My Nowhere

[nemorathwald]

Today, "Perhaps The Stars", the fourth and final installment of the Terra Ignota series of science fiction novels, is released in the United States. I have a lot to say about it, but will save my review for another day. For now, as a form of raising a glass in toast to celebrate the completion of the Terra Ignota series, I'm going to describe a dream I had. What interests me the most is what the scene in this dream implies about the world it would have to exist in.

In the Terra Ignota series, there are characters called the Utopians. The word "Utopia" has come to mean "unrealistically positive future world", but it originally meant "Nowhere". Each of these Utopians have their own Nowhere; an imaginative version of the world that has a special meaning to them personally. They wear display fabric which shows a computer-generated image of that Nowhere. I imagine that if I were a Utopian, I might select this dream to be my Nowhere. 
 

In the dream, we're driving through Tennessee. We see an artificial lake with an artificial island created for a film about a board game. The island is made from dark black rocks in the shape of equally-sized hexagonal platforms of varying heights. There are plenty of trees and foliage, but not enough to obscure the shapes. You'd think the board game would be Settlers of Cataan, but they made up a fictional board game for the film. The lake has unusually clear water, through which the bottom can be seen, which is also covered in hexagons.

Crossing the lake by boat, we reach a pavilion on a forested shore. It's some sort of stylized jungle temple made of yellowish-brown concrete covered with plants. Not stone. I'm guessing that would have been too expensive. The film-makers who made that island didn't make this. Who made it?

The antechamber is long and twisty, mostly stairs going up the slope of the shore. The antechamber is full of small, open-top tanks about a foot or two across, containing tiny alligators and lizards of every type. I hate that, but I understand the aesthetic. I hasten on.

Beyond this antechamber is a room with doors to many other rooms, and in the center, a row of three concrete sheaths, in which there are three ceremonial weapons. A sword, an axe, and a spear. None of them are sharp. It is as if all three weapons had been made in a metal shop with a grinder and welder in a week by someone who didn't know anything about weapons; the spear was made out of metal rods and dowels. To me, this lends them the charm of a child at play in a backyard. It seems more suitable for this place than replica weapons.

 

Signage over the weapons display tells all who visit this place that we may touch the exhibits, and asks that we please leave this place the way it is for the enjoyment of future visitors.

 

Off to the sides appears to be some sort of classroom, and a kitchenette, neither of which would have looked too out of place on Tatooine.

 

Through a space in the floor, about three feet in diameter, with a small railing, I see another floor below this one, filled with what appears to be a densely-packed profusion of memorabilia. I search and soon find an out-of-the-way stair going down. It's cramped even going single-file. The shelves and nooks on its walls are so packed with antique card games and tiny machines from 1920s penny arcades that I have to take care not to knock them down while passing.

 

In the lower floor, I'm not surprised to find video games among the memorabilia. They're apparently ROMs on SD cards in plastic clamshell boxes, labeled with screenshots and names I don't recognize. There seems to be an emulator system built into the table which will play these.

When I woke up, I immediately wrote down all of this. My final, dim memories from the dream involve answering the phone even though I was not part of the group that built this place. I instinctively knew it was no one's job to answer the phone and help the caller, and so it fell to me, a stranger, and at the same time, no one could be a stranger here.

What interests me most about this scene is what I can deduce from it about the rest of the Nowhere world that it would have to exist in. I probably dreamed about it because it is the type of world I spent my life creating. It reminds me of experiences I've had at local Burning Man events; plywood structures containing an interactive art project, or rope hammocks, or hundreds of handwritten notes of wishes and dreams tucked into the cracks between the planks.

Burning Man and theme park experiences are crafted to gradually separate you from your day-to-day life into a Nowhere world. But this dream presented me with a Nowhere experience merged into mundane life, and the realities of mundane life, such as video games, are embedded in pockets within the Nowhere. It elevates day-to-day life.

 

Consider not only that this is a theme park pavilion with no theme park. Consider also that this is a world in which it is possible to encounter such free-floating experiences free of charge in unexpected places.

 

It would have to be a world in which we all have Basic Income. That would not give us enough money to hire professionals, but we could afford to use the income from our day jobs to build things out of a dream. We'd have to do it ourselves. It would be affordable concrete instead of stone. It would involve jack-of-all-trades autodidact polymaths far more often than it would involve pros who make replica weapons for a living all day every day and nothing else.

 

It would still require a group to pool their labors. The classroom and kitchenette are clues to the social structure that built the physical structure. The Nowhere was not separate from the living of life itself.

 

I don't personally like some of the specifics of the pavilion -- for example, reptiles are very unpleasant for me-- but that's beside the point. It's not a "Utopia" for me personally. Something that merely gives me whatever I want. It's a "Utopia" in the sense of a Nowhere. The dream is a Nowhere of a world of small social structures that create small physical structures.

It has often been said that there was a time when almost all human beings, almost every day, sang and danced and told stories. We mostly did so for free. Mass media showed us the greatest singers and dancers and storytellers in the world, and then we stopped singing and dancing and telling stories every day, and watched the paid experts do so instead. I dreamed of a world of autodidactic polymaths, just barely good enough at a lot of things, creating things that they dreamed about, in the mundane places where they spend their time.

Their everyday is like a pilgrimage day, and their everywhere is their Nowhere.