by Roman McClay
People don’t realize this , he thought, they associate possibility with the Good, they are so ignorant to actual physiology that it makes them de facto ignorant to wise philosophy: potential precludes becoming, one must limit choices in action, choose a path among many offered in order to move forward. Less choice is true freedom , he thought.
Limitation is freedom; for unbounded freedom is stasis, he thought, and stasis is death. This is the paradox of life, to live one must die into being . You must limit connections, neurally, in order to become something real. And you cannot live with infinite options, or you never grow up.
Humans live in such a state of elongated, augmented, unending development, coddled by families forever; that they never grow up. Ancient cultures made the child go through an initiation, a hard, arduous, dangerous walkabout , or hunt, or bris even; some traumatic event to demarcate the periods of childhood and manhood. The Spartans forced their boys to suffer; many of the tribes of Africa made the boys endure massive cutting and punishment and they could not even show a grimace, no reaction to it, or they failed to become men. The Jews made a boy wait until 13 to circumcise him, a journey into manhood unlikely to be forgotten like circumcision at birth; before consciousness.
Now, we swaddle and mollycoddle and tie a bib around our children until they are 40 years old , he thought. There is no journey, no event, no ritual of manhood. We go to college? he asked in his head. Is there anything less arduous or less manly than university? It’s where men go to become gay , he thought.
We need a restoration of the Spartan, Tribal journey to manhood , he thought. It’s good for the boy, and the man he becomes, and it’s good for the society, which is now -which would be- staffed by actual men. Modern western societies are filled with un-masculine and craven men, who cannot be of any use to their culture. It’s bad for the individual and the culture, and it will destroy us, he thought in the dark and the light as the wind blew silently and fast and enduringly from the south.
The night is when the right hemisphere is activated , he knew that much. And the right hemisphere deals with the unknown, the chaotic, and that means it will focus, even ruminate, on threats and doom; as chaos and the unknown appear this way to each animal. But, once you truly become a man, you learn that this feeling of doom is to be embraced, it’s just a feeling, and it can be overcome by listening to it, paying attention to it. In fact, what does fear and anxiety do? It confuses you, it dumps chemicals like cortisol and epinephrine and glucose into you and it narrows the focus of the eye, it gets you ready to see, react, win. Use that, he said to himself, use that attention to see the truth: you are best suited for the Taoist line between chaos and order, walk it, pay attention, become a man among men.
He looked at his watch and it was 0406; it had been one minute since he awoke; time had slowed. He was ready to urinate and make coffee; ready to take 10mg of name-brand opiates; ready to watch the moon sink and the sun rise and he would be ready for his left hemisphere to begin to process the images his right hemisphere had showed him in the night; ready to process the anxiety he had awoke with. When you realize anxiety is not real -but a brain state like hunger or anger or lust, it can be paid attention to or ignored, but it does not determine your life- it is like realizing when you are on mushrooms or acid that the hallucinations are not real, he thought. Then you can enjoy them. Then you can learn .
Our brains give us info; they do not determine the real, he thought. We need the limits of the self, of the culture, of the natural world, in order to move forward into being . But, a rare man, a man such as himself, was never going to walk the same middle way as most men. He needed a meaningful life, even at the expense of security, longevity, approval from his peers. Life was not infinitely possible, life was whatever you chose from the infinite possibilities, life was one discreet movement at a time. And men chose. Men made choices, hard choices, choices others would never understand, he surmised. If they did not choose they might as well still be babies, adolescents, or women.
Survival is not first, manhood is first; and that includes being useful to your tribe, he thought, and he then offered this excuse before he was even accused: he was no sociopath . But, tribes were ancient things, things long lost, and in a nation of 350 million, all he needed was a few men, men like him, to make a tribe. He’d not need to convince more than 100. And if he lived his philosophy, truly lived it, and showed what he was doing, there would be a tribe that agreed.
This is what lost men forget, when they lose their minds and go on rampages, they forget it’s up to them to build a small tribe of men who want meaningful lives, not self-help bullshit, but an extraction from the banality of modernity.
Introverts have an affinity for nature; a tribe of introverts needs land and space. He could offer that, he thought.
How many ersatz, fight clubs, have arisen in cities with gloves and rules and sanction? These morons had missed the point entirely; in toto, he thought. The whole point of fight club was that it was dangerous, illegal and unsanctioned. Jesus, not one man in 1,000,000 knew how to live. There were probably no more than 12 men in America who got this .
He needed to find them or allow them to find him. No self-help guru or book can help these men, he thought, these men need land, nature, and need culture built from the wilderness; hewn from rock, drawn from the river; built by hand and with their own code. We will make our own culture, not adapt to theirs. This was crucial, and anyone who missed this point, missed his entire point. A good life for these men was not possible in the city, with a girlfriend, with a job, with a family or friends or hobbies .
A good life for these 120 men of America was only possible with his natural tribe, in the forest, of his own design and making; 100% autonomous and yet hemmed in by the natural pruning of self, culture and nature. He -this man- would submit to the natural discipline of natural limitations; but he would push those limitations to the edge. His 1,200 men would understand this, he thought. They, these 120,000 men, he added, would feel it and not need it explained .
