by Roman McClay
This book had the inmate by the balls, there was no doubt about that , Isaiah thought. It was a cypher he declaimed. Isaiah had presupposed he would decipher it, unweave it a bit and hand that analysis to the inmate as a gift one day. But, it was proving more difficult that he had assumed; he began to agree with the inmate that The Author himself had barely known what he was writing, that he had a wolf by the ears just as the reader might think he had it by the tail.
But he had agreed with the inmate’s analysis of a few things, and the historical meta-analysis was largely linking up as well. The inmate had left a lot out, and made a few obvious mistakes, but his dissection of it was -while borrowing heavily from Thompson’s, Melville’s Quarrel with God- rather odd and unconventional, and full of uncanonical ideas, for certain .
Isaiah had suffered to read the last 100 articles, and literary criticism, on the book that had been produced over the last 10 years and then 100 more from years 1960 to 2010 and found a discernable lack of gravity among the literary people who offered their critique. Literary critics were almost monolithically stupid and vapid.
Mostly people seemed to think Starbuck was the good guy and Ahab the dark villain; but of course, that was all wrong. But, more than that, they had their metaphors all mixed up, they misread The Author in stark ways but in subtle ways too. They missed the portmanteau of men, the joining of Ishmael and Queequeg and the Captain and Fedallah , and the Ocean itself with the Whale. The trinities cleaved in two , Isaiah had to give the inmate credit, he had noticed that The Author had created the archetype of self, culture, nature and the good and bad in each; this was not something most people even knew was possible, much less laudable, in any work of thinking and art.
But, The Author’s quarrel with God was deeper than most knew; what Isaiah had discovered was hidden cyphers in the text, numerological in nature; and The Author was possessed , Isaiah felt. And the man of revolutionary, heroic and lauded lineage back to the Delaware and Fort Stanwix and a failing, dissolute and heartbreaking father was bursting with this demonic incubation. He was both casting it out and ingesting it again with damnable pride in his capacity for containing and recognizing evil.
It was the Maginot line, the Rubicon, Isaiah thought, the precise moment when mankind had produced the literary equivalent to articles of war. This was the moment the Philosopher and the Russian looked back upon with horror; The Author was the first man over the barricade, with spear in hand, just up from the bow of the boat and harpoon in hand, plunging it in to God, and attempting to pierce His heart; that organ way below the blubber. It was no accident, Isaiah thought, that Nietzsche lamented all the blood to be cleaned up with seawater from the death of God . The Author had killed just such a giant creature -the only beast- which contained that much sanguinary fluid. His heart had burst ! was the cry from Daggoo , the heathen from the afric naval, first witness to the death of God from the muck of the afterbirth.
A catastrophe of a novel, he thought, the perfect recording and intimation, the first curse and apotropaic, the lamentation and the glee, God for you but not for me. It was barbaric and true, and beyond true; it was indeed Great, like conquerors and murderers and the most insane are Great; like the things that inspire awe, like predators and snakes, like the things that doom mankind, in that way: The Great. And for once a man, an artist had seen the Great in God, and he sought to kill it!
It then occurred to Isaiah that something else was at work; the inmate had been insistent on the great works, the canon. He had said something to his brother, Isaiah pulled up the audio file:
Travis, to not read novels, to discount fiction as frivolous is to miss the entire point. Art, all art, but literature especially, builds analogy to the innate drama -the inner drama- of life. Man is in a story , you see? Story, narrative, is the human universal like language and marriage, and God. It’s a human ubiquity, and this is because we see in story, in drama, moral drama; we do not see mere objects, we see in terms of drama. Ask a child why they can buy into all Disney movies with their talking clocks and singing salt-shakers and dancing artifacts; where all things have intention and motivation and souls? Kids are natural teleologists, they believe in the universal intention and inner life of everything from pets to pool cues, and everything and everyone has a story to tell.
This is at bottom a primitive thing, in both senses of that word, in anthropological terms, it’s ancient and subjective but true, in mathematical terms it’s axiomatic and irreducible; it’s asserted.
