-1 Darkness of Self; Noon of Others
If youre going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, dont even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three of four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are tests of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And youll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If youre going to try, go all the way. Theres no other feeling like it. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. Its the only good fight there is.
Factotum, [Bukowski, Charles]
Heres one who sold his country,
Foisted a tyrant on her, set up laws
Or nullified them for a price; another
Entered his daughters room to take a bride
Forbidden him. All these dared monstrous wrong
And took what they dared try for. If I had
A hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice
Of iron, I could not tell of all these shapes
Their crimes had taken, or their punishments.
All this he heard from her who for long years
Had served Apollo. Then she said:
Come now, be on your way, and carry out your mission.
The Aeneid; Book VI [Virgil]
Give me an utter wreck, if wreck I do
White Jacket [The Author]
I. 2039 e.v.
Lyndon was naked and shorn of nearly all but stubbles -shadow- of emerging dark hair.
The tank was being scrubbed via UV light from above and with nanobots from within, and the bottom of the massive aquarium was alive with abandoned and invaded coral and a bedrock of limestone and roan granite and black clay; the White shark swam against the current at the pelagic level.
The water pressed down heavily, ponderously, clearly.
Lyndon was standing at the glass view-screen unencumbered by not merely clothes but of wants or needs; he was just watching and trying to see what he saw with his newly improved eyes. His homeostatic system was dialed in; his allostatic system had just run its sweep and adjusted all emotional levels to a new baseline.
It was 0000hrs, and he was awake.
He had been fasting for 24-hours; his blood sugar had been set by his respirocytes and nano-9s to maintain itself as long as he didnt expend more than his metabolic minimum for cognition and immune-response; which was 40-calories per hour. He rested the body and let only the mind perform his punishment of work.
Soon the mind would do all the work , he thought.
He watched the white shark move in a rhythmic fashion; head opposite of tail, flexed in the middle; that large corpus of ancient aquatic predatory muscle and cartilage; an atavistic amalgam. He watched 500-million years of perfection; not true perfection, but the endless ungraspable digits of pi after the decimal, with each iteration, each elongation, each unit of time and element of space adding one more integer making a better -more perfect- circle in the mind of the great Mathematician Himself.
The shark was 500-million years of God solving for pi . Nobody else thought that was what the cosmos was; but Lyndon thought it and he was grateful to play his small part to help God solve the equation -the source of His pain- via his own.
God and he had made a handshake deal on this very thing, he believed.
Lyndon knew there were things he was missing; his mind searched it out like the tongue in the space where a tooth used to be. But he had no idea what it was he now didnt know; what he used to know but now did not. The other memories were of no use; unlike a tooth on either side might be clue of what that gap used to contain. He had no idea he was receiving pain -as stimuli- from not memories, but new abradings; from not his past, but from other futures.
The perfection of what works, he thought; floating past what he did not know .
What is good enough, what the ungraspable earth has allowed to live for one second, and one second more -and one more- until that second is so long that everything else left, all of us, Lyndon thought , are more it -it, the equation, the whole- than we -we, the integer- the discreet. We share more with that white shark than we do with whatever it is we think is us . That tiny, avant-garde , neo-mania of neo-cortex , that thin -powerful, but thin- cortical cap, the thing that has just barely learned to metaphorize the I, much less live in the world, he thought, is nothing compared to the whole.
Tribe over man, species over tribe, mammals over species of man, sea-beasts over land-animals, microbes -the single cells of the ancient ocean- over us all. And the earth over even those. And God over that.
And God subsumed by the math, he thought lastly -breezily- as he watched the tank, the water, the shark. His eyes watched each particle that made up each whole.
Each is part of the whole above it, he then thought . And yet we think we are individuals when we arent even in charge of this corporeal body itself; let alone everything else, he continued . He smiled at how illusions of self are required to even get out of bed . He watched the mouth and counted teeth he could see and felt he saw things others did not. He had no idea how much he missed.
Illusions and hatred, he thought as if packing a bag; leaving room -somewhere- for love.
We share a dopaminergic system with that apex fish, he thought as he stared at the giant shark in the watery tank. The core of us, the ancient parts of the brain, the oldest part, the part wed respect more if we were First Peoples from First Nations or, he added , the Japanese; if we were of those cultures that respect the Elder, the primogeniture, the one who came before. That part was sub-cortical , below the waterline, he thought ; and it ruled . It was 2/3 rds the earth, and 2/3 rds of mans mind; yet we live -we think- upon the shore, the denuded surface, the sand.
We call the smallest part our home , he thought of the land.
He loved the back of his neck shorn close like this; he raised his right hand and rubbed his palm on the stubble -beneath the braid-hawk- that ended in a chevron five-inches above his neckline.
