MYTH AND THE RIVER OF TIME
I spoke at the original Haunted Machines event, in Manchester, discussing the confluence of technology and the stories of deep time. We have three topics this year – myth, magic and monsters. I was asked to speak about myth, because, like myths these days, I am very old and rarely seen in the wild. So here we are again, for the first time. Because as old Heraclitus said, nobody ever steps in the same river twice.
We are here tonight within the northernmost branch of the delta of the river Rhine. The Romans built Utrecht on the river ford here. The Crooked Rhine of Utrecht is all but cut off from the main branch, now, but it retains the name. It’s a canal that haunts a river.
The Lorelei lays on the Rhine. Lorelei means “murmuring rock” – the Lorelei is a 130-metre tall chunk of slate that amplifies the sounds of a nearby waterfall and the strong currents in the Rhine at that point. All the myths around the Lorelei are about lurking dangers and siren songs that draw you in. What the myths actually mean is that the section of river around the Lorelei is very treacherous for ship navigation. It’s not the music of the river that’ll kill you – it’s the riptides. But when you hear the music, you remember the story and act to not be drawn into the rock.
Myth is the carrier wave on the river of time.
The Rhine runs all the way past Dusseldorf in Germany, where Michael Rother of Neu! stood and imagined a new kind of music. “It’s like time,” he said of the river. “It’s also like a picture of music.” The future flowed from there to here, caught in the crooked arm of a ghost river, and here we all are.
I’ve read that you have a river of words here. The Letters of Utrecht! Every Saturday, you add another paving stone containing one single letter to a poem you began in 2012. In another three hundred and fifty years or so, the lines of the poem will have formed the letters U and T at such size that they will have become part of the map of the city. I love that. Another one thousand, seven hundred and fifty years after that you will have cut the name of the city INTO the city at map scale.
It was inspired by The Clock Of The Long Now, a mechanical clock that would only tick once a year, with a hand that would move only once a century, for ten thousand years. They’ve still only created prototypes. You did this. A river of words that rolls into the future, that will only speak its complete statement to the people in this space a couple of thousand years from now, words that mark this city from orbit. And, with a bit of luck, the final words of the piece will be “and fuck Geert Wilders forever.”
You know… that better be a good poem. If that turns out to be a two-millennia-long gag that ends with a limerick about dicks, your descendants will dig you up and desecrate your corpses.
Changing the map. Haunting it with a poem.
“I am walking in an unknown street, when suddenly ghosts appear in front of me.” This is how the mathematician Rene Descartes begins his description of the three visions he had one night when living by the banks of the Danube River, that changed his approach to science, which changed everybody’s approach to science. He was French, but he did most of his work living in the Netherlands.
The first dream is of him being lost among ghosts. The second, of a large explosion.
The third is of an unknown man appearing and presenting him with a poem, which starts with the words “what is, and is not.” Upon awakening, he begins the process of sorting what is, from what is not. Myth and science are separated – science enumerates and measures, and myth only speaks, in murmurs, from the river’s edge.
The real world is a world of mathematical properties, and we can tell what is real and what is not. Mostly. All started by Descartes, a guy who locked himself in a room by the river, where he’d banked up the stove to the point where he was having heat-induced hallucinations in his sleep. Who decided his visions were real wisdom. We’re all doomed.
This was the break. This was the point at which alchemy split into measure and number on the one hand, and magic and myth on the other. Isaac Newton, born seven years before Descartes died, was the other great actor in this separation – a British astronomer, mathematician and physicist who was also an alchemist.
Alchemy was really the most developed science of its time – scientific observation and magic, poems indivisible from spells and lots of large explosions. Spells are nothing but poems intended to write something new on the face of reality.
He wrote something over a million words in his lifetime in pursuit of the philosopher’s stone, an alchemical concept whose first recorded mentions date back to the time of Socrates. It’s strongly believed that the philosopher’s stone was never truly believed to be a possible physical object, but was in fact a metaphor for some set of ultimate knowledge or tools about consciousness, existence and reality. A physicist looking for a technology of metaphysics. It was a myth, in search of transmission of its truth.
In the book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD by Déborah Danowski & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, there is this line:
“Maybe, as Lévi-Strauss often remarked, science, which started out by separating itself from myth… will eventually encounter it once again at the end.”
But myth is the carrier wave.
Human beings are hardwired for storytelling. We make stories out of everything. The earliest earthworks and megaliths are all about dramatizing the landscape, enhancing the stories we see in them. And we did the same with the sky. Gordon White’s book on myth, STAR SHIPS, makes a very important point very clearly. Once we began making stories about the night sky, astrological myths conjured up from the shapes the stars form, we began an important process. Astrology leads to astronomy. We perceive and understand the repeating patterns and positions. We measure and record. We do the work of science. And astronomy leads to navigation. The positions of the stars and planets at night become the markers that guide our way. Astrology leads to astronomy which leads to navigation. Or, put another way – myth transmits a technology through time via storytelling. What is NOT, is the carrier wave for what IS.
