Hurled into the Void
Trapping Demons in Silicon Crystal Megastructures
What do the songs “In Bloom” by Nirvana and “Kissed by a Rose” by Seal have in common?
This question was posed by an internet stranger in the comments section of an archival scan of the Voynich Manuscript. This ancient text of dubious origins was “re-discovered” by Polish book dealer Wilfred Voynich — after whom it was named. The tome attracted particular interest for its apparently indecipherable text; a subject of fierce debate amongst scholars and casual conspiracy theorists alike.
I first encountered this manuscript on a quest to archive my travels through the internet.
“Terminally online? No thanks, I prefer the term, Cyber Flaneur.”
I found that no matter where I started my research, I would almost always return to the same topics. I had a rich fascination with the arcane of prehistory. Christendom had very publicly borrowed its most potent broth from the multitude of pagan precedents, and I found myself enamored with their curious stone monuments and reverence for celestial bodies. Why do we so faithfully incise our narrative into stone? Why can’t we ever seem to learn from our mistakes when our past is so clearly wrought?
On this fateful day, I was looking at images of the Ziggurat of Ur. This stone monument dates back to the neo-Sumerian period and was constructed in what is now southern Iraq. In almost the same breath, I encountered a fan art tribute of the manga-vocaloid Hatsune Miku superimposed over an image of the stone monolith, and selfies taken during the “Desert Storm’’ invasion of Iraq; featuring U.S. soldiers sitting at the base of one of the great stone staircases. This unexpected mashup is hardly surprising in the age of memesis.
Miku is a famous anime styled character with bright blue pigtails and a short plaid skirt. This character is the official “moe anthropomorph” of Crypton Future Media. In anime culture, a “moe anthropromporph” is a personified object/machine/idea. For example: Wikepe-Tan– the “living” representation of the database Wikipedia .
Canonically, Miku is the personified embodiment of Crypton’s vocaloid software — a sort of digital synthesizer that converts strings of text into human voice-like sounds and animations of Miku dancing and singing. Just like talismans carved from reindeer horn or formed from terracotta, Miku is an Idol; a visual embodiment of ideas, desires, and narrative. Strings of computer characters — glyphs — bind her to the virtual realm. In this way, her character is stripped of agency and reduced to the realm of object, and then further subjected to the puppeting of the internet generation
From a similar standpoint, the images of soldiers at the base of the ancient holy pyramid made me think of their possible agency in this theater of war. I think of Manuel DeLanda’s “Assemblage Theory;” an extension of the musings of Deleuze and Guattari. In the text, DeLanda asserts that war is a mechanism consisting of increasingly nested assemblages. The bullet itself is useless without a chemical reaction, a casing to contain those expanding gasses and a primer to begin the whole situation. This assembled round is then nestled in the assemblage of a rifle; itself useless without an operator. This operator has no functional agency in the realm of 21st century war without the massive and intricate networks of intelligence and strategy. Even the presence of the soldier is more an act of performance, meant to intimidate a population under imperial control. Without the rifle, body armor, and helmet with its radio com system; the operator is a naked teenage boy too many miles from the Midwest, signed on for the promise of cheap tuition.
After sufficient time to process all of this information, I encountered “The Lament for Urim,” an ancient scripture recorded in a clay tablet in cuneiform. This text details the fall of the great civilizations of Ur and Urim.
“They gave instructions that my city should be utterly destroyed. They gave instructions that Urim should be utterly destroyed. They decreed its destiny that its people should be killed. In return for the speech (?) which I had given them, they both bound me together with my city and also bound my Urim together with me. An is not one to change his command, and Enlil does not alter what he has uttered.”
Her city has been destroyed in her presence, her powers have been alienated from her.
Enlil called the storm — the people groan. He brought the storm of abundance away from the Land — the people groan. He brought the good storm away from Sumer — the people groan. He issued directions to the evil storm — the people groan. He entrusted it to Kij-gal-uda, the keeper of the storm. He called upon the storm that annihilates the Land — the people groan. He called upon the evil gales — the people groan.
Some take this to mean that a “great wind” akin to some sort of explosion or rapture event had overtaken the lands. There is a reading too that suggests that this was retaliation for hubristic actions– something pertaining to speech. This immediately led my thinking to the allegory of the Tower of Babel, for its warnings of mortal arrogance, the power of speech, and the ruin that can befall a civilization that has stratified itself vertically.
