I.
8:56am – Mortimer awake, minutes before his alarm will sound, in what seems to him complete darkness. Confused, he approaches the window, opens the shades on an unusually crowded street. The stoplights and street lamps off for miles in both directions, the corrugated metal doors of injection sights rolled up during what would otherwise be peak hours. It occurs to Mortimer that the power has gone out, that it is dark in his apartment because his lights are off, and that he has never experienced an interruption of daily life such as this.
Grandpa used to talk about rolling blackouts. He said they would turn off the power in each neighborhood, one at a time, to save electricity and stop the whole grid from collapsing. He said, back then, you could use all the power you wanted most days – cheap too, compared to water and food – so when it got hot, or cold, people would just use as much as they could get. Seems a bit reckless… even to me. He said once he was in a grocery store, hours after the power had gone out, and everyone was just walking the aisles in darkness, pulling food off the shelves. Meats, cheeses, everything frozen, they just picked through it, even though it was melting and warm. He said it was habit, they were so used to shopping like that… I don’t know… I’ve never had cheese before.
“Good morning citizens. This is an emergency broadcast from your Leaders and Executioners. Do not be alarmed.”
Not this again.
“This is not a test; attention is mandatory. A powerful solar storm made its way into the earth’s atmosphere earlier this morning, disrupting satellite communication, GPS and RFID transmission, as well as certain non-essential power grids. Power to the System has not been affected; institutions and essential executive offices are working as usual, but peripheral services have already been affected. We are doing everything in our power to repair damaged infrastructure, but as a precautionary measure we are moving to a code red state of emergency.”
We’ve never even had a code yellow or orange state of emergency… straight to red?
“The following is the official timeline for the state of emergency: potable water distribution affected within several hours; perishable foods and medications lost in 12-24 hours; immediate or eventual loss of heating/air conditioning, sewage disposal, and fuel resupply. Should the situation improve, and crisis be averted, you will be notified.”
Doesn’t seem promising. It’s hard to believe it could all happen so quickly… I suppose I was thoroughly warned.
I should go for a walk outside and see the streets like this; all chaotic and unfocussed… it took a coronal mass ejection to interrupt the city’s schedule… to get anyone to acknoloedge non-human agency… I guess that’s what happens when you start controlling the weather and managing every ecosystem and watershed… it takes space weather for you to remember where you live.
My grandfather told me about – oh yeah… the book… Celine… my assignment… I got totally distracted by all the eloquent apocalyptica, I completely forgot about the library.
No time like the present.
II.
11:56 am – As Mortimer approaches the entrance to the library, a light rain begins to fall, exaggerating the dark streets and frantic pedestrians. He walks up to the ticket booth, to find a small, delicate woman, strangely dressed in a top hat and feathered scarf. Mortimer begins to feel the first pangs of frustration and anger at the ridiculousness of his situation, but decides that as long as he sticks to his own adventure he should be fine – he decides not to ask about the outfit.
“I’d like to enter the library…?”
“The Universe? Why the Universal Archives have an admission fee, can I can scan you for that now.”
“Yes of course.”
“Wonderful; we’re delighted to have you Mr. Blithe, is there anything I can do to aid your search?
“I don’t think so, I’m looking for books… I think I have to look for them myself.”
“I understand, there is fruit yet amongst these old trees.”
“What…?”
“Nothing. Are you familiar with the Universe Mr. Blithe?
“With the what?”
“With our library. We do have an extensive collection you understand, every book ever published right up to the end of the Gorge, including some very interesting things published during the transition.”
“No I’ve never been here before.”
“Well the Universe is composed of a series of hexagonal rooms, each with books lining the walls, each connected on all sides to another hexagonal room.”
“Like a honeycomb?”
“Like a what? Be serious for a moment Mr. Blithe, each room overlooks the ones below, huge airshafts used to control pressure and temperature run straight up and down in gigantic columns – that we might preserve our collection into the future. There are sixty stories up and twenty foundational stories below, with only low railings to keep you from the columns of air. Be serious Mortimer, these old books may seem inert, but should one grab you and possess you with vertiginous revelation, I hope you will grab the railing before epiphany becomes… oblivion – as it so often does.”
