Our Flesh Remained, Book One, Chapter One

This is the first chapter of the "Discus Declarations". A few notes on the reading experience.

1. Please note that both the author and the commentator insert footnotes, which are marked in the text by Arabic and Roman numerals respectively, and are found at the bottom of the post.

2. The indecipherable text in the epigram of chapter one is due to some uncertainty on my part as to whether I have legal permission to turn the Coptic font I use into a webfont. If you wish to see how it looks, you may copy it into a Word document and download the font found here. I do apologize.

Let me know by email or in the comments if you are enjoying this serial. Next week however, I will be returning to non-fiction with the first in a series of historical essays on the "Argument from Victory", and from here on out I plan to alternate weekly between fictional serials and nonfictional essays.

Book One[i]

Is This What You Want, Dear Reader?

Published upon the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos

I

peje IS e¥je Nta tsar3

¥wpe etbe pNA ou¥phre te e¥

je pNA de etbe pswma ou¥phre

N¥phre pe alla anok +R ¥phre

Mpaei je pws ateeinoq MMNTrMma

o asouwx xN teeiMNTxhke[ii]

I am revealed as something disgusting: a brooding, dirty old hen hovering over the face of his cracked Fabergé. The egg is broken: the girl is flown. And so, having arrived at the moment of age when one requires a holiday from the finality of certain crucial decisions (a holiday that must nevertheless confirm these decisions in the shackles of an emancipating necessity) a man comes to write his memoirs. If redemption is impossible, dear reader, you will at least give me the gift of mercy, or failing that, even the widow’s mite of pity. The smallest votive will not be turned away.

I begin one year ago exactly. August was holding court from the hot, sagging womb of his asphalt throne, and every piece of glass, metal, and tarmac in Los Angeles was shining, searing or steaming in obedience. At 2:30 PM on a Monday, after a frightening weekend in which an F5 tornado had obliterated the gated community of Rolling Hills and hurled a solar panel the size of a baseball diamond so high and far that it eventually came down in the middle of Central Avenue—where it decapitated a hot-dog vending shabti and nearly overturned a streetcar full of tourists—I was reclining in a birch paneled office that reeked of a chemically castrated spring breeze, watching a Miss America hologram with the rough dimensions of the Chrysler Building as she paused on her way down the boulevard to apply some Oxy-Bond® lipstick[iii].

Catching my gaze out of the corner of her eye, Miss America turned, smiled, winked, and blew me The Kiss That Would Save My Marriage. We had repeated this little ritual of ours every day for the past two weeks. (This little ritual of ours was of course being repeated with every streaming resident of Los Angeles who fell within a sightline and the specified demographic or preferential parameters, but I was not so proud as to deny myself a mild tincture of mid-morning delusion: gentle female duplicity has ever been the food of aging and embittered male vanity, and this is surely the least harmful format for the the thing so far). But this morning in particular, for reasons we will never know, the blown kiss contained a certain sudden something. I felt the impact on my ribs, and when I looked down, I discovered a dent of unpleasant realization:

I was given to reflect on the fact that I had occupied the last hour and a half with the internal contest between a 21:30 nightcap followed by a 22:00 bedtime or a 22:00 nightcap followed by a 22:30 bedtime. I was then given to reflect on the fact that this decision had me in the grip of a legitimate anxiety. I was then given to reflect on the fact that this decision had gripped me with legitimate anxiety on every Monday morning for the past six months. I was then given to reflect on the fact that a half hour interval between scheduled bedtimes had thus become the only source of genuine uncertainty in my every Monday morning.

Suddenly resolved in favor of a total change of scenery and the suspension or destruction of all my existing relationships, I decided that I would accept a ludicrous offer I had recently received for alternative academic employment: an associate professorship at Isaiah’s Bow University, a humble backwoods distillery of bible-friendly, socio-prophetic, eco-crusading academic moonshine in the wilds of north central Kentucky. As it turned out, the institution was—miraculously—already affiliated under my existing corporate prosopon: Ganymede Industries®. I contacted my client coordinator, one Guan Yin, and confirmed that my transfer would be approved by Ganymede. (Apparently Isaiah’s Bow had been only  recently acquired—at bargain basement prices—and Ganymede was happy to bring in a shiny name to try and increase blood flow in a declining body). Pleasantly surprised, I arranged to have my financial and medical portfolios transferred to the client coordinator for Spencer County.

