by Evan Dara
That’s why I’ve been particularly interested in physio-skonkology, Dr. Mellon said, and scratched his drooping lower-middle. It’s right at the astonishing interface of meaning and body, the endpoint of the path Descartes first put us on when he invented modern mind. Nowadays, we understand that our brains evolved to survive, not to know. To make religion, not science. Accordingly, one must bow to skonk’s generative productivity. It’s the necessary psychological agent for the continuation of the species, precisely what keeps the train chugging. Take care of the skonk, and everything else will take care of itself …
In fact – keeping to this line – skonk makes man Godlike, capable of creating and ordering worlds that conform to his wishes. It lets him form a new, preferred, perfection-touching reality. In essence, skonk is optimistic, proclaiming that things can be made better, forever, that they can continually receive new shine. For that reason, it provides the constantly self-renewing model, and inspiration, for all striving, and dreaming, and just plain going on. Boundless in its visionary capability, skonk is freedom, pure and simple, the American ideal …
True, our liberator can turn against us. One must admit having seen people drunk on skonk, or at least showing many of the associated symptoms – loss of restraint, loss of inhibition, muscle-slackening, merriment. And, unfortunately, some individuals may rightly be described as addicted. A terrible sight. As is so often the case with boons, downsides appear. But this, it seems, is something you may well understand …
So, said Dr. Mellon. To answer your question: Yes, there is much we might do together. Would you like to schedule another meeting? I would recommend moving forward—
—The doctor shifted in his seat. Lincoln became aware of the series of framed diplomas – medallioned, and printed in florid script, with handwritten insertions – hanging along a side wall. Well, here’s why, the doctor then said. Because it isn’t important. Truth is a fossil. It’s a relic from another era, and one we can only view as quaint. It’s like a stovepipe hat. Yes, it kept you warm – a bit – but to our eyes it just looks preposterous. So much so, you can’t even imagine the designer who came up with such a fashion … !
The current view, which recognizes skewed ontological qualia, is much more useful, Dr. DePaulo went on. Why? Because it’s much more accurate. Think about it: truth isn’t a feature of nature, it’s a decision. It isn’t something we find, it’s something we make. Verum est factum. Like history, truth is consensus, I think you’ll agree. Accordingly, nothing is presuppositionless. So what percentage of a proposition must be agreed upon as holding truth-value for us to say the proposition itself is true? And take it further. Meaning is approximate. Words are probabilities, statistical entities. Doesn’t that guarantee skonkification? Or further still: What are our traditional truth-generating mechanisms? Syllogism, dialectic, Socratic questioning, brute empiricism, induction, deduction, falsity-testing, even Cartesian skepticism itself. Yet every one of these rests on a foundation of incomplete information, or of error. What is this alchemy? How can you get something from nothing? Even our beloved, history-shaping scientific method ultimately assumes – is predicated on! – the conceit that all observers are irremediably biased, but that somehow the clashing of their biases will lead us into the endzone. But please, please – how can this be? How can clarity come from marrying mistakes? Where’s the virtue in exchanging one order of flubbing for another, more internally consistent, and therefore even more seductive, order of flubbing? Sing it out: I want to take you maya! …
And I suspect that’s part of the reason why we’re so passionately attracted to skonk, the doctor continued. It’s simply more persuasive than nonskonk. Nowadays, skonk is something you can believe in – easily, fully, without doubt. Unlike nonskonk, its existence, its solidity, is entirely beyond question – it’s the last refuge for those in search of water-displacing meaning. And it’s fabulously efficient: the deeper you believe a skonk – any skonk – the more productive it is for you. It’s a very, very smart investment vehicle …
