The Relevance of Clive Barker’s Imajica to the Modern World - Introduction
Trigger Warnings: Mild existential dread
Cycles. Cycles of history, of violence, revenge, and peace. Virtuous cycles, viscous cycles. Sin into forgiveness into more sin, but never redemption. Karma, samsara, the lifestream. The status quo. Not just cycles, but cycles that we’re trapped in.
Perhaps some less abstract examples? How about wedding rings, a symbol of the cycle of everlasting love. Going by the divorce[1,2] and pornography[3] statistics, though, people don’t generally seem to be capable of monogamous everlasting love. Unless perhaps there’s a financial advantage. It’s almost as though the very notion of marriage was designed around the idea of value transfer[4]. Funny, that. I’m tempted to think that money allows the monotony of a long-term relationship to be overcome with extravagant activities, or perhaps the impossibility of living alone requires a lifelong partnership now, but these are just hypotheses. I wonder, if lifespans were longer, would the divorce rate increase? Perhaps love itself is a cycle, with some span of time per partner? There’s no shame if that’s the case, just worth a thought. Nevertheless, it sems that everlasting love doesn’t, or can’t, exist.
Still too abstract? How about cycles of addiction: chemical and habitual. Recovery and relapse. Drug addicts never describe themselves as cured; they forever retain the identity of drug addict, always trying to take the next exit off of the roundabout only to find it closed[5]. Social media addiction. Notifications with dings and little lights flashing with frequencies tuned to make us keep interacting to get more notifications[6]. Netflix and Amazon Prime, giving us series and using our watching data to generate more series for us to watch to give them data. TV series themselves, comic and manga series, movies, and now serialised fiction that just never ends, it just keeps on going and going, season after season, every show the same. And the ultimate serialised drama these days, the news. Addicting us with fear-based adrenaline. A biological response, the mental equivalent of the itch-scratch cycle. Crisis into crisis into crisis. Pick up a paper on the bus in a morning to get your first hit. More hits come throughout the day on those digital boards around cities, keeping you on the hook. Those little microbursts of adrenaline you get when the word “Breaking” appears, barely different than the social media notification bell. Barely different than Pavlov’s bell to be honest. I wonder if the name “Pavlov” gave you a little pinch of adrenaline as well? What about Vladimir? Don’t you check that news app now, you’re not a dog. Oh, you think you’re not addicted, and you can stop anytime you want? I’m sure that’s true. Me though? I feel very trapped. Because this idea of a cycle is a metaphor for being trapped. Trapped, yet with the naïve perception of freedom because we can still move around it.
What about the very idea of a week in the modern world? We seem to believe that there is a weekend, but then the same week just begins again. If the Netflix series we were watching last week carries over into the next, then perhaps there isn’t even a weekend at all. At least workaholics don’t have to pretend that there’s an end to it, or that any day is different from any other. Amazon will still deliver parcels on a Sunday after all. A friend of mine jokingly called awareness of this cycle “Smunday” (where your Sunday is ruined due to the dread of Monday’s approach), but I wouldn’t undersell the existential dread of being trapped in a cycle you can’t escape as a joke, especially seeing as everyone under the age of about 30 feels it so deeply as a part of their everyday existence. “But they’re just so lazy, and entitled”, say the commentators. Birth, school, job, marriage, kids, retire, death[7]. Sometimes the order changes, isn’t that nice? How dare they want something better! Why can’t they just go around and around the hamster wheel like the rest of us? Why not indeed. Too smart for their own good, this next generation. Doing all these silly degrees, learning how to think critically. That’s a one-way trip to misery, as H.P. Lovecraft poignantly noted in the opening paragraph of the cosmic horror story “Call of Cthulhu”. Just get a trade. I’m sure the specific thing you do will be the last thing to be automated away.
We do love our cycles, don’t we? We venerate them in our religions and try to mimic them in our societies. They’re intimately linked with the idea of stability. Eternal, infinite stability. We move around them, feeling free, and yet nothing really changes. And we want more of them! A cyclical economy is the new big goal, symbolising the idea of perfect reuse and recycling. A new cycle to replace the old one. A big circular canal we’re building with no start and no end, moving around and around. People in boats, born riding with the flow. The water, liquid money, moving between and around frozen blocks of capital. Some people tie these blocks of capital to their boats and claim them as their own. Some people, like Jeff Bezos, get so much capital that they act as dams and rivulets, diverting large amounts of the flow to themselves. But nevertheless, the cycle continues. Motion is generated by dropping more people and more water into the canal via economic growth, and everyone is worried that it’s going to overflow. Some think it already is.
