R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 30

Light, Time, and Gravity (VIII)

Meaning is simply the shape of our abjection.

41

(1984)

Things you see in the harvest bunkhouse:

Cutter. Always keeping tabs, cigarette lolling from the corner of his carnivorous Chiclet grin. Always reserving some hidden right that no one had acknowledged, but that everyone–including Long Tom–had conceded. If anyone said anything goofy, his was the voice that always shouldered clear the scrum of derision. “Your head would make a great toilet brush, you know that? It’s like a fucking shit magnet or something.”

Ha-ha-ha.

Enough said. All you really need to know about Cutter was his facility for connecting, not in the sense of sharing (that was too mammalian), but in the sense of deferring, the recognition (quite unconscious) that nature itself had slotted you below him in this or that cruel respect. You just knew, and more importantly, so did he. No matter what the occasion, there was always something about his look, an observation that should be an accusation but wasn’t, always this clinical nuance, as if you were something cultured in a petri dish, even when he was emoting pure camaraderie. Pretty colours, but disgusting all the same.

And this made him… well, free. Cutter was the guy you could see doing pretty much anything. Only a pine box could render him tractable.

(The rest of them, you just knew, more or less. Thierry would become some chick’s project, disarm and dismay her by turns. Gilles would die a homeless addict. Long Tom would be murdered in self-defence. Kyle would raise a family of militant daughters. And Buke, by hook or crook, would find his way to God.)

You see the polished cement floor, grey and gum-mottled, polished by endless soles shuffling grime. Sometimes, when they all peaked together on acid, they would hear this accompanying ring as they roared with laughter, a whine as metallic as tinnitus.

That was the floor.

You see Thierry, the way his look darts, always careful to avoid making eye contact, not only because he never knew what the fuck was going on, but because his gaze was so adhesive. Where the looks of others would simply slide by, any chance encounter with Thierry’s eyes meant you were nodding and smiling, even laughing for no fucking reason. Most everyone tried to talk to him. He would laugh and they would laugh and he would nod clueless. Gilles, who had a genius for playing up his advantages, would only translate those comments he deemed worthy–not many, as it turned out.

Since he knew so little English (and seemed so unconcerned about the fact that his skills actually seemed to deteriorate over the weeks), Dylan found himself stranded at his surface. He read books, continuously, often in preference to partying with the rest of the crew. He would lay on his bunk, his skin-tight face utterly relaxed, his gaze fixed on the pages before and above him, reading for hours at a time. When something particularly uproarious or hilarious happened, he would shiver with laughter, then look down with those doe-wide eyes of his, so big you could swear you saw all the bunkroom’s lights glittering around his pupils, and laugh through his Crazee-dat! smile.

Everyone adored him, almost from the first day. He seemed to have that amoral, easy-going nature that people–male and female–adore, and that can be as easily coaxed into mission work as armed robbery.

Despite all his reading–French spy and crime novels for the most part–he was a highschool dropout. Thierry was one of those guys who were content to perpetually float, amiable enough to be welcomed by all strangers, and aimless enough to forever hew to the fork of least resistence. This happens to some people, those who find social circumstances effortless. Again and again they slip through the nets, latching onto this circle and that, exploring random paths through the degrees of separation that map us all. A different clan, a different reservoir of generosity.

Leave just as the love stales.

Thierry was a womanizer of circumstance, always bedding, always turning away, forgetting. Reading was simply the staple that held him together.

He was the kind of guy who could knowingly spread HIV without the least ill-will.

Gilles could as well, but for the sake of spite.

Buke couldn’t–as with so many crimes you could only see him as the victim.

Long Tom could.

Same with Cutter.

You see these banks of florescent lights, the long ones you typically find concealed in institutional dropped ceilings. They hung bare, pairs of them plugged into long aluminum boxes, which were screwed in turn to the chip-board ceiling, whose paint had been white at one time, but had since dulled to the complexion of ailing creme. Some tubes burned with the pure constancy of Luke’s light sabre, but most brightened in seizures, roiled and clicked with white luminescent smoke, contributing to the room’s dim, jittery air. Dust sagged from derelict webs.

You see Gilles, the way he stares off at angles, always angles, as if never daring gaze his distraction in the eye. He was one of those guys who taught everyone around him how to read his mind, and yet still insisted on playing poker. The sidelong reveries lent him a drunken, poetic air, as though his eyes were toddlers who needed to be continually corralled, continually redirected, continually kept ‘on task.’ “Fucked to the Gilles!” everyone would joke, referring to the disproportionate buzz you sometimes get from one or two afternoon beers.

And you could see it, the blundering confidence in him, the mark of a mark who’s perpetually convinced he’s the grifter and not the mark. “I tell you…” he would continually say. “I. Tell. You.” Especially when he got genuinely fucked up. A disgusted leer would hook his face, pained disbelief shining through a diminishing capacity to focus. And a strange kind of old man malevolence would leak out, stain his corner of the table. If you paused and thought, you realized he could wish evil upon you and congratulate himself for it.

It was almost as if he knew this attitude was the sole bastion of his bravado. He more or less assumed he deserved the airs he assumed, but he had been burned and laughed at so many times that his body had independently adapted to the facts. Where his words were tough, his posture was craven. Calling the other natives, “Chief.” Saying, “How you get so fat?” to Jerry’s face. All of this was fearless, genuinely fearless, and none of it was backed up. Dylan once watched Long Tom standup and wham, cuff him in the side of the head. Gilles huddled and cringed, all the while grinning and grimacing and hurling French curses. Thirty minutes later he’s dropping the cards in front of Long Tom, saying, “You deal… Chief.”

Wham.

Gilles out-and-out cherished his evil moods–always sneering, always laughing. His was a false empire. The world was grinding away his irresistible misconceptions, and this place of spite and hatred had become his most certain redoubt–his Constantinople. He was positively imperial when he got hammered. When he drank whisky, it was like watching someone slowly scrubbing visibility into painted plexiglass, colour smeared translucent, revealing some hideous angularity, something dull and demonic. He was a man who could beat children, Gilles.

Thierry wasn’t.

Buke wasn’t. Though he would let them find him dead in the garage.

Kyle was too smart to tell.

Long Tom was.

Cutter would hit, but never beat. A woman, maybe. But not a kid.

You see the table, one of those labourious school things, laminated particle board, with those kick-out legs that could cut you if you reefed on them the wrong way. Harley had given them a table-cloth, an atrocious emerald green thing they quickly abandoned because of the sheer number of spills. Like a lone surviving aircraft carrier, it became progressively more crowded as the battle wore on–empty beers, munchie wrappers, dead cigarette packs–forcing those who liked to lean forward to draw their elbows tighter and tighter.

You see Long Tom, the way he never he grinned, even though he smiled all the time. A grin suggests complicity, or at the very least prior understanding–you know, the way parents are often prone to ‘grin’ at one another. Long Tom’s smile was devoid of either of these things. Looking at him, you had the sense that his smile was identical no matter who was in the room–if anyone at all. It was absolute, impervious to all circumstance. The others saw it even in the grit and the sun-threaded gloom of the rows. The Smile, they came to call it.

The possibility that he was simply stupid never occurred to Dylan.

Smiles are just one of those identifying features, like the tags that airlines stick to your luggage. There was always this thing with Thierry, for instance, the way his smile and his eyes seemed to broadcast on an entirely different stations. Not so, with Long Tom. His face possessed an eerie totality of expression. Everything flew in formation, especially his eyes. His face was the dancing ball of the bunkhouse, the one thing that never changed, not matter what the lyric or note.

And it seemed appropriate. Being a real convict from a real penitentiary possessed an undeniable glamour–almost Hollywood. In these parts, ‘Kingston’ has the same cache as Alcatraz. Even his appearance contributed to the larger-than-life mystique. Perfect skin. All but hairless, to the point where his forearms looked like those of a monstrous three year old, especially when glimpsed under various chemically attenuated circumstances. And his hair, like something woven on a mythological loom, a black so glossy that you only glimpsed the black between instances of reflected light. Whenever he moved, he performed this rightward flick of his head, so that his hair bowed out and around like a twirling dancer’s skirts. Every time.

Where others were a motley of conflicting traits and hungers, Long Tom’s soul was continuous with his hair–a bolt of black silk. Perhaps there was a reservoir of pain and outrage somewhere within him, a place were the hurts lay gathered, the dregs of abuses suffered on the Reserve. But if so, he never betrayed so much as a whisper. No unguarded looks. No faltering smiles. Nothing caught in the twitching, expressive in-between. He was all in all the time, Long Tom, and this made him even more difficult to know than Thierry.

Somehow he managed to frustrate every attempt, no matter how ingenious, made to engage him–Cutter’s included. He would smile the Smile, his look would narrow, and he would say, maybe, five words in reply. “Ask Kyle,” or “So you didn’t hear…” or “What are you, a fucking pig?” His favourite was, “It was like this, your Honour…” a boyish voice in the clipped accent of the Six Nations. Never had Dylan encountered anyone who so actively spoke to shut-down speaking.

It made him seem a soul constructed entirely out of secrets–and all the more dangerous for the rumours of barroom violence and penal institutionalization. When Cutter asked him point blank about his time in Kingston Penitentiary, Long Tom smiled, leaned back his head (with the hair-throwing twitch), and said, “Fun enough to go back.”

Cutter had understood the implicit threat in Long Tom’s reply. Everyone had, which was why only Cutter dared ask the question again. The fact that he did do so, that he alone out of everyone, including Gilles at his most reckless, dared poke that particular bear (the one that made Long Tom so Hollywood), said everything about the social power dynamic of that group, including Dylan’s low ranking. He was a man who could murder, Long Tom.

Gilles was too, but in a poison-your-drink kind of way.

Thierry wasn’t.

Buke wasn’t, not really, but could given the right combination of stressors.

Kyle wasn’t, but only because he was too smart to murder anyone himself.

Cutter was–in the absence of witnesses.

You see the fifth primer locked, as usual, in the bathroom.

You see Dylan’s hands, which never seemed to stop fidgeting, sometimes absently, but usually in a way that suggested he wanted to wring them instead. One of the reasons he made the jump from the fields to the kiln was the way priming dummied his hands. He had some kind of obscure allergy, one that hardened the calloused pads of his fingers and palms into articulated lobster shells. Like plastic. Every crease would crack open, exposing lines of bare meat, and a whitish almost fungal dehydration would creep around and across his knuckles, chalking the normally invisible epidermal cross-hatching in white. Looking at them, it seemed Dylan could tell exactly what his hands would look like when he reached Nancy’s age. The becoming scab of all our surfaces. The translucence. The mottling of tissues going sour beneath.

His hands still suffered this kilnhanging, just nowhere near so bad.

You see Kyle, his gaze clicky and evasive, oriental and anything but inscrutable for it, always yanking his jaw sideways to exhale smoke, his mouth open (apparently against its will), smoke rising lazy, as if from a shot-gun barrel.

He had this voice that wasn’t so much high pitched as pinched, like he was perpetually sitting on one of those edge-of-coughing tokes, the angry ones that spend the whole time hammering at the door. Rather than turn to you he would lean your way as if trying to glimpse the same bird, and say shit like, “That, eh? That’s the way someone looks when wearing suits with the money.” Or, “He calls us that all the time, eh? Chief. Not good. He’s a fucker, that one.” Almost always something intense, something about power. It either exposed an obliviousness on Dylan’s part, or demonstrated just where his political scruples fit into his on-the-spot interpersonal priorities. The fact is, something about Kyle made him feel too embarrassed to see past his own agitation and truly engage. The natives had been well and truly fucked over–any idiot could see that. After gutting their languages for place names, our fathers tried to stamp them out. Dylan felt this almost overpowering need to apologize in his presence, one that simply wasn’t feasible given the social dynamics of the bunkroom. He would just sit there and nod like the stoned idiot he was when he found himself sitting next to Kyle.

“Yeah. That’s not right.”

Kyle had this strange, frightened calm about him, as if he had simply worried himself into a comfortable groove. He had one of those slovenly bodies where the torso sags from the shoulders at thirty the way it does other (somewhat overweight) men at seventy. He looked so fucking comfortable on his ass that him sitting became a relief for everyone around him. (This seemed to be a trait peculiar to boat drivers, looking like boat-drivers, that is, a person who should be sitting on their ass). He had a one song sensibility to him, ‘Fuck the White Man one more time, doo wah, doo wah.’

Cutter, especially, would ride him. “You should introduce me to your wife,” he once said, looking to the side with the unfocused eyes and yah-yah grin he always had before delivering a punchline. “Might as well. You’ve let the white man fuck everything else!”

Make no mistake, it was harsh stuff: genocide bandied with the same you-fucking-loser sarcasm as an argument over goaltending prospects, if only because he spoke it with such utter carelessness. “So my grandpa fucked your grandpa, and now we fork out billions. Fucking. Move. On. Already.” A sarcastic fanfare of fingers accompanied each word.

“Move on, he says,” Kyle replied with real disgust, a projecting-pain gaze, as if he had been injured to outrage. “We’re shut in reservations!”

“Hey, maaaaan. At least you can get reservations!”

And everyone screamed with laughter, not because it was funny, but because Cutter told us to… A certain chainsaw grind to the voice. A weirdly effeminate wobble of the head, eyes bright beneath laughing/beseeching eyebrows.

What can I say? Kyle just wasn’t the kind of guy who could resist. Like so many of us, his eyes were always checking, always gauging the reactions of others, searching for cues. He was easily swamped by his social environment–which is probably how he came by his militant views in the first place. And that was the thing: for all the fanaticism of his claims, Kyle’s attitude was always a creature of its environment. Cutter (who knew this at some level) could always get him laughing at his own obsessions–his own people–simply because he was sole proprietor of that environment.

Kyle may have been from a different planet from Dylan, but he still belonged to the same general species.

You see the bunks, rickety affairs bolted together out of two-by-fours, all of them damp, fabric melding bereft of dimples or starchy corners. The possessions: socks across a rucksack. Three yellow suitcases (belonging to Gilles) beneath ‘special’ orthopaedic pillows. A backpack (belonging to Buke), covered with cheesy Canadian flag patches. Long Tom’s garbage bags, lumpy with unfolded clothes.

You see a screen door that looked imported from Alabama. Yellowing plexiglass. Pellet-gun dents in the bottom plate. Skewed frame.

You see Buke, his eyes muppet big thanks to the magnification of his glasses, his gaze fluttering about, displaying degrees of passion that would see middleclass counterparts institutionalized.

Buke was a shoplifter, body and soul, one of those guys who used anonymous transgression to expunge a resentment as violent as it was amorphous. He was literally split along the lines of spite and cowardice: the person he was around others, and the person he was alone. Split to the pith. He had this native eagerness to please–every time he talked to you, you could feel his investment dwarf your own–a need like static electricity. He was one of those bastards who’s mere existence rendered God that much more inexplicable. To want so bad (so obsessive-compulsively) [10] to be included, or just to be counted, and to be cursed with a such a diaper for a personality. What a fucking gyp.

His voice became progressively choked as he spoke to you, to the point of squeaking as he sucked on the helium of your attention. He became more and more expressive, until his eyes looked like they might climb out of the terrarium of his glasses, until his hands were fairly exploding off his knees–a looney mannerism that caused him endless grief. Cutter, especially, had a genius for spoofing him: He did this creepy thing sometimes where he made Buke laugh like a donkey by impersonating him laughing like a donkey.

Dylan found it heartbreaking. But his face ached for laughing all the same.

They began calling him ‘Faggy’ the first week. “Eh, Faggy? Faggy… Could you grab me a beer, there, Faggy-buddy?” But the moniker was gradually abandoned as the public safety issues involved became more apparent. Not all stressors were equal. They had to sleep in the same room with the fucking nutbar, after all. This was the other bizarre… dimension about Buke: the wildness about the edges, like an interpolating aura. Wild eyes. Wild hair. Wild mustache and burns. Wild looks down into his palms. Wild knee, connected to a heel that pounded out endless distress calls in wild strings of Morse Code.

Wild blinks.

And when Buke was alone, Dylan knew, wild anger. You could see it in his look, the hours of raging, the cyclic descent from a sad-sack optimist into a perpetual recrimination machine. It was almost as if he suffered a kind of social bipolarity, manic in public, ingratiating unto humiliation, but paranoid and suicidal while alone.

He smoked with out-patient vigour. He had an energy to him, a vitality that, combined with his obvious physical strength, made him seem Doberman dangerous. And if he bit, you knew he would not let go. You could just see this red-crazy-hairy-bobble-head… Antagonizing Buke past a certain point was tantamount to a suicide pact.

Jesus was probably the best place for him, or AA–any community where others are forced to be kind. Dylan tried–to be kind. But God had simply committed too many building-code violations in the construction of Buke’s soul. To know him was to condemn him, whether you wanted to or not.

He was a man who could kill himself, given the proper pique.

Gilles wasn’t, though he wasn’t above faking an attempt.

Thierry was. Suicide was just another greased groove.

Long Tom wasn’t. His smile was too sincere.

Kyle wasn’t.

Cutter both was and wasn’t. He could orchestrate the circumstances of his demise.

He was a suicide-by-cop kind of guy.

[10] It is legion.

42

(1984)

Dylan had a good relationship with the tying machine girls–well, girl, strictly speaking. Brigetta and Alice–or Ghetto and Frankenhead–seemed almost pathologically shy where he was concerned. Ghetto especially: on the rare occasions when she had no choice but to address Dylan, she would blush and make this pained face that made her, for a whispering moment, look as ugly as Rex Murphy. Then she would begin, “Dill’anne…” Alice, Dylan was convinced, would sooner bleed to death than ask him for a tourniquet.

To be honest, the abyss between him and the two Mennonites was so natural, so to-be-expected, that Dylan really never pondered it. If he had, I suppose he would have chalked it up to some firebrand minister in some shack-slash-church promising eternal torment if they ‘succumbed’ to the all too human need for ‘worldly congress.’ There was nothing quite like God when it came to raising barricades between people.

But God, as it turned out, was no match for Missy.

The very first day she started with: “These guys, Dylan? What am I going to do with these guys?” She was a talker, definitely, but the kind who simply insists that others carry their share of the conversational load rather than monologuing. And she possessed the enviable feminine ability to shrug aside differences and verbally seize the shared human core that, for whatever reason, Dylan could never quite come to grips with.

“Look at Alice. Look at how beautiful she is!” A little girl smile.

“Oh, I believe in God and all that. I don’t go to church–I should go to church. I just don’t think God hates having fun. I mean, why should he? That makes him sound too much like people. It’s people who hate people having fun! Fuck, yah.”

Slow shaking heads, disagreeing but…

Missy was one of those right-back-atchya! girls, the ones who took pride in their ability to mix it up with what she called ‘oinkers’–men. In this respect she reminded Dylan of Shelley, only without the neurotic, compensatory aura–she seemed genuinely happy. This, combined with her loose tanks and high-cut shorts, made her fairly impossible to dislike–cheese or no cheese. I sometimes think the only thing keeping Alice in her kerchief, dress, and apron was Brigetta, that if she found herself working alone with Missy she would be wearing cut-offs and smoking weed within a week. Missy teased the two Mennonite women incessantly, but in a good-natured, I’m-the-biggest-idiot-of-all way that made them love the attention. She continually accused Brigetta of being a cock-tease. “What? A smile? Did you get laid last night?” The Mennonite girls would look at each other as if Missy were speaking a language they could only pretend not to understand. And she had this habit of taking some meek remark made by either woman and distilling it into something outrageous. Once Alice said something like, “I think Kyle likes you,” and during morning coffee Missy declared, “Eh, Dylan? Apparently, Kyle wants to do a white woman! Dirty Indian, eh, Alice?”

Alice looked to her buttoned-to-the-neck cleavage, blushed and smiled. “That’s not what I–”

“Of course he wants to do me! They all want to do me! How about you Dylan? You want to do me, don’t you?”

“Hell, no.”

“No?”

“I want to do you right.”

“Ah”–a quick, knowing glance at her co-workers–”Eh? And Alice? You would do Alice too if you could. C’mon, admit it.”

“Only if you were there to show her the ropes!”

“See! Fucking oinkers. Even the sweet ones!”

When Dylan reported these conversations to the guys in the bunkhouse during lunch, they would cry out, bury their faces in their hands.

“No fucking way, man. She say dat? Really?” Gilles.

“The question is what are you going to do about it?” Kyle.

“He ain’t going to do anything.” Cutter, of course.

“How do you know?” Dylan asked.

“Because she knows, man. She knows you run here every lunch blabbing.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Because it means she’s not talking to you.” His giant chicklet grin. “She’s talking to me.”

43

(1984)

At some point that first week, as everyone trudged back to their cars or the bunkhouse, Jerry swept up the lane in his pickup truck, calling for Dylan through curling sheets of dust. Something about helping him with the irrigation pump. This was bullshit of course–as Dylan quickly realized. Once at the pond, Jerry parked the pickup behind an obscuring fence of sumac and produced a one-grammer. They shared tokes directly from the cigarette, while Jerry explained, in a thin holding-the-smoke-in voice, how he needed Dylan to “keep on top of the girls.”

“Sure,” Dylan said. “But I’m not sure what difference it would make. We’re finishing boats minutes before Kyle arrives as it is.”

The big man shrugged, looked at him with eyes containing bigger concerns, and far more important questions. “More downtime for you then.”

So Dylan began his bitching at the girls, first from the darkness deep in the kiln, and then more personally later, when they were finishing the first half and he could stick his head out the kiln. Whenever the girls stopped the tying machine, no matter what the reason. “Pokey-pokey!” was pretty much all the nerve he could muster, but it was enough for Missy to notice.

Somehow, she managed to get Ghetto and Frankenhead on board, so just as he began complaining they would shout, “Shut the fuck up!” in unison–or partial unison, since only Missy would cry “the fuck.”

So Dylan began shouting, “Suck me off!”

After about the third or fourth time, there was a giggling pause, and he could hear Missy at her exhortatory best going, “C’mon, guys! C’monnnn! Ready? One. Two. Three…”

Then suddenly, all three of them shouted, “Eat! Me! Owwwwwwt!”

Delirious laughter.

That would be the one and only time Dylan would hear anything remotely risque from Ghetto and Frankenhead. Missy was a different story. After that she would screech “Eat me out!” no matter what Dylan called down.

