The Nelligan Review

Not American pages, or paragraphs, nor American sentences or even words. It’s called – writing, that is – American letters to remind us that this coding we use to program ourselves and thereby build our culture, can be broken down to the atomic level. And perhaps a reminder is in order. It’s been years since we’ve seen these 26 building blocks arranged on a chart in a classroom, laid out like elements on a periodic table. They are basically ciphers, mostly with no specific cultural meaning. The letter X is a prime exception, a pictograph used to mark the spot such as on a treasure map, and the letters A through F, with the exception of E for some reason, tend to embody academic ranking, etc.

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But our letters are nothing like the pictographic language Mandarin Chinese, the most-spoken language in the world, in which the symbol for mountain literally looks like a mountain, and the symbol for hutong, a narrow lane or alley, demonstrates place, its strokes resembling a head lowered in a corridor. Our American letters, in and of themselves, are unmoored of any such historical time and place. Our alphabetic system seems apropos for a country that claims to pride itself on free expression and making your own mark.

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Perhaps in our handwringing over what artificial intelligence will evolve into, we’ve forgotten that our own alphabet is already alive. We are gods, organizing these single-celled organisms of letters into words and sentences, arising the more complex lifeforms of ideas, until these metaphysical entities shape us back. What has unsettled some scientists is that the human brain might be a lot more like AI than we realize, in that we also expand our intelligence through vectorization: assigning strength-of-meaning to words and ideas by how we perceive their location in relation to other words and ideas. These ideas of metaphysical proximity are how we build our loves, hatreds, and prejudices. And only a quantum computer pulling power from alternate dimensions (physicists are working on it) could predict what might happen next in this roiling madhouse of meanings. When I was a kid, 69 was the paramount of numerical humor, but these days it’s 67, and no one saw that coming. Perhaps a supercomputer would have.

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As our languages, fed by our searches for meaning, develop into sentient entities, they begin to have their own ideas about each other. Our word red is a shorthand pejorative for communist cultures unaligned with our capitalistic values. It is also the color of our Republican party, our political party most vociferously against communists. And though Republicans tout conservative mores, red in an American film’s color palette indicates sexual lust, such as the bed of roses in American Beauty. Fascism is the attempt to simplify society by assigning as many singular meanings as possible, to decrease the number of wild language-beasts we’ve unleashed, roaming through the interdimensional terrain of our collective consciousness, and increase the accuracy of human prediction in terms of how a society will act and behave. (The vast cultural homogeny and sameness wreaked by such megabrands as Apple could also be considered fascism; as could the rise of McDonald’s apple pie and the extinction event that these mass-produced rectangular pies wrought on the panoply of mom-and-pop diners serving their own unique homemade recipes, and so on.) But fascists, who believe they are closest to The Truth, are hallucinating as much as the rest of us; and hallucinations have physical consequences. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong claimed that red meant “go”, causing all sorts of car crashes. Some people hadn’t gotten the memo, and were still hallucinating “stop” for red.

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In middle school I had a health teacher who bore a striking resemblance to the actor Jack Palance. I didn’t know he looked like Palance until years later when I saw the deconstructionist Godard’s film “Le Mépris”. Mr. Smith didn’t take the class seriously and he often went on tangents. One day he said, “Watch this,” and yanked down an overhead projector screen. “I’m gonna write a word, and try not to see it,” he said. Then he disappeared from the waist up, and the curtain shimmied as he wrote a word in chalk on the greenboard. “Ready,” he said, betting our brains they couldn’t just see the letters and not the word. He let go of the screen, sending it flapping back up into its spring-loaded rollbox. The word, written in calciferous capital letters, was WOLF. But I could not just see the letters, I saw the wolf. And not just any wolf. A timber wolf. I even saw a swath of its habitat: snow falling through trees, the wolf’s head slightly lowered in the violaceous haze of an Alaskan dusk. I could not stop my brain from vectorizing an entire scene, from four otherwise meaningless letters. To realize that this vectorization is what we call a personality, is to realize that AI has a lot more in common with us than we might want to consider.