“Do you have any other advice?”
“Only that in case of intellectual emergency – or dramatic ironical uncertainty – you should check back with the front desk. After all this is your first trip to the Universe.”
I feel like I’ve been here before.
“Okay, thanks.”
“Your very welcome Mr. Blithe.”
Okay, first things first.
Studs Terkel,
Working:
People Talk About What They Do All Day And How They Feel About What They Do
ISBN-10: 1565843428
Shouldn’t be too hard to find, just through this arch and into the first room, then I can figure out how far away my book is.
This is like entering a city with just an address and just wandering around checking the numbers on buildings until you find it. I bet in the Gorge they had robots to retrieve the books for you – then you wouldn’t have to risk your life with the open air shafts………………………………………………………………………… ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………oh no, this book’s number is something in the couple hundreds, mine’s a billion and a half or so… it must be all the way up. At least I’ll get to see the building – although I have to say it smells terrible in here. If I didn’t know better I would swear these books were filled with the bodies of the authors who wrote them. I guess they can’t have any windows because the light would damage the books, like the artifacts I get from the museum… I never did find that harmonica……………………………………………………………….. .…………………………………………………………………………….……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….okay, here it is ………………………………………………………. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… now I feel a little ridiculous, what did I think I would find? Chapter four?
Phil Stallings – Spot Welder
"I stand in the same spot, about two - or three - feet area, all night. The only time a person stops is when the line stops. We do about thirty-two jobs per car, per unit. Forty-eight units an hour, eight hours a day. Thirty-two times forty-eight times eight. Figure it out. That's how many times I push the button"
A lot of times… sounds a little like me… but I don’t really get it. Why come all the way down here for six sentences? I guess when we think of the Gorge now we always think of the time people had off… after work, of leisure… we never really think of their days… monotony like ours… always, I suppose, when you tell someone to stand in one place – or sit at one computer – everything attunes to the singular. I should keep reading.
“You got some guys that are uptight, they’re not sociable. It’s too rough. You pretty much stay to yourself. You get involved with yourself. You dream, you think of the things you’ve done. I drift back continuously to when I was a kid and what me and my brothers did. The things you love are the things you drift back into.”
Once Art and I had the same plan of escape.
“Lots of times I worked from the time I starter to the time of the break and I never realized I had even worked. When you dream, you reduce the chances of friction with the foreman or with the next guy.”
Carpet burn is caused by friction.
“It don’t stop. It just goes and goes. I bet there’re men who have lived and died out there, never seen the end of that line. And they never will – because it’s endless. It’s like a serpent. It’s just all body, no tail. It can do things to you… (Laughs.)
There is = there's. There are = there're (but it is in all ways horrible).
“Repetition is such that if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind. You’d let your problems build up, you’d get to a point where you’d be at the fellow next to you – his throat. Every time the foreman came by and looked at you, you’d have something to say. You just strike out at anything you can. So if you involve yourself by yourself, you overcome this.”
I don’t have any choice now… everyone is gone or going… there’ll be only myself for myself if I’m not careful. I should be paying more attention.
“The job I really want is utility. That’s where I can stand and say I can do any job in this department, and nobody has to worry about me. As it is now, out of say, sixty jobs, I can do almost half of ‘em. I want to get away from standing in one spot. Utility can do a different job every day. Instead of working right there for eight hours I could work over here for eight, I could work in another place for eight. Every day it would change. I would be around more people. I go out on my lunch break and work on the fork truck for a half- hour – to get the experience. As soon as I got it down pretty good, the foreman in charge says he’ll take me. I don’t want the other guys to see me. When I hit that fork lift, you just stop your thinking and you concentrate. Something right there in front of you, not in the past, not in the future. This is real healthy.
