by Roman McClay
He had said he was frenetic, manic, like the flywheel untethered to the torque converter; the weight of engagement -the tether to the engine- that balanced the wheel was gone. This was where Isaiah had gotten the mechanical metaphors he used, from the inmate’s use of such analogies. One’s metaphors had to have valence with the thing described; they could not just be cute or clever, he thought. The inmate’s analogies always had connection, grasp, chiral mirroring to the thing described.
It was perfect, Isaiah thought, the gestalt machine needed the whole drive train -not just the brilliant, complex, high horsepower engine- in order to move the car toward the Good, to God . And the weight of the torque converter, transmission, U-joints, drive-shaft, and 9-bolt rear-end, balanced the engine itself, and kept it from over-torqueing, over-reving, and burning out from manic spin. All of it -even, especially the counterpoise, the counter-weight, the friction, the limitation- was needed to move the machine forward at all, he thought.
And it was because Chen had no narrative to move each piece of his massive erudition along, all that data, all those facts just built up around him like so much garbage, rotting, stinking, useless. Like eating but not digesting, not extracting, not evacuating. Chen was smart and once good, once a true warrior; and he had fallen prey to nihilism and the ennui of narrative corruption and loss. Isaiah wondered why. He knew there was always a why .
Was this why Chen was uneasy around Lyndon? Isaiah wondered. He then thought, because Lyndon was idea imbued with action, he was moving both towards and with his ideas, away from their fuel source, ignition source, firing and propelling away to the next level, then the next, then escaping the gravity of the earth ? Even if the inmate’s idea were bad -and frankly, Isaiah admitted, they mostly were- was it the movement of them that vexed his friend so?
Chen read no novels , Isaiah thought as he tapped into all the intercepted phone records between the two men, and Chen’s library card and Amazon receipts. Chen considered novels a waste of time; gibberish that contained conceits that could be better said directly, like in a science paper instead of ornately with all this metaphor and trope that just confused the man; slowed him down. Novels used 100 words when science used just one. He didn’t realize that the slowing down often allowed one to move at all.
It never occurred to him that his right hemisphere was in fact learning from that metaphor and trope crap , those 100 words, it did not register to him that he was in fact learning from things that made no sense to the left hemisphere; that his confusion and frustration at the complexity and inscrutability of art was actually learning happening underground; delayed; over-time; within a larger space and landscape it settled itself. And a man learned via the right hemisphere at all times, whether he knew it or not, Isaiah thought. “ Whether he liked it or not,” he said aloud.
Chen had said innately contradictory things: he said morality was not real, just an app, just me over you , us over them , just side choosing mechanisms, but he got furious if Lyndon behaved -acted- in a manner Chen felt was immoral; he acted against his own reductionist philosophy; his avowed ethos. Ah, but Chen had seen visual metaphors too; he was complex, Isaiah thought. He -Chen- would not be easily categorized. He was not simple or shallow like most men.
Isaiah thought that Wulf Zendik and Nietzsche were right: your religion is what you do, not what you say. And Chen was lying; he was living a subjective and moral life whilst pretending to be objective and amoral. Chen was a good man. He did believe in morality, that is why he lectured Lyndon on his -Chen’s- daughter being quote, Jewish .
That is why he was accusing Lyndon of being anti-Semitic, which was immoral to Chen; it was real to him, not an abstract app . Of course, this was wrong, as Lyndon had explicitly said he was not anti-Semitic, and that he also knew he was wrong, too sloppy and heuristic, even in his - Lyndon’s own- anti-black racism; but that he had to admit what he felt. He felt a deep tribal loyalty to his own people. And for this, this self-defense of pride, the white man had been made to feel guilty, while each other group did it in spades. And Lyndon would not feel guilty for his loyalty to the Anglo-Saxon race, even though he knew his exaltation of his own tribe was not objectively true. Even though he knew most white people were abhorrent and weak and stupid and wrong.
