry would be inspired by Auster’s New York Trilogy, and the motif of the detective that he builds, and how a character becomes the sinkhole for everybody else. However, between these pieces, a rift has opened up. A new temporality, it would seem, has revealed itself.

Last month, Tahatto put up its play, Love in the Cholera of Time. A review, it would seem, has demanded itself.

The play has aged past its initial runs. Last year, when Jagriti Theatre put it up, a friend brought it to my attention. He told me that it combined many of my interests: time, Marquez, meta-textuality, the experience of non-linearity, the theatre, the incorporation of an audience in what is supposed to be a contained act, the body and its orientations and its movement — themes that escape conventional discussion. Since that day, and until this kind-of-review is published, I am already a few beats of the cosmos too late. Tahatto has organised this play multiple times in different cities, most recently in Delhi.

Perhaps the review would be better suited if I could point to an upcoming show and link to it. That does not seem possible right now. Then again, I may defer to the celebration of non-linearity within the play, hoping that not all of the past is lost, and not all of a future is exhausted in anticipation.

This delay gives my kind-of-review some breathing space. Other places (see reviews in The Hindu and Indulge Express, for instance) have already spoken about the motivation, preparation and organisation of the play. But because I am late, I can skimp on the summaries, the temptations, the causal linkages from page to stage. This review might be stationed outside of chronological time. Let us call this a transverse time, and remember Bachelard again,¹ who tells us that the present instant, the now, sits resolutely outside of the continuous flow of time. He says that in this now, we may experience a multiplicity of experience, without necessarily arguing what comes before and what comes after. We may ask then what it would be to review a work of art, a play, a composition, a story, standing not before nor after the piece, but by its side, or vertically above it. What must we speak about to speak about the play?

Time? Cholera? Or just plain old love? Perhaps, like Bachelard proposes, I need to be inspired by a poetic image, allow its reverberations to unsettle me.

Let me start with time. Let me also be pedantic for a moment, revisiting that century-old scientific breakthrough that is Einsteinian relativity. Einstein, invoked in the descriptions of the play, proposes that space-time does not offer us a certain Archimedean position. In his careful descriptions, clocks and rulers lose their solidity: they stretch and skew, they enmesh what they measure (time, space, time-space!) and they demand always a trace of where they measure it from.² In doing so, Einstein upsets our tripartite categories of time. No longer is time merely a matter of the past behind the present behind the future! A new category appears: the “absolute elsewhere”, that livezone of other happenings from which light cannot make it to the ‘here-now’, or to where light from here-now may not reach. This may just be the transverse zone (of escape? of desire? of political possibility?) in which the past reaches out to a different life, from which the future will have eventually become possible.³

It seems that in these places, we come unstuck in time. Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse V, who found himself loosened in the temporal flow, the characters of the play find themselves pushed outside the here-now, outside enclosures (of marriage, of prison), to meet in an other-zone. Where? When? In a time neither His nor Hers, not in-between either. The play opens with a juxtaposition outside prosaic time: a playful sort of beginning that has no ‘bearing’ upon a strict sequence of events the way conventional narratives do. What if the moon was made of cheese? Not a what-if that burgeons into a science fiction narrative, but a what-if unburdened from its own future. The question leads nowhere important, but is revived again and again, gaining currency in its recurrence. The first rule of the other-zone is that there is no rigorous plot: there is just idyllic romance around the moon, which splits, like Debussy’s reprises, throughout the play.

If I were to point to the strength of the play, I would point to this… this playfulness of its scenes. A play as play, whoever could think of that! Notice at the same time the sheer fluidity with which it indulges its audience in the time-settings of its characters. Almost to the extent where you feel that it is your anticipation that makes characters meet and speak on stage. To an extent where the audience intimately perceives multiple modalities at work: a visuality among the cast interacting with the stage, the rising music, that artistic sensibility of time that we insipidly call pacing…

But the critic is condemned to seriously engage even with playfulness! To speak a little about the stylistics and the themes of the production.

