

"Kafka the Joker"

### &

"Letter to a Friend"

By Don A Lashomb

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Don A Lashomb

License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this book has been provided for free, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and should not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed it, please encourage others to download their own copy via official channels so that the total number of copies and readers can be more accurately gauged.

Although some of the incidents described in this book are drawn from actual history, many other events, along with all of the characters, are fictional and imaginary; some can even be described as "fictionalizations of fictionalizations"; any resemblance anything here might bear to actual circumstances or to living people is entirely coincidental.

Quoted materials (including interpolations, deliberate misquotes, and creative paraphrases) remain copyright of their original authors or current legal holders. These passages are used and reproduced here under the fair use doctrine for commentary and criticism.

Cover artwork shows filtered photograph of Franz Kafka, with smile cut from famous still image of "The Man Who Laughs" (1928).

###  Table of Contents

Preamble

Introduction

Apologia

Kafka the Joker

Letter to a Friend

0. 'In Modern Society, Everyone Is Mentally Ill'

1. I Am Not a Dissident

2. Allison Fashion

3. Cameras, Conditioning, Cultural Propaganda

4. Sylvester Society

5. Confidential Appointment

6. Freedom, Instincts, Politics

7. Disappointment, Disposal, Dostoevsky

8. If Men Could Be Gods, They Wouldn't Already Be Men in the First Place

9. Parable of the Computer

10. Dana

11. K. was fore Kaczynski

12. Plagiarism

13. Taste

14. Phonies

15. From Maker to Faker

16. Cities

17. Last Words on Literature

18. Dark Side of McLuhan

19 i. Rousseau: There Is No Social Contract

19 ii. Rousseau: 'Ruesow', 'Ruse', 'Rose', etc. Parallels

20. Fuck: The Fetishism of Commodities

21. The Technillogical Society as Serial Killer

21a. Serial Killer Motif Contd.: Cannibalism & Laughing

21b. Further Addenda to Serial Killer Motif: Ted Bundy & The Joker

21c. Final Addenda to Serial Killer Motif

21d. One Last Quick Thing

22. Sideways for Survival

23. The Future Isn't What It Used To Be

24. PPL R GETTING STUPIDR: A Review of Brzezinski's 'Strategic Vision'

25. My Own Stupid 'Awakening'

26. False-Face Fascist

27. Batman as Sublimated Serial Killer

28. I Don't Blame the Politicians . . . I Blame the Voters

29. All Anyone Needs to Know about Politics

30. The Man Who Laughs [at his Father]

31. The Only Acceptable Way Forward

Appendix 1: Lost Snatches from the Manifesto of Dana O.

Appendix 2: Last Letter of KierJones

NOTES

About the Author

•

•

The Castle was well-informed about him and had foreseen all circumstances. But they had under-estimated his strength, resolve, and spirit. He would have more freedom of action than he dared hope, and even some freedom of thought as well. Yes, it was all quite propitious for Land-Surveyor K. The Castle had made the first move, and though he seemed indifferent, he was taking up the challenge with a smile.

### •

###

### •

###  Introduction

"I'm on the Westside of Chicago, lookin' for a bust-down

To make me put my two arms up: Touchdown!"

—Cam'ron, "Dipset Anthem"

"I'm on the Southside of Chicago, lookin' for a real ho'.

I don't see a touchdown. Arms up: Field goal!"

—Cam'ron, "More Gangsta Music"

With only the slightest facetiousness, I once cited the above pair of examples as exemplifying all that the driving aesthetic of art in the early twenty-first century might seek and hope to achieve. Between the two verses, along with the outside allusions and metaphors based on happy trivialities, we note in particular the self-referentiality: how the second passage plays with the motif of the first, sets up an expectation and then twists it. There is a mirroring effect. Art was always the mirror to life, but now in our current age the mirroring has expanded exponentially, shattering beyond human comprehension. What Cam'ron does in these verses is but a bite-sized "fractal" of a linguistic aesthetic that I consider likely to endure for a little while longer, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its misogynistic overtone and cartoonish sexuality. (In part, I offer this in contrast to what I am trying to achieve.)

More than ever, art must mirror itself, and if this hall of mirrors is set up correctly we can trace a line of sight toward a sort of rare truth. Within the incredibly complex simulacra, with an infinite number of choices, voices, robotic stand-ins and repetitions, we must either find or construct some relatively simplistic artful exercises for ourselves. That is how we keep going, without getting totally lost or overwhelmed. That is why I have written what I have written in the paired works below: to provide a mental training ground. I frequently disagree with my creation Sylas T. Ruesow, the rambling, somewhat paranoid, probably technophobic, allegedly brilliant "Letter"-writer of the second piece, but in this case I would generally reiterate what I have had him try to explain to his titular "friend":

It is very important to realize that, in a critical sense, there's only one way to think: Determining what's real and what isn't, what's true and what isn't. [. . .] You always have to be crosschecking the extent to which anything you encounter is real, and the extent to which it is or isn't true. If you aren't running those processes in the background all the time, then you can't ever really consciously think about anything. This method constitutes the necessary precondition you must start from if you're ever going to begin to figure anything out. This method is the key to unlocking this current system and seeing it for what it is — and this method was always the proper way of unraveling any confusion or complication ever.

Like Cam'ron in his twin verses above, I too have played with expectations. The first piece is an obvious fiction, thinly disguised as a woman's diary entry. But those expecting a madcap adventure with Franz Kafka cast as a flamboyant murderer will be disappointed: there is no action, and little feel-good goofiness. It is not a silly, anachronistic mash-up for the sake of a silly, anachronistic mash-up. It is even less of a proper narrative than many of Kafka's own stories are. And after suffering through "Kafka the Joker", the reader will probably be even more disappointed by the second piece, "Letter to a Friend": It would seem to be a series of essays (personal and political) disguised as a letter between estranged acquaintances, but then it reveals itself to be set in the same near-futuristic fictional world as the first piece. And you cannot trust this letter-writer. Most of his facts are wrong; many of his quotes can't be accurate. You might think he is a stand-in for myself but, no, he is so much less than that. Ruesow is an exaggerated skew used to explore certain avenues and go down roads that I could never honestly go down myself. I was interested in certain subject matters and ideologies and needed to create an obsessive personality with which to explore it all and suss out every last detail.

It bears expanding upon the fact that despite some of the bombastic subject matter, which appears and reappears throughout these pieces, readers attracted to graphic and gruesome descriptions will feel cheated. I have minimized the violent content, simply because, as text goes, I prefer dialogue and monologue to anything involving action, and I never set out to offend anyone. Perhaps it all can still resemble a humorous madcap adventure, but only in terms of twisting thought processes, if one has immeasurable patience and a high tolerance for facetiousness. Also, in short: I have grown to find pessimism funny.

Whereas Kafka couldn't help but feel guilty for writing he never published, much as Josef K. couldn't help but feel guilty for crimes he didn't commit; we note that serial killers and terrorists, on the other hand, do not feel guilty for the atrocities they carry out with glee. As I see it, then, the question might naturally arise as to whether or not I feel any guilt for turning an innocent writer into an arch-criminal. It's a fair question. Let me say that, for my part, I have been known to feel quite horrible whenever I've caused anyone even mild annoyance or slighted them unintentionally. A certain party has told me that this is a "privileged predilection" of which I must rid myself, and I "would do well to become much more ruthless". I am trying.

So the reader is warned: I have tried to keep costs low, but you are still in for a letdown. (Well, unless you learn to laugh at it.) Sorry kid, you were fooled into buying the wrong book. Try and learn something from this, so you don't make the same mistakes next time. That's my advice. I am a slow-learner; I had to go through all of this many, many times, with infinite rewrites, and there are still a ton of errors — not all of which can be mistaken for "art".

Nonetheless, I have been able to distill certain relevant, relatively interesting aspects of our reality — the lurid and sordid, the technical and textual — and then I have re-expressed them in two different, fictional forms. My sincere hope is that you will get something out of it — scoop out something you consider valuable from my mess the same way I scooped out things I considered valuable from the messes of others. We should always make an effort to repurpose old effects to fit new contexts: just keep taking things away, filtering them through your own experience, and try to make something better from them. And since everyone's filtering technique can stand some improvement, to that end I have tried to give you a good glut of input that will clean out your system and give your digestive processes a workout.

If you don't like it, I would recommend the Cam'ron instead. And if you do like it, I'd still recommend the Cam'ron album, which does include some great beats you can dance to.

Thank you for reading.

### •

###

### •

###  Apologia

There are many reasons why I have written the two prose pieces that follow: I wanted to pursue certain trains of thought to see where they would go. I wanted to push through certain unpleasant themes in order to overcome and dispose of them. I wanted to exhaust different ideological permutations. And I wanted to play with form, pretense, and intertexuality in terms of how the two pieces might relate and reflect upon each other. The composition process, however, took far longer than I thought it would, and by the end of it — despite being reasonably pleased with the result — I forgot why I had begun. I was left with a curious mass of text that reacted like a "nerve net" whenever I tried to probe it for clues into its origin. I knew its purpose but had lost sight of its impetus. Whatever it was that I had produced here, its personal meaning had twisted down neurological pathways that I couldn't follow back to their source. I was never all that interested in serial killers, terrorists, technology or politics, yet here I have researched and written about these matters for hundreds of pages. Why? How did I fall into all this?

Just now the real, simplest answer has dawned on me: I wrote all this because I didn't like how the Unabomber referenced Jacques Ellul. I didn't have a clear enough sense of this indignation when I began writing, but now, at root, this seems to have been the crux of things.

Ellul was a twentieth-century French philosopher who attributed most of the modern world's problems to technological know-how ("technique") having progressed to the point of autonomy. It is as if our tools, toys and creations have colluded with one another, launched a conspiracy against humanity, and become our masters. Though I disagree with Ellul on certain key issues (and on a plethora of minor ones), I have found several of his works to be among the most profound and interesting that I have ever read. In order to understand the modern world, there are no better books to read than The Technological Society, The Technological System, and The Technological Bluff. Written decades ago, they still have plenty to tell us. Consulting them would help answer many questions that you might have had regarding the unnatural nature of the frenzied and disquieting way that most of us Westerners live. The contents and lessons of Ellul's works have not aged poorly, and so it is a shame they remain fairly obscure. Painfully few people have ever really done anything with the words and advice of this great thinker.

It was a shock, then, when I found Ellul cited several times over in the "Unabomber Manifesto". Ellul was a humble Christian who stressed kindness, empathy, and nonviolence. But he was very critical of technology, and this is what Ted Kaczynski seized upon. The Unabomber mentions Ellul while making his case for ruthless, targeted attacks against whatever real human beings might be considered "faces" of the system, which he hates and blames for all his problems.

The first piece of writing that follows this introduction is a story that addresses the question: "If someone as pious as Ellul could inspire a serial murderer and terrorist, could a forerunner of Ellul have led to something even worse?"

For some time now I have considered Franz Kafka to be Ellul's great, unacknowledged precursor. Kafka's fiction ridicules, fears, and fights bureaucracy, regimented cruelty, and other organizational aspects of modernity that alienate human beings from life, from our surroundings, from each other, and from ourselves. These lines of Kafka's thought can all be interpreted as creative criticisms of pure technique, as Ellul knew the term — that is, technique minus considerations of the more obvious technological embodiments (computers, television, the atom bomb, electronic surveillance) that only developed after Kafka had passed from this earth.

In "Kafka the Joker", I have resurrected the Czech writer and turned him into something worse than Kaczynski, thereby staging a confrontation between literature, social criticism, and terrorism.

Whereas this first piece tells a long short story by means of a modified police report (with the narrator being a psychiatrist who interviews Kafka in prison), the second piece tells an even longer short story in the form of a letter. The private side of these outsiders (some of whom are "insiders") must also be told, and this second piece is the outcome of my having read far too many private correspondences between very troubled, somewhat deranged, intermittently ingenious people. The best way I can explain it — and I know it still sounds vague — is so say that I collated and combined certain exclusionary and delusory precepts, installed them into my "writing mode", and then played them out, followed the strange logic wherever it took me. As Brian Masters, author of a study on the (very interesting, Marxist) serial killer Dennis Nilsen, has succinctly put it: "This has been in many ways a disturbing book to write, and some will no doubt find it an unpleasant one to read." So . . . enjoy! In "Letter to a Friend" I have tried to go all out and produce an exhaustive and diverse screed that should seem authentically convoluted and hopefully engrossing in all the grossest ways. It is also so goddamn over the top that I certainly hope you will shake your head and laugh at its painstaking audacity.

For the sake of simplicity, the root comparisons might be drawn as follows: Between a Kafka and a Kaczynski, we note that both had family problems and both were crucially betrayed by those closest to them. Kafka's conflict with his father is well-known. Further, his supposed "best friend", Max Brod, made a name for himself by disobeying Kafka's dying wishes, to have his stories and other documents destroyed before they could — somehow — hurt someone. Instead, Brod published them for all the world to read, thereby creating some nice literary lore at the expense of his dead friend. Kafka's surviving family also gave over his private letters and diaries so they could be published as well. Kaczynski grew to hate both his parents, eventually telling them that he wished they were dead. He was only captured and brought to justice because his brother noticed similarities between, on the one hand, Ted's abusive letters-cum-diatribes that he shared with family, and, on the other hand, the "Unabomber Manifesto" as published by the New York Times. By their respective writings, it is clear that while Kafka comes across as a maladjusted victim, Kaczynski seems like a maladjusted brat, to say the very least. One wonders, however, if Kafka himself would have become vengeful had he lived to see how his friend and family would betray his confidence and privacy. Though these two figures only play supporting roles in the second story below, both pieces explore the types of difficult, personal themes outlined here, of which their famous biographies serve as touchstones.

Of course, Franz Kafka was not and could not have ever become a serial killer; but the absurdity of the fictitious allegation is meant to make the reader consider how various thought patterns, hallmarks, and critical outlooks nonetheless align. It is also meant to make us think about our own attraction to these sorts of senseless, sensational and sordid amalgamations, these inharmonious mashups, which seem to be getting more prevalent as our general culture gets stranger and more apathetic. Greater and greater shocks are needed to jolt us alert. As the saying goes, It goes without saying that we cannot go on this way indefinitely.

But there is reason to object to Ted Kaczynski being classified as a serial killer as well. Beyond the most superficial aspects, Kaczynski bears no similarities to Ted Bundy or Jeffery Dahmer. Indeed, as the letter-writer of the second story tells us, the technological society itself can be seen as a metaphorical serial killer, and it was Kaczynski who wanted to fight that oppressive entity, wrongheaded and horrible as his methods were.

Thus, infused throughout both pieces is a reoccurring sense of mistaken identity and annoyance that the public has gotten, or been given, the wrong impression. But whatever we might make of all this, it doesn't help matters that our guides are oft unreliable. I can't advise you strongly enough to double-check what they're telling you, run the quoted passages through search engines, and go through these thought processes for yourself. Some of what these characters say is deliberately nasty — so challenge them on it! If you disagree, I want you to fight! Let these troubled texts serve as a logistical arena in which you can exercise your ability to sort through different, overlapping realities. Both narrators seem to have spent their lives as bystanders, fending off dismaying fates that will eventually envelope them, consume them, and bring them down for good — with irresistibly rare truth offered as the consolation prize. To investigate the subject matter from all angles, I have assembled an array of linked personalities. With some of them, it is as if Nick Carraway went on to become a bigger troublemaker than Jay Gatsby. It is as if Marlow went back to Africa and reestablished Kurtz's station.

In all of this there always seems to be a personal betrayal of people — siblings or friends — who were once brought close to each another and who once had mutual respect. At times it seems as if change on the part of one party looks like betrayal, at least from a former confidant's point of view. Let us hope, all of us, that such changes in our own lives are made for good reasons and that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

Everywhere now there is a foreboding, smothering sense of unreality. Almost as an afterthought we recall that violence can dissipate unreality. A shot jolts us alert from our media-fueled daze and then — _Things just got real._ But we cannot allow this. We cannot succumb to the temptation of violence, for we have witnessed countless pathetic examples of how violence only makes the situation worse, of how everyone from cranks, jilted lovers, lone wolves, presidents, and armies have in fact empowered The Very System They Opposed by trying to attack it with violence. (Cue here the overused but scarcely understood Nietzsche quote, and the lines from Philip K. Dick about rebels being part of the empire.) Searching for _a definitive act_ that will prove both their selfhood and their authentic membership in a human race that still has some agency left in it, some of us settle for something bad, something horrible. When a natural sociable environment is denied, the natural energy will eventually, horribly, regrettably find its outlet in unnatural crime or violence.

Within this difficult framework . . . from the raw indignation of seeing my favorite philosopher's name sullied by the criminally insane . . . to the development of twin texts that form a "nerve net", intricate and absorbing, perhaps too wrapped up in itself for its own good . . . certain prevailing messages arise. After everything, the following points are strongly implied:

Violence really, really doesn't work. (As a brutish man I am loath to admit this, but right now it is true.) And we shouldn't be so interested in violence, whether voraciously or vicariously.

Appreciate your family, friends, and lovers while you have them, because you never know when — for whatever reason — any given relationship might not be there anymore.

Take stock of your humanity, appreciate it as distinct from our largely manufactured surroundings, and try to do as much with it as you possibly can.

Thanks again for reading.

•

### •

###  Kafka the Joker

This account of Franz Kafka, the famous writer-turned-terrorist, is taken from a private composition book of the late Dr. Mayu Sokmon, secret police psychologist.

* * *

The chief's message came late Sunday night, but I didn't see it till five the next morning.

With the sun coming up over the veranda, I sat at my tiny circular table with its three curved legs and sipped the last sweet, cold drops of my umpteenth cappuccino. Not for the first or last time did I notice that my wire-rim chair stood uncomfortably low to the ground, and still — no matter what I did — my knees cramped achingly against the underside of the tabletop. This would leave bruises yet again. My old yoga pants offered scant buffer, and indeed they had ripped a bit after catching on a just-sharp-enough nub of the black metal frame. A leisurely sigh escaped my lips. Surveying the artful little arrangement of chocolate crumbs and biscotti wrappers next to my computer, I noted the perils of living in The City when one suffers from an addiction to high-rise apartments, minimalist furniture, and thrice-daily trips to upscale coffee shops. A way of life so refined that it borders on the decadent.

My eyes hurt and felt as though they might fall out. All night long I had been staring at the glowing laptop screen, flummoxed by an acquaintance of mine who was now living abroad. This person — an old schoolmate, slightly younger than myself — had written a very long reply to a very short email of my own, which I had sent out Saturday morning. For over a decade we were quite close — almost sisters — but we had stopped contacting each other several years ago, for no apparent reason. In an offhand manner, I thought it was high time we attempted to renew our correspondence, as weird as that might be at first. I even invited the friend to visit me, and cited my nice new sofa. Sunday afternoon I received her response. When I saw that the missive was quite lengthy, I decided to print it out; when I saw how many pages long it would be, however, I knew printing was not a sensible option: I would have to read it online and respond in kind. The contents of these emails have no place in the present report; I only reference them in order to explain my mental state that day. I was sleep-derived, and suffice to say that both of my emails were polite, succinct, and honest, while the message in the middle — my former friend's letter to me — was absurdly long-winded, bizarrely accusatory, and, above all, exhausting to try and understand due to logistical inconsistencies. Furthermore, it bewildered and actually frightened me to see how much this person had changed. How did it happen? My training and experience in the department have taught me that things like this don't happen all at once; they build up gradually, waxing and waning repeatedly, like the stock market, over very long periods of time. It felt weird to deduce that, the whole time I hadn't checked in with her, a great rage and bitterness inside my old friend had been rising to a boil. She was evidently looking for an excuse to explode, which my innocent email provided. I thought back to the old days, the years during which our friendship was in full flower, but try as I might I couldn't recall any indications of growing resentment or contrarianism in my "little sister". Why didn't she write to me before now, before it was — apparently — too late? Didn't she still put some stock in the fact that discussions with me had helped her sort out personal and confusing matters in the past? Didn't she know that I would have done anything to help her, however difficult, even now? And wouldn't she have realized that once rejected — once dismissed at the very moment I sought reconciliation — my instinct would be to blame myself for the miserable, inconsolable state into which she had fallen? I was once proud to call her my best friend, but sadly I had to accept that I didn't know her anymore, and slowly I realized that I didn't need to know her either. Not that she was giving me much choice in the matter: she said she didn't even want me to reply. Still, I wasn't going to flagellate myself too much over all the angry things she wrote me; it was all so poorly written, anyway — overwritten, really — that I could scarcely make out what her actual criticisms and complaints were with any specificity. Still, I eventually managed to process the material well enough and issue a fairly quick response to my former friend, all while maintaining perfect composure. A small victory.

It was right after clicking SEND that I received my second big surprise of the past twelve-hour period, and this shock was due to an event far more important than a nasty letter from an old friend. There in my inbox, waiting for me all this time, was a message whose subject read "No kidding, Kafka Kaptured...". In times of crisis, my boss always had a flair for the irreverent. The first line continued: "...err 'surrendered'? Wanna interview him this mornin? Prob not but i thought i'd ask... ;o) ".

There and then, raising my hands to cover my mouth, I knew that all of my hard work and sacrifices had paid off. A great opportunity was being bestowed upon me. I would humbly accept the offer, follow through with the analysis — performing to the best of my abilities, of course — and then I would compose a case study for the ages. Written for a lay audience, it would be the sort of thing people would remember after I was gone. It would be used in classrooms. I had forsaken my dreams of creative writing long ago; so how ironic that, after pursuing forensic psychology and criminology instead, the perfect makings for writing the ultimate literary murder file would land right in my lycra-covered lap.

An inevitable guilt arises whenever someone takes advantage of the life they have been given and turns it, or more often some small portion of it, into art. The products of all such fictionalizations are — to state the obvious — unoriginal, a damning critique that should not be taken for granted. The more the artist tries to conceal his or her lack of imagination, the sadder the realization — which can only be repressed for so long — that the artist in question is fundamentally deficient and deceitful. Some say we should expect all stories to have some truth in them — the more truth the better, perhaps — but this then begs us to question why any given author would not simply tell us the facts straight away, as nonfiction, rather than ornamenting, exaggerating and skewing things so as to provoke undue emotional responses. The answer is simple: Because society irrationally and inevitably values myth over history, creative people frequently divulge their most precious and secretive experiences as if they were fiction, thereby aiming for higher accolades without having to work for them. Big budget dramas, not documentaries, garner the most prestigious awards. Novels, not textbooks, earn their authors a place in posterity. And yet, as all screenwriters and novelists know, every fantasy is tinged with — if not quite predicated by — the life of its writer. Every artful narration thus runs the risk of becoming an overcomplicated allegory of someone's biography. The storyteller should resist this urge to simply translate life into veiled fiction; the result of such a practice, no matter how stylistic or accurate, would always be inferior to plain reporting of the same information. Call it pedantry, but this is what my personal experience has taught me, especially in the last few years.

It follows that the greatest art is the art of pure imagination. As a young girl learning English as a second language, that is why I loved the stories of Franz Kafka. His abstract fairy tales cut to the heart with curious situations and funny parables that provided both escapism and introspection. His narratives had an authentic humanistic spirit within a wholly fantastical framework. This was a great inspiration for me, and all through my schooling, training, and early employment in law enforcement — dealing with brutal realities during the day while continuing to cultivate my own creative writing at night — I had thought of Franz Kafka as a kindred soul. Despite his reputation as a lonely and alienated figure, to faithful readers his words suggested a strong sense of fellowship and generosity.

But as they say, We should never meet our heroes.

When Kafka reemerged a little over a decade ago, the sense of disbelief was like an avalanche. The strange revelations compounded down on one another and seemed unending. Not only was he alive — and in far better shape at his age than seemed possible — but he had become an international terrorist. He was the opposite of everything his writing stood for: he was violent, he was flamboyant and loud and extroverted, and in place of any ominous literary genius there was a murderous cunning. In a former era, he had conscientiously evaded the spotlight, letting few of his stories see print in his lifetime, doing everything he could to efface his name from the historical record; and this shyness seemed to come from a sense of humility, modesty, and public concern, as if he believed that spreading his name and words might somehow contaminate any and all who read them. But now he repeatedly courted the camera and attained maximum fame in that most awful, most dismaying of all ways: by killing large numbers of people for no conceivable reason. He bolstered his notoriety again and again with every forthcoming dramatic terrorist action, devaluing human life to extents that were unbelievable, and disgracing his name in the process.

To this day, fringe radio hosts still insist that the real Kafka died — and stayed dead — in 1924. They say the more recent figure was an imposter, an actor hired by some organization somewhere to perform a menacing role in society — a phony who was then set up as a fall-guy by the federal government. Or else they conjecture that Franz Kafka never existed at all beyond pixels on a screen and words in books and articles, and that all eye-witness accounts, including my own, were fabrications. Ludicrous, I know, but one can understand how people might be driven toward such outlandish interpretations when faced with an excessive, unprecedented state of affairs. As a professor once suggested to me, the very idea of such events is literally too big to fit inside the human mind.

And on the other hand, operating under the assumption that Kafka had somehow been reincarnated, there was the phenomenon of online comic strips depicting Kafka as a zombie. The art style was childlike and made an effort to render the mass murderer as a cute and sympathetic figure, misunderstood and sad because he had come back to life and still no one could relate to him (especially not "born again" Christians, who became his routine nemeses). I am purposely leaving out the names of the despicable cartoonists behind this series; they received enough fame at the time, and then deserved every bit of the backlash they received from the respectable press and from victims' families — whom this childish "work" insulted, grossly and callously, simply by its very existence. What Franz Kafka did is certainly nothing to joke about, distort, draw silly pictures of, or render ridiculous by means of irresponsible conspiracy theories. We who have an actual stake in society agree: real-life tragedy is not funny and should never be rendered fictional. That sets a very dangerous precedent. We should never forget just who Kafka was and what he did; otherwise, he gets away with it.

First he attacked alone and from a distance, staging large-scale explosions in several major Western cities and appearing on CCTV footage to gloat after the fact. But soon his tactics became more intimate and interactive. To news agencies Kafka would send wordgames, puzzles that dared law enforcement to figure out his next move and prevent it, though they never could. He would goad them with statements such as "There's laughter hiding in every slaughter," which sometimes seemed to mean something but actually signaled nothing but madness. Then he got in the habit of crashing live events — news conferences, professional athletic competitions, political debates — accompanied by two identical jesters, his "assistants", and a seemingly hypnotized woman in Kabuki makeup, known only as "F." Kafka would commandeer the television broadcast his way, with his henchmen providing the muscle, and with F. dispersing any number of gaseous biological weapons. Somehow immune to these vapors themselves, Kafka and company would perform dark comedy routines for the viewers at home, by the end of which everyone on the scene would be left with the same permanent smile, happy but braindead.

A wry sense of humor was always present in Kafka's writing if one knew where to look, but upon his reemergence this comedic element had expanded and twisted, pervading and corrupting his entire disposition. This was the most bizarre aspect of the case, in my opinion: not that he had come back to life, not that he was a murderer, but that he had become, quite literally, a clown for all to see. And though the popular media were quite taken with this new image of his, glorifying him as an antihero as much as they possibly could shy of supporting terrorism, I saw these developments as a particularly insulting way of reinventing himself — insulting to his readers. Where once had been a unique and saintly imagination now stood an all-too-real cliché, a killer clown, a bad joke that hurt people.

If someone told me what lay ahead of me when I was eighteen years old, I would have considered any arduous course of study, any amount of toil and trouble, "worth it" if I'd eventually get to interview Franz Kafka. This foreknowledge would have driven me on and helped me through my cadet days as well. At age 38, however, soon after the police chief told me that Kafka had finally been taken into custody, and that I was being asked to interrogate him in order to piece together his motives, my heart unexpectedly sank and my stomach turned sour. After an initial rush of elation, I felt worse and worse, more scared and nervous, as the 9 a.m. interview drew near. Given my professional skills and my pleasure-reading interests, I was uniquely qualified; accepting the task should have been like consummating a wish-fulfillment dream of the highest order. Moreover, I felt a stunning sensation of synchronicity, since over the winter holidays I had reread (okay, sometimes only skimmed) most of Kafka's oeuvre, scanned several online essays of Kafka criticism (most of them classified as political science), and watched the two most decent Kafka videos (first the old adaptation of The Trial, quaintly and appropriately filmed in black and white, starring Orson Welles; and then the first big, much-lauded docudrama based on his terrorist activities, Kafka Strikes Back!). I was ready for this assignment before it was given to me; I had groomed myself for it almost since birth, crammed for it even more at the last minute, and now the chief handed it to me like the belated Christmas present I should have known was in the offing all along.

But suddenly it dawned on me that Kafka had effectively turned himself into the cruel embodiment of my own failed literary ambitions. What he had done since his return seemed to say — to scream — that anyone ever inspired by him was a royal fool. Confronting him would be like confronting the fundamental wrongness of my taste in literature. We don't get to choose our parents, but we do choose our major artistic influences, and mine turned out to be the nastiest author ever. Could I face something so fearsome, something that might cause me to learn horrible things about myself? It was only later, on that cold gray morning, as I was riding the omnibus from headquarters to our new satellite prison, scarce minutes before the interview, that my precious, selfish, creative urges found their voice again and I began to scheme. How could I take advantage of this?

Two portly guards met me at the door. They mercifully refrained from any comment as I quickly and embarrassingly dropped my superfluous umbrella into the lobby receptacle — for it had rained heavily in the night, and the air still smelled of it, but it was not going to rain anymore, and, bizarrely, as the sun rose the temperature had dropped below freezing anyway. As the guards led me to the elevator and then through the corridors of the labyrinthine cellblocks — I had never been to this particular jail before — my thoughts swirled with uncertainty and possibility in equal measure. Trying to swim in a creative freestyle on these rough ocean waves would be risky, but I was buoyed by long-suppressed dreams of fame. To use this situation to jumpstart my writing career seemed shameful, but the subversive opportunity was too inviting. Predictably, perhaps pathetically, this plucky pen-puller couldn't resist. I planned to convert into Great Art the rare reality which I was imminently going to witness.

Had I to do it all over again, however, I would have turned the chief down — would have shot him a reply of "no thanks, sick today" and gone back to bed. Either that, or I would have taken the assignment but would have somehow refrained from attempting to document it in the deceptive, pretentious, worthless way I did, in some sort of overwrought, quasi-fictional fashion.

I am nearly 42 now. I've spent the past three years trying to turn my penitentiary dialogue with Franz Kafka into something between an epic poem and a Greek tragedy. Though I thought this project was my ticket to immortality, it nearly cost me everything. I quit my job; I lost my sort-of boyfriend; I dropped out of contact with everyone I knew, resolving not to show my face again until I completed the book, which proved impossible. There were two major problems, equally embarrassing and equally banal. In terms of theme and content, I could never quite wrap my head around what my long conversation with Kafka meant, or what it said about society or humanity or whatever overblown concept it could — it should — have addressed in a radical, penetrating, etc. etc. manner. And in terms of form, I simply could not write good enough epic verse to fit within the confines of an e-reader screen, which is typically only three and a half inches wide. It took me far too long to recognize that on a portable device there is no satisfactory way of reprising the classic hexameter employed by Homer and Virgil, in modern English, without frequent broken lines, which I deemed unsightly. One should perceive each full verse as a single, unbroken unit, but satisfying this demand was difficult. The ridiculousness of my working solution — very tiny font size and preference for words with fewer letters — eventually dawned on me, as did my naïve notion that perhaps my hypothetical readers would readily print the whole opus out, on 8.5 x 11-inch paper, to get the full intended effect that way. If nothing else, my total failure to reinvoke ancient literary sensibilities for contemporary subject matter should serve as a stark, admonitory example for any other young writers foolish enough to start down this path or any path similar. (Moreover, for 200-plus pages, now scrapped, I had been forcing this shoehorned poetry to rhyme. It was god-awful!)

Thus I am now reduced, finally, to what I should have done from the beginning, to what my then-colleagues and few remaining friends recommended I do long ago: As best as possible, in straight prose, I will factually recount my meeting with Franz Kafka, which took place on the day before he hanged himself in his prison cell rather than stand trial for his atrocious crimes.

His gaudy zoot suits, flowery clown clothes, and rubber one-pieces have become the stuff of pop culture legend — garish iconography that reappears each year as tacky Halloween costumes — but when I met Franz Kafka on that early February morning he resembled the very same writer who appeared in a dozen or so black and white photographs from the early twentieth century. Aside from the dark purple tinge of his matching trousers, jacket, and tie, he looked just like the author I had fantasized about conferring with when I was a precocious young girl. It was uncanny and disarming. His hair was still black and thick, and even before testing it we somehow knew that it hadn't been dyed or transplanted. There were some modest wrinkles around his eyes, perceptible only when one looked closely, but most of his skin appeared almost unnaturally smooth and youthful, particularly his hands, which were long and immaculate. (And here I must resist the literary temptation to contrast these spotless hands with the blood he had on them.)

Could this really be the same man? Was this specimen, this perp, well over a hundred years old? One moment alone with him and I felt the weight of time and history. Where had he been and what had he been doing? Whatever scientific breakthroughs allowed for this monstrous prolongation of life, cloning was not one of them. This was the same man whose furtive prose had comforted and perplexed the many generations of readers who lived and died in his shadow. This was the man, born in 1883, who railed passive-aggressively against his father, failed with two fiancées, and supposedly died of tuberculosis at age 40, right after telling his best friend to burn all his writing. Yet this was also the man who returned an impossibly long time later — an entire epoch and a half of human civilization later — as something between a serial killer, a mass murderer, and a particularly sick performance artist.

He was already sitting bolt upright, almost at attention, waiting for me as I entered his cell, Room 255. The police had strip-searched him the night before but saw no reason not to give him back the clothes he was wearing when he turned himself in: he was clean; there were no hidden chemicals or tricks, and he promised a full confessional as long as he could remain separate from the main population and retain some dignity.

The one thing taken away from him upon his arrest was the hideous skinned face, mutilated and bleached pure white, that he had recently taken to wearing as a mask. In a long line of image-reinventions during the course of his criminal career, this final fashion statement of his was the most disturbing. He had evidently plucked the eyebrows off his last victim's face, scrubbed away all the blood, and treated the stretched slab of skin in a preserving solution. He surrendered this item readily but would not say whose face it was or whether the victim was still alive. Preliminary DNA tests on the gruesome mask told us nothing. To me it looked inhuman and synthetic.

His room was standard, small and square-shaped, but somehow the overhanging light (also standard issue) had a comforting, familiar glow to it. There was a tiny, barred window on the far wall behind him, and from it one could just make out the flakes of snow falling against the gray, overcast sky. The clouds had yet to brighten, and it seemed that the sun might hide under the covers all day long.

As I entered the room Kafka looked up at me matter-of-factly, almost kindly; any trace of a smile, honest or sarcastic, would have seemed acutely creepy, but there was none. Instead, he examined me the way a domestic animal would, like the way a gentle, well-trained dog might look at a friend of its master. On sight, only the handcuffs gave it away that I was dealing with a violent criminal.

Once the door had clicked shut behind me, he stood up slowly, took off his purple jacket to reveal a matching purple shirt and waistcoat, and then we exchanged quiet hellos, our words overlapping almost exactly. While introducing myself I couldn't help but notice how tall he was — about tall as I was, and I was wearing heels — and I recalled that Kafka was actually long and lanky, though there was a tendency to assume he was short and withdrawn, shriveling away to nothingness like one of his characters might. He was so gangly and obviously uncomfortable in his own body — and yet somehow it was almost endearing. Here I caught myself and took stock of the situation: I had to remember that I was not dealing with my own childish conception of a paperback idol but rather with the wiry, ungainly, brutal man of whom I had often seen video footage during the last several years, every time he committed a heinous act on television, always with a frozen, sneering grin on his face.

Now with a blank expression, however, the man glanced around in my direction before settling his gaze on the table between us as we sat down.

"No books for me to sign?" he asked, and his voice was sardonic and bemused. But it was also kind, with a hint of what I can only describe as mercy — mercy that he had for me in my position.

"N-no," I said, stuttering a bit and immediately shaming myself for this, resolving then and there to not let the moment overwhelm me. "No, of course not." I took my black pleather gloves off and set them in front of me on the table.

I should mention that it was at this moment I began to notice a strange, creeping chemical stink emanating from him. It was something between burning electrical wires and rotten meat, and it was sickening. I remember that the smell seemed to steadily increase throughout the first few minutes of our conversation, but after a while I either got used to it or else, for whatever reason, it went away, whatever it was.

"Did they not let you bring any books, then?" He pressed on, smiling a bit and leaning forward as if to force affability upon me. "Not even a pen and notebook? Don't tell me they consider me so dangerous with such things and clever enough to somehow appropriate them from you and—"

"This is all being recorded, Mr. Kafka." I intoned the words mechanically, as if reading him his rights, and slunk my hands into the pockets of my navy trenchcoat.

"Of course it is," he mused, sitting upright again. "Everything is always being recorded now. That's old news. And everyone has access to everything, for all the good it does you."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked, perhaps a little too quickly. I hadn't expected him to propound judgments about the modern world so soon; I thought a circuitous line of questioning would be needed to draw such opinions out.

"You know that all my old letters and diaries have been published." He spoke with his hands, making small but sweeping gestures which caused the little chain between his handcuffs to clink a bit. "My lovers published the letters I sent them, and my family turned over everything they had, after I told them all not to do so. You wouldn't think anyone would need to say such a thing — would need to make it clear to those close to him that he would not want such things published for all the world to see — but I actually told them not to, and yet they went ahead and published them anyway. Untrustworthy. One of my friends published my stories, of course, as everyone has heard, and through that betrayal he became known as my closest friend. He did not see that I was testing him, that he could only have remained my closest friend if he refrained from publishing, as I instructed. Only then would he have earned my closest confidence. But I should have known. The name Max Brod tells you everything you need to know about the guy. He's really Mr. Bad Ox, i.e. a beast of the field that proves unreliable. I couldn't bear to publish or scrap my writing; I set him to the task and he chose the wrong option."

"And this wrongdoing is what your crimes have avenged." I said this slowly and with deliberation, as if to state a definitive explanation — too soon.

"No," he said dismissively, then turned to the side and put a finger to his chin, frozen and looking disinterestedly into the left corner.

Upwards of a minute passed. Wishing I had indeed brought along a notebook, if only to pretend to examine it as I searched for a new line of questioning, I began to fear that I had hopelessly lost the thread already, and that I had squandered whatever confidence he might have given me.

Just as my mouth was opening to utter that last-ditch effort ("I used to read your books when I was a little girl . . ."), Kafka thankfully broke the silence himself.

"I faked my death to be left alone," he said, still turned sideways.

"Why? To write?" I was too eager. And much as I tried to hide it, overmatched puzzlement no doubt showed on my face.

"No," he said, dismissive as before, but then he turned toward me. "I went out to see the world, for quite a while."

"How did you live so long? Where did you go?" Suddenly a million obvious, urgent questions flooded my mind; it was incomprehensible how they had failed to materialize thus far.

"Everywhere, I—I was given an opportunity." His speech faltered a bit and I couldn't tell if this was one statement or two.

"You mean you were given a chance to go everywhere, or you went anywhere you had . . . job offers?" Here I remember taking my hands out of my pockets and itching them a bit.

"I only had one job, all those years," he said, then suddenly seemed to relax and deflate in his chair, "a very personal one, and I am not telling you what it was."

"How did you live so long?"

"Huh," he scoffed. "I held my breath."

Surely this was some allusion, one of his jokes or riddles.

"Is that why you went on to suffocate or gas so many people? Or why you drowned several of them and—"

"No," he said again, in that same soft tone he had uttered the word twice before, instantly disregarding and voiding the entire line of thought behind my question. "I just mean that during those years I held my breath, even more so than I did the first forty years — though in a different way, you might say. I decided to spend time living in hibernation, rather than not-living in a dull frantic routine. Seeing the world without being in it was an improvement over not seeing the world but barely being in it. I would compare this to the difference between thinking that you're sliding down a gravelly hill, sand and pebbles slipping between the treads of your boots, and realizing that you aren't moving at all, that you're actually on the edge of a sloping, bottomless sinkhole opening up before you, and there's no stopping it. Not a hill but a sinkhole. Now imagine if you could somehow marry the fun of that imaginary sliding with the import of the real, dangerous situation, perceiving both sides of it and enjoying the ride toward oblivion. That's where I've lived for a decade. And-and the whole while—" he suddenly looked at me with fear in his eyes "—I don't know about you, but whenever I saw someone on one of those portable telephones, putting it up to their ear or looking down at it intently, mesmerized . . . As far as I'm concerned they may as well be holding a severed head."

I still don't know what he meant by all this. I began to hope that the interrogation wouldn't prove useless due to Kafka's well-known and incorrigible obsession with obscurity.

There followed a lurid discussion of his specific crimes against humanity. He admitted to all of them, and explained the mechanics behind each one in more than enough detail to confirm beyond question that he was indeed the killer. For reasons of international security, and for reasons of good taste, this portion of the conversation cannot be reprinted here aside from some details pertaining to one incident, which is famous to everyone anyway: the library massacre he committed in Florence, Italy.

Because the crime was not televised, and because the local authorities would not release the video Kafka sent them, conspiracy theories soon sprouted up around the atrocity. Even now, years after the fact, many people do not believe that the crime was "a genuine Kafka". Some say it was a copycat. Some say the police and media have colluded to hide some evidence on the one hand and to manufacture some evidence on the other. Most say that the motivation was stridently political — which Kafka the writer never was — because so many of the victims were well-connected European dignitaries. The facts remain: three dozen very rich persons of middle-age and above, along with three dozen young fashion models of both sexes, were murdered in an old abandoned cathedral that had been turned into a university library. All of them had been wearing black, white, or red robes and matching dominos that covered their eyes. They had congregated around an enormous fireplace on which incense and other offerings had been burnt. In short, it was as if they had all seen Eyes Wide Shut a few hundred times too many. The next morning, they were all found with their throats neatly slit, and on the adjacent wall, elegantly done in blood and other fluids, someone had painted "The Divine Come-Die!" — a dark pun on the work of Dante Alighieri, a native Florentine. The ironic statement seemed to characterize the deceased victims, most of them members of the worldly elite, as "divine" gods on earth who were now dead. It certainly seemed like a Kafka crime, and that day in his prison cell he indeed confessed to it, adding that the message dubiously alluded not only to the sex-magick ritual he had interrupted ("While they'd come there that night to come, they actually came to die") but also to a pedantic understanding he had of literary terms and their wider significance: "In ancient Rome and Greece," he explained, "a comedy was simply a story in which no one died at the end. People then were so accustomed to tragedy that comedies didn't even have to be funny; they just had to stave off death. And the word die means 'day' in Latin. So, The Divine Come-Die: Every day you don't die is its own little comedy. It's only life as a whole that's tragic, that ends in death. But every day before your last one is like a comedy. Life is a trial, a process. And The Trial, as you call it, is a tragedy; K. dies at the end. The Castle is a comedy, however, because I never bothered writing the last chapter, in which K. would have died. But that's as it should be. In the first novel, K. was very guilty; in the second, he wasn't."

All the other details of all the other cases we discussed must remain secret. Again, to make it clear for all the skeptics, Kafka did admit to every crime of which he was accused. The only thing he wouldn't address during this confessional was the pale mask of human flesh that he had been wearing at the time of his arrest.

"Why the change from one extreme to the other?" I asked him, after he confirmed the entire litany of his alleged wrongdoings. "You were a quiet writer, then some sort of world traveler, so low-profile that you might as well have been a ghost, and you evidently found the secret of eternal youth. Why come back as the biggest, most famous terrorist of the last ten years? Why this" — I caught myself before saying metamorphosis — "total, violent about-face?"

"I've viewed all of this as a natural, continuous transition, Mayu."

His use of my first name startled me, and again, all at once, I reminded myself of the danger of getting too close. It was almost inconceivable to be on a first-name basis with this man, not twenty seconds after having discussed his many murders. Still, I couldn't help but feel flattered; and the anger forthcoming in my voice stemmed from self-reproach of that fact. I reminded myself of that old maxim: Never forget what he [the charismatic criminal] really is.

After pausing to look at him in open-mouthed disbelief (not caring that doing so probably exposed my chipped upper right canine tooth, which I was in the habit of hiding), I cried, "How on earth has what you've done been natural? To transition from a peaceful writer — and a vegetarian, even! — to a global criminal . . . This is not normal!"

"Obviously I changed." He spoke quickly and quietly now, but disinterestedly, as if he were reading someone else's words from a book he was perusing. "If one maintains circumspection and honesty about one's own development, at a certain point toward the end of each stage there will come a time when the need to evolve will manifest. I did not need to complete Der Process, for example, to be done with it; I did not need to finish my writing to finish my writing career; and I did not need to marry certain women to know how those marriages would have ended. So I went away. You see, certain healthy transitions may in fact only become possible if one initiates them before the current operations complete their cycles, lest they grind to a stop with the participant still caught up in the gears. To give another example, fast-fowarding a century, I did not find it necessary, or wise, to finish my terrorism with a bang, so to speak. Eventually, repetition or continuance of the same stage of life becomes unnecessary. Thus, at this point, yesterday, for survival, I turned myself in—to you."

Confused, I again had difficulty parsing the possible ambiguity of a closing statement.

"You mean . . . Yes, you turned yourself into the police — I mean, you surrendered."

"Yes," he said, with a trace of satisfaction.

"Because you want to come-die now," I ventured, "and blame us for it. "But that won't happen. Not yet anyway. Not without justice and due process. You're on 24-hour surveil—"

"No," he said in his characteristic way. "No, that is not why. I do not want to die; that's too irrational even for me. I stopped doing what I was doing and voluntarily entered jail for two reasons: firstly, because I saw that my killings were not improving the world, and, secondly, because I wanted to talk with you."

As the last part of his statement set my mind on fire, I willfully ignored it and blurted out, "What on earth kind of logic says that killing people might have improved the world?"

"Mayu, I hardly need reference all sorts of initiatives — from population control to family planning, from both righteous and wrongheaded wars to the very workings of Mother Nature herself — that support the elimination or prevention of life as an entirely valid—"

I cut him off, throwing my hands up in the air: "To finally hear you reveal yourself as a run-of-the-mill sociopath! How disappointing! Next will you tell us about your pivotal role in culling the 'least fit' humans, or how each murder somehow prevents the abortion of an unborn child?"

"No, absolutely not, Mayu," he said, and his tone was calm throughout all this. "You expressed disbelief that there might be logistics, anywhere on the planet, that ran contrary to the furtherance of some person's, animal's, or plant's unimpeded lifespan. And I simply pointed out that by denouncing such logic you would find yourself at cross-purposes not only with your society, not only with your employers, but with the natural order itself. Is Mother Nature an evil sociopath? Some people think Father God is. Both of them follow a logic of creation through destruction."

"And what exactly is your logic, Kafka?" I asked, making sure to emphasize the annoyance in my voice. "Stop talking like a textbook, and please don't call me Mayu."

"Oh haven't all the experts — those from sociology and criminology, to say nothing of the old-time literary critics — told you?" Wide-eyed, he feigned a sarcasm that didn't suit him very well. "I have no real logic — never have — and this is a wonderful thing, an endless irrational puzzle, for it allows us a sophisticated escape in which to contemplate all this and wonder what I am saying and why I've done what I do. The point is to wonder and imagine, because we could extrapolate so much from what I have provided, because my works can say so much about the Modern period onwards, through its afterbirth and excrement. The only upshot, ever, came when I returned and began killing people. That was uncomfortable for my professional fans. — But now that business is done and we all can simply enjoy surveying my deeds guiltlessly, especially the crimes."

I have him an incredulous look. "And do you know the answer to this whole 'irrational puzzle', as you called it?"

"Don't take this personally, but it's always amazed me," he said with a sad grin, "how people assume that those who purposely create chaos must know the secrets of life. I do know some secrets, but not the secrets you suspect me of knowing, and probably not anything you'd like to discover. As to your question: Because I am the puzzle, or a large part of it, myself, I lack the requisite perspective. Most likely, I would say no elegant solution exists. But that will not prevent people from trying to solve the riddle, even if they do not quite know what the riddle is exactly. On the other hand, distinct from my own problem is the problem of society, society being its own problem much as I am my own problem. I have no problem with society; it's society that has a problem with me; I would agree to any of its demands today, but I know that tomorrow it will change its own rules again, and then accost me anew for not already having complied with them. In the end, society will no doubt eliminate me to solve the problem of me. Likewise, the problem of society could only remedied by destroying society as it has come to be. Not changing; destroying. This I have the perspective to see very well, precisely because I have been so apart from society — not a part of society — for great lengths of time, like an alien looking down or like a man who went to the stars and then returned to find Earth a shambles. And most people living today, who are a part of it, couldn't even guess at the extent of the problems — theirs or my own."

Sensing how tedious this line of discussion might become, I changed tact, trying to steer the conversation toward matters that were recognizable and real:

"You said you wanted to confess. Does that mean you feel guilty and that your crimes haunt you?"

"Oh Mayu," Kafka smiled. "If you knew anything about me you'd know that I feel guilty for just about everything. But in terms of being haunted by my victims? No, I'm not haunted; I do the haunting. I haunt other people and have for quite a long time now. It's like people keep doing séances to invoke my spirit, and I get pulled into their ruminations against my will. But quite a lot of things regarding and affecting me have been done against my will."

I could follow some of his logic here. In my continuing effort to shift the focus back onto questions that were short, sensible, and to the point, I asked:

"What did you mean when you said you wanted to talk to me?"

"I meant that the time had come for me to talk to someone new in a different, totally nonthreatening context. You see, once I started committing famous crimes and getting so much publicity, there was no way for me to have a conversation with anyone again — an open conversation about myself — without that person suspecting that I was totally deranged and about to kill them. And on top of that, every potential contact was too awed by my celebrity. You understand?"

"Well enough. But why me?"

"You don't understand nearly well enough," he hissed. "It could have been anyone. I didn't know who would interview me; I only knew that I wanted to talk to someone who would have knowledge of me and who would be compelled to ask me somewhat worthwhile questions. A sort of exit interview. And you know that most criminals eventually feel the need to confess — to somebody. And if that somebody must then ask them questions back — perhaps to unburden both their hearts — that would be even better. So, yes, the man who was so unwilling to explain himself is now eager to be examined."

"And is this as fulfilling as you hoped it would be?" I asked, trying not to sound so sarcastic.

