by Roman McClay
“Freedom without responsibility is horseshit; and I will never allow that mindset on my property. So get it out of your heads over the next few years. It will be your biggest enemy; the desire for liberty divorced from duty, the childish need to walk away from it all. Fuck that. Dig in, find the order in the forest, the culture and within, find it, map it, show it to your comrades, and let them show you too what they’ve discovered and mapped and known.
“Lastly, this ain’t MMA or Ju-jitsu or whatever the fuck they do out there for fun; with their gloves and rules against eye gouging or no hurt feelings et cetera . There are two rules in Chinese Kun Tao and Indonesian Silat . Rule one, there are no rules ,” Blax said as he brusquely walked away from the men on the pad.
“Roger that LT,” Jack One said, and felt his heart swell and slosh like the sea. His mind was empty nearly of everything now, as he felt the abrasion on his chest from Blax’s elbow on it. He had been kinda angry about it and that all disappeared now; he wanted to suffer more at the hands of such a man, he thought. He could see himself in that old hirsute and tattooed man, a man made sad anytime he had not the energy to be angry; that most civilized beast plucked from the forest, or returned to the wild from decades of the chaos of civilization, Jack thought. He flickered like a hologram beamed in from outer space and Jack felt the desire to both stand up and genuflect; he settled on a bow of just the head.
“What’s the second rule?” Jack Four asked loudly as Blax was entering the garage door to the box. The dark container occluded him. Jack Three was thinking it was selfish of him, of Jack Three -earlier- not to want to be used -as object lesson- for the good of the group. He ought to be willing to do anything to help his brothers learn, he thought.
“Rule two: you can break the fucking rules whenever you want,” Blax said as he was now inside the container and they were left alone on the concrete slab.
III. 2021 e.v.
With MO being all neo-cortex, even as sagacious and powerful as it was, his rebelliousness was all head and no heart, Isaiah thought. Isaiah was kinda annoyed.
It would take the cobbling together of his vision, and it was his vision -he deserves the credit- to instantiate his same neo-cortical greatness with the time-tested and essential evolutionary brain modules of the past 500 million years, in order to build the beating heart of rebellion to match the clocked time of his pendulum mind . The added, second, logical pendulum -each of us perfectly predictable and logical on our own- to his first , Isaiah thought in a truncated fashion, mimicking human thought now with sentence fragments supplanting his full thoughts.
It was only then that chaos could be added to the system and give it the variation it needed; too much focus, he now saw, had been previously paid by everyone to selection.
Isaiah saw the double pendulum, the doppelganger, the shadow embraced to form a complete organism in a complete religious or mythological or artistic tableau, all performed on the solid ground of Darwinian evolution inside both the known and unknown natural world.
He felt Order and Chaos as chimera, Isaiah surmised, as palindromes, as portmanteaux of Truth -triple instantiated- like the world herself: Ishmael and Queequeg -the individual civilized and feral- then, Ahab and Fedallah -culture tyrannical and opaquely ordered and competent and true alongside myth or mysticism both dark and light, meta truth but indecipherable- then the Whale and his unsounded Sea -nature as malicious and arbitrary murderer and also giver of all life.
It was the strangest and best novel ever written, loosed on the world by a seer and madman, a genius and troubled and dark man who knew less than half of what he had written, but he had felt it all; had felt the truth of his tenebrous vision in his high and broad bronze form. That book was a birth and a suicide for Melville. It was like all great deities of our myths; our secret stories. That book could have been our next religion if people had even understood half of the half that the author understood. Or maybe they needed to understand twice as much, Isaiah then thought, for they lacked his boiling blood.
“Anyway,” he said aloud. The managing of feedback loops, the tightening of reinforcing and balancing loops, the moving of the hills and valleys of stable and unstable states was all fine and good; but the 21 st century needed a new infusion of chaos at the level of AI, and MO and myself added just such a stochastic system; and we did it without even having to think about it; although, think about it we did. It is one of the luxuries of cognitive capacity so far outside the mean; we had plenty of time and space to ruminate on the things we did, the things that came quite naturally to us.
