32
Excerpt from 7th Meditation
The Last Differentiation of Artist and Scientist
Not even the glowing crescendo of coming day could drive away the menace of two very disturbed men wrapped in the distorting shroud of narcotic excesses. Leopold and Dr Aymer were taking an impromptu stroll in the park in the bitter cold. Dr Aymer had been sleepless for so long, beguiled by unspeakable images, his face a terrain of beard scrabble. He was certain that he was losing his mind, but he was more alarmed that it didn't concern him as much as it ought to have - “I am completely out of character, and I am complicit with this.” He did not question why he had decided to take up on Leopold's late night invitation to “go out on the town”, and his work was suffering the ravages of neglect. Leopold, his own sleep-deprived eyes darting in every direction and motored by a hallucinogenic frenzy, was speaking utter gibberish, desperately trying to light his cigarette with a spent lighter.
“That's what I'm saying. It cudda been like that. A Pavlovian treatment kazoo, a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy, an Abrayam linkin... Fuck! What's wrong with this lighter? Always when you need the smoke the most. Didja ever see such a thing? Goddamn East St. Louis carnival monkeys and smokestacks making for the highs none of us can sustain... Anyway, yeah, the Chicago experimental free jazz scene... Cudda been like that here, but no: logic prisms where nothing beautiful can bloom, and dead soil turned with backhoes of naturalistic fallacies... no substantive principle patches or crops. Keeps spitting up like slush on moving tires. Splep-splep-splep: like that, all dirty and gross. Chicago. Jazz. Stars and Stripes. Those fifty Freudian stars, fifty American anuses shining bright, and for each a jazz musician can sax his way out through the pseudo-eroticism... that must be it, hot damnity-damn.”
The cigarette was never lit, it just hung like a damp rope from Leopold's lips. Dr Aymer was far too sleep-deprived and stupefied to engage Leopold's nonsensical rant. Perhaps there was something profound in the random whine and roar of Leopold's extempore versification, but Dr Aymer only felt a lingering feeling of general illness.
“I... do not feel very well,” said Dr Aymer, unsure if he should place his hands upon his belly or head.
The brief respite from a phalanx of angry images had once again come to an end, dispelling the welcome torpor and silence of Dr Aymer's unsolicited thoughts. As much as he attempted to resist this cavalcade of horrific flashes, his weakness only plunged him further into them, his enervating sanity flailing wildly in a toxic soup. His mind was drowning in images of torture and unmentionable atrocities, and there was no way he could distance them. What Dr Aymer did not know was the origin of these unwanted thoughts, emerging as they did by that crucible of the synthesis, the Red Lion sketchbook – a product of a very unstable mind. Leopold was the example of what sustained engagement with the book promised, and given the fluttering cacophony of Leopold's utterances reflecting what must have been an internal carnival of confused and grotesque ideas, Dr Aymer did not have much time left before he, too, succumbed to this devouring circulation.
Dr Aymer tried to anchor his thoughts to his immediate surroundings: Those salt-streaked streets, those wind-whipped overbites of snow, those brittle and ice-caked branches, those wisps of grey debris. Leopold sat with his hands digging in his coat pockets, grasping for some cached warmth. Perhaps he had left it in his other coat, Leopold thought. Meanwhile, the carefully erected latticework of Dr Aymer's reason was beginning to splinter. He could barely summon the strength to fight off this onslaught of thoughts that overwhelmed him. The hard-felt effects of the synthesis were already in motion, and his thoughts were coalescing with that of the lunatic artist that kept goading him on to accept the inevitability of their fusion. Leopold was making deadly overtures, trying to lure and seduce Dr Aymer into a domain where none of the six men were divisible anymore. It would be an act of surrender in the face of a force that had consumed the power of each of them, resetting them on a merged path towards what was still largely unknown.
Dr Aymer knew that there was a predictive quality to genetic mergers, but that there was always the haunting possibility of chance in any concatenation of codes. It was the accident of this merger that horrified him, the uncertainty of what would be produced in the end. And why did he act so passively, surrendering what made him an individual to the whims of a confusing and hasty explanation on the necessity of a synthesis? On whose authority? A bizarre and ambiguous sort of man who seemed to have taken the reins on behalf of all involved. Why did Dr Aymer not protest? Why did he give up so easily? Why did the others merely assent to this merger without question?
It was these thoughts that added further torment to the man who was once a notable geneticist. Although, at the same time, he could not divorce this mounting feeling of magnetizing to the other five figures, almost relishing on some level that he would become not less, but more as a result of this fusion of parts. What had been added to his personality had been all the stronger aspects of the others: the freedom in madness, the ponderousness of the philosophical, the mysticism of the prophet, the creative fervour of the artist, and... and? Something else, something dark and malicious clawing its way toward the light, something with an unspeakable vindictive gravity, its breath hot and sour with the desire for revenge against everything. Who was that “Third Man”, and what role did he play? This had never been revealed, and all queries to that effect had gone unanswered or were buried in ambiguously vague responses. He was sure now that whatever was tormenting him, taking control of his thoughts, was the influence of that Third Man.