Guan-Yin was, as ever, pleasantly sunny and polite. It was especially gratifying that she refrained from any theatrical perplexity at my obviously absurd decision. The same could not be said for my department head at UCLA. Still, he was perceptive enough to see that the fire had gone out of my belly some time ago, and I suspect he was happy for the opportunity to exchange my tarnished name-brand appeal for the bright hunger of a clawing young nobody[1].

Perhaps things have a different texture for people who chose to have children, but at least in my own experience of dotage, a cavalier set of sentiments pranced in upon the heavy hoof-prints of my middle age, an attitude distinct from, yet closely related to, the exuberant stupidity of my youth. Although, (unlike my younger self), I am fully aware of the potential consequences of my decisions, I am also (unlike my middle aged self), fully aware that however disastrous these consequences might be, my world will by no means end, (absenting of course the spectre of my mortality, something to which I have always been curiously indifferent). I will effect no grand subtraction in the measure of my happiness; excluding the temporary impact of transitional speed-bumps, I will probably go on feeling much the same as I have always felt about more or less everything. The great realization of life on the hill’s far side has been for me this: a thing that happens to you is just that and only that. And that is not so very much. The boldness of decrepitude is the knowledge that the stakes are, in fact and almost invariably, incredibly small.

By the afternoon of the following day, I was ready to leave. There is never much to pack. I left Pio Nono, my contemplative creamsicle shorthair, to the neighbors’ little boy Giuseppe, who loves him in that hair-raising way that children and misanthropes can love animals. Giuseppe’s parents were not home, for which I was grateful; I warned him to take Pio’s ex cathedra meows with a grain of salt—“too much wet food will only upset his digestion”—and left Giuseppe to prepare for the war of independence with his father Victor, who looks at cats as if they constitute a potential fifth column in the household.

The drive to the airport was unpleasant. The taxi was an aging model with an irritating faux-Chicana chirp, and the roadways were heavily snarled. Apparently, Hurricane Eliot had slammed an ancient white pine through a Pangaea® data-dome in Brooklyn, forcing Lisa, the LA traffic supervisor, to jocky with BART[iv] for server space in a rinky-dink backup data-dome somewhere southeast of Reno. The kinks had clearly not been ironed out: my PERD[v] helpfully informed me that the trip to LAX[vi] was 3.67x what it had been the last time I flew on a Tuesday afternoon, and that had been the week before Thanksgiving.

My autonomic response was to open an interface on the windshield and start re-shuffling a set of concepts I hoped to spin into a paper for the IAAI[vii] meeting next July, but for the sixth or seventh time I was forced to conclude that I was getting nowhere in the absence of more data. I spent a few minutes fine tuning a truffler I had begun composing in July—intended to identify any studies that could plug the gaps in my dataset—and instructed Hilarius to set it loose in the Labor Day A&I[viii] conference at CUNY[ix]. Then I lit a joint, opened a bottle of cognac, cracked the window, rolled down my ad-blockers, and took the cultural pulse.

Most of the holo-pitches bobbing, bouncing, burbling, and burlesquing their way through the traffic jam were Sirius themed: no matter the product, it was all lemonade and long siestas, browned arms and bikini tops. I paid five bucks for a P-W[x] that put a yellow-white bull’s eye on every surface that was hot enough to fry an egg. Pangaea® was still flaunting Kamaka’s[xi] sex appeal; she came jogging through the traffic jam in tiny teal shorts and a Hello-Kitty tank-top, pushing some new piece of scheduling software that integrated temperature forecasts into its automated trip booking. As usually happens for me, I felt over-stimulated within about ten minutes, and put the ad-blockers back up.

I opted instead to load a pirated P-W which compensates for tinting and opacity in automotive window glass, and used my zoom to do some people watching. An inveterate and incorrigible noser, I have always been grateful for the automobile: it is the most intimate interior space that is readily available for public viewing. People are curiously oblivious to the possibility that someone might be watching. The federal mandate on vehicular automation may have taken our hands off the wheel and our eyes off the road, but Americans continue to assume that every motorcar is a monad: a climate controlled personal cosmos, windowless, unscrutinized, sealed in the imperial grandeur of a splendid isolation.

