Carlo
Parcelli
“Merc'ry
smiled at th'Impudence; And Others call'd it want of Sence,...”
Bernard de Mandeville–
The Grumbling Hive: Or Knaves Turned Honest
Deconstructing
the Demiurge:
ESCHATOLOGY
OF REASON: THE SOUTH TOWER
Ah, Mercury!
You kleptocratic little fuck.
Wheeler-dealer, thief, errand boy.
Part Bull Market,
Part FTD truck.
A corporate logo;
Hood ornament
On the highway to Hell.
For my money,
I’ll take Typhus Argos.
Trade as a plague, irreversible—
The mug shot of theoretical chaos,
Effecting what he cannot know
With more not knowing.
Trigger for the end
Of the world.
But which pestilence blooms
Behind the crew team at Yale?
Not Typhus, but Mercury’s cloned bouquet,
The water
Pawed by the oars
Composes itself.
Action in a medium without consequence.
Perspective converging
In a little world. A little world
That flattens existence
Until we all fall off.
As Leibnitz knew,
Only with permanence, faith.
The constituents of the monad by which
He would reset the hour-glass.
With Democritus the atom was the horizon.
On Page One the threat to spent fuel rods
Has been downgraded from acts of God
To acts of terror in his name.
On page six but moving up,
The extreme chemical
Reactivity of nano in a landfill.
Chemical acts of God
Subject to acts of terror
In his name.
The Argonauts
Ran into Talos, the first robot;
Actually a home security device
Engineered by Hephaistos,
To guard the island of Crete
For the wealthy industrialist, Minos.
And Hephaistos, aside from being a god,
Was the Bell Lab of his time.
If those guys fucked up,
What chance did Westinghouse have?
Christ Rachel! What now!
The wind turbines
Have crucified the bats!
“Nano-particles”
Have gassed the "water fleas,"
That ecologically crucial niche
Near the bottom of the food chain.
And indeed, it was Feynman
Of the infinity deficient QED who said,
As way of introduction to nanotechnology.
“There’s plenty of room at the bottom,”
After the holocaust of fleas.
In 48 hours, the buckyfullerene
Oxidized
the bass’s brain.
So its chicken or egg, if one eats largemouth
What was, that initiated the same.
Little Johnnie complete with side- mounted med-chip
Comes
down with
Nano-bronchitis, nano-measles,
Nano-carcinomas, nano-emphysema.
Will he survive to meet the challenge of Nano-influenza, nano-small
pox,
Nano-malaria?
The method calls the slave songs
With all the empathy of the Massa
Lancing the uterus
Of his favorite
breeder.
Of a tenor on Lawrence Welk
Tapping time at the seam in his slacks.
The fathomless embrace of cold
Is not absolute
zero;
Pandora’s Cooler of Ice
Held tsunamis at bay,
Until unanticipated by consequence,
Terra-formed itself
into pasture.
The obvious, everyday properties
That are mined in 20 pound sacks
For the convenience store.
A cooler of beer
Delivered by clueless admen
Who wear the mask of
Hermes’
And by 4:00 are drunk
Wearing Hermes off-the-clock sneer.
If you admit to Brouwer’s intervention
Where’s the inevitability
Of the species
Except in exaggerated desire?
The principle of Anthropic Cosmology
That perfect
dollop of eternity
At about 6 feet, 180; Well done at 98.6 degrees.
So easy to admire Pol Pot’s
Intent for Nature,
Both being Tao.
To re-educate the oblivion of
Chirping corporate spielfrau
On the line
Is a situationist’s pollution clean-up.
The corporate spill
That hardens around integrity,
Oozes off its pins sending it crashing into the next fad. The hegemony
That caused
9/11 rumbles in
The technological aggression
Of the demiurges’s tsunami.
The delusion and ignorance
Not to see
it coming;
The poet Phan Van Tri said,
“When a good swatter someday comes to hand
I’ll pay you for your crimes without a blink!”
A song that now the rivers sing;
The oceans
sing.
The creatures of the earth sing, to sing
America back into oblivion.
As prologue, the sky darkened over Dien Ben Phu
And now every physical
principle
Queues up to be discredited
In an incurable Popperian dystopia.
“Oh! Don’t point that finger,
At me Cassandra.
Or I’ll break that fucker right off.”
QED.
