(ESSAY) Provocative Symmetries and Electromagnetic Dream-texts by Ed Garland

A stunning essay by Ed Garland where dreams refract through screens, and the brain-computer metaphor frays at its edges. Through C.K. Williams, Sherry Turkle, and Solzhenitsyn, this piece navigates the mutating architectures of memory, the internet, and the net neural economies of attention. What happens when the wifi swamp swallows poetry? When dreams are haunted by algorithmic suggestion? When the internet dreams itself immortal?

A dispatch from the internet unconscious, where the past might still cut through the electromagnetic fog: Stop, stop.

            I wish I could change dreams with you, baby. I’ve had the bad ones,

                        what comes now is calm and abstract.

            Last night, while you and that poor woman were trading deaths like

                        horrible toys,

            I was dreaming about the universe. The whole universe was happening

                        in one day, like a blossom,

            and during that day people’s voices kept going out to it, crying, “Stop!

                        Stop!”

from C.K. Williams, ‘The Last Deaths’

In her 1995 book Life on the Screen, the psychoanalyst Sherry Turkle wrote that people who compared the internet to a giant brain were engaging in ‘provocative symmetry.’ It’s provocative because it’s superficial: to make the resemblance plausible, you have to forget about the unbreachable cosmic difference between a commodified military technology and the organic product of a multi-million year evolutionary process. Over the last three decades, the internet has grown into an all-seeing CPU whose gospels are riddled with the robotic delusion that human skulls are full of wires and lights. But Turkle’s symmetry remains fundamentally provocative, its forgotten difference unbreachable. In the words of the neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, computers contain ‘merely the passage of minute electric currents along circuits’ until a person turns up to interpret them. Likewise, ‘seeing correlations between event A (neural activity) and event B (say, reported experience) is not the same as seeing event B when you are seeing event A.’ Brain is not mind, and world-eating network of promiscuous microchips is not and never will be brain. Map is not territory. Page is not poem. Screen is not YouTube. Stop, stop.

*

But the provocation persists. Our racist nerd emperors infuse neurology with computational hype, so popular metaphors for thinking and perceiving function as implicit adverts for their slave-driven industry. Spurious comparisons between organ and device, yoked together by the attention-thirst of HP and Redmi’s horrible toys, do actually seem quite valid quite often. It feels true to say emotions scroll and thoughts alt-tab. The auditory imagination resembles an interior playlist of half-remembered tracks that keep skipping to the next one before the current one is done. And the phone lies awake all night on the pillow, slipping literary podcasts into my buffering head. I wish I could change dreams with you, baby, it says, but first a quick word from our sponsors.

*

The thoughts at the start of this essay appear in C.K. Williams’ poem ‘The Last Deaths’, collected in 1977’s With Ignorance. Appearing on a backlit and Bluetoothed-to-5G-mobile-hotspot liquid crystal display unit in 2025, the poem’s original offline resonances sink beneath the planetary wi-fi swamp. The image of the whole universe happening ‘like a blossom’ in a single day can only be rendered as a mega-forest of time-lapse photography, a trillion tiny animated gifs with a Phillip Glass soundtrack. For people with a certain constellation of musical preferences, the word ‘baby’ so close to the word ‘dream’ kicks off an involuntary collage of Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream,’ Savages’ cover of the same song, and assorted others that don’t quite belong: Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’, Tom Waits’ ‘You’re Innocent When you Dream,’ and so on, shuffled into the auditorium because their titles contain the same word, nevermind their obvious audible differences. This is the same feeble silicon logic that makes my phone’s autocomplete suggest ‘Sheeran’ whenever I write my own first name. Stop, stop.

*

I’m not the only Microsoft customer who thinks Williams’ pre-broadband poems are somewhat screen-ish and clickable. His critics seem to hint at something data-hungry and wireless and computational in his work. Prominent accounts of his career note ‘the capacious flexibility’ of his unusually long lines, with their ‘constant qualifications and modifications’. His early publishers had to widen the standard dimensions of their books to accommodate his poems, and the ‘garish and clunky,’ ‘tender and troubling’ ways they explore not provocative symmetries but ‘dangerous equivalences’. Maybe his poems taste deep because they organise their data the way sleeping brains consolidate memories, forcing familiar things into strange new relationships, clicking heart icons beneath sets of pictures you’d never group together yourself. ‘[S]leep transforms memory traces over time, allowing us to extract generalizations, integrate information, and arrive at creative insights,’ the scientists argue, as if they were talking about poetry (or as if I’m seeing an A where there’s only a B).