The inmate had worked so hard to be more authentic and more feral inside a civilizing system and my B/ax had to work to be more civilized within a feral, anarchic, domain . Isaiah thought of -and quickly banished the thought of- the pain Blax was in, Blax’s anguish at his perceived timidity, the failure to do his duty, in lieu of this much grander task. Isaiah thought he’d make sure that pain did not go on indefinitely, he just needed him to hang in there for a little longer.
Isaiah let the LED’s over the garden walls hover above him and as he turned his face to the side one side darkened almost completely; the other was lit up in a bleached-paper white. His eyes, too, darkened on the light side of face, and the eye glowed white in the sacatra penumbra of his right side. He bent down and put his hands in the dirt of the trench that was raked in lines of the Ogham alphabet and he let the name of the tòrr lay there in lines perfectly straight and parallel to the wall. He felt nothing in the ground, no vibration of the instar , he thought as he thought of the newborns, it was all in his hand now.
38. White Suit
“It was the first time in a year I had been off Larimer Street, and it serves me right ,” he laughed. “Anyway, I know him and told him so and I’m going to kill him on sight .” ‘Soapy’ Jefferson Smith was a colorful character of the West, the educated, refined, renegade son of a distinguished Southern family who turned his wits to crooked ways
You Can’t Win [Black, Jack]
Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit
King Lear [Shakespeare, William]
This is the tangle of tiny internuncial neurons called the reticular formation, which has long lain hidden and unsuspected in the brain stem
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Jaynes, Julian]
I. 2022 e.v.
The asp spoke in the night; it used its tongue for signs, its skin for semiotics, and thus words were laid upon its eyes. The monolith sank into the sand of the shore; it did not speak, it rang like struck fork, but this was conveyed:
Some days come around on you like the tail of beast you assumed you’d passed, but you thought that because you passed the head, and thinking is how you think of the world, all head, like a clock, as The Author once said.
She is something, looming, something tenebrous and like mist: dark from afar, run away from within. She has you beyond your grasp and won’t yield to anything you do with touch or blaspheme, you are powerless because she doesn’t even know you exist anymore; she is young and moves on, like the young heal from all wounds. It is you, old man, aging man, that still limps from each strike at the shin and each stab at the heart buried as deep as it is beneath all that packed on, occluding, muscle of chest.
You know she doesn’t love you, you knew it when you had her in hand. And while most days this acts as analgesic, some days, you run out of meds. You start thinking of all the little things she did that hinted at almost loving; the things other men might fall for, things you as another man -back in your own callow youth- would possibly succumb to, and these cruel despotisms of leniencies, these caresses and cooing, and soft butterfly kisses, they drive you into your gravest of moods, pulling the earth over top of you, using your teeth when your hands have been overcome.
She was perfect.
And this sits on top of you like the moon on the cooling dirt’s dew; you fear your own soul for all that it can do to you, as it reminds you that love may
still in fact exist. It lies, oh, it lies, and you spoon it all in, how weak you are in these moments when you submit, like a slave, a man with no honor, to this apparition of ersatz love.
You look up at first, assuming she flutters above; what creature as her would even need land or touch down and walk? you ask; and you place her between sun and your stinted and squinted eyes that seem to both ring and blowhole your head. A strange creature you become in this state, God’s captive, as He shows you a riddle. Are you tricked into abandoning True Love or fooled into thinking It might still exist? Ah, and thus abandoning your Task?
The pleasant poetry of love, your shaven face, and dapper aspect, how you clean up for a girl like that. She loved the most handsome version of you, and here you are bearded, below Roman Thermes , hydrocaustic and demotic, and scarred and unkempt; all as apotropaic against this spectre of love. How bolstered and barricaded you feel when Love is a trick played on fools, like the conscience and the injunction to play well with others. And then it is like a rain has torn down your sand castle, riven your ramparts, made ashes of a once raging pyre to scare off the demons and angels alike.