Otto Mueller called Woodrow Wilson
“A cock-sucker
and a thief,”
A tweedy college prof
Colorfully incarnated as our Greek Deity.
“And when asked how he liked America, Mueller answered
‘Fuck
this god damned country’”
In pretty good English.
Hoover wanted him jailed
For the War’s duration;
Storey for just a few months
“For overstepping the rights of free speech”
Was anathema to the scheme
Of stepping over bodies
At
Ypres and Alsace Lorraine
With the gate of
One or another’s imperial reach.
Alan was not trying to convince us
That his Universal Turing Machine
Was indiscernible from a human being.
But that he was.
Remember the interrogator must distinguish
A full-blooded woman from a computer
That is pretending to be a man
After a round in which the interrogator
Tries to decipher the woman
From a man claiming
To be a woman.
Parlor game theory. A charade
For fear of exposure and disgrace
Shapes desire in the engineer.
So, more than the arts,
Cognitive science is in
The emotions business
Out of raw need.
A dangerous misrepresentation
Of product R&D.
Damned difficult to troubleshoot
Such a dissembling epistemology.
The Greeks
Had been tipped off
Early on
To end of the world.
Earth centered flatness was an ecological measure.
That the instant the Argo
Broke from the shore
Typhus was helmsman
Consciously selecting a path, but
Also, unconscious agent and spore.
But unhappy evolution found its denouement.
The mechanism for the end of time was tripped. That’s the prophecy.
It took the callowness of
The Renaissance & Enlightenment
To make the West the agent
For the end time.
It took an ever encompassing
Mathematical precision
To lose sight of Iolcus.
It took abject denial of anything lost
To expose the estrangement.
And it left A.I., A.L. and
Nanology, the ‘grey goo,’
To re-imagine generation
In a way commensurate
With a world where
Every birth, every bud, all life
Is too late.
And with nanocycles left
To reflect
On what
Was done next.
Kant said never treat a thing
As though you know what it is.
The antithesis of the scientific method.
As Latour: “—[P]roperties
Looking for a substance to belong too.”
Activated in the act of possession,
Property’s of things
Become the handbooks of hegemony.
Elsewhere in Leipzig
An enlightened piece of the action,
Its contemporized ambition
Meant expertise.
And expertise meant
Breaking off something
As close to nothing
As Zeno’s shaft or Dedekind’s Cut
Would bear,
The eternal half-measure
Of technology
Of which Heidegger despaired.
The enlightenment error is to think
That the device, e.g. a hydrogen bomb
Was outfitted with Tiphy’s timer,
[The stopwatch of duality,
The hour glass,
Entropy’s turkey thermometer
Monitoring leftovers
Reheated in a nuclear core]
But that Game Theory is not
Tick, tick, ticking folklore
And the folk have harrowed forgetting
Into distinctions.
So the revelation
Of the things of the world
As artifacts of reason
Is an eigenstate of the Second Coming.
Murray Gell-Mann sniffs
Up and down
His great chain of being
From lepton to whooping crane
Perched in the quanta
That jumps him
To his own reflection. Forever,
The chameleon on the looking glass
That doesn’t know how it got there.
There is no shading
To this consciousness.
No incremental, outstretched, god head’s fingertip.
He doesn’t have a clue
To the ding an sich.
His constructs
Are illustrations of
Infinite ways
Of not knowing
That require berms and breaks of formal theory,
So the limits
Of an expert system
Can be cult-
Ivated as an ontology
Of life forms,
And the feedback trace
Of a life form
Disappears into an expert system
Filling in for the organism
What comb it can.
Eat the honey of aspect
Because “the exact location
Of an arbitrary irrational
Requires an infinite
Amount of information.”
If the world were
To still
Be here,
In any event,
Dunning a day of devotion,
The myths would grind
Full circle
A grain-like metaphysics that
Flouresces a Moebius Strip.
The mass media is
The false bottom of history
As history is
The false bottom of experience.
And Science is
The false bottom of reality
So that reality’s conception
Is beyond redemption.
The world wired was the disconnect.
The new Gondwanaland
Of markets
With continents hurled together
Fused and fractured with diamonds,
Oil, rare earth, tantalum.
Diminutive national repositories
In which existence is set adrift.
So that being one with the world
Is surfing at the edge of the world
And not surfing the mediums
For the end of the world.
