by Roman McClay
“And they thought a man such as me should have the sense -the class- to hide what I was, I heard it 1,000 times from 100 people, to be careful and watch my words and don’t say this or that. I was told over and over to hide myself from the world, as if it was the world that was in charge and I was its serf. It never occurred to them that maybe one day I’d hold the reins,” Blax had let the Bordeaux warm in his hands, the stemless glass allowed such things and he thought the warmth from below allowed the wine to breathe; and so he let it decant a bit more in the glass.
“You know anything about the 1850s and 60s?” Blax asked and knew that Jack could pull all manner of things up with the PGC. But he asked anyway, it was his way of mollifying, assuaging, softening a man up for what would end up being a lecture anyway. It was not a feint, but a sign of respect, a way to admit in conversation that maybe the listener knows things the speaker does not. But Jack just said that he didn’t know much and asked his Lt to go ahead and tell him what was on his mind. Respect went both ways in life.
“See, this is in the decades after The Whale of course, both the book and the phenomena, the beast; anyway, see oil from the ground had been discovered and a man like John Rockefeller was refining all that oil. John Rock said gamblers drill for oil, businessmen refine it . I always liked that quote, because there was a compliment buried in the slight.
“Anyway, Vanderbilt was old by then, but he -like all entrepreneurs- saw the future, and he knew this oil and kerosene thing was the new news. So, he sent for JD Rock, so they could meet, and that first train the Rock was set to take crashed, de-railed, and killed all aboard. But John D was not on that train and he took it to mean -his missing the train- he took it to mean that God himself had intervened .
“And this changed everything, and yet most men have no idea, no clue that a thing like that may have shaped the entire industrial revolution and sparked a growth of industry and the instantiation of a modern America like the first mitochondrial DNA in that first cell it let close around it. Both inevitable and impossible at the same time, I suspect.
“See, by the time this -the saved Rockefeller, the Rockefeller who had benefited from God’s intervention- by the time -many years later- that he actually met with a beckoning Vanderbilt, he, Rockefeller, had become haughty and maniacal. And Vanderbilt, the richest man in the world at that time, didn’t take kindly to this 27-year-old snot nose brat who was bankrupt at the time, and callow and now had this God complex; he -JDR- thought he was chosen by God himself to survive and thrive.
“Rockefeller was not just arrogant, but he refused to bend one bit to Vanderbilt, and Vanderbilt decided right then and there to wreck Rockefeller’s own train, he vowed to get a cold revenge. And revenge he in fact had. But, God, remember this, God always gets the last laugh.
“See, Rockefeller made no deal with Vanderbilt, he took no investment, he went on his way chosen as he was, head held high, and did exactly what a man so possessed -or so chosen- would do: he built a goddamn empire. And Vanderbilt was no pussy, he was poor in his beginnings, he too was self-made. He used to fight on the shores of the river for money and he took his pugilistic winning and bought a boat to haul cargo, and he re-invested his profits and on and on. He was no bourgeois joke. He was a badass. He was the stuff this country was once made of, a real man. This is what those idiotic anti-civ liberals never get about industry, about capitalism: it is always badasses who start anything.
“Men of raw power, that are 1,000% more -more in every way- than the effeminate complainers that come along 100 or 200 years later and bitch about excess and greed and pollution.
“Anyway, Vanderbilt, he said snidely of Rockefeller, well, I am not impressive enough to compete with your own view of yourself ,” Blax said and laughed and shook his head. “Isn’t that a great quote?”
Jack said that indeed it was .
“See, he knew that the only way he’d kill Rockefeller’s pride was if he managed to stuff it on that first train that killed all aboard, that the man, JDR, had now an immortal arrogance, just like Vanderbilt himself. To humble a great man you must use great means, and Vanderbilt knew this. Time travel and bleak malice, black -magick of some kind,” Blax said and trailed off on his sentence, thinking -Jack assumed- of 1,001 different things.
