A KIND OF MADNESS
PART FOUR
38
I suppose you are aware, or, if not aware, you are suspicious; or perhaps you have forgotten, you've chosen to forget, given your highly refined skills in Ameritocratic self-deception, that these beliefs of yours, by which you live your life, and formed in your efforts to become a productive member of society, are, in point of fact, moles, not rodents but, if you will, agents, introduced in your intellect towards the hostile appropriation of your socialization system by Ameritocratic faiths and ideologies, making of you an unwitting host, as you proceed to vivify its beliefs, to the evolutionary domination of the symbiont Ameritocracy, but I do not anticipate you suspect the degree to which these myriad infiltrations have paved the well-beaten path, into you, for me.
37
I am standing at the crossroads of an alternate dimension, tentatively entering. Or, alternatively, I am standing perfectly still, ruminating in the revelation that it is my propensity for statement making, and not the vacillating contents of the statements made, that has led me here, right here, before this door, on the edge of this platform, to the brink of my madness.
Because the statements made tend to strengthen and not to ease the rift strewn between myself and my direct experience, my observational reality; my nature.
Because what I am standing at is, in fact, a waist-high swinging red door reading "Do Not Enter or Cross Tracks" and I am not, nor even tentatively, entering. I have, you see, or rather, I had - don't mind my tenses - I had this experiment planned, this ill-conceived experiment, this uncontrolled unscientific experiment planned, but I do not, any longer, to be perfectly frank, make plans. I take, instead, I take action.
I take impulsive actions based on the accidental, accidentally congruent, apparently indeterministic intersections between transient external events, such as the arrival or departure of a train, and stochastic internal reflections, such as are the consequence of my consciousness, and as such, the matter, or rather, the antimatter, the deep space dark matter, that composes the rift strewn in my head between myself and my nature.
These intersections, however, of which I am speaking, do not occur, admittedly, with congruity, commonly, so most of the time, I neither make plans, nor take action. I reflect. I engage in the only activity that permits us - and by us I mean to say, you, by you me - to convince ourselves that we are distinguished by some higher evolutionary or mightier divine or manifestly destined purpose from your average, also temporarily organized if a-conscious matter energy collectives: I imagine.
I reflect and I imagine and as such rend deeper the rift strewn between myself and my nature. You might then say that the alternate dimension, which I am, in fact, tentatively entering, is the expanding dimension of my self-referential imagination. I've a rich fantasy life, after all, a life much richer than my actual life, and in this, my rich fantasy life, I leave my body behind, and go deeper.
I am unable, for reasons which are perfectly clear to me - but which will remain, for you, for the time being, and with my apologies, a mystery - bodily, to leave the platform, so, leaving my body on the platform, under the direct deterministic if outrageously unfair course, as it turns out, of a slowly articulated thickly dripping series of filthy sewer or filthier still filtered rain water, I accelerate into the tunnel, microscopically, that is, and encounter my keeper.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I mean, I'm quite literally ahead of myself. I am in front of myself and (if I am indeed, at present, in my present state, a thing which can nod) nodding goodbye to myself, who stands there, his lips open, his arms at his sides, his extended fingers open in a gesture of embrace, his head raised as to the heavens, accepting the viscous water onto his head, his thorn-crowned head, his thorn-crowned, narcissistic, self-hating head, like a Jesus who has strayed from the path, even as I acclimate my microscopic self to the thick-as-origins air, the primordial air, the gaseous, saturated, cosmic-goo air, which fills the ill-lit underventilated tunnel with an atmosphere wherein prokaryotes await the lightening strike and upon which atmosphere I take a wild and gliding, life-defining ride.
Bare with me. It sometimes works like this, my imagination.
I am at swim on the static seas of creation.
