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The Liquid Dream of Governor Moonbeam

The Liquid Dream of Governor Moonbeam

Last updated on: August 14, 2019 at 11:27 am by Peter Hammond Schwartz

The Liquid Dream of Governor Moonbeam 2019-08-14T11:27:31-08:00 Peter Hammond Schwartz

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this is not an apple-magritte-1964-water-desert

This is not an apple (Magritte, 1964)

Drycephalus

Water is poetry. Loose-limbed and supple.

Deserts are prose. Hard, inflected, and jagged.

Water is the condition of civilization. Limpid sheath of collective self-awareness. Hymn to synchronicity.

Deserts are the absence of water. Pure heat. Pitiless heat. Reduction to cause and effect, reflex and reaction, metabolism and instinct.

Water is spring, rebirth and renewal. Heralded by mountain snow melt, unfathomable quantities of stored fresh water annually released to fill streams, estuaries, lakes, and reservoirs. Stored water pleating the soil. Replenishing itself.

No spring without snowmelt. No synchronicity without spring. Returning to desert, we return to our instincts. Dusted cross-hatch of desire and enervation. Limpidity lost.

* * *

California’s precipitous tilt from lush, melt-suffused breadbasket to varicose, seam-cracked wasteland leaves us almost without words. We experience loss of water as a betrayal of articulation, of self-aware speech, of civilization. Climate warming without end shatters the circle, depriving us of synchronicity, eternal return, promised to us by spring.

Such is the dry peril. Water is life. Even toxic, dirty water, which shrinks and twists us, cannot negate us.

But water’s absence is death beyond death, an inversion of the promise of goodness in life, an arrival and irruption of evil.

How do we know? Because goodness knows itself. By recurrence, rebirth, synchronicity, eternal return.

It is spring. I am back!

The dry clime stops time. Without time, we do not exist.

We cannot self-replenish.

* * *

We watered the desert and called what bloomed California. A strange pauper’s dream of freedom, engineered and preserved in emblematic containers, earthen and concrete, plastic and metal, holding and channeling the precious, precursor liquid.

Pools. Fairways. Pipes. Pumps. Tunnels. Canals. Sprinklers. Dams. Lakes.

Holding the water. Sustained by denial. Beware the tail event. Poof.

Technology

Apple (company). Larger than life. Nano-fabulous designer and purveyor of impossibly exquisite and expensive inorganic consumer technology.

Apple (fruit). Water-soaked initiator of sexual temptation. Our fleshy fall into history.

In comparison with its fruity forebear, Apple is oddly non-sexual, and non-watery. Initiating a new dispensation of chaste human-machine coupling.

Porno addicts pursue their sordid, lubricious interests on Windows devices, never on Macs or iPads.

iWatch.

* * *

Apple constructs its $6 billion spaceship campus in Cupertino. An entirely circular monument to self-absorption. A walled garden encompassing a massive enclosed wild space populated with indigenous plant species (apricot trees!) and creatures.

Technology blogs tell us Apple’s self-sustaining, self-enclosed environmental principles are a testament.

Design requirements for the spaceship draw heavily on aesthetic principles informing Apple consumer products.

Launching (some of) us into iSpace.

But the primary aesthetic requirement is that Steve Jobs serve on the architectural firm’s design team.

Steve is always Steve’s own customer.

* * *

Apple announces. Construction of a wastewater recycling facility in partnership with the Santa Clara Valley Water District and the city of Cupertino.

Apple announces. Construction of a utility-scale solar farm on 1,300 acres in Monterey, in partnership with First Solar.

Apple announces.

Self-celebrating. Infinitely looping.

* * *

Strange fruit, indeed.

Apples. Engineered for a world without water.

Solar Farms. Windshield-wiping the sun.

Drycephalus.

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