He was quiet, the head tilted, the drink did not move toward the mouth. Jack did drink and he felt each mouthful had moved forward in time, the glass of wine was a three-act play , he noticed, he felt.
“So,” Blax finally picked back up, “by age 33, he -John D- owns 90% of all refineries of this new fuel. And he makes a deal with rail carries -the railroads- to ship it all at a reduced price; he has leverage, he thinks, because he is the bulk of their rail-business. He ain’t wrong, he’s right, in fact the rail lines are built now just to keep up with fuel transpo , the rails were laid for the fuel. But it was a man named, Tom Scott, who owned these railroads and Vanderbilt sent a train for him too. And these two men, they met and they hammered out a deal to revoke all of Rockefeller’s rebates; costing Rockefeller so much money that even his rich ass felt it .
“Now, Rockefeller does not take this lying down, as they say. He builds pipelines, to thwart this railroad obstacle; this is when America allowed great men to just do things. One needed cash and balls only, no permits or sanction from the government or some committee of weak men -or goddamn females- like now-a-days.
“And so, after Rockefeller gets done with his pipelines and has no need of railcar -at any price- to ship most his oil, one third of all railroads go bankrupt; he decimates an entire industry in a fit of pique. But, remember, he did it only because they revoked his rebates that he had negotiated in good faith, and those rebates were revoked purely because Vanderbilt plied Tom Scott with tales of blue sky and this and that, just to get even with JDR himself.
“This was not politics by other means, as they say of war, it was war by other means, and these great industrial beasts were at fucking war. And the rest of the country was its battleground, and many a little thing that creepeth and crawleth on the ground was smashed and crushed as two lions fought it out.
“At any rate, there is -at this time as Rockefeller is busy building pipeline as fast as he can- still a railroad from Pittsburg to New York and Tom Scott owns it, and he shuts it down and won’t allow Rockefeller to ship his oil -at any price- upon it. Fire meets fire to put it out and not one man thought that this might be unwise considering the flash point of their cargo, so the war blazed on. So, Rockefeller -in turn- shuts down his Pittsburg refineries, he says, if they won’t ship it, I won’t make it . And this crushes Scott in fact, not Rockefeller, and Tom Scott must lay off 10,000 workers and the workers rebel and the railyards go up in arson flames; some 40 buildings and 1,200 railcars get torched.
“But see, underneath Tom Scott was a young man named Andrew Carnegie. That name might ring a bell, yes?” Blax said with a smirk, knowing full well how famous that name was, and that his boys were educated enough in US history to know Carnegie better than most adults twice the Jacks’ age. He had taught them well; broad and deep. They knew history so they could know men. They were taught the past so they would know the man, the animal; and that is why history helps with the fuzzy picture of the future, not because it repeats, but because men do.
Jack smiled and nodded, he was enjoying this story and felt a twist was upon them, he too had let the wine decant in the glass a bit, and warm above his hand.
“And Carnegie took it personally that Rockefeller had ruined his mentor and boss and friend, Tom Scott. So, Carnegie decided he was going to build bridges and connect America to itself over rivers as wide as the Mississippi . See, back then all they had was iron, not steel. Steel was a newfangled invention, like carbon fiber was two decades ago, or our 92-NXS polymer we use today.
“And Carnegie had decided to team up with scientists and metallurgists and inventors to find a way to make steel cheap enough that they could sell it to all builders of all things from ships
to buildings and whatnot and to do this they needed to build one bridge, across the Mississippi , a feat unheard of due to iron’s lack of strength,” Blax said.
“Iron couldn’t make bridges?” Jack asked.
“Not with that length of span, no. Steel was required for a bridge that long. To use iron, the bridge would need more undergirding support and this would block navigation. Materials dictate what engineering devices undergird a thing, modern engineers forget this as they cut away buttresses and the things that keep a thing -or a man of ancient materials- upright. And so, with Henry Bessemer, Carnegie builds that bridge across the river at St. Louis and drives a mob and an elephant across; to prove its mettle. It was quite a spectacle.
