The Map becomes the Territory

 by  Shaun Lawton 

   When the map becomes the territory, the world comes alive in a snap. The tumultuous terrain breaks free in upheaval, shedding series of dorsal fins from overlapping tectonic plates. Generated from the interstices in between, wriggling out a host of scuttling insects that swarm and shudder off into the shadowy distance. A bifurcating reality opens up, as if being unzipped and let in to ours; a monstrous invasion with no apparent way of stopping it. 

 These were to be known as the Dragons of the Instant, another manifestation of demonic possession.  What makes them unnerving but not overtly dangerous is how, upon their manifestation before us, while taking on the appearance of an objectively autonomous creature capable of attacking, they always render as an optical illusion and instead phase into the backdrop scenery itself, unraveling into the foothills along the horizon, revealing itself to be another section of the land we're traversing.  It does feel as if a map were being unfolded at our feet, a map to step into through which we enter into the terrain it depicts.  Leaving behind the sensation mirrored in the unfolding of creatures capable of appearing any time. 

Seeing Stones

 

   You're staring at the evolution of my digital art, and it's staring right back at you.   I can make this assertion with a certain degree of confidence considering the style templates I designed to be used in my deep dream generated pieces.  The swirling patterns that result often generate eye-like whirlpools in their random interwoven configurations for a reason.   

        A few months ago I began working on a series of digital images rendered using Wombo since they added the feature of being able to upload images for transfiguration.  I was working on the idea of creating a gallery of images which would be presented in the form of individual cards in an oracle deck.  I had already begun to build several oracle decks, beginning with the Tolkien middle-Earth deck (which for now I've been referring to as my Ennor deck), continuing with a series of individual cards based on Werewolves which I call the Wolf Pack, a Melnibonean oracle deck, and a Kaiju deck which features a subcategory (which is to say, many guest star appearances) depicting nods to Ultraman.  

   The Seeing Stone  deck is comprised of a series of images which all feature the oval shape of the cabochon-cut stones that I bought from my friend Andy through his Etsy shop Uncommon Stones. It all started the day I asked him to shine a blacklight on one of his dinosaur bone stones. A vivid interlaced tapestry of fossilized veins shone out in the resulting picture I took of it on my cellphone.  I decided to use this as a style template in Deep Dream Generator as well as in Wombo.  The two images depicted below were created on the Wombo app.  

   

    

   These two cards are from my dinosaur oracle deck.  The idea being, it's the same stone, only each time you look into it, a different scene from the distant past is shown.  In the case of this stone, it always displays glimpses into eras back when the dinosaurs roamed. These 'time stones' are kind of like little palantirs, which is to say windows through which the viewer may see certain scenes of the past. (The methods by which this may be achieved is the focus of my time travel story.)   

    The crux of the matter lies in the stones themselves, in particular the one dinosaur fossil which I photographed under blacklight. That's the one I think of as my flux capacitor. It's ultra hi-lit profile based on an actual fossil record serves as the foundation upon which the AI text-prompted vectors were configured into their shapes.  It's sort of an exercise in showcasing a range of possible variants to the requested scenery, and the best of these may serve to represent that bygone possibility, a subject still available for examination in hindsight.    

      As noted in the image at the top of the page here, the middle stone appears to be staring up at the top stone.  A closer examination of the top stone reveals the lower greenish circular area to be the top stone creature's nose, and its eye readily noted just above and to the right, in a shade of brown with a black pupil. This stone appears far older than the smaller one below it, which now resembles more of a newborn stone, or at least one yet in its infancy.  These are the opals. 

    The two darker stones below are the dinosaur fossils.  The one to the right appears to have an eye with which it stares out of and off the page at an angle.  The stone to the left seems to be a tangle of shadows and tails or some sort of blended components nestled up within the stone. The impression I'm left with is that these four are some sort of family of stones forming a nuclear unit, conjuring an electromagnetic connection like lodestones.  

   The seeing stones signify that time travel as we have typically come to wish to expect it to be (i.e, the ability to travel into the past or future) remains a mere fantasy, an objective which applied here in the real world will never yield results.   Thus making this ability to glimpse the past or future a viable alternative to outright time-travel, the next-best thing so to speak.    

    

Notescense Inusticularity

 If it wasn't in between the jaws of the sea leviathan,

 it would have been against the twisting edge 

of another's blade winking in the moonlight, 

just another cutting whisper on the wind.

 The way the earth's been shaking about once a week 

has got us pretty unsettled. It only happens during 

the weekend, and in hourly tremors, at that. 

If the novel coranavirus were one sign of the trumpet, 

these other manifestations fall in accord with the overall

 development of ongoing issues heralded in the scriptures 

of various languages and their countries, it would seem to me. 

The finishastration  ensumeralled encyclircodices 

diversticulated  enshrevesascense forwithinto 

a triumverification of elegant forces combined

 in a brand new concerted effort against the quarantine. 

only the unbroken

 

Tethered to the preamble

   why does time go on 

 are we time, time humanity 

 we exultant in song 

In the halls of you, I am

  in turn a hallway for thee 

 a passage toward another side

where vows serve a purpose

only the unbroken  

  are left to share a falling out 

 an erosion, expected 

   nevermind guaranteed 

mapping the grid

 

   It has been some time since I collected and read my science fiction books as a teenager, I'm staring at forty years since those halcyon days. I bought Dan Simmon's novel Hyperion in paperback back when it came out. That was thirty-one years ago, it may be time to read it. Two other paperbacks I'm revisiting leisurely are the aleph by Jorge Luis Borges and Case and the Dreamer by Theodore Sturgeon. My preorder of the Jeremy Robert Johnson novel The Loop came in, and I've begun reading it. I was about one fifth of the way through The Erstwhile, by Brian Catling. I fished out an old Robert Heinlein paperback, The Past Through Tomorrow, and have begun reading its first short stoy, Life-line, Heinlein's first published story. With my Doc Savage paperbacks and Michael Moorcock stacks alongside my Philip K. Dicks and Stephen King books, I'm a book dragon protecting its hoard. 

