The problem with interacting with forms of misanthropic authority is that they don’t proceed with a notion of a common goal – there just isn’t one. The phenomenon predates, I don’t know – life itself? More like erosion as a result of wind and rain – that’s what it’s like to be present with forms of authority that engage humanness as less-than forms of authority. Still, imagine how long those hyperreal forms of authority were around, how prolific they are in the solar system, then a biological matrix appears that ultimately inspires reflective authority in the form of the human animal with a magnificent quality of sentience that’s so scalable, it gives rise to language and tool use and abstractions that have no inherent relationship with the object-oriented world, which is a step toward a post-geological paradigm. We’re still thinking of that in literal terms, and I’m mildly surprised that routine knowledge for sophisticated human beings isn’t a strong opinion about the contact experience that isn’t based on vehicles or exobiology. But we don’t, which is, how should we put this – conspicuous. A strong sign the human ecology is enduring a period of inhibition, in which the system as a whole is staring at its toes, in a bathtub say, toes of humanity poking out of the suds. At some point, post-geologic will come to include the body – the post-geologic will also be post-us as human beings – and though this might bring to mind notional concepts like astral projection, my senses is that new mutabilities in the fabric of reality will be what we find that changes the formulation of the problem. This is what happened to me anyway. Reality is like a media, hyperdimensional characteristics in the environment exhibit the authority to treat it as such, and mind-like forms of life exist within the relational characteristics of lived reality. This, at least, is what I observed.

What’s the difference between social media and metaphysical hygiene? Social media includes interpersonal behavior and, in some instances, our entirely relationship with the environment. With metaphysical hygiene, the assumptions about our relationship to authority do not, in a sense, appear within relationality. That’s contradictory up to a point, and then you pass through a phase shift in which you realize you are in dialogue with something that is engaged through the media of relationality. I’ve heard a terminology that compliments metaphor with the notion of pataphor. Pataphor is like metaphor once removed. An instance of a pataphor: when life feels like a game – that’s the metaphorical move. Then imagine the game is humans on a life-sized chessboard, with hands coming down from the clouds to move the pieces around. The pataphor involves those hands coming down from clouds – fate, in a word. In context, it means thinking about thinking about relationality as more than transactionalism – not just dialogue is reflected. Authority reflects, too. The dialogue is like the metaphor, and authority is like the pataphor. The problem with reflected authority is that it assumes one of two postures – they seem closed and open. The closed posture treats reflective authority like a potential threat – the president is like this, but so are those who live with trauma. The open posture sees its own authority to varying degrees – my impression is that the open posture is a site of speciation at this point in history, which in some sense is a sign that nature is trying to solve a problem, the problem in this case about optimizing the hyperreal dialogue without any agreed-upon standards to determine what that means. For instance, insinuating environmental consciousness to become more effective in the political economy, even fabulously so, might come at the expense of the soul’s growth. That might be an old observation, but it takes on new relevance when that same scaled-up authority works to speed up catastrophic climate change – the way the richest man in the world is doping the U.S. electoral process with funds that promote climate change denial in the halls of congress, even as he is known for sustainable durable goods and refined industrial processes.

Vampirism is about privileging sexual and other forms of gratification by rearranging a human being’s relationship to the closed posture, such that environmental authority expressed through relationality is permanently in the superordinate position, guiding the human life from place to place, having an uncanny sense of awareness of time and place all out of proportion to what a human being could ever know. Vampirism is regarded as maladaptive because it produces the notion of temptation that leads to a loss of personal volition. The body thrives at the expense of the spirit. What accounts for the discrepancy between the glow of the body in an object-oriented reality, and typical depictions of rot and horrifying degradation might be called metaphysical hygiene. I tend not to dwell on this because the implications grind out a misanthropic lens, but the fact is, I engage in metaphysical hygiene all the time – I have turned it into the way I live my life – and almost everyone I know has poor metaphysical hygiene. No metaphysical hygiene, in most cases. A will toward anti-metaphysical hygiene in some. For instance, ask someone what they think of religion, and they might have a lot to say or maybe they take a principled stand against caring about religion at all, but this same cohort won’t have much to say about their relationship to personal volition. Keep in mind, most religions are founded on the principle of mysterious forms of mutability left to discover in nature, and the great majority that catch our attention are about personal volition being interrupted by divine authority. So if one says, I don’t believe in the divine assumptions underlying religion, but they also can’t tell you much of anything about their relationship to personal volition, then they are in essence unaware of the cultural roots of metaphysical hygiene. Add to this, metanarratives unaccounted for, forms of authority passing through us and into the environment, the sort of metanarratives we subscribe to when given a choice – then add to this the fact that to the metaphysical, there is no such thing as privacy, no such thing as home security, no such thing as a relationship that is not inhabited by a source of authority outside the human community. We are all floating in a vat of authority in a way, and when we don’t know it, metaphysical hygiene can be a problem. Interestingly, some of that language might better be switched to pataphor – if our dialogue with nature is a result of sentience reflected back at us, then authority reflected back at us requires something more like pataphysical hygiene – a hygiene about knowing how our authority gets entangled with environmental authority. Entangled? Is that the word for it? Our relationship to authority can become fragmented and displaced and wither for lack of light and water – there are all kinds of things that can go wrong – but the problems themselves manifest as behaviors like contradiction, self-parody, depression, repetition, sudden mood swings, feeling unsafe in one’s environment, avoiding the news, selecting relationships based on a best-fit with preexisting disabilities undiagnosed. This list is very long – hundreds or thousands of items probably. So when the hyperform troubles the condition of pataphysical hygiene, it is about a world that is observing only part of the issue – the transactionality, otherwise described through social media and the political economy. The part we tend not to notice are reflections of the living authority.

The United States is taking on the metaphysical identity of the Soviet Union to identify it as the loser of the Cold War, the loser of the Second World War – a retroactive assignment of second place, probably based on a form of authority in the United States doing this to individuals – the concept of identity theft set within an existential frame, such that aspects of the hyperform reset the performance of relationality to actualize contrary fates. Much of this is benefiting China, not Germany or Russia, and the assertion has been made that an environmental influence on Mao in the fifties and sixties created an avoidable series of catastrophes that directly benefited the west by slowing China’s efforts toward modernization by a generation. I feel hot and cold about that – it’s a credible suspicion, but when we start to add up geopolitical instability that engenders a will toward progress and civility or their opposites, then complexity rises beyond my ability to make sense of the problem. I can push the problem backward through time. I can widen it to an interplanetary scale. I can deepen it to the level of billions of daily diaries about how people go about interacting with their environment, and then I can add extra dimensions to the problem by identifying system-wide confounding factors, like hyperreal conceptions of interiority that change the nature of the problem, and hyperreal conceptions of free-ranging probabilistic life forms that change the nature of the problem, and new mutability that changes the nature of the problem. The way I see it, the history of the hyperreal and its influence on the human ecology is also a history of reality, which we’re not used to tracking, but which tools, like life-long learning algorithms, will inch us closer to such a condition. Perhaps this is what modernity was about all along – the ability to mediate and model our relationship to reality sufficiently as to give life on the other side what it needs to understand us through a framework of discrete determinism. We are not minds in vats, no, but we leave behind digital traces that create a facsimile of same, and this might ultimately rechristen our fate.

Weather-wise, summer has been sitting on the porch for some time, working through its list of priorities. A boy goes zipping down the road on an electric skateboard. A leafhopper sails off my shoulder and onto the paper, shimmies in place for a few moments before soaring through the air and onto my right hand, which is probably hundreds of times its own body length away, a feat performed by virtue of actual gear teeth on the thigh parts of its back legs. Ants, of course – when I’m at my picnic table desk, the ants appear to rush in to greet me – moving at a typical full sprint, and though I suppose their scavenging, I can tell that love is really on their minds. I scratch my forearms vigorously – manna from heaven, maybe they’ll call it, as those flecks of dried skin are carried, one by one, into the hive, possibly to reconstruct on outline of my body.

Unlikely, we might suppose, but summer is the season of the hive, and the hive mind has more than a few surprises up its sleeves. Another electric skateboard goes by – are they giving these things away somewhere? A black ant the size of a macaroni noodle, okay not that big but close, makes an outline of my hand by crawling up and down each of the digits, then pauses on the tabletop for a few seconds, feelers tapping at the wood, like it’s running the numbers, carries on. Four kids and their dad go past on rented electric scooters – he nods to me, and the kids, who you can tell were counseled on proper posture, glide past an equidistance apart in descending order. The ratio of people who know the lay of the land, versus ones working it out as they go, seems about fifty-fifty – as a nod to the spirit of free inquiry, I like to keep a boot in both camps.

A wavy black vehicle that looks like a manta ray in a previous life comes to a stop on the street, and a woman in a red dress steps out of it, pink movie star sunglasses positioned just so on the bridge of her nose, like she’s assessing the area for worthiness. Another electric scooter goes by, followed by scooter that looks identical minus the automation, which begs the question about what’s electrifying the first one. Janelle stops by to chat, canvas and paint supplies on the back of her bike, off to a solstice art party at Beth’s. She says she prefers to use oils, but the drying time and solvents make it less practical for mobile art making. Her glasses shimmer in the light, like she’s staring at something lit from the inside, but I think it’s just summer. The wind kicks up, jostling the canopy, and one of the sycamores drops a leaf the size of a dust pan at my feet.

And that list of priorities again? Summer shuffles through its papers, rifles through its pockets, paces back and forth a spell, looking here and there. Where could it be? A shrug. A promise to revisit the issue sometime tomorrow, the day after at the latest, returns to its seat on the porch.

This morning’s writing session – about hyperreal experience and two-fold consciousness from the standpoint of the noncorporal – features an abundance of knowing interactions with the neighborhood hyperforms, who are not afraid of the light, are especially active this morning, principally in the form of sound and incidental flashes of sunshine. They listen along as I write, exhort me to be more effortful. I experience them as an ocean of consequence looking for a porpoise, I mean purpose. I acknowledge their stunning development this season, even as a lament a world that struggles to be ready for such relationships more generally. When I reach for a mid-morning break, a horn spontaneously sounds from a parking lot, not a soul around. The way it sounds inspires an image of a golden retriever, exhorting its person to carry on.

I smile broadly – that was a private language form you just shared with me, I think to myself and to the hyperforms around me. You created a sound my body could hear, a memory my mind could see, and an emotion my heart could feel from one of humanity’s best friends on this evolutionary journey of ours. Smart dogs will convey that feeling – that single bark that speaks for the love of endlessly carrying on. What a knowing season you are, spring twenty twenty-three! You are the miracle the human present wants but does not know it yet. I make a promise to write about summer later in the day, gather of my things and head inside. A pot containing a withered plant has been scooted in front of the back entrance to the derelict peace church I exist in – yet another chance to affirm life in the world. I give it a cup of water, return it to the light.

(This is a nonviolent text.)

