Marriage and moving across the ocean are surprisingly complex and disruptive procedures. It seems almost childishly naive to be so taken aback by these facts, but it's the only excuse I can offer for my endless silence. If there are any readers still left, I offer my sincere apologies, I have no excuse. Nevertheless, I am now finally established in this absurd little English town with its drooping, drooling spires, and I have the time and the internet connection to pick up the dropped baton. The only penance I have to offer is a re-commitment to my old schedule of Sunday afternoon posts, (though now at GMT rather than EST).
I'm opening my reboot with something new: a sci-fi serial I have been working on for a year or so meant to explore the issues this blog is interested in. Please drop me a line in the comments to let me know if:
A: You are Still Reading.
B: You would like me to continue posting this serial alternately with my non-fiction essays, or if you would prefer me to ditch the fiction and stick with the old content and format for the blog.
Your feedback is desperately, squalidly, sordidly appreciated.
“Our
Flesh Remained”
The Discus
Declarations
Introduction to
the Critical Edition
The Discus Demon was not a monster, and he
was far from inhuman. This was my first discovery. It has remained the most
upsetting. I open with this observation in the hope that it might clarify—and
perhaps justify—my complicated and unseemly relationship with these texts. There
is an obvious morbidity in building your career on the man that murdered your
parents. By explaining my choices, I hope to demonstrate why I believe this
critical edition of the Discus Declarations, aimed at the general reader, will
have enduring value. I write in a confessional voice, but the events of Red
October are too recent to make anything else seem appropriate.
I would not be writing this introduction if I
thought my subject was another Anders Behring
Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, or Parashurama Balakrishna. Yet the conventional wisdom would place
the Discus Demon at the summit of this pantheon of infamy. All the taxanomic
cues point us towards this classification. The Discus Demon meets the criteria
for inclusion: A lone actor, (no shred of evidence has ever linked him to Al
Qaeda, the Nazirite Squads, the Kali Yuga Brigade, or any other active
terrorist group), he nevertheless formulated an explicit rationale for his
actions that transcends the desire to avenge personal grievances or achieve personal
immortality by way of maximum havoc (marking him out from school shooters and
bell-tower snipers.) And he is necessarily the superlative example of the type:
the body count of the Red October event surpasses that of every other name in
the pantheon combined nearly a
hundred times over. By rights the Discus Demon should be classified as the ultimate
Lonely and Deranged Ideologue.
I came to these texts, like so many others in the
weird, fantastic haze that saturated Red October, hoping to comfort myself by the
confirmation of this conventional wisdom. The media coinage for the texts, the
“Discus Declarations”, bespoke a manifesto, an ideological broadside, a Mein Kampf in miniature. I was hoping to
discover the unrepentant madness or badness of a Breivek or a McVeigh, a clear confirmation
of the Demon’s unspeakable Otherness. I wanted to consign my parents’ deaths to
an act of God: the category of natural disaster in which we can most safely accommodate
these rare and radical misfires in human nature, these Deranged Ideologues who
aspire to unlimited violence.
Instead I found a clever, funny, insightful, self-deprecating,
rather relatable man. In itself this might not be surprising: sociopaths are
well known for their wit and charm: it is a subset of their willingness to manipulate
others for their own ends. But the Discus Demon was not a sociopath. The ease
with which the sociopath exploits her social matrix is a function of her
immunity to the stings and goads that drive the rest of us in our relationships:
besetting anxieties, conflicting loyalties, soul-splitting imperatives. The
Demon, by contrast, was exquisitely vulnerable
to these stings and goads, to the point of ruminative paralysis; it seems
telling that he at one point compares himself to Hamlet.
While his reflections on his private life express
pains that are universal to the human experience, his regrets about his public
life capture terrors that seem specific to our historical moment. He expresses what
he might refer to as the “consensus tenor” of our age. He isolates and picks at
many of the cracks and fissures that have become immanent in the structure of
virtual-biminian existence. His writings and actions are an extremist
articulation of intuitions that most of us already respond to, consciously or
unconsciously.
In this he seems most akin to Theodore Kaczynski,
and the Discus Declarations a more nuanced and confessional update of
“Industrial Society and its Future.” The Discus Demon is of course quite unlike
the Unabomber in the extremity of his conclusions: Kaczynski assumed that true
flourishing was within human reach if we returned to the environment of
evolutionary adaptation by violently dismantling industrial society and
resuming Paleolithic subsistence patterns. The Discus Demon had no such hopes
to sustain him. Ultimately he concluded that consciousness itself is a fundamentally
pernicious phenomenon: that wakefulness,
evolved or engineered, biological or artificial, is malign at its very core.
