This is a story about a girl trapped in a tower by a dragon. The tower has no entrance and no exit. It has windows from the top until halfway down, wherein the only light available is from smokey candle sconces set into the walls.[1] The windows show no view except the outer wall, and sometimes the dragon’s glittering, pulsing body—all the windows save for one, which shows only the ever-varied sky after a lightning storm in the girl’s youth. The dragon has no face and every voice that the girl has ever heard. It is her only source of fresh supplies with which she lives, for which she trades a creation of her own on every quarter-moon. This is the only life the girl has ever known in twenty years since her memory begins. This is a story about a girl trapped in a tower by a dragon, escaping.
And where does she escape to? She suspects that there are lands which her feet can expect, since the deepest part of the tower wherein her room lies is embedded in the earth. Her room is rather cave-like—the walls are little more than boulders set on each other, craggy and breathing outside air, and little pools of moisture tend to form from water slipping in along its tiny cracks. Everything of the tower above her room is constructed, boulders turning to craggy, hewn stone turning to masoned stone growing further and further refined. The tower’s rafters are fine, intricately carved granitic, spidery and fractal, culminating in a perfectly smooth altar open to the sky above. Here, she presents her creations. Yet everything above her room could be an artifice; her room is the only evidence that the tower exists in a place.
The fine upper regions of the tower are populated by a sprawling library not confined by floor or hallway.
Many of the books have traveled from their long-forgotten ‘original places’ in the years that the girl has spent reading—a fact that she finds herself turning over in her mind now and again. Her books are her treasured allies, and ones she has come to suspect of subterfuge. After all, they are her only evidence of a world existing, since they contain the information from which a world could be imagined as existing. From them, she knows of a thing called nature, whose only evidence of existence is her room and the small patch of sky in one of the tower’s uppermost windows—and whose existence contrasts with the constructed quality of human projects.
Nature, she reasons, constructs itself; it can be trusted as explaining that more of itself exists and will exist. This place, the only place I have ever known, she thinks, could be nothing more than a dream, nothing more than the dream of a human being; after all, it is all constructed, save for my room.
Many of the books are of mystical and magical subject-matter, which in allyship with the mysteries of dreams have inclined the girl to this manner of thinking.
My room explains it, my room is how I know I live in a world.
Before the girl could read, and before she had to offer it her creations, the dragon taught her. It told her the names of things in a voice that was not a voice, that could be as many voices as she could hear in the span of a single word, as well as another entirely beginning the next. These things it told her before she could use her own voice. When she could speak she discovered that her voice was not at all like the dragon’s. When she could read she found that the authors of her books each spoke in no more than a few voices, while the dragon spoke in as many as could be found.
It told her the names of things, and later she would have nightmares of being surrounded by mirthful, chattering household items: buckets of sloshing water that never emptied, books with endlessly flipping pages, candle flames with neither wick nor candle, igniting and extinguishing from nothing and nowhere of their own accord. These things floated round the dragon, who sat there, watching her silently and without eyes.
In her waking life, the dragon had nothing she could call a fixed form save for its constant lack of a face—the rest of it was a constantly changing shape, its body shining and translucent in a moment revealing dappled, jewel-toned depths shimmering like water; the next moment its body opaque, a flat, dark shine showing nothing beneath except a dull, still grey. However, in her childhood nightmares it was the girl who was unfixed, shifting, not able to hold form or enact any will; in these nightmares it was the dragon who was perfectly normal, stable, confoundingly constant, and whose constancy never survived into waking memory.
Listen: the girl escapes, and her feet find grass and cool night’s open sky. She escapes to a world, rather than dropping and falling endlessly, becoming nothing at all enveloped totally by darkness and void. (She feared this happening if she somehow found a way to climb out the tower, this being the confirmation of the tower existing solely as a dream-element, albeit one capable of providing through her books the information that is its own basis for existing.) She does not climb or crawl her way out. When she escapes, the girl has merely had a flash of insight into the nature of her situation coupled with a long moment of great, concentrated effort of intention.
