Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board: A Novel

PRELUDE

Beware of the burdensome weight that accompanies the wholesale absorption of scholarly knowledge. Sold as a vehicle for empowerment and success, knowledge can nonetheless give rise to bouts of prejudice and close-mindedness within otherwise amenable hosts. While it certainly can win one accolades in accomplishment and acceptance from society, surreptitiously, knowledge can become the substitute for wonder and the playground for pride. Knowledge served through ideological filters is often the propellant for elitism, zealotry, even terrorism, and is the catalyst for the quakes that form the unnavigable schisms between mankind’s natural differences. Meanwhile, insisting upon the innocence of a given subject or field of study is sometimes or commonly the more constructive course of action for an amiable soul confronted by reams of conjecture sold clandestinely as knowledge.

Knowledge costs time and often revenue to attain, while innocence is complimentary. Knowledge is safeguarded by bigoted oligarchs who ensure that only favored acolytes are allowed to share in its power, while being presented as something that can be measured in degrees and any branch of it resolved to some eventual conclusion. Innocence, in contrast, is democratic, and available to everyone as an inalienable right. For every chain knowledge shakes off in opportunity, it acquires another in the loss of simplicity. Knowledge fogs the righteous path that is the true exercise of our natural inclinations. Knowledge muffles the individual’s audience with destiny and true desire, and grimes the genius with conflicting facts of nominal consequence.

Knowledge can be as yoking as hard bondage, and as debilitating as dismemberment. May the knowledge of certain speculative diseases be the actual cause, and the ignorance of them the immunity or cure? Isn’t the only true cure for an alcoholic the innocence of the effects of alcohol? Why do we shelter, revere, and cherish the innocence of youth as priceless, but then at some arbitrary point in late adolescence cast its fate to the wind? Knowledge is power, but isn’t power the most corruptible and uncontrollable force ever bestowed to man? A common accusation levied against malevolent leaders is how they are drunk on power. So why don’t we value the ignorance of power; and if knowledge is power, the ignorance of knowledge?

At the beginning of the era when prehistoric man began to resemble modern man anatomically, humans experienced few incidents of free thought. There were no hauntings from the thirst for knowledge, there were just the hauntings from thirst. There was little time for abstract thought. If man thought, man died. This was the naked truth of reality pressed by the constant siege of predators, frost, and famine. Action was truth. Action is truth. Prehistoric man—the true essence of our modern being—only acted infallibly in accordance with the complete uncompromising tenacity of his nature. He fulfilled his role in the harmonious design, or he died. Like the salmon that run and the birds that migrate, he slept, he shat, he hunted and foraged, and he procreated at the right time, in the right place, with the right relationship with his circumstances and with a certitude almost as predictable as the seasons changing and the stars and constellations revolving in the sky. It could be said that primal man was completely fulfilling of his role in the world, and thus, completely fulfilled. That is, he was fulfilled until the moment he found himself in the midst of surplus, and his carnal nature compromised by comfort. Now with brief moments removed from necessity, he possessed occasions to dream, and ponder. The existence of excess delivered doles of freewill to primal man, and with this came the trappings of conscious decision, frequent indecision, and bouts of misery. Only then did primitive humans begin to resemble their more modern cousins.

But even among his measures above necessity—even in The Garden of Eden one might say—prehistoric man still held advantage over modern man. During the tenure of one lifetime, primitive man could usurp all the requisite knowledge afforded him by his habitat and become the master of his domain, despite being immeasurably ignorant in comparison to modern man. Prehistoric man had not a clue of the gaseous molecular makeup of the stars like the modern-day middle school student does, but he could use the heavenly bodies to deduce precise measurements of direction and time—a practical exercise lost on modern man. Prehistoric man was not privy to the particular knowledge of the phyla of plants and animals or any other silly and meticulously-redundant modern classifications of natural occurrences, but he possessed an impressive comprehension of the practical applications of plant and animal lore for sustenance and safety that is unbeknownst to most in modern culture. And these were beneficial skills rooted in awareness and relations that were deeply imbued throughout prehistoric man’s constitution—forged into his consciousness by experience, and not chanced to the whim of remembrance like knowledge dictated on paper, lectured down through ritualized fact dissemination, or distributed through electronic channels that institutionally filter and distort their information at the instruction of subjective agendas related to opinions on economics, religion, humanism, and geopolitics. Prehistoric man was virtually ignorant of opinions. Lions eat people. That star denotes that direction. That plant you can eat, and that one makes you break out in rash. Such was the nature of his thought.

