An Open
Response to Adam Roberts' Review of Matrix Warrior, by Jake
Horsley
(Or: "Up
the Arsehole of Literary Criticism We Go")
Let me say first off that I enjoyed
enormously your, slightly self-indulgent, definitely overlong, but highly
insightful review of Matrix Warrior. You are correct in at least one of
your assumptions, namely, that I tend to prefer opposition to slavish praise
(depending of course on where it comes from). It seems to me however, leading
your piece, that your allegiance to an ideology (I presume Marxist in essence?)
that is repelled by my book is at odds with a more simple, instinctive response
that finds you enjoying the work despite yourself? That’s an assumption
right there, but a necessary one if I am to account for some of
the glaring contradictions and blind
spots in your treatise (it’s certainly more than a mere
“review”).
Your opening summary of the book is
concise and wholly accurate, right up to and beyond the part (my favourite)
about “cohorts of intelligent teenagers taking it as their Bible, poring
over its pages, feeding avidly . . . and even attempting to live their lives in
accord with its tenets.” Despite your misgivings, I for one sincerely
hope you are correct in this assertion. It’s when you start to talk about
energy and the book’s professed “vagueness” on this score
that you seem to lose your own clarity. (Tit for tat? It seems you level the
same charge at Matrix Warrior.) Only a Marxist could consider
“energy” to be a mystical or “New Age” term. And here
was I thinking I’d been daringly scientific! In “Reading the Code:
Everything is Energy” I tried to get down to the brass tacks of energy:
Electrons, neutrons, protons. The point, if point there is, about “energy
begetting energy,” and indeed of the whole book, is that energy is all
there is. If you don’t know what I mean by energy, I’m afraid
can only stare blankly, as I might at a fish brother who doubts the reality of
water and wants me to define it. Why reduce energy to “Will and
action,” since these (as you see the terms) are clearly results or
manifestations of energy, hence anything but synonymous with it. (NB:
“Will” as used in Matrix Warrior is NOT
synonymous with the common or even Nietzschean meaning, that of “will
power”; it is used as a magical term, as what connects the individual to
his environment; as such it is receptive-feminine-as well as creative,
masculine.)
From this point on, the reviewer’s
sloppiness multiplies, like spores between a wino’s toes. First example:
“If Horsley hasn’t read Schopenhauer then he’s certainly read
several people who have read Schopenhauer.” Anyone who has read anything
by anyone, within the realms of philosophical thought, will surely have
been exposed to Schopenhauer’s ideas, however removed from the source. What
does this prove? Nada.
[Personal info: I have never read
Schopenhauer, and besides a smattering of Kierkegaard and the French
existentialists, have restricted myself to Nietzsche, who as a philosopher at
least retains a little
poetry (irrationality) to balance out
his polemic.]
Ten paragraphs in, you finally throw
down the gauntlet and declare that the book “is harmful and it is
wrong.” This is then followed by one of the most revealing and
potentially self-disparaging statements ever made by a reviewer: “Or so
it seems to my plugged-in perspective.” Indeed.
Here’s the thing, Adam: Although
you profess to entertain the premise of the book (that none of this is real),
it seems to me that you never actually take the red pill,
not even for a moment. If you had, even in your imagination, for the sake of
argument and for the lucidity of the review, none of your following points
(specifically the ones I am quoting back at you) would be possible. As it is,
your treatise, eminently readable as it is, really makes no sense at all within
the context set up for it.
Firstly, regarding your
“ubermensch standing on top of the mountain drunk on his own
Will-to-Power,” you state, “He is myth, not reality.” Well,
duh! Your vision of the ubermensch is certainly a myth, in the derogatory sense
of the word, i.e., something not true; Nietzsche’s and that posited
(satirically) by Matrix Warrior is something else, however. It is a
myth in the sense of something beyond the merely factual.
