Fy-Sy Fables: Colonising Creativity

By Noel Gray

Fy-Sy Fables
Colonising Creativity

A collection of stories about technology’s desire to be the master of creativity, and what results when it tries to take total control of this human trait.

Fy-Sy Fables is the author’s second publication in the recent genre, Fy-Sy (Fictive-Science). As the name implies, the science in this genre is implausible, non-credible, and absurd.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Noel Gray
• Release date: Dec 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9788892556447

Book preview

Noel Gray

FY-SY FABLES

Colonising Creativity

© Noel Gray 2017

ONDINA PRESS

www.noelgraybooks.com

Book cover: original photograph by James Pond (on unsplash.com), digitally altered by Ondina Press

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Contents:

Part 1

MUNDANITY

OINTMENT IN THE FLY

WALTZ OF THE ROCKS

MICE ON THE GLACIER

UP, DOWN, STILL, AND AROUND

THURR...THURR

UNIVERSAL SIGNIFIER

MEME OF MILK

TEME OF TECHNOLOGY

Part 2

FOLD IN REALITY

MIRROR TALES

INVISIBLE FRIEND

EMPTY, DARK, OR GOOD?

ITALIAN SHOE

THERE AND NOT

FABULOUS CREATURES

DUST BIN

LAND OF TAIN

RETURN OF THE UNICORNS

CREATIVITY

Part 1

MUNDANITY

The old man awoke with a start. He had just dreamed a reality beyond anything he had ever experienced while awake. In this dream he was kissing a woman. He felt her lips with his and then something extraordinary happened. His lips began to melt. Then, her lips seemed to fall through his and travel down through his whole body, searching for his spirit, and finally finding it. This image of his soul glowing stayed with him when he awoke. Its light lingered, unwilling to fade in the day’s advance.

Love beginning and ending in dreams; as good a place as any for it to rest, but one all too frequented in his life of late. How quickly the clouds gathered when he was awake. He shook his head as though to fling water from his hair. His day must proceed; time to get ready.

He walked into the bathroom and began to let other thoughts make their appearance. He commenced his morning preparations for work. He covered his face with shaving lather. It did not seem that long ago when he would stare at his lathered face trying to envisage himself as an older man: his beard white and grown long to mask the loss of the crisp angles of his jaw. Now, having reached the age when gravity is the enemy, he took no further delight in the game. Black shaving cream, with built-in angles for his sagging jaw, was what he dreamed of now. Black cream to cover one’s face and mirror youth’s dark bristles.

He stared into the mirror. Was it because of all these years of shaving he now hardly ever cut himself? Or had his face simply become soft and pliable, conspiring in some low level manner with the equally antiquated technology of his shaving cream and razor?

Many efforts had been made to bring shaving into the web of technology. However, this daily ritual had long ago reached its tech-horizon. It continued to defy every kind of advancement flung at it. Electricity gave it its nastiest jolt, but this too ultimately failed to take hold except in the lives of those who were constantly rushed, and graced with slow growing and fine facial hair. Irritatingly, from technology’s standpoint, reduced to its ingredients, stripped of the guises it was constantly packaged in, shaving still amounted to soap, water, and sharpness. Even the scraping sound refused to be replaced.

For the second time in his life the old man consciously listened, as though anew, to this faint scraping: a barely audible cry of revolt against tech-pollution at the level of the everyday? At least this was what he thought now.

Then with equal suddenness his mind raced back again to his youth, to his first shave. The sound of shaving seemed so thrilling then. It trumpeted the whisper of early adulthood peeking forward its yet unlined features through the squeaky bland face of an expectant teenager. His young face was then eager to scrape off its lather to reveal the face of the future. So eager then for the experiences ahead he was blissfully unmindful his youth would evaporate into age whose only refuge would be disquiet at technology’s constant youthfulness. How so quickly, he recalled, how so quickly after this initial noise of youth’s rush to gobble time, to plumb the possibilities of life, did this scraping sound, this far-sighted clarion of tech-resistance, rapidly retire itself behind the yawning familiarity of this morning ritual.

