"As my senses become uncannily reliable I find, also, that I can start to depend upon the reliability of the uncanny as well...subtle hallucinations in the landscape & ghosts of past runs/ruins"
(@gwilymeades tweets, February 15th and 19th, 2019, respectively)
My twitter profile picture
I've been using my GPS watch, and its function of being able to map and track my running, as a way of generating science-fictional and uncanny outcomes. Aside from the fact that I do occasionally experience very brief hallucinations when I'm on an especially long run, this might seem a bit of a stretch. It seemed that way to me too, for a time.
I've since come around, and am now a firm believer in the power of GPS to produce what Suvin might have called 'cognitive estrangement'. I did a bit of a 'lit. review' in the area just to see what titles I could come up with related to the search term "science fiction and running". The top hit was Walker's End of the World Running Club, which has a (possibly apocryphal) tweet-review by Stephen King.
Actually, it is interesting that King is, himself, a dedicated walker/runner, but it's not entirely clear if that has affected King's fiction beyond possibly making it more consistent or somehow more clearly motivated.
In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King of course tells the true story of how he was struck and almost killed by a vehicle while he was out on one of his long walks; about his ideas around writing-as-telepathy (an idea that clearly, for King, has a firm grounding in belief aided by evidence from his own strong sense and ability in the power of writing to communicate); and his (pretty clearly not-apocryphal) observation that he does not remember writing Cujo on account of excessive alcohol- and cocaine-ingestion during the writing process.
Aside from being related clearly to my previous post "On Running Addiction," these observations on King's own senses of the uncanny in walking/running/writing, there's a parallel between the ways in which both SF and running 're-wire' the brains of its participants. Suvin, a Marxist, realized the revolutionary potential of this fact, in relation to science fiction (and not, of course, running).
But actually I think you can take any activity, performed obsessively, and find claims in relation to improvement of mental health. Take knitting, for example. There are whole books dedicated to how the physical, repetitive, activity related to knitting, and the counting of rows and knots, 're-wires' the brain of the knitter to improve their sense of health and well-being. (I am also a knitter, by the way).
But I think Suvin was really onto something and, philosophically at least, he gathered a good deal of academic and 'cognitive' evidence to back up his claims around the transformative power of SF. Technology has the power, after all, to structurally re-classify our senses of (well-)being. It can change whole orders of social spatiality with implications for class and senses of empowerment.
The era of self-tracking, evidenced by the rise of fitbits, watches (e.g. Garmin or Apple), and mobile apps that track our every movement, footstep, and trace, is taking us, in the digital age, well-beyond what earlier 'technologies' were able to do, and not necessarily in a good way.
I am part of a class of 'elite' that can not only afford a Garmin watch, but I also have so much extra time and energy, that I freely burn a great deal of 'extra-curricular' energy beyond what the necessaries of what my job entails. I don't stack bricks for a living, I stack ideas, and beyond communicating those ideas to large lecture halls, my job mostly involves sitting at a desk.
Cognitively, then, I am part of a class that is privileged enough to be able to experience cognitive estrangement to the point of hallucination. Reading science fiction often has the same effect. It makes me see the world in such a radically different way that there is an order of magnitude of difference (at least) between the way I saw the world yesterday before reading, for example, Solaris, and the way I now see the world having experienced that deeply unsettling work.
Lem's work was the starting point, the fundamental turning or Archimedean punctum, around which much of Suvin's discussion of science fiction revolved. He went as far as to argue that the novum of Solaris represents a kind of zero-degree, or absolute-zero, starting point for the genre, the literary equivalent of 0 degrees Kelvin or absolute zero. In other words, the innovation of Solaris is so fundamental to, and so fundamentally changed, the genre that everything thereafter could not help but be in some way defined by it.
We are in a somewhat similar situation with both King (as writers) and with the 'Garmin' watch (here standing in for all self-tracking GPS-watches). Our activity is so fundamentally different after the introduction of the key innovation that there is no going back.
With surveillance capitalism this is a scary fact. I am positing here that one way of resisting 'capture' by corporations that benefit in both an Orwellian and a more liquid sense from the free-harvest of our individual and collective data-exhaust is through the use of counter-mapping and more subjective auto-carto-ethnographic (self-mapping-writing) techniques.
By this I mean mapping ourselves across the expected and inscribed boundaries of power through the transgression of that expectation and boundedness. I want to promote unbounded senses of estrangement through the production of spatial hybridities and mobilities that are enabled by seemingly obsessive-addictive activities as running and science fiction (and why not, knitting!).
This is not (just) a justification for my continued use of Strava, cross-linked to other social media platforms like twitter, facebook, and instagram. If it's about self-promotion, then self-promote outside of your comfort zone, into the event-horizons of the unknown.
There were several weeks in a row where I was writing a science fiction story while a ran. I was structuring the story loosely upon Markson's book Wittgenstein's Mistress, imagining myself to be the last person on earth as I made my way north towards Datchet Bridge along the Thames. The quality of light and burnt-autumn vegetation spiked into my imagination, and I invented new terms, new species of being in my head. It is a meditation on solitude, mental health, and language.
It is also a meditation on moving through to new phases of experimentation, on being constantly on the move, both physically and cognivitely, and of finding new kinds of productive estrangement in that fact.
References:
Neff, Gina and Nafus, Dawn. 2016. Self-Tracking. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.