But don’t you feel trapped by the canal itself, it’s very existence? Is this all there is? After all, if we don’t take and reshape the Earth in some way, make some capital, won’t humans be born, live and die having no impact whatsoever? Yet there’s no room to do so without hurting someone else. “Take only pictures, leave only footprints” expanded to the wilderness of the entire world; that seems to be the goal of the environmentalist movement. They care about all humans equally, but perhaps at the expense of any humans individually. We used to be in bigger boats here in the West, but Thatcher and Reagan did away with that in the 80s. Now even families and friends only ride near one another, never in the same boat. The Soviets would have had us all in the same boat, a magnificent cruise liner of collective spirit, but it turns out that if you’re not careful, the lower decks can get pretty uninhabitable[8,9]. Russia is just like the West now, as much as they like to deny it. Forever playing one another in the metaphorical game of chess, the collapse of the Soviet Union just meaning that now we’re all playing by the same capitalist ruleset. I’m not entirely sure what China is doing. Hoarding all the capital ice blocks and refilling the canal at their own leisure? Loaning us extra chess pieces at a decent interest rate? Something like that.
The boat on a canal metaphor of the economy breaks down eventually (the economy is quite complex, it turns out), but it contains some useful analogies for me. Do we regular folk have control over our boats, or are we just being pulled along with the current? Who made the canal in the first place[10]? Most of all, why can’t we realise that this idealised cyclical economy is just another example of a cycle that traps us all? All my choices are made within this framework now, of capital being bought and sold. My knowledge of physics is worth, apparently, the monetary cost of training me to PhD level, and now I loan out those skills for rental salary. A soldier’s very life is valued in the same way, perhaps losing its true worth at the same time, depending on your point of view. Even our time is commodified and sold, to the extent that wage slaves speak of wanting more hours, rather than wanting more money. All this to fit within the conceptual framework of a cyclical economy.
Let’s talk about the physics of human society. The thermodynamic (physical) analogue of the perfect cyclical economy is called a Carnot cycle, the purpose of which is to minimise the energetic “waste” of a system. But “waste” in the Carnot cycle is defined as the energy not used in the designed function of the system. So how do we define waste in the human economy? What is the purpose of the economy? Modern politics seems to suggest that the purpose of the economy is to grow, but I think they’re mixing up cause and effect here. Surely the purpose of the economy is human happiness? Or at least it would be, if we had any real say in its structure and function.
Are we humans designing the cycles and systems that bind us, or are we just trapped in something that already exists? Did you know that marching ants can get trapped in circles[11]? Whereas the hamster is in a wheel specifically designed and put there by someone else, marching ants just follow their neighbours and the ants in front. Each ant follows its neighbours and the ones in front until eventually, in some cases, the ones in front are also the ones at the very back. And then that’s it, the circle is complete and they’ll march ‘til they die, not understanding that they were trapped at all. Not understanding, not thinking, just going with the flow. The physical system this is most akin to is called a liquid crystalline system, and the mathematical structure is called a steady vortex flow, or a constant vector (tensor) field. But, I hear you say, humans wouldn’t be so stupid as ants, they’ll leave the system once they notice that they’re trapped in it, and going around in circles. But with us humans being so smart, all it really takes is a more complicated trap. It turns out that human travel behaviour is highly predictable[12], so from a certain perspective, humans aren’t thinking either, or at least they aren’t choosing. They’re just doing what they’re expected to do given certain external conditions, moving in such predictable ways that it can be accurately computationally modelled[13]. Ants behave like liquid crystalline molecules in these situations, and just like liquid crystals follow mathematical equations of motion, it's as though ants, and humans, are also subject to some external laws of societal motion, rather than making decisions based upon free will. Yes the patterns are more complex for humans, but they still exist. So what if the system that humans are moving around in is so big, so abstract, that they don’t even notice it? What does freedom mean in that sort of situation?