We folks begin as beings with brute speech; art, perhaps, is our development into nuanced language. When we first come across Einsteinian time, we say, “Time is non-linear,” to sketch its broad contours. Linearity is a Cartesian gridline; it is to act per rules, to realise freedom with reference to an overarching rulebook. Chronology is linearity in time. The play’s the thing that substantiates non-linearity: in marking time this way or that, it points us toward the dramatic curve that our own lives occupy. Is time all-knowing? Is all already known? Can there be no surprise from this moment to the next?

The distance between a broad non-chronology — the time guardians would explain to you as the play begins — and how the act will be chronologically structured for ‘you’, the viewer, is what sets up its tension. There are, on one hand, the themes of destiny and certainty. The Nation is under construction; we know that it will become independent; that is history. Our own world will see the proliferation of dehumanisation, such as the business of deleting old social media accounts; we may predict this much future; that is sociopolitics.⁴ The power of a thousand Black Holes will be unleashed; the device that the actor hands the audience member must be of some import; that is good storytelling! On the other hand, there is desire, there is the possibility of chance. Will He and She meet again? Might the Moon be really made of cheese?⁵ The play shores up and lets go of this tension with metric certainty, playing upon an irony with the audience. And this too is its way of drawing the audience into its own telling. Here, when He reveals a fact that is Her proper future, the audience is in on the joke — we laugh at the characters. There, when the audience is treated as mere ‘humans’, limited in the way they understand time, the audience is the butt of the joke — we laugh at ourselves. And then, when someone asks out loud, “What sort of a question is And then?” we are not sure what to laugh at, because so central is this question to the telling of a story that the joke seems targeted to every one of us, the actors, the audience, the fictional characters, the multiple allusions, perhaps even the city itself.

Enough about time; there is also cholera and love, the signals for passion and romance, evoking that strange combination that is Marquez’ story.⁶

Marquez gives us Him and Her, Florentino and Fermina, whose soft names constantly interrupt the world of the novel. Cholera, water-borne, a disease from the very thing that must sustain you, is perhaps in this regard much like love. And I have “confused cholera with love, of course” like Marquez’ character. The afflicted man in either case displays all the signs of a lack of health, a paleness that persists somewhere deeper than his bones. His passions run wild; he retches his insides out. Bleeding from every orifice, he realises that he is a dead man walking, talking, acting out a part not his own. Love, the choleric kind, erupts. Perhaps, love in the cholera of time should erupt too. That evocation is missed in the play; that kind of love impinges itself as an absence in the play. That feels like a loss.

What is this temporal syndrome, this ‘cholera-of-time’? In his landmark work on perception, Merleau-Ponty says that time-instants are telegraphed, embodied totalities⁷ — you find yourself a Russian doll, stacked as moment within moment within moment, each moment a full life — and that moments do not die, but remain open like a wound. Love, the choleric kind, then, persists multiply and totally because you encounter it along many worldlines, chaotically and surprisingly arranged. A full life here, and here again, and then, and then again. What better way to tell a love story then than to tell it as a series of images that stand relatively alone, among which you see not at first a narrative but a reverberation, where scenes do not follow or precede other scenes but contract them, like one contracts an illness. What is written now exists autonomously in the past: a letter, a rose find themselves travelling in time, characters have memories of the future and anticipate the past. And just like that, life is brought up short by time.

Surely the operational concept is that of movement. Surely, disturbing the nature of time must cause paradoxes of motion. If love may be encountered along all possible worldlines, if I may enter it faltering and stumbling, open doors to it and briskly walk in, be whisked away into the past or slip, violating some physical laws, into the absolute elsewhere of my own existence, how may I go about making such a huge range of motion possible? The characters must mount a difficulty with an obvious answer, that which in Boulder,⁸ Baltasar explains with surprising clarity, “But all this tunneling has opened rifts through which the captive parts of me have started to emerge.” Against the inner borders of the tripartite stage-set, the characters must thrust and recede and tunnel: at the right time, after all, these borders have to be transgressed for Him and Her to appear elsewhere. It feels in such moments of transgression that the extended gag to open a door for a performance appraisal, or the conversation with a parent across prison walls — that these are conditioning possibilities; that these mundane motions make the extraordinary flights of the characters possible. The play hints at these minor confinements, these minor escapes, until it is time for a major escape, a major stumbling into a transverse world with another. If there is a concern, it is only that these possibilities skew more toward Him than Her, that He has been apportioned more of the conditions of motion than She.

