A Whirly Man Loses His Turn

In losing our faith, we did not lose our ecstasy at the metamorphosis of God which takes place before our eyes, at the monstrous peristalsis of his intestines – the convolutions of the brain. We don’t know where to go, not having understood there is nothing to be done; we begin to think, to construct conjectures, to suggest. Perhaps we will think up something amazing. But it will no longer be Socialist Realism.

—Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism, 1959

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. * * * The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2009

Prologue.

I met Dr. Karp at the trailers after one of my merry-go-round treatments. His rival, Dr. Upaantim, directed the monstrous apparatus. She sat in her wheelchair with a chemo IV in her arm. At her command, the rotator shaft swung my gondola around faster and faster until suffocation narrowed me heavily down a crimson tunnel. I tried to shout, squeeze me, press the grape, but could not.

Everything crushed, finally, to black. Upaantim called that the moment of G-Loc, for Gravitic Loss Of Consciousness. When the EEG signaled, she let the centrifuge wind down. The gondola rocked, bumped. I felt my body lift against the straps. An Army nurse opened the hatch. Another held out a device.

Dígame. Tell me.

This was my sixth G-Loc dream. It was another serial, the sixth episode of a TV show. A guy had to choose between a girlfriend and a sandwich. His name was Todd Mann. He made a checklist with Girlfriend on one side, Sandwich on the other. The checkmarks on the Sandwich side were winning. His neighbor Hermann Gerbil scoffed at him at first. But as Hermann listened to Todd’s arguments, he admitted Todd had legitimate points.

Dr. Upaantim looked heavenward.

I will not be provoked.

I assured her that I was not sabotaging the effort. It disturbed me too that my dreams were so daft. I didn’t want to let Upaantim down. I wanted her respect. Also, I had to fight a male feeling to protect her. She was sharp-eyed and small. She held her arms poised over her chest, hands hanging, like animals do when rearing up.

She urged me to concentrate on the globe as I swung around. When the nurses determined my body was ready, they strapped me back in the centrifuge. I didn’t like the punishment the centrifuge dealt me, but I thought I deserved it.

I did focus on the globe. The gondola’s Soyuz model cockpit included a control panel. This electro-mechanical setup included a glass panel on the right side. There was a globe behind the glass. On a real Soyuz, it would orient to show the cosmonauts where they were in their orbit. This globe was the cockpit’s mad brain. Strangled, it shook with thought. Squeezed, the continents wormed into darkness.

Again I woke. I was too battered to articulate my next G-Loc dream. The nurses helped me with my nosebleed. Upaantim signaled the technicians to shut down the centrifuge for the night.

An old Army truck showed wear from sandstorms. It waited to take me to my quarters. Upon arrival, the Army nurses helped me out of the truck and let me go. As I wobbled to the front door of my trailer, I noticed I had a neighbor. The colonel had told me to expect Dr. Paul Karp. He was a tall, spare man with white hair and a calm, sunburnt face.

With the clack of a salvaged sheet metal sheer, he carved a boxwood shrub. He had already shaped an evergreen pyramid and a cube. Nature still feathered the rest of the boxwoods. Apparently, decades ago, a Warsaw Pact officer had planted them.

Karp hesitated before the next one. He waved his old Soviet snips and made imaginary slices. He saw me approach and offered a sad smile.

What shape is next? I asked. I didn’t dare say octahedron. My neighbor wouldn’t care about Platonic solids, would he?

He looked up and laughed. Octahedron! Do you think it’s possible to carve an octahedron out of this bush?

Eight sides! Yes, I thought the large boxwood could sustain that. Somebody else cared about Platonic solids! Let no one ignorant of geometry enter. So marked the gate of Plato's Academy. There was a moment of confusion.

Prologue, continued.

Dr. Karp held me sitting up.

Where is it? I asked him.

The small bloodless shopping list in Alyssa’s handwriting lay where I had dropped it. Months ago, the colonel’s agents had retrieved it from the bleak wedge of pedestrian concrete at Massachusetts Avenue North West and 22nd, back in the capital. I saw ROM, probably for romaine, and then LEMON TOM SHAL EGG OLIV. Maybe she had been shopping for the ingredients of a salade niçoise. Did she intend to eat it alone? It didn’t matter. I refolded the note.

I looked at my new neighbor.

The colonel told me to expect a shrink. Did a profiler advise you I would respond to your shapes?

Yes, Karp admitted. He gestured for calm. But no one says you are a criminal. I did read your youthful monograph on Platonic solids while flying here. I decided I like them. Let me help you. I think you’re dehydrated.

This was perhaps a euphemism.

‘Dehydrated,’ I pronounced.

He hurried into his trailer and came back with a glass of water.

I drank some of it. I touched the nearest hedge.

Maybe it’s silly to make shapes out of plants. Nature doesn’t want to form live Platonic solids.

Karp contradicted me in good humor. Indeed she does, at the level of protozoa and virus.

This impressed me. Karp sat on the grass too. He asked what I thought of Upaantim’s theory. Were my high gravity micro-dreams in any manner linked to my lost prognostic insights?

I let out a long breath.

I had to accept my visions as I would intuition or fate. They came. They left. I don’t think whirling me around will bring me closer to the veiled face.

He was silent a moment as he processed that. Finally he replied: The veiled face. Is that the way you speak with Dr. Upaantim or just me?

I laughed. I decided I liked Karp.