From Babel came the notion of incoherence. Many suggested that the Voynich Manuscript, with its indecipherable text, must be a legacy of this great confounding of speech. Most scholars agree that this text has been carbon dated to the 15th century and is likely a creative work by a Turk who had studied Greek and wanted to try their hand at inventing a new alphabet. The illustrations are clearly botanical, and seem to detail processes of cultivating, grafting, and breeding plants.
Still, I am more interested in the collective desire of random people on the internet to invent a narrative that suits a particular fixation. Some suggest it must be a lost work of Da Vinci, or a manual describing plants with a high concentration of the hallucinogen DMT, or a coded message from someone who communed with extraterrestrials. The deeper one delves into the comments sections and the chatrooms the more theories emerge. In a way it really was the legacy of Babylon to raise these cell towers. Come let us build a network, and satellites high up in the heavens, let us blog and tweet until the collective dissonance builds beyond
All of this research into stone monuments and the legacy of the glyph brought me to the concept of long term nuclear waste disposal. In a few short decades of scientific exploration, humanity has produced an excess of radioactive waste products. The danger this waste presents will surely outlast our best efforts to archive and document. This waste may outlast humanity itself. Scientists and designers have teamed up to address the challenge of creating a warning for a future being that has no concept of our culture and history.
Once again they turn to the glyph. There is a potential to create graphic representations of ruination and danger that can transcend time. As the story goes, these teams gathered to discuss the parameters of their task. The monuments must withstand the test of time. After a few hundred thousand years even stainless steel will rust — the glyphs must be etched into stone. The monuments must be massive enough to not be buried by shifting sands, or easily overlooked as trivial burial sites. The monuments must declare a danger that cannot be seen, felt, or perceived, but that carries a grave and lasting consequence for all life that encounters it. A hush fell over the room as the group realized that the monuments they described already encircled the earth. Massive pyramidal structures stretch up to the heavens, inscribed with lore of curses and ruination.
Once again, the myth precedes itself, as if to taunt us with the inescapable follies of our hubris. But what beautiful theater it makes, to keep so many on the edge of their sanity with the dramatic irony.
And how uncanny it is that this manuscript, after centuries of absence, would appear in the shop of Wilfrid Voynich. At the time, Voynich had been recently married to Ethel Lillian Boole. Before their union, Boole had authored “The Gadfly,” a romantic work of revolutionary fiction detailing the atrocities of the rule of the Austrian empire and an intimate encounter between herself and a Ukrainian born secret agent working for Scotland Yard. Unbeknownst to Ethel Boole, the “Gadfly” went on to be an incredibly influential meme in the cultural sway of communist revolution in Russia, China, and Iran. At one point the text was required reading in the USSR and sold 2.5 million copies there by the time of the author’s death. “The Gadfly ‘’ became a viral entity, spreading ideology far beyond the scope of its author’s intention.
The singularity of Boole and Voynich becoming partners in their later lives was palpably exciting to me. One became pseudonymously linked to a book with no discernible meaning (and which he did not write,) and the other a forgotten and under-celebrated author of a book with tremendous historical consequences.
What is more significantly displacing however, is that Ethel Boole is the daughter of George Boole; the mathematician who devised Boolean algebra in the mid 1800’s. Boolean logic is the binary rationality on which all computer decision making is based. Boole speculated that the patterns of human thought– while complex — could be described by mathematics as a series of discrete operations in sequential order. First this, then that, but not this, nor that. To this day, all computational infrastructure rests on the shoulders of these simple equations.
But here I am in the comments section of this high-resolution archival-scan of an ancient text. Delicate watercolors drift on vellum leaves. Curling script dances across the page; laughing at decades of intense research and debate into its origins. I found the comment left by this stranger to tease me in almost the same way.