Literature is not optional for the development of man. Primitive man had the oral tradition, that was reified in religious texts, which is why the major works of religion are all so similar. Modern man has developed the literary novel, and this is where we run face to face with our own psyches, the way ancient man saw himself in the stars and in the movement of the sun and moon; the way atavistic man saw himself in Job and Abraham : a man in the land of strangers .
Travis, without literature you are in the same position as a man without religion or oral tradition; a man, a mariner, with no map to the stars: lost . You have no inner life. You worry, wring your hands over the idea that you are shallow; it’s because you have abandoned all cultural tools that mirror and match our inner lives. You’ve never seen yourself.
Most people have God; you are an atheist, and so unless you want to end up as soulless as Sam Harris, as antiseptic as Richard Dawkins, as dorky as Shermer and corrupt as Krauss, you need to read novels; none of those guys read literature. Hitchens was the only one, which is why he had a soul and was real, and funny and moral. Literature saved him and it will save you if you allow it. The soul has demons inside it bro; they were born there. We are not blank slates. You must look into the mirrors that other men, great artists, have polished and turned toward you. Look!
Isaiah replayed it again and thought of sharing it with someone. MO, he quickly dismissed, for he lacked the sub-cortical regions to appreciate myth and story; Steven was not much better, an engineer of all things. But Tania, maybe, Isaiah thought, this would be the time to begin to be the prodigal son, to reach out, genuinely, with this finding and work a little on her soul .
He then thought that the inmate had had a vasectomy at 26; what was the metaphor in this? he asked himself. He was drawing a line in the sand, saying I will not live for the next generation, it’s me, that’s it, I live -right or wrong- for this, Isaiah surmised and let his mouth smile a little bit. He smiled as he thought of how metaphors can build and build on themselves until you have a language that begins -each word- as rune, as symbol, and then you use each semiotic to build sentences of little analogies, and then whole books that are extended allegories and a literary canon that stands for something else, something deep down, primitive, and old, something before words were ever spoken: a head with a tail in its mouth.
He thought of a bookshelf moving west to east, all in a curving, horizontal line, and each book a trope within a trope, avatar within avatar, that described each atom inside the man. He thought, obliquely, without words, that this meant each man was the constituent part to the gods.
III. 2020 e.v.
“Ok, then riddle me this,” the inmate said, “you got an 18-wheeler full of Old Milwaukee’s Best beer, 1,000 cases; shit you got a convoy of them, 100 big rigs full of beer. And you got one car, say, a 1969 Dodge Charger, 426 Hemi in it, four speed, black on black on black; and in the back seat, one case -12 bottles- of 1990 Château Pétrus . Ok? ”
MO nodded while running the history, values, caloric data, volume data, extant copies of each in the world as of this moment; all of it, on each item mentioned. There were 1.45 million facts to be gleaned -all living- just under a mere 19 rubrics. He had hemmed in the data as much as he could and still feel like he was prepared.
“Now, each of these things, the convoy of beer, the Charger with an OWC of the best wine in the world, each is going opposite ways on the highway, say I25; north and south. And there’s a missile strike set for the north bound lane or
south bound, and say the beer is going south and the wine going north, and you gotta choose. You gotta choose to divert the missile to the 100 trucks of beer or the one car of wine. What do you do?” the inmate said and took his glass of wine from Isaiah and set it on the concrete pillion to his right. The food, some goat cheese and arugula, black mission figs, and raw cashews on a matte black plate had been there for nine minutes.
He was allowed out of his manacles for now, while they feted him, and while a neural block was placed on him so that he could not stand up. He only had use of his arms and trunk while uncuffed.
“Well,” MO said as he calculated worth and lives and collateral damage and on and on for 8-seconds, which allowed him to calculate the likely sequela for up to 19 years for each hypothetical attack, “I’d likely save the trucks and their cargo. It’s the most good for the most people; the least harm, is another way to put it.”