I accelerate effortlessly over complex and intersecting, concentric tides of life. I make friends of microorganisms and develop an implicit understanding of mitochondrion, genetic transference, genetic engineering, genomes, nanotechnology. Cultural Neo-Darwinism. I witness entire life cycles ascend and expend in seconds. I cannot distinguish any longer between the meaning of growth and the meaning of decay. I expand and I contract. I make apocalyptic prophecies at single cell communities who haven't the social skills to make of me a supreme being. I remain, instead, for them, a mystery.
The waste in the tunnel, for the most part organic, composed in some part of small extinguished life forms and in large part of partially congested or reconstituted or carelessly discarded excess waste produced by the unilateral ecological indifference of an entire urban population, is held in stasis in still stagnant waters, in silky swamp waters that ripple, occasionally, to the vibrations of distant trains, and which are raised, at times, by waves emanating from my swimming, subterranean supra-conscious keepers, who approach the third rail with a slippery wet kiss that will unleash on us, on our primitive air, the 60,000 volt blue-fingered lightening strike, illuminating everything.
This waste slowly decomposes into the primitive air at the steady rate of famished, feeding microbes, who release, in the process of the feast, the life-sustaining gasses that would remain otherwise unperturbed in organic matter, trapped as a mere possibility, or as in the fleeting imagination of some suffocating, self-important, impotent, idolatrous godhead who can also transform the organic - the body, if you will, and the blood - but who can do so in metaphor only.
My microbes, in the meantime, my miraculous microbes, who create in part the air I breathe, do so in the absence of ideology, making of them the more worthy martyrs of mythology, and reminding me that I am most use to the function of life when I am dead and decomposing and passing, also, in their capable jaws, and without, even, having to take a leap of faith, into gas.
Jesus might have stood a better chance with me had he farted in illustration of the spirit, but he does not happen to be the keeper whom I have left my body in order to be able to see.
Bare with me.
Remember that mythmaking, mine as well as yours, occupies the same rift strewn by our consciousness between ourselves - by which I mean to say your self, you know, mine - and our nature.
Mine is no more or less meaningful than yours is.
Mine may have me racing at the speed of light in and out of the pale fields of light cast by yellow-white work lights, which illuminate suspended elements of the tunnel incompletely, but it is no more or less meaningful than yours is. Mine may feature insentient creatures, and my keeper may walk on four feet in favor of two, but he impacts me, nonetheless, with important insights into the matter that composes me.
He emerges from a thickly congested manifestation of waste, piled more deeply, it seems to me, than the possible depth of the tunnel, and fixes me with a red-eyed gaze that fills me with an all-embracing love for everyone. He isolates me, who is out of body, from the atmosphere that holds me, and backs into the third rail, intentionally.
The air in the tunnel is unified, for a moment, in a blinding white light. I am unified, for a moment, with the atmosphere by a binding, blinding white light. I am composed for a moment of what also composes light and then I see him. I see him lying there, knocked on his back by a charge mortal to women and to men - that electric charge that we can now think of as the energy that connects everything - and then watch him find his own four feet again.
I marvel at that.
I watch him feel the electric air on his whisker tips.
Does he bask, I would like to ask him, in the basic truth that he has survived where I could not? Does he possess a psychology advanced enough to bask in the basic truth that he has survived, or is it enough, simply, to have survived?
"Is it enough to be alive?" I am asking him, but he fixes me with the red-eyed gaze that can discern intimate details down dark passageways within which I cannot, even, perceive the obvious, and then sinks slowly, silently, into the decomposing matter that someone might chance, someday, to breathe.
36
I am never aware that anything is happening to me until it already has happened to me. By the time it finally occurs to me that an event is occurring to me, it already has occurred to me. All events, are, consequently, to me, past events, and the past is - well, the past is a dark passageway down which I cannot even perceive the obvious, so forgive me my remembrances, and for god's sake, don't mind my tenses.
What happened was this: I was standing on the platform - I was at the end of the platform, and on the platform's edge - and was letting - was trying to let - the day take me wherever the day may. I was trying out this life-as-in-origins naiveté, this carpe diem, rolling stone, dust in the wind sort of day, when I was struck on the head by something wet and thick as, I don't know, as smoker's spit, and I said to myself, "What's this?"