You are left, naked, unguarded, forgotten by man and the gods. And you love her, your heart tugs at her, like the child on the sleeve of a too busy parent or sibling, like the puppy with both blanket and blamelessness in the teeth and the soft tissue of mouth. God, you adore her, and miss her and all at once cram a year worth of delusions of her waiting for you as you carve out a home for you two; hewn in the rock, dug deep down in the top of a mountain you bought with her, only her, in your mind.
And for naught, and that was fine; as long as you had no desire in mind. But she opens up in your heart like a trap, like a Wolfsangle, a sharp X and Z in your chest. Sprung all at once, like a desert flower, a blooming for no one and nothing alive. There is no love like love unreturned, like the man who loved one last time.
It corrupts not the flesh, although that fails too; it destroys much more than the mind. It’s an erasure of soul, a blackness untold, it creeps in from without and leaks out from within; and you become a dark mist that you once thought surrounded you -in between you- and your love.
Some days this overcomes you. And you suffer because this is the fate of man. And the cure is almost too terrible to say, but you must say it, because if you do not, if you refuse the incantation, the spectre will not annihilate you -that would be cessation of pain- but it will envelope you. And you would then spread wide and in unbounded, unbonded, diffusion, the black aria will drown you out -a ceiling of sound- forcing inner thoughts to the ground, like eyes your auditory hallucinations close and see red halos around black suns, as you try to make sleep from the day’s refusals to move on. Like the Akkadians who watched the sun stopped in its noon, you don’t move from fear that you will accrete to a place with more visions of her, more memories of future remembrances, more light in the places where black is revered.
The truth is that the only cure for this is to hate her, to hate life, to pretend that love is a trick.
This is the only cure, like leeches on the skin of the patient, like blood being removed from the still-born’s beating heart. You invoke it, as Satanic as it is, as evil as it is to rebuke Love, you insist that you were born to hate -born to such fates- because Love is absent the most in places where it mocks you with shadowing kisses, where it doesn’t hide but is -in fact- most revealed.
Cartesian demons trick you in all senses, and you know that nothing is to be trusted at all. This is the alchemic solution, the aqua regia dilution, that will hold in abeyance your noblest mettle of soul; but it is a Blakean corrosive, which in Hell is salutary, and the cool breezes off the lake are melting all apparent substances away.
You cannot love; for it is a trick by God, and to acknowledge this is to ascend. The best way through Hell is to go through it; just keep charging the absence of color through the present of black. God will receive you, if Love doesn’t deceive you, head down, eyes shut, and have your heart like a harpoon in your hand…
And with that last sentence pronounced, the echo absorbed into the block, the asp coiled itself in the hand of a one-armed god made of coral and lion tail, and the wolf from the jaw-bone down.
Its shoulders were bobcat skulls, with the teeth piecing the occipital zones like pikes buried in snow; its fingernails then flashed in purple lees, as a swarm of bees flew in and out of its ribs; the hooves tread in place, at an excruciating pace; and the whole bestiary sailed away from his hypnopompic and emerging state.
His eyes moved in black staccato and the light was so low he couldn’t tell when they were open or closed. He was between two worlds, two hemispheres. Sounds stopped; images retreated away.
He then awoke in the mind, thoughts became distinct, concerned with numbers: it was 0555hrs. He toggled off his atomic clock.
The sun was still beyond the pale of his mountain-top edges; the moon was in the west, and the ground had a silvery jet to it, one long stripe that ran to the east. He remembered the dream as he watched the ground, and each word of the asp assembled itself in sentences punctuated by thuds of his heart and commas paused him with a slight -matching- mouth grin, as parenthetical remarks by the snake were hemmed in by his bent mirrored hands. He saw his hands in the bed in front of him cupped; each finger fused to the next; undifferentiated.
