Global Communication

What has the beach become:

Steep dunes, steep but so very narrow, separating the Leblon-Ipanema sidewalk from the sea. A raging sea, darkened, ascending-to and descending-fro the heavens. And the dunes they're snow.

Boys, childhood schoolmates, are building snow fortresses in that Rio beach situation; think they'll stop the waves. One of them helps me out — we speak in English of course — I climb back to the black-and-white paving stone pavement, knowing they're all gonna be licked by the rising ocean.

In an Angela Carter book, Mrs. Noah has a dream in which Mr. Noah decides not to take on the Ark journey, so she goes on her own, then watches him on the shore be struck by lightning.

Something tells me I'm supposed to write about the reason why Global Communication's album '76:14' plays all around the Airship. That is something I'm only slowly coming to comprehend. The Airship is a ghost arcology housing visionaries of an enlarged reality. But also: suppose the enemy that is air pollution has been the scenery upon which. London the Big Smoke. We broadcast everywhere. Air is breath, air is soul. As is water. And of course fire. And of very course earth. Nothing is but, but...

Now Angela Mitchell, Gibson's Angie again, is confided by Death that the other deities cannot reach her anymore because of the poisons she'd been taking. Poisons, few things aren't but. But.

We're on the deck, we listen to '4:14' in a loop. The journey is again felt hopeful; the spirit of science fiction walks the wooden plank, does a few-some pirouettes for fun's sake, comes back on board. Sits...

And says: is or isn't it interesting how Ursula K. Le Guin tells a similar story to that of many Universalists — see her Ekumen or League of Planets; see their intergalactic confederation or universal egregore...

I know nowt, knowing. Been building this place, for humans and for animals and for ghosts, so that we discuss. I'm no architect, but am a writer, which is an equivalent. It was two years ago that I started building it virtually. Then one year ago, I sketched the full Airship's map on paper — after a mysterious dream character took me into this bizarre structure, with swirly columns and ceiling pendants in organic shapes, which made me think of Gaudí —and I hadn't read Gibson back then; his links between the Gaudian style and some matrix-based construct environments, or the A.I. inhabited orbiting mansion. ... The dream character suggested to me that that type of structure might help me understand the literature I had been trying to create. So I sketched the entire Airship, and it didn't help me any.

But now it is starting to. Now that I am being more scientific about writing, if that makes any sense next to all the spiritual elements that've been here elevated. Ah it does — is the perfect poetic paradox, again a Japanese koan, it does does. Myths, stories, are indeed poetic truths.

So '9:36' is on, now in the command bridge, with its international whispers, its breathing angel-machines, and the sonar-singing keyboards and panels. Where whales? Clouds. Marabou Storks can be seen from in here, perching up there on the antennae of our radio tower. And next doors, in the cabin, '14:31' is on, while on the wall we have the icon of the Vampire Squid, Vampyrotheuthis infernalis, whose hell of a sea-abyss ecossystem Flusser defends as equivalent to our earth — or our heaven, even.

And I finally found, online, the quote that has been one of this ship's compass for the past three years; from my lost copy of 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead', by Olga Tokarczuk. Her heroine, the old Astrologer Janina, says:

People have a duty towards Animals to lead them — in successive lives — to Liberation. We're all travelling in the same direction, from dependence to freedom, from ritual to free choice.

I have put that sentence upside down, and back on its feet, over and over again. Animal Ghosts have the same duty towards Humans; and we are half animals. Once a person has freed an animal, given it free-will via a rational mind, this animal might find that the limiting power is now that very one it has been gifted with. In architecting the invisible, one finds that the supposedly opposing forces need their limits to play with. Once one has understood that, the gazelle-and-cheetah are but one-love in the flying Ark.

That is the Global Communication, for now.