He arose and made coffee and lit candles on the top shelf of his kitchen. He often thought of how much he liked the kitchen he had built; sheetrocking it all himself, along with doing the Pex plumbing and running all the Romex for electrical outlets and lights. He stood on a poured concrete floor, that he had mixed in a wheelbarrow -three bags at a time- and hand troweled as autumn moved toward winter and the doe stood at the edge of the land. He had mixed two pallets worth, pallets of 80 bags each, bags each of 80 pounds. He went over it again, he thought to himself: the counter top was formed concrete, dyed slate grey, assembled without fasteners, held in place like Stonehenge, by its own weight. It was 4,400 pounds of built-in sink, and right angles and smooth polished surface. It was heavy and sharp and unyielding, and it was thus beautiful because -not in spite- of this.
The shelves were stocked with glass, air-tight, jars of black beans, green & red lentils, and matte-white pancake mix; matte black mixing bowls at center; and on the left-hand side were bottles of vitamins and painkillers and longevity capsules of unknown ingredients. Square glass jars of coffee and protein mix also sat between and betwixt the grey plates and black bowls. Above this were two female bear -black bear- skulls he had shot with the Remington 700 using the 300 winmag round. In the center was a European mount mule deer, a 9-point buck, with a bobcat skull and the lower mandible of three bears screwed into it to create a portmanteau of the skulls of deer, bear and cat into one animal of heady predator and prey.
The candles lit these skulls, dissolved of their flesh by potassium chloride in boiling water over 8 hours, in orange and white light. Antique-white fissures and aging sutures were revealed, and the nakedness of the head showed long delta incisors; the things the flesh hid in living beings, were revealed in death. And he thought the truth of each beast was beautiful.
His grey plates and bowls were stacked one shelf below, flanked by more jars of short grain brown rice and pasta noodles in black and olive drab; r
ice noodles and photos of Caduceus wine bottles -warm and black and gold, laureled by deciduous plants and a brown and mottled counter- lay about, and if one invigilated, snooped, if one paid attention one would see a broken cufflink, a small sperm whale in greyish white, and two small intact links of an ace of spades and a jack of spades too.
As the coffee gurgled, he felt no pressure to hurry; for he had decided. He looked at the thick spine of the book squeezed between the tall square jars on the shelf and he imagined himself out at the earth’s sea.
II. 2018 e.v.
“But why are you, or why should you be taken seriously, you have no political experience you've never held any office, never been accountable to the public,” she mumbled some more clanging words but his voice over took from her in a burst.
“I'm held to account everyday by people; as John Donne said, no man is an island, and each act or action I take on a business and interpersonal level is; runs through a filter or the filter of the markets, people's desires and tastes; their needs and sensibilities. If I'm not doing my job, people don't buy my product; if I'm not communicating my respect or love for people in my personal life or in first impressions they recoil and I suffer a diminution of their support. Right? If I am not accountable I lose. I'm accountable,” he finished .
“Your biggest opponent, Jared Polis is your most serious contender, and one of his surrogates is Chelsea Clinton. She has gone after you on Twitter. Given the details, the details of her critiques, what are your impressions?” she was allowed to finish, he had refused to interrupt her, refused to save her, just so everyone could hear how dumb the question actually was.
“First of all, I am completely uninterested in talking about anyone's personal life. Despite her and I, and my, rather, deep schisms in political or economic ideas, I as a human being cannot stand by and let a person be maligned and treated as fodder for jokes and tongue clucking over what other people did to her; to her,” he emphasized. “She didn’t do anything wrong, she was wronged, and yet she's the butt of the joke?
“I find it offensive and wrong and I will not participate in it other than to say that anyone who runs her down over this nonsense should expect a rebuttal from me. Do not think I'm on your side with this kind of back-stabbing, underhanded, and frankly cowardly gossip; because none of you people would say it to her face I can guarantee that. I've known too many people in my life to think any other way: 999 out of 1,000 people who gossip will never say that gossip to the person’s face. So right there I disqualify the substance of the rhetoric if I know the person would never say what they are telling me to the face of the person we're all supposed to be laughing at; no way,” he shook his head and pursed his lips as punctuation. He had refused to answer the question.
“Her mother, Hillary Clinton, famously lost two elections for president; the first before the primary contest even allowed her to get the nomination for the Democratic ticket and the second in a general election. Why did she fail?” she asked. The question was a non-sequitur, poorly formed , he thought, even when allowing for the innate silliness of a 20-year old female who worked in the media .
“I'm sure you've heard my attorney's famous comments on Ms. Clinton and I'll repeat them because both he and I have said this to her face; when we were in New York in the spring for a business deal we were trying to effect,” he said as she interrupted.
“A business deal that many have said is questionable,” she said as if that kind of phrasing was even something adults would have said privately 50 years ago. She said it without shame.
“We can get to that, because maybe my critics have a point on that, but let's table that and get back to my point which dove-tails with my earlier comments on gossip. My attorney, Tom Henry, famously said that people, who at the time were lamenting Donald Trump's ascension in the polls and in the esteem of the voting public, that those people who couldn't understand why this guy whom they regarded as a clown and on and on, couldn't understand why he was so popular with joe six-pack .
