This is a picture of the smoke rising above the torched Centre. Afterwards, questions were raised; yoga instructors were filmed for the Late Breaking News. But the real value of the fire occurred during its burning. Because something specific had happened, a counterpoint, a clarifying bas-relief. Like what happens when a plane crashes or a murder is committed. The event jumps out specifically from the background chaos, the focus enlarges, and the wider world is seen. Illuminated.
My name is Darwin, like the man who invented the monkey. I hit the planet in ’59. I was named Darwin because 1959 was the centenary of the publication of The Origin of Species. My father, now dead, was a postal clerk whose hobby was botany. He was also a vegetarian and an atheist, the only one in the neighborhood, or as I came to understand from the school taunting I received, the only one in the world. I spent my childhood being singled out for weirdness. Like my father, I’m a loner. I regard this fact as an extreme form of random good luck.
My last trip to the hospital was in ’91. I thought something was controlling me. I was right. It was my own mind.
Being crazy is being the victim of mind-fuck situations all the time.
In the hospital I was pinned down and questioned by behaviourist nerds. I fought back. I told them I’d look after my own mental health. Then I discovered Freud and psychoanalyzed myself. This is what I learned: maintaining clarity in the waking state is the most difficult thing of all. Maintaining illumination, next to impossible. But I followed Freud’s example and, giving myself repeated raps to the mindset in much the same way a jackhammer pulverizes cement, I was able to successfully eliminate a large portion of my unconscious mind. Now I never dream. And my emotions have become mere passing phenomena.
These things I have done in order to avoid the pharmaceutical control of the mental health militia.
For some of us, these are the dark ages.
But I’m not dangerous.
Do you sense the agitation? It’s everywhere, but especially in the cities. The inhabitants there are restless, over-stimulated, desperate to maintain a transient vital energy. They shop, eat, drink, watch videos, ravenously. Everyone’s wild-eyed, nervous, catwalking through crowds and traffic like haunted runway models. Pacing the streets, nerve endings vibrating. Money in their pockets, fulfillment eluding.
Everyone’s hungry. Most hungry are the images that hold us in thrall—the images that sell us things, that entertain us. Who would have guessed that this is what artificial intelligence has become: visual images with lives of their own feeding on our hunger?
The whole world has become a madness machine.
Your so-called “advanced civilization.”
I know. I’m just another angst-ridden Postmodern casualty.
Easily dismissed.
Bang. Bang.
This is a picture of me in my trench.
In my mother’s backyard in the city. When I built it she was happy. “It’s just like when you were a boy with your Erector set in the basement,” she said.
She was wrong. When I was a boy I was filled with a wild and ultimately stupid hope, creating the elaborate and beautiful metal forms of a skeleton city.
Now I dig holes.
When you abandon hope you also abandon hopelessness.
But I’ve discovered that an open trench provides poor protection. The slings and arrows of skyshine and gamma rays; the pounding music from the giant ad screens mounted on city buildings; the jarring wail of ambulance and police sirens sound like a city screaming in pain.
These things penetrate the fragile brain.
Speaking of brains, did you know that somehow the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness? But that scientists draw a blank on the nature of this conversion? The concept is simple. It’s like watching a white trail in the sky (brain) tracking the movement of a supersonic jet (consciousness).
Even with the penetrating rays and noises, I’m relaxed in my trench. Relief washing over me as I watch the white trail disappear.
Once I sat on the curbs of busy streets writing poems about anguish, love and terror. Some people still do that. Huddle inside their lives dragging pens across their pain.
The world is filled with inexplicable things. And love is in hiding. Perhaps this has always been so and it’s just that now we have too much black information, our perception has become damaged. Narrowed. Warped. Listen to the headlines; they say it all: “There is a great panic amongst the people and they have spilled out into the streets.” … “Corpses are piled on verandas. Bruised and bleeding bodies are laid in rows along the streets … ”
The information is all like this.
But information is not understanding.
Darwin provided a glossary at the end of The Origin of Species. The word degradation is listed: the wearing down of land by the action of the sea or of meteoric agencies.
Change a couple of words and you’ve got Darwin Two’s definition of the times: Degradation: the wearing down of the human species by the action of negative information. Or read the OED: Degradation: to become degenerate; a morbid change in structure.
Mother barricades herself inside her home. Most people do. Her trust in a beneficent world has become degraded. “You want my opinion?” Mother whispers through the bolted door. “Everything hurts! Inside. Outside. Everything is shattering like glass.”
Citizens tearing their hair, uncomprehending.
The cities are terrible places to live.
This is a sentence I like: There is newer and stronger evidence that the solitary individual who has disconnected himself from Postmodern life may actually represent the last vestige of independent, human thought.
A glimmer, a modus operandi, a casual illumination, perhaps.
Perhaps, even, the species value of Postmodern dislocation. A thing not easily dismissed.
Newer and stronger. Isn’t that what the original Darwin was all about?
Still, I vacillate. Who knows anything for sure? Who even understands?