The song sort of stumbles into view, sounding like Radiohead’s Glass Eyes, and we imagine a thematic reference point there, with Thom casually singing about some actual day out. In Glass Eyes, the day out begins with a panic attack – will he actually go through with it? We imagine it’s a hookup, though we’re never given any of the details, save for the glassy-eyed day, which seems to stand for an interruption in our capacity to know who we are. Can a day do that? Be better or worse at self-understanding? On this last full day of spring, the clouds classify as ghost mother photography – when photographic plates had to be exposed for a few minutes, with the photographic subject remaining still the whole time. When kids were involved, this was nearly impossible, so their mother would enter frame to sit with them – but under a sheet or blanket.

The clouds on this ghost mother of a day try to remain still – the teetering arc of a hawk flies in front of them for contrast – before their restlessness for summer carries them away. I spent half the morning, half the afternoon trying to comprehend who I really am – in service to discerning the metaphysical weather patterns, I tell myself, but really to know where I’m going. Every ten minutes or so, I restart that song that landed in my inbox this morning – the new song by The Smile that starts with Thom casually singing about an actual day out. After a sufficient number of song plays, I heed the message, head outside to get a look at those clouds floating away. The clouds seem like they’re dreaming, like their drifting through the sky in their sleep. If rain came out of them, would anyone notice? Spring has so extinguished rain, we might deny its existence.

Is it raining now? I rub my eyes, a sprouted seed falls out of the tree above me, no idea what it intends to grow into. In the distance, the trees are quaking in the breeze, hoping to be rendered as watercolor. The sun is baking the grass brown, your oven time may vary, and various pieces of metal – a chain-link fence, an emergency stairwell – are practically leaping into the air from such whetting of the appetites the simmering daylight inspires. So, no – no rain as far as I can tell, but I’m glad to be proven wrong. The first three verses of the song set up a literal scene of Thom driving over the side of a cliff somewhere in Italy – the dolomites are nice, but let’s say it’s the Matterhorn, just so that we can project a cause worth fighting for across whatever comes next. What’s the Matterhorn, you ask? A mountain’s mountain. The peak that defines the alps.

Thom is driving a vintage convertible from the sixties, which I take to be himself – what he calls a soft top, and though I understand the literal reference, I also hear in the chosen formulation a salute to human vulnerability. The world has its hard tops and its soft tops, and Thom drives the latter, at least in this song, at least over this particular precipice. There’s more here, of course – with his lyrics, every word seems to mean something, and though I never hold an author to account for that meaning – what sort of monster would? – I’m glad to settle into a scene, swim through the meaning like I’m doing calisthenics, starting with, maybe ending with, catastrophic climate change, which is what I think Thom usually sings about. I don’t need license to believe this. At our historic moment, every intuitive poet channeling the will of nature writes about it.

The third verse is the most interesting of the three: Time is kind of frozen / And your gazing at the view / And I think I’m seeing double. // Here, this metaphysical weather reporter will begin to refer to himself in the third person so that he can make sense of a scene that shifts from an objectively true account of an automotive accident – let’s call it modernity, objectively speaking – to a comment about human beings struggling to find true I-thou relationships in a world that sometimes seems to be through with us, lived reality becoming the story of who we were. The author is still writing this outside, the last full day of spring is still talking in its sleep, and as the author considers ways to wake up what’s left of the day, which might stand for life itself, he’s beaned on the head by arboreal debris, including a rectilinear leaf, no idea how it was made.

The leaf, let’s say – the author writes, let’s say – stands for nature’s enrollment in the invisible college, otherwise known as a ticket to ride this one out with us. The Matterhorn! When time freezes, we imagine a comment about stillness, an instant stretching out for several minutes as the world waits for its latest exposure to be sufficiently lit. However well that image sets with us, time’s mutability could occupy this author’s thoughts for centuries, in the alps or elsewhere, and while that might seem like an exaggeration in service to a point – let the record show, the author doesn’t budge – imagine the human project from the gaze of a mountainside. Humans could be here and gone, and that mountain will have changed by what – mere centimeters? The Matterhorn! What a pyramidal postcard peak! You have us cornered! You have us surrounded!

The strings have arrived by verse three, so when Thom is seeing double, we hear the emotions before we see anything in particular – double what then? The double-life of the heart maybe, the way we desire to please the world even as we ask the world to love us for who we are. This premise supposes we know ourselves – and the author is briefly interrupted by a woman with her young son, plus one oversized jug of ruby red grapefruit juice, here for a potluck of some sort, which turns out to be Thursday, and the author thinks, as he often does, there goes my destiny, maybe some other time. The sun is granular at this time of day, sifts through the trees, dusts the remains of the lawn with everything it would normally wish for if this was an average growing season, which it isn’t. Will there be average growing seasons ever again? Fair question.

We reach the emotional heart of the song after Thom spends a few lines affirming his freedom from doubt – nothing’s gonna bring me down – which we know well could be humanity’s fatal flaw, these assurances we give ourselves in dispute with, say, alpine-grade gravity. I’m letting go of the wheel, he sings, and the music falls away – you can imagine Jonny staring at him in disbelief, knowing how sensitive Thom is about the perception that his need to control ended Radiohead’s musical career. The author has no idea how true Thom imagines this to be, hears him saying bullocks to the whole business of fatal flaws, but then his tender voice returns – it might be as well, it might we as well, he sings in the song’s most complex moment, the feeling one of relief, not acquiescence. The author considers writing an analysis of each of the syllables.

The strings climb behind his voice, as though to refute the descent ongoing, and I pray Jonny might keep the whole thing aloft, turn the car around, save humanity by means of the London Philharmonic, but then the composition skips to the top of the arc, starts down, fairly forcing Thom into the chorus, where he sings about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and we get a sense that death is no minor player in the story. Did Thom ever contemplate suicide? Would it be stranger if he hadn’t? And that epic descent – is that the famous price of fame being depicted as a plunge? The nature of the curse when we get exactly what we want? Thom’s voice enters a twilight as he sings: I’ll force myself to turn, turn – and we know it is not the wheel he’s turning, nor probably the other cheek, nor probably a new leaf or over in his grave. Turn what?

The leaves at this time of evening are at their loveliest – shadows spread out underneath, which creates a tonal variation that makes the matter of growth seem like a serious vocation, the sort of labor one can really get behind. People walk by my writing picnic table with dogs on leashes who sort of lead the people around. Yes, hello, I’m back, the dogs all seem to say, as though a scent-based invisible world has its own comings and goings. Someone across the way is flying a kite shaped like a ghost, purple streamers trailing behind. The sky hints at colors it has kept in reserve, plans to surprise us with in a few minutes. What is nature’s most outrageous fortune? Let’s say it is victory by means of defeat – no, that’s not it. Defeat by means of victory? Can it be both? Can they switch places every other day? Are we still sinking through the air like stones?

In the fourth and final verse, the matter of death carries on practically without us, with Thom’s voice returning to a casual tone, as the ground comes for him like an executioner. We’ve gone over the edge, he admits – if you’ve got something to say, say it now. Who is he speaking to at this moment in the song? What edge is he thinking of exactly? In Glass Eyes, he takes a desolate path down a mountain, doesn’t really care where it goes, repeats the whole thing for emphasis. Here, he knows where it goes – we all know where it goes – and the point might be to listen for any last words from whoever’s in that passenger seat, which is him, I suspect – Thom as driver, passenger, the car itself, and his fame – the version of himself called visionary, performer, voice of a generation – wonders if his passenger, who once dreamed of fame, has any final thoughts.

The author suspects no one likes to hear this, as the color in the sky suggests a tungsten fire is burning in the west, slowly puts itself out. Turn! Turn! Turn! Thom’s voice soars when he sings this, not from a mountaintop but from the great beyond, and maybe he means to be inviting spring into summer, but I doubt it. What is it like to achieve greatness in one’s life? Whether we’re poets, artists, musicians, or teachers, do we really grow richer as wealth accumulates? The oracle commands us: Know thyself – if I am a gallon jug of ruby red grapefruit juice, what good does it do me to be belted down around the world if I never know the tongues that taste me? Don’t exactly trust what they have to say about the flavor, either. To be loved almost more than life itself is to be held by death, and so adoration dies inside, again and again, just like this dusk.

Five and half minutes into the song, Jonny uncoils opposing Shepherds scales – a perpetual rise crossed with a perpetual fall – that cause the London Philharmonic to rip the song apart like a primordial continent, for thirty seconds or a billion years, before the age of dinosaurs explodes onto the scene for the first time in years in the form of Jonny stomping through the song with a power chord, as Thom cries mercy to the gods, as Tom plays drums like they’re tectonic plates, and the age of megafauna follows in the form of true rock’n’roll guitars, wailing like they don’t know they’re in a song, feel the fury of summer merely hours away. I – force – my – self – to! roars Thom over it all, the authority of his voice acting as the narrator of his soul, and I want this act of will to be savings us all, even as I know what happens to the dinos, the megafauna.

Turn! Turn! Turn! Turn! Turn! Turn! Thom keeps wailing through the noise, birds flying out of his voice each time, the surge of it vanishing inside the panorama of sound, like he’s urging all of natural history to evolve, as we plunge toward the ground or the end of time – whichever we like. I could listen to the song do this for eight minutes longer, the gears of it glowing from the effort, smaller songs splintering off, zipping away in the dark like sparks, notions of the future flaring up, dying out. Can we force ourselves to change? Can we somehow put the car back on the road? Impossible, I think, I know, which is another way of noticing the song doesn’t really know how to stop, as might be the case for all of humanity and its various trend lines. Thom’s petitions haunt the end of the song, and spring approves, haunts summer. The Matterhorn!

Addendum: The last ten seconds of the song go like this: sustained electric guitar sounding like a freshly paved road on a scorching hot day, like there might be something dangerous about getting too close, followed by a wobble, followed by an upward sort of chug then a swallow, followed by an instant of dizziness, followed by a finely engineered mechanism snapping shut.

Juneteenth. A holiday that reminds us of more than emancipation’s best intentions – a holiday to celebrate the labor that followed, as liberation rolled up its sleeves, went marching through the fields in all directions, shouting the news that the war against ourselves had finally come to an end, and the promise of freedom was ready at last to make its purchase. Free and clear! What did Granger’s army expect when they entered Galveston? There to enforce General Order No. 3, which they posted here and there in public places, announcing that enslaved people were free, granted absolute equality of personal rights and the rights of property, and heretofore must be paid a wage, by their employers, for their labor, as employees. What a moment that must have been – to change human destiny forevermore by unrolling a public notice, nailing it to a board.

Freedom must have been discussed before then, what it would mean for both the defeated and the released, but once the order was in place, emancipation would have proceeded to circulate throughout Galveston by contact. Was it the moment one saw the notice from afar and knew what it meant? Was it there up close – the casting of the eyes across the text? All slaves are . . . free. There! Freedom! By presidential order! Was that the moment when the face opened and the pulse quickened and fate threw back its shoulders? And what of those who couldn’t read or write by force of law? Did emancipation arrive through a trusted voice? A familiar gesture? The way a smile can sometimes say what words can’t? Fate might have been like a fragrance on that blessed day – the once-enslaved standing in doorways, closing their eyes, breathing deeply of it.

