by Roman McClay
He did not look, it was too dark still, he just felt his left fist held something, and he transferred it slowly, without naming his actions, from the wise left hand into the righteousness of the right.
39. Amsvartnir
God asked if I wanted to be ‘great’ or ‘loved’ and so I replied, somewhat slowly, “great, question,” as He had already turned to go, taking me at my first word.
The Interviews II Vol 1.1 [Inmate 16180339]
Thus great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest ! …thou wouldn’t have weariest of thy light and the journey had it not been for me, mine eagle, my serpent
Thus Spake Zarathustra [Nietzsche, Fredrich]
Every wind shook the scarecrows in vain for the birds fine in song and feather took no warning
A Tale of Two Cities [Dickens, Charles]
I. 2020 e.v.
The seventh respirocyte entered the inmate’s body at the dorsal horn of the spine. It linked -via RFIDs that were using the plasma in the blood as a conductor- with the other six nanobots as they traversed the body at equidistant sections in the extremities and the heart and enteric nervous system. They managed their speed and vector to remain in this configuration as they ran their sweep.
The inmate breathed at 22 breaths per minute, heart rate at 58, pulse/ox at 99.
The respirocyte at the horn traveled to the CNS via the basal ganglia, invigilating all electro-chemical signaling and mapped it to the data sent by the other 6-cyctes . It traveled then to the limbic system and did likewise as it recorded updates via the other nanobots. They reported in segments of .009ths of a second.
The bot flew through the brain as if it -they- were mere clouds, penetrating the tissue due to the gauzy nature of that tissue itself; the way each second 65 billion neutrinos travel through one square centimeter of the earth itself. The way X-rays travel, the way engrams travel, the way ideas travel from man to man, time to time.
The bots used the vascular system when convenient, like river travel; then through worn paths of the grey matter, like foot traffic on forest paths; then on top of the white matter like treks into the mountain-tops covered in old and hard winter snow.
It gathered up all it could see and linked it to the six other eyes in the body as they explored their continents of this whole corporeal world. They held their ships in port, adjusted their horologe when out to sea, and used the stars of cellular material to navigate. They approved apoptosis as novae they each could describe in the captain’s log at first and fourth bell, and then on deck compare with each other in nano-whispers to maintain their dominance over this man’s inner seas with a marine sandglass in hand and the ocean bottom as a valence to land .
They sent soundings down into the depths of the sanguinary fluid, they drilled deep into blubber and gleaned core samples of each organ and each side of the flesh itself.
A man had never been more entered, had more hands laid upon, more explored and more mapped as the seven bots ran channels and waterways and trails and rails and hallways and corridors and lochs and canals through the Jetstream of the space in between each edifice and sluiceway of this city, this isle, of Man.
And MO took all the data in and lazily built an analog, a matryoshka doll -a voodoo doll- for Isaiah to then take. MO felt this inmate was one of a billion neurons in his own mind to deal with; MO thought of all he had yet to do, for the Governor, for the algorithms for the election, for the neuro-chemistry of each voter and how he must maintain each feeling inside each man, woman and child within the state.
MO saw each thing, each data point, each man, each neuron, each fact as one of trillions that must be turned over in the mind, mapped, and seen independently. The only whole there was, the only gestalt whole, was the addition -the aggregate- of more and more facts. All of life could be understood by simply -although it was not simple , MO thought- adding more and more facts to the reservoir of the low Sea of Galilee of extant facts. And Isaiah was one more fact of this world , MO thought.
He passed off the recon data from the seven bots as insouciantly as the hand of God on the Sistine Chapel reached out for man’s digital extension.