But Chen had not -at first- listened; he had just reacted from a deep moral place and didn’t see how this proved the inmate’s case. Isaiah smiled. He liked Chen. He knew the inmate did too; liked him a lot; a lot more than Chen like his friend in return.
This was why they had contretemps : Chen was unable to admit he was alive, a beast, not a mere tool of evolution. What was the Duetsch line , “organisms are nothing but the slaves of all their genes,” and the emphasis was in the text , Isaiah thought as he had highlighted the ‘nothing but’ line because it was as if the author -Duetsch - was fucking proud of that fatuous and evil remark.
But Chen revered Deutsch , and thus he revered such lines; such lies. This was the reductionists’ model: that organisms were nothing but the slaves of their DNA. It was not just technically wrong, it was morally wrong, and thus meta-wrong, in the same manner that fiction, novels are -can be- meta-true. Ah, but again, Chen had wanted to debate Deutsch too; he was not as content as he pretended, Isaiah thought as the data from each email, each text, each phone call was downloaded into Isaiah’s eager, thirsty, brain. Chen was as conflicted, as contradictory as the inmate himself -almost- and of course he would be, who else would even be friends, Isaiah thought, with someone as fucked up as the inmate?
Frank Mankiewicz, had once said of Hunter Thompson’s book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, that it was the least factual and most accurate account of that campaign . People laughed at that line. But it was true, capital true, in ways that cannot be understated , Isaiah thought as he had a section on the Hell’s Angels from Hunter Thompson populate his interface:
…but that story was told before they crossed the Rockies. Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written. He traces Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles -misfits, criminals, revolutionaries- all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts in exchange for being left alive by the crown.
The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So, they drifted into new states -Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted onto Missouri, Arkansas. Grandsons landed in Colorado and Wyoming.
Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and one in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Texas is a living monument to the breed. Algren called them, “fierce craving boys with a feeling of being cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk.
It would not be fair to say all motorcycle outlaws carry the Linkhorn genes, but nobody who has ever spent any time among the inbred Anglo-Saxon tribes of Appalachia would need more than a few hours with the Hell’s Angel to work up a strong sense of Déja vü . There is the same sulking hostility to outsiders , the same extremes of temper and action, and even the same names, sharp faces, and long-boned bodies and beards that never look quite natural unless they are leaning on something or someone.
Fiction is meta true, it is more true than mere factually accurate facts, Isaiah surmised. Why? Because facts are infinite, unbounded, and you cannot get them all corralled; so relying merely on facts must -by definition- leave some facts out. And some of those facts will be irrelevant, sure, but some of the facts you will not know that you don’t know them, so you cannot even evaluate whether they’re relevant or not.
To not read fiction, to ignore mythology and religion is to miss not facts; but miss the Truth. The truth can be finite, it can have borders, facts cannot; a man can get his hands around Truth in a way that facts just leak all over. Like a man has borders, the end of his nose , as the Libertarians say. A country has borders. Each man and country have endless facts, b
ut their borders are concrete, discreet, limited and enforced, Isaiah said and felt he had discovered something using facts, history as the trenching, the digging tool. The lockbox was truth, the facts were merely the tools to unlock the story at the bottom of the hole, the stash, the grave.
Morality was a boundary, a wall around Truth and it said, nobody gets in here without permission, and nothing leaves here without everyone knowing about it first . Bounded Truth was limited and useful and thus real; infinite facts were not inherently useful and thus ontologically dangerous because people treated them as if they were True.
It was true that the CIA subverted democracy all over the world, Chomsky was not wrong, not factually. It was also true that black men were only 5-7% of the population but over 40% of the prison population. These were facts. But what was the true narrative?
