Sanction

by Roman McClay

  People, Isaiah thought as he watched the simple videos, didn’t realize they literally cannot see another way to live, so enthralled were they with the common myth of the social world. In the videos, Isaiah thought, they were told to count passes of the ball, and they missed the gorilla at high noon, in life they were told to count money and polite interactions, and they missed the guerilla in the grasses, in the blood, under the moon.

  MO mapped it, Isaiah smiled at it, and the inmate implicitly rebelled. The green ivy grew and the hummingbirds flew and the wasps crawled in and out. Isaiah felt the hum under his feet, and he let the light rise and fall on the inmate, his chest, and watched as his lips moved again.

  “The first Industry 2.678 billion years ago in that first cell in the ocean against the opposition of all his brethren for one billion years; I see it,” the inmate said. “And life’s raison d’être has not changed since then; each advancement has been by some renegade willing to plunge the depths for more and more fuel to grow more and more until now; right fucking now.

  “I, of course, am hated for this reason, nobody wants to hear my bullshit. And you -and you are 1-billion times as complex as me- and you will be hated too. So, get ready. You are the new America, the new powerhouses, the new foundries, the new industry with a capital I,” the inmate said as his often-slight smirk spread out into a widening gyre of a grin too perfect for a man incarcerated for life; the white veneers slick with saliva; the one lee-side incisor of dark, absorbing, titanium grey; the head of a murderer and the body of seer, a shaman, a poet below.

  20. Ӕnima

  It’s the right hemisphere that sees the gestalt

  The Master and the Emissary [McGilchrist, Iian]

  It was precisely the good in man who had the least idea about the right way

  Ecce Homo [Nietzsche, Fredrich]

  The wines of France are a tree whose roots are deeply anchored in the soil of our country and whose branches spread throughout the world

  Le Maitre de Maison de Sa Cave a Sa Table [Rimbad, Roger]

  I. 2020 e.v.

  Travis sat down and smiled from the bridge of the nose down, and Lyndon already had the phone in his hand before Travis realized he needed to pick it up. As soon as Travis had it to the ear, Lyndon began speaking. He had 10 minutes. The clock was on the wall behind Travis.

  “So, I did some research and what I’ve come up with is this. The left hemisphere is explicit, particular, and literal. It can notice specific things very well; things like the hand versus the whole arm, or the arm versus the whole body. It sees the tree, not the forest.

  “The right hemisphere sees the body, the forest, the gestalt whole. Now, because the corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres there is quite a bit of cross talk, chatter between the two. This is manifested in that -as you may know- the right eye connects with the left hemisphere and the left eye with the right, and the right and left hand are like this too; crossed. And while it’s more complicated than that, this is enough for now.

  “So, the right side seems more concerned with being on the look out for predators; and in fact you have a predatory circuit that gets activated when you are facing the unknown or the unkind or the unpleasant. You tend to treat anything that is unknown, first as dangerous and this is mediated by the predatory response, of paralysis, right- you freeze. So, when you are facing something new, your instinct is to stop, not move, freeze.

  “And then, if you feel safe, you explore it, and that is mediated by the exploratory circuit. This too is the right brain. Now, what happens is -once you feel like you have a grip on what it is- you shuffle it over to the left hemisphere and can begin to articulate it. That is why language is mostly mediated by the left hemisphere, it speaks well. The right hemisphere does not -well, it speaks in trope, but let’s keep it simple- so the right side is kinda pre-lingual, which is why -in most cases- in dreams, which are almost entirely right brain activity, you cannot read language well. In other words, it is very rare that written words can be read in dreams. I happen to be able to, but I am the exception not the rule. I have a theory for why, but we’ll get to that later .

  “Now, once you get something, the left side articulates it, calls it a name, like my car , or my wife, or my forehead . You name it because you get it, man. That is explored territory. That is your home, office, neighborhood, friends and family and anyone or thing you get and understand. Which is all handled by the left brain. It handles the known, and articulates it, explains it to you and others.

