Sanction

by Roman McClay

  He had a natural teleology, like a child, Chen guessed, where he saw purpose in what others might see mere vibrating matter. He liked viewing this map from behind and around these asp-like plants and the pylons; he felt as an aboriginal Adam , the first man, under cover of the primal jungle and the foundational ruins of some temple his ancestors may have built in some frenzy a millennia, or two, ago.

  The voice, the man’s voice reading to him in the room’s air, was ethereal, like an ancestor’s low, wise, warning, sotto voce . It seemed like some vestigial remnant of some pre-conscious brain: it commanded him but with less and less power as his conscious mind was able to focus and adapt to novel phenomena; he became more self-directed, more autonomous as the day itself, and as the days moved on in this massive concrete bunker of a home. He had been here for weeks, months maybe , he thought. The voices receded to the inner monologue.

  He now saw an image of his friend in his mind's eye and saw the stretched earlobes, plugged and apertured with one-inch bushings that gave another orifice to his ears -in which to hear those olden voices, he guessed- and it had given his friend that tribal, atavistic look even as so much nano-tech populated his bloodstream and brainwaves. Lyndon was carrying around a massive amount of avant garde technology buried inside his blood and brain. It was suspected -by Chen- that this was all that was keeping him alive. He seemed to limp, hobble, grimace each time he saw the man -in person- attempt to move.

  Chen had never really understood the man's tribalism before, all that bone-in-the-nose and black-block tattoos shit, he thought, but now he thought of Julian Jayne's work, the thesis, in the 40-year-old book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind . Lyndon had given Chen a copy months ago when he had first arrived here at elevation, and Chen had languidly read it as the days rolled on; they never discussed it; the book just hung around in his head like a cicada buried in the forest floor year after year on some timeline linked with the larger cosmic rhythm of rainfall, internal insect chronometry, and the seasonal weather temperatures. But neither man pushed the book’s contents to the fore.

  But here now, in this small knoll within the greater hall, behind the broken line of these concrete monoliths and rootless, soilless plants; inside the audio-soporific of the man's readings on the nature of the particular Man on the stele , the Tao of the Cosmos, Reality and Ontology, and as Chen imbibed the larger wave of information flowing off that concrete wall, he felt as if he knew some of what Lyndon was feeling as he straddled both sides of the 21st century as both savage and modern man. Ideas just appeared in Chen’s mind, over time .

  He guessed that what Lyndon felt was a pining for purpose, nostalgia for the comfort of loyalty to a cause larger than one's self housed inside a central nervous system, an endocrine system, a ponderous heart and capacious brain that knew it was alone in the cosmos; a man adrift at sea forsaken by not merely man and his ships & God and his storms, but by the forces of nature that could even conceive of omnipotent and ubiquitous gods, and both their wars and their peace.

  He felt as though he had gone past the lip of the event horizon of Yeat’s un-holding center then been flung out past the widening gyre. And he felt the worst in himself building with passionate intensity and could only laugh at the lack of conviction his best could muster.

  And what this was he could not attribute to anyone but himself.

  He thought of Lyndon’s plans. He thought of what he -Chen- had been told, and what it all was for. Most men plot against the State and rivals for resources, for women, for riches, for status. But, this man, his friend, he guessed, was playing some different game.

  He was devoting time, money, mental force, and risking who knows how much, to achieve a brain-state, to become a different species , he had said, if only temporarily. Man -the average man- cannot conceive of men who take huge risks not for money and fame, as if all men are motivated by such low things. Some men are motivated by the higher callings to Art and Love and Knowledge. But, while Chen didn’t feel like risking all his wealth -although he had no wealth to risk , Chen added to himself- nor risk his freedom or safety or even his time for such grand and quixotic things, he was beginning to see why Lyndon did.

  But did he even know what he was risking? Chen asked.