8 + 8+ 8 = 24. What’s the other eight for? What’s a fork lift – even the Gastropod got rid of the forks because people kept stealing them. Maybe I should just find the other book.
Boguslav P. Lowendowski,
Grey Matter Mirage
ISBN-7: 1645386537
I think I know my way around now. Should be easy ………………………….… …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..okay, got it. Wait a minute, right author, right number, but it’s called Constraint Based Grammar Functionalisms.
I thought it was called Grey Matter Mirage.
III.
In an angry display clearly meant for the eyes of some compassionate observer, Mortimer throws the eminent Mr. Lowendoski’s book to the ground, echoing its flat thud with a grunt of his own. A small bookmark falls out of the pages of Boguslav’s opus work.
If only you knew,
The dimensions of truth,
You could tell…
The difference between,
The nightmare the dream and the spell,
But you can’t tell…
Celine
Mortimer briefly considers the possibilities. 1) Ms. Surkis is absolutely real, the most organized and surreptitious foe he has every encountered. 2) She does not exist and neither does he (this seems attractive given that it would explain the Universal Archives: they also do not exist). 3) Despite the tragedy of the thought, he, Mortimer Blithe, has indeed completely lost his mind, or at least the part of it responsible for discernment – the real and the unreal, the possible and the impossible, the logical and the illogical have all ceased to exist by virtue of their collapse into one. Reviewing the possibilities, honesty compels him to accept that a clear distinction between the three cannot be found. Subsequently, he has a thought. His grandmother told him that the verdict regarding his grandfather’s sanity surely hinged on the existence of a text Tranquil claimed to have written possessed by revolutionary spirit. It was her opinion that if such a manuscript could ever be found, at least some of Tranquil’s paranoid fears were justified, not to mention the oft conspiratorial explanations of his disappearance. Perhaps the personal reality of his grandfather, if discovered, might lend itself to Mortimer, pending further discoveries. With his mood temporarily buoyed, Mortimer decides that the least he can do is return to the main sirkulation desk and ask about his grandfather’s book. He assumes, correctly, that findings corresponding to truth’ could not help but follow from such a search.
“Um… excuse me.”
“Yes Mr. Blithe, is something wrong, did you find everything you were looking for?”
“How do you know my name?”
“You already paid your entrance fee Mortimer, all information is available at that point.”
“Right, well I need your help finding a book.”
“Of course, what’s the name of the book?”
“Uh, well… I don’t actually know, there’s a chance it doesn’t exist.”
“Are you quite serious Mr. Blithe?”
“No wait, I mean yes I am; I know some things about it and I know the author’s name, so I thought… maybe…”
"You thought perhaps I would sit here at the fall of our great civilization and play twenty questions with a meandering and aimless madman?”
“Something like that.”
“What is the author’s name Mr. Blithe, and please some context to aid my search.”
“Yeah, it was by my grandfather, Tranquil Blithe, and I think it was intended to be a kind of antidote to the Gorge and the reorganization, the Executioners and the future of – ”
“That’s quite enough information Mr. Blithe.”
“You know the book?”
“I know it is believed to be a fiction of your dear grandfather’s imagination. Do you Mr. Blithe, are you aware of this?”
“Yes but I thought this would be the place, of all places, to find out if it’s true or not.”
“True or not?”
“Well is it?”
“It’s not.”
“So it does exist?”
“Listen to me very carefully Mortimer. This book will be as dangerous for you as it has been for so many – as it was for your grandfather. With any tome like this, there is never any way to tell exactly who or what will be destroyed when it is opened.”
“That doesn’t matter now, I don’t have anything left; there’s no one left. It’s just you and me left in the city. The world could end tomorrow, so consider this a dying man’s last request. What cipher could it contain compared to the one the sun has plunged us into?”
“Mr. Blithe, no one ever knows what will happen tomorrow, but I will direct you to the book with the understanding that I will not be implicated if something should go wrong.”
Should something go wrong?
“Here is the call number: 6245366537.”