The Enlightenment forfeited its good name:
“Science, Hegemony and Violence,”
With Science “accepted as intrinsically Good;”
And Violence
“As intrinsically evil.”
“Yet the more Science
The more Violence.”
“If a correct picture had emerged,
There would have been no pollution
Or ecological imbalance on the application
Of such scientific knowledge.”
“The machine to replace the organism...”
A numerical value to tattoo each element
And covenant of elements.
“A civilization... ipso facto
A colonizing force, and aspires
To bring under its sway
Every other culture
That has based its survival
On a natural relationship with its surroundings.”
“The diabolism
As well as the appalling banality
Of Auschwitz and Hiroshima
Is implicit in the fundamental formative idea
Of modern civilization...
In the last analysis,
Hiroshima remains a Masterly Experiment.”
“Recent years have seen numerous attempts
To integrate modern science
And eastern metaphysics. Whether
This has helped science is not known,
But it certainly has cheapened eastern metaphysics.”
Standardizing is the colonial method for
Mining the infinite .
The Second Law is big business,
Petroleum, coal, turbines etc. And “[T]his monopoly
Is based on the premise that all forms of acquisition or
Accumulation of knowledge,
All other epistemologies, are
Worthless, antiquated, magical,
And must be eliminated”
Most often by killing the organism so enculturated.
“Certain species of flora and fauna
Lost to science itself
If the dam were built.” But “the destruction
Of earlier forests
Was equally against science.
How could what had once been scientific
Now turn unscientific?”
“We are fond of extolling the achievements of man
And apt to talk with pride
Of his conquest of Nature.
This is at present of the same order
As the Nazi conquest of Europe.
As
Europe is in revolt against the tyrant,
So is nature in revolt
Against the exploitation of man.
As the world is in revolt against the tyrant
So nature
is in revolt
Against the exploitation of technological man.
And leaps from the torch of the guerilla
To immolate itself to the very edge of another of its forms.
Fire itself,
nature can’t be circumvented
The dispossessed
in nature
Have joined togther to drive the enlightenment.
When man preys upon man
It
is a form of cannibalism.
When man sets out to ‘conquer’ nature
By exploitation, it is no less
A form of cannibalism,
For
man is part of nature,” says Balfour.
The ‘other’ does not compliment science
Though
science insists it compliments the other.
“[T]he scientific image of nature is incomplete
And the application of such
Incomplete images
Has
led to devastating effects.”
With its first burst of pre-eminence
Washington became a clearing house for Nazis.
The scientific imagination retooled
To ballistic missiles
And guidance systems for calculating out
The demiurge in the way
His finest tolerances had been milled from the sciences.
“The Americans pushed through a clause
That would except civilian protection
From atomic weapons. The British
Opposed rules that ‘restrict[ed] freedom
To carry out operations,
Particularly bombing.’”
And thus with the necessary ‘freedoms’ in place
“Those who had suffered
Most from bombs,
The Germans and Japanese,
Were not invited to the discussion.”
Unless, of course, you had
Rocket expertise.
The effect derives its economy from the cause
Unless some adverse consequence
Accrues to the agent.
Then a set of laws
Which, by their complexity,
The chaos a judgement might provoke,
Spreads the charge over a thin film
Weakening expectation with fact.
The genius is establishing exchange rates
For words and concepts
Currency for constructing an alternating reality.
What chance does actuality have
Against such Ovidian fungibility
That can change forms,
Reinvent intent,
Deny ambitions while marching them out?
Its immutability in remaining consistent
With the utility and objectivity
Prescribed by science itself.
The handshake as
Masonic hand job,
As much a currency;
As the world’s
Assorted professions of love.
Irradiated pollution,
Spilling out to waste the womb
Where once caveat’s of technology’s soul had
Been a matter for the sensual.
“It’s too late baby.”
Even as such infantalia
Fizzes in the waves.
“But we really did try to make it.”
Like Hell,
Grants for a dying planet.
Extinction puffed
For charitable contributions.
Product recognition for the Apocalypse.
Where Lockheed, Dow & Westinghouse could co-exist
With a Billboard top 100 armistice.
But what subterfuge is otherwise
That by its invention,
Invents its own demise.
Dien Bien Phu to Cu Chih.
Altar & ant farm, Olympus & Hades.
Get ‘em while they last, Camus.
And you’d think Nothing
Would get their attention
Like the end of the world, that
You and I live through. |