We can’t even give current mankind credit for overcoming his lack of carnal instincts and primitive skills with the crutch of technology. Despite contriving machines to perform the tasks that came naturally to modern man’s early ancestors, these devices carry the caveat of dependency on natural resources, infrastructure, and convenient transfer receptacles and wireless networks burdened by proprietary compatibility issues and password access. Why give credit to modern man for solving ineptitudes that he has devised for himself by abandoning his natural tendencies, especially when there is still a deficit between the ones he’s solved through technology and the ones that still persist, while technology itself has engendered even more dilemmas for the modern human to hurdle and solve? Yes, prehistoric man would be thoroughly puzzled by the internal workings and array of capabilities of the average modern man’s hoard of consumer innovations, but so is modern man. It is true that modern humans have utilized applications of magnetism through technology to cure many of the side effects of mankind’s wayward existence, for example. But there exists no person who can explain what magnetism actually is. Nor will there ever be on the current trajectory, especially with high-nosed contemporaries balking at the insertion of the metaphysical into their scientific studies, whose goals are increasingly financially and consumer driven, practical, and anemic in imagination. Yes, man has mastered invention, but invention is not the art of creation, only of manipulation. The meaning of life will never be solved in a beaker, or through an equation. This can only occur in the laboratory of the natural human vessel that finds itself ignorant of the bulk of modern knowledge and deaf to the din of the naysayer’s doubt. The first drills that the peddlers of knowledge indoctrinate into novice scientists are atheism and arrogance. They are commissioned to disregard the sheer wanton ignorance of the foundations of man’s existence and the impenetrable holes in the knowledge of the Universe that surrounds him. Instead they’re told to fixate upon studying the explainable to fool themselves into believing that everything can be ultimately explained. You want to enrage a scientist? Insist they explain what gravity is, and beyond how it can be measured, manipulated, and applied until they fail to convey the true essence of what it actually is, and are rendered frustrated.

As one follows the timeline of mankind throughout the ages, the dawning of a groundbreaking new technology is often a marker denoting the next stage of humanity’s gestation into contemporary suffering. Once our forebearers had mastered their domain and were afforded luxuries of time, they could teach in knowledge what before had to be gained in experience anew by each upcoming generation. Knowledge could be built upon itself and expanded, and more time could be exhausted on brooding, and nothing, and cultivating man’s vices. Soon there was a need for rules, then commandments, then laws and a governing class and the classification of all human beings into social orders. When one man could no longer grasp all common knowledge, because the realm of common knowledge was too vast, the idea of mastering one’s own domain became extinct. This is the dilemma modern man finds himself among today. He is the proud product of the constant pursuit, perpetuation, and application of knowledge, leaving one patently miserable and unfulfilled.

What about the quickly dwindling population of present-day humans living on earth in perpetual poverty and ignorance, untouched by the onslaught of knowledge and technology? Where do they fit into this philosophy of the suffering of modern man? First let’s dispose of this term poverty. Poverty is a term for wealthy nations where poor people are fat and still own the latest electronic devices. Poverty is not a disease, it is the foundation of the human condition. Poverty is in the mind just as much as it is in the paunch, and it cannot be solved alone by the introduction of running water, name-brand textiles, and antidotes to over-diagnosed modern phobias. Poverty is an invention to help gluttonous people deal with the guilt of excess. You might say, Do you not feel compassion for the degree of plight of the impoverished? I say that I am envious of their simplicity. They are often ignorant of their plight, and the degree of it, because they know no different, until misguided apostles of modern civilization impart it to them like a disease. The traditional people of the earth who live in ignorance of most of the doings of the modern world—the people that the modern world foolishly labels as impoverished—they are often the truly righteous, because they are living as akin as one can to the essential elements of the human experience. They live as islands in an ocean of social and societal breakdowns, of mass-marketed corporate capitalist credos, and of unrealistic state-sponsored efforts at equality that tend to perpetrate even more suffering through guilt and envy. The primitive people of the modern world often have strong familial bonds and the ease of modest living, at least until modernity arrives with ideas of conscription and conquest. And the barrage of ideals from wealthy nations holds no quarter upon the Third World. Traditional peoples are used as shameful examples for academic and religious types to assert their dogmatic or political ideologies, and when they’re not being exploited with hand-me-down industrialism, the elite of wealthy nations are usurping their dignity by exploiting them as an outlet for their guilt-ridden need to exercise charity. It is interesting that we can conclude that humans feeding wild animals creates a dependence and a burden that imperils these creatures, but we cannot transfer these same lessons to members of our own species.

