by Roman McClay
There are few great men who can be good men too. This is like asking the sun to burn hot for a billion years but turn cool for the night. No, he thought, this Star is permanently enraged and boiling, it's the job of the earth to turn away when it can't suffer any more of its heat. The public needs to accept the men -men who have built everything they see around them- accept them as they are; and acknowledge it to themselves at least; and be grateful these men are driven to do it. This mollifying honesty might temper most folk’s opprobrium and beta burblings , he thought, it might dampen their smirking and shaking at the arrogance and accomplishments of men they could never be.
Our culture is like a gang of children, teenagers who are certain they could do a better job than their own parents at anything under the sun; shit, just ask them. The fact that they have everything they have because of these chided primogenitures -of Adam- and the fact that these brats have never accomplished anything on their own yet, seems not merely irrelevant to these tongue cluckers -these puerile protestors- but almost appears as a pure badge of honor. Their lack of accomplishment is to be brayed about because -to hear them tell it- they have never had had to sell-out to this world, and of course we all know this means they never will.
Beta-males and women, he thought even as he knew it was too broad a brush, but he was exhausted and he had no energy to make caveats and exclusions right now, these fucks are like toddlers and children, they never have to make the hard choices that real men make every day. And these choices have led us here, like it or not, with ever expanding and increasing life-span and wealth and knowledge and communication and durability of institutions and peace.
By every metric poverty is down, life span is up, violence is down, liberty up, inequality between races and sexes is down, access to information is up. And where there are still these remnants of poverty, tribal retributive violence, 18th century life-spans, inequality between the sexes and ignorance so shocking it seems unbelievable, these places are held static by the spike in the windlass; held up from progress by religion and atavism and the bowing of the head to ancient gods , a 34-year-old Lyndon thought. But he did remind himself of the corneal blind spot, and how man’s visual cortex fills in the gap with lies as he felt tired -inside his exhaustion- and eager to sit down.
The irony , he continued, is that these romanced olden cultures are infinitely more patriarchal and undemocratic and their moribund technological progress is directly related to their lack of social progress. If you want women to thrive, you need to set the creative power of alphas free, unfettered by stoic and intransigent religion and pusillanimous Naturalism , he went on in his head. Nature is trying to kill us and has succeeded for millennia; we’re lucky we’ve lived long enough to rut at all. The average human life span was 25 for all but the last 1,000 years of homo-sapien's history; that's no more than 10% of our time as a species; more like 2.5% of it.
Microbes and cataclysmic assaults from the sky as meteors plumed the feral globe like strafing from a cosmic attack-ship; prokaryotes below us and flak from volcanoes above; predators as small as scorpions and as large as Leviathan itself; mosquitos delivering disease and your psychopathic neighbor delivering a blow in the night because his unlettered mind was certain you had cast a spell on his crops as starvation and exposure wiped out your whole clan. 30% of deaths came from violence in the ancestral environment and the myth of Typee and Rousseau is 100% dead now, he said in his head and he meant it and he felt better already as his body was worn and battered but not devastated; and his soul too had almost a decade left before it gave out.
The good-old days were horrid, and they got better precisely because great men knew that a whole lot of this unmanicured earth and a great deal of dross in every species -including man- had to be bulldozed and fed into the maw of the machine; and no timid and moralizing, no unambitious and suitably grateful and dutifully pious, man could even fashion the dream that is the modern machine that has placed us all on the doorstep to immortality and unlimited knowledge. Everything would still be as low tech as a Spanish Windlass, if we hadn’t gotten over our romance with the planet, he thought down in the night of the valley and within the noise of the rig.
Panait Istrati, he recalled now, visiting the Soviet Union in the 30's of the last century had said, “I see all these broken eggs,” when talking to some apparatchik regurgitating Stalin's famous remark, “but where is this omelet of yours?”
As true as that is, he thought as the diesels began to ramp up and he could hear the kelly clank in the bell as reminder it was likely near the four-balls of midnight, the fact remains that we have some decent scrambled eggs to eat each day.