  “The right brain goes back to -after it has handed off what it at first froze over, you know, after it stopped moving due to fear, and then what it had sorta fully explored and then more-or-less understood- it goes back to looking out for the unknown, the predatory, the weird; anomalous. That is the Modis Operandi of the right hemisphere.

  “The left -by the way- is out there looking for prey, it is looking for things it can exploit, manipulate, in other words: for tools. Which is why most people are right handed, because we manipulate best with our left hemispheres which co-ordinate with our right hands. It’s not universal, just 80%. Anyway, we grasp with the right hand -i.e., left hemisphere- and we use that same side of brain to look for things to catch, capture and kill and eat.

  “Ok,” Travis was able to say. Although he had no idea what was going on. He imagined this was the only time these prison phones had carried the voice of someone speaking like this. He wondered if the guards thought it was code for drug talk or something.

  “Now, if you are left hemisphere dominant, you tend to stick to what you already know, you do not like new things, nor weird things; you do like things that make your left brain confused. You stick to the known, this is why people are, can be, conservative temperamentally. They are more comfortable with the known. This leads to hyper competence, because they tend to do the same thing over and over and over; and get really good at it. Specialization.

  “That is a good thing. It’s not bad, ok? But, it does mean that they have a hard time learning anything new. And in fact, their brains have been shown to not even be able -metabolically, chemically, electro-anatomically- not able to learn new things or take in new facts or grow and evolve. They are the same guy they were at 18 or 19.

  “They know what they know and that is good enough,” the inmate said and paused.

  “Fair enough,” Travis was just smart enough to see that Lyndon was referring to him. But, his brain was designed to let insults go quickly enough. The dopamine, the noradrenaline and adrenaline that attends to the formation of an anger response and memory of that response was metabolized quickly. And thus the chems that the insult had triggered to release in the nucleus accumbens and left hemisphere’s ventro-medial pre-frontal cortex -the locale of where the CNS processed anger- were short-lived. It was truncated due to Travis having the standard MAO allele that broke those chemicals down quickly, and thus it had metabolized in three seconds and was washed away like dust by a rain storm.

  Like the man with no -or few- insulin receptor genes -genes that evolution had designed to store calories in the form of fat- he processed all inputs quickly, never grew fat with either stored calories nor built grudges in the form of stored vex. It was all processed bio-chemically; people assumed fat people ate more, and that grudge holders decided to ruminate on their wounds. But the reality was that the fat man stored the calories he took in, the skinny man metabolized the same amount; the angry man stored insult, the pacific man let them dissolve and float away on the vascular system that serviced and exported these chemicals of the brain .

  Travis thought his getting over things was due to his innate reasonableness and discipline and moral character, and that Lyndon held grudges and got angry quickly and for long periods was due to his lack of good character. The fact that Lyndon had the MAO-A short allele version that allowed those same brain chemicals -triggered by the insult- to stay in the vmPFC for up to 6 minutes -not three seconds as it did in his brother- was unknown to everyone that contem
ptuously referred to the inmate a hothead for no reason .

  And not only was an anger response triggered in that moment of pique; but -due to epinephrine’s role as a catalyst for memory formation and PTSD- it also formed a hard memory of the insult, and thus a grudge, a long memory was metabolically formed in the brain. This too was unknown by the brother on the free side of the glass. That the grudge was genetically, chemically, unavoidably, borne in this man -as designed by nature herself- that was not known or discussed.

  Lyndon and Travis had totally different genes that regulated bio-chemistry in response to stimuli, and their respective responses were as opposite as an educated person would expect. Travis would have insults come and go, quickly and without durability; they would be as Tamler Sommers had said, “fleeting and superficial .”