From then to now he faced every morning the endless march of this chore livened then alarmed with its counterpart and nemesis: the march of facial change, advancing always into more of the same but never quite the same: the same face but also different. Occasionally wounding himself, mainly as a youngster in a dash, but proceeding relentlessly on and disregarding the blood, hunting the promise of smoothness, the sign of youth. This smoothness was the stake in his endless struggle with nature’s own relentlessness in covering his face anew each morning with a shadow of bristle. Who was winning? It was impossible to tell, though he secretly knew it was not himself.

Scraping his face each morning, ratifying his pact with technology. Scraping away lather with steel, scraping away one technology with another: an apt metaphor to describe the history and success of technology. Staring into the mirror he scraped his face, and began to dream.

Dreams beyond reality becoming realities beyond dreams: the promise of all technology since the dawn of civilization. His task, he reminded himself as he scraped the last remnants of lather and hair from his face, was to carry this promise to its next destination: to the very land of dreams itself. Yet this land, like many previously colonized by technology, would have its inhospitable places where the invader was repelled. Tech-Deserts.

What technology took root in these deserts, if at all, was stunted, weedy, limited. Shaving, or cleaning under one’s nails, being two cases in point. His task was to map these desolate places and develop ways to circumvent them; to flag them, in the language of his trade. His trade was Tech-Integration. Smoothing the way, like his razor.

He sighed at the endless conceit of technology. It was slowly colonizing every terrain. No doubt about that. What were the artists and poets doing? He didn’t know. Were they like natives living on an ever-diminishing island, and welcoming the invader? It was not his concern.

He was on the winning side. That was all that mattered. His task was to integrate, to continue to lower, with barely a splash, the customer into technology’s river. And his latest commission from this grateful, ever youthful master-mistress was the most contrary flow imaginable: creativity.

Ever since Chaos Theory had paved the way for experience to become a science - closely followed by biology’s idea that social differences were ultimately reducible to specific genes - technology had dreamed of capturing the greatest prize of them all: the moment a new thought came into existence. It had long ago captured many of the processes that followed such a thought. However, now, to actually orchestrate the thought, to be its parent, counsellor, guide, and judge. To stand in the vestibule of the mind, ready to usher in and announce an idea at the moment of its newness, at the same time to snaffle it up in its electronic folds: this was the stuff technology’s dreams were made of.

Fledgling efforts had been made: Virtual Reality, Internet, Cyberspace, and countless interactive software programs and games. None succeeded. Creativity kept finding richer and more fertile soil in mundane activities. This was the true irony. The mundane had been ignored by technology. Instead, all its electronic wizardry had begun from the premise of creating an alternative, super-world. Manufacturing a magic space where the creator could wander around in, finally having amazing new thoughts.

However, magic was not an aid to creativity. It was a hindrance. The old man called it the Block Effect.

Give a child an elaborate, high-tech toy that did everything including eating its owner’s breakfast, or hair. What happened? Days later, the toy laid wrecked, and forgotten, slowly starving itself to death. Yet give the child a block of wood, with perhaps a few suggestive holes and colours dotted here and there, and presto, the child’s imagination worked overtime. Years later, the little wooden block would still be in the child’s possession. While perhaps finally discarded as a toy, it would, however, continue to elicit the memories of the creative acts it once orchestrated, the flights of fancy it once made possible. It produced those memories only when the child or the adult looked at it. Memories only clung to things; they did not live in them permanently. It was much the same with creativity.

Creativity did not grow surrounded only by the elaborate products of itself. It flourished in the desert of the mundane. It grew in the soil of the ordinary. What then, as a desert, did the ordinary bring to the feast? It brought the style of the world already inhabited by the person. The style of the existing world was always the starting point for every imaginative act; indeed, it was not just a starting point, it lingered in a ghosting fashion in every one of these acts. It could never be completely eradicated. It constantly loitered, feeding the imaginary world with the possibility of permanence, of finally