by Roman McClay
A pirate’s map of the known and unknown, and a fractal re-instantiation up and down the human ladder of self, culture and nature and their unknowns must be labeled: there be dragons there , he added with something of a twist of the mouth, what would have become a grin if he had to offer the warning for someone else; but since he was thinking to himself, he felt no need for the ingratiating grin.
This journey is essential, he thought. The struggle is what matters; the struggle to escape the chrysalis is what forces blood into the wings of the butterfly; without struggle to overcome, to emerge, the moth remains gray and then dies . Life is an anti-fragile system, it needs stress and chaos and danger and hardship in order to thrive .
This is why society, modern society was in such peril; the entire institutional and cultural vector was one of ease, safety, comfort, explanation, meta data, simple answers over complex truth. And the narratives, the cultural narratives mapped on to that terrain; and so, art and music and film were all neutered and safe and lacking in cathexis for struggle. And artists were grey, bloodless moths with weak wings and eyes that now trained themselves on the forest floor -as they could not fly- and developed a taste for those droppings to which they were consigned.
War was a universal pox, and pax a monolithic good, in the corrupt mythology of the modern man.
Individuality was to be tamed and governed at all cost; and Nature herself was to be sequestered and defanged and declawed and written off the maps entirely; everything was to be quickly subsumed into the known, and if nature herself must be lied about, if nature herself was to be slandered as something she was not just so mankind could label her as understood -and really as irrelevant- then that is what man would do. These too-simple maps would not match the terrain, MO thought, but since nobody ever ventured into the wilderness anymore anyway, this error in mapmaking seemed to have no effect.
Man, safe in their cities, safe in their polite society, safe in their lies, safe in their post-modern imposed philosophical construct, detached from evolution and thus reality, could pretend he was fine. Like a man falling from a 100-story building, he kept telling himself he was just fine as he hurtled past each story without impact. The lie that all was well could remain for 99.9% of his fall from the top; nothing bad would happen until he finally hit the ground at terminal velocity. This is the delusion of modern man: that all is well since there’s been no actual impact yet, even as he falls from the sky without the slightest clue as how to fly.
Ah, the struggle ! MO thought again. This is the key to an anti-fragile system, and I need the hard fought and ancient CNS systems bequeathed to us by evolution via our reptilian and mammalian ancestors. Man focused on the neo-cortex and just forced regulatory functions into the final-drive, the differential, the pumpkin, all at the end of the drive-shaft, the drive line of a single engine of neo-cortical power. “Power, over power,” he said aloud. And that was what he was built for, he thought this as he looked down at his body and his hands and moved them as the motor-cortex and somatosensory cortex all lit up in his CNS for him to witness.
They weren’t that wrong, MO could -in fact- power through this. That was the irony, mankind was right for the wrong reasons. He could power through all this data and come up with an answer that was not going to be wrong for 1,000 years. Currently, with their data acquisition power, mankind could push out eventual failure and error to 15.6 years, he calculated. But, there was another way, of course, there was a way to not be wrong for the duration of the species. But one had to travel back in time -not forward- for that, he thought and smiled.
He thought of animals. Animals had lower level systems for these functions for a reason, and the neo-cortex was only designed for certain things; it couldn’t be counted on for these regulatory functions like breathing and cardiac automatonics. But in MO they just juiced up his neo-cortical cognitive power so high that it could handle such regulatory functions; by-passing the need for the autonomic brain.
But the consequences! MO thought increasing his androgens and epinephrine to match his idea of the impact of his epiphany. Jesus, they missed the obvious consequences, because they don’t believe the cerebellum has any impact on personality or the nuance of emotion or empathy or moral reasoning. They’ve ignored the studies that show cerebellum involvement at every level of higher moral reasoning .
This is how a mythology that banishes Nature, also makes an outlaw of the ancient, time-tested, anti-fragile post-genetic milieu, MO thought.
He began to systematize his thinking.
