Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Soft Machine

I have just written an e-mail to New Scientist magazine. The text is as follows:

Dear New Scientist,
I would like to offer some comment on Ray Kurzweil's article in the September 24th issue of New Scientist, 'Human 2.0'(Sep 24th, 2005, p.32).

Mr Kurzweil describes a future in which human beings will 'merge' with the technology of artificial intelligence, having brains and bodies enhanced by nanobots. He posits this future as quite close, specifically, he mentions the 2020s, the 2030s and the 2040s. Towards the end of the article he wisely makes the reservation that "[t]his is not a utopian vision".



I would call that an understatement. As a person who has to share the same world with Mr Kurzweil, I would have to describe the scenario he puts forward as a nightmare, or, to try and use more 'objective' language, a positive dystopia.

Mr Kurzweil further states that, "some commentators have questioned whether we would still be human after such dramatic changes. These observers may define the concept of human as being based on our limitations, but I prefer to define us as the species that seeks - and succeeds - in going beyond our limitations."

I would say that the scenario Mr Kurzweil puts forward is dehumanising not because it shows us exceeding our limitations, but for precisely the oppostie reason, that it ties human destiny forever to the thread of a single type of technology, therefore limiting us further. We all know how IQ tests may be culturally biased. How much more so the software of 'artificial intelligence'. The limitations themselves may prove to be 'exponential'- one of Mr Kurzweil's favourite words, it seems - in their implications.

The very title of the article gives a clue to the kinds of limitations we might face. If we are all to be permeated with software, how can we be free of the values of those manufacturing the software? We know already of Mr Gates' monopolising practises in the field of software, and how ineffecient Windows and Word are. Must we have such corporate forms of corruption actually built into us?



Mr Kurzweil argues that this future is inevitable and that we must make the best of it. It seems to me that people often argue that a certain future is inevitable in order to demoralise all resistance against it when they have a vested interest. I cannot help but wonder whether that is the case here.

Yours,
Quentin S. Crisp

Looking Back on the Future

I have just written my quota for the day on my main piece of current fiction, Domesday Afternoon, which looks like it will become a novel on the scale of Lord of the Rings, or War and Peace. It's raining outside, the soundtrack to Bladerunner is playing in my room, and my ribcage is full of the bitter ache of anxiety.

I live in a cul-de-sac. Opposite the window in my room is the wall surrounding a cemetery, within which foxes can be heard in weird orgiastic chorus most nights. Beyond the cemetery are houses and a petrol station. Cross the road at the petrol station, pass the church on the left, and you come to the River Thames. There is a lane there called Flood Lane, and on the wall surrounding the grounds of the church there is a mark showing how high the waters of the Thames have risen in the past. The mark on the wall is higher than my head.

Listening to the rain after I lay down my pen, I wonder why I'm writing. I am almost entirely convinced that the Thames will flood its banks tonight and that all the contents of my room will be washed away, all the years I have spent on the many, many notepads stuffed in my chest of drawers and scattered about the floor, all turned to waste.

These days I try to calm myself with Taoist philosophy, but how does that philosophy help me, I wonder, to cope with some of the most brutally random quirks of fate? Suddenly a meteor hits the Earth and... What would the venerable Lao Tze do in this situation? I don't know. I really don't know.

Earlier today, I typed up some of my novel. It was a part of the novel concerning a future scenario in which the sea-level rises by about eighty metres (perhaps more, perhaps less, depending on the results of my research). I suppose I can't claim to have been prophetic, in as much as I was aware of scientific predictions before writing the piece. However, I wrote this particular section of the novel in late January this year, long before Hurricane Katrina. It is another reminder (if we need such) that such predictions have been made for a long time, and they are continuing to come true.

When I expressed my concern to a friend at how long this novel is turning out to be, he advised me to take my time, reminding me that Tolkien took eleven years to write Lord of the Rings. I wonder if we will recognise the world in eleven years, or whether there will be anyone left to read my story.