But let me not nitpick here. Let me insist that in the play, love possesses some allure. Love’s preferred symbol, like in poetry, is the moon. Here, the play becomes indulgent, especially with Debussy’s Clair de Lune. The moon, like in Calvino’s cosmology, becomes desire and its fulfilment, fantasy and its reason, the promise of and pining for love. The moon, we are told, holds hands with the earth the way lovers must hold hands. Scientifically, it is of interest that the moon is a poor companion: it is drifting away from us a little each day. Scientifically, it is also of interest that the earth and the moon do not hold hands; their motion is, perhaps, best described as falling past each other at immense speeds, a constant choreography of sidestepping the other. There is thus in this romance, some wish-fulfilment, some pure fiction. Surely, something in this romance might interrupt the celestial motion of the planets. Surely, something in this romance might even stop time.

Of course, that happens… In perhaps one of the more explosive displays of telling a story, time slows. The actors slowly lunge at one another, falling past one another with insufficient speed. It is the acting out of slow motion, an effect which might be borrowed partly from slapstick, partly from old Bollywood, partly from the history of movement on stage. It is cathartic (look, the device that had been foreshadowed has been used!), comical (look they are jumping and tumbling!), intense (where is this sequence going?). Almost everybody who walked out of the theatre with me marvelled at this sequence. Weeks later, they could remember the visuals from the scene. “Like a movie,” said someone, offering that paradigmatic comparison that we often make for excellence in visuality. “Like time actually slowed,” said someone else, as if time actually hadn’t! My favourite comparison comes from a friend who has the disappointing habit of stating the answer obviously embedded in the question. “Like in love,” they said.

Yes, like that.

Notes

1. Bachelard, G. (2013). Intuition of the instant (E. Rizo-Patron, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1932).
2. Ismael, J. (2021). Time: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. See sections on Einstein for a quick summary. Most of the reproduction here is succinctly presented in Ismael’s work.
3. It is tempting here to cite so much of Bergson, whose historic debate with Einstein spells out much of twentieth-century tussles between the great disciplines. See for instance:
   Bergson, H, (1930). The possible and the real (DVL, Trans.). Bergsonian.org. https://bergsonian.org/the-possible-and-the-real/
4. Here, of course, a host of texts come to mind. For a relatively accessible and recent TV series, see Upload.
   Daniels, G. (2020). Upload. Amazon Prime Video.
5. Of course, one does not talk about the Moon this way and forget Calvino’s Cosmicomics, and the many degrees of desire and liminality that it suggests.
   Calvino, I. (2010). The complete cosmicomics. Penguin. (Originally published 1965).
6. Márquez, G. G. (2003). Love in the time of cholera (E. Grossman, Trans.). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. (Originally published 1985).
7. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
8. Baltasar, E. (2022). Boulder (J. Sanches, Trans.). And Other Stories.

To this, add the image of the dispassionate critic, Ego, who in the final act of Ratatouille enters into an aesthetic agreement with life.² Such agreement is rare; it occurs in that thick instant that Bachelard imagines, where you sense so many oppositions in such little life! Envy, but also fulfilment; loss, but also plenitude; sinking depth where all at once the entirety of your life seems touched by the present. Nothing could have prepared Ego for the titular dish, yet his entire life suddenly seems reverberant with its taste.³

What might you not do in such a moment? Ego chooses to act, for he reverses his own critical enterprise, for he chooses, when faced with food that is art that is life, to revise his own conservatism. He reorients the past and envisions a project for the future, one that he names “the discovery and defence of the new”, a private principle that is recursive enough that his own movement becomes the thrust of the tale, the spark of the story, the one-message-you-take-away if you will. Ego has, perhaps after a long time, been revealed to himself. It is as if he has become aware of the solidity of his body when touching it from the outside.

In his private room, we must see him struggle with himself to develop this criterion that he calls the new. He types, but now and then he pauses to gaze upon the world from a summit, balanced precariously on his own toes. He does not have a clear recourse to the past in words; the novelty he seeks is the one that he is now swept up within. His critique is neither given, nor motivated as if he were writing about something distantly remembered; instead, his words speak repeatedly about the very experience he is caught up within.

