Hendrix - Standing Wave

Before the Wave, and After

Beginning in 1986, a dozen years before the publication of Standing Wave , I began writing and publishing stories about a near-future world that would be increasingly overpopulated, heatgas insulated, corporate dominated, hypermediated, and stridently opinionated (particularly around political and religious issues). Many of those stories, particularly from the period 1986-1991 and using precisely those terms, can now be found reprinted in the Borgo Press double collection, Human in the Circuit/Depth of Perception .

Re-reading this novel a dozen years after its initial publication, I am surprised at how prescient the novel is in terms of so many of its speculationseven if it does so at the expense of being both dense and sprawling at the same time, more often than I would like. That it should prove both successful in many of its speculations and a bit slow in getting its plot off the ground stems from the encyclopedic type of novel it is. I have long been a fan of books which try to capture between their covers as big a slice as possible of both the world and the authors particular way of thinking about the worldMelvilles Moby Dick , Joyces Ulysses , Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow , Gibsons Sprawl trilogy ( Neuromancer , Count Zero , Mona Lisa Overdrive ).

In Standing Wave I attempted to capture that big slicethe novel as model of both world and mindby utilizing many of the stories I had written over the previous decade and more as background to the world of Standing Wave . I went so far as to embed some of those earlier stories (and even quite a few poems) within the matrix of the novel, too. More so than any of my other novels, this one is a story made up of stories, a voice made up of many voices. It is an exercise not only in the novel as encyclopedic text but also as polyvocal text (as Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin once noted of novels generally).

Although Standing Wave was my second novel and can be read as a sequel to both my first and third novels ( Lightpaths and Better Angels , respectively), the relationship of this book to my previous short fiction is the reason I chose to have this book appear first from Borgo, in conjunction with my short story collection from the same publisher. This novel also lays out, perhaps most explicitly of all my work, the importance of privacy to consciousness, and the way the pressures of collective media, mass dogmatism, corporate thinking, and climate crisisall ultimately traceable to the pressures of populationserve, individually and collectively, to erode privacy and threaten the continuation of human consciousness itself.

That is why zoos and arks and orbital parks, tepuis and living fossils and relict populations, figure so prominently in this book. Threatened biodiversity has persisted in those places and among those populations, often in microrefugia against a world overpopulated and altered by humans to the exclusion of other species. Yet threatened biodiversity in the world of this novel also reflects and is reflected in the threatened neurodiversity of human brains, the threatened ideodiversity of human minds, and the threatened sociodiversity of human cultures in the face of a conformity which medicates or co-opts even aberrant behavior into a sort of standard deviation.

The search for transcendencethrough hallucinogens and entheogens and many other meansfigures in the novel as the resistance of wild minds against co-optation, conformity, and the erosion of privacy that would destroy individual consciousness. I have been fortunate to know such wild minds: first of all my brother Vincent John Jay Hendrix, but also Bruce Albert and Mike Lepper, whom I acknowledged when this book was first published in 1998.

Such minds are nunataks above the glaciers in an age of ice, tepui cloudminds above an increasingly monocultured brainforest. The climatic conditions which create the widespread glaciers and the rainforeststhe cold winds of the former and rains of the latterparadoxically become so severe on nunatak and tepui as to render them places of alternity, islands where life goes on, but differently. The winds across the nunatak are so severe that they sweep it clear of the snow and ice which have buried everything else, allowing the life that was before the ice to maintain a foothold there. The rains on the tepuis top pound the nutrients from the soil until only stunted cloudforests of endemic species remainbut remain they do. In these places, and these minds, the extremity of adversity preserves the different against an overwhelming sameness. Yet it is also from these storehouses of difference that life and ideas can spread outward again, if and when conditions change.

I hope this book serves as a reminder that the repressed can persist and return, that the stone rejected by the builders can become the cornerstone. I hope it also serves as a warning that any world system which besieges and destroys the strongholds of the weak and the fastnesses of slow wisdom will, in the end, only weaken its own chances for continued survival.

Howard V. Hendrix

Shaver Lake, California

August 2010