- Paris
- Section 1 of 12
Dante makes the dishes clean again, then leaves the city for good
Section 1 of 12
Dante makes the dishes clean again, then leaves the city for good
I wash the dishes -- and try to make them clean again. In the city, in the back of the café, I slipped a copy of Nietzsche, that I bought yesterday on the cold-and-winding walk home, back in my pocket. So it wouldn't get wet, while I washed the dishes and tried to make them clean again. When I was young, I thought I was strong, but life was merely easy. Students of the Revolution: "pockets" were fabricated holding places in "clothes", meant for "paperback books" such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.
It seems it was some time late Winter -- around the turn of the millennium. Year one of our infamous struggle against the Great-Idiøcy, that by now I assume you've all read about in school if schools must still exist. January, I suppose, still, in the city, in the café, Nate had disappeared into the cosmodemonic cosmopolis of New York. So, Chuck came by to visit me in the city, in the coffeehouse. Years before Nate and I defeated the Illuminati and became philosopher-kings of the World-Empire. Nate disappeared in the Fall, and left me alone, as I've largely been, to face the world and the riff-raff of existence in this godforsaken night-horse we had come to call the finite uni-verse.
Nate said: I want to go to the biggest city in the World, where I can be free, and where life must certainly be meaningful -- where people must surely speak of interesting and meaningful things. And so, Chuck comes by to visit me, in the coffeehouse, the café, in the city, as we wait for Winter to go, and Spring to come. It's cold outside, and I like keeping my hands soaking in the hot soapy water. There is no escape, everything seems so hopeless now. I wash the dishes and make them clean again, and try to forget about everything else. I don't understand what has led me to this place, down deep the rabbit hole.
The World is as it was caused to be, atom by atom, action by reaction, the fall of the dominoes, the Great Chain of Being, and the immutable laws of Cause and Effect. It's not so much that I mind Chuck's little visits, he distracts me from my self which had somehow become my sole obsession. He has become a god to me, a force of nature, a priapic entity, a sociopathic poet who does the things one wishes one could do if not for common decency. But I will not harp on neither the infernal nor supernal nature of Chuck. I have come to embrace my fate and its bedfellows, hesitantly -- amor fati, love of fate as Nietzsche so oft reiterates. Here I wish only to better inform you students of the revolution on the proper history of Nate's and my defeats of the powers that be.
Having said that, one last thought on Chuck -- he was of course one of the old gods, not yet evolved through time and myth to full omniscience, not yet omnipotent nor fully immutable. But then, Superman himself wasn't born bulletproof, you know, he at first needed his magic cape. On some visits, Chuck might have seemed omnipresent, but not in a good way -- a heterodoxic agnostic, skeptical of gnosis, with a pretty Jewish mother, from the city, who wanted to love Jesus so he could hold hands with all the shiny, giggling girls from the mid-west sub'urbane breeding camps (M.W.S.U.B.C) called in the vulgate 'proper homes', and feel the "love" of "Jesus" flow through him. Even I, caught in my own little echo-copra-lalia lalia melancholia involutia, who had fled from them and those, long ago when I was young and thought I was strong, understood this primordial desire for long wool skirts and clean pretty faces.
I am washing dishes in the back of the café. And though I like this idea of friend-ship or "company", today I want to be left alone, with my cups and spoons and the various side-effects of my latest anti-anxiety/anti-depression medication. I suppose in theory, if this were a better world or if I were better suited for it, I'd be out front right now sitting with the students, sipping the heads off cappuccinos and speaking endlessly of the interesting and consuming things that surely they should be teaching now-a-days in the uni-versities. And laughing.
But I like the quiet in the back, and the warm water, and the soap, the wet heat on my hands, in the back of the café, in the city -- and I dread Chuck's visits only when I realize he'll never appear just to give me what I need. In this respect, he is very much a god. Doppelgängers of him stand in his stead, whenever he is gone. I argue endlessly with the remnants and reflections of him, and of my friends living and dead, over meaningless things. There is no escape, not just from life-sucking fiends who call themselves "friends", without intending irony, but from the world that created them, and that created me, precisely as we were caused to be. The heat and the water, from the sinks in the café, in the back, in the city, refresh me, momentarily, day-after-day.