"I didn't have any expectations. I rolled the dice and got you; it certainly could have been worse."

"Thanks," I grumbled, insulted in a way I don't think was altogether inappropriate.

"It could have been much worse," he amended himself.

"I read your stories when I was younger," I said at last, unable to hold it back any longer, knowing how childish it sounded but not caring. If nothing else, maybe this admission would get him to divulge something decent in return. "You made me want to write."

"And how has reading all those old scribblings of mine helped you cross-examine me today, so far?"

"It . . ." I searched for answers on the ceiling, as if I were back in school. "It hasn't helped in any way I can define, but I am sure that it has helped — by establishing a sort of foundation."

"It hasn't helped you at all," he declared, pronouncing the words slowly so as to endow them with the widest, most existential meaning. "It is exactly those books whose contents are most closely associated with the task at hand that prove the most useless. Funny enough, I wrote that in one of my stories — an unpopular one, so you may not have read it. Either way, studying such things won't do you any good in the end; those who think otherwise are fooling themselves."

"For your information, I happened to have read all your writing," I shot back harshly, feeling slighted again, underestimated. "You said you surrendered so you could talk to someone. Would you rather have talked to someone who never read you?"

After pausing a long moment and turning to the side once again, he said, "Brod sprang my writing on the world, sprang my meditations of alienation onto the same world I was hiding from; and he did so at the very moment I thought I would finally have been able to experience that world freely, anonymously, with my past forgotten and my sins forgiven. Instead, my freeform travels were often interrupted by overhearing or chancing upon mentions of my name and what it, apparently, represented — all of which was now widespread and distorted, thanks to my friend. Not a very relaxing way to spend your long vacation. Not a very good position in which to try and come to grips with an already dizzying globe that seems to keep spinning faster every year. People wondered why I never seemed happier than when I was on my deathbed, but I didn't remain happy very long after that."

"And this killing spree of yours was revenge for Max's betrayal," I ventured again, and then, unsure of myself, added, "in some respect, at least?"

"My writing and what happened to it" — he turned to look me directly in the eye — "is now almost completely unimportant. Even here, even with me."

"And does it have no meaning, then? Does it — or has it — played no role in your life these past years?"

"When I was a young man," he said, "which was a long time ago, the production of literature, a fairly but not completely private literature, was my one and only calling. I was, I must admit, quite a bit like the melancholic figure the twentieth century came to know me as: a loner even when in crowds or surrounded by noise, a night owl, introverted, invisibly stunted; yet I was indeed sensitive to the pathos and background despair of all people due to a deep familiarity with my own personal failings. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to call my writing just a sort of coping-strategy. It was that — it was an assuagement of suffering — but it was not only that."

"People said that you wrote because—"

"People have said a lot of stupid things about me," he interrupted. "From the first to the most recent — i.e., you, Mayu — my critics and analysts have pretended to try and solve me. But solving me would eliminate so much of their interest in me, which they enjoy and which has become such a great recreation and even a source of employment for them. So they do not really try to solve my problems. What is more, these ill-defined problems that I help them sense the existence of — which they sense rather blindly — most of these conundrums relate far more closely to my investigators than they do to myself. The notion that Kafka has problems allows their dim perceptions of their own problems to rise to the fore — at least enough for them to investigate and then apply their problems to me in some detail. It is not that I personally do not have problems — I certainly do — but my problems are not, and perhaps cannot be, very accurately sensed, much less addressed, by others. They do not really want to solve my problems anyway, and still less are they brave enough to address their own in any brutally honest fashion. They would rather keep their recreation and live — fairly happily, it must be admitted, even if so much of their happiness is based on lies — live proudly with their boring neuroses, histrionic symptoms, and hysterical handicaps. And there is nothing funny about that."

I had no idea what he was going on about. "Why are you telling me all this?" I wanted to say.

"I always found much of your writing quite humorous, in an understated way," I offered instead, helpfully, after a beat had passed.

"Yes yes yes," he said, very quickly and dismissively, flitting his right hand back and forth in the air. "And others could see the humor in my stories when I read them aloud, yes, and we laughed together — the same way I'm told that the audience of James Joyce could understand his funny language when he read aloud as well. And this is all known and understood and done with—"

"What is the relation" — I suddenly hit upon it — "between the humor of your writing, which as I say is understated amidst the foregrounded nightmare-narratives, and the comedic elements of your criminal persona . . . which are obvious — the jester imagery, all the wide smiles — but always, in any healthy person's mind, ruined by the horrible serious consequences of your actions?"

I felt as though I was in a classroom again, but was having a good day this time around.

"Sorry," he said, chuckling, "I'm afraid you're going to have to repeat that."

"I'm not sure I can," I said, chuckling back. "But Kafka the haunted writer was funny to those who 'got him', whereas Kafka the criminal isn't really funny to anyone — not even to those who misguidedly see him as an antihero — even though he came on the scene dressed as a clown."

He scrutinized me with amusement, and only gradually did the blithe glint fade from his eyes.

"I'm not sure that reality, or human psychology — not even my own abnormal version, or versions," he began slowly, fumbling over his words, then cleared his throat — "I'm not sure all this can function in a clear, or divisible enough way for whatever theories you're contemplating to catch hold."

"But how exactly," I pressed onwards, in spite of what he said, "does this figure into your switch from the private to the global? You wrote your funny, horrible, wonderful stories just for yourself . . . and a few other people—"

"Jokes are always at someone's expense," he said, becoming visibly disconcerted but forcing a smile. "Or at the very least they represent a sort of transcendence or overcoming. — Still, even in the most innocuous jokes, something or someone is being put down, overcome, or trounced. And all jokers necessarily overlook or look down on the subjects of their jests. In my writing, the humor was usually at my own expense; I tried overcoming myself, joining the others in kicking Franz Kafka around. Now, however, the joke is on you." He let this trite statement hang in the air for a moment before adding: "And please try to understand that the scope and magnitude of the joke being played on you far exceeds my voluntary involvement in it. The joke continues to be played whether I participate or not. I didn't start the joke and, indeed, for all my apparent buffoonery, no one ever tried to stop the joke harder than I did. I can accurately claim this because my actions served to bring out the humor, to put a fine point on it all, so that some people at least might begin to realize how a terribly large joke was indeed being played on them. And once in on the joke, a person might eventually develop some successful way of taking it. The only thing worse than a person who can't take a joke is a person who won't even admit that a joke is being played on them. Unfortunately, as you might guess, I can't just come out and say what this hideously great joke is: because even though I hate this joke and all it has come to represent, explaining a joke not only ruins the joke but also in a sense shames the audience in a way they can never recover from: embarrassed to learn that they have blind spots, they actually become less watchful, and in this way it actually guarantees that they will fall for the same joke, or a similar one, next time. Hope against hope, I would want them — and you — to finally simply get the joke, to pick up on it, to put two and two together of your own accord, after I humorously gesture toward the equation, setup, and punch line long enough. And one wouldn't think it the case, but a very big, very old joke is sometimes the hardest one to notice; the bigger it is and the longer it goes on, the more it conceals itself in the very fabric of everyday life — but once someone like me points the joke out enough times, underscoring it as wildly as possible without giving it away, I'm convinced that eventually all but the most stubborn dullards would admit at least something of the joke's existence, and then begin the long, necessary journey toward laughing it off. If you continue, however, like many a vainglorious idiot, to insist that no one could ever pull one over on you — well, then, everything is lost."

I ignored most of this and pursued him further on my own tract, nonplussed at his refusal to hear me out fully or answer in terms I could understand: "But you brought your decidedly unfunny crimes to everyone, to random people. If your stories, your fictions, were an attempt at personal achievement and betterment, then how, as you've already suggested, was your all-too-real terrorism supposed to be good for everyone?"

"First of all" — he gave a quick sigh — "fiction is all a big hoax. A hoax you buy into, play on yourself, and try to sell other people." He sighed again. "But there is something in what you have just said, I admit. The most important thing to remember—"

"As if perhaps you were attempting to edge humanity onwards," I continued, unable to stop myself, "while also in effect — by negative example, since you are so immoral — reminding them that morality exists."

"The most important thing to remember is that I ultimately failed, Mayu. And writing is no more a justification for life than murder." (I opened my mouth to object and demand clarification, but he waved me off and barreled forward.) "The skill of the fiction writer is to make dead or imaginary figures seem alive and real. The skill of your bosses, and their friends in the media and technology fields, is to make a dying civilization seem like it still could be thriving, against all contrary evidence and experience. I failed as a writer because I wanted to inject a peaceful, deathly stasis into texts that wanted to come alive. And I failed as a freedom fighter because I could only stamp out little glimmers of life, not reanimate the societal skeleton. Understandable mistakes, but still . . . flawed logic."

Here, at these tiresomely strange statements, I must pause to tell the reader that, believe it or not, I am well aware of how poorly I must come off in this entire account. I know how naïve I sound, how silly, how at times I could not help but become too much the starstruck teenager, even though I was a 38-year-old professional, a renowned veteran of terrorist interrogation. Moreover, though I initially tried to do so in the first few drafts of this essay, I ultimately cannot cover up or excuse my fundamental immaturity even now, long after the fact, when recounting these events. All of this is evident, and thus my best option is to make it clear that no one can be harder on me than I have already been on myself. In the interest of full disclosure, then — as preposterous as it must sound — I must report that it was not until this moment in the dialogue that I suddenly realized something very basic:

"You're insane," I told him.

Had I been asked that morning — or the previous month, or even when I was a ten-year-old girl reading his stories — whether or not Franz Kafka was "insane" (and I use the quotation marks to denote the fuzziness of the concept), I likely would have readily said, "Of course. He's kinda totally nuts." But only at this instant did I fully grasp the meaning and consequences of the diagnosis. Vague and blunt and inexact and mitigable as the judgment was — in the simplest, most pragmatic sense, it was obviously true.

"Of course," he said blankly. "And haven't you heard? It's all because I must have had a small penis, which my big mean father must have teased me about."

"I . . ."

"This is what some have said about me," he explained. "This is the depth of their thinking, their interests and their humor. I speak of those whom I, apparently, touched with my writing. Another celebrated theory says that I was a victim of pedophilia — a willing victim, no less. These are the ideas they've tossed around; this is how they spoke of the presumed dead — how they spoke of someone they purported to feel kinship to! This is their ability, or inability, to perceive me as having been a real person, not a mental exercise or playtoy whose broken nature amuses or pointlessly interests them."

"And that is why you came back with a vengeance as you did" — I was sure I had it this time — "because if they're going to make sick, rude fantasies about you, you may as well come back as the sickest, rudest, all-too-realest version of Franz—"

"No," he said, simply and dismissively yet again, with only a hint of frustration; and despite all that had come before, I felt as if we were back at square one. "And please stop saying this 'all-too-realest' phrase."

Annoyed, I put my hands back in my pockets, turned my right side to him, and turned my neck as well, my chin resting on my left shoulder, and I pretended to examine the door behind us. As quietly as I could, for no reason, I slipped my heels off and pressed the hosiery-covered soles of my feet against the icy cell floor.

"Whose face did you made the mask out of?" I asked after another half-minute had gone by.

"Can't I have one bit of privacy?" Kafka asked, in a sniveling tone that caught me a bit off guard. "That's why I finally made a mask, transparent though it is, as a last attempt to hide something of myself from your eyes and cameras. You know what I look like — still you couldn't tolerate the mask, felt so threatened by it."

I sighed. "Whose face is it? Tell me before the mystery gets boring."

"Oh it'll get boring all right," he chuckled, "but you'll still find yourself compelled to examine it — that's the curse. And you know whose face it is, Mayu. Or you should. I've already told you."

"Answer me straight," I snapped, while breezing through my mental rolodex, trying to remember if there were any particular politicians or celebrities Kafka had promised to kill but never did. "Don't mislead me or lie or answer with crazy statements. Eventually the truth will come out anyway."

"So long as you complain about my lack of clarity, which I have no control over, we cannot come to an understanding."

"But this specific question must have a very simple answer."

"It certainly does not," he said, smiling for the first time that morning in a way that definitely reminded me of the deranged murderer I had seen so often on television. "These allegedly simple solutions won't get you anywhere, and the very fact that you search for such things goes to show how very far you've strayed from the path."

"A name, Kafka. Tell me. The truth, with none of your confusion."

"The truth is you are not fit for this job. And it is not me but the job, the task at hand, that confuses you, because you are not fit for it. Granted, it is not so high a job, and you are not so low a person. It is likely that most people today would prove incapable of this task, but still—"

"And what enables you to judge all this?" I asked. "I would honestly like to know. What allows you, you who in your own words 'lack the requisite perspective', to speak so knowledgeably on such matters?"

"I can see for myself," he chuckled, "that you aren't good at your job. One doesn't need any training to notice that. Oh you look very smart and dapper — your clothes suit you beautifully, you must exercise regularly, your pretty black hair shines, you smell wonderful, groom yourself well and even take care to hide your chipped tooth — but none of this pomp and pageantry can fool someone like me. Likewise, the guards here appear so handsome — in their own way, at least — with nice thick arms, meaty faces, and impressive epaulettes adorning their scary stormtrooper uniforms. But it is all just nice costuming, really, whether you realize it or not. They actually fed me cake this morning for breakfast, and asked whether I wanted chocolate or strawberry frosting. If I didn't know better I'd think they were trying to fatten me up and rot my teeth — and that would be punishment! I find it all quite amusing and pleasant, and indeed I came to jail voluntarily because I wanted to get some peace. When I was a fugitive, I knew that your vaunted automated weaponry would dispose of me speedily and savagely, if it could ever locate me. But after simply surrendering, as I've done, I'm now able to relax, get easy treatment, and partake of some unintended entertainment from the bumbling staff, so typical of today's 'best and brightest'. Perhaps your excess of training prevents you from recognizing your own ineptness, Mayu, and the ineptness of virtually all your colleagues as well. From what I've seen, this whole operation is lackadaisical, incompetent and ridiculous. People call me a comedian, but it's your agency that's the joke. In your offices, at your desks — you're the clowns. Goofy people. Silly without realizing it. And it'd all be hilarious, except for the terrible power that you wield. The reins of human destiny, somehow placed in the hands of overgrown children, as petulant as they are dopey. I'm the comedian but you're the co-media, all of you — you're their accomplice. I may as well be talking to a person with a television screen for a face. If your sort really knew anything about 'psychopaths', you'd have investigated your bosses and brought them to justice long ago. Control freaks. Trolls who run cons."

"My tooth," I growled, "got that way when I was headbutted into the concrete last month by an inmate even more violent than you are irritating. And I can only inform you that I have done a lot of very good profiling work over the years, Mr. Kafka. Real profiling work in the real world, and it was real good work. Otherwise, why would police departments keep hiring me?"

"Oh, the case studies get processed, I'm sure. You and those like you see to that well enough. After all, you're paid to be a 'profiler' — a pro at filing. But people today, especially criminals and malcontents, are so easy to figure out anyway. And you have so many tools at your disposal. All I ever had was a pen and paper, sometimes a typewriter. Yet alongside that prehistoric technology sat a veritable caveman" — he looked himself over and gestured down the length of his body — "a veritable ape or animal, who is somehow far too complex for all your sophistication and cutting-edge bureaucracy to process and break down. Just like old times."

"As far as all that's concerned," I warned him, "it is very unfortunate that an insanity defense will not save you. Make no mistake, you are insane, as any reasonable person can recognize, but that is not going to stop us from executing you."

"It didn't stop you from reading me either," he retorted, leaning back and actually putting his black dress shoes up on the table. "I've noticed that the last few generations, they like their authors and artists crazy. The crazier they are, the more the audience hangs on their every word. And if they commit suicide, they're admired all the more. Perhaps I was somewhat less crazy in my youth than I am now, yet still my words and ideas then should not have been taken to heart as they were, without prejudice, as such innocent things. For — look what those thoughts led to!" He held his hands out before him, fingers wide, and spread them as far apart as the cuffs would allow.

"What you say is simply unfair and spiteful," I told him. "It's almost as though you're blaming your readers for liking writing that, in and of itself, was undeniably quite good. That you went on to become someone so awful and dreadful does not—"

"But there is no in and of itself, Mayu. It wasn't just art. It was real. It was me. It wasn't meant for others to see — not much of it, anyway."

"That is true. You do have some legitimate grievance," I told him, trying not to sound too patronizing, and trying to earn his trust.

"You misunderstand me again. I am not grieving or wanting revenge but simply stating how things were and how they've functioned. I simply had no use for an audience — not then or now or any time in between. I only performed in front of television cameras, for a while, because I thought that anyone willing to watch television or care so much about the news deserved to be offended and see offensive things. But even that mass audience served no real use for me. And as for today's readers? Well, they're more useless than any other audience — of any sort — in history."

"Fine," I told him, "be an ungrateful jerk. But whether you wanted it published or not, your work had a positive influence on many lives."

"Yes, I know this 'positive influence'. It encouraged others to repeat my mistakes for no reason, to seclude themselves to no good end, and at best to produce lesser quality prose than my own — and I do not have such a high opinion of my writing in the first place. People like you think I 'spoke for millions', when really I was struggling just to speak for myself. How strange that readers would flatter themselves in this masochistic way, to presume they could honestly identify with such a colossal failure who for his part wouldn't want to identify with anyone — who wanted his papers destroyed just so they would not provoke this insulting and in every way unwarranted case of mistaken identity! Kafka the savior. Kafka the prophet. Pah!"

"You are much too pessimistic," I insisted. "From your stories I learned—"

"All they were capable of teaching was how to relish moroseness — how to enjoy and be thirsty for a sort of slow-acting mental poison. The doses of melancholia I drank on an hourly basis were enough to turn a hundred happy schoolchildren into sullen Werthers. My disgraceful, early example showed the Modern man how to 'adjust' in the most discreet ways possible to an ever more abrasive, increasingly anti-human society which, if one really must live and die within, one should certainly not strive to coexist with easily. One must put up more resistance than the composition and pamphleteering of fairy tales, silly stories that coerce their author and readers to get used to and like the disorienting, bewildering sensation of losing a bit more of their humanity with every passing day."

Having worked himself up, he took a deep breath.

"No," I told him, "people found themselves in your writing."

"Mayu, I only found myself writing because my father by turns neglected and verbally abused me as a child, over and over again almost every day, traumatizing me to the point that I could do little else but write and obsess over abstract figures. That's why I retreated into paperwork. What's your excuse?"

Not wanting any silence to underscore his statement, I quickly responded, "You seem to think that literature is pointless, something for the crazy alone."

"When it becomes akin to a religion, as it did for me, it is indeed pointless and crazy. And no matter how much irony or irreverence or self-depreciating humor I tried to mollify it with, it was still a fire-and-brimstone religion of bookishness, which would have eventually burned away all that was vital within me, had I not taken flight and forsworn the hobby-turned-obsession of my youth."

"Yet you came to replace it with . . ." I fumbled in my pockets, before deciding on ". . . a religion of crime. Or a religion of comedy. But I don't think you're funny at all."

"I must be a blasphemer, then," he said, furrowing his brow and giving me an intent stare.

"You are either a fool or a very wicked person, dangerous to everyone, even to those who have been friendly to you. Whatever happened to your two assistants?"

He hadn't been seen with his clownish henchmen in nearly a year.

Kafka yawned. "It began to annoy me," he said, "that they didn't take our mischief seriously enough. They were really just overgrown boys, of course, full of rebelliousness and very malleable to someone like me. Thrilled at not having to go to school anymore, once they entered my service they became acquainted with a real sense of freedom that hardly anyone else in their generation, or in their parents' or grandparents' generations, had ever succeeded in winning — a sort of freedom that they hadn't even known could exist, and once they got a taste of it, smelling it on me like bloodhoods would, nothing could drive them away."

Here one of the guards knocked at the door and, inexplicably, offered me a stylus and notepad. I shooed him away, wishing he had brought a glass of water instead.

"The problem was," he continued, "the fellows never got the hang of doing anything with this freedom — other than taking orders from me, of course, and partaking of my follies. When I knew my career of crime was creeping to a close, however, I sent them away. Inevitably, they kept returning, asking me for directives, unable to figure out anything to do on their own. I started leaving them behind when F. and I would go out on missions, but whenever I looked over my shoulder they would always be there, tagging along like lost puppies. Their presence became annoying; and I wanted to kill them and get it over with — it would've been doing them a favor — but time and again F. would talk me out of it, convincing me that rather than get mad it was still more sensible to laugh at them and carry on with my business regardless. Still, they made sleeping difficult because they seemed to experience simultaneous nightmares. Almost every night F. and I would be awakened by their call-and-response howlings; and time and again I would have to trudge downstairs, into their cold dark room, wake them up by candle, and offer to leave the flickering light there on their bed stand if they promised to try and sleep soundly, stop crying, and not be afraid of the shadows."

"And where are they at this moment?" I asked, raising my legs, straightening them and letting my knee joints crack.

"Still in my hideout, presumably, where I left them yesterday morning. I took them aside separately and told each to mimic what the other one was doing until I returned. That should keep them occupied. When we're done here I'll give the chief inspector the address. I know they'll both go to jail as well, and possibly be executed . . . but they are really just overgrown boys, as I say, and still a little dazed and excited. By now they must realize that I'm not coming back, and have probably resigned themselves to the fact that their freedom is over forever. Poor souls, they'd be miserable now no matter where they were, so they probably won't mind going away to a cellblock."

"And what about the woman called F.?"

His face flushed, just slightly, and he said, "There you might be able to provide more insight than I can."

"How do you mean?" I asked, wishing I had taken the notepad.

"Women have always been drawn to me, for reasons I cannot fathom."

"You're not my type," I sneered, then added, "you psycho."

"That's not what I was insinuating," he said with contrition. "My apologies. I only meant that I could never understand what attracted F. to me and . . . For months I've suspected she was a double agent, working for the same people you work for — or for their bosses, whoever they are. Right before you stepped in here, when the door opened I half-expected F. to walk through it, dressed in a pantsuit and without any clown makeup. And upon seeing you I had to ask myself whether I was actually seeing a costume, with immaculate and naturalistic makeup, within which F. was hiding, pretending to be a very different person, to trick me. Because F., after all, would have had cause — and the ability — to be much harder on me than you've been, Mayu, were she the one conducting this interrogation."

"She is working for us," I told him, suddenly quite taken with this pointless bluff and hoping I could pull it off. "She wasn't in our employ when the two of you were together, but this morning we picked her up, and she was very eager to join us."

"Well, well," he said smoothly. "It is indeed easy for any stranger to influence her, as I myself can attest firsthand. I suppose you won't let me speak to her?"

"Of course not," I told him. "F. is ours and she's going to stay that way."

"You should know that she could easily be won over to any other side, or to any subsection that even slightly opposes your particular agency." He looked at me earnestly. "So I would advise not getting too attached to her. I was always surprised I could hold onto her for so long. Just a few new words contrary to anything she's heard before, and she becomes enraptured by whoever's speaking, ready to do their bidding thenceforth, until the next time something new comes along."

"All women are gullible and all men are killers. Is that how things work in your little world?" I asked, and not a second later I regretted uttering such a sweeping statement. I was starting to act like him!

"No, of course not," he said blankly. "In my world all the boys and girls are equally gullible, equally guilty of murder, directly or indirectly, and equally incredulous that they could ever be either of those things. Is that arrangement more to your liking?"

"And when did you stop wishing it were otherwise?" I slapped both my palms against the table — too hard — and my hands began to sting. "You might deny that you ever ceased wanting something better, but it's evident that F.'s defection has scarcely shocked you, and that bespeaks a sad lack of commitment to whatever relationship you two had. Unhealthy though it must have been, it was the closest thing you had to a true bond with another individual."

"All F. wanted was to be separated, physically and spiritually, from the trappings of the general population. That was a state of living with which I could easily provide her, and something your employer can evidently offer up to some degree as well. When she begins to ask questions, however, the person in charge of her must be ready to tell whatever lies or stories would prevent her from naturally wandering back the way she came. Otherwise, she will gradually return to the vicinity of the life she wanted to leave behind, forgetting why she wanted to leave in the first place."

"And why must they tell her lies?" I asked, skeptical of all this, slowly sliding my hands back towards me across the desk, then putting them in my coat pockets again.

"Because without a little misdirection every now and then, she would eventually reach the conclusion that her original life in the crowd, annoying as it might have been, suited her better than her new life amongst the other odd outsiders. You might then ask, why not just let her return to her home? Because she would never quite fit in there, not ever again, due to the outsider's perspective that she worked so hard to achieve. And so in that case she would soon become estranged, helpless and miserable; she would learn that things were better long before she knew much of anything, before she gained any genuine insights into the general situation or the extent of its current shortcomings. But she could never quite forget what she experienced after she left, the knowledge and experience which has set her apart forever, if not 'for good'. One might say that in a sense — for this is not quite true — she would realize that whatever free will she had earned had in fact been turned against her. But rather than blame freedom itself, as a terribly narcissistic person might do, F. would have no choice but to begin blaming herself, without end and without any clear point of departure. For once cast down in this sorry position, every course of action that one might propose to her would inevitably seem hopeless, senseless, and demeaning. To prevent this humiliating state of affairs from arising, someone like F. needs someone like me, or like your employers, to lie to her a bit from the very start. Day after day, she must always have someone there to tell her that she is doing the right thing now and that whatever she is up to at the moment represents the natural and sensible development of her life. And this must be reinforced even though she has separated herself from many if not all of the people she would have naturally been around and loved — if her world hadn't turned out the way it did, compelling her to run away from everything years ago."

Predicting where he was going with all this and wishing to forestall it, I said, "Mmhm. And I suppose you'd like me to believe that my superiors are feeding me lies, just as they're apparently lying to F., to make me feel a similar sense of false pride for having pulled myself up and made sacrifices? For I too have had to leave people behind to get where I've gotten."

He grinned at me then, resting his right elbow on the table, and laid the tips of his fingers against his forehead. He seemed to be really enjoying himself for the first time all morning.

I straightened myself and continued: "In other words, I wouldn't have naturally wanted to excel, but only did so because some presumably mean person tricked me into succeeding? What a mess of logic that is!"

"Mayu, only lies and misdirection could ever have estranged us from the people we were supposed to live with and love."

"You and F. didn't love each other!" I snapped, immediately refusing to try and decipher his last oblique statement, not so much due to fear of whatever it might reveal but rather due to the anticipation that it would probably prove nonsensical. "That's one illusion even we the gullible could always see through! Whenever the paparazzi photographed the two of you candidly and alone, your phony smiles vanished. You both looked sad and bored to tears in each other's company whenever you didn't know there was a mass audience watching you, and whenever you didn't have someone to kill in front of the cameras!"

"She once told me . . ." he began, speaking serenely and staring right through me, "that if we had only gone somewhere far, far away, all at once, that first night or some night soon after, then we might have found peace, always together, each of us with hands always near enough for the other's hands to reach. Oh how much we have needed each other's companionship, more than can fit into a dream or a story, so much more so that putting it into words makes words themselves seem stupid."

I opened my mouth to confess my lie, but before I could he continued:

"That is what she said to me once. And I listened to her then just as she usually listened to me: attentively, giving me her full attention, and she would be stroking my arm, repeating whatever opinions I had just propounded as if they were her own and she had arrived at them independently."

"She hasn't really defected, you fool," I told him. "That was a bluff on my part, dummy."

"It's all just as well," he said blankly.

Rather than move on, as I knew he would like, I decided to press him on this.

"So suddenly F. doesn't matter anymore? As quick as that?"

"This wasn't the first time she went out of her way to get involved with a destructive — and self-destructive — man, and it probably won't be the last time, either. And somehow she always seems to slip out of these dire situations with less harm done to her than to the men around her. I won't say that she has a hidden talent for somehow manipulating others, nor would I suggest that she doesn't bear invisible scars — but there is something of the Femme Fatale in F., obviously, and one cannot argue that at the conclusion of each crisis she always suffers less than those who stood closest to her."

I looked at him long and hard, then mimicked his habit of drawing out words so as to impart the most sweeping, existential meaning: "But who, or what, is to blame for all this?"

"Artfulness," he said fast and cheerily, as if he expected the question. "Artfulness or style in the widest scope of the term, not in the tiny sense fussed over by dilettantes and debutantes — though in the case of myself and F. respectively, our tragic trajectories were launched via those small-minded pursuits. For me, my course was set that night long ago when I decided to push on, working straight through till morning, to complete my first real story, 'The Judgment'. I looked at myself in the dark window behind my desk, wrote down what I saw under the skin — studying my reflection backlit by the oil lamp in my room — and captured that x-ray version of myself on paper forever. From then on, repeatedly, hours upon hours of quiet concentration would double as uninterrupted monologues with myself: a ritualistic loneliness I needed to reenact every night, in order to heal myself from the mundane traumas of the day, but also a loneliness I could never recover from once its secret, addicting succor became familiar to me. The 'liberation of inner life, of much vaunted imagination' at the expense of everything real, of everything else I could have had. A menial, boring existence, in reality, in exchange for being able to write about just how boring and alienating some slightly fictionalized versions of my life could be. What a deal. But I consigned myself to it, voluntarily went into a sort of prison even then, and I found the first rays of the morning sun odious, because they meant I had to stop writing, hurriedly get some rest, and then go to work. Living with my parents until I was 31, this was the oft-disturbed routine of my freedom. . . And on the other hand, F.'s fate was fixed — when? When she snuck out one stormy evening to meet a boy she shouldn't have trusted so much? When she ran away from her problems and her parents? Or when she first took so much affinity with a new pop song that she thought, very deeply, 'This is me'? F. wanted to be a singer once upon a time, Mayu, like you wanted to be a writer. Regardless, her fate was fixed once she committed some dramatic act with enough artfulness in it to capture her imagination and hold it hostage. It was much the same with me. And who could blame either of us when we were at the start of our journeys? And who could blame any of those who have romanticized our crime spree because it reminds them of any number of famous criminal couples? Like it or not — and I don't like it — myths are bigger than people. Since all of these stories and lives are inevitably electrified and fictionalized now, they thereby become in a certain, now-familiar way more real than any of the people involved, and more real than any of the people watching."

"No," I said dismissively, purloining another of his conversational tactics. "The people are always the most real element of any situation. That includes the people you killed — real people with real feelings! You've spoken about the great consideration it took to ward off F.'s unhappiness, but what about all the happiness you destroyed in the lives of others? You alone must accept responsibility for what you've done, your moribund activities, your euphemistic 'follies'. No amount of abstraction, no amount of qualification — no saying that the people or their feelings aren't authentic enough for your liking — no riddles or doublespeak can hide the fact that you decided to end their lives, and did so with a smile on your face."

"There you have me, I must admit," he said, putting his left elbow on the table and resting his chin in his palm. "Still, I have to mention that you yourself seemed quite smug, some minutes ago, when you announced that I too was to be executed. There are some parallels—"

"Whatever parallels there might be are scant," I informed him, "and whatever comparison you are attempting to draw is perhaps the most laughable joke you've told yet, whether you realize it or not. You killed innocents, and no matter how much 'guilt' you might pretend your victims bore for the failings of their society, that's nothing compared to the very real, very clear guilt that you bear for killing them directly. Even someone so far afield from reason and sanity must still see the truth in that."

Here I was finally scoring major points, I knew. Kafka had hardly been putting up a solid defense that morning, relying on conceited nonsense and childish non sequiturs as subterfuge. I had let him divert my attention long enough. Eventually the essence of any situation, no matter how bizarre, will unveil itself. The prevailing essence here at the moment showed Kafka to be mistaken in virtually everything he said.

So wrong was he that I briefly began wondering whether he had purposefully put forth such long, strange, twisting and torturous fallacies in order to waste my time and throw me off the scent. If he himself viewed most of his statements as lies and quagmires — and intentionally designed them as such — then perhaps behind them there lay a deeper, more precious explanation, a hard-won secret about the human spirit that he would do anything to keep out of the minds of his adversaries, of whom I was the face. But no, that was overthinking things.

"It seems my actions and words of late, including those committed during our time here today, have earned me nothing but disappointment in your eyes," he said remorsefully, the hint of a smile indicating that he knew his assertion was an understatement.

"Well, yes," I sighed, "this has all been quite disappointing. I don't pretend to know what you've gone through, but it's reasonable to suspect that you could have done so much more with what you had, what you knew, what you had going for you, and the unique, enviable station you had attained via to your 'death' and disappearance. And today you don't seem enough like the wise sage I once thought you were or the rabid villain that the media loved to hate. You've let everyone down on all sorts of levels."

"Very possibly," he remarked, a little too flippantly for my liking, and began picking at his teeth with his fingernails. "But isn't that how you know I'm real, because I don't correspond to your imagination of me?"

Ignoring this last bit, I continued on, clearing my throat and stretching my legs under the table: "Perhaps there are good reasons for your ongoing failure to meet expectations. Granted, your life as it was, in 1920s Prague, must have been monotonous. And you had been there far too long. At a foundational level, it was necessary to devise a means of escape; and for the survival of your psyche, you accomplished this: you left. You did so in a very peculiar, inexplicable way, but you did so successfully. There then followed what I will describe as a blank period during which — and this is perhaps the most important thing — you were evidently healthy, for you didn't leave even one traceable mark of your very distinctive illness anywhere on earth. It seemed for all the world that you were dead and gone. Eventually, however, something went wrong, or a threshold of tolerance was breached. Hence your violent return."

His otherwise impassive expression was interrupted by a sharp twitch in the corner of his mouth. "That's a very neat and tidy way of summing things up," he said. "Slightly modified, I'm sure it could serve as the opening monologue of a 40-minute television special on—"

"Just because it's a quick summary doesn't make it untrue," I fired back, pointing a finger at him. "Did it ever occur to you that your case might not be so complex after all? It seems as though you take it as a given that just because you are unusual you should also be incomprehensible. You use that as an excuse not to bother coming to terms with yourself, and you try to convince others that your nature is similarly beyond their grasp as well. That tactic might turn out to be a simple bluff, but if so — you've fooled yourself as well, cheated yourself out of the better life you could've led if only you had the courage to straighten yourself out long ago. You only had a century plus to think it over and come up with something better; instead you came up with the worst of all possible self-reinventions."

"I'm not concerned with your analysis," he told me, his eyes downcast "I only wanted you for your ears, to listen to me, and for whatever amusement you might provide. And the more you think you understand me, Mayu, the more it does entertain me."

"What really amuses me," I said, smiling radiantly, "is considering your comments about F. in light of your current situation. You had much to say about how someone like her, if she wasn't careful, might 'stray from the path' and find herself right back where she started from, in a familiar place she might not like that very much. But what about you? Here you find yourself isolated and alone, and you can expect plenty of long, cold, monotonous days without very much to do — scarce sunshine, just you trapped with your thoughts. How very much like your time in Prague! Very much like the life you worked so hard to get away from — for a time, at least!"

"Again," he murmured, "I'm not concerned with your analysis."

"What really concerns me," I went on, trying not to gloat but rather liking the idea of lecturing him now, "is that you don't seem to realize how colossal, and cliché, your errors have been. Frankly, it's dismaying to hear you carry on as you have today; at times it seemed as if you thought the ways of the world — if not the workings of the universe itself — were on trial here. Why did you conceive of the situation that way? I suspect it is because on some level you, like a little child, thought that the whole world was about you. And if you were the whole world, it would follow that the crimes you committed were actually the world's crimes, and indeed before your first murder you probably projected every crime you wanted to commit onto the world. 'The world murders people; even Mother Nature and Father God have ended many lives; therefore I can do so as well, to my gratification.' That seems to have been your reasoning, though perhaps you could never verbalize it. I can, however, and through my words you might learn that there is indeed something else in the world besides yourself. For it is not the world, nor any part of it — not even our particular society — that will be on trial. It is you who will be on trial, and the very real, very simple and logical accusations cast against you bear absolutely no similarities with anything in your books. You are not being persecuted by an impossibly large conspiracy for crimes you didn't commit. No matter who you used to be, no matter how you managed to live this long, and no matter how horribly you mischaracterize your opposition, in the end you'll actually be taken down by a very reasonable, pragmatic brand of justice. Draw on all your talents — you won't be able to hide behind paradoxes where none exist."

Almost as an afterthought, pursing my lips, I tried to add a touch of pity and empathy to this last sentence, but suspect I didn't add enough. He dropped his head, looked sincerely dejected, and slowly rubbed his hands against his thin thighs.

"I suppose you're right," he said, after several moments had passed, and I knew he was feeling the bite of my words. "Still, would it be alright if we talked for a while longer? I've nothing to do or go back to once you leave."

"Of course," I said readily, almost tenderly. "We aren't cruel here, no matter what monsters you make us out to be. There's a little time left, and you know I've always wanted to talk to you."

"Good," he replied sweetly, like a boy who has been told he can keep playing outside (or more likely on the computer) for another fifteen or twenty minutes.

"What would you like to talk about?" I asked brightly.

"You," he declared merrily.

Caught flatfooted, my mouth opened and closed twice without any words issuing forth.

"Go on!" he continued happily. "I've told you my side of things; now it's your turn! 'Quid pro quo' and all that, right? So out with your life's story! And not just scraps, either — tell me everything, from beginning to end. There's nothing I'd like to hear more, and if you don't satiate my curiosity, I'll be moaning your name all night long, begging for you to return. You wouldn't want to think about that happening, would you, while you lay in bed tonight? Knowing that I'm locked in a scary room somewhere screaming your name till I go hoarse?" He laughed at me, and still I was speechless, not so much from the initial shock but from nervousness of what I would say. "And you can count on my discretion! Tell me all about it, whatever's on your mind. You'll never again get the opportunity to have so formidable a listener, that's for certain!" He lowered his voice then, adding, almost in a whisper, "And you don't need to be afraid of me — what's quite unnecessary." He held his hands up, jingled the delicate chain of the handcuffs, and giggled twice.

Despite his overtures toward casualness, I became ever more convinced that his every word and motion was calculated and forced. My guard had slackened some; I raised it again and scrutinized him intensely as I spoke:

"Perhaps you have things confused, Kafka. We have never been in need of any information from you, and still less do we need to give you any information — let alone any personal details. We regard you simply as a curiosity—"

"As long as you say 'we' instead of 'I'," he interrupted, beaming from ear to ear, "I'll know you are deeply threatened by what I might say to you. And perhaps rightly so! Still, speaking in the first-person plural suggests an excessive fear, a longing even on the linguistic level to feel the comfort of immersion within a likeminded group. Clearly you're accustomed to seeking too much outside help, though ironically the people who help you are all awfully insular in their thinking — terribly urbane, yet provincial — and wouldn't know the real outside unless someone finally threw them out in the wilderness to contend with wild beasts. That kind of treatment is long overdue, if you ask me. Regardless, as I was saying, you seem to seek this 'we' protection in my presence especially, as if a few choice sentences from me might rip up your entire world. And I derive no satisfaction from this ability of mine to frighten you; rather, it is a great responsibility that makes me nervous, knowing that saying the wrong word might inadvertently cause you to run screaming out of here, making a beeline for the nearest overpass or bridge!"

"What vain, idiotic things you say!" I cried, far too loudly — but he remained unfazed, his smile frozen in place. "Your presuppositions are astonishing in their ignorance! You asked about my life and myself? There's not much to tell. I'm fine; I'm very happy!"

"Well!" he chuckled, "I'm glad to be considered trustworthy enough to hear this evidently secret information! If it's true and you really are happy, then you should let yourself know this news as well, since every psychosomatic hint, facial expression, and body language clue that you've emitted since stepping into this room has indicated the disposition of someone quite distraught, unhappy, and frustrated — and not just because you've been dealing with me!"

"I'm not obliged to go down this path with you," I told him, squinting my eyes a bit in order to seem meaner, "and I can get up and leave at any time, but I'll say the following just to humor you. Pardon the pun."

Here he gleefully clapped his hands together once and then sat silent and still, with only a slight (probably involuntary) twitching sometimes in the corners of his lips.

"You asked about my history," I continued. "Fine. That was inappropriate on your part. Which comes as no surprise, since you have no manners or tact, no consideration for others. However, now I want to say this: I've lived a quite normal life. The sort of life you would simultaneously envy and rail against as 'conformist'. It may not seem so on paper — because my credentials are impressive — but in reality I am a regular person. My job may be very exclusive, specialized, and labor-intensive—"

"Pah!" he blurted, then hid his mouth with his hands.

"What?" I asked, glaring at him.

" 'Labor-intensive'! I've always found such self-congratulatory attempts to identify with a long-extinct 'working man' to be endlessly ridiculous. I have to laugh because otherwise it's just too sad. Whatever training or struggling you've done to get where you've gotten, I can assure you that every bit of it was nonsensical busywork, sitting in a room all day and tying your brain into knots for some bureaucratic benefit. I imagine you staring at a computer screen so long that you don't even notice when the sun has gone down, and the screen has become your only source of illumination. And yet, if you're going in for that sort of self-harm — then whatever happened to all those novels you probably wanted to write but somehow got too busy to scarcely start? Bending over a desk isn't 'labor', Mayu — it's repetition compulsion, and I should know. But I get the impression you actually believe that you went through a bootcamp scenario, or that spending hours alone hunched over a laptop means you know the plight of feudal serfs or dirt-poor nineteenth-century immigrants." (Here I started to say, "Well, I did move to the U.S. as an infant," but he ignored me.) "The effort that you've sensed in life has not been from any honest work of your own, but rather from the friction of the system itself — to mold you into a particular sort of tool. Evidently, you've gone along with this dehumanizing process as much as possible, and your only regrets amount to saying that you couldn't 'go with the flow' even faster than you already have."

He leaned back and put his shoes on the desk again.

"Oh, here we go — 'the system', huh?" I snickered mockingly. "I suppose what I should have done was fight authority at every turn, for pointless and paranoid reasons? — No, reasons would be far too generous a term for your thoughtless, blind reactions to anything the slightest bit sociable or sophisticated. Such childish defiance is unbecoming in someone so old. — And I suppose that when one sees an opportunity for a nice life and interesting employment, one should refuse the offer on principle, specifically because a nice life and interesting employment are in and of themselves suspicious or malicious things? As far as the extent to which I have or haven't worked or sacrificed: Of course I can't compare myself to other people from other ages. But I know what it took to get where I am, and what it takes to maintain my present lifestyle, which is comfortable and good enough for me. It is also worth the effort — my effort — and the infrequent inconveniences of having to suffer through conversations with frustrating people such as you!"

"You know, Mayu, one can be overworked and lazy all at the same time!" he chirped, resting his shackled hands behind his head. "In terms of your particular toolish use and activity, you're more like the fork with which a glutton shovels endless bloody gobbets into his gullet: The fork shouldn't get any perverse credit for exercising — that should go to the hand that holds you — nor should the fork get the blame for its owner's obesity. But there is one thing for sure: Without the fork, and without the malleability of its thin metal to have become such a clever utensil, the fat man holding you wouldn't have such an easy time of it."

I rolled my eyes in a very snotty way, sighed, then looked at him sadly.

Once the better part of a minute passed without either of us uttering a word, I slid my chair back noisily, calmly put my long black gloves on, placed my hands against the table for support, and stood up tall — promptly hitting my head against the overhanging light bulb, which flickered and then went out, leaving us in pure darkness.

"Please turn on the light!" I screamed. "Someone turn on the light!" There was no answer. I asked again, but again got no response from the guards who were supposed to be right outside. "Where are you?!" I yelled toward the door — which I soon discovered was locked, as it should have been. Of all the things for them to get right. Helpless and distraught, on the verge of tears, I called again, "Where did you go?!"

"I'm right here," said the calm, familiar voice behind me. I heard a shrill sliding noise as Kafka presumably pushed his chair back to rise.

"Stay right where you are!" I warned, whirling around and protectively shoving my arms outwards through the black air in front of me. "Don't you move."

"I think our rapport might be even stronger in the dark," he said. "Wouldn't it be better for us to talk this way? I think it would relax us more and we could really concentrate on our answers and questions. Words, without visual distraction. Like a book."

Ignoring him, I pounded on the steel door madly, making a damn loud racket. To no effect. This was inconceivable. Surely someone was monitoring the situation live; I knew it was being recorded. Where had the guards gone?

"Just relax," Kafka said behind me, closer than ever before.

I shrieked. My mind racing, I suddenly wondered whether all this had been an elaborate plot. Had my superiors teamed with Kafka in order to bring this about, to ensnare and terrorize me this way? How could I be sure that the chief's message that morning had actually come from his fingers? Could Kafka have hacked into the email system and compromised just enough of the police force to pull this off? I didn't actually see many of the higher-ups that day. The prison I was in looked like the place it was supposed to be, but how could I be sure that the omnibus driver hadn't taken me to a decoy location? Kafka the joker had orchestrated deathtraps just as intricate several times before. Was the camera in the cell there to monitor him or to record my slow descent from annoyance to confusion to hysterical misery?

"Open your eyes, Mayu."

I wildly pawed the air in front of me, not listening to him.

"Open your eyes!"

Finally, I realized that I must have shut them in the confusion. The light was back on now. Kafka was sitting at the table again, if he ever left. Before I had too much time to feel stupid, the door opened and a guard brought in a tray with two glasses of water.

"Sorry it took a while," he told me. Unsure whether he was referring to the light having inexplicably fixed itself, or perhaps to some unsaid agreement mandating that he bring us drinks at a certain time, I just nodded dumbly and raised my hand to him as he left.

After putting the tray in the middle of the table, I took off my navy blue trenchcoat, which felt so heavy now, and placed it on the back of my chair.

"I thought you were leaving," Kafka said, reaching for a glass of water and running his eyes up and down my body. I wore a long white pleated skirt, dark hosiery beneath it, and a red cardigan on top. "But I'm glad you've decided to stay," he offered as an afterthought. "Your clothes fit you very well. I can't help but notice."

"I'm sure you can't," I retorted, sitting down hurriedly and wishing I hadn't taken off my coat. "Yours, on the other hand, look about two hundred years old."

"No, these are women's clothes," he said smiling, glancing down at his purple suit and tie. "It was a bit hard to find my size, but I wanted the color. And I'm surprised — though glad — that your superiors have allowed me to keep wearing this getup in jail. Perhaps they thought it might constitute a crime on their part, a cruel and objectionable mistreatment, to deprive me of clothing that's become associated with my identity. But this seems to have been a gross miscalculation, since it puts you at a disadvantage — or rather it removes the one advantage over me that any interrogator would have had, were I forced into the standard orange jumpsuit. How can I feel very much inferior to you, Mayu — sexy though you are — if we're both wearing such nice formal clothing?" He let the silly, tactless question hang in the air for a few seconds. "Regardless, the one thing I regret, as far as my career in crime went, is never being able to make it clear enough that I was going for either a sexless or transvestite image, if only because I suspected it might get me more attention. That point never really came through well enough, though, simply because these days it's not so easy to tell men's and women's clothes apart."

"This bothers you," I noted, sipping my water.

"Not at all. Only, it's unfortunate that blurred lines can be so difficult for an artist to work with, and for an audience to decipher."

"And what sort of message did your clothing—"

"Please, Mayu," he broke in, "let's not talk about any of that anymore. It was all just bullshit, really. And that means — yes — in addition to whatever tragedy I caused in the lives of others, whatever revolution of consciousness I failed to bring about through so much sacrificial bloodshed, I also acknowledge that what I did was simply in bad taste. I knew going in that it was a bad joke; I thought I could turn it around and somehow show a process of redemption, but I couldn't." He spoke frankly, his sad tone hinting that he really did know very well how pathetic and pretentious he had become, his demeanor suggesting that he wanted to move on with honesty in the scant time we had left. "But, really, all I wanted to say before was that you look beautiful. Not just your clothes — everything. And what a fine complexion you have. You're Japanese, obviously, but somehow your skin seems very tan. It's a strange hue and I can only compare it that of a man I met once in Seville. Strange how certain people stick in your mind. I can see that you are one of those people, stuck there in a lot of people's minds. And what I said earlier about your tooth — that sort of modest, faultless flaw can only make a woman more beautiful. Maybe I have been too hard on you; I sense that your temperament is gentle unless someone gives you cause to behave otherwise, which I certainly have. Maybe I've misjudged everything; possibly you cope quite sensibly with the difficulty of living today. . . . And what a kind face. You're what many men dream of, and I bet you love ardently, passionately and loyally — if ever anyone proved himself worthy of you."

"Well . . . thanks," I said, feeling even more uncomfortable than I probably should have felt.

He held the glass of water up to his lips but did not take a drink. I realized that he must be smelling it.

"It's not drugged," I told him.

"How would you know?" he asked, a faint smile on his face. "How do you know that the water they've been giving you hasn't been drugged to make you . . . act the way you do?"

"Well, I . . ."

A wider smile let me know that he wasn't really being serious. He took a gulp, then pretended to choke and bugged his eyes out for a second or two, as if something in the drink had affected him. Then he composed himself and cleared his throat.

"And after all," he added, "if you wanted to hurt me, I don't think you'd do it through something as innocuous as water. You have it in your power to inflict any amount of pain on me at any moment, do you not? All you'd need to do is call the guards in and tell them to beat me — or you could thrash and trash me yourself, and I wouldn't be allowed to make any resistance, would I? There are many people, twisted by life, who would find that very attractive of you and who would pay—"

"Ugh, please stop!" I said, wincing and giving him a disgusted look.

Withdrawn and self-conscious as I had become in the last few minutes, it nevertheless didn't escape my notice that he too had been sitting there rather embarrassed, making clumsy attempts at establishing a more coherent relationship between us. He seemed to believe that even obvious antagonism or lewd harassment would be preferable to awkwardness. And even during the fairly brief moments when our exchanges became almost friendly, even then I had sensed that he was still having some difficulty, with his furtive posture making it clear that he wanted to keep his distance from me. This interview had certainly not gone the way either of us might have wanted.

Then: "You have a boyfriend, of course," he barked, setting his empty glass down with a bang.

"And how did you know that?" I asked, narrowing my eyes, a bit annoyed.

"It seemed far more likely that you'd have a boyfriend than any of the alternatives," he said. "You feel justified in projecting confidence, which suggests that you aren't single. And I knew you couldn't have a husband."

"What does that mean? How are you trying to insult me now?" I asked, putting my hands on my hips and contemplating putting my coat on again. "You mean that I am only girlfriend material, that I couldn't be a wife, or get a husband?"

"I only said what I did because earlier I noticed that you don't wear a wedding band," he replied, causing me instant mortification. "You just have rings on your thumb and forefinger. But since you pressed the issue: Yes, even if your hands were hidden, I'd still have bet anything that you weren't married. Similarly, there's no need for me to ask you if you have any children. Sorry to say, for your sake, but all my initial intuitions about the sort of person you are have proven completely true."