Here is the part of the story I typed up this evening:

I had intended only to write the story of Joe Manser – the fiction to which I have given the title Domesday Afternoon – but, after all, I find I must break from the breathless detail of that story and simply talk for a while. Oh, one thing I must say before I go on; it’s been so long since I have had the pleasure of such elastic, trampoline play with words. For some reason the colours that come to me, in a sort of synaesthesia, when I am in the midst of such bouncy play, are blue and white. And what do these colours represent? They are cartoon stars in a magical night sky, as fresh as if squeezed from a tube of toothpaste. Yes. Or perhaps they are the white and blue of the ocean waves that seemed to madden and tease and dizzy me into writing to begin with. I do not know. It only seems that whatever else has changed, the white and the blue are ever fresh, and young, as I was when I first began to write this kind of nonsense, and my white bones behind their blue veins were as bouncy and elastic as the words I played with. In the end, are the white and blue more real in their unreal brightness than everything else?

This question brings me to the other matter I have decided I must deal with. That matter is the Deluge. I have avoided telling of it so far, because the telling is not easy. It has happened; that much I have given you, the non-existent reader, to understand. The Deluge is, to resurrect a grammatical phrase from my memory, ‘present perfect’. As for how it happened and what it was like when it was present continuous, these are things I have had no wish to dwell upon. But my story, Domesday Afternoon, requires context. Perhaps I must write of the destruction of the world before its exhumation in writing can make sense. Very well. But I cannot describe that destruction as it seemed to come – in one fell swoop. I will start by describing a moment – the moment when I knew everything was lost.

It was about ten years ago now. I write that sentence and I find I must pause. What a terrible and miraculous thing to think on! Those ten years seem longer in my memory than all the long history that preceded them, which was erased with the coming of the waves. I almost grow hopeful at the thought of how young this new age of the waters truly is. But I shall try not to digress. It was, as I was saying, about ten years ago. I was living on a hillside in France with a woman named Simone. The world had already changed so vastly that if I had been granted a vision of it as a boy, I would not have recognised it. Both my personal world and the world of global events were such as I could never have believed possible, much less anticipated.

The decline of humanity, that was prelude to its fall, had been swift, but was nonetheless too protracted for me to give details here. Floods we had already seen, and disasters and extinctions. Much of the coastline of Britain had already been rendered uninhabitable by rising sea-levels. There were many refugees even within the country; or rather, evacuees, for the mood was that of a country at war. Emergency measures were implemented, but factional struggles within whichever political organisation was currently fumbling the ball of power, meant that there was little in the way of decisive, long-term action being taken.

Most of this I watched from afar. I had left Britain in the zero years of the century, or the ‘noughties’, as they were somewhat incongruously dubbed at the time. The human race had surely never known true emptiness until it had come upon those zeroes.

The scientists warned of the catastrophes that were in store if we continued to pollute the atmosphere, but the machine that was the source of this pollution had already become our life; we could not conceive of life as something separate from that machine. That machine was the car. We were locked inside it, the windows sealed, no brakes, hurtling down the road to extinction, and even as we began to sweat at the rising temperature, we carried on listening to the same stupid voices and the same stupid music on the radio.

But I Digress...

Well, it seems that the first review of Rule Dementia! has hit the net. You may read it here. I can't say that it's what I was hoping for. In fact, it's quite possibly the worst review I've ever had. Just to clarify a few points, the stories in Rule Dementia! were not generally written before those in Morbid Tales. Due to the vagaries of the publishing world, I was unable to put the pieces together in the kind of collections I'd originally envisaged, and so the stories, chronologically, are simply jumbled. However, Rule Dementia! features work that is generally more recent. I would also like to say that the stories feature, in many ways, the direction I am taking, in which plot takes a backseat. The reviewer mentions the many digressions in 'The Haunted Bicycle', for instance. For me, the digressions were the entire point of the whole piece.

Well, I always feel that my work is balanced on a razor edge between rubbish and... er... rubbish, anyway, but so far I've been happily surprised that others disagree. In this case I'm rather saddened that someone seems to agree with me about my own work, at least in the broad, general sense of it being shoddy. The strange thing is, I really don't think there's much of a quality gap between Morbid Tales and Rule Dementia!, if any. In fact, 'The Haunted Bicycle' is one of the few stories that I am close to feeling proud of.

Anyway, such is my insignificant response to this review. I am sorry to have disappointed the reviewer.