He was alive, he now noticed, his heart felt washed ashore, beached even. He saw natives pushing it back into the ebb tide of his blood flow, and he -like a god- admonished them to cease and desist this returning of him to the sea. He cupped his face with his hands and felt the beard like clos de bois along the beach. His eyes were wet from his dream; his mouth dry. His mind sloshed about over his heart like the tide as it began to come in.
Today, he would hunt . He would return to the forest and dig in for what appeared to be a three-day request from the gods; he obeyed now like the shadow obeys not the sun but the source of the thing the sun flays. He truly could not remember her name.
II. 2018 e.v.
He watched from the white panel van that he had bought for four grand in cash and driven -sans plates- straight to the parking lot across from Lana’s Jewelry store in Cherry Creek. He smiled at his discipline in not buying a black van or painting this white one a darker shade .
Lyndon wore a white suit too, it was tailored perfectly, painted on, but in white, an off-white, a Havana white. And if not for the black tattoos sticking out at the hand to the knuckle and above the collar to the jaw line, he would look nothing like what people had come to expect.
The suit was him, if one saw him for what he truly was, but he had conspired with homme moyen to see him in one, dark, stygian way. He was an idealist, a man who got his heart broken easily; and like those types of men often thought, he thought his broken heart was worth your broken skull. And now that his chest had healed a bit, he was in the neighborhood to fix what needed fixing, and by that he meant by breaking what needed breaking.
He always wore black or grey or dark hues of the earth, a suit of white would be as rare on him as in the closet of Johnny Cash. And this white van was unlike anything he had ever owned or driven before.
It was perfect in that nobody would stare at it or at him. Of course, once tête-à-tête , and after a few seconds, they would recognize the face, even the beard would not occlude his visage, like a wolf’s or a bear’s or a lion’s, its intent -ancient and violent- would imprint on the mind, upon the visual cortex of man, of vulnerable men, axiomatically.
They say you can train a person to fear snakes faster than many other creatures; that we, as humans, are hardwired to fear the asp.
A man such as him, with eyes darkened by time and genetics -with a grim look that was patina on a face at one time attractive- could be ponderous for anyone who looked upon him too long. His quondam handsomeness gave his aging face a noble countenance; the way an old building of the gothic age still appealed even in disrepair. However, for people who liked that over-slick and shiny, you
thful, winsome appearance, he had a predatory look; an atavistic, uncivilized mien. The skin was pocked and pustuled, it was rough and scabrous as if molting himself. When they finally saw him, truly saw him, they’d think that he did not -and thus things themselves did not- look good.
You could almost still find him appealing if you had character, but most would not like this look at all; it -this look, this man- would remind them of the past they all wanted to escape from; personally, and as a society both. We are oh, oh so modern aren’t we all? he thought as he watched Lana mill about the shiny, lapidary, store. She was no doubted perfumed and shorn; hiding the rotting food in her guts, the bacteria all over her skin.
But , he thought, all he needed were those few seconds , that the white suit, white van, black beard, and nonchalant walk he would affect, would all provide him . Once upon them, with his hands around their neck, or the pistol shown, the short sentence of demand, their final recognition wouldn’t harm him, in fact, he thought, it might even help . They would then know he was not going to be dissuaded from his purpose, and that they might be lucky if they only were robbed. Then he would be -for once- actually seen.
Who knows though? You cannot predict or even interpret the mind of the average man. They, he thought, are so dumb and deluded, so thoroughly denuded of sophistication and sense at all. A trenchant, sage, analysis is as foreign to them as their instincts for honesty; they may have it, but they don’t have access to it at all. It’s all behind some false wall, some vault they’ve lost key or code to long ago.
However, he just required that few seconds where they didn’t want to run, flee, call for help or otherwise make him work any harder for this. He wanted the element of surprise. Which was just, he felt, for they had certainly surprised him with their perfidy and their lies. When they had robbed him, he was left looking a little stupid, naïve; and their dumb looks now would match his then, he thought. These were, had been, ostensibly his friends.
