Sanction

by Roman McClay

  And he then fell into a deep sleep in the afternoon, upright on the ground; and night passed away from camp. His dreams hid themselves from his conscious mind, the animals gave him berth, the light took its leave. The moon took another route, as he slept for a full eight hours for once in many years. When he awoke and felt his eyes sewn shut with saline and muck he spit on his hands and rubbed this admixture on his lids and opened them to a perfect quiet and dark just before dawn. Inside and without , he felt. The blood on the palm from the day before had dried into the heartlines and the fissures of the first fist made in the womb .

  And he bowed his head and that passage in Clarel made sense to him all at once.

  The Slanting Cross, of course, the rune for need, for distress, that was the language, he had seen meteors, the Mannaz, on the slanting cross .

  It was sun and rain and wind with grit, with grit, he repeated to himself, driving; and this is what will cancel the slanting cross, the rune of Naudiz, that sent out distress signals with the arrival of new gods: first the weakness, the voluntary poverty of power, the diminution of power of their humbling Christ -a first try at rationality, but still in touch with the gods- then, next, unavoidably, the devouring of Science, the investiture of all power in machines and the State; it was all a progression of evil over the power of the gods that lived in the heart of Man. The Author knew so much more than he had known, Blax thought with madness now at a boil.

  He thought, I shall break myself apart to spread myself like driving sand in the wind and the rain -baked in the sun- so that Man, not just a man, but Mankind may return to the heart of the gods. He knew his conscious mind would forget all that he had discovered, but his body would remember it he was certain, as he drifted back to sleep on the ground.

  13. Not a Single Element

  You can run the cards for prints, DNA, but they’ll come back clean like the last ones; do it anyway, who knows we might get lucky; that counts too

  Death-investigation: Costilow, Jeremey, et.al. ; 2018 [Emickole, Ron. DET. DPD]

  Simone Weil was the only great spirit of our time

  [Camus, Albert]

  Soon, however, he grasps the fact that the weapon which is pointing at him will not be diverted

  The Iliad, or the Poem of Force [Weil, Simone]

  I. 2036 e.v.

  The shadow from the top of the garage door, the 4-inch square tubing that he had welded in place 20 years ago, now with a patina of rust, washed brown and a mottled white and matte clear with the light, lay on his eyes like a mask. Blax sat on the counter while the Jacks played cards, and Jack Four looked up to see Blax reading from tea-stained paper in this shadow and silence of the game.

  His hands, too, were occluded by shadow, this layer of black beam was produced from their heads -heads between the star and he- as one side of their Janus faces -from the sunrise in the north east- was warm and lit; and as they spoke their lee-side teeth saffroned from the sunrays; their Blax-side was dark against what he saw out in the sunlit agoge .

  Jack Four stared at what he saw, what he could see, and grew nervous as the man’s -Blax’s- eyes and hands were black and hidden; the body a lighter grey and faded cobalt; from his periphery he saw the cards moved about the table. His brothers held two each. He checked his hand as the cards came around again and then they each held three.

  Blax held a cigar in his paw and the smoke rose from shadow to light and to shadow again, and Jack began to automatically attempt to predict where the smoke plumes would go. He thought of termites building tunnels to each other, from one side of a divide to the next, and Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of a morphogenic field that invisibly held common ideals between separated members of a species. He now had a fourth card in his hand, just like the other Jacks. The smoke rose and he had only predicted its vector with 51% accuracy according to his PGC.

  The 5th card was dealt and Blax’s beard was rubbed and the wine was drank from a stemless glass; the music of 16 Horsepower rolled low under them then rose up like crops, like cobras from a basket, like vapor from rain heated up by the sun. Jack Four heard his Jack -Jack Two- pass and knock on the table surface, and he looked at his fan of cards: the Bauers of black he had, and aces over 10s of both types of red. He looked at the discarded pile of four-cards with one turned up and saw the Ace of spades like a new grave on the other side of the table. He told Jack Two to pick it up, and he let the shadow fall and then he saw his Lt’s eyes rise like gibbous moons at dawn; and Jack began to play the game.