I instinctively talk that way with a fellow who understands Platonic solids.

After a moment, I added, If I spoke that way with Dr. Upaantim, she might increase the rate of acceleration.

I imagine she wouldn’t think much of an occult explanation of your visions.

It was just the right moment for an eagle to appear high above.

No, I agreed. And neither do I. But to me there’s a connection between the occult and fate.

We discussed the Ancient Greek’s word for occult power, daimōn. Daimōns were primordial snakes that lived in caves. Mythic heroes would go into the darkness to wrestle these forces left over from a former age. The Ancient Greeks used this same word for fate and for intuition. Daimōn, then, was how fate meets intuition.

The eagle hovered. It had black wings and a white tail. I imagined I could see it move its head as it scrutinized the valley.

This must seem like metaphors of activity in the unconscious. Is my head full of snakes, doc?

He took this in with a faint smile.

We all have an active unconscious. We have inner dynamics and tensions. In psychoanalysis we would call your daimōn an authority figure critical to your childhood mental growth. Infants need that daimōn to help build their unconscious.

I watched the eagle slide without moving its wings. Karp impressed upon me the miracle of unconscious growth required for an infant to develop a functioning consciousness. There was not one unitary self but a weave of unconscious dynamics. The infant had at least the same number of neurons as an adult. The miracle was in the formation of connections, a fabric of one hundred trillion synapses.

The neuron cell was similar to a humble bacterium in behavior and capability. Somehow, to coordinate the onslaught of responses to sensory information, nearly one hundred billion neuron cells created the illusion of self. Each neuron cell itself was unconscious. Where did consciousness come from? It came from a network of inner dynamics and tensions that the infant constructed.

Let’s get to the point, I thought. I was exhausted, tired of the punishment I deserved and weary of my failures, but interested.

So what are my snakes? My G-Loc dreams are far from visionary. They’re always low and comical.

The eagle was gone now. I expected everyone to mock my unconscious as a disappointment to the nation, if not the whole Western World. Karp, however, was serious.

Your lowbrow dreams at G-Loc may be a sign of resistance in your unconscious. Humor can help bridge a disconnect, an unconscious search for authenticity. This could be some of the factors of whatever dynamic produced your visions.

This claim made me smile. What do you think, doc? Was it a mental illness?

He winced a little. Perhaps I had said something ignorant.

I would say that delusions or psychosis, when it occurs, might be the way the mind makes sense of a lacking signifier. If so, why did your delusions turn out to be true? How can a lacking signifier lead to prognostication? All I have are questions.

Of course, he was not going to give me a simple answer. I respected that. But I was tired. I was not ready to enter the cave. I responded with bitterness.

I know what I lack now, I told him. It ended my visions. She’s not coming back. So they’re not coming back.

He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. In a quiet voice, he spoke.

I’m sorry about what happened.

I looked down at the grass for a long time. Dr. Karp waited. When I restored my composure, I lifted my head again.

Karp spoke. Let’s continue. That lack I speak of lies in the unconscious. What causes it? We aren’t the only animal with an unconscious. We aren’t the only self-aware animal. What separates us from nature is language. We are animals sick with language...

1.

My intestines wind clockwise, then counterclockwise. This is the opposite of yours. My heart, unlike yours, is tilted to the right side. My spleen is on the right. Yours is on the left. My liver is on the left. Yours is on the right. One in ten thousand humans have situs inversus totalis but no-one but me had those visions.

Between episodes of centrifuge, Dr. Upaantim rested from chemotherapy. I brought her some wildflowers. I had found them growing around a rusting Lada sedan, where the mowers couldn’t reach, near the base fence.

Upaantim thanked me, but she had no time for flowers. Her brief smile was a muscle movement, not a manifestation of feeling.

Her dedication to the mission was raw. I admired her mind and determination. True, it was making her sick. As if waiting for this opportunity to talk to me, she placed the flowers down.

She told me, Imagine the national renaissance we would bring, if we could restore your ability.

With hands perched by her chest, prairie-dog style, she spoke of mysterious atomic particles, forces that curve and vibrate, vibrations of time and mind, how vibrations might remember, or possibly, anticipate....

We tried for some time. Upaantim whirred me into the crush of unconsciousness over and over again for months. It exhausted me. My face stung. Sometimes the centrifuge gave me black eyes. My legs confused up from down. My dreams were clownish. At first, this offended Upaantim. Then she accepted it as a data point.

One day, there was a change in administration. Upaantim left to work on another strategic project. The effort to restore me continued with Karp.

He diverted my questions about Alyssa: When was my first vision? I ran to catch an old woman even before she fell. But was it a conscious or unconscious intervention with fate? It was unconscious. I had not yet understood my visions.

Karp said this unresolvable, fated intervention against fate was a clue. Unconscious structures carried my visions. They could change as my self-awareness changed. Analysis, therefore, might help us understand. Then he draped a brocade fabric over my chair.

I want those tangled patterns to remind you of your unconscious. In patterns lie logos, manifestations of larger meaning.

Karp wanted me to believe that answers lurked in my mind. The unconscious would help give me insights into repressed material.

Sometimes he would talk about theory. He would pry into my G-Loc dreams. He wasn’t as interested in my visions as the events leading up to them. He warned me that the purpose of the investigation was not therapy, not support for the state of my ego mechanism, nor to develop coping techniques. It was government research.

It was unethical, Karp wanted me to know. To limit its evil to necessity, he would try not to ask anything