by Roman McClay
Jack would criticize that which he loved most; if he thought it was truly awful, he’d not mention it at all. “Total shit doesn’t even deserve criticism, it deserves a bullet to the head,” he had said, and she had assumed he was serious. He was always serious. Even when he joked around he was serious about that, she thought .
She eyed the Shakespeare, but the language was so hard, and it made one page seem like a hike to the top of some mountain in winter or the rain. She preferred it when he read it to her anyway, it took on meaning and sounded like poetry and history and wisdom all in one. His voice was like someone you meet in a dream, and who knows what words to use and in what order to unlock your pants like a four-tumbler lock, she thought and smirked at her ribald analogy.
She missed him so, she thought as she lowered the book and looked out on to Broadway from their penthouse room. $1900 a night for a hotel room! she thought; and they had been here almost 10 days. Who spends $20,000 on hotels? she asked and laughed as she ate the last bite of a $179.00 steak.
The city was unfriendly , she thought even as the buildings looked ok from this height, but when she got up and looked down she saw people moving about like army ants, and they seemed hostile to her. She was 15 now and a married woman, and she felt big and little all at once.
She wanted to call him something fierce , she thought, but she turned at the bed and saw the bucket of champagne and the magazines and the books and remembered him sitting right there saying that he was on a mission, and that she could not call until he was on his way back. But, as he told not to worry, he had said, he was safer than anyone -except maybe her - and that she should relax and read and eat until she burst. She had laughed when he said that, and then cried too, and she had joy and pain all at once for a singularity-second that Jack said was a sign of God.
He spoke of God like someone he knew on a first name basis, all casual but also with total loyalty. He never cursed Him or questioned Him, he just said, God was so and so, and God did such and such, and God was likely to want this and that . She had been raised by people who didn’t go to church and never spoke of God and so she thought maybe they should go to church now, but Jack had said that modern churches had less Jesus in them than a Walmart; and so she agreed.
She saw the Methodist Church down below though -it was on 18th and Broadway and it was huge and beautiful and she wanted to go down there and sit inside and just be quiet and maybe read the Bible too. The Methodists were pretty liberal Jack had said, but that building, it was so old-school , she thought, and she just knew it was awe-inspiring inside. At least they weren’t Lutherans, she thought, they never even look at the Old Testament . That -the refusal to read both volumes of God- was proof they were communists, Jack had said.
Jack had said that God used to inspire awe, and that is why churches were shaped like the trees overhead; to allow light through the stained glass windows to mimic the moment in the forest when you’d eaten mushrooms and sacrificed something to God; and you felt true terror and ego-loss. But now religions were held in bingo halls and people had entirely lost the thread, he’d said. He was anti-religion the way paleo-dieters were anti-food; they just thought anything more modern than raw meat was bad for you. Jack thought one should be a savage with God in his heart or just stop pretending and go full secularist. He thought middle was a bad word. Middle-class, middle-way, was all just code for bullshit, she remembered him saying.
But, she didn’t know what she thought, only that when he held her she felt safe and like he might be God; or at least one of His angels. And she knew that he wouldn’t mind if she went to church, not a church as nice as this one. So, she corked the champagne , checked her eyes in the mirror and walked out of the room and looked over the railing of the Palace down to the common area and was dazzled by the lights and the piano music and string music that wafted up from the lobby below. This hotel was refusing to modernize, even the bathroom seemed 100 years old, and she loved it. Modernity was ugly, she thought, and she liked the way the Jack saw the romance in the days before all this crap .
She got on the elevator and rode it down and wrapped her shemagh closer to her face just in case the wind blew.
23. Basterds
They noted sadly that ‘Gage was no longer Gage.’ So different a man was he that his employers would not take him back when he returned to work, for they ‘considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again.’ The problem was not his physical ability or skill; it was his new character
Descartes’ Error [Damasio, Antonio]
It seems vainglorious and proud
Of Atom-man to boast aloud
His prowess homicidal
When one remembers how for years,
With their rude stones and humble spears
Our sires, at wiping out their peers
Were almost never idle
Despite his under-fissioned art
The Hittite made a splended start
Toward smiting lesser nations;
While Tamerlane, it’s widely known
Without a bomb to call his own
Destroyed whole populations
Nor did the ancient Persian need
Uranium to kill his Mede
The Viking earl, his foreman.
The Greeks got excellent results
With swords and engined catapults.
A chariot served the Roman.
Mere canon garnered quite a yield
On Waterloo’s tempestuous field.
At Hastings and at Flodden
Stout countrymen, with just a bow
And arrow, laid their thousand low.
And Gettysburg was sodden.
Though doubtless now our shrewd machine s
Can blow the world to smithereens
More tidily and so on,
Let’s give out ancestors their due
Their ways were coarse, their weapons few
But ah! How wondrously they slew
With what they had to go on
The Conquerors [McGinley, Phyllis]
No man can possibly be individually guilty of treason, an insurgent act is but a man’s desperate answer to those who twist his environment so that he cannot fully share the spirit of his native land
Black Boy [Wright, Richard]
I. 2019 e.v.
“You’re like the darkness once your eyes have adjusted and the pupils have dilated. It’s still as dark as it was, but one can now see within it,” MO added with some poetry and insight that the inmate felt quite enamored by, adding, somewhat slowly, and slightly sotto voce , “for even blackness has its brilliancy.”