“All talk!” he began crying in reply. Then he got creative.

“You should see me in action! Like Kentucky Fried Chicken, baby! I know how to make the bucket moan, believe you me.”

Even Ghetto and Frankenhead were laughing by this time, though with the fear of eternal damnation in their eyes. They always seemed to have the fear of damnation in their eyes. Either that or the memory of husbands and fathers.

“You won’t need to do dishes afterward, honey, ‘cause I always lick the plate clean!”

Missy tried to do the same with cocksucking, but she knew how it worked. Guys always won these games, not simply because the patriarchal dice were loaded, but because guys always were game. He would go down on her.

Still, you could tell she enjoyed losing these kinds of matches. She was young and attractive. Everyone opens up the throttle on a deserted road now and again.

Then finally, as the afternoon waxed, she cried out: “Okay, mouthy motherfucker. You want to eat me out, you can eat me out!”

“Bring it on, baby!”

Suddenly, she was standing at the base of the elevator shouting at him to shut it down. He glared at her in a yeah-right way, but did as he was told. Sure enough, she climbed on the base of the elevator, then laid out backwards, crying, “Turn it on, Sweetheart! Here I come!” Again Dylan did as he was told, marvelled as she began her ascent upside-down knees out. Everyone roared, even Ghetto and Frankenhead. Missy was crying she was laughing so hard. Dylan crouched at the belt’s terminus, waiting with his tongue out. “Heeeeer I come!” Missy cried, laughing at him from between her knees.

But as petite as she was, she was still too heavy for the ancient contraption. The belt began slipping once she made it half way up. That was when she realized how high up she was–when she got scared. Her eyes popping, she tried sitting up, only to precariously wobble. “Distribute your weight!” Dylan cried. “Lay back down!”

What began as a gag turned into a rescue operation. Heaving on the belt with his palms, Dylan was able to slowly paw her up to the kiln, where he pulled her to the relative safety of his boards. There was an awkward intimacy to their contact–as though they had scored an inadvertent hit with their flirtatious test rounds. She blushed crimson, gasped a toothy “Holy fuck, man!” and he lowered her to the bottom of the kiln. The rest of the afternoon was coloured by the rueful humour of antics gone wrong.

Missy was different around Dylan after that. More shy, and certainly more intent. No one talked about sucking off or eating out–at least outside the bunkhouse. A air of bashful wariness kept them polite. Like cousins trying to forget a night of passion.

44

(1984)

This was 1984, remember. We were the proletariat, not party members like you.

45

(Inapplicable)

Humans are hardwired to be easily and nearly irrevocably programmed. All humans.

This is a fact.

We start off as little sponges, unconsciously soaking up the claims and attitudes of those in our environment, and then, at a certain point, we harden.

46

(Indeterminate)

You think most the world lives in a dream.

Dylan thought he was a critical thinker. He knew very little about informal reasoning, a fallacy or two, and absolutely nothing about the myriad cognitive shortcomings that afflict us all. And yet he was certain he was a critical thinker. No different than you.

Why? Well, primarily because he didn’t believe what ‘uncritical thinkers’ believed (aside, that is, from believing he was a critical thinker).

When he began teaching his first courses, he regularly congratulated himself for teaching critical thinking, even though he hadn’t the foggiest idea of what ‘critical thinking’ was. He taught students how to formulate a thesis, then how to come up with arguments to justify that conclusion. Not simply how to write the ‘College Paper,’ but how to confuse it with all things good and rational.

He knew nothing about rationalization, of course, the way humans are prone to game interpretative underdetermination to justify their conclusions post hoc. If he had, he would have realized that was what he was teaching: how to more effectively gerrymander ‘evidence’ to support preexisting assumptions. Under the auspices of critical thought, he was literally closing down its possibility.

He believed he was a critical thinker simply because he thought most of the world lived in a dream.

But there’s no such thing as ‘critical thinkers.’

And everyone lives in a fucking dream.

47

(Present)

When it comes to all the questions that matter, neither of us know fuck all.

Being pigheaded and delusional actually paid real dividends back in the ancient communities that fixed our cognitive abilities. All sorts of social advantages fall out of cognitive selfishness in small groups, advantages that have real reproductive consequences, which make winning the argument far more important than getting things right. And this is what you’re hardwired for: winning the argument. This is why these very words annoy you or amuse you or whatever, why odds are you will ultimately refuse to concede, or start pinning on qualification after qualification, until you “realize” this is what you believed all along.

How many people do you think are capable of saying, “Fuck. I have been duping myself all along…”?

You in your first years of university, where the authority gradient is as steep as a cliff.

Born again Christians before their rebirth.

Certainly not you Now. Only traitors and cult-members possess that strength of character. Too many tools are worse than too few when it comes to assembling rationalizations.

At least back in the stone age we had the in-your-face interdependence of our communities to keep us in check. But Now, with the lines of interdependence multiplied and stretched to the point of utter economic anonymity, with the freedom to live in disposable, transient groups, we can just believe whatever–which is to say, all the bullshit you’re clinging to this very moment.

See, this is the thing. You don’t know who you are. You never have.

And yet you judge and judge and judge…

You should have heard her!.

Why does he do that?

Can you believe it?

You are the problem, my friend. You need to understand how profoundly you cannot be trusted. It’s a psychological fact that you can’t be certain of what you feel, what you perceive, what you remember, what you tell yourself as you cringe above the nethers of sleep.

You, my friend, are an illusion.

An unreliable reader if there ever was one.

48

(Indeterminate)

Tobacco is antithetical to human life. You don’t need a lifetime of smoking or decades of cancer research. You don’t need to know the concentrations of polonium 210 that leach out of the phosphates used to fertilize them. Just walk up to a tobacco plant: your evolutionary heritage will instantly tell you the rest.

We are born with knowledge of tobacco.

The look of it, the touch of it, and certainly the smell of it, are written into our DNA. A knee-jerk aversion. Even children raised by wolves would turn up their noses.

Tobacco worms are a case in point. About as long as your F finger, and easily as muscular. Green, with secondary colouring as bright as an airbrushed van. Compound eyes from another planet. As turgid as the plants they eat, and filled with a kind of day-glo green jelly. Cheesy creatures really, far too absurd to be found above sea level. Barbarella cheesy…

Tobacco, man, I’m telling you. Only aliens could consume the stuff.

And yet buried in these layers of antithesis lies this deep and improbable affinity, a chemical key that keeps when combusted, keeps the monkey coming back.

But of course.

When you work in tobacco, when you find yourself immersed in it, there’s this part of you trapped between shudders, a revulsion, not just because of the miserable form of your labour, but for the content as well. Then the field boss calls ‘coffee’ and you know that he really means ‘smoke.’ You stand, stretch and rub your back, then gingerly–because there’s nothing worse than the taste of tobacco–pluck a cigarette from your battered pack. Tobacco from some other field, harvested by other cramped and gum-stained hands.

Spark it up. Breathe deep.

Yes. Exactly what you needed. Tobacco.

This is why I never quit smoking. Two packs a day, making me a pariah among my more righteous colleagues and a hero [11] to the graduate students.

I figure I owe it to Dylan to finish at least one of the things he started.

[11] It is an opening to the ignorance it has always been, but has confused, since its very beginning, with fictive cultural prostheses.

49

(Indeterminate)

You have to understand: Canada Now is what Russia was in the 19th Century.

I imagine Nietzsche coming across the German translation of Notes from Underground, reading it and seeing not simply a stylistic model, but Europe at the close of the 19th Century. How? he must have asked. How could Dostoevsky, this literary yokel from a backward nation, have seen so clearly from so far?

What did he see?

In his second year in university, Dylan misread the Notes as a kind of character study, a stinging illustration of his own reflective insecurities carried to the extreme. Adolescents, particularly those who suffer the “disease of excessive consciousness,” are forever second guessing themselves, forever hesitating when they should be acting, forever regretting the inevitable byproducts of trying too hard. Think of your own adolescence, the booming imperative to be that amorphous thing called ‘cool.’ In a sense, you’re always betraying yourself when you’re 17, always strung across the chasm between who you want to be and what you happen to be–as a matter of unfortunate fact. Instead of maturing in the tight knit communities of our evolutionary past, we find ourselves shuffled between anonymous institutions. Instead of our peer groups growing like the successive tree rings about those of our parents, they form like wind-flung weeds. Instead of inheriting our identities, we find ourselves scrambling to cobble one together through various patterns of consumption, cultural or otherwise. Add to this the barrage of concepts and possibilities, all the ways for our thoughts to grow as hairy and unruly as our crotches and armpits… So of course the Underground Man rings true for undergraduates, or for anyone still smarting from their pubescent bruises. Only punks possess an authentic sense of self-identity. Only their ineptitude in treacherous social environments allows them to see how thoroughly they come after themselves. How many nights did Dylan spend rehearsing this or that event, cursing himself for saying or being this when he should have said or been that? How many anxious tirades? How many embittered resolutions? How many betrayals of self? And all of it hidden, concealed behind the awkward pantomime that was (to him) his phoney life. All of it buried beneath his anxious eyes–in the Underground. You see, Dylan quite naturally thought that the “Underground” was a kind of self, a genuine self, one too wretched, too insecure to ever be revealed in the light of others.

He missed the whole point of the Notes. The “Underground” isn’t a self, it’s the self’s antithesis.

What Dylan missed–and what Nietzsche saw–was this… The occluded frame of this very moment Now.

The it that thinks.

The word translated as “underground” in English is actually podpol’ye, which (my Russian uncle tells me) means the “space beneath the floor,” or in other words, the space you never see, or even better, the space outside of living space. And because you never see it, you typically don’t think it exists, even though it joists the floor of your possibility. (I mean, for most of us, adolescence is simply a “phase.” Sooner or later the planks of our thoughts come together to create the illusion of a seamless whole. The gaps that so plagued us in highschool recede into mists of rueful dinner party recollections. Perhaps we’ve become what we wanted. Perhaps we’ve ceased wanting to be what we weren’t. Most likely, we’ve simply pretended for so long we’ve forgotten we were pretending.) The voice of the Underground Man is the voice from the floorboards, which is to say, the voice from nowhere. Thus the consistency of his inconsistency: the Cretan illogic of his declarations make the assignation of unitary identity impossible–something other is always leaking through, not contaminating his voice, for this assumes some prior purity, but rather, constituting it, because you gotta ask yourself with each inevitable contradiction, who is disagreeing with whom? Our every thought arises out of a nowhere that we promptly confuse with here. We draw the connections sideways because we can’t see past the floor. This is what Nietzsche understood: the it thinking us in such a way that it denies itself. His mistake was to think we could come to some kind of ‘healthy accord,’ that we could compose authentic selves once we cleared away the debris of our denial, [12] which is to say, Christianity and Enlightenment Rationality. Notes from Underground is actually a kind of formal exercise. Each line of text a plank pried from the floor, each thought swinging to take the previous thought as its object, this… spinning in circles, gawking and craning, trying to glimpse the back of its head, and always only finding ‘that’–all the while jimmying itself ever further from ‘living life.’ For the space of an afternoon, it performs you, allows you to be what you in fact are via the prophylactic of another voice, first in the connective tissue of theory, then through the skin of narrative.

In Russia modernity came late. People like you are often surprised by just how unnatural theoretical questions are. An anthropologist specializing in religion could give you an endless list of the out-and-out preposterous things we’re capable of believing unto death, things that turtle at the slightest critical touch. There’s people out there sharing the same basic cognitive architecture as you who believe that Hitler is not only alive, but presently rules a Fourth Reich inside our hollow earth. We’re literally capable of swallowing anything, impossibilities, contradictions, and just plain retarded stupid stuff. This is what made the ancient Greeks and their annoying habit of systematic interrogation so earth-shattering: we’re hardwired to think we have things pretty much sewn up. So in traditional cultural contexts, we repeat, over and over, and transformation occurs through the meandering accumulation of largely arbitrary mutations within the template of our shared circumstances and common biological imperatives. But once we begin asking questions, oh boy. And once we begin institutionalizing the asking of questions… look out! The tides of repetition begin evaporating beneath the rays of reflection. Implicit norms become explicit norms become obsolete norms. The solidarity and the organic unity of the past begins breaking down. Everything becomes rationalized: we revamp our codes, make them slaves of those repetitions that lie beyond the power of reflection, the things we can’t stop doing, fighting, fucking, and feeding. Capitalism and consumerism take root. Traditional cultures become compost heaps, yet one more way to maximize yields. In Europe, this breakdown occurred gradually enough for creeping normalcy to do its work. But in Russia, where modernization was imposed from the top down, the frog tried to jump out. Dostoevsky was one of those soft-skinned amphibians. He could feel the pot boiling, and he could remember when the water was cool. He believed his Bible [13] enough to be afraid of numbers. “Give me the old norms back!” he cried. But he was wise enough to leave the Crawlspace Man where the Czar’s censors had left him: hanging without ersatz redemption (sometimes oppression gets things right). Nietzsche, who saw through this nostalgic nonsense, replaced it with his own affirmative nonsense. “Be your own rule!” he cried, so giving birth to lord knows how many groundless po-mo affirmations.

But in Canada modernity is all there ever was. We’re rationalized down to the final plank, and we always have been. Like they say, we’re a country that is a question (looking for your navel is not the same as gazing at it). A place of quiet lives, quiet joys, and quiet sorrows–a land of bewildered contentment.

Canada is where humanity at long last wakes up to discover that it’s dead.

Which is why I cry, “Who gives a fuck?”

Really. Who?

Everyone sleeps through their own funeral.

[12] It cannot countenance what it is.

[13] A word is a hundred million neurons starved to a point.

Light, Time, and Gravity (VII)

Imagine being hated.

31

(1984)

Dylan despised the phone–almost as much as Dad did.

When I was twelve I would drive our riding lawn-mower a mile or so down Lakeshore Road to the Parson’s, the engine so loud that I wouldn’t hear the whisk of passing cars until they passed me. I mowed their lawn every week through the spring and summer, 3 dollar’s a pop. The thing is, I was always too shy to ask Mrs. Parsons for the money after finishing the lawn, and Dad would ride me about asking. Finally, toward the end of summer, I screwed up my courage and asked her–the outstanding sum was something like 30 dollars, I think. Mrs. Parsons stunned me by saying, no, that I didn’t deserve to be paid because I had never asked. My father was outraged, and that evening he demanded I call the Parsons and ask them if they were the kind of people who cheated little kids. I didn’t want to. I cried, begged Dad to not make me. He grabbed me by the neck and pinned me against the wall beneath the phone–our only one–in the kitchen. He screamed at me to make the call, began whacking me on the head with the receiver when I refused.

I caved. I was a blubbering, snivelling mess. For the life of me I don’t remember what I said–only trying to pitch my hitching, heaving voice over Mom and Dad screaming. Mrs. Parsons paid me in full the next time I saw her.

Dad congratulated me, told me that I had learned a valuable lesson.

So valuable that it pretty much made calling Harley one of the most difficult things Dylan had ever done.

“I just thought, um, you know, if you were ever feeling lonely, that I could come over and watch another, um, movie, you know?”

“Dylan…”

“Just a thought.”

“Dylan… look…” A long sigh packed with essays of meaning. “There’s just so much… so much you wouldn’t… understand.”

“I can try. I want to try.”

“I gotta go. Look. Please…”

“Please what?”

“Please don’t call.”

The phone clattered in the cradle.

I sometimes ask myself where they’ve all gone, the tingling phone conversations, the breathlessness of forcing anxious, inarticulate thought through hair-thin wires. The tickle of pop-song heartbreak in the bottom of your ears. Aging and bloating are so often the very same thing. When you’re young the aperture is so blessedly small that these things can only be monstrously big. Nothing is small or sordid. Significance is the cause of blindness, and not just another symptom.

Things. Things. Things.

I like to think that it understands what Dylan could not, and in my blank wall reveries I spin stories for her, Harley, subtle tales of Bovarian frustration, as well as graphic Penthouse letters. I have so many words now–too many. I look past the turn-of-the-century French circus poster decorating my office wall, and I see her, walking naked beneath the floating fabric of her dress.

My cock feels as young as my heart feels old.

32

(1997)

Rachel left me within eighteen months. She had taken a job with the Ministry of Natural Resources counting tree zygotes or something like that. This involved a six week stint up at some research centre somewhere around Ottawa. We were scheduled to talk every Sunday afternoon–nowadays this seems hard to believe, but she had only limited access to a phone. The first Sunday she was all chatty excitement. The second Sunday she was sobbing uncontrollably.

“What’s wrong? Honey?”

“We-we went c-camping…”

I remember spasms of hatred, images of unknown male competitors, the horrified certainty that she had been assaulted or raped. I didn’t so much feel the urge to murder as I felt the impulse aiming me.

“Rachel–Rachel! What happened?”

“I-I was the one who-who was supposed to p-put out the fire…”

“And?”

“I-I th-thought I had! I really did! I didn’t m-m-mean to!”

“Mean to what?”

“The fire wasn’t ooout,” she bawled. “After we left, it-it… I burned down nine hectares of forest!”

He wasn’t sure what a ‘hectare’ was then, just as I’m not now. Everywhere I look, I see acres.

“What? You?”

“Oooold growth!” she keened.

“Oh, Sweetheart, please. It was an accide–!”

“I w-work for the Min-ministry,” she screeched, “and I burned down nine hectares of f-fucking forest! What kind of loser does that?“

So the next Sunday I was deeply concerned, as you might imagine. But she seemed almost annoyingly chipper when I talked to her. I found myself irritated by how little she seemed to need me, let alone care about my meagre attempts to cheer her up. This was when she told me about ‘Jeff,’ and how he had been sooo understanding, sooo helpful.

More spasms of hatred.

“He’s just my friend. God, why are you so insecure all of a sudden?”

I was reading War and Peace at the time, [7] and I spent the next week absolutely mystified by how much difficulty I was having with Anatole’s seduction of Natasha. Simply reading made me feel like I had a chest-cold.

Then the next Sunday finally rolled around.

I could hear it in her voice: I swear I knew the sum of our conversation even before she completed her first word.

“Look…” spoken in that angry-to-better-be-cruel tone. “I don’t know how to say this so I’m just going to say it. Jeff and I, well… we want…”

Rachel had always been a curiously tactless person, forever mystified by the violent responses that her ‘just saying’ this or that seemed to provoke.

“We want to… you know, sleep with each other.”

Just like that. Boom.

It was as if she were hanging in some other dimension, dangling from some phone company thread: I couldn’t grab her, shake her, hug her knees and weep. I couldn’t frighten her with the ferocity of my outrage. All she had to do was let slip the receiver and snip, she would be gone forever.

All I had were pleas, arguments… theories…

About Jeff. About her. How he was playing on her vulnerabilities (because he was). How he would happily let her grenade her marriage, fuck her for the brief remainder of their contractual term, then unceremoniously dump her after the mission was done (as he did).

All I had was the truth. They, on the other hand, had biology. Aside from her quaint scruples, her need to be ‘honest’ about her desires, everybody knew what was going to happen. That was what made it so fraught.

There was no call the following Sunday.

It’s a funny thing, finding yourself stranded with the belongings of an unfaithful wife. You would think you would hate them, all these little behavioural residues. The shoes piled beside the door. The belts hanging in the closet. All the prints that you hated but she adored…

A starfish? What the fuck was she thinking?

But you don’t.

It’s like you wake up in this space where everything has gone wrong, and there’s nothing to do but soak it all in, absorb all the cutting edges. You feel incarcerated by the hanging of things. All the possessions lying fallow  according to this or that unactualized project. You feel pious with outrage, abject with shame. You feel mystified by the sheer impossibility of it all. You begin packing because the apartment seems so stupid, as if someone had paused the movie for so long it had become pointless to watch the end.

You just need to change the channel.

Meanwhile this primeval conviction undulates on the reefs just below, a poisonous anemone rooted and waving across the low boundaries of your awareness, the knowledge that some other man is fucking the woman you (Now, suddenly) love with the same reckless urgency as you once did in those first days… That she’s crying out, convulsing about some other man’s cock.

You actually feel it in your chest: the momentary mashing of his glans, the bread-soft pop of insertion, the swallowing glide.

So you begin packing, trying not to think of the ghost fucking your heart. You go slow. You itemize, not so much out of reluctance to be done, but because your confusion seems to require an answering fastidiousness. It’s painstaking business cleaning up after disasters. Debris becomes holy.

This was when I found an old sheet fading into cadaverous grey about the edges, upon which someone had typed the following:

Everything has a cause.

A –> B –> C

A= outer event

B= inner event

C= this very thought Now!!!!!!

My first thought was one of pity. Poor fool…

Stupid cocksucker.

But for all its sincerity, this preemptive interpretation simply made matters worse. I was in pain, you see, genuine anguish. So why not think of myself as a kind of spontaneous output?

Or even better, why not look at her as a kind mechanism running through an ancient reproductive program? Rachel’s eyes, which had always seemed so luminous and emotive in the Now, dulled to painted marbles in my memory. Her beauty became premeditated, cynical, something contrived to evoke certain responses, like the way Disney characters exploit infantile facial characteristics to trigger parental and familial instincts.

A doll, I thought. I’ve been betrayed by a doll.

She wasn’t even fucking real… Christ.

I remember sitting down to wrestle with the breathlessness of the thought. A, I thought. B… C…

This was when the car swerved and hit me.

You see, for the first time I realized that this stupid formula was what I had been pursuing all along, from fucking Lacan to Derrida to Deleuze to… whoever it is you pretend to ‘get’ this intellectual quarter.

It thinks, therefore I was.

Only expressed in the clumsy common sense of a 14 year-old, banging thoughts away on his first typewriter.

And I finally realized that Dylan and I had been typing the same fucking thing all along. We had literally kept typing the same self-immolating thought through decades of apparent ‘revelation.’ [8] Ever since I was fourteen…

It. Me. Nobody.

Running me down and backing up, again and again. [9]

[7] It is this…

[8] It is continuous with the world as described by science.

[9] It iterates. Iterates without interval. Thus the illusion of this…

33

(Inapplicable)

I look for him in the mirror… Almost every morning.

Nothing.

Of course the brain can’t recognize itself. Of course the brain can’t interpret its own processes the way it interprets environmental processes. Since the thalamocortical system is hardwired to the rest of the brain it simply cannot ‘gain perspective’ on itself, which is to say, sample its neurological environment the variable way it can its ecological.

