by Roman McClay
“We forget our love, we banish that woman, that perfect girl, that arch-angel, we exile her down to Hell just so we may sleep at night. And we never ponder that maybe we ought not sleep so well; that love is too noble and sacred a thing to dismiss, to move on, to forget, just so that this profane body may in fact heal.”
22. Crook
If this country can’t find its way to a human path, if it can’t inform conduct with a deep sense of life, then all of us are going down the same drain
Black Boy [Wright, Richard]
I hope for the day to come with it will not be necessary for any man to carry an automatic. But in the meantime, preferring to be a live dog rather than a dead lion, I keep thin oil on my pistol and try it out once in a while to make sure that it is working, so it is with nations, it behooves nations to keep thin oil on their war machinery and know how to handle it
Interview San Jose Times [London, Jack]
First, a hole must be drilled in the rock
Descartes’ Error [Damasio, Antonio]
I. 2038 e.v.
He stood in the cove created by the geometry of the building's architecture. Isosceles triangles of dark shadows were formed; and with the triple light sources -of the large LED fixtures on the corners of each section of wall- the darkest shadows themselves had their own grey shadows that fanned out with structure like the leaves of an open book.
He thought of how often the surface-to-air canopy of a plant, a tree, mirrored the outreach of the root ball underneath; the diameter of the sun-feeding leaves and branches of the tree above growing in proportion to the drinking roots below. He could flip them end on end in his mind and have it look unchanged; only the leaves themselves would give the stochastic growth of brachia a discernable difference from above ground to below. In the winter there may not be any evidence of a change at all, he thought.
He imagined each tree in the world uprooting and flipping on an axis at ground level to bury its green-leaf and brown-bough canopy and expose its white roots, hirsute with blonde tendrils, coated in richly populated and darkly camouflaged forks of captured lightning, the constituents of what most people merely called soil: mycorrhizae and humus and peat and worm castings. Was atmosphere just oxygen and nitrogen or did it too include the birds of the air?
All of it was like ribbons and ore of Prussian orthodox ornaments on an old-world Tannenbaum on the solstice; hand-fashioned with a martial brocade that one suspected might have been the medals that hung on the breast of the dress coat of some Lange Kerls grandfather or great uncle before being re-purposed for this seasonal phenomenon.
His eyes were wide open and he hung them under his high Scottish brow -that he implicitly assumed was his alone- like mundi orbs beneath some cathedral’s spandrel or buttress. They hanged, those bark brown and mottled rings of aperture and iris that cannot look like anything but an eclipse of two suns by two moons and the amber-saffron photon-coronal roiling suspended in a god-white effluvium allowing only the sanguinary lightning strikes of burst blood vessels to mar its muscovite surface. And like caught pirates, as they hanged, those eyes stared forward at just above the horizon into the concrete lot and beyond the corporate fencing into the large fallow field that surrounded the property; and beyond that too.
Across that 17.5-acre field were the crepuscular, pulsar-star, lights of the regional emergency call center for ADT that seemed to beam out to him in as if from the Alexandrian Pharos to his anchored Caesar vessel. It too, the security center building, was expanding out along the same vector as the edifice that backed and hid him; north and south ran the bulk of the offices in a longitudinal arc that, and this was not true of his temporary FOB, walled the eastern shore and perimeter of Tout-latte Lake .
“As above, so below,” he mumbled about the water and the land both.
He thought of Wittgenstein, and how the body was the best impression of the soul. We must grow our soul as we corporeally grow, it seemed , he thought.
He began to think of both the new embryonic and old senescent life along the aqueous shore of that lake. He thought of the mosses and endemic insect larvae that would be embedded in the lattice work of soil and climbers and the nests of departed creatures. How often did we, as humans, see the large features in our horizon and neglected the assembling constituent norma-flora of these phenomena? He forgave us these sins as soon as he enumerated them; magnanimous he was in this state. Allocution was necessary, but once accomplished, forgiveness came.
He, however, was no different than homme moyen, he thought; the average man . How much did he miss in any scene, he thought, how much did those ignored creatures themselves miss as they scrambled to eat and reproduce often in time spans nearly as short as the Lyapunov time of a cubic centimeter of argon at room temperature? The shallow lover of nature always denies the lower creatures their capacity for sin; he did not. He treated the mammalian and reptilian, and microbial creatures like adults. They were as myopic and selfish and stupid as humans; they only lacked the power to destroy the earth, they did not lack the solipsism and stupidity to do it.
It was the patronizing, low expectations vis-à-vis the lower orders; the subtle racism of low-expectations that most hippies and liberals put on full display as if nobody noticed their fatuous and evil philosophy for what it was, he, taking some pride here in his trenchant analysis, noticed. “Gifted with the high perception; I lack the low enjoying power,” he quoted the Great Captain aloud to help stunt the feeling, the pain, the ennui in his heart and his heart’s outpost of the brain.
We can forgive beasts for their murder, forgive blacks for their criminality, their reveling in the low enjoying power as they laugh like hyenas at absolutely nothing; but we must call it by its true name first, before, he thought, we can forgive .