   With Dungeons & Dragons and popular movies having seeded the blueprint we're being force-shaped into (along all the remaining science fictional ephemera and its fantasy horror accessories) the startling revelation is exactly the truth that's being hidden which is nothing short of the fact that we're all subject to the delights of paradise here, subsumed through a refractive prism for best containment. Long since the heyday of the legend of the Grub Bros rolled out into its denouement have I noted the mirror neuron aspect to our virtual reflected realities. With the added insight of how Google and then sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have rendered us into living product for micropimping corporations to make money off international advertising, it's not difficult to see how we've been primed as real flesh estate; in an almost Cronenbergian sense, we've kept the mantra of 'long live the new flesh' close at hand, but in an altogether unexpected way that's preparing us for full on interface with it. It's been given a lot of names now, but its just known as the grid. 

     The thing about the grid is that everyone's has an interlocution factor based on the amount of years experience they've gathered online. The more years and time they've spent weaving and being woven into the digital fabric of the world wide web, the greater the digital psionic power amassed, the more powerful an expenditure of force, if need be. I know myself since I built my first computer twenty-five years ago and accessed the John Shirley bulletin board being used at the time. I made the decision to log on with my own first name as the user. This was critical for me to be the other cat on their besides John who was using his real first name. The remaining majority hid behind exotic handles like Q the Inert and El Queso. The old bb shifted over to being hosted on darkecho.com, and from there the Board With A Nail On It continued to flourish until a lot of us migrated over to Myspace. 

      Music being the primary motivator for a lot of us gathered together over there, it became a place which tended to gravitate around bands and the scenes they represented. Then it started to fall apart and everyone moved on over to Facebook. At least a decade went by before some began to notice not everyone who got on board at the get go were still on here. To those who kept returning on their PCs and their smart phones it may take a lifetime to never know. Sometimes I think we're clinging to each other because we know that we're the grid. Individual human lives. Spread across the USA like a tapestry of lit candles in a field of stars. Ultimately life is shaped by our dreams and sometimes if what you believe in is real then hanging in there for too long can never be a problem because sometimes it takes way more than that even for it to come into fruition but if its a dream that's what they do. No matter what you think life's trying to teach you now believe me dreams do come true. 

    It's not always our dream where that ends up happening to. Some folks out there make it. Or so I've heard. A good portion of them fake it, mark my word. That doesn't mean they didn't take it. Far from it. They've taken a lifetime to break in to the finals. These people are there for the recitals. We're all raw input as performers for the ai algorithms to map out in aggregates. What they're poised on the cusp of a moment to decipher, we have always known in our hearts and minds forever. Better become wary of what we might gain in an exchange. It's what we choose to lose that we so quickly learn how to forget. 

Self Assembling Portrait

We are incandescent with an uneasy recollection having left a trail of blood and tears behind. We are incantation and reminiscence converging into a faded memory left tainted to drain. 

We are a wind tunnel hammered into remembering the wracking farewell of the trees' limbs. 

Each individual bone fragment the smile left behind from the broken off nose's rosy profile.

In seeing our world as the humor of an eye scanning all the sunsets left tumbling behind it 

We learn to appreciate the deep and easy sigh left within the incubator to reach fruition. 

Shielding the glare of the sun at the beach with a cluster of bleeding finger bones as a visor, 

Holding a magnifying glass under the moonlight to try to capture the ocean in its network, 

Balancing your vision of a star behind a melting glacier to spearhead a pack of flashing dogs.

The island behind your scope of view assembles into a cloud that piles up behind an eyebrow. 

Science Fiction and the Imagination

for Al Attanasio

 

   Who are we?  We are Thou and each other, even as Thou are we. (Despite the word 'thou' being just an archaic version of 'you', I like capitalizing it to refer to that place-holder we've also utilized to our benefit and detriment with the word 'God.')  I have to think long and hard about what science says about the author of science.  That's a good question.  It seems science, on the whole, may be too busy chasing after its own tail to bother; I don't know.  In my experience of our penchant for asking the wrong questions, perhaps were science to ponder over the authorship, it would consider the possibility of their being no author.  Which doesn't mean there's no authority to being, of course.  Generative powers within our psyche do appear to remain in collusion to create each one of us individually.  That is to say, our individuality itself may be the real illusion; for are we not comprised, as Thich Nhat Hanh has pointed out, of non-human elements?
   I love the idea that we live in a world not of science, but of science fiction.  And that's because I've believed for a long time now that imagination remains at the center of creation. And magic lies within the heart of imagination. Because the word 'impossible' does not mean what we think it means. The prefix "im-" means "before," so the real definition of the word impossible should be "before possible," which precisely explains how such miraculous things as airplanes achieving flight, and streets of asphalt and concrete skyscrapers, were formerly impossible, until someone (such as the Wright brothers, for example) dreamed those things into concrete reality, and made them possible via their imaginations.   How else could we have arrived here, if not due to an understanding that 'we' may not have 'arrived' at all, but rather, have been 'here' all along as an ever-evolving manifestation of what science has yet to define as the 'author' of our existence; that is, our authentic being.