Below you will find the first chapter of my upcoming book, ‘The Loser, the Robot, and the Antichrist’. I’m releasing this sample chapter to coincide with my appearance on Double Vision with Timothy Wilcox, Ph.D.
Wilcox and I compare 2 poems by Yvor Winters with the 1969 film Easy Rider, addressing the meaning of California in the American consciousness, the desire for freedom, the anxiety of losing control, and much else. Winters has a reputation for highly dogmatic criticism and for being dismissive of experimental styles of poetry, while Easy Rider is highly experimental in its construction and countercultural in its subject. At times I struggled to avoid going on about my own love/hate relationship with the work of Winters, but I was surprised how much there was to say about these two very different works.
You can listen to the episode here: doublevisionpod.podbean.com/e/yvor-winters-easy-ride-ft-e-l-brooks/
You can also follow Timothy Wilcox’s blog discussing, among other things, the intersection of literature and modern technology here: www.precursorpoets.com
Please let me know what you think of Chapter 1 of my book. So far I have gotten an overwhelmingly positive response from my readers, but I love to hear from critics also. I will share Chapter 2 either later this week or next week, and hopefully start taking pre-orders sometime in the near future.
The finished book will be a short novel. Close half of it will be in verse. This opening section establishes the major themes, but I’m sure you will be surprised to see how they’re developed later on.
Ch. 1 Hubert
“The birds of spring grew old again when all the world was young.”
The words of the old song rattled around in the back of Hubert’s head: a bit of old junk. A hunk of metal in search of the correct recycling depository. A precious, worn treasure. Each word a world. A better world, a harder world. Every day was the same– too easy.
Hubert never did anything about it. He never undertook a struggle. He never even talked about it. Hubert stayed quiet.
What could be said? Who could he say it to? The world was loud. The automation was total. He but thought of a song and it played for him. Atop a mountain. Under the sea. In bed. Awake or asleep. With friends or alone. In his head or aloud according to the desires of those around him. And when the music caused him too much anxiety, it stopped. As much silence as he wanted. The world was ever silent. The noise meant nothing. If he longed for another world, he was promptly fed and put to bed. Everyone loved him. No one loved anything. Nothing could be hated. But maybe he could love the old songs. Maybe he couldn’t help loving them. And maybe this would make him hate this heaven for which he was made.
Hubert remembered his birthday. “Birth.” “Day.” But no one was born here. And there was hardly any meaning to day and night, or seasons of days, or years of seasons, when light and darkness, hot and cold, came and went on command.
The City knew. Even if he turned his thoughts on private, the City knew that he alone among its millions of citizens had thought to destroy it, that songs of birds had made him dream of escape, and yet that it must keep feeding him this music to keep him content. No drug could do it anymore.
What did they sing? His friends were there. No one else knew the songs, but they all could sing them and, with the right manipulation, enjoy them when the City knew it would be appropriate. The pleasures of human contact! The designers understood you could not be happy locked in a box no matter how fine the food, how well-crafted the stories you viewed, or how delightful the chat. There was nature here. There was hiking and diving, zip lining over buildings. Real nature, and better than nature. There were friends. Real friends. Flesh and blood. Real feelings. Manipulated, but not an illusion. What in the past had been unmanipulated? Were men free when they were guided in friendship by custom, by religious laws, by indefinable ideals? When they acted violently and were subdued by violence? Were they less free now that they had created a place in which their needs were always met, in which there was no violence or disagreement, in which the violence of disagreement about untestable ideas was gone, and all could pursue their own likes at leisure, and friendship arose naturally according to likes without any hatred of the other?
What did they sing? Oh, that Hubert! He was quite the character, they said. They loved his moping. Never seen anything like it. They sang, “Roll down, ye hills, roll down ye timeless hills.” They sang, “Rise up and be true sons of glory.” They loved the songs because they loved Hubert. Truly they did.
And they were truly his friends. They liked him before he got so strange, and they would keep liking him if he became more strange. They had been children together. They liked the same things. They enjoyed the same movie about the talking dog who rescued the football team from the volcano, and this sorted them from other children. From that first friendship the City had guided them to continue growing in the same likes, to love each other more. Undoubtedly some raised in the disorder of the past would say they loved untruly because it was not “free.” But what is free? Without the guidance of the City they would have formed the same early friendship based on the same movies. Then they would have continued in friendship or broken friendship based on their reaction to later developments. Is it “free” for friendships to be made or broken based on people’s reactions to random uncoordinated events, but unfree to have things arranged such that one’s first impulse of friendship and affection is able to grow and fully blossom over the course of a lifetime?
