RE: Oligophrenia

[Thomas Friese <tfriese@eumeswil.org>]

Whoah, the list is getting spicy! Russian! 

But now here's a request in English (so that everyone can understand - sorry, but I'm trying to be practical).

We've got a group in Vancouver reading the Glass Bees together once a week and we're quite unable to satisfy ourselves on the nature of Zapparoni's automatons and the film genre as it is visualized by Juenger in this book. The uncertainty regards the tangible reality of these creatures. On the explicit level Juenger is describing a level of physical robot technology which we can only suppose at this point could be possible in the future. (Or are we further than that, Gary?) Yet the suggestion has recurred within the group that perhaps his vision was of our emerging virtual reality ..... Here, with my emphases, is a particularly relevant passage: 

	"Prognoses have been made which contend that our technology will terminate in pure necromancy, If so, everything we now experience would be only a departure and mechanics would become refined to a degree that would no longer require any crude embodiment. Lights, words, yes even thoughts would be sufficient. Clearly the Zapparoni films had very nearly realized such a future. The dreams of old Utopians were coarse-grained in comparison. With the freedom and elegance of dancers, the automatons had opened up a world of their own. Here a principle operative only in dreams - namely, that matter thinks- seemed to be realized."  
		Pg. 28-29, from the Noonday Press 1991 translation.

A couple of our members are computer game animators and  they instinctively assigned these "actors" to the virtual world they "create" in. Do these "perfect" human models not remind one of the ever-more perfect virtual creations we see on video games, music videos, cartoons, movies? (What really surprised them was Junger's vision of the deep power that these images have on their viewers, young and old - but this is different point...)

One thinks back to Man's age-old attempts to attain immortality through the creation of his likeness in an automaton - Frankenstein, etc - and one imagines that Juenger gave Zapparoni a similar ambition.  At the time of this glimpse into the future computers had barely been invented and so Juenger conceived his creatures with the most logical technological "flesh" that was known to him back then - robotics. Yet he saw clearly enough to give these "robots" an ethereal, insubstantial nature. (The Luminar in Eumeswil is certainly a virtual reality synthesizer but then this novel came much later.)

What do you all think - is this reasonable, or are we to still await perfect material automatons from technology? An interesting question arises from this line of thought: if the robots are in fact virtual, then what of the glass bees who have the same creator and seem to share the same technology and physical nature? If they are not robots, what are they? Do they have a corresponding virtual form, as we are imagining for the robots? Or are mechanical bees an analogy for a new type of human and human society, the type Zapparoni is in some mysterious way fostering with his robot role-models: "In this place, however, a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. The same mind had devised this insult: it intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisible, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed." Pg. 141. This last idea has some terrifying implications.

If anyone would care to shed their own light on these questions we would be grateful  -  these do seem to be questions of importance, and not just to an isolated group in Vancouver or on the Internet. Actually we'd love to hear any thoughts on the Glass Bees at all. 


Thomas Friese
Association Eumeswil Vancouver

Can't resist a last comment: why so much discussion on the old Junger and so little on the recent works, which are surely the product of an even wiser and more mature author - force of habit? 




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