By probing deep into both hedonistic and utilitarian desires manifest in widely suppressed middle-American white culture, our aim is to demonstrate that certain aspects of Mr Trump’s rise to prominence are not only explainable – scientifically – and replicable, but are also not without predictable consequences despite (to the best of our researches) their utter lack of historical precedent.
Hemorrhagic Neck-Ties. With this bold new programme of research, Axsel couldn’t help but notice that Tamara de Pravern – a lioness in the field of prediction markets, and a co-investigator whom he’d long admired – had taken an intense curiosity in his activities.
Tamara (Dr de Pravern to her research colleagues) was a woman who looked like she’d been born in a skyscraper:
Her sleek legs rose halfway to the sky.
A harsh-angled jawline framed red velvet lips that drew all onlookers into their trap of geometrical perfection.
And coppery eyes gazed out like the enormous panes of privacy glass bejeweling the executive levels atop the Institute.
She favored brash accents (scarlet sashes, peacock scarves, dagger-to-the-heart heels) with jewelry that bordered on the gigantesque, from the twisted helixes of her earrings, her necklaces with faux-pearls the size of a man’s testicles, and black mood rings that circled her fingers and their well manicured, talon-like nails.
Although he had tried to keep the project secret, Axsel was certain – almost certain – that Tamara had caught a glimpse of his projected leviathan of Trump.
But he couldn’t discount the possibility that her arousal was just a product of his newfound attention to detail in his wardrobe, inspired of course by the Presidential candidate himself, although due to the limitations of his means Axsel was forced to scour thrift shops for his stern black suits.
All of this running-about – always on his thin-soled dress shoes because he couldn’t afford the taxi fares – left his clothing smelling faintly of diesel exhaust, although none of his co-workers (not even Tamara, with her acute sense of smell) had commented on it.
But on one minor point he took issue with the Presidential candidate’s taste.
Axsel eschewed Trump’s occasional penchant for cornflower blue neckties, in favor of brilliant reds.
These flamboyant ciphers seemed to relentlessly build in Axsel’s own mind until they burst forth from his carotids, flowing down his neck and across his chest, like the stigmata of a hemorrhagic fever.
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Our methodology was a simple one. Brutality begets brutality, yet only with repeated and unflinching exposure can an audience be first conditioned, then familiarized, and – as so convincingly demonstrated by Mr Trump – ultimately aroused by denigration and ad hominem attacks.
We therefore undertook the following course of study.
Quietus in Diesel Minor. After being haunted for hours by vivid dreams of Tamara de Pravern, Axsel awoke deep in a night so black that even the trucks had fallen silent.
And yet the high-rise still seemed to tremble at their memory.
Hands shaking, he pulled out his tattered moleskin, taking care to avoid spilling his foul-smelling cup of caffeinated petroleum distillates. He arranged a text buffer side-by-side with his exhaustive statistical analyses and started typing furiously.
He was no longer certain he could recall his own name.
STIMULI
In Phase I, subjects were exposed to projected stimuli, consisting of no less than:
(1) six-second film loops of large-screen televisions being hurled off of high-rise balconies (with and without pedestrians, early-childhood development centers, and heavy truck traffic below);
(2) time-shifted splices of the World Trade Center collapse (North Tower) interspersed with millisecond samples from pornographic films;
(3) the final monolith sequence from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (“My God, it’s full of stars”);
(4) graphic footage of stereotactic neurosurgical procedures (i.e. surgical interventions utilizing a steel frame bolted directly to the skull table), with no less than ten square centimeters of exposed brain tissue, and only when conducted on fully conscious patients; and lastly
(5) microscope slides (400X enlargement) of Stage IV metastatic cancers originating in the lower bowel and/or rectum.
Participants exhibited markedly increased levels of arousal for all five projections following exposure to still images of Mr Trump captured in the midst of denigrating remarks he was verified to have made regarding certain classes of immigrants; but no effect was observed for control images of Hillary Clinton (with or without single-frame exposures of Monica Lewinsky, wide-mouthed, lips fully exposed); nor for stock footage obtained of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, both of whom the investigators originally hypothesized would induce a similar effect.
The implications for the candidacy of Mr Trump are profound.
Savage Harmonic. Even as the interrogations began, he (Ansel…yes, that was it, Ansel) could hear the rumble of trucks circling the interchange growing ever louder, as if the heavy diesel traffic had become lost within a maze of off-ramps exiting his own mind.
As a point of honor Ansel refused to implicate his co-investigator, Tamara de Pravern. At first he claimed he’d found the video clips online – where of course all deep truths about human nature reside, so that they can resonate with one another in a self-amplifying feedback loop – even though later, under conditions of enhanced interrogation, he was forced to admit to quasi-officials of law enforcement that he had – even if it was at Tamara’s suggestion – uploaded all of the clips himself.
He tried to make them understand. Once light was captured in a charge-coupled device, digitized, and brought online, it was no longer evidence of a physical manifestation but rather (quite to the contrary) became a sensor, a probe of the electroencephalographic signals underpinning collective human consciousness.