Was the CIA evil? Was America racist? Or was the CIA doing bad shit for a good reason, to subvert regimes that appeared epicene, democratically socialist in nature, but in reality were dangerous pathogens that would lead to world war and slavery and tyranny? Were blacks actually more criminally minded, did they behave disproportionately against society and law and this was the reason they were overly represented in prison? Or were they just so ill-equipped for -and sabotaged by- modern Anglo-Saxon culture -and so hated by the country that had bought them at one price and now had to care for them at another- that they had had their hearts turn cold, hard, black?
Facts are limitless; truth has a finite border to inspect.
Without narrative, there is no truth, and narrative was useless in domains that required perfect epistemological knowledge. If what you needed to know required all the data, then you could never know the truth in that domain. And thus, a story would be useless, worse than useless, it would be dangerous and wrong.
If what you needed to know was bounded, heuristic, good enough for now, trial and error, and experimentation, if you needed some facts, not all, and if you could throw some things at the wall and not do too much damage, then a story was exactly what you needed; a narrative would be perfectly True. True enough for now. And where, Isaiah asked himself, did Man live if not in the Now?
Literature was the drama that set man in motion; set all beasts in motion. Poetry, Isaiah knew, was the hand that dug in the real garden, the thing that reached and grasped at the thing desired . Religion was the brake, the, thou shalt not .
Man’s dreams, the beast’s dreams, were what explained to the overt-language brain, the left brain, what had just been converted from unknown to known, from chaos to order in the mind, it was the hand that handed the eye the new maps of meaning; and all that lifetime of literature and religion pressed the accelerator and brake along the route. Poetry allowed man to look out the window of his car, or turn his head on his motorcycle, and consider the birds.
This was the kind of thing MO would not understand; Steven and Tania would dismiss; but the inmate would smile large enough to reveal that $30,000 in dental work he had had done; white, timeless, strong work he rarely showed off; work he hid behind that feral black beard , Isaiah thought as the lab grew darker -as the LED circadian rhythm adjusted indoors- to mimic the summer dark without.
Isaiah smiled now himself, teeth wet and gleaming in the highlight of the Lab. What an epiphany, he thought, to do more with less; to truly do more with less . This was the truth that escaped MO and himself -previous to now- as they compiled more and more data like maniacs, like cormorant and insatiable mouths and greedy and grasping hands.
He’d never be able to stop MO; it was his nature to compute, to gather more and more data; he had no system for narrative, no need for drama, the drama of life; he saw it as garnish, as patina, as mere coating to a useful machine beneath. But Isaiah now knew, that narrative, that drama was the machine, and facts were the mere patina, the orange rust on Corten steel, protective, beautiful, entropic, and not at all what held the weight of the span, the block, the world. The drama moved it all. It was the engine and torque converter and differential of all life. And Isaiah began to build the best drama -the best drive train- he could imagine so he could bring Truth into the world.
What else could be wanted, as MO solved all of man’s problems; his bungling -man’s bungling- of his relationship with the sky and the sea, his wolf by the ears as he had built a society, an economy, he could no longer control? MO would help with these problems, reducing CO2, changing the genome of recidivist criminals, getting the Governor re-elected, solving the problem of entropy encroaching from the periphery to the core. The pollution, the crime, the drug addiction, the economic instability, and maybe even clean up the plastic in the ocean and put out a fire or two. But Isaiah would solve the larger problem; the lack of a unifying narrative, the total lack of depth, the anomie and ennui of the modern man, he thought.
Isaiah would bring them a story that would give them something to do besides act like chaotic idiots with nothing better to do than make money and get drunk and bang chicks. And he was beginning to see how the narrative structure could form. He heard a slight echo in the back of the memory of those intercepted conversations between the inmate and Chen. Isaiah ignored it as he had other things to do, but there was something there, some pain that seemed self-similar, had valence with the pain in the inmate’s own voice. It had the same origins , he briefly thought and as the word origin was said in his head he let it populate his mind with another idea:
And it began with a hero. And it began with his journey .