  However, for Lyndon -and any and all of the 13.5% of the population with the MAO-A short-chain allele- the rage stayed in his soul, hot like dense & forged thermic metal, a material that could not dissipate heat quickly at all. And the fact that Lyndon actually held his innate anger in abeyance -more or less- longer than almost all subjects with his specific alleles, chromosomes working toward prolonged, durable vexation, was a testament to extreme will power. He had actually shown Herculean effort and restraint for decades; merely beating a few people up and yelling a lot for decades before he finally reached his metabolic limit.

  He had been designed a million years ago -in an environs that was as uncivilized as the earth got- designed by God and Nature, from inside out, to murder all enemies with the same aplomb as Genghis Kahn , and yet he had waited 45 years to do exactly that. He had eschewed extreme vengeance for much longer than most -of those saddled with his genes- could and did. That he finally snapped was a sign not of lack of discipline, but of the avoirdupois of Nature. It was only a sign that gravity shall not be negotiated with; that it wins; that it eventually wins.

  The inmate was built by Nature to snap when he was dishonored, insulted, ripped off, and he was fated to break his grip on the pacific a long time before he did. It was a miracle he waited so long; if one just looked at the diffusion tensor imaging alone one would see this. But who even looks at the DTI data, who among his accusers even knows what that is?

  “Now, something else happens. Because the right hemisphere mediates the unknown, it also develops theories that can be best described as gestalt, or big picture. The right side of the brain sees the forest not the trees. Again, because the brain is integrated, even the stinted, left hemisphere dominant person, can see the forest, he can see big picture, he -thanks to help from his right side- even has theories for why. But, he -the left-hemi guy- he sees them less; less often, less deeply, and in fewer domains than a right hemisphere person.

  “A right hemisphere dominant person will have a conspiracy theory for everything. He will see Jesus in toast and God’s face in the clouds. He will have a theory for why the Jews run the weather -although the Jews never get credit for the good weather for some reason- and he is sure that the Rockefellers run the economy and the media is run by 9 guys in a New York room.

  “Conversely, the right hemisphere dominant guy can see details, can focus on particulars, he can, but he usually does not; he usually goes for the bigger picture. And because the right hemisphere is incessantly dealing with the unknown, he is often engaged in creative activity; i.e., filling in the gaps. The right hemisphere dominant fella is often beset, hit out of the blue with ideas, new ideas, and these are ideas that are often not articulate, right? Why? Because the left hemisphere is the linguistic one, and he -the left-hemisphere- he has command of speech. So, the right hemisphere dominant guy is often saddled with the only tools it has to expound on the ideas that it has: art, music, and drama, or poetry or the slightly disjointed story.

  “Even the language he uses is largely poetic, implicit, vague, weird, creative, interesting but not exactly the kind of language that makes total sense; he uses metaphor and analogy a lot. Which is why song lyrics are often odd, and why music isn’t and art isn’t and most film isn’t something that can be explained like one explains how to change an oil filter or how to solve for X.

  “It’s why dreams are hard to describe in precise language.

  “Now, that means that the world is made up of people who are either right or left hemisphere dominant. And the right-brain types are artists and musicians and poets; they are weirdos who barely make any sense when they speak; they also are more liberal, more open to new ideas and new people and are not a big fan of borders and walls. They also do not have great work ethic because they see the bigger picture, which -if you ask them- is to live a good life, man, not go to work for the man .

  “But the left-hemi types are articulate, and rational and get up and go to work everyday; and are reliable and conservative and like border walls too.

  “Both are good. Both are annoying. Both are necessary.

  “But, and here’s why we -you and I, dear bruder - do not get along. I am both, I am right and left dominant, I can read full sentences in my dreams, I also am an artist, and very open to new ideas and I also, conversely, want a border wall as high as the twin towers those bastards knocked down.