These vapid liberals skipped that process and moved right on to imbuing nature with an innocence; or declaiming our dark brothers' behavior as anodyne, or not even worthy of comment at all. Think of how the liberal media and progressive cultural managers sob and wail and rend garments over nine dead white people, killed in one day as happens a few times a year; but that same media ignores the daily carnage of black on black crime as 19 black bodies stack up in the drug-war zones of our cuidads over a long weekend; every day, every week, every weekend .
But , he insisted to himself, the bestiary of feral animals and even less domesticated niggers are busy burying their own souls in heaped piles of funerary bones outside of the homes of their enemies; homes either commandeered or set on fire by these nihilists in the middle of the night . The dead bodies are the least of their worries. The niggers -like the rest of man- have lost their souls.
And he didn't put it in those stark of terms merely to denounce it; but to illuminate it. Because the darkness in which the so-called civilized world lived in regarding the sanguinary and remorseless philosophy of the animals -that all of us are- was so total that only a bonfire of rhetoric would drive out a few meters of that blackness so one's eyes could focus on the reality within and without the emptiness. He thought of Flannery O'Connor's, large and startling figures, drawn for the almost blind.
Some, very few, but some, would call that true respect for the natural world, and maybe even see respect as one day's travel on horseback from True Love , he thought as he stood as still as he could.
Most would call it insanity and racism; but there is a transitive property at work in the clockworks of this universe and as we watch the secondhand tick maybe there is a madness that is woe and a woe that is wisdom in the larger, slowly moving hands of the epochs. He felt something approaching sadness for how the whole world governed itself; and for those who thought murder and lies and chaos were aberrations and somehow a human-only phenomenon, he felt something close to pity for the naïvete of bourgeois man.
It was a form of denial to not see the links between each species and ourselves , he thought, and to merely say one accepted evolution wasn't enough. One had to accept the corollaries of man’s deep connection
to all the earth, both up and down the slippery ladder: all God's creatures lied and killed just like fallen mankind. Robert Trivers outlined 1,000 deceptions from bacteria to birds; and humans were motivated by the same impulses as the lower orders, we only gave post-hoc justifications to our rutting and gutting or even worse: the running away from a fight.
Justifications written and sounded out in a language that he asserted God spoke in too, filled his own head like hydraulics as he watched the building and the lake in his fore.
The building stood there, intransigent like some stone carving of a portmanteau of a lion and a bearded Anunnaki made by -more frightened than pious- aboriginals; but, he corrected himself, maybe fear and piety are equal, maybe that is what is meant by: Awe.
It was perfectly hewn , he thought, all those right angles he adored. It could be re-purposed too , he thought; but there would be plenty of large industrial buildings he could take over later; this one had to go. But that was it wasn't it? he thought, he always seemed to have a head like a witches' cauldron under which burned a large imperishable flame that boiled his thoughts. He’d plan and think of things he’d like or like to do or like to change, but this roiling soup was always on the boil thanks to his body’s deep-seated belief that there was no time. He lived as if he had six months to do anything before lights out. This is what drove him on; it’s why he accomplished so much and why he never felt like he’d ever get it all accomplished at all.
He just happened to keep living long after his body had warned him of death, annihilation, as The Author would much more frighteningly put it to Hawthorn. Warned, he was, with signals of anxiety and doom; these were the CNS's chemical language employed to get him out of bed in the morning and keep him up at night; his aide-de-camp .
His accomplishments just piled up in between these feelings of fear of not enough time welded to a seemingly endless succession of long days in which to work. But the pot never came off the boil and it drove him to always think like this; myopically. His coder seemed to ignore this phenomenon as if its myopia was adaptive, functional, even desirable. But, the irony was that his short-sightedness produced seemingly long-term and adaptive results; no different than evolution itself, he concluded. Luck counts as much as competence does , he lamented but noted that he had benefitted from this too. Man has made religion of long-term thinking, when maybe the short term is all evolution needs to think long-term. Maybe , he thought, the universe doesn’t need our fucking long-term thinking, maybe it doesn’t need our help at all .
How could a man ever reconcile himself to these truncated life spans ? he then insisted on posing to himself, despite the moment of rebellion against the clock in his heart sending tremors and tics to his head. By limiting the scope of one's desiderata , he supposed, and by answering this question thus, he moved on from any insouciance that might allow him to let down his guard. He had many avatars of himself in his head, and they all spoke their piece at the round table.
He thought of each decision to move on from one interest to the next, or to hone one skill more perfectly rather than to acquire another; to build further, deeper upon a living relationship's foundational root ball or cultivate more shallowly a new grafting across more and more acreage; to describe in more nuanced detail a phenomenon to one's self or to tie it off and focus the eyes on another part of this grand, but fractal whole. “This mise-an-abyme ,” he muttered; Blax’s words often populated his head and then mouth as one of the avatars, gods, at the Mount Olympus in his lofty head; that heady loft to the body. He asked plainly, did one make the best -most rare and golden- grapes on the vine in just one acre, some Eden, providing drink for the gods; or did one spread one’s vineyard over the earth to make the whole world drink from the veritas of his wine?