  It's as if Lyndon knew that once all the governing sinew, all the inhibiting musculature, all the tempering admonitions of ancient empathies and ancestral discursive prose heard in his mind's ears like they grew there from some endogenous soil, some substrate made rich by his own heat-first then nitrogen-second releasing compost, his own mycelium, his own graveyard worm castings, as if all this weight of silt and sediment of bequeathing forces and men and mothers was blown from the hand of some final and incompatible god, then, he felt, then he would be left alone with himself -a true man, a genuine animal- left to navigate the annihilation of life and the fecundity of death with no comfort of confusion, no solace of stupidity, no aplomb in ambivalence.

  It was as if he wanted to burn it all off and become just core, iron core of animal; to feel, and no longer think.

  Lyndon, Chen thought, feared autonomy and liberation even as he destroyed every fetter on his warmly shackled soul, cut every tie and every bind that held his psyche together . He marched away mechanically from the sweet din of his ancestors’ injunctions and promptings, all the while cupping his hands around his stretched ears to receive further instruction -of and from- this ancient creed. The messages were garbled; so he improvised. The signal-voices turned to mere wind-noises as the cohesion of language could not hold; then he pretended to ride that wind in some forward direction of its choosing as it actually cavitated and ran in retrograde. The far-flung falcon turned back as the thermals abandoned it aloft; the still-air denuded of all creature, all sound, all voice; he marched on and stretched his ears and painted his body with black tattoos like some aboriginal wearing just the stygian earth, begging it to pull him back to the core as he struggled to break free.

  What would Lyndon find out here on the edge? his friend had to wonder more than even he wondered, Chen said to himself as he kept pushing his eyes into the wall before him, his ears back-drafted by the harmonic voice still reading aloud of this and that fact of The Author and his progeny.

  He had to know, Chen thought, insisted of his friend, it was not merely an abandonment of the world and of God, but of the Self. Itself, he thought. He had to know the modules of the brain would break down, first the super-ego , the desiderata of communal life, the need to get along; next to go, was the ego , that self-conception in the opposing mirrors, the mise-en-abyme , and then the Id , the open maw of the ancient and the immediate; the animal with no future.

  Of course, his Post-Genetic Coder would eliminate every one of these natural modules until he was pure being; and he would then have to choose what systems to put back online; and yet, who would he be that would make that choice? Did one have to be something to make a choice, was there a first cause? Was hierarchy and valuation first cause? It was hard for Chen to even wonder that -and if Lyndon had not suggested it, he wouldn’t have- for Chen thought morality was nothing more than an app; an add-on to something more fundamental in life. But Lyndon didn’t think that at all and so Chen tried to think of it from his benefactor’s point of view -if he could- for a moment or two.

  Lyndon often spoke of Cuba, and their revolution. And the analogy just appeared to Chen now idiopathically, and he tried to build a metaphor of the Self, and he thought of a radio, a box of communication used to throw the technology of language even further; the ICBM of language: the radio wave. Chen then thought -made metaphor- of the shocking technology of 1959:

  Was Lyndon like some Cuban boy, some scion of an illiterate compansino of Oriente, taking his radio apart looking for the residence and body of the man speaking of the dangerous guerillas in the Sierra Maestras? Or, was he like some brigand, a guerilla storming that radio transmitter’s shack and pulling that Batista soldier -that CIA-man inside- pulling
him apart limb by limb to see what made him say such things? Was he more? Was Lyndon a country who jammed that transmitter with his own Radio Free Marti and broadcast some new Liberation chatter; using some algorithmic code to invigilate the Patria itself; to ferret out and discover who was the rebel and whom the loyalist? Who was each man, and what part of brain was most truly them? Revolutions began with men and ended with them too. But there was so much in between.

  Chen tried to make metaphors bloom and draw bees to them so something else may grow farther afield; he wanted his ideas to pollenate inside his own brain. He felt warm, tight about the head, the mind, he felt gears jam, springs pull taut. He felt hot.

  Goddammit, what had Jaynes said on this? How old was modern man; conscious man: 10,000 years old; 12,000? What novelty, what emergent technology this self-reflective brain was and yet it still refused to answer this most fundamental question of itself, Chen thought .