"What's this?" I said to, but not necessarily within myself, but no sooner had I spoken the word "what" and the word, "this", then I was struck in the head by a second glob of sinewy smoker's spit, and I said to myself, "What are the conditions that have led to this?" As I asked myself this question regarding governing conditions, a third glob of viscous, primordial, cosmic-goo spit hit my head, causing the first and the second drip to travel across the crown of my head, down my forehead, leaving behind, I imagined, a black or brown snail's trail, and approach my nose, which sensed a sewer origin to the water that was the cause of this.
"What have I done," I thought or I said, "to deserve this?" when a fourth drip, falling at a rate, after the third, as the third after the second, as after the first, landed in the same place on my head, causing the third drip to join the second on my nose, and the first to drip from the tip. I should not then have licked my lips. I would not, then, have licked my lips, but I was ruminating in the revelation that the first and the second and the third events were not arbitrary, but were, in fact, the consequence of a larger sequence, confirmed by the fourth event and now by a fifth. And though the appearance of this sequence in my life may have been arbitrary, I could now predict future events relative to the conditions of the sequence, as long as the conditions governing the sequence did not change, and so I predicted, for myself, six.
I raised my head in anticipation of six and was struck by six and then the thought occurred to me, seven. I could rely upon seven. I knew all about this seven. I knew that seven would occur to me before seven occurred to me, and as seven occurred to me, I was aware that seven was occurring to me, and that pretty much brings us up to date. I am present with eight. As a matter of tenses, I mean.
I am in the present.
I am entirely in the present. I know the future, and am neither surprised by nine or by ten. I am privy to the events of the future as present events, and because I am aware of these events, and can chose to deflect or to embrace them, I feel, somehow, more free, in the present, than I have felt before.
I am more free in the reliable hands of a fixed, deterministic sequence of events then when, previously, I had left my fate to the trembling whims of the arbitrary. I am only free because I have exposed the arbitrary to a deterministic sequence of events. I have imposed a sequence of events on the arbitrary. I am only free because of the imposition of determinism on the arbitrary. I am only free because. I am only free.
I am not free.
If a sequence - an arbitrary sequence - and here I mean arbitrary in the way it has appeared in my life - even if it is, in and of itself, entirely deterministic - if this sequence can provide me with a greater sense of freedom than I myself can, that I do not, I can not, claim to have free will. Because it is coming from outside of me. It is coming all over me. And yet, I have chosen to interact with this sequence, to subject myself to the rules governing this sequence, whereas I could easily have walked freely away from it, and so perhaps I do have free will. On the other hand, some many years ago, some men or women or dug this hole in this earth, and then filled this hole with metal and with concrete and then lined this concrete hole with water pipes, through which flimsy pipes flowed a filthy water that, over the years, corrupted the pipes, causing, in at least one pipe, a leak, a tiny leak, perhaps, but a leak nonetheless, through which leak the water evacuated and collected and accumulated to a critical mass, when gravity finally got the better of friction and inertia, at that precise point in history of humanity when I happened to come to stand beneath it. So the water is the cause of this. So I do not have free will. However, while all of this has occurred independent of me, it is I who am standing under the water, in as much as the water is falling over me, so I am the cause of this. So I do have free will. But my standing here is the consequence of a lifetime of events, the last meaningful event of which was a man, a musician man, asking me for a dime, which sent me racing here, right here, before this door, under the direct deterministic if outrageously unfair course of a falling filthy sewer water. So he is the cause of this. So I do not have free will. But while his is only a single contributing event in a lifetime of events, this is my lifetime, in the course of which lifetime I have, I'll have to admit, made decisions, not, necessarily, the best of decisions, but decisions nonetheless, and while some of the component events of my lifetime have been the consequence of forces over which I have no control, I did have control over my response to these events, so I feel as though I should be careful not to eliminate my will from any equation to which I am the solution.