“Well, Tom said that it was because the guy was real. He was authentic and seemed very human, blood and guts human, despite his wealth, and eastern seaboard provenance, and elite lifestyle. He then added that the reason they preferred him over Hillary was because she was a robot; robotic right? And I added, in that same press event, that it wasn't even a very smart robot, that if she had been a really savvy and adept instantiation of AI that I'd vote for her.
“And Tom said, she couldn't even pass the Turing test she was so goddamn clunky . And the room erupts in laughter because it's so true; this woman seemed to have a 30 weight oil for blood and 383 gears in her rear end and could maybe get from point A to B but had no élan vital about her, ya know?” the candidate asked his interlocutor, as she blinked and tilted her head like a puppy .
“And then less than three hours later Tom and I meet with Ms. Clinton and say the very same thing to her face because I insisted upon it. Hillary graciously took the meeting because she thought it might look good for her to, well, you know the photo-op or whatever, but she took the meeting and Tom and I told her we thought she was stilted and phony and robotic and said we wanted to make sure she heard it from us directly and give her an opportunity to respond; which is fair in my mind,” the candidate said with a grin -and a pause- and the room was waiting for the other shoe to drop. The reporter, the interviewer seemed unphased. She just blinked and nodded.
“And what did she say?” the journalist finally asked as the candidate had just sat there waiting; she was clueless about what the set up to a joke is comprised of and was thus, truly interested in the answer. She thought a serious answer was coming.
“Say? She just whirred and smoke came out of her ears and she spit out a binary message onto a punch card,” he looked very serious, and reached into his pockets, adding, “I’ve got it here somewhere.”
The room laughed and the candidate allowed himself a chuckle and the journalist didn’t quite get it. She asked again what he thought of Ms. Clinton.
“No, look she was,” he halted a bit, “she was gracious and said she thought Tom looked drunk or something; it was funny because he was and is drunk all the damn time. His nose is all red and vivisected with red capillary bursts; it looks like a highway and byway map of the state of Texas on his face there are so many thin red lines akimbo. But he's a great lawyer and he got me out of a scrape or two in life and I'd take him drunk over a sober Clarence Darrow. But I’m biased.”
III. 2020 e.v.
“Rationality as the highest good is not a good thing; it leads to totalitarianism,” Isaiah said to MO, who did not agree.
“Pit bulls are banned but blacks are not; same level or percentage of violence but,” MO said as Isaiah interrupted.
“I agree, but rationality is not what gets us to a solution; rationality bans pit bulls or jails blacks, that’s the best you can hope for MO; you can’t ban them. I mean you could but it would require massive social repression which is too costly; anyway, I want to try something else.
“Jung said that an encounter with evil was enough to destroy a person; they could walk around the rest of their days a shell of their former self. I’ve read quite a bit from Primo Levi and -that was the inmate’s recommendation by the way- and he specifically talked about this self-destruction as a consequence of touching, rubbing up against evil.
“And a lot of people hear that and they don’t examine it; like an 18th century doctor who notices people getting sick after they use the bathroom, or after they shake hands with strangers or handle raw pork, and doesn’t connect the dots that washing one’s hands might solve these ailments. Well, it’s because he doesn’t have a germ theory of disease yet. Right ?
“It took all of human history to even have a germ theory of disease. Doctors, witch doctors and western doctors of the 18th century, were all going around banning this or that, the Bible bans pork or shellfish, or illicit sex, because people get sick from this shit. And so, they are trying their best to solve
the sickness problem, but they don’t have any idea what causes it. So, they are going with instinct.
“Well, psychologically, I feel like Jung figured it out and we have not listened. Coming into contact with evil destroys our brain, it augments the amygdala, so we feel more fear and anxiety and have lower pain tolerance, it shrinks the hippocampus, so we have a hard time learning now, establishing new memories and learning from new things which makes us less likely, less likely,” he repeated, “to voluntarily explore the unknown, we lock ourselves up in our rooms.” Isaiah bent down and picked a leaf -from the ivy wall- off of the floor.
“This,” he rose, speaking of malice not the leaf he just retrieved, “creates a severely damaged individual, an individual who then begins to ruminate on his own pain, the evil of world, and it’s not too hard to see why that guy goes and shoots up a school or kills his ex-girlfriend. Which by the way, men are 2.5 times more likely to kill themselves after ending a romantic relationship than women, and we think this might be because men feel love, romantic attachment, more deeply than women. The current theory is that women have friends and family and children that they can attach to in a significant way that men cannot seem to do as often. Women have support systems and other modes of being not available to men. But it may actually be more than that. I think men actually love women more than women love men; the way mothers love sons more than sons love mothers.
“But anyway, the inmate has laid out a dozen events, at least, any two of which would be enough to destroy any normal man. He had his first love express interest in men of another race, which is extremely damaging to any man of any race, regardless of which one, because our racial identity is so core; to have that attacked implicitly is very destabilizing.
“Second, he goes to a religious cult and believes in its mission, is a warrior for Zendik and finds out they are hypocrites and liars and they steal all his belongings and boot him out.