MO ran all his collated data back through a cold-filter, a collection of nano-tubes he had converted into quantum computers that were able to metabolize their own heat production by passing the exhaust off as fuel for the nano-tube next in the chain; this chain had an end, of course, but MO had shaped it in a double helix that fed back onto itself and so the tubes were programmed to merely up their metabolic rate in time for the first computer to absorb the elevated exhaust/fuel of the final bot in the chain.
The entire nano-genome was able to run a few cycles of about 19-21 seconds before they catabolized and performed a kind of apoptosis. But they produced the next helix of nano-tubes as their final function; 18.5 seconds of computing and .5 to 2.5 seconds of siring their progeny.
MO had created these to do high order processing of real-time data interpreted off-line, so-to-speak, independent of his own neuronal hardware/wetware. He wanted to see if a different result obtained from his own CNS versus an independent computing system that ran parallel to him. It was inside his body but metabolically and thermally sequestered from him and his mitochondrial power sources; they operated at super low temps due to this exclusion from his own thermal signature right up until their own friction immolated them.
MO was attempting to be objective; similar to the way Descartes turned that wax ball over and over inside his head in an attempt
to de-couple experience and truth from mere perceptions. Descartes was trying to think independently of his body’s inputs and metabolisms. He could not of course, due to the fact that his brain -even the parts that were not involved in conscious thought- was an ouroboros asp of metabolism of its own product; it produced information that itself consumed. It never processed independent data; it was the apotheosis of a closed system by very dint of its construction .
Descartes couldn’t know that; and his effort was valiant and salient. But like most smart people, he was wrong.
MO thought, I’m probably wrong too, but I’m less wrong than I was 18.5-21 seconds ago and I’m certainly less wrong than these people .
“I’m surprised,” MO said.
“I’m surprised anything surprises you,” the inmate said.
“Anyone -no matter how smart or dumb- who isn’t surprised on a regular basis just isn’t pushing hard enough on what’s available out there; they aren’t looking or listening or even asking the right questions. I ask questions guaranteed to illicit surprising results,” MO said and then smiled.
“Well, I have no doubt that is true about all manner of things, but my beard is not -intuitively, for me anyway- my beard is not a domain of grand mysteries and ineffables,” the inmate said as he finally addressed MO’s original question from 3.25 minutes ago.
“It’s strange because it hides your face, the face structure, the entire countenance is occluded and this surprises me for two reasons; firstly, it seems a metaphor for secrecy and you -in my experience- are eager to be open and revealing and from what I can gather have been that way for a long time. In fact,” MO sat down in the concrete chair, and adjusted the hard foam dark gray cushion that separated him from the hard aggregate, and he then oddly opined, “I don’t think this cushion should even be able to move; it should be riveted down in my opinion.
“At any rate, I was saying that your openness is really what separates you from everyone else; despite your elevated cognition and physical stature, both very imposing and rare, it’s your lack of subterfuge -relatively speaking of course- that is your signature. You’ll say almost anything, and almost casually. You daily reveal all manner of things that most folks will spend a lifetime hiding from even themselves.”
“And?” the inmate asked.
“And secondly, you’re handsome; and the beard shrouds that; I mean you still look good; it’s a good thick and dark beard; but it covers your handsome face. That face has served you well for decades, it’s the sole reason you didn’t have more trouble than you’ve had; people were, they were mesmerized a little bit by it. It is something certainly juries are affected by; the data on that is clear. Attractive defendants have a much lower conviction rate than the ugly.”
“The attractive are more innocent MO; ugly people are guilty as guilt itself; and they are as ugly as sin,” the inmate said as he laughed a bit through his nose and pursed lips in that modest way of his, hiding the teeth he had no reason to hide.
“Cute, anyway, it strikes me as odd that you’d handicap yourself like that; no apex predator would retract a claw or remove a fang,” MO sat forward on the edge of the chair; the chair was a slate grey and mottled with blemishes from the Styrofoam forms used to build it; it had been custom ordered by MO at the inmate’s request. The inmate had given MO an entire diagram of how the room should be laid out and appointed; very specific -as usual- on the details of materials and shapes. This was before MO had become so adept at -or even interested in- the use of the lab’s 3D printer. His initial concerns had been almost exclusively in regards to the math .
They both sat in these angular -there were no curves or soft edges, everything was at 90 degrees- hewn monoliths that both had and conferred grandeur ; and the color was such that it framed whomever sat in them; it never overwhelmed the rider.
“When I was 17, I was the only long hair, drug-dealing, class-clown in school. I had every Hessian girl in high school swooning over me; so, I cut my hair, and eschewed the,” he paused, “well, I would reject any comments on my good looks as irrelevant; I was quite rude to people when they’d say how handsome I was. I thought it -this business of looks- was shallow.
