I was just going to let all that stuff out, too. Why the fuck not? I was all the way into the gutter now until I saw a police patrol car ahead and thought I’d better do the sidewalk for a while. I was sleepy for a bit but was now wide awake and in full concocting mode.
Inside the arrogance first is fear. The same fear is apparent when they view a place of particular beauty, or majesty. Their first impulse is to lose the fragile self they’ve constructed because it is puny in the scale of majestic and beautiful nature. So immediately they declare the place holy and reduce it to creeds and dogmas that come with organized holiness. That act contains the majesty, restores the self to grander size (after all the religion is a product of those same selves) and drives away that fear of dissolution. Name the place (e.g., Delphi in Greece) and reduce it to the priesthood’s cartography. Then there they are, slapping of hands, and they all feel undiminished. When the time comes, I recommend we use majesty, the scale of it, to our ends.
I believe it is important, as it has been in the past, for us to understand any people’s origin stories. The study of these stories has yielded, in more than one case, a piece of the cultural puzzle that proved crucial when the time came. For example, one group not on earth, saw themselves as having been exonerated completely by supernatural powers of their own invention so that the entire group was enfranchised as sort of lower-level gods—blameless for all previous error, favored by all the powers they could then subsequently invent, and, above all, superior to even their own natural extinction in death. When the time came, they proved a very resilient people, like rainwater or dust or some other naturally occurring element. Elemental, yes. That’s what made them difficult.
But humans have universally conceived of themselves as faulty because they die. They see themselves as punished and unworthy of even the continuity of rainwater, wind, seasonally falling leaves. They see themselves as beholding to the whim or grace or unfathomable kindness of great powers other than themselves. So they sacrifice and trade ritual acts for God’s forgiveness—forgiving them for what they merely are. This fact is an extraordinary leverage for us. We don’t even need to deceive them into thinking we ARE those whimsical powers. Since they conceive of these in such a variety of ways, we might have some trouble acting out all the variations on the themes. But we don’t have to. Their enormous sense of inferiority is sufficient to our ends. Weak, small, puny insufficient humans: only temporary experiments with grandeur—it was labeled historically as arrogance—pop up here and there. Most appear under the rubric of what they called Romanticism. All were eventually condemned. We should have no trouble when the time comes harnessing the word “mere” in mere humans.
That might be just crabby, but it stays in if I can make it stay in.
One origin story is instructive, and we should keep it in mind. The Mayan group created a story that began four steps earlier than any other creation story. Most origin stories begin with emptiness then move into filling the creation. But the Mayans, in their story-performance called the Popol Vuh, begin four steps before the void. The gods, two of them, try out creation three times before hitting on a suitable version of humans—the people made of corn. Trial creation number one, after having created the animals, was the mud people who immediately tried an assault on the two creators and so the creators sent a flood to wash away and dissolve the dangerous mud people. Next try was the stick men who proved so boring—they had no souls, no minds they said—that the gods grew bored with them and sent them back into nature along with the reed women created for them. The people made of corn proved satisfactory: for constant worship, to feed the immense egos of the two gods, to provide more of themselves. Just right.
While the Christian, Buddhist, Mayan, Muslim, Hindu and especially the Kalapuya Indian versions each have their charm—a void, then an active agent (God, Turtle, Thunderbird, etc.)—they all leap immediately to making sacred worship a feature of each life. I think we will find it useful to study this pattern well before the time comes since universal patterns in the past have always been the keys to our successful enterprises. The Mayan version postulates an error-prone, egomaniacal, childlike eternal power, as often do the other creation stories when they don’t substitute an angry father who creates on a whim. The logic here is the key. When the time comes, we will choose a way to appear to them. We will choose a collective personality, and the most efficient one we can choose is one that is immediately recognizable to the largest segment of the human population. Child or angry father—or a combination—will do. But whatever we choose, I recommend an immense and immeasurable ego and sense of privilege that the most successful gods have. Humans need to serve, to worship, to sublimate themselves into a larger plan. We can do this for them when the time comes.