  Blax had received a letter, by post, in a small envelope, the epistle on heavy stock paper and written in black ink so dark it still looked wet. He had run his finger pads over it and felt it slightly raised, like his own spirits now that he held it in hand. She had written to him and he had missed her and wondered what thoughts populated her mind; he allowed himself to think of her heart; alone like a hung portrait in the safe keeping of her tiny chest that breathed in and out in his visions of her sleeping next to him for all those years. He read each word as itself a gift of nesting dolls, read at levels three and four and more.

  The Hall Rainin vineyard cabernet from 2013 had been decanted at 0000hrs last night and he awoke to pour a glass at 0600. It was structured, bold, and had a mid-pallet that did S-turns in his mouth, a mountain pass was made of his face, cassis-de-crème , and calcareous rock-licks bounced off the route he took with each drink at an ascending elevation. It had scored a Robert Parker 100 in 2016, and now in 2036 it was perfectly bottle aged -he felt- as the fingers of the wine lay like red, translucent claw-marks inside the glass as he set it down and notice the color of the paper as well.

  They had drunk The Bishop, 2012 vintage last night with dinner and the bottle lay on its side in the grooves of the sink drain that were molded into the concrete and his Pinar del Rio burned slowly just starboard to the page.

  The men played Euchre and each side had two points; this their 3rd round in their 2nd game, each side Euchred once. He had told them once that at some point he had learned something important from this game, and he taught it to them so they too might learn something, effortlessly, the way games teach.

  He had learned he’d rather lose being aggressive than lose being cautious, and that you had the same chances either way. And since this was the case, why not choose the way you play and let the results be handled by God and his angels. Jack Four and Jack One had agreed at once, but Two and Three rolled that advice over in their mouths like smoke, and who knows how much seeped in past the blood-brain barrier. One imbibed advice like that just like a cigar, not all at once, not as consummatory reward, but as process, as subtle whiff, not deeply breathed. If one really learned from it, one didn’t gulp it down all at once, but turned it over in the mind and saw its opposite as well as itself. What he had also learned -yet did not know it or tell it- was that he’d rather lose being aggressive than win being cautious, and that is something else entirely. And thus, Blax’s victories of that chided kind abraded and chaffed and made him want to move on.

  She was there in Florence, Colorado, four hours from here, and had been for six months now. She had learned a lot, about a lot of things. But, she had wondered if she might not learn some things by describing what her thoughts might actually be; beyond those feelings she had directly felt, perceived, in these 180 days since they last spoke.

  He read the letter as the sounds of morning at Lot 45 emerged like birds from eggs and men from dreams, like gods whispering things.

  ​ Papa:

  The moments of silence here are true and real and I can think; which is like home. It is the only thing like home, and I only get it in brief moments of respite. But Isaiah has seen to it that I get all else that I need. He is so life-like, it is hard to believe he is AI. But, my child’s mind thought my Mongol dolls had numina in them; I’d breathe into their horsey mouths and pull the air across the warrior’s bows & brows. So, I guess it’s not so hard to believe after all.

  I have been reading of Simone Weil, I’m
sure you’ve read her -you’ve read everything!- but I will tell you what she said to me and we can compare notes when I return home.

  She reminds me of you and I both, in many ways. But she is a tragic figure because of her time and place. She was a genius but born in a family with a genius older brother; 3-years her elder. Imagine being that great and yet to still be second place due to an accident of nature! Ah, but she did the thing true genius’s do, I hope I am the first to tell you this, because it excites me so: she didn’t play the game her brother played and be thus condemned to always be second place. No, she made up her own game, papa.

  She took morality to level three and built her own rules and played that game to the utmost. Ah, papa, she took first place as all the players around her bowed and scraped and blushed a bit around the face and hidden places.