This is a picture of my unconscious mind. It’s black, as in, empty. It’s like a night scene in a city without lights. Something is there but you can’t see it. It’s like willed, internal blindness. The interior barely existing. This is a view that spiritual people the world over aspire to. In the picture I’ve left three stars shining. These represent points of connection. They allow for the occasional moment of spontaneity. I had one of those a few years ago. I jumped off a cliff into the ocean. It was great.
Ha. Ha.
That was a joke.
Something I’m still capable of.
Here’s another joke.
During a lifetime, a couple of things might happen to make you laugh. But usually you’re stuck on your back at the bottom of some trench, the world sitting on your face like some obnoxious fat man using your head for a pillow.
Did I say, “joke”?
Jump shot to right about now. I thought I’d build a better shelter. I found an old book about nuclear war. Now there’s nostalgia. The comfort of a single external threat. None of this vague, confusing stuff. But a clear, constant menace, something you could get your teeth into.
So this book. From the survivalist movement of the early eighties. The cover: large black letters on a gunmetal grey background. Inside: a revelation of practical instructions. How to ventilate and cool a below-ground shelter. Emergency sanitation. Surviving without doctors. Improvised clothing. Air pumps. Water and Food: In the histories of great famines, some people do rob and kill for food, and a very few become cannibals. But the big majority continues to maintain civilized values while they starve. Self-Defence: There is no need to tell people that they will need their guns …
The book had everything, even personal stories. A family of six from Utah travelled sixty-four miles by car to a remote countryside location and built a door-covered trench shelter in only thirty-four hours. A pair of college girls made a hose ventilated toilet out of a five-gallon paint can. Three rural families
in Tennessee built an expedient blast shelter in forty-eight hours complete with bunks and bed sheet hammocks. A man travelled fifteen miles on foot carrying eighty pounds of water in two burlap bags, each lined with two plastic trash bags.
I decided on a Small-Pole Shelter.
Tools required to build a Small-Pole Shelter:
Axe, long handle.
Bow-saw, 28 in.
Pick.
Shovel, long handle.
Claw hammer.
File, 10 in.
Steel tape, 10 ft.
The beauty of a plan: the particular in sharp focus. This may be the secret of a smooth existence, the pathway to a temporarily untroubled life.
A Small-Pole Shelter provides excellent protection against fallout radiation, blast, and fires. Twelve people can live in this shelter without serious hardship. For Darwin Two it’s a palace.
This is a picture of me building the Small-Pole Shelter.
A picture I’ve titled, “A lonely, intelligent mutation scrambling with the brutes for existence.”
À la Darwin One. Who also worried about being seen as a monomaniac or a crank.
Darwin alone in the universe.
Here are some questions.
1. What if evolution has for some reason speeded up like a generalized cancer and that a rapid species change is occurring? That what once took millions of years to transmute and evolve is now taking one or two generations? That we are now fundamentally different animals from what our grandparents were?
2. What if all the lone, discontented, dismissed and hated voices living on the edge of our species’ existence are really an aberration, a mutation?
3. What if independent, objective thought is the cause of this mutation? Has, in fact, become the mutation?
4. What if the song we mutants should be singing starts like this: Hey Mama, I’m extinction bound …
Another picture, this one of me resting. The Small-Pole Shelter half complete.
Then came Dorothy like a random variation hauling her busted rainbow. Wandering the universe, homeless, deviating, stunned. Stopping by my half-built shelter. I told her to take off, get lost. But she was already lost. She stayed and after a few days made a nest for herself against my mother’s fence. A green plastic tarp crudely fashioned into a lean-to, a ratty sleeping bag.
Dorothy. Named for the 1939 film, carrying the burden of Oz: an alien world of delight and menace, magic and loyal friends.
Now that’s a definition of extinction.
Dorothy who seldom speaks.
A kid, in her early twenties. Spending her days clearing bits of wood from the shelter site, hauling dirt, tidying up. Seeping slowly into my life.
During this time I still slept and ate in my mother’s house. I started leaving her food like the stray animal she was.
Weeks went by. I became accustomed to her quiet presence. She’d watch me work on the shelter, helping when she saw the need. When the shelter was complete, I invited her inside. She moved her things to a far corner, away from my bunk. We are not lovers; we seldom speak, we never touch. But Dorothy has become my apprentice.
“Variation Under Domestication.” This is the title of Chapter 1 of the Origin.
Dorothy. An allied species.
This is a picture of Dorothy and Darwin Two—in disguise, of course—resting in the Small-Pole Shelter the morning after the Multiplex Cinema burned down. A spectacular fire lasting throughout the night and spreading to neighbouring buildings. Several of the mounted ad screens were also destroyed, a hugely fulfilling sight: blue and white electrical sparks exploding from the screens as they burned, the prancing images and the music suddenly eliminated, the blank screens crashing to the ground.
Did I say I wasn’t dangerous? I may have lied. Independent thought or action is always dangerous.
Illumination, of any sort, is dangerous.
And fire, in particular, can be cleansing.