“Here is a hint. What do a Venus fly trap, the birth of Venus painting and the songs “in bloom” and “kiss by a rose” have in common? Something like Carl Jung and the Truman show, :) Email me…“
At a surface level it’s too easy to dismiss it all as coincidental. Maybe a bit deeper and we can say that as social beings we have a tendency to trend toward similar lines of thought. These allegories and historical references are the most concrete for their collective weight across centuries. Then there’s the obvious floral connection, something about sex, and something about violence. In bloom has that fresh pin prick feeling, Venus is the result of castration, the fly trap is our casual countertop carnivore, and “Kissed by a Rose,” a banger from the soundtrack of the 1995 blockbuster “Batman Forever.” The harder I lean into this, the less it means but the deeper the connection seems to go. I listen to the two songs simultaneously, trying to find some hidden messages in the tunes coming in and out of phase.
The stream returns to the source as a jagged and disrupted wave that outlines the nature of its interactions. Reverberations are the very core of feeling.
Do I line up the start of the song, the melody, the hook? I make photo collages of every depiction of Venus I can find; that Botticelli shell starts to look so much like the gaping-maw of the fly trap.
For two weeks I cannot sleep. I’ve never experienced fixation like this. I listen to the two songs on incessant repeat. I go back and retrace my steps that night, archiving my internet derive. I began a practice of listening to multiple songs at once. I start to feel for the first time in my life that these preferential search tools are approaching sentience, that my metadata is like a bag of runes, or an old wardrobe full of inherited demons. Something brought me to this series of stimuli; something older than time itself. Something wants me to know that it’s out there lurking.
I need to sleep. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to breathe without feeling my heart welling up in my throat. I finally reached out to email the stranger from the manuscript pages. Over the next few months we exchanged in one of the most meaningful conversations I’ve ever had. This stranger confirms many subconscious feelings I’ve had about the funny way that history rhymes, and the way we faithfully record the past in intimate detail and then choose to ignore it. The stranger goes a bit further; an introduction to something dark, something powerful — something ancient. I get scared. I cut off communications.
Two years pass and I once again start thinking about glyphs. I am thinking about the process of inscribing meaning into an object — about the idea of graven images.
I began this train of thought after a friend of mine reminded me of the golden record aboard the Voyager spacecraft. In general, I was thinking about space travel and the allegory of Icarus. Once again we dance with fate. Our hubris is the only thing keeping us aloft. This craft, however, embodied entirely different gestures. Voyager had no real end goal, no return trip, no timeline. The intrepid little ship did a bit of reconnaissance around our local system and then having fulfilled its purpose, hurled itself into the void. Forever drifting toward the edge of our perception, driven by a bank of slowly waning nuclear batteries. On board is a gilded LP inscribed on one side with glyphs meant to be meaningful to any sufficiently advanced being. It describes the location of earth relative to a pulsar star, which vibrates with its own unique heartbeat.
Reverberations are the very core of feeling.
On the reverse of the record is an audio inscription like you might expect to find on a vinyl record. It contains the sounds of earth, laughter, crying, children playing, and a gentle breeze. I fell in love with the Boolean poetry of it all. Either the craft will collide with something that will destroy it completely, or it will drift for eons until it is discovered. A love letter for a time beyond our understanding.
Once again I think of Boole. He taught the machines how to dance in the way that we do, with our tongues and our breath. Then I was thinking about the way they do that these days. Perfect silicon crystals are formed in a laboratory. Glass won’t do, its bonds are amorphous and irregular. In order to create the regimented architecture we need for computation, only perfectly tessellating crystalline molecules will do. At the scale at which we intend to inscribe our glyphs, machines are far too bulky. Optics are key. We make a large scale schematic, then use lenses to focus high intensity beams of light down onto these crystal wafers. The patterns are intricate labyrinths, resembling sprawling cityscapes. The tendril pathways weave themselves across the surface of the chip, exploiting certain potentials of silicon to hold both positive and negative charges with ease. The complex arrangement of these pathways into circuits is determined by the prophetic musings of Boole, two centuries prior. The bifurcation moments, where these routes encounter a crossroads, determine the fate of the operation being performed. The devil waits for you at the fork in the road.
Once more, into stone, we inscribe glyphs, runes of power, which then conduct electrical current in complex operations to perform “logic”. We make computers out of crystals and light… Trapping demons in silicon crystal megastructures, forcing them to do our bidding. Like that vocaloid trapped in the screen or the soldier swung about like a puppet. The story is older than time itself, and it’s demons who are moving the pieces, reciting the folk tales they wrote eons ago. It’s demons who brought me to Voynich, as a subtle taunt that even when we trap them in rocks they still make the music.