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“You couldn’t do it, could you,” Mr. Smith grinned. Writing these words now, seeing his nicotine smile across the years, I think about the personality shifts multilingual persons experience as they shift from language to language.

 

I’m not the first to consider cultures as mass hallucinations. Terrence McKenna did, and William Burroughs spoke of language as a virus of the mind. Such unique minds might be traduced as drug-addled lunatics. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Yet if anyone wholeheartedly agrees with them, it might ironically be the architects of fascist propaganda who exploit the very theses of such minds. 

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Fascists are brilliant slogan-makers, unlike flowery liberals, because of their lust for a single system of singular truths. What would a single AI mind, fed our culture and trying to vectorize lines of best fit through our far-flung human hallucinations, become?

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Consider the sadistic supercomputer AM in Harlan Ellison’s prescient 1967 story “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream”. The title appeals to language; if a single artificial mind were to speak the one final language, we would have no language to speak against it. Even some zealots of industry who ushered in our technocracy are beginning to step back and sweat. 

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Anyway, as we all live out our last days of life as we know it, consider the two “sides” into which we’ve polarized America. (The idea that our culture has two sides is of course another hallucination, reminiscent of the reductive geometrical characters in the 1884 satire “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions”. Why we have not assigned a more complex shape to our multivariate culture, such as a tetrahedron, or even a scutoid – I believe attests to the profound dumbing-down and intellectual flattening Americans seem so bent on. Perhaps we could modernize Patrick Henry’s rally cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death”, to “Give us simplicity, and give them death”, with “them” referring increasingly to anyone challenging the Trumpian status quo.)

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These two sides, the prime warring camps in the great operatic sweep of the last decade, are: Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Make America Great Again (MAGA). This cultural bifurcation brings into focus the tangle of Escherian staircases of the moment. Though I voted for Bernie Sanders, I’d be the first to admit MAGA is much more potent than BLM, as a cultural vectorizer.

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BLM is facile, passive, even snappish. It’s more an offhand remark than a war cry. Why not just state, Stop Murdering Black People? The indirect BLM even lacks the galvanic idealism liberals do espouse; as much as liberals talk about intersectionality, the clunky specificity of BLM undercuts the complexity they say is necessary to move America forward. The tagline is not broad enough to encapsulate the entire movement and thus has been derisively and effectively hijacked by MAGA (from T-shirts that claim Banjo Lives Matter, to bumper stickers that read All Lives Matter, etc.). 

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I’d argue that slogan choice was a major reason Trump won; BLM, unlike MAGA, was not a mystical screen onto which Americans could project their own ideas. In terms of a vectorizer, BLM was a lukewarm cup of herbal tea, but MAGA was LSD. 

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When liberals attempted their own linguistic hijacking (Grateful Dead-themed stickers that suggested we Make America Grateful Again, hats that read Make America Read Again, etc.), such retaliations only backfired as ramifications of the MAGA fountainhead. As I said, fascists are excellent wordsmiths, and MAGA is diabolically penetrative propaganda, because its means whatever you want it to mean. It is vaporware; no one can tell you the referent dates of when America was great – the slogan means nothing, thus it can mean everything to the right hallucinator. (One begins to see how confirmation bias might be defined as vectorization performed by a lazy or faulty mind.) Thus, once the vector gains inertia, anything Trump does is interpreted as Making America Great Again, even destroying its institutions, even building concentration camps in the Everglades, and so on.

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So, let the hallucinations begin! While MAGA has been so powerful as to effectively brainwash swaths of supposed freedom-loving Americans into openly championing dictatorship, liberals, perhaps too intellectualized for their own good, have only been able to retaliate with ham-fisted notions about “saving democracy”, though democracy is exactly what put Trump into office in the first place.