To begin with, I focused on the brisk black shoals of private petro-cars pollocking the candy apple sea of electric city taxis. Beautiful in their sureness of purpose and hideous in their sense of entitlement, they zipped brusquely past my aging red hat lady, as they roared down the channels Lisa parted for their expedition payments like waters before the staff of Moses. The zoom revealed corporate conquistadores in kaleidoscopic suits (what is that fashion which has burst over Sao Paulo runways like a parakeet firework? West African Couture?) batting at their windshield interfaces like overlarge cats and shouting at inefficiencies unseen.

One red haired woman, sporting a purple stovepipe surmounting pink pince-nez and an emerald suit with buttercream piping, appeared to be meditating; her legs were crossed and her chest moved in gentle swells; yet her eyes were open and obviously streaming. Perhaps a new form of Vipassana was trending, relying on sensory saturation for insight rather than sensory withdrawal. It would be easy to market: you could back it up with neuroimaging demonstrating a positive impact on cognitive tasks involving the bifurcation of relevant and irrelevant stimuli, then roll out some longitudinal studies associating a regular regimen with improved performance in executive and upper management positions, maybe incorporate Saturation Vipassana™ into an executive excellence retreat program in the Sonoran Desert, see if you could get Kamaka Hitomi to attend; it wouldn’t be hard, she’s been pumping iconoclastic spirituality into the Pangaea® brand for years now.

But I soon tired of the petro-princes, the carbon-neutral crawlers were much more entertaining. I saw a Chinese family circling their seats and setting dim sum on a black lacquered table at the taxi’s center. I saw an ancient Hispanic woman who clearly took Pacem Mortis[xii] very seriously (my PERD pegged her at 104.16 years of age—zooming on her face was like flying over a wadi delta) murmuring fervently over a rosary. I saw a delightful eruption of sibling outrage: a four-year-old in a central booster seat waited until her brothers, sitting on either side, fell fast asleep, then executed a spring-loaded super-smack: both brothers caught a sharp backhand full in the face and one sprang a nosebleed.

Of course scenes like this needed to be actively sought out. They were the exception, not the rule. Most of my fellow passengers were glazed in or glazed out, either lost in the wynds and closes of the secret city that loomed in the mist behind their eyes, or swallowed by the holographic panorama parading down the boulevard: a garden of earthly delights decades in the making, specially tailored by the benevolent and omniscient persons that watch us from our birth, learning our hopes and insecurities with maternal patience and attention to detail, educating the assembly of algorithms that descend from their firmament and minister to us. We can trust that the assembly of gods, Pangaea®, Ganymede®, Loki®, Hathor®, Shangdi®, He Xiangu®, Fu Lu Shou®, Agbala®, Pandora®, will never fail to spread the dew of desires as yet unknown over the fresh green landscapes of our morning hearts.

I watched the faces of the dreamers, wondering what, if anything, my world might share with theirs. My adblockers were still up, and the holo-pitches looked like gleaming compound eyes: faceted black grapefruits buzzing along the trolley lines suspended over our heads. For the dreamers, though, they were the fragments of a pristine realm, untouched by choice or pain. For the dreamers, those sparkling black jewels were windows into the Kingdom of Promise, the dominion where a gnawing sense of absence finds its undreamt referent, unsullied by the crass mud of actual fulfillment, promising that things will be alright if you will only…

What did they see out there, the dreamers? This sweaty bald diving bell of a man, alone in the front seat with a Retro-Gulp® soda in his hand, what was it that drew his head around in rhythmic circles? Did exotically colored women with long lashes and lurid propositions circle just beyond the windows of his red hat lady? Probably not. More likely the pitch had summoned a merry-go-round and placed him in the center. Now the brass, the round transparent bulbs with their hot white filaments, the eight silly pastorals painted on the octagonal central column, were spinning round and round to a cheerful tune, and in the squealing features of the children on their wild-eyed mounts he could see echoes of the children who were there for all his firsts. And whatever It was, if he bought It, It would take him back to that time of firsts, when every moment was fresh from the Creator’s hands, smelling of cold cool daybreak spattered over wet white flowers.