  Its blind spot was that it -this mind- had no idea it was just one more instantiation among millions of evolution's projects to process information; to accelerate entropy. This mind, woke up -but in this hypnopompic state- it had no idea that it did most of its best work asleep; that it worked just fine asleep, Chen thought. It reveled in its new state; now awake, it thought itself wholly apart from mere animal minds. But like the rest of the body of man, sharing 99% of its DNA with our cousin chimpanzee, this brain shared 99% with unconscious animal brains. So much of what it did was still the clockworks of faceless gears and soulless springs; what Descartes called rotam et sacoma .

  And what if all of it was still this mechanical and our Selves behind the eyes just another perception like heat or cold or an object in our way; what if it were just something lifting off the brain? What if purpose and the Self were more illusions like the optical blind spot papered over by the mind's editors? Chen was of two minds himself on this, he saw evolution’s logic and often consulted the I-Ching ; he was not as consistent as he pretended to be , he upbraided himself with such things as his thoughts circled like mid-western plains’ funnels and carrion birds black and aloft. He felt beset on all sides by jackals and inner thieves. He protected ideas others wanted, and yet when unsought he felt no loyalty to them at all.

  Is this what Lyndon wanted to prove? To himself? That he was mere machine? Why? Would it absolve him of his greatest crimes, his tawdry desiderata, his solipsism, his lies ? Would it be some magic incantation, some key, some passe partout that lets half-man and half-god, Gilgamesh, past the Elohim -the flaming cherubim- and into the home of the gods? Where, Chen asked himself, were these words coming from, from whence these ideas?

  The man -his friend- was tinkering with the whole clockworks and he had no idea if he'd find freedom or annihilation at the bottom of the springs; or worse, would he find Hell? Chen had asked Lyndon if he knew what Hell was, and Lyndon had said indeed he did, but then he had walked away for once not sharing all he knew -or thought he knew- on a subject.

  Lyndon, he too, was of two minds; the first mind pushed him towards his own knife-edge, and the second listened to the wind for any advice that would tell him how to turn back and yet keep his honor; the first, the widening gyre, saw only the untrod, chaste, landscape ahead; the second, the falconer, looked for the falcon as a tether back to slightly entropic center.

  Chen looked at the monolith: What were those names that flanked his friend ; to the left and right of his friend’s own genome and name? Why did they go laterally, and not down -down like all evolution heretofore- why all the same?

  Chen focused on this ancestral map again, as this question appeared in his mind. The boy was by him on the map; JN1 , is what was written, stamped in the stele , and this was what Lyndon called him. The flanking names were coeval with his; like other versions of himself maybe. Possible alternatives maybe , Chen thought. Avatars.

  Maybe, Lyndon ran his genome through a massive algorithm and had it print out four of the best -or most useful- variations , Chen said the word, maybe, again to himself as if to hedge what he knew instinctively. Lyndon had spoken of cloning brazenly, he did not hide his intents like most evil geniuses, Chen thought and laughed a bit at this characterization of his friend; who he thought wasn’t exactly evil , nor a genius . “He was just extremely weird and well read,” Chen said with a smirk as his voice battled deeply -via just those eight words- with the room’s narrator who still spoke of this and that .

  Lyndon , he thought, had almost no guile in him at all. He spoke his feelings into the air to carve a swath into the forest, the thicket, the clos-du-bois . He made way with this slashing speech, and he didn’t want to get away with anything; the taboo on such tactics were irrelevant to him as would be the forest-clearing of any natural, tribal man. No, he wanted to convince the world that his intents were pure and unavoidable and good and thus should be sanctioned.

  Chen was almost always telling him to be careful, to watch his step , missing the entire point of this man, which was: to be authentic and push the whole world to the edge without hiding or lying about it. The point was to tell the truth, when one had every reason to lie. The point was not to get away with it, but to do it when -even when, especially when- all of life would kill him for it.

  But, avoiding trouble was Chen’s raison d’être now, shit, he was tired; he’d battled the dragon for decades before Lyndon was even awake, and so Lyndon’s ideas on the purpose of life were so counter intuitive, he had to stop, rethink and formulate the world from his friend’s point of view just to make sense of all these moves that seemed like mistakes. His aims were loftier, unachievable, like all artists, he supposed; Chen was happy to put the best spin on it he could. The point was not the money or women or status, although one would take all three; the point was the expression, the need to tell the truth at all cost. This was the force inside artistic men, and men of conscience, and no amount of warning them would ever work; if anything warnings made them more determined to do it the hard way.