"Your detective skills don't impress me at all," I told him, while deciding to take my gloves off again. "And all your supposed intuitions say far more about you and your own pessimistic, judgmental nature than they do about me."

"Surprise me, then," he said, standing up and beginning to pace in a small circle. "Tell me something important about yourself that I wouldn't expect. Do you love your boyfriend?"

"It—" I started, then stopped, wanting to call the whole thing off but deciding to face it down instead. "It is quite a complicated issue. You can't just ask . . . I say I love him, and I do in the casual sense. And I believe I nearly really love him and could love him someday if things go right."

"But do you honestly expect things will fall into place for that to happen?" he asked, still pacing, hunched over, looking at the floor.

"Probably not!" I admitted with restrained frustration, tossing my hands up before myself and then slapping them softly against my thighs. "We both try but know things probably won't work out quite well enough in the long run. But we have hope! And what we have together is very good for what it is, for now. What is wrong with that?" I asked him honestly.

He took a few more slow laps around his little circle, hands clasped together at the level of his waist, head bent down so low that his chin pressed into his chest.

"What's wrong," he finally said, as he took his seat again and drew a deep breath, "is that you seem to be approaching the age of 40 without any genuine reliable love or family in your life. In absence of these things — perhaps the reason for their absence — you have thrown yourself headlong into a huge, bad apparatus, made of contrived lifestyles and falsely emotional infrastructures. What hinders and controls you is not a vast organization of men but rather a vast collection of objects, wires, signals, catchphrases and rampant ideological flows, all of which have taken on a life of their own and become far too interconnected for any human hands to untangle. Not a Frankenstein's monster for us to wrestle with but a Frankenstein's stomach for us to dwell and dissolve inside. We swim in this unfathomable, polluted fluid full of all sorts of weird and half-dead things. Aside from finding a way out through the mazelike intestinal tract, the only way to survive here is to integrate yourself into the artificial digestive system like bacteria in the stomach, eating anything and anyone around you that still has some life left. We find ourselves reduced to an amoeboid status scavenging and harvesting the diminishing returns of what we call our home culture — culture in the sense of soil or tissue. We're less than bugs, living in an automatous social environment that exerts more influence on us than we can exert on it — and it has an agency stronger than all of ours combined. For even the insects and amoebas have a place and a function in the natural order, an important and perhaps even decisive place; but compared to them — compared to anything — we're useless, now more so than ever, lost as we are in this huge and obscure apparatus. Further, this disorienting state of affairs seems almost sentient at times. After all, man created this system as a way of better taking care of everything and everyone, and still we sense that we are being invited ever further inside the apparatus. And though it may ultimately prove uninhabitable, we behave as though we don't have any choice but to follow along. We all see that our system fails in its attempts to bolster civilization and succeeds in its attempts to throttle humanity, until we no longer recognize ourselves or know how or why to live. I've watched these developments all my life. I wrote about them early on: the insanity of organization, the enslavement through bureaucracy, and the freewheeling chaos that dances and pillages through it all. I never imagined this whirlwind would have really expanded as much as it has. I thought it was at least somewhat of a fiction that I made up in my head, and I couldn't stand it in 1920. How can you stand it now? In the face of this technical monstrosity, I have seen very little human resistance worth mentioning. All of this points toward a deep—"

"You act as if you aren't a part of it all yourself," I calmly retorted, my words scarcely more than a whisper, but a whisper that was rapidly building up steam. "And you're more than a part — You're a contributor of products and ideas and bad lifestyles yourself. You mentioned the media earlier, in a negative light — but a good portion of the media you hate has come dangerously close to celebrating you! Yes, they could hardly restrain themselves from praising you, and no doubt some of them soon will be ambivalent about celebrating your capture. Whatever reasons you had for dressing up the way you did, some of it must have been to give a good image to the media: your painted white face, the bright red lips — it appeals to people. You appeal to them. In various ways both your writings and your actions were calculated to appeal to society. Yes, even your old stories were, because — I don't care what you say — no one writes for no one. All along, what you've said and what you've done, incomprehensible as it all is . . . and whatever your critique of society, as juvenile as it is — your critique, I mean, not society — even if we take it seriously, it still only goes to show how you have absurdly overemphasized your apartness, your individuality, at the expense of everything else you could have experienced or understood . . . till you got to the point where anything connected to anything else seemed part of an unhealthy 'apparatus', as you call it. And that's a good word, I think, whether you realize it or not — and you probably do — because it has apart in it, and you certainly have to be very much isolated and apart in order to view things in such a skewed way and not realize that you are a part . . ." Losing my way, I swallowed hard to regain the bit of composure I'd lost, and started over. "From your vantage point of extreme separateness, every piece of this 'apparatus' appears to be functioning together in eerily collusion, as if everyone involved had only one mind between them, and even the internal conflicts probably seem planned and scripted to you. I've seen these symptoms before, Kafka. Several times over. And because of this twisted and overdramatic sense of what was going on outside yourself, you developed a variety of 'touching phobia' in which you could not risk having anything to do with anything, lest the external person you made contact with might instantly suck you into the greater, perceptibly malicious society. But what you can't bear to realize is that there's no getting away from it, Kafka, no matter what. You can't not be a part of the world you are in: even when you disappeared, for most of the twentieth century, you were with _us then_ more so than the first forty years of your life! You were _with us_ even if you wouldn't allow us _with you!_ A few minutes ago you lectured me for saying 'we' some of the time, yet in a way you only allow yourself to say 'I' all of the time. But the moment you were born, you were born into a community — no matter how bad it was or how much worse you think it's gotten — and you've interacted with it all along ever since then. You're interacting with it now. Even your inaction serves as an interaction, because you exist in this isolated planet — a 'closed system' you could call it — and withholding yourself affects the whole. There's no getting away from it . . . and maybe you should listen to me because I've managed to live far better and happier here than you have, and . . ."

"No, we've both failed, Mayu," he interjected, cutting me off just at the right time, before I ran out of breath. And while his words sounded rougher than they had before, he slumped down and put his head in his hands lazily. "If you've surpassed me in some way, it's only because you haven't bothered to mislead the world with your writing the way I did, inadvertently, once Brod published so much of my backlog. Most authors take being read as a victory. But long ago our culture passed the threshold beyond which it became impossible to write about much of anything in a helpful enough way; it's so complicated now that all any writer — no matter how thoughtful — ends up doing is introducing yet another voice into the cacophony, compounding the disorder, 'adding chaos to chaos'. No matter how skillful or nuanced our words, the potentiality of our language has been far surpassed by the intricacy of the simulacra that have developed around us — and inside us. By comparison, our vocabulary, grammar and logic are clumsy, blunt instruments, grown rusty from disuse; and even at their best they would have posed no threat to the ethereal circuitry which processes and blends our minds to toxic stew."

"Uh-huh," I said, bored with his ramblings. "And how does that prove that we've 'both failed,' as you contend?"

"Because neither one of us have any children. That's the main thing. If you're really a fine, normal, happy person, with an authentic and sympathetic capacity, Mayu, then why haven't you reproduced yourself? This can't be anything else but evidence of a deep failure, obviously, on a raw biological level."

"I didn't have kids," I hissed, "for the same reason a lot of people don't: Because I wouldn't want to bring them into—"

"The very same 'wonderful world' you've been defending from me!" he shrieked happily. "Laugh about it! Laugh about it all! Sometimes there's no other respite from the sad truth!"

Unable to help myself, I did laugh a few times, my cackle matching his. For the first time that day, Kafka's full visage really did resemble that of the jovially insane villain the media had shown us for the past decade. And for the first time that day, sorry to say, I felt a strange but true connection with him.

Brushing my hair back around my ear, still smiling, I asked him tersely, "What does this mean?" in the same clumsy way I might have asked him about one of his weird stories when I was sixteen.

"When considering how our actions in the current situation would affect others," he said, moving his hands down his face and eventually rubbing his chin, "it turns out that the only thing worse than remaining unpublished would be to publish, and thereby make the minds of readers even more confused, whether they know it or not. Similarly, again under the reasoned course of action as insinuated by our culture, the only thing worse than not having children would be to have children, and thereby force all sorts of inconvenience, uncertainty, and potential unhappiness into new lives and the lives of other people."

Giving a short exhalation and slouching over to rub my calves (which were cramping again for no reason), I told him, "You're finally living up to the expectations of what I would have wanted Franz Kafka to sound like when I was little, and what sorts of things he would talk about and tell me. Of course, that also means you're talking more like a book again and less like a person. More like one of your old books, I mean; and regardless of how strange and distasteful you've become in recent years, we still have to admit that you're an actual person, whether you want to be or not. Maybe that's unfair, and it goes without saying that confirming someone's childish, outdated ideas doesn't necessarily matter. But I just mean that you've certainly looked the part today — dressing more conservatively, as you used to long ago — but so often you've been abrasive to me. The ugly side of yourself. I guess the germ of it was always there; your discomforting bent was just easier to take or overlook when it was only read about. In printed words it doesn't seem troubling in any real way. Not to me, at least. Hearing you and seeing you face to face is different, though. It's very nerve-wracking and unsetting. Maybe I'm just getting used to it now, finally. We were both a little unhinged earlier, huh?"

He might have given a short nod here. I sat back up and smiled at him.

"Something I said earlier wasn't exactly true," I continued. "You probably guessed this anyway, but of course we want information from you. Suggesting otherwise was peevish and insulting of me, and I'm sorry. We aren't sure what we're looking for exactly, but the goal would obviously be to prevent 'the next Kafka' — or . . ." Flustered, not wanting to insult him, I hastened to add: "the next great terrorist, I should say. We just wonder what societal safety nets, personal liberties, or vouchers might have given you a better life in the first place. This probably sounds contrived, but please don't think we come at this from an arrogant, elitist view. We know we don't always know what's best. Your very existence — your antisocial actions — prove that we still haven't quite arranged our system in the correct way to solve everyone's problems and meet every need. But we're trying. You can't blame us for that."

"Yes, Mayu, I understand this very well." He sat up and I was pleased to see him returning my smile and good-natured attitude. "Whenever an unhappy anomaly arises the authorities must go into overdrive to figure out how it happened and prevent its recurrence — or the recurrence of anything similarly distasteful. I know this situation well and it does seem reasonable. The only problem" — again he started laughing a bit, in a contagious way — "is that in trying to make a more smoothly running society, you end up producing people who are increasingly dysfunctional in unforeseen ways." We both giggled at this for quite some time. I don't find it all that funny today, but I guess "you had to be there". "And in some ways," he chuckled, wiping a few tears from his eyes, "you actually can make a more efficient society, but in the process you simultaneously make more inefficient people — and there is no contradiction here. The housing, infrastructure, organization, wealth, education, and art all improve, but not the human beings involved. As the saying goes, 'Things are getting better.' Not people. Things."

As our laughter subsided, I said, "Yes, that's more like the Kafka I knew."

Evidently charmed by this, he was content to fold his arms on the table in front of him and gaze at me sweetly, and at great length, without blinking.

"When I was little," I began boldly, if only to prevent silence from setting in, "I thought you were the most interesting Western writer — and not just because of how exotic your name sounded. I remember learning to read with, of all books, The Castle. I found an ancient copy of it, with a strange little drawing of three turrets and a flag on the cover, which looked so curious that I had to have it. At first I would sit at the dinner table with the book on my lap, and after we had eaten I'd spend the whole evening looking at the same page, moving my fingers slowly back and forth, over and over again, under the same words. For hours I would do this, and eventually my mother would sigh and send me to bed. I had to keep filing my nails so they didn't wear slits in the paper when I traced and retraced your lines. Learning to read is hard enough, but learning to read with your kind of writing? Well . . . I-It's like what Orson Welles — I mean the Advocate — said about law books: The scriptures are very difficult." Here I laughed, but Kafka didn't get the reference to the Trial movie. Of course he hadn't seen it. He looked at me thoughtfully, though, mercifully, and I continued on: "I never sounded things out, but once I got to the point where I could recognize a good portion of the words on sight, I would stay in my room all day, as long as my parents would permit, and try to read your book. I say 'try' because . . . even after I knew what the words meant and what was happening, still I thought that there was some secret trapped within the story. I wasn't allowed to keep my door closed, so my mother and father would sometimes peek in at me now and then, break my concentration, and ask if I had 'Found any good clues lately?'. From the way I talked about you, I think I gave them the impression that you were a mystery writer . . . But you never completed any of your books — there was no explanatory, tell-all scene at the end — so readers had to look really hard at what you had given us and try to figure out where you were going with everything and . . . It was a bad time for my family — and for everyone really, back then, thirty-some years ago, when everything was so miserable and unstable for so long — but I had my one piece of real literature that was written in English, and studying it helped me forget about so many problems, at least for a while. As things wore on, in the evenings I would read some of it aloud to my mother and father; they could understand few of the words and nothing of what they meant, but they would pretend to get something out of it, and would say they were proud of me. I think probably they did get something really special out of it, even if they didn't understand. And now I wish I had brought something for you to autograph; I would have brought that old copy of The Castle, which I think I still have, somewhere. People usually express so much surprise and even concern when I tell them I learned English from a Kafka novel, and we joke and say maybe that's why I'm slightly quirkier even than the average girl, like The Castle infected me. But I guess it isn't much more unusual than how children used to learn how to read, by looking at comic books and cartoon strips in the news-papers, right? Most of those aren't any weirder than your stories."

Absentmindedly, I swung my feet back and forth under the chair, scuffing the heels and soles of my booties audibly against the rough tiled floor.

"You're quite a catch," he mused, slowly shaking his head back and forth, still grinning a bit. "I congratulate myself on my luck of the draw, getting you to talk with me. Or maybe you're a gift that's been sent to me, a reward for a job well done? Have you considered that interpretation yet? No? But you can consider it, and perhaps my words here can do some good after all."

"About those words of yours," I began, sitting up straight and composing myself, "it's as if they always guided me into a maze of your construction. You might tell me, 'No, this maze is the world you live in'; but whether or not life could be called a maze, your words certainly are a maze inside of life, a maze you've gone out of your way to make very difficult and sometimes annoying. And it's like — Sometimes I think I see an exit, but a boulder always blocks the way."

"Can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go around it — gotta go through it!" he chirped.

Laughing along with him, I admitted, "I have no idea what that means, or what it applies to. Life? The maze? You?"

"Those who understand the least sometimes laugh the loudest," he quipped.

"Well, I'm proud to say I've understood something of what you've said here today."

Suddenly frowning severely, he bellowed, "Your being proud about it proves you haven't understood any of it! And maybe — led on by how your clothes cling to your body, once you finally deigned to take off your coat in my presence — I've been giving you too much credit as of late! And by the way, what you said earlier was untrue: I don't always say 'I', sometimes I use 'K.' and refer to myself that way. Have you even read my books, Mayu? I'm sure you have, but even worse — you've not remembered the few important bits in them!"

"I weary of this up and down, back and forth," I said, deflated and fatigued.

He drummed his fingers on the table and tilted his head.

"You do not exist," he said tentatively, apropos of nothing. Then he closed his eyes and waved his hands in front of him, jingling the chains a bit, as if trying to erase his previous statement. Momentarily he settled on a new track and asked, "What would your ancestors think of you?"

"What?"

"You once wanted my approval because I was an old author from a past age whose words happened to resonate with you for reasons of fringe aesthetics. What about the people who influenced you more directly, the lineage you came from, your great-great-grandparents? What would they say about what you—"

"My ancestors were fascists, Kafka," I shot back. "You might know something about that, since you've acted quite fascistic as of late."

"You mean because of my smiling cruelty? 'Friendly Fascism' and all? If that's what you're finally getting around to asking me, it's about time. A fake smile, grinning and bearing it, wearing a mask — that's the only way to get by in this world, now more than ever. Of course not every smile is exactly false, but these days most of them are made under false pretenses. The world as we know it is ending, as slowly and as obnoxiously as possible — and in the face of this most cowards, living in denial, can't refrain from laughing and acting silly, no matter how terrible things get, no matter the atrocities committed under their very noses, for which they could by some measures be held accountable. And I showed you a clearer, more extreme version of all that. Right?"

I sighed. "How is becoming the distillation of everything bad, in order to make some sort of point, any better than the alleged 'anti-human' society you're lampooning? It was a mistake to care what you thought of me. It would be just as much of a mistake to care all that much about how I'd appear to my ancestors, many of whom were either fascists, or in league with fascists, or else they produced children who grew up to support fascism."

"And you aren't?" he asked bemusedly. "You aren't in league with something whose consequences — if not its surface details — are even more authoritarian, more totalitarian, more anti-human and so forth? — And this is so because you cannot help but go along with the presiding regime and ersatz will of the people, which in the last hundred years has turned masochistic — collectively suicidal to the extent that in its tantrum of self-hate it will destroy itself and as many lifeforms as it can consume — greedily, spitefully, obsessive-compulsively — in its wake."

"So simple," I said in a slow, singsong way, shaking my head. "Can you really be so boring as to insinuate that everyone you disagree with is something like a Nazi? Even complaining about how disappointing that tactic is, as I am forced to do, is in itself quite trite. You say society's trying to suck you down into its mess — but I feel the same way about what you're trying to drag me into! And whatever slight truth may lie at the root of your accusations: We, the grown-ups of the world, acknowledge these imperfections. Life isn't perfect; every one of us, you included, makes the best of it that we can, and the composite of what we've all done comprises the quality of life on this planet. Could we focus on the negative? Yes, but if we're going to do that, you should also acknowledge that few citizens have done less to help and more to hurt than you have."

"Still," he said, insufferably contented with himself, leaning back in his chair, "I haven't gone along with it all the way you have, pretending it's something it isn't, making excuses for myself, downplaying or denying outright the crimes of your bosses."

"I think you have gone along with it," I said, crossing my arms defiantly. "I think you did sit by and let a lot of nastiness take place, though you might not want to admit it. Since you're so quick to allude to fascists—" ("No, you are," he interrupted, but I ignored him.) "—what about the genocide some of those people committed against your relatives? Some of your sisters, right? It turns out you were alive while all that was happening, Kafka. So what did you do about it? Why didn't you , with all of your ghostlike powers, intervene to save them?"

"It wasn't that simple, Mayu," he muttered in strained tones. "And I wasn't exactly around for that. Not exactly. I didn't know."

"You know what?" I asked rhetorically, tightening my arms across my stomach. "I actually believe you. From what one can discern of your typical behavior, you probably were aloof enough to miss the greatest conflict and tragedy in history, in addition to losing track — or simply not caring — about what happened to your family members as they were rounded up and carted away to die. Again your ignorance of a given situation is appalling, but it's to be expected. Perhaps you can't help it. You should, however, at the very least, stop going around trying to give definitive proclamations about world events and modern society. Refrain from that, and then you might be tolerable. Not that it will do you any good at this point."

"Of course I'm ignorant," Kafka said. "That's sad and true, but not without its advantages. Ignorance can shield one from certain facts that confuse while giving the illusion of clarity. Ignorance has also given me greater courage: not knowing what to expect, I attempt feats others—"

"Oh that's too rich," I scoffed, throwing my hands onto the desk. "You? Courageous? Attempting feats? You've done just the opposite. Mostly you've just simply hidden, and nearly everything you've done has been antisocial and horrible. I used to think otherwise; I even came into this room with mixed feelings; I don't have them anymore."

We sat there for a moment, staring into each other's eyes, exhausted.

"You really can't name anything I've done that you don't consider bad?" he asked finally.

After rubbing my eyes I arrived at: "The hardhat. And I sure could've used one earlier." I pointed an index finger to my right temple, where I had hit my head on the light bulb.

"Excuse me?" He looked dumbstruck, evidently embarrassed about something he should have known but didn't.

"You invented the hardhat," I said, "or that's what they say. When you worked in an insurance office or something. Or, maybe you didn't invent it but you instituted its use on a wider basis."

"No I didn't," he said, perplexed. "At least, I don't remember doing so. This is something I'm known for? I've never come across it."

"I think so," I said helplessly. Now it was my turn to feel stupid again. "I remember seeing a post about it online quite recently. Someone was giving you credit for 'understanding workers and the common people'. Or something along those lines. But now that I think about it, the article mentioned Dostoevsky in the same regard, specifically for writing Notes from Underground."

After a long pause, he said, "That is a misanthropic work."

"Yes. I think the blogger's idea was to say the novel sympathized with the everyman because an everyman apparently has cause for misanthropy. But how can everyman be praised for hating everyman? I notice the contradiction now, but it all seemed clearer at the time, including the part about you and the hardhat—"

"You see," Kafka broke in, turning sharply to the side again and crossing his right foot over his left knee, "that sort of statement is the worst sort of maze, a confused morass that considers itself to be a straightforward path. Dostoevsky's Underground Man — the anomaly, the monster — celebrated as just one of the everyday people! And the horror is that this misconception does verge ever closer toward the truth. A world of Underground Men, cave-dwellers coming to the surface — like an urban paradise full of Kafkas, whether writing or murdering — these are the unrecognized nightmares that have nearly come true."

"I can see where you'd take offense because, ironically, the author was trying to give you some credit — for what you used to do, at least, before . . ." I trailed off and abruptly decided to down the last drops of my water.

"I don't object to anyone mentioning me," he continued, "nor do I object to being used as a figure of speech or a character. After all, I used myself as a protagonist all the time — just as Cervantes turned himself into Sancho Panza, whom I in turn used as a character. So if droll writers must use me as a character, then let them go right ahead. But they could at least do a good, accurate job of portraying me. You'll think me terribly vain to say this, but it's a comparison that often comes to mind: Jesus of Nazareth. In the last half century or so, as you probably know, bored artists have sculpted him in feces or painted him in urine. The intended message behind these crude works is often not as sacrilegious as Christians might assume. These artists did not assert, 'Jesus is shit; we piss on your religion' — forgive my language. No, what many of them purport to be criticizing has more to do with the concept and use of iconography itself, to which they object. 'Jesus himself is not shit, but one should not derive worshipful thought from an image of Jesus, because an image is actually a shitty, false idol.' Needless to say, the message gets lost for the simple reason that the art itself is, in common parlance, shitty. Whatever the intention behind them, the actual sculptures are clumsy and insulting to their literal subjects, to Jesus more than to Christianity or iconography. The urine paintings are childlike. The art is ugly. How much better, how much sharper, would the point have been made if these works of defecation were highly detailed masterworks. Then the audience would experience an awe turned into instructive guilt. They would be moved onto a path of self-searching once they realized that the work they began to admire for its intricacy was composed of something vile, and that their entire habitual study of such a religious work — and what they took from it — was wrongheaded and foolish."

"And you compare those poorly made, insulting statues of religious figures—" I began.

"To the stupid stories they have told of me," he concluded. "Kafka's Cute Penis. Or Kafka Gets Molested on the Beach and It's Beautiful. The most insulting aspect is knowing that they weren't meant to insult me at all. The authors were trying to flatter me, and my fans happily read right along. They are attracted by the titles and subject matter. I think they are wrong to want these things in the first place. It is a cartoonish game to them, and yet many still professed sympathy for me even after my killings began. And before you ask again — No, I didn't come back to murder my fans, though sometimes I think maybe I should have, along with all the undeserving brutes who would make use of my name." He ground his teeth audibly now and sneered. "The same way maybe your ancestors should come back and teach you a lesson too, Mayu, for doing them wrong, for using their surname in ways they—"

"Enough!" I shouted. "They're dead. Nothing can bring them back. They do nothing for me, and they're nothing to me. I don't want to live in strict accordance with my ancestors!"

"You act as if you had a clear choice in the matter," he said, folding his hands together in front of him. "Even leaving aside the question of how one person could resist cultural evolution, you act as if you were in a position to judge the present against the past fairly, when by definition everything you've heard about the past will be what the present has told you about it. So of course the negative aspects of your ancestors have been emphasized."

"If someone supports fascism," I broke in sharply, "or fosters a lineage that does — that pretty much taints everything else they've ever done. Don't you think?"

"People used to be able to pray to their ancestors for strength and courage," he said calmly. "But you can't allow yourself to do that. And so, accordingly, it's not an accident that you don't have any strength. And you don't have any courage. Not that I've seen anyway."

I banged my palm against the table, which caused one of my rings to make a loud but dull tapping sound. "Well, I'm brave enough to step in a room with the worst murder in recent memory. That has to count for something, and you know it. My thinking is that you don't even believe in what you're saying half the time. You're the one who's so fond of dubious, insane wordgames, but if I didn't know better I'd say Kafka, Faker, and Joker were all the same word."

He snorted, then took a sip of water before continuing:

"The present together with the past will be judged by the great Joker. And the People of the World will stay fascinated by their own common insanity, until it's too late. However 'dubious' Nostradamus was, you have to admit that the prophecy works better here, with me, than in any other context. You're right that I don't believe in it, but it is interesting and worth paying attention to — as are many of my other concerns — in order to sort of triangulate what the truth might actually be."

I just looked at him dourly.

He grimaced.

"What I am telling you, Mayu, is that I, at least, can judge between an assortment of civilizations that I have experienced firsthand, and I find yours sicker and more maddening than any other. You can call this a cliché or a typical complaint, but it is the truth and you had better contemplate it. Aside from all matters of sex or human rights, it is a question of courage and honor and vitality, or the lack thereof. When measured beside this society, even I seem a superman, and even I am behooved to become a bully — out of disgust. Merely writing about the dangers of bureaucracy did nothing: firstly, to suggest that the problem amounts to 'bureaucracy' isn't nearly enough, and secondly, the sort of people I grew to detest — they championed my work! So my idea was to become a personification of the system as I came to see it. I would be a cruel distillation of the cruel world. And yet after all the awful things I've done, you still would have wanted my approval, my autograph, as someone who once inspired you. But I don't approve of you or what you're involved with, not in any way. And you have to wonder, if lowly meek Franz Kafka would come back this way, what would your great-grandparents think, and what would they be moved to do if they could? No doubt, you wouldn't have to trace the branches of your family tree very far back to find even women and children who rang chickens' necks on their farm. Whatever you may think of them, whatever you project onto them, whatever of your own baggage you might want to saddle them with — They had honor and humility and weren't afraid to be human. They prayed to the heavens for permission, and prayed to the animals for forgiveness. If they could see your society, they would not stand for it. 'Obviously this is a time for mass murder,' they would conclude, after about two seconds' contemplation, 'and it is long past due. These silly shameful, shameless creatures would wipe themselves out eventually, of their accord and through their own mismanagement. But we may as well help the process along, to get it over with as soon as possible.' " ("I don't think — That's not true!" I protested to no avail.) "You are lucky that more of the dead haven't risen to carry through the same course of action I undertook. It would in fact be the sane, natural reaction. For decades now the 'zombies' — amongst a few other morbid fascinations — have represented your people's greatest, most obsessive fear; they haunt the recesses of your culture as if they were trying to tell you something — and it is no wonder. Generally, I suspect that if almost any person from the past could see what this world has become, every human instinct still firing in their brain would scream for apologies, blood, and restitution. And everyone who grew up in the world as it is now? As soon as they died they'd somehow gain the perspective to see what a gyp it was, living this way. And they'd come back if they could, to tear it all down."

"So what would you have had me do, then?" I asked as calmly as possible, not giving in to his emotional baiting and grandstanding. "I feel almost totally lost again, but I suspect you're more lost than I am, only you won't admit it. You just want me to contemplate all this? If I can't really judge or choose what kind of life I want anyway — if it isn't my fault and I can't have all the facts — then why I do feel like you're always blaming me?"

"I didn't say you couldn't have chosen a better, saner, more moral life for yourself — indeed, I think you could have, and you must acknowledge the responsibility you bear for having been willingly led astray. Granted, you probably are plagued with uncertainty and second-guessing. You sometimes scour back through your actions and think no major faults can be found, because most everything you do is considered correct and generally approved. The hours spent in offices and sitting rooms, the friendly restaurants and stores, chatting with your peer group about sanctioned subjects, taking care not to litter the streets or waste electricity, always diligently doing what you should be doing. And yet somehow, as you know, it is all going wrong." His eyes bulged and he allowed himself a sarcastic half-smile that to me seemed a touch overdone. "As to your ancestors, I was only defending the past from unjust and pointless demonization; you can't go back and live there, not even if you wanted to, but it's worth considering what your forebears would have thought of you."

His voice had suddenly gotten weak and the way he looked at me made it seem as though he might cry. It made me very uncomfortable, but I also pitied him, for a number of reasons.

"And do you wish you could have just lived a life, a regular life, back then when you were supposed to be living?" I asked, wetting my lips.

"No, but at times I think that an early natural death — something like the cover story I devised — would have been a mercy from God. In my case, at least."

"Forgive me," I said, because at the moment the notion of begging Kafka's forgiveness didn't seem wrong, "but this business about what my ancestors would have thought — I can't help but suspect that you only ask it for some reason connected to your problems with your father. Obviously a lot has been written about this, and not only by you. Some have said that he was a mean drunk who beat you and your mother, and maybe he raped you, and scarred you for life mentally or even somewhere physically. Since your return there have been dissenting voices saying that all of this background, much like your supposed 'death', was invented and exaggerated, and that it only serves to get you off the hook."

"I loved my father," he said, making it plain that he would address the matter in his own way. "He was wrong often. He was mean often. On the other hand, he supported his family, which he loved. I wish he liked me more, but I am not a very likable person. . . . Still, he should have liked me more."

"He was ungrateful for what he created," I said.

Kafka snorted. "And in that way he became the prototypical person of the twentieth century and beyond."

"What do you mean?" I asked, not excited by the prospect of another bizarre comparison.

"For nearly a hundred years they wanted to give me that 'credit', saying I was 'ahead of my time' due to my alienation from the modernity they loved so much. You see how they like to use me even in death — as if my life wasn't bad enough — making me into some kind of icon of everything I thought was negative? But my father was alienated too, separated from a good deal of the things and people right under his nose — and that sort of disjuncture in perception, quite unlike my own, can have much direr consequences for others. You see, I didn't like being so separated from so much that was real; but my father liked it and used the distance to his advantage."

"Obviously," I said, "we know that your father abused you, whether through neglect or—"

"You're not listening," he said, frustration rising in his voice. "Most every person in this city, this country, this world — It is as if you are all like my father; scarcely acknowledging your own creations. The future — as many of us can easily see, and as some of us can even bear to admit — is not turning out to be a success, and we react to this news with annoyance, just as my father grew annoyed with me once he noticed what a failure I was becoming. Like my father, people today refuse to take much responsibility for their role in these disappointing outcomes. But we are the fathers of the future. Even you, Mayu. We are not the mothers: we never grew this civilization inside us; it was never a part of us. But we are like the fathers: we launch our missives, our messages, our seeds of ideas out into the world — we take great pleasure in shooting these off, expressing and exerting ourselves, launching our influences out into the world, seeing what sticks — and eventually we fertilize something, and a new future begins to grow. But now we find ourselves surrounded by increasing unpleasantness and dysfunction, by ever more good-for-nothing, bratty, cruel children — they are our own progeny, yet we will not acknowledge them. Oh we play with them in our way, whatever good that does, for we are very much 'with the world'; we are overbearing fathers, yet negligent."

"Whose face did you make that mask out of?" I asked him as a means of changing the subject, but even as the words left my lips I realized how Kafka had steered me into this.

"It's my father's face, of course," he said, and whether it was true or not, somehow it made sense. "My last victim, who should have been my first. Or should I say not my last but my latest? In a way they're all equally late now. It doesn't matter. No one even recognized my father's face when I wore it, though that's been the standard explanation all along — ha! — that my father is responsible and that he's the secret! If only I had fought back against my father sooner — fought back in a normal, natural, limited way — none of this would have happened." He paused then, and to my eye he looked contrite. "And let me ask you, Mayu: Do you think this was overkill?"

"Y-yes, o-of course!" I stuttered, caught off guard.

"The revenge of children often goes far beyond what would be reasonable or just, for there's nothing to keep it in check. I've tried my best to show you all this. Even the weakest and most sympathetic person can become a rightfully despised monster. In our vengeance we resemble the father who did us wrong. If we could bear looking in the mirror we might see his face staring back at us — a mask of our own depravity, evidence of how much worse than him we've let ourselves become."

"Remorse at last," I said, genuinely impressed. "Bravo."

"Not remorse," he snapped. "I didn't stop killing because I felt sorry — quite the opposite. First I blamed myself; then I blamed bureaucracy; then bureaucrats; then the elite, the politicos and pied pipers; then the general public; and then, finally, I saw that it didn't matter. I was right and wrong about everything. Because we are all guilty, but we are all also victimized. We created a sort of cruel golem, because we thought it would be safe and remarkable to live inside such a formidable manmade creation. We used it to kill God and fuck Nature. Then it turned on us. And the retaliation of the victim is endless, unless someone stays his hand — and no one could ever stay mine. During my time away, every decade or so, I would return briefly to examine the world. I really was the 'Land-Surveyor' then, able to look down on it all. I wanted to come back and join you sooner, but every time I checked I found that things had gotten worse. No, that's not true; soon after World War II it got better, it had to get better, for a time. Still, it wasn't a place I wanted to live in again. Then, ten years ago, I decided that what I saw warranted murder. Today, however? Killing now would be a blessing when you all deserve worse than death. So I will leave you to the slower sufferings of your own making. Deny it all you want. Scramble away from the painful mess you've made — you can't hide forever. The torturous ordeal you put yourselves and each other through — inventing new and more ridiculous tactics every day, needing to strike each other harder the more senseless and numb you become, cutting each other deeper as you become more superficial — it far surpasses any conventional punishment I could deliver."

My jaw must have fallen open a bit, for as soon as he stopped talking I felt a fly buzz into my mouth. "Kaff!" I coughed, but then instinctively swallowed.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes," I said, gasping for air, "yes. It's . . . horrible. But there's nothing I can do about it now, is there?"

"Well," he said, folding his hands together. "There's no use in pessimism or inaction. Things have gotten bad and will get even worse, but that doesn't mean you are free to stop trying to make the best of it. Besides, what else do you have to lose?"

Evidently he hadn't seen the fly and thus assumed that my previous statement and question had been more abstract or existential.

"There's something in you, I know it," he continued, "something like me." I suppressed a chortle at his unintended irony. He was like a pesky fly sometimes. "I wish I could have met you when you were younger, but there's still some time left for you — and for me. You'll return to interview me again, correct?"

"If I'm allowed," I said. "Certainly. And next time I'll remember to bring some books with me. The only signed editions of Kafka in existence — those would be worth a lot."

"You know, Mayu . . ." he tilted his head and leaned to the side, "you don't have to stay here. Whatever contract you might have signed, there's always a way out. Are any of your friends lawyers?" He paused and raised his eyebrows. "What I would do is . . . Take a vacation. It's plain to see, you've done enough legwork. The first chance you get, you ought to take your leave. Even if you're unconvinced now, you'll thank me later. I guarantee, the apparatus you've lived within may look impressive and benevolent up close, but from a distance, well . . . It becomes obvious that your superiors bear no allegiance to the honest wellbeing of their subordinates. The traditional reward for a career in their service is fatigue, regrets, and irrelevance. You think that entering this employment set you up for life; really you've just been set up. But you won't owe them anything after today. This is the interview of a lifetime, underwhelming though it might have been at times — the interview, I mean, not your life." He chuckled and I wasn't sure it sounded genuine. "You might even say that, in retrospect, your job only existed in order for you to get this interview; and now that you've got it, there's no reason to stay at your station. It'd all be downhill from here on out anyway: every case after this, every interrogation, will seem beneath you. Only by completely changing your livelihood could you find a suitable, stimulating, worthy follow-up act. Luckily, you know as well as I do that as soon as this interview concludes, a very brief but very wide window of fame will open up for you — and you must escape through that window! There will be such interest in what you have to say that not even your employers would be able to keep you bound and gagged or refuse to renegotiate your contract. And, yes, you will owe all of this to me, but please don't let that debt — which I've already forgiven and forgotten — compromise the integrity of your report. You said earlier that you weren't sent in here with a clear agenda, and I believe you. You don't have a clear agenda, but your masters do. They're using your naïveté against you, and trying to use it against me also, hoping to see what kind of clues they can shake out of me, because they know your attractiveness and relative innocence would tempt me to try and impress you by hurriedly imparting all of whatever I think of as wisdom. By now they think they've tricked me and gotten their way, but they should have been more careful about what they wished for and what its consequences might be. I want to help you make a name for youself, Mayu. Together we can beat them. I know this must all seem gloriously delusional, but believe me: my words have set you in the right direction now, finally; for the first time in your life you really can trust that honest effort will be rewarded, and thus you can hope for the future in a reasonable way. You can save the both of us, eventually, break the two of us out of here, somehow. Thanks to me, you really can succeed at all this. It's obvious; I told you, I've been staging all of this just so I can get the message across to you. Together we can save the world, if you let us, if you want it. But if I can save even one person — just you — it will all have been worth it to me."

"Huh!" I threw my head back and laughed, not so much at the absurdity of his statements as at his vanity, which was greater than I suspected. And I thought, "Jesus Christ! Sometimes he never shuts up!" Still, for whatever reason, I was yet again developing a momentary fondness for him.

"You know, Kafka," I said, mimicking him with a grin and tilting to the side myself, "you don't have to try so damn hard to be such an individual. You're a character already; you can't not be yourself, and no one can take that away."

"No, no, you do have to fight!" he exclaimed, lurching toward me and slamming his fists against the table. "Or if it's not quite fighting, then it's at least resistance! Resistance is the only authentic action anymore! That is what I've seen, overlooking the earth. That's what I've experienced and that's what I've come to tell you."

"Oh you're so worldly," I said, really tiring of this now. My second wind gone as quickly as it had come.

"No, you are," he said, peevish and pathetic. "Too much with the world."

"Anything else?" I asked, standing up, stretching my lean figure, working the kinks out of my legs, and then tapping my foot. "Or was that the best parting shot you could come up with? The longer I talk with you, the more I think you really turned yourself in just to ensure that no one could ever take credit for catching you." I was quite impressed with myself for stumbling upon this theory, even if I didn't totally believe in it. I don't know where it came from; it suddenly just appeared in my head. "Like surrendering would prove once and for all that you were smarter than everybody else. But when I'm done with you, everyone will definitely see how smart you really aren't. Even if I have to get awfully rude and nasty and bring myself down to your level in the process."

Blushing, he too rose from his seat. "I hope I haven't accosted you too much," he said, yawning in an attempt to conceal his contrition.

"Of course not," I said, walking up to him. "I am a big girl, as you can tell."

"I've no one to tell it to," he quipped lazily, a sleepy expression on his face. "But who will you tell about me, and what will you tell them?"

"I'll sell my story to Hollywood," I said wryly, looking him in his tired eyes. "Though they'd probably film a reenactment and pass it off as a found-footage porno. The handcuffs, the cameras in the corners" — I nodded at one of the devices above us — "and the thrilling setting of discipline. Coerced interrogation. And degradation. All the fetishistic ingredients are present."

At that he gave a merry snort.

"Whatever you do with this, Mayu, try to paint a full portrait of me. That would be a nice surprise. And whatever you do, don't use me to try to prove any theories — and don't say that I couldn't help doing what I have done. I was not corrupted by my environment; quite the opposite. Or if you allow that I am corrupt, at least give me credit for doing it to myself. And no –isms; you'll never launch an honest literary career that way, not one of any use — not anymore, thank God!" Then he gave a laugh.

"Aside from the clinical report for the department," I murmured, putting my pleather gloves back on, "I can't imagine I'll be doing any sort of writing anytime soon. Last night I wrote a very long email — or, it was in response to a very long email. Mine was — Oh, it doesn't matter."

"If I might make a suggestion," Kafka began uncertainly, scratching his chin, suddenly very serious. "Write it in a different form. Something impressively baroque." I began to protest — it was as if he hadn't heard what I'd just said — but he waved me off. "I know you will write something. I know you'll try to produce something from all this. You will give in to the temptation. But whether your output would take the shape of a novelization, or some sort of celebrity biography . . . I must say that straight prose is just — forgive me again — shit. None of it is any good anymore. Prose hasn't been good in a century. I try reading this recent stuff — F. was into some of it — and it always seems so flimsy. My eyes pass over the words easily, but not without guilt; I feel like I must read 250 pages just to get one or two good ideas. Or else, just as likely, one finds far too many ideas, none of them given enough attention — few of them even warranting attention, or inclusion in the first place. All in all, it has embarrassed me to read these books; guilt accrues as I read them; I shrink in horror at all the wasted space, and sometimes at all the wasted effort. I survey the shelves and am moved to conclude: "Yes, this certainly is the silly, self-important, distracting sort of literature that would diffuse and disperse during the long fall of a civilization in denial. After the Second World War, or after detonation of the first atomic bombs, or maybe after the invasion of television — invention, I mean — after all that, no one can write good enough prose anymore. Others have suggested as much, but I can tell you for certain that it is true. Like an invisible shockwave shut off a specific aptitude in the genetic code of humanity."

Now it was my turn to chuckle.

"You're serious about this?" I asked, awkwardly putting my gloved hands flat and low on my hips. "What format, then, do you deem worthy of an 'Ode to an Incarcerated Kafka'? Would you allow me to represent our meeting as a collection of modern poems?"

"God no!" he laughed. "Don't break up my syntax! I need to be punctuated!"

"How about an epic poem? Longwinded verse for a longwinded conference."

"That . . . might work," he said, incomprehensibly impressed with my nonsensical suggestion. "Yes. Homeric verse. Nothing less, or else I'll go on a media tour denouncing you and your book, whenever it comes out."

"If you're still alive then," I shot back happily, not thinking and instantly deadening all good humor in the room.

"Bah!" Kafka said smugly, trying to shake it off. "I'll have escaped long before that. They'll never hold me. If I wanted to, don't forget, I could transform myself into a cockroach and slip through the cracks in the wall."

He crouched down on his knees and with shocking speed and agility — especially for someone handcuffed — he began scrambling around on all fours. As I smiled at his antics, he began a strange dance, kicking out one leg and shaking it parallel to the floor, then doing the same with the other, all the while with his face and chest pushed flat against the tiles, his hands cupping his belly. Next he squealed and threw himself into a spasm. The contortions looked frightful and painful. Just as I began to wonder whether this episode had become real and involuntary, he seemed to snap out of it — to a degree, at least — then crawled over toward me and started sniffing my ankles. It tickled.

"Hey, cockroaches can't smell," I called down to the creature below me. "Can they?"

He continued his routine, unfazed, now rubbing his cheeks and nose against my booties.

"Maybe cockroaches can't hear, either?" I said laughingly, picking up one foot and then the other, ostensibly trying to get away. "Stop it! Hey! Watch out my heels don't come down on your hands!"

Finally, he sat still. He looked up at me and grinned, grateful that I had humored him. Then he rose up to stand like a man again.

"I suppose you'd better get going," he said, putting on a brave face. I nodded. "Don't try to rescue me, Mayu. This is the organization's revenge on me: I cheated and hid for so long that even I forgot to feel guilty about it. And I attacked the people the way a wolf attacks livestock. — I was always a lone wolf, and it took me a while to find my teeth, but when I did . . . Nonetheless, I deserve to be put down by the farmer's gun. And even when admitting my wrongdoings, I still can't help but insult and strike out against the forces I feel threatened by, even though I've won something over on them an infinite number of times before. And because of all this, maybe it'd be best if someone made me stop talking for good and forever." He paused. "Then again, don't be surprised if some day we meet again on a beach in the Caribbean."

"For what it's worth," I told him as he helped me into my slim trenchcoat, "I think you'll be content here. Earlier I said it resembled your parents' home in some ways — but maybe that's not a bad thing. And now you'll take solace in seeing the sun creep across the sky each day — well, on the days it bothers to come out. Given your sensitivity, you'll get more out of how the sun throws the shadows of your barred window against the far wall, than many people outside — beset by the underlying grayness of urban existence, which you correctly assess — can get out of all sorts of activities and diversions. And you've certainly had a busy ten years; for better or worse, you deserve some monotony. Perilous as it might be — and you know more about the dangers of isolation than anyone — you are safer here than anywhere else. Saner here too. And so is everyone else." I winced then added, "We're safer and saner with you here, I mean. Not that we'd all be saner if we were in your position."

"No, I understood the right meaning," he said blankly, seeming to withdraw into himself again, steeling himself for his time alone.

I backed toward the door, but he abruptly lunged forward and caught my left hand, bowing over and kissing the black glove in a manner equally awkward and charming.

"And that is the whole, anticlimactic secret," he said, lifting his eyes to stare up at me. "But what are you crying for?"

Surprised, I brought my other gloved hand up to feel my cheeks. But when I took it away I saw no tears on it.

"Got you," Kafka said, smiling as he let me go.

The two guards stood at attention, waiting for me when I left the cell. (For just an instant I thought they might be Kafka's assistants in disguise — for they looked nearly identical! — but no, I saw the actual assistants later, in a different building, once the police had collected them from their hideout.) One guard asked me, "So how did it go?" As I searched for a proper response, the other guard shoved the first's shoulder and reproached him for having asked "the nice lady" such a rude question, the answer to which was "above our paygrade, idiot." Then they stepped over each other's words offering to escort me to the exit. But I brushed them both off, not caring if they interpreted this as an insult. Trotting forward at a good clip, I had no idea how to get out of the building. Which was fine. I felt like getting lost for a while.

I took his advice and withdrew . . . and in the end accomplished nothing. I wasted three years of my life, shunning almost everyone who had ever meant anything to me while trying to convert my experience with Franz Kafka into an epic paean for the 21st century's most famous murderer.

He died the night after I left him, as everyone knows. Walking to work early the next morning, I saw the hordes of bizarrely celebratory college students, which spontaneously appeared out of nowhere, even before I myself received the official word. I felt very puzzled: What on earth could have convinced these kids to wake up so early, start screaming happily, and begin proudly waving American flags for the first time in their young lives? Soon the reporters were there to record the scene, and it was all over the news that Kafka had been found dead an hour or so before. He had hanged himself from the ceiling by the cord of a light bulb — the same one that I hit my head against. As one might expect in such a sensitive matter, the camera footage was sealed in the interest of international security, and his body was disposed of at an undisclosed location — much as his original (empty) grave in Prague had been bulldozed years ago — so as not to create a rallying point for radicals. All this was normal procedure. Still, it didn't stop many denizens of the internet from concluding that Kafka was definitely "suicided", killed by our government in a way that made it look like he had done it to himself. And some of them even contended that the absence of a corpse and the abolishment of a grave constituted some sort of "wink", from Them to Us, hinting that there was never any Kafka, that he never really lived in the first place, and that everything said on the subject — my testimony included — all serves as some sort of mass public distraction.

I went on all the talkshows and my opinion as stated then remains the same to this day: Franz Kafka existed — he was as alive as you or me — and Franz Kafka killed himself. He was crazy and depressed. I didn't think he was suicidal when I interviewed him, but I didn't think he was sane either. Above all else he was unpredictable and unstable.

Chemical analysis of his makeshift mask, which he claimed to have made from his father, never told us anything. It appeared to be an authentic human face, but the flesh could have been genetically fabricated from any number of fashion labs. Many have intensely scrutinized his statement — somehow leaked to the press the day after his death — that his father was his "latest" victim rather than his "last". Some said that this indicated a plan to kill himself, that he himself was his final victim. I don't think that's true. More than once have I considered whether or not he thought he was victimizing me just by talking in my direction, and there I was his last victim. I've never shared that somewhat self-important theory with anyone until now.

In the weeks that followed, every media outlet encouraged me to plug my "upcoming book" on Kafka, which I hadn't even started yet. On several programs I made the mistake of mentioning that its format, as per Kafka's own request, would have to be "something like a cross between the Iliad and Hamlet — a drama for two players, written in meticulous longform verse". Had I not let those plans slip, I wouldn't have had to spend so much space here recounting my troubles, justifying the long gestation period, and explaining why the eventual textual offering has ended up looking and reading so very differently from what was promised in the early going. I've taken a lot of heat over the years whenever Kafka gets brought up: ". . . Yeah, and whatever happened to that weird woman doctor who talked to him at the end?" "Is she still off penning a 2000-page novel that's also one big palindrome?" "I thought it was a series of limericks, an imaginary conversation between herself, Kafka, Shakespeare and Homer Simpson." "Yeah, nothing less could really, really do the material justice." Those jokes hurt.

As I told you before, I lost my job, my significant other (that horribly persistent man who wasn't as easy to drop as I thought he'd be), and all my friends. Oh, it was my decision — to quit, to leave, to stop contacting — but once these things were gone I could never really get them back. I lived in a different space now, one that didn't tolerate backsliding or socializing, period. At least not until The Work was done, which never happened. It was hardly even begun. Sure, I accumulated a couple hundred pages of carefully arranged ramblings, grossly reshaping Kafka's words and my own until they conformed to a strict meter and rhyme scheme, but it all added up to nothing.

Was it a matter of poor advice on Kafka's part, or my own dearth of talent?

A year and a half into it, with my bank account and inheritance nearly depleted, I took a break from writing and did some rereading. First on my list was Kafka's Letter to His Father. Given the revelations he had imparted during our conversation, I thought the actual letter might tell me something more, something that would cause a few other puzzle pieces to snap into focus. I recognized the opening sentence immediately ("Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you"), but nothing that followed seemed at all familiar. This disconcerted me; until then I believed I had read everything Kafka ever wrote. As a whole, I found the letter very listless and predictable; it didn't help me at all. Neither did his other works. This time around I thought them extremely tiresome and wondered whether I ever really liked them in the first place, or whether I had fooled myself into believing that they held more meaning and grace than they actually did. Their pages may have been blank, for all they told me. The Castle was the worst of all. It was simply pointless. Less a novel and more like the most boring Andy Warhol video ever (complete with bad sex scenes) turned into prose.

After a while I didn't know which would be more frightening to learn: that Kafka was somehow right about everything — that the world really was so bad — just in a way that I couldn't grasp, or that Kafka was totally wrong about everything, and had perhaps purposely wasted so much of my time and effort. No middle position seemed possible. Often it seemed certain that Kafka couldn't be wrong about everything. He had to be at least partially right on something. But whenever I then tried to elaborate or draw conclusions from any seemingly sound point in any one of his arguments, I always found myself being led into completely inoperable positions beyond which no progress — or even existence — was possible. Every instinct I had told me that I should abandon Kafka and cut my losses, however substantial they were and however embarrassing it would feel to admit total defeat. At least that would clear the way for something different, whatever that might be.

