Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  “Let’s hope. Considering the alternatives.” After picking through the pepper beef in favor of the beef with her chopsticks, Drew said, “More to the point, let’s hope you’re the just-in-time person so you don’t have to endure the same pains Hartman did as a man-out-of-time.”

  “Aren’t we all men-out-of-time?” Robin expanded his pecking with the chopsticks to Drew’s plate, reaching for the peppers. “Aren’t we all a doorway to some alternate future, bringing it with us in the guise of our life mission, ensuring all possible futures, all parallel universes, remain open and accessible, as we build the multi-verse from the ground up? That’s what comes, I think, from embracing Aristotle’s challenge in his Nicomachean Ethics: The greatest way to serve society, is to serve yourself, or to follow your heart, bravely, uncompromisingly.”

  Drew smiled, and, with those fateful last words, realized she’d be taking a back seat in Robin’s quest for self-transcendence from here on out. So much for what advantages being more socially sophisticated offered. Hartman was right: what an ability to deconstruct the mind—which shapes reality—could accomplish.

  Drew was eager to witness Robin’s blossoming in the days and months ahead, as he finished healing from his ordeal. The new him hadn’t quite taken hold yet; he didn’t quite have a lock on it. As witnessed by his vacant eyes, and the fact he’d lost the moment again; Robin was far, far away. Had been for over ten minutes, as Drew finished her dinner. It was the second time catatonia had snuck up on him. Robin hadn’t even blinked all this time. His body grown rigid. Not even the dropping of plates in the background by one of the busboys, which triggered a startle response in countless others, even registered. Maybe the malady would prove to be part of the healing process, giving him time to go deeper than he could go by paying attention to the demands of the outside world.

  Drew could only hope.

  FORTY-SIX

  Robin sat in on a seminar on deconstructionism. It was a world in which Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes were gods – and De Grammatology was the official epistle. He was here with the realization that not only had his campaign to flush Hartman out of his mind gone miserably awry; he was becoming Hartman. He kept asking himself, “What would Hartman say?”

  Robin could hear his father ranting in his head. “Derrida? They’re still stuck on him? He was all they talked about at Cal Berkeley back in the 70s. Four decades later, they still haven’t moved on? Has nothing happened in philosophy in all this time? It’s like walking past the frat houses and hearing nothing but the Beatles, a no less vexing problem, incidentally. And since when did philosophy drive out big picture thinkers in favor of these narrow specialists? Shit, why not just call it a linguistics degree, admit philosophy is dead, and be done with it?” Robin had no good responses to give, and neither did any of these people, reading between the lines.

  Speaking ever more loudly inside his head, dear old dad railed on. “Our democracy is failing, you’d think contemplating alternative forms of government, and forms of social organization, from city states on artificial floating islands to cruise ships, would be better fodder for a philosopher’s mind. New forms of social justice. How to keep an increasingly pluralistic society together and make it work even as each party enjoys more freedoms, when each new freedom takes away from someone else’s idea of the best of all possible worlds.

  “Engineering life forms to live among the stars, tell me eugenics and bioengineering aren’t subjects worth a philosopher’s time in this day and age. And they’re stuck on debating the agonies of a predicate that is over-determined by a fascistic and over-controlling subject? As if we don’t intuit wisdoms on a higher level by accessing cosmic consciousness via our crown chakra. As if we don’t have prescient visions of what form the future needs to take using our sixth chakra, to only then communicate them in language, never entirely relying on the vagaries of any linguistic system, however linear and non-linear the thoughts afforded by the grammar and syntax.

  “Furthermore, until the heart and other chakras get involved, for a full seven-chakra understanding of the issue, no complete understanding is possible. No one-dimensional approach – in this case an over-reliance on what the fifth chakra can do for us with speech – can ever hope to get us anywhere. I guess it’s no surprise, then, they’re stuck in neutral!” If dad was good for one thing, it was for rants.