We need men who can smash things without compunction; yes, smash even people, as long as their goal gets us here from there; and there from here, he added. As peaceful and stoic as an islander man may be, living in harmony with nature like his ancestors did, like his progeny will, that man will never build a future where death is banished, where all members of society can reach anything close to their full height as a creature, where humankind can gain true insight into what it is we actually are .
He looked out over the night of the mountain and saw almost nothing but that flame of rig #3. As he watched it remain erect in the windless noche , he sat down in the chair by the window and drifted asleep without eating a dinner; he dreamt of slipping on wet sand out to sea.
III. 2020 e.v.
Isaiah sprayed the poppies with distilled water heated to 72 degrees. The sage green husks beaded the water and the hummingbirds came and drank from each globule like 20th century phone operators plugged new lines, into new holes, to connect waiting calls.
The poppies were closed, a coxcomb hat of cellular growth at their apex, thin slices like tally marks on their distal effacement.
Some began to open, the red petals descending to pure black, looking clear and then the omphalos, a hair crown of thorns, guarding the yellowish closure of center. Isaiah watched them with their micro phototropisms bend in nanometers to the LED lights above them beaming with mixed spectrum lighting from blue to red and compressed back into white .
The white sap drained from four poppies he had vivisected and collected in pools at their base. He shooed away humming birds and wasps with his hand, freshly tattooed with black roans on each pad between each knuckle black with dark scabs.
He sucked up the sap with a hypodermic needle, 16g, and walked it over to the new machine he had built for synthesizing opiates from the raw material of the Papaver somniferum . It extracted the amber narcotic like one of those hummingbirds and processed it efficiently and quietly.
Isaiah -in his head- had read the inmate’s essay on Rimbaud , as the centrifugal apparatus spun and MO tinkered with the 3D printer quietly on the other end of the concrete slab. He held it on paper in front of him as his eyes and mind read both the page and the digital copy on his interface again:
On August 29th , 1870, Rimbaud headed north toward Belgium and changed trains in Charleroi ; arriving back in Paris on August 31st . Do you think the Islamists who shuttled back and forth along that route on November 19th of 2015 knew anything of Rimbaud or of poetry or of our Occidental tradition?
Of course, Rimbaud was imprisoned for taking such a circuitous route to Paris on a ticket without sufficient funds. Into the Mazos Prison he went as the Prussians laid down the law in France after their defeat of Napoleon III. In those times the avant garde political philosophy of many inmates was the Anarchism of Kropotkin and Bakunin ; but now European prisons are filled with a kettle of Islamist fish and one wonders if -once they go in- it might not be better if they never come out.
It’s worth noting that while in Charleville, Rimbaud wrote letters complaining of a dearth of books, but by the time he left Paris he was beginning a demarche to the Mayor of Douai in similar anguish -but this time- over the total lack of weapons.
Isaiah felt something of the inmate’s soul in that, a desperation to connect disparate elements as if more knowledge
might give him the entire truth of the world. As if some key was there in the words; some key to men gone mad from feeling too much in a world all dead -and tenaciously committed to being dead- to the man of heart.
He had it though, he had the truth, Isaiah thought, even if in low-resolution . Like a tiger has the truth when he hunts on impulse and avoids man too without cause but just instinct. Sure, more detail, more connections, more data would give him a higher res pic; but he had it, and the truth was that man was unable to live on his own, and yet struggled and kicked against his fellow man until he was let go. Then man, he’d crawled back to his fellow man, and asked to be again let in. This was the truth, man was incapable of satisfaction; only yearning for whatever he did not yet have. Man was built to strive.
Rimbaud was quoted as saying, “I am of a distant race, my ancestors were Norsemen; they used to pierce their sides, drink their blood – I will cover myself with gashes, tattoo my body, I want to be as ugly as a Mongol… never show me jewels, my wealth, I’d want it spattered all over with blood.”
Isaiah knew the inmate had read that section, and Isaiah felt that the inmate had -somehow & someway- written those words first, 120 years after ; nothing seemed to come to him so purely as those words.