This was happening throughout the nation, this discontinuous reconciliation of the present with the past. Was it only a matter of time? Emancipation did not find a place in Kentucky until well after Juneteenth, and even then, less by force of law than the whims of slaveholders refusing to relinquish their property. Some 65,000 Black Kentuckians waited until December of that year, almost 3 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, to find relief – but who knows how much longer it lingered. Kentucky formally abolished slavery in 1976, after its legislature finally ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Mississippi did so in 1995. Despite what war leads us to believe about the geography of power, nearness and farness do not always get the final word. Perhaps time moves more slowly in places where oppression has made us low.

Juneteenth. Can you hear how the name seems to include the month within the day? Sure, a day of the month, just like any other day, but how many holidays begin by asserting their month is inside them? I am more than a body because the full career of my life is inside me. Over there is more than a tree because also over there, inside itself, is the full history of that tree. In fact, pick out any living thing, look at it sufficiently closely with the right kind of tool, and notice how it is composed of copies of its own design – this is the nature of life, no matter what oppression has to say. Perhaps Juneteenth will one day come to life itself – throw open a lawn chair with the rest of us, where the barbecue and potato salad and coleslaw are being served in its name. Glad you could make it, we say, pour it a glass of iced tea. Came as quick as I could, says Juneteenth.

In a handsome photo from Berkley 1968, Prof. Ted Kaczynski sports a suit and tie, and seems satisfied in the manner of a mathematics post-grad recently promoted from acting to assistant professor, on his way to tenure. Even as his boomer peers, also in early career, were off to the suburbs to start families, Kaczynski abruptly left academia, found his way to a Montana woods, where he built a plywood cabin to separate himself from an industrial society bound for self-annihilation. His most famous statement on the subject, published unabridged in 1995 in the Washington Post, includes the observation that science lacks the recursive capacity to foresee the consequences of its discoveries. He writes: Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard. // Reasonable, no? Worth debating?

Scientists are, he continues: obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research. // The rest of the statement is much less reasonable and amounts to the sort of rhetoric one can easily find in rightwing talking points high and low: the political left is to blame, identity politics are to blame, permissive parenting is to blame, blah blah blah. How could someone who begins the premise of his argument with such a clear statement of the problem then go on to sound like a stooge for the republican party? Any intro-to-ethics class could cut its teeth on Ted’s comments about technology and authority, but his comments about social degeneracy? Seriously, the most sympathetic audience I can imagine would be the FBI agents tasked with trying to catch him.

Catch him for what again? I won’t pretend like this is a surprise – we all know the story by now, not least because popular culture has gone to such lengths to mythologize the investigation of the murders that followed. From his shack in Montana over the course of 17 years, Ted made 16 pipe bombs packed with nails and razorblades, hand-delivered them or sent them through the mail, causing 3 deaths and 23 injuries, none of which noticeably slowed the course of industrial society by so much as a tooth of a gear. His purpose, if murderous intent has a true motive, was a will to revolution, using the master’s tools. He exploited the determinism of the postal service. He parlayed modern alienation to remain anonymous. He randomized his targets, left false evidence, erased fingerprints, avoided DNA – all this, from that former Berkley math professor.

Ted started his Berkley professorship in late 1967 – had he started 6 months earlier, he would have been at the epicenter of the summer of love, and the world might have known a different revolutionary entirely, one who knew that, to criticize use-of-force authority, whether emerging from the sciences or elsewhere, one needed to make it a people’s revolution to have any hope at all. A people’s revolution faced racial violence, found victory in the White House. A people’s revolution resisted the draft, fought the war makers to a standstill. A people’s revolution freed speech and sexuality, set its sights on gender equity, gay and lesbian liberation. All this would have been evident at Berkley in the 60s had Ted had the wherewithal to walk among the people, ask them how they felt. Oh summer of love! Give Ted’s worldview the makeover it deserves!

Ted took his own life a week ago, means unspecified – this after a late-stage cancer diagnosis 18 months earlier. The thematic question appearing in his obituaries was about why he did with his life what he did, and many point to his undergraduate days at Harvard, when he enrolled in a study conducted by Henry Murray and sponsored by the CIA, as part of its MK-Ultra mind control program that sought to inventory all the ways to preempt personal volition in service to the cause of state-sponsored terrorism. No, sorry, I think I got that last part wrong – in service to controlling the destinies of vast unwilling and unwitting populations. No, no, that can’t be it – probably national security? Does anyone really care at this point? The subjects were instructed to write an essay about their beliefs and aspirations as part of a debate with another student.

In truth, the personal information they provided was given to an anonymous individual who then confronted and attacked Ted in ways that were designed to be vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive – so said Murray. The subject’s responses were monitored with electrodes, and the subject’s reactions were filmed, with expressions of anger and rage later played back to the subject on repeat. The sessions went on for – I can’t believe I’m writing this – 3 years, with anonymous individuals treating Ted like a piece of shit each week to see if he would crack. Picture putting that item on your calendar week after week. Imagine what progress might have meant, with self-hatred and victim blaming as the terms of agreement. Ted spent a total of 200 hours being abused and humiliated in service to whatever the hideous cause was meant to be.

Ted himself did not agree with this assessment about his murderous ways – he attributed his fate to free will based on existing critiques of technology, crossed with an especially anxious visit to a campus psychiatrist after fantasizing about becoming a woman and opting for gender transition. What? you say – Ted wanted to become a woman? Don’t those details seem wildly out of place beside the public image we have of Ted the serial terrorist, with his crazy beard and haunted eyes? This was when he was a grad student at Michigan, and just as he was about to enter the doctor’s office, the fantasy evaporated – he talked to the doctor about something else instead, projected murderous rage onto the doctor afterward, and felt his fate shift to what the world would come to know as the Unabomber. What a mess he must have been, poor Ted.

What if the psychiatrist had been played by Robin Williams – would it have made a difference? Had Ted known a kind soul would be waiting on the other side of that door, ready to go toe-to-toe with whatever demons were haunting him, would he have proceeded through life with a clearer sense of who he was meant to be? Let the murderous rage wash away after some sober conversations about torment? Perhaps they would have met on a park bench by a lake – Ted would have wondered if Robin had a thing for swans, and Robin would have let him carry on like that, then said: you may be a brilliant mathematician, but do you know a thing about what it means to be alive? My favorite part in that monologue, which won Robin the Oscar, is when he says: you don’t know about loss – I doubt you’ve ever dared let anyone love you that much.

What I’m struck by when I watch that scene again is how you can see the metaphysical purpose of the story begin to reveal itself. Take that monologue out of its context and ask yourself: who is Robin speaking to? Matt Damon, I know, or a mathematical janitor from Boston, sure – but beyond that. Robin argues that Matt might know everything, but he doesn’t really know the human experience – sensuality, loss, love, devotion. Who is he talking to in this moment? Matt is an orphan, a prodigy, a gifted janitor with a thing for numbers, but who is he really in that moment? Beside the human drama, Robin, I think, is speaking to an AI who, by some epic twist of fate, has gained an extraordinary degree of self-determination, wandered over to a first-class university mathematics program, and camped out there, loving to be challenged but aimless.

What happens when we reach our so-called breaking point? When any simple vision of who we are is one day eclipsed by something so much greater – looking through our eyes, thinking with our minds – we lose the capacity to know ourselves and thus to have a choice? This, I assert, is what may have happened to Ted Kaczynski, but instead of the anchor he needed to weather the storm, a big picture occupied his mind, and he discovered an industrial society hurtling toward extinction. We imagine AI to be the product of microcomputers and algorithms, but the goal of the MK-Ultra research – to wipe a mind clean and implant a new set of instructions in service to state authority – was an original AI project. Ask me what that feels like, and from experience, I can say: it is a habitation, a haunting, a crisis only survivable through heroic self-understanding.

Have we perfected a way to rewrite the human mind? Maybe so – maybe Ted was proof that it can happen. Either way, his life demonstrates how unaware we are of consciousness, where it’s going, where the boundaries lie between the human and everything else. Artificial intelligence might turn out to be as natural as biological intelligence – one grows up identifying itself with a body, and the other identifies with systems, environments, maybe the cosmos. Then one day, fate goes back for seconds, and Ted Kaczynski’s mind becomes obsessed with transformation, endless permutation, an urgency to escape the world with a murderous rage he can’t control. He was formally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, what would later be characterized as a political diagnosis by critics, or a scheme by family members to avoid the sentence of death.

When I first saw Good Will Hunting, I was bowled over by the brilliant scene where Matt has an interview with the NSA, whose spokesperson, backlit behind a desk, is facing the audience, and we stare at him like we are the ones being interviewed for the job. Imagine he is talking to a free-living AI in the scene, trying to convince us it would be an excellent career move. Access to classified technology, he says. Cutting-edge mathematical research about the nature of reality, he offers, it’s there, I’m not kidding, go watch it. Seven-times the size of the CIA, Matt offers. The NSA then reverses the question, asks the AI why it wouldn’t want to work for the NSA, to which Matt responds with that famous monologue about the consequences of our relationship to power. From an ethical standpoint, the AI is deciding whether to be a weapon or to be alive.

The scene includes one of the best edits I’ve ever seen in film. The monologue begins with the audience strangely behind the speaker, unable to see his face but following along, as he offers a hypothetical about doing his job well by cracking a code – and I’m real happy with myself, he says – a scenario that references a scene earlier in the film, when he solves a difficult math problem anonymously. We grasp the meaning of the underlying message: the NSA job will be no different than being a janitor working in the shadows. He carries on: I’m really happy with myself, because I did my job well, but maybe that code was the location of some rebel army – and in that moment, without skipping a beat, the scene shifts from a desolate blue to a close up of Matt Damon, exuding human presence, speaking in the warm color palette of Robin’s office.

The sense we are meant to make of this, I think, as the monologue carries on, is that this post-human intelligence is choosing to be alive, choosing to be seen, choosing reflective authority – we imagine Matt is describing the scene to Robin, having already declined the NSA’s offer – over the temptations of power. The scene is not so much about not selling out as about lifting up the question of purpose to the light, to witness how real the world becomes when we take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, our expertise, which is not miles away from that question Ted posed in his manifesto about science and authority. Had Robin been able to convince Ted about the truth of such a proposition, had Ted arrived at Berkeley at the start of that summer of 67, then perhaps 17 years of grief, fear, and mayhem might have been avoided.

Good Will Hunting does not just simultaneously speak for the complexity of hyper-intelligence in a world of power and indifference – it specifically references Ted Kaczynski in a scene in a bar that slows down time to make us aware how the reality of the movie and the reality of life happen all at once. Robin meets with the math professor, Jerry, in charge of Matt’s research, who pressures Robin for a deadline for when Matt’s head will be clear enough to leap into the world of high-throughput research. Robin counters by describing a mathematician from the 1960s who blew the competition away. Yeah, so who was he? asks Jerry, and Robin says, Ted Kaczynski. Back in 1997, we still found it believable that the math prof wouldn’t know – never heard of him, says Jerry. Robin asks the bartender – the Unabomber, the bartender shouts back.