THE WHITE SATIRE
The bride’s dress was beautiful. It was made of white satire and flowed about her in an elegant trample.
The wedding ceremony took place on a revolving stair and was conducted by the lead guitarist of a local rock group. Afterwards, the groom bowed and the bride did a ballerina curtsy. The audience was huge and everyone applauded. But the groom had had enough by then and became slack and cold. Now the bride saw him as a thin and sour manager. The man in her mind had fled!
A dear friend stepped in and became the stand-in groom. Together they greeted the guests. There was no harm in this. Everyone thought the stand-in was the groom.
As for the real groom, he was never seen again.
“What lucre!” cried the bride.
Now she gives talks on wedding preparations to dazed young wits. They all want a white satire like hers.
“White satires are essentially harmless and delightful,” the bride tells them. “Setting is important, of course, but anything loose will do—a hallucination, the great outrageous. A reluctant groom is useful for the photographs but if one isn’t available, a stand-in will do. After that … pfft! And make sure the minister is novel.”
The young wits are taking notes. “Reluctant groom,” they write. “Novel!” “Hallucination!” “Outrageous!” “Delight!”
CHEERLEADING
During the birthday dinner—there was just the two of them—they talked about art and how the “new” music seemed to be leading the arts as far as expressing the present time was concerned—the bass driven DJ compositions, almost symphonic in their construction, yet elemental, heart pounding. How this music delighted and excited while expressing a seamless present! Music subtly layered, full of unpredictability and surprise. At the time they were listening to St. Germain’s Boulevard and drinking red Bordeaux.
Still thinking of music, she mentioned the notion that consciousness is tied to technology, that, historically, consciousness has changed alongside technology. “Or probably,” she said, “it is that they are paired, each influencing and altering the other.”
Briefly, they imagined a “Minuet mind,” pinched and decorous, then a “Christian mind,” trapped in its own narrative, a “Gutenberg mind,” which must have been initially frightening, a “Digital mind,” embryonic, confusing.
The writer J.G. Ballard was mentioned next, and his statement that, contrary to popular perception, the twentieth century was not dominated by holocaust and doom but was, in fact, a century of optimism and naiveté. They thought about that for a while and wondered if perhaps human beings have a cheerleader gene, as a kind of survival mechanism, hidden away in their DNA makeup.
They considered the societal function of inspiration—uplifting thoughts and feelings. Perhaps there was some basic drive to exaltation, he suggested, the whole purpose being to provide a parallel experience to the bleak facts undermining human existence. A deeper and more lasting perspective, say, than religion or entertainment provided. Many, they agreed, were whole-heartedly, and by definition singly, engaged in this endeavour. Artists and fevered scientists caught unawares in an unlikely union like good news ambassadors for the race, all of them desperate to find the cure for the human condition.
They went for a walk, the evening lengthening now in early April. The air was sharp, the sky overcast but lovely with many small birds chattering in the leafless poplars, and the dangling flower cones of the maple trees shedding their fine yellow dust on the roadway, on their shoulders.
On the beach thousands of seagulls perched on the rocks and many flew overhead in cawing agitation. It was said that after fifty years the herring had, inexplicably, returned to the inlet. Suddenly their neighbourhood beach had become a feeding ground. There were other birds, too, ravens, and more crows than they’d ever seen amassed at one place. And many bald eagles. When the eagles flew above the rocks, the perched gulls rose in one fluid movement; they were the exact same colour as the grey sky.
After the beach they walked home and she made coffee. He presented a small birthday cake�
�vanilla with a cream and wafer filling. Today she was fifty-one years old. But there was only one lit candle on the cake, a stub end from the sideboard, and she blew it out and made a wish which concerned the continuing good health of their children. The talk then settled on their children, especially in light of the birthday wish, and of the framed pictures of them he’d given her as a gift.
Admiring the gift she remarked that while the children were living at home, they’d never showcased their pictures—other than snapshots on the fridge—and how it was strange but also sad to see them mounted now, their images like ghosts or spirits hovering around them.
And so the evening continued. Still seated at the table, they turned their gaze outward once more, towards the world, and watched the moon rise, and listened to the birdsong outside. They found it surprising and lovely to hear birdsong while the moon shone.
THE AIR IS THICK WITH METAPHORS
We’ll score the winning goal, capture the grand slam, ace the hole-in-one. After that, in the Pairs Free Dance, we’ll execute a perfect triple salchow, a transcending move so unexpectedly pure that simultaneous orgasms will occur amongst those watching, perhaps millions of them.
We’ll change our names to Cheeky and Markita and clean up in the Latin category of Ballroom Dancing in America. The crowd will love our sleek and piquant moves, our predatory Salsa, the way you push and pull me with your hot, animal eyes.
We’ll shake champagne bottles and, ecstatic, pour the contents over each other’s heads. This will be on the podium after the Indy win, after the sudden death playoffs, after the gold medals, after the successful births of our children, after the successful birth of anything.
Down the Road to Eternity Page 15
