by Roman McClay
“Trump, Trump Trump!” she bellowed with glee. She liked that guy , she thought.
He laughed quickly, “ok, ok, ok, so, randomness is the only tactic that makes sense in a world of incomplete knowledge; with predators thinking they know your next move. Randomness must be used to combat a stochastic system’s innate un-knowableness; and a system that uses knowledge to determine what’s next.”
“Got it,” she nodded and looked at his face as he spoke.
“So, that’s at the level of corporeal movement. Now, what about a little lower level down Starbuck?” he narrowed his eyes and furrowed his brow and placed his wide forehead on her little one and rubbed his nose against hers as he spoke the lines from the book.
III. 2038 e.v.
She had carried a book into the lab and he had spied its title. He took it as divine providence and spoke.
“The migraines brought forth God, and what was in between was worth discussing for those both in and without pain, that is to say, to those in and without contact with the divine
“The thing in humans is that we can think things and -by staying the motor cortex- not do them; it’s our avatars, these thoughts, that we kill, instead of dying ourselves. However, this is not as good as it seems, it has a cost unseen. Simone Weil said, ‘we kill in ourselves the thoughts which we do not express by acts; we must refrain from killing thoughts that are precious and good. ’
“Her headaches brought her in touch with the divine -like the Russian , she had revelations in migraines- and thus her philosophy unfurled from this first principle; the Greeks called it unrolling the umbilicus; but, her first principle was: the absence of God, the Tzimtzum -the retraction, the pulling back of Himself- is what made mankind and the world possible; this was His first act of self-abnegation, and the second was to come into the world himself, as Christ, and to be killed.
“It follows, Weil thought, that for man to return this love, we must retract, contract, de -create ourselves and make room for God. This is so sublime an idea that when I first heard it I knew at once that it was true. I felt it fill the empty spaces in me that I had made for God, although I never knew that was who I did it for. But, there was a vacuum in these empty spaces in me, made empty for God, but not yet filled with God. Prepared but still uncommitted. Unready,” he paused and watched her face soften and scrunch up like a butterfly raise and lower its wings. She was so beautiful it hurt to look upon her. His neck began to hurt in the muscles to the right of the spine and he tilted away from it to no avail.
“The way to de-create , that word, was her own creation by-the-way,” he paused, “the way to de-create was through suffering, through pain. And there were many ways to do this, the first was through physical labor. She made this plain and because she was one of the least hypocritical people ever born, she got to work immediately. She worked in an automobile factory in the 1930’s and the conditions were so rough, that she became too physically exhausted and injured to continue at times. So, she took breaks then returned as soon as she was able .
“The second method of de-creation was through the suffering of common pains, that is to say, to match,” he paused again as if to let this sink in, “to match the deprivations of the working-class. If they had no heat in winter, then Simone had no heat in winter. If they lacked food, then she lacked it too. She saw her own shrinking, her emaciated frame, as evidence of her de-creation .
“Her friend, a Dominican monk, Father Thibon warned her of her absolutism, her martyrdom. She wrestled too with this and took his words seriously. She paid attention and questioned herself in this regard: was her fervor for consistency itself some form of luxury as the father had said ?
“This is the life of the truly authentic and honest human being, and while I’m not even close to her level of greatness, I have a bit, a spark of her needs in me. It is why I try to flange up my thoughts, my ideas, my beliefs with my actions, and always have. I have failed twice as often as I’ve succeeded, but the pain of hypocrisy was one I tried to banish, assuage, mollify by behaving more in accordance with my actual thoughts. And from this the soul took precedence over the body. It happened like callouses, not tried for, inevitable.
“We who are built this way, are often wrestling the angel in ourselves, for even when we do what we think is right, we wonder, has the devil tricked us into thinking this is right when it’s truly wrong? We wonder it no matter which side we take. I thought my thoughts of murder were wrong, a devil’s trick and refused to enact them. But, I then surmised that the Devil’s real trick was actually to bring me by the hand to inaction, and, I then saw, that for me to vanquish my enemies was -in fact- the work of God.
“I read the Bible , unrolling the umbilicus in toto , and God was ambivalent, he spoke of both the divine nature of vengeance and the wisdom in its abeyance. God was telling me to decide for myself, that either could be right, but the Devil was only saying: one way or the other. Simone herself -a member of the Sebastian Faure Century - manned the machine guns and hosted Trotsky in her Paris flat. She was violent in action for Good; for God.
“I decided to ask what was in line with the root of God, what was closest to God, and I found The Author’s line on the pasteboard mask, the prison wall, the need to bust through the wall, and reach outside. Even, The Author said, if there be naught beyond .
“But, Simone, she too used the same prison metaphor, and she said the wall itself was the thing that separated us from God, but too was conduit, the metaxu , the only one we had, the only way for us to remain in touch with God. For the prisoner may bang on the wall, in some kind of code, and the sound will transfer to the other side.
“God had removed himself from the world, with the death of Christ, but this wall, the prison wall, was there to reach him, if by code, by semaphore, by trope only.