In fact, Mr. Anderson, most behavioral skonkologists now believe we can only even perceive nonskonk via its pressures on, or warpages of, skonkic activity. It’s like those moons or galaxies whose existences are inferred through wobbles in the orbits of other celestial entities. It’s even reflected in what Sidney Hook said: A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. And that’s great: skonk harbors the last, best indicator of nonskonk – a frail trace in the all-encompassing eye of its unstoppable, Goofuslike sibling …
But this is nothing new, Dr. DePaulo continued. Folks have known this for a long, long time. It’s built into our founding principles. The First Amendment not only guarantees the right to unlimited skonkifying – in fact, in a most foresightful fashion, our most cherished statute accords skonk the same legal status as stabs at non-skonking – it implicitly recognizes skonk’s universality. Why would we need to speak so God-bedamned much if we had access to the truth? Say it and shut it. Going further, the Cambridge Potentialists claim that every statement is a criticism of every statement that came before it. Why? Because – of course – of the irreducible skonk factorials harbored in the predecessors. Multiply two fractions and you always get a lesser quantity. And the First Amendment, as well, recognizes skonk’s miracle productivity: By guaranteeing free and unrestricted skonk, the great document declares, we create the best conditions for arriving at the most expedient error. Wonderful! Breathtaking! So go ahead: print the legend! Yes, traditional truth is skonk plus time. But skon—
Ah. Sorry. I see, I regret to say, our hour is up. But thank you. Thanks very much …
The doctor rose. So, is this something that might … ? Because next week, I’ve got—
—So what. What? Tell me what we make of this, said Dr. Shevrin, still pacing his book-clogged office. Is it the result of the narrative instinct, that kindergarten sandtrap, and its insistence – its virulent, skonkomatic insistence – on coherence, on continuity, on significance? Is it a depredation of language, the strumpet scourge forever seducing us into believing in things that do not exist? What?
—And when he showed up at the lunch meeting, there was Nick Holloway, as always – predictable, predictable – crooning on—
—And even if language paid some benefits, Holloway said, it’s obviously way too coarse a tool to stand up to any sort of serious audit. I mean come on: language is no more than an analog process that we’ve correctly learned to distrust. No business could survive if it were built on that kind of imprecision. Just because we’re born with a horror vacui and feel compelled fill it up, that doesn’t mean our oozings are worth anything. I mean go ahead: take your adverbs to market. See what they bring you—-
—And like shit, you know, this time the guy was right. Words are nothing, OK? Literally, they are nothing by themselves. The bunch that barreled out of Mathesius’ office constructed like a whole ethos around this – that a word has absolutely no positive value on its own. Those guys understood that meaning is created only, exclusively, through opposition, you dig? – by being different. Here, I got it right here, their formula. Listen up: What distinguishes a word is what constitutes it. You got that? Significance lies in difference. And that’s exactly right. Words derive their meaning from what they are not. They are what they are not.
—And I thought he expressed that very elegantly.
—And well, sure, OK, that’s exactly right – until you get to the second part of—
—Listen here, Dr. Watzlavik said. Let me tell you something. It is all quite simple. Clearly, we are evolving away from truth. Why? Because it has little-to-no – OK, let’s just say no – survival value. So experience selects against it. Both – may I add – in production and in reception …
And here’s an interval in which you can tell me you’re surprised …
Dr. Watzlavik drew on his short plastic cigarette, which he’d explained was a nicotine delivery system that required no tobacco, no light and heat. Doctor’s order
s, he had said …
Think of it this way, Dr. Watzlavik continued, and tilted back on his thick-padded chair. Skonk-skills are mighty handy. They convey advantage. In the jungle, in the primitive days, two pre-humans are hunting. One spots a wounded zebra. Then he convinces his fellow there’s a rich waterfowl hatchery just beyond the next mountain ridge. Off goes hunter two, likely to starve. Leaving hunter one. To feast …
Sound familiar … ?