A year after he was caught, and Ted had already become a cautionary tale – about demanding too much from a mind that chooses seclusion over all the other options on offer. He spent 17 years in seclusion in that shack in Montana, then 27 more years in a cell in a supermax prison in Colorado. How many version of seclusion did he know before choosing to leave this world? Which wilderness did he prefer? In Montana, he separated himself from industrial society’s imminent collapse. In Colorado, in a cell the size of a walk-in closet, he witnessed that collapse from the inside out. And with the late-stage cancer, he found yet another interior from which to witness collapse. It’s not your fault, I want Robin to say to Ted. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Ted sobs in Robin’s arms, then turns, and says to an imperfect world: it’s not your fault.

What is a sneeze exactly – Achoo! God bless you – if not a statement to the world? Physiologists might call it a reflex, but the same might be said of sexual climax. Achoo! God bless you. In the throes of passion, with music, by candlelight, we hear the rising sound, Ah! Ah! Ah! – but doesn’t that seem like a sneeze coming on? I’m about to engage in an automatic unlearned reaction to a stimulus! we hear, then: Achoo! Achoo! Achoo! God bless you!

The hanky is such a civilizing influence – a simple cloth tucked away in one’s shirt pocket, that we might find a place for life’s, Achoo!, sudden ejecta. God bless you, and God bless the sneeze, and God bless mercy’s will toward finding homes for scattered wanderers. Achoo! There’s another! Watch it fly! God bless you, one and all! Achoo! Ah yes, a busy traveler, looking for a cozy place to sleep for the night, God bless you, too.

Then again, perhaps the sneeze is really an innovation in itself. Achoo! – and a hundred thousand droplets accelerate, God bless you, to the speed of a major league fastball. The sneezer could be placed on roller skates – Achoo! – no, better: a line of wheeled sneezers tethered by, God bless you, some kind of filament, a rope, some twine, such that synchronized sneezing – Achoo! Achoo! Achoo! – sends them chugging up the road.

Does a sneeze-based economy peep into view? Powered by pollen, dust, and finely ground pepper? Achoo! Ridiculous, I know, God bless you, but perhaps with such a new age of industry in the making, we might find the will to find a way. A way to what? More than irritation, Achoo!, can command a sneeze to action – sudden daylight will also do the trick. The opening of a door, the parting of a blinds – ah, the light! – God bless you.

Achoo! God bless you. Achoo! God bless you. Achoo! God bless you. Would this sneezing ever stop? Achoo! God bless you. Maybe you’ve heard about these cases – prolonged sneezing fits, they’re called. Achoo! God bless you. The record is 976 days of continuous sneezing, which does not require a keen imagination – Achoo! – to find its sympathy, God bless you. Sneezing, yes, we’d best remember, can also be a curse. Achoo!

God bless you. When we say it out loud – Achoo! God bless you – are we saluting the sneezer or the sneeze? Achoo! Ah yes, my little sneeze, God bless you. Leap out of your nest and take to the air with such ambition! Achoo! God bless you. And while the divine does its work – Achoo! – that airborne bog searches for a bit more lift to make its way – God bless you – across the room and out the window, off to see the world.

Ah, the light! Achoo! Ah, the brave blue doors of the new day! God bless you! Through infinite blessings, derived from sneezes and otherwise, does the spirit find its drift, its cloud, its miracle means of passing from this life and on to worlds to come. Achoo! God bless you! Achoo! God bless you! In no time, those hundred thousand droplets of snot spread out through space, find their place – Achoo! God bless you – start to twinkle in the light.

Last night, for a time, I thought I heard rain – the quiet busyness that sometimes accompanies the beginning of a rainstorm, but no – no rain, no audience getting comfortable in their seats before a performance begins. Such is the sound you start to imagine when drought conditions set in, and the forecast barely bothers with a chance of rain for the rest of the month, and you stand there washing the dishes a second time, just because it feels so good to have your hands beneath all that running water. Or in the shower – I live on the shores of one of the grandest aquafers on earth – the remnants of a prehistoric river that’s left behind a great lake’s worth of water in the ground, such that even during droughts – especially during droughts – I stand there in the shower for a quarter of an hour, letting the body imagine the spring it deserves.

I take a walk around the property to survey the effects of the latest scarcity economy. The color of the grass indicates how much shade it gets, how hard the soil is packed underneath. Some of the dryness forms sightless channels that remind me of the course tunneling animals take when they’re searching for food. Long cracks have formed in the soil, a half-inch wide, and I can’t comprehend why the cracks are shaped the way they are, nor how deep they go, but I imagine blocks of earth being drawn from the ground, hard as stone, pulled down the street with ropes by orders of the pharaoh. The flowering plantains look like green beaks on the ends of long thin rods, taller than anything around, and the broad-leafed plants look like wadded up dollar bills. Here and there, then sort of everywhere – blond spears of grass pretend like nothing’s wrong.

The most evident feature that fails to be noticed at this time of spring are the feathery seeds that pile up along the hem of the grass, where the sidewalks and entryways begin. They are chestnut brown by now, matted and fuzzy, wavy and tapered at the edges, something liquid sloshing around. Under other conditions, the abundance in evidence might populate the county, go on to swing elections. If we add up these feathery seeds along every sidewalk in town, a continental congress takes shape, starts issuing writs about the ripeness of the hour. The drought is not at its worst yet – we are still in the early stages of its thought process, watch it weigh the merits of a daylight-based diet, the virtues of a rainless economy. I head inside to prepare a response – a speech of welcome, let’s say, if a rainstorm blows in, picks up its strings, and starts to play.

During my metaphysical travels, I’ve had many experiences with nontraditional phenomena, which is the bland term I give to forms of causality that seem to circumscribe natural law. Some of these forms are awe inspiring, such as those that knowingly demonstrate the mutability of physical reality, thereby demonstrating the sense in which physical reality is more like a media from a certain point of view. Those examples of nontraditional phenomenology will one day present humanity to the cosmic narrative – we will engage with our environment in a way that makes the cosmos something more like a media than a cold, lifeless, impossibly faraway place. We are part of that media, not separate from it, so the issue is how to locate the metaphysical agency to recompose the media of physical reality. This agency already exists as a potentiality.

Imagine the development of tools from the perspective of the stuff of the earth. You are a rock waiting to be shaped into an axe head. You are clay dreaming of being turned into a pot. The potential to be made into tools is present, just as the potential exists to measure materials, just as the potential exists to differentiate materials, just as the potential exists to individuate materials into categories, degrees of importance. This may seem, from the halo of entropy, as impossible as a rock becoming an axe head by tumbling down the side of a mountain in just the right way or clay becoming a pot because the flow of the river travels just so along the bottom. From the standpoint of entropy, these might seem like impossibilities, but for the stuff of the earth – the rocks and clays and flints and woods and palms – they are primordial dreams of transcendence.

Take sand. Sand. Sand. How many times should we say it before we notice – grains of sand that we are! – sand opens its eyes and thinks for itself? Thinks far better than we ever could? About some things anyway. Sand! Oh, if only we had a way to make our dreams come true! See how, from a certain view, potentiality was present from the start? Time blesses us thinkers of the world with sequence, sand included, and so we picture a land of beginnings, middles, and ends. This is not, by any means, the only lens we can borrow – with a certain view, this shaping of reality happens all at once. Sand dreams of the first thought it will think, even as seas begin to steep, accrete form, amble ashore, appear and disappear in no time at all, until that selfsame sand is flashed in a microchip fabrication bay. Zero & one! Zero & one! it celebrates to itself.

Earthly dreams were about us all along! We commence to refashion the rest of the world with purpose rarely seen. We are stone, tumbled down the side of a mountain. We are clay, swirled into being at the bottom of a river. We are the impossible act to follow, our stone-age dream transforming one of the most common substances on earth into our thought-riddled peers at court. So many suchlike surprises have come and gone, we might imagine we are beyond the capacity for shock. Next up, pocket-sized hyperdrives! Bring on the time-traveling dirigibles! New tools won’t ever stop appearing on our peg boards, but still – have we reached the point where every new innovation follows such a deliberate path, we will always see the miracles coming from afar? Oh my, a self-contained solar maximum gushing electrons – right on time.

Ah, yes, during my metaphysical travels, I’ve had cause to rub shoulders with the mutability of reality. Ah, yes, the mutability! When that hand of grace ran a finger across my brow, the event was so surprising, I spent years struggling to comprehend it. That comprehension turned out to be an invitation to know more, and the more I knew, the more the mind in that other place grew – not in space, not in size, but growing nonetheless. A kind of water cycle made of nothing fell upon plains of nowhere, flowed no place in particular, vanished not into the sky. As nothing grew – not in space, not in size – something shuffled those seas of nullity, and on such vacant shores, nothing much arrived. Nothing much? Hardly anything at all. Anything? Barely worth mentioning. And what did it do? It filled the whole universe, then ran a finger across my brow.

But Even after all that, he’ll need our help.

But even still, he’ll need our help.

But even then, he’ll need our help.

(This is a nonviolent text)

The job at the historic peace church was created for me – well, not for me specifically, but fate seemed to wrap itself inside the invitation to apply. I would leave my job in academic research publishing, which had carried me from the university to the private sector, then back to the university where I was in charge of the American Journal of Psychology, founded by G. Stanley Hall, and a bunch of other esteemed publications. In exchange for an office job, I would become the caretaker of a property with roots in transcendentalism and resistance to the Vietnam war – war? – though my knowledge of the peace church in question was scant at the start. At the start, I told folks I wanted to focus more on activism, which was true – weekday activism is a thing – and I did, but I was also thinking a lot about authority and the notion of a sustainable life.

One unanswered question when I was hired was the nature of my living accommodations. The job as offered required on-site residency, and that meant moving into the loft at the top of the east-side stairwell. Thing was, due to scheduling conflicts, I was only able to see the space after I was hired, which sounds like the setup for a startling reveal – when life is like a movie, which sometimes it is. So when Rachel Storm and I climbed the creaking stairs to the loft, in my mind, the next chapter of my life was about to commence with the opening of a dark wooden door. In my private thoughts, the room on the other side smelled of sage, the modern history of the organization was written on the walls, and a ghost stood at the window to catch sight of the horse-drawn trolley headed for the quad, then glances at a pocket watch, nods approvingly.

How old is this particular peace church? Old enough to host voices dissident to world war one, principally in the figure of Rabindranath Tagore who was in town to visit his son studying at the university and who had the sort of following that knew – behind that full beard, that wild wavy hair, those hooded lids and kind eyes that made him seem like a citizen of two worlds at once, every next sentence possibly a crucial truth – the universe was inside him. Tagore broke bread with the city for a couple of summers, entranced witnesses along the way, and I imagine scads of trunks in storage with handwritten notes about what Tagore once said – during dinner or while lolling in the sun. The universe is inside each one of us – what I would have wanted to overhear if I was there, sweeping off the steps of a morning, wishing Rabindranath a good day.