*

‘We are peculiarly vulnerable to the message,’ says Turkle, ‘that we and machines are kin.’ The vulnerability is why totalitarian geeks spend billions to keep the message blaring morning noon and night wherever you get your podcasts. Our dreams, however, can send us counter-messages: ‘sleep facilitates schema development through the repeated reactivation of related information’, the scientists argue. Snoring on our backs with our eyes closed, the dream-brain can steer us away from rechargeable propaganda by conjuring up some uncanny personal sci-fi that jolts us back to the truth: all the good stuff happens inside the people, not inside the only-just-purchased-and-already-malfunctioning second-cheapest PC World laptops. But despite the many faults of the brain-is-mainframe message, says Turkle, it’s still inadvisable to disparage computers as mere vessels for binary code produced by incredible amounts of corporate violence. They also act as portals into virtual worlds, and so ‘enable us to spend more time in our dreams.’

*

She means dreams in the broad sense, something like ‘the time we spend lending our consciousness to imaginary events,’ whether asleep or awake or uncertainly insomniac. She means it in reference to text-based role-playing games, where a single user could inhabit multiple characters simultaneously with other real people in the same imaginary wordy domain. ‘We are all dreaming cyborg dreams,’ she says. But some of us are doing it differently: ‘our computer scientists dream themselves immortal’.

*

Those dial-up psychoanalysts could read the future through their modems. In 1995, we hadn’t yet created our smartphones or discovered our billionaire vampire daddies, but I think Turkle could already see how a messianic geek with a taste for human blood would inevitably emerge from the economic triumph of the I.T. Caesars. Now we live in their wildest fantasy, where dying is for plebs.

*

Maybe chronic overuse of an intelCORE-powered pseudo-cortex can make a person suspect that everythingpossesses a circuitry. I admit that I’m not sure where symmetry – a specific kind of similarity involving axis, echo, repetition, proportion – dissolves into mere likeness. All my ink-and-paper rectangles seem to have a networky feel. The thin rusty pages of 1960s paperbacks borrow my brain to dream of their online future. Let’s inspect Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, for example, first published in English in 1968.

*

Capitalists are about to go retro and legislate against communism. Liberals are trying to build memorials to ‘victims of communism’ that would act as mourning sites for actual Nazis. In this climate it’s worth looking at Nobel-winning ‘dissidents’ like Solzhenitsyn, an author often casually presented in literary venues as a conduit of unquestionable truths. His wife thought otherwise, saying his descriptions of gulags ‘bore a folkloric and frequently a mythical character’. Cancer Ward presents a ridiculous love plot within a heavy-handed rendering of the provocative symmetries between the author’s experience of terminal illness and his opinion of Soviet life. It was an instant critical success. The main thing I enjoyed about it was all the unexpectedly dreamy electromagnetic resonance.

*

I thought the YouTube algorithm was supposed to monitor your soul and show you less of what you don’t want and more of what you do. It refuses to acknowledge my disinterest in watching instructional videos aimed at my personal data (I’m a 40-year-old human male with an autoimmune disease). I can’t rid the screen of promotions for alternative therapies or masculine exercise regimes or MasterClass Life Lessons from George W. Bush. No matter how often I block or report or say I’m not interested in the Mad Muscles Calisthenics Strength Plan for Men, it (or something like it) keeps sneaking back to the top of the feed.

*

Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Soviet medical romance, like my wayward content stream, is preoccupied with gendered health and alternative treatments. The male patients of its cancer ward are intrigued by rumours of cures made from gold, bark, and fungus, all unavailable in their free healthcare system, about which they have many furious debates. Part of the protagonist’s treatment for his cancer is a course of hormone injections, and the 1960s narrative expends much 2020s conservative disapproval in lengthy speculations about the changes such a treatment might wreak upon the mettle of its rugged individual hero. This fucking chatterbox, Oleg Kostoglotov, is not a doctor but has read some medical textbooks. He thinks injections are a ‘twentieth-century gimmick,’ like those contemporary people who Do Their Own Research while ignoring all the other research that doesn’t fit their desired conclusions. One of his functions in the book is to provide what the narrator calls ‘that unwieldy heaviness men have, which is a woman’s only refuge’. The lady will float away unless she’s anchored to a difficult beefcake – an idea YouTube begs me to believe in by pushing clips of cis women who teach me how to win at sex by displaying erotic leadership.