Or how better to increase the chances of your genes’ continuation than to convince a female – any female – that in exchange for mating, you will stay with her, and provide for her, exclusively, forever. Until you achieve fecundation, and immediately disappear over the next hill. Whereupon you repeat the script all over again. And then etc …
Don’t think there’s a copyright on that one, either …
And now there are many, many genes in the breeding pool predisposed to such strategy. And programmed to argue, with unswayable passion, for it …
And then, maybe just a few weeks later, there are even more such genes wading into the pool …
And what’s known – certainly, clearly – is that the best way to maximize a skonk’s chances for success is for the skonker himself to believe it. For him to become a virtuoso autoskonker. The deeper he believes, the greater his advantage …
Sounds circular, I know …
But where would we be without the wheel …
Continue listening, Mr. Coons. The flipside is that there exists little – precious little – survival value in nonskonk. Truth-tellers – all right, nonskonk-speakers – are, nearly without exception, denied, resented, hated, ostracized. Or worse. Who wants to hear that his facial mole has grown in ugliness. Who will step forward to tell the tyrant, or even the departmental boss, of his offenses …
Are you now rehearsing such speeches … ?
And so you see. For our species, deeply veriphobic, skonk is a positive pathology, a productive debility that performs exceptionally well. It is our very basis: faced with the boundless, boundariless nonskonk of nature, our mythic ancestors felt compelled to shield themselves from its harrying ravages, its neverending onslaughts and pries. And so they herded themselves together, in a collective attempt to cobble up some self-reinforcing psychic-affective defense. They fabricated social structures and creed conventions, juridical levers and tacit pacts, altogether pitiable in their flimsiness and untenability but held to stand by necessity’s buttress. And before long, our skonkian shelter proved benevolent, even providential, producing affirmable gains along such axes as easeful sleep, longevity, infant mortality, ever-subtler coleslaw-seasoning techniques …
But the scheme’s shortcomings were evident, unmaskable, transparently taking as much – more – than they were giving. And so we had to devise a superstructure that would protect us from the implications of our own protections. Soon enough, we turned to the ratiocinators, the systematizers, the masters of schematics, to construct word-justifications for what every evidence asserted could not be the case. We all know the roll call by now. At the very infancy of the desperate West, Plato proclaimed our attraction to truth, and cited this as the propellant of civilization. For this we rewarded him with reverence, and façade-stone immortality. Later, others made the same claim for reason, freedom, will, the good, spirit, reified history, God’s will, hypostatized human will, eros, virtue, beauty, its opposite: power, dialectical materialism, charisma, technological innovation, capital flow, weather patterns, satyagraha, many other outboard motors …
Please serve no more of this with my stew …
What can one make of this rabbling gaggle of assertions? Their existence is their annihilation. Each refutes all others. Mind’s writhings track to zero …
The elephant itself is blind, to summon such investigators …
But is there something to extract? What do all these fevered brain-frenzies – sorry, these pathetic guesses – hold in common? What is the extrapolable element that unifies them, that underlies and enables their flawed, partial, egocentric arguments, and so, surely, gets the gold in our eternal Olympiad of proactive inability … ?
Certainly, irrefutably, skonk is the generator of human history, the great inspiriting angel of our days. It is both the fuel and the fire, the reason for what we do and our means to accomplish it, the invisible genius of the race. Some unshuttered sentinels – in particular, M. L. Manning out of Rutgers – have gone so far as to assert that the whole Hibachi of civilization was pieced together specifically to produce ever more persuasive skonk …
And if this happens to suit the interests of a few individuals … ?
Individuals who – by coincidence – see the dynamic properties of skonk at work absolutely nowhere, and who – by coincidence – see absolutely linear merit-relations informing, even determining, all our works and days … ?
Just send ’em a round of congratulations …
Couldn’t happen to a nicer crowd …
How can all this be?, Dr. Watzlavik continued. Some say it’s because we have, since the beginning, been put awrong. That certain urskonks mark our origins, and therefore set us on the great chain of skonking. Take, for instance, the skonk of self, that gnurry nubbin that must be gratified, that must come before all the rest of the creation, that stands entirely outside of it, and that is surely destined to go the way of the Rutherford atom. Now go larger: climatologists tell us an apple could never have grown in the Garden of Eden. In the climes of the Middle East, the tree’s seedlings wouldn’t stand a chance …
Why didn’t the elders tell us Eve ate an apricot … ?