I want to stay hidden in the back, for the rest of my life, but they won't let me. Some thing intrudes. Some one wants something from me. I can't shake the despair. Ranting and riffing quietly to myself, in the back, muttering over my cups and knives, staves off the tics, thrashing about in theoretical conflicts. If only I could leave, just go to an ideal city like Paris, where I could sit in a café and listen to people make witty remarks about interesting and meaningful things in a language I cannot comprehend. I don't need much money, I just need to be free.
I used to think about leaving the city to return to the suburbs, to pick up my life where I left off, 13.5 billion years ago, to beg forgiveness of the powers that be for my hubris in thinking I was strong and believing I needed to be in the grit of life where people spoke of art and philosophy and other such meaningful things. I can see now Chuck reflected in the spoons and knives drying in their racks, as he slips in the back, behind me. I see myself reflected in the cups, not as I might appear in the mirror, but as I see myself inside my head. I never recognize my self in photographs. I can't escape this awareness of my awareness of my existence -- eyes within eyes following me. My day-dreams overflowing with images of knives reflecting my face, cutting me quickly. Though consciously, I have no awareness of this concern for pain, and I heal quite easily.
Students of the revolution, after the time of Nate, I'm sure your society is largely based on the movie The Matrix, so you'll know full-well whereof I speak when I say that I now tried to recall what Neo said about there being no spoon. One cannot bend a spoon, it is only the mind that bends. I find this comforting, somehow. In elementary school, in the suburbs, long ago when I thought I was strong but life was merely easy, at St. Sebastian's, I wrote a report on telekinesis and the bending of spoons. I see my face reflected, watching myself watch Chuck's reflection. I tried to bend spoons with my mind. There was no first grade at the catholic school, so I went to a public elementary named Walden -- after Thoreau's little Eden, where his mom brought him soup to keep him warm. The pond is now polluted with coffeecups, from all the travelers and seekers of meaning. I used to despise those depressed caffeine-addicts, whose clarity was obviously impinged upon by their addiction, and now, the only comfort I feel lies in the warm and wet lap of my own despair and a cup of the sweet creamy bean-water soup we drank in those days.
Why do restaurants never have enough spoons? The eternal philsophical question of the day. Nate took his coffee black, while I stirred mine white, that's what they say in Paris, "white". Bend the mind, bend the mind, repeat the prayer, and make the cups clean again. I am washing dishes in the back of the café and Chuck comes by to visit. The refreshing heat, the reflection off the knives, the spoons, the cups, the sink. Chuck slips in the back, asks for some cash, and tells me to come meet a friend of his. This girl from Canada. He says this as if he's giving me a gift in exchange. I can't go on like this. Chuck says everything happens for a reason, but it doesn't.
Everything is caused by the unbreakable chain of being, and the immutable laws of cause and effect. There is no free-will; conscious intent is merely epiphenomenal, a mere side-effect, a cog in the machine. There is only one reason, the dominoes, falling, atoms like billiard balls colliding. I am consoled by the fact of the nonexistence of free-will, and the determined nature of the finite Universe. Students of the revolution ... nevermind.
There's a model of the space-shuttle on a table out in the café, like the one I carry with me. The craft has always been so surreal to me, but perhaps you students of the world to-day, born with technology that makes this seem like child's play, see it as insignificant normalcy. "Children" are small humans, similar to monkeys or criminals but less strong.
There's a model of the shuttle on a table in the café, like the one I carry with me. I was thinking that some kid just left it there. Having grown up with the comfortingly simple, elegant, rockets on their way to the moon, and the ones aimed at those godless atheistic communistic russkies (G.A.C.R.) with their 'great Russian experiment' (G.R.E.), and their cosmo-nauts, their 'sailors of the cosmos', I found the engorged, tumorous, shape of the space-shuttle to be rather disturbing.
When I'm at Home, alone, in my apart'ment, with my cat, so not precisely alone, I build rocket ships in my mind, to fall asleep. And watch them fly effortlessly away, to better worlds. Perhaps you are not familiar with the concept of sleep; sleep is like being awake, only the nightmares last less long. Nitrous oxide (N2O), known as laughing gas by "dentists" who used to use it to give a neo-cortex (organic brain) the illusion of the inability to feel pain, in some patients produced exhilaration and uncontrollable laughter, utilized by addicts (Nate) to blank their minds, manufactured in large doses as an efficient rocket propellant. Pressurized gas would escape through a tunnel, a rabbit-hole if you will, of burning rubber, and explode with terrible force, compelling the rocket outward and away. There's a model of the shuttle, on a table out in the café, like the one I carry with me. I was thinking some dumb kid left it, but that kid was me. Here I was, wishing we wouldn't let families in here, thinking: I should pocket the craft now before they come back!
