Story number one. Gephyrophobia
At the top of the trunk there’s a small brown leather notebook, like most of Ivan’s notebooks, bursting at the seams. Scratched stained battered as if it has spent a lifetime at war with itself. Loosened pages fall out of the book as I open it. The pages contain what seem like random jottings, mathematical formulas, flow charts and maps. I pick up one of these chaotic pages and read Ivan’s hurriedly scribbled words. Everything he writes appears to have been executed in a maddening rush – time is always chasing Ivan.
"Uncomfortable memories merge with my sense of the present. I’m minded of the dank riverside house of my youth. The rancid riverside fat and urea stink of the ancient pariah industries leaks into every room, through the paws of my slaughterer ancestors my once rancid zygote in the centre of my mother’s equally rancid riverside womb.
I roll these ancient thoughts into a small damp ball and fire them way over the dull sad Morley street houses or drown them in a glass of water. As if a house could ever heal, make happy or pacify a noon-day demon. My secret imaginative background - this street righted through a simple shell script I thought might filter and sort all the stinking noise for me, here with this command:
"sort <>> sort.txt"
At the top of the trunk there’s a small brown leather notebook, like most of Ivan’s notebooks, bursting at the seams. Scratched stained battered as if it has spent a lifetime at war with itself. Loosened pages fall out of the book as I open it. The pages contain what seem like random jottings, mathematical formulas, flow charts and maps. I pick up one of these chaotic pages and read Ivan’s hurriedly scribbled words. Everything he writes appears to have been executed in a maddening rush – time is always chasing Ivan.
"Uncomfortable memories merge with my sense of the present. I’m minded of the dank riverside house of my youth. The rancid riverside fat and urea stink of the ancient pariah industries leaks into every room, through the paws of my slaughterer ancestors my once rancid zygote in the centre of my mother’s equally rancid riverside womb.
I roll these ancient thoughts into a small damp ball and fire them way over the dull sad Morley street houses or drown them in a glass of water. As if a house could ever heal, make happy or pacify a noon-day demon. My secret imaginative background - this street righted through a simple shell script I thought might filter and sort all the stinking noise for me, here with this command:
"sort <>> sort.txt"
Such a command I once thought might sort and recombine the chaotic stench here into palatable new meanings. Arthur C. Clarke knew this too in The Nine Billion Names of God, which features a Tibetan monastery with an automatic sequence computer, “compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God."
Somewhere there is a bridge to a sorted world. But unfortunately I have lived my whole life long with a fear of bridges. Gephyrophobia. Though I have tried to recreate bridge like structures in my code, Dra/Dar is a bridge I fear I cannot Cross,
http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/9billion_clarke.html
No comments:
Post a Comment