In many traditional mythologies, angels are represented by good and innocence, and demons are the evil keepers of knowledge. Then there is the story that some humans believe of the Garden of Eden—the serpent and the apple. How true it is that we shall be as gods when half of us harbor foolish misnomers of who and what the ultimate entity is, while the other half contrives that the only ultimate entities that truly exist are themselves. The knowledge of good and evil was a ruse deployed against human curiosity that succeeded in titillating to blindness man’s natural disposition to harbor innocence. The decision was made for us then, but we continue to decide to fall further out of grace by pursuing the knowledge of good and evil today. And it is such a foolish pursuit, because good and evil are so discretionary. The idea that one can receive the knowledge of good and evil is the genesis of all human conflict. It is the incendiary for the fragmentary negativism that is expelled through the mediums of religion, politics, and cultural heritage.

Knowledge is saddening and maddening, while innocence is pure and magical. Knowledge clogs all our internal mechanisms with stuttered, muddled thoughts, while innocence is the ideal of the open, clear mind. Innocence—like poverty—is the foundation of the human condition. Ignorance is what knowledge unflatteringly labels innocence from fear, envy, misunderstanding, and arrogance. Pursuing innocence as a life principle is impossible and can really only be done in an abstract manner in the modern context, unfortunately. But after being pursued by knowledge peppered with subjective realities through one’s formative years, pursuing innocence can become gratifying and fulfilling. It is like a brilliant awakening.

So as you proceed through this body of work, look at it not as a book of knowledge. Do not think of what to learn from it, but how to forget what you have learned. Do not reflect on what you know, but how it was subjectively taught to you. As a theme to my existence, I have decided not to pursue knowledge as a form of conquest because it is a never-ending journey, and a dead end all the same. It is an addiction, a broken promise, and a fruitless effort. I hope that you will join me. For I value only wisdom, which is a clear audience with experience and instinct. They can keep their knowledge.

CHAPTER 1

It began innocently enough. I’ve heard the maxim that some humans try to fight it, but eventually we all become who we truly are, and I am not one to claim immunity from, or the ability to rise above, my humanity. I began dabbling with it in my youth at the time most adolescent males of the human species do so—when the martial influences (blood, war, power, love, and the like) assert their pull upon the poorly fortified human soul; or if you prefer more colloquial language, when the male adolescent’s balls drop. At its inception, it was sport. Pilfer an electronic device from a gymnasium locker. Lift a candy bar from a local grocer. It felt good and it felt right. I was adept at it. I never got caught, and I never learned my lesson. Even at a tender age I began to tap my take on justice and morality to justify my trespasses. I never executed such deeds for the possession, or so I rationalized to myself. I performed them for justice, and for the satiating thrill that doling out justice remits to the yearning soul. It was my bid for equality, and my brand of socialism. Steal from the happy to give to the sad. Slip a solider toy. Lift a candy bar. Make everyone equal—as equally angry and miserable as my world and me.

From this foundation, my transgressions against the brotherhood of man only increased, and I budded into a clever and brash young man. I watched as the mark of adolescent mischief faded from all of my peer’s eyes, and attended the mirror frequently, wondering why my own eyes had not yet matured. The passion was