"Perhaps in the next generation or
two, a great artist from one of the cultures of the Pacific Rim
will create the formative work
for
this new culture, to do for the Pacific what Homer did long ago
for the Mediterranean world. This imagined masterpiece may not
be literary,
for it is hard to deny that the use of film, television, and
computer graphics has created a new sensibility that cannot be
expressed in
exclusively literary form." (William Irwin Thompson, Pacific
Shift. San Francisco, CA., 1985.)
The Pacific Rim
is also known as the Ring of Fire. Containing 76 % of the world’s active and inactive volcanoes, it traverses my home
in the Pacific Northwest, rising as evidence in as a truncated Mount
St. Helens which, twenty-two years ago, blew its top. From here, the
Ring runs north to British Columbia, bending westward at Alaska, peppering
the Aleutian Islands, along with Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, with
fumaroles, down to Japan, the Philippines, Java, and New Zealand, turning
east toward South America, then north, where, in 1943, Popocatapetl and
Paricutun suddenly rose from a placid cornfield in Mexico, bursting into
mountains. Closing in on itself, the Ring snakes up North
America’s West Coast, a uroboros of sudden destruction and relentless creation,
dancing the inevitable steps of Shiva, the Hindu god, "who loves the burning
ground.
But what does he destroy?" the renowned scholar of Indian Art, A.K. Coomaraswamy,
rhetorically asks; then replies, "Not merely the heavens and earth…but
the
fetters that bind each separate soul." "The disaster," wrote Maurice
Blanchot, "takes care of everything."
Thus
we are joined by disruptively productive forces of our shared planet, a
tectonic avant-garde
flowing back to the very beginnings
of hominid
relationship with fire. Some anthropologists believe this fascination
extends at least two and a half million years into the past, when lightning
was perhaps seen as an angered god throwing jagged bolts of light that
erupted into fire. Surviving because of our ability to turn even dangerous
opportunities to our advantage, we learned to capture the effect, and
later the cause. Recently, Pascal Simonet, at the University of Lyon,
discovered that lightning strikes play a significant role in bacterial
evolution, promoting genetic diversity by making cell membranes permeable,
thus increasing the likelihood of gene-swapping, or "horizontal
transfer." Closer at hand, Rodolfo Llinás, of New York University’s
School of
Medicine, points out that "all brain activity is basically electrical chattering
between cells." "I sing the body electric," wrote Walt Whitman.
Electricity also fires up computers, driving packets of information
over the World Wide Web, fabricating web rings that invite disparate
cultures into
contributive electronic
communities. With this in mind, I suggest the "new sensibility" of
which William
Irwin Thompson speaks will be collaborative, and "the formative work for
this new
culture," perhaps including some "masterpieces," to morph the
Modernist trope, will be made by networked artists and writers linking the Pacific
Rim. For them, the challenge in this third millennium is to embrace cyberspace
as an opportunity not to appropriate but to breach cultural and linguistic barriers
with equal signs and
intonations; a circle, then, as Blanchot would say, "bereft of a center."
© Joel
Weishaus 2002
© Leonardo Electronic Almanac 2002