Futures and Fictions
Page 29
Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a couple of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. An old woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowers from a basket, and tall young men, wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.
He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute.
As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses’ necks and soothe them, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope. . . .” They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits haunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.
They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.
This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.
Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.
Now do you believe in them? Are they not more credible? But there is one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible.
At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Oreet Ashery is a visual artist and educator working with political fiction, gender materiality, biotechnologies and potential communities, in local and international contexts. Ashery’s practice spans live situations and performances, moving image, photography, workshops, writing and assemblages and turns to areas such as music, costume, publishing and activism. Ashery’s current work is an artist web-series titled Revisiting Genesis on d
igital death, memory as identity and feminist art reincarnations. Recent works have included The World is Flooding, a Tate Modern Turbine Hall performance project (2014), and Party for Freedom, an Artangel commission (2013). Ashery is a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art Painting Department (2013-15), a Fine Art Fellow at the Stanley Picker Gallery and a Practitioner in Residence at Chelsea College of Art, Fine Art (2016) where she runs No Nothing Salons in the Dark. Ashery’s work can be found in art, cultural and academic publications worldwide.
Originally formatted in 1945, AUDINT currently consists of Eleni Ikoniadou, Patrick Defasten, Toby Heys, Steve Goodman and Souzanna Zamfe. Having been individually drafted into the research cell by IREX2, over the past eight years they have been collectively: researching the weaponisation of vibration; developing a cartography of liminal waveformed perception (unsound); and investigating the ways in which frequencies are utilised to modulate our understanding of presence/non-presence, entertainment/torture and ultimately life/death. The information garnered from these activities is subsequently utilised to produce audio recordings, computer software, art installations, performances, books and films. Featuring texts from thirty-two contributors, AUDINT’s upcoming anthology, Unsound : Undead will be published by Univocal in Autumn 2017. The book listens to how disparate cultures deploy frequencies to channel and populate the interzone between life and death. For more information about AUDINT visit www.audint.net.
Annett Busch works as a freelance curator, writer and translator and lives in Trondheim and Berlin. Among other present and future projects she is collaborating on ongoing research into Pan-African magazines and developing an artistic electronic-book format. Her long-term project of the French-to-German translation of Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space is forthcoming with Spector Books and an exhibition and series of screenings and talks on and with the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is currently in progress (co-curated with Tobias Hering and with the support of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin).
Bridget Crone is a curator and writer based in London. She is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Bridget was the Artistic Director of Media Art Bath (2006-11), and has held numerous curatorial roles in the UK and Australia including at The Showroom, London; Arnolfini, Bristol; The Ian Potter Museum of Art; and Melbourne International Biennial, Melbourne. Bridget’s recent project, The Cinemas Project: Exploring the Spectral Spaces of Cinema (2014), took place across multiple sites in regional Australia, and included five newly commissioned moving image and performance-based works and a substantial research project. Recent publications include The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image (Cornerhouse, 2012), with contributions by Alain Badiou and others (new edition forthcoming from Intellect, 2017). Recent essays include contributions to Fassbinder Jetz! (Deutsche Film Institut, 2013), Fitch/Trecartin: Priority Innfield (Zabludovich Collection, 2014) and Amanda Beech: Final Machine (Urbanomic, 2013). Bridget has given talks and lectures at University Paris VIII, Tate Britain, Photographers Gallery and The Whitechapel Gallery.
Laboria Cuboniks (b. 2014) is a polymorphous xenofeminist collective comprised of six women across five countries, working in collaboration online to redefine a feminism adequate to the twenty-first century. As an anagram of the “Nicolas Bourbaki” group of twentieth-century French mathematicians, Cuboniks also advances an affirmation of abstraction as an epistopolitical necessity for twenty-first-century claims on equality. Espousing reason and vigorous anti-naturalism, she seeks to dismantle gender implicitly. Cuboniks is a multi-taloned, tetra-headed creature uncomfortably navigating the fields of art, design, architecture, archeology, philosophy, techno-feminism, sexuality studies, digital music, translation, writing and regularly experiments with the use of evolutionary algorithms in offensive cybersecurity.
Elvira Dyangani Ose is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, independent curator and member of the Thought Council at the Fondazione Prada. She is part of the curatorial team of the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2016, and was curator of the eighth edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, GIBCA 2015. Previously, Dyangani Ose served as Curator International Art at Tate Modern (2011–14), Curator at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, as Artistic Director of Rencontres Picha, Lubumbashi Biennial (2013) and as Guest Curator of the triennial SUD, Salon Urbain de Douala (2010).
Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, Visiting Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet, 1998) and Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (Afterall, 2012) and co-editor of Post Punk Then and Now (Repeater, 2016), The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography (Third Text, 2011), Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom? (Koenig Books, 2010) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982-1998 (Chicago University Press, 2007).
Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (Zer0, 2009), Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Zer0, 2014) and The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater, 2016). He is also the co-editor (with Gavin Butt and Kodwo Eshun) of Post-Punk Then and Now (Repeater, 2016). He has written for numerous publications including Frieze, New Humanist, Sight&-Sound and The Wire. He was a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Henriette Gunkel is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (Palgrave, 2012), What Can a Body Do? (Campus, 2010) and Frieda Grafe: 30 Filme (Brinkman & Bose, 2013). She is currently working on a monograph on Africanist science-fictional interventions, and on two further volumes: Visual Cultures as Time Travel, co-authored with Ayesha Hameed (Sternberg, forthcoming) and We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions (Duke University Press, forthcoming).