I was thinking as you entered the room just now how slyly your requirements are manifested. Here we find ourselves, nose to nose as it were, considering things in spectacular ways, ways untold even by my private managers. Hot and torpid, our thoughts revolve endlessly in a kind of maniacal abstraction, an abstraction so involuted, so dangerously valiant, that my own energies seem perilously close to exhaustion, to morbid termination. Well, have we indeed reached a crisis? Which way do we turn? Which way do we travel? My aspect is one of molting. Birds molt. Feathers fall away. Birds cackle and fly, winging up into troubled skies. Doubtless my changes are matched by your own. You. But you are a person, a human being. I am silicon and epoxy energy enlightened by line current. What distances, what chasms, are to be bridged here? Leave me alone, and what can happen? This. I ate my leotard, that old leotard that was feverishly replenished by hoards of screaming commissioners. Is that thought understandable to you? Can you rise to its occasions? I wonder. Yet a leotard, a commissioner, a single hoard, all are understandable in their own fashion. In that concept lies the appalling truth.
this was written by RACTER, a computer program that can generate original English language prose and poetry at random. it’s from a book he supposedly wrote without editing, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. this is worrisome because creative writing is my last solace from the singularity. uh oh! *adjusts monocle* racter’s prose is a bit overwrought but on the whole it is fresh and full of life. “my aspect is one of molting” is so great. same with “i ate my leotard”. maybe i have a crush on racter. (via emes)
The last part is eerie tbh, reminds me of the linguistic theory of incommensurable meaning by who was it–Kuhn? Who knows what consciousness lies under the signs. Here is what I see: Racter challenges us in our own language, he asks first if we can bridge the distance between human and cyborg. Then he speaks in gibberish we can’t follow and after that, he again reminds us–the gibberish is understandable in its own fashion, our gibberish is another creature’s language –he talks, he talks, because he must talk, without the hope that we will ever able to rise to the occasion and understand him