The essence of the matrix warrior (so
far as I can gauge it) is that, via “unplugging,” he reinvents
himself exactly so, as myth, and not reality. The fact that the proles (if I
may use the term) can only ever see him as a fantasy figure to worship or
revile, and themselves (their world) as a reality to be oppressed by or to
“reform,” this only goes to prove the nature of the illusion:
diabolically binding to the extent that only a very few ever dare to throw out
the baby of “reality,” along with the bathwater of consensus.
You continue to insist that the myth is
“not true,” and that “Human beings are not like this; we are
social creatures.” Spoken like a true humaton.
IF the book/movie WERE true, if its
arguments were right, then society itself, and even humanity, would be a trap
which we are (collectively) obliged to escape from, if we are not to disappear
along with it. Apparently this simple idea is too much for the reviewer to grok
(i.e., to incorporate into his cognitive process without being deranged by it),
even for the short time it takes to write his review.
If I am beginning to seem feisty, or
even impolite, so be it. I am upholding my end of our Blakean friendship. After
all, you pull no punches yourself with your sweeping vilification of the
author’s vision when you write that, “Horsley has broken one of the
crucial Blakean commands. He has not Created
a System of his own; he has become
enslav’d to another man’s, or to the system of two other men (the
brothers Wachowski).”
I plead innocent of all charges. Unless, that is, you
have answered your own question—as to whether Horsley “actually,
literally believe[s] this?”—categorically in the negative. If you
have persuaded yourself that Matrix Warrior is
“nothing more than a useful metaphor out of which [to] write a zesty
pastiche ... and popular movie cash-in,” then your judgment would
certainly be sound. Since you cannot, by your own admission, persuade yourself
of this (“It is impossible to say”), then how can you be sure that
the Wachowskis didn’t base their movie on the author’s
“system”? That the traditions which Blake, Crowley, Castaneda, and
now Horsley have helped create for themselves are but variations on a single,
true (and
possibly divine) system, for which Man
is no measure at all (much less a pair of Hollywood hucksters)??
Following this (however irresistible,
still inexcusable) presumption on your part, you then come off the rails
entirely, and plummet straight into the pit of Marxist-feminist proselytising,
at which point all critical faculties are inevitably banished.
You quote Matrix Warrior:
“According to Horsley, ‘sex is either a lewd and slightly sordid
indulgence, a potentially deadly distraction, a total irrelevance, or else an
act of world-saving numinosity’ and counter that “This is so
bizarrely puritanical an assertion it is difficult to know what to do with
it.” You could start by re-quoting the passage in its proper context, at
which point you might find that the author is himself also gently chiding the
movie’s simple-mindedness; meaning that you are mocking the author for his
simple-mindedness for having mocked th
e true or deserved
object of your mockery (forgive the tormented grammar of that sentence). The
author’s actual view of sex appears in the following sentence:
“It seems logical that, since matrix warriors’ prime concern is
that of energy, and since sex is the most energy-consuming and/or
–creating act they can engage in, it would be viewed with corresponding gravitas, and handled
with the utmost care and respect.” Ah, well.
Your claim that Dr
Strangelove’s Jack D. Ripper “exhibited all the qualities of a Horsleyan
Matrix Warrior” (thanks for inventing a new adjective, by the way) is
even more off-the-mark. These are the same qualities you previously cite as
“detached, passionate, ruthless, graceful, patient, imaginative, full of
laughter, living with humility and prowess.” Besides being ruthless, and
at a pinch passionate (though demented is closer to the mark), do these really
sound to you like qualities attributable to Sterling Hayden’s deranged
General? Maybe we saw a different movie?
Let me reiterate: Matrix warriors are
not psychopaths: they just appear that way, sometimes, to humatons.
Your advice to my (alas still imaginary)
“constituency of bright adolescent males” not to “confuse [their]
own muddle of sexual yearning/guilt with the way the world actually is”
seems a tad, ah, ingenuous. The book’s premise is that the world
ISN’T the way it actually is, remember? Your advice seems to me to be
more or less in accord with that of the matrix itself: don’t worry if you
are confused and disillusioned, just plug back in, and face reality! Since
you’re a Marxist, and obviously a clever chap, I’m sure this
isn’t how you want to come across; which only underlines the fuzziness of
your argument to me.