But there’s bigger problems. There’s process assymmetry, the fact that whatever recursive processing the brain develops will simply add to the load of ‘blind processing.’ Growing a second brain to keep track of the mammalian first simply increases the amount of brain that goes untracked. And then there’s the developmental fact that human consciousness is so young in evolutionary terms.

Of course consciousness is an exercise in misrecognition.

The problem is that for us this misrecognition is the baseline, the only frame of reference we possess.

I’m not accusing you of being a fiction for nothing.

Given this, we should expect comparative increases in human self-knowledge to take the form of a series of ‘seeings through,’ a setting aside of more superficial understandings. The question is simply one of how far this process will take us from ourselves…

This is the joke at the heart of the comedy called transhumanism: the blithe faith that the truth of humanistic principles transcends our parochial humanity, that the integration of man and technology will lead to anything more than angelic monsters…

Suicides. Homocides.

Bartlebys.

Cutters.

34

(Inapplicable)

If you set aside all the theoretical claims that have no hope of finding arbitration, all the myriad philosophical ‘revolutions’ and ‘circumventions,’ then the most honest thing you can say about  this… is that it’s all in your head–which in turn is all in your head.

The question, the missing question, is simply: what is it about the structure of the brain that explains how the head can be in our head. How come this… can only be grasped as that from the standpoint of another occluded this…

Why does consciousness possess an ‘occluded frame structure’?

35

(Inapplicable)

The thalamocortical system suffers from what might be called ‘recursive encapsulation.’

When we process our brain the way neuroscientists do, through our ancient and powerful environmental circuitry, the information horizon of the thalamocortical system is all but invisible. We just see process stacked on processes, with nothing to suggest why only a fraction of them seem to be involved in the production of experience. When we process our brain through our young and ill-equipped experiential circuitry, the information horizon becomes all powerful. We see trees, rather than trees causing us to see trees. Things like words and people seem to hang outside the causal circuit of the surrounding world. Our wants and decisions seem to arise ex nihilo. The list goes on.

Say someday, using various structural and functional criteria, we are able to map thalamocortical information horizons in the brain, so that we can reliably predict whether this or that neurophysiological process lies within the pale of possible awareness or not. Say that we are able to plot the flexible boundaries of consciousness.

Now here’s the problem. When we look at our map through our environmental circuitry, the way neuroscientists do, we see process continuity, which is to say, we see both sides of the boundary. We see, in other words, the very thing that utterly drops out of experience: the functional provenance of the information taken up by the thalamocortical system.

The functionality of the thalamocortical system simply cannot be taken up as a datum within that system–as a matter of principle, thanks to process asymmetry, the fact that recursive processing simply adds to the blind processing load. But apart from the generation problem–the question as to why recursive processing should give rise to something as peculiar (from a scientific perspective) as consciousness at all–this suggests that consciousness as we experience it can only be explained away.

Why? Because recursive encapsulation insures that experience is a concatenation of fragmentary kluges, gerrymandered ways that the thalamocortical system makes due with its necessarily limited recursive access. Purpose, meaning, morality, and so on, are simply on-the-spot fixes, reliable because of their broader functional role, yet misapprehensions all the same.

Which means, in some bizarre way, that we are impervious to theoretical knowledge.

Inapplicable.

36

(Inapplicable)

Why can’t I make sense of my life?

Because the very experience of comprehension is a form of misapprehension.

Sounds impossible, I know.

It could be the case that what counts as comprehension for the brain and what counts as comprehension for experience are different animals entirely.

Say your brain ‘gets’ my brain is some deep sense, but all you experience (encapsulated as you are) is a fractional sliver of this concordance, perhaps accompanied by a ‘feeling of understanding.’ Since your conscious comprehension is systematically related to your brain’s occluded comprehension, then, no matter how distorted or fragmentary your conscious comprehension may be, it will get things ‘right’ if your brain gets things right. Since your conscious comprehension is your baseline for comprehension period, your understanding will seem exhaustive.

The confusion will only arise when you try to ‘get behind’ this understanding, when your thalamocortical system gropes for resources that lay beyond its information horizon.

This is when you begin to confabulate…

Philosophize.

37

(Present)

This is why confusion and controversy drag down our every attempt to get behind intentionality.

This is why intentionality ‘works,’ even though there is no such thing.

This is why intentionality will never be ‘eliminated’ or ‘reduced.’

This is why my life makes as little sense as yours.

38

(Inapplicable)

In the humanities we have grown comfortable with the notion that we are little more than fragments, that consciousness is the froth on the deep, dark pint of the unconscious. We have grown comfortable with the notion of meanings and morals and intentions and choices operating outside of our volition. The fragmentary self, the ‘decentred post-modern subject,’ is pretty much an article of faith among us.

But note the inconsistency: we assume fragmentary subjects, only to blithely assume that the experiential staples that comprise it–meanings and morals and intentions and so on–are wholes. They are not.

That’s the craziest thing about this…

It doesn’t exist.

39

(Inapplicable)

Consciousness is simply a fraction of the brain turned inside out.

The ‘for world’ of consciousness is an artifact of the thalamocortical system’s inability to process its neurophysiological from. There is no such world.

And we’re trapped in it.

40

(Present)

Meaning is simply the shape of our abjection.

Light, Time, and Gravity (VI)

When you hang in the high gloom, everything is illuminated from below.

18

(1996)

Truth is just theory with a handgun.

Sometimes it’s the universe that shoots you. Sometimes it’s the theorist (or more embarrassing yet, a fucking disciple).

I had learned my lesson. By this time I was keeping two books, one to show my in-group authorities, the other to pursue my own crackpot inclinations. I had gradually adopted a thoroughly sociopathic stance toward my academic career, submitting everything to ad hoc analyses of cost and benefit. I read the ‘names’ I needed to read to play and win the game–I even pretended to believe. I jumped on the Frankfurt bandwagon, began smoking Adorno, Marcuse, and poor, plodding Habermas. I started trashing Derrida every chance I could: deconstruction, I began complaining, was nothing but negative dialectics starved into an empty formalism.

I scaled back my dissertation: instead of offering something new as my theoretical tertium quid, I decided to offer something old, or I should say, someone: Herman Melville. I adopted a kind of revenge motif: rather than use contemporary theory to interpret Melville, I would use Melville to interpret contemporary theory. Of course I never mentioned this inversion outright, figuring that my committee members would be impressed the degree to which they owned this observation…

“Simply brilliant,” one of them remarked.

“Thank you,” was my faux-surprised, aw-shucks reply. “But I’m not… quite… sure…”

“This… this… inversion of the interpretative relation between theory and narrativ–”

“Yes!” another chimed in. “I was thinking the same thing. It completely reverses the typical power relation: usually narrative occupies the object position… But what you’re do–”

“Subject position.”

“Excuse me?”

“You mean subject position. Usually narrative occu–”

“No-no. That’s not what I mea–”

“Interesting implications for gender as well, I think, anyway.”

That pretty much sealed the deal, even though philosophically speaking, the project was a total mess. It was interesting enough, I suppose, to interpret Derrida’s metaphysics of presence as the white whale, or to use Bartleby to theorize the problematic relation between representation and repetition in Freud, but I could never shake the feeling of institutional coercion–even betrayal. Compared to my prior project, this was little more than a gimmick, a skate-board stunt. So of course they were falling over themselves to own it.

“All I’m trying to do,” I said, “is to place theoretical and narrative cognition on the same obstacle course, and see, not so much who wins the race–because I think they have different finish lines–but how they fare when confronted with similar obstructions.”

‘Cognitive’ was a word that I had begun using with more and more frequency over the preceding months. I had never forgotten that argument with the nihilist, even though I had yet to take any of his questions to heart. Instead, I did what most all of us do when we find our beliefs genuinely threatened: I reinterpreted the threat into something I could use to theoretically intimidate others. (I say genuinely threatened because of the well-known (in cognitive psychological circles, at least) phenomena of belief polarization).

‘Cognitive’ pricked quite a few ears, hearkening as it did to an alien and largely antagonistic theoretical tradition: the much-maligned and even more feared Analytic Philosophy. I may have looked like I belonged, but that word… All I need do is speak it, and a good number of my interlocutors would begin speaking in slow motion, parsing their replies with almost ludicrous care. Every one knows you need to be secretive around someone with secrets.

For all they knew, I could be a dreaded Quinean.

20

(Indeterminate)

Harvest was harvest. Periodically the guys would joke about picking cancer, but no one took this seriously. They picked their leaves and smoked their cigarettes and ignored the long transformative chain between. The thing about vast industrial articulations is that they’re too big to be seen, and what can’t be seen can’t be blamed, let alone held accountable.

Shrug your shoulders. Light another smoke.

People live in Middle-earth, both in Tolkien’s and in Dawkin’s sense. Too big to see microbes, let alone sub-atomic particles. Too ephemeral to see evolution or plate tectonics. Too small to see climate, let alone crashing galaxies. Too long-lived to see quantum or relativistic effects. We dwell among fractions, which we confuse for whole numbers. Our history becomes the whole of history, the fossil record be damned. Our truth becomes the only truth, the nay-sayers be damned. Our awareness [4] becomes the whole of existence, the inconsistencies forgotten, or even worse, fetishized.

Psychology becomes cosmology. Magic crawls into the space between the leaf and the cigarette.

We call it God, not because we hate hanging in the dark, but because people fence our every other horizon. Why not the big one as well?

[4] It is the misapprehension called consciousness.

21

(1984)

Dylan saw the crew in the morning, and then saw them again during clean-up at the end of the day, but disgust and exhaustion typically made these silent, staring-off-into-the-distance affairs. Lunch was his only window on what was happening in the fields. He found himself wary of Cutter, as though part of him understood the circumstantial nature of his friendships. He found himself curious as well: he had ascribed too many envied attributes to Cutter not to wonder how the man would fair in complicated social situations.

The shark-smiling man flourished–no surprise there. At lunch, Kyle would return with the pickup and the boat loaded with the others, skin and clothes blackened, looking for all the world like a band of Guatemalan insurgents. If the morning had been really wet, a couple of them would still be wearing their rain pants. All of them except Gilles sported grimy caps. They would all file into the bunkhouse, the long room on the side of the main barn where Jerry had installed all their beds. Some prior conversation would be rekindled the instant they pulled up to the table with their beers. No matter what the subject matter was, Cutter would always occupy one of the discussion’s poles, cracking jokes or firing questions. He had this way of orchestrating conversations so as to include those who might otherwise remain stranded at the perimeter.

Dylan’s fear was that he would be deemed “one of the girls” simply because he was stuck with them all day. That first lunch break he hunkered down alone on the sunny side of the kiln’s foundation, not wanting to hang with the chicks, and assuming he would be forgotten by the others. It’s actually an intoxicating feeling, the assumption of social exclusion–as opposed to the fact of it. Just you, the bugs, and the ticking silence of cooling machinery. Dylan appreciated solitude the way asthmatic runners appreciated breathers–as an honest reprieve from his aspirations. His legs kicked out, he sat, chewing on his peanut butter and banana sandwich, washing it down with a crisp can of Coke, gazing at things near and far. He soaked in his loneliness as if it were a tub of cool water.

“Weirdsma!”

Sure enough, Cutter appeared around the corner looking at him with pained mirth. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Eating lunch.”

The man held out a one-grammer of oil between gum-stained fingers. “This is lunch, my friend. C’mon.”

And like that, Dylan became one of the druggie-drinking crew.

Perhaps this wasn’t so much of a shock, given that he was a ready-made confederate of Cutter’s, someone the man trusted to have in his corner. The surprise was the way Cutter went out of his way to carve out a place of privilege for Dylan.

All the man had to do was mention Missy, and the comments and questions came piling in. He became the excuse, the occasion. Of course, they would have had these conversations without him, but the fact that Dylan glimpsed Missy every time he grabbed another stick from the elevator leant their imaginings–how they would fuck her this way and that–a daring near-reality. The combination of Cutter, Missy, and his obvious wit instantly cemented his position as “one of us.”

After that first lunch he could count on smiles and jokes from almost everyone on the farm. The reasons mattered not at all.

22

(Inapplicable)

Language is the most violent and miraculous form of memory. With each word our past is hacked into fragments, then welded into new forms, new angles, new lines on the Absolute.

With language we can take what happened to us and manufacture memories for the world.

Good and bad.

23

(1984)

The ‘bunkhouse’ smelled of dust, wood, and ripe socks. It was a long low room attached to the equipment barn. After the last of the autumn chores were completed and winter began to close in, tobacco farmers would begin “stripping,” a process where they removed all the cured tobacco from the sticks, sifted through leaves according to varying grades of quality, then compressed the sorted product into bales that would then be brought to market for auction. The bunkhouse was simply the stripping room made habitable: three bunks set against opposing walls, a long counter with two hotplates, and a huge table set in the centre. Aside from the mat at the entrance, only a lime-green rug covered the bare cement floor. Tittie, hair-band, and gear-pig posters adorned the chip-board walls. Beaten suitcases and rucksacks had been heaped against the foot and head of the bunks. Everywhere you looked you saw empty beer bottles: lots of Canadian and Fifty, interspersed with the odd Labatt’s Crystal–the brand Buke was always pitching to the others. Since there was an even split between the Player’s Light and DuMaurier smokers, the ashtrays were always packed with white and orange filters.

With Dylan in tow, Cutter waltzed in while explaining the provenance of his one-grammer: in those days spinning stories about your drugs was the small-talk mode of choice. Only three of the others, Thierry, Kyle, and Long Tom, were already sitting, sucking on frosty bottles of beer. The others were still cleaning up. “Hey, boys,” Cutter said negligently as he pulled out a chair. “You remember Weirdsma here…”

As innocuous as this moment might seem, Dylan actually learned a lesson he would hold tight for the rest of his days: When it comes to people, act as if, and it will be.

The two Indians simply nodded, smiling. Thierry reached out to shake his hand, grinning at him the way you might grin at a stupid dog or a mental retard. “‘ello,” he said, his grip veiny and strong. At that moment Gilles strode from the small bathroom trailing a cloud of soap-smelling steam, drawing a comb through his wet hair.

“Whaddafuck, man. I need a toke.”

“You shower?” Cutter cried.

Thierry jerked his head up and down in a silent hee-hee. “Alweeez!”

“See?” Kyle said, a wary kind of humour on his face. “I told you he spoke English.”

Thierry turned to him. “Alweez!” he cried nodding. “Alweez showur, dat fucking guy.”

Gilles snapped something at him in French–there was something at once mercurial and effeminate about his temper. Thierry simply smiled at him like he was crazy, turned to the others and laughed. “Fucking crazeee! Dat guy…”

“Toke!” Gilles shouted, pulling a chair close to the table.

While they tried to figure out which of the empty beers was the bottle-toker, the screen-door swung wide and crashed behind them. Buke and Jerry sauntered in, jawing on about dump-trucks bigger than houses. Everyone at the table fell silent. Dylan saw Kyle glance at the one-grammar standing like a bullet on the table, then shoot Cutter a look of warning. Cutter simply grinned and shook his head.

“First toke for the boss man?” he called to Jerry over his shoulder.

Their talk took on that careful, boss-is-listening tone that Dylan would hear and use so often over the rest of his life. Jerry peppered them with several just-asking questions: Was the boat truck starting reliably, Kyle? Did Thierry understand that he needed to take at least three leaves, eh, Gilles? Twoi. Dylan, meanwhile, watched Cutter steer Jerry his bottle-toke. The glob he pulled was so big it almost put out his cigarette. He dipped the heater in the small hole at the bottom of the bottle, which almost instantly turned grey.

“That’ll be kife,” Dylan warned him in a murmur.

Cutter simply blinked at him in the course of saying, to no one in particular, “Looks like we’re kicking some ass in Los Angeles…”

This triggered the inevitable debate about whether this Olympics was more or less “real” because of the commie boycott.

Cutter nonchalantly handed a smiling, still standing Jerry the bottle in the midst of the controversy. The voices may have continued their previous trajectories, but for a split second, all eyes clicked to the big man. He had no choice but to inhale “with authority,” as the saying went. He sucked the Now white bottle clear with single quick breath, then began hacking like a drowning victim.

“Owich!” Cutter cried. “Sorry about that, Jerr.” He glanced at Dylan, wagged his eyes at heaven. The rest of the crew laughed in the tippytoe way of children laughing at an abusive father.

Cruelty flickered from voice to voice. Cruelty and celebration.

24

(1984)

Jerry persisted for about a week before giving up. Conspicuous for being clean, he would stand with his beer rather than sit, glancing at his watch every-time he took a drink. After a half-an-hour would pass he would say something like, “Okay, boyzzz! We’re burning daylight, here…”

This was what was called ‘pulling a heavy,’ the phrase everyone used to denote the exercise of social authority–or pretty much any comment that popped the good times balloon. Given his sensibilities, Dylan found these moments almost unbearable, primarily because of the farcical way Jerry struggled to make his heavies sound light. His just-another-guy-joking tone. His bouncing yah-yah gaze.

The crew would drag their asses from the table… eventually. It was the “whatever” character of this ‘eventually’ that pinned and needled Dylan the most, the collective insinuation buried within it. There was no point to it, no relevant grievance real or imagined, since everyone, if asked, would agree that longer lunches made for longer days; they were paid by the kiln, after all. Sad fact is, we like punishing people between the seams of our daily routines. We pack far too much truth in those split-second lags.

Then, on their first working Sunday, after some five days of finishing later than 6PM, the resentment that had been brewing finally bubbled into some ‘friendly’ questions.

“Hey, Jerr,” Kyle asked, “how many leaves you put on a stick?”

“Depends-dependzzz,” the big man said smiling in his all-the-world-loves-me, rosy-lipped way.

“How often do you check?” Cutter asked, looking up as though trying to glimpse his bangs. His hair was kinked and short.

“They feel alright to me,” Dylan said, giving in to some reluctant instinct to defend his boss.

“Aw, it’s okay, boys.” Jerry said. “Things will pick up once everyone gets the hang of things.”

“Something’s fucked up…” Kyle again.

“How often you count?” Gilles said with a frown that seemed unique to his puffy handsome-face, a look that suggested unpleasant odors as much as disapproving thoughts. “Da leefs? You count dem much?”

“Not so long as Ballard’s running the show,” Jerry cackled. He was obviously uncomfortable Now.

“Something, man,” Kyle said with a strangely nervous roll of the eyes across Jerry and beyond. “This working into dark is fucked up… It’s not right.”

“You should crank that,” Jerry said, rolling his head to the tune warbling out of the radio: Van Halen’s “Teacher.”

No one moved.

25

(1997)

Rachel and I met in a graduate seminar on Chaucer and post-structuralism during the third year of my PhD. Fucking Chaucer. Who would have known the pompous pilgrim had a thing for promiscuous signifiers?

After we slept together for the first time, Rachel told me that I had frightened her when she first noticed me. Apparently she had turned around to watch someone else responding to a question and caught me staring directly at her. Rather than break eye contact in embarrassment, however, I kept staring at her, with an almost psychotic intensity.

“I was looking over my shoulder all the way home!” she said in gushing confession. “I literally thought you were a psychopath or something… that you wanted to rape and murder me!”

I still have no idea what the hell she was talking about. Not the slightest recollection. But the fact that she believed it had happened and had let me into her pants anyway should have warned me away.

So we got married.

At the time, of course, we got married because we had finally found someone who ‘understood,’ who was compassionate and funny and brilliant and good-looking and whom we could talk-and-talk-and-talk to without ever running out of things to say. At the time we got married because it just made so much sense, splitting the costs, the chores, the friends–you name it. We got married because we were having fun and I was so fucking convincing, especially when I was dead wrong.

I had a theory for everything. Even then.

It was a small civil ceremony, the kind that seems surreal for being so bureaucratically aerodynamic. Everyone stood motionless, yet I felt like I was watching something about gliding thermals on IMAX.

Her mother flew in from Vancouver, where she was some kind of producer for the CBC. I remember we had this conversation at Swiss Chalet about why the Chinese could only develop technology so far before handing the baton to Europe. I realized then that she didn’t like me: apparently I was white trash–even though she had been the one angling at racial explanations for the Triumph of the West. She went straight back to the hotel afterward, begging jet-lag. Afterward Rachel told me they had been chased out of their old neighbourhood because of the influx of Hong Kong Chinese.

The following morning, the day of the ceremony, she finally came over to the apartment, a small, second-floor two-bedroom on Elias street. She looked brisk and smart, with the streamlined airs and attitudes you so often see on television. We took her to see the bedroom–a tense moment. “Yes, Margaret, this is where I feed it to your daughter… Right there. She likes to bite that corner of the pillow.”

Even though I never uttered a word of this, I’m quite certain this was what she heard.

All I said was, “Lot’s of light from the window…”

She stepped before the glowing rectangle, peering against the morning glare. Rachel and I joined her.

The house directly across from us was owned by this big-smiling, big-talking Jamaican that everyone called Smiles. He didn’t give a flying fuck who he rented rooms out to so long as he was paid: the place had become a Loadie Shelter as a result, a refuge from the cruelty and violence of a world that demanded sobriety, self-restraint, and a modicum of long-term strategic thinking. I didn’t mind it so much, but Rachel was out-and-out terrified of the place and its transient denizens.

At that instant, the three of us gazing down from our window, Smiles’s screen door exploded open on a lung-cracking “FUCK!” This shirtless red-haired guy staggered out onto the porch, teetered for a moment, then pulled out his dick and began pissing over the rail. He had his head craned around, chin on shoulder, and seemed to mumbling something to someone unseen. I remember that a bolt of sunlight managed to capture the disorderly arc of his piss, so that it glittered like magic before disappearing into the weedy shadows.

I almost laughed–I should have laughed.

Margaret simply turned away, acting for all the world as if the incident was apiece with everything else she had seen. “Romantic,” she said drily.

I already had a low opinion of Margaret, thanks to Rachel and all of her Mommy stories. I already knew that the ferocity of her judgements had everything to do with the ferocity of her appearance, that she was someone who was continually warring to be someone. Treat yourself with enough fascistic cruelty, and you can’t help but treat your loved ones the same. She possessed, I was later to find out, a veritable library of self-help books. The same way Christians use their self-abasement before God and Christ to leverage their comical self-righteousness, she used her ‘open-mindedness’ to New Age hacks to warrant her pompous insensitivity toward her daughter. Every time she mentioned the word ‘humility,’ I found myself hearing ‘humiliation.’