I am the cause of this. I do have free will, even if I may choose, sometimes, often times, really, almost all the time, not to use it.
But as I am trying to decide whether or not I have free will, and whether or not I should use this free will of mine to remove myself from the dirty waters, thereby altering the conditions which are required by the sequence in order for it to remain reliable, and wondering, all the while, whether the answer to these questions has any functional relevance, in my life, or if it is enough, conversely, simply, to be alive, the tunnel, before which I am standing, is illuminated, for a moment, by the blinding white lights, the two wide, white-eyed lights, on the front car of an advancing train.
This has become one of my favorite moments, a moment from a different sequence of moments upon which I have come to rely, because there comes a moment, when the train comes racing in - when the train applies its breaks, and the train's breaks scream - that you can find yourself reflected in the decelerating metal and speak to yourself as loud as you wish, and never be heard.
Or rather, you can speak in order not to be heard.
You can have your thoughts, at long last, where they belong, and from whence they came: Outside of yourself; scattered into the collective, into the energy, that is, that connects everything, and shattered by the train's break's scream.
35
You might as well know that I lose hours, sometimes, sometimes I lose days - sometimes I fear I have lost years, simply drifting; adrift, is what I mean to say, in the course of my reflections, and then pick up again right where I left off, seamlessly, as if no time has passed, or as if the time that has passed is the short breath of time that passes between one moment and the next, in the present.
The course of reflection, you see, is the longest distance between two points.
If you want to get from point A to point B, try not to think about it.
34
It is hard to blame the child, sequestered on a wooden bench, his elbows pressed to his sides in a, possibly, a pre-sociopathic behavioral avoidance of his strange neighbors, for staring, with downcast eyes, into a gameboyÔ, I don't know, or an ipodÔ, a palm pilot, or cell phone, or CD or MP3 or portable DVD player, or some such device of technological alienation, but, in this case, I think, some manner of game-playing alienation, judging by the artificial sounds of animated mayhem emanating from his fiercely articulating thumbs. It's hard to blame this child, with downcast, bloodshot eyes, for ignoring the world that is going on around him, giving the simulated nature of the reality that immediately surrounds him, this hole-in-the-ground reality, that we've created with our head-up-our-ass trends, and the concrete we lay, the oil we burn, the air we breathe, the schedules we keep, the path we have beaten in the course of our reflections towards this monoculture of individuals, grown in the waters of expendable income, in the controlled ecosphere of progress, under a synthetic bubble of an atomized republic, in the otherwise barren desert of complicit corporate sponsorship, advertising its cultural wares on billboards, on little platform billboards, announcing the arrival in our lives of television events, or movie events, or other mass media events, or occasionally social or political events that ask of the child, that demand the child, at every juncture in his life, on the box of every cereal, on the side of every bus, the signs of every roadway, the bumpers of every car, in the car of every train, the pages of every newspaper, every cover of every magazine, every label of every garment and undergarment, on the blackboards and tongues of every professor of history, to endorse the presence of the simulated reality, by so much as purchasing its cultural wares, or by so little as, simply, participating in it.
No. I cannot blame this child for receding into himself, in an effort to protect himself, to protect what remains of his self, from participatory simulation.
What concerns me is what he will miss off the world that is going on without the world that is going on around him.
I am concerned with the horizontal, cultural transference of an artificial intelligence into our consciousness. I am concerned with the alienating rift strewn by our cultural consciousness between ourselves and our nature. If we, indeed, are distinguished from the, for example, from the rat, in that, in addition to a vertical transference of genetic knowledge, and in addition also to the knowledge accrued by a lifetime of direct experience, we are also unwittingly exposed, in language and in symbols, to the accumulated knowledge of every human and every human collective that has preceded us, then I am concerned that humanity, somewhere along the line, has strayed from The Path.
