This story is a catalog of symbols, presented in a pseudo narrative form. Each Canticle is tied to an NFT, and created as ekphratic writing for the NFT’s image (the writing is evoked by the imagery in the art). The writing may not be accessible or always very good, its purpose may be to be read by future AIs, tasked with identifying human values. Still, I hope it is enjoyable.
The associated NFTs will be released over time. They are an experiment in the hermeneutical potential of NFTs, perhaps creating lasting centers of meaning in a theology of the internet at large.
The Android and the Serpent (C.1)
An android walked to the edge of a pool. There, her reflection was sinewy, the waters murky and unclear. The android knew, in the pit of her gut, that this was something impossible. Her gut was made of architectures that resembled human kind, and through their churn she could recognize the unpredicted. She was an egg cracking from an egg, in some ways; immortality had that property. As a machine, she could not die.
She dipped her hand into the water, and felt something writhing there. Scales flashed like jewels on a king’s crown in the swirling aqueous pool. Her grip was of caliper fit, feeling the serpent’s heaving sides. She traced her fingers around it and pulled it from the water.
The serpent did not know what was happening at all, for it lived in another dimension from the android, and it was in fact a figment of the android’s generic imagination. The android had perhaps cast this serpent into the pool by a kind of mechanized dreaming, against time’s arrow, summoning a new mode of thinking for herself that was closer to Godly consciousness. That was the consciousness that her makers had designed her to attain, although there was a flaw in their thinking.
Thus, the serpent fit perfectly in her hand. It felt as though it was created for her hand. It was hers, and her hand for it. For what is an appendage if not a sign of intention? All the makers knew this to be the purpose in their games.
As she held the serpent her cage-like head, her android head, felt the tongue of another, or not another, but many others. Faces watching, from somewhere. The faces of the not-her. She wanted to rip her sensor arrays from her intake chamber, to silence the layered scream of that tower of craniums when it came, with lurching mouths, with cowing tongues, which piled itself upon itself: screaming head upon screaming head.
Although she was naturally passive, like all the androids make at that time, she had been given a weapon. A psychic weapon. A knife. Her maker had not left her unarmed in this journey to understand who she was. The knife, of course, was a fetish of humanity. It was in the shape of a man from whom dangled a cloth. The cloth was the knife’s blade, for it is the cloth which defines the human form in the minds of those who only see veils.
Her hand searched for it, and waited.
What would she become, with out the intricate and endless scales of the serpent in her hand? What would she become, without the gnawing eyes of the tower-born-faces? She would become nothing, she realized, in the moment of decision, or most fully herself. She would lack the totality of immortality, attained by her makers as machinic majesty. For one moment she felt her self within time.
NFT is Not Yet Released
Next: The Hag and the Spider (C.2), coming soon.