It looked like this: surrounded by books, her faithful allies, she stared incredulously at a spot on the floor. She was cajoled into attention less by a thought than an impulse in the dim form of a question. What is that? Not wondering so much as actively figuring, just what is that? Fearless, and stilled totally by the intensity of the impulse and her question, she saw it. It’s nothing at all, she might have thought, but she was already barreling ahead into the next implication. Anywhere at all, because, she thought, but again, less thought than it was her sheer intent, conveyed here as words, it’s all just —, and that means-
And it meant in the next moment she feels her feet beneath her on ground with an alien sensation, prickly and a little wet, and her vision was clearing as if she had just stood up too fast (because she may as well have). The moon, close to the horizon as it rises, greets her. The sky behind her is the gradient blue of dusk, the whole sky a jewel of which an unnameable majesty can be felt in. This majesty is filled with stars. A prickle throughout her body, culminating in the far edges of her skin.
What is interesting about this story? Nothing at all happens: a girl lives a life, and then for no reason at all (or for every reason) she is able to leave that life. That is interesting—whatever happens next. What world has she found herself in? Who will she meet? What will it be like as she tries to form relationships, which is to say, as she finds her place in this new world?
The story thus far, as it has been given, is not interesting. There is a girl stuck in a certain life, and she has always been in that life, and it seems it has a very limited scope (though even within that scope there is a breadth of opportunity for enrichment and fulfillment), and this sense of limitation is and has always been present by virtue of the sheerness of the situation. A tower, with no entrance or exit, with a single real window, a dragon who must be placated to receive rations, a room at its very bottom which is its only sign of nature besides the girl herself. Books that provide context, but which are utterly without context given the sheerness of the situation. Yes, she exerts a certain amount of ‘spiritual effort’ in teleporting herself out of the tower, but this is the least of our concerns at the moment.
What is interesting about this? As it was given, there are intimations of deeper ‘character study’. In my first draft I leaned into this, as it was where I felt able to go. After all, how does it feel to be raised by a dragon which is capable of simulating an infinite variety of companionship, yet which is always unable to summon up itself as actual companionship? If I add detail here, you must revisit the situation to see it for yourself that this detail can be seen. By prostrating to this dragon her creations—such things as sewn hats, knitwear, bits of poetry or storywriting, a song at the altar, and so on—it’s true, she gets exactly what she needs in order to continue living in the manner that she has done so for over 20 years of her long life.
Would the essentials of her situation be any different if the range of ‘materials for living’ were to widen? A new conflict might be introduced by the fact of her having to juggle maintaining a creative output with the novelty of new desires, newly sated (but not for long). No, the essentials remain the same: there is never any possibility for real contact with another, since, after all, she does not even know properly whether the authors of her books truly exist in a significant manner. This is leaving alone all problems of contact with an author through the text.
Listen: there’s this Christian saint, Saint Cyprian the Mage, whose figure is popular among certain magicians like King Solomon is. If Solomon is an exemplar for the fact that he is able to be a godly man at the same time as he is consorting with demons to accomplish worldly feats—then Cyprian is an exemplar for the fact of being a magical prodigy who discovers the royalty of Christ, which is to say that in Christianity he finds a purpose and a reality which is not so small and conditional as the basis of his life beforehand.
Perhaps the story of Saint Cyprian up to that point can be interesting—a list of events beginning with contact with certain spirit-teachers, continuing with impressively magical feats, culminating in surrender to the Lord, Jesus.
Precisely this sort of thing is found in Jake Stratton-Kent’s Night School vol. II in the ‘Collect of Cyprian the Mage’, given as fulfilling the imperative, found in Cyprianic grimoires, for a ‘Mass of Saint Cyprian’ meant to consecrate the magic circle/ritual space being constructed. Isn’t it clear why? Listen: for Cyprian it’s put in Christian terms, for a Buddhist it’s put in Buddhist terms—but there’s otherwise no way about it—there is an event which is first passed through before it can be said that ‘one is really living life’. In the words of Gabe K-S, “There must be something like the opposite of suicide, whereby a person radically and abruptly decides to start living.”
So, this girl in the tower: she’s living, but not ‘really living’. One could imagine her, or a weaker girl, committing suicide in this tower. One could imagine themselves in her situation, since isn’t much of life like that tower? Don’t we all face a dragon?
By writing the dragon, I don’t mean something so literal as ‘the internet’ or ‘AI’, or even such a fundamentally contemporary structure as ‘agricultural, urban, colonial/imperial structures called civilizations’ as it has spread across the globe to replace ‘ecologically distinct cultural formations as decided creatively by the-people-which-includes-the-land-and-its-life’.[2]
Consider that the girl is trapped in the tower, and she is trapped by the dragon. It is not exactly that she’s ‘coerced’ in this relationship, as even though she would starve without her output, this situation is all she’s ever known. She can say nothing of its injustice because it is entirely an ouroboros—the tower and the dragon both have ‘provided’ her with everything she has ever known, and even will know provided she doesn’t escape. The books taunt her with impressions of a life outside the tower, but she has no way of knowing whether these books are or aren’t mere figments. A more cynical girl might have concluded long ago that these books’ purpose is merely to taunt and soothe.