  She was born weak, in a slight female body, sickly, and yet did the most masculine of things; and not as competition, but as empathy; she worked in a car factory, alongside men and hard and hard again. But once achieved she was adamant that empathy was not enough, not sufficient to feel as one’s brethren feel in mere thought, she felt it in her body proper and said this was the key.

  She went without heat in winter as the workers did, she worked her body even with a genius IQ, because her fellow Edenic humans had to work, the academy and its soft requirements were unavailable to them; so too to her then , she said. This is the way to live a life! To act as one says one believes; to align the body and mind and soul in cascading 3s that build a giant 1. To read Genesis and not try to escape its injunctions. Who among Christians is this way? Who works purely as piety to God?

  I know you know many, many men who would consider this foolish and martyrdom, and of course they are wrong, but how wrong! Half-wise men think it is a pragmatism to survive against all odds, but Simone -and I agree and I know you do too- Simone thought it was the ultimate pragmatism to die against all odds! To die against all odds!

  She was just 34 when the tuberculosis took her, papa. Blake -I remember from your readings to me when I was a girl- said that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. How that truth stings me and all of us; does our pain -as we submit to this- itself have an equal and opposite joy in heaven? Do the angels feel our pain as joy, and do they feel it as a burden then?

  And yet what a life she lived, 100 times as long as most men; 1,000 times the LIFE. She got it, she got the point and got that it was actually pragmatic to live life as recklessly moral -recklessly moral , is that not le mot juste ! to live life as recklessly moral as possible, since none of us get out of this alive.

  What sense does it make to play it safe, and only take care of one’s body-self and only worry about getting yours, and money grubbing and ease-seeking and material comforts as the soul drifts away, gets caught in the wheel of your Lorenz water-device, what sense does it make to ruin the one thing from this life to the next you are allowed to take? The soul !

  Why easily sin when one can become Good with so much effort? Does not man thrill in hard work? Can he not see the gift that is hard moral work?

  Why take the easy route of self-protection and slurping at the trough and endless days like stones upon stones, of sinning to survive?

  What is pragmatic in any of that? What is pragmatic in storing up riches here on earth and letting the soul atrophy and die so that for eternity you neither have nor can miss what you stupidly worked on -money!- and then absurdly not have still with you, what God allows to carry on, as carry-on; why ignore what you could have brought forth? Men could have character when they die, but they preferred to live on and on in tawdry humiliating sin! Stupid men!

  Ah, but modern man -and Simone, she was an atheist too, papa, until she saw God in the shadows and in the light- but modern man thinks everything backwards and sees all upside-down. She saw this, from the ground, from the workshop floor. She saw it from Spain among the Lincoln Brigade. She saw this from the singularity of death and the infinity of fragility, she saw that life was deeply coiled inside the outer shell.

  She made fun of Marx like you, papa, for never working real jobs like the proles. She said laboring made her into something much more than a tool; it deadened her inside so that she may excise the soul that was too deep within to reach when her body was fragile and weak and tender and sweet. To get roughed up allowed invasive surgery to extract the beating heart, she saw that only after working hard, with her body, in a mechanized industrial economy. Oh, papa, she saw the things you speak of, and she saw them in the same language of poetry; who knew that you saw real things, real things papa, not apparitions, but documentary evidence, from the other side?

  I have now two sightings of the working life from the eyes of the poet and revolutionary, the being that holds their heart -ripped from chest as if by a Mexica Priest- in their own hand and shows it to the blinking crowd of prone-men. She saw the same thing you saw papa and spoke of it just as you have; this means it’s real, it must be real, I am certain of it now. I was certain of it then, too, of course, but only because I was certain of YOU. But now I am certain of IT, do you see the difference? The subtle difference? Of course, you do! My God, of course…

  How can man miss the point of life so often, each man so often, so often each man? But maybe it takes a specialness found in 1 of 1 million men to see what is so well hidden by God; that rascal! Maybe its obviousness is merely what seems apparent to the man with eyes among the blind. Average man, ha, with this stupid obsession with mere life, but with no feel or affection for real life at all; what an irony, what a tragedy is man!