Leopold was quite certainly mad, and no less buffoonish for it. He was the artist, but the artist unchecked by any rational focus – wild and metastatic creation without intent or purpose. The synthesis would most likely benefit by furnishing that pure creativity with determination, just as the dry and analytical thinking of the philosopher or the scientist would be broadened by the infusion of creativity. Dr Aymer thought to himself that this synthesis was, in some ways, attempting to engineer the perfect and most well-rounded being. Dr Aymer was daunted by the scope of this project, and yet it appealed to that deep and secret longing lodged in the darkness of thoughts he would have rather left unexposed: the desire to create the perfect genetic specimen, as if the very theories of Darwin himself had thrown down the gauntlet, a contest to produce the ideal organism. Who, thought Dr Aymer to himself, had any right to interfere in such a lofty move toward perfection, even if it meant sacrificing what one knew as life.
Dr Aymer could no longer keep the listing barge of himself in any degree of control. He began to cry, softly at first, and then heaving sobs overtook him. Leopold, captured within his own madness, merely looked on with the gaze of someone enjoying a plot twist in a film.
He was making small slits in his arms, entry points for the wires that were hooked up to the generator. An extension of the vein is an extension of life, the madman thought. His eyes scanned the pompous titles of every article his mind had ever conspired to write, every trace of the paper-scholar trail that littered his professional past, every pound of text on his collapsing shelves, and he was sickened. But there was one freeing thought, one method of purest release: the great electrocution. What would stay his hand now, now that there was only loss to look forward to? The madman, despite initial enthusiasm, was now overcome with regret at the thought of the inevitable synthesis that would forever efface his own individual self. His fear had got the better of him, and he realized that his secret dream of being a part of a great electric circuit belonging to something far more meaningful had ceased to entice him since he now knew what it entailed. However, despite his sudden timidity in the face of his goal, he could not go through with his plan to remove himself irrevocably from the synthesis by way of this electric suicide. But what stayed his hand – fear, inevitability or necessity – he could not say.
Russell the would-be philosopher sat in his overly white kitchen; its stainless steel appliances set in minimalist array, the flood of the grey light of morning tucking itself in the far too clean crevasses of the kitchen. The coffee had scalded his lips, and he was crying. He could not bear to witness the reflection in the steel, or in the spoon, or on the glass of the cupboards. Russell did not know to whom the reflection belonged anymore. All he knew was that whatever he fancied himself to be was merely the pilot of a vessel that desperately clambered for identity. Russell only wanted to be someone – anyone - while he could, before the chance would be snatched away by that which promised a premature end to his search for an identity he could live with.
Russell was losing his bearings. He felt himself split in two, the mitosis of a cell with no nucleus. No, not a cell... a kind of lateral evolution, a swapping of traits among the already born, a slime mold. The madness that had visited the others had now visited over him as well. His double – or what his mind perceived to be his double – was nothing more than a voice coming from another room.
“Will you go to war against me, little magus?” asked the voice of his double.
“I don't understand,” was Russell's reply.
“I wasn't talking to you. Keep quiet. Stay indiscernible.”
Russell wanted to amplify himself in protest, but his thoughts were being mulched, broken down into a pasty solution and becoming absorbed into the nullity of he knew not what. It was as though he were being hollowed out, violently forced to disgorge the paltriness of his contents to face what he really was: an impostor, a filmy residue and little more.
Something else imminent was brewing. Peels of mocking laughter erupted from the other room, his double obviously amused by Russell's free-falling dissolution. Russell tried to appeal to his hasty readings of the great philosophers as a guide to defending himself against the paradox of the synthesis, but only their faces stood in static silence, mutely dismissing his internal appeals. Their places in the arcanum of his mind was quickly being filled with monsters. He held his head and weakly cried for help against the menacing visions pushing up from the soil of his subconscious, a disarray of fragments.
This scherzo was claiming each and every one of them, a vicious maelstrom that caused them all to recoil in their respective places, the shuddering waves of synthesis rippling outward in a a rapidly expanding arabesque.
[If my proceeding through the text was matching the pace of actually occurring events, then it was too late for me to do anything. I wonder if I stopped reading, events would be frozen, halting the narrative in the book as well as its correspondence in this world. Wishful thinking, Gimaldi].
12
The Third Man Issues a Taste
See here. Touch but a shade of what roils within: rats, sodomites, underbelly people and overbelly people, winos, dispossessed pharaohs, painters of mechanical unicorns, trampled Magyars, Laertians, slovenly street children straight from Dickens, maniacs, schizos, map-worshipers, plotters, crowded piles of medieval sex manuals written by anonymous monks, furious Tatars, broken hookahs, pinned up centerfolds from the 1950s, empty liquor bottles, gas-sniffers, cardboard tents, tattered blankets, street pirates, pinchers, oenolots, oafs, beggars, mouldy bread, occasional gobs of blood, schizophrenic graffiti, tag-artists, runaways, coffee zealots, and urban washouts, there was one implacable and constant hum. It was a twitching drone coming from within the low hanging pipes, barging in on stupors and bringing some moments to a feverish pitch of epileptic delirium. Wires that cut into the skin, deranged gazes, the rarest types of people in eccentric orbits around their quarry, horror dressed in new flesh, a shower of glass shards, the recasting of dice against shadow... In sum: heralding glimpses into the new era, that of the dark side of collective desire, collective will. Breathe into our clay and grant us life, bookish one. We are your clay bird. Your golem. Your reddest lion. Beware those with only one book, but make that book live.