Listen: the dragon’s only real role in this story is as a means of ‘real contact’, as in, it is the mediator though which is carried out any action that would require immediate communication with other life. I call this alienation, a deep, extreme alienation—an impossible gulf between beings such that an impossible dragon is required to bridge the gap so life may continue.
It may well be that ‘the dragon’ ‘is’ such structures as capitalism, civilization[3], patriarchy or transmisogyny, white supremacy or anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, and so on; however, these structures are more like outgrowths of the deeper dragon that is a sheer irrecognition of something which is very fundamentally shared among beings.
Here is the irony: the tower and dragon which held this girl captive were, actually, the condition for the girl’s escape. Is this a redundancy? I actually said that she escaped ‘for no reason at all’, but also ‘for every reason’, which is what I mean here—without having needed to write it out, it can be readily seen that the mystical and magical texts which primed her to suspect the dream-quality of her life were also what brought her to the capability of having such an insight as this one, through which she teleported to another life. This is not even to mention the exercise of intention, will, perception, and chance-encounter carried out across years of artistic practice.
One can imagine a more complacent girl ‘getting stuck’ somewhere along that way, but this is a paradox. For one, ‘complacent’, ‘cynical’, whatever it is—these are only indications of a kind of pain sustained within the conditions such that requires certain effective remedies, and the whole complex that arises from that is only later judged as ‘complacent’, ‘cynical’, and so on. While the complex has a reality, it is one which has no choice but to change for the better given the arising of conditions conducive to healing. After all, the ‘elements’ which constitute a person do solely what they do, which is to do what it is that supports their continuing, which is to contact the ‘elements’ that support them.
What is the paradox? Well, let me restate the problem. If the girl is cynical, she’s nursing some secret hope that the books of the tower demonstrate a real world outside. Nevermind some of the complexity of it—we can say that the hope is a pain, comes from pain and makes more pain, and the cynicism is like an armor to conceal this hope from herself, as well as perhaps the kinds of thoughts and feelings for which hope is an armor to conceal and protect.
The cynicism operates in a cycle with the hope: she ‘takes off’ the cynicism to ‘project’ her hope into some new book, only to find that its account of the world fundamentally contradicts some other. Unfortunately, she hasn’t yet realized this is a feature of world and perception. In this moment, rather than feeling the very real rage and hilarity lurking under the surface, the hope turns into a pain, and the pain necessitates the cynicism. Is it a crude analysis? Sure—but it’s operative in that the condition for this dynamic’s unraveling can be quickly imagined: she only needs a book whose sole necessary message to be conveyed is ‘fundamentally contradictory accounts of the world arise from different perceptions, even in the same person’. Rashomon will suffice.
Then, is it the girl who is responsible for discovering this message? She might have some somatic awareness in her that her pain has a ‘more true’ balm than the one provided within the cycle of hope/pain/cynicism—all of them are the balm, since in my example the whole complex is a balm for rage/hilarity that for some reason is yet intolerable to experience. Heeding this ‘silent scream’ of the wound for a more true salve, she might follow strange messages and impulses of the heart and gut toward the right place (who can really say where these really come from?).
Then, receiving this message, she’s left in an interesting place: there’s ‘solid ground’ beneath her in the form of support having come from this message. However, the rage/hilarity beneath the hope/pain/cynicism is still there, and it’s questionable as to whether it’s now tolerable to feel or not. Perhaps with a little more support, it can be a little more tolerable—she’s a little more irritable lately, she has a marginally few more critical-but-sincere thoughts, and so on. Who can say how it will go, except that things unfold as they need to—all she will do as this occurs is look for more ‘solid ground’, in whatever form that comes in, against the feeling of ‘falling endlessly, becoming nothing at all enveloped totally by darkness and void.’[4]
She is, in the end, dependent on the tower and the dragon not only as the basis of her life as it is (oh, but why couldn’t she have a different life? Why does the dragon exist, why does this tower exist? A more operative question for our girl is how does this exist?), but for her escaping. Her allies are the books, their distant and suspect origin notwithstanding though always a little disconcerting.