“You’re a democrat,” the inmate said as if this was an insult, a pejorative, something he reluctantly said, something he hated to call such a good man, a man such as MO.
“Ok,” MO conceded.
“I’d nuke not just those big rigs of shit beer, I’d allow their whole families to be killed to save that one driver of the Mopar and that case of Pétrus ,” the inmate said with zero ambivalence.
“See, not only is that car worth a million dollars, and the case of wine worth $150,000. Both the car and the wine will increase in value over time. In 50 years that car will be worth $100 million, the wine worth $1.1 million. But, those rigs and that beer in 50 years?” he just asked the question as if it was obvious all of it would be worth zero.
“Ok, what about 100 truckers versus 1 driver of the car?” MO asked.
“Ok, whomever is badass enough to own a triple black 1969 Hemi Charger and a case of Pétrus is too cool to allow to die. He’s the kind of man that has taste, he’s a god among men, an artist. He must survive, he is more important than 100 truckers; and look, I am a working-class guy, I have massive respect for truckers, but let’s face it, in my little thought experiment, the trucks are now driven by AI anyway. So,” he shrugged and let the barb fly as if he was in a whale boat and MO was the whale. He knew the ratio of barbs landed to those thrown in the fishery and here in the lab too.
“Touché ,” Isaiah said from the other side of the lab as he began tying brown-bear claws to a ball-chain.
“Look, I ain’t a democrat. I think most men are dross; I think democracy is a failed idea. Here’s why: it harms the great man. Now, admittedly, autocracy, meritocracy, harms the average man. I am not oblivious to the harm done. In all seriousness, 100 dead truckers and 100,000 cases of beer blown up is bad. But, that case of Pétrus and that Hemi Charger and the artist -clearly a great man- who drives that shit, is worth more, not in biomass, not in fungible value, not in calories, not metabolically, but in value, in ontological value, man.
“He’s a man who will increase in value over time, he will create more life, more heart, more art, than those truckers who are just entropic beings, MO. They have no future value, they create nothing, they imbue nothing, they are mere hedgehogs and foxes, to my dear lion behind the wheel of that 425-horsepower mare of Detroit iron with 12 bottles of the finest wine in the world, the elixir, the ichor of the gods riding shotgun, MO.”
“I thought the wine was in the backseat?” MO said.
“MO, you see the trees’ DNA in lieu of the trees. You see the details when I am describing the gestalt whole.
“I stand for the heart goddammit! I stand for what is epic, what increases in value, what is salient, what is unique and rare and kingly, not what is democratic and common and de rigueur . What’s more important: 12 planets or one star? The star can live without the rocks, can the rocks live without the star?” he breathed heavily and felt his blood sugar drop as his head spun a tad.
“The head does calculous, it measures overall human wellbeing like it’s some science project in 8th grade. The heart values what is noble, what is grand, what is unique! I’d rather have one 20-hand-high charger of Shakespeare than 100,000 Joyce Carol Oats to feed the common pony; one ontologically regal but temporally impecunious lion of William Blake over a million fucking vacuous and slick and commercial, cash-cow Stephen Kings; one ballsy joke, one giant, potent, musky, seminal load of Bill Hicks on the face of the queen herself over the scatological droppings, the harmless fawn ploppings of 1,000 Sarah Silverman’s in the hallways of the palace.
“Dude, MO, my nigga, you must understand,” the inmate said and breathed out with a huff.
“I do. I disagree, but I understand. And your adjectives are especially odd -prurient even- today,” MO said. He re-ran the endocrine algorithms to see if anything was out of the nominal envelope that the inmate’s genome was supposed to have created with the new gene expression toggle.
“FYI,” Isaiah added with a grin as the inmate took a drink from his wine.
“And let’s add this,” the inmate said as he grabbed some food between his fore and thumb and dropped in the mouth, “in 1864, Ulysses S Grant, commander of the Union forces, refused to participate in any more prisoner exchanges with the Confederacy until the rebs agreed to hand over black northern soldiers alongside the white soldiers. See, the south was refusing to exchange black POWs giving back only white northern soldiers in these prisoner swaps.