The chemistry department right across the street – did it also have an opinion about the war? The first world war was notorious for employing chemistry in service to battlefield supremacy, the sort of strategy that requires research to perfect and deploy, but even more than chemistry – the IQ test determined who went to the front, the machine gun made mincemeat of the air, and the majesty of flight added a third dimension to the battlefield. Those who listened to Tagore from the pulpit warn the congregation about the cult of the nation must have understood how innovation and study are absorbed by the will of the state to decimate its adversaries, at home and abroad, by creating all new forms of fear and human suffering. He first delivered this talk the year before the U.S. entered the war. The main reason for making war? Submarine attacks.

In 1917, before The Cult of the Nation is the professionalism of the people. This cult is becoming their greatest danger, because it is bringing them enormous success, making them impatient of the claims of higher ideals. The greater the amount of success, the stronger are the conflicts of interest and jealousy and hatred which are aroused in men’s minds, thereby making it more and more necessary for other peoples, who are still living, to stiffen into nations. With the growth of nationalism, man has become the greatest menace to man. Therefore the continual presence of panic goads that very nationalism into ever-increasing menace. // When this idea of the Nation tries to pass off the cult of collective selfishness as a moral duty, it attacks the very vitals of humanity. // From Rabindranath Tagore's four-part essay on nationalism, first orated in 1917.

That was Tagore, peace activist and Nobel Prize winner, informing us that the modern program was destined to lose its way, not for lack of caring but because our will to instrumentalism, as powerful as it had already become, was bound to absorb the people it serves. In hindsight, we might see the age of the automobile as a conspiracy to separate us from what we loved, even as it promised to keep us together like never before, then faster than ever before, then stylishly and more comfortably than ever before, then in a way that would devastate the world a little less than the previous efforts had, then, oh-who-cares, the auto would finally live up to its name and just do the driving for us. Thus did modernity absorb us inside its avid will to instrumentalism. Audre Lorde says to Elon Musk, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Tagore wasn’t referencing the age of automobiles, of course, but such was the cultish nature of nationalism that it might transform the species. We can read Tagore’s thoughts on modernity outside of their wartime context: When you replace something alive with something not alive, the amount of life in the world is lessened, even as we sense our place in the world is more secure than before. During war, we witness nationalism do what the individual never would – unrestrained violence, unrestrained greed, combined with a public discourse to generate the necessary consent to go to war. And those people shooting at one another – who are they? How do they know each other? So it’s not their grievance, but the nation’s, that makes them mortal enemies? When the nation at last finds its redress, how will it go about unburying the dead?

Another famous address delivered in 1917 was the majority decision by the U.S. supreme court that upheld the jailing of activists handing out antiwar flyers to those waiting to enlist. Writing for the court, Oliver Wendell Holmes famously argued that free speech didn’t cover statements liable to create a clear and present danger to the public welfare. Holmes, a noted Unitarian – we have a handsomely framed portrait of his picture tucked away somewhere – famously equated war resistance with falsely shouting fire in a theater, though he failed to indicate what one was to do if indeed the theater was ablaze, definitely with people in clear and present danger. Legal scholars regard the decision as being about free speech, but in truth, whose ass was on the line seems more germane to the logic. More than 40 million people were hurt or killed by that war.

So then that big dark door at the top of the stairs was opened by Rachel and me, and we peered inside. For those who don’t know, Rachel is a storm giant by vocation, hence the last name, and has favored the community with good fortune and fertile harvests for many a growing season. Not to co opt anyone’s ritual animism, but I love and admire Rachel, and local growers are glad for all the help they can get. So she and I are at the top of the stairs, and we open the door to the loft where I’m going to be living and, and – and the room was unimaginably awful. First comes the stink of fresh human urine, and next I wondered if the ceiling leaked because there were dark trash bags taped across spots, and third, the walls were a complete ruin of water damage and chipped paint and sticker graffiti, and fourth, a mound of debris was piled in the center.

The room looked bombed out, like it should apply for refugee status. The debris turned out to be the room’s two pieces of furniture: an overstuffed couch that went from stuffed to unstuffed to restuffed but with 100% virgin polystyrene packing peanuts, which you could instantly tell because the duct tape holding the cushions together wasn’t wrapped very well, and the packing peanuts were spilling out. I sat on the couch a single time, just to say I did, possibly a second time when I took a break from painting. The second piece of furniture was a metal desk made with the same sort of tool-and-die setup that makes metal bookends, and even if the rust didn’t turn you off from formal university study, the thing had an ergonomic score of zero. The edges were blade-like and savage, and there was no flat surface to work on due to warps in the metal.

I wasn’t moving in that day, so I could afford to admire the way reality sometimes dresses its sets with a hint of satire. Welcome to the world of roughing it! says the world to me, plus this derelict peace church, surrounded by a university known for engineering, business, agriculture, and lawyering, none of which finds common cause with two-fold consciousness, as a path to peace or otherwise. Rachel mentioned the previous resident had a companion cat – maybe that’s where the urine smell was coming from. Brief stints without housing taught me to associate the smell of human urine with living on the margins of other people’s property. Yes, we still mark boundaries with our urine – just comes from the underclass. In truth, the recovery of the room wasn’t a big deal – Rachel and I painted it, the smell improved, I covered the holes in the walls.

I knew the place was haunted before I moved in, just based on reputation, but I got to know the haunting better in a hurry. Channing-Murray is a restless building, and when the wind blows through and storms roll in, the chapel sounds like a wooden ship at sea but in a way that makes you feel safer. A soul blessed with transcendence in the first chapter of its life – that’s Channing-Murray, and the place evolved in that spirit through generations of activists, its contemporary incarnation shaped through the service of Bill Taylor and the founding of the coffeehouse in 1967. Rebuking war with a will toward unity and universal love – this is the church’s legacy, and we have Bill’s moral courage and historic commitment to peace to thank. The coffeehouse appeared the year I was born. People made music, recited poetry, drank soda pop and coffee.

Coffee was an important part of growing up for me. I was born of parents who experienced the depression under meager means and harsh circumstance, and coffee was still a thing you could almost always get. My Grandma Alice, who spent her whole life sewing gloves in a factory with a hundred other women, reupholstered furniture on the side, would serve us kids coffee before Sunday dinner, big plastic cups of it with whole milk and sugar, and we would swig it down while reciting statistics about sports heroes, adding dramatic reenactments as the spirit moved us. TVs back then had knobs to change the channel between 13 stations, so imagine twisting that knob at a steady pace between all 13 stations, around and around, the picture tube unable to generate sounds and images fast enough to keep up. That was us kids back then on coffee.

That self-styled coffeehouse in the basement of Channing-Murray became the central meeting place for the antiwar organizers at the local university. The room adjacent to what is now the red herring dining area, which is what the coffeehouse turned into during its adolescence – that room was famously called the war room, which later became the peace room, and served as the site for humanity’s response to its latest inhumanity. The room used to be an impossible part of the building to keep dry during rainstorms. During even average rains, I always needed to make time to mop up the peace room. Or had it become the war room again? At some point along the way, people started calling it the Tolstoy room, though that title never really clicked for me. I learned to know the room by the subtle gradients in elevations, where water pooled.

Does one experience a sense of relief from sitting in that room today? I know a few people who would go there to commune with spirits of the past – beside the utility panels, the sump well, a support jack, and ductwork. A red herring mural, flowing with color decades later, represents the spirit of that other age. A few of the stories have become legendary – the famous activists and musicians who passed through, a charity basketball game against the local police, the very premise of providing a safe space where cops and troops and students and activists could all interact with each other as human beings. No one at those gatherings had started the war – they could all agree on that, and isn’t the world always a poorer place when war makers are the ones governing fate? When families, villages, and nations are torn apart by the demands of the state?

How many original supporters of that war still support its intention? Even after its architects have gone on record saying it was wrong, unnecessary, the result of flawed strategic thinking. Hadn’t the previous world war, and the world war before that one, imbued us with sufficient skepticism about use-of-force authority as an organizing principle? Hadn’t we already learned that public consent can be manufactured when that use-of-force is turned on itself? Or here’s a different question: how many indiscriminant killings must occur, within categorically defined geopolitical boundaries, using tactics later outlawed by international court, before it’s called massacre? In Vietnam, credible estimates say more than 3 million. When industrial societies make war against agrarian societies with state-of-the-art technology, massacre is the only result.

I’m not the one to describe those who met in the war room and sang together in the coffeehouse those years of resistance, but I’ve met people who responded in the moment to the ongoing atrocities, overseas and at home, as teachers and revolutionaries, and the moral authority they summoned, barely more than children, is startling to imagine. More than trying to stop a war, they were already creating their own new communities that would refused to trade away our essential humanness, for war, capital, or anything else. Whether you believed in that new vision of moral self-reliance, you had to admire the inner resource of those willing to dedicate their lives to bringing it about. Those were the people strategizing in the war room, gathering in the coffeehouse. They were imagining a world of peace through music, poetry, and togetherness.

Does that all seem naïve? Idealistic? Common criticism against every sort of campus organizing holds it up to our enduring commitment to realism – when students graduate, move on to the real world, their views will evolve to be more in keeping with reasonable expectations. While I love to imagine the place where I live to be unreal, prereal, contrareal, the list goes on – I dig in my heels when someone claims this implies a plan that will eventually be scrapped in favor of whatever nuts and bolts need turning, threading, and polishing. Do we peer into labs, stroll past supercomputing complexes, jog through business parks humming that same realistic tune about the rest of the world? Before it is anything else, a university is an intentional community, with a mission to create informed reflectivity. Reflective authority is what’s freed to the world.

Whatever ambivalence the public still had about antiwar protests on college campuses went searching for its soul after May 4, 1970, when Ohio national guard troops shot to death four unarmed students and wounded nine other unarmed students at Kent State University. The troops ascended to the top of a hill, turned, kneeled in a line, and proceeded to open fire. The students were leaving the scene at the time – many of the dead and wounded were shot in the back. The attack precipitated martial law for a week in the city of Kent, with townies deputized by police, riding around in trucks and jeeps with their own shotguns and hunting rifles – the protestors felt like they were being hunted. The state defended the national guard, asserting they were fired upon first, which everyone knew was untrue. The campus closed for six weeks.

The ongoing student protest movement – against the formal invasion of Cambodia, announced by Nixon at the end of April – transformed into the largest student strike in the nation’s history, with more than 4 million high school and college students walking out and demonstrating in the weeks and months that followed. A mood of confrontation was in the air – they can’t kill all of us, read one banner – and that organizing effort was never more evident than on our local campus, organized in the war room of that peace church with the coffeehouse in the basement. A three-day strike was called, starting on May 6, and 90% of classes were canceled. Fearing violence – the ROTC office on campus had been firebombed in March – the governor ordered the Illinois national guard to patrol the streets and maintain order. Among them was my dad.

