Not just occasional horizontal transfer but massive and intentional exchange — there is a global marketplace for genes. Not the isolating effect of islands or valleys resulting in genetic drift and xenophobia, but a growing addiction to foreign gene products, for example, humans “mating” with wormwood for antimalarial drug precursor artemisinin, and with Clostridium for Botox.17
If you think that all this sounds comfortably science-fiction-like and distant, take a moment to consider how you might have reacted in 1985 if someone had told you that within your own lifetime, you would carry a Cray 2 supercomputer in your pocket, as would farmers in rural India. Synbio is here, and bio-hackers and programmers will change you and your environment much sooner than you think.
The effects of code will spill out from the compiler; its vyanjana or suggestiveness will echo through the world and the human body. Undoubtedly, artists will — and already do — arrange this suggestion to manifest dhvani and rasa. The question, really, is not whether code can be art; as Bhatta Nayaka — a tenth-century theorist — put it:
Scripture is distinguished by its dependence on the primacy of the wording [that is, the Veda is more important for how it says than what it says, and it can therefore never be rephrased]. Historical narrative, for its part, is a matter of factual meaning [that is, what it says is more important than how it says it, and can be rephrased multiply]. When both these, wording and meaning, are subordinate, and the aesthetic process itself has primacy, we call it literature.18
If an artist can manipulate our attention to code so that “the aesthetic process itself has primacy,” code becomes art. Recent filmic visualizations of cyberspace — William Gibson’s “mass consensual hallucination”—as networks of embodied logic gates and circuits begin to demonstrate how code can be manifested, how code can itself become the object of perception and therefore, perhaps, of savoring.
The more difficult and intricate problem, it seems to me, is understanding the self that will be paying attention to the embodied code. In the analyses of the classical Indian theorists, a model of the self is produced: this self is limited, bounded, local, but also diffused through the entire universe; it has boundaries, but those boundaries are porous, and can allow inflows from without; it has stability but is also capable of submergence and emergence; it dies but reappears; it forgets but has endless stores of latent memories; it is itself but has been everything else.
What is the nature of the self that codes and is coded itself, which resides in a biology transformed by code? How will it allow inflows across its borders? When will this self be limited, and how will it be diffused or expanded? What will be the distance this self adopts in relation to the objects of its cognition? When and how will its perceptions undergo sadharanikarana or generalization? Under what circumstances will it feel personally attached to emotions generated by external stimuli?
The Tantric systems promised profound transformations of outlook, and also siddhis, superpowers that allowed control over nature itself, over biology and physics: the ability to reduce one’s body to the size of an atom, or to an infinitely large size; the ability to appear simultaneously in more than one place, or to move through space; the power to subjugate all. This was possible because reality itself was encoded in a primal, eternal language, in the alphabet of Sanskrit, in its matrka, the mothers of the universe. With Tantric mantras, strings of phonemes that emerged from the “pre-cognitive, pre-linguistic, and pre-discursive layers” of the self, the practitioner could change himself and the world.19
In one of the Tantric visualizations used during meditation, the practitioner imagines himself sitting “above the Lords of the world.” Then he, with the power of his mantra, burns his entire body, sees it “blazing from the feet” upwards until nothing is left but a pile of ashes. He “floods the ashes to the directions” with water that arises from his meditation. Having destroyed his gross body, his elemental image of himself, he now meditates upon “the complete, solitary, pure body of the five true mantras, bursting with the energies of the mantras.” Now he enters this subtle mantra-body made of blazing phonemes, he becomes it. “Then meditating on his own speech, which is the support of all the worlds, the complete word [the entire mantra] creates total satisfaction.”20
In the Tantraloka, Abhinavagupta writes:
The more this uncreated overflowing reality is seen clearly, the more wonder unfolds. The various levels in which creative intuition is present follow from conventional language being immersed in what precedes it, and that in the primordial, transcendental phonemes. Those who repose in this creative intuition, overflowing with the primordial phonemes, become poetic and linguistic adepts. Resting in this consciousness-reality in its highest form, unlimited by conventional language, what would they not [be able to] know [and] what would they not [be able to] do?21
How do we imagine selves that can easily manipulate language to remake the world and themselves? How would they make art and experience it? Perhaps these are questions not for programmers but for novelists and poets, for thinkers who deal with “the philosophy of awareness and the philosophy of language.” We await an Anandavardhana, an Abhinavagupta, for answers.
In March 1954, a few months before his tragic death, Alan Turing sent four postcards to his friend, the logician Robin Gandy. Gandy kept only the last three of the series, which was labeled “Messages from the Unseen World.” The second postcard contains the following lines in Turing’s handwriting:
III. The Universe is the interior of the Light Cone of the Creation.
IV. Science is a Differential Equation. Religion is a Boundary Condition.
And on the third postcard, Turing writes:
V. Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour there Waves which somehow Might
Play out God’s holy pantomime.
22
Red Earth and Pouring Rain was published in 1995. It feels now, of course, like it was written by somebody else, by another person with whom I am moderately familiar. When I try to recall its writing, what I remember is the heat haze of Houston afternoons; reading photocopied historical texts in a transit lounge at Dubai airport; moments of uncertainty and thirty-something unpublished-writer panic in Bombay when I ran into school friends who already had jobs, spouses, children, homes. I remember girlfriends, and loneliness, and the generosity of my teachers. And vividly, I remember computers, the machines I spent endless hours with, through which my characters came alive: the borrowed IBM PCjr I began writing the book on, with its abominable Chiclet keyboard and associated stack of WordStar floppies; my clone XT, the first computer I ever owned, bought with the entirety of a grant that was supposed to supplement my meager TA stipend through a semester; “Sikander,” the big beast of a 486 clone I indulged in once I was making money as a consultant and programmer.
Makers tend to fetishize tools that they use successfully, and computer geeks are no exception — hackers will tell you in exacting detail about the first computer they ever used, the first program they ever wrote. My writing life and my life with computers, in spite of their differences, seem mirrored, twinned. Both are explorations of process, of the unfolding of connections. Both reward curiosity, dogged patience. And perhaps it is just the double presence that I cherish, of art and logic, of deep historical roots and newness. All cognition is re-cognition, recognition; discovery and rediscovery are both nourishing. It has been pointed out to me that my fiction proliferates doubles, couplings, alter egos, layers within layers. Duchamp noticed that “most artists only repeat themselves.”23 If so, an obsession with contradiction, paradox, ambiguity, and mirroring has been my repetition, one that I’m happy with. Repetition need not only be a grim karmic necessity, or an endless rehearsal of trauma. In the practice of fiction, what is tasted — first and then again — is consciousness itself.