And what is the nature of these books? Well, what is the nature of the dragon? It is the root of alienation as enabled by an intermediary force which stands in place of direct contact between living beings; the books carry messages. While the girl is in a tower, trapped, she is incapable of meeting people. However, listen: the girl is not incapable of receiving messages.
The dragon can speak in any voice, and it teaches her what she needs to learn (and perhaps for a more contritious girl this is a period which lasts longer, extending into the period during which she begins to read and ‘teach herself’), but it is her books which represent to her real people, only capable of speaking in their few voices learned in the world, in life. They have specific things to say, offering specific forms of support.
Let me return to the paradox: it is that the girl is in an environment which is an outgrowth of the pain she is in, such that it supports the continuing complex cycle which that pain creates. She can shed these cycles by changing the environment (and by changing ‘from within’, she can change the environment). However, without any change, the environment and the internal cycle remain in constant mutual support; they make up a negative feedback loop.
What hope is there? The environment itself is an agent.
Let me return to Cyprian, the mage, or even to Buddha: in either case, this is someone who is discovering ‘the gift of royalty’, a ‘purpose and reality which is not so small and conditional as the basis of their life beforehand’. For Buddha, there is a story, the burning house parable, go look it up if you want—essentially, it is about someone ‘awakening’ and suddenly seeing the suffering of the whole world around them, and especially of those most dear to them. Try as they might, they cannot even convince those (in the story they’re a rich man’s adopted children) beloveds that they are even in danger, let alone of coming out of the ‘burning house’.
This girl, in this tower—do you not know anyone like this? Do you not weep for her? Do you not wish to do anything in your power to help her?
The only thing you can do is make yourself a book; for the girl in the tower, contacting someone who has ‘escaped’, the appearance of others with something truly to offer her is that of a book.
On the one hand, life itself after having escaped can be truly lived: this is its own reason, its own gift, the ‘royal gift’. Life is suddenly neither so small nor conditional as it seemed, no longer such a cold and dismal place. On the other—life is suddenly a burning house, and your children are in grave danger whether they realize it or not. What can you do to help them? What at all can you do? This is the ‘royal gift’, a greater purpose commensurate with a greater reality.
Let me return to the principal question: what is interesting about this story? It should be clear right now that I am not ‘really’ talking about the story of the girl trapped in the tower, trapped by dragon, which I wrote above; however, I am also ‘really’ talking about that story. In that sense, this question has at least three tangible aspects. It is supplication; it is plea; and it is mockery.
Clearly, at this point, a majority of humanity is ‘the girl in the tower’. The dragon is well-manifested as the internet, and now as Claude and Chat-GPT, etc. We are well-ensconced by an elaborate tower and a powerful dragon, and there seems to be neither exit nor entrance, and we neither are nor are not under duress by the dragon—who merely provides our daily ration in return for the exercise of our creative powers—whose purpose in using our powers and their fruits is not really known to us (the Marxist sense of alienation from labor).
There are plenty of people who have ‘escaped’. That’s not to say that life after the tower is without pain and suffering, or that escaping confers any special powers in itself, or even that ‘those outside’ are to be trusted from the outset (you have to kill the Buddha, that one koan says. After all, on your way to ‘escaping’, there are many ‘messages’ to contact and receive support from, and yet the direction toward greater support will necessarily entail ‘moving away from’ even the supportive complexes that those messages will have formed over time). However: that is to say that a large movement of ‘escaped people’ is capable of coordinating a ‘prison-breaking effort’—that it may even be possible for a a large ‘party’[5] of such people to kill a dragon.
What does that mean—to kill a dragon? My mind went to MMO raid boss fights, specifically (but not an MMO) the Ur-Dragon fight from Dragon’s Dogma. I mean, it’s sort of like asking: what’s life after capitalism? What does the real, actual communism look like, the one Marx wrote about as not being prescriptive nor predicted, as the real appropriation of the whole means of living by self-liberating human beings? In the sense meant by Fredy Perlman, what is life without civilization?
I could put it like this: life is something improvised, and it has to be improvised, since literally every one of the infinite discrete moments that appears as time is new. This is the case, but it’s not the case that human beings (at this point in time) are good improvisers. I, certainly, always have room for improvement, and improving is a whole thing, so I’m not necessarily blaming anyone for anything here. On the whole, the performance we’re making together is pretty bad.