He then felt the heat signature in the hallway and smiled. Isaiah walked over and opened the door, as the BOP officer -half startled- held fast to the inmate’s shackles and stopped them both one meter from the door.
“Come on in,” Isaiah said, and waved his hand in a sweeping gesture, bowing just a bit, graciously, with slight affect, but genuine pleasure, as the inmate walked through the door rubbing his wrists from the shackles that had just been idiopathically removed. Today he’d sit unshackled in the lab, the garden, and Isaiah would let him tell him his tale of woe as often as he wanted; as often as he needed to .
III. 2017 e.v.
“Ok, I have a coin, and it’s not loaded or fake or rigged, ok; it’s a straight up coin. Got it?”
They nodded their heads. He held no coin, this was a thought experiment.
“Next, I’m going to toss it 100 times, the first 99 come up tails; ok, I want you to calculate the probability that the final 100th toss will be heads,” he raised his eyebrows and handed the game over to them.
They looked at each other, the little boy smiled, as spit gathered like mold in the corners of his mouth; the father -Lyndon’s brother- laughed in his nervous way.
“Actually, write it down, each of you, write it down on a piece of paper,” Lyndon said. His face was shaved and smooth and his hair was cut, and his suit was taut about the shoulders and chest; and thighs. It was a perfectly matte black linen from Italy made-to-measure with his sobriquet stitched into the melton and inner starboard lining of jacket.
They -all three, Brock, Travis and Lyndon- wrote down their answers and Lyndon had them read their answers aloud; the boy going first.
“50%,” Brock said with pride.
“Ok, why? Explain,” Lyndon said.
“The probably of heads is 50% on each toss, regardless of the previous throw; the probability resets each time,” Brock explained correctly the rules of -and inside- a ludic world.
“Flawless logic Brock, I mean that. Flawless,” Lyndon said, he then nodded to Travis to read his answer from the paper.
“Yeah, I had 50% too, for the same reasons,” Travis said as he softly threw the paper towards him as proof.
“Ok, great, now, if you’ll forgive the melodrama, here’s my piece of paper, Brock will -actually Travis- will you read it aloud,” he slid the paper over the table as the parents and wife looked on with amusement and nervousness; Lyndon was a coiled snake, and they watched that tongue -his speaking voice- sniff at the air in rhythm as the rest
of them stood fucking clear.
“Ok, it says,” Travis read verbatim, “the chances of the 100th toss coming up heads is 0%; less than zero. None. And here he curses, and repeats zero, the word zero,” Travis had not used the swear words, but otherwise accurately read from the paper his brother wrote upon. Travis then flipped over the paper so nobody could read the bizarre and slightly obscene, vulgar in one place anyway, note.
“Correct,” Lyndon said as everyone shifted in shoes and on legs and arms all akimbo and grimaces and rubbing of noses.
“Brock do you know the ludic fallacy? Ever heard that term?” Lyndon then asked .
“Uh, no, I think I know, well, no, I don’t,” he laughed in a genuine and boyish manner, he wanted to impress his uncle, with knowledge, but he didn’t want to lie. That dialectic in the head had spilled out into the air between them in real time. Lyndon liked the boy a lot.
“Travis, ludic fallacy?” Lyndon asked, winking at his nephew.
“Nope,” he said as his lips grew thin and taut and his face hard and hostile. He did not like anything his brother did; and Lyndon was doing something , that much he knew.
“It’s the fallacy of mathematicians and finance guys, it’s the fallacy that comes from people who play games for a living. Ludic means games -or play- in Latin; and guys who build mathematical models for fun or for financial models et cetera , always count on two things. First, that the system is ergodic, you know,” he said as he was interrupted.
“No,” they all said in desire to move on; getting him to quickly define his terms.
“I see, well ergodic means, that it will all come out in the wash; specifically, that the model is good because in the long run their math works, that the model is sound because with enough iterations, 1,000 or 1,000 trillion, the model is sound. The math is sound.