On some level, a myth is always a true story. And the machine is always haunted.
When we do these events, we’re talking about how science and magic are intertwined. How technology is informed by folklore at every step. We do, in fact, live in the age when science and myth have met again.
In the days before science, the only tool Socrates had to describe self-reflective consciousness and cognition was to create myth. He told people the story that he possessed a Daemon, an intercessor spirit that influenced his decision making. A voice that told him what is, and what is not.
Daemons exist today – they’re computer programs that run as background processes without the direct control of the user. The machine is always haunted. We always put myths inside them.
In that same book THE ENDS OF THE WORLD, I came across a wonderful term. Mythophysics. They write:
“Jorge Luis Borges’ well-known quip on metaphysics being a branch of fantastic literature… requires that the converse be true – fantastic literature and science fiction are the pop metaphysics (or the “mythophysics”) of our time.”
The literature of the fantastic has always been one part myth to one part social fiction. We transmit what we see and what we believe to be true through the carrier of story.
If you were an alchemist who was also a physicist, metaphysics would be a subset of physics.
Myth and physics. Mythophysics. Connected all along, as if alchemy had never split and as if someone had slapped Descartes and told him to lay off the mushrooms.
And here’s our wicked problem. Mythophysics is both old and new, and either through its novelty or the separation that saw it confined to the haunted dark for a few hundred years, we haven’t gotten good at it.
Levi-Strauss notes that outright mythical thought passed to the background in western thought during that time of separation, but, at that same time, the first novels began to appear. Mythic lore begins its alchemical transmutation into popular culture.
The monomyth is iterated – Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the near-algorithmic combination of all the world’s most enduring epics into a single template. It has no power or significance or information to transmit now. It’s been cooked down into a twelve-step timeline that’s in everything from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings to almost every single Marvel movie. This isn’t mythophysics. We have, on some level, lost control of storytelling.
The other thing that was beginning to change was what must have seemed like the near-eternal state of undercommunication. For almost all of human history, it was nigh impossible to know what was going on in the rest of the world and information could only be transmitted by spoken word and single documents, in the forms most resistant to degradation. Ghost stories and poems, built on the model of mythology.
Today, we exist in a never-before seen condition of over-communication. Almost anyone in almost any place in the world can know much of what’s going on in the rest of the world. We now live on an incredibly loud planet. Measure and number have put magic mirrors in our pockets that can show us storms on the other side of the planet. Haunted by our own machines, to the point where a lot of us seem to forget they come with off switches.
They also show us fascists getting asked their opinions about things on mainstream news. Fascism coming from a Roman word for a bundle of rods, the fasces. The same Romans who frequently recorded that they knew when it was safe to ford a river because the gods told them so.
We forget things, as a culture. Myth is the way to preserve the things that matter. The warnings from deep time, and the ways to navigate away from the rocks. It’s the carrier wave for civiilsation. But, thanks to a half-reformed alchemist who wanted to make a magic stone and a mathematician who lost his shit in a room that was too hot, we became convinced that we didn’t need myths any more. And what happened after that is that we proved why we needed those resonant mythic forms murmuring down the ages – we’re really, really good at forgetting things. Took us just seventy years to forget why we don’t put fucking Nazis on television.
I’m pissed off. I admit it. When we started doing this event, it was just called Haunted Machines. It almost feels decadent now, having that space to talk about occultism in technology and the secret stories that underpin our tools and society. A couple of years later, and we’re now Haunted Machines and Wicked Problems. Because it’s been that kind of a couple of years. Storytelling’s been subverted in ways I used to write satirical fiction about, in the last century. Now? We treat the news like pop culture and we treat reality television like news. A significant proportion of the world population can’t tell the difference any more. Including a lot of the perpetrators. How many times have you heard the words “fake news” in the last year? Like a spell cast over a truth that’s already drowning in the river. Have you tried watching CNN or even BBC News 24? All they’re missing is a fucking astrologer.
So here we are. Standing in shouting distance of a ghost river, where you’re conjuring a spell in stone that’s writing something both new and old on the face of the city. This is as good a place as any to make the stand for mythophysics. We need to look forward, but we can rarely see where we’re gone unless we can first see where we’ve been. The river always needs to point into the future, but we navigate it with the lessons learned from the stories of the past.
Myth has context. Myth has information, and tools. Myth is a solid stone step towards civilization. We build it by the river, where we can hear the resonant music of the future. Myth is memory. If we take anything from this haunted week of wicked problems, it’s that millennia of human culture worked to give us the tools to survive the future, and to remember our ghosts. The people who came before us did not do all that, did not tell all those stories, just for us to steer into the rocks. It’s on us to preserve those stories and provide the new myths and warnings to those who come after us. So that they get to finish that poem.
And if it’s a shit poem, we get to come back and haunt them all.
Thanks for your time.
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