Bathysphere (1979)
A bathysphere descends. – Not steel and glass. Sensitive and sapient…. A sapient bathysphere is shaped by and shapes that through which it falls and that which it contains.
The sociological-psychological bathysphere descends through the rhythms and currents of the ocean of voices.
A bathysphere descends to the depth of bathysphere construction…descent into descent.
A Fertile Open Space: A Sociological-Psychological Fiction (1980)
1
There is a nation. It is bounded on three sides by the ocean and on the fourth by a fertile open space.
Perhaps everyone in the nation enters this open space at once.
Perhaps no one enters. (They cannot imagine its existence and/or already inhabit it in imagination and/or worship it.)
Historical outcomes are not either/or, always residues and shadows…always ambiguities. Fact is haunted by repressed potentialities.
2
Explorers enter. They represent their people. They are “an advance guard.” – They would impose their old world on their new. Yet to survive they must engage the new.
3
3.1
Explorers are invited into a village. A man and a woman love one another in a way they create between them. They love within a space that is abolishing itself. A half stifled birth moan is also a death cry.
There are alternatives
3.2
3.21
.One can will mastery so obsessively that experience of the other, however close and detailed, remains impersonal.
Love is precluded. The explorer is a craftsman of manipulation…. Knowledge is merely instrumental (only for prediction and control).
3.22
The conquistadors appear again and again in different costumes with different cover stories (e.g.,” Christianity triumphant,” “the white man’s burden,” “Aryan superiority,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” “Pax Americana,” “the new world order”).
Their first victims could not imagine them. Now all are infected. The kill is less certain.
Above Exert from A Dream of Reason by Avron Soyer.