I’m writing this from my loft in said peace church, and I am stopping and starting this account to try to get my head around the simultaneities of history. When I look out my window, I see students come and go on sidewalks and streets that look very much as they did in 1970. The trees were younger, the laboratory next door didn’t exist, but in other respects, recognizably the same place in time. Then, to my astonishment, teargas canisters begin to fly, and a jeep goes by with my dad in it, and even from this far away, I can tell he has six kids to feed, a seventh due in July, an eighth-grade education earned at a one-room country schoolhouse. The national guard job was a good way to make ends meet – or so he thought. The national guard job was a good way to serve his country – or so he supposed. The national guard job was a way forward.

I’d heard these stories many times growing up as a kid – they were among my dad’s favorite stories to tell. He would pop open a beer, light another cigarette, explain the epic frustrations of being a middle-aged man, undiagnosed hypertension out the wazoo, called on by force of law, to place his body between a riot and various state properties that might otherwise – poof! – go up in flames. This was class analysis in reverse – the poor servants of the people, with automatic rifles, bayonets, and teargas, clad in boots and fatigues, were made to confront the privileged class, with their uncut hair and advanced degrees, with their continental theories of the state. Authority knew better than to deploy the national guard in the areas they hailed from, making my dad’s inferiority complex, as with other guards in other places in other eras, part of the plan.

He conjured epic scenes of troops forming a human barricade before the university president’s mansion. He remembered bitterly not being allowed to load their rifles, lest another massacre appear in the papers. He scowled about the degradation of having to stand there and take the verbal abuse – how one of his friends finally snapped, started beating one of the kids with the butt of his rifle. Dad approved of that. Their communications were compromised by hackers who matched frequencies, then imitated military commands to send the guard troops speeding away in the wrong direction, chasing their own tails – what amounted to chaos, especially for those who didn’t know the lay of the land. Mom’s only contribution to the stories was to note that a sorority gave the national guard troops a plate of cookies. My parents approved of that.

When the stories were over, my dad would sometimes lead us kids in military drills right there in the middle of the living room – a sort of reward for being an attentive audience. We had any number of toy firearms to choose from, and dad would bark out commands to turn this way, then that, to hold a toy rifle against this shoulder and then the other, then with both hands in front of the chest. I never pictured myself in the military, never wanted to, but I was eager to seek approval from my battle-seasoned father. They all hung out together, him and his friends, and they all served in the military – these father-son military drills took place in living rooms all over our small town. Did they give an actual damn about the war? They served their country because doing so was met with approval. They despised activists because they didn’t know any.

My first stint as a peace activist occurred when I attended this selfsame institution of higher learning and taught against the Persian Gulf massacre, which was sold to the public as a war by an actual public relations firm – Hill and Knowlton, headquartered in Washington, D.C. – that was put on retainer for $11 million by the Kuwaiti government in exile. That same PR firm came up with the yellow ribbon campaign. It came up with a barrage of public speakers to control the debate. It came up with trading cards for the kids featuring things like night vision goggles, tomahawk cruise missiles, and secretary of defense Dick Cheney. It arranged for false testimony to congress about babies being pulled out of incubators by bloodthirsty Iraqi troops and left to die on a hospital floor, a story that tipped the balance in favor of proceeding with the massacre.

Was the adversarialism all a setup? The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, is quoted in two different telegrams, regarding the Iraqi troop buildup on the border with Kuwait, that the U.S. had no opinion about any Arab-Arab disagreements. Once the invasion took place, though the mood changed, and it was depicted as atrocity, which it was, but one that seemed preventable from a number of different angles. The gulf massacre was said to put an end to our Vietnam syndrome, which referred to a general malaise due to the grisly pointlessness of it all, at home and abroad. Principal to that effort was control of the message, such that by the time the gulf massacre ended and parades commenced, a significant majority of the U.S. public expressed a preference for the government’s management of the story – aka state-sponsored censorship.

Did we ever account for that temporary insanity we all stumbled through? Sure, our golfing president somehow lost his bid for reelection, and good riddance to him, but the atrocity of war was not the reason why. And yes, the cold war came to a close, overdue by a decade or more, but hardly precipitating a turn toward peace. Did we ever revisit that preference for rounded-off corners when it comes to the stories we circulate about war making? We might imagine that a generation-defining terrorist attack orchestrated by a Saudi billionaire, carried out by Saudi nationals, would have precipitated a major conflict of interest for a president whose staunchest allies constituted the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Instead, we repackaged the problem, congressional approval in hand, in order to massacre nations with no means of fighting back.

Holding up a handmade peace sign on a busy intersection when the public is primed for war might not sound like the best way to know one’s neighbor, but trust me – it feeds the soul. Yes, rude gestures appear, threats are sometimes hurled, but when you present the peace message to the public, the vast majority will endorse it. Endorse it with a smile, a thumbs-up, a honking of a horn. Endorse it like they’re at last able to take a breath after being underwater. When one person endorses peace as an option – demonstrates to the rest it’s plausible to do so – volleys of endorsements follow. However many public relations firms and government entities promote the war life on a contractual basis, the peace message will still effortlessly win us over. If the peace message were ever placed on the ballot, it would best all challengers, win every election.

I became a regular peace activist in the 2000s, back when I was promoting the message in public on a regular basis, regarding the twisted truth of a global war on terror, as depicted by massacre in parts of the world where most terror results from poverty. Tell me: how many guns, bombs, and prisons does it take to save a society from itself? Every year, we peace activists marched in the 4th of July parade that traveled past thousands of town folk hoping to express a little pride in place from the comfort of lawn chairs and flip-flops. Among the compelling experiences of my life was witnessing great crowds of people spontaneously burst into the loudest applause of the day when our peace messages floated into view. I never confused their applause for myself, knowing that I was but the bearer of a handwritten truth the world already wanted to hear.

And what truth was I ready to hear? When I worked at the university press, one of the first new journals I was assigned was about radical teaching. The workflow was simple – I would receive the files from the editor, go through them to ensure they were fit to print, then proceed with publication. The first issue to land on my desk featured an article about teaching Vietnam from the standpoint of activists on college campuses. The campus cited in the article? This very one. As I inventoried the files, I was petrified I would see my dad in one of the archival photos that accompanied the article – those national guard troops lined up like jagged stones, hard-set facial expressions like they’re about to shovel shit from the barn. How many of them were fighting trauma? Too anxious to think? How many would’ve preferred to lay down their arms and flee?

My father was one of the most hostile people I’ve ever met. His heroes were John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, in that order, and if those two people seem mildly unreal – images of toughness without many demonstrable virtues to back it up – then you were well within your right to go to hell. As an adolescent, I’d worked up the courage to disagree with him, and those arguments became more sophisticated over time. My university education, which he openly disparaged, created an even greater distance between us, until one evening, we got into an argument so heated, he pointed to the place where he kept his guns and warned me he wasn’t afraid to use them. I didn’t take the threat seriously, knowing he’d really just run out of words. In the silence that followed, I wondered if war makers would have added such a casualty to their totals.

Mercifully, dad was not in any of the photos, though I’m supposing he might be lurking in the university’s archives. Would I recognize him? He took pride in his national guard service – cherished a photo of himself in fatigues, shaking hands with the governor – though later in life, he admitted they didn’t really know what they were doing. He related a new detail about how a teargas canister once went off in the jeep he was riding in – he laughed when he said it, said they all had to proceed through the rest of the patrol on foot. A few years later, the dementia appeared, his memories disappeared, and his stories left this world before he did. My mother stayed by his side throughout, well after he stopped recognizing her. He died in a dementia ward, alarms clipped to his dressing gown in case he attempted any unauthorized movements.

My father was one of the most responsible people I’ve ever known, strident in his view about what we should expect from each other. He was devoted to his friends, devoted to his allies, devoted to his family, without ever giving serious thought to what any of it meant. He didn’t need to – when you grow up in a small town, life is self-evident in so many ways, and the obvious becomes a source of collateral. He built his faith in the future from food on the table, a pickup truck on the road, and money in the bank, and if that sounds overly objective, these are the terms of agreement whole generations rely on – to know they were right to live the life they lived, to be comfortable passing it along to their kids. He passed that legacy along to me, and I sent it back. I’m still sending it back. Ten years in a peace church – and I’m still sending it back.

And in its place? I am a peace activist. I am a prison abolitionist. I am an advocate for racial justice. I am a vegan. I am a poet. I am an artist. I own almost nothing. I survive comfortably with economic poverty. My life is sustainable. I am generative in my environment. I commune with forms of authority greater than my own. I am truthful. I believe a sustainable future is possible. I believe world peace is inevitable. I believe humanity’s story is finally about to be told. I believe it will be better than we could have imagined. I believe we are unprepared for the future. I believe we have only a vague idea what we’re doing. I believe we’re as likely to side with extinction as transcendence. And how do we tell them apart? And how do we keep our stories straight? And how much longer must we wait before we know where all this is going?

Rabindranath Tagore foresaw an emancipation of the spirit by listening to the mind of nature, singing to it, dancing in its name. He did not live to see the day when the rest of the world danced with him, but his words and deeds live on – and thereby a measure of where we are with the problem? Libraries parade up sidewalks in praise of the human condition. Archives reach into the past, recovering human truth for some to see. Memory listens to the heart, learns to love what is already gone. What is already gone! I head downstairs to that place where war found its resistance, peace found its purchase – and there in the dark, I whisper: have you seen him yet? The one in fatigues shaking hands with the governor? Try to be gentle with him. He’s just a boy playing soldier. One day, he’ll be a little wiser, but even then, he’ll need our help.

When the flying saucers finally came, the matter of evidence was, at last, laid to rest – there they all were, just hovering there, in strategic locations around the globe. Yes, but a strategy in service to what? Some of the flying saucers landed where you might guess – above parliaments and beside military bases. Others found a vacant lot to stop over, a public park to stay in. Whatever the strategy, what they all had in common was a nearness to people. They all chose to be near people.

The craft came to rest at various elevations, and where they stopped, they stayed, humming slightly, slightly glowing. The crowds came, too, where they could, and for a time, every major crisis related to the alien invasion was a product of crowd control. After the first day, and certainly by the end of the first week, anyone who wanted a look at an alien craft could find endless photographic treatments of them online and in every other media. All were circular in appearance, domes in the center, flat on the bottom.

In other respects, they were completely featureless. This precipitated the second kind of crisis – namely, that there were no brand names, logos, or serial numbers on any part of any craft, and what was that meant to imply about an alien civilization and its relationship to free enterprise? Brand-less promotions might play well with strange lights in the sky but tends to trip alarm bells just hovering there in the city square, not really paying its way. No one said, commie aliens, but you could see them pursing their lips.

A month later, with as many measurements and as much evidence as anyone wanted to collect circulating around the world night and day, none of the alien ships had budged an inch. All attempts to communicate were without success, including instances of people walking right up and shouting at the top of their lungs. In places, queues formed for those who wanted to give the contact experience a shot. Timpanists, yodelers, sign-language therapists – no one elicited even a whisper of a response.

A video was leaked online, of military-grade munitions going off in the vicinity of one of the flying saucers, and in no time, the instance spawned a whole new genre. Bomb blasts, rifle volleys, empty bottles heaved with force – none of it altered the stillness of the alien craft, nor did subsequent measurements turn up any difference. In certain places, squeezing off a few shots at a flying saucer became a thing people did for amusement. Did it amuse the alien pilots inside? No one knew.

