LOW POWER SOCIETY
PREFACE by
This book is a hammer that strikes a gong. The gong is a planet in the middle of the galaxy, and the ripples of sound launch - and yet, the book is extremely precise and acute; so magnified that it explodes every detail it offers and makes it into a new planet - so we are looking at a book that can and does turn itself inside out and reveal its own energy and process as it expands - and why should such a book be written, why should such a book appear out of nowhere - because the author, Emanuel Pimenta, and we were waiting for it, we were sitting in front of a screen watching the news and the avoidance of news and the cartoon of news hoping it would crack open and put an end to itself - and as we waited, we were doing something else, composing the interior ligaments of another much wilder story, and this is such a book, too, a poem that spirals and twists and unfolds past Consensus mazes and settles like a bird at the mouth of a flower.
The book discusses, in every paragraph, the world, the planet, the population as a whole, but it is always talking about the individual lurking behind and above and below every fascination with those sciences that define constant change with maps and better maps and faster maps and more urgent and determined maps.
So this is a book about the emerging future of the human who is, on one level, preoccupied with charting the collective transformation, and who, on another level, is staging a revolution of his/her own.
The book is made of air. It is all openings. It is all first sentences. It is, in that way, a hundred books, serially constructed - but on closer examination, the sequences are taking place from a core, and inhabiting 500, a thousand, 5000 dimensions.
Pimenta views an up-to-the-minute milieu-explosion outward of countless pieces of information, and in doing it, realizes that in order to give sense to the process, he needs to enter it. So he becomes the explosion while commenting on it.
To do that takes a deep acquaintance with simultaneous rhythms and colliding sonorities, and the author is, of course, a well-known and well-celebrated composer. In this book, his music turns out to be serene and generous and sly and relentless and a recapitulation of copper and bronze ages when the shaping of objects was both a highly personal endeavor and a joy of first discovery - out of nowhere.
In other words, you cannot write a book about the titanic changes that have been taking place on the macro level on this planet for the past hundred years without emboldening yourself with draughts of magic. You can bring to bear all the science you want to, but eventually you come to the brink where you must MOVE currents of information like chords, and you make new music. Commentary without imagination fades away in seconds.
WHERE IS THE HUMAN RACE GOING? Pimenta answers this with his own invented process of inquiry, and allows us to see that his invention and the question and the answer can become merged as they travel through space together. Is it literal information? Most certainly. Is it poetry? Yes. Is it music? Yes. Is it something else entirely? Yes. Do we have a name for it? No.
And thank goodness for that.
Author, The Magic Agent