Tag Archives: Present Shock

Timothy Leary in Cyberland

chaos_cyberculture

I think about Timothy Leary a lot these days. He is widely believed to have died on May 31, 1996. If so, it’s really too bad. A pioneering technopagan and an elder statesman of Cyberpunk, he would revel in Google, Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest of our digital paraphernalia. What Douglas Rushkoff has called “Present Shock” (we are way beyond Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”) wouldn’t faze him one little bit.

Leary wouldn’t even be bothered by encroachments on personal privacy. As I remember, he rather liked having his phone tapped—because whoever was listening might actually learn something. “Privacy is the evil of monotheism,” he once said to me—or rather, he will say it to J. X. Brillig in the year 2040.

Pat’s and my jamais inter-vu with Leary, entitled “Brillig in Cyberland,” was first published in our jamais vu newsletter in December 1988. In it, Leary plays a garrulous tour guide to a futuristic, William Gibsonesque wonderworld. Leary himself included “Brillig and Cyberland” as the epilog to his last non-posthumous book, Chaos & Cyber Culture (1994).

But why am I somewhat skeptical that he actually died in 1996? Well, talk of Timothy Leary’s demise dates all the way back to 1968 and the lyrics to “Legend of the Mind” by the Moody Blues. “Timothy Leary’s dead,” the song announced. It wasn’t true then, and I’m not so sure it is now.

Leary was obsessed with life extension, and he considered death (or “irreversible involuntary coma”) an inexcusable waste of time and resources. So he didn’t plan on dying if he could possibly help it. It’s well known that Leary arranged to have his head cryonically preserved, only to change his mind shortly before his final “coma.” He grumbled,

I was worried I would wake up in fifty years surrounded by people with clipboards.

He opted for cremation—which would seem to put an end to the matter.

But in an increasingly informational world, immortality isn’t necessarily about the survival of the physical body. In “Brillig in Cyberland,” Leary explained (or will explain in 2040),

Basically, immortality is about digitizing. The more of yourself you digitize, the more of yourself is going to be immortal. The more of your actions and memories you get digitized, the more immortal you’re going to be. I was one of the first people to discover this. My claim to fame today is that there is more of me in digital form than almost any other person from the twentieth century.

There is, indeed, a lot of information about Timothy Leary kicking around, so I wouldn’t write him off just yet. While it’s true that the Moody Blues said that he was dead, they went right on to say otherwise:

The Jamais Vu Papers

No, no, no, no, he’s outside looking in.

“Brillig in Cyberland” is now available in both The Jamais Vu Papers and its brand new companion volume Jamais Vu VIEWS. I hope you’ll check them out.

jvV ebook 180

Concerning Wisdom—Old and New

“There is no such thing as ancient wisdom; it is always new.”
Thus Spake Aforista

Count on the Postfuturist Sage Aforista to say something strident, hyperbolic, and even untrue. Of course there is such a thing as ancient wisdom, and of course we all need to be mindful of it in this speed-of-light age of rampant newness—what Douglas Rushkoff has dubbed Present Shock. As the authors of a recently published novel exploring Mayan culture of a millennium ago, Pat and I would seem to be active proponents of ancient wisdom.

And yet …

Mayan-72Is Mayan Interface really about ancient wisdom at all? There are certainly aspects of indigenous culture that Pat and I extol. In my post of February 13, I wrote about our fascination with Mayan storytelling techniques. A related excerpt written in authentic Mayan fashion may be found in the current issue of SOL: English Writing in Mexico.

But readers looking for a quick and easy fixes based Mayan ancient wisdom will surely be disappointed by our book. Pakabtun’s fictional king Bohol Caan has no more of a grasp on certainty ca. 900 CE than epigrapher Lydia Rosenstrom does in 2012 CE. In our novels, Pat and I just don’t do certainty.

Just yesterday, Pat asked me if any of our novels even had “endings” to speak of. Could I think of just one that culminated in some final resolution, realization, or insight? No, I couldn’t. While I hope that all of our stories have satisfactory and satisfying denouements, Pat and I always leave our protagonists on the brink of fresh discoveries, as if another turn of the page will lead into an entirely new adventure. “And that’s essential,” Pat remarked.

One of my favorite twentieth-century plays is Bernard Shaw’s little-known The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles. In this 1934 extravaganza, an angel arrives, announcing that the Day of Judgment has come. This is not to be the noisy apocalypse of the Book of Revelation, the angel explains:

The Day of Judgment is not the end of the world, but the end of its childhood and the beginning of its responsibility.

According to the angel, there will be no reward or punishment, no heaven or hell—only the quiet vaporization of almost all of humanity:

The lives which have no use, no meaning, no purpose, will fade out. You will have to justify your existence or perish.

The play’s characters are understandably unsettled by this proclamation. How can anyone ever “justify” one’s existence? Whose life can assuredly be said to have use, meaning, and purpose? None of the characters can answer these questions, and one by one they vanish—accompanied, presumably, by most if not all of the human race.

Finally, only two people remain onstage: the priestess Prola and her husband, the priest Pra. Fully aware that their lives have been engaged in folly and futility, Prola and Pra expect to evaporate at any moment. But that moment never comes.

Flawed, failed, and seemingly useless as they are, Prola and Pra share the redemptive belief in the doctrine, “Let Life Come.” And this doctrine is, after all, merely a denial of all doctrines, of all beliefs.

Prola and Pra prevail through the Judgment, for together they grasp that “the future is to those who prefer surprise and wonder to security.” As Prola puts it,

Remember: we are in the Unexpected Isles; and in the Unexpected Isles all plans fail. So much the better: plans are only jigsaw puzzles: one gets tired of them long before one can piece them together. There are still a million lives beyond all the Utopias and the Millenniums and the rest of the jigsaw puzzles.… We are not here to fulfill prophecies and fit ourselves into puzzles, but to wrestle with life as it comes. And it never comes as we expect it to come.

So I suppose Aforista may be onto something after all. There are no endings in the world of Story. There is only wisdom’s perpetually unfolding newness.