I hate all those oblivious brainless suburban families -- agents of the system, every last one of them. Happy dumb housewives, who would lock me up and throw away the key if I happened to be on trial for some reason or no reason at all (determinism, fatalism, crimes against superstition), stumbling through my coffeehouse, mucking up my ambiance, my atmosphere, leaving their refuse behind. Just so they can Š what? Pretend to find some pretence of meaning in the grit of the city where the world is supposed to be seen for what it is? There's a poster of the Columbia, or maybe it's the Challenger, the space-shuttle -- in the bookstore that I walk to on my way home. I recall a book report I wrote, when I was a kid in catholic boys-school, on the Columbia. Years before the Challenger exploded, killing the teacher of the year. We watched it blow up, on TV, at "school". I should pocket the craft now.
I keep forgetting that wasn't me, I don't have a very good memory -- I wrote my report on a book I never read about the cold war between America and Russia. I keep thinking that it was me who wrote on the Columbia, long before it was launched, before the Challenger failed, in its hubris to challenge the gods in outerspace, beyond the crystal dome I suppose, and blew up. And the Universe gobbled up the teacher of the year, while all the little schoolchildren stood and stared and (I assume) regretted having honored their favorite teacher, perhaps the only decent one in their entire city, with this spectacle of a public execution.
And God said, Now the teacher of the year is all mine, mine, mine! ... And I too can look at her long grey skirt and dream of perfect worlds. While she sits on her desk, and rambles on about trivia and tricks to master the illusion of reason, thinking she's actually teaching the little monkeys and criminals something real and meaningful.
My bath-toy space-shuttle that Dr. Jojo gave me, long before she overdosed on Christmas day, is left floating in the sink as I wash the dishes, and try to make them clean again. I use the device to remind myself of simple and dangerous things, like if the water needs changed or if I put knives in the sink to soak. When I see the craft floating there I know there is something bad I knew I would forget. And I like watching the craft bob up and down. Plash -- I talk to Chuck and pull the toy out of the sink. I dry my wet hands off on my towel and shirt, and stick the device in my pocket. I'm always fondling my pants in public to make sure I still have my keys and credit cards and little notes I'll need when it's finally time to change the world, making sure over and over a-gain nothing has fallen out and been lost. I have this dread I'll someday misplace something, but yet I never do.
Years before Nate and I defeated the Illuminati, were named philosopher-kings of the World-Empire, and made the jump into the infinite, I was washing dishes in the back of my Milleresque cosmo-dæmonic coffeehouse mired in the muck of the tumorous intestines of a secondary cosmopolis of a cancerous state. Deep in the Midwest Winter around the turn of the millennium, the new year had begun, and the great Nathan Henry, had disappeared, as you know well from "school", into the infernal sewer of New York, and left me to fend for myself with Chuck my parasitic god.
Riffing and ranting in the back kept me occupied, but the despair was creeping up. Everyone kept saying it was Dr. Jojo's suicidal overdose, Mark's Cancer, Rick's AIDS, Jim's hanging himself, that individually, and/or collectively, had worked their way into my subconscious unbeknownst to me. Perhaps they were right, in a manner of speaking. Unlike the every-day psychotics and neurotics with which I know people of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries are or were commonly compelled to deal, I lack many of the fundamental instinctual capacities such as the ability to sense when my own emotions are pushing me to my own doom. I, still, mistakenly thought I was strong.
But I no longer believed in death, I had become a causalist believing only in the universe as a single creature and time as a continuous gesture. And this idea and event of 'no longer existing' never bothered me in the first place. I had always felt as if I had unintentionally inevitably left behind an infinite number of me's who now only existed as fragments of memory; every six months was like a whole new life to me. When I watched each of my friends die, I felt relieved, as if their game was over and finally finely won, as if I was glad to no longer worry about their continued struggle. If I were not all too painfully sane and sober, one might (I suppose) fear that one such as I might be all too glad to intentfully bring this relief of the illusion of death to myself and to others ahead of schedule so to speak, but then we must consider atomic causality. But, I suppose I am a sort of neurotic at the core; when I dream, I only have nightmares.