We hated each other instantly, it seemed. It was a visceral, atavistic recognition, as if the demons that possessed us had battled across the ages. Only years afterward would I realize the sordid truth: that we both possessed predatory, insecurity-fed personalities, and that Rachel was simply the last toy in the sandbox. It was a good old-fashioned competition of interests with nary a market to facilitate any equitable solution.

Someone was going to lose.

At some level I understood that war had been declared long before she had left Vancouver, that she was really just foraging for ammunition. She already knew that I was trash: all she needed was evidence.

This explains the stew of contradictory attitudes that accompanied our silent trundle down the stairs out to the sidewalk. Margaret cold and vindicated. Me bewildered. Rachel cold and inscrutable.

I found myself frowning at the rooming house as we crossed the street, wondering how I could suddenly feel ashamed of something I had told so many stories about–a house filled with all the characters I had been taught to cherish and celebrate from a safe distance. I remember thinking you had to dress losers in ink before you could think them beautiful. They horrify you in the nude, bring you face to face with all those aeons of social evolution, to the good ole days when thoughtless bigotry paid real reproductive dividends.

I was relegated to the back seat of Margaret’s rental. Just as I pulled open the door, I heard

“Fucking Weirdsma! Hee-heeee!”

All three of us turned to the rooming house, saw a figure lurch upright from the garden beneath the porch…

It was the redhead who had taken a piss not more than twenty minutes before.

“Nooo. Fucking. Waaaay, man!” he cried, speaking as if his vocal chords had a whammy-bar and speech were an instrument best played at the throaty edge of distortion. We stood dumbstruck. He crawled to his hands and knees, then staggered to his feet. He was sun-burned in that wincing, freckled way. His eyes were inflamed slits, his mouth mealy with a slurred grin. Grass cuttings adhered to his outline, and hooks of dirt blackened his jeans.

“Whaddafuck you sayinngg, man?”

He had that scrapper-scumbag build, lean and broad-shouldered: for Rachel and Margaret, I’m sure he looked like some kind of Viking nightmare.

But it was just Todd Stewart, this kid we used to tease in grade nine because of his name, only to cut him a berth once he proved himself a hardcore asskicker. He became a ‘buddy’ in the way of overlapping secondary school coalitions, a guy you never made plans with, but found yourself bumping into on a regular basis–and glad for it, simply because he was such a fucking dervish with his fists.

We always called him ‘Re-Todd,’ for obvious reasons. No one but no one fucked with you when Re-Todd was around. When he was 16, Dylan once watched him pound the shit out of this drunk behind Eddies, this old bar in St. Thomas. Dylan had gone home shaking, convinced he had witnessed a murder. The next morning he purchased his first newspaper, convinced he would find some salacious headline–RE-TODD MURDERS RETARD–and terrified he would be charged as an accessory, but there wasn’t so much as blip.

Todd was not to be trifled with, especially when he was blotto. Blowing him off was not an option. No one wants to get their ass kicked period, let alone by a Re-Todd.

So Dylan did the only thing he could. He stepped up to shake his hand, thumb-grip style. Todd was one of those guys who always liked to grab your hand high, so that you had no grip, while he could break your thumb if he wanted to. It was simply the headbanger version of those older guys who grabbed your fingers when shaking hands: the traditional way to make you feel effeminate.

I introduced him to Rachel and Margaret, then told him that I was about to get married, hoping to jar a little dignity loose in him. He kept shaking my thumb, saying “Cungratch, man! Cungratch! Fucking married! Whoa! Too fucking much! Are you fucking kidding me!”

As strange as this might sound, this was the first time I had seen anyone with a ring through their nipple. It looked particularly graphic with Todd simply because his nipples were so Hello-Kitty pink.

I finally managed to disengage my hand. He followed me to the car door. He made a cartoonhish oh-aren’t-we-high-and-mighty-face? at the girls as they hastily jumped in the front.

“You banging that,” he cried in a false whisper, laughing and grinning like he had just met the Prime Minister and farted while shaking his hand. “Fuck, Dylan! You did awwwllright, man!”

It would be hard to explain the feeling in my throat: the kind of torsion that only warring social facts can produce. These are the moments that make plain the looping lines that locate you in social space–and reveal your lack of substance.

“See ya around, Todd. Peace out, brother.”

“Oooooow! Cungratchululations…” An instant of thick-tongued rage, bent into a sneering grin. “Yeaaaah, Motherfucker!”

Shame, you see, is just one of those impossible-to-hide-things, like smoke or a pungent smell: even total drunks can sense it. Todd made as if to wave, but began playing air guitar as we floated, then whisked away. He never bothered shooting me the finger. He didn’t need to.

We had breakfast at Mickey D’s–no one had the wind for anything more sophisticated. I kept waiting for either woman to mention the incident directly. Neither did.

They spent the whole time talking about the importance of University.

“Ooh. That does sound interesting… What about you, Dylan?”

26

(Indeterminate)

They’ve installed screens and VDPs in the classrooms, with jacks I can connect my computer to. I rarely use them. All I seem to do is talk anymore.

The sun shines through tall Edwardian windows, throwing three oblongs of sunlight across the rows. My students cluster in the far corners of the room to avoid them, but there’s always a stubborn few, young with beauty, beautiful with youth, sitting in the light. The sun enamels them, dims colour into shadow.

They squint at me, wondering why they should care.

Who is this salesman cum preacher? This gantry?

You need to buy this special, abrasive soap to clean up afterward. Sand-soap, they call it. And even then you can still see it, faint in the whorls of your skin. The residue.

Nothing stains quite so deeply, so stubbornly, as the fields.

27

(1984)

Generally you worked rain or shine in tobacco–thunderstorms were the only exception, since lightening was a real danger. The first thunderstorm rolled in, conveniently enough, before they hit the fields, and more importantly, the day after payday.

Which meant that Long Tom had acid.

It’s hard to think of a drug more aptly named than acid, with the possible exception of crack.

The great and horrible thing about dropping acid is that the world always comes along for the ride. Sometimes it unfurls before you like an exquisite rug, allowing you see the beauty in the weave of inanities that comprise our lives. Sometimes you carry it on your back, and you have this sense that if you stand and shrug hard enough it will slip to your waist, become something you can climb out of like a wading pool. Sometimes it baits and dogs you, barks and snaps like a thing with a million vicious heads.

But mostly it follows you around like a portable cage.

Dylan liked to grab the bars and rattle.

You laugh a lot. You read minds [5] from faces. You can feel the neural circuits sizzle. And if the acid is good enough, you drink and drink to keep the beast down. Since it holds consciousness up by the scruff of the neck, you can punish yourself with quantities of booze and dope that would send you crashing to the mat otherwise .

Acid was to be respected.

Circumstances had to be controlled: if the world is going to get fried with you, you want to make sure you bring the right kind of world with you.

First and foremost, assholes had to be policed: Nothing was worse than finding yourself trapped with an asshole on acid. The problem with acid is that you end up thinking faster than you can think, which isn’t nearly as impossible as it sounds. Like dope, acid left a stone-cold sober version of you intact. No matter how mad the madness, there you would be, here, watching yourself race from moment to moment, too far after-the-fact to really get a handle on anything. This made any form of provocation dangerous in the extreme, because you tended to react with alarming speed. The sober part of you would watch with horror as your words and emotions–and sometimes even fists–sprinted far ahead.

Supplies needed to stockpiled: the only thing worse than dealing with an asshole, was running out of booze while on some particularly potent acid. “Blotter,” which was simply a small square of paper that had been soaked in LSD, was always a kind of gamble because you never knew exactly how much acid you were taking. Maybe the biker with the eye-dropper had a periodic tremor, or even worse, a diabolic sense of humour. With acid, quantity control was always as dicey an issue as quality control. You could take one hit and find yourself riding five. And when that happened, pray-pray-pray that you had enough beer or whiskey or what-have-you on hand to blanket the crashing edges.

Moods needed to be controlled: moods were contagion when people took acid. One person laughing meant everyone laughing. One person freaking meant everyone freaking. Dylan and his buddies had all dropped acid to celebrate New Years the prior winter, and even though everything had been carefully prepared, assholes avoided, supplies laid up, the night had nevertheless turned into a nightmare simply because of the way the mood of the group had reverberated and transformed. It started with a single negative vibe–a dude catching a buddy staring at his girlfriend’s ass–and the night ended shaking itself apart within a matter of a few hours.

Fights. Screaming.

Of course none of these rules were observed the day Dylan dropped Long Tom’s acid. “Orange Owl,” he called it, because it came in little orange squares of construction paper with a small cartoon owl printed on it. That day, and all the many days after that, it was acid au natural.

Let the brain cells fall where they may.

[5] It has been mistaken for a ‘mind.’

28

(Indeterminate)

The world roars.

All the time, without pausing for breath or remorse. The world is a beast, and we are fleas trapped in its matted pelt. You understand this when you drop acid.

The world is a mouth and details are its teeth.

Acid lets you step out, glimpse the existential bandwidth of the life you lead. The signal, you realize, has more strength than your senses can swallow.

You hear the hiss and crackle of reality. Like a station that never quite comes in.

29

(1984)

“I’m telling you, man, Indians are the niggers of Canada!”

Kyle–of course.

“Oh yeah?” Cutter quipped. “Then why can’t you guys fucking run?”

Everyone laughed hard at that, but for some reason it still sounded straight. Dylan simply sat back, sucking it all in with pupils like watch-batteries.

“Hey,” Long Tom said. His voice was so much a surprise and so at odds with his appearance that it always prompted an involuntary exchange of glances. “What’s wrong with four niggers in a Cadillac going over a cliff?”

“Nice car?” Gilles ventured lamely–though his heavy accent made everything he said sound cute.

“A Cadillac seats five.”

Guffaws and several slugs of beer. There’s always this point of indecision, when waiting for acid to sink in, where the laughter’s brimming but not quite ready to spill. A good buzz required foreplay.

“Hey,” Buke called out from his bunk. “What does a squaw say when having sex?”

It was like someone had strung a clothesline through the room and hooked everyone’s nerves to it. Buke was already snorting in laughter. “‘Get off me pa! You’re crushing me smokes!’”

Cutter howled, but in a way that made it clear that it was Buke’s stupidity he found so funny, not the joke.

Long Tom casually stood up, walked toward where Buke was sitting.

Kyle continued as though none of it had happened. “You make jokes, but I’m serious. We’re oppressed, man!”

“Oppressed?” Cutter cried, holding up fingers to count. “You pay no taxes, you go to college for free, the government spends billions… I wish I was a nigger Indian!”

Buke was looking up at Long Tom. “Hey,” he was saying. “Tom. It was just a joke–”

Long Tom made as though to hit him, stomped his foot instead. He turned, laughing at the sight of Buke with his head ducked, his forearms bent into a cage about his face.

“He’s right, Chief,” Gilles said. “You Indians think you have it tough, eh? The French as much niggers as you. More.”

Kyle made a face while downing a slug of beer. “You stole our land, then the English stole yours. Boo-fucking-hoo. Get to the back of the line.”

Long Tom resumed his seat, smiling at everyone and nodding toward Buke. He had shown him, Now he wanted to show everyone else.

Cutter leaned forward, shuffling the cards. “But that’s the fucking point, isn’t it? Whine-whine-whine.” He wagged his eyes at heaven. “You guys lost, we won. Just fucking deal with it.”

“You fucking deal!” Gilles cried, obviously pleased with his mastery of English puns. “Then we’ll see who wins.” He turned to spout something in French to Thierry, whose eyes flickered between the two Indians before laughing.

Gilles, who had been driving BT’s the whole time, finally handed one to Dylan. Kyle, meanwhile, was watching Cutter more carefully than Dylan liked. “You probably think Reagan’s the best president we’ve ever had,” the pudgy radical said.

“Fucking A, I do.”

“I like him too,” Gilles said. “We should throw more our weight around, I think.”

“He’s a cowboy,” Kyle said, a psychedelic twinkle in his eye. “We Indians don’t like cowboys, eh, Tom?”

Tom’s smile had a kind of endearing menace to it, almost Sears Catalogue perfect, yet slippery, as though it could be as easily attached to a fatal stabbing as to a buddy’s joke. Nodding, he flicked the black silk of his hair over his shoulder. Everyone’s knees were pumping beneath the table Now, too quick for anything short of fast-motion photography. Their laughter had reached that tinderbox phase, where the sparks always seemed to swirl.

“Reagan isn’t our president,” Dylan coughed out.

“Are you playing?” Cutter demanded, holding a card out in a freeze-frame deal.

“No,” Dylan said, shaking his head in a cloud of smoke. He already knew these guys played deeper than he was willing to go.

“Then shut the fuck up,” he said, snorting and tossing cards–red Bicycles. Everyone glanced at Dylan and laughed, but in a manner far different than when they laughed at Buke. There was something almost affectionate about it, as though his youth was the one thing they could all agree on. Aside from sitting in Cutter’s shielding shadow, he was officially the “Kid.” You only went through the motions of giving the Kid a hard time–everyone knew that…

Except Buke.

“What? You a fucking pussy or something, Pickle-boy?”

This from someone who also refused to play poker. At some level Dylan knew that Buke resented him because he thought Dylan should be the natural runt of the litter.

“At least a pussy’s useful!” Cutter cracked past his cigarette. Cutter never, not once, glanced at Buke while he was carving him, and this, for some arcane reason, made it all the more damning, looking at others while baiting someone.

Another, almost delirious spasm of laughter. Smiling, Dylan turned and shot Buke the finger. It was intense.

He didn’t really mean it though.

30

(Indeterminate)

Let’s be clear as to what kind of people I’m talking about. Reading about them, you might be inclined to think they’re entertaining, interesting, maybe even cool. But if you were to meet any of them, any of them, I don’t care how much egalitarian rhetoric you throw at me, you would instantly judge them. If they accosted you, you would go tactically blank, maintain momentary eye contact, say something at once courteous and dismissive. You would, in other words, do everything you could to fall between the cracks of their attention. If you’re a homeowner, you would watch them, just to make sure, and if they have the temerity to soak in their surroundings–your neighbourhood–you would be convinced they were casing homes for robbery.

Of all the insidious flatteries that reading instills in people like you, few are more destructive than the illusion that you’re an open, accepting person. The illusion that you don’t judge.

These are the people who instantly instill feelings of moral superiority. But where others would simply call them lowlifes, scumbags, loadies, or whatever caste slang happens to be in fashion, you pretend to know them, to “sympathize” with their “plight,” even as you carefully follow their progress along the perimeter of your property lines. Why do you think they hate you so much?

And they do hate you.

This is what made things so difficult for Dylan, growing up as he did in their midst. Now and again they would catch a whiff of you in him. At that age, judging and shame exercised the same exhausted muscle in Dylan–his feelings of superiority were too brittle not to crumble whenever he clutched for them. There was no self-righteousness for them to see, though their was plenty of arrogance. And yet, many of those who took an instant dislike to him did so because they could see the self-righteousness to come. They could see the prejudicial buds that would bloom once he was replanted in university soil.

Because no one is more self-righteous than the educated. Thinking you know more is one thing. Knowing that you know more is a different animal entirely. Especially when you’re wrong.

How many times have you been embarrassed for the lone non-academic in academic company? How often have you secretly rolled your eyes at this or that family inanity at Christmas dinner? How many time have you uttered some version of the words, “They just don’t get it”?

I’m sure you have this rationalized somehow, that you have some meta-cognitive admission or apologia or shrug-of-the-shoulders.

Think about fundamentalist Christians, whom, I have no doubt, you think epitomize self-righteousness. What is it, in their minds, that makes them morally superior to you? A belief system. Nothing more, nothing less. Granted, the types of judgements they hang from that belief system are absurdly drastic, but the fact remains: beliefs are cheap. This is what makes them so evangelically optimistic: they understand that the line dividing you from them is tragically thin. All you gotta do is say, “Yes!” to Jesus, you’re in like Flynn.

Now what do you think makes you morally superior to Christian fundamentalists? (You can knock off the “But-I-don’t-feel-morally-superior-to-anyone,” bullshit, because I know you do. We’re judging machines.) Is it simply a matter of belief systems? Oh, no. Set this book down, walk to the nearest construction site, and begin explaining your belief system to the “guys.” Impossible, isn’t it? Your belief system is a hot-house flower, one requiring an extended period of specialized training to comprehend, let alone appreciate. In other words, it’s not simply a belief system that lies at the basis of your feelings of moral superiority, it’s also a prolonged period of institutionalization.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it? because there are real issues of inclination and native ability involved in the pursuit of an education like yours. It’s not simply what you believe that sets you apart, nor what you have undergone to wrest those beliefs out of the ignorant dark, but the grain of your character and your inborn intellectual abilities. It’s not just that everyone in the world is an “undergrad” to you. At least undergrads have bared their skin to the light of your learning, right down to bikini bottoms and Speedos. Everyone else, all the poor, slovenly masses, the “victims of corporate cretinization,” the ones who “don’t know better,” because they “never had the chance,” are actually made of lesser stuff, aren’t they? This is why you’re loathe to evangelize outside the classroom, why you think it’s largely a waste of time talking to the likes of them. This is why you aim all your gifts away from people in general, and seek out those you can congratulate as surrogates for yourself.

And you wonder why they hate you? The moral superiority of aristocracy has a stink all its own, and trust me, my friend, you reek of it.

Which is what makes the pedestrian character of your conceit so laughable. After all, what makes you feel morally superior are just all the things that are yours. All the ways you identify yourself as an exception, as somehow special…

Just like everyone else.

It’s only the intricacy and, dare I say it? the essentialism of your moral superiority that sets you apart. Admit it. You think you’re better to the pith.

(No! you say. Yes…)

So let’s be honest, here, as writer and reader. [6] These are the people that you look down on, that you loathe and ridicule in the hill-billy fringes of your own family. If you want to honestly read about then, imagine how your skin would crawl if you found yourself in their midst. Imagine the defensive train of condescending thoughts that would flit through you, the moments of self-reproach, the stillborn reminders to be open and egalitarian, poised on the brink of the inevitable condemnation to come. Imagine your fear, the unthought recognition that should things turn sour, nothing you could say or do would be of any use. Imagine the company of cruel, crude, and most importantly, impervious people.

Imagine being hated.

[6] It has been called ‘you’ and it has been called ‘I.’

Light, Time, and Gravity (IV)

You only scrub viruses from your skin.

X

(Childhood)

Dishevelled. That is how I feel. That is how I am.

“So… Who next?”

Disorganized.

“What about this one?”

I can barely remember what it’s like, living in an environment that enabled. Being in love.

“Simmons? I don’t know… What’s she doing again?”

Disapproval is a funny thing. We’re always checking, always calibrating, between the frames of what we call awareness. What you see looks good enough, workable, but it really doesn’t matter, so long as the subtext continually condemns and repudiates. So you blunder forward oblivious, and the frame of what you are shrinks, withdraws.

“Umm… Post-feminist critiques of Marxist body art.”

“I think she’s brilliant.”

[Reading]. “Ah… The Benjamin messianic thing… with the… What does she call it?”

“Spiked heel. It’s a fascinating concept, believe it or not.”

You want to ‘pull it together.’ But what do you do? Apart is what you are, what you’ve always been. Pull who together? What I am? Pull what I am together? But then who would I be?

“I know you like it.”

“What’s not to like?”

She’s always angry, now. You know all the mechanisms, how it works. You’ve become the topic of a college essay, and she’s been trained to cherry-pick what she needs from the mixed bag of your life, how to select the most sympathetic jurors, bribe the judge. She only sees what she needs to convict you now. You used to share the same skull, understand and appreciate the common will that once bound you. But you’re a stranger to her now. All you have are your actions to redeem you, and she can only see the fault in what you do.

“For my part? Nothing. But this is SHHRC we’re talking about.”

The fix is in. And this, you begin to realize, is the most pernicious fact of all. The fucking fix.

“Patrice told me that ‘conservative’ is the wor–”

You know the feeling. The taste. The heft of your head. The weight of your hands. You understand how the whole world can become a chore, the make-work sadism of petty fathers and heartless governments.

“Patrice? Your buddy in Ottawa?”

How even a soul’s resting position can become labourious.

“He just said that, um, optics will be important.”

This is what the fix does to you. The exhausting immobility. The waiting for a second wind that only seems to come. This is what the fix does to you.

“He literally told you that?“

When I was that age when the colour of the Smartie trumped the taste, strings connected me to my father’s anger. Hooks through the armpits. The throat.

“What does it matter? We knew as much going in. It’s human nature. They’re going to shy from projects that can be… what? [Laughs]. What’s the word I’m looking for?”

My mother had this way of crying, my way, that I found unforgivable. Crying reveals so much–too much–about the worm that is our nature.

“Weaponized.”

Sometimes Dad would pound the dinner table for emphasis. His version of italics. It was like poking a fork into an outlet, the jolt of alarm. Strange the way everything jumps: forks, plates, glasses, limbs, hearts. You always pound two tables, when your family is gathered around you: one in the room and one in the head.

[Laughter].

My flinch would taste like copper.

“Oh well. Sorry, Simmons.”

My mother had this way of crying, like I said. She understood the fix we were in.

“Okay… One down. What about this Took, guy?”

Sooner or later me and Johnny would start crying too.

“He’s the one who even looks like a hobbit, isn’t he?”

Dad would pretend to be dumbfounded. “Guys… Aw… c’mon, guys. There’s no need for you–”

[Laughter].

“You’re scaring them, Frank!”

“It’s the eyes. He has the most beautiful eyes–have you ever noticed that?”

“Guys?” he would exclaim, his head wobbling, a kind of you-got-me-all-wrong smile on his face.

“What’s his project again?”

Whiskey or beer. It always smelled the same. Like phoney smiles.

“Something about Schelling…”

Sudden Old Testament indignation. “So I’m the bad guy, huh?”

“German Idealism and mass media portrayals nature… He’s the one who published that essay on Avatar.”

This would send a different kind of jolt through me. You become a connoisseur of self-pity when you live in captivity, all the modes and variations, and the kinds of consequences that flowed from each.