Cycles don’t have ends, and maybe that’s why we love them. Ends are scary, after all. What will I do once I’ve finished a book? It’s so profound to me, and yet I can never have that feeling of reading it for the first time again. What do I do when I die? That’s so scary that people pretend that their genes are somehow existentially meaningful, and that our children are a literal extension of ourselves. Generational cycles, children living the unfulfilled lives of their parents. But perhaps these cycles and systems are themselves the problem for an “advanced” civilisation. Again, these cycles, although sometimes real, are mostly just metaphors for being trapped while still having the naïve perception of motion, of freedom.
What if stability is not good enough for a society that has outgrown its childhood? Like teenagers rebelling against their parents, the results of continued repression can only be anger, and probably violence. I want more than this system, more than a politics arguing about the same things again and again, limited by philosophies with no imagination1. I want more spirituality than stagnant religions can offer[14]. I want more sensation and wonder than current societal structures provide. Whatever part we humans play in any of these systems, I want to break the cycles themselves. I want brave ideas of gender and sexuality, identity, and thought itself based in ideas of mutual consent and even meta-consent, unrestrained by resurgent historical shame and repression. I want to leave the canal entirely, and bring those metaphysical ideas of enlightenment, karma and samsara into the physical, a metaphor brought into reality. And the literary framework that best represents these ideas is Imajica by Clive Barker[15]. If you want to explore these ideas yourself before I give you a first impression that you won’t be able to unhear, then read the book. I guarantee that it’ll be a worthwhile 30 hours of your life. The audiobook is also good, the reader (Simon Vance) has the perfect English accent for all the characters.
Barker invites us to imagine being trapped within the greatest cycle of all, beyond politics, beyond karma, the cycle of existence itself. This is the cycle of the Imajica, both physical and metaphysical. As the Matrix did after him2, albeit with a different scope, Barker also asks what causes us to be trapped this way. His main claim, I believe, is that things that happen on the individual scale are reflected at the cosmic scale, and the politics and philosophies of both are inseparable from one another[16]. Thus the now (in)famous ideas of Jordan Peterson3 are represented (before you try to change the big things, tidy your room), but are paired with the idea that change can and should also come from the top down. He also suggests that real enlightenment might require us to agree philosophically before we agree politically. After all, the house of the Maestro Sartori, the greatest magician in all the Dominions:
“-had been a place of great souls and great ambition, where all commonplace debate had been banned. If you wanted to talk politics or tittle-tattle you went to the coffee house; if you wanted commerce, to the Exchange. Here, only miracles. Here, only the rising of the spirit. And, yes, love, if it was pertinent (which it was, so often); and sometimes bloodletting. But never the prosaic, never the trivial. Here the man who brought the strangest tale was the most welcome. Here every excess was celebrated if it brought visions, and every vision analysed for the hints it held to the nature of the Everlasting.”
Our politicians don’t seem to understand this, but I suppose it’s not their job to think beyond the scope of their own systems of control. That’s our job.
1Even our word for political transformation is loaded with the trappings of a cyclical process: revolution
2The Wachowskis worked with Barker on some Hellraiser comics, and in Book of the Damned deliver the best description of Karmic enlightenment via physical sensation that I’ve ever read
3Who himself just channels Friedrich Nietzsche, to be honest
Bibliography
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[2] UK Office of National Statistics. Date Accessed: 27/04/2022. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/datasets/divorcesinenglandandwales
[3] Pornhub Annual Statistical Insights. Date Accessed: 27/04/2022. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/yir-2021
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[10] Varoufakis, Yanis. (2018). “Talking to My Daughter about the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism”, Bodley Head. ISBN:9781847924445
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[13] Hudson, Alex. “Supermarkets ‘can read your mind to get you to buy exactly what they want’”, 10/05/2017. Date Accessed: 27/04/2022. https://metro.co.uk/2017/05/10/supermarkets-can-predict-if-youll-buy-soup-based-on-the-weather-6627836/
[14] Cusack, Carole M. et al. (2019). “The Sacred in Fantastic Fandom: Essays on the Intersection of Religion and Pop Culture”. McFarland. ISBN: 9781476670836
[15] Barker, Clive. (1991). “Imajica”. Harper Collins. ISBN:0060179325
[16] Hanson, Benjamin S. “Fairness At Scale“, 30/04/2022. Date Accessed: 03/05/2022. https://abstractacademic.co.uk/politics-economics/fairness-at-scale