Jean-Luc Lemarchal has chosen to summarize the Discus Declarations with that
famous phrase of Van Gogh: “La tristesse
durera toujours”. And yet, I do not believe the Demon was in any way as
unbalanced as Van Gogh. It is the Discus Demon’s obvious and transparent sanity
that makes him so profoundly terrifying.
This is what accounts for why I believe the Discus
Demon should be placed in a category of his very own. It also accounts for why
I was unable to concentrate on anything but the Discus Declarations when the
time came to write my dissertation, scarcely five months after the events of
October 8th. When I tabled my proposal before the Department of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University, I was met with general
incredulity. I recall one grizzled Old Guard accusing me of “profiteering
hipness.” I suspect it was my personal connection to the event more than the
strength of my arguments that swayed the committee in the end.
The notes the reader encounters here have
their
genesis
in a manuscript of the Discus Declarations I produced for my own use in the
course of this dissertation. I eventually submitted the monograph in accordance
with the requirements of my doctorate as “Digital Tectonics, Analog Eruptions:
The Discus Demon in the Meta-Discursive Firmament of Pascal Wells.” This work
aimed to situate the Discus Demon within the constellations of inter-textuality
identified by the pioneering Post-Neo-Historicist critic Pascal Wells around
the 21st century meta-discursive thematico-onticities of “Automation
Anxiety,” “Data-Gag,” “Butlerian Jihad,” “The Slippage of Simulacrum,” and “The
Crisis of Embodiment.” Of course given the circumstances, a significant portion
of my text was dedicated to securing a mandate for treating the Discus
Declarations as a literary text in the first place.
The resulting monograph was surprisingly
well received by advisors and colleagues, and Columbia University Press offered
to format it for public release under the title “The Discus Declarations as a
Work of Literature” (despite its opacity to the general reader). I was
completely unprepared for the culture squall awaiting me on its release; I can
still recall the wet, lifeless February day when the clouds opened up and the
outrage poured down. I was appreciating the Seattle skyline while my car
whisked me to an early lecture when my PERD® began plinking insistently and my
NewsTruffler® started flashing a priority color I had never seen before. I
opened the prompt to find a red face under a cowboy hat referring to me as a
“literary lich.” Holo-punditry is a tight and fast-moving community: by the
time I arrived at my office, the requirements of one-upmanship had added “lefty
academic cryptkeeper”, “blackboard bonelord” and “novelistic necrophiliac” to
my list of titles and epithets.
I was foolish enough to disregard those colleagues
who warned me against accepting any offers for a live appearance to defend
myself. My first clue that I should have listened came when a shock jockey
introduced me as “The Man Who Wants Us To Believe The Discus Demon Was A Great
Artist Who Was Simply Misunderstood.” The clincher came when I was ambushed on
live holovision by the family members of some other victims, who informed me (with
a crisp unanimity that reeked of prior studio rehearsal) that I was “shitting
on my father’s grave and pissing on my mother’s ashes.”
That was quite enough for me. I cancelled the rest
of my appearances and restricted myself to a series of Op-Ed pieces. They were
roundly savaged, but at least they were savaged with a reasonable degree of
civility. I still feel a good deal of lingering bitterness over the episode,
given that none of my assailants even bothered to read my work. But in the end it amounted to raw animal pain finding
the nearest object at hand and battering itself bloody. You are reading a
product of the same process, differently expressed.
This almighty hiccup of indignation proved itself a
boon to my work in the end, showing that there is at least some truth in the
old truism that “all publicity is good publicity.” Once the two-week public
attention span had burned itself out, I began to hear from quieter and more
measured voices. In the years since, a trickle has become a modest stream, and
the Discus Declarations have accumulated their very own critical halo, with
contributors from a wide variety of disciplines and critical traditions,
everything from Old Catholic heuro-structuralists with an anti-gnosticizing
agenda to globalization & media anthropologists looking for a new way to interrogate the claims
of biminian eschatology. I am grateful that in writing these notes, I have been
able to refer the reader to voices in that growing body of analysis and
commentary.