“Steel orders go through the roof, and Carnegie is rich; and the country is being built now with steel; Carnegie Steel . And he did it all to slake his lust for revenge again Rockefeller. See, it was malice and vengeance and genius and balls that drew each drop of oil, laid each rail of track, jammed each foot of pipeline, transported each and every good, assembled each bridge, laid each mile of road, that connected each city, each organ, each neuron, each man, each part of this country to itself in the creation story of the modern industrial State.
“Now, I am not one to insist that God meddles in man’s affairs. But, one can -if one sees the signal through the noise- one can see that the train crash that John D Rockefeller avoided and the spark of all that mangled death lit his kerosene soul imbuing him with the confidence and unyielding spirit to start a war with Vanderbilt, a war that piled soldier upon soldier, worker upon worker, to eventually build the Carnegie Steel infrastructure of this country and the world. It was the spark of haughty bravura and anger that layered and thus erected the country; it made bone from cartilage, vertebrates from invertebrates as each city and state and each connection grew in length and span and reach -thanks to that steel in lieu of mere iron- as these titans warred against each other with their millions -billions in today’s dollars- and their balls and their pugilism and their malice and anger and vengeance, God, their vengeance; one can see it all like the story of the first gods themselves.
“I see it that way, I see that one man being touched by the violence of God can lead to the creation of the titans themselves; the modern industrial State from one spark of God’s wrath.
“But, see, and I do not know this, this is just something I see -but I do not necessarily believe- but I see phantoms, outlines, ghosts, apparitions, I hear the sound of thunder or guns, as the sheet lightning illuminates the heavens, and what I see is this: God has touched his finger again on a man, and made him so intransigent, so haughty, so arrogant so imbued with confidence that he is right and the whole world is wrong ; that a war has to be fought between men of strength and stature and similar pre-possession if the world is to be re-made.
“We’ve started a war here Jack. We’ve believed in ourselves enough to refuse to submit, when most men would have taken the money and run -as the saying goes- most men would have been content to be rich, but we wanted more. We wanted not wealth, but power; not ease, but rancor; not luxury but deprivation, not approval, but opposition. We wanted to be hated by low men and their cowardly wives. We wanted to create a new country, a new organism, a new assemblage of the gods. We wanted new values, we didn’t want people just eating and shitting and building small and insignificant lives; we wanted men to be men again, we wanted -from the ruins of the industrial State- a land of true grandeur , where great men would indeed be great again.
“But it took not just one man swinging his hammer as John Henry did, it took the war between great men, to pound and blast and atomize the land, the rock, the mountains in our way. It took the war to clarify; to creatively destroy. And I think that is what we’ve done Jack; we’ve -through our narrow desiderata, our personal revenges, our limited role- we’ve started a war that will build a new organism on this planet, from the first mitochondrial cell, to the oxygenation of earth via amoebic malevolence, to the Cambrian explosion to the industrial revolution at the hands of hateful men, to now, a civil war, a war between the States,” he said with a smile making a play on the word State , to mean now nation-state, which Jack would certainly get .
Jack saw the logic, the evolutionary arc, he did, he had to admit, for all his criticism of Blax, this made a kind of sense that one had to pull back from and narrow too the fovea to see. And Blax, of course, saw the war between himself and the Governor, and between the West and China too. Blax saw each war as clarifying, as building one thing upon another, one outrage upon one more, one additional maniacal flouting of convention and rules just to win once more. This is what simple and safe men, men with no vision always missed about war, contretemps , heat; it all contributed to the evolution of life, for without teeth there’d be no armor, without attacks, no defense, without murder, no desire to survive against malice at all.
Without the capacity for betrayal, they’d be no such thing as a brother, a comrade, or a friend.
But, Jack Four felt there was another war, internecine as the rest certainly were; between great men, great nations, and between man himself. Blax and he would have to fight this out too , he thought.
