Jacki Apple: One Word at a Time (1994)

1. ONE WORD AT A TIME Said Maxine Hong Kingston. That's how you change the world. One word at a time. Lay them down like bricks. A yellow brick road through the wilderness, the post-industrial wasteland of noise. 500 channels. Murder, mayhem, and shopping. 2. THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME The Traveler moves between thoughts in an inter- dimensional universe, where matter is consciousness projected into form, and vice versa. The Traveler dreams, and awakens in the place she is dreaming. She slipped through an anomoly in space, an aperture in time. She had no idea how it happened. She flung open the window shutters and gazed out into the immensity of her own imagination. 3. BLANK SCREEN (something about dreams and 'electronic sheep'...or was that sleep) I gaze into the gray void in search of a text. The yellow cursor bleeps insistently in the left hand corner. A YELLOWALERT. A pulsar heading towards a black hole. The humming in the faceless box increases in volume. A rushing in the ears. It does no good to cover them. The sound inside the skull is the same, only in a much lower key and with a little reverb. All that fluid thundering through tunnels. Although the electronic drone has no outwardly detectable variance, I can feel it vibrating against my skin. It is omni- present, inescapable, like the wave fre- quency emanating from the incessant flow of traffic traversing the city..............

[AUDIO] (Water dripping drip... drip... drip... ............. ...wind blowing ............ ooooohh sssshhh oohhhaa ............ train whistle... ...wind fade.....) (sound of freeway... Ebb/flow like waves .......)

4. APPARITION (a ghost of a chance) A full moon appears at about the same level as my right ear just right of center in the upper quadrant of the screen. I look over my shoulder. Nothing there. The orb of light hasn't moved. Identifying it as a moon is a first glance unproven assumption. It might just as well be a very bright star. A white dwarf even. (See Hawking, Stephen W. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes) In the interim a doorway has appeared just over my left shoulder at the left edge of the screen. White sky above dark wall. What appears to be a lemon tree in the foreground. I hear a piece of ripe fruit falling. It's drop is a deep whir, gravity cutting a groove through the air, a dark swirling tunnel that will quickly close on itself. A wormhole in the fabric of existence. The lemon never lands. 5. PAW PRINTS ON THE EVENT HORIZON (read the signs and keep your ears open) For weeks my eldest cat had obsessively positioned himself daily against the front door like a giant immovable ceramic doorjamb. He behaved as if the sheer weight of his will emanated a magnetic force field that would barr all from crossing his path. All except me, whom he grudgingly allowed to open and close the door. Then one day for no apparent reason he changed his spot and took up residence on my desk nestled up to the computer monitor, observing me through half closed eyes, purring in tune with the hum of the machine. "You can't sit there", I implored, "It's unhealthy. You'll get radiated!" He stubbornly resisted all efforts to dislodge him. I imagine him beginning to glow, his orangeness becoming incandescent. His face is right next to the door on the screen. He grins, Cheshire variety, ear twitching.

(wind.... Chimes Chimes ....wind) (pigeons... .......)

6. I HEAR IT. A lone signal traveling across the cosmos, trans- missions from a simpler time. Someone else's childhood long gone, a nation's innocence, leaving behind the heavy hollow slap of a screen door on a hot summer day. Not the aluminum ones with click locks on the front doors of old time suburban tract houses. But the old wooden ones with hook and eye latches and slightly peeling paint that banjo swung shut with a loud clap on all the front porches with music squeaky rockers, where after dinner grandpa turned onthe radio and everyone listened to the Jack Benny Show, or One Man's Family. 7. BIG BROTHER HAS A BIG MOUTH (don't stick your tongue in it) During his voyage to England in 1928 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked out how big a star could be and still support itself against its own gravity after it had used up all its fuel. He calculated that the limit to the repulsion Pauli's exclusion principle could provide as a balance to gravity's attraction would occur in a cold star about one and a half times the mass of the sun. He concluded that if the star's mass were less than this limit it could eventually cease contracting and settle down to a possible final state as a White Dwarf with a radius of a few thousand miles and a density of hundreds of tons per cubic inch. The problem of what would happen to such a star, according to general relativity, was first solved by the young American Robert Oppenheimer in 1939. His result, however, suggested that there would be no observational consequences that could be detected by the telescopes of the day.