Feeling like a Mideast peace negotiator — or like a stupid teenager who had finally decided to stop sulking and brooding — I struck a tentative ceasefire with myself. I put down my pen, put away my books, and decided finally to seek the advice of former friends, people I used to trust and wanted to trust again.

Some of them I wrote physical letters to; some of them I called on the phone; some of them I decided to track down in person. Every one of them was asked the same question, which was my excuse for communicating with them again: "Do you think things are getting worse?" Time and again I heard the same type of initial responses, and then each person went through the same process of qualifying their answers once I explained that I wanted them to think in the long-term more than the short-term. At first they each said, without hesitation, that things were obviously getting worse. They cited the politics of the day, the global financial catastrophe of the week, and the latest round of offerings from the world of entertainment (always proudly hitting a new all-time low). When pressed to reconsider the question in terms of centuries, however, they all changed their minds immediately and made flowery overtures to some combination of technology, science, and freedom, all of which were unambiguously good and more than made up for whatever human messiness might transpire. When I told them, honestly, that I wanted to agree with them but that Kafka would have said otherwise, they dismissed his pessimism and differing perspective as being due to his own misfortunes and the (hypothetical but evident) imbalance of chemicals in his brain.

This always left me wondering how far back this sort of thinking went, regarding the recent past, the distant past, and whether or not things were really getting better. My intuition told me that it had been this way for an awful long time: that people always believed that the last little bit of history was quite negative overall, or at best underwhelming, and yet they were quite convinced that longer periods of time showed a generally upward trend. How could this be, though? If almost every brief segment of the last several centuries has been judged unfavorably by those living through it, those in the best position to scrutinize it, then how could the long-term trajectory be considered quite good? Are the people's innate perceptions always a bit askew, and does this error lead to misperceptions of increasingly greater magnitude as history unfolds? To be more optimistic, on the other hand, I was perfectly willing to believe that somehow this paradox could prove truthful — that today could be worse than yesterday, and tomorrow worse still than today, but that somehow this century can turn out to be better than last century, and the next century will somehow be better still, even if none of these eras can seem nice and happy and great to those living through them at the time. I was willing to believe that this situation could be the case — that the laws of the universe might work in this mysterious and senseless way — but I'm not sure it actually is the case. Indulging in such paradoxes could obfuscate an already hazy reality and short-circuit my thought process. Then again, I had to admit that some foundational paradoxes might be true. I wasn't used to thinking this way, but I tried.

Soon after this last round of communication with the figures from my past (we did not keep in contact afterward, even though we said we would), I made the hard decision to scrap my manuscript, an entire year's work, plopping it in the recycling bin one Sunday morning with a mighty thud. I would have burnt it but my building code didn't allow fires. The very same day, I started over. I wrote in prose and exaggerated nothing. I've put it all down now exactly as it happened. Our dialogue is verbatim, true to the confidential audio recording that the police were kind enough to give me access to once a week, every week, for nearly six months now.

It seems like there should be more to it, doesn't there? I'll miss riding the omnibus to and from the prison. I'll miss the young guards who always smile at me and take off their hats in my presence, guiding me to and from the audio library every single time — because my memory and sense of direction still have a hard time functioning in that building, for whatever reason. I'm something of a legend amongst the city's law enforcement staff: "The lady who gave it all up, who got infected by the Kafka bug after a relatively brief exposure, and was never the same since. She's still pretty, though — for her age, at least." And I have to admit, that last part makes me blush a bit — even qualified as it is, even knowing that I will not remain like this for much longer. I put on a little eyeliner in the mirror each morning. I hide my still-chipped tooth. Everyday I dress in pleated skirts and Byzantine hosiery. The same nice clothes I've always worn, though now they're starting to seem too nice and unsuitable for me. In my opinion, at least. People go out of their way to tell me otherwise. I feel dirty and I don't know why.

Was there something I couldn't see, something I'm still missing? Or have I been thinking too hard about it, and is that the problem? Frequently I suspect that my original self, the little girl, could have figured all this out long before now. That genius child, the twelve-year-old with her pigtails and ribbons, her simple shoes and brown dresses, she could have patiently read all the books and transcripts three times over and calmly come to the right conclusions without even taking any notes. I was smarter back then — before my degrees, before I learned much of anything. I say that as a joke but it's probably closer to the truth than I could ever fully admit, and I'm scared to investigate why I suspect this.

Might I have grown less sensitive over the years? Less perceptive?

Whatever the failings of my previous life, it was better than the isolation and nothingness to which I've condemned myself (for a little longer, at least). There was always something more in me, the seed of something wishing to be free in a way that my wicked ancestors could have surely understood but I sure can't. And now I wish I could somehow go back to my childhood and terminate that seed before it took root. I know how evil that sounds. And this awful wishing has only led to problems. Still, the plant of freedom has grown within me, you see — Kafka watered it, finally — but it has no way to reach the sun. So instead the flower grew inside me like a parasite, wrapping ever more vines around my heart, snaking through my ribs, gestating itself like a cancer, and emanating from my undead stomach, trying to force its way out through my bellybutton. If only I didn't have this metaphorical bellybutton, this link and reminder of a past that prevents me from ever starting over again fresh with a clear conscience.

A few days ago I had a dream that I started prowling the streets at night, dressed in spandex and Kabuki makeup, and the press went wild with news that "F. has returned". Eventually two detectives, identical twin brothers, tracked me down and slammed me in a cell — in the cell, Room 255. Kafka was there again, resurrected for a second time, and just before I awoke from my slumber he told me that I had always been F., and that he should know because he created the character and cast the role, and didn't I remember how hard I had to fight to get the part?

As an atheist, I have denied the presence of anything divine. I have denied this both in my understanding of past, historical, anecdotal accounts of others and in what I have experienced myself first-hand. I have never witnessed a miracle and do not believe anyone else has, either — not if we are to take "miracle" to signify something of supernatural devising. Nor did I take my meeting with Franz Kafka to be any sort of divine communion or touch of otherworldly phenomenon: it was two people sitting in a room talking; and for me, it was all in a day's work. Only in my memory, when I began to replay this day, did he — the great "HE" of his Aphorisms — and the experience itself begin to take on certain ineffable characteristics that I could not find precedent for in my "book of life", so to speak. When I was younger I stupidly thought of Kafka as a saintly "prophet", because so many literary svengalis had billed him as such. I now know him as something else, something equally divine in its own way. The thing that sat by turns clumsily, lazily, and all too properly on the chair across from me was more like a demon that for some reason had been banished out of hell. He returned to earth with flames of anger that burned for ten years, the fire finally dying out on the day before our encounter, when he gave up his strange war.

My work, my life — such as it is — and my history have all in retrospect started to seem Kafkaesque. Not in the usual sense. Nothing in my waking reality has ever seemed all that strange. Quite the opposite. No complicated, hierarchical system was out to get me. Other people have been understanding and kind to me. I've been offered variations of my old job back many times, with full benefits, and I could set my own hours. But it's all Kafkaesque in its boredom, its prosaic elaborateness, its incompletion. Nothing ever reaches a satisfying conclusion; nothing can ever bring itself to become clear and definite. Everything hangs in the air like Kafka in his cell, and beyond the dubious "morose relish" enjoyed by some people, beyond the horrifying celebrations of others — especially of the youth, who barely knew him or cared about his crimes but readily cheered his death simply because the media told them to, or because they knew the media would film it — beyond all this there lies a pity, a regret, and a universal despair which only a few of us sense. He died too soon. He died without giving us the answers we needed. He died before we could question him just one more time, to finally stumble upon and ask the one question that would unlock the whole apparatus and bring our own mysterious illnesses to light.

This world of mine — if I could ever get far enough outside to look back on the whole thing — must appear so much better than it actually feels to live through, moment after moment. But Kafka said it was the other way around, that the current apparatus should look good up close, and only distance would reveal the flaw in the big picture. Either way, it's as if the last God grew bored and left once he finally admitted that no Great Work could really be constructed here anymore, that the materials had proven deficient and that the builders had all grown old, irredeemable, and rusty. And now I'm left with the mess, left to pick up the pieces and try to make the best of it — but to do so, to attempt a reconstruction, would be tantamount to saying I can succeed where the previous Creator failed. And I just don't have that amount of hubris in me. He built from nothing, or from himself. He painted on a clean canvas. I might live in a clean city, but I see a trash dump when I close my eyes.

And then I open them to find that my apartment itself has gotten so much messier since the last time I really looked, and maybe that's the clearest sign of all that something's gone wrong. My cherished minimalism gave way at some point, but I don't know when, and while scavenging through the debris — the highend magazines, vintage clothes, candy and paperwork — the line between public rubbish and personal treasure gets blurrier than ever. What items, hidden somewhere in this garbage collage, would really be worth sifting through? Which warrant my scrutiny? Bank statements, favorite t-shirts, ancient valentines — if I don't securely dispose of them, or hold them close enough to my heart, could someone steal them away and suddenly know me too well — or worse, get a skewed idea? I'd prefer to either leave it all untouched, or throw it all away without looking. Is it painful to remember these things because of the memories attached, or because the memories are so pathetic? Some are so dusty, I haven't looked at them in years.

I'm a girl from Japan who grew up in America. I know two languages and did a lot of good work with psychology. My friends like me and I like them, even if we don't see each other much anymore. I can't write what I promised someone I would write for them, so I wrote this instead. But what I've written, and the experience of writing it, has done something awful to me. I think I'm trapped here, no matter what I do, and that's no way to live. I think the writer whom I was supposed to write this for might have somehow gotten inside me, or gotten into my life, or my story — yet every time I focus on a piece of myself, or a piece of my life or story, the writer isn't actually there. Not really. I try different lenses and different perspectives. None of it does any good. And while he would say that nothing here is even supposed to make sense, I know that some of this makes a lot of sense. It has to.

Hope against hope, I want my example to somehow do someone some good, even if I myself stand condemned. If you're in a maze like I am, but haven't been there as long as I've been here, you should try like hell to remember the way out. You weren't born in the maze, so somewhere in your mind must lie a thread of memory you can trace backward, to exit through the entrance. Don't let the overwhelming, arresting question of what you'd even do once you got out of there prevent you from trying your hardest to escape before it's too late. And it may not seem so, but at any moment it could suddenly be too late. Of course, Kafka would say that it's already too late, that this maze may as well have been built just for you, despite so many other people having starved to death in it over the last century at least — for you see skeletons and insane, emaciated forms everywhere, and some of them seem to die happy. Kafka would say that you only find yourself in the maze because you have recognized the absolute truth of your surroundings — but that once you first knew yourself to be in the maze, there was no way to stop thinking about the maze ever again, and thus no way out of it. That's the paradoxical parable. He would say that it's all for nothing, so we might as well laugh at it. And he would say this decaying maze you find yourself in is the only maze there ever is, the only maze there ever was. He would say there's no evidence anything exists outside of the maze. That there is no outside, and that you were born here.

But this isn't a Kafka story. This is real life.

•

###

### •

###  Letter to a Friend

It is easy to excite common, lowbrow interests by presenting irrelevant stories and curious new faces, all of which pass like gaseous forms across magic screens. But it is far more difficult to sustain interest by means of the same few objects, the same few subjects, without the aid of wonderful adventures or lantern lights. The simplicity, repetition, and focus of such 'impoverished' or 'austere' works make it possible for their author to penetrate deep into the souls of readers. Other performers may be more popular than Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but few have gotten as far under the skin of the audience — and that is why I write the way I've written, in my previous books and in these Confessions.

Because of this I am hated — but only when I am remembered by name. After the fiery moment passes, as soon as my enemies forget about me for even the smallest length of time, then not only do they cease to despise me but once again my ideas and opinions begin to influence their own — without their knowing it. And so, despite their best efforts, they find themselves striking ever closer toward my lines of thought — while thinking that they are blazing their own trails. It's no matter: I will convert them to my way even as they profess to have rejected me. How curious: The more they say they hate me, the more they become like my adopted children. Not that I want them!

. . . However, all of it is dead — all of these bodies, figurative, literal, and textual; all of these screens, stretched skins, parchments and palimpsests, blank and defiled sheets. Others deny this and dance with the corpus, but I have worn these bodies like clothes and I know beyond all doubt that they are dead. Moreover, I know the reason, the cause of mortification. Believe it or not:

C'est moi.

But it shall all come to life again and return eventually, inevitably, supposedly. That is the story, and I hope — for the sake of my soul — that it is true.

•

Dear Contact,

You probably wondered why I couldn't respond properly to your New Year's email. The simplest explanation of the delay, and of our estrangement in general — or at least my part in it — would be to say that I am afraid of you. I am afraid to find out what you are like now, because doing so might prevent me from assuming the best, which is something I have been trying (with moderate success) to assume about everybody — everybody I don't really know anymore, and everybody I never met in the first place.

For a while I believed that the friend I knew was dead — what little might remain of him would have grown or morphed or fermented or blossomed, and become something else altogether. Surely you couldn't be very much like the person I knew and felt such affection for so long ago. I mourned the loss. And I don't say that callously or arrogantly; I really did feel bad and in some ways blamed myself. You who meant so much to me were gone, removed from my life — and yet you were still out there. Eventually I had to enter into a new way of thinking about you, paradoxical but better than endless mourning, blame and uncertainty: Against all evidence and intuition, I would assume the best, assume that you were in some indefinable and really meaningless sense still my friend, and yet I would never check in on you — even though, if you really were still my friend, there would be no reason not to communicate with you. . . . But then, finally, you made the decision to contact me. And I couldn't help but play along, and try to make our friendship work again. And yet you — you who contacted me first, so tentatively, so bravely — never really got around to making time for the big long difficult conversation that we both agreed needed to happen. You would propose a time, but then you'd never be available, or you'd never answer my messages at that time. I didn't even bother responding to your last email, in which you tried to set things up once again (and who knows, maybe on the tenth chance you might have actually shown up at the appointed time). But soon there will be this long letter for you to read instead — this letter that I am writing now — and now I am forced to realize anew that I don't know who you are, reader, for you could be anybody now.

This message has been done the old-fashioned way, delivered on paper, so you may have the pleasure of throwing it away, burning it, or misplacing it in violent indifference. I will insist that you choose one of these three options, hopefully the first or second.

•

Where have I been and what have I been doing? Who have I been associating with? These are the questions people have wanted me to answer for several years now. Below, I will go a good way toward answering them for you.

This past weekend an old school friend of ours — Mort — got married. (Mort whose name means death but who is the only one of us who as yet has brought forth life.) I attended and James attended but you were not there. I thought I might see you, but no. (Not you, you who once chastised me when I suggested that these formative friendships might be hard to maintain after we all moved to different places. You who adamantly proclaimed that the friendships would continue — you turned out to be the one in our circle who did not keep in contact with any of us.) The wedding was nice and I had a lot of fun.

At the reception I found myself in inebriated conversation with one of Mort's older cousins, a man who was four or five grades ahead of us in school. He told me that he had been looking forward to seeing me again. Almost ten years ago, he said, he had been following me online (when I was still online), liked reading my posts (back when I would post things), and had 'made a mental note that this guy is onto something, and it'd be worth keeping him [me] in mind in the future.' I was flattered and asked him what exactly I'd written that had made this impression on him. He didn't remember but said some of it was a response to the general topic of 'orthodoxy' as critiqued by someone else who went to school with us, whom I'll mention to you later on (hint: his initials were K and J). Then this cousin of Mort's asked me what I'd been working on lately. So I told him about the fairly long short story I'd just finished, and I told him about this very long letter that I'd been planning to write, for which I'd been making a ton of unorganizable notes. Then he asked me where I had been and what I'd been doing, so I told him that too, and he was more impressed than he should have been. But this cousin of Mort's had also been to Ireland, so we talked about Ireland for a while. He said the media in Ireland was too liberal but that the people were too conservative. I didn't have an opinion either way.

We got on the subject of Irish literature and (since I was somewhat drunk) I decided to make an analogy between James Joyce and Ireland, on the one hand, and a serial killer and his perfect victim on the other. 'The serial killer is always searching for that perfect victim, the prey that he can perversely and creatively honor . . . and also revel in destroying at the same time. And remember that a serial killer always first starts to covet what he sees when he's younger. Those early obsessions . . . crystallized into how he thinks of one particular person or entity. Ireland itself was like this "perfect victim" for Joyce. You've heard the adage about how Dublin or Ireland itself could be rebuilt by searching for pieces of it in Joyce's books? Think about that in terms of a serial killer chopping up a victim and preserving the pieces as a sort of "shrine". He wants to defile his victim but he also wants to glory in the meaning of it all, which for him is very personal and universal and debased and profound, all at once. It is one of those very twisted, passive-aggressive relationships that Modernity facilitates. And I don't hate him, but Joyce was not a nice man. You can think of him like a serial killer who never got over his first intended victim. In his mind he continually spread the Irish entrails in ever more elaborate and artistic patterns. He needed to write about this, and needed others to read it and see what he had done to and with and for Ireland — the same way a serial killer eventually wants the public to know what he has perversely accomplished. Ulysses isn't pornography in the traditional sense, but Joyce certainly did get off on what he was doing, in a very narcissistic way. This must be admitted. There is intellectualized prurience in what he wrote. There's no getting away from its intentional, refined sickness and the way he tortures as much meaning as possible from every word and reference. And he encourages us to do the same.'

Mort's cousin casually and readily agreed with all I had said, took another sip of the 'special concoction' he was carrying in a hip flask, and then asked me, 'You care for Flann O'Brien?' The party was loud, so I misunderstood this as 'You can't fight O'Brien,' which I thought was a very interesting non sequitur and probably the best response possible to my sordid screed. 'Is that a reference to 1984?' I asked, and before he could correct me I added, 'Uh. Hm. Yeah, I generally agree. You can't fight O'Brien.'

•

A long time ago — about fifteen years ago — you asked me for some 'reassurance' that I didn't hold you 'in the same bracket with the rest of them'. This inquiry came in the context of teenage misanthropy on both our parts (mine more than yours). You wanted this reassurance of our friendship in response to my writing you a very terse, superficial, sarcastic note. We had exchanged copies of our respective senior portraits, and I had written an intentionally silly and snotty message to you on the back of mine. You suspected (rightly so) that this was given in jest, that I wouldn't honestly be so cold and glib with you, but you wanted to make sure that I was joking, and that you were getting the joke. Even then I was struck by the disjuncture in how we perceived things, in what you perceived me to be perceiving, and in the somewhat contradictory way you valued me and my opinions. Firstly, I found it puzzling that you would even have to worry that I considered you no better than 'the rabble' (to use a term favored by another whiny writer — aforementioned — whom so many people including ourselves have liked and supported over the years, though he would probably hate us). You were obviously my greatest friend and the person with whom I enjoyed spending so much time. I never did anything to cause you to second-guess the value I placed on you and our friendship, not back then and never in the years afterwards — and that is part of why this current letter has been so hard to write. Obviously, I do have reservations now, based on reminisces and inferences about who you currently are. I also question where exactly your identity might currently intersect with the general culture — whose 'unpaid agents' and proselytes I want nothing to do with, because the propaganda they breathe in and out smells very toxic to me, very boring and dismaying. That is one way of putting it. If you are a great repeater of generic propaganda, I want nothing to do with you.

Another reason why this present composition is so difficult for me is simply because too much time has passed with very little contact between the two of us. In the last five years we have had almost no communication. But even before that, from about seven, eight, or nine years ago: your emails to me were always shorter than mine to you; your attempts at getting in touch with me were less frequent than my overtures toward you; you undertook less effort to meet me than I undertook to meet you. You never visited me at either of my colleges or universities, despite being invited, whereas I visited yours, sometimes at your request and sometimes after suggesting to you that I visit. It is true that four years ago you invited me to go on an overseas trip with you, to Central America; that was kind of you, but it puzzled me, since the offer came out of nowhere, since we had not had even moderate contact in the years leading up to that. In truth, even when we toured Europe together nine years ago, I thought it a bit strange even then, that after some laxity of engagement on your part (the estrangement was already beginning to set in), you would want to go on a long trip with me, to several countries that neither of us had ever been to before. Perhaps all of these dates and feelings seem jumbled to you now, or perhaps not, but suffice to say that for me I have only perceived a long, sad, inexplicable decline of interest on your part, for basically a decade now. Yes, my interest in you has also plummeted, but I followed your lead in walking away, only ever taking a step further away from you once I saw that you had taken yet another step further away from me. Perhaps — probably — there are good reasons for this on your part — I have character flaws, I have made mistakes — but whatever it was about me that might have put you off at any given time, you never brought any of it to my attention. If you thought I was going wrong, you never tried to stop me. And in the last four years you have only returned sporadically, to offer the idea of my going on long trips with you, or to offer the idea of me coming and visit you again, when I cannot recall a time when you ever came to visit me in any place I was living.

Very possibly I am a person worth avoiding, as you have progressively done, more and more (though, as noted, not without ever less frequent relapses into seeking out my friendship again). Maybe I am a bad person. Indeed, at various times I have been called a 'centre of pestilence' and a 'contaminator' by people who were paying me perverse compliments and not entirely joking. But, as I say, if you noticed something going wrong in me, you owed it to me to tell me. On the other hand, I am guilty myself and feel that I owe you an explanation — more than an explanation. Some friend I would have turned out to be if even at this late stage in the game I didn't try, on some level, to warn you that you (amongst so many others) were going wrong. That's a big part of what this long letter will be about.

I do want to explain myself, and I do want to somehow alert you of certain contemporary dangers in a way that might help you (or at least give you something worth thinking about), and in some ways both of these matters amount to my trying to convey the same thing: To explain how I have changed is the equivalent of saying what I think is wrong with the world. And I don't believe I am risking too much by assuming that you also might think something has gone horribly wrong with the world. Despite all the usual and predictable reasonings, explanations, and scapegoats, you sometimes possibly feel a sort of creeping dread that the real problem, the real threat, remains invisible, and is thus perhaps imaginary (N.B. It isn't). I would want to tell you what I think is wrong with the world, what is harming most people in it, but at the same time I would almost want to protect you from this information and from considering what it might make you consider, because I don't see a way out of this predicament and because it is very difficult for some people to live with these questions once they hear them explained and phrased in certain ways. I want to make my thoughts on these matters as clear and comprehensible as possible, but at the same time I believe that probably the best thing for you to do would be to dismiss them all out of hand as nonsense.

I want to say impossible things.

For now, let me describe the problem (your problem) this way: There is a secret agent after you. He has been following you for quite some time. He has gotten inside your head. As the years have gone on, his knowledge of you and his control over you have increased. He cares nothing for you. Maybe he will kill you; maybe not. I, however, am onto him. But at this point I don't even know if you'd want to be alerted of your surveillant, your subtle manipulator. For you know nothing of his existence, and yet you identify with him very strongly, sympathize with him, and would defend him against me to the death.

My concern in all this is as follows. Even though I am quite happy to live in this world, despite having come to understand it in the way I do, I know that the process of coming to this understanding can be a very difficult and miserable one. I don't have the right to change your mind — I don't like forcing people to change in ways that are painful — but if you come to agree with me in much of what I write below, in a sense that would only speed the unpleasant information's infection of you and cause you unease and disease. You may not want me in your life after reading this — and a good part of me is counting on that.

Thus, the reason for presenting things to you in this way, with all of this secrecy, elaboration, and prosaic ornamentation — the very opposite of a terse, superficial, sarcastic note — is to construct a missive so tedious, dubious and serious that a response from you would be impossible, because you would not want to try and write back. Everything about this is designed to annoy you, unsettle you, and make you uncomfortable — because that is what would be necessary either for you to understand this information — or else for you to let these matters go in the quickest and easiest manner for the both of us. At the same time, however, I want you to read this and I want it to have an effect. You once told me, when I first showed you pages of that awful roman à clef I wrote when I was 17 or 18, that 'everything in it excited me [you] in spite of my prior knowledge in much of what was recounted. It appeals to so many different sensors all at once. It's like reading something you're not supposed to be reading, like private documents or something.' That was exactly what I was going for in what I wrote then, and it's quite close to what I'm going for now. Only now I want this letter to be something you feel you have to read even though you have an uncomfortable, foreboding sense that makes you wish you could stop reading it, yet you can't because you have a horrible need to know what I'm going to say to you and about you. It's something addressed to you, but for your own peace of mind . . . maybe you're not supposed to be reading it.

What did I call the character based on you, in that awful 'novel' I wrote so long ago? Alex Comfortable. I named you that because back then you were the most comfortable person to be around. Nowadays, however, the name seems more appropriate for another reason: because you have chosen the comfortable route in life, going along to get along, working hard only in ways that support the system and provide yourself with monetary reward. Very possibly that is unfair. But that is how I cannot help but imagine you, based on our past and last encounters and exchanges over the past, last decade. And that is dismaying to me, to say the least. So with this letter I want to do my best to make you Alex Uncomfortable.

However, I have gotten ahead of myself and far off-script.

Continuing to recount your old query of 'reassurance', the second thing that puzzled me was how you went on to say that if I did hold you 'in the same bracket with the rest of them', then, while you 'would be quite disappointed', still you wanted me know that you would respect my decision: 'If that's the case . . . so be it. I think no less of you, or of our friendship.' This troubled me on various levels. — Look, you either respect me or you don't, and you either respect yourself or you don't. If you respect me and my opinions, which you ostensibly did — a bit too much even, in my opinion — then any criticism I might make of you should matter to you. Further, if you had a modicum of self-respect, then surely you should be uncomfortable with the notion of my not respecting you: How could you not think less of our friendship if it was suddenly revealed as being an unequal relationship in which one party viewed the other as no better than 'the rabble'?

But this was all hypothetical then, and in some measure it still is. Then I obviously did not think of you as being no better than just another random peer; it never would have crossed my mind. Now, however — and in truth for years now — I have had to fight the suspicion that you were slipping into the faceless crowd. Whether or not you were becoming a 'worse person', I couldn't say, and can't say — and the only brightside of not knowing much about you anymore is that I am thereby prevented from knowing for sure just how bad, or how typical, or how outstanding (in all the wrong ways) you may have become. For despite the assumptions others might have made of me — might still make of me — I do not want to be critical of 'the masses' or of any individual in particular, least of all you. But sometimes it can't be helped or avoided.

And that is the last issue I would make regarding that old 'reassurance' question of yours, which has seemed the best way for me to begin this letter. Your assumption that I hated the masses is the final point of contention — but it should have been the first, for its matter underlies everything: the assumption that I perceive general humanity to be uniformly bad and awful. Yes, as noted above, I have been misanthropic, but never to the extent that others — particularly those who don't know me well — have supposed. Repeatedly have I encountered this suspicion in people: they suspect that I dislike them or dislike everyone, though I have never given them a real good reason to think this of me. And the strangest aspect of this phenomenon, which occurs in my proximity and seems to follow me around, is that people, rather than becoming angry with me, almost always seem to agree with this perceived version of myself who is so critical of them — as if it were a guilty pleasure of theirs. It seems they suspect that a judgment should be made against them, and they use me and misinterpret me as an excuse to feel this self-criticism. Henceforth they become nervous near me and they fear me, all because of what they think I'm thinking about them and what sharp, devastating comments they presume I'm preparing to throw their way.

I do not know why my presence seems to bring about this bizarre premonition in others. I am not 'anti-social' — I am not KierJones — I absolutely enjoy talking with people, especially close-knit groups in which everyone can really get to know each other and know that they are being understood — but there is this idea out there that I am antisocial and dislike contact. Perhaps this is due to some combination of my much-maligned reputation for being 'smart', and how that interrelates to how my often quiet nature (when I am in large groups) is punctuated by a slightly unorthodox sense of humor.

Or perhaps people really have sensed something genuinely critical within me, something I myself don't even know is there. If so, it's been there since my childhood, something that I could never give voice to, some ineffable sense that the world was very wrong and was heading blindly toward unprecedented disaster. And yet others' interpretation of this very hidden, very abstract, grandiose dissension that I might (I stress, might) make regarding existence itself, Earth itself, or God Himself . . . causes them to think of me as simply 'stuck-up', as if I were about to make fun of their clothes or taste in music. If there is any good reason for them to suspect me of having a deeply hidden critical nature, of which I myself am not even aware of possessing, then surely it should have to do with more important matters; but when pressed they put it into petty terms. 'He thinks he's too good to watch the movies most people enjoy.' Or 'I sense that he doesn't watch as much television as I do, and I subtly press him on this issue only to find out that, indeed, he is more than content with the fact that he doesn't watch as much television as I do, and this makes me feel bad, so I will passively blame him while also guilt-tripping myself into respecting him all the more.' Something like that is what goes on. Something very wrong and obnoxious. Regardless, it all says more about their own obsessions and inner fears than it does about my serious judgments, correct or incorrect, few of which I have ever even made known, until now.

A few pages ago, did you dare blame me for writing that I do not want to have anything to do with proliferators of propaganda? How can I be blamed for this when we are all annoyed by advertisements of all sorts? Am I to be blamed simply for making it very clear — that which is already clear in most everyone's minds — that many people nowadays cannot help but repeat very trite slogans or modes of thought, that this seems like a disease that individuals can contract, and that it is incurable and incorrigible, and that I want nothing to do with it? If someone has fallen into the condition in which he or she cannot help but be terribly talkative and concerned about the boring and nonsensical news of the day, then I cannot make apologies for wanting nothing to do with that person. I do not hate them, but want them as far away as possible. They are trying to invade my mind; I am not trying to invade theirs.

It is not I but the system you support that hates people.

At this point you will notice that this letter will begin to resemble emails of a format in which we used to communicate, and that is because the entire syllabi of themes I'm trying to cover would be better served by headlines and (fairly) short paragraph bursts.

0. 'In Modern Society, Everyone Is Mentally Ill': Because the whole situation is untenable. From the mass murderers and serial killers . . . to the obsessive-compulsives . . . to the people who are addicted to all sorts of things, substances, behaviors, ideological statements . . . to the people who are ready to support the oppression of any group, foreign or domestic, that the government or military or media might target . . . to the adult sports fans who are literally worshipping children's games . . . to those who are power-hungry, money-hungry, or junkfood-hungry . . . and to the people who are arguably the most insane of anyone, because they go around listlessly, thinking that all of this is fine and normal. — There is a baseline level at which none of them can even help it; of course they'd be insane, and should be understood as such. Within a situation of work (most of it abstract, unnecessary and contrived), media (omnipresent), constant educational 'nudges', and the environment of a city, which demands and encourages hive-like overpopulation — all of this alienates people from each other and alienates individuals from themselves; all of this breaks down the will, wellbeing, and constitution of any and all human beings . . . There's no way anyone involved with any of this could maintain a degree of health or sanity rigorous enough to sustain our species in any favorable way. When you consider the amount of psychotropic medication, as well as the amount of economic medication (bail-outs, 'pumping', bubbles, printing money, grants, subsidies), that needs to be constantly administered to a substantial and growing proportion of the society, simply to ease the endless stress and dysfunction that this way of life is causing to everyone and everything — You can't consider this society anything other than mentally ill. And we are all supporting it; we are all a part of it and can't not be. There is no way to exist here without being involved within the anti-human process that is dragging everything down. Because of our necessary involvement, each and every one of us can be diagnosed as insane. The word sanity comes from the Latin for health. We are behaving in and contributing to our collective and individual unhealth. Thus, we are all insane — to some degree, at least, probably a degree larger than we would want to admit. Human beings are simply not capable of handling this social, physical, or psychological environment in a healthy way; and it is getting worse, because everything keeps escalating.

Is there some underlying sense, in your head, that somehow things could get better for no reason? Do you actually think there's a chance that could happen, when all the evidence you've ever seen and all the experiences you've ever had continually show that on every real 'macro' level things are just getting worse and/or weirder and/or crazier and/or less emotionally, financially, psychologically, pragmatically feasible? And haven't you noticed how, when confronted with these dire circumstances, many people will try and turn to science and technology to somehow get us out of this mess — when to a very, very large extent these things are responsible for augmenting, if not outright creating, all of these problems in the first place? I guess people need to believe that somehow, in some unknown, unclear way, 'things could get better'. They need to tell themselves that to go on living and making the best of things. And it is good that they go on living and making the best of things. But what a sad and infuriating state of affairs — the need to believe in such a colossal lie in order to live, to live under the mistaken assumption that everything will work out fine.

They — we — are devoted to artificiality and the technologically mandated ways of life. They — we — are content with serving this system; it is their — our — master and captor, but we are more like 'happy captives' than 'happy slaves', to reference a term from ancient Greek theater. Slave would imply that some sort of work needs to be done. Slaves at least have a clear use and a usefulness, values which we do not possess. For us there is nothing that really needs to be done; most of us are quite useless, and most of the self-described work that we do is more or less busywork — actions and duties with no clear purpose, only extenuating contrivances. There is absolutely nothing that goes on in an office building that can honestly be considered 'important' or vital to life on earth — quite the opposite. Human beings do not really need anything that comes from paperwork, data, or documentation; this is just building more walls for a system that is already labyrinthine. And no matter how many large and impressive hallways and windows we build around us, with ever more impressive architecture and infrastructure, the sense of existential uselessness always keeps finding us again and imprinting us again and again with boredom and dread. Humanity, especially in the West, has developed an elaborate guilt complex to mirror the complex network of artificiality around it: on a (usually) subconscious level we feel guilty because we have so much stuff, so much knowledge, and yet we feel somehow wrong, because to a large extent we are not really living or making good use of what we've been given. Thus, to go back on what I said above, a master/slave dynamic does develop, but it is a somewhat farcical one, despite its intensity: I mean 'master/slave' less in the sense of economic exploitation and more in the sense of sadomasochistic role-playing. People put up with the increasing indignity of Modern life simply because — as the anti-human system develops around them, and as they further ingratiate themselves to it, looking for its perks — they feel this sense of profound guilt. They want to feel indignant because they feel they deserve to feel that way. In a sense they want to be punished in certain ways and also see others punished in ways that they can accept, predict, and enjoy watching. They want to see certain classes or types of people experience economic hardship. They want to see celebrities undergo drug problems. They want to feel certain shocks and pinpricks of pain and displeasure themselves, as developments encroach upon their own sense of humanity. On a very deep and true level, they believe that humans deserve this denigration, because, after all, they have gone along with the program thus far. And how could they not? There is no way around it but still it is wrong, and at times it seems like justice when someone — anyone — everyone — is being punished for the circuitous madness and sense of blasphemous excess all around. It is a sick affair, in which humanity's mass mental illness plays into and augments our increasingly artificial society, and vice versa.

It bears repeating that the people who think that somehow this is all more or less okay are the craziest people on earth. Thinking that things will magically work out, or that it isn't a big deal that the problems we have seem to always keep getting worse and worse and worse without recourse, but 'Oh well, whatta ya gonna do? Things'll work themselves out.' — These hopeful sentiments are as delusional and desperate as anything dreamt of in apocalyptic 'rapture' visions. You may as well be thinking that Jesus is just going to come down and fix everything. And a lot of religious people actually believe that will happen. But a lot of religious and non-religious people display similar traits and believe something just as crazy: I mean this business about everything just magically 'working out' as we 'evolve', i.e. as we continue to allow an out-of-control technological society to drive us into the ground even further. As Aldous Huxley said:

'The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found amongst those who appear to be most normal. . . . They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of individuality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized.'

So as an aside, let me say now, Alex, that when I once knew you, you were a fairly coherent individual — as was I, a fairly (not totally) coherent individual. Now you very possibly think me an incoherent individual — and I am worried that you are not an individual at all. Both of us are probably wrong in these fearsome suspicions — but not totally wrong.

Sixty years ago, the silly Beat writers said that all of the best minds were the mad ones and that the only people they wanted to hang out with were the crazies. As always, the supplement of most any left-leaning drive is 'Be careful what you wish for': Now everyone is crazy.

But even before the Beats, Aldous Huxley said that in the near future (our present) everyone would indeed be more or less insane. There is, however, a bit of a saving grace in that we are not all insane in the exact same way, and those able to carve out a unique sort of insanity for themselves will at least be able to gain crucial perspective on the dangerous insanities of those around them. As Huxley succinctly put it: 'Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.' Yes. That is how it goes.

There is a risk one faces in writing any sort of a letter like this, and that is for the recipient to label the writer insane. And so, frankly, I admit it. Yes, I admit it; and I have given and substantiated the not flippant disclaimer that 'Well, we are all insane', myself included, and I now invite you to try and learn something from the carefully overwrought verbal byproducts of my unique form of insanity, for it is likely to be very different from your own, and thus it will no doubt — in spite of and in a sense because of my particular idée fixes — offer perspectives on otherwise hidden truths that you in your insanity will not have noticed.

1. I Am Not a Dissident: I have told you that this perception of me as a misanthrope is unfounded. But — and somehow I think you might expect this of me — many passages of this letter could be described as complaints or criticisms. Lest these strands in the argument become misconstrued, before we go any further, let me come right out and admit something:

For some time now, I have been finding it harder and harder to relate to what's left of humanity.

Let us not speak of 'people' here but rather humanity, for it is humanity that I care for more than 'the people'. Whether I like or dislike people, it is humanity that I find precious and valuable — even when it happens to annoy me ('human, all too human' and all that). If I find fault in a person, or if I criticize a collective group of people, please know without a doubt that my sharp words should never be seen to strike whatever portion of my targets might actually be human or natural. It is true that humans and humanity are far from perfect, and indeed they — I mean we — contain fatal flaws; but my criticisms — at least the harshest ones here, the ones that really matter — always amount to one thing: something or someone not being human enough.

Do you remember, when we were sixteen or seventeen, when we came up with that way of evaluating our classmates (and ourselves) in terms of 'how much computer' someone was? The internet and everything related to it was really starting to take off in those years, and we were getting literally tons of computers in our little school. The answer to 'how much computer' someone was always came in the form of a percentage, representing how savvy (or how consumed) that person was with using computers, being on the internet, managing email, etc. But I'm pretty sure that the metaphor went a bit further than that, and applied also to how good the person was at interacting with oncoming technology, how quick they were at grabbing whatever latest gadget dropped off the assembly line. Both you and I, if I remember right, were about 40% computer, at the time.

So when I now describe people, collectively and individually, as only having portions of their humanity left, that is sort of the flipside of what we, so happily, were getting at back then with our quite facetious idea of any given person having a percentage of them that was 'computer', as if cancerous circuitry was growing in their brains.

There is no easy way to say any of this. So rather than pausing here to ruminate, rather than taking my time to proceed tediously toward where I want to take you, I will escalate my rhetoric even further, lest I lose my nerve altogether:

It is not just computers and people. Everything about a technological society — and everyone in a technological society — trends unstoppably toward the anti-human and the artificial.

Considerations of 'good' or 'bad' do not matter here. Straightaway we must dispel that old line about 'technology being good or bad depending on how we use it.' That does not apply once development surpasses a certain threshold. Overseeing the last century-plus of what is called progress, we note fewer and fewer cases in which 'man uses technology', more and more cases in which technology uses man — almost as if our bodies and energies were its fuel source. It is sort of like the joke about our pets really being our masters, because we give our all for them and provide them with devotion and sustenance: Their mastery over us is so great that they can trick us into thinking that we are in charge of them, and this false belief makes their dominance fool-proof, and ensures we could never think to revolt against them. Technology — really technique — has effectively fooled us in much the same way, only it is no joke: It is the fall of humanity and a tyranny over humanity greater than any human could have imagined, because it saps away humanity itself and the human condition once and for all. It happened by accident, with the autonomy of technological society being gradually unlocked by many hands in many fields. And it is unstoppable, could kill us all, and we are all to blame for supporting it and helping it along, because in the short term its fruits are convenient for our ever lazier dispositions.

Despite having said all that, it must be understood that I am not really 'speaking out against technology' here at all. I am simply noting the fact that this development is unstoppable and anti-human. It is even more unsustainable for human psychology than it is for the natural environment. Artificially created objects have been inserted into our environment — they have been placed around us, in some sense inside us, and in some sense we have been placed inside them — and this has removed us both from our natural state of life and from our natural state of thought. This would not be a problem for us, except for the fact that it is impossible for (more or less) natural creations such as ourselves to adapt successfully enough to an unnatural system that evolves much faster than we ever could. The system also evolves without any consideration for our physical, psychological, or spiritual well-being. It is as if, over a century ago, technology hijacked evolution itself out of the hands of humanity. Ironically enough, this happened around the time of Darwin. Soon after we knew about evolution, we more or less stopped evolving, experienced a mortifying moment of self-consciousness — and then perhaps it's fair to say that we started devolving in various ways. This occurred as soon as the already developing technological system reached the aforementioned threshold, at which point we human beings could no longer influence our increasingly artificial surroundings as much as this technological system could, can, and does influence us. From then on, if we are really being honest, it seems as if technology — our toolbox — has been using us to develop it, at our own expense — especially our mental and spiritual expense. Bertrand Russell once said something about how 'There are, it is urged, three stages in natural evolution: matter, life, and mind. We have no reason to suppose that the world has finished evolving, but with our human minds we feel as though we have reached a natural limit. Now, matter could not have foreseen life, and life could not have foreseen mind, but mind can dimly foresee the next stage, even if we know that it shall no longer be natural.' This next stage is a sort of bodiless mind that appears to be alive: that is exactly what autonomous technique is. 'It is obvious,' Russell continues, 'that where this is going is all guesswork, but it seems safe to venture that — thanks to our understanding of science — natural evolution can, will, and must be usurped by artificial evolution. Only through strict commitment to reason will humanity be able to harness and hold this artificial evolution in check.' My contention is the emergence of the out-of-control technillogical society shows that humanity has definitely lost hold of the reins. Generally, however, we cheer this runaway development on. Why? Because — rich and poor, smart and stupid — we like how technology always seems to numb our minds a bit more than it expands them. Agree or disagree on minor points, but the fact remains that there is no getting out of the situation. We have somehow entered into an unbreakable contractual arrangement of serving the artificial system, no matter what the cost to our personal relations, to our planet, or to our sanity and dignity as humans. Whether we can admit this to ourselves or not, a cursory examination of progress shows us to be sacrificing more and more of ourselves, our minds, our time and our attention, to increasingly complicated constructs that are very non-human, very artificial, very out of control, and, at best, fascinating in ways that hardly ever prove healthy in the long run. Like it or not, medicine and sanitation techniques are responsible for the world's insane, unsolvable, and ever-rising overpopulation problems, and all the hunger, need, want, stress, and poverty that they entail. And whatever help 'gadgets' — whether they are the size of a penny or the size of a nation — might provide us within our daily life, it is clear that the cost is increasingly great and, what's more, our alleged 'free will' scarcely seems capable of refusing the offer to keep incorporating these things deeper and deeper into our lives and ourselves. Once you have so many digital temptations, you can't really have much free will anymore; you have the illusion of choice, but you really just go with the flow.

By now I have shocked you and simultaneously relieved you, because you suspect that I can be dismissed as a crank. But while you are glad to have a reason to dismiss me on principle, I am glad that I have needled you. So let us both continue to indulge ourselves as I put forward the following:

Living in a first-world city has nothing to do with true reality. In such a life, you are not really engaging with anything related to normal, natural behaviors or activities. You might disagree with that, but you must admit that your very environment is almost entirely artificial. — So how can anyone (how can I? how can you?) expect your very thoughts and reflections on this largely fake and artificial life to be anything other than fake and artificial and confused? Your thoughts must be just as confused and artificial as your surroundings, because you have no real solid reference point on which to discern anything. Living in a city, you live in an extremely confused environment — confused because it is almost wholly artificial and non-human. It is all developing out of control by escalating technological and bureaucratic systems, which no human can manage or keep track of well enough. Without a doubt, your habitat is confusing. Should you profess only calm and collected thoughts about this living space of yours, and your place in it, that would mean you were totally ignorant or blind to the crazy world around you. So it is your choice: either you admit that you voluntarily live in virtually the craziest, most confusing and non-human environment possible, or else you lie to yourself and pretend it's all fine and reasonable. It isn't a reasonable habitat; that should be obvious.

Really, however, I would not expect you, or many city-dwellers, to even pretend to have 'figured life out'; many people seem rather upfront — even proud — of their confusion. And what does that say about them? You live in The City, and so an ever-more-confusing life must on some level seem normal to you. We see the abnormal becoming accepted as normal; the random becoming accepted as expected; chaos being accepted as order; insane becoming accepted as sane — but, no matter what you say, and no matter how you or anyone around you might at times trick yourselves into thinking that you are leading a great life which you are fully aware of and in charge of, it is not really sane, and you are not really in control of hardly anything, and the dysfunction of the system itself as well as the dysfunction of almost everyone's life will prove this continually, many times over. But obviously The City must seem fine enough to you, otherwise you would leave. Unless leaving The City would seem even scarier to you, which might well be the case.

I don't like to cite pop culture — because I hate it with every fiber of my being — but there is a 1980 movie called My Dinner with Andre, which puts forth the idea that The City is

'the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they've built — they've built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have — having been lobotomized — the capacity to leave the prison they've made, or to even see it as a prison.'

I see The Citydwellers as trying to construct and manage their own mental asylum, however, not a prison. No one wants any responsibility; no one wants to stand guilty as an accomplice in the murder of their own humanity. I think that's part of why everyone wants to 'get off' all the time now, because subconsciously they know they're guilty. Lots of sex without conception — the wonderful sensation is like getting away with a real big crime. And who are the only people — besides politicians and billionaires — who can get away with having done horrible things without being held responsible? The insane. No one wants to accept his or her own guilt for kowtowing more and more to the technological system each and every day, and so we each need to find a way to try and become innocent. 'Innocent by reason of insanity' is what most of us have subconsciously settled for — and even though most of us would not admit to being insane, well, we could just say, 'No truly insane person would ever admit to being sane. But I am surely not guilty. So maybe I am insane. If I am, I do not have to admit it. And really it is you who are starting to seem even more insane, Mr. Malcontent, especially because you titled this opening "I Am Not a Dissident".'

I am being a bit facetious with all of this, but only a bit. We should seriously consider how most people in the Western world today would have to be considered insane by any historical measure, especially if you break down the word. Once again, sane comes from the Latin for 'health' — sanitary and all that — and what we're all dealing with here is obviously an insane — a non-healthy — social atmosphere. Only insane people would want to keep adjusting to surroundings that are increasingly unhealthy, maddening, and anti-human. But that is what they're doing. Because they have contracted a contagious mental illness. They have contracted it from being doused with the ideological byproducts of what I call the technillogical society.

More and more people feel bad, but they don't really know why. There's a basic, root cause that always gets overlooked because we've grown so accustomed to it. People feel bad because — physically, mentally, and socially — they're living in an increasingly unnatural environment. It is not the discontents of civilization, meaning the annoyances here and there; rather, our civilization itself, as it becomes increasingly artificial, must disconcert human psychology in a very direct way. Man is (at least) part animal. There is a reason why we build different parts of zoos to look like the animals' natural habitats. You can't expect a natural creation to live in an unnatural environment without feeling, at the animal's very core, bad and wrong about itself and what it is being made to go through. (And really, in addition to the 'mental asylum' metaphor, I think that society as a whole is tending to be more or less a 'people zoo', rather than the Animal Farm that Orwell suggested. Unlike those in zoos, farm animals at least produce something and do real work outside. People today mostly just stay inside or in cubicles, usually have food and drink transported in to them, and would soon find out the limits of their relatively lazy, laissez-faire captivity if they ever tried to escape.) We keep feeling worse about ourselves as our technological system improves itself at our expense. This is obvious. Why are there more and more mental disorders? The groundwork for mental disorders is caused by external development and advancing media and communication techniques, which disorient our subconscious thought patterns. Yet still people cheer for better cellphones.

So what is the recourse? you might ask. My friend Dana (see below) used to be able to explain the one and only possible solution very well. But no one wants to try it, not even myself. So the short answer is: There is no solution, not for me or you or anyone I know.

So what am I saying? Here I will pause to ruminate.

. . .

. . .

. . .

It is very important to realize that, in a critical sense, there's only one way to think: Determining what's real and what isn't, what's true and what isn't. What's real isn't necessarily true — reality and truth aren't the same — because there are artificial constructs and ideas that possess and exert a lot of their own reality, but these realities aren't necessarily true or honest or natural. You always have to be crosschecking the extent to which anything you encounter is real, and the extent to which it is or isn't true. If you aren't running those processes in the background all the time, then you can't ever really consciously think about anything. This method constitutes the necessary precondition you must start from if you're ever going to begin to figure anything out. This method is the key to unlocking this current system and seeing it for what it is — and this method was always the proper way of unraveling any confusion or complication ever.

There's only one way to untie a knot: you untie it, for real — You don't tie more fancy knots into the rope, and then expect a reward for doing so; you don't pretend to untie it all, but really only untie a few of the knots that happen to offend you most; you don't write a story about untying the knot, without ever even touching the actual knot itself; and you don't envision an untied knot in your mind and think that's good enough for you personally. No, you need to untie the rope for real if you want to see the noose for what it actually is and figure out how it got that way, how it was shaped into an instrument of murder.

The problem now — the problem we've had with increasing frequency and intensity for quite a few years now — is that in any given situation fewer and fewer people are capable discerning what is real and what is fake. They don't even know what they're looking at, most of them, and don't much care. They live and think in varying degrees of virtual reality and are separated from any reality that is remotely true or natural. Either way: if they're not lost in entertainment, then they consider themselves well-informed citizens — citizens of the world, even — and yet 95% of what they know is tenth-hand information filtered through various media and refracted through various mirrors. Almost everything they think about anything is skewed and disordered, and there is no getting around that; the fundamental, distorting effects of media easily overpower any honest human voices. You can't think clearly when you open your mind up to so many artificial influences. As far as the political side goes, Walter Lippmann saw where all of this was heading over a hundred years ago; democracy is impossible once you have mass communication, because at that point reach exceeds grasp, and people will always think that they know and understand far more than they actually do. Mass media change democracy into mediocracy. What it comes down to is: Technology creates false realities; the more complicated technology becomes, the more it alienates us from our surroundings, from our actions, from each other, and from ourselves. People can hardly think at all anymore — think correctly, about anything real — because their minds are working overtime, processing and playing with an ever-increasing number of false realities — some of them only slightly fictional — in which actual logic would not apply anyway, because these virtual worlds we see through backlit screens are fundamentally unreal. So it is a waste of time to think much about them; but people think a lot about them, and as a result they have very little time to practice thinking for real in true reality.