I have been working recently on a more abstract project. The present version of Western culture—Europe and what they call “The New World” especially—seems to have collectively grasped on to what I have come to call outrageousness. We see everywhere attempts by individuals to decorate themselves in ways that will draw to them the attention of others. I don’t mean what they call style or fashion (we have a full report on that in another document elsewhere). Here is the abstraction. Our observations include various forms of self-mutilation in which ink is injected somewhat painfully under their skin and a variety of metal devices pierced through the skin as tokens of something. It’s not clear. But our present portmanteau word is “outrageousness.” It seems a significant part of the population will … no, that’s not the right word. The concept is better conveyed in “need.” They need to be considered outrageous by the others around them. There seems a special satisfaction, a gratification and yearning fulfilled in this outrageousness. Our studies show that maybe there is even a fundamental saving of the particular self in becoming this perceived outrageous: a gratification very close to the needs for food and water and maybe even sex. Comparable anyway. Our scientists are having trouble understanding the potency of this outrageousness. Tattoos and piercings are only two of the ways outrageousness is cultivated. Very big, very loud—any of a number of excessives—accompany very expensive, very rare, very illegal and very ugly/beautiful. The humans seem to receive from outrageousness some of what we have termed “mother’s milk” in studying other worlds. While their societies run on a perceived center, an even keel, a moderation of both cause and effect, the surreptitious individual agenda is excess and outrageousness. The group form of this is war. Though they consider war idiosyncratic, it is in fact the long-established norm. War is the way societies come to define themselves—outrageous behavior as “normal.” When the time comes there will have to be preparations, as we have made other times and other places, for the bellicose norms of humans. And as we have done in the past, we can use their inclination toward conflict to lead them to the precise point of the arrival of the “moment” in time, time arrived. It hasn’t failed yet, our jujitsu use of their momentum against them. It’s always delightful to watch for the exact moment when they realize what has happened, how their own force has succeeded against them.
One step at a time, I thought as I was going home, but I’m wandering. And wondering.
Our group is nearly through with its various studies. There are, however, a few puzzles that remain. Some percentage of them seem capable of a peculiar ability to embrace no belief whatsoever. Or rather they embrace the lack of belief or emptiness itself as if it could stand in the place of religions, love, the soul, even optimism as an abstract. This ability we have not encountered in other instances, other worlds. It seems an aberration in this one. It could be the same percentage as left-handedness, and that might be the pattern that reveals a constant variation in their world, the 10 percent rule maybe, though I have thought to name it after myself since I noted the correspondence to frequency of left-handedness. And we find it compellingly powerful in a number of ways. This ability to hold dear the absence of any evidence of God’s presence—it is an absence that we feel has a presence. Power
comes from the suspension, the waiting, the balancing on a knife’s edge without plunging off in either direction into some prepackaged belief or another. The temptation must be just as powerful to relent, to go along with the comforting and prepared narratives of creeds and doctrines and dogmas. We find this 10 percent both interesting and, frankly, harrowing, because when the time comes, this group will become, could become a significant problem. Our ancient wisdom has always radiated from one single revelation now lost in time itself—that there is no actual. The corollaries that logically flow from this key to reality account for everything we are, everything we’ve become—past present future. The 10 percent have the capability to … well, interrupt us when the time comes. Derail. And so, the question arises about how to identify this small segment of humans, how to reduce their numbers so whatever perceptions they are capable of when the time comes will not interfere in any meaningful way. They are small in percentage but a significantly large number when calculated globally. What to do with them? How to, perhaps, discredit them in front of the others. Another Inquisition but this time on a bigger scale. We have to find a way to identify these people. Alas, left-handedness is not useful in any way. Only the percentages of the population seem about the same. If we could detect the propensity by our standard readouts, if it ran in families, if it were located on the DNA, if factors in its presence were environmental.… But so far we have no etiology. It has random distribution, irrational association, no formal pattern.
And so with everything else ready, we still have this wild card in favor of the humans. And when the time comes we will see just how the scenario plays out. That’s my view. My superiors are in favor of taking no chances and continuing study on the 10 percent we think might be fatally dangerous to our project. I defer to them, of course, because they have been right to be thorough in the past. But I can’t help but harbor a curiosity, a powerful curiosity I admit, about what would happen if we just went ahead when the time comes. What would be the result of the 10 percent resistance? Would they be enough to sabotage the entire enterprise? I think I am only this curious because we have succeeded so well in the past. I self-accuse and see that my curiosity is idle and maybe even playful and does not fit in a serious situation. Still … I wonder.
We’ll see. The time has come.
And I damn sure want to be there for it, too. They wouldn’t dare do it, of course, without me. I wouldn’t let them. But, alas, maybe the time has come. Rex? You listening?
Chapter IX
The next manifestation of Rex was not so playful. It turns out his curiosity was not only boundless, but absolutely amoral. The New York Times rarely has short articles, but this one was. In the “Science Tuesday” section appeared a report on a scientific breakthrough that seemed to get away from the researcher. In an attempt to contrive bacteria that would eat metal and return it to a pure state, the researchers at Abbott-Limberg Labs in Germany had accidentally produced a second generation of the bacteria, an offshoot or error in the production of the original that had escaped through the plastic restraining walls and begun to eat internal combustion engines. Something about the contiguous oil and metal made the actual engine much more desirable for the bacterium than just the metal. The oil acted like mayonnaise, I guess. This second generation also ate plastics, as it did to escape, while the original was completely contained by plastics. For forty days and forty nights, biblically enough, the well oiled engines of European highways beginning with Germany, were brought to a standstill. The engines were pitted like Swiss cheese, completely eaten through where the oil was most available. All electric cars were spared. Electric trams and trains were spared. And then the eating stopped. The bacteria had run its course. It was over. It was Rex, of course, but could I hail the world and tell my story? You see, I would begin. I went to interview a guy who had a bowl of gray oatmeal and … No, there were enough competing versions of what happened. And Europe was perfectly willing to blame the Germans for everything and other ills besides. After all, it was a German scientist in South America who did the breeding on Africanized bees, wasn’t it? Here they go again, was the general consensus. Why should we be surprised?