“Yeah-yeah. I remember… He actually got that in the CJFS, right?”

“I’m the Big. Fucking. Loser, eh?”

“Forthcoming.”

There was always this moment of transition, expressions crawling from mire to mire.

“I’m sure they’ll approve of ‘German’ in the title.”

“Huh? Huh? Who do you think! Put this fucking food! On this table!“

[Laughter].

How do you ‘capture’ something like this? That feeling of inversion, the slow implosion of composure. Your mother wilting, becoming another abused child. The sobbing interior peeling outward, sheathing you in gleaming shame. Your father a bastion of shadow and fury. Teeth of flint. Fists of stone. And your heroic little brother spitting outrage through snot, daring what you could never do, bawling defiance, shrieking I-hate-you-I-hate-you-I-hate-you. And all you want to do is shut him up, because you know the animal now staggering to its feet. The existential bellow. The rude outrage. The musk of domination.

“So we’re agreed, then?”

He stands, a teetering Dark Lord.

“I think so… Dylan?”

You know the irrelevance of justice. The only thing that matters about vengeance is visibility.

“Dylan?”

So your little brother shrieks hatred, and you shield your face behind your arms. You don’t have to commit any crime to be the least innocent.

“Yes?”

I am the Law. This is the message he holds in his strangling grip.

“You liked Took, didn’t you? This stuff is right up your alley.”

And there is beauty even in this. A glimpse through the window of a rural hovel, sweat-stain gold and the gleam of second-hand things, the great father standing in judgement, the mother and children cringing below. The upraised hand–

“Sure.”

A little boy struck, so hard his chair tips backward. And you glimpse his face, distorted for a warble in the window pane. You see him vanish into the fog of your exhalation.

“Good, Hobbit genes, huh? What do you call them?”

The one too terrified to break the Law.

“Fitness indicators.”

There is beauty even in this.

[Laughter].

89

(1984)

The Dodge was gone when Dylan pulled up to the house. The windows were dark save for blue pins of light creasing the livingroom curtains. Somebody watching TV.

He tried hard not to think what he was thinking, went to the side door off the kitchen, rapped his distorted reflection across the screen door. Moths spiraled into the bare bulb hanging above. Even though the night was cool, it smelled of dust and vegetation wilting in the sun.

He waited, listened to the moth tink-tink-tink through the whine of nocturnal insects. He sensed movement in his house. He knocked again, watched his reflection blur with each impact.

He glimpsed Harley’s silhouette pass across the white counter-top light.

“He’s gone,” she said as she pulled open the door. The smell of her steamed into the cooler outdoor air. “And he didn’t leave you a cheque, I’m afraid.”

“Oof,” Dylan replied. “Cutter’s not going to be happy.”

She studied him for a moment. “Who do you think he’s out drinking with?”

Dylan smiled ruefully–or tried to. “No way.”

He had expected some kind of in-spite-of-herself laugh, but instead she cocked her head and peered at him. Something was wrong–he knew this instantly, but the fact of her presence had struck him too vividly. Her mussed hair. Her cotton dress, which seemed lay across her as lightly as a doily on polished wood.

“Why do you like him?” she asked.

“Cutter?”

“Cutter.”

Dylan shrugged. “He makes me laugh. He’s a character.”

A strange softness mellowed her eyes. For the first time Dylan noticed that her mascara had smeared, charcoal against freckled white. A shudder passed through him when he realized she’d been crying.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure. I’m watching a creepy movie. Little Girl who Lived Down the Lane…” She trailed, waved a dismissive hand at her own stupidity. “Something like that. The neighbour just threw her hamster into the fireplace.”

“Sounds more crispy than creepy.”

She made a face, batted her eyes as she laughed. Somehow the time they had spent on the couch weeks earlier had managed to creep into the empty space between them. A thickness of some kind, like promise or sin.

“Would you like to watch the rest of it with me?”

He said, “Sure,” over a tripping heart.

She led him into the dark kitchen, asked him if he wanted a drink.

“Sure,” he said, trying to sound relaxed and lighthearted. He watched her root through the fridge. People are never the same size in there homes. Sometimes they fill them to the point where rooms seem little more than baggy clothes, extensions of their character. But other times, especially at night, the spaces grow as long as shadows, and people find themselves dwarfed. The shelter leaks out of the walls. Homes become houses, shells.

Harley seemed small and naked in this place, like a little girl in a dead mother’s clothes. It was the kind of kitchen you might find in any rural rental at the time. Linoleum floor cracked and gnawed around the door. Old boots and shoes and sandals assembled along a section of old carpet. Plain cupboards beaded with yellowing paint. A table with a brushed aluminum rim. Five warped chairs. A dozen empty cases of Labatt Blue piled next to the fridge–which of course was harvest green.

There was something about it all–an impoverished utility perhaps–that promised to swallow any ornament, to make a sham of any attempt to decorate. It seemed Harley should be covered with bruises.

She poured him a Coke with ice-cubes, then led him smiling into the livingroom. There was a dank odour, the smell of beaten sofas and walls that had outlived the fragrance of plaster and wood. The TV flashed and glittered soundlessly.

The pillows and tangled blanket told him she had been laying on the couch to the left, so he took the one to the right, with the yellow foam bulging from the centre cushion.

“No.” She said with faux off-hand resolution. “Let’s sit like we did the other night… I liked that.”

“Sure.”

The fact that neither of them needed clarification–”Which night was that? How was it we sat again?”–said it all. They effortlessly recreated their earlier pose, Dylan at the sofa’s right arm, Harley leaning against him facing the fish-tank light of the TV. For some reason, the only thing that made it seem strange–illicit–was the absence of Johnny Carson on the screen. If they could only recreate the circumstances perfectly, it seemed, they could recapture the innocence. They needed an accident and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, accidental here.

Her head felt warm against his shoulder, like that of a drowsy niece or nephew. Her dark hair tangled down about his arm, tingling more than tickling.

“Oops, commercial,” she said girlishly. She bounced to her feet saying, “Pee break…”

He sat staring at the television, anxious, soaking in the details of the room. Three empty beer bottles conferred by the far leg of the other coffee table. A lighter and a pack of Cameos sat next to a black glass astray on the table at his knees, as well as half a KitKat, a silver bracelet and gold ring. It seemed he could see her watching these things during muted commercial breaks, the little landmarks that testified to her existence, the kinds of clues police investigators could use to reconstruct the final moments of her life.

Harley.

Then she was back, hurrying as if evading his gaze.

She curled her feet beneath her, reached forward to retrieve the remote, then leaned her head against his shoulder. Her movements were brisk, offhand in a pretend way. They sat breathing, staring at the still-muted screen. And just like before, he was arched and aching-hard, the head of his prick thumbing past the band of his briefs, partially pressing his left jeans pocket inside out.

She finally hit the volume. A Ford commercial tumbled across the screen. Giant loads mastered. Big wheels snacking on mud.

“I got a chill,” she said. He looked at her, bewildered and dismayed, certain that she was fishing for reasons to back out of whatever it was they were pretending not to do.

“Here,” she said, standing before the TV screen. He glimpsed the slender outline of her hips and thighs through the cotton of her dress, quickly looked up into her eyes. “You stretch out against the back of the couch,” she said. Dylan obliged, could not help but notice her eyes briefly follow his tented groin.

She lowered a single knee to the centre cushion, hesitated, her eyes searching his.

“Do you mind if we cuddle?” she asked.

Her voice was so small, so far from the smokey brashness that was her daylight voice, that Dylan almost thought she was mimicking some comedy thing. When she blinked, two tears slipped down her cheeks. She smiled in embarrassment, sniffled and wiped at her face and nose with her wrist. “Sorry,” she said, her voice meek with self-condemnation.

Dylan smiled from a spark of confidence he never knew he had, a small fire of masculine assurance that would gutter out in my late thirties. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’re friends, right?”

She smiled in turn. “Friends,” she repeated, finding courage in him. She sat on the centre cushion, grabbed the blanket from where it had been bunched near Dylan’s feet, then stretched across her narrow half of the couch. Contact was unavoidable, but several slow-thumping heartbeats passed before she finally leaned into him.

She gasped, swallowed, pretended to cough. His hard-on crossed the cleft of her buttocks at an angle. Even through denim, it seemed he could feel her every pore, everything down to the aura of fine hairs.

They lay like this for several minutes.

Her hands were shaking when she reached beneath the blankets, then back to undo his button and unzip his fly. Both of them kept their eyes fixed on the floating TV screen the entire time. She fumbled several times, but when she got it, the action was effortless. He instinctively leaned into her plying fingers, but instead of grabbing him, she hooked the band of his underwear and, squirming for leverage, yanked it down to his scrotum.

The sudden lack of constraint, the douse of cool air. Empty space had become the labial deep.

“Friends,” she murmured thickly, hoisting her skirt to her waist beneath the blanket. Somehow he already knew she wasn’t wearing any panties.

Skin against electric skin.

She clutched him at the root, pulled him away from his abdomen while opening her knees. A soft slap, and he was curved between her legs, along the fiery length of her wetness to the soft fur of her pubis.

She sobbed, once–twice.

They lay like this for several minutes.

Breathing had become difficult, pained and laboured. The figures on the blue screen were a blur, but the miniature voices seemed painfully distinct. He could feel their sweat soaking, meeting in the interstices between skin and clothes.

He wasn’t sure when it happened, or who was even responsible, but somehow the angle of his hips to her buttocks shifted, his glans sunk across a moist track of hair, and he seemed to simply rise up into her.

A blessed accident.

She was gasping and grinding Now. Small cries. Curious little grunts. With his left hand he seized her hip, tried to pin her motionless against him. With his right hand he reached under her and around, reached into her dress to grab her left breast. She choked and bucked at this, and somehow the movement put him beneath her. Her hair tumbled against the side of his face. He watched her raise her swaying knees, felt her socked heels drag along his shins to his knees. The blue blanket slid down her blue thighs, became a crumpled mini, an emanating line falling just short. He reached over her waist with his left arm, trying in vain to clamp her still. At the same time he pinched her left nipple.

She cried out.

This entire time his cock had been an exquisite vessel, precariously balanced, brimming with the ache to spill. It seemed all the world buzzed and squeezed about the hook of him, that here was the one place where it all plugged in.

“Ima gunna…” she rasped, writhing and writhing against him. “Ima… Ima… Ooooh jesus-fuck…”

Voice. Spoken words. Strangely, absurdly, he realized he was fucking Harley–Harley!

He released her breast with his right hand, reached down over the blanket hem, down into the humming space between her inner thighs. He pressed shuddering fingers against the slickness he found there, felt one of his fingernails nip the shaft of his cock.

She began howling, “Oooo! Oooo! Ooooh!“

And the delirium–aching, strangling–that arched within him blurred into her, into her pussy, into her squirming torso, her rigid legs, the hand she had thrown back to palm his cheek.

Into her keening.

Into the anguished spasm that was her breath.

All of it was there, all of her, stamped into the hot clay of his bliss.

She was his. He was fucking Harley and she was his.

90

(Indeterminate)

What is this that reaches within us? What is this decadent limb?

A beautiful morning. Children trudging down the sidewalk, the strong, the weak. Some eyes up, voices warbling, shimming along the edge of laughter. Some eyes down, filing their soles on concrete, silent.

Which one was me?

Even then they were telling me. But instead of Homer or trickster tales, they told that I was special, that I could be whatever I wanted to be if only I tried hard enough. They said there was a hero within me, that I could be Achilles, that I need only work to set him free–and work, and work, and work.

I was a point, they said, on the cusp of innumerable trajectories. My every decision, my every effort, collapsed clouds of probabilities (only Deleuzean virtualities would set me free!).

They told me nothing of path dependency. I had to discover that for myself when he was 14.

They taught me nothing of critical thinking. Asking questions willy-nilly, they said, was more than enough.

They told me to aspire. (Breathe-godamn-you-breathe!)

And here I am, reaching, my fingers numb for the cold, my tendons crooked for the lack of grasping.

What is this that reaches through us?

91

(1984)

She fell motionless, began softly crying. As gently as he could, he rolled her to his right so that they could resume their previous positions.

He breathed deep the scent of her hair-conditioner. He found himself nuzzling her hair, kissing her shoulder where the strap of her dress indented her skin. She tasted of salt. “Shhh,” he murmured. “We’re just friends, watching TV.”

He could feel her body shake for a little while longer, against his chest, but mostly through his engorged centre. He whispered, “Shhh…” through the course of her calming, and it seemed that even in this her body answered him.

After a time she bent her head around to look at him askance. The memory of her face–her hair a tangled picture frame, her eyes ringed in mascara bruises, her lips swollen about the edges of glistening teeth, her cheek soft and blue and close enough to make his lips tingle–that memory shines within me still.

A small, cold cube.

“Did you?” she asked with little girl shyness.

“Shhh. I’m trying to watch TV.”

He had no clue what was even on.

“But…”

“I just want to lay like this for a bit.”

She pivoted back to the TV–a Colgate commercial. After a moment of indecision, she snuggled backward, smearing the hot puddle between them, firmly enough to remind them both of how hard he was hooked through her. His cock had become a totem it seemed, a charm against the real. Somewhere he was aware that his car was clearly visible in the driveway, that at any moment someone might decide to “pop by” to see what “Harl and Jerry” were up to. At some level he understood that Harley was more than a shining form about a burning nucleus. He knew that she was more than her body or her cries. She was a wife…

But none of this mattered, it seemed, so long as he stayed plugged in. They had found stasis, two brains locked in the parallel flare of pleasure centres.

Centres encompassing centres–moving as slow as bubbles in oil–or mud.

The long ache of his cock sustained them through an entire rerun of Gilligan’s Island. The trivial talk about who was funnier than who, the impressions of Thurston Howell III, the gut-kicking laughter–everything found itself reflected across the fact of her parsed vulva and his parsing erection. The pretense of television friendship became a kind of petting, a stationary thrust and grind, tantric for its duration. Pleasure soaked up all motion, every little scratch and fidget, every sound and glimpse and smell. The world came to them strained.

She lay spooned against him on a shabby couch. In the humid murk beneath blankets, his cock reached out from the sodden wrinkles of his fly up between her buttocks and into her–deep into her.

And instead of moving, they pretended. They made believe…

Interlocked. A mingling of earthen lights.

Her voice thickened, and the tempo of the game slowed. She started cheating.

It began during the commercials, the accidental shifts and squirms. Soon the talk became excuses to exhale. Then he was gripping her naked hip once again, fighting to hold her still.

This time she kicked up on top of him, and he gave up fighting altogether, content to let her thrust and ride. He threw off the blanket, bunched her dress up around her throat, ran his fingers along the swallow curve of her tits, pinched her pink nipples.

Her second climax was longer in coming, but more intense.

This time she did not cry, but simply lay heaving, naked in his clothed embrace.

“Ooooh my fucking Gaaaawd,” she finally moaned. She squeezed her legs, testing his hardness. She gazed at him with eyes that blurted disbelief. “You still haven’t, have you?” she said.

“No,” he murmured, still stuck in her, a rod holding its breath, stubborn and gluttonous. It seemed the most natural thing in the world holding her inside and out, as if she had been born in his captivity. “I don’t want to,” he said thickly.

“Please. I want you to. I need you to…”

He cleared his throat. Watched her, his eyes aglow with anxious pride–and far too many things aside. “I can,” he said raggedly. “It’s like I’ve been standing on the edge of a cliff. Like… all I have to do is say, ‘Yes,’ and… step… and it’ll just… happen.”

“Say it,” she said, once again thrusting against him. A lazy flutter seized her eyes.

He swallowed. “No… no. Be still. Still. Very still.”

She stopped. “Good grief you’re so hard,” she gasped. She bit her lip and said, “I can feel your pulse. I can actually… feel it. Jeeesus.”

They lay breathing, one powerful heart thumping between them. Dylan heard himself moan. She began keening under her breath. “Touch me,” she whispered. “Touch…”

He touched, wondered that he could carry her passion in a trembling left hand.

“Kiss me…”

He kissed her, and it seemed that some circuit had been closed between lips and genitals and fluttering fingertips, that the last of the lightening had been bottled, and they could flare with greater light. They cried into each others mouths. Spasms rocked him. His boundaries reared within her, strained and strained, then burst…

Their writhing became twitches. Their cries trailed into winded gasps.

She almost burst out laughing in amazement. “I could feel it. I could really feel it!” Then she was kissing him, stroking his hair, whispering, “You’re so beautiful, soooo beautiful,” over and over.

92

(1984)

He knew what she was afraid of.

She began with a friendly furiousness. At one point she even began pushing him into the kitchen.

He resisted with jokes. He wasn’t finished pretending.

Then she said things mildly. She flashed him a squinty smile, the kind you use to tell people they’ve squandered what’s left of your patience.

Eventually he found himself backing away from his reflection in the screen door, the gravel creaking beneath his heels. He could see her face, stripped of all pretense, watching him from the reflected apparition of his chest. His smile had become slippery, hard to hold. He lifted his cap and bowed like an idiot.

It should seem like a movie, he thought.

When he looked back up, she was gone.

Just like a movie… or even better, a book.

Affairs are the dragons of literature.

93

(Indeterminate)

There was a truth to her face, as feminine as breasts or hips or scolding smiles. Something bigger than beauty, smaller than honesty.

Harley was a poor farm girl. She grew up with rattling windows, spiders on the ceiling, and dogshit in the backyard. Her doll clothes were dirt-stained, her knees were coltish and scabbed, and she continually ran out of clean underwear. She laid her cheek on the kitchen table when she wrote or drew. She bawled before school dances, felt more shame for her parents than for her sins, and was fingered in her uncle’s barn when she was fifteen.

She had been more eager than willing.

She partied through highschool, smoked dope, blew supers to boys she liked, puked at the side of gravel roads. She got conceited when drunk–she even intentionally started a fight by flirting with two boys, but only once. Afterward, she said, “Ohmigawd! I’m. Such. A bitch!” to her girlfriends, and they laughed so hard they cried.

None of this prevented her from making straight A’s. All she wanted to do was please her teachers, even the ones she hated. They all seemed to be real in a way she never felt.

University changed her life–or so she always told herself. At the very least, it gifted her with the sad smile she used to greet her mom and dad. She graduated with a literature degree, then moved back home to marry the boy who had fingered her–the star offensive tackle on the football team. Even though she would never admit it to herself, that, in the end, was precisely the kind of girl she was.

The one who marries the offensive tackle.

And here she had thought she was better…

19

(Present)

Like everyone else you call yourself open–‘critical.’ But like everyone else you are anything but.

You have a statistical tendency to mistake agreement for intelligence. You have a statistical tendency to think anything that exceeds you comprehension is excessive. When a signal passes beyond your frequency range, your reflex is to blame the transmission.

Language is competition–it wouldn’t own the planet otherwise.

So before we reap what we have sown, let’s get this one thing straight…

We all read to win.

Inchoroi Love Song

Aphorism of the Day: compliments of Thomas Metzinger…

.

There’s this pernicious myth out there, one that bears too many similarities to the kinds of bootstrapping myths you find in popular culture more generally. The claim is that individuals and/or communities are makers of meaning.

Just think of all the narratives you’ve encountered where the hero has to own up to some difficult ‘choice,’ an easy, cowardly one that will lead to a dissolute, meaningless existence, and a difficult, courageous one that will lead to status, love, and the restoration of some traditional order. We are weaned on versions of what might be called the ‘HUMAN Potential Narrative,’ stories that teach us to strive, strive, strive (which is to say, work-work-work—largely for the benefit of others) to become ‘more than we are.’ This is, without any real doubt, the dominant ideology of the liberal democratic West. This is largely why we tend to buy into our system as enthusiastically as we do, and this is largely why so many of us think we only have ourselves to blame when we almost inevitably fail to achieve our ‘dreams.’ The more our meritocracies seem to drip away, the more our aggrandizing myths seem to seize our imagination.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the bootstrapping impulse seems to so intimately inform so much transhumanist and posthumanist thought.

The value of science lies in the way it renders the natural world compliant to HUMAN desire. Science, whatever it is, means power over the natural. Since extracting what we need from our natural environments is what we are all about, biologically speaking, science has proven to be an almost miraculous boon. The twentieth century, however, provided us with the first real indications that our power over nature could possess catastrophic consequences, intended or otherwise. Nuclear Armageddon. Biological Apocalypse. Environmental Ragnarok. Pick your poison.

And the pharmakon is growing. Now, we are entering an era which will see HUMAN nature become thoroughly compliant to HUMAN desire, and so dwell in the shadow of yet another catastrophic consequence: the Semantic Apocalypse.

The potential problem with rendering HUMAN nature compliant to HUMAN desire is quite obvious: given that HUMAN desire is rooted in HUMAN nature, the power to transform HUMAN nature according to HUMAN desire becomes the power to transform HUMAN desire according to HUMAN desire. This is a cornerstone of what troubles so-called ‘bioconservatives’ like Francis Fukuyama, for instance: the possibility of ‘desire run amok’—or put differently, the breakdown of the consensual values required for liberal democratic society.

For the first time in HUMAN history, in other words, the biological basis of HUMAN desire will be put into play. Given that this is historically unprecedented, and given the degree to which social cohesion depends upon overlapping networks of consistent—or at the very least, compatible—desires, the threat seems quite clear. ‘Designer desires’ should have the same sinister ring as ‘neurocosmetic surgery.’ Imagine waking up and deciding what to wear as well as what to feel for the day.

Now it should be noted that pretty much everyone in the field understands the social necessity of regulating desire (value). What distinguishes bioconservatives like Fukuyama is the desire to prevent the problem of designer desires from even arising, to regulate, in effect, the technologies of HUMAN nature. Call this the Easy Answer. Even though it would likely be impossible in practice to regulate these technologies (because the market, not to mention, strategic, advantages would be too decisive), it certainly is easy to suggest in theory. Pass a law, perish the thought.

Fukuyama’s myriad critics, on the other hand, have a harder row to hoe. What they need to provide is some kind of theoretical assurance that things won’t go awry in the manner that Fukuyama fears. The strategy, at least from what little I’ve read, seems to be twofold: to argue, first, that HUMAN desire as it stands is biologically, historically, or conceptually insufficient and so only stands to gain from technological augmentation and the resulting cultural transformations, and second, that desire is self-regulating in some way.