“I had two ideas in my mind, the first was this: I could vanquish my enemies, for they are the enemies of God, of this there was no doubt. My enemies were liars and thieves and cuckolding swine and men who bore false witness against me. These were cowards who plotted against me not for my faults but for my few virtues. These were bad men.
“Their de-creation would make room for God in their absence, that was first and true.
“The second was that I was to sacrifice myself, to de-create, this, this self I had spent my life creating, building up, making large, doubling in size and weight over time.
“Thus, to accept responsibility for my crimes, that was next. I did it. Further, I was to lend my idea of myself, my genome, to make other men, how many I did not pretend to know. But these men I gave birth to would also vanquish God’s enemies, de-create some number similar to mine, 50 or 100 each, and then -for they would be men of principle- de-create themselves. They would come into the world to make less of it, so that God may return.
“I would gain nothing, I would lose everything and this -on both ends of my debate with good and evil- would reveal the truth. For if to continue with my life, to focus on the tawdry things of money and career and even creative acts, which are not tawdry by the way, but if I was to forego my revenge, then what would come of it? More and more creation in the world, my enemies would go on, multiplying their evil -of course- and continuing to exist; and I would go on too and no advancement would be made to de-create.
“But if instead, I did this thing, if my vengeance and immediate recompense was good then it would reduce the space taken up by men and reduce myself as well.” He paused and drank from the glass. She listened, and Isaiah kept track of words and vacuoles and things heard and beats of heart in the brain, sparks on the brain that set fire to each heart.
“So, I offered up my ideas of myself, my genome, so as to allow myself to be destroyed one million times, and with me, alongside me, 100-fold the wicked of this world. It was obvious what was right; but what was dubious, what I did not yet know, was whether or not I had the courage.
“These were my thoughts. I felt I had an answer, I felt it would be wicked to kill these
thoughts by failing to act them out. Second, I wondered if I had any reason to trust my judgement at all? Did I have a track-record of de-creation , or was this some de novo infatuation, some cause celebre in me?
“So first, I had experience ego-loss, de-creation, three times, under the Godly hand of entheogens, and had seen what a Self-less man can be. I had made myself one standard deviation higher in trait openness, and I had reduced the Self to naught, all in one. And I carried this forward in my next phase of ontological thought. I decided to leave the university, as it was too bourgeois , and effete and over focuses on money, diplomas, imprimatur, and low values. I lost ego and decided to see if I could build up character instead,” he breathed heavily as if maybe the ache in his shoulder and just under his ear could be carried out of him on this river of air, but he only watched her face change and those fluid ways distracted him from this pain. He figured he’d talk as long as she listened. And he watched -like a woman watches a baby- for any hint of discontent on her face.
She had asked -how ever long ago- and now he was answering, but he knew that he often went on too long, gave too much detail, and repeated himself more often than he liked. And so he watched her face and her hips and looked to the ground for a shadow too; for its clues.
She watched his grimacing and the way he moved in strange and illogical ways, his neck and arms and shoulders -even his jaw- all moved forward and backward and side-to-side as if on deformed rails or as if he was trying to avoid some pinpoint of light that followed rational moves. She knew he was in pain and it pained her too. She listened, and she thought that she would for just as long as he wanted to talk.
“I had left university at 24, and gone to work in the world, just as Simone Weil. I had worked hard, physically hard, at first, as community organizer in often times poor and African American neighborhoods; walking neighborhoods by foot each day. Then farm work, as herder and hay bailer and mechanic on the farm vehicles; we demolished decomposing buildings so that we may build them again on the farm from the best parts. I mucked barns and shod horses and milked goats and brushed their coats and was sore and slept so soundly I did not dream .
“Then I worked in the mountains, drilling and blasting rock for 12 hours each day and 13 of 14 days on and on in summer and winter both. I hurt so much my hands had to be soaked in hot water at night to get them to unfurl, they were like a newborn’s clasping around the finger of their parent. I was a new-born Temujin with the black clot in the fist of a babe. My clasp was around an 80lb hammer drill and I hung on to it as if God Himself was allowing me to drill into creation.
“Then I worked in factories at night, 3rd shift from 2200hrs to 0600 and I’d pull double shifts as often as they needed me. 88-pound bags of shingles over shoulder and pulling heavy sheets from breaks; our hamstrings were like rubber bands stretched taut and could be strummed like string instruments to create notes, panegyrics, to angels. I couldn’t sleep during the day so I often was up 24 hours and I worked in a fugue state. This too was a way to de-create.
“I hurt in body and soul now, as the loss of REM sleep makes a man feel pain in places his body has left unreserved, the places God retreated from first, the places eager for this torture to prove that it too exists; that it is not mere machine. Pain in these places expands the soul, pioneers, it is colonial expansion of the inner landscape. And it rules unjustly too.
“From there I worked the oil patch, and that was a whole new world of pain. 12-16 hour days carrying things so heavy they compacted the spaces between each joint and each vertebrae, and for endless days, there were no breaks, and the sun bore down like God’s dubious eye, and the nights’ desert cold made the flayed skin contract and the heart shrink inside the chest as it & the soul retreated in time and space. There, there was less of me.