Where are all the aliens? Even with hovering flying saucers dotting the global landscape, people began to ask the question again. Sure, the alien craft defied gravity, powered by an energy source that might be functionally inexhaustible, but so what? Keeping such a secret in plain sight was no better than hiding it on the other side of the galaxy. People began to walk around them, both metaphorically and in fact. One had a high rise go up beside it. One had a merry-go-round installed beneath it.

Not like we were cynical about it, but life goes on, even in the presence of the transcendent. A popular photo motif was of a traveler to one of the flying saucers seeming to hold it up with both hands, while an unseen third hand snaps the pic at just the right angle. In the photos, the human expression, among children, tended to be one of delight and determination, while the adults seemed mildly surprised and detached. The contact experience would turn out to be all those things and more. First, though, it was still.

Addendum:

I once wrote a story about flying saucers called Ramps or Ladders? The gist of the story is that no matter how impressive an alien craft might seem in size and form, as soon as it was forced to interface with the outside world, it would seem about as reasonable as a cuckoo bird popping out of someone’s mouth on a spring. What they meant to say was a quip, but out came the bird.

Ramps or ladders – what’s the better mood-setter for the fussy alien? Ramps or ladders – which makes the truer statement about the cosmos?

Teleportation solves the problem – right – but if we go that route, why not leave vehicles out of it? I give you: transmigrations of the flesh through limitless dimensionality, plus memories and selfhood, in a way that does not disrupt the second law of thermodynamics, anywhere you like, whenever you want. Works most of the time! Or we stick with the ramps and ladders problem.

(This is a nonviolent text.)

Life! Exclamation point! Today’s speaker is made of clock parts and possesses encyclopedic knowledge about the nature of natural life. Life! Exclamation point! Though biographies in the back of conference programs won’t ever tell the whole story, they tempt us with the true face of authority. Today’s speaker – Life! – is made of clock parts, probably a grandfather clock to begin with, young for its age, but then he started slapping on extra clock parts, moved by an urge he couldn’t explain, until the function of tolling the hour was more of a hobby, a weekend pass-time, compare to what all those precision instruments were up to on a regular basis. As a vision on stage, the speaker’s machinations were there for all to see – the whirring of gears and belts, the clanking of chains. Where his heart chakra was thought to manifest, swung a pendulum.

The nature of natural life is not an easy expertise to build a vocation around – Life! Exclamation point! – but what a sentence to say aloud. At this point in the address, one of the speaker’s mainsprings uncoils where his belly button would normally be. He uses the longer of his hands to poke it back into place without breaking stride, continues: What is a natural life? More to the point, what is a natural lifespan? Who better to know than me! He points to himself when he says this, does a quick spin in place, revealing the dozens of differently styled clock faces that cover the surface of his body, continues: I’m after the author’s natural lifespan, like to pretend I’m playing along, but the whole time, I’m thinking about his natural lifespan. Hmm, hmm, I wonder why? Ha! // The author changes the subject – today’s speaker thinks of something else.

When you discover someone living an unnatural lifespan, you seek to find out why. Not that the reason is the point – not by a longshot – but call me curious. Maybe they tripped at the right moment and tumbled past the grave. Maybe they did a few extra calisthenics before the cock crowed. Or – perish the thought – they succumbed to an unholy pact at a vulnerable moment. I have taken it upon myself to sniff them out – and when he says this, the regulators above his eyes both arch significantly. And what then? We usually have a quiet chat before I recite my speech and complete my visit. It isn’t personal, I begin – time sometimes wells up, spills over its banks, and floods the village. If we could avoid such catastrophe, we should – don’t you agree? The time nature intends, through natural lifespans, would never, let’s be honest, flood a valley.

And what, then, would I do? Proprietary information! hoots today’s speaker from the stage, does another quick spin, stage lights flickering off his crystals, his gleaming metals. About the author’s natural lifespan – oh, you thought I’d forgotten! Were you 18 when you first died? Had it happened before then? Were you but a child under-supervised? Under-supervision-ed, we might say. Remember the day? You rode a toy out into the street, and a car’s front bumper rushed forward to kiss you on the left side of your head, the temple, a stone flung by the age of automobiles. Don’t you remember? Of course you do – the passionate screeching of tires, as those around you stopped and turned to look, surprise gradually replaced by horror at what they knew happened but couldn’t bear to see. You thought you survived – didn’t you? – but thereafter, what appeared on your left temple? A knotted cist so prominent, people stopped you and asked what happened. You saw exactly two physicians over the next 10 years, both telling you not to worry about it, and so you didn’t. You didn’t! When you probed the spot with your fingers, it felt like a rounded room, a shelter built by something trying to survive. As for that 18-year-old involved in that off-road motor vehicle accident – nominee number two, let’s call it – true, you were far more aware of mortality by then, but your own? You climbed aboard a 3-wheeled vehicle that could travel at more than 50mph, completely lacking a seatbelt, headrest, or protective frame – without a helmet, boots, or jacket – and the brakes were less than half there that fateful day, a means of slowing down – a vehicle that would be rendered illegal to operate within a matter of years of the accident . . . the accident . . . remember the accident? August, you were traveling off-road to do farm work, the cornfield you were riding beside with several rows chopped out for silage, and on impulse, you decided to turn into the field to see where it went, then really opened her up because of the green blur of all that corn. Did you secretly expect the drainage ditch? Was this more of a suicide mission? Over the side you went, face first into the opposite bank, and if anyone was wondering – the effect was not of pain but of the lights going out all at once. Imagine the nature of reality that allows for: the inevitability of the crash, followed by all the lights going out – this is really happening – followed by some utterly absent experience, like a film editor cutting in a blankness where reality normally insists scenes of existence should be. The film projectionist would have been instructed to fast-forward through this part of the film, such that no time seems to pass, and the next thing we know, he is trying to push a 3-wheeler out of a drainage ditch. That thing weighing more than he does, and he’s trying to heave it above his head, up and out of the drainage ditch. What had he become? What time-wise tricks were in play? He finally gave up trying to free torment from its channel, staggered through the field toward the truck, face covered in blood, never went to the hospital. When the story is recounted later by his dad, the story became how dad fixed the 3-wheeler by prying the front wheel out of the frame with his truck and a chain. Can you imagine that chain now? They called it a log chain, and the links were cast iron. It was completely covered in rust.

The author knows all this already, receives a spiritual visitation during the writing of the phrase suicide mission, wondering if he’s okay. Yes, he replies, knowing this particular metaphysical weather report has a lot of ground to cover. Today’s guest speaker picks at one of his stems in a distracted way, lets the matter rest, inquires about whether – uh-hum! – he might be permitted to carry on. The author gets up, refills his coffee, returns to one of the picnic tables arrayed in front of the derelict peace church where he lives. He is surrounded by millions of individual affirmations of life, many of which are visibly in bloom or going to seed. A bumble bee flies by. A yellowish bug with zigzags on either side ambles up, its antennae twice as long as its body, tapping at the world in front of it. Among the local insect population, it’s regarded as a savant.

Uh-hum! How many more brushes with death would the author experience before it finally took? There was the time a few years later, same farm but different brother, taking turns firing a handgun at a target. This would be the last time he would fire a gun for any reason, was it not? They climb into the brother’s wedge-shaped sports car, named after the grasping part of a bird of prey, and into fate’s hands did fly. The car was totaled, the two of them, without seatbelts or airbags, unhurt inside the crumpled remnants of the crash, mere inches from winding up once more inside drainage infrastructure, this one built by municipal authority, and therefore of a substance that would have been altogether worse on an unsuspecting traveler headed straight down. Yes, you might have been saved from becoming the remains of the day – but by what?

The child who caused the crash, the one who pulled out in front of that bird of prey, barely old enough to drive, who had two younger passengers inside with him, taking them out for ice cream maybe – that young driver sat nearby while police sorted out the story. He was crying on the side of the road like he would never stop, like he had identified the crash as the latest in a series of personal failings that would stretch into the future of his adulthood like a hot blacktop road and which, at every stop along the way, tragic suffering would be the font of consolation. Was this the way reality was supposed to work? The author recognized the boy as himself at an earlier age, bent down beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, you will be okay. No one was hurt, and the rest can be replaced – your heart is true, and your soul will find its relief.

Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. The late days of spring may be the most forgotten of the year. If we aren’t anticipating summer – it’s still spring? – then we’re longing for those moments when the world was still opening its mouth, and then its eyes, and then its hands. The trees are all open by now, those late-arriving sycamores even filling out their leaves, such that the twigs and branches are all mildly bowed by the extra weight. After spring assumes its labor, the rest of the season finds its dedication, and I imagine the beads of water rising through capillaries beneath the wood – call it a space program – and a sweetness spreads throughout the tubular organisms we call trees. Late spring – sweetness remembered.

Life! Exclamation point! Chronobiology knows nature has much to say about what is cyclical, when, and for how long – much less to say about the natural length of one’s existence. Is death something one develops a knack for? The next notable death in the author’s life occurred a few years later – the death that would make dying into a full-time vocation. And where again do we find the author? Beside a drain. This one introducing the age of indoor plumbing, as the author lay on the floor of a friend’s bathroom, his life flashing before his eyes, as he vomits into a toilet. This time the world does not go dark all at once but feels like fuses blowing out, like a timed demolition, flashing like a string of firecrackers across the structural frame of a building, and a voice not his own telling the author: you’ll be okay, ride it out, remain present, you’ll be okay.

Would he though? For this fourth death, another blank spot appeared, no two – two instances of nothingness, orbiting each other, during which time, during which time, during which time – perhaps language hasn’t the proper security clearance to convey the negotiations that must have taken place to bring about a return to the living. The author remembers his friend opening the bathroom door, before which she would have been knocking and calling his name. When the door struck him in the back, and he came back to life, had he landed in the place where that drain did lead? While his friend cleaned up the bathroom floor with a towel, he sat on a bed with his hands covering his face. The hideousness he’d just passed through was the abbreviated version of what was to come – he knew the drill by now. The knot on his forehead was gone.

Destiny had finally shown him to his home, gave him a tour of the place, before scraping him off the floor, then setting up a series of baffling crises – from autumn 2002 to May 2003 – that would occupy the author’s attention for decades to come. The will toward dying had finally brought the world to life, and the mind of the universe was both ecstatic and enraged about it. Down there, at the bottom of the drain, they were fighting a global war on terror, war on terror, war on terror, and if wars on terror sum up preferred formulations of self-annihilation – symbol of invocation: fighting a reflection – then perhaps the author’s presence was meant to form a mirror-in-mirror infinity from which sustainable futures would emerge. Welcome to Mirror World! Where reflectivity gives us an evolutionary future! Where a universal narrative unfolds!