The Discus Demon was not a monster, or a
madman, I want to emphasize that again. That is why I have given my career over
to the study of his final words, and that is why an edition of his work aimed
at the lay reader is so important. If a sane, sensitive, and brilliant man can
look at our world and come to such conclusions—and take the actions those
conclusions necessarily imply—then we need to ask serious questions about where
we are headed. Our culture is divided between voices that herald our coming
collapse into the grim realities of a finite planet and voices that trumpet our
imminent apotheosis. Like nearly every sensible person, I don’t feel qualified
to pronounce a verdict either way. But if the voices for apotheosis are
correct, if the twin maws of death and scarcity are closing behind us at last,
the existential abyss is yawning before us ever wider. The Discus Demon looked
it square in the eye, and it broke him. If we don’t take his experience
seriously when making our decisions today, it may cost us tomorrow.
Before I close this introduction, a few
words on some characteristic features of the text, and the aid the notes can
provide in connection with these features. First is the Demon’s prose style. It
is characterized by a ponderous, academic sort of floridity, as in: “The tyrant
cumulonimbus of decision was pierced and scattered by the liberating rays of fascination.”
I’ve found it has a bloodless and self-aware sort of charm once you grow accustomed
to it, as evidenced by the way it has infected my own style, (something I will
never have a comfortable relationship with.) But the average reader will find
it sludgy and unappealing. I regret that the notes can do little to ameliorate
this.
Second, the Demon is referentially self-indulgent in
a way that shows real contempt for any possible reader. The literary,
religious, and historical references that saturate the text, and the linguistic
esoterisms he indulges himself with in the chapter epigraphs and elsewhere, are
impossible to follow unless you are A: a polymath, B: willing to pick the text
to pieces and track down every little loose thread, C: the Discus Demon
himself. I have assumed that most readers are neither A nor C, but will be
happy to benefit from the fact that I am B. Although nearly all of the
allusions and direct references can be untangled with nothing but an internet
connection, it implies an investment of time and a disruption to the narrative
flow that I wish to spare the reader. The translations and explanations that
appear in the notes are provided with this in mind.
Third, the Demon has an odd penchant for blending
high and low culture in a way that can only be termed “geeky.” He yokes many of
his most important themes to odd nuggets of 20th century cultural ephemera,
ripples on the surface of the pond that were long since obscure by the time the
Demon was writing. I never thought to spend part of my academic career playing
ancient video games in search of clues or combing forgotten scraps of low
fantasy novels in search of character allusions, but at a certain point it
became a necessity. The critical notes alert the reader when the Demon is
shaping his narrative around a story the rest of the world has forgotten.
Fourth, the Demon’s work is pockmarked with narrative
dislocations, punctuations, and fragmentations. Structurally, it can be
infuriating, with abrupt or incomplete transitions between perspectives that
make many chapters initially seem like unforgivable non-sequiturs. This is not
the result of the Demon’s compressed attention span or unbalanced personality.
It is a deliberate attempt to represent himself as the creature of his
contradictions. The notes help the reader to navigate difficult transitions on
their feet, and point out the threads that knit together seemingly jagged edges.
Fifth and finally, the Demon treats his own life as
a work of literature, with all the poetic license that implies. The post-Event
frenzy deployed shoals of reporters to every place and person mentioned in the
Declarations even as Pompeian cumuli were still drifting in the air over Lake St.
Clair. The discovery that many details of the Demon’s career, (including the semi-eremetic
episode in the Valley of Kidron and his work on the Nous Project), could be
authenticated, gave the misleading impression that the Discus Declarations were
a “factual account.” The Discus Declarations are nothing of the kind. They are
a true account, not a factual account. They are a narrative of the spiritual
developments that eventually thrust the Red October Event upon the Demon as a
black interior necessity. Many details are wholly fictional. For example, an
enormous amount of the action in Book One revolves around the fact that Dolores
Medina Villanueva has the name she does, when in fact, although she is very
much a real person, this is not her name at all. The notes are invaluable to any
reader trying to distinguish the literary Demon from the historical Demon.
And this, of course, brings up the question of the Fabergé girl. I want to make my position on this point absolutely
clear: She never existed, nor does she “walk among us.” Legions of journalists,
scholars and scientists have confirmed the logical and factual impossibility of
this person, yet she remains the darling of conspiracy theorists worldwide. But
there is no question about it. She is an imaginative construct, an aggregation
of the Demon’s own inner voices. And those are the voices that should interest
us in the first place. The Discus Declarations do not draw our attention to
mysterious outward powers acting upon us, they draw our attention to the inward
results of our culture’s unreflective pursuit of its own wayward impulses. The
Discus Demon asks us, as Humbert Humbert once did, to “look at this tangle of
thorns.” I think we can benefit by complying. - Vladimir Wimpleton
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