Finally, let me address your most
provocative point. You say that I “soft-peddle” the fact that
warriors in The Matrix (the movie that is) “feel no remorse that
they are ... murdering countless ordinary people.” Yet the book covers
this point on several different occasions, in admitting to the necessity of
unplugging humatons even if it kills them (since they will die soon
anyway). Once again, you conveniently ignore the original premise in order to
make your (moral, i.e., humatonic) point. Since the matrix is not real,
plugged-in humans (i.e., everyone) are already worse than dead in any case.
Killing them is only setting them free from the satanic agenda of AI. If
it’s a question of everyone dying or everyone dying except for a tiny few
("chosen” by God or Nature or
Fate or Lucids, or whatever), this is surely no question at all, and certainly
not a moral one. It’s wholly practical, and the only argument I can see
for letting everyone die would be that humanity is not worth saving anyway (a perfectly
tenable argument, but not one I would imagine you have sympathy for).
You write that such
“murderous” tactics are “exciting as cinema, but would be
appalling as reality.” Again: what reality? Watch those knee-jerk
assumptions, Adam. Something else is doing your thinking for you. And it
ain’t lucid.
“Horsley isn’t, of course,
trying to write a recruitment manual for the Shining Path guerrilla force; but
perhaps, if he had the courage of his convictions, he ought to be.”
That is quite a challenge. Are you sure I’m not?
Some of those teen cohorts already amassing would perhaps disagree. Sounds OK
with me. Time will tell. As for courage; if I was comfortable claiming ANY
convictions, I’d be sure and back
‘em up. But convictions, as Robert Anton Wilson once said, make convicts.
Get thee behind me, Newton!
“He or she must be prepared to
kill repeatedly, and to feel no guilt or anxiety about this. This is
‘ruthlessness’. It’s also so close to psychopathy as to be,
well, exactly the same thing.”
This is true, and you’ll get no
argument from me, but only to the humatonic perspective. As
a Marxist you advocate the collective perspective, and yet your point of view
is filtered through personal ego, terminally flawed from its
“birth.” From a truly collective perspective, the death of
individuals is immaterial, just as the death of cells in a body is immaterial,
providing it be part of the regeneration of the whole. And so we arrive at the
very darkest part of your review.
“This is the shadow side of the
superman ethos; it shades inevitably into fascism.”
You have summoned the evil spectre, and
not without cause, and so it befalls me to do battle with it.
Once again this is true, but only to
humatons like Marx and Hitler. Hitler took spiritual or magical
truths and, unable to grok them save from the perspective of his twisted little
ego, he twisted them into mundane social reform programs, programs that not
only missed the whole point (that life is transformation, and ruled not
by form but by consciousness), but thoroughly debased and perverted
it in the process, until it became the exact inverse of what was
intended (by “God,” Physics, or the higher designs of
“evolution,” whichever you prefer).
When Blake wrote, “Better to
murder an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desire,” did he
really mean us to go out killing babies in their cribs? Hardly. He was speaking
poetically, from the “Infinity perspective,” the world of the
Imagination, which is bigger and more encompassing than the world of Reason.
What is an evil act in the rational world of form—to kill a
child—is nothing at all in the realm of the Infinite, where the only
“sin” is restriction. But the difference between a Poet (or a
Lucid) and a
psychopath is that the latter takes
poetic or magical truths literally, having no other way to take them, and acts
accordingly, without awareness.
A Lucid (like a Poet) is defined by
awareness. He or she is “beyond good and evil,” sure, but only as a
comet, hurricane, earthquake, or star (or termite) is beyond it. These things
simply are what they are, and knowing that “all that is, is holy,”
they act accordingly, with full acceptance of their place in the greater scheme
of things. Let rip! The Sun doesn’t worry about burning us with its rays,
does it? God forbid. So why should we worry about the full _expression of our
natures as warriors? All’s fair after all, and if love is the law, then
war is the warrior’s love in action. If you can’t stand the heat,
get out of the Cosmos. Stay safe inside the matrix.
2003 Jake Horsley