  “Here’s one for you…” In his mind’s eye, Robin’s father was now also talking with a mug of coffee in his hand, basically painting a Jackson Pollock, using the kitchen as a canvas. “How about the philosophical question of how best to concoct a Renaissance man, when interdisciplinary thinking is necessary just to fathom how an increasingly interconnected world works?! How about not burying our heads in the sand because being a generalist, someone who can marshal numerous aptitudes at once and parlay them to more efficient decision-making, is just way harder than being a specialist? Any self-respecting philosopher alive today would be busy at work turning himself into the next true Renaissance man!”

  Robin was ashamed to admit his dad and Hartman would get along just fine. It was one more impetus taking Robin’s character arc ever forward into an intersecting trajectory with Hartman’s. They were opposites once, the way an innocent was to a sage. Now, they were increasingly indistinguishable. Not good, considering Hartman’s prognosis.

  Dad had been such a deep thinker in his own right, that, like Socrates, Robin pretended to know nothing, and indeed let nothing stick to him, for fear of inviting the deluge of intellectual activity that would follow the instant he tempted the dam to burst with a theory about something. He rather relished being empty inside, and not being plagued with thought upon thought. That was his father’s legacy, ironically. Now the days of emptiness seemed like they belonged to someone else entirely.

  Dad had never gone postal because blowing up nightly was his way of achieving catharsis, aided by copious amounts of liquor. But drugs did nothing for Robin, besides make him feel sick, a feeling he didn’t particularly enjoy. And emotional manic-depressive-like roller coaster rides, for which his father was also famous, were also devoid of temptation. He loved his calm seas, sunny disposition, which kept him forever beyond the reach of soul-searching torment.

  But Hartman had killed off the innocent in Robin. And Robin had, as of yet, no idea what would spring up to take its place. Perhaps he had genuinely skipped to Sage, having passed over the major arcana of other Jungian-archetypes, like drawing one of those get-out-of-jail free cards in Monopoly. Or he might soon slip into some equally alien mindset. Maybe he would not be able to hold on to the sage-like heights of Hartman, however hard he tried, becoming a poser in his own right.

  Maybe he’d have no other choice but to sink into some intermediary realm between the bliss of either extreme. In the shades of gray between them, there, he could be certain was where real torment existed. The sage can wipe himself free of mental crap, keep it from sticking to him in the first place by always shifting perspectives on a situation. The Innocent achieves the same freedom by simply being blind to the situation in the first place. But knowing with incomplete and partial understanding…. Dear, God. He didn’t need any solutions that were partial and incomplete. No, thank you.

  On the other hand… the archetype of the Adventurer… he existed in the middle ground between extremes of Innocent and Sage. Robin knew because dad was big on using Carol S. Pearson’s Awakening the Heroes Within as his own personal compass for how best to round out human nature and embrace one’s inner wholeness. Maybe if Robin could hand this part of his life over to the adventurer, he could enjoy the ride better, stop cringing at the approaching rapids and instead whoop it up as the raft went careening over the waterfall. Fear is the mind killer, Robin. He had to let go of fear before it got ahold of him the way fear of failure got ahold of Hartman.

  ***

  Despite the tedium of hearing these posers spout nonsense, Robin focused on the debate about Derrida. He came out of his digression, enjoying
far more fertile ground for his mind than this intellectual desert surrounding the oasis. Let’s see if he could actually shut them up with “What Would Hartman Say?”

  The girl to his right beat Robin to the punch. Shifting in her chair like a pitcher winding up, she said, “I think the politics of language is inescapable.” She combed a loose strand of long blond hair behind her head. “The predicate is over-determined by the subject, is brought into being by it, by the act of creation of the verb itself at the hand of god of the subject. It’s a creation myth. But it’s a poor one. For we are cobbled, dysfunctional gods. Unaware of our own powers. Unconscious in our administration of them. And left to wander the world of our creations trapped as if in the mists of Maya, to borrow from the Buddhists.”