In the elicitation of this savage harmonic underlying all human thought, Ansel had discovered that there was no more powerful stimulus than the projected visage of Donald Trump.
PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS: PHASE II
At the conclusion of the first stage of the study participants walked through life-size holographic projections of select cross-sections of the blood spatters produced by a hypothetical terrorist assassination of Mr Trump (also at 400X magnification).
These shapes were referred to by participants variously as: the hanging jowls of swine just before being herded into a slaughterhouse; cross-sections of a severe bowel obstruction; brain lesions of an indeterminate nature; and, remarkably, by no less then seven participants, as the sexual orifices of imaginary creatures.
Invisible Jihad. Spurned on this occasion by Tamara for reasons that he could not comprehend, and still perplexed by the grossly enlarged projection of the Presidential candidate playing out on the wall in front of him, Ashel turned his back and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows for inspiration.
And inspiration struck.
The film of pollution clinging to the glass had become so heavy that Ashel could barely make out the city skyline any longer. What he principally saw was, in fact, a reflection of himself—
With the enormous shimmering halo of Mr Trump’s projection engulfing his own visage.
As if waving himself away, Ashel tried to wipe the grime off of the window with a bare hand, but of course the diesel particulate and the heaviest vibrations of the trucks only haunted the outside surface of the double-paned glass.
And so all he left behind were the sickle-shaped wipe marks of his own fingers – stylized traces that seemed to form a cuneiform of violence – and which announced his own invisible jihad.
DISCUSSION: PHASE II
While disturbing, viewed with a clinical eye these honest and unfiltered auto-associations reported by our participants seem to support certain modern theories regarding the functioning of the amygdala and basal ganglia, up to and including the synchronized mass psychosis effect t
hat some claim was originally hypothesized in the lost writings of A.R. Luria (1927; cf. “The Man with a Shattered Mind”) – and first put into practice by various combatants in episodes of trench warfare during World War II (esp. those involving flame throwers, though of course not exclusively so).
Standing Wave. Despite the severe economic downturn and the dissolution of the Institute – Askel had repeatedly been forced to break into the locked and barricaded building, where somehow he always found Tamara de Pravern waiting for him – there now seemed to be heavier truck traffic outside than ever.
Endless fleets of diesel rigs mounted the cloverleafs, downshifted, and engaged their air-brakes with enthusiasm.
The entire high-rise shook.
As if in subconscious response to these rumblings, the oily and bitter-smelling surface of Askel’s coffee trembled in concentric rings, a standing wave of madness.
METHOD AND APPARATUS
Forty-eight volunteers of reproductive age were ushered into a modified lecture hall outfitted with a mirrored ceiling, walls of half-silvered glass, and custom low-pile industrial carpeting sheeted over with a highly reflective layer of aluminized mylar.
A sharp tang of noxious industrial fumes off-gassed by these materials was noted by the investigators, but deemed safe for human exposure. Nonetheless several participants noted their discomfort with the “synthetic diesel smell”, and the presence of such odors is suspected to have significantly enhanced the effects observed.
The room was outfitted with twenty-seven discreetly located nano-projectors, as well as near-infrared transcranial receiver/transmitters. Full brain imaging of the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes was therefore enabled to a depth of three centimeters, thought to encompass all higher perceptual and cognitive functions available to scientific inquiry.
Although unusual, this apparatus obviated the need for mass dissections at the conclusion of the experiment, for which human subjects’ approval had proved inordinately difficult to obtain.
Please note that at all times participants could see our projected stimuli, as well as grossly distorted reflections of their own visages in the floor, walls, and/or ceiling. This was thought to enhance participant identification with the test images of Mr Trump’s head and face, so long as these were displayed at a minimum diameter of three meters.
Smaller likenesses of Trump were found to induce overwhelming feelings of self-loathing and disgust when combined with our five projected conditions, which strongly interfered with the observation of the desired effect. This, we assumed, was due to a Stroop-like effect (i.e., of contradictory self-images) brought on by the incidental reflections of the subject’s own visage when they occurred at the same or a similar scale to the likeness of Mr Trump.
In the following we therefore restrict our observations to the “Large” (six-foot), “Jumbo” (twelve-foot), and “Cyclopean” (eighteen-foot) conditions.
We must stress that in the latter condition the cavernous nasal septum of Mr Trump brought on intense feelings of hopelessness and despair in a majority of our test subjects.
Detached Sutures. For months the insoluble cipher of Trump’s visage – its postures and its battlements, the way it shifted so effortlessly between all of its many derisive planes of existence – had haunted Alesk’s dreams.
Finally, the bulb of the projector burned out. Robbed of his perverted Buddha – the projected face he had come to love so much – and no closer to a solution, in his frustration Alesk lashed out at the cup of putrescent coffee which still squatted defiantly on his desk.
Dollops of acrid black liquid seemed to launch themselves in slow motion, as if they were spatters of blood that dried as soon as they came into contact with the corrosive atmosphere of the office-space. Alesk again felt as if he were walking through the simulated assassinations, a holographic Zapruder film projected onto the spectral diffuser of his mind, which documented a historical event that had not yet occurred.