*

In Cancer Ward’s medicated dreamworld, the patients are unmoored from their homes and forced to wallow in the distorted durations of their indefinite bedtime. This strange atmosphere amplifies their thoughts and electrifies their interpersonal tensions. They desire and detest each other the same way they desire and detest the media, and much of what they say about mass communication technology in the 1950s USSR seems applicable to mass communication technology in the 2020s UK. There is frantic news consumption, where someone reading a paper ‘deftly and efficiently […] leaped from heading to heading’. Young Vadim bemoans the ‘permanent mutter’ of public loudspeakers, which deliver ‘information you hadn’t asked for alternating with music you hadn’t chosen’. The speakers, like smartphones, are ‘a theft of time, a diffusion and an entropy of the spirit’.

*

Away from the ward, a doctor called Vega spends an intense evening at home attending to her hi-fi, a combined radio and record player. She sits in her darkening living room and listens repeatedly to an album called The Sleeping Beauty. The narrative shows us the hi-fi’s screen – a radio dial whose ‘greenish light’ coats Vega’s listening experience in a sickly visuality. While she plays the album, she has an imaginary conversation with Kostoglotov about his hormone therapy, and the light from the screen starts ‘deepening, casting its glow further and further over the whole room’. After a five-page trip down memory lane, she has remained in the chair until midnight and listened to ‘a great many’ records. When she finally goes to bed, she has ‘a great many dreams, too many perhaps for a single night’.

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(A dreamy coincidence occurs. Halfway through reading Cancer Ward, I received a targeted spam email from a scientific journal called Psycho-Oncologie:

Psycho-Oncologie describes itself in terms that would also apply to Solzhenitsyn’s novel: ‘a distinguished publication dedicated to exploring the psychosocial, behavioural, and ethical aspects of cancer.’ My name is back to front, and I’ve acquired a status I do not possess, salaried and pensioned in the oceanic academy. ‘Dear Prof. Garland Ed,’ they say, join our ‘vibrant community’ and our ‘global researcher user base’. I’d like to, I think, but I am not quite the person they seem to be addressing).

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Cancer Ward’s characters and the voices in ‘The Last Deaths’ both experience a sense of unwanted excess in their electromagnetic dreams. There is a resemblance, too, in the way their speeches resonate against a sense of political restriction. Solzhenitsyn has a whole long novel to make the source of this restriction explicit, but Williams leaves plenty of room for interpretation. The poem’s speaker is a father addressing his child in his imagination, navigating the challenges of talking to her about death. The quote at the start of this essay comes from the fifth stanza. In the first stanza, the child sees a screaming woman on the TV news, whose ‘husband and all her children had been killed the night before’. Later on in the poem, the child dreams under the influence of this TV moment, but the screaming woman has become a girl:

What could have gone on in my child’s dreams last night so that woman

                        was a girl now?

            How many times must they have traded places back and forth in that

                        innocent crib?

            “You mean the lady whose house fell down?” “Yeah, who knocked her

                        house down?”

The stanza ends there. The child asks her parent who demolished the house and killed the woman’s family, and we are denied an answer. The poem slowly builds a quiet affective storm, made all the more powerful where it refuses to be specific. Here it withholds the name of whoever destroyed the house and murdered the family, and you don’t have to go very far on the imperial internet to find the provocative symmetry of this refusal to identify a perpetrator. You can find it, for example, in the Society of Authors’ bizarre recent statement that failed to name East Jerusalem as the location and the Israeli police as the force who arrested Mahmoud and Ahmad Mouna of The Educational Bookshop for the crime of selling books. You can find it in CNN and Guardian and BBC News headlines that manufacture consent for the genocide in Palestine, during which Israel has killed probably upwards of 183,000 people, including more journalists than have ever been killed in any conflict of any duration since records began, knocked down thousands of homes in the West Bank, and destroyed all of Gaza’s universities along with 88 percent of its buildings. This is enabled by copious military, diplomatic, and financial support from Western institutions, who constantly defend Zionism by obscuring their answers to the question posed by the child in the poem. The old poem’s politics are entangled in technologised dreams, gesturing in symmetrical silence towards present-day capitalist atrocities for which adequate language is impossible to find.

~

Author: Ed Garland

Images by the author

Published: 18/3/25