Ian Watson The Embedding

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Mighty
Hi-jack the Starship! And our babes'll wander naked thru the Cities of the
Universe '
The album was called
Blows Against the Empire.
And yet, thought Sole, the Empire still stands strong. Intercepting the first
real Starship. Orbiting it over oceans where none of the people, except a few
frostbitten Icelanders and sailors on the high seas can see it. Flooding the
Amazon. Funding through dummy foundations neurotherapy units in other lands.
He glanced at Zwingler. The American was sleeping like a prim babe in his
seat. Wasn't it a fact that all those who were in the know wanted to get this
embarrassing alien business cleared out of the way as quickly and clinically
as possible, so that they could get back to their own obsessions again whether
these happened to be the breaking of
Chinese codes, the flooding of Brazil . . . or the rearing of Indo-Pak refugee
children to speak alien languages ?
Zwingler was right. The visitation was as idiotic and annoying as a bout of
flu but maybe as potentially lethal as a dose of flu had been to isolated
tribes in the South Pacific.
So the aliens had invited the Leapfrog crew into a cage of glass and now this
plane was heading for a man-made cage of sand hidden in Nevada. Which raised
the question: who was quarantining who?
On Station KMMJ the Jefferson Airplane sang:
'In nineteen hundred and seventy five
All the people rose from the countryside
To move against you government man
D'you understand?'
Sorry, Jefferson Airplane, murmured Sole, it's later than that already, and
the Empire still stands firm.
Bored with the radio sounds, but unable to sleep, Sole hunted through his
pockets till he found Pierre's letter. Idly, he recommenced reading it.
'. . . Their Bruxo is practising with amazing skill that deep embedding of
language that Rousselian embedding which we talked about so long ago in Africa
as the most freakish of possibilities.
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'To do this, he makes use of some psychedelic drug. I haven't yet pinned down
the origin of it. Every night he chants the complex myths of the tribe and the
structure of these myths is reflected directly in the structure of the
embedded language, which the drug enables him to understand.
'This embedded speech keeps the soul of the tribe, their myths, secret. But it
also permits the Xemahoa to participate in their myth life as a direct
experience during the dance chant. The daily vernacular (Xemahoa A) passes
through an extremely sophisticated receding process, which breaks down the
linear features of normal language and returns the
Xemahoa people to the space-time unity which we other human beings have
blinded ourselves to. For our languages all set a barrier a great filter up
for us between Reality and our Idea of Reality.
'In some ways Xemahoa B is the truest language I have ever come across. In
other respects, of course for all practical purposes of daily life it directs
crippling blows at our straightforward logical vision of the world. It is a
lunatic language, like Roussel's, only worse. The unaided mind has no hope of
holding on to it. But in their hallucinations these Indians have found the
vital elixir of understanding!'
And now Sole sat up and really took notice. Reaching overhead, he directed the
cool-air nozzle on to his face to sharpen his attention. He felt a surge of
excitement of dark doorways opening as though it was the whole outside world
he was breathing through the lungs of the plane, as he read on:
'. . . The old Bruxo snorts this drug through a cane tube into his bleeding,
rotting nostrils and he aims for no less than a total statement of Reality
uttered in the eternal present of the drug trance. And by achieving a total
statement of reality, to be able to control and manipulate that reality. The
age-old dream of the wizard!
'But what wizard has set himself up against such dragons? The whole weight of
American imperialist technology.
The Brazilian military dictatorship. Imposing their will on this jungle from
afar, while the Indians within it are trapped as casually as flies are trapped
on a fly-strip, whilst the making of the meal goes on the great feasting of
the giants on the Amazon's wealth: the meal of spectacular consumption.
'The Bruxo is killing himself in the process. No shaman has ever dared stay
high on this drug so long before
except for some myth figure, the world-creating culture hero Xemahawo, who
vanished on the day of creation of the world, dissolving into the environment
like a flock of birds scattering in the forest,
'For the Bruxo and for the Xemahoa, knowledge isn't an abstract thing, but
something coded in terms of the birds and beasts, and rocks and plants, of the
jungle in terms of the clouds and stars above the jungle in terms of the
concrete actuality of the world. Therefore total description of this knowledge
is no abstract thing but a taking-hold of the actual reality about them. And
to take hold of reality is to control it to manipulate it. So he hopes!
'Soon, he will hold a giant embedded statement of all the coded myths of the
tribe in his present consciousness. Day by day, in the drug dance, he adds
more material to this statement of a totality of meaning all the while
maintaining his awareness of past days and past material as something
ever-present by means of the maka-i drug despite the terrible overload on
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brain and body.
'Soon, he may achieve total consciousness of Being. Soon, the total scheme
underlying symbolic thought may be clear to him.
'If this is true? That would be incredible indeed. In such a place! Such a
"primitive" backwater!
'Incredible and damnable. For just as this occurs, the genius-fly is about to
be drowned, poxed out, poisoned on that orange fly-strip of a dam! If only
some of its poison might fall into the gluttonous feast of the exploiters . .
.
'I take the opportunity of sending this cry of rage out by way of a halfcaste
who is passing through. He should reach that bloody dam in about a week, and
get the letter posted. He's cagey about why he's making the journey. Maybe
he's found some diamonds who knows? After all, this mess is supposed to
contain El Dorado!
'I at least suspect I've found my own El Dorado of the human mind here at the
moment it is due to be swept away.
'They embed the Amazon in a sea you can see from the Moon and drown the human
mind in the process.
'To yourself and Eileen, my useless love. Pierre Darriand.'
On the way over Utah, Station KSL announced the launch of the spectacular new
Russian transpolar satellite.
" Reports say it's brighter than the planet Venus. Only, you folks won't be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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