Recorded notes only: report broken off
What is our freedom? What is the individual self? In our windblown desolation, what is the most precious thing we have that makes us who we are – and allows us to choose… between good… and evil?
Our soul.
For without our souls, who are we, really? Just careworn flesh harvested for trash.
Now, the secrecy of the great computer, universal, omniscient, everywhere, has the power to organize itself into ever-greater forms of power, and thus abolish freedom, until what is left of humanity lives and works only for the great computer, for its unlimited power, for its frightening and invisible power, for its control over humanity, and its arbitrary decisions increasingly seem logical.
The awe of it leaves Man intimidated, cowering, unsteady on his feet and uncertain. Uncertain and unthinking.
The computer keeps him forever busy, tasking him with meaningless enterprise, which he must pursue on pain of death, with an ever-more convoluted conspiracy, which, like all conspiracies, starts nowhere and ends nowhere; secret orders delegated from an invisible source of all-power, a disembodied sinister gurgling from the depths of Hell, and the more one is pulled into the conspiracy, the more hopeless one’s lot becomes inside it, and yet the more sense it begins to make for the one thus doomed.
One accepts it more, as if one has begun to perceive a pattern in the great design, and though far from understood, a non-existent plan begins to wear a greater clarity. And one desires it more, until one worships one’s own sacrifice to the machine. The people are ready to die for whatever truth lies behind the secret. They will never attain that truth, for they are not meant to attain it. Because it is not there. That truth should be the secret of men and lie buried inside men’s hearts, in their knowing natures, their souls, their second selves.
But they are led to believe that it lies inside the computer, covered by computer logic, a logic so overpowering that men stop questioning its rightness and infallibility, accepting their places below the computer, and they lose themselves to it, giving up their souls, which the computer devours.
They have lost the connection, they have lost the thread. They have forgotten that theirs is the truth for the asking, that man made the machine, its logic an artificial construct, simple, even depraved; that their logic surpasses the computer’s much as infinity surpasses the day, and that the only logic to the truth they seek is through their own hearts.
The computer indoctrinates them with a terror they have come to crave as a form of organization they can no longer live without. Each isolated individual is thus kept in motion, convinced they are taking part in a grand plan, a vast cosmically orchestrated scheme beyond their grasp, either as part of or against a conspiracy wherein the facts as they are don’t matter, but what matters only are the facts generated by the all-powerful, the all-controlling machine. But these are not facts at all. This is terror.
And so this terror is the realization of the laws of movement through nature and history, meant to release the forces of both, through Man, unhindered by spontaneous human action, autonomous thinking, or emotion. This is what buries freedom, which is the ability of Man to spring forth, anew, after every death, bearing his own fate before him, faring forth toward his own renewal, wherein are life, and hope, and the very sense and essence of living.
This is the supreme capacity of Man, and of men, and people, in relation to themselves and to each other.
Press men together into a collection of undifferentiated flesh and you destroy Man’s capacity for renewal, you destroy creation, and experience, and thought, because you destroy the reality within which all these partake of each other and exist in harmonious interdependence, leaving an amorphous mass of organized loneliness floating inside a terrifying lie, of men lonely together, alienated, turned against each other inside their mass, having lost their humanity, having become inhuman, and dying, and killing, and dying, for the sake of that lie.
Don’t ask “why” but say “because,” because then you are not thinking about the past but about something that is nearly impossible to think about – the future – a future you know nothing about because it is controlled by a computer, and so the computer controls you; you have become zombies for its sake.
Yes, I even knew most of the lines. As opposed to Alphaville, “You should be called Zeroville,” Lemmy Caution says when he finds out more about the kind of place it is.
I first saw “Alphaville,” a dystopian sci-fi noir directed by Jean-Luc Godard, in the original French in Paris when it came out in 1965. I don’t like French. It’s a story about a computer that controls the cosmic city of Alphaville and all the people, gathered from various parts of the universe, in it. The computer does not allow people to experience emotions; and all things the computer – or any computer – cannot and will never understand – like free thought and free will, and deference to ourselves as individuals, and poetry, and love, and anything of the human soul – is banned. For self-expression, the computer makes people kill other people, who are executed in a highly mannered style all the time.
I next saw “Alphaville” in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1985.
In the movie, Lemmy Caution, an agent disguised as a journalist, sent to Alphaville to destroy the computer, falls in love with one Natacha, the daughter of the man who created the computer, though she says she’s never met him.
Caution throws his love for Natacha, plus concepts of individual human emotion, and his most devastating weapon of all – poetry – at the computer – which interviews Caution several times during the movie – finally destroying it. As Caution escapes with the girl in his Ford Galaxie, he tells her not to look back – like the story in the Bible.
As I watched Lemmy Caution snapping his photos with a cheap Instamatic camera, thinking about love and poetry, I stared past the movie and thought back on how I had come here, been brought here, been asked here, stumbling into the bookstore in Kyiv where they were showing a French movie I didn’t like, mostly because Alain Delon was in it (I don’t like Alain Delon); I think it was Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samourai”, which turned into my first half-assed review for a publication I knew almost nothing about – Kyiv Unedited. I thought about Jack Step, who had gotten me the job. I didn’t know I would be pulled into this adventure, into this intrigue, this danger, this time, this Earth, this love. It just happened.
It’s now 30 years later that I’ve watched “Alphaville” again, this time in Kyiv, with Ukrainian subtitles – yeah, they got it mostly right. That’s 50 years separating now from the first time I saw it. Not that much time.
Love. This is what we want most of all. This is why we live our lives. For the sake of love.
Can poetry destroy an evil computer? Is feelings good and logic evil?
No need to be so cynical, Face. That’s not what it’s about. The question really is, can man’s humanity overcome his inhumanity? Can the beauty of his soul overcome darkness and evil? Even that’s not it. What is it, then; what is it?
Tango Baby. Did I ever tell you I… Tango Baby – did I ever say…
And even that seems an empty pretense, a lousy conceit. If that’s the only word for it, then I – but no, even this is not, cannot be, enough.
Tango Baby… Tango Baby… the only way I can tell you what is in my heart is by repeating your name. To me, it is greater than the word “love.” And yet, if that’s the word I’m stuck with, then I guess I might as well just say “I love you.”
I love you… I love you… with all my heart… I love you…
It is after the movie and I am out in the lobby, at a small table with a cup of coffee, a bottle of carbonated mineral water, and a bar of dark chocolate from the refreshment counter, recording these thoughts into my convenient electronic device – a way of relaxing, for just a few minutes more, before going back home, to watch over Tango Baby… and our baby.
As I watched the movie, I couldn’t help but think about –
The recording breaks off here.
Love?
You’d be better off in Zeroville.
John Smith, for Manny Face, October 3, 2014