|
|
A Tale A young man who devotes himself to the destruction of mystery is like a young man who goes on a crusade to find nothing. They stand together in the middle of Ponte Vecchio. The first ignores a vendor's haggling in favor of the chocolate Arno; the second believes the history of the Etruscans is available in the aroma of sausages. A third young man zooms to get a view down a tourist's dress. Isn't that the appeal of cyberspace? Being somewhere you're not and having the freedom to make your own content? There's nothing magic about it, and speed will always increase, until we cross the threshold and can no longer say we're anywhere. At all. One day there will be international organizations dedicated to preserving the here, the now, for keeping the narrative of the future from folding into a loop, for holding up the Brooklyn Bridge. In a perfect society, there are no utopian dreams and the Golden Gate is a transporter beam into chocolate and sex. But the future in Utopia is the bend of the loop, where the past is always just about to happen. What they've left unexplained in the annals of idealism is how that's any different from this global purgatory. What are those guys waiting for on that bridge with everyone else running around and waving their hands? You'd think they'd want to hurry up and prepare, to cross the bridge into the 21st century and applaud. But they're stuck in a total collapse, a quicksand of superstition that prevents them from coming up with a complete account of their whereabouts at the time of the New Dawn. The only chronicle that will allow them to survive is that of velocity and magnitude, and they will survive by completely bypassing the bridgework in favor again of the chocolate Arno. It is the tale of Lucrezia Borgia's Rome and of the colonization of Alpha Centauri. It's in service of age and the creep towards a universal no of arriving. The third young man turns out to be a woman. She's on the left end of the Pont des Arts, wondering if artifice is enough. She's attracted to mystery. She likes it. She likes the music they used to play at the beginning of Wide World of Sports, because it reminds her there could be ice skaters under the bridge; there could be moments of perfection scattered throughout history like tympanies; there could be moments of acceleration where not even adrenaline can catch up to the actual beauty; there could be virtual realities as complex and as horrible as this one. But there aren't.
by Brian Clements |