(Thunder clap... 2 claps rain Heavy Old-time banjo music... Fade rain....) (clock ticking... tick tock tick tock tick tick tick .......)

8. SWISS CHEESE (as to a mouse) My younger cat, Red Ryder, the one who is a visitor from elsewhere in the universe, is aerial and still marveling at what a cat's body can do. He lands on my shoulders, rubs his cheek against mine, sticks his tongue in my ear....He slides into my lap, flicks his tail in my face. The screen door swings shut and the vibration shakes dancing Newton's apple loose. It hits the ground with a thud and splits open. It's full of wormholes. The words TRAP DOOR appear on the screen. Cut off the head of a worm, it grows a new tail. WATCH OUT FOR DWARF SIBLINGS (Black Holes ain't so Black)* 9. SKY WRITING (the turn of a phrase) A bright blue and yellow parrot flies through the window. "....a house of wind and voice", wrote Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, "...hovers on the frontier between reality and unreality". "You've tampered with the quote", says the parrot disapprovingly. "Yes", I reply, exhaling very slowly, holding my palms up to the light. "But so did Bachelard." The parrot puzzles on this, opening the dictionary. ART\n. 1. skill acquired by experience, study, or observation. Syn. ART, SKILL, CUNNING, CRAFT, ARTIFICE the faculty of executing well what one has devised. ART distinctively implies a personal unanalyzable creative power." He turns the page. ARTIFICE\n. 1. an artful strategm; TRICK. Syn. see ART.

(Dwarf vocals... Tap dancing dwarf taps..... ..........) (breeze in trees.... crickets... pages turn ....... chimes loon ...pages.. loon pages... ........)

10. WE ARE ALL DWARFED BY THE SYSTEM (a sample performance) START PROGRAM "Yeh, yeh, yeh." He's got his feet up on the mixing board! Little black patent leather shoes with taps on the bottom sticking out of his banana colored linen Armani jacket that must've come down nearly to his ankles when he stood up. Big head, pug-nosed and cheeky, spiky hair. Indonesian and moroccan beads jingle and jangle as he dances around the room singing, "Just do it, just do it, just do it". He does a somersault in the air, lands on top of a speaker and strikes a pose waging his finger provocatively at a slightly Larger Dwarf seated in the corner. "Always taking things apart, you don't know how to make in the first place", he taunts gleefully. He leaps off the speaker, cartwheels across a keyboard, lands right side up on a stool. "Footnote, footnote", he proclaims, doing a little tap dance. "Pan-cultural post-postmodernism is just another critics' ruse, a way to inflate your own status. It's your revenge against artists!" snarls a pony-tailed head sporting half a dozen earrings, as it looms over sword. A trap door pops open and a Dwarf in a Gap T-shirt and baseball cap springs out, jumping up and down shouting "Dungeons and Dragons", then disappears back down the hole.

(Carousel music... laughter.. tap dancing big laughs double laughs high- pitched baby laugh music begins... laughs

The spiky-haired one snaps his braces aggressively, and shoves a microphone into the Larger Dwarf's face. "Speech! Speech!" The Larger Dwarf has jowls, rumpled graying hair that curls over his collar, and those little half glasses that sit on the end of a long nose. "Frenetic kineticism", he scrawls in his leather- bound notebook. He taps his pencil in a sharp gesture of punctuation, raises his eyebrows peering over his glasses, the corners of his mouth turning downward. See: Language and Facial expression. Observational data.] ** The Larger Dwarf purses his lips. "Je me considere comme chirurgien, entrain de dissequer le culturel arracher les tumeurs si necessaire, en particulier celles de la langue, afin de faire l'analyse de son systeme image/texte explicatoire, l'esthetique de la dissonance cognitive et sa dystopie, et leurs rapports a....." ("I think of myself as a surgeon dissecting the cultural body, extracting tumors when necessary partic- ularly those of the tongue, in order to analyse the pathology of its image/text replicating system, the esthetics of cognitive dissonance, and dystopia and their relationship to...") A window opens and another Dwarf materializes, wheezing. This one is pale and balding with fleshy earlobes that hang over his turtleneck sweater. They tremble as he blows his nose, then carefully folds the tissue.