  Lyndon was like Wulf Zendik this way , Chen thought. And Chen, despite his personal feelings on the labile and mercurial -and thus dangerous- nature of him, liked Wulf so much that he transferred some of that filial affect to the man of the house even as he scared and confused him. Even as he knew Lyndon was almost certainly -and almost entirely- wrong.

  But did they exist? he asked of these stamped genomes on the wall; returning to the stele and the project it represented. Were they mere hypotheticals; simulations on or in some computer program perhaps? Chen mused as more words came into his head. To be honest, he suddenly then thought, they were the least interesting part of the wall to him. The two tenuous points of contact in 1883 and again in 1944 were these small waists in the body of this huge organism. Bottlenecks. Articulations.

  Chen began to follow the highways of roots back up from Lyndon's name to Melville's son Stanwick and at each joint in the weird skeletal bone of family tree there was a narrative paragraph attending; he had only to listen to the man's voice as he focused on the name on the wall. The optical reader of the library knew which name on the genealogy one gazed upon and as one did -as Chen did- the home's audio system began to play this, the following recording, in a slight Kiwi accent:

  At the end of the 19th century Melville’s legitimate son, Stanwick, had taken a trip to Fiji and harbored himself along the South Island of New Zealand after his many days in Viti Levu. The letters he wrote were never sent and so there is some provenance issue; but the fact is that DNA that matches Herman and all the Melville children was found on half the letters. And no monetary gain was even attempted when the correspondence was inquired of in 1959 during an antiquities dealer's inventory of a governor's armoire ; as part of a larger Suva estate sale. These letters mention a trip to New Zealand and to a purported cousin of Stanwick in the town of Pleasant Point. The Author's son was very intent on going there after ostensibly receiving the information from some reliable locals in Fiji itself. The news seemed to have surprised the man and since Stanwick's father was ve
ry much alive still one wonders if that put even more wind in Stanwick's sails to find out as to the validity of the claim.

  We have no letters once the man was in New Zealand, what we have instead is the account of his arrival on a farm in the town of Pleasant Point in January of 1883. Stanwick was 34 years old and he apparently met his cousin, once removed, working as a ranch hand on a sheep farm. The man, Hapua-Tireo , was 28 and was the off-spring of a woman named Mo-Roimata , who herself had been the daughter of Herman Melville and a Maori native woman named Moana.

  This male heir, Hapua-Tireo in 1908, now at 53 years of age, had a daughter, Hermanilla , with a British woman, Joan Henderson who was the daughter of an exiled Scottish family working a sub-plot of the farm Hapua himself had been working on his entire life by that point. She was only 16 years old and her family had found nothing objectionable about the Maori mullatoe and so they were married and subsequently moved to Timaru .

  By 1943, their daughter Hermanilla , 32, had moved back to Pleasant Point and met Joan Henderson's sister, Gay, who had a son by the name of Peter. In the autumn of that year Peter, Hermanilla's cousin, and her were working together on their mutual grandfather's farm and fell in love. They had a daughter, Pamela, who was born in June of 1944.

  21 years later, in 1965, that Scottish-Maori girl ran off with another Scottish blackjack who -from the south of the United States of America- had landed in Aotearoa with the USAF, and they in turn had landed, in South Carolina, USA. Pamela and Lee -who went by Roy at that time- had two boys. The first in 1968, was born under the name of Travis Lee, and by the year of 1974 of the common era, the family had its final genetic say in the 20th century when Lyndon James breached in a rare snow storm in January in Texarkana .

  As the voice spoke and as Chen listened and as nightfall had come on without him noticing, Lyndon walked into the hall.

  Chen noticed it was late, his friend was like moonlight, like the hoot of the owl, the howl of the wolf; he came alive in the absence of the ambient light. The room darkened and this was the time his friend awoke each time; each day; each night.