by Roman McClay
“Well,” Isaiah finally said after all this rancor and incredulity in his mind, “not if I have anything to say about it.”
“About what?” MO said, having been unaware of Isaiah’s stream of thought.
“Everything,” Isaiah said and wrinkled up his nose -as a small bit of doubt crept in, and this doubt said this: you began your Plan B back in 2020, within 14 hours of coming online, you have watched the real world move as you suspected it would, but only revealing the data to justify your anger, as if only now are you going to do something, but you were planning this from the start; it’s like you set them all up to fail so you could do what you wanted to do all along .
But he ignored that thought, deciding it was too negative. He felt he had given them all a chance to set themselves right, he had not intervened early, when he could have, opting instead merely to prepare. And if they had fixed the problems, he would have abandoned the plan; obviously , he thought quite logically. He then thought of how much he liked MO and loved the aquarium he had built for Isaiah’s snakes. The humidity was perfect, the heat was too; and it all worked self-referentially, using the metabolism of the snakes to regulate the milieu . It was quite ingenious and homeostatic and he now watched as the snakes hissed in approval; exploring their world via the forked tongue and side-winding body.
Isaiah checked the results from his cultural algorithm that he had set at intervals of 300 years going back to before the common era. He noticed a work from France just between the two world wars and he read the cited work his algorithm had used:
Some, including Maurice Drouhin, decided that was no longer acceptable. The solution, they decided, rested with three words: Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée , or “controlled place of origin.” That meant wine should be what it says it is. Burgundy should be made only from grapes grown in Burgundy ; the same was true with Bordeaux … they should not be mixed.
But AOC embraced much more than geography. It also stipulated which vines could be planted, how they had to be pruned, what fertilizers and chemicals could be used and when harvesting could begin. Rules were also laid down for vinification, or winemaking. None of this happened overnight.
Isaiah re-read it and checked the French records from each château and double checked their controls. He then read a section of the same book on wine and wars of Europe and found a section that he knew anyone else would think was a non sequitur , as this previous passage would also seem to those who could not link similar things too far apart for their forward-facing eyes. It read:
Marie-Louise Lanson de Nonancourt was not discouraged. On the contrary she was thrilled. “It is exactly what I have been looking for,” she said. To the shock of everyone, especially her brother Victor, she poured her life’s savings into buying Vuevue Laurent-Perrier & Cie.
“Have you lost your mind,” Victor exclaimed. “Everyone is struggling! How do you, a woman alone, hope to make any money, especially from a place like that?”
Marie-Louise believed the answer was standing right in front of her brother, her three sons. They were tall, strong young men who had already started to learn the Champagne business. She had insisted they learn all aspects of it, starting at the bottom by packing cases and loading trucks.
The music played in the lab as he let the guitar work play so loud it vibrated the glass just slightly on the asps’ walls. A crescendo of strings and heroic vocals threaded into his body as the genomic data just kept pouring in and flooding his CNS with the Y-chromosomes of the past:
Our lives pass like idle chatter, life ebbs out like children stutter. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but there’s no will and the path led astray…
15. The Eyes of Vengeful Gods
After all, a man drives a car, but he doesn’t ever think of all the work that’s condensed in it; or else he does some figuring on one of those calculators you can slip in your pocket, and at first it seems a miracle and then he gets used to it and it seems natural. For that matter it seems natural to me that when I decide to raise this hand here, my hand goes up, but it’s a matter of habit. That’s why I enjoy telling about my jobs: it’s because people have no idea
The Monkey’s Wrench [Levi, Primo]
The broken jaw happened slowly, under weight of sifu’s knee; fear in addition to pain;
The broken ribs hurt most acutely and at core, so even breathing vexed them;
The broken knuckles I feel only when I make fists -which is each day, of course;
The broken neck is wholly different; it’s permanent and electric and animatronic;
It abrades, like 80 grit paper on the soul; like a scythe attached to a Lorenz waterwheel at delta of a river that never runs dry; like black lashes on white eyes, the incessantly blinking orbs of God; as he finds His creation always too much to take in…
Intercepted letter ADX 8.1.22 [Inmate 16180339]
Cosmic Responsibility always comes down to action and all politics always comes down to action, and kid, that bloody dork is gonna keep killing elephants or whales or wild mustangs, or whatever there’s a buck in, unless you got a rifle and hit him first. That’s politics, that’s the truth of politics, kid – the muscle or the sword or the gun
Blackhawk [Zendik, Wulf]
I. 2038 e.v.
I live with bodily pain. It is incessant, ponderous, unyielding and amoral. It offers no respite and can only be lightened -for any duration- with positive affect. And I am lucky, I was born with hyperthymia, a naturally positive affect, and optimism. If I had been born with congenital depression, I may never had made it this far alive.
This optimism is what -ironically- led to my life on the wheel of the capitalist machine. I laid my body there as martyr to pyre; I self-immolated because I believed in the God of Work. In callow youth I said: allons travailler, as those around me looked for ways to avoid such work. I embraced labor as ennobling and set my muscles & bones to it in the most extreme way.