So with regards to the first strategy, you find Nick Bostrom, for instance, continually characterizing HUMAN desire as it exists as a kind of biological cage. If only we could set aside our fears, we could let desire fly into the vast possibility space of transhuman potential. Or Donna Haraway, continually characterizing HUMAN desire as it exists as a kind of socio-biological cage. The fear should be embraced as belonging to the liberating potential of transcending the oppressive conceptual and political orthodoxy of our existing values.

With reference to the second strategy, you find, to put it crudely, the wanker’s predictable and perhaps obligatory faith in wank. For transhumanists like Bostrom, this faith seems to be grounded in the Enlightenment link between autonomy and reason. As Kenan Malik writes in his review of Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future, HUMANs “possess the capacity to rise above their natural inclinations and, through the use of reason, to shape their values. But if this is so, then no amount of biotechnological intervention will transform our fundamental  values.” For other posthumanists, particularly those with poststructuralist commitments, you generally find varying degrees of residual commitment to these selfsame values, only refracted through the funhouse lens of some specific diagnostic cultural critique. So for posthumanists like Cary Wolfe, for instance, who place animal suffering on a par with HUMAN suffering, the present situation is simply so horrific that any exit has to be a good exit. Anything that forces society to abandon the conceptual cage of the ‘HUMAN’ and the horrifying crimes that it licences is a good thing.

Needless to say, we tend to be pretty cynical about the ‘power of reason’ to ‘bootstrap HUMAN desire’ here at Three Pound Brain. Like Hume guessed, and cognitive psychology is discovering, reason seems primarily invested in rationalizing desire. To use Haidt’s metaphor, these guys are putting the elephant on the back of the rider.

But I literally think that all of this, from Fukuyama to Bostrom to Haraway and Wolfe, is beside the point. Why? Because no one—including them—knows what the fuck they are talking about.

Strong words, I know, but I mean them quite literally.

Should we count contemporary philosophical theories of the HUMAN as knowledge? Of course not. But the sad fact is that this is all we got. Opinions abound, the way they always abound, and the wild diversity of claims is enough to beggar belief. Until recently almost all theoretical claims regarding the HUMAN were prescientific in a very profound sense. All things being equal, the overarching reason why we can’t definitively decide between varying philosophical conceptions of the ‘HUMAN’ is the same reason any other prescientific speculation regarding another domain couldn’t arbitrate between its competing claims. No one knew what they were talking about. Of course, people in the grip of this or that interpretation are prone to forget as much, to treat abject guesswork as knowledge, but this is just what we do: buy our own bullshit.

The HUMAN, as yet, eludes anything resembling thorough scientific understanding. The speculative discourses devoted to it, such as philosophy, literature, and so on, contradict one another in innumerable ways. Perhaps no concept is so wildly overdetermined. When we talk about the ‘posthuman,’ there’s a very real sense in which we are talking about the ‘post-whatchamacallit.’ As yet, we really have no idea just what it is that science is set to transform. Aside from low resolution facts, all we really know about the ‘HUMAN’ as we intuit it is that we cannot trust our intuition. As Eric Schwitzgebel puts it, “There are major lacunae in our self-knowledge that are not easily filled in, and we make gross, enduring mistakes about even the most basic features of our currently ongoing conscious experience, even in favorable circumstances of careful reflection, with distressing regularity.”

It really is the case that science might have more humbling, epochal revelations to make, perhaps the most dreadful of all revelations, a final ’wound’ (to use Freud’s famous image) which kills far more than our narcissism. Think about it. Creeping medicalization. Corporations retooling themselves in ways to manage you as a mechanism. The factory farm is becoming the assembly plant as we speak.

Should we worry that this is the very trend we might expect given the truth of nihilism (the trend given narrative bones in Neuropath). Should we write it off as mere coincidence? Or should we prepare? This very experience you are having now really could be a kind of informatic dream, systematically connected to actual, effective processes of the brain, but hopelessly distorted—and certainly not an ‘agent’ in any obvious intentional sense. And the more we learn, the more plausible this seems to become.

When it comes to this debate as opposed to the posthuman, I find myself stranded, quite against my wishes, on the side that thinks science will show how the ‘HUMAN’ as we intuit it is largely hallucinatory, an artifact of any number of neuromechanical kluges. I could be wrong. Christ, I pray that I’m wrong. But no amount of neoenlightenment or poststructuralist speculation can decide the issue one way or another. The fact is, for better or worse, the question of HUMAN meaning has now become an empirical one. The question of the posthuman is largely a question of the consequences of neuromechanical intervention, of how we will change ourselves once we know ourselves. And this means the question of meaning is prior to the question of the posthuman, both practically and theoretically. To talk about transhuman or posthuman ‘value’ is to assume there will be such a thing. If meaning and value are parochial to the way HUMANs are, then being posthuman could be tantamount to being post value as well.

In this respect, with the glaring exception of David Roden, almost everything I’ve encountered in the posthuman literature so far, even the stuff that touts its radicality on its theoretical sleeves, suffers from what might be called the ‘Star Trek fallacy.’ They all assume that intentionality will survive the break with evolved biology, that the future will be familiar enough for the intentional kernel of our dramas to live on. But the discontinuities awaiting us are existential in every sense, including the conceptual. Why should science serve up anything other than a knowledge utterly indifferent to our hopes and desires? Isn’t that what we pay it for?

Experience and knowledge stand at a crossroads. This is the explosive time, the bewilderment that comes before the reckoning. We cannot assume that meaning transcends biological humanity as it stands, or that the hopes invested in some set of contemporary scruples can be pinned on a future indifferent to all scruple. We cannot presume that ‘right desire,’ let alone reason, is sure to survive what comes.

The future of value must be decided before it can be divined.

Because Three Pounds Doesn’t Cut It

Aphorism of the Day: Without madness, sanity would be a whole lot more interesting.

So this is how it is. I have this perverse, self-destructive bent that prevents me from pimping my books the way that I should, or at least the way that other authors seem to do so effectively. Add to this a penchant for monomania and a general inability to organize my life, and what you have is an author who just ain’t any good at selling himself, let alone his books. Just look at this bloody blog: all the papers I never send out to publish, all the crackpot concepts I cook up only to throw away or sock in the fridge. Three Pound Brain literally shouts agenda, wank and pessimism – things that are almost certain to make most prospective readers run for cover. And to make matters worse, I pick fights with crazies who then devote their energies to smearing my already tarnished name…

And I fucking love it. I wouldn’t have it any other way because I can’t have it any other way.

But it is, I think, something I need to apologize for. The sad fact is, I would likely be quite a bit more successful if it weren’t for my suite of character flaws. I would be further along in the series – that’s for sure. Who knows, I might even be able to hire someone to compensate for all my weaknesses, a sock-puppet pimp or something like that. But as it stands, I don’t have a pot to piss in…

Just a small legion of too-forgiving fans.

Many of whom, I suspect, will be glad to learn that Madness has opened a real, honest-to-goodness forum to discuss the books, as well as other things secondarily apocalyptic. I’m trying to think of a way to give it some real publicity… Maybe a sample from the first chapter of The Unholy Consult? A naked photo or two? Or a love poem?

 

 

Tell Me Another One

Aphorism of the Day: The taller the tale, the shorter the teller.

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A couple of weeks ago The Boston Globe published a piece by Jonathan Gottschall, whose recent book, The Story-telling Animal: How Stories Make us Human had already made my woefully long list of books-I-must-pretend-to-read. “Until recently,” Gottschall writes, “we’ve only been able to guess about the actual psychological effects of fiction on individuals and society. But new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis is finally taking questions about morality out of the realm of speculation.”

The New York Times also has a short piece on the research of Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar detailing the ways narrative not only accesses those parts of the brain—social and experiential—that light up when we actually experience what is described, but also seems to make us better at navigating the social complexities of everyday life.

Despite mountains of residual institutional animus, empirical research into things literary continues to grow in profile. Over the course of twenty years, Joseph Carroll has managed to bootstrap what was a heretical cult of science nerds into a full blown intellectual movement. For me, all of this smacks of inevitability. Once the human brain became genuinely permeable to science, the obsolescence of the traditional discourses of the soul—the ‘Humanities’—was pretty much assured. Why? Simply because prescientific theoretical discourses always yield when science gains some purchase on their subject matter.

E. O. Wilson only sounds radical the degree to which you are Medieval.

Make no mistake, I was mightily impressed by post-structuralism and post-modernism back in the day. I had no fucking clue what that bespectacled, scarf-wearing twit at the front of the class was talking about, but I knew a powerful ingroup social status display when I saw one. I made it my mission to conquer all that French wankery, to master the ‘po-mo’ language game, and I did. Soon I was that obnoxious prick in the back who actually argued degrees of semantic promiscuity with the twit at the chalkboard.

But it didn’t take me long to burn through my enthusiasm. And now, when I find myself reading new stuff written in that old mould I always suffer a stab of pity—not so different, perhaps, than the one I feel upon hearing that another species of amphibian has gone extinct. The naive social constructivism. The preposterous faith in bald theoretical assertion. The woeful ignorance of some of the crazy and counterintuitive things that science, the Great Satan, has to say.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the integration of the sciences and the humanities is a good thing. Science is far too prone to level nuances and to provide psychologically indigestible facts for me to believe this. Only that it is inevitable, and that any discourse that fails to engage or incorporate the sciences of the soul are doomed to irrelevance and amphibian extinction.

Besides, the naturalization of a field of discourse only entails the death of a certain kind of theory and speculation. As certain questions are removed from “the realm of speculation” new ones arise, proliferate. The very foundation of interrogation moves. This is likely the most exciting time, intellectually speaking, for any wanker to be alive, the dawn of an Enlightenment that will make the previous one look as profound as a trip to Home Depot.

Gottschall, for instance, has an answer for one of the things that has consistently puzzled me about the fracas over my books. Why does fiction motivate so much moral defensiveness, the blithe willingness to pass summary judgment on the worth of an entire life in defence of a mere reading? According to Gottschall:

“Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.”

As I suggested not so long ago, we seem to understand this at some instinctive level. As Alan Dershowitz likes to say, everyone is censorious somehow. Who is saying what to whom is something that we are exquisitely sensitive to: We are literally hardwired to wage and win communicative warfare, and morality, it seems, is our principle battleground.

Again, Gottschall writes:

“Since fiction’s earliest beginnings, morally repulsive behavior has been a great staple of the stories we tell. From the sickening sexual violence of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” to the deranged sadism of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, to Oedipus stabbing his eyes out in disgust, to the horrors portrayed on TV shows like “Breaking Bad” and “CSI” — throughout time, the most popular stories have often featured the most unpleasant subject matter. Fiction’s obsession with filth and vice has led critics of different stripes to condemn plays, novels, comic books, and TV for corroding values and corrupting youth.”

Narratives make us nervous simply because they can be dangerous: Gottschall references, for instance, the way Birth of a Nation revived the KKK. But they also, he is quick to point out, tend to increase our overall capacity to empathize with others, and so reinforce what he calls “an ethic of decency that is deeper than politics.” The research he cites to support this case may seem impressive, but it’s important to realize that this is a nascent field, and that some warts are likely bound to come into focus sooner or later. One might ask, for instance, the degree to which that ability to empathize is group specific. Could it be that reading makes us more likely to demonize perceived outgroup competitors as well? (If anyone comes across any research along these lines be sure to pile in with links).

But what I find most interesting about the article is the pervasive role accorded to fantasy, not in the literary, but the cognitive sense. According to Gottschall, the vast majority of narratives not only depict morally structured worlds—ones where events mete out punishments and rewards according to the moral rectitude of the characters involved—they also tend to strengthen what some psychologists call the ‘just-world bias,’ the projection of one’s own moral scruples (particularly those involving victimization) onto the world…

Moral anthropomorphism.

And this, Gottschall argues, is a good thing. “[F]iction’s happy endings,” he writes, “seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.”

I have this running ‘You-know-the-Semantic-Apocalypse-is-beginning-when…’ list, and at the top are instances like these, discoveries of deceptions we depend on, not only for personal, mental-health reasons, but for our social cohesion as well. Narratives may delude us, Gottschall is saying, but they delude us in the best way possible.

The evopsych explanation of the survival value of narrative probably predates the field of evolutionary psychology: narratives affirm ingroup identity and reinforce prevailing social norms, thus providing what Gottschall calls the ‘social glue’ that enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. Perhaps, given the benefits of self-sacrifice and cooperation in times of scarcity, the promised ‘happy ending’ wasn’t nearly so far-fetched for our ancestors. Gottschall concludes his article with a study of his own, one suggesting that the traits most commonly associated with protagonists and antagonists line up rather neatly with the moral expectations of actual hunter-gathering peoples. Narratives, on this account, provide a collective counterweight to the cognitive conceits and vanities that serve to communicate our genes at the individual level.

But whatever the evolutionary fable, the connection between narrative and the fantastic, not to mention the antithesis posed by the scientific worldview, is out-and-out striking. Narrative, according to Gottschall’s ‘social simulator account,’ is an organ of our moral instincts, a powerful and pervasive way to organize the world into judgments of right and wrong, punishment and reward. Their very nature imposes a psychological structure onto the utterly indifferent world of science. The Whirlwind doesn’t give a damn, but we do. And, when it comes to the cosmos, it seems we would much rather be hated than go unnoticed.

This happens to be something I’ve pondered quite a bit over the years: the idea of using the assumptive truth of nihilism as an informal metric for distinguishing different varieties of fiction. (I self-consciously explore this in Light, Time, and Gravity, where the idea is to stretch story so tight over recalcitrant facts that the fabric rips and death shines through). On this ‘sliding semantic scale,’ fantasy would represent the ‘maxing out’ of meaning, where the world (setting) is intentional, events (plot) are intentional, and people (characters) are intentional. Drain intentionality out of the world, and you have the story-telling form we moderns are perhaps most familiar with, narratives with meaningful people doing meaningful things. Drain intentionality out of events, and you have something that most of us would recognize as ‘literary,’ those ‘slice of life’ stories that typically leave us feeling pompous, mortal, and bummed by the ending. Drain intentionality out of the characters—abandon morality and value altogether—and you have something no one has attempted (yet): Even the most radical post-modern narratives cowtow to meaning in the end, an incipient (and insipid) humanism that falls out of their commitment to transcendental speculation (post-structuralism, social constructivism, etc.).

A few weeks back I finished reading Luciano Floridi’s wonderfully written Philosophy of Information, and I’ve been surprised how the first two introductory chapters, which I blew through, have remained stuck in the craw of my imagination. (For those of you into the wank, I heartily recommend you give it a read, if only because of the inevitability of the ‘Informatic Turn.’ Just think: If you start now, you will never need to race to keep up! Even though it fairly bristles with brilliance, I personally found the book sad, largely because of the extreme lengths Floridi is forced to go in his attempt to defend a semantic account of information. At every turn, it seemed to me, the easiest thing to do would be to simply abandon the semantics and to just look at information in terms of systematic differences making systematic differences. The only reason I can say as much is simply because I think I might have found a means, not only of explaining semantics away, but of explaining why it seems impossible to circumvent—why, in other words, philosophers like Floridi have to heap rationalization upon ambiguity upon outright obscurity in order to accommodate it. I was hoping PI would show me a way out of the Void, and all I found was another indirect argument for it.)

For some reason, reading Gottschall reminded me of this particular passage from the opening chapter:

“From Descartes to Kant, epistemology can be seen as a branch of information theory. Ultimately, its task is decrypting and deciphering the world, god’s message. From Galileo to Newton, the task was made easier by a theological background against which the message is guaranteed to make sense, at least in principle. So, whatever made Descartes’s god increasingly frail and ultimately killed it … Nietzsche was right to mourn its disappearance. Contemporary philosophy is founded on that loss, and on the irreplaceable absence of the great programmer of the game of Being.” (20)

As crazy as it sounds, fantasy is also founded on that loss. With Descartes, remember, it is God that assures the integrity of nature’s message. The world is a kind of communication. Of course, everything will ‘make sense,’ or ‘turn out for the best,’ because we are living a kind of story, one where punishment and reward will be dispensed according to the villainy or heroism or our role. The death of God, Nietzsche points out, forces us to abandon all such assurances, to acknowledge that the world makes no narrative, or moral, sense whatsoever.

And that those who insist that it does are probably living in a fantasy world…

Telling the tallest of tales.

Snowballing Ignorance

Aphorism of the Day:

“Sceptics are philanthropic and wish to cure by argument, as far as they can, the conceit and rashness of the Dogmatists.”

– Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism

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Roger here again.  This is going to be my final post as a guest-blogger for a while.  I’ll still check in when I can, but I simply have too many demands on my time to keep up with the go-go blogging lifestyle.

In parting, I’ve written a pretty thorough — and no doubt thoroughly exhausting — response to Vox Day’s multi-part ‘dissection‘ of my two posts on ancient skepticism.  I apologize in advance.

“Why bother?” is an entirely understandable question.  I could dress it up any number of ways, but given that I have zero expectation of actually making any dialogic progress with Vox or his partisans, it comes down to vanity.

So here it is: my vanity post.

I’ll do my best to keep up with any comments, and I hope to return as a guest-blogger soon.

P.S.:  My wife and I went to see The Avengers tonight.  How awesome is that movie?!  It was especially sweet for old Buffy/Angel fans like us.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics I”

It seems to me that textual criticism can be charted along two axes: the axis of charitability (of the reading) and the axis of depth (of the criticism).  It is easy to know what to do with criticisms that place high on the charitable-reading axis: if they are shallow, you answer the criticism while filling in what the critic has overlooked or misunderstood; if they are deep, you ponder the criticisms for as long as it takes to come to grips with them.  But when criticisms, whether deep or shallow, score low on the charitable-reading axis, it’s difficult to know what to do with them.  In the case of deep-but-uncharitable criticisms, it’s often the case, it seems to me, that you’re not really dealing with ‘criticism’ at all, properly speaking, but rather with an articulation of views held by the critic that are only tangentially related—if they’re related at all—to the text ostensibly being criticized.

In the case of shallow-and-uncharitable criticisms, it’s generally best simply to ignore them, for the following two related reasons: (1) if the critic read your initial text uncharitably, then (ceteris paribus) you have no reason to expect him to read your responses charitably; (2) given that they are based on an uncharitable reading of the text, the criticisms are likely to betray such deep misunderstandings of the text as to require a great deal of work to reach the point at which you and the shallow-and-uncharitable critic are on the same page (and are thus able to avoid talking past each other)—and given (1), you have no reason to expect that your work will be rewarded.

I have done my best to give Vox’s ‘dissection’ of my two posts on ancient skepticism a charitable reading.  He doesn’t make it easy, given how frequently his ‘logical dissection’ is interrupted by personal insults—all directed at me, of course.  But again, I have done my best.  My conclusion is that, if we put aside all the posturing and name-calling, Vox’s response to my posts are (through no fault of his own) shallow and (very much through a fault of his own) uncharitable.

Let me say a few words on what I mean by ‘charitable.’  The so-called ‘principle of charity’ is a basic hermeneutic principle according to which it is incumbent upon (honest, bipartisan, truth-seeking) critics of texts both (a) to give that text the fairest reading possible and (b) to develop the most sympathetic interpretation of the texts they can.  It should be evident why the principle of charity is a hermeneutic virtue.  Most obviously, it conduces to fruitful debate by avoiding straw-man arguments.  Less obviously, perhaps, it contributes to the development of deep criticisms as opposed to shallow ones.

It seems to me that Vox is pretty upfront about his uncharitable approach to my texts.  He starts out “Dissecting the Skeptics I” by writing, “I’ve been asked in the past to explain how go [sic] about breaking down and critically analyzing an argument and how I am able to so readily spot the flaws it contains… [Delavagus’s] two posts on ancient scepticism will serve as an ideal specimen for this example.”  Now, of course you could argue that, having already read the posts charitably, Vox is able to identify them as “ideal specimen[s].”  But (a) it is clear from the context in which Vox was directed to the posts that he approached them with an uncharitable attitude (I cannot possibly dredge up the evidence here—I’m simply airing my opinion of the matter; you are free to see for yourself, if you care to); and (b) the ‘dissections’ themselves offer ample evidence of uncharitable readings and scant to no evidence of charitable readings.  (For example, he starts out with this: “And since he’s an academic of sorts, we know to look for the word games, in particular the definitional bait-and-switch of which they are so very fond. At this point, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I smell a rat, only that I believe there is a high probability that a rat or two will soon present itself.”  The thing about these sorts of interpretive preconceptions is that they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies.)

Most obviously, Vox immediately slaps the label ‘Error!’ on what a charitable critic would formulate as a question or as a remark on a passage’s lack of clarity.  In other words, where a charitable critic would say something like, “It isn’t clear to me why the author has chosen this particular definition of knowledge,” Vox instead declares, “Error!”

The uncharitability of the reading goes so deep and is so pervasive that I’m left at a loss to pick out particular examples, since essentially every sentence of every post is an example.  But I’ll make one more general remark: Vox says, in post 1, that he always asks himself four questions when faced with a text.  It’s striking that the most obvious candidates are nowhere to be found in his list.  Among the things any reader should ask themselves when faced with a text (at least if they intend to criticize the text) are: (1) For what purpose was this written?  (Note that this is a charitable question as opposed to Vox’s fourth, uncharitable variant: “What is the author trying to prove?”)  (2) Who is the intended audience for this text?  (3) What are the author’s goals?  And so on.

I like to think that, had Vox asked himself these questions, he would not have been led to write some of the things he wrote in his first post.  For example, take question (1): the purpose of my two posts on ancient skepticism were to give a brief, thumbnail sketch of a much larger topic.  Question (2): these posts are clearly intended for a general audience; thus, they’re intended to be generally accessible (i.e., not weighed down with too much detail or too many technicalities).  In several places throughout his ‘dissections,’ Vox levels complaints along the lines of: “Delavagus failed fully to address problem x or y, which he himself admits are clearly relevant to the points he wants to make.”  I grant the charge, but dispute its relevancy.  (And, contra Vox, the fact that I point out issues that I fail to address seems to me to suggest intellectual honesty rather than dishonesty on my part!)  A charitable reader—or simply a good reader of texts—would have known from the start that I was not attempting to deal comprehensively with any of the numerous topics I bring up.  It seems that nothing short of an entire scholarly, footnoted tome on the subject would satisfy Vox (though of course it wouldn’t satisfy him, since he’d read the book uncharitably!).  To label as ‘Errors’ what are nothing more than unavoidable internal constraints of the texts themselves (i.e., constraints arising from the posts’ purpose, scope, goals, etc.) indicates nothing but Vox’s inability to recognize or accept the texts for what they are.

