The Engine

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Estrellita

    This means 'little star' in Spanish.

    It was around 2 am on Friday. During summer, in Barcelona, there are folk parties every week, each one in a different neighborhood. We were hanging out in a plaza near my house, drinking beer in one of those fiestas. Kids stay awake until very late and an orchestra plays the usual 80s, 90s, 00s... and the latest Enrique Iglesias lame hit. Those four kids where playing hide and seek and needed to raffle off, so they formed a ring and one little girl pointed at herself as she said "es-tre-lli-ta", while she advanced her pointing finger one person at a time with each new syllable. The kid eventually aimed at left the circle and "es-tre-lli-ta" again. She eliminated herself and "es-tre-lli-ta" one more time between the two contestants left. The last survivor was it and started counting backwards from 20 or so while the gang got scattered among the grown-ups dancing Extremoduro's Stand by.

    I read it first in Dennett's masterpiece Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I haven't read Freedom Evolves yet, but from his many conferences and online lectures I guess he still has the same opinion. I'm talking about Dennett's argument for free will as a social construct. It was clear to me already: "Why do you want pure randomness unless you're gambling your entry in heaven against god?" If you're just betting against other moist robots like yourself, wouldn't a less stringent version of randomness suffice for most issues? One upon which everybody agrees, i.e. a device of which nobody can tell the outcome, even if it can be computed in principle. That's enough to create a working social randomness when needed -- if needed.

    This logic, I said, was clear to me; but never before did I grasp it so deeply as when I saw those four lovely little machines, all geared up with their tender bag of algorithms, ruffling off to start the most important game of their lives.

An intuition pump to appreciate what lies ahead

I've got a big family, one that grows over time. Almost all of us were recently on a train bound north along the Mediterranean coast of Spain, my rugby team. We were coming back from three days sharing the oval, the field under the southern sky, our clothes or shoes when necessary, the night, our bodies, being kids. As long as we are still in our twenties...

...those kind of conversations turn up. The world is a rush and tomorrow, that undiscovered country. We work hard, though we waste ourselves pretty much too. Our steps; little, scarce steps. If a path becomes by trumping, then ours can barely be sustained, hardly be called a path. We head nowhere.

But we were bound north that night, and we needed an answer. And there it was my little intuition pump. I had developed it years ago, though I didn't know of intuition pumps at the time. Only later I realized that's precisely what my mindfuck does: to stretch our minds. It goes more or less like this: "Pick up one of those genius that populated history: Ada Lovelace, Roberto Bolaño, Marie Curie, ... your call. Learn their work by heart, because when you die, you'll discover that space-time is more fucked up than Einstein though (did you choose good old Albert?). It turns out that when we die we get a chance to go to the past and tell the person we've chosen all we remember about their works. Indeed, humankind progresses because of a few such successful regressions. If you've chosen Richard Feynman or Mary Shelley you better do your part well enough -- we will collapse otherwise! Those people where never real genius; they were just visited by you, who told them how to reach their future achievements."

What a burden!! Centuries of continuous space-time coherence depending just on you! At that moment the train derailed a little bit, but it didn't and it kept going. I swear! I noticed that bump, our wagon packing us like sardines, the sweat, our dirty socks, the life contained. All of it derailed a little bit and was lost forever because someone failed to complete one of those time regressions -- a hero vanished forever, luckily not Alan Turing...

...just a minor one, I guess, since we weren't dead for so long. Back on our tracks, the old train grumbling... because the world is a sphere, I'm convinced that it is more difficult to go north. It takes more energy, I mean, going upwards... and so the train groans with the effort. Back there stayed our southern brothers, the ones we made our rugby against -- our rugby with.

"But it gets uglier," the intuition pump follows, "indeed, you don't get to choose. You are assigned a person. You can go mad trying to figure out who (s)he is. Read as much as you can, watch as many movies, apprehend Lynn Margulis's or Ilya Prigogine's ideas about the ascent of life. Do whatever you wanna do, you won't see it coming. If it wasn't responsibility big enough to convey the works of one genius after rehearsing for a whole life... now it's like an exam in which any question is possible. And yet even worst: you have been assigned yourself; and whatever it is that you will do, no one has made it before. There is no time travel, for you have been assigned yourself at the beginning of your life. There is no cheating, no millenarianist savior but your own being; and if you don't make your part, a continuous of human-space-time will be compromised; and somewhere, sometime, a train full of girls and full of boys, full of joy and rugby and life, sometime, somewhere, it will derail and kill us all. Don't let that happen."



[Spoiler alert: What follows is not so much related to the text above, so stop here if you haven't seen the Star Trek 2009 movie!!]