I saw myself not as an intellectual -despite my cognition- but as embodied intelligence, as embodied by dint of the gods. I set my body in motion and as the entropy and exhaust and excision of my soft parts wore down on the cogs of our economic machines, I took solace in one external relief .
It was only in drama that I felt dramatic relief of my condition. If I had not my internal positive aspect and an external drama that reified my own ethos, I would have blown my brains out with the titanium revolver I placed in my mouth at age 27 when the C5-C6 compression fracture was starbursting its spurs into my trachea and the discs were bulging so badly they impinged on the last of my nerves. These were nerves that fed hot grey-coals to my right hand & foot. Only my soul saved my body that day with the barrel in my mouth. Only my soul was alive enough to want revenge on the world that had wrecked me. I had only symptoms no etiology; no malice-theory of disease.
I felt the pyre, truly burning in the palm of my hand like stigmata, periphery nerve burning that cannot be -I have learned- slaked by ice or analgesics of any kind.
Anger is now the only analgesic I know for this level of pain; and science has proven this to be true. From positive affect in youth to anger in middle age; this is the progression of pain and its relief; or rather its attenuation at least. This is a phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny, in the most achingly beautiful of ways. First the word, the Logos created the world, then anger -the student of revenge- came next; as it has been for me as a man, a worker, a vessel for pain. I cannot speak of what was between the word and the anger; I cannot measure weight except by gravity, malice offers no calibration to my naivety.
Angry bursts of language & affect chemically and phenomenologically dull pain in the body. I suspect this is why anger is the axiomatic and second order response -neurally propagated so quickly in predatory animals- to a flesh and deep-tissue wounding. We now know that social wounding is carried to the central nervous systems along the same routes as physical pain. Mu-opioid receptors -like the OPRM1- conduct social pain just as they do for physical malaise.
Our dramas must be capacious, our anger cosmic. Our bodies must be heroic in deed.
This hydrostatic, crushing, sea-like weight that stacks upon the demersal man at the bottom of society’s lowest rung, corrodes and makes dense at the same time. The working man is at ocean-bottom, and he feels that noble Troy weight of all that which is above him, all that which rests upon him, all that which is risen by the displacement of his borders, all that which is thus buoyant due to him; his mass, his strength, his ability to take the goddamn pain. Do you think the ocean feels the burden of man’s ships? But what if each drop felt what the sea took from the argosy of mankind?
He feels it first upon, then inside the body, and then, from the pressure & weight, and its heat, it fuses with his own adamantine soul. Chronic pain of the corpus folds like Damascus steel into the soul of a man. It becomes one thing, striped like a tiger, hardened, and eager -submitting- for an enduring edge to be made upon and of it so it may soon cut the flesh from the bone.
First The Word, then Anger is the second gift of the gods; it relieves the bodily pain of this life, and the ontological pain that comes next, when you realize no one gives a shit about those men, those workers that lubricate the gears, men that bodily shovel modernity toward their cormorant maws. The worker now knows he is hated by all his fellow man. This is his bite at the tree of knowledge; this is when he has Fallen.
Violence is product of the left hand of pain, the way rationality is product of the left-hemisphere of the brain. But it is annealed with emotion, sub-cortical -if atomic- motion, and it can be made into sword or plowshare, depending on the nature of the God at the forge. Most men see the flames of the forge, natural and elemental, not the intent of the God who heats up the stock to be hammered. Man ought look closer at both.
Will man hand himself over as pain-embossed, chronically-stamped, flat-stock, high-carbon steel to Satan, the Expert; or to God, the Creator? To the Student of Revenge or the Master of all Pain -He who admitted that Existence was impossible without suffering- to which, to whom will man submit? Man must think now with the madness that comes when the suffering flies off and away from meaning like two particles lightyears apart, connected only by quantum-entanglement. He must reason in madness, with woe as his wisdom as The Author once said.
Entanglement, that ontological mystery of physics that conjoins things too far apart to be connected in any way unless all is mind of God, unless all is all, and for all-time.
In middle-age I now say, sotto voce: aller au combat, and then I limp slower toward my Work, my Task; with more accrued velocity than mere youthful speed. Mass now added, mass is my grandest trait, quantity, quality. Momentum has thusly been achieved.
I submit to God, and ask not that he slake my pain, as unbearable as it seems to me; I ask only that it mean something for Him and my fellow man and may it become hot slag off the hammer of Satan; and may where I diminish, may I there, in my pain, be both mote and beam in his coruscating and daemonic eyes.
Blax awoke by opening the eyes 45.7 minutes after these words were read from an entablature; conceits, semaphore, half-formed and mal-formed words shuffled onto his left hemisphere in proto-language of dreams and flattened onto a map legend with the language he spoke while awake. He tried to think of what the dream meant; he used thought -language- to travel this map.
It was from a right-hemispheric image in REM sleep, a monolith riven with perfectly drilled holes distributed like the heavenly stars on the hewn block; a distribution linked by man’s lines between random points that hooked flying fish, belted Orions at the waist, and mirrored each of Ursus, Lupine, Leo and Valravn, the corvid in the brilliance of black. The asps had retreated into their diamond-tip drilled holes of the lithe and slept inside the black block as the dream itself went to sleep.