Here’s an example.  One of the errors Vox charges me with under the heading First Error (he lumps two separate charges together) is the following: I make “irrelevant musings on what would fascinate Sextus and an unjustified belief claim concerning how Sextus would have made use of modern scientific evidence.”  From this, he concludes that I am “not a rigorous thinker and… [am] liable to going off on irrelevant tangents and making groundless assertions concerning things [I] can’t possibly know.”

But any competent reader should see what I was attempting to do with my introductory remarks.  Noting that I somehow failed in my intention would be fine; but the intention itself is surely plain as day (so to speak).  I start out by saying, “In this post, I’d like to discuss one of Scott’s favorite themes—human stupidity—in relation to Pyrrhonism.  Scott focuses, and for good reason, on the growing scientific (that is, empirical) evidence to the effect that humans are stupid, stupid creatures…  However, Sextus did not think that we require empirical evidence in order to arrive at the conclusion that we’re all idiots.  That conclusion, he thought, can be arrived at purely a priori, that is, while lounging in our armchairs and merely thinking through our knowing.”

It’s obvious what I’m trying to do, yes?  I’m trying to segue, in my first post as a guest-blogger on the Three Pound Brain, from topics typical of the Three Pound Brain (cognitive psych, neuroscience) to the more abstract philosophical musings of my post by suggesting a connection between the two.  That connection takes the form of my claim that Sextus Empiricus, the ancient Pyrrhonian, utilized both empirical and a priori arguments as part of his skeptical dialectic.  Scott talks a lot about the empirical side, whereas I want to discuss the a priori, philosophical side.  Again, this all seems like something any reader should pick up on.  But apparently Vox missed it.

Now, as we’ve seen, Vox charges me with making an “unjustified belief claim concerning how Sextus would have made use of modern scientific evidence.”  But this is what I actually wrote: “Sextus Empiricus himself based many of his arguments on empirical evidence.  Though, of course, his ‘evidence’ was not the sort of thing that would pass muster in a modern scientific context, I believe there’s every reason to think that, were he alive today, Sextus would be at least as fascinated by the growing body of evidence concerning human cognitive shortcomings as Scott is—and moreover, there’s every reason to think that he would have made potent use of this evidence in his skeptical dialectic.”

It’s telling, and indicative of Vox’s uncharitable reading, that he reads right past the two instances of “there’s every reason to think” in my passage.  It honestly boggles my mind to think that a competent reader would call foul—let alone ‘Error!’ (what kind of error, anyway? logical? factual?)—on speculative claims like, “If x were alive today, he’d probably y.”  This is a common enough, and perfectly harmless, thought-experiment.  Any half-intelligent (or halfway-charitable) reader ought to know what I’m saying, namely, “Since Sextus made use of the empirical evidence that was available to him, were ‘he’ alive today (‘he’ meaning: a contemporary analogue to Sextus, i.e., a person alive today writing with the same goals, philosophical outlook, and methodology as Sextus) would no doubt also make use of what empirical evidence is now available.”  Is this really so hard to understand?  Is this really an ‘error’?  Not in any meaningful sense.

The second half of the First Error is this: “a questionable word game being played with ‘evidence.’”  What does this refer to?  The following passage: “Sextus Empiricus himself based many of his arguments on empirical evidence. Though, of course, his ‘evidence’ was not the sort of thing that would pass muster in a modern scientific context.”  What is ‘questionable’ about this?  By putting the second instance of ‘evidence’ in scare-quotes, I’m signaling that it would not pass muster in a modern scientific context.  This is true.  Science has advanced considerably since the second-century; for this reason, modern readers are not likely to consider Sextus’s ‘evidence’ to be genuine evidence.  This is not hard to understand.

The Second Error Vox identifies concerns my use of ‘justified true belief’ as an analysis of knowledge.  The oddity of labeling this an ‘error’ is so startling I’m not even sure what to say about it.  I’ve already explained elsewhere to Vox the wrong-headedness of appealing to the dictionary as a final word on the matter even in ordinary contexts, let alone in philosophical contexts.  As far as I’ve seen, Vox has not responded to these remarks.  I will not repeat them here.  Suffice it to say that ‘justified true belief’ is the standard philosophical analysis of knowledge.  It is not intended to capture everyday usage of variants of ‘to know,’ and thus pointing out that it fails to do so is not a criticism.  This is such an elementary point that, again, I’m not sure what to say about it.  I can only marvel at Vox’s shallowness.

Now, Vox seems to think that the proffered philosophical analysis is just one more definition, on a par with the nine he pulls from whatever dictionary he consults.  But that is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature and purpose of a philosophical analysis of a concept.  In short, the idea behind the ‘justified true belief’ formulation (as I say in my first post) is that there are, on the one hand, beliefs, while on the other hand there is the truth.  A certain kind of person—most of us, I would hope—ideally want our beliefs to be true, that is, we want to believe true things.  We have this word, knowledge, that is generally (my God, I said ‘generally’! ‘error’! ‘error’!) taken as a contrast to belief, in the sense that ‘knowledge’ differs from (mere) belief in also being true.  This is backed up by most of the definitions Vox trots out: knowledge has to do with ‘facts’ and ‘truths.’  The question, then, is how we can bridge the prima facie gap between ‘belief’ and ‘truth.’  We do so, philosophy has long maintained, by way of justification.  Hence, ‘justified true belief’ is an analysis of the concept of knowledge, not a definition of the use of the word.

A brief comment on ‘generally.’  I wrote: “Knowledge is generally taken to be justified true belief.”  Vox claims: “Weasel words such as ‘generally’, ‘basically’, and ‘pretty much’ are always red flags, particularly when they precede something as important as the definition of an argument’s foundation or central subject.”  This is such a bizarre criticism that it boggles the mind.  ‘Generally’ is not (or needn’t be) a ‘weasel’ word; it is simply a qualifier.  It appears all the time in scholarly literature, or anything written by people who are actually conversant with the welter of views on a complex subject.  When it comes to something like the proper analysis of ‘knowledge,’ it is to be expected that not all philosophers agree.  In other words, it is to be expected that any analysis is, at best, only ‘generally’ accepted.

Vox concludes: “As should be clear, Delavagus’s definition of knowledge isn’t a valid one in common usage, but instead represents a different concept altogether. His statement is provably incorrect, as knowledge is quite clearly NOT ‘generally taken to be justified true belief’.”

To sum up: Vox mistakes a philosophical analysis of a concept for a definition of the everyday usage of a word.  Now, of course, I could have been clearer.  I could have said, “Knowledge is generally taken by philosophers to be ‘justified true belief.’”  But this admission merely underscores the shallowness of the criticism.  Vox’s remark here also demonstrates clearly his arrogant uncharitability.

Earlier today I was reading Luciano Floridi’s brilliant article “The Problem of the Justification of a Theory of Knowledge, Part I: Some Historical Metamorphoses.”  I came across the following passage: “… it is generally recognized that neither Plato… nor Aristotle were very concerned with sceptical problems.  Even when Plato and Aristotle can be seen to be interested in proto-sceptical questions, the latter are generally to be characterized as objections on the nature of knowledge rather than objections on the nature of epistemology…” (209).  Floridi attached a footnote to the second instance of ‘generally.’  That footnote reads: “I say ‘generally’ because it has seemed possible to recognize in Meno’s paradox a methodological interested by Plato…  But I shall disregard such as an issue in this context.”

Vox, apparently, would call ‘Error!’ on Luciano Floridi.  Again, the shallowness of Vox’s criticism is incredible.  I won’t even bother to comment on his ‘criticism’ of my footnote regarding Gettier.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics II”

Vox’s either inept (or intentionally tendentious) interpretive skills are put on display again.  He claims: “Delavagus even goes so far as admitting he has ‘no way to establish the truth/justification of a putative criterion of truth/justification’.”  What I actually wrote, however, was: “… without an already-established criterion of truth/justification, we have no way to establish the truth/justification of a putative criterion of truth/justification.”

In other words, Vox turns what is an articulation of the problem into a claim in my own voice.  This is just sloppy reading.

The Fourth Error.  I wrote, “But even if we bracket out the problem of the criterion, our difficulties are hardly over.  For the sake of argument, let’s all agree to construe justification in purely rationalistic terms. Let us, in other words, agree to seek justification solely on the basis of the autonomous exercise of our capacity to reason. (Let us, that is, become philosophers.)”  Vox labels this an error because “[i]nstead of giving up the philosophical definition of knowledge as intrinsically worthless due to what he has admitted is the impossibility of providing any established justifications for true beliefs, Delavagus simply waves his hand again and attempts to leap over the bottomless pit of the epistemic abyss by asking the reader to agree to pretend the problem of the criterion does not exist.”

Again, this interpretation of what I said is so bizarre as to beggar the understanding.  Notice how Vox has leveraged the misreading I pointed out at the start of this section: I did not “[admit] the impossibility of providing any established justifications of true beliefs.”  Rather, the passage cited was an articulation of the skeptical challenge.  This illustrates the more general fact that Vox’s misinterpretations have now begun to snowball, making it more and more difficult to push them aside.  We saw above that Vox fails to understand the difference between a philosophical analysis of a concept and a definition of the usage of a word.  I suggested that he saw the philosophical analysis as just one more definition to be added to the list.  Therefore, he thinks that we can just abandon the analysis in favor of one of the other definitions.  But this is a simple category mistake.  Above, I said a little about the motivation behind the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief.  It should be clear that none of the dictionary definitions of knowledge address what is at issue in the analysis.  They are not the right sort of thing; it is not their purpose.  (Vox also overlooks, in this connection, the fact that I do consider a number of other ways of analyzing knowledge.)

As for the charge of ‘hand-waving,’ it seems as though Vox is fond of leveling this criticism against people, but there’s no grounds for it here.  It is a common procedure—notably so in Sextus himself!—to grant something in order to show that even if we do so, the problem persists.  The expression ‘for the sake of argument’ is so common, and so understandable, that it’s frankly bizarre for Vox to label my use of it an ‘Error.’  Moreover, I would think any intelligent, alert reader would see what I’m doing by granting that rationality is the path to knowledge: I’m explicitly locating the rest of the discussion at a philosophical level.  The fact is, most philosophers simply fail to recognize that the initial problem I point out—that is, the problem of establishing that rationality is the path to knowledge—is even a problem.  They simply take it for granted.  So what I’m doing in this passage is (a) pinpointing a problem so fundamental, so ‘under the radar,’ that it is usually overlooked, and (b) reorienting the argument in such a way that even if we give philosophers what they want, they’re still not out of the woods.

Where is the ‘error’ here?  Again, I could have been clearer on all of this.  But I doubt that many intelligent readers would get tripped up the way Vox repeatedly does.  The key is to try to understand the text.  As far as I can see, all Vox is doing is trying to pick the text apart, not in order to understand it, but to leave it in tatters.  Unfortunately for him—and fortunately for the rest of us—you have to understand a text before you can successfully pick it apart.

Fifth Error.  Vox claims that there are three errors in the claim “wherein [I state] that ‘If a claim to knowledge cannot be justified, then the claimant is rationally constrained to withdraw it’.”  The ‘three problems’ are as follows:

1.  “As it stands, (3) is nothing more than an appeal to authority of the sort that Delavagus has already ruled out of bounds.”

This criticism is, once again, utterly bizarre.  Let’s look at what I actually wrote: “Ancient skeptics suggested the following as non-tendentious rational constraints…  (3) If a claim to knowledge cannot be justified, then the claimant is rationally constrained to withdraw it (at least qua knowledge-claim).”

So Vox’s mistakes include (a) attributing this statement to me personally, when instead I present it as a view of the ancient skeptics, and (b) it is not an ‘appeal to authority’ either way, since, as I wrote, the ancient skeptics viewed all three of these constraints as “non-tendentious,” that is, noncontroversial constraints that dogmatists themselves are bound to endorse.  So it would be one thing had Vox challenged the constraint, i.e., if he had argued that it is tendentious.  But he doesn’t do that.  Even if he had, that would only be a mark against the ancient skeptics, not an ‘error’ committed by me.  At most, it would be a misreading of the ancient skeptics on my part, but he has hardly shown that.  In fact, he has not provided any reason whatsoever for rejecting (3), as we’ll see.

2.  “Second, it is a circular statement, as how can a constraint intended to mark the limits between the rational and the irrational be itself dependent upon a rational constrainment?”

Vox has not shown that the statement is circular.  The constraints come down to this: “If you say you know something, then you open yourself up to being asking how you know.  If you can’t say how you know, then you don’t know, you only believe.  Therefore, you should give up your claim to knowledge.”  What is circular about this?  Furthermore, the idea of using rationality to “mark the limits between the rational and irrational” is common in philosophy.  Now, of course Vox could argue that it’s incoherent in some way, but he hasn’t done that.  On the face of it, it’s perfectly possible.  Vox himself seems to think that he’s an ultimately authority on what is and is not rational!  He draws the limit himself, constantly!

3.  “Third, since Delavagus has permitted himself to simply ‘bracket out the problem of the criterion’, he has no ability to assert that anyone with a claim to knowledge that cannot be justified cannot do exactly the same in refusing to withdraw that claim. The statement isn’t necessarily untrue, but it is both questionable and unjustified.”

This overlooks the point that these constraints are rational.  They are supposed to embody non-tendentious views on what separates rational (epistemically responsible) from irrational (epistemically irresponsible) knowledge-claims.  Of course someone can refuse to withdraw their claim despite their inability to justify it (it happens all the time!).  And of course they can even go on thinking themselves perfectly rational (Vox is a great example of this!).  But given these constraints, that person would nonetheless be failing to be epistemically responsible, i.e., failing to live up to the standards of rationality.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics III”

Sixth Error.  My sixth error, according to Vox, is in failing to acknowledge that externalist theories of knowledge answer the skeptical trilemma.  I readily admit that I could have been much clearer on this point.  Indeed, I could have written an entire post (to say nothing of an entire scholarly article) on just this one point.  So Vox is right to have questions about my position.  He is right to be unsure about what I’m saying, whether I’m right, and so on.  But notice that he does not have questions; he is not unsure.  No, he hits me with another ‘Error!’

Quoth Vox: “Remember, the original question which Delavagus intended to answer was this: ‘What, if anything, do we know?’ So, if an individual possesses knowledge, defined as justified true belief, then reason dictates he possesses it regardless of whether he happens to be aware of the validity of the justification for his true belief or not. What do we know? Those true beliefs that are justified, whether we know they are justified or not.”

Vox is right that this is the externalist position.  And it’s right to say that I could have been clearer on this point.  But an intelligent reader should have had little trouble understanding the view.  Vox, clearly, does not understand.

Recall the three constraints on rational justification discussed above.  They are:

(1) If a person claims to know something, then that person opens herself up to the standing possibility of being asked how she knows, i.e., to being asked for the justification of her belief.

(2)  Successful justification cannot fall prey to the Agrippan trilemma.

(3)  If a claim to knowledge cannot be justified, then the claimant is rationally constrained to withdraw it (at least qua knowledge-claim).

It is clear that, within this framework, the externalist position simply fails to answer the challenge.  An obvious consequence of the elaboration of these rational constraints on justification is that the question “What, if anything, do we know?” comes down to the question “What, if anything, do we know that we know?”  On this view—one I endorse, and one which Vox has not addressed at all—philosophical knowledge is staunchly internalist.  Per (1), if a person claims to know something, then she must be prepared to explain how she knows.  Per (3), if she can’t, then she must withdraw her knowledge-claim.  Per (2), she’s going to have a helluva time justifying her knowledge-claim.

Within this framework, what the externalist position comes down to is: “Subject S can be said to know p on the basis of q even if S is not aware that she knows p or that q justifies p.”  Fine!  That’s great.  As I say in the original post: I accept that, Sextus accepts that, no problem!  But it doesn’t answer the challenge, for if S cannot produce a justification for p, then she must withdraw her claim to know p.  It might well be that she had never before thought about p in epistemic terms; but once the challenge is put to her, the idea here is that rationality requires that she produce a justification… or withdraw the claim qua knowledge-claim.

The Seventh Objection simply reiterates the sixth, as far as I can see.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics IV”

It seems to me that this post consists of (a) reiterations of misunderstandings of Vox’s that I’ve already addressed above, and (b) name-calling and baseless accusations.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics V”

In this post, Vox trots out his reading of the Pyrrhonian way of life: “The philosophy cannot be impractical because the skeptic maintains a firewall of sorts between his reason and his daily life.”

This is an understandable first impression of the passage he cites, but this interpretation is almost certainly false.  It’s actually closer to my view than most.  The standard reading rejects this sort of interpretation outright.  Vox, read some Myles Burnyeat or Gisela Striker if you actually want to understand what you’re talking about.

Now, Vox claims that Sextus’s argument against self-refutation fails for three reasons:

1.  “First, Sextus erroneously conflates the subset of his particular philosophy with the set of all philosophico-rational thought; because we can observe there is philosophico-rational thought that is not Pyrrhonian skepticism, all refutation of the latter cannot automatically be taken as any refutation of the former.”

2.  “Second, even if Sextus were correct and charging the skeptic with self-refutation actually did amount to charging philosophico-rational thought as such with self-refutation, that doesn’t change the fact that if the charge is substantiated and all philosophico-rational thought is, in fact, self-refuting, then the charge of peritrope against Scepticism must also be correct! If the set is refuted, then the subset is refuted as well. So, it’s not a valid defense against the charge.”

3.  “Third, Delavagus doesn’t realize that the intended target of Pyrrhonian skepticism is irrelevant with regards to its self-refuting nature; it doesn’t matter what Sextus is intending to target when it can be shown that the same arguments can be used just as effectively against his own clearly stated aims.”

All of these points are wrong—though Vox’s arguments are understandable, given a superficial reading and a limited understanding of the text.  I want to emphasize again that if Vox wasn’t such an arrogant ass, I would welcome these sorts of questions.  I like teaching this stuff.  But Vox isn’t interested in learning anything.  Oh no.  He’s only interested in being right.

I’ve already responded to these arguments here.  [http://voxday.blogspot.com/2012/04/ma...]  Thus, I’m going to respond to Vox’s response to my response.

Regarding (1), I argue that Pyrrhonism is best seen as a metaphilosophy—a philosophy about philosophizing—rather than as a philosophy.  Vox responds: “even if we accept his contention that Pyrrhonism is not a philosophy, it still specifically purports to be rational thought.”  Yes.  But apparently Vox doesn’t understand the conception of ‘meta,’ nor the concept of ‘ad hominem’ argumentation (in the ancient style).  The Pyrrhonian takes up the second-order rational principles of the dogmatists and shows that, given those principles, we’re led to suspension of judgment.  It is immanent critique, but it operates at a metaepistemological level.  I see no evidence that Vox comprehends what this means.

He then says: “Delavagus’s view that Pyrrhonism is not a philosophy is provably wrong.”  This is understandable, given a superficial familiarity with the ancient texts.  Yes, Sextus introduces Pyrrhonism as a ‘philosophy,’ but (a) he clearly distinguishes it from other philosophies (in a significant early passage of the Outlines, he refers to “what they call philosophy,” ‘they’ being the dogmatists, suggesting that Pyrrhonism is not a philosophy in the way that dogmatic philosophies are), and (b) in claiming to Pyrrhonism is best understood as a metaphilosophy, I’m using modern conceptions.  ‘Philosophy’ had a much broader meaning in the Hellenistic world than it does now.  Given what we understand by ‘philosophy,’ Pyrrhonism doesn’t really qualify, since it always adopts a second-order, ‘meta’ position vis-à-vis whatever dogmatism it is engaging.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics VI”

Vox calls me on my description of the Pyrrhonian method as ad hominem, in the sense of utilizing the beliefs, convictions, etc., of one’s interlocutors.  It’s entirely right to pinpoint this as a topic deserving of elaboration.  But again, instead Vox hits me with an ‘Error.’  (I’m assuming this is Error Eight; I don’t see an eighth error singled out anywhere.)

It can seem that the ad hominem approach flies in the face of the equipollence method, according to which skeptics oppose dogma to dogma.  After all, surely then we’re dealing with two different dogmatists with two different sets of beliefs, convictions, etc.  So how can we be said to make arguments on the basis of premises, etc., which both parties agree to?  This is a good question.  But it has an obvious answer, one that is explicitly brought up in the paragraph under discussion.

I write: “At their most abstract… Pyrrhonian arguments depend only on our most abstract rational commitments. The Five Agrippan Modes… are merely a handy formulation by skeptics of the rational commitments of non-skeptics (‘dogmatists,’ in Sextus’s sense). For those who accept their constraints, the Five Modes constitute part of the framework of any search for the truth.”

The claim, then, is that equipollence arguments are set up on the basis of abstract rational commitments shared by both parties to the dispute.  Notice that the competing dogmas Sextus considers are all philosophical.  The idea is that, at their most abstract, Pyrrhonian arguments trade only on those rational commitments that structure any search for truth, that is, that structure all philosophical inquiries.

Then we have some more examples of really terrible textual interpretation.  Vox writes: “Delavagus then goes on to assert because the skeptic adopts the rational commitments of the philosophical dogmatist, ‘the self-refutatory character of skepticism demonstrates the self-refutatory character of all philosophizing done under the aegis of the rational commitments that give rise to the skeptical conclusion.’ First, note that this is an admission that the skeptic has no commitment to rational thought.”

The conclusion Vox draws from the passage he quotes from me simply does not follow, for nowhere is it claimed that “the rational commitments that give rise to the skeptical conclusion” are the only rational commitments available to us, that they are the locus of ‘rational thought’ as such.  Vox seems, dimly, to be picking up on the dialectic working in the background (and later the foreground) of my posts: the undermining of philosophy from within and the reconception of our shared human epistemic situation.  Yes, the mature Pyrrhonian, as Vox says, “has no commitment to rational thought,” but only when “rational thought” is construed in purely philosophical terms.  He seems to have missed the moral of the story, namely, that the failure of philosophy reveals to the mature Pyrrhonian the pragmatic-transcendental character of common life.  (As far as I can see, Vox has no idea what this means.  Nor does he care to know.)