I feel that in the little space Ego concedes in the movie—surely Paris must not be overrun by rats in toques!—he allows art to change him. In doing so, he conducts himself with a certain kind of bravery that Le Guin demands of her writers.⁴ Le Guin asks that brave writers write Truth; Ego demands that brave critics defend Novelty. Le Guin’s writers are not divorced from the world that already is; Ego’s critics are not divorced from art that already makes certain demands. Le Guin’s writers point to what is written and say, “This here is the truth, if you will have it”; Ego’s critics point to what is critiqued and say, “This here is the new, if you will have it.” Central to either enterprise, the way I see it, is to commit to something that holds you inescapably.

With State of Matter, we asked if we could create conditions for a commitment to the new. And in turn, we found ourselves entrenched in the verticality of our own experience. Always, despite sustaining an arduous engagement with a literary or cultural tradition, we found ourselves rising transversely with an ambiguity that refused to be settled. We found ourselves discussing not being determined by our past, our names, or the received wisdom about our geographies. We wanted, perhaps in other words, an alternative that we feel is central to speculative fiction, an alternative that makes demands for its own novelty, an alternative that forces you to reckon with it as new.

Let me borrow a metaphor from space-fiction: terraforming, the ecoscaping action that creates conditions for living. A story that terraforms does not settle within a given cosmology, a pre-existing arrangement of things, but forces us to confront the machine arms thrusting into our souls. There is nothing in our past that provides it space amenable for living; it must create within us these conditions, and propel us into that which cannot be foreseen.

Consider a story of first contact, whose brute form we know too well—of course there is nothing absolutely new in the promise of a first contact. You have here a society in relative stasis, perhaps with the seeds of an internal dynamism. There comes an alien truly speaking, someone who fans an inner tension and causes it to come to head in a piece. And then you have a ‘conflict’ or ‘conceit’, or more humbly, a system of variations that construe a story.

But here arrives a prying eye looking for what is different, what if noticed might reach into our pasts and modify how we understand first contact. Perhaps in this piece, (see Morton, The Stranger), conditions have to be made for paranoia around a discovery. Perhaps in another one (see Changming, Speciating), conditions have to be made to understand first contact as memory of one’s origins. These are ruptures from the brute cosmological form of the first contact story; these stories are terraforming. They help us remember that there is always in speculative fiction the unfamiliar that structures the familiar, that the land we stand upon has been eroded in the past, that these mountains have been formed, that these ridges have been carved, that Earth itself has been terraformed so many times in the past and will be in the future, again and again. They force us to reckon with “words as riparian forms” (Mullins, Sublime Terrain) as a recent poet reminds us, and force us to immerse ourselves in the fluidity of the text and do some terraforming of our own reader selves, so our souls may receive this alien story. This is a world amenable to construction, and it is this openness that allows us to confront it in ways unforeseen. This is a novel world.

And here the gushing of words point to Bachelardian “spouts” of time. Nothing prepares us for a novel story. Its arrival is compulsive enough; it sweeps us up in the moment of its arrival, not before, not after. Like someone who has been thrown outside of established meaning-making, I am reduced to counting words, looking for repetitions, marking time until meaning surges back in.⁵

When a story terraforms, it asks a structuring question and presents itself to you ambivalently, without the immediate force of history compelling movement one way or another. “Is the story asking me to arrange things this way or that?” “What position am I being assigned?” The novel story interrupts a given flow of memory, a familiar orbit of the planets. “Is it suggesting that I read the poem with these concerns?” It makes the world a little more speculative, open and rife with possibilities. Of course, in another instant there will be other concerns, concerns also of truth and beauty, of myriad enumerations and closures and evaluations, but let us wait here a while. As the concerns proliferate—the nuts and bolts, the tension and its release, the style and syntax of a piece, the suggestions that open up when time decides to flow through us, what Bachelard calls the prosody of prose—we might want to mark that this instant has thrown up before any of that a disorienting effect (see Timss, Slowly Through the Middle Distance). Can we discuss if this renders us unhinged, forces us into the wind desperate for solid ground? Can we discuss if we find ourselves enveloped within a speculative world, but not merely as surveyors?