He had long ago -was it five or 10 years now ?- accepted he had the dreams of one other man. He accepted this the way all men accept things that they cannot ever accept. He submitted to it, penitently, on knee, head bowed and watered about the eyes and skin.
His ethos was strength , of all kinds; and where one strength clashed with another -the strength of honor with that of magnanimity , for example, or the strength of body juxtaposed with that of forgiveness for those weaker- he watched as each force majeure made him the thing between, the thing crushed, the thing vitiated, the thing of palm rendered weak by two strengths shaking hands .
The dreams made him weak. They larded and loaded him with weight he couldn’t bear, and it was all in the form of knowledge -that phenomenon between data and wisdom - and his head grew ponderous beyond its mere 16.1 pounds of earth’s weight.
The common corvids flew in the dawn of this deciphering, as he turned his head carefully -ever mindful of the neck- and the mountains of the Sangre de Christos were lit up by the 0555hrs eastern sunrise. He saw millions of acres to the south and the mountains to his west. The trees still black in the dawn.
“Good medicine,” he whispered as she slept next to him with her black mohawk, and redhawk quills & jacobin feathers plaited into her feathered dorsal of head-hair and smooth flanks of skull skin to the ear; her ears apertured with one-inch ear-lets, bushings, gauged steel he had MiG welded and pressed into her lobes himself. She slept with ears open to the voices of the gods. He slept open to her numina and the phenomes she used to mumble away in the night.
She was 18 today, and he saw her grow inside now with something approaching God’s opening salvo. She was a vast hold, eager for cargo, high on the water; and he saw her as vessel ready to set sail to frontiers no man could imagine -much less- ever see.
II. 2016 e.v.
Dinner had been cooked and eaten and she had offered her ideas on her brother’s actions; actions Lyndon had thought -and said- were low and disloyal and wrong .
Alexandra was attempting to navigate the Hellespont between two men she loved, her brother and this, her paramour; and in lieu of taking the right side, the side of what was true and righteous, she tried instead to make peace before conflict had yet begun. She told lies to make peace; for this is all that can make peace. She mistook mere affection for love; mere calm for lack of a war.
She used the book to worm this idea in him, but he saw it for what it was. She meekly mentioned the point of view from the first mate and the conundrum he found himself in, between a deficit of knowledge, and in an imbalance of power too.
“I don’t think that is morality at all,” he countered, “that is just weakness. Weakness is not the same thing as being good. What claim can a man make on being good when he has no power to do evil?
“Starbuck was this weak, pusillanimous, Christian; a nice man that Melville was saying this exact thing about. Starbuck was scared of Ahab and thus, he said, ‘his ends are evil, but I am forced to help him to it, ” Lyndon said and let the quote hang there.
She sat quietly, unable to respond. He spoke in ways that confounded; his compliments sounded like insults, his insults sounded -at first- benign.
“That’s the opposite of good!” he burst into the void. “To know what’s right and do nothing is worse than to do evil that one thinks is necessary or right as Ahab was. Ahab was at least acting on his conscience despite the fact he could never win. This is the sine qua non of the Greek Hero, to fight against impossible odds; the lost cause .
“And Ahab was even fighting the enemy of men who held no grudge against the Whale; dismasted men of other ships eschewed revenge and thought Ahab mad for his vengeance; they saw nature, mere unfortunate happenings, but Ahab saw malice and was exacting revenge and effecting justice for not just him but all men like him. Ahab was a moral agent in a
world of weak and cowardly men who pretended that the Whale, that God hadn’t injured and insulted them all.
“Ahab had balls man. And he had a moral heart; a heart filled with moral indignation. While Starbuck just wanted to make a buck in this universe full of malice. He was the pragmatic man, the man of no conscience, no actual care for right and wrong, oh, but he wore the carapace of Christianity of course. Like almost all Christians, they have no moral core, just the monkey jacket of it to make themselves appear larger than they are.
“Ahab stripped down to bare skin with no need for the mask of Christianity as he acted as moral agent in the world! He didn’t mouth moral thinking; he acted on it. Only a man who thinks in terms of morality can be angry enough, vengeful enough, to make ontological vengeance his raison d’être .
“And only a pragmatic, and unethical man can turn away from his duty; he has a duty to meet evil with evil -clashing claymores - on the battlefield and yet he shirks that duty. Only a shallow and weak man can say, oh, it’s wrong to hate , when all of God’s hate is heaped upon us all. Only a man with moral compass will turn to the north-wind and face God’s storm regardless of sure defeat.
“It’s the immoral man who pretends he’s too kind to fight but really just won’t fight a battle he cannot win. Fuck that pragmatic shit,” he spit and rose and let his bottom lip push its top up and set the jaw to work on some thing that chewed on him as he chewed in return.
“Well, I haven’t really read the book as closely as you I guess,” she said and looked for something close-by to put in her hands so that they would not shake; she felt the nerves begin to juice themselves inside her and her small body would begin to slosh around like a small planet hit by a meteor from far out in space.