I do not, don't get me wrong, I do not have a proper sense of the correct path, but I'm pretty sure it is not the path that we have undertaken. I am not entirely certain that there is such a thing as a correct path, but, nonetheless, I am convinced that humanity is strayed. And if this, indeed, is the case, and we are as powerless to disabuse ourselves of this particular information set as to alter, in vitro, our own color of hair, then the vicarious knowledge of a strayed humanity, operating on a neo-biological imperative to survive, acts on us, on the child and on us, on you, you know, and on me, as an imposition, an imperialist infiltration, an inner-colonization, such that every step I take on these artificial grounds represents, not only an endorsement of, but a contribution to, the exponential growth of the vicarious knowledge of the strayed.
I don't know about you, but when I finally developed and intelligence advanced enough, at roughly this child's age, in the Happy Days of my youth, to begin to consider the course that my own life would take, I had already been robbed, by my culture, of the context within which I could discuss a viable alternative to the strayed path humanity had paved. Or, if the course of humanity is a river, then I could perceive convenient alternatives to the main stream, but nothing that would alter or reverse the course of the raging waters. I was adrift, is what I'm trying to say, in a total running water that was leading us, from every direction, to an historical Niagara.
So what I'm doing here, before this child, I am lamenting. I lament. I lament loss. I lament the loss of something that I never had the opportunity to possess: autonomy. True autonomy. Autonomy from culture, but not necessarily from humanity. The kind of autonomy that even a rat enjoys as it goes about its business of survival. What I arrived at, however, in an effort to possess this autonomy, as I systematically destroyed every meaningful relationship in my life, each of which had bound me, nonetheless, to the culture that possessed me, is what this poor child is hell bent to possess: alienation. Abject alienation. Abject individuated alienation.
Well look, I already told you that hope is something that I am trying to learn to live without, so if you've reached that point at which, in order to survive, you have ceased to feel for me, I am begging you: Bare with me. Or rather, rise with me. Rise with me, because what I am after, here, is a paradigm shift, a cataclysmic shake-up, a categorical reorganization in the fundamental principles of the rules that govern us. What I'm looking for is a reversal, an inversion, a regression, a countdown, if you will, that will retrieve, for us, our origins, and that will return us to the primitive source, to the primitive collective that existed prior to the universal decision to stray.
I am not one, incidentally, to criminalize the primitive, to associate the word criminal with the word primitive, to say the word primitive where I mean to say criminal, to say evil instead of inexplicable, or cave in favor of shelter, or right instead of righteous, or any other culturally attributed meaning that contradicts the implicit. I honor the primitive. I aspire to the primitive, to that brief period, in the history of humanity, several tens of thousands of years ago, that stutter, so to speak, in the discourse of infinity, some forty thousands years or so, a long time ago, in which everyone was granted equal access to the unnamable, before access to the unnamable became the sole province of priests and of scholars, of philosophers and of professors of knowledge, of the manifest powerful, the nepotistic, fascistic, jingoistic lunatic presidents, but I am not, on the other hand, naïve.
I know that the inverted structure the I have imposed on my life, my sixty to zero structure, is just another mundane contextual contribution to the sequences we impose on life, so that we may come to rely upon life, and within which reliable structures we can convince ourselves that we are autonomous, or righteous, or that we are free.
I know that my ritualized regression is no more or less an accurate expression of the unnamable than is your accumulating progression. I know that mine is a ritual as, in the end, alienating as yours is, because there is a number, in my inverted sequence, that has become talismanic, by repetitive association, with the appearance, in my life, of tragedy, for reasons which are perfectly clear to me, but which will remain, at present, for you, a mystery, and this is the number which begins and ends with three, the utterance of or encounter with which number has a profoundly disturbing effect on my psyche.
I know that this is not an actual, by which I mean to say a natural, but rather an attributed, effect, and that attributed in favor of implicit effects are the signposts on the roadways of the strayed, and although I know that I have had a hand in creating it, and though it also pains me to say it,
33
I know, when I say it, that I am being punished for having been born into culture, which is not the same thing, I also happen to know, as having been born.
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