A story may be splendidly written, ticking all the boxes of classic fantasy or horror or science fiction, but does it offer us something new? Where I find it, there is Novelty, which has thickened this instant, has brought me into an agreement with life. I have discovered something new.

And like Ego, I defend it because I cannot resist being swept up by it. Our confrontation with speculative fiction is also our experience of time, our own sense of the past that we are writing with the authors we publish. When engaging with pieces submitted to State of Matter, I often respond with feedback that tells writers if we found their work novel enough. This is already a forked statement: I defend at once what we value and why we value it. We conduct a business in words: each word resonant with a meaning that has derived from our practical struggles, choices this way or that, settled debates, tentative positions, compromises, ideological commitments and non-negotiables. And we prefer that these words do not crystallise into clear, articulate criteria beyond vague categories; we prefer that we are thrown off-balance, that we are left groping for words, for positions to settle on, for another compromise to be struck. In each instant, we are looking to create conditions of our own deciphering: to terraform, in other words, where we choose to reside. We want through our stories to reveal ourselves to the world.

Sometimes I tell authors, “Your story did not invoke a new way of looking at this issue.” This implicates the author and me. It means that the author has caught me in a flow, where their story has created horizontal relations with a settled piece, as a trope, a cliché, something familiar. Many stories move you, but some move you horizontally by sheer logic or a wealth of experience, in a prosody, with the memory of stories that I have seen in my time before this one, structuring, anticipating this one. The author has not moved me vertically, that beckons me beyond the many different readings and identities that I have already folded within myself. It has not allowed me a break from where I stand. This here is a cosmic non-disjunction. I cannot defend such a piece since its concerns are of little risk to me—I lose precious little for a story whose core issues I have already settled within myself. To defend something, after all as Ego says, is to “truly risk something”, to look for that which is truly alternative, truly speculative.

There is too, in this opinion, a subjectivity of criteria. On the horizon, there are other relations that you may assume with speculative fiction. There are ways of structuring speculative fiction as means of categorising alternatives, perhaps as archiving them. Where pieces are juxtaposed or sequenced to create comparative visions. And these different arrangements inform what a speculative fiction magazine must do, how it should situate and conduct itself, what it should and should not say, with what inflection and what emphasis, what it should look for and what it should refract into the world. The particular arrangement that we have chosen requires its own defence, and perhaps it requires such a defence in its own time. But even as an assertion, it makes clear that this is what the world looks like from where we stand.

Our experience with the stories we read is touched by this concern. It is touched, first, by an expectation that we are capable of being moved by the stories we read, that text that is art that is life presents to us the possibility of our aesthetic vision. Such an expectation places an implicit demand on our authors too, that they will move us, help us narrate our own history. There is in this expectation a trepidation, a certain vulnerability that we must parcel out on all ends, and the politics of an editor-author relation that enters this fold. Second, it is touched by the peculiarities of who we are, the liminal bodies and identities that we continuously negotiate, and the stories of our private lives that unfolds with this project we have chosen for ourselves. The two questions we must settle then are those of selection: from within our monthly slush, those pieces that end up in our quarterly issues, and of truth of an experience that our peculiar definition of South Asian-ness permits us.

In due time, I will perhaps write about these.

Notes

1. Bachelard, G. (2013). Poetic instant and metaphysical instant. Intuition of the instant (E. Rizo-Patron, Trans.), 58–63. Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1932).
2. Bird, B., & Pinkava, J. (2007). Ratatouille. Buena Vista Pictures.
3. Bachelard, G. (2014). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Penguin. (Original work published 1958). Here Bachelard introduces the idea of reverberations, the effects of a poem that we construct in the past.
4. Le Guin, U, K. (1987). Introduction. The left hand of darkness (50^th anniversary ed.). Penguin. (Originally published 1969). Le Guin argues that brave authors use words to write fiction to write truth, engaging perennially with what is.
5. Carl, P. (2018). Architecture, geometries, rhythm. Log, 43. 119–129. Anyone Corporation. Carl reads Corbusier and the ‘rhythms’ in his architecture, arguing that we return to the bare activity of marking time when dominant meaning-making (“Zeit without a particular Geist”) is unavailable.