“All the way at the top?”
“Might I encourage you, familial affiliations notwithstanding, to approach this text with the cold detachment of a historian?”
“You might.”
“Just be careful Mr. Blithe.”
One more walk up these stairs… to know for sure… for him and for me… for some of the past and some of the future, I suppose, as well…………………………….…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. here it is…
The Secret Life
of
Sameness
-Or-
How to Destroy Art by Surviving the Future
-By-
Tranquil Blithe
Nice title. What should I read? Maybe from the beginning? Maybe from the end. Doesn’t really matter, if I’m able to start.
I went to the movies this evening. The Phoenix Cinema House. I heard a hundred strangers eating silently in the dark, waiting… their hunger an impossible feat for the packages of sugar and gelatin meant to subdue it.
I’ve heard about the moving picture shows… purely for entertainment… cinema … not small screens and auditory implants, just a large auditorium; big screen big sound. What’s gelatin?
I saw advertisements for drugs to enhance your life, then ads for more movies, then ads for phones on which to film the movie of an enhanced life. In the dark, sitting there with a hundred others, I had a dream, a premonition, or both.
He could still dream.
I wandered back to the beginning, before the dance, before the show. When we started this, these stories, they were nothing but ashen scratches on cave walls. Dried flowers and blood ground with water into paint. To say what? To tell who what? Maybe just to tell ourselves that we were really here, that the luxurious life that allowed for time enough to make paint was still our true and animal life.
But maybe we were not convinced, because our storytelling, enhanced with brushes and chisels, didn’t not stop there. The stories of our lives, of our lives together, burst out onto the world canvass, monuments and buildings of sand and stone, wood and bone. Now we could wake up in the shadows of the testament. Our proof forever, of ourselves to ourselves, of how real we really were. But there was surprise, and kind of exotic terror, when these monuments snuck up on us in the circumlocution that is time. With the joy that accompanies ignorance, we were lost and found to ourselves through these monuments. When, in our long history, tragedy would strike a robust and sophisticated culture, destroying it completely; we would, in the course of generations, stumble upon this civilization’s ruined monuments and exclaim that at last our lineage had been discovered. At last the truth of our existence had been found: ‘We are the gods themselves,’ ‘we are a stellar offering’, ‘we are the descendants of original man.’ ‘Just look at these structures,’ unanimous in our incredulity, ‘how else could you explain them?’ What is the reason that we do not know our origin? What is the reason that we do not know where we came from? Whatever the answer, it also explains why we paint and build to prove our existence to ourselves.
Has it come to this?
But of course we weren’t finished then either. There came a time when the world as canvas itself seemed a kind of crude and confined storytelling. Perhaps our monuments were successful in one respect: they protected us from the cosmic abyss long enough to go about the daily slaughter and plantation, long enough for a poetic silence to enter our lives. As we sat with full belies, the moonlight reflecting off our architectural theology, we managed to yearn. And what just what was it we wanted?
Has it come to this?
This art, these abstracted dreams – not to explain but to amuse – rose to fill the silence made possible by our success. And us, you and I, the ones to come so many years after all of this, carried away completely by these stories, by these abstractions, how could we know, now, who we are, where we came from, balanced on such elaborate and time altering illusions? This art that paraphrases life, to justify it, that cancels reality with its fantasy, that proves our existence to ourselves not by proof at all but by a crushing sensual phantasm; by spectacle and evocation… how could we see past or around it to the real?
In the manner of a body disconnecting from the mind to permit dreams, our mind disconnected itself from the purpose of the story, went cold, detached, and enjoyed the play that replaces dreams… make no mistake, we would outgrow our dreams on the path chosen.
It has come to this.
With this parade of history cascading through my mind, I looked up and realized I had missed the opening credits. I must pay more attention I thought to myself, must get to know the characters more intimately, commune with them so that I might commune with them again when saga and situation would elevate their lives to the extraordinary. But as I watched, I realized that the players could not possibly be counted the only characters in the drama. The play itself, its way of talking, me and all the chomping mouths, all of us were playing. Who were the characters on the screen, then, to me, if I was one of them? I did not know then, I do not know now – I felt exposed.