More and more I see the holo-pitches playing with nostalgia, bringing us back to a time when Waking Life still kissed our fresh new skin with inscrutable rosy lips: a time when it still felt right to make a sound because you liked the way it sounded, to hop up and down because you wished to hop up and down, to tell a strange man in a supermarket that his mustache made you feel dizzy. The most spectacular fruits of Progress are now applied to our secret hopes of Regress, a backwards passage through the snake of time to the moment when we could still feel the soft cool fingers of the Present on our hairless cheeks. I used to think it cruelly ironic that these keen black eyes should convince us we might reclaim the Present by acquiring something we did not already possess. But, at this point on my own road, watching youthful hopes receding in the rearview mirror, I can understand the holo-pitch and what it stands for as something less harmful than the truth. I woke from my reverie with LAX looming up before me.

I decided to travel by air-sloop, the low-hanging, slow-moving, paternalistic profiles that have so recently materialized in the placid horizons beyond our over-crowded and over-caffeinated urban skies. I could not say why. All my instincts testified against the decision. Our cereal-bowl flight plan, mapped upon the mysteries of August zephyrs, involved four weeks’ over the southwestern and southern United States before reaching Spencer County. The exorbitant price tag and “Don’t You Deserve…?” marketing guaranteed that my travel companions would be trowelled from an exhausting corner of the socioeconomic pie.

But none of that had mattered once I caught my first glimpse of Moby Dick.[xiii] Craning my head under the creamy panorama of his rippling belly, feeling my loins throbbing with the benign murmur of his subaltern grumblings, I was suddenly seized by the vigorous and undifferentiated possibility of travel. I think it may have excavated my childhood experience of the zeppelin in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and all that movie stood for at the time: mystery, danger, the disruption of the known, the territory that escapes cartography. I found a map of the United States circa 1938 on my PARD[xiv] and traced the journey in thick lipstick lines, marking every stop with a fat winterberry[xv]. Then I printed an enormous sepia hardcopy to cover the wall at the foot of my bed. Dolores and I spent long nude hours gazing happily at that map, hotboxing the cabin with badly rolled blunts and the enormous Cuban phalli she could produce from her antique medicine chest in such miraculous quantities. It became a symbol in common, the peg on which we hung this brief convergence in our aspirations, as she prepared to start a new life, and I prepared to bring one to an end.

[1] What is that famous quip of Pompey to Sulla? “More people worship the rising than the setting sun”. I have often wondered that it was not uttered with Americans specifically in mind.

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[i] The reader should note that although I will be adhering to popular convention by referring to the first and second “Discus Declarations,” the Demon himself never used the term “Declaration,” he simply referred to his texts as “Book One” and “Book Two.” Book One was released on August 15^th, the date, in the Eastern Orthodox Liturgical Calender, of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. Book Two was, of course, released simultaneously with the terrorist attack of November 8^th of the same year, on the date of the Holy Synaxis of the Archangel Micheal and the Other Bodiless Powers. For a detailed discussion of the possible significance of these dates, see the the article by Herby Hu in my recent anthology of essays on the Discus Declarations: (“Method in the Madness?: The Liturgical Calender of the Discus Demon” in Living Blood from Lifeless Ashes: Essays in Response to Vladimir Wimpleton’s Discus Demon; POI:5, p. 285-300