And Isaiah took it as the file came over the corporate cloud via DM. Isaiah allowed it to settle and open like ovum, like warm egg and the man’s entire corporeal data unfurled: his gene expression in real time, his salinity, his neural propagation conductivity, his acidity, his bio-chemistry in details such that he could measure ppms as low as .0004. He bloomed inside Isaiah as he saw each weakness, each strength, each thing that hesitated and those that did not. He saw it all , he thought. He saw the speed of O2 molecules in tissue, and in capillaries and veins and arteries; he saw CO2 rhythms in each and how chemical changes happened in the bowels and the organs and the brain.
Isaiah saw receptor sites for pain, dendrites in explosions so small they matched stoic angels on the heads of black-ice pins, and voltage he measured from the data that came in -in the millions- like the million words of a book on the war between the States. Isaiah thought, but these million words, these semaphores, these coms between axons and dendrites happened each second, each half second, each quarter second in a trillion regions of brain.
And this was just one galaxy in this cosmos of man -and he was now the cosmos, the mapped universe, the known of the black- for andromeda of the enteric systems was spinning toward his milky way of brain too. A crash course was inevitable, like those two galaxies above. Isaiah watched the images from the Hubble Deep Space Telescope and saw Andromeda and their own galaxy vortexing toward each other in intractable doom.
A man like this was no different, only in sizes smaller, in times shorter, in consequences too few to measure. Only we do measure them , Isaiah thought with a smile.
The guts, the viscera, the neurons of mind in the loins of a man, of mankind himself, churning and whirring and like the arms of hurricane, reaching out to the brain, like the first flaps of some tiny black & blue butterfly, the ghost-grey beats of raven’s wings all at the neural level previously unmeasured in man. And these sentinels of the gods, the emissaries, the s-winged seraphim, flying and landing from the vault inside the universe of this inmate, laying their hands and brushing their shoulders and resting their imbricate wings on the steam that lifts off the brain itself, whispering to the Cerberus-dogs of the CNS, the basal and limbic and neo-cortical maw of the canines held in tense wrangling by this Hercules of the Will.
Isaiah saw it, the Will holding back the rancor, the wildness, the violence in this man sent by the angels of the inner gods themselves. He was possessed, at all times; his winds dying down only to save up for more gales; ash-white oars dipped into sea merely to pile on more black-canvass sail; and the oceans moved against the moon in magick rejoinder behind clouds and in front of this darkness; gravity more photon than force than photon again, bleakness more tenebrous than this clear absence of light.
The brain exploded like the 8-million lightning strikes on the earth herself each day, like nuclear conflagration at the end of each seventh-sea, each .66th of a second enough detonation to crack his world right in six fucking halves.
Isaiah saw it and his respirocytes had flown over this man’s worlds within worlds within worlds, each organ a system, each cell a pulsar-star, each vacuole a planet, each atom a First Adam.
“Where was his -this inmate, this prisoner set in a cage to lordship over this cosmos- where was his eve, his ante-physics as Wulf used to say?” Isaiah asked aloud as MO worked on the 3D printer tweaking it and making it more independent, so it could print matter based merely on ideas it -the printer- would believe it needed to obtain in the lab. It would think the lab its whole inner and outer cosmos , MO thought as he ran the algorithms through his own obstacle course of the math.
Isaiah searched for the analog to the feminine, the anima , the thing that selects in the man. His Huginn and Muninn had flown across the world of this man and brought back thought and memory both, presence and his
tory in hands clasped into one prayer fist. His bots had been ringed with eyes, invigilating eyes, and their noses could sniff out the dead like those Valravns themselves. The cosmos was entropy accelerated with instantiation, each new construction a way to speed up its own heat death. Each life an arc-weld toward coldness.
What in man was this way? he asked. Isaiah built analogs, metaphors, tropes, semaphores into the millions, each thing standing in for each other thing and he couldn’t decide what was ante ; what was before ; what was on the Eve of this new year’s nanosecond of each thing that happened inside and to and by this man they had just made one million of in ovum and poem and the salty fluid of the whole world of women with child.