You are perhaps wondering what any of this has to do with you personally, or why I have personally brought these matters to your attention in this way, in a letter that in some sense, it would seem, should be about other, more personal things. (And it will again be about more personal things soon enough; don't worry.) Much of the above is a long way of saying the following: There are many reasons why I would find your sort of person distasteful. You live in The City (that most disgustingly artificial of all places) and you work as a lawyer (that most historically disgusting of all professions, for it allows pedantic notations to rule over living beings). Notice again, however, that what I am criticizing is not you, not the part of you that could be said to be naturally human. Rather I take issue with these intricate and artificial hallmarks that you have taken into your identity; those things give me pause. You are a City lawyer, which many people would consider the most distasteful thing in all the world. And while that would not be all I could — or will — hold against you, it would indeed be unfair of me to judge you simply because of that. After all, you were once my best friend and no doubt there is still some of the person I knew — as I knew him — in you.

I am jealous of you in a very superficial sense. I admit that. It is only the coward in me that envies you and would want your obvious social status — but to a significant extent I am sometimes a coward and I do sometimes envy you.

And maybe I have not been giving you enough credit. Possibly various aspects of the ideas outlined above have crossed your mind before. Very possibly you are disappointed or dismayed with modern life and human beings' seeming unwillingness — really our incapacity, within anything resembling the current framework — to improve our lot. What has happened to our fellows is sad, and that we sometimes find them despicable is even sadder. They aren't innocent, but they aren't totally guilty, either. (As Dana would frequently say, 'Blaming first-world adults for falling for electronic propaganda is like blaming third-world children for dying when they get hit with cluster bombs.')

Thus, on the verge of us finding some common ground and greater sympathy, I will throw out two more wild punches, though perhaps you could have seen them coming by now:

Firstly — Most of your fellow citizens actively resist any real help that might come their way. The simple fact is that people who don't want to save themselves can't be helped by anyone else anyway, and most people are not even trying. For my part, I'm barely even trying; I'm trying less than a lot of people, in fact. You think you might be able to help me or show me the error of my ways. You can't. And I can't show you the error of yours. This is how things go now, with people conditioned not to take anyone else's advice if it means getting out of their comfort zone. They want handouts, not help. They want accolades, not advice. The citizens cannot be saved. Even if you or I could figure out what exactly 'saving' them, on this earth, would even mean, they do not seek salvation and they will not get it. That sounds cruel, I know, but it is the truth. They fight against being saved, in fact, and defend and contribute to their own oppression, happily, willingly, for short-term gain and to fulfill instant gratification. They proudly call this fundamentally anti-human system their home. Those who take it as a given that humanity should pretty much live this way and just go along with it — cannot be helped. And you may think that I am being mean and nasty here, but, again, these statements are a double-edged sword: I cannot help you, and you cannot help me either, for I am still somewhat inside this same system myself. To a large extent, to my shame, I am also one of these people. I have sympathy for them but realize that there is no way to help them within this system. You can't help people who don't really want to be helped. Try to help them, by all means, but beyond a certain point you may find that you are hurting yourself to try and help them, to no avail.

Secondly — I am not a dissident, because I myself, living in his system, accept my punishment. It is true that, these past several years, I have mostly lived on the outskirts. I am playing the Old Man of the Mountains as well as I can, but even at this distance I am still far too connected to the system, and to the sort of things that go on in your City, and I do not live a very naturalistic life either. Far more naturalistic than yours, but not nearly naturalistic enough in the long run to make a difference. And I am a bit too lazy to really want to change any of that.

Here is the crux of the matter: We are inside a fully functioning system; to a great extent, it overlaps, checks, reproduces and extends itself. No matter if one of its metal tentacles is resisted by human muscle, cut with a sword, or blown up with a bomb: the system will push back or regrow the same tentacle, until its reach extends where it wants to go. What this means is that human beings (myself included) would not be able to pick out little parts of the system to keep with us while somehow magically disposing of the rest. The technological society does not come à la carte; it comes at its own pace, not at your leisure, and you cannot refuse what it offers you for very long. If you want some — or any — of the comforts of this system, you will soon find yourself supporting everything else that comes with it. Purchasing any artificial product indirectly funds the research and development of the entire system. This is especially true of the formless products known as ideologies. There is no getting around this: 'voting with your dollar' does not work; nor does voting with your attention span. Your money, interest, and will power go to the end of a hallway that you approve of, but then they'll turn a corner or two and end up in the hands of the very organizations that you so nobly thought you were opposing and avoiding. You are not up against specific people and institutions but an entire immaterial network and the evolutionary drive of a system that is beyond humanity's grasp. And I do not resist any of this because I cannot resist this. Even though I try to make my comments about the system value-neutral — I am simply trying to describe the way it is — there is always a degree of hypocrisy that cannot be removed, because I am nevertheless still in the system. It should be understood that I am describing what is going on, not complaining. Complaining is futile and wrongheaded. Unless you reject everything (which I have not done), you cannot form legitimate, meaningful, justifiable dissent against anything. Again: The technological society does not come à la carte. Criticizing any specific aspects of the system while living within it may yield interesting essays, but the practice is always futile. There is no way any given aspect can be reformed to any degree that would matter; reforms are simply ever-more-temporary relief valves for the petty pressures that humans might happen to experience. Technological development and various organizational techniques simply continue on, uncaring, building up pressure again.

When talking about a 'technological system', I am absolutely not positing any sort of dystopian future in which herded humans must try and rebel against A.I. robots that rule over them. I consider that scenario incorrect on every count. Firstly, this battle is not something that will take place in the future; it is not even taking place now, and this is another reason why I am not a dissident: because the battle already took place over a hundred years ago; it was a silent, invisible battle, and humanity decisively lost. No exact tipping point can be cited, but the development of mass electronic communication made it inevitable for anti-human techniques to propagate themselves in the human psyche, to such an extent that human self-governance has become all but impossible. (From the international and national levels, down to the individual level of personal self-control: We can't take very good care of ourselves anymore. In fact we can't really take care of ourselves at all; the system takes care of us for us.) Henceforth humans became governed by chain-reaction signals in the ether and trends in the noosphere. From that point on, the human mind became defenseless against an invasion of artificiality. Technology was already out there, but once our brains really got a taste for so many images, memes, illusions, machines, bureaucracies and gadgets, then the system could direct us and addict us to proliferating its artificiality in each and every way, in our thoughts, speech, society, and world. It is important to note, however, that even though this artificial system may have seemed to take on a life of its own — certainly, human beings are far too addicted and weak to regain mastery of themselves or 'their own' society — none of these swirling technologies and techniques are actually 'alive'. Any 'intelligence of the system' would refer to the ingeniousness and adaptability of its dynamics; but a computer, for example, is not 'smart'. The system does have consummate processing capabilities and mitigating contingency plans far beyond our own; but it is not 'alive' or 'intelligent'. The only 'artificial intelligence' involved here, in fact, lies in the minds of men, who possess ever more useless information and overwrought nonsense but do not know how to do much of anything real. Whereas the technological system knows how to proliferate its kingdom of artificiality, we lack practical knowledge of how to live as human beings. It is crippling. To admit to ourselves just how little we know about anything real, and how much we know about frivolity and trivia, rightly makes us feel ashamed of ourselves. (Show me some allegedly smart person filled with useless knowledge, and I will show you an example of 'artificial intelligence' — for I myself am one such example!) We are now totally dependent on the system: some of us for pocket money, most of us for food, all of us for distraction, entertainment, and busywork that helps us find self-esteem. All we know how to do anymore is how to exist in this system, whose complicated workings far surpass human comprehension. It takes care of us, one way or the other, as if we were its pets.

Lastly, I am not a dissident because — it seems clear — this non-human system will destroy itself anyway, eventually[]. There's no sense opposing various distasteful aspects of a civilization when that civilization is falling apart anyway. Why try to knock down a tower — perhaps because you think people built it too high, or because there are people behaving badly in the higher floors — when the tower has been building itself for years now, and is already making itself dangerously top-heavy? My only concern is that this tower may crush most of humanity whenever it finally falls. So I'm not exactly praying for a fall, either. I am not anti-social. I do not want to punish society — no one should have any need to try and do that — because society is already punishing itself.

But this is all ominous, self-important, and depressing talk. Instead we can talk about girls.

2. Allison Fashion: I don't like drudging up the distant past — because doing so after so long without any contact makes me seem as though I were still obsessed with things I was never quite so totally obsessed with in the first place — not totally — but we will need to bring in some old characters to illustrate some points.

We always knew there was something special about her, and even now, unlikely and irrelevant as the name might seem at first, Allison Fashion proves an unlikely touchstone. You need to ruminate on the following aspects associated with her. Treat her as a typical 'cross-section of the American public', even though when we knew her she seemed terribly unique. And that is just the point: how a unique star with everything going its way, with such fun gravity that attracts everyone, somehow alters and falters and falls lower and lower, burning even brighter while falling — and the star herself has lost all perspective — she thinks she's rising — until she inevitably crashes, burns, causes all sorts of damage to herself and others — and then bounces up, ready to do it all over again if she possibly can.

In our little school, as we knew her from childhood, at least before our high school years, Allison seemed to combine the best of every quality. She was the smartest and the prettiest and the coolest and the most popular and the most athletic. Our old friend James made a comparison about how in kindergarten he thought of Sylvester Society and Allison Fashion as 'the Mickey and Minnie Mouse' of our class; I'm not sure if that metaphor makes sense to you, but I think it says an awful lot about how people's personalities can become bonded to media simulacra. Allison has always customized her personality to resemble whatever apex of the simulacra she values most at any given time. (At the moment, based on her appearance and internet postings, she seems to have decided to mimic a snarky lesbian talk show host. I'm serious. Allison's suddenly short haircut, needlessly thick glasses, unisex clothing, and the tenor of her discourse all suggest this. Needless to say, I still find her very attractive, and I'm sure you do too. Anyone could still be easily persuaded to fall in love with her.)

I can remember when we took some sort of aptitude tests in fifth grade, and for whatever reason the teacher decided to write everyone's scores on the chalkboard at the front of the room, and then leave them up there staring down at us for about a week. The tests were divided into two sections, math and language skills. I scored highest in math while she was second; and she scored highest in language while I was second. I didn't have it in me to add up our scores to see who scored highest overall, because I didn't want to know whether or not she was smarter than me, but she very possibly was. At that point it seemed she was smarter than the teachers and everyone. People probably thought I was smarter than the teachers too, but I never felt that way. Anyway, she and I were both scoring on 11th and 12th grade levels. At least, that's how I remember it, but in the years since then I've wondered whether that was actually true, if fifth grade students could really be on that level in any realistic way. Maybe Allison was smarter when she was eleven than she when she was eighteen, though. She would probably actually, laughingly agree with that statement.

Again in fifth grade: She was my first crush. It was the first time we had been in the same homeroom together since first grade, and in the intervening years — silly as it is to speak of things like this, in our little elementary school — it always seemed as if our legends had been building, because she had become known as obviously the smartest girl, and I had the same reputation for the boys. But we were never in the same classroom together, so we never went head-to-head. I liked her in fifth grade. And she liked me in fifth grade, too. I will not recount what did or didn't happen between us, because it is all a bunch of pathetic silly kid stuff — and perhaps I've already told you some of this already, years ago; I don't remember — but suffice to say that in the end I chickened out and somehow let her slip through my fingers even though I wanted her, and she was encouraging me to be more assertive with her, but I wasn't. This is ancient history, and it almost embarrasses me to even remember this again — but I only mention it here because I have to convey to you how I have actually blamed myself for Allison's deterioration and assimilation. In the years since then, especially in my late teens and early twenties, I blamed myself for not having somehow rescued her, as if having more of a puppylove affair with her when we were eleven would have instilled her with enough willpower or fortitude to see her through life afterwards — to help her see through the B.S. that came her way afterwards, and to keep her safe and sane and special. (Well, she is still special, just not as special as we thought she'd be. We all thought she'd become like the most important person on Earth.)

We both know what happened to Allison soon after fifth grade and how much of a (mostly) unspoken disappointment it was for everyone. Everyone was shocked when the first marking period of seventh grade ended and Allison's name was only fourth in the class rankings. And she only went downhill from there. She got stupid, got lazy, and got boy-crazy — this is what many people said about her. She dated much older boys who were drug-addicts, petty criminals, and morons. (But obviously they were nonetheless more assertive than either you or I could be. She decided that these men would make better lovers, and probably she was right.) And then in twelfth grade she suddenly dated a much younger boy who was scarcely above cretin status. (But again, he was an assertive lover, and this is apparently what mattered. I don't blame her.) She was always interested in new music and television shows — I remember that she was the first person who ever mentioned The Simpsons or the Fox network to me, and how she prided herself on having learned about Vanilla Ice months before anyone else in our community had, because she had gone on vacation to Orlando one summer and heard him there. — But then it seemed as if her concern with media started doing her more harm than good. She seemed to know little else in life besides what was popular. One year I had a math class with her, and every week I remember hearing her talking with other students about professional wrestling, which was surging in popularity then. (How utterly gauche. Right?)

I'll mention only one more example, because it always stuck with me due to 'synchronicity'. Of course, during those years she was an X-Files fan. She saw herself as being like Dana Scully, and once when our psychology teacher asked her what she wanted to be in life, she told him she wanted to be a criminologist or 'florensic'[] psychologist, and I knew that she said this because she admired Scully on The X-Files. A job like that would require far more seriousness and dedication than she was exhibiting at the time, but I bring up the example because Allison's first email handle also came from the X-Files: 'Invisigoth', which was the name of a computer company on one of the episodes. I knew this episode at the time and I rewatched it a few years ago: it features a sexy and smart cyberpunk woman in her early 20s, whom teenage Allison would have taken as a personal role model, and the story is about an out-of-control computer program becoming self-aware, growing via the internet, and trying to gain control of weapons systems and destroy humanity. The theme of this metaphor may and should start to seem more significant in light of these pages that I have written to you. It is uncanny that Allison Fashion, a young woman whose own personal theme seems fairly important in all this, would have been so captivated by this specific X-Files episode that she would have, in a sense, renamed herself after it. Most amusing of all, though, is the fact that the cyberpunk character is enamored with a lost love, the computer programmer 'genius' who created the artificial intelligence program in the first place — and this programmer character has the same unusual first name that I do. Perhaps it is colossal vanity on my part — and I fully recognize how ridiculous this all sounds; I laugh at it and at myself for thinking about it — but I can't help but imagine how Allison Fashion, age 16 or whatever, must have watched this episode and on some level interpreted it as a twisted analogy of her own life and her abortive relationship with me, complete with the sense that technology — the very thing which was bringing the story to her — was somehow weaponized against us.

To continue on with the high school narrative: She remained good at sports, and a perceptible mental sharpness — still very smart when she wanted to be — would still emerge from her sometimes in casual conversation — though even in her intermittent smartness she was trending toward a predictable 'edginess' — but there was not much else in her anymore. No uniqueness. The fire had smoldered. She soon became one of those kids, during that relatively brief window when this slang flourished, who unfortunately used the word 'gay' to denote something that was stupid or annoying. (And this even though she remained friends with Sly Society.)

I can remember, sometime during our junior or senior year, one night when you and I were mildly intoxicated and sitting in my car, and I remarked that when we were in elementary school it always seemed as if Allison Fashion would someday become the first female president. You said that — yes — that was exactly what it used to feel like to know her, that it felt like you were knowing the girl who was going to grow up to be the first female president, and that it was a shame what had happened with her. Even then, before any of the other stuff, it was a shame.

Shortly afterwards, you had two different dreams about Allison, one of which you told to Sly and one of which you told to me. Sly recounted your first dream to me in the following way:

'So listen to this,' Sly said. 'Alex Comfortable said, "Two nights ago I had a dream that I can't stop thinking about. Allison Fashion was telling me she was in love with me, but didn't want to break up with her boyfriend because that little monster would kill himself." So I said, "Alex, you are dreamin'. He is way hotter than you, and she is way hotter than you, and she would never fall in love with you." That's what I told Alex Comfortable.'

I find this first dream remarkable because, a few years later, Allison really did cause someone to kill himself by breaking up with him. (Of course it was not really her 'fault', and I use 'cause' in the colloquial sense; I'm not blaming her. But probably she shouldn't've gotten involved with someone like that vulnerable in the first place.) That was the first crisis of her life, which caused her to drop out of college. Besides that, the dream, as wish-fulfillment, makes it clear that you felt something for Allison — which I pretty much knew anyway and which is perfectly understandable, because every guy wanted her bad back then. (Her green eyes. The way her straight blonde hair curled down under her chin. Her smooth white hands.) Sly's reaction here was also worth recounting.

Then, in the second dream, which you told me about directly, you were trying to rescue Allison from The City, and, again, from her 'little monster'. In the dream, Allison was living in The City, and you were helping her pack her things up as quickly as possible. You had a car there and were ready to move her out before her boyfriend came home from work.

I find this second dream remarkable because you had it several years before she (and then you) even thought of moving to The City, before either of you had ever even visited there (since this was before our senior trip). And yet in your dream 'rescuing Allison Fashion' meant getting her out of The City and away from what The City represented, whether you knew it or not — and on some level you must have known what it meant.

When I adapted The Great Gatsby into our senior play, you knew as well as I did how natural it seemed for Allison to play the character of Jordan. An attractive dynamo. Fun-loving. Lackadaisical. Devil-may-care. Self-assured. Thrillingly sporty: would probably beat most men at most games. Her firm athletic body. The 'autumn leaf yellow of her hair'. She's known for driving fast, and it's hard to think about getting in a car crash with her without being overwhelmed with the romantic dangerousness of it all. Allison was a perfect Jordan Baker and rightly showed up whoever it was who played Daisy.

Now let us flash forward in time. Allison lives in The City. You live in The City. I doubt you have ever met up, though. Because The City is big and living there causes your personal history to not matter. All of this — all of this that I have recounted so far and all of this that I will proceed to say below — has long been out of your head, is very possibly annoying for you to try and remember or be confronted with — it is an imposition, and I am blameworthy for bringing it up. Moreover, most of these ideas about Allison Fashion have possibly never entered into Allison Fashion's head either, though perhaps they could have fit in her head more comfortably than they have fit inside mine — they are painful for me to think about; this is not leisurely slideshow nostalgia. She had more potential and ability than I did — higher functioning capacity — even though she has amounted to even less than I have — and I haven't amounted to very much myself. And though I have not lived with all of these thoughts in a way that was obsessive — not quite obsessive, not when compared to my other obsessions — I have been uneasy with these thoughts and want to finally commit them to writing if only, perhaps, to get them out of my head. They are overdue to leave it.

Moving on: I don't know for sure if she gave you one or what she would have written on yours, but I have always kept and admired the copy of her senior portrait that Allison gave me. (Actually, I misplaced it years ago but for a while I considered it a special item. Other guys offered me $100 for it. I'm not joking.) It was a great image and her smile was perfect. (In college I scanned it and turned it into a Warhol silkscreen print, which I used for credit in an art class. Appropriately enough, with her haunting eyes and lips, it resembled the famous cover art of The Great Gatsby. The beautiful female face in the sky, looking down on The City. Only, because it was Allison, it was sexier. For years now James has had a framed copy of this artwork of mine hanging in his apartment, and you would know this if you ever visited him once.) Later on Allison said that she hated this senior picture of hers, and pointed out that in it she had a lump on her right temple, from where she had gotten hit by a softball. I never even noticed that before then, because obviously the rest of her image was so damn beautiful, unbelievably beautiful and sexy and perfect. The sort of visage that makes men embarrass themselves and actually dehumanize the woman by calling her a Goddess or an Angel and really meaning it. On the back of the picture she wrote me a long note — in tiny, girly, meticulous handwriting — all about how glad she was to have had me as an acquaintances all those years, and how

'You and Alex make for an interesting psych. class. You guys and your sarcasm... Sometimes I can't tell whether or not you're putting the rest of us (Mr. Daluck included) in therapy or not? Anyway, you and I should try to have some 'talks' or something before this year gets along too far. I think you might be surprised by the content, probably because I feel like I've... disappointed you in the past? I hope you'll share some more of your screenplays with me.'

When she words it that way . . . When I remember what she wrote . . . No, she didn't disappoint me. I don't know how she sussed that out, but — No. No! Allison Fashion never disappointed me. Allison Fashion is wonderful: a perfect girl, perfect woman, and the sort of exciting and provoking creature who makes you want to live life. It's what happened to her that disappoints me, and I can't blame her for how she reacted to artificial stimuli that her beautiful human mind was never meant to have to try processing in the first place. Again, that'd be like blaming Iraqi children for dying when they get hit with cluster bombs.

One final anecdote, an impressionist touch that may not mean much now but may come to mean something more later on, if you can draw more exact meaning from it than I've been able to extract, though unlike most of the other information here, this one factoid has admittedly run through my head at least once a week for the last three years.

Before I more or less left the internet, the last social media update I saw came from Allison Fashion. It was simply a notification from her, letting the world know that she liked (and ostensibly approved of) a politician who had recently been disgraced. He cheated on his wife and, moreover — what made the story really 'sexy' as far as the media were concerned — he did an awfully sloppy job of sending lewd pictures of himself to young women he wanted to entice and proposition over the internet. Then, once his behavior was revealed by one of these horrified women, he eagerly took to the airwaves and insisted loudly, obnoxiously, and repeatedly that he had done nothing wrong. You know to whom I'm referring: his surname appropriately recalls both the male sex organ and also someone who 'whines'. He is possibly the avatar of our age.

The important thing here is to keep in mind that Allison Fashion seems to have decided to like this politician, and publically proclaim her liking of him, specifically because he did something lurid and indefensible, and showed no tact in his response. Whether or not she agreed with his policies and social beliefs — and she probably does, since he mouths all the predictable platitudes — she only started really liking him once he became disgraced, once he had this great fall. It is important to try and think about the mindset of someone who would decide to throw her electronic support behind a person like that, in that way, for all her friends and family to see, and in light of her own personal fall.

But what did I ever do to help her? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Did I ever try to help her? Did I ever make an effort? No, of course not. What should I have done? Try to get her alone, sit her down, and explain things to her in my own ridiculous way? Or write her a letter maybe? That wouldn't've worked. It won't work. I'm not the man for the job; in the end, I'm just really not. (Last summer she actually invited me to visit her in The City. We had this rare, random, great chat, and it felt so comfortable and natural to talk with her again after all these years. I felt great that she — she — would invite me — me — to visit her. But she let slip that she was seeing someone. So of course I didn't visit her. There is always a reason not to try.) So in the end, regarding Allison Fashion, I just sat by, watched, lusted and criticized. Shamefully, without wanting to help her or thinking that I could or should, it got to the point where I became attracted to her because of her failings and waste. Not unlike the way she is attracted to the horrible politician. Still I have a positive view of her, idolize her, use her as an illustrative example of what is going wrong, adore her.

3. Cameras, Conditioning, Cultural Propaganda: A camera always takes over any place in which it appears. During a night out, or during a pleasant visit with friends, pull out a camera and the entire dynamic of the scene changes. Everyone knows this. It doesn't matter whether the camera takes videos or still images. People who know they could be recorded behave differently, less naturally, less humanly, and ultimately less healthily.

For quite some time an aforementioned acquaintance of mine (about whom I shall write much more below) lived with various tribes in the rainforests of southeast Asia, deep in the jungle. She wanted to document their natural ways of life, in order to show the rest of the world a better, less modern way of living. But here she was faced with a problem: 'The situations with the tribe,' she told me, 'were both too intense and too relaxed for me to be pulling out a camera and filming everything that was going on. The situations were too real. It's intrusive, the camera.' By extension, I would add that any recording technology, from the advent of writing onward, has the potential to subordinate the living reality of any place in which its presence is known — to subordinate reality to the simulacra of the particular recording devices involved. It is impossible to record anything real; only an imitation of the real is recorded; recordings are inherently artificial. Mere human observation may not always quite ruin empirical study, but recording technology definitely erodes and destroys natural, healthy human behavior. The moment some kind of device starts creating and preserving an externalized simulacrum of what may be transpiring around it, all human situations in the vicinity begin to become fake.

You know it was not Yoko Ono who broke up the Beatles; it happened because they decided to film their recording sessions for Let It Be. That ramped up the awkwardness and they started performing for the cameras, against each other. John in particular didn't like being filmed all the time, from eight in the morning on. Extra lights needed to be brought in, and the process turned the recording studio into a movie set. (Once again, I would say that the very appearance of cameras in any setting effectively transforms the place into a movie set.) Creative differences existed before then, but filming made it all unbearable: 'The camera made us aware that it was a phony situation,' John said (and that's a good, commonplace old word, phony, which I'll try to redeem and resuscitate later). Even in the earlier days, though, the band was of the opinion that 'being recorded on tour always meant a bad show'. And it's ironic that what finally broke them up was filming a movie of the Let It Be sessions: things can't just be when cameras are around; letting something be is the opposite of pulling a camera out.

The first of what we would call 'reality TV shows' was produced by PBS in the 1970s. It was supposed to be the simple documentation of just what its title said: An American Family. But before long, due initially to the presence of constant filming, which exacerbated every little problem, the husband and wife divorced. Divorce became the theme of the American Family; this was both entirely unplanned and entirely emblematic. (The family's name was Loud, but they were fairly quiet people — except for their teenage son, Lance. He was the first significant and openly gay personality on television. He became a Warhol superstar and consequently contracted many diseases and died young. As a child he written to Warhol, because he always admired Warhol, and Warhol actually called the kid's home once at 3 a.m. to thank him for the fan letters. I think I would have liked to have known Lance Loud. Everything bad that happened to him was due to television.)

And also I have to mention that the desert ranch the Manson Family lived on was an old movie set. I'm not suggesting that the ghosts of Hollywood's past somehow soaked into the souls of murderous hippies, or that the falseness of the surroundings led to the killings in any direct, pragmatic way. But still it seems appropriate: a 'Family' that isn't a family, living in a place that wasn't a real home — that was only made up to look like a home, for the cameras — and it's all conducive to deranged behavior, cultish devotion, and anti-human outcomes. Manson's followers killed movie stars, and then their leader became a sensation because the media kept showing him on TV.

But to bring our analysis up to more recent decades: Firstly, a 'reality show' is a contradiction in terms. Whenever and wherever there is a show or a program, reality gets falsified. The average person becomes 'too self-conscious' when filmed; but in these moments of 'self-consciousness' one actually searches for oneself, without luck, in vain. This so-called 'self-consciousness' is actually an evaporation of one's genuine identity — because the human self does not and cannot belong on film, or on recording of any sort. Those being filmed may try to 'act naturally', but this is again another contradiction in terms. When you see someone on television, whether that person is an actor reciting a script or a just a normal person trying to be themselves — in either case the person is alienated from themselves and is playing a contrived role. You cannot act and be natural at the same time. On a literal level, when you see someone on television, you're not seeing a real person but rather an image of a person. And while people are being filmed, they tend to perceive their own identities as only images of what they really are. In more recent years we have seen the development of 'scripted reality shows' — but really we can leave out that final word, because it is redundant: Life in an artificial, media-saturated environment is in and of itself a 'show'. Almost everything around us is a sort of virtual reality, a reality that is scripted. When we in our modern habitats are surrounded by so many overlapping electronic portals into different, layered types of contrived realities, how in this disorienting framework can any of us possibly find enough reference points (or even one) to things that are truly real? If we lack any such reference point, then how can we ever begin to map and untangle our composite reality? And if our behavior has been conditioned more by our seeing so many fake people acting on TV, versus seeing so few people in real life who act remotely genuine, then how can we even know for sure if we are being honest with ourselves or behaving genuinely ourselves, when we don't even have a solid idea of what an authentic, genuine human being would even behave like anymore?

Cameras and recordings always force us to confront these sorts of impossible problems. It is not a question of technology 'making us consider interesting questions about reality', or whatever positive spin some apologist might try to come up with — for the simple fact that there are no answers to these questions. Is that what you would want the experience of your life to become? A stressful interrogation session in which you're made to face an unending series of troubling existential questions to which there are no answers? Due in large part to the media arm of the technological society, the experience of our civilization always threatens to turn into a nonstop puzzle session in which we wonder 'What does it even mean to be human anymore? What does such-and-such new development mean for human life?' And note that, while many people complain about 'the media', meaning the nasty little narcissists who populate the airwaves, I use the word to refer specifically to the actual communication technologies themselves. By their very nature, these methods of seeing images, hearing voices of people who aren't really there, and feeling ourselves part of an audience of strangers, cannot but do us harm and lead us into error. And no matter which side of the camera we're on, the moment we stop to think about the unreality of the situation, the experience bombards us with pointless riddles and makes us look foolish. Sooner or later, our relationships with each other and ourselves fall apart; they become sacrificed offerings for our crass entertainment and casual 'interest' — all in order to provide content to fuel the media machine.

The work of Orson Welles should have told us some of this long ago. What is his first film, Citizen Kane, except proof that viewing and recounting scenes from a man's external life cannot really tell us enough about who he is? There mere word 'Rosebud' does not explain this human being to us — not in any satisfying, non-superficial way, it doesn't. As the procession of 'moving pictures' finally ends, we are reminded again that there is 'no tresspassing' over the human heart. In other words, film, recording, and cameras are all inherently non-human; they cannot capture our essence but only create the illusion of doing so, and thereby negate the realness of ourselves. In a later film, his Don Quixote, Welles recommits himself to this idea, and indeed furthers it by portraying Cervantes' knight errant in a modern world in which his stated enemy is the corrupting effect of technology, film in particular. 'The evil is in the human being,' the Don declares, 'for becoming a slave of those despicable machines.' And as he says this line we see the director himself looking at us through a movie camera.

I say 'camera', but we can use that to stand for all varying manners of recording devices — going all the way back to writing. The introduction and implementation of writing, for all the literary wonders it brings, always killed and/or dethroned any given culture's oral tradition; writing is a means of fixing, freezing, and arresting the language and details of people. The recording technologies of more recent years take their cue from the function of writing: the inherent and irremovable goal of these media is to create and preserve a reproducible externalization of all human signs, communications, and features.

Before all this, there was a sense that God or Santa Claus was always watching — but thankfully we would eventually be judged fairly. Now, however, there is a continually emerging — and correct — sense that anything and everything we do may well be preserved for earthly posterity, perhaps to be used against us in a court of law, or perhaps to return, unannounced, in very petty ways, to embarrass us with something we might have said or done years before. And very little of this seems 'fair'. Moreover, the recording techniques are always improving themselves, and their data content is far too large for anyone to organize. To a great extent, direct evidence of our past crimes and gaffs remains at the mercy of randomness and computer glitches. How reassuring. On the whole, human beings will simply have an ever more difficult time functioning in a happy or healthy way while knowing that this process is happening. Modern people already suffer from psychological disorders due, once again, to their artificial environments; once they have reason to suspect that anything they say or do might be recorded, they begin to suffer from what I would call 'spychological disorders' as well.

One of Marshall McLuhan's many errors (see section 18 below) was to suggest that electronic technology would return us to an oral culture, this time on an interconnected global scale. But, no, technology has instead yielded a situation in which people's appearances, actions, and language, on an ongoing basis, as soon as they emerge, are held hostage by media far more powerful, far more accurate, far more inaccurate, and far more dangerous and anti-human than writing ever was. Where once our naturalness, honesty, and nonchalance might, sometimes, have been threatened by the equivalent of a court stenographer sitting off to the side, but somewhere in sight — What is one part-time stenographer compared to an endlessly complex and immersive surveillance grid? Think of the difference between a person having to deal with the one stenographer once in a while, versus having to deal with a large, multifaceted apparatus that can turn invisible and could be anywhere, all the time. But that is how things proceed in the technological society, and it all conditions us to act more furtively, more uncertainly, less human.

Humanity is in the process of recording its own technologically-assisted suicide. It is proving to be a very indulgent and painful suicide at that, but nonetheless it is the only show on every channel; it continues to be uploaded online constantly, filmed from an infinite number of angles, and everything anyone says functions as a critique of how entertaining (or not) the show is. The snarky critique of the show is built into the show, and that's what our prevailing reality has become.

Do I really even need to go over this? This should all just be obvious by now — long before now, actually.

The worldwide initiative of providing endless electronic media to humanity is like the old program of giving alcohol to Native Americans through the fur trade, or flooding China with opium during the 19th century, or introducing crack cocaine to black communities in the early 1980s. Societies, past and present, often show themselves to be fundamentally incapable of adjusting to various sorts of unfamiliar stimuli. Because they don't know how to deal with these strange insertions into their environment, a certain percentage of people in these heretofore functioning groups will always become dangerously addicted to these new pursuits, to the point of mass distraction, to the point that the societies always risk collapsing and yielding to any larger external force (in the previous cases, colonial, imperial, or police force; in our case, the force of technological flow).

Humanity as a whole is genetically incompatible with an environment full of electronic media. Humans once used inanimate tools, but technology now appears to have taken on a life of its own. This situation, which appears as a weird sort of symbiotic relationship between people and technology, cannot last for very long: the symbiotic relationship transforms into a parasitic relationship. These conditions transform humanity into a group of confused, lost souls who simply cannot maintain survival, much less sanity, and who, if they were being honest with themselves, should not even want to survive in their current state, on this tiresomely long, draining, one-way road to extinction.

Now for something happier — or at least gayer.

4. Sylvester Society: I am using the fake surnames of all these people because I don't know who in the future might happen to read this letter — this weird, antiquated form of communication that I have printed out for you. That's the problem with physical writing; it's hard to get rid of and you never know if the copy you gave someone has actually been quarantined, destroyed, or sent back out to an unintended reader. With digital texts, on the other hand, you know for sure that someone somewhere will always archive it, that it's always circulating amongst automated databases, and you may as well assume that the whole world can read it if they want. When everything was physical, you never knew who might have gotten ahold of your words and reappropriated them. But now with digital, you can just search for the best phrases you've ever come up with, and see everyone who's taken and twisted them to their own ends. When I think about how certain literary attempts of mine could still be in the hands of old friends, teachers, professors, and ex-girlfriends, it makes me uneasy. And while I realize that most of these copies have been thrown away like the trash they are, or else they have gotten lost somewhere in stacks of past acquaintances' old junk and paperwork, and probably these initial recipients have forgotten that my missives ever existed, if they ever read them in the first place — still that's not good enough, not obscure enough for me to save face. Several years ago I happened to run into KierJones, a name you probably haven't thought of in a decade. His green eyes were sunken and more piercing than ever, and his gangly red beard was nearly down to his bellybutton. In the midst of a surprisingly nice conversation he informed me that he still had hundreds of emails that we had exchanged when we were fifteen or so, and apparently every six months or so he still finds himself browsing through their contents, disinterring old corpuses. (I will present his last email to me as an appendix to this letter.) I wish everything I wrote prior to age 28 or so could simply vanish, both physically and from everyone's memory. I know, however, that you really did read and pay close attention to the 'novel' I wrote during our last year of high school, so I have decided to use these old character-names to conceal the identities of those old friends of ours. To anyone else these figures may seem like exaggerations, archetypes, or perhaps even clichés — and I myself, the cantankerous, introverted author, might also seem clichéd — but I know you can remember the real human beings involved here.

Sly Society. I never blamed you for remaining his friend after he and I fell out. After all, you were friends with him before you were friends with me. And how can I complain when, soon after graduation, you dropped him as a friend even quicker, less gradually, than you eased your contact with me? Nor do I have anything against Sly — nothing in particular, and no complaints with his 'sort of person'. But might I have some qualms with certain abstractions or themes suggested by him, his name and his person? Yes, well . . . I am not his enemy, but I don't much like Sly Society.

What always confused me most, however, was how you could stand to remain friends with him in light of what he did to you. You know the primary incident to which I'm referring.

I experienced a similar confusion when you acquiesced to my writing about this incident in my first bad book. At the time I felt awful even to ask if you would give me your permission to fictionalize what happened, but an obsession with presenting the truth of all our lives got the best of me. I wasn't expecting you to give me your blessing, but you readily did, and I don't think you were hiding any trepidation. You said, 'if that was what it took to create great literature,' then 'so be it' — even though there would be no doubt of mystery about the identities of the real people who inspired the characters, and this incident with Sly had already put you through great embarrassment and stress just amongst our close peers, and we were operating then under the assumption that my novel would be read by a much larger audience, many of whom might be curious as to what sordid truths there were in it. So I do not know what surprised me more, and really both surprises were one and the same: first that you remained friends with Sly after he did what he did to you, and then that you were supportive of the idea of me in effect choosing literary recapitulation of this incident over you and at your reputation's expense.

But even though you continued your friendship with Sly, keeping it up was not easy. One spring day, soon before we were to graduate, you asked me, 'Have you ever seriously thought about killing Sylvester Society? Because I have.' This was in the wake of yet another public humiliation that he had put you through. I told you that, no, I hadn't, but that I had thought about maybe slashing the tires of his car under cover of night, or some other cowardly, passive-aggressive act. We talked for another few minutes about these sorts of emotions, but nothing inciting was said, and of course nothing became of any of it. I wish I knew how 'serious' you really were about any of this. While I don't think you ever would have killed him under any circumstances, you were certainly thinking more seriously about the idea of murder than I was about the idea of slashing his tires. In my estimation, I think you wanted to hear me say, 'Yes, I've thought about killing him too,' if only to reassure you that you weren't alone in those kinds of considerations. (But I've honestly never thought about killing anyone, least of all myself.)

Again another puzzling sensation enters into the story. Because as strange as it was for me to realize that you had been remaining friends with someone you, on some level, wished you could do away with, it is even stranger — to me, anyway — that you would think of murdering someone with whom you once had sexual relations. I cannot imagine wanting, even passingly, to kill any girl I have ever had affection for, much less kill any of those with whom I have actually felt pleasure. Have I been angry with ex-partners? Of course. But the mention of killing juxtaposed with sexual history troubles me deeply. Maybe that says more about me than it does about general human relations — I'm honestly not sure. I know it seems as though, for rhetorical effect, we might say that just as 'love can turn to hate in an instant' (which it can), so too do we 'often come to murder that which we have loved.' Actually, Wagner wrote something to that effect and was celebrated for doing so, but I am not at all sure that this idea should actually apply in any remotely literal way — it is not a good excuse — for we rightly judge those who kill ex-lovers as heinous murderers. And I am not so sure that 'seriously thinking' about committing such an act should be considered all that normal either.

Then again, I'm not sure about your motivations in any of this. The whole chain of events began when — under some insane logic — you asked Sylvester Society to give you oral sex in order to upset your then-girlfriend, Rosaline, who had displeased you in some way. In order for this to happen, the news of your action had to reach Rose — so gossip seems to have been built into the plan — and yet you were obviously even more displeased when Sly continued to tell the story to more and more people, a few more here and a few more there, again and again, whenever any new friend entered into his confidence, however briefly — and Sly Society was (and presumably is) often making new friends. That's how I learned of this incident in the first place — from a joking, smirking Sly who had informed me that I was his new best friend. He would simultaneously brag about having had you, but also insult you, saying with a wink that he took pity on you and that you were not at all well-endowed. And yet you remained friends with him. Why? Perhaps you were afraid that if you went against Sly, he would tell even more people of the incident. But, no, that can't be it, because you were fine with me telling the same story to an unknown quantity of strangers, when I wrote of it in a 'literary memoir'.

There is only one explanation that I can find for any of this, and it is the simplest explanation of all: you are, at the very least, bisexual. You wanted the story to get out so that you could have no choice but to be who you really are.

That is the simplest explanation, even though most who knew you assumed that your sexual contact with Sly was a fit of insanity. It was only those distant from you, our other schoolmates who heard pieces of the story as a rumor, second- or third-hand, who jumped to conclusions and said 'So, Alex is gay.' But perhaps they had the social distance needed to see it, and it is only after the distance of years that I can see it too. You didn't have oral sex with a man to get back at your girlfriend; that was just an excuse; you had oral sex with a man — one night in the open air, under the stars and of your own free will — simply because you wanted to have oral sex with a man.

Please believe me when I tell you that none of this is said to insult you or shame you. And it would not be facetious to say that if nothing else it proves you are more 'open-minded' than me in some things. You very possibly won't believe any of that, and might think it is some sort of backhanded compliment, which it isn't. It isn't backhanded and it isn't a compliment; it's just a statement of fact that you are more 'open-minded'. Also, of course, more gullible, because I have no doubt that you believed Sly when he told you that you were really special to him. (You believed that, and yet I have, ironically enough, a fear of you not believing the seriousness of so much of this letter.)

But if I am very wrong about your hidden sexuality — which I am sorry you could not admit openly — that only goes to show that I don't know you anymore. And perhaps my current ignorance of you is so great that it has contaminated my retrospection and effaced what I used to know.

As for Sly Society, like Allison Fashion, there are aspects of this person which may take on greater thematic importance for you later. I didn't know much back then, but at least I named these characters well and got to their essence when I put them in a book the first time.

5. Confidential Appointment: The theoretical stuff I've been mentioning here — I started thinking about these sorts of things during my final summer in Japan. My last months there — I can't decide whether they were good or bad, but they were definitely strange. Recovering from an eye condition that made me hypersensitive to light, I lived somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness, with nothing to do with myself after having submitted my thesis that spring. My attempts to sleep during the day resulted in my simply lying there with the lights off, for a dozen hours straight, listening to bizarre old radio shows and having internal conversations with myself. At night I wandered through the streets and did other things I don't want to go into here.

At first I loved studying in Japan; the popular culture and news media was alien enough that I didn't feel 'interpellated' by it: I wasn't its target audience, so I didn't perceive it as trying to lead me along or make a claim on my soul. I can't stress to you how important and how nice it is to be able to live life without facing an onslaught of propaganda specifically designed to play off of your own nationality and background demographic; it is so serene, vicarious and freeing, to live within a sea of media without being subject to any of it. There for a time I knew something of that kind of peace, even in a fairly crowded, loud city in Japan. But during my last year there, the third year . . . I got sick of it all. Sick of it figuratively — sick of the psychology department and my advisors' fussy demands for rewrites of evaluations that were already perfectly fine — and then sick of it literally, once my eye problems became debilitating. All I thought about was getting back to the States, though the disorientation of that final summer made it impossible for me to make a plan regarding what I'd do once I returned.

As luck had it, I wouldn't need to make a plan. My 'aunt' gave me one, and once I heard it, I wasn't allowed to refuse.

You may not remember, but I told you about my 'aunt' before, when we both came back to the old town for Christmas one year and got drunk together. I think I remember conveying to you this woman's childish nature in private — she still slept with stuffed animals and sometimes watched Disney cartoons — which contrasted so adorably, I thought, with her otherwise professional demeanor. (This was in the first decade of the twenty-first century, right before it became quite so common for adults to indulge in media originally intended for children.) She was a professor there at the college, and even though I never took a class with her, even though I never did anything around her that was in any way impressive, she took a strong liking to me.

We met at one of the departmental cocktail parties, during my first year there. She asked me what I was working on at the moment, and I said some ridiculous line about 'an essay investigating "culture-creation" and the operational and consumeristic differences between music, on the one hand, and muzak, on the other, in terms of how they can influence mass psychology.' Stunned, she asked under whom I was studying. I told her my adviser's name, but then had to add — lest she check up on me, which she would have — that this particular essay wasn't for him, rather it was just something of my own that I was composing out of boredom. Not letting it go, ushering me to sit down next to her and handing me a glass of champagne that tasted cheap but wasn't, she inquired into what journals I was thinking of submitting the article to, how far along in it was I, how I got the idea, etc. I tried to put her off as best I could, but in the end — after she kept looking at me with interest, crossing her dark-hosed legs, bouncing a black leather spiked bootie over her knee, brushing back her auburn hair behind her ears, and going out of her way to give me academic advice that did indeed seem to have quite a lot of merit (and so it was wasted on me) — in the end I left the party having promised her that I would update her on my progress, and then send the article to a psychology journal at which she had some pull. I trudged back to my dorm room then, wishing I was drunker than I was, with the added weight of having to plan an insane essay on quite dubious topics that I had scarcely ever thought of before. But I'd be lying if I said that the thought of having a reason to see the woman again didn't excite me.

She was in her early 40s, unmarried, no children. She appeared refined and fashionable. She had a simple elegance that made others feel comfortable. In social situations, and before I got to know her much in private, she seemed like the most serene, tactful, and amicable person I had ever met. She had a way of drawing ideas and abilities out of people when they didn't know they even had the capacity. I had never heard of her before meeting her that night at the party, but several times afterwards I encountered students who professed their love for her and called her 'amazing'. (Only once, bafflingly, did I hear one sullen overseas student say 'I left my home country to get away from people like that!') She was, of course, very attractive. Her elegance, tidiness and properness offered themselves as niceties to be discarded, if she ever had a reason to discard them, and I gave her a reason, or at least provided her with an excuse. She was a demon in the sack. Everyone at the university was impressed by her attention to mores and refinement, but at the same time she made it obvious that this was an edifice kept up as much for her own amusement as for considerations of professionalism. And in all this, in her public demeanor, she was an artist and not a particularly dishonest one. She was unassuming, but a healthy vigor radiated from her smooth complexion. She stood a few inches shorter than myself and had a great body, which was very curvy. (Self-deprecatingly, she once called herself 'corpulent'; I told her this wasn't the case, then joked that her English was off and that really she was thinking of something along the lines of 'copulate'.) She rarely showed any skin in public, but her shirts and sweaters were usually quite tight, which I enjoyed. After telling you that she had shoulder-length auburn hair, I should clarify and say that it was dyed; it must have been, because it was 'too red' — deep red and glossy — and she was Japanese. Or half-Japanese. I know she was part Caucasian. — And this might seem unbelievable to you, but a lot of my fellow overseas students thought that I was part Japanese. Something about the darkness and shape of my eyes, combined with how I shaved my head — almost like a monk — after starting to go gray so early. The Japanese obviously knew that I wasn't one of them, but the other foreigners just assumed that I was mixed. (Do you remember a girl named Jessica Miner who came into our third grade class for about six months before her family moved on? About two months into her stay, she told my cousin Mary that she assumed I was Chinese. Probably this was because I needed glasses then and was squinting to see the blackboard. But still. And then some years later someone else once informed me that I was actually Jewish, because my earlobes connect directly to my neck, with no dangly bit. This person made the statement with an air of self-satisfaction, then smiled knowingly and nodded when I told him I really wasn't Jewish. It's all bizarre, I know, but the memories of these ethnic misreadings have always stayed with me, and I experienced it again in Japan.) — Anyway, I called her my 'aunt' after we laughed about some of this and she suggested that if I was mixed-race too then we might be related, maybe twice over. She was a wonderful person, and I'm glad to have known her, but these were all strange moments. Sicky-sweet situations.

The 'culture-creation muzak' article finally emerged a few months later. I had to keep working on it if I wanted to have an excuse to visit my 'aunt'. It wasn't easy, but eventually my fingers landed on a passable combination of keystrokes. Passable at least in the sense that an essay was typed. I didn't think it was very good. To me it looked like something I might have written when I was sixteen. It actually looked like the emails KierJones and I used to exchange. The references were scant and the arguments anachronistic. Several times I alluded to a series of experiments that the de Gaulle government supposedly conducted on its own citizens in the 1960s, flooding the Paris Métro with various sorts of increasingly 'cool' jazz music, and using this to drive record sales and (attempt to) stem the tide of social unrest. Eventually, when the public workers went on strike, the French citizenry subconsciously blamed them for the sudden lack of nice background music in everyone's lives — and they had less patience for the student protestors as well, for their angry aesthetic clashed with the music that most people wanted to hear all the time now. De Gaulle was reelected in a landside, and studies showed the musical conditioning had influenced mass psychology to that very end. Of course, all of this was fictitious. I made it up as I went along and provided absolutely no citations. The entire essay was punctuated with profound but incorrect ideas; and after a while I couldn't help myself, because the only way for me to go on was to make the lies bigger and bigger, sillier and sillier. I suggested that certain musical frequencies beneath human perception — of the sort that only dogs could hear — might be broadcast at high volumes over large cities. These tones could be used to calm, embolden, focus, or enrage the populace — whatever the social planners thought was in everyone's best interest. Suggesting such things, and having my name attached to them — it shamed me, even if only one submissions editor would ever read it.

Amazingly, the essay was published. How much of a hand my 'aunt' had in this, she wouldn't say. She'd just smile and raise her glass to me. I'd still go to visit her once every few weeks.

Halfway through my second year we drifted apart. My workload was very heavy, and my thesis took up most of my time. During my third year, the few times when I did see my 'aunt', she would want to spend at least two minutes talking about my future, and the annoyance I felt during those two minutes outweighed whatever other pleasures might be offered. So I stopped going to her, probably for the worst reason possible: because she actually wanted to help me in ways that made sense. She wanted me to get a teaching job in Japan and was going to help me get one; I could stay rent-free, either with her or at one of the apartments she usually let to students. But, I didn't want to go for any of that. I didn't want to plan much less do anything, and by the time my arduous thesis was completed, I didn't even want to think. During that final summer, those rainy months when I lost all sense of time, and all sense of what I was supposed to be doing in life, I remember thinking about my 'aunt' a few times while listening to some New Age radio host spout off about magic crystals or healing through magnetism. My 'aunt' often talked about similar things — the power of wearing a quartz pendant around your neck on your birthday, or trying to live in a house that's as close as possible to a ley line. There in the darkness then, I thought of it all with a smile on my face. She had trippy tendencies, but I never looked down on her. If anything I felt guilt that I couldn't do more for her than I had, shame that I wouldn't let her do anything more practical for me. Through everything I admired her and wished that somehow it would have made sense for us to be together longer. But it had to be a sordid affair — its appeal was its very sordidness. Yet through this sordid affair I got a great appointment.

She contacted me one day that August, at noon, the phone waking me from my dreamy reverie (I could never quite sleep any longer). The clarity and determination in her voice startled me — scared me would only be a touch too strong. Only once before had I ever heard her talk this way to someone, when she scolded a student. It thrilled me then, witnessing her admonish and harness another's will, but now I didn't know how to take it. Looking back on this now, I'm sure she wasn't mad at me but was only trying to convey the seriousness of the situation. Some 'very impressive' people she knew wanted a meeting with me. I began to tell her, in the most meandering way possible, that I didn't like her trying to set me up with jobs and placements, that I didn't want to do a postdoc, and — But she cut me off and told me, very pointedly, that she hadn't contacted anyone, that they had contacted her. 'I'd tell you who they are, but if I did . . . I don't think you'd be able to sleep at all, and you need your rest, sleepyhead.' With this last word, a pet name she had for me, she tried to inject some nicety into the conversation. But after another mumbling response on my part, her tone became very pointed and annoyed, and she told me that it would make her look very bad if I didn't get myself together and 'be there, tomorrow morning.' I just wanted her to stop talking, so I agreed and mercifully she let me hang up and get back to my bed and blankets.

