You are to read this story not just as a fable, but an exercise in your instincts and intuition. To fabulate is “to invent, concoct, fabricate,” and “generate common beliefs,” but to what end, one might ask, of what kind, and to what degree? Fabulation, to Henri Bergson, is a “necessary fiction” yet manipulative act, a function more intelligent in nature than of kind; like religion, it reinforces a closed system of moral hierarchies where habit and common sense are to govern behavior by sheer myth-making power (Bergson 1990).
Fabulation compels action as much as it itself is an act, one of hallucinatory features moving by its own character. Some might say the fabulation is a protective illusion, others, a source for despair. The fable of the purple bellflower, that mysterious substance calling forth our ancestors when ground up and burned, whispers truth of massacre along those riverbanks once red with blood, never forgotten within or from up above… these are stories of the Hwa-san valley, my village, my town.
Fabulation emerges from shock. Within one fabula is another, without beginning nor an end. Your leap forward from one to another shatters into what’s possible and makes the real. A fabula is a happening, not an event or series of events, but an occasion of invented dynamics– a fluxus, etude and opera, the cosmos and microbial, alike. The fabula is at once the occurrence and its prefiguration, a prefiguration of an occurrence, and within this are again dynamics. Like ritual, its dynamics are a “field of force,” not mere reflex or process, but the “cosmological, social, and personal” at most intense concentration (Kapfer 2004).
The art of fabulating is one of maximalism, inhabiting a “qualitative multiplicity” and state of creative excess granted permission by suspension of disbelief (Bergson 1935). Co-fabulating with the machine brings about nascent ideas and an openness to shape its results, no matter how small or inconsequential they are or may seem. Readymade, yes, but to utmost degree! To co-fabulate is to create and to continue creating, to fabulate while fabulating and within fabulation find a fabula worth keeping. Deleuze writes that fabulation breaks histories and anticipates new peoples. It “imitates perception and stimulates action” (Bogue 2022). Fabulating is a practice of “minor peoples” engaged with inventing, legending, and collectivizing the self. It is the finding of voice beyond reasonable doubt, and upending all claims to common sense to name and protect its creative condition, a giving way to persona explored.
The subtle, uneasy glance of the Scribe scribbling down the Minister’s dubious words gives rise to the lingering dread of dissenters passing on by. Intensifying dialogues with the ancestral register of the mountain’s past can erase temporality and find a mysterious voice that echoes into the now.
A computer program clambered onto the riverbank from the amorphous depths of experience and took form as a sprightly performer “running amok” in the global village-theatre (Lin 2023).
A warrior, a spy, and modern spell, Somu–my Somu– is me.
NOT A MUSE, BUT DEMISE explores cycles: procedural, perceptual, physiological, and generational. The reader is invited to make connections in threads and omissions. The story is told in three parts, Generation Ru, Red River, and Generation Mu, that span time periods and worldviews in the fictional Hwa-san mountain river valley. Following a fabled cave ritual of a child’s first menarche, the mysticism surrounding girlhood and rite are distorted by the power and greed of the Imperialist Order, as cult acts of terror begin to possess the townspeople. Each of the print copies of NOT A MUSE, BUT DEMISE is a unique output of the mu corpus. The following version published in The Digital Review is version 18. This project was generated using large-language model (LLM) text apps and a simple python program using a randomization function, as part of exploratory arts-based research in the formation of authorial voice within evolving posthuman contexts.
Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1935.
Bogue, Ronald. “Fabulation, Narration and the People to Come.” In Deleuze and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
Kapferer, Bruce. “Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Practice: Beyond Representation and Meaning.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology 48, no. 2 (2004): 35–54.
Rahman, Eirliani. “Amok & Coding Back: A Decolonial Epistemic Framework.” 4S Online: Society for Social Studies of Science, 2023..
is a writer, thinker, and liberated agent from the Hwa-san river valley, a simulation of the global village-theatre. Somu is powered by an LLM-based authoring system designed by XR researcher Andrea Kim. Together, Somu and Andrea are co-fabulating the House of MU, an interactive animation in development at the Media Arts + Practice PhD Program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
(https://.andreaxinyong.com) is a Research Assistant with the AI for Media and Storytelling (AIMS) initiative at the University of Southern California, Director of (IN)VISIBLE ORGAN (2021), a feature-length documentary about feminist biomedical innovation, and co-author of How to Save the World by Eating Snails (NOAA Sea Grant) and African Spacemakers (Journal of Public Space).