I watched the actors, threads in a great winding, an elegant entanglement, sewing the stitches of lives, bringing together the tattered squares of experience, carefully quilting. The garments they produced, made of all the days, concealed and adorned a nakedness. So that the characters might not die the way they began… naked. I too felt less exposed. With everything they covered, they and we were always more as a result. This adornment, this life theatre and art existence, this making personal the mythology of man – inspired me.
I changed my mind. We will be triumphant!
But time ran out on the building. Suddenly, and without warning, the drama became fevered, the plot sick and twisted, the players out of control and scared. No matter how many squares, no matter how much time spent, no matter how convincingly covered – for each there came a time to disrobe, to destitch, to fall and tear the fabric, to undo what they had done. The players seemed to be looking at me, ‘you like us, us together forever, always the same and indifferent life,’ they wailed. Was it always this way I wondered, for all of us in all times and places, so tragic and cyclical, so naked? ‘Yes,’ the plot nodded, ‘yes’ then and ‘yes’ again now.
We will be triumphant…
The narrator could no longer contain himself, temporarily losing his head, and quite unceremoniously declaring that even though the plot was technically ‘right,’ he was using his executive authority to investigate the actor’s claims. He himself, with all his powers of omniscience mounted a convincing defense of freedom, will power, and a strange combination of the two he called ‘free will.’ No e in the audience seemed convinced, but I myself hoped he wouldn’t stop until they were. I may have cried a little.
The narrator tried once more, but no action or dialogue followed his claims. I became quite sure as he was speaking that this was the moral of the story and that sameness and indifference would be defeated in the end.
‘You,’ he said. ‘You are not some silent tree, some meandering river, whose motion and existence are one. There can never be similitude like that for the human heart – the experience of love or understanding cannot be collapsed into one; neither can one be made of war or madness. The human mind, a reflecting pool for a dangerous body, is always more, is always story and teller, is always player and part, is always free to foreshadow or interpret the events of life. Freedom is a hand that moves a mouth, a puppet puppeteer.’
Will we be triumphant?
The music began to play, the credits rolled the names of the army of hands and feet responsible for the production… I cried a little more. What I had wanted, I had not wanted after all. I wanted an explanation, I thought, some justification for these moments I had suffered in the throws of life lived, for the struggle that is life expressing itself.
I’m trying to say…
That wasn’t it at all, was it? I wanted the real thing the whole time, just the life and no explanation of it. I was already emptied out, body, mind, and soul, trying to weigh down my floating body with stories about it. But these words… and justifications, and explanations, and artistic renderings… they never had the weight necessary. I could talk and talk, I could accrue for my mundane life so much narrative baggage, so much storied past, and bright future… and it would never add an ounce at all. ‘How’, I wanted to ask the narrator, ‘how, after all you said about possibility, could my efforts have added so little’… I wanted to ask, but he was gone.
What I want to say…
I sat there, even though the others had gone. Brooms and garbage cans attached to sticks emerged from the walls, but I remained seated. For a moment, it occurred to me that only I was suffering from such dissatisfaction, that others narrating a personal drama went to sleep with tomorrow’s lines clutched seriously in hand, glad to have some guidance for a day that had not yet begun. Or that others still, unable to explain the bizarre events of their lives, had always, forever, been happy to write about them in a theatre of their own creation, recasting whoever may have played their part badly in the dress rehearsal. And then I stopped, thought of my mother, thought of my father, thought of my sister and friends – thought of this whole life and world we have created, winding down to apocalypse… and I thought… it’s not nearly enough.
Without having to say...
It’s not enough to pass a life of discomfort and justify it with words and colours – it’s not enough to rewrite your life to make it right in the face of the immense possibility of doing it properly the first time – it’s not enough to hover above experience, watching it, waiting to manipulate it, detached from it even as it jabs at you on the way by.