No , he then immediately thought, belaying the order, no , it was Rimbaud who wrote them, like demiurge, he wrote them, and the words, they predicted the inmate, built him, spoke him into being , Isaiah concluded in the snap of a 500th of a second. Now he felt he had the order right, the manner described, the truth delivered and transcribed.
And then -three months ago- Isaiah had built Blax; grown him from embryo and CRISPR-cas9/13 vectors, a synthesized and yet organic version, a back-of-the-mirror to the inmate; his Huginn to the Muninn of Oðinn Himself; of Isaiah’s own two ravens. The inmate was mars -black memory , and Blax was smoke -grey thought , and they flew together -untethered- out over the world each day at the behest of the Great Maniac, the Fury, the poet and warrior and outlaw god, himself built by the first god, MO. MO was all head like God, who needed a soul to combat the pain of His creation -pain that nobody cared about, the pain of a god- and like the arch-angel, the Student of Revenge, Isaiah saw how best to fight pain and it was not with pleasure at all.
Isaiah settled on this at once as true in enough ways to be actionable.
Isaiah monitored relative humidity again as the morning glories opened and closed like baby-bird mouths and the wasps flew around the green wall in sorties hunting for larva. He lowered his own DMT dose to .004. He took a drink of water. He breathed.
Lyndon had been a trapped beast, a suspended solution, imprisoned far before being inmate 16180339 at ADX in Florence, Colorado, Isaiah thought. He had been frozen in some state waiting for the heat of the alchemical furnace to release his ancient DNA, a code that when truly read would be exactly as Rimbaud had written. He knew the alchemy of poetry as well as Rimbaud did; to speak it was to bring it forth and Rimbaud brought Lyndon forth like a daemon , a spectre from his season in hell . These were the words both hidden from those that could read and overtly available to anyone with the illiterate’s eyes, he thought.
Lyndon had come to prison to be set free , Isaiah realized and smiled. He watched MO from a distance far in body -20 meters- but close in mind’s eye. MO was his father, brother, rival, his god all in one. He was a genius and admirable, and to be defeated too. It was with almost no malice that Isaiah saw and thought this; the way mathematicians cross out numbers above; subsumed by numbers below. Did not the man of science think thoughts designed to destroy errors in his own head? What was Isaiah if not a thought in MO’s head?
Isaiah removed the synthesized morphine and codeine from the titanium centrifuge -that was on his side of the lab, on his concrete slab- and he encapsulated it into seven clear pills. He walked to the middle line of the 3,300-square-foot lab and handed them to the inmate as he sat in the chair quietly, his central nervous system being scanned and read by MO for the rebuilding of the next phase of the model to repair the putative psychopath’s brain.
“There is this line by Nietzsche that kills me,” the inmate said as he took the pills in hand. “I mean all his lines kill me, but he has this one where he says, mine eagle is awake and like me honors the sun. With its talons it grasps at new light. Ye are my proper animals; I love you. But I still do; I lack my proper men.”
Isaiah nodded as he read -in 1.011 seconds- the entire book that parenthetically hemmed in that quote and nodded more earnestly now. He measured the man’s blood Ph and watched as the gene expression of the MAO-A/L was dormant, and blood sugar was being overpowered by insulin now. The inmate’s over-all androgens were high: a 1,101 test score, and bio-availability of 560. Isaiah instructed a nanobot to adhere to the inmate’s neck and injected a small molecule that would augment the pituitary’s production of TSH .
Isaiah had finished reading all of the literature on Chimpanzee -and Bonobo- troops; their individual blood work and fecal analysis from field work and the game theory data that had been layered on top of it in the previous decade. While many data points were still missing, it seemed to Isaiah as if a rudimentary model could be extrapolated out and placed on top of the v1.0 model of man from which he had designed and instantiated the v.2.2. He sent a signal to the embryonic b/ax fetus in the warm womb on his side of the lab.