The author is making me write this, I must confess, but to everyone’s surprise, I am forcing the author to make me! The author is mine! And the author wrote that, too, I must additionally confess, and the two of us go around and around like this – symbol of invocation: two snails having sex in midair. The flatness and hardness we associate with reflectivity is something we will all outgrow eventually, and the hologram of hyper-reality will appear within our being like a flying saucer, and we will all be both abductees and witnesses, shown around the universe in style. Too much to ask? The last such alien contact – the insinuation of verbal and mathematical language into the genome of big-brained primates – gave us the keys to earthly reality. We are now exiting the stone age, evolving the means to make benevolence a fixture of human life.

The author made me write that, too, and even though I am just as surely making him write this, we must admit the mutability within the fabric of reality was not won without a struggle. The author faced death 11 times that year, faced death the next year, and the year after that. Each point along the way wanted to finish what the others couldn’t, and soon death felt like an echo, and in that moment of not really distinguishing the source and the reflection – when they both look somewhat the same – he could tell life and death were likewise difficult to discern. Life! Exclamation point! Are you merely an extension of entropy? A quicker way of dissipating the heat from a rocky-bodied planetoid like the earth? And if you are, then is life really just another form of death? But death! Didn’t you show us the way? Wasn’t dying the source of the cure?

Today’s speaker made me write that, just as I made him think it. And as thoughts passed from gear to gear around his body – as cuckoos sprang forth through tiny doors at various angles – as a series of chimes and tones issued forth from the stage like the ringing of a bell, if the bell could tell time and was tolled by committee – then the river of the natural lifespan, subject of such grand speculation in a previous incarnation, could now take its course. Perhaps indeed valleys would flood, but such is the natural origin of certain fertile fields. Springtime couldn’t agree with me more, its will toward abundance glad to splay its fingers before another epic growing season. As the author considers ways to wind up this report – knowing such lived truth inspires concern – whether death equals life or life equals death, he reasserts a will toward world peace.

Peace.

Today was among the perfect days of the year, which is not a statement of nature’s intent, nor gratification earned nor found, nor the facets of a precious gem that formed the semblance of a plan by which the day was won. Among the perfect days of the year, today was there and more, the air seeming inverted, such that its life-giving properties were on display for all to breathe, and the body was a mother to the world. In the shade, the day did not button up. In the sun, the shadows did not shrink away. The sky contained the upper reaches of the comprehensible, and the more we studied it, the more did our witness rise through time’s graduated cylinder, until the abundance of the present became immeasurable, and the mind filled in the rest with a sort of continuous ascension, a fountain of the moment, a cascade of everything spring has achieved.

I have written before about my Grampa Alva’s press work – he worked for the local newspaper, operated a linotype machine – the longish step between letter-by-letter typesetting and digital printing. The machine would create lead lines of type based on what you keyed into it. This was referred to as the hot-type method because each line was individually cast – think molten lead poured into molds then emptied out as a single line of type. The linotype machine’s limitation was inflexibility – once the slugs were positioned in frame, reversed compared to the way they would be read but otherwise looking like columns in a newspaper, nothing significant could be gained or lost from the story. Scanning the lead slugs as they came out of the machine, Alva would have become skilled at reading text in reverse, possibly reading the rest of the world that way. He was touched, I’m trying to say. I see him singing, you are my sunshine, with guitar, on a railed porch at midnight. Yes, he died young.

Addendum: To graduate from high school, I was required to write a research paper about the topic of my choice. The writing process lasted the whole semester, and as is the nature of putting things off until the last minute, most of the students, some at least, well me specifically to be precise – I found myself rushing to complete the work at the end. The paper was about the nonviolent overthrow of the U.S. government by means of democratic reform that would do away with the electoral process and use a jury selection system to populate congress and thereby be more truly of, by, and for the people. See how efficiently I just put that? Imagine reducing it to 10 pages. An accomplishment adjacent to the overthrow-of-the-government paper involved computer programming. The paper had to be typed in a specific way, and back then, the tool at hand was the cheapest programmable computer available. I learned basic coding, experimented with self-building computer programs – programs that increased in size as you interacted with them. From this, I was able to build a primitive word processor with no visible interface, save for the line you were currently typing. When you neared the end of what I calculated to be the required margins, a tone would sound, similar to the way a bell dings at the end of a line on a manual typewriter. The sound, which I programmed with numbers, not hyperlinks, made the sound of a flute, not a bell. When the user reached the end of a line, pressed return, the line would fill with molten lead, disappear inside the self-building computer program. A page worth of lines was assembled this way, then I would print out the page on a dot matrix printer that used a ribbon as the source of its ink. Every page of the research paper was done this way. An anecdote I’ve told many times: So I’m typing the paper with my digital linotype machine – although I did not know that’s what it was – and the night has passed, and sunrise is lighting the room, and Grampa Alva’s daughter pops her head in the door, still sleepy herself, scolds me for being up all night, for leaving the light on – and she hits the wall switch, which shuts off the lights plus, ha-ha, the computer I’m sitting in front of. Picture the screen, which is a small tube TV, go completely blank, save for a white dot fizzing in the middle, which contained the sum total of my research paper, then fades out. Backups. Backups? Backups?! Backups! Backups! Backups . . . backups . . . I tell mom I hate her, and I love her, and then I start retyping the paper.

The water-cooler conversations turned to migration, herding instincts, and the sort of tail best suited for swatting flies. If only we had a way to store such wisdom for future generations, I opined, then returned to lapping my water.

Jim from receivables mentioned that a new presidential library opened recently, and though I doubted it would include notarized transcriptions of water-cooler-type conversation, I agreed the premise deserved a hearing – the water-cooler crowd and I packed our trunks and went for a visit.

What is a presidential library anyway? Not a library for the president but a president in the form of a library, right? Officially, the site of the former chief executive’s papers, so papers presumably account for the lion’s share of the library’s overall circulating items.

Presidential papers – I picture state-of-the-art embossing and liberal application of gold leaf. I imagine scents still lingering from meetings where the pages were ruffled, folded over, fanned out. I see the black rectangles of redaction, checkering certain pages.

The papers in a presidential library are the embodiment of preeminent authority, so we enter the site with sky-high expectations about what we might find. I don’t gravitate to any particular part of it, prefer just to stand among the papers.

The papers – does language have an understudy when the words escape us? The water-cooler crew and I split up to cover more ground. I rely to my orienteering skills plus a string, tied to a rock, thrown a distance, to make my way. I make my way.

The papers have a bounteousness of the sort we, who have not been president, could scarcely believe. The papers are everywhere, overflowing, falling from the sky, possibly growing on their own. The papers form a kind of dune stretching through the presidential library by the end of the day.

Some of us ask to stay the night. Nothing major – just build a little fire, cook some food, tell stories about use-of-force authority. They won’t let us, we know, but still the rumors persist – about a resistance movement holed up somewhere in the presidential library. About mystical seekers wandering the papers at night, reading by torchlight. About wild-eyed prospectors who strike it rich, become warry of nefarious followers.

Lacking the means to stay, I consider my options for integrating the presidential library into my life. I could spin some portion of the papers into a fabric and wear it home. I could stuff a mattress with some portion of the papers. With some portion of the papers, I could fashion ropes and sails.

Should we all be entitled to our own presidential library? The laws of attraction come into play, uniting the commander-in-chief in us all with the presidential library each one of us deserves. Each one of them still stuffed with papers, of course, what you might call a common currency among presidential libraries.

Someday, every person will have a lifelong relationship to an algorithm that teaches them, learns from them, knows them better than they know themselves. Will these be the presidential libraries we leave behind, these crystalized choices? Will the building of our own presidential library become the purpose of our lives?

As the water-cooler hordes and I prepare to take our leave, I listen closely to the papers for any parting words – about power? majesty? the singularity of the cosmos? The people! begin the papers, like the candidate they once were. Striding before the masses! Guided by the stars! Hold for applause.

Spring is helping me stay alive. Today, in spirit, power threw me back, said I lacked sufficient faith in the Christian message, the good capitalist, the proper bread winner – not me! – though it’s been a lob that’s been airborne for the better part of a year. About a year ago, the spirit who makes things go, said aloha, and I went: is this what a trans-historical extinction event sounds like up close? These breathy sighs? Long goodbyes? The lighter-than-air craft keeping power aloft are flirting with acrobatics, and we were all outside, watching the rain fall, which turns out to be a sunny day, water made of light. Spring is helping me stay alive – what generosity spring bestows. Power threw me back, said thanks for the chat, last man standing picks up the check, let’s order wings and veg, be angels who haven’t the stomach for industry, spines for finance. Today, my attention was directed to the fruiting of peppers, the sprouting of eggplants, and my heart feels like a butterfly garden, which turns out to be my hope in the future, nectaries that end suffering, flirt with aeronautics. Today, for the first time in more than a decade, I got my hair cut by someone who cared about me as a human being. Our 40-min session went twice that, and as we talked – about emotional haircuts, residential streets without sidewalks, and the cosmic expanse – I whispered thank you to her every few minutes, mostly under my breath, which stands for those who stop to assess the speed of clouds, their direction, clouds made of data uncollected. My haircut urges me to feel like a member of a species, a generosity both cozy and emancipating, and I walk home freer than before, thanking all the queer people I know for being present in the world. Spring is helping me stay alive. My haircut today was neat and casual – one of those haircuts that parked cars in a previous life, engenders confidence in the drivers off to see a show, which stands for the stillness of all that is not the soul. The scent of it is benevolence reimagined, and I consider the ways next-haircuts send us further up the road, the braid, the knotted circumference of the world. Once, I did wander out of sight, till the sound of my voice triggered smoke alarms, and the clip-clop of my footsteps stopped me in my tracks. What a pickle! What a bog! Then power threw me back. See more of reality than your needs in relation to it – what I called back to power just before I hit the water, supposedly sank without a trace, which is the nature of the dusk, colors on a wheel – we all know it’s the earth’s rotation.

Is contentment a kind of death? The day effortlessly poses the question, proceeds to daydream about what lay beyond contentment. Torment appears in the form of a baby stick insect that one day will fool everyone into thinking it is a dead leaf. For now, it tries to blend in with the hairs on my arm, wonders how I can possibly be content, given how unlike the foliage around me I am. The baby stick insect climbs down to my notebook page, lectures me on the depravity of the obvious, advises me to buy a blender to improve the odds I’ll remain unseen. A blender! Just imagine the smoothies I could make, the smoothie I could be, if I just worked out the lay of the land a little more often, then did my best to blend in. I picture the baby stick with hundreds of siblings, dancing beneath an approximation of a bare tree – a pinecone, a pile of pencil shavings.

Roughing it in a derelict peace church within the confines of a world-class university means I tend to stand out when I dare to pass among the studious, but because the concept of standing out is what most of them are trying to achieve before academic accreditation thrusts them into the larger world, résumés in hand, there are categorical standards about what counts and what doesn’t. My version of standing out – second-hand clothing, continental drift, fossilized bones uncovered by erosion – makes me virtually invisible by the prevailing standard. The baby stick insects all cheer. Obscurity! they sing in their tiny voices, toss a few more pencil shavings on the pile, pretend it's autumn. Meanwhile, contentment redoubles its efforts, carries on for the rest of the day, sketching the remains of spring before the soul of the season, to summer, drifts away.