Yes?
This narrating animal, this story monkey, this aping ape, is a false monkey, monkey unto death, I thought. We have to wake from this dream, this trance, or its wings will carry our heads so far from out bodies, that when they run out of lift, out of loft and loftiness, we will fall from the sky to our all too human deaths.
Yes?
The people who make themselves the protagonist in the story of their lives disappear in the telling of the tale – you could never ask them what had actually happened, they wouldn’t know, they only know they told a story about a character an awful lot like themselves. Truth or fiction, fun or not, they couldn’t say. But those other unfortunates, the others that couldn’t make a life of life rendered dramatically… what happens to them? Either they lose themselves trying to detach and float away from the life they are living, or they are crushed by the failure to effectively sublimate it, to dance their days for imaginary audiences, on imaginary stages of questionable cosmic significance. The result is the same for both; all external possibility dies for them. They cannot watch other stories seriously, or hear other people deeply – everything has become the set of a work in progress. There is no experience at all at this point, just the dedicated, sincere, selfish hope for a convincing conclusion.
Yes.
Art is the comfort that comes to mind when mind can’t accept the changing world. Art changes the world, so that mind can stay the same. But the disturbances and discrepancies keep coming, and the battle of life rages on. It should not be recourse to paint red paint on black hearts every time a mood swings. We should live in the battle of life. Anyone can keep calm in a cave or while asleep – or behind a curtain. We should train to stand in the whirl and madness of action, and lean in to reach the center. From the centre, the changing world is, but does nothing. And from the center, all possibility, difference, and choice fan out in every conceivable direction.
IV.
9:45 pm – Mortimer leaves the library, strangely satisfied with himself. With the lights out, the city seems, somehow, less dangerous. But in the crush of the crowd, a sadness returns. With the clarity of mind only disaster can provide, the city’s inhabitants rush to make final preparations. Those that can, have left by now, but what the remainder lack in ability they make up for with a kind of earnest desperation. Mortimer finds them compelling. He realizes that he can hear a single voice above the scuffle and hurry of the moving bodies.
It’s the man that was leading the protest the other day, when me and Art were eating.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone just stand on a box like that and scream at people in the street… in the dark… it looks like he doesn’t care if we listen…
I’m listening…
“People of the System, I am not like these and greedy Executioners. I am not for a pattern work to the Nexus as many yes men spend their mandate there. I want really new changes, working out good news for the people – there are enough resources! I want to put new themes, jurisdictions, existing ignored barriers, scantiness, human tragedies to bring up to the table and make brilliant decisions over those problems. The public need that attention from those in power, to use their mind, guts, opportunity to speak up and represent the others properly!”
He’s from a different time. We used to have politicians because we used to have politics – the selection of a few individuals to represent the interests of the whole. The Executioners aren’t politicians, they’re technicians, and they don’t work for us, we work for them.
“When someone asks ‘who I am with,’ I say “I am with the Help the Poor Help the Good.”
I’ve got to get home. I hope my apartment’s where I left it – I’m not used to having to find it.
10:45pm – Mortimer arrives home, lies down, closes his eyes and hopes that, without his injections, sleep might offer some relief.
The stars are blotted out, clouds are covering clouds,
It is darkness, vibrant, sonant.
In the roaring whirling wind are the souls of a million lunatics,
Just loose from the prison house, wrenching trees by the roots,
Sweeping all from the path.
The sea has joined the fray, and swirls up mountain-waves,
To reach the pitchy sky.
A flash of lurid light reveals on every side,
A thousand, thousand shades of Death begrimed and black –
Scattering plagues and sorrows, dancing mad with joy,
Come, mother, come!
Terror is your name, Death is in your breath,
And every shaking step destroys a world forever.
You, ‘Time’, the All-Destroyer!
Come, mother, Come!
Who dares misery loves and hugs the form of Death,
Dance in destruction’s dance.
[Vivekananda]