The optimum scale and vector-space of the act would almost certainly be reduced to practice by others – the Arabs had always had a knack for mathematical breakthroughs – even though his own researches had just started to pick up momentum. This reflection made Alesk neither happy nor sad, but rather fueled him to let his mind run wild in truly original terrain.
Dizzy…
Alesk’s eyelids fluttered.
He staggered, disoriented and confused.
Uncertain what he’d been doing a few seconds before.
He was jolted by the uneasy sensation that he was no longer in his own office. The cup of coffee, which had so long trembled in the wake of his researches, was no longer where he had left it. And this desk had coffee stains all over it, whereas he always kept his own spotless and clean.
It was hard to tell where he had gone awry, given the identical layout on every floor of the Institute. Perhaps without realizing it he had gotten off the high-rise’s elevator on the wrong level.
Yes.
He was sure of it.
Alesk was in somebody else’s office, much lower in the Institute than he had first thought.
Because the roar of the diesel trucks had grown louder than ever, reverberating within his mind, detaching the sutures of his cranium from one another.
RESULTS
Given the well-known problems with Null Hypothesis Statistical Testing, the investigators preferred to extract qualitative interrogations from each and every participant, which rarely required recourse to methods such as waterboarding.
Statements made by participants were collected and grouped via affinity diagrams to construct a taxonomy of techno-erotic responses to Mr Trump’s visage. The techno-sadistic valence of participants’ nonverbal reactions was also inventoried and coded by independent judges, whenever feasible.
Predictably, a majority of participants were left speechless by their experience, but correlation of their phasic brain waves with the (final) ninety seconds of cardiac activity collected from eleven convicts executed by electric chair yielded positive results.
It is noted (but not endorsed) that the electrical supply to many border fences could be connected at an identical voltage without significant strain on the nation’s electrical grid, if such a solution were to be deemed politically feasible by Mr Trump. The ramifications of such a decision are left to future work, however, although it is suggested that existing online footage of trespassers and other victims coming into contact with high-voltage terminals at unsecured electrical substations could be highly valuable in such an inquiry.
For those participants that remained responsive, a majority preferred the production of automatic drawings to verbal remarks. Of these auto-suggestive “reports”, investigators noted prominent themes such as:
(i) works with a striking resemblance (despite use of pastels and colored pencils) to macaroni art produced by psychotic children;
(ii) pencil-strokes for which we calculated a fractal dimension identical to certain images from a well-known textbook of head trauma, e.g. “Woman with complete dissection of the corpus callosum, sagittal plane, brought on by high-speed ejection and subsequent head-first collision with sheet metal peeled back from a long-haul tractor trailer”;
(iii) statistically significant correlations with the indices of curvature derived from plaster-casts of Mediterranean beaches, and particularly the hollows and depressions left therein by the child-victims of migratory drowning incidents resulting from unseaworthy vessels;
(iv) shapes strongly resembling the crystalline geometry of certain very high-end fragrance decanters produced in Paris prior to the Charlie Hebdo attacks;
(v) phase diagrams consistent with a model of an extremely large sewer culvert, corrugated and fiberglass-reinforced, which recently entered mass production.
The Inspiration of the Death Plunge. The window-washer pendulumed away from the high-rise and Azzel, about to take the first sip of his freshly brewed coffee, was already anticipating the thump of the man’s heavy boots ag
ainst the floor-to-ceiling windows when the harness let loose.
Time seemed to halt as fragments of the window-washer’s failed carabiner ricocheted off of the outer of the double panes. Azzel stared right into the window washer’s eyes – as the reality of the death plunge struck the man – from his observation post safely within the panes of mirrored glass.
The window-washer was short and compact, all muscle, wearing olive drab cargo pants and a tombstone-gray sweatshirt. His eyes flared wide as they beheld his own reflection suspended in mid-air for that fleeting second, but the grim set of his mouth never shifted.
He threw his hands in the air, clawing at the sky, and the rag he had just wiped his brow with fluttered away and landed on one of the blades of the louvered sunshades just above Azzel’s office windows, where ironically the scrap of terrycloth thereafter lay draped in perpetual safety.
Then the time-trap loosened its hold on reality, and the man—
(Azzel later learned that his name was Gonzalo Reyes de la Puenta, a twenty-three-year-old Venezuelan who had illegally entered the States only three weeks ago)
—plummeted seventy-two stories onto the hood of an Aston Martin idling on the parkway below.
The rag hung there above Azzel’s office, suspended from the sun-louvers like a shroud, for months afterwards. Even the winter storms failed to dislodge it from its precarious perch, although it was buffeted by strong winds and the louvers constantly shuddered with the vibrations induced by the heavy truck traffic of the cloverleafs encircling the high-rise.
As the cloth mildewed, stiffened, and started to deteriorate, it became a powerful cipher symbolizing the death-plunge of Azzel’s own mind, and ultimately became the inspiration for his bold new programme of research.
But he never touched that cup of coffee, and thereafter it remained at his station, an unholy distillate of the event that had so profoundly altered the arc of his career.
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 9