  Ah, but she was a woman , and I’ve come last to that. She is twice as great as any man -with the exception of you-know-who-xo- because she was ten times as weak, and yet held still half as much as they above her head, and theirs too. What is greater: the man who can lift 300 but cheaply lifts 200 instead, or the woman who can only lift 99 and yet lifts 100? You know the answer to that, and she was that woman, papa. She lifted 100 and mightily, and she lived more courageously than any 1,000 men.

  You’ve often said moral courage is physical courage, and I see that now more than ever. She was physically brave in a body of a woman, all lithe and small and all the more vulnerable; who are these men in strong bodies who fear every goddamn thing! Who are they kidding! They fear not death -they fear LIFE! The fools, the cowards! What must it be like to be you, a hero among the craven, what more must it be to be a woman heroine among Fallen men? Oh, how much more sublime and tragic both!

  She loved God for the right reasons, half respectful fear and half love of that ugliness which could be beautiful with grace.

  She had come from wealth and abandoned the value of it. She -at age 5- would refuse sugar, the crack cocaine of the underage, and did so on principle, because the soldiers at the front -World War One- had none of the white substance. Who else but a woman destined to greatness is great already at the age of 5!

  She was an intellectual, one of only a few women to enter the French academy, the Ecole normale superieure ! One of only four women, papa! Oh, high marks high marks of course! But, she saw it as tawdry as money, ha, the genius always scorns the trophies of the middlebrow; that imprimatur of the fiat currency of the so-called Elite, the elite, who cannot even think!

  She left the ivory towel of babble of the academy to work in a car factory -oh, I’ve already mentioned that- but she said it was -it would be- the greatest evil to ignore her call -His call- to the impossible; to work in the real black factories in lieu of the mere intellectual, the safe, ethereal realm of thoughts.

  She was called -she did not desire- she was called by God to match the work of man, of men. Oh, I feel it now why I learned by your side all the things you know, and more, the things you DO , because I was called to it, it was not an option; an option only morally, the failure to obey this call would be a sin, a sin, and my body knew it then and my mind knows it now.

  I will therefore I am, not merely think ! She rebuked, reformed, reshaped, redirected the Car
tesian maxim in the most important way. She was embodied, and I must say this is what Isaiah -if you’ll forgive the intrusion in this place on this page- but this is what Isaiah said -oh, I think it was last week- he said this was the key to his intelligence, his embodiment! Who would know this, none among the so-called intellectuals. Only workers would have known.

  She was made aware of this through God’s injunction to work; Simone knew more than she would say. Is this what man -what I- should do: say less than we know? Whilst doing more than we can do?

  The Great Beast was the supra-embodiment of man, the next level up, the city, the crowd; and she saw this danger as you see. Man alone is capable of growth, but as a group he deforms. Ah, the Platonic haughtiness, not wrong… not wrong.

  Incarnate, she said, incarnate , is what is problem and solution both, with Christ as substrate for both substance and spirit both. Born a non-believing Jew, then a leftist activist and intellectual turned Christian mystic, in the best sense of that word; of all those words! How can you -papa- not be some re-incarnation of this very thing!

  She went to Spain to fight alongside the Lincoln-Anarchists of the Republican Brigades, in the Durruit . A slave to work, she said, not with angst or bitterness, a slave to God she thought; oh, work, that condemnation from Eden, that noble punishment be paid. She felt that she -and all who are above- should match the low, to work side-by-side, to fight side- by-side, to lack side-by-side with all those born under God’s word and light. The city should genuflect to the man, the man to the spirit, the spirit to the void.

  There is no safe way to use force, she said, but this must not be seen as a rebuke of violence, she lost her pacifism the most honest way: she saw that force was already -and always- employed, and one merely had option to help control its application, its direction, only; not whether it did -or did not- exist.