aphorism 1, A Human Strategy
My Slice of Eternity
1
In life we confuse equation with nature and settle into our recliners, buoyed with incredible smugness by our day-to-day routine. If, however, this routine were to be unceremoniously pulled out from under us, we would find ourselves prostrate upon the hard earth ... upon the rude truth: we would not know where or how to begin anew, since we had thought that the principle was our comfort. But what do we do? We kneel and work out new equations, tearing out pages from our scratch pad as quickly as we fill them with numbers and symbols ... while the natural phenomenon, habit, on its own, slowly weaves out a new fabric for us. One day the fabric holds, and once again we believe ourselves to float “above reality.” We are content again. “The principle!”
But what if I discarded all principle from the outset? Set fire to all the scraps of paper around me? What if I found it possible to have wicked thoughts even within the sterilized corridor of science? What if I were no longer content with the mere observation of human behavior? What if instead I sought out forces ... immediate control? Just as the engineer seeks out force and builds an apparatus to apply that force, I would seek out natural influences ... to myself ... for myself ... with no other rule or law but this: to gain more and more personal force.
What if, to my horror, these forces were more basic ... more simplistic than I had wished them to be? I find myself an “automated process” where every occasion for human meaningfulness reduces itself all too quickly to a mechanical clarity. What if it were this horror — honesty — that choked me so that I could no longer speak of the human condition with any sense of dignity? What if I had the same face as always, but with a new apparatus to see that face, for the first time, and so as to be able finally to recognize myself? To suffer an identity crisis because I have absolutely no doubt as to who and what I am.
With this horrible, rigorous science, I observe my thoughts in their daily routine, as I would a white rat in the labyrinth, working its way through incredible complexities, all toward a very simple end ... all of my aspirations and virtues sniffling toward this same piece of cheese. I keep my chin up, follow my nose back down that ancient path, turning my head left and right in search of that older, more savage means which had glory and dignity for an end ... but I stop even before this last virtue. It only smells of nobility.
I can no longer worship kings, or the Lord, or a universal being. I have no appetite for new ideas. I no longer want to get behind it all ... to seek out that all encompassing truth, for I already have it in my paws. The ultimate truth is a wedge of cheese. These days if I kneel at all, I kneel and tinker with the mechanical force of stimulus and response ... kneel before this white rat in its maze and press the cheese into the double-mirrored corridor of my choosing. The rat, once arrived — and to my horror, it always arrives — looks left and right to the thousand thousand iterations of itself ... each iteration pressing that cheese a little more precisely, pat into this selfsame corner ... each iteration inching toward the sublime perfection of itself.
I find no humor in this, so why does Fate go on and on with these ridiculous attempts? I lack a sense for humor, perhaps. Well, I can develop even that, if there were but cheese enough and time.
Here is another bad joke which I must endure: man as machine had hitherto been the horror of my life, but now it promises to become my newest hope ... and though I have grown wary of all hopes, I know of no deeper reality than this mechanical force, of no other means of getting to the other side of the equation of life than to pursue greater and greater natural force from the immediate world ... energy ... to build out of myself an apparatus not only for the application of force, but for the acquisition of more force.
This has become something like a religion with me. Of course, it is really only madness ... of course, I am mad ... but in my own defense, it is only self-control, in every applicable sense of the word, that constitutes my madness. The day I found myself institutionalized within a society which forbade my own control over myself, I resigned myself to this padded cell. I consider myself lucky. A few generations ago they would have burned me at the stake; now, my words are tolerated ... but never my force ... my tools for altering my own destiny and thereby the destiny of others ... for once I set tools to the hinges of this door I will be wrestled to the ground again, injected with the palliatives of the newest, most advanced morality, and hustled into a stronger cell.
But what do I care? I am in the pursuit of force, if not its possession. One day, perhaps, I may even harness it. And what would a little control do for me? The claim is modest enough: I would then have the block and tackle to lower this oversized rodent into a new labyrinth. I would scoff at the absurdity of my circumstance, make of my world a cornucopia of cheeses. It would smell of a newer hope ... of a last hope, and this new, final hope would become my only possible response. In the pursuit of what? A slice of eternity, a few priceless jewels of recollection to set in velvet, the gratitude of a few friends, a new path toward dignity ...