#phrophecy

Phil predicts Dan coming into his life by use of Tarot cards:

Robot death machine

If you think something is going to happen, but it has not happened yet, please head over to the ultra secret blog @phrophussys

Thanks!

 ’24-Hour Atrocity Cabaret’ in Pigeons and Peacocks:  Issue 9, May, 2016.

Let’s face it politics is a tired old Punch and Judy show presenting us false choices and adversaries; the big pharma has strangled the health of millions, inventing new diseases and promoting epidemics to continue selling us lethally addictive drugs; perpetual war is provoked and created to sustain a perpetual state of high alert insecurity where we demonise whoever the latest enemy might be; the media is a non-stop cabaret spinning image of chaos, using doublespeak until up becomes down, and the divide between legal and ethical is poorly concealed; advertising is propaganda exploiting people’s vulnerabilities and toying with their fears, aspirations and hopes for a better life;  shopping malls are the new towering edifices of Babylon offering the sacrament of consumerism as the main driving force of our inner vitality, replacing a genuine search for self-exploration and enquiry; sex and death have become main fodder for edutainment threaded into the aneasthetised retail servicescape; and genuine shock has become that rare phenomenon in an age of exhaustion, information-overload and compassion fatigue.

It’s the curse of modernity. And that’s before we even get to the internet and its alleged massive impact on our brains. The net has become an all pervasive sheath of our inner selves, acting as a non-local extension of our brain, networking direct to our visual cortex. It is a reality-warper, fusing the external with the internal, entangling the real with the surreal and the hyperreal, the documentary with the mockumentary, until the blend is so fused we barely notice. We can also disseminate  idealised personas via selfies on Instagram, or on Blogs, with a reach across the globe that no one could possibly have imagined 40 years ago. But it’s still a choice we don’t have to make.

I often turn to great works of fiction for divinatory insight into what might be the direction to take in the labyrinth before us. Works with a visionary perspective by Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, J.L. Borges, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Junior, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick, Chuck Palahniuk and others can be dipped into for understanding and solutions. But few can reach the intensity of J.G. Ballard. In a Dazed interview in 2003, he said the net was an ‘amazing development’. But, he also said, in the hunger for ‘reality’ “it’s difficult to find the ‘real’ because the environment is totally manufactured.”

Fiction, according to Ballard, is less to record the actual or remain stuck in the obsession with nuances of a bourgeois class system, than to liberate the imagination. So that’s what he did, in a disquieting way, and slowly we’ve been catching up to him. His novels were vilified as psychopathic aberrations, namely The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1974). Yet, Ballard seemed to have his finger tighter on the pulse of what was happening than any other English writer. In High Rise, the film (2016) we revisit a novel he wrote back in 1975. He probes into cracks in the social order with the precision of a brain surgeon, outlining how those fault lines are enshrined in the hierarchy of upper to lower floors. This was the book most favoured by Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, and it belonged on David Bowie’s list of 100 favourite books. Ballard forensically located this social psychopathology in a series of high rises on the north side of the Thames, exactly where, ten years later, Canary Wharf arose like a taller spectral shadow city of London. The foresight is astonishing.

It is often claimed that books are dying, if not already dead. Yet, the contrary is true; books are experiencing a Lazarus-like rebirth. Seems you can’t stamp them out, even if you order a book burning festival. Print and digital books and multi-media formats exist in a synergy sparking interest in variety, and the rivalry, like many alleged rivalries, turns out to be false. This would seem a healthy development. Another typical belief comes from writers like Tim Parks. In his recent Guardian article he alleges that the internet is dumbing us down, and reducing attention spans. Novelist, John Banville, disagrees saying “We haven’t changed intellectually because of technology.” The number of people reading long novels requiring concentration was always a smaller percentage of the population anyway. It may be true that teenagers have shorter attention spans than non-urbans or the older generation, but that does not mean anything about their intellectual ability. It might be that  millennials take less time to absorb more information and do it better.

What fiction says about our current state of mind regarding the overwhelming presence of the net is worth considering as we now occupy a liminal space where anything can develop – and fast. But it is still poorly understood and fears abound. Are we addicted to the net or just find we compulsively like certain images? That’s a qualitative difference that does not pathologise our interest. Staying poised to celebrate it but yet remain wary of its consequences is a tightrope walk. Ballard’s prose poem I Believe is useful here where he intones:  “I believe in… alcoholism, venereal disease…..fever.. exhaustion…pain. .despair.. children.. maps.. diagrams, codes.. chess games.. puzzles.. airline time-tables.. airport indicator signs.. excuses.. reasons ..hallucinations.. anger.. mythologies.. lies.. fantasies.. evasions. .the mystery and melancholy of a hand.. in the kindness of trees..in the wisdom of light.”

Sounds a regular session surfing the net, where we don’t just self promote, but also self educate, so perhaps obsession with it may paradoxically lead us to this kindness and new inner light?

From Ballard we learn that the strangest planet is this one: the real aliens are right next door, so the focus is not planet Zykon X in galaxy B1346 – except to make an allegory of what’s the latest sickness of modernity is – but to zero in on the now, or five minutes in the future and peer into the dark core of suburbia, English red-brick houses with gardens and cars in the drive, or high rises, rooms full of consumer goods, and people inside with their heads glued to their laptop screens and kids inseparable from their smart phones. What that means however is still open to interpretation.