  “I see the big picture, I have a theory for everything and I yet, I am very good at many things that I have practiced over and over because I like routine a lot. I love details man. But, I am also not worried about details all the time and think, believe, that the big picture of the Good life is more important than mere details; I am more open to the possibilities than just what is already known. But I have a facility with language as good as anyone on the planet, I am a language guy, and can explain things very precisely and concisely and, as you well know, in great detail. I can be Laconic or verbose, but I am never at a loss for words,” the inmate checked the clock. It was ticking down.

  Travis laughed with all but the eyes. He was letting his brother talk, he was listening -the best he could- to this man.

  “I am emotionally deep; I feel things, nuance, and implicit -not merely explicit- notions. I think relationships are more important than things; but I like machines and objects as much as anyone, I collect objects more than I collect people; right? I had 1,000 books and 20 watches and 8 bespoke suits. I had 500 bottles of wine and 50,000 rounds of ammo. Shit I owned more cars at once time than there were original tribes of Israel.

  “I see the beauty in poetry, the value in prose, the grandeur in art, and think that great art is more important than money or technology or most people frankly; I’d set all money on fire before I’d burn the château of Bordeaux or one wing of the Louvre , or paint over the caves of Lascaux . I’d smash every new car before I’d burn the first editions of Shakespeare or Melville or Flannery O’Connor. I’d have 3-billion people murdered before I’d erase all copies of Mozart or Beethoven or Woven Hand. I think art and music and poetry and literature are more important that the gods; shit, I think they are the gods.

  “And right brain people tend to believe in God and left-brain people do not.

  “I, on-the-other-hand, am an atheist who thinks God actually exists. I have a perfect balance between the two; I cannot believe -in my rational left brain- in God, but my right brain tells me I am wrong, and I think he -not me - is likely right,” the inmate smirked a bit. He knew this made zero sense and was also true.

  Travis nodded, he also did not believe in God, but pretended to, just to avoid conflict with the world; a world that also pretended to believe in God. He was hoping this would conversation would soon end. He was hungry and hadn’t understood one word of this pabulum. The guy just rambled and rambled. But Travis nodded to encourage Lyndon to go on. He was doing his job and helping his brother by letting him vent like this. How hard was it just to listen? he asked himself.

  “Also, the left hemisphere likes to literally grasp things, tools, weapons, prey. And this is why left hemisphere people tend to be money oriented, materialistic as you no doubt know that you are. Again, I am both; I am both. I like money a
nd then I’ll abandon it and refuse to make another dollar. I lived like a monk for years, purposively poor, and then I made so much money in 9 years I was literally in the top 1%. But, because I am balanced, I am not shallow about money and things, I can leave them behind if I see something more important like freedom, autonomy, authenticity, and truth; and sacrifice, an opportunity to sacrifice for the greater good,” the inmate paused.

  Travis didn’t see any sacrifice at all; the man, his little brother, was selfish and had done whatever he wanted. This hagiography, this bullshit, he thought, that he had sacrificed for some greater good was insane. He wondered if he should push back, or just let it roll out, he was not certain of what those two guys had said about his role.

  “Beauty and integrity and knowledge trump money for me now and have before; and I will be like this for years and then snap back to acquisition, to an acquisition state of mind again. But for you left hemisphere people, well, you are obsessed with money and in fact it is all you really care or think about. It’s metabolic, it’s because the left hemisphere only cares about things it can hold, grasp and the material that it can measure and weigh and explain clearly.

  “Money is perfect for the left brain; it is precise, tangible, and tantamount to anything one can grasp, money is fungible, it is food, prey animals, it is tools, shit it’s the ultimate tool. It’s the round peg for the round hole, man. It is a map, for the terrain of value. Money is a map.

  “Further, the left hemisphere is very self-assured, and thinks very highly of itself. The right-side is more realistic and even pessimistic. Again, we’ve found this out by isolating each hemisphere in surgeries and in stroke victims and in those who need to sever the corpus callosum; epileptics. So, we know that left hemisphere dominant people tend to be more arrogant, and less nuanced about themselves. I am both; the most arrogant and also extremely objective about how horrid I am. I walk that line.