double laughs laugh music end. Dwarf vocals snores... ........ laughs snores

"The ability to produce doesn't necessarily imbue the product with any particular significance, a mani- festation of late post-industrial culture..." shrugging his shoulders "in which Neo-primitivism is a very interesting phenomena..." A nasal voice comes blasting out of the speaker, "Bloody little wankers!" followed by explicatives drowned out by a screech of electric guitar chords at a volume and frequency that causes space to distort, springing a barrel-chested beady-eyed neckless Dwarf in a short-sleeved shirt and a tie up out of the floor like a projectile. Sweating profusely, he shouts, "Horse manure. Your primary purpose is to serve the community!" and launches into a diatribe. Suddenly there are all shades of dwarves everywhere, popping in and out of trap doors, shaking little clenched fists above their huge heads, all shouting at once, like in a Wooster Group production. Some begin to take off their clothes. The spiky-haired one turns on the drum machine, cheering them on. A great red-faced one in a black robe swoops down from above like a bat, fat little hairy fingers scraping the air as he shreiks "Deviants! Perverts!" "Now if we could just put this in an interview format with call-ins", counters one with wire-rimmed glasses, Power Book in hand, as the spiky-haired Dwarf flips through the air, a whirling dervish chanting "Opera, opera".

laughs music... ...plus "Do You Wanna Dance" disco full house applause...

PROGRAM DIRECTOR to PRODUCTION ENGINEER "What the hell's going on? Whose program is this?" "We've got an intruder. I think it's called Traveler." "Is this thing LIVE?" "It's on-line." "What's that supposed to mean. Are we on-the-air or not?" "Looks that way." "Well OVERRIDE damn it! And get those freaks outta there. The dwarfs are spinning wildly now, actually shrinking as they are pulled together in one gravitational mass imploding into a black hole. C:\DWARFS\ESCAPE END PROGRAM [Language and Facial Expression.Observational data.] ** The use of musculature in the utterance of different languages appears to determine facial de- meanor which may cause misinter- pretations in intercultural ex- changes. EXAMPLE: The preponderance of vowel sounds pushed up from the throat thrusting the lower lip outward result in the impression that the French never smile. While the sharp precise conson- ant sounds thrust by the tongue through open lips give the im- pression that the Japanese smile all the time.

disco out ........) SILENCE

11. (We are not where we are, therefore we are where we are not.) 12. IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES In a vast green field a man is lying on the ground. He is wearing a stethoscope, the end of which he presses against the earth. He is listening to the grass growing. He has been there for several months now. Each day someone from a nearby shrine brings him food and water. The tread of their feet sends a signal that gradually increases in volume, alerting him to their approach well in advance of their arrival. After awhile he begins to be able to detect an earthworm going about its work. Then the activities of insects, followed by their intricate communications. Later the digestive processes of a large shade tree gathering nutrients from the soil. He realizes that he does not need the stethescope any more, that his body is a resonant chamber tuned to the workings of the earth. Thus, he thinks, it must be equally connected to the workings of the universe! 13. "Umhmm, says the Traveler, now we're getting somewhere."

(wind..... scraping munching ........ .........)

14. "I've been thinking about potatoes", says Dr. Chamb, opening a large volume on civilizations of the Andes, replete with illustrations and diagrams on terraced agriculture and all manner of tubers and roots, a hundred and fifty varieties. " amarilla, llamellina, papa seca, ulluku, uqa, mashua, maca, puka pina " he begins to chant..... In a highland Peruvian village, a villager pulls aside a visiting American. "Can you tell me, please," he asks, "how can we buy a VCR?" 15. THE POSSIBLE SHAPE OF THINGS THAT ARE (a dialogue) "Stephen, why is the universe the way we see it?" "Well, if it had been different, we would not be here!" "Can you elaborate." "For example if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different stars either would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium or else they would not have exploded. From what we know at present, it seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the fundamental numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life. Of course there might be other forms of intelligent life we cannot even imagine that do not require the light of a star or the heavier chemical elements made in stars and flung back into space when they explode. But then they would inhabit another kind of universe than the one which we are able to observe."

(Andean music... ..........) (clock ticking...