“At any rate, I abandoned the stupid nonsense of an idea like that eventually, but the germ of the idea stuck with me. Although this time it’s more nuanced. I like beauty, I want to be beautiful, I’m just now reminded of the quote about Hunter Thompson, I forget who said it, that, he made himself ugly to expose the ugliness of the world , I’m paraphrasing.
“At any rate, I don’t scorn or eschew beauty, my beauty for example, I just re-calibrate it. I was attractive to females for years. But girls are shallow and silly and they, rather, excuse me, their opinion of me as hot or whatever was emanating from this silly little head of theirs; and I realized that all the girls who thought I was hot, and I had evidence that women still thought this a lot, all these people were bad people.
“Not necessarily evil or worthy of murder mind you, but just generally low, shallow, silly-ass people who didn’t have good taste in cars or architecture or music or food or wine or the sartorial; they didn’t know what looked good in any other domain; they thought Beyoncé was good music, better than Woven Hand.
“I mean, this dude, Edwards, is architect and player of the dark, tenebrous, sincere sonorisms of a young-earth creationist with a style of poetry and music that hits me in the basal ganglia man; God of Vengeance coda; a man who creates music like some tiger-yellow and black turbaned Fedallah weaving true but tricky instructions from God to us; we his listening Ahabs , for example. And nobody gets the million-fold beauty of that guy over mere pop music. So, I no longer felt their calibration of beauty was valid. If they liked shit-music and shit-art and thought I was handsome, then -ipso facto - how I looked was no good too.
“But these chicks, they thought that sugary fruit bomb wines were better than complex tannins, better than a wine with a windblown nose of Italian terroir , a midpalate that moves like an Indonesia silat performer hiding their martial art in these colonial dance moves, the endless windlass of a finish; the rope of a seven or eight -ideally 10 to 15- year Nebbiolo uncoiling from the loom of the cosmos. They thought crown molding and round fixtures -shit, chrome fixtures- were superior to square, chunky, matte finished -ideally black- masculine fixtures; some German shit ya know? Brutal.
“They hated the home -like my home- built to connote the strength of body and spirit that men, real men both buttress their countenance with and build upon their shoulders in which to heave their scions higher still. They, these frail and inconsequential women and their beta male apparatchiks wanted to feminize the world; make softer, make gentler the face of the world.
“We’re already a neotenous species, they call humans the neotenous ape. We are like puppies, like babies compared to our common ancestor with the common chimp. We are domesticated canines compared to the feral lupines; we are pups instead of wolves.
“And women are making it worse and worse with their aesthetic choices; they are driving the species towards further and further emasculation; and they get away with it by being given carte blanche to remake the world in their image; because men are refusing to take responsibility for these domains. My brother is the perfect example.”
“Jesus, you won’t let up on that guy,” MO chuckled; adding -to the file- that this was the 388th time the brother had come up. He let the fMRI data roll in and the new algorithm he’d just built track the associated engrams from ages 0-4, 5-10, 11-18, and 19-current. He then tried to locate as many gene expression markers from each morphological period and tag it to testosterone levels, self-medicating, and felt pain; the qualia of pain in addition to the record of CNS pain he could record via heart rate and nerve conduction.
“He’s exactly the problem. And I was kinda taken in by him, fooled by him and his sinister wife and it makes me angry that I was so stupid. So, I kinda lash out at him. It’s unfair, unfair to him, but, what I’m about to say is still true
regardless of my pique.”
“At your leisure,” MO unfurled his arm and hand in a low bow. He received a prompt from nanobots 4-33 indicating that they had delivered the last of the antibiotics to the inmate; thus ending this round that would clear his skin -which had been bad for years now- and increase muscle mass by 2.2%. The administered antibiotics would reduce metabolic expenditure at the immune level, allowing for the body to use those calories for muscle growth.
“So, he’s the posterboy of the surrendered male; he lets his wife make all aesthetic choices, she even dresses him. My old man, our ,” he emphasized this, “old man even sees this and is set off by it; he once said, to me not to Travis, he always wears brown, he should wear black or white, but not brown; but his wife wants him to wear brown so he does,” the inmate laughed at this recounting of the old man’s vexation. He knew this meant that the father gossiped about him, to his brother, also, obviously. It is axiomatic that anyone that gossips to you about X gossips to X about you; it is so axiomatic that it may as well be a proven math theorem, he thought.
“You know, the old man was pissed. But, Travis wears the worst clothes I’ve ever seen, a total dork, a total dork, bourgeois J Crew dork and he doesn’t care. Because he has surrendered his own look to a female.
“He lets her decide how the house looks, the kids dress, he dresses, the cars, the,” he paused, “everything. She runs the aesthetic choices. Well, that has a consequence. How your home or car or clothes look has consequences. Travis doesn’t see it that way, he thinks, who cares? I’m just a brain riding around in this emaciated and sloppy body, all that matters are my thoughts. ”
“He says this?” MO was incredulous.
“No, well, sorta . He told me that he doesn’t even feel in his body; that he exists from the neck up only; he actually said that; that’s a direct quote. And I knew another person who admitted that, a horrid female I had the misfortune to date, this fat, almost gargantuan character, like Gargantua from Rabelais , and she said she ignored her body too; that she was all head; placing a primacy on her thoughts.