It's been a freaking cold Winter so far, did I mention that? The windows in the café are completely fogged up. I tried to send Nate a Christmas, NewYear's, Birthday card. I slapped a "stamp" on a photograph of a "cat", but I couldn't find his address. I put his name on the back and wrote: To the Great Nathan Henry -- Care of: New York, New York. Better half-assed than never. Everybody's dead. Jojo overdosed on Christmas. Rick died of AIDS, Mark died of Cancer, Jim just hung himself. Perhaps I'm not recalling correctly, perhaps that happened later. I don't have a very good memory. And Nate's, still, somewhere in New York, I assumed and was right.
Dr. Jojo up and got married to some rockstar from the 1970s, and for all I knew gave up her lucrative practice and moved to Amsterdam to prescribe LSD to herself as a cure for the American dream. I hadn't realized yet that she killed herself on Christmas day. Months from now, in the Summer, in the country, a year after Mark's death, Chuck or maybe it was mother (I don't recall), will send me a clipping with some dubious story vomited by Jojo's twin-sister -- lies of Jojo finding God in her struggle to fight the despair. I felt that was the logical end of a human being too decent and a mind too reasonable; I felt I should've saved her, but what end? Jojo had a photographic memory, and was a successful doctor before she was thirty, but all she wanted was to marry a rockstar and run away.
But despair is a pandemic, a virus,
perpetuated by the salve of religion,
pretending to be the cure for the ills it causes.
I forget who said that. Chuck comes scurrying in, all five parasitic feet of him. Slips in the back, where I'm up to my elbows in dishwater, and watching his reflection in the coffee-cake knives. I hear him mumble some perfunctory nicety about Nate in New York, but the question is meaningless. Before I can slip a word in edgewise, Chuck starts in on this rant.
Some sociopathic riff, rife with all the standard paranoid rationalizations, illogical conclusions, strung haphazardly together, making my little, neurotic, dopamine-induced, ticking, avocational wordplay seem entirely sane in comparison. Some story about the Christian-girl from utopian-socialist French-Canada, having come to visit again. I know exactly who he's talking about, and he wants me to 'meet' her ... and of course to loan him thirteen bucks and change, so he can buy her "a drink or two".
In the world of the real, as we can call it here in the dishwater-vulgate, where things are made clean again, he needs the cash. Which, I suppose, is fine. What is money to a suicidal causalist like me? I like the idea of being surrounded by people, but I hate restaurants and bars; I like people-watching but I can barely stand just going for a low-cost pleasant walk home. I can't even look at the books I buy, and they cost about a buck thirty-five, but I like to hold them and touch them and rearrange them on my shelf. My cat's perfectly happy I can't find the courage to leave my apart'ment except to go to work. I can't even comprehend people whose lives consist of shopping malls and business lunches and sporting events and rock concerts and nightclubs; I should've known there was something wrong with me from the start.
The medicine isn't working properly. The anxiety pills put me to sleep, and though the depression medication stops me from resorting so quickly to suicide, it makes me so sick I wish I wanted to die. And you know I've already met this girl, this born-again Christian from utopian-socialist French-Canada. And sure, he knows this too. There's always that fine line between what Chuck doesn't know and what he pretends to be unable to grasp. It always sounds better to borrow cash, which one has no intention of ever paying back, based on the mystery of an exotic stranger having come for a visit from a strange land where they practice socialized medicine.
Chuck has come to visit me in the city, in the café. As you students of the revolution know all too well. Now, you might ask: Did I in fact know that Nate would one day be named 'Pope Innocent the 14th', the most famous though not the only atheist Pope?
Å is the sign for the ångstrom unit, a microscopic unit of Time
commonly used for discourse on: travel through Time;
the nonfinite realm of indeterminate infinite-smallness;
and other such matters concerning the
beginning of Time and the ends of Space.
You can't always believe the hype they write in history books. Reality tends to be so much more mundane, pedestrian you might say, than the idealistic fantasies concocted to brainwash children into believing that their great leaders and heroes were anything but dimwitted and well-adapted sociopaths. ...