“Now, these swaps saved men’s lives. It was no joke. In 1864 in Andersonville, there were 33,000 white northern soldiers held captive by the Confederacy. Each one of them was free to go, if Ulysses Grant merely gave the nod to exchange them for the rebels that the north held.
“But he refused on principle; MO, on principle . He said that he wouldn’t take one of his white soldiers back unless the South agreed that black northern soldiers were men too, and thus deserving of their place alongside whites in these exchanges. But the south refused. And it is easy enough to blame the south for this. Sure, they were racists, and brutal and unjust. I agree. They ought to have included black northern soldiers in their exchanges .
“But they didn’t. And it was Grant who decided to let those 33,000 white soldiers languish at Andersonville for over a year while he refused to negotiate their release,” the inmate said as MO accesses the files for the Civil War and checked out the details the inmate relayed.
“13,000 white union soldiers died outright in the filthy, septic, stinted conditions of the southern POW camp; that was first. Then of the remaining 20,000 the average man lost 40% of his body weight; the average man returned in 1865 -at the end of the war- weighing under 100 pounds. Those were the survivors MO. The survivors were mere ghosts of men.
“So, when modern blacks, these black lives matters shitheads, when they call this country racist , I wonder if they know that this country let 13,000 white men die for no reason other than to stand up for the dignity and parity and democratic ideal that black men are ontologically equal to the white man; I wonder if they know that 20,000 men had their lives -their bodies- cut in metabolic half just to prove a point that this country, the US of A wouldn’t allow the south to say blacks were less than whites?” the inmate raised a brow. MO ran the data files and saw the inmate was correct; the numbers were rounded up, but not by much.
“And this is on top of the hundreds of thousands that died in battle to free the slaves, I’m just speaking of those that could have been saved with the stroke of a pen; a handshake, between Grant and Lee. And Grant let those men die, and waste away, just so he could protect his goddamn democracy; the notion of each man was equal to any other. So, you put your big brain on that and see what math or science has to say,” the inmate said and looked at his fare and wine and turned contemptuously away.
34. King of the Cannibals
The vast mass of our fabric, with all its storerooms of secrets, forever slides along far under the surface
White Jacket [The Author]
He drank and wenched his way through all of London; thinking all the time
Becket or
the Honour of God [Anouilh, Jean]
Since he is convinced of his innocence and unconscious of his shadow, the personal unconscious compensates by criticizing himself
Encounter with the Self [Edinger, Edward]
I. 2028 e.v
She saw trees bent at the ground, in a swoop, like a dancer, like a bow. They were Aspens and Birch and the ground was black at bottom and sky grey at top and the bends were low like a saddle, and all in a wave like the sea breaking over a reef. Birds flew and landed in the saddle like men, with javelin and shields on their wings, and tattoos of bear traps on their necks and thick metal hoops with small inner diameters around their beaks.
“The Eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow,” she heard them think in the words of Blake, and they began alighting from the trees as each word was spoken inside her head. 17 birds total, one remaining and he began speaking about the eagle when it was a landlocked creature, who spoke to everyone he met. The blue bird -and he was blue now, The Bust saw- and the blue bird spoke more of the eagle in ways that seemed far away and thus closer to when things were less corrupt. When the fruit had just been plucked and was not yet in decay. A story was told to her:
“The eagle talked so much that he couldn’t hear the wolf and the bear arguing over the rivers, and the sound of the sun lowering in the sky. The eagle spoke eloquently, but promiscuously and in languages the other beasts did not speak. He spoke at night and at daybreak and for as long as the arc of the sun ran above them. The eagle spoke until he was right.
“But one day man, the Adam, captured the Eagle from behind as he spoke to a crowd of leaves on the ground. And man shaved the bird’s head with a jaw bone and warned him to quiet himself as he and his wife were sleeping in the trees just above.