Now restless and even more unable to sleep than usual, after another half hour or so of restless nothingness, I got up and took a shower. The sunlight was streaming in through the skylight but, for the first time in months, this didn't bother my eyes a bit. I shaved, because she liked me clean-shaven, and went through two new razerblades in the process, my thick facial growth clogging the shavers.

After cleaning myself up, I put on proper, respectable clothes for the first time since early spring. It used to be that I enjoyed wearing formal trousers, button-ups, and suitcoats, even when there was no reason for it, but I had gotten out of the habit. That day, however, I dressed to the nines in an attempt to make myself feel better, convince myself that something important really was transpiring.

I called on my 'aunt' unannounced then. 'The appointment isn't until tomorrow—' she started to say, but I ignored her and pushed my way past her, inside. Then I whirled around, almost slipping on the waxed wooden floor, and took in my surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. The white walls, undecorated except by the large, framed portrait of herself and her father, drawn in pencil by a family friend. The pile of shoes and boots by the door — all hers — stacked and overflowing from a footwear rack purchased many years ago. The canister-style, industrial-sized vacuum cleaner, which was far too large and unwieldy for her, left there on the gray carpet — the carpet that had many tears in it from her old cat. I saw her apartment in a new light, then. She once described it as cozy, and I accepted it as such, because I didn't care to give it a second thought; but now it seemed cramped. If she were really wealthy and well-connected, where was the evidence? She had told me many times that she rented flats to students, but what did that prove? The rental properties must have been inferior to her home, and even her home wasn't all that great. Personally, I didn't care about homemaking, furnishing, 'creature-comforts', any of that. But she did; she was always pointing out a thousand such details whenever we walked together in the street — 'Look at the curtains there! Look at how they've trimmed their hedges! Look at those windows that open out, not up! I'd like some of those!' — and yet for herself she had procured none of this. Never in all her years. Not because she didn't have the money but because she never really got around to anything besides academic work. 'I can't be bothered' — a favorite, adorable response of hers whenever asked why she doesn't do something she says she wants to do. I didn't blame her, only saw her existence as much more morose than before. Usually her personality was delightful; usually she was happy — but now I saw this optimism of hers as a very thin disguise that wasn't amusing or funny. She deserved something better and it was sad she didn't have it. I turned to her then — she was standing in the doorway, looking a bit perplexed — and minutes later, as if in an earnest attempt to win something worthwhile from the universe while we still had the opportunity, we made love confidently and with passion for the first time. Not just with a sort of naughtiness and lust that was ultimately self-defeating, as I'm sorry to say was always the case before. We wanted to appreciate each other more than we had ever done before — and even though the sex was tremendous, still, at the end, I think we both sensed that we had somehow screwed things up and consummated things ever so slightly wrongly, in some mysterious way that had nothing to do with moanings and orgasms. Maybe the entire setup was fatally flawed from the start. It was never like love at all: in the beginning we were glad that it wasn't; at the end we were sad that it couldn't be.

Lying next to her a few hours later, waiting for a pineapple and ham pizza to be delivered, she told me that even if we drifted apart psychologically — even if we never saw each other again — she wanted us to live near each other, if only so we'd have the option of visiting and starting the affair anew. Just feeling that she had the option of this would be enough for her, she said. I didn't say anything but knew then that I'd never see her again after I graduated and left Japan. I didn't want to hurt her any more than I probably already had, on some level, without meaning to, but . . . I wasn't really meaning much of anything in those days.

Then the insane thought occurred to me that I would like to have given her a child. She would never have asked me that, but then and there I knew that if she had, I would have been proud to provide her with one. I could see how in a somewhat different world — even a world in which she didn't have as much money and free-time — she could have become a happy, loving, nurturing mother. I sure hope you don't think that's a wrong or insulting or degrading thing for me to say.

The next morning, after what would be our last 'big breakfast' at a favorite café, she insisted that I alone take a cab to her contacts' address. She said that she already had a reputation for being pushy with them, and didn't want to invite herself along, since they — whoever they were — had only asked for me. Usually I never liked spending more than twelve hours or so with my 'aunt' at one time, but that day I didn't want her to leave my side. 'You are sending me away,' I told her melodramatically, trying and failing to make myself feel better by turning my sudden clinginess into a joke. 'Be nice to my friends,' she quipped. Another attempt at humor that rang hollow. Never before had things been so awkward between us. Usually everything had been effortless, cordial, open and fun.

If nothing else, before I left I wanted more information about just who wanted to interview me, and for what. Deciding at this point to turn away from me and begin to clean up a neighboring table after breakfast — to the befuddlement of our waitress — she told me that it was 'a group of people in the entertainment industry, mostly' and that they had become interested in me due to that stupid damn 'wonderful article I helped you write, a year and a half ago.' That figured. The worst essay I've ever written. Not only did it become my first publishing credit — something I still occasionally have to live down to this day — but it also attracted the attention of people who, in some respect at least, made my 'aunt' more nervous and reverential than anyone in academia ever did.

I paid the cab driver with money my 'aunt' gave me, noting that she only gave me enough for the drive there, not the return. Maybe this was to be a one-way trip — quite ominous — or else, more likely, she simply forgot to factor for how I would get back. I couldn't complain, though. I was dead broke, and wouldn't mind an hour-long walk back from a part of the city I'd never been in before. If I got lost, so be it.

My destination didn't seem particularly noteworthy on first sight. Just another office building squeezed in amongst all the others. It was on a busy street — I would have thought that such important people would want to get away from the noise, but apparently not — and the only somewhat odd thing was that there was just one doorbell. Evidently the entire building was owned by one entity — but even this wasn't so very impressive to me, because the building was only about seven feet wide.

It was a hot sunny day, for a change. It was beautiful out but there was no one about, aside from two fashionable women with shopping bags at the end of the block, ambling toward me, laughing to each other as they looked at their cellphones.

In the street then — I don't know why — a weird feeling came over me, a deep burning mixed with a sense of being very out of place. For the first time in over a year, I felt that I didn't belong there, where I was — and I don't just mean Japan. The best way to describe it is to say that, for some reason, I felt like an impostor who had just been found out. No one was even looking at me then, and I hadn't even gotten to my appointment yet, but I was suddenly somehow convinced that these people — the people behind this, whoever they were — knew all about me. They had probably checked into me somehow, and had found out more than I wanted anyone to know. My 'aunt' didn't really know much about me at all, and that was the way I liked it. But from now on, if I took this assignment — whatever it was — because it sounded important, I could be sure that someone was going to be keeping tabs on me to an extent to which I wasn't accustomed or amenable.

I entertained the idea of simply walking away. I would have too, if I didn't have the suspicion that the moment I took a step away, someone from above would shout at me, or else the door would buzz at me or open on its own. Then those thoughts gave way and I realized that, no, if I walked away then nothing would happen and no one would care. I would be able to avoid my 'aunt' fairly easily during my last few weeks in the country, and I would never hear about of any of this again. Possibly the people above, inside, didn't really even want to see me, wouldn't like me when they saw me, and could probably determine, after they met me, that meeting me was a waste of time, and that I would not be a suitable candidate for whatever they had in mind. I resolved then and there to ring the doorbell, if only to inconvenience someone else out of spite. Seconds later a soft chime sounded, the door unlocked, and I was inside.

The lobby was barren and a bit dilapidated. It looked like it had been a nice place once upon a time, but several of the large white marble tiles had cracks in them and chips taken out of them. There was very stately, stained oak paneling for walls, but a couple large, sweeping gashes had been cut into them — marks somewhere between gang tags and pure vandalism, and nothing short of a samurai sword could have made them. I was beginning to feel like my 'aunt', starting to care so much about decor — but I had to notice things like that, if only to look for clues as to just who was about to interview me and why.

Just as I noticed that there was no button next to the elevator, I heard the elevator car come down. Evidently they had sent it to bring me up. 'How does the first person here in the morning get up there?' I wondered. 'Or do they have 24-hour guards for whatever strange operation this is? 24-hour security, but their lobby looks abandoned.' The elevator doors opened and I saw that the car was empty. I stepped inside and pressed the up-arrow, which was the only button there to press.

Thirty seconds later and — however many floors up that took me — I arrived at the far end of a narrow but luxurious office. A wall of wet heat hit me as I stepped into the room. To my left I saw a large humidifying machine, five feet tall and made of white plastic, pumping out a cloud of water vapor. I had never seen one this large before; upon closer inspection I saw a layer of grime on it, with lint, fuzz, and curlycue black hairs having settled onto its surface. The rest of the office was immaculate, however: large rugs with what looked to be a Native American pattern; huge tapestries on the wall, with Oriental designs and characters on them; mahogany bookcases, full of leather-bound volumes, that reached to the 12-foot ceilings. I had to wonder how on earth someone could run a humidifier — at full blast, no less — in a posh room like this, full of expensive and sensitive décor.

As I spun my head around, to trace the trajectory of the water vapor as it floated away from the elevator, I saw two figures standing at the end of the long, thin, rectangular room. Behind them was a huge picture window, which seemed to take up the entire back wall, seven by twelve, and through the window the rising sun was blasting light.

Just then, one of the figures said my full name. It was an old man's voice. Squinting and putting my right hand in front of my face to block the sun, I walked forward through the humidor mist, towards my hosts, whom I could only see in silhouette.

As I drew closer, I could see that the man was facing me and leaning over a large desk. The desk was covered with literally hundreds of scattered loose-leaf papers, wrinkled print-outs, binders and notebooks, but beneath all that one could just about notice that the desk too was made out of mahogany — to match the bookcases — and its formidable legs were shaped like dragon claws resting upon spheroids. Of the two legs that I could see, the front legs, one of the claws seemed to be clutching a representation of the earth, and the other clutched a representation of the moon. — I could see this desk very well, because the sunlight coming streaming in compelled me to look down, but the man behind it remained a mystery to me.

'Gill, lower that shade, will ya?' he said.

The other figure, evidently a woman named Gill, moved her lithe form over to the wall, pressed a button, and slowly — with a whirring sound — a seven-foot-wide shade began to descend. It was cream-colored, and still let some light through, draping the room in a warm glow.

As things slowly came into focus, my eyes were naturally drawn to the female, whose face was turned away from me as she watched the shade come down. Seeing what she looked like gave me more questions than answers. She appeared to be an extremely tall, thin but athletic teenager. Her skin was almost pure white. Her platinum blonde hair was in pigtails, and she was wearing an outfit that I'd later hear her describe as part of her 'Lolita goth' phase: black ribbons in her hair, a bizarre white cummerbund-style top that revealed most of her cleavage and midriff, frilly white silk fingerless gloves, a frilly pink skirt that exposed almost everything, and lastly, beneath all that, white silk leggings. I would later realize that she was not quite so tall but was wearing 8-inch pink platform shoes, with curved heels. Despite the perverse babydoll-style attire, when she turned back around I could tell that she was much older than I would have expected. In those times, certain girls in their twenties might have worn this sort of getup to private Halloween parties, but this woman was in her early 40s, at least. She wore a ton of makeup, expertly applied, with very red lips and very sexy eyeliner, but her huge eyelashes didn't quite hide the crow's-feet. Not that it mattered. Regardless of her ridiculous style, she was extremely attractive. What she had done to herself hardly augmented her beauty — not in my opinion, at least — but it couldn't conceal it either.

The old man, on the other hand, turned out to be younger than I initially expected from his voice. I estimated that he was in his late 50s. He had very tan skin — like leather — and wore light-blue-tinted glasses with silver frames. He also wore a black baseball cap, turned backwards, and was dressed in a sky-blue plush tracksuit. He said my name again — just my first name this time — and held out a hand for me to shake. It was cold and clammy — as you might expect — but also dry like sandpaper, and the way he gripped me caused his oversized rectangular gold rings to cut into my wrist. 'Jamie,' he said, introducing himself as we shook.

He sat down and gestured for me to do the same. The chair he pointed me to was purple and pink, low-to-the-ground, overstuffed — its big cushion was so hard that it supported me without sinking down at all — with a jutting backside that jammed against my lower spine whenever I rested upon it in the slightest. The chair seemed like it was made to set a porcelain doll on during an imaginary tea party; it was not something you would offer a guest to sit in, but I'm sure it cost a fortune.

At this point Gill slowly began to pirouette on her stilt legs, throwing her head this way and that, sometimes observing me with a huge red and white smile, sometimes turning away and pulling back the edge of the shade so she could peek out the window. She never said anything.

Jamie, on the other hand . . .

'You've worked a lot on your own, haven't you?' he asked, with a heavy Brooklyn accent. 'No — don't answer that. You like working alone? Why?' He paused, and just as I was about to say something he continued: 'I know why. Guys like us.' He smiled, then puffed air out his nose. 'Because that's the best way to work most of the time. And we do what's best. What saves us is efficiency — the devotion to efficiency. In the work that I do — that I'm doing now — I need to build a direct relationship with customers. In other words: service. But service in the sense of — just what we've been talking about — working it out the best way for you and doing things efficiently. And effectively. The service here is just taking that idea, that sense, and expanding it and giving it to other people. With the internet there's like a million options but, ah . . . With the internet we have, ah . . . It's like: mass production. Like what Iggy Pop tried to sing about, ages ago? Except now there is zero overhead, with the internet. With digital, making a copy — or a clone, if you will — is totally free and flowing — no more mechanics — and you can do it on-demand. Now what do you think about that.' He looked at me deadpan, then seemed to get a bit annoyed at my lack of response, blew a puff of air and continued: 'O-kay. So: Unlimited addiction. Get it? Do you understand that? Next: Unlimited supply. An' when the two a those things happen t'come together, they create this intense and truly insane reaction, an' they feed each other — they just do, an' we can't say exactly why — an' it doesn't even matter. But, ah . . . what does matter is that nobody knows what the hell they wanna buy.' He laughed. 'So we need some kinda d'vice that tells people what to buy — helps-helps people figure out what they wanna buy, rather. A d'vice — and this d'vice could be a person' — he raised a pointer finger — 'that makes things easier for them. Walks them through it and, ah, and has a relationship with them.' He swallowed hard. 'You and I — guys like us — I think we need to build a special rapport with the customers and I really think we need to service them.' He paused to let that sink in. 'And we need to learn how ta help them work all the great equipment in life — mental as well as musical — the music of the mind and of-of-of the spheres — so they can get whatever they want . . . and whatever they're most capable of making, and most capable of taking, and paying for . . . one way or the other. Keep pushing, tell them. Find where the barrier is now — whatever that barrier is — so that tomorrow the barrier will be a little further on. And, lemme tella ya, that will turn the tide. Something as simple as that. An idea like that.' He snapped his fingers. 'Marry it with technology, and . . . boom. It just has to be reasonably priced. Or subsidized by . . . by anyone? It doesn't have to be subsidized by the government or the taxpayer, but . . . Just price it, you know? It can go a lot of ways, ah . . . Phone companies? Hardware companies? Hardware stores? Software? Clothing? Digital? There's a lot of merchants. Grocers? Yeah. And health and human services. What are "human services"? That includes everybody. And remember, whoever has the content in the end — the unique content — especially music . . .' Here he paused to lay his palms down on the desk — or rather onto the pile of papers on his desk — drummed them a few times and sighed. 'The reason the music industry — lemme tell ya somethin' — the reason the music industry got in trouble on the internet is cuz they're the best app. They're each other's killer app, rather. A lotta people will tell you that the internet is music's killer app, but I think music can become the internet's killer app, too. It's a killer. Like a deadly assassin who sings. Like . . . go back to troubadours. Okay? Bands today gotta learn how to get good live. Practice getting good live, first of all. Practice practicin'. First they gotta practice practicin', some of these guys now. Get good live an' then kill 'em dead. — But, yeah, the internet and music — music just flows through that thing like water. Flows like water. So, a lotta people . . . Lemme tell ya, that's gonna help the record industry in the end. It's gonna really help it. I don't know how, but somehow. We just don't know how yet, but . . . Technology. You know? We need to license with technology companies. And, these things happening? In the end, it's a good thing. Something wonderful is happening, you know that? Why? It forces people to think. Correction: It forces guys like us to think. How can we give our content away — for free — and call it promotion? It's stupid. Content and promotion are not the same thing. Are they? If they are, they goddamn well shouldn't be, and that's something that's gotta be fixed real fuckin' fast!' Having worked himself up suddenly, he cleared his throat and put a hand to his chest to excuse himself. 'We've been so stupid for so long. The internet made us realize that — made me realize that, even if no one else has yet. Because . . . Promotion? Someone's gotta pay for it. Am I right? Somehow, someone is paying for it. They are paying for it — on what they used to call the spiritual level, you know — even if they're not.' He looked me dead in the eye and sucked in a long breath. 'Do you agree with that, sir?'
I just nodded. What he said sounded like mad ranting, but it was also vaguely familiar. Before I could remember where I had encountered some of this stuff before — and it really was just stuff — he started talking again.

'What I do is — What I've done is . . . hustle and look for talent. It's not a job. It's a passion and a vocation and you can't do it part-time. What attracted me to you is that you don't do what you do part-time, either. Am I right?' I made no attempt to speak, but then after scarcely a moment's silence he said: 'Okay, shut up and listen then and let me tell you how I do it.' Then he paused for half a minute or more, putting his hands over his face and leaning his head back. Eventually he slumped down, let his hands fall limply against the desk, and looked up at me. 'A clear view of what's great and what isn't. That's the way to go, bro. Because — these guys, you, me, everybody — one way or the other, you'll be told. You'll be told that you suck. You really suck! So you need a clear view to know whether that's true or not when you hear it — when you hear it about yourself and when you hear it about anybody else. Because — when people like you or say they do? These days? You can damn well be sure that, early on, if people like you, or like me, or like anything that hasn't made it yet, then . . . Whatever they're selling has ta suck!' Here he broke into a giggling fit, and I — looking over at Gill to see her laughing as well, with her frozen smile — I started laughing as well. Despite Gill's manufactured appearance, her eyes still seemed very human, and they begged me to laugh along with Jamie — probably because it'd be better for both of us, to keep him happy. And that wasn't a problem, because at the time I did think that what Jamie was saying was funny, honestly funny in the same straight-forward way he did; but looking back on it now, I have no idea why. After wiping his eyes, he continued: 'So, ah, what, ah, what people who don't get that do is, ah . . . They blame the record company. Pfft. Assholes. But, ah . . . that's okay. Lotta good that does them. You know? The way this world is right now: ten television shows auditioning how many people? You want in, you'll get heard. Okay? It's a tough game, to keep it solid and pure, to get through the . . . maze? But just believe in yourself — I tell 'em — and you'll be told — be heard, rather. And, in the end, there will be someone or something who organizes it. And that'll be called a record company.' After another pause, he added, 'So?' and looked to me.

I had no answers and no response. But I remembered where I had heard some of this before — snatches of it anyway. Some of what he was saying seemed like a jumbled version of some sentences I had written in that goddamn essay from two years ago. Did he know this? It would make sense, if he was interested in some of these ideas — crackpot as they were — that he would want to talk to me about them, like they were something new and true and original. But he was passing this stuff off as if it were his own. Did he know that they were actually my stupid ideas, not his? Was he self-aware? You might have gotten the impression — and it would be a correct one — that Jamie is a ridiculous person. But he's also made billions of dollars, and pretty much knew what he was doing in the process. At least on his way up, he knew what he was doing and wasn't crazy. But could he have been playing dumb with me — with everyone — all along, all the time? I don't think so, but that explanation is at least possible.

'A real strong combination of natural talent and learned ability,' he began again. 'Talent and the ability to feel what excites and what can move popular culture and what can help us guide people to that end. Whatever that end is!' At this last sentence he flung his right hand into the air flippantly and I was reminded of Joyce's 'sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature'. Jamie continued: 'The real goal for all of us — you and me; not just the grunt artists — is to, ah . . . move culture. That's what we're trying to do. For people with their eyes open and their brains turned on, that's the one and only game in town. Am I right? And when you can do that, when you can look out at some-some punk-ass kid you never met before and see him doin' somethin' goofy you thought up, off the top of your head, and slapped in the background of a rap video — somethin' goofy or silly or something fun or cool or whatever it is — that-that's really — that's really rewarding, let me tell you. No foolin'. A great producer understands that, and does everything he can to move the needle. I mean, ah . . . I hate to go into it like this but, ah . . . Everybody wants to get paid? Okay? Okay. That's very popular these days. In my generation at least it was very popular, but maybe not quite so much in yours. Because now everyone is so happy to be a borderline broke-ass bum, like that gives them credibility because they're a loser? Lemme tell ya, there is no such thing as "credibility" anymore. Get the fuck outta here with that Mickey Mouse bullshit.' He made a raspberry noise and, in an imitation of masturbation, made a stroking gesture with his right hand. 'But I'm gettin' off track. The fact is that what we're really trying to do is impact culture. Right? Okay, I'm honestly asking you. Do you agree with that, sir, with what I said there?'

After a pause, I just nodded. But I wanted to say, 'I should, since I wrote it.' Then I thought better of it: 'No, I wrote all that in the article, but I don't agree with it and never did.' And then I said 'Yes' aloud.

'Good,' he said, very happily. 'Go-o-od. Now — Oh, I read what you wrote, by the way; we can get to that later. But, ah . . . Okay, before we go any further. Ever any madness in your family?' I shook my head, and then he added: 'Besides your "aunt", I mean.' A snickering laugh. 'Okay, no madness. Guess your generation is a good a place as any to sow the seed, then!' A final half-snicker. 'Okay, what I'm asking you then, is . . . Okay, first — Do you want to have a look at the culture? Of course you do. At this point, you can't not look, like, ah, like Odysseus on the mast or whatever. And the sirens? Anyway, ah . . . Can you interpret it? Of course you can. It's second nature. Guys like us. What I need you to do, though . . . Okay, two things. You do good at the first thing, and your "punishment" is you get to do the second thing. Okay? The first thing is . . . I need to know how much of the needle is moving cuz of my artists. Some of them, they need to know, personally, how much — call it credit or call it blame — how much they're personally responsible for. If you wanna call it that. One of them in particular. A rap singer. Having some second thoughts. Wants to know what he's doing. He's doing it alright — he's doing it great, or he was — but he doesn't know what he's doing. You understand? Don't sugarcoat it or, ah, moralize it, in terms of right and wrong. Just . . . quantify how much of it is any artist's doing. You know? Figure out a way to, ah, to factor that. And get back to them — and me — on it. Because, personally, I would like to know whether or not — independent of profit — this company is worth runnin', purely on the base of, ah . . . call it its humanitarian function? Take the money off the table and you tell me how much the needle is moving specifically because of us, versus how much of what I'm seeing out there, with the kids, is just . . . just happening for whatever-whatever reason? Think of it like . . . We're all nuts — ha ha ha — Okay? But . . . are we just insane, or are we criminally insane? Are they responsible for their actions? For other people's actions? Are we liable? I mean not necessarily in a legal sense, but . . . actually, yeah, that too. This is what my artists wanna know — some of 'em — and what I really wanna know. Now don't you wanna figure that out for me? There's a real lotta money in that for you, and a real lotta somethin' else. Maybe. And — Gill-Gill? Hey' — he snapped his fingers at her — 'whyn't you get us all some drinks? I just want water.'

And that was the end of part one of our conversation.

Obviously, despite Jamie's logorrhea, I have left out some of my responses.

The truth is, I can't tell you any more of this portion of our conversation, or its immediate outcome. Beyond this point, officially, nothing happened. I can't tell you, for example, what my evaluations of Jamie's artists were — how much responsibility, if any, they bore for 'moving' or 'impacting' culture in any number of specific ways — because none of that happened. I hope you get my drift. Not only am I unaware of any such activity or operation, but no records will be found of any of this. Moreover, the very notion that I myself went on to ghostwrite for several of these famous musicians and 'lyricists' over the next few years — that suggestion would be erroneous. There would be no substance to it. I would be legally barred from divulging details like that, and even the very claim that I contributed in some unaccredited capacity to five gold and three multi-platinum albums would probably be a breech of contract. So I am not claiming that. And, besides, as I've been telling you, there is no contract. It's no matter to me anyway, since the songs in question — if they were in question — are certainly nothing of which to be proud.

•

Since the narrative has already been paused, I might as well let you know something that's been bothering me. It's bothered me since before I started writing you, and to some extent it's the reason why I held out for so long without contacting you. In addition to my other fear — my fear of you being too much like everybody else now — I also fear that you won't believe this letter or take it seriously. I mentioned this briefly, parenthetically, in a previous section. I doubt you would believe certain information regarding where I've been and what I've done these last few years. Sometimes, along the way, I've consciously stopped and thought, 'There's no way Alex would ever believe this.' What is one thing I have done? I have ghostwritten for several famous musicians and 'lyricists'. If I told you for whom, you wouldn't believe me — and besides, I'm legally barred from divulging these details. And, again, it's no matter to me anyway, since the songs are certainly nothing of which to be proud.

For me, I've found that believability or lack thereof has to do with delivery — as with comedy, it's all in the timing — and with how much my listener or reader thinks I care about being taken seriously. If I really want to be believed, people think I'm lying. But if I convey information by putting forth an almost aggressively apathetic attitude, as if I didn't care whether or not you believed me or took anything I said seriously or was moved even to think about it, then, in that case, you'd probably believe anything. The trouble right now is — I really want you to believe me, take me seriously, and consider the ideas, anecdotes, and reminiscences I'm telling you. And I doubt you'll do so. On some level, you don't believe me, even though I'm trying really hard to tell you the truth and my truth. And yet I have the definite impression that if I told you huge lies, instead — perhaps that I was working with the CIA, perhaps that I was a top consultant for UNESCO — then you might well believe almost anything I said. (I've told those things to other people, by the way, people who know me better than you do now, and they believed me. Just like how I used to tell people in college that Return of the Jedi was filmed in the forest around our hometown, and that all us neighborhood kids got to put on costumes and play Ewok extras.)

To a large extent it has often been this way for me, due to some dark quality that I have. You (or anyone) could probably accuse me of almost any crime, and I'd be convicted, simply because of how nervous and awkward I'd surely act, faking myself out in the cross-examination. On the other hand, I could get away with almost anything, never get caught, and lie perfectly well, very convincingly — very casually — professing my innocence when questioned. This is how it has been for me for quite a long time. But there are further complications besides this annoying, contradictory quality of myself.

I guess there are certain external and circumstantial conditions that can envelope a speaker or a writer that cause his audience to always believe his lies but never his truths. I've lived in that condition for quite some time now, like a man within a whirlwind of information — a swirl of data and declaration that's all taking place within a narrational Bermuda Triangle — and I only get swept further and further into the storm as the years pass. Whenever I have tried to convince someone of something true, or something that I really believe in, my insistence always has the opposite effect: the person walks away thinking that I am either lying or putting them on, joking, trying to have a laugh at their expense. That's what makes this letter so difficult, because it has to be very long, to try and really explain myself as best as possible. But the more I write the less you'll believe me.

6. Freedom, Instincts, Politics: People want to be free. That's a natural, inherent drive. The problem is, people don't know what real freedom amounts to anymore; they have mistaken freedom for a seductive combination of creature comforts and unimpeded instincts. They like wanting to be free; they do not always like being free. They do not want the personal responsibility of freedom — and even mentioning 'personal responsibility' brings a Pavlovian eye-roll. I myself roll my eyes at the notion. Most of the time I can't be bothered.

Looking back on the last several centuries we do see a general expansion of what civilized people have called freedom. At first this Enlightened movement took the form of slow and considered arguments, many of them contradictory and deceptive. Then there came the slow, deliberate, dignified marches of people, most of whom had their hearts in the right place. In more recent times the remnants of these ideas have flared up as little more than empty manias: We see this in people who live by stupid catchphrases, people who — if you kept giving them everything they asked for in life — would just end up overdosing on drugs and committing suicide in short order (which we are instead doing collectively in slow motion). To behave in this way is their 'freedom'. We have seen beyond the veneer of the patriot, the revolutionary, the freedom fighter, the mad bomber, and the indignant couch potato or internet troll — and all of them are really lusting for their own destruction. Some of them, the most overbearing busybodies, say they would actually be happy to die for their causes — but really I think they would just be happy to die, period, out of spite and frustration; they need a good excuse to do so, a righteous cause, and hope someone or something can assist them in this suicidal process. The desire for more technology is a desire for less natural humanity. If certain people didn't have a perceived enemy around, from whom they could keep demanding some kind of freedom, they would have nothing to do in life. Like almost everyone else now, they've generally proven themselves incapable of forming lasting, robust human relationships.

You can't have real freedom within a technological society. Every 'reform' only serves to solidify the system itself, effectively plugging another hole, sealing another exit from which humans in their natural search for freedom could have escaped. Every reform removes one more reason to leave the system behind; you're left feeling increasingly unhappy — your unhappiness being tied directly to the increasing artificiality of your surroundings and the increasing contrivances of society — but you have fewer and fewer legitimate grievances to bring up. You're unhappy, but you can't explain why, and history says that the people always keep getting more of more of what they want — So why are they ever unhappier and ever more dysfunctional? Every time a reform movement succeeds, a small amount of creature comfort or a small degree of licentiousness is allowed by the system. But the overall mental confines still remain, and their walls keep getting thicker and stronger. Reforms, and politics in general, do not actually allow people to 'do what they want'; rather, they're a roundabout way of limiting what people would even think about wanting to do in the first place. Everything has tended to get worse and worse under the guise of getting better. If you're always becoming less of a human being on a fundamental level, then what difference does it make if you're able to earn more perks or benefits, or receive more money to buy toys? A popular bromide says 'Things are getting better' — things, not people. We celebrate hollow victories of protestors who simultaneously win more rights from human governments — yet indenture themselves and their souls further and further into the clutches of technicality, bureaucracy, and thoughtless trendiness.

In a convoluted way of making ourselves feel okay about our domesticity, we say that only savage animals are but ruled by instinct. No. It is the domesticated animals that are ruled by instinct. It is the modern human beings who are ruled, one way or the other, by their instincts; for they have birthed a non-human system that better domesticates them, in perpetuity, by manipulating their instincts and guiding them through the glimmering artificial environment that makes humanity itself almost seem irrelevant. On the other hand, it is the wild animals who rule their natural environment by using their instincts to their own advantage. Unlike us, animals in the wild do not constantly get their instincts played with by an outside force that seems to hate them the way an ungrateful, oedipal child would hate his overbearing but weakening father — or the way the Monster hated Dr. Frankenstein. That is the way the technological society treats us. It is our creation which we made to serve our ego and raise us to godhood, but it has long since turned on us; it has truly consumed us.

The bottom line is, any movement toward real freedom is impossible if you're not moving toward something more natural, which absolutely no one in civilization is doing to any extent that isn't pathetic and contrived. They want cars that run on water and solar-powered computers. They don't realize that these things hurt their minds; they want that process streamlined. They've lost their connection to the natural world. They don't understand what matters anymore. They want things that actually harm them, and the poisonous formula needs less and less sugar in it for them to decide to drink it. They like the trappings of the system, but they all keep saying that they want to be free.

7. Disappointment, Disposal, Dostoevsky: As you might be able to discern, I've wanted to try and write some of this down for quite some time now. Rather than letting these scraps of ideas keep living in my head, swirling around and around . . . If forming them into words and paragraphs on the page somehow kills them and makes me look stupid and mistaken — that would be no big loss. I would welcome that. There are hypotheses and inner suspicions that should eventually be confronted, if only to dispose of them. The same goes for friends.

As I said, I wanted to write to you for some time as well. There was again this terrible 'synchronicity' when you wrote to me this past winter — because I was in the beginning stages of writing all of this then, and your preemptive strike caught me off-guard. At first I wanted to frame everything I had to say under the disguise of a novella, or maybe a supplement to such a work, if the material I wanted to express could not be inserted into the characters' mouths stealthily enough. I say 'novella', but really it was just one big long scene of two people talking (sort of like My Dinner with Andre, again, unfortunately). And of course the plot was just going to be another literary rip-off. I was going to make Fyodor Dostoevsky my protagonist and sort of drop him into his own 'Grand Inquisitor' scenario (Part 2, Book 5, Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov), but in a contemporary setting. Instead of Jesus coming back in Medieval Spain, only to be imprisoned by the Inquisition, Dostoevsky would return in our time, only to be held hostage, in a university library, by the literary establishment. He would have returned to try and free his followers — or rather those who thought they were following him — and explain to them just how far down the wrong path, for the wrong reasons, they had gone. Whereas Dostoevsky's Jesus is eventually freed by the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky in my story would magically disappear into a book to escape the indignant tongue-lashing of the 'sensitive readers' around him, specifically because of his professed beliefs in Christianity, which no one tolerated anymore. The academics then decide to ban and burn all of the old books in the library, because they feel as though a devil were in them and he could spring out to corrupt the youth at any time. I would somewhat provocatively title the piece Dostoevsky the Christ, in order to tempt a certain type of person to pick it up in the first place, then I would hopefully be able to give them something better than they expected, rather than just some sort of cheap mash-up.

And you'll call me a liar, but it wasn't until I had thought a lot about this story that I noticed the similarities with what (supposedly) happened with Franz Kafka. So, I am really glad that I never finished this novella, because I wouldn't want people to get the wrong impression of me. As it is, half the people I know think I'm a Kafka devotee. I'm not. As I'll explain in a later section, I think of him in much the same way I think of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: I think his cause was misinformed and his actions were deplorable, and he deserved the punishment he got from the U.S. government. Moreover, as you might remember, I have always had a particular hatred for that frequent line of 'ironic' commentary that insinuates Kafka's literature to have been a greater crime than his (supposed) terrorist acts. I detest that opinion! Art (as in artificiality) may be the downfall of us all, but in terms of one individual's actions, obviously murder is much worse than literature! There's no comparison!

Nonetheless, I was beginning to write this Dostoevsky story, some months ago, when your email interrupted me. I then began to compose a first draft of the letter you're reading now — though, there again, I was interrupted, when my fiancée left me. This totally devastated me, and I was moved to write you a relatively short email then, explaining what had happened, how I was feeling ('the worst I've ever felt'), and that I had begun to compose a proper response to your email but had become severely sidetracked. I also proposed that we simply chat about some of this. You wrote back quite quickly, and even though you expressed absolutely no sympathy for how my life had changed, you said you would be 'glad to chat soon'. In the next week or so we exchanged a few more emails, with me trying to set up a time to chat, and you telling me vague statements about being 'free in the evenings' but that your screen name was invisible. So I sat there online, each night, for another week, waiting for you to contact me, but you never did.

Do you see how hard it is for me not to 'bracket' you with 'the rest of them' now? Actually, most of 'the rest of them' — every other old acquaintance I have either kept in contact with or resumed contact with recently — expressed concern for me as I went through and emerged from my darkest days. You couldn't even bother to try and care. All I got from you were empty promises, like those of the politicians for whom you vote, or those of the society you have positioned yourself to support quite enthusiastically. A lawyer in The City who does not have time for his supposed best friend when the latter needs warm human contact more than he ever has needed it before: Forget any lumping you in with the generic masses or whatever — at this point, how can I not identify you with the worst, with the specific, systemic elements that are the most anti-human?

8. If Men Could Be Gods, They Wouldn't Already Be Men in the First Place: I'm not sure how familiar you are with the idea that humans can 'become like gods', or how this thought has reappeared across the centuries. In Genesis it's said that the serpent tricks Eve by telling her that eating the apple will make her and Adam 'like God'. In more recent times various hucksters have floated the meme that technology can extend human capabilities to such an extent that we can accomplish 'Godlike' feats. Both of these deceitful, too-good-to-be-true offers seem to rely on the 'knowledge is power' cliché: Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge; every technological gadget amounts to an externalization of engineering knowledge that some humans somewhere once acquired and put into practice. There are also 'New Age' beliefs suggesting that if only the human race could become sensitive enough to access some type of higher consciousness, then this knowledge would transubstantiate the human race into gods.

This is all bullshit. Personally I think that an awful lot of this sentiment simply stems from the fact that people have lost track of what humans (as humans) can accomplish. If one has fallen far below the human norm, any truly human act would seem godly. But that interpretation is supplemental to the very obvious, obnoxious, egomaniacal idea that 'progress' will somehow turn men into gods.

I am not saying that 'knowledge is bad', or that 'technology is bad', or that 'science is bad', or that 'human beings shouldn't try to do more impressive things'. I am not making those statements and I do not believe in them.

But the idea that humans can become gods — or that somehow we already are gods in some secret way — This is an extremely dangerous, misleading, and fundamentally incorrect notion that always, sooner or later, leads to disaster. Man can't become God; that's the quintessential false promise with which the Devil would be tempting you.

It is true that in the Bible (not much of which I believe) Jesus (with whom I have no problems) seems to call certain human beings 'gods': 'Is it not written in your law that ye are gods?' He says this to a group of Jews who doubt that he's the Son of God. He's referring to a line in the Old Testament that makes a parallel between wise judges and God; the Hebrew word for 'God' sometimes functions — and is sometimes translated — as 'judge'. So Jesus in the New Testament is basically mocking these particular Jews, wondering why they find it so hard to believe that he could be divine when they (in a sense) already believe themselves to be divine, they who judge. Lawyers perform at the behest of judges; and it's not such an exaggeration to say that you, Alex, are indeed, on perhaps a few different levels, serving men who believe themselves to be gods simply because their favorite books seem to flatter them in this way.

Perhaps I am wrong, but that is how I understand it. And you're a Catholic, so by your own faith you should believe in all this far more literally than I ever would: You serve false gods.

But, really, when you think about it, what has a God come to signify in this modern age? What do we Moderns think of when we think of what past people called 'God'? We think of some 'Big Man' who is cruel and petty, who needs people to worship him and love him unconditionally, even though he treats them cruelly. When we think of God we think of an overgrown, selfish baby, who died before we were born and who never cared for anything except himself. It's very telling of us that we think of God this way. We've heard it said that God needs everyone else in the world to love him too, and give him attention and devotion, regularly and whenever he might want it, or else he throws a fit. We think of something totally useless — and we can't believe it ever had a good use — when we think of God. Someone who insists that everyone else play by his rules, because it's illegal to say that his rules are not already fair and just. God is something malignant and narcissistic, something and someone worth getting rid of and banishing for the betterment of humanity as a whole. That is the common thinking. — So in that sense, yes, we humans can indeed — and many of us have — become as God. And therefore a Godless age is what we would deserve.

9. Parable of the Computer: The above reminds me of a scene in the Orson Welles adaptation of The Trial.

We sometimes hear of computers (or technology in general) being compared to God, but here we find Josef K. standing before a room-sized ENIAC-type model, which he seeks to use in the way he would use a lawyer, to get advice regarding his mysterious case. But just as K. begins to ask the computer for help, an attendant — a female scientist in a lab coat — laughs at him. K. readily realizes his mistake and muses: 'I guess a computer is more like a Judge [than a lawyer].'

Yes, a computer really is more like a judge. You serve judges and you serve computers. Sometimes you serve people as well, but always you are serving judges and computers. (You are always serving and begging to be of some 'service'. Lawyers and prostitutes both solicit, but prostitutes are said to be far more likely to refuse unscrupulous clients.)

There is a factoid that sometimes pops up: 'You know, IBM developed the identification system that Nazi Germany used for the Holocaust. . . . You know, IBM did the punch-card system and the tattoos and the databases to keep track of people for the concentration camps.' Usually these statements are supposed to indict IBM. What people don't realize is that, in the big picture, the entire technological system serves us in a way similar to how IBM served the people in Nazi camps — only we're doing it to ourselves. We are the jailers and the prisoners, and — We are all IBM — We are all like 'International Busyness Machines', or rather 'International Laziness Machines' when the system requires some of us to consume excess products rather than produce more. Gone is the mid-20th-century fantasy of man-as-efficient-robot; we are more like lackadaisical lackeys, rubes in a monstrous Rube Goldberg machine which we can't bother to be outraged by, because we can no longer bother to try and comprehend it — because it is incomprehensible. If all of this seems tired and tiring . . . If 'the depersonalizing conditions of modern urban life' (quoting Susan Sontag, amongst a hundred other critics from the time) are no longer felt, it is because our alienation has progressed to the extent that we can no longer remember what it was like not to feel depersonalized by our mental and physical surroundings. There are no reliable outside reference points from which to make comparisons. And if we have nothing to compare our situation to, it must be judged 'fine' and 'normal' by default — and admittedly it is as fine and normal as possible. If we don't know how lost we are, it's because we no longer know what it feels like not to be lost — and yet just this position is our rightful one in the technological society.

It is all a corporation, a coerced cooperation of bodies. There are no countries. There is no democracy. There is no communism. There is no free market capitalism. There never was. There never could be. 'There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the only real "persons" left in this world, Mr. Beale. What do you think the Soviets talked about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? No. They got out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and computed the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments — just like we did.' The ultimate motive isn't profit, but progress — progress of the machine, the machine going through its internally devised program — and any human profit or human progress along the way is incidental. It's not such-and-such particular company that is to blame nearly so much as the entire technological apparatus — the corporation of corporations, private and public, visible and invisible — of which we are but imperfect repeater cells. The apparatus has to function in this general way. Interrelatedness and interdependence causes everything to become a network, causes the matrices of the network to become finer and tighter, causes the network to assume a life of its own once its actions and reactions occur fast enough to mimic life, when objective reality seems to give way to a simulation of itself, a copy that effaces the original. The term computer 'network' in fact derived from the concept of netting itself, with net meaning 'to bind, tie, trap'. When people today suspect that technological networks are traps for humanity — nets thrown over us — they fail to realize that right from the start the concept of network should have already clued them in to what was happening. You're using a word that signifies a trap, throwing it over everything, but only toward the end do you realize 'Hey maybe this thing whose name is a synonym for trap is something like a trap?' At this point, however, it's not like there's an alternative, and it's only as scary as you want to recognize.

No I don't believe that death factories will reappear, but the entire Western society, overseen by technological surveillance and databasing, conducts us on a long march toward the death of humanity. That is not hyperbole; we are obviously losing anything and everything that was ever known as a human trait. Whether we ever get to the end of that road is hardly the point; the point is, that's the process we've submitted ourselves to in the name of progress. A former friend of mine, who became a Holocaust denier — this is a former friend of mine — is now fond of saying: 'You know, the Nazi concentration camps weren't that bad for the inmates. They had games, theaters, swimming pools.' My response is to stare blankly and say, 'Yes, all of those things are necessary to pacify people who are being dehumanized. So of course there is a lot of so-called freedom and entertainment to be found, even — no — especially in a concentration camp.' Only when really pressed up against the wall would prisoners come face to face with their humanity, and until that moment the guards might well grant small pleasures. It takes an insane person to look at the small pleasures afforded and think they're 'good enough' and are actually evidence of kindness.

Oddly enough, in the documentary Filming 'The Trial', Welles remarks that he changed certain aspects of the novel because Kafka had written it in the previous era, before World War II, which changed everything. 'We are all Jewish since the Holocaust,' Welles ruminates — and he says this only a few minutes after explaining that the computer scene in his movie was 'designed to show man's slavish relationship to something which is really only his tool.' I don't think Welles quite noticed the potential connection between these two conjectures of his[], however, even though the computer scene ended with K. (played by Anthony Perkins; not a Jew) saying that the device indicated 'suicide' as 'the crime [he's] most likely to commit'. And this is in fact the same crime that the technological system cajoles humanity toward committing en masse: the suicide of everything that makes us human.

The night, eleven or twelve years ago, when I wanted you to watch The Trial movie, I could tell that you weren't interested in it. It was the first time that you weren't eager to consume some sort of media that I was bringing to your attention. A frat-friend of yours (ironically named 'Art') was there with us at the time, and the mood just wasn't right. I felt bad about trying to make the movie idea work then; I could tell that under these inopportune circumstances you were approaching The Trial (which is really something special) in the way I approach almost all art and media: as an imposition. In recent days I've wondered whether or not, if Art wasn't there, whether you would have gotten a lot out of the movie, understood and enjoyed of its cautions and criticisms. I've wondered whether or not it would have forestalled whatever impetus there might have been in you then for a future career in law. (Yes — haha — how absurd.)

I think I made some sort of a joke about Art's name that night, a play on words or something; possibly a bad pun on my part, but he didn't pick up on what I was saying, and for a moment it got awkward. It reminds me of how the technician gets offended when K. makes a joke about the computer. K. explains that he was 'only trying to be funny.' 'That's your trouble, K.' the scientist says. 'Always trying to be funny.'

The way the all-knowing computer is referred to in the Trial movie (1962) reminds me of the screen portrayals of two other computers: HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Batcomputer from the 1960s Batman TV show. Everyone knows about HAL, and the less said about him the better, but I thought I'd share with you an anecdote about the Batcomputer. There is a clip of one of these old episodes, easily found online, in which Batman and Robin literally feed the Batcomputer a certain can of Campbell's alphabet soup, which they suspect might contain a hidden message. The machine whirls and hisses — Robin says he thinks that 'It's blown a Bat-gasket! All those noodles!' — but then, sure enough, it tries every anagram, unscrambles the message, and, just as always, spits out an index card on which the solution is neatly typed. To me, this Batman scene seems like a metaphor: the idea that technology can help us navigate through all of the mixed-up coding, semiology, and hypertexts that make up so much of our increasingly artificial, fractured reality. A computer itself actually runs on coding that, to most humans, looks like gibberish; but a computer can also decode pieces of reality so that humans can better understand them. It is as if a variation of the Maxwell's demon idea were hiding inside the computer, organizing and sorting everything flawlessly, configuring incoming information correctly, right on sight, at first glance, in just the right way for human beings to understand everything, once the final sequence of signs is presented to us. Today it would be a quaint, old-fashioned idea, to approach a computer with the idea that its central processor could solve your problems in such a simple-minded way — and yet this is what was shown in the Batman TV show, with the Batcomputer offering specific answers and even personal advice in response to questions of a direct nature, whether professional or fairly colloquial. What is wanted is a direct, amicable relationship between the human mind and the computer, in which both are on the same page and working together for the same goal. This is what K. in the Trial movie wants the computer to do for him: he wants it to give him advice and be his lawyer. He soon sees his error: no matter what first appearances might suggest, a computer does not give you help or work with you the way a friend or even a lawyer is supposed to; rather, the computer judges you and commands respect, for a human is always necessarily in the computer's court. (And these days we try to make computers more like our friends than our lawyers, even.)

But actually this particular scene was cut from the Trial movie, and wasn't featured on the DVD copy I owned at the time. So that night we couldn't've seen it anyway.

10. Dana: A year and a half ago I became involved with a woman named Dana. It began when Jamie directed me to an article she had written. Actually, I didn't know Dana was a 'she' then, but that comes later. This was a few months after I told Jamie I wanted nothing more to do with him or any of his artists. I no longer wanted to track, much less help move, 'the needle of popular culture'. But all Jamie said he wanted me to do was read something written on the internet, and we could proceed from there, or I could walk away. 'I read this and thoughta you,' he said. 'It reminded me of the, ah, the thing you wrote that your, ah, "aunt" showed me that time.'

The article was about how technological society destroys human psychology even more than it does the natural environment. Above all other 'unsustainabilities' is the unsustainability of humans to cope psychologically with the sheer artificiality and anti-human drive of the system that they depend upon for nearly everything all the time. Culture — or what we call culture now — functions as a coping strategy to mitigate the ever-increasing stress caused by this difficult situation. It is all a coping strategy or a consolation: we need art and artificiality as consolation — as a consolation prize for not being lucky enough to have been born into a time and place that would allow for realer modes of existence. Western culture keeps becoming more abrasive and shocking, shallower and stupider, weirder and snottier, vainer and vainer, simply because people need an easier and more potent 'fix'. Why else would there be this continually escalating drive for so much media and entertainment? It is a reaction to the ever-increasing development of the technological system. Disposable culture is a legitimate response to the demands of the people themselves, due to the system using and abusing them with greater disregard, day after day with greater intensity. People need to witness ever more silliness and fun disorientation, need to hear ever more familiar, reassuring voices in their heads — even if these voices are telling them lies or fairy tales — just so they can cope with their personal uncertainty and alienation from the living space around them. Thus, despite what individuals may think, with every passing day our society actually needs more propaganda — just as it voluntarily requests more anti-depressant drugs, simply in order to feel saner and maintain functionality on a short-term basis. (Within the category propaganda I would include all entertainment. Think about the escalation of media consumption — What is driving this? What is the need? Just how much fiction do we need to consume in order to deal with reality these days?) But there has to be a breaking point, and — like it or not — it seems as though we will hit this breaking point before our wonderful science and technology can devise a way to totally thwart the human condition. Unlike the case with many species of animals, which have been domesticated by humans quite well, human beings themselves — for all our pliability and slavishness — are proving a little too resistant to ultimate domestication by the technological system. There is a very simple explanation for this: Whereas farmers and animal trainers have personalities that are fairly reliable and coherent, the technological system is always in flux, always changing, always unstable. This uncertainty — of technology, of media, of trends — has been imprinted onto the human beings who know no better than to look to the artificial system for guidance, the way farm animals rely on the management of the farm to organize their lives. We are domesticated animals whose robot farmers are out of control, whose robot farmers are in a sense far wilder than we are. In other words, our further domestication is dysfunctional because our trainers are less domesticated than we are. To put it yet another way, we have become like confused pets trapped in an apartment full of unreliable automated appliances — appliances that sometimes remember to feed us but rarely take us for walks anymore.

When I read this article, for some unknown reason — writing style or some personal allusion in the text that I misinterpreted — I thought that Dana was probably a middle-aged black man. But after I contacted Jamie to say how much I enjoyed the article, and how it said things that I had silently believed for years, I discovered that Dana was actually a white woman a few months younger than myself, a popstar in training whom Jamie had enlisted a good while back. A year or two ago, he assigned her to go to the Philippines, because it was an untapped market, and told her to learn to appropriate aspects of the native fashion, something exotic to sell back to a Western audience. Soon after arriving on the island nation, however, she broke contact, escaped her handlers, ran off to live with a tribe there, and the first thing anyone had heard from her since then was the essay that appeared online in her name.

When I met him — begrudgingly — in his swank Manhattan office, Jamie couldn't stop cackling at my misperception. 'Why would you think she was a dude?' he asked. I had no answer.