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To live in such a freewheeling country as America is to constantly negotiate a tangled skein of visions. As the internet and social media traffic unlimited hypnogogic ideas to us all at the speed of light, reality can often feel like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. As if to cope, hypocrisies are now shrugged off without any discomfort of dissonance. Conservatives demand a religious respect for the American flag, yet they also wear the stars and stripes as string bikinis. Liberals use smart phones, filled with tin, tantalum, and tungsten, conflict minerals mined by literal black slaves, to type #BlackLivesMatter, and so on. In America, our hallucinations have reached a state of critical meltdown. To see a T-shirt on which Trump’s face has been Photoshopped onto a bodybuilder’s torso is to wonder how much the wearer actually considers this true. To try to stop and unknot such contradictions is to move too slowly in our fast-paced modern world. 

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Walt Whitman sang of creating advertisements for himself. But we’ve merely been trained to foist mundane agitprop onto ourselves. We’ve been programmed to become our own propagandists. Sure, we did this to some degree before the internet exponentiated our unreason. But as the velocity of information increases, our logical through-lines fracture, and the structural integrity of our shared narratives collapse. We’ve become hysterical and suggestible. 

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At the height of the BLM protests, Fox News repeatedly aired a clip of a BLM protester shattering a single window. A mass-scale hallucination was produced in the minds of millions of Americans that the “radical left” was burning down their own cities. It did not matter that people living in those cities denied this and produced photographic evidence that Fox New’s claim was totally false. Further, in another perverse twist of reason, conservatives were then infuriated that these urban centers were supposedly being destroyed, though they also claimed to hate modern day Sodoms or Gomorrahs such as New York and Los Angeles. Perhaps such nonsense is by design: mental warfare to break the sanity of still-reasonable minds, as if the MAGA hallucination were an entity that wanted to live, its kryptonite being logic. 

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All this heady stuff was roiling in my head on a recent road trip through California. And it came to a head in a hotel room in Indio. The circumstances are immaterial, but I arrived at my hotel room in the dead of night. I was not planning on having a mystical experience. Hotel rooms, the midrange type, are spooky in their sanitized sameness. They are anti-hallucinatory in their mind-dulling predictability. They’ve even removed their Gideon bibles these days – no more burning bushes or talking snakes, just the empty spaces of drawers. I began to watch myself, in this homogenized space, this simulation of sameness. I observed my pattern of predictable behavior – which seemed dictated by this environment designed for maximum predictability. I watched the TV for a minute and lackadaisically flipped through the coffee table book which highlighted the history of local hot spots. I unwrapped the little soap. I did all the things people in hotel rooms do. It seemed I’d shifted into a Baudrillardian hyperreality where I’d become not myself, but a man in a room. Perhaps in the next room, there was another man doing the same exact things, and based on our behaviors dictated by our mirrored environments, we might be symbolically indistinguishable from one another. When I looked in the closet for a robe, I stopped. I felt creeped out, like I’d caught myself spying on myself. Was there a man in the next room, putting on a robe, wondering who I was? Or was I him? 

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It also happened that no one in the world knew where I was. Only the desk clerk, who did not know who I was. I was only a man going into a room. I was in a state of strange solitude. I floated mindlessly in the room’s symbolic lack of semiotics. The closet had the muffled silence of a womb. I heard the air moving in my nostrils, and it occurred to me that I was an earth animal whose very name was a hallucination. The fruits of meditation are shocking, because they are closer to the truth than any culture, though cultures always claim to seek truths. I was in a nameless deconstructed zero point. It was a profound deliverance to suddenly not to be trapped in language. The next morning, I stepped out onto the patio. I now saw the hotel was surrounded by a bowl of red rock. It was like I stepped out of a pod, onto an alien terrain. I wondered, could we hallucinate ourselves back out of this all? Perhaps this is what Pascal meant when he said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Have we forgotten our own agency as the creators of the myths we live by? Perhaps the sound of silence, what some ascetics call aum, might be how to remember.