The Dimensions of a Cave: A Novel by Greg Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Crimes of the Spirit

This is a novel about power. Professional power. Governmental power. Scientific power. The power of art. Power in relationships. Ultimately the accumulation of power to oneself. And how power works, especially when abused. The book, I think, offers something new, or at least a new interpretation of the perennial attempt to deal with power as a fundamental fact of human existence. It’s sci-fi but only just (see https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...).

The striving for power is our original sin. We want things that other people don’t want to give us. So we coerce them. We want to create things that require many other people to realise. So we persuade people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do. Others want us to contribute to realising their desires in conflict with our own. So we resist and if necessary resist with violence. There is no escape from the striving for power and we are constantly inventing new forms of grabbing for it, many criminal but as the book’s protagonist points out “There are crimes we don’t even have words for yet. Crimes of the psyche, the spirit.” These crimes of power-seeking are what Jackson explores.

The principle weapon of power is language, the power of language embodied in communication, in technology and in law. Who controls this embodied language has the power to coerce, persuade and resist others in their striving for power. Language is “the immaterial machine, which writes itself out of perceptibility by suggesting it is only the transparent, ineffable medium of our lives.” We are in other words “flies caught in webs. We didn’t make the webs.”

And words can kill. They have ethical import. Words translated into code and algorithms can kill with exquisite subtlety. And like the inverse of a neutron bomb, they can kill the spirit - that which is not linguistic in human beings - while leaving the physical person unharmed.

…[W]hat the algorithms want, reward, and select for, and as our desire to rebel against this becomes yet another way to manipulate us, one more tactic to exploit while the policing function moves inward and installs itself, like the most potent software, in the alloy of our brains.”

As the journalist Quentin Jones, Jackson’s protagonist, knows, using language to confront power and undermine it is a paradoxical endeavour.

“‘We use abstractions to hold on to realities too big and messy to approach as they are’, Quentin said. ‘This was the root of human knowledge and power. But our abstractions ruled us and turned deadly precisely for what made them powerful in the first place: that they suggested we could encounter and subdue far more than we could.’”

Sin cannot overcome sin, even with good intentions. Idealism and power-seeking are necessarily linked. To desire an ideal implies the desire for the means to achieve that ideal whatever that ideal may be - science, peace, personal salvation, or even truth. Ideals inevitably become rationalisations for the most horrible human actions. Idealists are tolerated because “Realists have always slept better knowing that idealists are out there dying in the name of justice.”

So terrorists threaten atrocities in the name of justice. And their potential victims counter with atrocities in the name of protection. First with disinformation, then with propaganda, then with rationalisations and justifications, then physical violence, made extreme through the faculty of the scientific, sociological, and psychological plans, designs, and command-structures of language. Or alternatively, according to Jackson’s story, through the latest language-technology of Artificial Intelligence, an entirely linguistic reality which both shapes desires and fulfils them simultaneously - “the numerology of the soul.”

So who has power in such a safety-hungry world? According to Greg Jackson, and I think correctly, it is language itself. Of course it has to be. This is what Thomas Ligotti has called The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It is in the nature of language to induce us to hide what is not-language from us, including ourselves. We unwittingly allow language to become reality.

The only way to outsmart language is to recognise the seemingly divine power of language and to essentially do something it doesn’t expect. The ancient Egyptians recognised language as the product of divine creation and knew they couldn’t really comprehend it. By making it a god, Thoth, they saw its own subjectivity as a living entity. Medieval mystics - Christians like St. John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, and Jewish Kabbalists like Nachmanides and Abulafia - undermined the power of language by divorcing it from all referents except itself. Poets of all ages from Homer and the biblical authors have twisted language to the point of incomprehension in order to make it say things it prefers not to.

The common historical strategy is clear. Language cannot be used anywhere or anytime without giving it more power, or overcome therefore by language. The only possibly effective approach available is to succumb to language totally, to give up, to recognise its invincibility, and hope to turn its power upon itself by allowing it to go wherever it wants. That is, by accepting language as reality and dealing with it as such. We can then consciously explore language and its effects from the inside as it were, within the belly of the beast (or the interactive simulation we’ve become part of) without being overcome by it. The search then becomes not one for power but for what might be called “the dark matter of the soul.”

It takes a clever journalist like Jackson’s Quentin Jones to undermine the latest technological ploy of language to give it yet more power. In essence his strategy is compatible with the Egyptians, the mystics and the poets - the recognition that everything he writes is fraudulent because language is in control. His mission is to create a “rigorous but rigorously incomplete story.” This is the “necessary, timeless fraud of the human endeavour.” Quentin is fully aware that, quite apart from any technological dominance of his experience, “The story had me; I didn’t have it. ”

And indeed, Jackson’s story had me, I didn’t have it.

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