The recursion in these repeating patterns of questions, and that the lake's shore line itself was exemplar of this, was worth noticing , he thought, but where was the most revealing data point for one to stare at: was it at each point using three different levels of magnification, or all along the perimeter of just one level? Did one dig down to Hell and climb up to heaven from where a man stood; or did he follow the ouroboros asp of the terrestrial plane surveying the great circle of the now?
But what if one had infinite time to explore all of it? he pined from inside his finite skin and bones, as this greedy insubordination bubbled up from his heated brew of a brain. What if one doesn't have to choose? he insurgently asked himself.
He looked at his chronograph and its tritium tipped analog hands pointed like an intersection's street signs as seen from above or below at an oblique angle; akimbo and askew; in an X. It was 0220hrs; he liked to look at this atavistic technology even though his post-genetic coder kept atomic time in his head making it unnecessary to refer to its face and hands. He then focused out at the black again; the ghosts of the green, haloed, chronometer’s hands burned into his retina and traveled up with his gaze seeming as satellites of some dark planet until they faded into the monolithic black, behind the planet of the space between him and his target .
The terrestrial level was, of course, how homosapien’s central nervous system, or rather , he corrected, in which pre-augmented humankind's CNS and eyes, and heuristics developed . Our minds discerned medium sized objects, moving at medium speeds, along days and years, time barely rising to the level of a rubric like, medium, in this billions-year-old cosmos .
These sizes and speeds and times were intuitive to us and when we developed the tools to peer into the microbial, the atomistic, we found ourselves unprepared for it; and too, when Wilhelm and Caroline Herschel ground and polished their own mirrors for these telescopic eyes peering, reaching, into the cosmic expanse, all their intuitions must have been upon the fires in their kilns and on the nubs of their fingers and on the finish of the lens off which came the compounding black. Man had no instinct for the small and the large, the quick or the enduring. Man was short sighted by design.
Could the first men who brought the atomistic, tessellated world up into the imbricate, 3D eye of the human mind ever truly understand these structures that seem governed by laws superseding Newtonian physics? Did, he added, olden man have instincts for truth? Did man even have eyes for truth? he asked as he thought of Donald Hoffman’s insistence that the answer was, no.
He watched the signal and noise ahead of him from the pure black of clear anonymity. He carried no identification; none of his biometrics were in any database. He had no credit nor record of employment nor education. He had no SSN or DOB in the system; neither he nor his brothers. He was a Lockean tabula rasa . He didn't fetishize it; as it was how he was raised and how he continued to live; a seamless journey marked by such early technologies as cash and fungible goods; informal apprenticeship acquired skills and the autodidactic life, writ large . He liked to say he was raised by wolves; it was cute and accurate enough to convey the point he was making, but it lacked the socially awkward bite of the actual lupine nature of his adoptive parents. It was better than saying he was raised by sociopaths. Nobody likes to admit normal men are demons, that one’s entire society is sick to its core.
They were adoptive in a very strange notion of the word. But, he knew he was not of them, not really. He knew more than Isaiah let on.
Nobody wanted to hear that shit; and frankly, he didn't want to say it. It lacked masculinity to blame one's parents for anything. It was exactly the kind of thing a child, or a woman would say to justify some abhorrent behavior . Also, and nobody wanted to hear this either: he didn't feel the need to justify any of this anti-social behavior of his. Well, he corrected, he didn’t feel the need to explain himself to anyone but himself; his constant, and at times harshest critic .
Of course, that wasn't exactly true. The thing that separated the revolutionary, he thought, from the mere criminal was the manifesto, the screed, the Olive Branch Epistle like the one the American colonists sent to King George in 1775 . This salient point was allowed to pop into his brain as a corrective to his g
lum and stygian moods of nihilism. It was Fidel Castro's words, in fact, that rang out in his head; words dictated from his famously expansive, five-hour long tirade in the courtroom during his trial before he was sent to the Isle of Pines ; words and ideas that made it into the book famous throughout Latin America and Africa and Asia; a piece of literature as invisible a publication in the US as an anti-particle.
Nobody reads that which they disagree with, he thought with contempt. They don’t even see the point in knowing thine enemy any more. People are not just averse to pain, they are so stupid they ignore the battleplans -of the invading armies- fucking handed to them! he thought with no grin at all .
The lawyer -turned Jeffe Maximo- justified his rebellion-by-force by quoting the anti-cleric Thomas Paine and the clerical Thomas Aquinas, the Cuban Jose Marti and Scottish John Knox, all extemporaneously from his still-young memory. Fidel hit upon one point that stuck like a burr in Jack Four’s saddle: the difference between mere criminals and the Revolutionary was that the criminal will hide from the law, while the Revolutionary will explain why the law must be changed, abolished or placed like a whip in his -the revolutionary's- own hands.
Jack let that sink in and continued to watch the building across the field. His eyes, the pupils, those moons -now dilated to their furthest aperture as a tropicamide stimulus was sent from his PGC to push them beyond the natural mydriatic of low light conditions- could see the lake beyond the building; the lights reflected off its surface, producing the slight illusion of a nebula lifting off the water.