“I broke the body there, of this I am certain. I never stood upright again, not really, not as I had in my youth; not in my body. This was the first sign of penitence, and I had every right to expect the mocking of the human race for this, as I was -in action, not yet thought or speech- a Christian. And Christians, true Christians, not the kind who are bourgeois and rich and fancy and smell nice, but real Christians know that they are to be mocked. And mocked I was, for my injuries were seen as sign of sin, not penitence at all. I read the Book of Job the way you read a man’s intent in his hands. I read it for clues.
“This was the first sign that I was not on the Devil’s side, even though I thought I was an atheist. My own family, thought me wicked, because I worked so much that I had become rough, overheated, febrile in my ways. They saw the calloused hands as calloused soul, the smell of sweat as offensive, the plain, demotic speech of the working-class as demonic vulgarities. I cussed too much.
“I was in pain each day, in each way, and thus de-creating myself so as to communicate through this prison wall,” he banged twice on his own belly and chest with his hands as stretched from the chains as he could, “with God. I took the pangs, the bangs, the staccato rapping on the wall as distributions as random as the stars; erratic and irrational communion; as nothing at all.
“But, now I see it was evidence that I was always on this path to God. From there I started my own businesses, working-class businesses as farmer and entrepreneur, and had each of these 9 or 10 instantiations ruined, ripped off, closed down, stolen and immolated or flooded in one case. I suffered each time in silence, I took it and rebuilt, insisting -like a fool- on re-creating the world. I had no idea I was working against God, by building up, and I failed to see the lesson. The lesson was -albeit given in the diabolical language of the ungodly, for he uses them too, consult your First Kings,” he paused again, “but the lesson was, that I was to stop. Full stop.” He paused and watched her face. And she watched his. And neither blinked .
“I was to retreat; so I did. I moved to the wilderness and built the smallest house possible, just 320 square feet. And I limited myself to the basics, no luxuries at all. And I worked my hands and back and head again, to their last capacity. I finished off what I had begun at 24; I made the body incompatible with the world. I couldn’t work at all anymore and by winter, once the last of the welding and plumbing and concrete work was done -all by hand, all by me- I retreated to my ideas.
“God chooses the most outrageous among us to do his will; it is never those that are admired or seen as worthy of emulation. From Saul to Magdalene, John Brown, to each and every great artist; all rebuked, all ignored, all hated.
“I was ignored and thought insane and then hated when those first two were not enough. And so, I had my three evidences, I had the path of pain from physical labors, I had the negation of myself through ego-loss, and I had -from the earliest ages stuck up for the underdog, this was in me- I had the evidence before reason, before a boy can have a philosophy and his behavior is all gut, all balls, all emotion, all soul. And that proved my innate character was such that I unthinkingly sacrificed safety and I’d transgress the taboo and be violent, use force, the poetry of force to stand up for what is Good in the world, to make space for God by laying the wicked -and myself- low.
“See, at age 7, I had shoved a half dozen boys to the ground as they made fun of one fat girl. And this was the only time this instinct in me was sanctioned by the world, after that it was punished, each and every time. This -and this is the genius of God- this was to give me the choice, for if bravery and moral action was always applauded then it is no cost at all for the individual.
“No, God makes it painful to do what is right, you will be abused, hated, called immoral, a villain; you will not be respected, you will be shunned even by your own family. Even though they know who you are, for they have that example of your youthful honor too.
“But, I had concluded that my legacy, my tangible and discernable vector was one of righteous action, of sacrifice, of pain, of ego-loss, of self-negation, of right-action in the face of universal condemnation, and all without God. I did it all without God, for there is no room in the world for Him; and ha
sn’t been for 2,000 years. There is only room for us,” he said this to her and she knew what he meant and they both agreed to not make any more of such a romantic thing to say.
“And not a dozen or a hundred or a thousand versions of me either; one version. I had to act; and stop all this thinking and hemming and hawing. This made my choice clear,” he went on. “Make room, make room , I said to myself, make room for God.
“So you see, once I had seen what I had been chosen to do, and what my choices actually had been -the embrace of all the things that are necessary to communicate with God, the ego-loss, the physical pain, the laboring, the willingness to sacrifice the self to the task of reducing the men who are taking up space that could be filled with God, and to then, voluntarily offer the Self up to imprisonment, so that I may tap on the walls themselves and finally talk directly with God? Well, then I saw this was not a choice, but fate. I saw then that this was all my fate, all along, and I could of course, say I didn’t believe in God, but this was a lie.
“I obviously did believe in Him, or I’d be out there making money and worrying about my career and all the stupid shit the rest of the demonic world is doing. And of course, they all call themselves Godly, and Christian! Of course, this is exactly what the Devil does; that dapper man .
“He inverts Good and Evil, and so I knew the more people condemned me the more Good I was doing. It was now a law of mathematics, I took each insult, each condemnation, each speck of opprobrium as confirmation of my communique with God.
“And now, beyond my secular comprehension, God has seen fit to use my blueprint to make this very thing repeat itself, 1 million times, and lay waste to all this stuff, all this creation, that is preventing His return. It makes such deep, ontological sense, that I no longer even try to argue out of it. I accept, I accept, with the same belief that I had when I accepted pain. I always accepted pain as real, I never doubted it.