The room was a veritable jungle, which made Jamie's complaints about Dana 'going native' seem a touch ironic. Plants were everywhere, most of them hanging, vines coming down everywhere, and I had to bob my head in between them as I walked to his desk. None — or very few — of these plants had any flowers on them, but Jamie's shirt had a very loud yellow and fluorescent green floral pattern. He had the same blue tinted glasses on as before, and the same black baseball cap, pulled to the back. I have never seen him without this cap on, nor has anyone with whom I've ever discussed the matter. The artists I used to work with all speculated that probably Jamie was bald, and had a funny-shaped head, but wanted to appear hip — hence, black backwards baseball cap. Once I said that probably he wanted to hide the fact that he had had a lobotomy, and the scars were still showing.

Gill wasn't there this time, but I noticed that behind Jamie's desk there was a large, framed picture of the two of them. It looked like they were at a New Year's Eve party, but with these sorts of people you never can tell. Their whole life seems like one big party. Gill had a silver cone-shaped hat on, and in one of her delicate white-gloved hands, with her pinky extended, she was holding a blowout kazoo to her big red lips. Jamie looked horrible — what we used to call 'shitfaced' when we were in high school — his eyes squinted, probably because of the camera's flash, and his mouth twisted in a sneering smile. Some chocolate cake crumbs were visible in his mouth. Why would this guy want that picture hanging up in his office?

'I want ya ta find her,' Jamie told me, in a voice more serious than any I had ever heard him speak. 'Dana's putting us in jeopardy here. Not because we have that much invested in her — we don't — but because of morals and principles. Not on the artist level, but on my level. She never knew any of the other artists and they never knew her. She can sing but I never thought of her as a singer.'

'You want me to go to the Philippines,' I asked him. It wasn't quite a question.

'What, then I'm gonna lose you too?' he laughed. 'No, you don't gotta go there. Just, ah . . . Well, maybe, actually, yeah, you might have to go there if it comes to that. But . . . Okay, let me explain something to you. I'm trying to turn her into a major platform. Still. I'm trying to do this still even though I haven't heard from her in over a year and I'm completely sure that she thinks she's finished with me. Well, she ain't. So. Anyway, yeah, "major platform". Okay? I mean, top down, it could look like anything with her. She becomes the media, in a coupla senses. Right? So it could look like a network, like iTunes on stereo — on steroids, rather. It could, ah . . .' He looked up at the ceiling, searching, then looked back at me. 'It could look like anything. What I'm tryin' ta do is build out that infrastructure to where she — where she can deliver for me, and for everyone else. "Bring it on home," y'know? Or "bringing it on back home"? Like we're all partners. Because, in the larger sense, we are.'

I grew impatient. It was annoying enough for me to be back in contact with this slimeball and his company. And the fact that we had to do this in Manhattan certainly didn't thrill me, despite the fact that they had paid for my plane ticket, and put me up in a nice hotel. I made the trip because Dana's essay had impressed me so much. Now Jamie was asking me to act as his right hand again, to go out and capture a glittering light and bring her back into the swamp from which I had just escaped myself. That's how it felt.

'Look,' Jamie said, pointing a stubby, ringed index finger at me. 'I can tell you ain't quite gettin' this. So let me explain something. She is a prodigy. She's a first-class agent. And she is, ah . . . she is a remarkable person? An exceptionally gifted artist, even if she doesn't come up with any of her own shit. I mean, in terms of songs. You know? But, ah . . . Dana is a woman you don't get hold of every day. She is an emissary of pity — for humanity — and of science and of progress. And I thought the Filipinos would take to her, not so much the other way around. I don't know what she's thinkin'. I mean, she doesn't need to go have tribal drums. If that's what she's thinkin'. If she's tryin' to make an album there — and I hope she's still tryin' to make an album. Because we can make drums in the studio that sound just as good on a bad day as whatever she's hearing there and that's a goddamn muthafuckin' fact.' He paused. 'If she does want to stay there and do some records there? That's okay. Maybe that's what she's doing. But, I need to know. You know? She can be there for a while. We have the internet now. And apparently she has access to put her . . . shit . . . writing out. So just get a record out too, tell her. That's all. Just hook it up.'

Still wondering what exactly he wanted from me and how I was to go about it, I asked him if he had her email.

'Yeah, it's ah . . . it's linked on that thing. That article. It's through that account and it's the same email she used to have. She just, ah, she stopped responding to anyone here. But you just approach her as someone who read the article she wrote, which she's probably proud of — jesus christ — and, ah . . . go from there. You know? And, somehow, convince her to come back. At least, give us a timetable for when she would get back. I think you approaching her that way would work, because you can talk her lingo. You know. The technology or anti-technology stuff, whatever. Because — this isn't just because she's a pretty girl. I don't need her on the cover of a magazine to sell a song with her name on it. Or her ass on it. I could sell more copies with my ass on the cover, if I really wanted to. That's how good I am. No bullshittin'. You tell her that from me, okay? You tell her that from me!' Pause. 'Actually, don't tell her that. Don't tell her you even know me, in fact. The point being: she doesn't have her picture on the article, or anywhere on the net, and she isn't known yet, so she'd know you'd be genuine if you approached her. And . . . you would. Am I right?'

I nodded tentatively. I did like her writing. The nuance and perspective was incredibly bold and unique. If I had come across the essay myself, I think I would have wanted to contact the author anyway, eventually.

Without responding to my affirmation, Jamie continued: 'It's something where . . . When we get our platform going, I ah . . . I think it's gonna be a good model. And . . . It's a good model for whether you're a kid or whether you're a major. And I don't know why she thinks this would be "stifling"!' He suddenly tossed back his head, rolled his eyes, and dropped his hands onto his messy desk in dismay. Then he looked me in the eye again and pointed. 'Hey, we just don't work like that, and you better know that too! . . . We, ah, we'll do anything.' He smiled warmly and looked a bit to the side. 'We'll make movies, we'll make music, we'll do direct-to-telephone. We do a lot of crazy things and there's room for . . . for lotsa things. We, um . . . I'll sign anybody. Okay? I'll sign anyone that's really gifted at any — at almost anything that resembles popular culture. If I met a great artist — painter, sculpture-sculptor — I'd back him. Or her. Um. I mean . . . Anything: whatever's solid shit — that fits right in here as far as I'm concerned. We're a company that's about keepin' you company. I said that a long time ago. I think it was me. Back then we were just kids ourselves. "Rock 'n' rollers with one foot in the grave".' He scoffed. 'And if she asks, you tell her . . . "Everything in America is good — is satisfactory." Okay? Cuz it is just fuckin' fine here anyway, far as I'm concerned.'

•

Uneventfully, I left your wonderful City the next day. I fixed myself a gigantic pot of coffee once I got home, and wrote Dana a very long letter. (Not one tenth as long as this letter to you, but still pretty long. Well . . . maybe it was a tenth as long.) The letter began with 'Greetings from America, where everything is just swell.' To this day I think that's the only sarcastic thing I ever wrote or said to her.

We hit it off instantly and exchanged several hundred emails in the next couple weeks. (I called these early exchanges of ours 'the new Platonic dialogues' — much better than those of old, which were really monologues, filled with strawmen and yes-men to whom Socrates simply dictated Platonic truths.) She wrote seemingly without effort, composing her thoughts on her daily trek into the village, to use an internet café. Every time, she would type for half an hour straight — faultlessly, without any typos — and then send the missive off to me. I would always print her emails out, and usually they would fill close to 20 pages. Every day — without once repeating herself or waxing poetic. ('There's not a poetic bone in my body,' she told me. 'Well, give me a chance,' I replied.) Meanwhile, I needed to stay awake until 4 and 5 a.m. every night — with work at 8 the next morning — drinking gallons of coffee, all around the clock, just to keep up. I didn't want to disappoint her; I didn't want there to be a disparity between the length and quality of her emails vs. mine. That meant a lot of revision on my part, before I could bring myself to click send. And I could never really start writing in earnest until after my housemates went to bed. I needed the aloneness, the vacuum, the darkness, in order to be able to concentrate well enough, to do her ideas/my ideas/our ideas justice. Whenever I would reference any of these somewhat fussy hardships that I endured in order to write to her adequately, as she deserved, she would tell me that what I was going through was 'very cute'. 'Writing comes easy for me,' she said. 'I have a feeling my mind is much clearer simply because I spend most of my time in the forest, not in houses with flickering lights and electricity. I miss proper coffee, though. All they have here, in town, is this stuff that's supposed to be more like instant coffee, but it's made out of rice. It tastes even worse than it sounds.'

We found an incredible amount of similarity between our philosophies, and many uncanny coincidences between our personal details. The names of people and places in her life seemed to mirror those in my own. (Her former best friend was named Alice, not Alex.) It was as though each of us could have been a remixed version of the other. And the central figure in all of this was Jamie: the same man had invested in both of us, had sent her off to an island and had assigned me the task of bringing her back. Disobeying his orders, I admitted my connection to Jamie right from the start, but told her that I had no intention of 'working for him' in any way — and neither did she. We rarely talked about Jamie, or pop music; we had enough topics, insights, and coincidences to pour over. Most amazingly, aside from one outlying letter our full names were anagrams of each other.

She was from Eastern Europe, had gone to Oxford for half a year before dropping out, then traveled to Australia and New Guinea, before staying with a very old uncle of hers ('a pervert producer, in more than one sense') who lived in Hollywood. It was at one of her uncle's parties that she was introduced to Jamie, and she had agreed to work with him 'mostly on a lark, because I didn't have anything better to do, and by doing so I could get my own apartment. I was tried of my uncle and cousin asking me why I didn't want to put on my swimsuit and meet them at the pool.' She soon realized, of course, that Jamie in his own way was far worse than her uncle, so when he suggested that she do 'fieldwork' in the Philippines, she knew then and there that she would use the opportunity to escape him.

She loved it there. She had been staying with and studying various tribes that still lived by ancient customs. They adored her; but everyone always liked Dana, as I would later discover. She had such a sweetness about her, which never disappeared even when she would propound the most sweeping judgments, things no one else could get away with. The tribes she met and ingratiated herself with lived deep in the forest, and in the mountains, and near lakes, and they stayed far away from any sort of civilization. And so did she, for the most part, until her monthly trips into town (mostly for the internet café) became daily, for my benefit.

She sent me a picture of herself with over a hundred glass beads draped around her neck — most of them white, red, and black — and a multi-colored headdress that looked something between a paper fan and a peacock's tail feathers. 'No,' she was careful to tell me, 'I do not dress like this all the time, but some of the witch-men here insisted. They bring me these trinkets and gifts all the time, but I've never liked wearing any jewelry ever. It is important for them to see me wearing these things, at least once, so as not to feel insulted or unappreciated. That is why I wore them, and I thought you might like to see.' Nonetheless, she looked magnificent. She had a strange glint in her eyes that was fierce, provocative, and ominous all at once. It made her look both stately and savage; like a wild animal that had been hurt once, a long time ago, had never forgotten, and had then gathered her strength, marshaled her forces, and was now about to lead her pack and exact the planned revenge that had become her singular, driving purpose in life. (Looking back on it now, it seems clear that she looked like a nut.)

When I made her acquaintance, Dana had digested what she learned from the tribes and was on the cusp of promoting a solution to the problems she had seen in the rest of the world, especially in the West: People should just withdraw from the system and all of its trappings. It could be done in many different ways, in many different places, amongst groups of relatively like-minded people. It could be a step-by-step process of phasing gadgetry, media, fads, and technology in general out of one's life, all while (re)learning how to become autonomous. Westerners could either go to a third-world country, as Dana had done, or possibly camp in a national forest somewhere. She was not trying to tell anyone how to live, but she was pretty sure that if first- and second-worlders didn't try this now, then within a few generations they would have to do so anyway, once the system inevitably collapsed, and it would be better to plan ahead and practice.

The philosophies, reasoning, and arguments behind all this may have gotten incredibly complex at times ('What I am saying does not fit in a nutshell,' she would say, 'or even a coconut shell — and there are plenty of them around here'), but the gist of it was simple. She was suggesting a total exit strategy as an alternative to the endless and insufficient coping strategies of the system, a way to go back to a situation in which life had inherent meaning and the average person was relatively healthy and happy, rather than often unsatisfied and borderline insane. We are born into this system and presented with falsity as if it were normal. We are born into an artificial environment; no one asked us if we wanted it; we never signed up for it (despite what your favorite French philosopher might say; see section 19 below). Humans deserve to be presented with a real choice; at long last, they need to realize that they really do have the option to 'come out of Babylon', so to speak. In the way Dana had lived for a year with tribes in the rainforests, she had demonstrated the viability of this option, even for Westerners who had never been 'outdoors' types before. 'There's nothing standing in your way,' she wrote in the brochure, 'other than a psychological block. But that goes away as soon as you take the leap of faith. And it doesn't require money — that's sort of the whole point. Once you're in the forest, it's almost like there's a divine force guiding you. It may not seem doable, but along the way certain things will happen and fit together to help you — that's how the natural universe works. Nature provides. After a while it comes instinctively, but figuring out what to eat, figuring out how to get water, and figuring out how to live are inherently rewarding and important experiences. Whereas modern life needs more and more noise and distractions to stave off a feeling of pointlessness, emptiness, and fragmented existence — in the old times it was very easy to see how every action had intrinsic meanings, connections to the larger whole, all forming a broad image of the human being and our relation to the universe.'

It wasn't New Agey; it was the opposite of anything to do with a New Age. And it wasn't 'green' in any trendy sense, either. Rather, it was pragmatic and reasoned. It wasn't as simple as any utopian 'back to nature' movement, because she was challenging the system on a detailed point-by-point basis, and she was admitting upfront that living more natural lives wouldn't amount to utopia — it would be real, honest, uncertain work. And that was the point, to choose something imperfect and real with an open-ended future, rather than to sit contentedly in a dead-end postmodern wasteland, where more and more joys, all of them transient, can only come from artificial sources, and where naïve 'reform' movements are just as futile as passive kvetching.

I had never read articles with so much Promethean fire in them. 'As material wealth goes up,' she wrote, 'happiness tends to go down. Especially in the long term. Through materialism and advertising, the poor(ish) people of the West are being conditioned to become just as greedy as the rich ever were[], while at the same time they are becoming incapable of appreciating what they have: not goods and services, but friends and family and the gift of life itself. Those free things are the real riches of human existence. But we should note that, at the same time, technological gadgets are becoming cheaper and cheaper. The average lower-income household now owns more goods, sees more entertainment, and enjoys far more pleasure than an upper middle-class household owned, saw, and enjoyed half a century ago — and yet the families and individuals of today are less happy and appreciative. Peasants now live like royalty used to — but they're unimpressed and rightly ungrateful. Why? Because if you're in a technological society, every object around you is a barrier that keeps real practical wisdom from coming out of you. If only you could process your surroundings without so many distractions, then you would naturally learn from what you've seen and experienced. That is the way things are supposed to work. Instead, however, our society seems incapable of learning from its mistakes. That is because there is less and less genuine experience being offered; everything in the Modern age tends toward vicariousness, surrogation, and lack of real, invigorating risk. The basic principle I'm advocating is to negate the system rather than fight it. It can't be beaten or negotiated with on human terms, because it isn't human — and the humans in positions of power don't run the system; the system runs them. Trying to improve your lot in life by petitioning twenty-first century politicians is like lying down in front of a train and trying to plead your case before the distant conductors. They can't hear you, and they have a schedule to meet or else they'll get fired. So the train isn't going to stop, even if the conductors wanted to stop it. It's over a century too late to stop this train now; eventually it's going to crash anyway, of its own accord; so your best bet right now is to get off the tracks.' That is something Dana wrote. Of course, not everyone would follow her advice, only those who wanted to give their genealogy a better chance of surviving beyond the ever-closer crash of the Modern system. At one point she had drawn up a 200-page manifesto, explaining everything; but before she could put the finishing touches on the anti-technology bible and print it out, her hard drive went bad and she lost it. She was just about ready to finally give it to me for proofreading and editing. (What a loss for humanity, I know. If her manifesto manifested, there'd be no need for me to have written this letter — since everything would well on the way to perfection for everyone anyway.)

But Dana herself had to leave the jungle for an extended period of time to try and promote her cause. Partly, however, this was an excuse for us to finally meet. We didn't tell Jamie about this; by this point I had broken off communication with him just as she had. She and I spent a year traveling together. And beyond all of the ideological bullshit, you could say we fell in love. I admired her more than I've ever admired anyone. She was truly brilliant. She was outstanding in every way. She was a good person, too. A caring woman with a sharp wit about her. She was one of the funniest, nicest, smartest people I've ever known. And one of the most beautiful; she never wore makeup, because she didn't need any. (Being in Dana's presence gave me the uncomfortable realization that so much of what I've been attracted to in women was simply artificiality, technique, fashion, paint, color, clothes. After her, I can never be attracted to those things again. Lucky, beneath them there is something better, which was there all along.) Physically and mentally, in yet another callback or coincidence, she really did remind me of Dana Scully.

In actuality, however, she was nowhere near as committed to her cause as her rhetoric suggested. And it may surprise you at this point to learn that I wasn't committed to it at all, ever. Oh, I firmly believe that just about everything she laid out was correct. I had thought about many of these same ideas for years, and I had a large hand in tweaking her message. From that first article, even if I didn't intuit her sex and race correctly, I instantly understood what she was saying — all of it, part and parcel, the rationale behind every single one of her critiques of the modern system. ('Thank you so much for being there to talk about this shit with me,' she wrote early on. 'No one else can give me the kind of feedback you can. Sometimes I don't think anyone else living in the West could even begin to understand it. Your emails are always read three times through.') But I never wanted to live in the jungle, or the forest, or the desert. Just living in a rural area in America is good enough for me, and I told her all that even before we met, before we traveled the world together for a year. And I loved her, not her ideology, even if it was the correct one. It's impossible to love an ideology. What fanatics have — that's not love.

Anyway, it was all thrilling, the happiest year of both of our lives. But she waffled with commitment to me just as I waffled with commitment to her cause. Truth be told, she used my indecision as an excuse not to go back to the Philippines, though she really should have checked back in with the tribes and sured up her supporters there. She had been away for thirteen months. And by then she was ready to give up on her own cause, even on a theoretical level. At the end of it, she suddenly upbraided me for everything, said I had never done anything positive for her. 'When we met, you knew I wanted a change in life, that I wanted to really do something. I thought you wanted that too, but I guess you didn't.' I pleaded with her and told her that I did, that we were doing something, but she wasn't listening. I offered to go back to the Philippines with her, and try to live there — because I was always open to at least visiting the jungle — but she said that she wanted to forget that place. She was now embarrassed at ever having tried to live in such 'disgusting conditions'. And even though I was the one who convinced her to leave that (apparently, suddenly) awful place, she resented me for having caused her to 'waste a whole year of life' nonetheless. She said she was dumping me so she could 'really go do something'.

But what actually happened to her? She decided to go live in Seattle, the most depressing city in the world, because that's where her mother had moved. Before she started traveling, she had been unemployed for a few years, living in an apartment with her mother — even though she professed to hate and resent her mother — and that's where she returned, and now she was going to live there indefinitely, 'until something better comes along again.'

She has since 'significantly changed [her] views on how to battle the diseases of mental and physical consumerism' — and become a neo-Nazi leader of sorts. Yes, quite a rarity, I know; still a sort of woman 'you don't get hold of every day,' as Jamie said, but not at all in the same way. We don't get to choose who we fall in love with, but it's a shame one of my 'great big loves' turned out to be so nasty. It makes me feel like an idiot, because I didn't see it coming. And I feel bad for her too; the girl I knew didn't deserve to put herself in this miserable position. I asked her why she did it, why she changed so radically and angrily, and I was told, 'It isn't enough to try and escape the system. I want to see the whole thing burned. And if I told you I want to see it burned because of you, would you have the guts to disbelieve me?' She is now the 'director' (and seemingly the sole member on file) of several fascist organizations, and has gained something of a following in the most arbitrary sense. That is to say, while few people agree with her or would follow her in any realistic way, many are at least curious, and she provides a great deal of amusing controversy on the internet. At the time of this writing, she has yet to enact any of the many striking societal changes with which she has threatened Western society, but she has attracted a lot of attention. Her most recent article contends that the Holocaust was simply a Hollywood production, and that the proof of this is hidden in plain sight: because 'they tell you it was a hollow-cost.' (That is, of course, not correct or sane etymology, but she insists upon it.) Hundreds of people comment on her site, and most are generally quite supportive of what she is 'doing'. And even though 'the Jews' keep getting her various social networking accounts closed down, she tirelessly makes new ones almost every single day. Many of her paragraphs begin with 'When I take over the government . . .' Her last words to me were 'I'm famous now, and I'm not going to let that window of opportunity close or go to waste.'

She told me never to contact her again or reveal any of her personal information publicly, or else she'd send the stormtroopers after me. So make sure you keep what I've told you about her to yourself.

11. K. was fore Kaczynski: I've rented a cabin closer to Thoreau's place on Walden Pond than to the Unabomber's shack. I felt as though I'd uncovered a secret that could shatter the world, end everything, and I came here to hide that knowledge away some place where it could never get out. So, I know something you don't know, my old friend — but I don't want to know it. It has been very difficult to learn to live with this knowledge that is as tedious as it is rare. No one should have to know what I know, but under the circumstance more people should know it. And still, despite everything, despite how pathetic I've felt many times during my recent time of inaction, somehow it has all been very, very invigorating!

That said, taking in its real and ideological implications, if you really want to try to understand all this, the best starting point is The Technological Society (1954) by Jacques Ellul, a fairly obscure work that seems to have directly inspired large portions of Ted Kaczynski's 'Unabomber Manifesto', which was actually titled Industrial Society and Its Future (1995). The 'future' of the 'industrial society', to which Kaczynski so often refers, is simply the technological society as already analyzed by Ellul. In recent decades the West has lost much of its industrial base, yet it is still a technological society — increasingly so. Thus, in my opinion, it makes little sense to speak in terms of 'industrial' society anymore. As I noted above, what we are really dealing with here is primarily technique, not technology per se. Technology is simply the externalization of technique. The -ology in technology signifies that we are dealing with the discourse or expression of technique. Oftentimes this discourse attains physical embodiment, and in that respect technology is the word given flesh of technique. But technique does not always result in technology, nor should technological manifestation be seen as the inherent goal of all progressing techniques. To see what an assortment of successful totalitarian techniques look like without much technological outgrowth, one need only consult The Trial (1915) or The Castle (1922). I see these literary forebodings of Franz Kafka as premonitions of the non-human spirit of technique that would begin to consume everything after the Second World War. In the rest of this section I shall outline some crucial distinctions between these works and thinkers, and make some very important judgment calls, which you, Alex, must always, always keep in mind.

'Ellul was right about everything' – That is what I'd like to say, but mostly when I think of Ellul now I only think of my many minor disagreements with him. It would be better for me to say that No one else was nearly as correct as Jacques Ellul. What did he get wrong? Where do I differ from him? For starters, while The Technological Society is the best book I've ever read, the final chapter ('A Look at the Year 2000', which Kaczynski explicitly cites in a positive manner) is embarrassingly silly. In general, I find Ellul to have been far too optimistic. He really did seem to think that by explaining these things to people he could actually get them to change their ways, curb their technological addiction, and bring the system under human control again. He acknowledged that such a prospect would be difficult, but he should have known that it was beyond a doubt impossible. All of his work in fact leads one to the correct conclusion that all of these matters have rapidly escaped humans' grasp, that the system will simply have to explode and implode of its own volition. Why Ellul himself could not admit that, I don't know. But perhaps if I were in Ellul's position, seeing things from the perspective of decades past, when the system was not as developed as I have come to know it in the twenty-first century, then I too might have held out more optimism than I am capable of considering without feeling foolish today. Or perhaps Ellul's very dedicated Christian background (another area in which I differ from him) gave him more hope. Either way, it's impossible for me to see how history could have played out any differently than it did: during the '60s, '70s, and '80s, there was no way to have turned this thing around. Ellul talked about the internet decades before it was invented; he knew all about flatscreen HD TVs in 1986; he was up on all of this stuff and knew exactly what it would do to people's minds; thus he should have known better than to think that somehow, through a type of astute education and mindfulness, anything could be reformed from within the system.

'The Unabomber was wrong about everything' – I would normally not want to make such a sweeping statement, but here it seems warranted, especially once I consider how Kaczynski basically plagiarized Ellul without giving him credit, and then totally ignored Ellul's advice and indulged in lowdown terrorist activities. Someone who read Ellul should have known better . . . but I don't think Kaczynski, history's most famous and infamous Ellul scholar, really understood Ellul in the first place. (In turn, various non-Ellulian sections of the 'Unabomber Manifesto' were plagiarized by Anders Breivik. So you can see how terrorists just keep plagiarizing each other, each one understanding their influences less and less well.) Kaczynski targeted high-level technicians — As if removing individuals would halt the hivemind process of technological development? As if killing smart people who had committed no crimes was a good way to inspire others to kill more and more innocents? Serious miscalculations on Kaczynski's part. In terms of justice, none of the smart people he murdered were any guiltier than anyone else who lives within and thereby supports the technological system. Worse, Kaczynski used technology and calculated techniques to kill these people — talk about hypocrisy!

Conspiracy theorists sometimes say that Kaczynski didn't commit these crimes, that he was mind-controlled or framed. As a college student, he did participate in MK-ULTRA experiments, but I find the significance of this program vastly overrated by almost everyone (government official or private investigator) who knows anything about it. The idea that Kaczynski could have been programmed twenty years in advance, to quit his job and suddenly start sending letterbombs to certain people, is ludicrous. Far from being mind-controlled or insane, I would say that Ted Kaczynski in his cabin — by virtue of basically living outside of the system — could have been one of the sanest men in America . . . and yet he still went wrong and made horrible, evil decisions. I do not think he was framed. Nothing in Kaczynski's writing conflicts with the murderous behavior that has been attributed to him. In a letter written in April 2000, regarding Timothy McVeigh, Kaczynski expresses the notion that McVeigh's murderous 'protest would have earned far more sympathy' had the violence been targeted only toward specific individuals, rather than at a whole building full of innocent people. He then goes on to justify domestic violence against the U.S. government by citing foreign wars that the U.S. has perpetrated. So he was fine with killing people; he specialized in thinking about which people should be targeted and in what ways they might, in his mind, deserve it. There's no doubt in my mind that Kaczynski was guilty, and I would call him the worst and least successful dissident in history.

But to return to this notion of guilt and who is guilty — either the smart technician and/or the generic consumer of products and media. — Here is where Kafka and Josef K.'s undisclosed crime come into play. In the technological society that Kafka saw coming into view, everyone is simultaneously irresponsible and guilty. We are irresponsible in that we resemble both lackadaisical children and out-of-our-depth officials within a labyrinthine bureaucracy. And we are guilty in that we help further the technological society, which tends to make humanity obsolete. And we thus become in a sense irresponsible only by virtue of our irrelevance. As Ellul wrote in one of his later books [with my italics and with my interpolations in brackets]:

'The choice of ignorance agreed upon between those who work the machine and have an interest in this ignorance and those who are part of the machine and have an interest in their own peace of mind or mental health has the remarkable effect of completely erasing responsibility from our society. Everyone has become irresponsible. . . . [O]ur present-day operations are a hundred times too complicated for a single person, or even ten, to be responsible. . . . I ought to have recalled that the word irresponsible has a double sense. The mentally deficient are not responsible for their acts. . . . Those who commit a crime, or attack public morals or their neighbors, or violate the truth but cannot be questioned on the matter, are irresponsible because their social status puts them outside the norms and relieves them of any investigation. There is also, however, a third sense, that of evasion. People may be held responsible but deep down inside they mock at responsibility and try in every way to escape their obligations. They seek protection. This is the point of insurance. [And note that Kafka worked in an insurance office.] But it is not just the financial world that engenders and reinforces the inner feeling of not being responsible for anything. The general climate of irresponsibility makes possible the irresponsibility of politicians, scientists, and technicians [and voters].'

All of this is true. But to the extent that any of us retain our humanity, we still feel guilt and invite guilt to be applied to us. K. must die because to the very end he insists on keeping a bit too much of his humanity. He senses more acutely than anyone else around him that as a member of his society he must have committed a crime akin to original sin, but he cannot put his finger on what this might be. 'I can remember my father looking at me,' K. muses,

'looking at me straight in the eye. "Come on, boy," he'd say. "What've you been up to?" And even when I'd been up to nothing at all, I'd still feel guilty. You know that feeling? And the teacher at school making the announcement that something was missing from her desk. "All right, who's the guilty one?" It was me, of course. I'd feel just sick with guilt, and I didn't even know what was missing.'

In a metaphorical way, we might indeed say that something vital, precious, and delicate has been subtracted due to a new, gross, and unprecedented addition: the proliferation of technique, bureaucracy, and formal institutions, around the human being, making the person feel bad without knowing why. A few of the better critics (Deleuze and Guattari) have modified the usual reading of Kafka's work, in which all the 'judges, commissioners . . . and so on' are seen as 'substitutes' for the author's overbearing father: 'rather,' they claim, 'it is the father who is a condensation of all these forces that he submits to and that he tries to get his son to submit to.' What I would say is that in Kafka's mind there existed a mediation and a circulation between the variations and incarnations of technique (the courts, the offices, the long bureaucratic babblings, the sophistic qualifications and disclaimers, the always changing and self-elaborating rules of society, and the tactics of the creative individual to indulge and escape all this) on the one hand, and the personification of his father, Hermann Kafka, on the other. What the son resisted was not so much — or not only — the brutish father himself, but the world of technique which the father, a great and happy man of society, wanted his son to embrace, as he himself had done a long time ago in order to be made a real, productive citizen. (Hermann was a merchant; and what merchants in the modern age sell is, first and foremost, modernity itself.)

To summarize, Kafka's writing is a critique of pure technique — of technique usually without its technological outcroppings[]. In his novels especially, he showcases human adherence to the cold rituals and non-human customs[] of technicality. But all of his writings — excellent as they are — read like what a particularly gifted, neurotic patient might produce as part of an 'art therapy' program. I am tempted to say that all post-1900 literature reads this way. Who can really trust any of it? Isn't literature supposed to be something reliable, something understandable and something understanding, which you can trust to place close to your soul? I suppose that at least Kafka's work gives us an unspoken but obvious acknowledgement of this failing on the part of the modern author. This admission of imperfection (to put it mildly) is of course directly connected with Kafka's not publishing the work and willing it to be burned, so that his own confused thoughts — however artful — could not infect anyone else. I know that defenders would be quick to rush on the scene, apologize for Kafka (though he would not want them to do so) and try to pretend that everything and everyone were and are and will always be just fine, and that I am being a meanie in my criticism. This misses the point. Again, what I am criticizing is not the human being but rather this artificial world of ours, which makes the human being dysfunctional; what I object to is not the author whose words tell us 'My words can scarcely make sense of this world', but rather I object to the other authors who pretend that everything is just fine, that the increasingly non-human world and anti-human society can actually be described quite well, quite honestly, and quite lovingly in human terms and humanistic words. It cannot. Writing when he did, at the point of no-return — when technique was threatening to become autonomous and take both itself and human destiny out of human hands — Kafka's work portrays an accurate vagueness and certain confusion about what was happening. And there are no paradoxes here. How could it have been otherwise? 'You have harnessed yourself ridiculously to this world,' he tells us in an aphorism. 'Faith in progress does not mean faith that progress has already been made.' Thus he attempts to mitigate and minister to a situation in which humans have willingly given up agency over their own lives, in order to fit into an ever-more-inhuman system whose technical development they identify with as if it had something to do with the human heart. It does not. Human progress is itself a very tricky term. But to conflate it with technical and/or scientific progress as we have done? That guarantees endless confusion, danger, existential threats and fatal mistakes.

We have already discussed the significance of Kafka not witnessing World War II. But even before World War I, Kafka had expressed stark reservations not only about technique but also about the technological society that wouldn't emerge full-form until decades later. In 1909 he wrote the following in his article 'The Aeroplanes at Brescia':

'What is happening here? Over our heads, twenty metres above the earth, is a man entangled in a wooden frame, defending himself against an invisible danger that he has freely taken on. [. . .] But we stand down below, quite left behind and insignificant and we watch this man.'

Aside from the 'wooden' attribute, this is the very metaphorical situation that we have found ourselves in: We are both the man in danger — having flown higher than he ever thought he could, or should, go — and also the bystanders on the ground, feeling the lowness of their humanity as they watch the technological spectacle taking place above their heads.[]

The plane could crash, either on us or with us inside it, but there's nothing we can do about it; writing books, whether their arguments are metaphorical or literal, doesn't work (Kafka, Ellul), and neither does killing people (Kaczynski). These differing attempts are all wrongheaded. How can you attack the media-mindset of the system with passé media such as text? And why would you expect to be able to harm the non-human system by harming human beings? What must be understood is that the system is collapsing anyway, its every victory against humanity bringing it closer to collapse. As the tower builds itself higher it necessarily becomes more unstable. It cannot look out for its safety and self-interest because it has no real self to look out for. And all along its structural integrity has been an illusion; it has no integrity.

•

Lastly, you will have noticed that in this section I have referred to Franz Kafka only as a twentieth-century writer, not as a twenty-first-century murderer. That is because I do not believe that the latter figure was in fact Franz Kafka. An unorthodox and borderline heretical contention, I know. Perhaps it further discredits me in your eyes, but I will not be silent about this or pretend otherwise. Imagine if someone told you that Dostoevsky came back to life and became a religious martyr. Would you believe that news? Of course you wouldn't. Or rather, you might — if it were actually on the news, the way the so-called Kafka murders were. You believe that the comparison isn't fair and that, yes, Kafka's apparent reincarnation was very strange, but it was a one-of-a-kind bizarre incident, and science could and supposedly has explained it somehow, and we should allow for that and give credence to the incident. I do not agree. To clarify, I do believe that the murders were real, not fabricated media events — real people died and it is a tragedy — and I also believe that there was indeed a guilty criminal at the center of it who called himself Franz Kafka. But I do not believe that he was the real Franz Kafka. No doubt this person was extremely insane — we know this from everything he did and said — and so it is not much of a stretch to suppose that he simply believed and convinced himself that he was Franz Kafka. Isn't that explanation a lot simpler than supposing that the real Franz Kafka had somehow lived that long, and become a terrorist, or that he was reincarnated through the real Kafka's buried DNA and then brainwashed to think that he was the original? I think so. I think he was just a nutter.

By the way, I have read Sokmon's report, and in that case I absolutely do believe that persons and events were entirely fabricated. Why were they fabricated? Who knows. Probably a high-level intelligence operative decided that the 'Kafka' case had gotten too popular and important, and so after his demise the public had better be given a palatable and media-friendly version of the death. They probably killed him outright, in the field, after a sloppy investigation and approach. I do not believe this villainous person would have voluntarily surrendered himself and then committed suicide for no reason.

Furthermore, I do not believe 'Mayu Sokmon' ever existed. Yes, I've seen videos of her being interviewed; I admit that she was probably a real person in the sense that she was not a hologram or whatever. But I do not believe her name was what we were told it was, or that she was who they said she was. She was not a psychologist. How do I know? During my final year in Japan, my flatmate had a thing for certain Japanese fetish 'actresses' (though most of them weren't really acting). One of them was called 'Mayu' — I do not know what her surname was, or even if 'Mayu' was her real first name — and I remember that she looked extremely similar to the way this later 'Mayu Sokmon' looked during the media tour she went on before her own supposed suicide. Convenient, isn't it? They don't need her anymore, so they can retire the character by saying the person committed suicide. (How cliché an ending, by the way! To have both her and 'Kafka' commit suicide! What, like Romeo and Juliet? Hah!) Anyway, 'Mayu' the porno star had a chipped tooth and always had a small bandage or two on her knees — kind of disturbing — and she was extremely tall and usually wore heels. This corresponds to the self-description that we glean from the Kafka report of 'Mayu Sokmon', right down to her complaining about her long legs banging painfully against the underside of a desk. And it corresponds as much as possible to what we can see from the waist-up interviews of 'Mayu Sokmon' that were televised. I believe the inclusion of these details in the report constitutes a 'wink' from whatever intelligence agency created this scenario and hired the porno star to play a suddenly 'famous' psychological profiler.

Towards the end of the report (which, again, was totally fabricated, in my opinion), Mayu and Kafka even joke about making a porno together. Kafka gives a few hints that he would like Mayu to 'dominate' him, and that was the sort of pornography that 'the real Mayu' (as I will call her) used to make: S&M, which also happen to be the reversed initials of 'Mayu Sokmon'. Her porno movies were very strange. For the first hour, she'd be verbally abusing and pushing around little naked Japanese guys, who couldn't have even been five feet tall. It was almost like a perverted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves routine. They'd fuck standing up, though the men's penises would only reach between her lower thighs, or between her knees if she had heels on. So time and again the little guys would need to stand on stools to reach her vagina. Sometimes she'd pick one of them up, have him wrap his legs around her, let him try to reach his little arms up around her neck for support, and then she'd sort of cradle him in the air and rock him as he fucked her. Sometimes she'd even flip him upside-down, hold him over her head, and give him fellatio that way, pausing every now and then to laugh, insult him about his cock size, and threaten to body-slam him. The acrobatics were amazing: the lift-and-carry routine being a total expression of female dominance. But then during the second half of the movies, she'd usually be tied down or constrained somehow, and these same nasty little men would have all sorts of wires hooked up to her, linking her to transformers and batteries. I think the idea was to have a (misplaced) revenge fantasy based on her domination and humiliation of them in the first half. I can't understand how the same audience that apparently got off on the previous hour would still be able to get off on the diametrically opposed content of the second hour, but apparently they could and did. The package said that the video was a 'million+ seller', and my flatmate sure liked watching it all the way through. The little men would turn on the power — electrocuting Mayu on the slab like she was the Bride of Frankenstein — and start probing her with modified taser-vibrators. It seemed that this torture would just totally overwhelm her. It made you think she was being driven to painful orgasm after painful orgasm. Whatever cruel aspects there were in her treatment of the men, their treatment of her was simply sadistic. But first they embraced the role of victim and then they abused her as part of a ceaseless, righteous revenge.

That had to have been faked, right? I mean all of it — the orgasms and the electrocution. I really hope it was fake. She must have been pretending in those respects. And if so, she was doing a great job of it. And based on her television appearances about Kafka, we know she's a really good actress. She almost certainly would have played the role of 'F.' as well: Mayu's reported 'dream' about wearing Kabuki makeup and becoming a vigilante seems more like she experienced a flashback. I imagine that playing all of these roles must do something pitiable to a person's psyche. Not that I have much sympathy for someone like her. To sit there and say that stuff in those interviews like she did, lying so much to so many people about such very important things . . . Still, in the pornos there is the matter of the chipped tooth and the worrying bandages on her legs. It can't all have been make-believe.

But as I said, the whole Kafka report has to be fabricated. For what purpose or why the public had to have access to it, I don't know. It's like some intelligence agency's version of a Freudian 'screen memory'. It doesn't even make sense: Kafka was handcuffed, but as soon as Mayu enters his cell he supposedly 'stood up slowly and took off his purple jacket'. Now you tell me how a person can take off his coat if he's handcuffed? It's either really sloppily done or someone's idea of a joke. Then halfway through there's the part where the lights go out and the room becomes totally dark — but elsewhere we're told that the cell has windows to the outside. (And supposedly it was a gray day, but still, come on, the room would not have turned totally dark with the lights out.)

And by the way, no I didn't watch a great deal of Japanese pornography. But I will give them credit for always blurring the genital regions. There is something so much more refined about that. It almost gives dignity and politeness to the whole operation.

12. Plagiarism: You plagiarized me. You may not even remember, but I've never forgotten. It doesn't make me hate you — in some ways it's quite flattering — but this incident says a lot about your perception of me in ways that I find quite troubling.

How did I discover what you did?

It was during the summer before our sophomore year of college. You had found an apartment near your campus and I went to visit you for a week. I'm sure you remember my first night there. I had brought your half of the dissociative drugs we purchased, and that evening the two of us, your then-girlfriend, and your housemate and frat brother (again this 'Art') indulged in several hours of shared hallucinations. At the time Art seemed to be enjoying himself, but the next morning he had a change of heart — came up with some wacky theory about the drugs having transported his mind to an alien dimension while he slept, bringing him back on a city bus that landed in the kitchen — and told you that if any more of the substance remained in the house, then he would break the lease and leave, because just the thought of going back to the UFO scared him too much.

Though Art and his sensibilities are much different from me and my own, like him I also had an extremely interesting and unforgettable time later that night (morning, really). It started once I returned to the guest room and the space you had provided me. I don't recall if you ever experienced this phenomenon any of the times we did the drug together, but my hearing always became almost super-humanly sensitive. Lying on the bed then, unable to sleep, I heard you and your girlfriend speaking. You may have been on the other side of the house, but it sounded as if you were just outside the door. The two of you were talking about me, and you both seemed to be surprised, after our quite pleasant day and evening together — radical hallucinations included — that it really was 'okay for [me] to come here.' This took me aback. Why wouldn't it be okay for me to come see you? You had invited me. I had never met your then-girlfriend before, and yet the way the two of you spoke made it clear that you had had previous conversations in which the both of you expressed reservation, for some unstated reasons, about my arrival. Of course, I suppose that whenever someone from one's past, even not-so-distant-past, visits one's present life in its new surroundings, there is the phenomenon of 'worlds colliding', which can seem a bit strange for the person in the middle who must straddle both old and new, and see different parts of himself reflected in each. But the immense relief in your voice seemed to suggest far greater concerns had been involved. I can't blame you. But, again, I have to say that if you had seen something going wrong with me before then, you should have said something.

I think I slept then, though I cannot be sure.

I am certain, however, that the next thing I knew was not a dream. I suppose most people would insist that it was a latecoming hallucination, and perhaps they would be correct, though it felt as real as anything I have ever experienced. What happened was this: I got my soul back. I did not see God; I did not see anything; but I felt an overwhelmingly peaceful, positive and hopeful sensation. I sensed that the ruling body of whatever there is beyond this life and this physical universe was looking down on me with forgiveness and at least temporary approval. I do not know what, if anything, triggered this — perhaps it had simply been a matter of time, and God thought that I had suffered long enough for my stupidity — but instantly I knew what had happened. It felt like the complete opposite of the sensation I had experienced several years earlier, the shame and the burning you would not believe, when — allegedly, again — I suspect that I foolishly forsook my soul.

Happy and contented, I lay on the bed for hours then, in perfect bliss, not caring about how little sleep I had gotten (if any). Then, after the warm glow of the sun had been streaming through the curtains for a long time, I sat up, went over to your bookshelf, and found that you had plagiarized me.

The loose pages were in a folder that was just lying there — not begging to be opened but certainly not hidden.

One look at the first page and I knew exactly what it was and exactly what you had done, and under what circumstances. It was the opening of the real-life novel I had written during our final year of high school. Right there on the top line was that horrible opening about 'someday I'm going to be famous', and all the rest of it followed. You did alter some of the personal physical details that I, or my protagonist and narrator, had stated in the first few paragraphs, but everything else was left intact. I changed more facts in the first place, when describing my real life, than you did when copying my words.

My thoughts then were quite conflicted. Certainly, I was hurt and felt used. But, as alluded to above, I was also flattered. You evidently liked my writing enough to make it your own, if only temporarily, before a classroom of your peers. Yes, I immediately realized the circumstances around this plagiarism, and this — early on — was my biggest disappointment: During your freshman year of college you had enrolled in a fiction workshop, and you had used an opening chapter of mine as if it were a short story of your own — probably because you had been partying at your fraternity and were too lazy to write anything for yourself.

The problem was, by that point, that morning — a little over year after I'd finished writing it — I myself did not think highly of my first novel. In its attempts at realism, hipness, and innovation, it became obsessed with the petty side of life; by far it valued twentieth-century culture over eternal human concerns; and it broke rules simply for the sake of breaking them. I noticed all of these faults when I first reread the book earlier that same year, and that summer morning at your house I was shocked and dismayed, on principle, to have to face those same first sentences again, unexpectedly. (Handed-down sentences, if you get the pun, which condemned me!)

So, without looking at much of them, I put the papers away in the folder and put the folder back on the shelf. I never mentioned any of this to you, put it out of my mind as best I could, and the rest of my visit went pleasantly if unremarkably.

Several years later, however, after racking my conscience to figure out why our friendship fell apart, I remembered the plagiarism incident again, and after some rumination on this a hidden consequence seemed to emerge: Probably the feedback you received in the fiction workshop inadvertently told you quite a bit more about me — the author of the work you passed off as your own — than you bargained for. After I hit upon this theory, my natural inclination was to assume that the rest of the class didn't like the tale. Perhaps they called my teenage prose pointlessly mean-spirited, and claustrophobic. Certainly, that's what I would call it, especially then (and at times maybe even now!). That was my first thought — that you received negative criticism for my work, perhaps even received a low grade for such bad writing from a bad narrator, and thereby you soured on me after suddenly seeing me anew in a harsh, unflattering light — and perhaps that explanation solves the riddle.

But there is another explanation, one just as likely to have occurred, just as reasonable, but twice as complicated and disturbing: Perhaps your professor and classmates actually liked my writing, but for all the wrong reasons — due to an unintended perspective that may have earned you a good grade at the my expense, which would have lowered your estimation of me. Perhaps the feedback you received sounded something like: 'This was interesting! So unexpected! I have to ask, though, Alex — You're such a nice guy — How did you ever write from the perspective of a demon?' And then, with this premise having been laid, you would then have to elucidate and defend your work based upon the assumption that the protagonist and narrator was someone much different from your very best friend, whose character you still approved of and whose opinions you admired — until then — more than anyone else's.

This second explanation is more complicated but no less likely than the first scenario. It obviously intrigues me more, as it would twist the knife in more and wedge us apart further.

But whatever did happen that day in the classroom — when my private life was laid bare for strangers to pick apart and judge, as if it were all something frivolous, something for their entertainment and fickle dilettantism, as if my insufferable dilettantism were mere foodstuff for their insufferable dilettantism — I must underscore the following: You took my truth and made it your fiction. You took a novel meant as a thinly veiled memoir, and made it seem as though it were a wholly new work. Your readers would have known up front that the text was told from the perspective of someone other than yourself, for what remained of the narrator's self-description did not resemble you at all; and the way I wrote then, in my final year of high school, with my particular hobbyhorses and obsessions then, was all far different from anything you would have been concerned with in your first year of college.

Here I must pause and stress that honest knowledge of authorship — knowledge of a writer's relation to his text — is very important. I would remind you of how crucial it is for people to be able to discern what is real and what isn't, what happened and what was dreamed up, whether words and descriptions are true or not. But when someone like you plays with these premises of authorship in an underhanded way, useful perceptions become impossible for a readership to grasp. My first novel needed to be seen as a memoir; it works, barely, as such. It does not work as fiction, and certainly not as real literature (which is beyond fact and fiction) — you see, presented in those ways it only 'works' against me.

I don't know whether or not you realized any of the consequences of your plagiarism — its indirect effect on our friendship and the unjust reframing of my first, worst text — and how it put so many things into worse, negative, unintended, unreal perspectives. What I do know, however, and what disappointed me beyond anything, is how little you changed my words when you took them for your own. It seems odd to say, but all along my prevailing complaint in all of this has been: that you did not make more of an effort to try to improve (or at least creatively alter) my clumsy, youthful ideas and phrasing. In that respect, I wish that you had taken the time and effort to redeem my nasty book, rather than use it as a crutch.

You see, some very abstract, highly theoretical concepts lie beneath all this, truly; and they may remind us of passé literary theories, but they are worth going over.

Non-fiction gets it wrong from the get-go. Words cannot reproduce, track, or rule reality. They can try, and at times even non-lawyers such as myself find it necessary and useful to bind ourselves and others to words that, more or less, describe reality. But words can never really accomplish the documentarian task any better than video can, so there is a necessary degree of error that always factors in to every non-fictional statement. There is no way to ever describe reality fully or accurately enough. Words are always metaphors. Some non-fictional works are better than others, some are more accurate than others; but every bit of them, from the first word on, involves a compromise that we are expected to overlook.

With fiction — and better yet, with literature — there is no compromise. Fiction makes no bones about it: it acknowledges language as a metaphor from the beginning. It seeks to tell truth through a lie, after readers and author alike are made aware of the fact that the words themselves are a lie. And that is an honest, open situation — unlike the authors who lie to their readers and to themselves by always pretending to tell the whole truth.

In my memoir I attempted some distancing; not enough, but it was there. I looked it all over a few weeks ago, in preparation for this letter. Though it was the first time in years that I actually dusted it off, certain passages and phrases from it have always reappeared and run through my mind, approximately once a month. Overall, today I think it is better than I thought it was for so long. It has some literary value, whatever that is worth. But everyone I showed it to back then, twelve or thirteen years ago, told me what a great and unique read it was. 'Amazing . . . fucking mindblowing' were the words you used. Mr. Praust told me it was 'contemporary, circumspect and innovative, like hip-hop,' which I took as a huge compliment at the time. Soon afterwards I grew ashamed of what I'd written and what I'd done.

It still amuses me, however, to think back on how other local people, non-readers, reacted to the idea of what I'd done. They were so afraid of what I could have written about them, when really I didn't know anything, and you and myself were the only people whose embarrassing secrets were revealed. I remember one night, in the summer before college, when you told me that people, some of them our age and some of them much older than us, were saying 'Writing that tell-all book is gonna get [me] killed!' I was amused by that then and I'm amused by it now, despite not liking the writing in question. I'm not sure if just hearing about such talk counts as getting death-threats, but I preferred the situation as it was: no one specifically threatening me — because no one had any idea if their dark truths had found their way into my book — but everyone saying that it stood to reason that someone was going to be really upset, driven to the point of madness and murder.

Dubious thing to write, though. Not really a nasty book — only in certain parts — but a deliberately confrontational one, one that showed off its artifice and its true-to-life subjects. A book that flaunted its dysfunctionality. I say that I wish you, in your reappropriation and plagiarism, could have redeemed it somehow — maybe you should have been my editor all along — but I only bring up this notion because it reminds me so much of what I think the point and use of art and literature really should be in this age. As everything around us, and everything in our lives, our thoughts, and ourselves, is becoming more and more artificial, I think that somehow art should be able to address — if not quite mitigate, if not quite redeem — this defining drive of our global culture. Artificiality, the word, is based on art; the concepts are directly connected. And yet oftentimes it seems as though art has become useless, perhaps because we and the world have become like art as we and the world have become more artificial. But shouldn't there be a way around this paradox, or a way to cut through it? 'Art as the redeemer of artificiality', or 'Art as the killer of artificiality', or 'Art as the cure of artificiality.' There should be something there, if only the recipe of the holy, poisonous, medicinal art could be worked out correctly.