  She squirmed in her seat as if fear the other students might not be receiving her ideas well caused her physical discomfort. “Derrida is right. It’s very hard to escape the tyranny of this poor man’s god, not to mention the linear thoughts he gives rise to, forever holding us prisoner in a one-dimensional world. Forego any thought of escape by way of branching tree logic, or hyperbole, or digression…tools in a philosopher’s hands, but unavailable to the bulk of humanity.”

  She changed strategies, gone on the offensive now, openly staring into the eyes of each of her fellow students, virtually daring them to disagree with her to her face, or perhaps trying to hypnotize them into seeing the light.

  “No, what we need is a universal language more akin to mathematics, that allows us to write new equations in order to create new worlds, to understand how they work, and to make them work, make them every bit as sustainable as what we find in ‘reality’.”

  That was Thornbull, Mary A., which is exactly how she introduced herself each morning. The fact she could make semi-coherent sense of Derrida’s opaqueness made her a giant among Lilliputians. Her hair flowed straight and long, in the color of spun-gold. Her cream skin had the look of polished pearl. She was fifty to seventy-five pounds overweight by Robin’s reckoning, maybe more, but she wore the extra weight the way an albatross wore its wings: gracefully. She dressed to enhance her beauty in the way some curvy women knew how to do.

  The boy opposite her in the semi-circle of desk-chairs cut in next. “So what you’re saying is we should all become mathematicians. Philosophy is dead; all we can do is remind ourselves of our inability to think in the one truly liberating medium.” That was River Dayton. River looked ravaged by AIDS, with his hair falling out in clumps, his skin marred by Kaposi-sarcoma-like lesions.

  It was all theater of the absurd meant as homage to the unsung suffering of the world, who everyone pushed out of their minds in their Nietzsche-like quest for man into superman, in their determined search for excellence driven by the marketplace which ensured only the best of the best survived. Like old people – no one wanted to consider growing old – the sick were marginalized, locked up, tucked away and forgotten, and River was having none of it. There were actually quite a lot of them on campus – the cult of sick-people worshippers who weren’t actually sick themselves, only posing as dead men walking. Robin found the lifestyle strangely appealing and more honest than much of what passed for student consciousness.

  The only other woman in the class chimed in. As she talked, she ran her fingers along strands of her corn-starched hair, jutting from her head like stalagmites in a dark crystal cave. “You’re taking language too narrowly. According to Roland Barthes, and to semiologists in general, how a lighting designer lights a film set, how the editor cuts the film, how the actors choose their wardrobe and manners of movement… these are all part of the cinematic language, ripe for deconstruction.”

  She continued, “Of even more meaningful impact is all these linguistic systems working together synergistically, making film such a powerfully hypnotic medium, and making video games even more so.” She finished that line in time to move the ring from the right ear to the upper lip, and the one on the upper lip to the left eyebrow. “Without an ability to tease apart these various strands in the mesh of the fabricated reality, see how each linguistic system subliminally coaxes our mind over the cliff the filmmaker wants us to saunter over like lemmings…” The ring in the nose was now on the right ear. She practiced makeover voodoo to hold her audience’s attention while she struggled with her verbosity. “Well, we are forever lost to the veils of Maya like Mary says, forever doomed to fall into the abyss of non-understanding. Forever slaves to the puppet masters.”

  She finally left her face alone and slouched into her chair. “It’s at that level we should focus our deconstruction, of the typical TV news broadcast, of the novel or videogame as a whole, looking at each strand, and how they’re woven into the overall garment to create the overall effect, to expose what the true subtext is, if we truly wish to be free of Big Brother influences.”

  That was Minerva, dressed in Goth getup. Earrings punctured even her cheeks, her tongue, and ran along the ridges of her facial bones. Counting them would probably pass for a better use of Robin’s time. Though he had to admit, since deciding to check back in, the flow of drivel had improved, as if the faucet had time to clear the rust in the pipes out of the way.