The rest of the problems he cites here are just artifacts of previous misunderstandings, snowballing ignorance.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics VII”

I found nothing of substance worth discussing in this post.  Vox’s remarks display a complete lack of understanding of the view he is so quick to dismiss.

Dissecting “Dissecting the Skeptics VIII”

Ninth Error.  I’ve misrepresented Pyrrhonism by claiming that Pyrrhonians will believe all sorts of things in an everyday way, and that they will claim to know all sorts of things in an everyday way.  He writes: “Either Delavagus truly does not understand Pyrrhonian skepticism on a fundamental level or he is blatantly misrepresenting it in order to provide a false foundation for his own dogmatic opinions.”

Simply put, there is no question whatsoever that throughout his texts Sextus claims to ‘champion common life.’  Vox himself, above, claimed that: “The philosophy cannot be impractical because the skeptic maintains a firewall of sorts between his reason and his daily life.”  I think this is wrong—what would it mean to have a ‘firewall’ between ‘reason’ and ‘daily life,’ given that ‘daily life’ involves the use of ‘reason’?—but it gestures precisely in the direction that Vox is now saying is clearly false of Pyrrhonians.  Vox himself quotes the chapter of the Outlines entitled “Do Skeptics hold beliefs?”  It is clear that Sextus’s answer to this question is yes.  The only dispute is over what this ‘yes’ amounts to.  Interpreters from Hegel down to Myles Burnyeat have argued that the ‘belief’ in question is not genuine belief, whereas others, from Montaigne to Kant down to Michael Frede, have argued otherwise.

Consider the following quotes from Sextus:

(1)  “We accept, from an everyday point of view, that piety is good and impiety bad” (PH 1.24).  By ‘everyday point of view,’ Sextus is clear that he means “without holding opinions [adoxastōs]” (PH 1.23).  Adoxastōs is a very difficult term to interpret, but I maintain that it ought to understood as meaning ‘without holding dogmata.’

(2)  “Following ordinary life without opinions [adoxastōs], we say that there are gods and we are pious towards the gods and say that they are provident” (PH §3.2).

It is only “against the rashness of the Dogmatists” that Sextus brings his skeptical dialectic to bear against belief in the gods (PH §3.2).  What does the skeptical dialectic demonstrate?  It demonstrates that belief in the gods is not, by the dogmatist’s own lights, philosophically justified.  “The existence of the gods… is neither clear in itself [i.e., self-evident] nor proved by something else” (PH §§3.8–9).  Then how can Pyrrhonians claim to believe in the gods?  They can do so undogmatically, that is, without the added belief that their belief in the gods enjoys objective, philosophical justification.

Tenth Error.  According to Vox, I’ve misrepresented Pyrrhonism by claiming that the Pyrrhonian agōgē (the life adoxastōs) involves adopting a new sort of attitude toward ourselves, one purified of dogmatism.  Why is this an ‘error’?  Because, Vox claims: “The entire purpose of Pyrrhonian scepticism is to rob us of our judgment, to suspend it, in the interest of our tranquility.”  Note, first, that I made no mention of tranquility (ataraxia) in my posts.  I never claimed, nor would any good reader suppose that I had intended, to provide a complete interpretation of Pyrrhonism.  I left out ataraxia even though it is obviously central to any complete account of Pyrrhonism.  But given that I did not mention it, Vox is bound by the principle of charity to interpret my claims about Pyrrhonism as claims that are separable from claims about ataraxia.  He has failed in that.  Moreover, all he’s done is present his own, flat-footed reading of the texts in opposition to my more nuanced account.

In other words, Vox wants to trade on appeals to his reading of the ancient texts as clearly correct.  But notice that my posts were not intended as textual exegesis.  Simply put, Vox has no idea how I correlate my reading with the ancient texts.  Moreover, it is clear, given the decidedly ‘modern’ cast of the discussion, that I was stating a Pyrrhonian view in largely contemporary terms.

If Vox was actually interested in understanding the view he is so quick to dismiss, then he would have had questions, not condemnations.

He would expressed doubts, not dogmatism.

The ‘Me-me!’ Meme

Aphorism of the Day: If we don’t move, it’s because we remain motionless relative to ourselves.

So I’ve been as busy as all hell, the past couple of weeks, what with my pop in the hospital, family visiting, and staying on top of my writing schedule—not to mention trying to keep up with all the activity on the blogosphere.

Vox, it appears, has decided to wage a war of attrition, to keep throwing his cherries until people turn their bowls upside down. I’ve decided to oblige him. But since it stings my vanity knowing the self-aggrandizing way he’ll inevitably spin this, I figured I had better lay out some reasons, as well as discharge an old promise I made regarding the uses of abuses of arguing ad hominem.

Vox literally believes, if you recall, that he really is the winner of the Magical Belief Lottery. You might be inclined, on a occasion, to think that he is simply having one on, but I assure you, when he says things like, “Of course, I am a superintelligence, so the fact that [delevagus] been studying it for years whereas I read Sextus once on an airplane meant that it really wasn’t a fair contest,” he genuinely means it.

At this point, I’m inclined to simply take him as ‘Exhibit A’ of human irrationality. Some, in the jungle that has overrun the comment thread on the previous post, have suggested that I’m ‘running scared’ and the fact is, I am. But from what he represents, not what he ‘argues.’ Vox is what you might call an ‘epistemic bombast’–self-described. He literally believes he has the most powerful three pound brain in the universe. That, in my books, counts as delusional.

One thing I was always big on in my teaching days was what I called the ‘minimum condition of rationality.’ Once you realize that reason is primarily argumentative, as opposed to epistemic, you realize that reason is just as liable to deceive as to reveal. So the question you always need to ask yourself in any debate is whether you are the victim of your own ingenuity. You are more apt to use you intelligence to justify your stupidity post hoc—to rationalize—than otherwise. And that’s a fact Jack.

Thus the crucial importance of epistemic humility. Rational debate is impossible with epistemic bombasts simply because, as more and more research shows, reason is primarily a public relations device, a way to snag other three pound brains, and only secondarily epistemic, a way to snag the world. It is quite literally impossible to convince an epistemic bombast of anything on theoretical subject matters lacking any clear, consensually defined truth conditions.

This is why some cognitive psychologists are now arguing that rationality is quite independent of intelligence.

So what then is the measure of epistemic humility? How can you tell whether you should trust yourself, let alone your interlocutor?

Well some interlocutors, like Vox, make things easy for you. Vox is a self-declared epistemic bombast. As such, given that you accept that science is the best tool we have ever devised for sorting—even if only contingently—fact from fiction, you can write him off as a serious interlocutor.

In other words, you can safely dismiss him on ad hominem grounds.

Other interlocutors are nowhere so easy. One of the things I was hoping to spark with this post is a discussion of the kinds of criteria that could be used to make this determination.

Or how about yourself—or in my case, myself? How can we know whether we’ve lapsed into the epistemic bombast mould, especially knowing that we have a hardwired predilection to do so?

In my case, the fact that I genuinely struggle with this question gives me some hope. As deflationary (minimal) as my position is (at least in terms of exclusive epistemic commitments), I have never in my life consistently believed anything for such a long time. I know the way the brain works, how repeated functions get stamped into its very architecture—and how this architecture is the very frame of reference for what does and does not make sense.

I try to restrict myself to platitudes, like the fact that not all claims are equal, or the fact that science is easily the most transformative claim-making institution in human history. Like the social constructivists, Vox seems to think that commitment to a philosophical theory of ‘What Science Is’ warrants suspending commitment to What Science Does (provide us with facts about nature). For my part, I have no definitive idea What Science Is, but I am deeply impressed by what it makes possible—like for instance, the semiconductor technology that allows you to read this at all.

Now the retreat to platitudes is not without its perils, simply because these could be wrong as well. I’ve probably been accused of being ‘dogmatic about science’ as much as anything else over the years. But for the life of me, I can’t think of any theoretical claim-making institution with a track record even remotely resembling that of science. It really seems to be the case that nothing compares.

Given science, you actually have a very powerful standard for sorting interlocutors according to rationality. As soon as your interlocutor starts telling you What Science Is, you should smell a cognitive rat. Why? Because odds are they have some set of philosophical or religious claims that are incompatible with scientific fact. In other words, they find themselves in the embarrassing position of having to discredit the most powerful claim-making institution in human history to make their own claims stick.

The argument tends to take a similar form:

Armchair claim (1): Science is A.

Armchair claim (2): A is a social construct, philosophically derivative, or epistemically overblown, etc.

Therefore, armchair conclusion (3): Scientific claims (or a particular set of them) should not be believed.

In other words, even though scientific claims have transformed the world, even though they seem to possess every theoretical virtue we know of (short of flattering our parochial preconceptions), we should suspend our commitment to them on the basis of a prior commitment to one out of hundreds of armchair claims regarding What Science Is—which, by some happy coincidence, happens to flatter this or that parochial preconception.

Pardon me for suggesting this is just more self-serving bullshit. Rationalization. Like I’ve said many times before, it seems awfully like convicting Mother Theresa on Ted Bundy’s testimony.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be critical of science. My own worry is that it is too powerful of an institutional tool for a species as vain and blinkered as ourselves. And there’s no shortage of bad science, simply because scientists belong to the same vain and blinkered species. Nevertheless, when it comes to the provision of reliable, comprehensive, actionable information regarding nature, it is literally the only game in town. When an interlocutor thinks their wank trumps scientific fact, there’s a good chance you’re locking horns with an epistemic bombast.

In other words, epistemic humility entails demuring to scientific fact, especially when you find it inconvenient.

Where science doesn’t have anything to say, I try to avoid exclusive epistemic commitments as much as I can, and always try to remind myself to entertain theoretical positions, not believe them. I’m skeptical of governments to the degree I’m skeptical of centralized answers to supercomplicated social problems. I’m skeptical of markets to the degree I am skeptical of power. I see political and economic matters as an interminable high-wire act, an attempt to sum the interests of disparate and often antagonistic constituencies. Some guesses have to be made, of course. Policy is unavoidable: but it has to be experimental. We need the humility to 1) recognize our inevitable mistakes; and 2) let people, as much as possible, chart their own social and moral course.

Likewise, I take it to be a platitude that Christianity is one out of thousands of religions claiming supernatural authority. I also think it’s a platitude that each of those religions has adherents, like Vox, claiming ‘indisputable evidence’ that always turns out to be quite disputable indeed.

And on a number of issues, like consciousness, I find myself mired in what Roger would call, ‘epistemic akrasia,’ the state of having been ‘rationally forced’ to reach conclusions that I simply cannot bring myself to believe. Meaning skepticism is the big one.

Of course, for people who reject my platitudes, I have to be the bombastic one. Each of us is cursed with being our own frame of reference, with having only the yardsticks and information we happen to have. Perhaps you think science is no great shakes, or that your armchair theories, unlike those entertained by billions of others, actually happen to be right. Perhaps you really have won the Magical Belief Lottery–ruly truly.

Or perhaps not. I’m sure that you’ll forgive me for thinking you’re at least as full of shit as I fear that I am.

A Dirge for the Troubling and the New

Aphorism of the Day: Apology is the most common way to weaponize humility—short of flattery and prayer.

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A storm is coming.

Sometimes storms are good things. The world gets cluttered, contaminants build up, and a good scrub and rinse seems to be the very thing. The storm passes. The air has that chill edge, makes you feel like the first human to exhale. The streets are glazed black. The leaves click for being so turgid green.

Sometimes storms are bad, like the spinning finger of God, enough to turn history around.

But this one is different. This one, you see, has no end.

‘Storm’ is merely a ‘metaphor,’ of course, a way to connote turbulence, upheaval, chaotic transformation. A storm, you could say, is just more weather crowded into less time—concentrated change. And this is the storm that I’m talking about: the concentration of technological and social change.

As John von Neumann predicted over half a century ago, we are “approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” As the past decade has demonstrated more profoundly than any other, technological change means social change. Accelerating technological change, then, means accelerating social change. And this, I think, means big trouble.

Why? Simply because our capacity for social change is a product of the Pleistocene. As much as we love novelty, we humans tend to fear genuine social change—and when we fear, we hate.

If you check out websites like the Singularity Institute, you will find endless papers on the prospects and consequences of AI, the post-human, and so on. If you read someone like Ray Kurzweil, you will find a kind of Hegelian optimism, arguments that say good riddance to ‘human affairs as we know them.’ If you follow Three Pound Brain or read my novels you will find one, overriding question repeated in hundreds of different guises: Do humans have what it takes? Biologically? Culturally? Individually or collectively?

Because make no mistake, the storm is coming…

Last weekend National Geographic channel had a marathon day of Apocalypse: The Rise of Adolf Hitler, and I ended up getting sucked right in. The first question of the Holocaust really is a question of how? How could the most scientifically, culturally, and industrially advanced nation on the planet slip so effortlessly into the barbarity of Nazism? The second question is a question of that. What does it mean that the pinnacle of Western civilization could so quickly and so tragically become the gutter?

There really is something wrong with us. We’ve pretty much known all along, but we were always quick to project our flaws onto our ‘Others,’ perceived outgroup competitors, lest it interfere with the serious business of tribal/gender/racial/national self-glorification—a business that every totalitarian regime knows all too well. Now, however, we have detailed scientific knowledge of our cognitive and affective flaws, or a good number of them anyway. We have a good sense of the kinds of mechanisms that predispose us to chauvinistic barbarism, to scapegoat the Other. And the picture is… well, ugly.

I’m the bad news guy. All my novels are bent on exploring the tangle of thematics that arise from this. Why, because fucking empty identity affirmation and belief confirmation has become the oxygen of our culture. Everywhere you turn, you are urged to celebrate who you are and to believe in yourself—or worse yet, simply ‘believe.’ Everywhere!

The problem is that you don’t know who you are, and you really are the last person you should be believing in! As the evolutionary product of ancestral social ecosystems, the brain is literally designed to defend and enhance your social standing: to self-promote. And it plays dirty. It edits, cherry-picks, fabricates, denigrates, insinuates, exculpates and more, even as it convinces you that you’re the most open and fair-minded monkey in the room.

So for instance, not one of you reading this thinks you could verbally browbeaten into confessing to a murder you didn’t commit, or convinced by a unknown phone caller into sexually abusing one or your employees, or bullied by a lab technician into applying lethal electrical doses to another human being, or gulled by power and camaraderie into torturing those you have power over. Not one of you.

And yet, plant you in these social circumstances and there’s a very good chance you would. We are situational, anything but the strong-willed monads we take ourselves to be. And this is a fact, even though I would bet my royalty check that you think the notion preposterous. As David Dunning so wonderfully illustrates, one of our most pernicious cognitive shortcomings is our inability to acknowledge our cognitive shortcomings.

The Second Apocalypse began as an experimental exploration of fantasy as ‘scripture otherwise,’ as a form of ‘anti-modernism.’ Part of the idea was to exaggerate the very things that epic fantasies generally idealized, to show readers the ‘wages of their wonder.’ One of the things that makes epic fantasy so bizarre as a genre is its status as the most fictional of all fictions. It’s not just fictional, it’s fantastically so. The crazy thing is that the very thing that identifies it as super fictional, its prescientific, anthropomorphic ‘secondary worlds,’ is the very thing that it shares with traditional scripture. Structurally speaking, fantasy worlds are scriptural worlds.

And I don’t know how many of you still peruse your Illiads or your Bibles, but, man, those are some pretty scary worlds.

Daniel Abraham has recently argued against the Realism Defence of representations of sexism and racism in fantasy novels. He begins by taking a ‘It wasn’t as bad as all that,’ line, providing a brief list of historical facts that contradict the notion that the Middle Ages were characterized by chauvinistic brutality. The Middle Ages were a boisterous and exceedingly complicated period of human history. Given this, he claims, the Realism Defence amounts to cherry-picking. If ‘realism’ is what you’re after, then you had better make sure your representations are proportional.

But this doesn’t matter that much, simply because Abraham thinks it mistakes What Fantasy Is. Realism is irrelevant, because fantasy literature isn’t about the past at all; it’s about previous works of fantasy literature.

In other words, he shifts from a Middle Ages were more complicated than you know argument to a Fantasy Literature is more simple than you know argument.

The first argument has merit, and should certainly sting those who think women universally lived in conditions of abject misery and oppression. I just don’t know anyone who thinks that.

The second argument simply runs afoul the first. It turns out that fantasy is more complicated than Abraham seems to know. Like all fiction, it is about many things. And like authors of other types of fiction, fantasy authors actually get to choose what their books are ‘about.’ That’s what makes each fantasy series so unique.

If I want to write a fantasy that replaces nostalgia, sentimentalism, and idealization with historical realism, I will.

Abraham presents the Realism Defence as an attempt to trump one form of ‘representational propriety’ with another. It boils down to pitting honesty against harm reduction. Cut the cord between fantasy and history (by arguing first, What History Is, and then second, What Fantasy Is), then honesty no longer seems proof against harm reduction. Politically correct representation seems to sweep the table.

Unconsciously we all understand the power of representations: we’re hardwired for censoriousness for damn good reason! Loose lips, as they say. This, paradoxically, is why we place such a premium both on honesty and on harm reduction—and why we find ourselves at such loggerheads when these two seem to conflict.

This conundrum is most frequently debated in television, where the sheer size of the audiences involved makes the issue of reinforcing negative racial stereotypes a pressing one. Here, the tendency is usually to see the Realism Defense as a little more than rhetorical fig-leaf when the show is deemed to be more commercially oriented than otherwise. Art actually has a claim to make in this debate, and few would dispute that saddling creators with representational obligations compromises their artistic integrity.

As Abraham acknowledges, “there are legitimate reasons for racism, sexism, and sexual violence to be part of a fantasy project,” he just doesn’t think that historical realism is one of them. But he’s wrong. The Realism Defence you might say, only rings true when it doesn’t stand alone, when the author actually has something to say about premodern history and our relation to it. Otherwise, it’s probably just a post hoc rationale.

How can you tell whether an author has a genuine artistic vision? Nowadays, you just check out their blog! The more wank and contemplation you find, the more evidence you have of a genuine artistic vision. You may not like that vision, but like it or not, you have wandered onto the intractable and often embarrassing ground of trying to sort the ‘good’ art from the ‘bad.’ The further argument, that different rules should apply to each, is even more treacherous.

Either way, despite what Abraham says, the Middle Ages were chauvinistic through and through. Research shows that our contemporary conception of morality in the West is very peculiar—and quite unnatural, in fact. The live and let live logic that informs so much of moral reasoning simply did not exist before the Enlightenment. Where most of us acknowledge a certain degree of moral uncertainty, our prescientific ancestors did not. Your ‘place’ was your place no matter how brutally unfair or oppressive it might seem to some disinterested observer. You played the role allotted, and if you refused out of some sense of outrage, well then, your goose was pretty much cooked.

As Abraham says, some of those roles were relatively commodious, but most of them quite simply were not.

The notion of ethics we inherited from the Greeks, the notion that moral problems could resolved by recourse to reason as opposed to tradition, was not something Medieval Europeans cared about, although there were exceptions to be sure. Chauvinism was the foundation, plain and simple, the arbitrary valuation of certain groups and identities over others. Sometimes that chauvinism was benign, as Abraham points out, but it was chauvinism all the same.

The modernist paradigm typically depicts a protagonist struggling to hold onto meaning in a meaningless world. And all too often, that meaning is found in some saccharine or occult notion of romantic love. What a fantasy world fantastic, however, is that the world is given as meaningful. Fantasy worlds are psychological worlds, where nothing ‘dead’ and everything is animate, filled with agency and intent.

My big idea, way back when, was to simply turn the modernist paradigm upside down, to follow a protagonist struggling to find meaninglessness in a meaningful world. And that protagonist was Kellhus. The paradox I wanted to explore is nothing other than the paradox you and I are living this very moment, what might be called the Big Swap: emancipation from disease, poverty, and oppression for the ‘Death of God’—or the nihilism incipient in contemporary consumer culture.

I chose patriarchy to explore and critique premodern chauvinism because I knew it would continually cut against the reader’s own baseline moral appraisals. On the one hand, it would give them a taste of the very moral certainty under the narrative microscope. On the other hand, it would make the reader’s moral intuitions a component of Kellhus’s ‘revelations,’ and so put them into a curious double-bind. Since Kellhus invariably manipulates, emancipation, in his hands, simply becomes another tool. What does it mean, when the truth itself deceives? (I had Marx on the mind back then: The women’s liberation movement, it so happens, also ‘liberated’ tremendous pools of labour for capital to rationalize. Is emancipation even possible in a society designed to systematically exploit its every human resource? Was the women’s liberation movement the product of mass moral enlightenment or the economic obsolescence of traditional feminine roles?)

What I wanted to show was the way the escape from traditional chauvinism that Serwe and Esmenet find via Kellhus, was a form of false escape, that the nihilistic system that Kellhus erects over the ruins of traditional Three Seas society was every bit as exploitative as the system it replaced—a world where the waif could no longer survive, and the harlot had to follow the forking ways of an even more devious labyrinth. A world, I would argue, not so very unlike our own.

And in each case, I wanted to be true to situational psychology, the fact that we rarely see beyond the facts of our immediate circumstances. The only way to be honest to the insidious difficulty faced by anyone who finds themselves within exploitative social environments was to represent overcoming as something long-drawn and fraught with reversals.

I knew this would controversial. It was meant to be. Like I said: a storm is coming.

The notion that I should have provided another female character to discharge some extrinsic representational obligation, either to better reflect the reality of premodern societies or to provide ‘positive role models,’ strikes me as preposterous. This is the difficult story I elected to tell. And, it happens to be a kind of story no one has ever told before. This in itself, I think, makes the project worthwhile, even if in the end the critical consensus is that The Second Apocalypse is a disastrous failure. “The distance between the old and new,” Dewey writes, “is the measure of the range and depth of thought required.” The problem is that this distance is always invisible. We look at the new, the different, and we see only the old, the same. So many read my books and see the same old representations of exploited and disempowered women, and so assume that I must be ‘just another’ misogynistic fantasy writer.

The degree you should trust those voices is the degree to which they actually engage, as opposed to simply dismiss what I’ve discussed here.