Flowers

Digging through 1970s literary theory (loamy dirt) will find you a
popular byword: that there is less a divide between fiction and
non-fiction than you might believe.

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Today, I walked with a bouquet of flowers near 7th and Morris. The
neighborhood is a mix of different ethnicities--Cambodian, Dominican,
Portuguese, African American, Chinese, and South Philly Italian. In
my experience, this kind of neighborhood is vibrant and filthy, from
the lack of neighborly unity.

The flowers were among the only living plants on the block, and people
walking, stooping it, and even sitting across the street turned their
heads to notice. A little girl asked me, "are you giving those to
your girlfriend?"

I held them in front of me as I moved down the block. In my field of
vision were the flowers, almost glowing, and around them the greyed
brick walls and pavement. I didn't expect so much attention on the
flowers, and it made me conscious of how I must have looked out of
place on the street. Who ever carries something so bright and alive
in this part of town? If my neighbors are at all like me, they
probably think "this place is so dirty," and they wish it were
cleaner. I wish it were too.

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Back to that divide: even if the circumstances of a fictional story
aren't physically possible in our world, the story is still written by
a human, and thus reveals human beliefs. Adding to that, non-fiction
and historical narratives also follow some common rules of fiction,
like a moralistic ending and a tendency to make sense of the world
through storytelling. Pretty similar.

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I feel like everyone is always going to crane their neck to see
flowers. Everyone wants the streets to be clean, but it's not going
to happen unless people are forced to do it. In a way, the streets
are like our unconscious, both individual and collective--we want to
be good people, but not everyone is good, unless somehow forced to be good.

We have lots of fictional narratives that reveal the human consciousness.

Do we live in a world like 1984, where the way to get humans to behave
is to control the intricacies of our lives?

Or do we live in a world like Brave New World, where the way to get us
to behave is to keep us drugged and complacent?

Or do we live in a world like the Matrix, where the only way to
prevent us from destroying the world is to control our bodies and let
us believe in a fictional version of it?

Don't think for a moment that The Matrix puts forth a narrative in
which computer sentience happened by accident. Just like pollution,
capitalistic excess, and overusage, humans don't have the capacity to
stop at a safe point. We proceed to obtain, consume, reproduce, and
waste every available resource, whether natural or produced, until it
either destroys us or disappears.

Agent Smith said it himself: "You move to an area and you multiply,
and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way
you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another
organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know
what it is? –A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this
planet."

So I don't think humans desired to create sentience in computers, and
if I remember the story correctly, it happened by chance; but I watch
that movie with the belief that in that fictional world, humans
allowed technology to progress even past the limits of safety. I also
watch that movie with the belief that it makes a very true,
non-fictive, commentary on the consciousness of modern society.

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Morris St. is the human unconscious. It treats beauty as a spectacle, it's made up of many thinking parts that want nothing to do with each other, and despite what we'd all love to believe, it's never spotless.