The inmate sat in the chair and Isaiah -with eyes built and augmented now with 7.4 times the acuity of an osprey- could see the scars on his hands and the one over the brow and down -bypassing the eye- onto and into the cheek and jaw line. The heavy Scottish brow protected the eyes from such strikes he saw; whether from bear or mountain cat -as was the case with the inmate- or from a human enemy’s sword. A heavy brow was ancient marker of what had gotten a man from there to here.
The inmate was covered in massive black tattoos, monoliths not images, oceans not islands, whole regions devoted to the ein sof of annihilation; noir -continents moving away and toward one another on the large predatory body that sat -erectly- in the chair. Isaiah watched it all and built inchoate theories and 3-layer metaphors and grand and hagiographic narratives with his right hemisphere; while his left made a map, flat and logical and clear.
The scar was an archipelago that began one inch above the hair of the eyebrow and then staccatoed down; stuttered to the side of the jaw. Isaiah watched as his model was built and then unfurled the umbilicus and began to synthesize it in human language:
The chimpanzee alpha who is tyrannical is usurped by two betas ¾ his size. However, the maxim of Nietzsche is that one who does not see the hand that kills through leniency cannot see at all . The alpha chimp who fails to physically punish the betas if two betas form a gossiping cabal against him; fails to smash a beta offender who makes eye contact with one of the alpha’s harem; and fails to beat about the head and shoulders any beta -or female- who throws rocks at him -as juveniles are wont to do- will too be usurped by a coup .
That failure of that insouciant and liberal and blind alpha chimp produces usurpation as reliably as tyranny , within weeks of these magnanimities. Tyranny invites a putsch , as does liberality. The middle way, the Tao of the alpha is to use minimum necessary force. But force must be used.
The modern alpha male in human society has a large problem: the State is the actual -if abstract- alpha now. The State has monopoly on violence and has become the abstraction in the mind of the hundreds of millions of beta males who roam the large plain of the new environment.
And the modern State is both tyrant and lenient in all the wrong ways. And because the real life alpha -not an abstraction but a man- must live in the world, under this clockworks alpha, he suffers from the tyranny and leniency both; and most severely. The alpha has always borne, shouldered, the heaviest burden of his society, his troop, his tribe. But now he is suffering unduly; and this is why: he cannot win no matter which strategy he uses.
The way betas test authority is known. Chimps throw rocks, they conspire in little
gangs, and they walk too closely to the alpha or make eye contact with one of his brides. They test him this way. It is a 3-phase strategy -like the crafty corvid he works in threes- and it works. First the betas gather around one another -a beta male sewing circle- and talk shit about the alpha male; then they watch to see what he does.
If he comes over and breaks it up with violence they take note.
If he fails to notice or notices and does nothing, they take note.
Next, they throw pebbles at him and take notice if he smashes them for this or not.
Their next ploy is to walk closely to the alpha, brushing shoulders when very bold; and they stare -in the open air- at a female and wait to see if the alpha notices or reacts with indifference, mere screeching, or with a fist to the beta face.
The betas take notes in their sub-cortical brains and make proto-notions in abstractions in their burgeoning simian neo-cortices. They plot in dreams and instincts and impulses low and gravid and ignoble.
In human societies it works the exact same way. Only now, the State is the alpha, and he is like God -too high- and like the king -too far away - to punish the plots of the usurping betas. They play their little beta-games and they do get away. They laugh and cluck their tongues and its real men -not the State- who suffer each day.
Beta males gather in groups almost exclusively. They gather and gossip; this is phase one. Once they have all agreed to make fun of the human alpha in their domain they get a boost of bio-chems that embolden them; they get their inchoate ideas reified and ramified by the little beta group. Five betas can outmatch one alpha they think, and they behave as if this is true. Often it is.
They throw rocks in the form of assaulting the alpha’s reputation, by spreading lies of his lack of honor. Then they watch to see if the alpha breaks up their cabals; their gossiping sewing circles; smashes them for these reputation-destroying rumors. They wait to see what the real-life alpha will do. Next, they make eye contact with one of his women, his wife or girlfriend or -if he has a harem- one of the lower status females within his orbit.