Even in the pleasure of singing with his friends Hubert wondered these things. The City did not insulate its citizens from outside ideas and influences. Other technological strongholds had tried to manufacture the happiness of their citizens, but the Architects of the City were successful by working with the input of citizens without coercion or violence. He knew, had always known, what those on the outside said about freedom, and he knew they were wrong. He had no idea with which to counter the City’s wise designers. To have one’s development conditioned by random events is not more free than to be conditioned by events designed to help you reach your full potential. In fact, the latter was the truly free life, the life in which, with all chaos and hardship removed, our most purely individual impulses and loves, likes and dislikes, could come into their own. There had been no freedom before full automation. But he had another thought that day.
Hubert enjoyed the rest of the party. They ate, they drank, they danced, they touched, they laughed, they knew all things good. Then when they had gone, he thought of a fragment of a poem left by some Doomsayer when the City was first completed.
O city of perfect ease, convenience brought
to its final end. Within machines
all hope finds rest– the mind and grid at last
made one. Food comes before hunger is felt,
games and shows roll out before boredom
is consciously felt. Each girl who’s loved is cloned
to please whoever wants her. Work is gone.
The automatic world gives all as fast
as thought can demand sensation,
as sense can bite at air,
all good in every ideation.
On hill remote man placed the shining tower
as beacon, calling history to its end.
What all technology had done in part, the free
desire to pursue a chosen end more clearly,
with each new right declared, now built perfect.
Not hobbled from the scraps of fate, but built
by knowledge up from nothing into air.
In the machine earth is built into the sky.
There is no pain or argument,
and man need never die.
He recited it to himself a couple times. It was supposed to be a prophecy of despair, but it was difficult not to hear it as a chorus of triumph. He bypassed the elevator, took the stairs to the top of his building. He recalled the poem again, now atop that great structure in which he was housed. All metal, but no harsh edge. Nothing out of place. No disjointed mess of sky scrapers and old houses. No dirty streets. No struggle between classes, no scarcity, no crime. A perfectly balanced composition from every angle without any of the defects Hubert knew from pictures and stories of the City’s early industrial predecessors. Everything was the ideal height, shape, and color to fill him with awe, but he felt sick. He opened his mouth and found his throat too dry to speak. Did he have something to say? Who was he talking to alone on top of a building? Too high for anyone to hear him. He felt sure he had something to say. He wet his lips, swallowed his spit, took a deep breath, opened his mouth again, and found words pouring out, unsure if they were his own.
Come out, ye words of stone, come out
from depths of unseen sea.
Come out, ye ancient things of air
in sorrow I summon thee.
I give my life to know thy ways,
I offer a broken heart.
I give what none but I can have
by true magician’s art.
Descend, O words of fire, descend,
and guide me by thy pain.
Mix with the water of the stars
and lose me for thy gain.
As he spoke the final words, he found himself doing what he barely realized he had thought of doing. He felt the edge of the building under the balls of his right foot. Slowly slipping forward, the edge pressing in just in front of his heel. Why was he nervous? People did this from time to time. He had done it before. It was permissible, like everything. A machine would catch him. It was a recreation. Another good time. Even if he longed to break against the street below, he would never reach it. But he did not want to break. He did not want to be caught. He wanted something. He jumped to find it.
Falling. At peace. Not thinking of death. Seeing the world as never before. Not as what it’s arranged to be. Only as primal something. The drones came with nets, and he couldn’t see them. Only the elements. Aluminum, cadmium, barium, gold, iron, lead, manganese, palladium, zinc. He could see them. The steel of the buildings. The waves of light. No things, but he knew them as things. How long had he been falling? How long would everything keep moving around him? His own body. Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. Fluoride, sodium, magnesium. Iron, copper, silver. Phosphorus, potassium. But he knew himself. He saw these things and knew himself as falling.
Something was coming. How long had he been falling? Something was coming. A living whole. The only whole. Not a heap of elements, only the face. A human face? No, an owl face. An owl, the size of a man. Not an owl, just look at the tail. Like a scorpion. Always striking. The elements fled from it. Were the drones breaking apart? Were the buildings breaking apart? Everything near the animal seemed to disperse. If it was breaking the drones, would he die? Would he like to die? No. Somehow he knew he wouldn’t. He was looking for something, even if he hadn’t understood that when he first ascended the steps. Was he looking for the owl? No, but it was coming for him. It would save him. The drones would not. And he knew that it was right.