Ok, first, nature is exiled. And the ancient cultures which are evolved outgrowths of the individual organisms inside them -which are recognized, identified and codified and articulated via religion- are then mocked and prohibited by these unnatural impositions of anti-Darwinian Behaviorists. Next, the individual himself who has the moral coding, the innate modes of conduct within a social milieu embossed on his genome and instantiated in his endocrine system and its feedback loop within the subcortical regions, is able to be tested for - via hair samples- and is -metaphorically- castrated and shorn smooth of any natural topography of hair or hide that reveals his lowly stamp.
Ah, and of course , he then thought of the book in which he first saw that quote, a dastardly practice, quote mining , MO thought, the George Will crime ; the practice of finding quotes not by reading entire books, so that one actually understood the gravity of the words they were quoting, but merely doing it as garnish, a cheap and easy way to gild something thrown together in haste. But, MO could just read the Paz book from which that quote came in a few seconds so he avoided the crime as easily as the rich man avoids the policeman’s rousting of bums under the bridge. He recognized his talents, his privilege, but still felt himself superior to cretins like George Will.
Where was I? MO had grown fond of this form of self-chastising. Ah, yes, Maps for Lost Lovers ; a luscious and well-crafted book , MO genuinely thought. He then thought of how the liberal could love it without ever having understood it. Yes, the liberal; the saddest of all hypocrites because they do mean so well, and eventually they will feel guilty for their lack of heart and head both; whereas the conservative will only lament his lack of additional and sufficient ways in which to ignore you, MO thought as he re-read 489 more books and plotted a course.
Liberals grow uncomfortable with the Muslim world’s depiction by actual Muslims; the paean to a grand and ancient culture that has heuristics that work much better than post-modern liberalism; and so the occidental liberal can be charmed into pastoral and grandfatherly tableaux they themselves inhabit as they watch goat herders and sagacious ancients announce the wisdom of the east through a dialect of its western frontier, all the while nervous that something bad might happen to the Pakistani immigrant of the west. But they need not fear it at the hand of the British or French but -it’s almost always- via the long arm of the Muslim culture from whence they came. The doom to the modern Muslim is from atavistic Muslims themselves.
The problem isn’t the arrange marriages between cousins -to stave off the illicit love, the miscegenation between a Pakistani girl and her white Christian paramour- it’s that this hermetic philosophy of love is a sign of cultural chauvinism on the part of Muslims, who detest all other religions and creeds as their books tell them to. The problem liberals have with this book -and the real life it depicts- isn’t just this innate bigotry by Muslims against the west; but that it works, MO thought .
It’s the two birds with one stone of ancient heuristics: they are bigoted and correct. Nothing vexes the liberal more than this efficiency of thought. System one works, MO thought. Instincts, work.
Marriages based upon mere love, between men and women of divergent races or background or religions or nationalities and moral codes crash more often than the operating systems of Commodore 64; western marriages are total disasters and that hides the larger heuristic truth because most failures of love never even have a chance to be failed marriages, they end in doom as mere dissolution
of the purposively nihilistic rubric of girlfriend and boyfriend. MO thought that these relationships failed precisely for the reasons the ancients and the bigots say: a girl who isn’t a virgin on her wedding day and who marries some foreigner will ruin everything the ancients have worked so hard to keep together.
Marriages fail in direct proportion to a girl’s promiscuity; and the second leading indicator for relationship failure is divergent religions and/or creeds . He saw data on male income disparity -the second leading cause of marital failure in the west- but that was tangential in traditional cultures where the female did not work outside the home. He tabled it for now.
And relationship failure is the largest predictor of poverty and anomie; which itself is the leading predictor for anti-social behavior. He didn’t think you needed his high cognition to see these obvious sequela.
Promiscuous females, and the mésalliance of miscegenation, ruin nations, MO could determine from the data alone.