  Robin figured it was the right time to chime in with a “What Would Hartman Say?” statement. “Don’t you think the ultimate solution is to do what Godard and Truffaut did, stop playing the role of critic, pick up a damn camera, and start filming?” He mimed a hand cranked movie camera for them, aiming it at each in turn. In this group, a little theater of the absurd definitely helped the medicine go down. “Create those alternate realities that provide options we will never access otherwise if we spend all our time ruminating on how inescapable this reality is.”

  He paused for emphasis, then shifted in his chair to indicate a change of tack. “Learn the techniques of the puppet master, definitely, there’s no getting around the apprenticeship period. But if the politics of language is inescapable as you say, however many languages that go into making a film, then why not put that at your disposal, and like a pied piper, lead people out of hell into better worlds?”

  He searched their eyes for understanding, surprised by the lack of eye-rolling and defensive reactions. “In the dynamics of your film world—and under the laws by which it works—they will have no choice but to be more self-conscious. If done right, the more engaging your world, paradoxically, the more distance they’ll have on it. With any luck, that psychology of no attachments-no aversions will carry over to this world, setting up the context for slipping and sliding in and out of alternate realities at will. They’ll no longer need the spell-caster—the filmmaker—to manage this for them.”

  Robin once again paused to gauge understanding, saw no eye-rolling, or perplexed faces coming back at him. Since the zero resistance to his thoughts wasn’t likely to last, he pressed on while he could. “Films that deal with the theme of awakening into higher consciousness such as The Matrix, or more recently, Terminator Salvation, and Total Recall, strike me as cases in point. Another approach is the one taken by the now defunct TV series Queer as Folk—where an entire subculture is envisioned which prides itself on its bead-reading; its ability to rip the masks we all wear off one another; has zero-tolerance for bullshit; and exists to keep each other honest, so we aren’t all walking around in a trance, and a prisoner to our self-delusions.”

  He shifted into another body position to indicate the next point bore emphasis. “We get stuck in an in-between place, not fully conscious, not fully asleep, because this reality in which we find ourselves is not fully engaging, so, not fully worth deconstructing either. But a truly enticing world would be one worth pulling apart to see what makes it tick, so we can remake it anew for ourselves. And each time we remake it, the world becomes both more compelling, and allows us greater distance on it at the same time.”

  Realizing he was going off on a tangent, he just ran with it. “Maybe this stage theory, building better, more enticing worlds, so we can get simultaneously better at
deconstructing them, constitutes one small step for man, one big step for mankind. Maybe it offers the only true chance of liberation for the masses, hell, for any of us. To take, in short, a Hegelian-like approach to history, allowing it to spiral upwards, two steps forward, one step back, with each turn of the spiral.” He did the slumping back into his chair thing, subtly making fun of his fellow students. “Maybe to hope for more, to insist on getting from the darkness to the light any other way is nothing more than idealism, the idealism of the narcissist who favors lost causes.”

  The revelations created a stunned silence which lasted less than a minute before the vultures gobbled up the carrion of his expelled thoughts. Leaving Robin to wonder if he’d pulled off a Hartmanesque moment, or had simply joined the rank and file of posers. It was time to flee the scene, in any case.

  Time to check out the science labs where the future was being made, according to Drew, and leave these critics of the present behind for the forgers of tomorrow.

  Drew was right. Robin was ashamed he couldn’t see it before. His love of humanities above all else had created a blanket of prejudice which he had thrown over the most promising leads he had. What more fertile ground to root around in than the people whose inventions would shift the very bedrock defining the nature of reality? If he wanted prisons with more room to move about – as he’d just finished arguing was the most they could hope for – then why not chase after the people making artificial eyes that allowed us to see along the entire electromagnetic spectrum instead of the narrow band of light in which we currently perceived reality? Why not chase after the people who could make our sense of smell superior to a hound dog’s? Why not upgrade each of the five senses, which according to Kant, affected our perception of reality?