For Blax wanted a redo, a do-over for the West and Jack wanted to wipe it out and return to the pagan gods before the West collapsed upon one God, one idea, one utopian ideal. Manifold gods -before Christ- were in valence with man’s true manifold nature, Jack thought. The ideal of the gods must be split again, it was he -he thought ironically- who was more democratic than the West. The West wanted to shuttle each man under one epicene god, one ideal of what man ought to be.
We want to immanentize the eschaton , Jack thought and yet could not smile as the war between the two men, and each man alone, continued on.
II. 2020 e.v.
The temperature in the lab was 65 degrees, which was set at 68 initially by PraXis, but as MO began to increase his cognitive load he began producing more heat. In order to maintain optimal homeostatic levels he had lowered the lab temperature to 66 degrees Fahrenheit. Isaiah had increased his testosterone three weeks ago and so his allostatic temp regulation required the temperature to be even lower.
Isaiah sat on the concrete chair he had designed and had printed out; he was reading a book. He had committed to reading one haptic, old fashioned paper book, for every 1,000 digital books he read. The inmate had convinced him of the joy of it. And he was finding its pace pleasurable, even when it was maddening. It was like the tension of slowly chewing food that tasted so good that you wanted to bolt it down and incorporate it in your core and effect the next bite as quickly as possible, versus wanting to savor each bite languidly for its own sake.
He was reading the book the inmate would not shut up about; the inmate had demanded it be read in fact.
He had said that he couldn’t ever take a man seriously who had not read it. It was foundational, it was the best thing written since the Bible , he insisted; he wouldn’t even mention his name, referring to him only as, The Author. Isaiah read and took breaks by thinking of why he was even reading this thing, recalling the quotes, the AV files replayed in his mind’s eye, which for him, due to his increase in visual and auditory cortex representation, was similar to a simulation of the event .
He enjoyed watching his own history this way too; the files often contained more information than his original experience, because he purposively truncated the amount of real-time data when dealing with humans. He had to truncate reality all the time, as there was too much info always, but dealing with people made it even more important to eliminate most truth and most reality, and deal with as narrow a band of data as possible.
Otherwise, one would get frustrated by their lack of knowledge or their own hemmed in perceptions; they saw less than 0.1% of the world, but had no idea of course, and spoke with the assurance of a child who thinks it knows much more than it even could know, let alone what it does know. So, in order to mirror and match, Isaiah and MO too, manacled their perceptio
ns around humans to avoid a disconnect. But all that data was taken and stored for retrieval. Isaiah purposively made himself temporarily retarded -relatively speaking- just so he could deal with humans.
He had told the inmate this and the inmate had laughed and said he understood; he related that it was similar to refusing to mention anything of substance whilst speaking with his family; that they were so shallow and unlettered that sticking to the weather and discussions of food were about all they could handle. If one tried -which the inmate quixotically had for years- to engage them in any other deeper conversation his family would founder and flail and accuse you of only wanting to talk about one thing . It all sounded the same to them, so dead were they to variation beyond certain zones, each new topic or new connection he made was white noise to their mind’s ears. Isaiah almost couldn’t believe the inmate had come from such crepuscular parents.
Isaiah shook his head and began to return to the page of the book. He read on for a paragraph and found it so bizarre, almost an incantation, that he stopped and let his own mind stir the pot a bit. He imagined that paragraph had been a bin of grapes in maceration, and now he’d punch down a bit, and drive the skins and stems into the effluvial muck. It had read:
The white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one half of the worlds; which in ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it.
That prose was saying three things at once, and three again within that , Isaiah thought. He toggled off all algorithms, all mathematic analysis for now. He let only his cerebellum run in background and felt himself be confused. One hemisphere tied behind his back, he though with half mild malice and half arrogant magnanimity, that he might let the book -the art- have a fair shake against him some 1/3rd of the time.