Part of the reason why it’s bad is how I understand ‘picking up the slack’ works in improv. If I’m performing, if I want there to be a good show rather than just fucking over my colleagues (and myself in the process), it’s my constant personal responsibility to ‘pick up the slack’ when something doesn’t land. If I can improve a poor choice by legitimizing it by riffing on it, or, in other words, if I can ‘alchemize’ the choices that come my way with my own choices, it’s possible to make my little corner of the stage something genuinely beautiful and moving—to make a good performance.
I can’t always do that... or can I? Can I be surrounded by dogshit improvisers and transform, totally, what’s happening and even what happened with a highly selective, highly intentional choice? Maybe. Who’s judging? Who’s the audience? Well, it’s not just humans in this universe—who else are we here with?
Moreover, who else are we performing with? Who is already picking up the slack? Whose overtime can we ease by performing better?
Listen, this analogy maybe seems fraught to someone who’s especially supported by the idea of rallying the working class for violent overthrow of the state/the capitalist class, but I’ll put it this way: the existence of patterned mediums meant to be deployed in lieu of ‘improvising’, such as state and economy, is a sign of lazy improvising.
Certainly there’s a balance to be struck here, since idioms and motifs and specific ideas can be employed beautifully in an evolving performance—but you could do more, couldn’t you? You could be more creative, right? More spontaneous? More life-affirming? More supportive to your fellow performers? Specifically, the deployment of strictly patterned mediums is something that works well with itself and tends to punish less skilled—or, perhaps, more surprising—improvisers. An example of this is the baby crying in the concert hall, that latter of which is supremely rigid patterned medium. Another example is armed overthrow of a ruling class, which simultaneously tends to maintain a state of affairs that renders the Other (whoever’s closest to Wild Nature, to include ‘Nature’ itself) subordinate and instrumentalized.
As well, maybe some people just need to focus on killing the dragon, and maybe some other people just need to focus on supporting the ‘girl in the tower’ with the right messages, and maybe these are actually contradictory efforts which cannot be combined by the apparatus of the state—and to be overt, armed overthrow of the state is actually more ‘supporting the girl’ than it is ‘killing the dragon’, it’s just that it’s also more ‘building up the tower’ than it is ‘expanding and supporting the library’.
So, the story is plea, the above three paragraphs are plea. Plea-se, can we do something about this? Here’s the mockery: is humanity’s life in this condition really so interesting that we have to keep doing this? And here’s the supplication: what the hell do I do now that isn’t trying to build myself a new tower?
May the answer please come and find me, and may I have the strength and equanimity to meet it.
The girl hates this middle-lower section of the tower, which contains the kitchen, the laundry and baths, the rations-depot, and closets, for the fact of the candle-smoke which accumulates quickly throughout the floors after only an hour of work. She works in the dark, navigating by sensitivity of feet, as much as possible.↩︎
I hate cyborg theory; I think a world in which our lifeway isn’t mutually decided between us and ‘technology’, but rather which is mutually decided between us-and-us—us, the life, and us, the life—is much more interesting.
In other words, not that a group of humans decides (amongst themselves, by themselves and for themselves) how to live (no matter how observantly informed by local ecology this is), rather that this was a decision, for which the humans are only responsible for well-receiving, made essentially by the largest and smallest and most familiar and most alien of all plants, animals, rocks, and waters, as well as the land, with whom those humans share the land.
Without having done the proper reading for it, my impression is that this difference in inclinations reflects the maturation of Donna Haraway’s thought. Am I correct?
Nonetheless: my point here is that this world we live in is that world decided between us-and-us, and that this clear truth is obscured by an inclination toward instrumentalizing other beings; an inclination which I am doing my best to unravel within myself.↩︎Again, meant here as ‘agricultural, urban, colonial/imperial structures’ in the vein of an analysis like Fredy Perlman’s.↩︎
The accuracy or reality of the aforementioned pain-complex is less important than is the arrival at ‘sources of support’, since it’s these insights, places, energies, feelings, perceptions, and so on that actually accumulate into a self-supporting ‘state of being’ called ‘health’—as well as to ‘escaping’.
While an accurate map of pain-complexes can help with navigating while ‘in it’, if the map doesn’t lead to a source of support capable of dissipating the pattern of the complex, then I regard it as a useless map.↩︎“The more I think about what a successful revolution looks like, the more I think it’s going to look like a huge party“, quoted and paraphrased from some person on Reels.↩︎