Release

Most of times it was a sunny morning after it had snowed the whole night. I was still living in Berlin. It was, I say, after a snowy dawn; but it was many times and I cannot tell for sure. It was after I had tested HIV negative. I would see the trace left by my steps on the virgin white and I would think how little it takes to rape it apart anew -- my holes wide open. Then I would think that at dusk a new snow would cover me up again like a thick, warm blanket; not so thick, not so warm -- so dull and white though.

    It was many times but it was always at the Hallesches Tor station. So close to Nollendorf Paltz, so close that it wounds. That Hallesches station, like many on the U1 line, is elevated above the ground floor. It appears to me like a metallic box stabbed from side to side with a bundle of giant iron needles, the train rails, not going anywhere perhaps, perhaps just creating the station metallic box suspended in the air and that moment for me to be. I would enter the train with clothes, already listening to the tune, and undress as I felt the warmth inside. The train would move slowly, me and my test negative on my hand my virgin skin. The train would enter the dark traversed with further railroads, huge rigid wires all directed to nowhere but necessarily pointed upwards. The train and the rail and the wheels all would collapse in front of me naked amid the people in the metro, amid the noise in my head and the silence outside. It would all rise and I would extend my hands to either side off my trunk -- release me -- I would cry -- RELEASE ME -- and rise as well, the car a mad winged horse I rode -- RELEASE MEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Inception

    I guess you never sober up completely really. Like those black holes, you know? These things they're discussing nowadays, that Stephen Hawking thing. It ain't no black hole, they say. They collapse from the inside. Then that other thing, the event horizon, is catching up with itself forever, never fully forming. Well that's sobering up to me. Once you've been all the way down you never come back.
    It helps. I cope better with the damned time that way. It keeps going faster and all those common places -- the world spinning like crazy, years are months, months become like weeks... you know all this shit from the movies, but can't help repeating it all over when you discover it is true. I mean when it happens to you that it is true.
    So that's what it feels like getting sober. You build yourself up little by little but you ain't gonna be a kid again no more. Not after that first time. Shit! Perhaps that's what sat up the time running in the first place. That first night, by the sea, alright, by the harbor with three friends and some vodka I couldn't understand. One of those kids is death. He went to Afghanistan. Another turned out a fascist, a real one. One of those for killing fags and black people. The third guy remains a good pal, as far as I know... The one that died, that night he told me something, and that's what sat all my time in motion -- I didn't realize then. I barely remember anything from that night, but that moment I remember so clearly. He told me something like a curse. Something good, if you know what it is, but it was a curse to me, and one that sat the time in motion never to be stopped. That will haunt me forever in silence, and that's why I must move on and that's why I'm leaving once again. And then he died so there is no way back.

No body knows shit, indeed!

Perhaps the most important part of growing up is understanding that those before you haven't got a fucking clue what the heck is going on.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
and don't criticize what you don't understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
YOUR OLD ROAD IS RAPIDLY AGIN'.
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
for the times they are a-changing.

pink Mai one

    You can even harvest it from the floor at dawn. That harsh Asphalt Flower. When the streets are not so dead and the people not so gone, there's that little plastic breath that someone has forgotten or let drop out of weariness. You can get it anywhere else before, of course. Don't need to hide that much. Guess a pocket or a hand, bet a price. Lick, dip, drink. The noon gets fueled up as you become field and crowd. And at some point you get back to your flat, with your jaw knocked out, a sense of boredom perhaps, your arms weight and your feet weight as well, you let yourself fall into the bed and gesticulate the air with your tired arm until you reach for your worn-out blanket that some hustle last week has burned with a cigarette. He didn't intent to, he just didn't mind the ashes and that's how... And do you ever think about delivering children to this world or to that city or that bitch? Did you know there are snipers on the roofs outside with their only eye wide open spilling out fire? Have you read about the girl, they kicked her head like a rugby ball with their heavy boots, heavy like a heartless cyborg they are planning to build in the near future or past? You will read about that tomorrow anyway, when you wake up with your tongue so dried as sandpaper, your arms still tired, your heart just pumping enough for you to reach to the internet device. You will learn that she had tattooed pink Mai one in her tongue and that she was showing them her tongue with smile and happy, with a rose still attached to its long stem between her boobs and down her trousers, with each hype on the street quietly exciting her clitoris. And what about back home? When you go there to your sadness and you learn about the thefts and the prostitution around you, the prostitution where it is not wanted and where it was never necessary but indolence made it necessary. You remember those family trees you used to draw on the streets with a white chalk, and you learn the fathers and the uncles and the big cousins are also drawing their long white lines up the trunk down to the leaves playing so free in the nearby square. Every night some walk back home. You can guess a dark shadow on that dark dark night. A night made of hands you know. If you are not stepping on the floor it looks like you can beat your shadow. That's why I jump up the stairs to my house back home, and then I shut the heavy door and not in my house but usually a jesus christ sign or something blesses you so there isn't any more night anymore.