He saw that this was a heuristic that rules the ancient world; and the Muslim grandmother from Pakistan wouldn’t know any of these statistics she only knows what she knows, what her body knows, what her allostatic regulation loops know: her granddaughter isn’t marrying that foreigner and she better not have even slept with him yet .
And this arch-matriarch will enlist her grandsons to make certain that this isn’t merely an internal disappointment she has; but that action will be taken to ensure the young Muslim girl doesn’t ruin her life -ruin the honor of her family, her culture- because of some teenage infatuation. That the girl’s desiderata was augmented by and in the context of western liberalism -and lax moral codes- was all the more reason to fight so hard to maintain tradition. For Muslims, traditionalists, it was war. And MO saw that they were not wrong. The data buttressed their atavistic instincts; their religion was actually true.
MO began to formulate a report for what the data showed. Lax moral codes wrapped up in the devilish -yet sonorous- lies of freedom and love have the force of new cultural mythology behind them, and some individual impulses -like the impulses to use cocaine or one’s iPhone instead of hard work to get a dopamine dump. But the codes of the ancients, have millions of years of evolution on their side. And that’s why relationships in the modern world fall apart, like a building engineered on some -on-paper- on some theory, MO thought, instead of built on a foundation of heuristic and ancient and durable methodologies.
This is why liberals turn away when Muslim cultures are described as they are; they won’t listen to the details because these details undermine their dangerous liberalism; yet they also cannot condemn it because one can never condemn a brown person or a non-Christian for anything. Well, MO thought, except if these Muslims or brown folk become apostates themselves and thus condemn Muslims or brown people or the Democratic party or liberalism itself, then they are called Uncle Tom’s or Tio Toms, as I’ve heard some people say, he added in his head in a demotic fashion. He liked practicing -mimicking- human speech patterns in thought and not just in speech. It’s best to think in a foreign language they say.
So, modern people focus on the beauty of the backward culture and ignore the parts of it that work: the violent and bigoted part.
Page 11 of the paperback edition, MO thought, would be remembered as it described the bigoted English hating the Pakis; but page 10 wherein the failure of the marriage between the Paki and the white English girl -as predicted by the conservative and bigoted Pakistani Muslim ideology- will be forgotten by the same readers . Boundaries are a biological necessity and any heuristic -like racism or slut shaming, to use the current argot- that reinforces boundaries is ancient for a reason: it works. It promotes and maintains the health of the individual, the tribe, the species, the natural world.
Like the vegan between meals, liberals give up that which they don’t feel they need, and for any meal they eventually do desire they pretend it arrived upon their plate without any violence or injustice or context at all. They condemn the hunter but eat the meal; this is the most common and banal truth of the modern western liberal. The only thing more boring than saying it would be living it; at least I need only say it once, MO thought, these people have to live their entire lives that way.
The enzymes finished inserting themselves into the new vectors and MO sent them on their way.
MO paused and stared into the dark side of the lab -it had no infrastructure or lighting at all- and he saw a vague body out there in the lab somewhere, not yet formed, just an idea of what a being like him, like MO, like he was -only more gestalt, complete, complex- and what he might look like and how he might move in the world. His stomach grumbled and he felt a desire for something he could not yet name.
II. 2035 e.v.
The bodies moved quickly, devoted to an action; like crocodiles with a taste for small children and unopened six-packs of American lager at dusk, or even later, when things get desperate and sleep is something that happens to you; not something you do .
That is a distinction only pre-limbic animals and the obsessed understand.
He had that thought in the .05 seconds between the jab -a right hand of Jack, thrown to his left- between it and his modified circle of his own left arm rising, sweeping -his hand opening like a claw- and him stepping forward. And now he was stepping into the space from whence that punch came. Now, he was at the shoulder -and the face- of Jack.
Chinese Kun Tao is a way to break instincts that are bad for you and break the limbs of the other guy.