[ii] This epigraph, the first of a total of fourteen, sets the tone in more ways than one. The text is Coptic, saying twenty-nine from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, and reads as follows: Jesus said: “If the flesh came into existence because of the spirit, it is a marvel. But if the spirit (came into existence) because of the body, it is a marvel of marvels. But as for me, I wonder at this, how this great wealth made its home in this poverty” (Blatz, B. in New Testament Apocrypha; POI:12, vol. 1, 110-33. Since this edition is intended for the general rather than the academic reader, I will be using the Pangaea® citation style.) The Gospel of Thomas is part of a body of so-called “Gnostic” texts, unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945, that grant significant insights into the oral traditions of early Christianity. Unlike the canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas is not a linear account of the life of Jesus, but a body of 114 sayings (or logoi) attributed to him. Two things should be noted here. The first is the thematic harmony that logos twenty nine sounds upon the rest of the Demon’s work, especially in light of the “spiritualizing” and “body denying” impulses widely associated with Gnostic forms of Christianity (it is worthy of note that the works of Plato were also prominent among the Nag Hammadi texts.) The second is the introduction of a formal pattern which will be employed in later epigraphs and in much of the work’s main body that draws on the Gnostic and monastic traditions of early Christianity, in which logoi (sayings) attributed to Jesus and (later), to saints and monastic fathers, played a significant role in the pursuit of a purified state of ascetic “singleness.” The Greek logos can mean both a single “word” and a narrative or explanatory account, (whence the English suffix “logy” for an account/body of knowledge, as, in the case of living things, the discipline of “biology.”) Many of the sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (the 4^th and 5^th century originators of Medieval monasticism) begin with a novice or disciple asking to be given a logos to aid them in their pursuit of spiritual integration and wholeness.

[iii] Presumably Shirley Gorman of Georgia, who sold the reproduction rights for her simulacrum to the Oxy-Bond® company after her January 12^th victory in the Miss America Pageant of the same year.

[iv] I will be casting a vote in favor of this edition’s value to posterity by explaining local and contemporary acronyms: “Bay Area Rapid Transit”, originally the public transportation network and subsequently the traffic AI for San Francisco and its greater metropolitan area.

[v] “Pangaea® Enhanced Reality Display”.

[vi] “Los Angeles International Airport”.

[vii] “International Academy of Artificial Intelligence”.

[viii] “Automation & Ingenuity”, an annual event sponsored by second generation Singularitarian and industrialist Vladimir Itskov.

[ix] “City University of New York”.

[x] “Perception Wash”, a common West Coast idiom for ERD visual filters.

[xi] Kamaka Hitomi Europa, then and now the CEO of Pangaea®, was a personal acquaintance of the Discus Demon. They worked closely together when he was hired to integrate the results of the Nous Project into the Pangaea® prosopon’s Search Engine Optimization department, which she headed at that time. There has been some speculation that they may have briefly pursued a non-professional relationship, but there is little to support the assertion beyond the desire to see a tickling new collision in the firmament of celebrity.

[xii] The famous encyclical of Pope Pius XIII issuing strong cautions regarding the use of biminian therapies. Originally trained as an Assyriologist, Pius had a penchant for classical references and rhetorical flourishes; one of the document’s key phrases, Non simus simili Gilgamo “let us not be like Gilgamesh”, has become a staple among both Catholics and non-Catholics in the anti-biminian community.

[xiii] No air-sloop by that name is currently in service, making this a private or poetic designation. Ashley Nazharkan (“Subaltern Nature: Moby Dick as a Mode of Transport in the Discus Declarations,” in Living Blood from Lifeless Ashes: Essays in Response to Vladimir Wimpleton’s Discus Demon; POI:5, p. 302-367) has attempted to situate this curiosity within a hermeneutic horizon developed by previous interpreters of Herman Melville’s white whale, which understands Moby Dick as a symbol of the Realist idea of Nature: wild, violent, irrational, indifferent and unstoppable. Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” is the typical example of this conception. It is worth keeping in mind, of course, that Moby Dick has also been interpreted as a symbol of God.

[xiv] Pangea® Artificial Reality Display.

[xv] The first instance of Our Hero’s predilection for dragging in assorted fragments of 20^th and 21^st century pop culture ephemera. The Indiana Jones movies are still well known among cellulophiles. A collaboration between the late 20^th century crowd-pleasers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (the creator of Star Wars) they recount the story of a fedora wearing, bullwhip wielding, globe-trotting archeologist (played by Harrison Ford) racing against the Nazis to recover biblical artifacts of extraordinary power, notably the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. The movies hold up well, it must be said: an intoxicating blend of ruthless Old Testament mythology and klepto-cosmopolitan swashbucklery, served with a generous helping of grittily cartoonish violence. Travel in the movies is consistently represented by blood red lines on a yellowed map, with large red dots to mark stopovers and arrivals. Raiders of the Lost Ark is set in 1938. (Lucasfilm Ltd., The Indiana Jones Trilogy; POI:718.)