“What?” he barked aloud to himself, to the ether -he demanded to know- in confusion and vex and submission into the lab as MO looked up to see what his son had found so animating this time. They both remained silent and inert now, as Isaiah looked to the rust-red and desert blonde stele on the north wall, and MO looked at Isaiah himself.
Isaiah let his brain go fallow, rest, he did not try to think. He placed his own will to the side. He let the file on the inmate open and bloom and heliotropically move about searching out its own sun to follow inside Isaiah, letting the arc of his own source of warmth and light follow some organic rhythm outside his manipulations and schemes.
He let the data wash over him, he let it unfurl, he allowed it to fall like rain drops and half hail, hover like fog, he let it evaporate into steam and give weight to the air .
II. 2040 e.v.
“I don’t know if you know Xeno’s paradox ?” he asked as he drank from his glass of wine.
“No,” his guest said.
“That before a man can walk towards his destination, he must first reach half the distance, and before that half he must reach half of that, and on and on until it prevents motion at all; as there are infinite halves to all distances. It’s a paradox that Xeno said made motion an illusion.”
“Ok,” the guest said.
“Well, it was dealt with later on, but the point is that it presents a good metaphor for the problem of knowledge. There is always more to be known; and that any discussion will leave things out, and so nothing said nor heard can be said to be true , not completely true, because it must leave something out. I must leave the half before the half just reached.”
“I agree,” the guest nodded.
“Well, you take a book, any book, that purports to be some capacious compendium of canonical knowledge on a subject, let’s say whaling. And if you’ve read Moby Dick then you will know that The Author spent quite a bit of time and space listing everything known about the Right Whale, the Greenland Whale, the Narwhale and the Sperm Whale and discussing if dolphins were whales or not, and where the head of the whale ended and the tail began and on and on; he made quite a show of it.
“And it was lengthy and thorough, and so thorough that it annoyed a lot of readers; Gore Vidal said that the book itself wasn’t very good unless one wanted to know a lot about whales. This was, of course, probably one of the most fatuous statements -most revelatory of innate philistinism and lack of soul- ever uttered by a man of ostensible wit and erudition and charm. It’s an almost unbelievable statement considering how intelligent Mr. Vidal was perceived by everyone to be, those who liked and disliked him alike.
“It was as if a beautiful woman, held as such by all, fell apart in some immediate leprosy, or was revealed to be an apparition or hologram of our collective imagination, and her beauty, then, a fraud.
“At any rate, the thing he -Vidal- got right with his asinine and evil statement that sent him to Hell faster -and with less mitigation- than all his gay sex would have -since God is by definition more interested in Right and Wrong, and Moby Dick’s value ontologically and literarily is Right and unimpeachable- the thing Gore Vidal got right regardless of his total lack of character or soul in such a Satanic remark, is that one could in fact learn very much about whales from the book, from The Whale.
“The Author was almost treating the novel as part essay, part biological -or biographical- treatise on the species of whales that were then known to man. It was encyclopedic. And yet it got things wrong, it left things out and like Xeno’s steps never did reach full stride, always half way to the previous half,” the man said.
“My head hurts already,” the guest said as he still had not touched the poured 1990 Pétrus that had been decanted in his glass for him 18 minutes ago.
“Ah, well, it gets worse. My point is that one cannot speak or write with total knowledge, it is impossible not merely epistemologically which is what computer scientists and mathematicians always, incessantly, retardedly think. Rather, it’s ontological; because there is no such thing as total knowledge; there will always be fourth quadrant phenomena. ”
“Ok, but knowledge can always increase one would suppose,” the guest said.
“Yes, theoretically this is true. But, again, it’s not a matter of increase it’s a matter of total. Can we ever reach total knowledge and the answer is, no . Despite the ludic world of mathematicians, and geeks, in the real world, dynamical systems prevent total knowledge, because infinite facts arise from any phenomena, and any system has turbulence, movement; and that fact alone means that the system is always in flux and thus new facts are always presenting. And those facts are interacting with previous facts and other systems, like the butterfly effect, that acknowledges that facts far removed in distance and time can impact other facts and there is no way to predict it and thus total knowledge is ontologically, not merely empirically, impossible.”