In fact, why did they tell us anything at all? About something that, by definition, they could know nothing …
But so it is. And so you see: we worship skonk, we cherish it: it is our bringer of revelation, all the way up to the prime skonker himself. Skonk inspires, it energizes, it fortifies, it directs and incites our dreams and deeds …
So go ahead: Offer me a maker I can’t refuse …
And with civilization now understood as an emergent phenomenon of swarming skonks, of pure hot air, where does that leave us? Actually, in pretty good shape. Let us use the invariant standard. Skonk has been estimated to cost the West some 1.3 trillion dollars per year. But it also gains us 6.6 trillion. Sir, this is a program to hang with!
—And skonk is a rapacious thing, a demon being, a devil that lives to extend and conquer, to colonize any- and every-thing it can possibly, can conceivably—
—And forms – to boot!, as Carlino proclaims – the sixth notch on the post of the great post-Copernico/Darwinian bringdown: relativity, indeterminacy, incompleteness, complementarity, undecidability, skonkophilia—
—When are cultures highly skonkogenic? When expansionist tendencies combine with a heterogeneous population and diminishing resources in a time of consolidating—
—And it is beautiful, it is beautiful, there is even a word for this, a word for the deep and flowing feeling that arises from skonk-based contentment. So live it, feel it, glory in it, yes: love your ronja, touch the precious blessing of ronja in your holy life—
—And what I do, what I can offer you—
—Is a really groundbreaking new technique for cleansing the body of skonk and skonkful by-products—
—Rather, what I do is rebalance the flows of skonkic energy that permeate your psychic/corporeal availences—
—And by re-aligning the major skonk meridians, I—
—And by re-orienting the dominant skonk tendencies—
—I will clean out—
—And clear out—
—We will sweep out—
—And flush out—
—And tweeze out—
—And douche out—
—To unblock—
—To de-block—
—And purify—
—And purge—
—To eliminate—
—And drain deeply—
—Skonkolonic! The new, clinically-teste
d way to—
—As seen in ThumpBody and Newsweek magazines! And as featured on WTMJ’s Good Morning Milwauk—
—So, your Zinkofsky—
—Well, I mean, I’ve never heard of it, but I’m sure I can—
—So would you—?
—Might you—?
—Did you hear that—?
—That Lincoln was invited—
—By Di—
—Oh … Didi Metzger—
—To lunch. She invited Lincoln to lunch!
—To a French place she—
—Yeah. He had to be ready at 11:15 AM. And right on the minute, her car picked him up at his place, and took him straight to O’Hare—
—She wasn’t even in the car! She met him in—!
—Auran drove up, opened the passenger door. She was speaking even before Lincoln got in. She was charged, she said. Buzzed. She had a fat folder of new names, gotten from a guy at Ogilvy so deep in favor-debt to her that he couldn’t even resent paying a bit of it back. And this was good: she’d have the revised list of hi-pri contacts available for Lincoln in two days …
She drove into blustery sunset. But there was one thing, she said. He should think about Didi, her presence in his life. Think about what it meant – what it would do for him. OK, take up her offer and go to Merin for the weekend. Why not. Can’t hurt. Might be fun. But do it once. With someone like that, you’re always in her shadow. You’re her appliance. It’s a mistake. Get seen with someone who’ll burnish you, who’ll enhance you, not someone for whom you’re the barrette. Think Montand/Piaf, not Maine/Blodgett …
But don’t worry: I’ve got some ideas.
—She drove north on Ashland Avenue, up towards Wilmette, past homes whose rising street-numbers seemed to describe their progressively swelling sizes. It was late winter, and even as woodframe ceded to Tudor brick, and slid back on widening lawns, the homes’ trees, leafless and stark, brought out barrenness, a shared gray frost …