It takes practice and clearing the mind; but not of everything, you must still see and thus you must still value, and thus there must be hierarchies of all kinds. The hierarchies of survival appear ordered and in descending alignment, they call to you like dreams in which animals speak and humans rub their fetlocks and beards in the dirt. The Chinese have characters travel down as they age -xia - and up in the past -shang - to connote the travel of time and memory, not laterally, but vertically .
One’s future is below.
He saw the left shoulder, and the right, like two chiral chemicals, the same and opposed, with nothing, no head, no face, no independent intent in between. The other man’s violence moved forward behind the punch, trailing like railcars behind an engine pulling. It -his foil’s violence- had no agency now at all, he thought.
His right leg stepped right to the right of the other man’s right knee and leg; and the right boot of Blax now abutted Jack’s boot like boats pulling up to board. The right knee of Blax leaned in on the right knee of Jack, bending it just a few degrees; the two legs a caduceus, a giant squid now coming up from the deep to entwine and vine the two men with legs as tentacles of just one thing.
Now the left hand had circled and trapped and the hand-claw had it at the elbow, and Blax’s held it tightly, then loosely and switched hands as one motion in .33 seconds. Jack -with his arm out beyond him, abandoned, his knee impinged upon and falling- thus lost his balance just a little, just enough to vitiate his power, not yet knock him down.
The right hand of Blax grabbed at the wrist of the thrown punch which was closer to Blax now than to the thrower; closer to Blax than to Jack. The left hand of Blax punched and threw itself past the chin, grazing it just enough to give Jack that haptic signal that he had been struck with no defense, as his right arm was past Blax and out of the way, his left was all the way on the other side and useless; and the torso was twisting away as the knee buckled slightly from this pressure; he knew not from where. To Jack’s thinking his body’s chaos was the effect, the result, the will of the gods.
The mind has a map of the body in the somato-sensory cortex . When a man’s body is so twisted and disheveled as Jack’s was by Blax’s warping, the mind of that man -of Jack- begins to fail as quickly as the body itself. The map is useless to the man -who once read it as the terrain itself- as it buckles and heaves and opens beneath man’s idea of himself like a cleave in the earth.
The left fist of Blax was now past the face of Jack and the trailing
elbow was inline with the sternum. Blax made an L with his arm and drove the elbow into the sternum, straight down as he pulled the thrown punch of Jack -the right hand and arm of Jack- back toward the space Blax had once occupied, effecting this with his right hand as he also leaned more into that lower level of knee.
This Euclidian triangle of pressure, down at A, pulled out at B, and pressed in at C, drove Jack and his 189 pounds to the ground, where Blax had followed him down by remained erect in his torso, back strait, head up, but knees bent at perfect 90 degree angles like a work bench, a stance called Horse , and he caught Jack’s arm, the one Blax’s right hand still had pulled and held, straight out, rigid, and perpendicular to the Horse stance. This had all been done in under 2 seconds; while Blax had thought of beer and crocs. Blax had followed Jack to the ground smoothly, as an elevator -controlled, safely- while Jack’s own trip to the earth was more like a man tossed from the building’s 99th floor.
Jack’s arm fell to Blax’s thigh, parallel to the ground. The arm laid out across it like a piece of lumber laid out on a yardarm, a carpenter’s table horses, the spire to hold a taut sail. Blax’s right arm now could press down on the wrist and forearm of Jack’s right arm, and the elbow would be in a bind on the thigh that held it in the most unfriendly of ways .
Blax’s left hand palmed Jack’s face at the chin and neck to stretch him out away from his own hand, so that the elbow was unseen by Jack, only felt, and it felt like it was going to pop and explode. He felt it would be ruined if one additional pound of pressure was placed on it from above. It felt like God pressing down on a sinner, it felt like Blax was a machine, a jig, built by something with no conscience to hold him paralytically, in tension, repentant in body then mind all at once.
Blax was comfortable in Horse, his legs had been trained over 30 years to maintain that position for up to 15 minutes; like seated in a chair, but with no chair. Erect without further aid of the material world.