"So the conditions of life as we know it and its evolution are very specific to the laws of this universe?" "Yes. At least it appears that way as far as we know." "Then can we consider the possibility that the fact that we are here is in some way as necessary to the existence of the universe as we understand it, as it is to our existence." "That's an interesting hypothesis. I haven't really looked at it quite that way. What do you have in mind?" "Taking into account the probable existence of the physical embodiment of intelligent life in various stages of its evolution throughout the universe, a significant enough portion of it being humanoid, and similarly pursuing these questions, there's the uniquely human phenomena of the compulsion, one might even say the necessity,to make art, which I am suggesting acts as a counterbalance to the destructive forces. A cat does not compose symphonies, nor does he wage war." "And though I can't be entirely sure, I don't suppose a cat goes about asking himself how the universe began or will end, or worries about why he's here and what does that mean. He just is." "Which is also like saying that he doesn't need to ask the question because the answer is contained in the fact of his existence. It's a bit like your 'no-boundary' theory. Which is, well, kind of Zen, don't you think? I mean, the idea that maybe "imaginary time" is really the real time, and what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations, something we invented to help us describe what we think the universe is like, which we have to do in order to know why we exist in it. What I'm getting at is that the energy being exerted and emitted in this exchange is keeping the universe from collapsing; that is, this activity is necessary to maintaining the balance of order and disorder, expansion and contraction."

"So your talking about intelligent life as a kind of fuel, a nutrient necessary to the continuing life of the universe as it exists. That is, it's state of expansion necessary for intelligent life." "In a sense. But think of it as a corollary to the black hole problem. Particle/antiparticle, opposing forces of gravity. We're talking about creative as opposed to entrophic forces. For example -- Can we make a mathematical model of the actual energy generated by consciousness? Since we don't really know very much about how consciousness behaves outside it's containment in the physical body." "That's an interesting proposition." "Equally important is the question of the kind and type of frequencies -- disruptive, harmonic, etc. in the overall equation. So it's not just that we think, but the content of our thoughts and the form of expression. In terms of electro-magnetic resonances, how is the balance of things affected by what we fill the air with?" "If you were just dealing with the planetary environment in this century, it wouldn't seem very promising would it? In terms of pure malevolence and dissonance, that is...." "Well just in terms of artistic practice, not to mention the problem of media space, I think this is a major challenge for the 21st century, but that's a whole other philosophical discussion...." FOOTNOTE*** A subsequent conversation between Stephen Hawking, Jacki Apple, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lucianno Pavarotti, the Dalai Lama, Bruce Odland, Helen Thorington, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Bill Witherspoon, did take place, but no transcripts are available at this time.

tick tock .........)

16. SOMETHING ABOUT AN EMERALD CITY "EXCELLENT!" says the Traveler. She turns over another card. PSEUDOPODIA. False feet. She begins to laugh. She laughs herself halfway across the galaxy. When she opens her eyes she is standing in the glistening sunlight ankle deep in a pool of fresh mountain water. She is holding a pair of black patent leather shoes that are much too small. 17. YOU KNOW HOW TO WHISTLE, DON'T YOU.... "We are the music-makers, and the dreamers of dreams", Shakespeare declares with some satisfaction. "I always suspected you were an optimist", T.S. Elliot replies. "I'd put it this way -- we are the music, while the music lasts!" "And every time Pavarotti sings he keeps the universe from collapsing," I say. Loren Eiseley nods thoughtfully. "That may be, but it is not enough. For if we are to go on singing, Man must consciously re-enter and preserve the first world from which he has emerged, not simply the one we have drawn from our brain. He must do this if he is to survive." "The probability is that you are all correct", Einstein chuckles. "You know, I always liked Fred Astaire and those Gershwin boys."

(tap dancing... more tap dancers... .........)

18. PHANTOM UNIVERSE:\CULTURE A huge receiver simultaneously scans 14 million beeping in channels of radio waves from existing radiotelescopes phased around the world. It is eavesdropping on our neighbors within 80 light years where there are 770 Sun-like stars. It is tuned to the galaxy, listening for transmissions, continuous waves or pulsed signals from across the vast expanse of the Milky Way and its 400 billion stars. Based on his equation for estimating the likelihood of advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe, Dr. Drake guesses there are 10,000 to 100,000 in the Milky Way alone. But time, they say, is running out. Soon we will be enmeshed in a web of interference from our own orbitting satellites. 19. "Ugly skin bags of water!", MURK bellowed, the thunderous vibration flinging the alien humanoids off his belly like fleas off a dog.

(satellites beeping in phased conversations .........)

20. TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING A diffused aura of light now surrounds the white orb on the screen. The sky in the doorway had darkened when I wasn't looking. The following message appears on the screen: THE WAVE FREQUENCIES OF THE CITIES ARE OUT OF SYNC WITH THE UNIVERSE. THE RESULT IS WIDESPREAD SOCIAL CONFLICT, DISINTEGRATION, VIOLENCE. It's just across the border, you know, in that Phantom Universe otherwise known as Culture -- violation, ravishment, blood and bones, rubble and ashes...   Everyone fiddling. The screen door is banging loudly, swinging half off a rusty hinge in the wind. An old antenna dangles from the roof. The house has been abandoned for some time now. Weeds grown up around the saging porch. No more stars left in the tattered flag. 21. THE TIDES THAT TURN MENS FORTUNES (or the tune that turns the tide) It has yet to be proven that the energy generated from a group of people chanting certain ritual songs can't make it rain. PENNIES FROM HEAVEN appear(s) on the screen. "You don't get radio messages for free!" countered the very down-to-earth Dr. Rood. "And I don't see them making such an expensive investment to communicate with primitives like us."

(music... ....... snoring Train whistle..) (water dripping.. pigeons cooing drip...

22. The Traveler shuffles her deck of cards. She turns them over one at a time, alternating between the constructed world and the imagined world. 23. METAMORPH In a high-ceilinged room in a disappearing city of old torch songs and creaking stairs, a woman receives footsteps, messages without signals. Her hearing becomes so acute that sometimes there are so many voices they blot out the sound of the outside world. Slowly she learns how to shift frequencies, to sort out harmony and dissonance, to move between dimensions of reality. But she is unable to leave the room, even when she walks the streets of the city. **** "Hush little baby, don't you cry, Mama's gonna sing you a lullaby. And if that lullaby isn't heard, Mama's gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird doesn't sing, Mama's gonna buy you a golden ring. And if the gold should turn to brass, Mama's gonna buy you a looking glass. And if that looking glass should break Mama's gonna bake you a chocolate cake So hush little baby don't you cry, Cause mama's gonna sing you a lullaby. 24. See Baudelaire's Dwarf. "A Heroic Death". A heart attack, I believe. Brought on by children's laughter.

drip.... .......) (lullaby**** .......... Footsteps ......... ........)

25. YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERMAN.... It rained for fifty-two days. Fifty-two cards in the deck. Fifty-two weeks in the year. Something about the significance of numbers. Things had gotten out of hand. The Mississippi doubled in size spreading itself beyond its borders. Bridges disappeared like toy models as the river rose and crested. She refused to leave the house. Even as the water crept into the basement and climbed the stairs, at first seeping up from below, from the drenched earth, then entering a downstairs window like a thief slipping over the sill from the garden that had become a lake. It must have been this way when the ice melted she thought. Except for the rain, and its relentless pounding on the roof, drumming on the windows. She put her head- phones on and played her Walkman around the clock, to blot it out. She let the pigeons into the attic, and shared the box of dry oatmeal with them. When she had moved everything she could carry upstairs, she lay down on her bed and slept for a long time, like someone adrift at sea. She awoke to the dim gray light of morning and the glossy-eyed stare of a fish lodged in the branches of a tree outside her window, gasping to stay alive in the downpour of rain. She opened the window, reached down and released it to the river below. She spent the day writing poems, pieces of her life which she shaped into little boats. In each one she placed a small votive candle, shielded by a tiny parasol made from aluminum foil and hairpins. As night fell she lit the candles and set the boats afloat from her window, like in a Japanese festival for the spirits of the dead. When she woke in the morning the rain had stopped.

(rain... ....and river... ...rain fades... bird chirps...)

26. GOING BETWEEN The white dwarf star contracts into the cursor. I could feel my head being pulled farther and farther from my feet. PRESS ESCAPE. The door slams shut disappearing from the screen. APPEND DOCUMENT TO: For what seems a very long moment everything vanishes, all light and sound. I have no sensations whatsoever, and it occurs to me that I might no longer be in my body. First naming the parts then the action, one word at a time I reconstruct myself from the inside out until I picture my hands at the end of my arms thrusting forward and apart as if throwing open drapes. The whole night sky suddenly bursts into view, a million stars shining above. I feel my hands clutching the sides of a hammock with relief and amazement. "Welcome", says the Traveler.

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