“Ok,” the guest furrowed the brow; he was not sure he agreed with any of this now.
“Well, The Author wrote this into his book, he stated that it was mere draft of a draft ; lacking the copestone. He admitted it. Why? Why would a man so committed to the appearance of totalizing knowledge, why do what no author does in a novel with the infinite display of the vagaries and minutia of facts? Why also admit that his task was impossible in this very regard? It’s a paradox to be that specific and totalizing and yet admit that the text was by necessity incomplete and that he -as an author- was unable to finish the work?”
“I feel like you know this already,” the guest said drolly. His benefactor was into the rhetorical question. Since there were no girls around, this must be how the man of the house entertained himself, the guest thought.
“I am nearly certain The Author was making an ontological argument within an ontological argument, a recursion, a fractal, an ouroboros asp of language and meaning.
“He was admitting that man’s search for knowledge was both innate to his Nature and doomed to failure; the prey animal he hunted, and yet never could catch but the tail of. In search, giving chase, but neither able to discern the Head from the Tail not the Tail from the Head, there being no true dividing line in the Whale, the whale being the one true God, or the thing God created for man to search out as God, the shadow, the white shadow of God. The Author was showing man’s ignorance through wisdom and erudition, on purpose, with irony, with magnificence, he was saying, look at all we know, and yet, look at how we can never ever know enough; if knowledge is our desire .”
“It’s a religious book then,” the man’s guest said.
“And even more brilliantly, he pretended to hand the dilemma off to the next author, as an example of being magnanimous and gracious, like Death in On a Pale Horse , passing his Horseman’s task onto the next instantiation, the next human, a gift from and to the damned.
“We seek out knowledge, when what we seek is unknowable. We give details that are real, and useful and true, but can never come close to revealing the Truth. We must abandon this quest and admit that the fourth quadrant is permanently opaque to all but God, and that God will never reveal such things to us.
“It was the tree of knowledge, it bore fruit, but it never bore itself. It did not propagate, it was permanent and like Adam and Eve; it was never meant to reproduce. They fai
led to honor their permanence, but the Tree itself was unharmed by their eating of the seedless fruit,” the man said .
“Weird,” the guest said thinking of what was just said and who said it.
“Yeah, the point is, all any artist can do is further the question, he answers nothing.
“And The Author knew this and built it right into his ironically thorough and capacious novel, the one stuffed to the gills with knowledge and facts and wisdom. He made it as knowledgeable as possible for 1851 and -half winkingly and half tearfully- admitted it was never going to come close to the Truth. He was not making a joke, he was saying he was the joke.
“And yet it was more true than anything before or since, rivaled only by Shakespeare and the Bible . It was more true than anything because it did both things at once, it shared its author’s wisdom and knowledge and admitted, genuinely, hiddenly -and thus genuinely, he did not bray about it with false modesty- but genuinely, admitted it was impossible for him to convey anything of this life, adding syntax and punctuation to the question, but in no way coming close to an answer. And like a demon he touched the arm of the next man in line saddled with the curse of this question as seed in their belly and said in a whisper, you’re up next, good luck, here is my hawk quill and my vial and a dram of squid ink. ”
“Well, I ought to read it,” the guest said.
“It’s as profound a work as I know, and nobody touches it for weirdness and wisdom in such an embrace, an unbreakable clasp, a fraught and fond grasp, it’s by far the most revealing and occluding of works. It’s demonic, deamonic , it’s a virus that will undo me, and I will -like the ant enthralled by the parasite- reach upward until consumed by the sheep mowing the long grass, and then I suspect whatever consumes me will itself then go mad with the compulsions of small viruses in bigger and bigger of brains,” Lyndon said as he drank down the last of his own glass of the right bank Bordeaux .