My take on the whole forty-day catastrophe was that Rex had moved from harmless fooling around into the realm of paradigm-changing experiments. He had, I figured, the earth by the short hairs. Yes, those short hairs. And was giving a yank to see what would happen, how we’d react.
We, I mean all of us, reacted by concocting competing stories, letting our narratives vie with each other. The weak minded used the oldest stories since they were available: God’s vengeance for our failure to … (fill in your own favorite sin or moral failing here), or the long predicted apocalypse is finally here and Hallelujah. Next came the second-generation stories that accounted for the particulars of the “accident”: the Frankenstein punishments for messing around with the natural—the GMO-into-monster eventuality—then the aliens and new masters who have made their presence known to us finally. And then there were the most contrived explanations of paradigm shifts in nature that were inevitable: global warming, overpopulation, inattention to great and striving variety of Darwinian life-principle. I figured that last one was the closest to getting at Rex. And “Rex!” was what I wanted to shout from the metaphoric rooftops.
Here’s the shit that was flowing my way. My editor had essentially fired me, told me to go to hell with my delays and “just-a-minutes.” Marnie had left town on a vacation that I figured might never end. The art gallery told me she had taken a “sabbatical.” Dr. S was unavailable and in conference and would get back to me and would like any questions submitted by email and … just like that I was floating.
The only thing I could think to do was return to Dr. S’s former office in the Ag building. Maybe he had left something there I could use to make sense of what I couldn’t make sense of. I couldn’t get anywhere near his new office; the guardians he had posted sealed off all the outer and inner layers of access. I alone knew it was Rex and not the poor old schlub I first met with his bowl of trick goo. Either that or my own delusions had finally ganged up on me, cut my mooring ropes, and set me adrift.
In the Ag building, I felt the urge to hail the stock by name, pat the sleeping grad student on the hay bales, hoot and moo and squeak and honk my way through, because I wasn’t sure what I was doing there if it wasn’t the equivalence of mooing at the fluorescent lights.
Dr. Sewall’s old office had the writing scraped off the window, the plate removed from the door. I pushed it open. Took a deep breath and went in. It smelled like socks. Pretty clean socks but socks all the same. This little piggy went to market all right.
His desk was still there in the same place. The file cabinets had been emptied—I checked immediately. And way back in the corner where Rex’s Lucite cage had been, there was something. The light was flickering in the bad-fluorescent mode, with the blue-orange shift and some hum and crackle. Rex’s corner was empty, or so I thought at first. I wished I had brought a flashlight. I thought I heard a voice say “over here” but I hear my name and the voices all the time. And again, they don’t tell me to do bad things or threaten me. Taken as an average, the two words, “over here,” are some of the most common of all the voices. I think of them as merely pointing out the world, as if the world had supplied a voice-over for me, a guide. So I heard “over here” like an old friend saying, “You won’t believe what I saw today.” I’ve been alive long enough to know that not everyone has a voice—any voice—going on in his head. But I also know, as I’ve said, those Augustinian voices in people’s heads prove God’s existence—our God who we are not to presume to understand (cf. the book of Job).
“Over here” again and there was Rex. Or sort of Rex. In the corner where he had formerly been a gray blob awaiting his stripes was a teaspoon of what looked like dried rye bread. It was sufficient, it appeared, to send out a signal.
“Rex? I asked. “Is that you?”
And here I would like to
be as careful as I can in relaying what went on. I often answer the voices—and so do you. Some of you. And in many ways this was no different. I was talking to rye breadcrumbs in a most affable way. “How are? How’re you doing?” But also, given the disappearance of Dr. S, the German engine fiasco, the dust of this, the flowering of that, the seeping together of all the thin layers of the world, I was ready for the extraordinary dressed up as the mundane. Rex said: “I just came back for a while … to my roots, you see. Here’s where it started. For me, anyway. It’s one of the places it always starts. And stops. It starts and stops and starts. Always starts again. But I think of Dr. Sewall as a kind of father, a progenitor. My ancestor. But the more I ponder it, I have had so many fathers, so many …”
Some Assembly Required Page 14