That's why I didn't want to follow Dana when she proposed leaving civilization for good, because I'm addicted to 'interesting art' just enough that I can't let it go. So instead I brought her back to civilization, and she decided she actually wanted to stay, because she became addicted to complaining in the most abrasive, least helpful ways about what she now sees around her and — especially — what she sees in the media screens.

•

It is impossible for me to close this section on your plagiarism of me without mentioning your imitation of me. And though you probably did not even remember your plagiarism, I am sure that you don't remember your imitation.

Possibly you don't do this anymore, and hopefully you haven't for years, but you used to imitate others' speech patterns when talking with them. You'd involuntarily mimic their rhythm and syntax, even their diction. For so long I never noticed this — in much the same way that people don't recognize their own voices when they hear recordings of them. Probably you developed this habit gradually, specifically around me. And every time I heard you speak in class or in a group of friends — well, since we were always sitting next to each other, or standing next to each other, always talking to each other, when you would respond to a teacher or quip to a classmate, it would be in the same voice I knew you to speak in during our own conversations. So, it wasn't quite as simple as you always imitating the person to whom you were speaking, for whenever I was in the general area my speaking pattern would influence yours — even if I wasn't speaking. You were in a sense performing for me — usually quite well, quite humorously, to the point that you were doing me better than I could do myself. Though I didn't realize exactly what was going on at the time, I told you as much in an early email:

'We think quite a lot alike at times; you read my mind, yes. I enjoy all our antics and it does seem like we push each other to come up with more wonderfully creative nonsense. Usually you do a better job of it than I do.'

There was even one time when Sylvester Society didn't like one of your jokes, and so he told you to your face to 'Stop trying to be [me].' At first I thought he said this to you simply because there were girls around and he wanted to embarrass you.

I didn't realize what was going on with you until I overheard you talking with Hans Hotter, the foreign exchange student. You were imitating his broken English in a way that, if I didn't know better — and I did, and Hans did — made it seem as though you were making fun of him. But you weren't; you had simply fallen into imitation. Then I joined the two of you, and I noticed that your voice changed to match mine. When Hans talked again, you went back to imitating him for a moment, then seemed to pause and think better of it, a bit confused, and then decided to sound more like me again.

None of this is a deficiency in you; I don't bring it up to shame you. As you may remember, I had more speech eccentricities than you did, for a few years at least. I only note this now because it reminds me of your plagiarism. First you took my voice, then you took my written words, then you didn't want to talk to me or see me.

In fact, I remember one night during grad school when I heard someone consciously impersonating me, and I thought I was hearing you. I had just returned home after a night at the pub with some friends. One of them had evidently called my landline before I got back, and he left a very amusing message on my answering machine. What he had done was impersonate me — almost flawlessly, as I later realized — and in my voice he left a message for me describing the drunken but harmless shenanigans that had happened that evening. But he left this message as if he were me from the future calling back in time, trying to catch me before I went out on the town that night: 'It's going to be a disaster! Don't go out! I hope you haven't already left and that this message reaches you before it's too late!' As soon as I heard this message, however, I thought it was you; I thought, 'Alex? Alex is calling me from across the ocean. Finally. But . . . he's describing what happened tonight. Was he there?!' I didn't understand what was happening, and in my state of inebriation I wasted no time in calling your number, not knowing or caring what time it was in America. My mind worked overtime as your phone rang, and just before you picked up I realized what had happened; I realized that it was my grad school friend playing a joke on me, and I realized what the joke was. I heard an annoyed, rudely awakened voice say 'Hello?' then, and I didn't recognize the voice, but I knew it was yours — it was your new voice, your real voice, the voice you didn't use when I was around — and I hung up.

13. Taste: From plagiarism . . . to imitation . . . And I cannot help but trace this line of thinking back around to something else curious that you used to do. When I would copy CDs for you, after a while I started noticing that you would trace over the names of them, covering my own magic-marker scrawl with your own. Even when I would write out the entire tracklist on the CD, you would copy it over, just enough to hide my own handwriting and sort of make the labeling your own. I wasn't offended by this, but it was simply curious, especially in light of everything else. You must have done this about two hundred times, since that's about the number of CDs that you asked me to copy for you during our last two years of high school. That's a lot of copying, on both our parts.

You got your taste from me, a lot of it. You don't 'owe' me for this; I don't want gratitude, and indeed most of the artists and writers I turned you onto — I don't even like them anymore myself, so I don't want credit. Or blame.

Your dad even called me 'the movie guy', though I hate film — I hated it back then, too — but the dozen or so movies I thought were worth watching, I brought them to your house and we watched them.

We processed so much art together. I've looked back sometimes and couldn't believe it, the amount of art-products we went through in such a short amount of time. I was reading three books a week back then, when I still had the fire in me, and we were consuming five albums a week, easily. These days I'm lucky to process — really, fully process and digest — that much media in a year. And it'd be easy to say that we weren't digesting any of it back then, but we were: I remember every book I read then, and still remember almost all the lyrics to almost every song. Tens of thousands of them.

We were pressing each other onward through the culture — back through the popular culture, I should say. Our peers mostly consumed things passively — whatever was popular or whatever happened to fall their way — but we did it actively and with discernment, like it was a study — a study of shit, sometimes, a study of garbage or gourmet poison, but still a study. Very little of what we consumed was subpar; we always did a good job of picking out the top ten or top hundred or top thousand best examples of any given genre.

I didn't like your changing tastes in music after a few years of college.

I would specifically cite Bruce Springsteen as a very indicative example of what I didn't like there. I remember you often telling the factoid about Bruce Springsteen getting kicked out of college for 'excessive weirdness'; this amused you, and the joke or funny irony here is that Bruce Springsteen does not seem so 'weird' at all. Rather he cultivates the image and persona of an everyday workin' man.

I never liked Bruce Springsteen's music. I always found it very boring, and later on I discovered that it was indeed a very false and deceitful aesthetic that succeeds only by leading the listener astray, getting the listener to think of the singer in an incorrect way, and making the listener the butt of the joke. What I would say — and what I know to be true — is that Bruce Springsteen is phonier than Madonna, Andy Warhol, and David Bowie combined — because those three more or less tell their audience, 'Yes, I am phony; my art is artifice; this is a game we are playing'. 'B.S.', on the other hand, steps on stage and opens his mouth always with the pretense that he is an everyday workin' man — and most of his audience has no reason to doubt him — they believe him, as he wants them to believe him — when really Bruce Springsteen is a weirdo and not a workin' man at all in any real honest sense. You have to admit artifice up front to give your art a chance to tell some truth. For me to respect you as an artist, rather than a deceiver, that is what you must do. B.S. is a deceiver who causes his audience to mistake a lie for truth, a fantasy (albeit a realistic one) for reality, an actor for an honest person, and art for life. Art is not life; that which is artificial, however well it's rendered, must not be taken for true reality.

You have probably heard about how the Reagan campaign in 1984 reappropriated 'Born in the U.S.A.', using it without permission and much to Bruce Springsteen's annoyance. I think it was good that Ronald Reagan did that. It was one actor taking a shot at another, and I think it was just what someone like Bruce Springsteen deserves. I think Ronald Reagan at his worst was no more a liar or deceiver than B.S. ever was. I think the way politicians have used and misused America and the American Dream is no worse than anything Bruce Springsteen has ever done, when he has pretended to be 'the real spirit of America and the American people' — or whatever propaganda his art is predicated on, all of which you've approved of and enjoyed and supported by buying his music.

This isn't just me complaining about someone's taste in music. It is that, but it isn't just that. The issues in play are bigger; they really are. And I feel bad about much of the pop culture I used to patronize, too. It is good that we can grow to resent the existence of a trick that we fell for long ago. All of this says something very important about the culture and about you — about what you let slide, enjoy, like being fooled by, and support much in the same way that Allison Fashion supports disgraced politicians because they're disgraced.

14. Phonies: We are coming right down to it now, where the rubber meets the road, and my sharp disagreements with you are about to begin.

Perhaps some of the statements above seem juvenile to you. Very well. Then I have nothing to lose and it is time to rejuvenate, resuscitate, and redeem an old, dead, tainted word:

Phony.

You are a phony. That is the crux of my argument, if I must sum it up in four words instead of four hundred thousand. And worse: You are a phony because you don't know you are.

What is a phony? This term reminds us of Holden Caulfield and so many petty complaints. Holden Caulfield called people phonies — Does that mean he was good? Does that mean I champion Holden Caulfield? No. No, I don't want to resurrect Holden Caulfield. That was a very overrated book. But wasn't there something good, something important, about Holden Caulfield's criticism of his world? Yes. It was lost in the atrophying culture of the time, but there was something that Caulfield represented and witnessed with ineffable indignation that was important. Didn't it seem like Caulfield and his creator were trying to get at something, trying to pin down and call out some failing of the world, but couldn't quite work out how to describe the problem or expose it in any way that, ultimately, didn't seem childish? Yes. The best they could do was to just call it all phony. And so many others for a few decades there in the last half of the previous century, they too used the word before it fell out of fashion — and they stopped using it because it feel out of fashion, because what they cared about most was fashion — but within those criticisms too there was the kernel of truth, the squandered promise of some cultural diagnosis, which needed to have been made in time but wasn't. It was almost as though they said the word phony but didn't know what it meant, or knew some of what it meant but could not bring themselves to understand what the ramifications were, and what their unhappy, spiteful, petulant complaint was really saying about their world.

Here I will explain my own unhappy, spiteful, petulant complaints. Here I will finally explain why phony was such an appropriate and correct term to use, for all of those criticisms of fifty, sixty years ago — and why it is still an appropriate and correct term to use today.

To call someone phony is to point out their artificiality. It is the 'how much computer?' idea again. A phony has too much computer in him.

Calling someone a phony also suggests that the person is not being genuine — that he is an actor, like Sly Society, always putting on a performance. (You know I saw him this past summer. He wants me to write a one-man show for him. Yes! He wants me to ghostwrite his autobiography for him to sing. He wants it to be about his younger days and what a hard time he had — while everyone else envied him as the most popular. But that's a story for another day. I liked seeing him — we weren't enemies — he hit on me, asked me how often I worked out, told me only I could help write his show, but in all that there is something phony.) There is a connection here to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which I will expound upon later, but for now let it suffice for us to recall Rousseau's ideas regarding the public 'masks' worn by everyone in society. This phenomenon is inescapable, a basic feature of any and all societies — and as such I have no problem with it, for I am certainly not anti-society (because there has to be some sort of society, always — for god's sake, let's hope so). Still, we must admit that as modernity has progressed the 'masking' of human beings has proliferated exponentially, to the point that people have lost track of who and what they really are. Perhaps 'phony' has fallen out of fashion because we're all phonies now and don't notice phoniness so much. Millennials' obsession with cellphones warrants reviving the term, I think: The phonies on their phones; the dumb phonies on their smartphones; the phonies locked into their 'cells'. They don't know they aren't free, because they don't know what's real. The inescapable falseness of recent decades has made all of us actors: we can either take situations seen in media for our behavioral models, or else be influenced by the behaviors of real humans around us — who got their behavioral patterns from the media. Few genuine points of reference exist anymore. Just as actors do, we respond in predictable manners when confronted with false stimuli and cues. Day in and day out, the media remind us what the 'motivations' are for our particular character types. Meanwhile, as in a Twilight Zone episode, our masks have become our actual faces. It's all surface now, and there's nothing beneath it — just as Warhol described the meaning of his paintings — no hidden depths[]. We almost might as well judge each person's book by its cover now — because no pages, no content, is waiting between the covers. Another way of putting it is to say that each person's face is an open book. Of course, I am exaggerating, but this is the model that the standard Western human being has been moving toward, though obviously not without difficulty and heartache. One might say that the stock Western psychological type went from 'inner-directed' to 'outer-directed' and then became so insecure, so vulnerable to the judgments of others, that the locus of psychological perception was pushed right to limits of personhood, on the outside shell itself. That is the metaphor, anyway. This superficiality and flatness serves as a sort of protection, because to consciously activate deeper levels of consciousness and bring them into contact with the sort of intensely anti-human social environment that we're in now — well, that would be very scary. Better to exist just on the surface, to be the flat surface, rather than risk bringing inner dysfunction to the fore in any real, confrontational way. And nowadays when we do our best to stave off each other's insecurities, we say things that flatter the other person — that is, we make them flatter, massage their egos out further and further along the psychological surface-level, and they experience pleasure and reassurance from this flattening. Because they know that in such a situation nothing messy and deep will be called into question.

Many people today, with good reason, express displeasure with laws that grant NGOs and large industrial companies 'personhood'. But we should now sense a duplicity in the term 'artificial people'. We rail against evil corporations for not being 'real people', while we ourselves become less human all the time. A hundred years ago, J.D. Bernal[] was already talking about 'corporate personalities' and 'corporate men', and he wasn't speaking of anything to do with companies, think tanks, or men committed to serving capitalist interests; he was referring to his prediction that groups of individuals would soon become assimilated into aggregate personalities, simply by means of technology that would effectively link their brains and psychologies together. In the last decade we have heard increased shouting about how 'Corporations are selfish and greedy and lack a human touch'. Of course. That is how corporations of capital tend to function, always trying to expand themselves and increase their wealth; but this is how corporations of human sentiment also function, trying to expand their cult of personality and self-love for everyone in their group. There is no getting around this. Every point we strike against corporations for their greed — and there are plenty such points to be struck — is shadowed by another criticism that might be made of our own narcissism. (What happened in the myth of Narcissus? He became spellbound by staring at his shimmering, wavy reflection in the water, then fell in and drowned. What is happening to us today? Spellbound by simulacra representations, we are falling into the media pool and mentally drowning.) That is how the system has now organized matters: once capitalism became subordinate to technillogical conceits, human beings themselves began to be transformed into generic commodities (cf. 'human resources') via their technological interconnections. The people are becoming (and in some sense even aspire to be) as hollow as the corporations they resent. The root cause of all of this is simply the technological system itself, which has developed artificial bonds of all sorts to tie varied people and interests together in ways that may be profitable, or nice, or fun, or gratifying in the short term — but certainly these configurations are not natural, healthy, or sustainable. Bernal and others foresaw many aspects of this a full century ago, but it is not so easy for the people of today to admit their own 'corporate personhood'.

No one can stand understanding how artificial they are. Our flight from this realization causes such anxiety, and at times it seems that all aspects of technological society — all conveyor belts and mental treadmills — are powered by the hamster wheels we run on to escape the knowledge that we aren't real people anymore. Knowing how much of us is fake — and how much of our concerns and thoughts and composite personalities are largely artificial — is almost more than I can bear.

In closing, I should admit to being something of a phony myself. No doubt. Not as phony as you! I hasten to add. But perhaps . . . overall . . . I have been phonier than most. Yes, I realize that this is a strong possibility. Writing a letter like this, for example: a good amount of phoniness must go into a production like this. And then there is my sense of humor: I acknowledged that it has been problematic, for me and others, but couldn't it also have been called facetious? Isn't my humor largely a lot of facetiousness? And what is facetiousness except a slight variation of phoniness and the 'false face' idea yet again? Does hiding behind humor, hurriedly putting on the clown mask after the fact, and saying one was 'only joking', really redeem phoniness? I'm not at all sure that this sort of comedic sensibility really expiates any inner dysfunction or lessens the potential harm of the deceitful words, funny or not. If anything, facetious humor such as my own only ramps up the artificiality even more, even higher. This is unacceptable, but it is also inescapable.

On the other hand, I would like to say that the person you knew, when you knew me, was all an act. I would like to say that, because I am ashamed of so many petty things I said and the stupid things I did — usually with your approval. We know — or knew — each other well because we each said horrible things in the other's presence. We trusted each other and thus were able lift our masks from time to time, and let the smelly things air out. But we can't do that anymore, you and I, certainly not around each other. That is why I had to write and communicate all this from the necessary distance.

15. From Maker to Faker: That is the core of how art and artists have changed: From Maker to Faker; from Homer the Greek bard, who sang of heroes and inspired his people, to Homer Simpson, fat and masochistic, proudly stupid, loved by self-hating Americans.
The concepts of originality and creativity have become so impossibly misconstrued that I do not know if they could ever be set right again, or set into any new configuration that was at all culturally healthy. Over the last few centuries, corporate interests and copyright laws have combined to ensure that 'originality' only means new names pasted over top of the same old lazy ideas. The word poet, however, derived from the Greek word for 'make/compose/create'. And yet Homer did not personally dream up any heroes or gods out of nothingness. What needs to be understood here is that a carpenter does not create a house in the sense of causing it to appear out of thin air; a carpenter creates a house by taking preexisting materials and (re)combining them in a skillful way. That is the way in which the true poets of old were makers: they made something of the culture that was already there; they did not load it down with 'original' or 'new' fantasies that no one ever had any reason to care too much about. Modernity, however, is fueled by an exhausting lust for 'the new'; even when little of it is all that new at all, we have fun pretending that it is novel and exciting. Thus, driven by monetary profit and protected by copyright, we witness this parade of millions of disposable art-products masquerading as if it were all genuine culture for and of our civilization. No, it is fake culture for a fake society.

This is the essence of modernism itself, which gives us little else but us a legacy of dysfunction that is, in the best of times, papered over with happy lies. This is the simply another version of the Freudian 'dreamwork', which is creatively cobbled together in order to hush away any nagging discomfort that might naturally spring up in a sleeper's mind. Humanity is the sleeper, ever since mass media put us to sleep and kept us dreaming, even making our nightmares entertainments.

Of the comparison between dreamwork and art, in 1957 Ernest van den Haag wrote:

'The "substitute gratification" produced by the dreamwork, mainly by displacements, helps the dreamer continue sleeping. However, one major function of art is precisely to undo this dreamwork, to see through disguises, to reveal to our consciousness the true nature of our wishes and fears. The dreamwork covers, to protect sleep. Art discovers and attempts to awaken the sleeper. Whereas the dreamwork tries to aid repression, the work of art intensifies and deepens perception and experience of the world and of the self. It attempts to pluck the heart of the mystery, to show where "the action lies in its true nature."

'Though dreams and art both may disregard literal reality, they do so to answer the opposite needs. The dream may ignore reality to keep the sleeper's eyes closed. Art transcends immediate reality to encompass wider views, penetrate into deeper experience and lead to a fuller confrontation of man's predicament. The dreamwork even tries to cover upsetting basic impulses with harmless immediate reality. Art, in contrast, ignores the immediate only to uncover the essential.'

These are all hopeful and inspiring statements, but in the prevailing media — and hence the prevailing art — of the last half-century-plus, we are dealing with art that does not awaken people. In truth art cannot awaken people now anyway, no matter how hard it may try to do so. In fact the harder it tries, the more it is ignored. This is so because a change of parameters has been made, the dreamer has fallen into a deeper hibernation in which the normal tactics of forcing oneself — or others — awake no longer work.

Even the appearance of nightmares — dystopias — no longer causes much alarm. It is as if we view horrifying parables, note their application to our own surroundings, and then become perversely reassured by them, as if the very fact that we can consume such horror stories, and the very fact that we proudly can note their terrifying relevance, is 'good enough' and actually an outstanding example that the all-important culture industry is still functioning accordingly. For we seem to care more about the continued success of dreamwork — of the media, of the charts, of the box office, of the award-presentations — than we do about the status of humanity itself. 'There is a terrifying new film about suffering and injustice, with easy-to-find real-world analogues? All is as it should be! I shall consume this film in order to participate in a "discussion" of the issues involved, though the reality of these issues is indeed beyond my control and will never improve.'

In all this note how poets have given way to lullaby singers. What the sleepers desire are dreams — the illusion of waking life. If the house is burning down, they would rather dream of being burned alive than be jolted awake, even though there still would be time to run out of the house.

From a different starting place, Walter Benjamin gets to the same point when he writes: 'This is evidently the consummation of "l'art pour l'art." Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object for contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.'

Poet, in the paragraphs above, could stand for any artist — but poets who double as singers seem to stand out, probably due to aspects of oral tradition that always remain potent and capture the human attention on a very deep level. The Maker-to-Faker process plays out here as well.

No matter how fake or artificial many popular singers have seemed over the last half century, I find pseudo-genuine bards, the faux-folk singers, far more troubling and indicative of our sickness. The appearance of the fake does not harm us nearly so much as our mistaking a certain type of the fake for the real. I have already mentioned Bruce Springsteen, but far more significant than him lies Bob Dylan.

Since I am focused on technology, you might expect me to take Dylan to task for 'going electric' and taking folk music with him. Nothing of the sort. Everyone had it the wrong way round: Dylan going electric wasn't the moment of change; folk music being put through mass media, that was the moment of change beyond which folk music wasn't real anymore. The media themselves — radio, broadcasts, recordings — affect audience psychology in such a way as to neuter the human spirit, co-opting the soul of the music and using it to further the interests of mass communication techniques. Much as Bob Dylan has been referred to as 'our greatest poet', Bob Marley has been called a prophet, and Tupac a revolutionary. Above all else, however, far and away, they were recording artists, i.e. mouthpieces of and for the technological society. The mass media renders individuals artificial. Great figures such as these three were no exception; they become functions of the system, and their efforts to address reality — to say 'real things' — get circulated back, via the media through which they must speak if they are to reach anyone, and end up revitalizing the artificial system.[] Genuine, spirited artists inevitably become the greatest sources of energy for the artificial system, as soon as they become figures in the media. Therefore the greatest effect of these poets, prophets, and revolutionaries is their capacity to sing lullabies, pacify the people and then direct them in certain contrived ways, all while generating revenue and public interest enough to fuel the biggest revolution of the last century: the continual rollout of newer technology and slicker audience-management techniques. Compared to all that, Dylan using an electric guitar meant very little; before and after that moment, his words and sounds were broadcast, transmitted, recorded and consumed in the same way: via mass media.

But what I would call into question is this: Why didn't the folk fans get mad at Dylan's abstract lyrics? His words were nonsensical, self-important, and overwrought; they were even more of a departure from traditional music than was the addition of electric amplification. The answer is simply that by the early 1960s the general culture was already so far gone that the audience could not discern the charlatanry of Dylan's lyrics. They could not make sense of them — and after all, there was precious little there to make sense of! — but this evidently did not bother them. They were in fact happy to mistake opaqueness for profundity. It made them feel as though they were listening to something profound.

Dylan himself said people read too much into his lyrics, but that didn't dissuade them from continuing to do so — nor did it dissuade him from continuing to feed their brains artful nonsense. The skill of Bob Dylan — and he does have real talent — is to say curious and provocative things that made people believe there were deeper meanings to be found. Early on he admitted to emulating performers 'whose eyes seemed to say I know something you don't know'; he wanted to be such a figure himself; and rather than cultivate true, elusive, exclusive wisdom, he crafted lyrics that directed listeners toward nonexistent secrets. After Dylan's early salvos, much of popular music began to adopt the technique of abstract lyrics; this drew the listeners in and caused their minds to endlessly obsess over peculiar words and wordings that, at bottom, had no underlying, sensible message to decode. The great trouble, once again, is not the fakeness — not the fact that the words have far less meaning than they seem to have — but rather that the general audience scarcely perceives the vacuity of the lyrics, choosing instead to suspect that the words contain genuine and very human statements. These songs become celebrated as the most meaningful and profound words-to-live-by; we end up living our lives beneath ultimately incomprehensible utterances.

There is a great irony here in that 'folk music' is supposed to come ground-up, from the people; but under the paradigm enacted by Dylan's artfulness, we instead find the cagey and oblique singers being worshipped by a mass audience who barely understands anything about the songs (note, again, that there is actually very little there to understand in any clear way). Initially at least, Dylan himself rejected the 'folk singer' label: to his credit, he insisted that he wasn't 'a folk singer or a pop singer', and that he didn't call his music 'folk songs' but rather 'contemporary songs'. In short order, however, the culture itself and everyone in it came to know Dylan as Folk Singer #1, the gold standard. This makes perfect sense when you realize that you are dealing with an artificial culture: within an artificial culture, a nonsense-peddler operating on a top-down dissemination model may as well be called a folk singer, because his endemic falseness is an accurate representation of what's going on in the culture.

Dylan has made more than a few self-aggrandizing statements over the years, and one of the most revealing was his contention early on that, before him, 'No one had ever written songs before.' Yes, indeed, the basis of what Dylan did was to force music to conform to writerly concerns, in the most artificial fashion. Moreover, the songs were not just written but typed, mechanically — that is how Dylan wrote many of his lyrics, on a typewriter. The audience hears sweeping, plinkety old-time sounds, but the words and meaning are entirely the product of a Modern typing culture. The singer is no longer a Homer or a bard, no longer a culture-hero who happens to be a poet; rather, the singer is first and foremost a famous person who happens to be something of a poet, who has egotism and ulterior motives, who catches the ears of the masses by means of technology, marketing, propaganda, cathartic snobbishness, and of course drugged states of consciousness. Rather than sing the truths of the culture, rather than reinforce these truths and allow them to grow with the people, the new singers must spout either 'fashionable nonsense' or childishly simplistic declarations, all of which, through the electronic transmission process and within the labyrinthine artificiality of the technological society, sounds as if it contained deep wisdom, meaning, and truth. There is a disconnect in the mind of the audience and in the mind of the singer as well; due to modernist conceits, they have totally misconstrued the point of this cultural process. When speaking of his early material, Dylan said: 'I know it's good; I know when something's deceiving like in poetry.' To deceive, mislead, beguile — these are regarded as good things to do. Art once helped explain the world to people, sometimes by means of metaphor; now art confuses people, gets them to mistake metaphor for true reality, and helps them live in false worlds.

Nature, i.e. the true reality, doesn't lie. Ever. The fundamental conceit of so much post-Modern folk art is the premise that certain types of art may as well be considered natural. 'This is real music.' Or 'This is honest-to-goodness writin'.' No. No. Even realism (which we are very, very far away from, with most of this stuff) is a contrivance, a bluff. All art(ificiality) is Against Nature, like Huysmans said (À Rebours). The failure to recognize this basic fact means that no truth-through-fiction can develop. The first, necessary admission of everything our philosophies ever achieved was Socrates' saying that he knows more than those around him because he knows that he knows nothing, whereas everyone else just nonchalantly thinks they know more than they really do. It is like the truism that tells us how wisdom — for you, on a personal level — can only arise once you have fully and rightly acknowledged your own past mistakes. (I certainly acknowledge mine; I have made a lot of mistakes.) But we have lost this capacity for good self-criticism, and consequently we buy into so very much stuff that is counterfeit, artifice. Today we are too distracted and our self-esteem has become too bound up in artificial understandings of the world and of ourselves, as conveyed and superhumanly imprinted upon us by electric media. We don't dare recognize our errors now, because the errors are too great and too humiliatingly childish. But we need to be humiliated, just a bit, so that we may become better than what we are now. We need to be humbled (the very word from which human derives). In the most abstract but crucial sense, it is art that has stolen away our humanity. It is as if we have been misled, through great costuming and talent, to mistake character-actors for real people, and these actors themselves have lost track of who they ever really were in the first place; for we have all misinterpreted the grandiose, touching, comforting, Spielbergian themes — the apexes of contrivance — as if they were the actual building blocks of the universe. We fall for nostalgia that was never true in the first place. It's almost like we've had to resort to false cultural examples because, from 1900 or so onwards, there was nothing real left. I once heard a radio host argue that the town in It's a Wonderful Life was 'a real place' and that 'anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to destroy America'. These people are lost in a mirror maze . . .

Several years ago I saw one of Dylan's direct descendants, Tom Waits, interviewed on a silly talk show. He was wearing the standard hobo costume, old-fashioned hat and bummy suit; he had a million-selling album to promote and was about to play The Devil in a major motion picture. The starstruck goofball host expressed surprise regarding how — backstage — Tom Waits seemed happy and sociable and not at all like the down-and-out, drunk-on-death's-doorstep persona that his records suggested. At that, Waits smiled, shook his head, threw up one hand and said, 'It's an act, you know?'

No, they don't know. They don't get it. The power of the electronic media itself, the image and form of what the content is supposed to be, overrides anything that they might be able to deduce from the actual content of the art — or from life itself. Even people working in the media do not realize how fake things are.

Oh, I openly like a lot of Tom Waits' music, and Dylan's, and Tupac's, and Marley's[]. But that's the same as saying, 'They sure sing pretty lies.' It's nice stuff, but you can't really build a lasting society on it. By pretending to be genuine, bonafide, old-fashioned troubadours, they provide a big audience full of increasingly artificial people with the comforting illusion that some real culture actually exists anymore. That is their use-function within this system.

Any authenticity was over and done with a long, long, long time ago, really. As a little boy, Bob Dylan was inspired not by any real music he heard real people playing, but by grainy, poppy rock'n'roll music he heard on the radio. He grew up in the American Midwest, in 'real America'. But the real culture was already dead, even way out there. How do I know this? Well, stop and think. Look it up: Where did Bob Dylan, sixty years ago, need to go to learn about something called 'folk music'? He had to go learn about it in a museum in New York City.

16. Cities: 'Life in large cities is not conducive to mental health.' – This was once a commonplace sentiment among public intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, back when the large cities were smaller than the small cities of today. More often than not, this was expressed as a truism, not a facetious grin-and-bare-it statement. But a few decades later, by the time My Dinner with Andre (1980) identified The City as 'the new model for the new concentration camp', inhabited and supported by people who 'exist in a state of schizophrenia', such ideas were already unbelievable to the intelligentsia: these were but lines in some artsy movie, statements for people at cocktail parties to quote and say they agree with ('You know, there's really something to it!'), then forget about during the cab ride back to their City apartments. But even ten years before that, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the second most influential American political advisor of his lifetime or ours, could call attention to similar concerns without raising any national alarm or, evidently, sparking any serious effort on the part of anyone — anyone — to address much less mitigate these problems. As Brzezinski noted:

'[P]opulation growth, crowding, and social oppression all contribute to irrational and intensified aggression, [and] experiments on rats seem to bear this out; observation of human behavior in large cities seems to warrant a similar conclusion. . . . Julian Huxley was perhaps guilty of only slight exaggeration when he warned that "overcrowding in animals leads to distorted neurotic and downright pathological behavior. We can be sure that the same is true in principle of people. City life today is definitely leading to mass mental disease . . ." '

Again, think about the fact that one of the two most influential and respected policy advisors of the last half-century said this — that urban life was leading to mass mental illness — and yet nothing was done, and no one really commented on it, and we barreled on ahead, glorifying and encouraging city life.

It is worth underscoring this point about animals and zoos. Almost without exception in the history of all studies, wild animals in their natural habitats do not suffer from anything we could call mental illness. But domestic animals sometimes do, and animals in captivity often get depressed. As Jerry Mander writes in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television: '[I]t is well known that there is an extraordinarily high death rate (even suicide rate) among all confined animals. This is especially true of the more intelligent ones, such as dolphins and monkeys. There is an even higher lethargy rate, as a visit to any zoo reveals' — just as any visit to America or Britain will reveal an escalating obesity rate. What are human beings but domestic animals who have, in a strong and inescapable sense, let themselves be taken captive by an automated environment, which keeps forcing them to become ever more domesticated? Obviously human beings in contemporary society, especially in the West, have and are experiencing escalating rates of mental illness — so much so that we do not really even know what healthy is anymore, since there is no normal anymore. This is because human beings, especially those in cities, have become perversely and hopelessly addicted to the flashiest, most unnatural, anti-human aspects of the technological society.

Your first reaction might be to say, 'So what?' Or you might pause, parlay some of my own terms and concerns, and say, 'But we have evolved to function within cities. Technology allows this to happen simply because humans want to live this way. Of course there is psychological pressure, but anti-depressant techniques continually rise to the challenge, supporting human beings who feel — and who are you to judge them? — that it is their exciting, worthwhile destiny to live within a sea of strangers, surrounded by noise and concrete. It may not be the life for you, but obviously more and more people want to live that way.' Very well.

But even if all that were true — Do you honestly consider these urban areas to have experienced increased functionality over the decades? I suppose it is at least arguable (though hardly clear) that cities themselves, cities as cities, may in some places, in some ways, be functioning better. But certainly even the most smoothly running cities demand their populations to readjust on a daily basis to ever more abnormal, ever more technical life-experiences — with literally a million or more impersonal interactions for every one personal relationship. When that is happening (and it is), then humans themselves, humans as humans, cannot be said to be functioning very well in those places, not by any measure, human or otherwise (and man is no longer 'the measure' anymore, because we have different 'rulers' now).

Over the last few years, I've noticed that an increasing number of people have begun to realize that 'online communities' are not real communities. Whether this awareness has become a general trend or not, I'm not sure. (Certainly, much to my regret, I do not believe that any worldwide 'awakening' of humanity is taking place.) I wonder, however, how many of these same people will ever begin to notice just how artificial their actual physical 'communities' have become, especially 'urban communities' (another contradiction in terms). I feel bad for the people involved, because they could have had something better if history and development went differently. You and I, Alex, grew up in an extremely small town — a living situation that has rapidly disappeared from the earth — in which almost everyone in a sparsely populated twenty-mile radius knew almost everyone else. But even we did not really live in a functioning community. All of our food and goods were imported. Almost all of the young people left at eighteen. There was far too much alienation and artificiality. Even ours wasn't a true community, not in the sense that almost all human beings prior to 1900 knew and experienced community. So think of how much less communal any other situation, any urban situation, is compared to what we had. Our hometown had a somewhat compromised sense of community, largely perpetuated by habit and nostalgia; but in retrospect our hometown seems infinitely more like a real community than most other places. These other places — especially cities — are not communities. To call them that only shows how little we know or respect the meaning of the word, much less the very human, binding, immersive, genuine, real situations to which the word once referred.

By now you might expect me to say that cities only really became a big problem during the modernist era, when certain techniques and technologies ramped up, and when concentrated populations exploded. Indeed, that is what I would tell you. Frankly, however, whenever I have read rhapsodies of city life in any historical texts, ancient or medieval or Renaissance, none of that ever moved or impressed me either. I cringe at the words of theologians who expound 'the city' as the culmination of God's will on earth. Similarly, the notion of America as 'that shining city on a hill' always struck me as dubious. All of these ideas seem to have been spawned by 'the good city' of Plato's Republic, that masterwork of treachery, arrogance, and intellectual delusion. (I have a book on my shelf entitled Plato: Totalitarian or Democrat? Obviously, like too many people today, he was both.)

But we do not need to look back through history, religion, philosophy or politics for this theme of The City, and why I hate it, to be brought home to you. We need only look at our personal literature.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. My favorite novel when we first became such great friends. And one of your favorite authors as well. At least, you liked Miller a lot during our junior and senior years of high school. Then, four years later, during our European travels, I remember that you went to Greece, and tried to write poetry there, because of Miller's Colossus of Maroussi. So it is clear that, for several years — oddly enough, years during which our friendship was strong — you regarded Henry Miller quite highly. I press this point in light of the following passage from Tropic of Cancer, which I have always remembered and which I bet will seem familiar to you now upon rereading it. This excerpt from like a hundred years ago doubles as what I would say to you now, in response to whatever defense of your City you have been making in your head:

'When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a test tube. Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated.

'When I think of this city where I was born and raised, this Manhattan that Whitman sang of, a blind, white rage licks my guts. New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the playboys that laugh there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves. . . . A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And Forty-second street! The top of the world, they call it. Where's the bottom then? You can walk along with your hands out and they'll put cinders in your cap. Rich or poor, they walk along with head thrown back and they almost break their necks looking up at their beautiful white prisons.'

Without much pause, in hurried juxtaposition, let me remind you of something you wrote to me not so long after you read Tropic of Cancer for the first time, something sloppy that you wrote to me right after our class returned from our senior trip:

'I' ve seen times square, it's absolutely fucking amazing, it's the most beautiful fucking thing I've seen in my life. I'm completely fucked up right now. The city is everything that I exp[ected it to be, the only thing I've been listening to lately is rap music because it goeas hand in hand with getting compleltyt fucked up. I really wish you woul de-mail mail me, It would make me feel great.'

You interpret beautiful white prisons as the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. That disjuncture in reasoning sums up the concern that I have with you and with your fellow inmates at the big pretty asylum. (Note that Miller could break out of his prison, leave and grow to hate it, even though he was born there, conditioned from birth to accept non-human, mechanized, herded insanity. That's real humanity, what he had. It's more than either of us has, probably more than what anyone today has.)

You might say, 'Why should I care more about what is written in some old book than I do about what my eyes tell me? Times Square looks amazing. It feels amazing to be there. To be here. I like it.' But as I told you before, Alex, if I were you I would not trust my eyes or ears or judgment. You are too easily deceived, and you do not see what is really there, but rather you sense the pleasing and self-important idea that the artificial environment has told you to expect to see and to enjoy contemplating. This whole system is exemplified by The City, which is supposed to be glittering and wonderful but is actually nasty and inhuman; it is only a massive illusion that any of this stuff has any real kind of value. In movies The City always seems exciting and romantic. It is where humans can find exciting life-stories. But in reality The City is a place where people submit to the non-human chaos and where almost all interactions must be impersonal, even and especially when you are shoved right up against someone in a subway car.[] A superabundance of passive interaction, but little intimacy; over-communication, but no communion. (Haven't you ever thought about what being around so many strangers all the time must do to the human mind, and how going through this unreal experience for years must permanently warp someone's sense of identity as well as his capacity for preserving the human race?) Movies will also show quiet moments set in cities: on a rooftop or balcony at night, or early in the morning as a protagonist walks all alone over a stark, empty bridge. Ludicrous. All of these scenes are made-up; nothing is ever quiet in cities; there is no capacity for scenic poignancy; no one can ever sense themselves, know themselves, know any other individual, or know humanity in general as anything other than a loud messy mass. A clutter of shapeless and shattered fragments of frozen souls, thrown together in a blender. That's what a city is. And even if by some freak occurrence one could find peace and poignancy, for a moment or two, in a city, the experience would seem like a movie, not like reality, because movies have overwritten your reality anyway. If you want a true perspective on The City, it'd be better and healthier to pay attention to what Henry Miller calmly wrote a hundred years ago, from a distance, than to try examining things from within the tornado that's been raging ever since then and has only picked up ferocity.

I have noticed a mania amongst people who live in The City. What is this and why is this? The answer ties in with the conceit of The City as inherently important, a benchmark and cultural mecca. This inflated opinion addresses quite well and sublimates a nagging concern of all human beings who live within the technological system: namely, natural ties and direct life-fulfilling roles have been so broken and extenuated, that individuals often feel insignificant no matter what they do, feel lonely even when in contact with others. As has been well known for over a century now, humans within the Modern context often feel compelled to question what the point of existence is and, moreover, doubt whether or not life even has any meaning. These absolutely harrowing lines of thought have become clichés, but that makes them no less troubling, these open chasms within people's hearts, which rarely if ever existed before the modernist era. Never before was there the capacity to become so defamiliarized and alienated from everyday surroundings. We have seen that blunt consumption, in and of itself, is not a good enough strategy to mitigate or make us forget these troubling questions: We can never really fill the voids inside us with objects or with commodified ideologies, simply because these voids are endlessly deep, and also because we sometimes run out of purchasing power, or else temporarily become too psychologically exhausted to take another new interest in another new trend. Living in The City, then, is a way to mute most of these painful existential questions most of the time. Much of the technological society can be seen as an elaborate series of gimmicks; whenever the current gimmicks start to wear thin, new ones must be invented. The City is the locus of all this; it produces so much oncoming input that the dazed inhabitant oftentimes believes he might well never get bored again — and that is the great fear, which we live with all the time, and which we came to The City to avoid: boredom, the absence of someone else's thoughts in your head, the point at which you might have to start thinking for yourself a little more. It is even more thrilling to the inhabitant because, as a Citizen himself, he actually feels like a privileged part of the very significant spectacle going on all around him. He is an audience member, but he is also in The Show, and that is something to take pride in, something to remind yourself of whenever the gimmicks wear thin and the underlying emptiness of it all starts to creep back into view. It sometimes 'cheers one up,' as Zamyatin's overstressed protagonist says, 'to feel oneself as part of an enormous, powerful unit'. The City is impressive. The City is itself important. It is extremely important to itself. Even if we do not understand its workings, we can easily tell ourselves that the chaos and confusion of The City is simply a beautiful order that lies above and beyond the human grasp. By becoming a part of The City, we become part of something big and important. That is the thinking. And to be perfectly honest, it is natural to try to bond with your environment. Tribal people didn't even have to try; they successfully did it. Psychologically, they were their homelands. To a notable degree, even nationalism as it emerged a few centuries ago entailed within it an authentic bond between human beings and their countries. When a man from Ireland talked about loving Ireland and identifying with Ireland, he meant it and it was true. But . . . loving and identifying with a modern city? That is sick. It's like the cases of newborn lab monkeys, born in captivity, who try to bond with a wire sculpture that has a feeding bottle stuck onto it, because this metal structure is supposed to be their 'mother'. Scientists have done experiments in which they put more and more barbed wire onto the edifice, but still the little animals will cling to it for dear life. It is the same with us in modern civilization, especially in cities.

It amuses me whenever citydwellers express particular attachment to their city, when all cities are fairly standardized and interchangeable. Particularities regarding the experience of living in one city vs. another become a little more standardized, a little more interchangeable, with every passing day. In the modern era, favoring one's own city over all others seems like a type of misplaced tribal attachment, which ironically crops up in people whose lives, personalities, and behaviors have become so inauthentic — compared to those of any real tribesmen — that these modern 'tribal' attachments seem pathetic. It is all the narcissism of minor differences, valuing one's city over any others. The whole point of modern life, especially in cities, is to submit humanity en masse into the gears of technology, standardization, commodification, etc., and yet any given lot of citydwellers will value the particular meatgrinder(s) they've been through over any other gigantic meatgrinders — not realizing that the same engineering has built all these meatgrinders, and that the citydwellers processed by these meatgrinders all resemble each other quite closely and become more alike all the time.

The most obnoxious and dismaying aspect of the narcissism of minor differences between cities lies in professional sports fanaticism. Few if any of the athletes lived in these particular cities before they signed their contracts. Few if any of them, with their exorbitant wealth, experience anything close to the normal lives of the average sports fans of the given city. And few if any of them will remain with this city's team for the entirety of their playing career: when the contract is up, they are very likely to go to another team in another city, whose sports fans will instantly embrace them and begin to identify the new player with their city and with themselves. The players are clearly interchangeable, to a large degree, as are the teams themselves, and yet the illusion of specificity of place persists — as if modern cities were actually authentic communities, and as if they were each terribly unique communities. And the players — to say nothing of the beloved teams' owners — are clearly and primarily driven by money . . . and yet the fans associate the players and teams with some sort of allegedly humanistic, magnanimous spirit unique to their particular cities. They don't realize that if they lived elsewhere they'd feel the same way about that city and that team. This unacknowledged interchangeability is funny, troubling, and speaks to the endemic inauthenticity involved.

Besides professional sports, the only thing really tying each clump of citydwellers together is terrorism. Terrorism. Terror! First there is the genuine fear of external threats. Then, the dubious feeling of togetherness and community that can seem to occur between any and all people from the same city, though some of them were miles away from each other at the time, on opposite sides of the disaster, and almost all of them were in fact totally safe and unaffected. If the media didn't tell them something big had gone on, they'd scarcely know. But none of them will ever forget what they went through. Bystanders, miles apart. Eyewitnesses, after watching the local news. They look at each other (and at themselves) as if they were something like World War II veterans who saved civilization. But, actually, for people living in a Western city, being within ten miles of something real actually happening is the closest they'll ever come to knowing what real human life and risk actually feels like. Our ancestors experienced this all the time, and they could experience togetherness in a positive way not associated with mass death or arbitrary games.

I have said that cities are interchangeable, but even I can admit that there is something special about The City, your City. It is currently governed by the most intrusive, petty-tyrant media-empire control-freak billionaire in the history of American mayors. This is the man who rules over you, and yet you don't seem to want to leave. What does this say about you? The last I knew, you still smoked cigarettes. Have you given them up yet? If so, did you quit for your own sake, or because your mayor ordered you to do so under threat of public shaming? And do you now already look down on other smokers, though you were like them yesterday, because as of today they have still not yet exterminated quite as much resistance to totalitarianism within their heads as you have exterminated within yours? (There is always this incentive for going along with the next step of the domestication process; you can always look back at the humans who are not quite as well trained as you are and scoff at them for being so free and resistant to ninnying propaganda.) You can't live in a city, much less The City, and not passively go along with scientific dictatorship, blanket anti-humanism, and hatred of anything and everything natural[]. To suggest otherwise would be like saying there are some ants in an anthill, who serve their queen and dig the tunnels, but who nonetheless might not believe in worshipping a monarchy or living underground.

Regarding your major, however: good news is on the way. He has decided not to extend his term limit again, opening the way for someone else to play God over you. Amazingly, the leading candidate at the moment seems to be the same formerly disgraced politician whom Allison Fashion, your fellow Citydweller, publicly likes so much.

This is what happens when the grand and enlightened institution of democracy meets the self-important and irreproachable institutions of 'the good city' and modern technology. These are the sorts of lives, rulers, and thought-processes that become prevalent. It is not going in a positive direction. It is not psychologically or materially sustainable. It may be a downer, but don't you think the root problems of urban existence should be addressed since they effect so much and so many? Why is the very basis of this kind of life, or anything remotely similar to it — by which I mean everything that now passes for 'rural' — ever addressed? Virtually all of our individual and collective dysfunctions can be traced back to the Modern foundations of artificial environments, and yet instead of questioning them we'd rather take drugs, watch screens, and blame each other.

It's all so taxing and our ancestors wouldn't've put up with it, but, nonetheless, people today stay there, even though they complain about it. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do? . . . Why do you think they don't leave?

It reminds me of a conundrum that comes up in Batman comic books sometimes. Who on earth would want to live in Gotham City if it's so crime-infested? Who in their right mind wouldn't move away once they realized that just by being there they're putting themselves at great risk on a daily basis? How can sane people want to stay there in a city like that? Well, here's the secret: The sane people have already left. Everyone in the city is insane; they would have to be, to stay. In terms of Gotham, I would actually go as far as to suggest that the only sane people there are Batman and the seemingly psychotic villains he faces. They're the only ones really flourishing, acting out their dreams, and getting a lot out of the environment there. Of course, by any normal standard they would be seen as crazy — I mean the criminals and Batman as well — but since the society itself is crazy . . . and since they are able to manipulate the urban parameters in ways that allow their individual insanities to actually reach wish-fulfillment . . . I don't think these costumed lunatics can be criticized so easily. Someone like the Joker or the Riddler or Catwoman or Batman — they would have a real good reason to love being in an insane monstrous playground like The City. So, if you're not acting like a maniac every night and continually breaking other people's laws (and other people's bones) to reach personal catharsis, what's your excuse for staying there?

And in all of these fictions, in all of these superhero dramas and overblown crime stories, why does The City always need saving? Why is that the overriding motif? Because it's unsustainable, the whole operation. Secretly we all know this, and we embrace stories that invent some impossible hero who's going to keep this top-heavy edifice, with its eroding foundation, standing upright, so we can keep living in it, going about our habitual, artificial existence in just the same way as we always have. The 'heroes' are those who rescue us from having to face our humanity and thereby acknowledge the abuse it's taking for the sake of convenience.

17. Last Words on Literature: By now I should have already laid some of this out and put it to rest. After spending the best years of my life trying to figure out just what literature does, what it means, what it could do, and what it could possibly mean anymore in this contemporary world, the inescapable conclusion is as follows:

After World War II, literature doesn't matter anymore.

Great literature is about summing up cultural understanding and inspiring future generations. But after World War II we have a globalizing culture that is far too complicated for anyone to ever understand well enough to create great literature ever again. There is a great study on Franz Kafka subtitled Toward a Minor Literature — but every great literature is the fulfillment of a global minority, with even something like Shakespeare representing the at-the-time-tiny struggle of English linguistic domination. Once we all become honorary 'citizens of the world,' however, great literature is no longer possible, because there is nothing for any one's personal, real culture to struggle for anymore on the literary plane. On the most important human levels, the system has homogenized us; while paying lipservice to multiculturalism, it makes our particularities irrelevant. It is the system that matters now, and we matter only in the ways that we can fit into various standardizations. Differences as profound qualities disappear. Compounded with all of this — and most important of all — is the technological progress which began by allowing truly wonderful cultural and intercultural transmissions, quick and almost magical communications between people in far-flung places — and as we should all know by now, the messages proliferated so much, and their content devolved so much, that we soon began drowning in babble. A million different voices speaking all at once, saying nothing; and nothing they say can possibly stake out any substance that is lasting, reliable, or very much worthwhile. Under these parameters, why even bother trying to write a novel or an epic poem? Such attempts are so much vanity, so much futility. Things are changing too fast for literature to ever get a foothold now. Very few things written in recent years are worth reading twice and nothing's worth reading three times. Nothing endures for any noticeable length of time, sadly. Find something you like; blink and it turns to akrasia. (I can't believe you still write occasionally and put it out online. At least I have the decency to keep my writing to myself.)

Compare the thoughts above with what Claude Lévi-Strauss noted regarding myth and meaning, the fundamental building blocks of human culture and literature:

'[D]ifferences are extremely fecund. [. . .] What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication — that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, their superiority over the others; it is only under conditions of under-communication that it can produce anything. We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from every culture, but of losing all originality.'

Lévi-Strauss noted this years before you and I were even born. Before the internet, before MTV, he knew that things were already so far gone that it was impossible for authentic culture and customs to function anymore. This incapacity for genuinely human matters was due, almost wholly, to the easy, technologically-assisted transmission of stupid babble, which renders the thoughtful documentation of meaningful language (i.e., literature) obsolete, passé, and unwieldy. The spirit of literature is neither silly nor transient enough for our worldly, borged-out, brain-drain mind-meld.

The system is so big, and is increasing in magnitude so fast, that no one can pull back far enough to get a good enough perspective on it — not even for a second — to describe any of it well enough in words. World War II unleashed an unstoppable technological drive that quickly overwhelmed all human cultural sensibilities; ever since then an avalanche of new artificiality always crashes down upon the writer. It is no accident that literature, the artful wordizing of culture, occupies the highest echelon of what are called the humanities; but the less humanity a society has, the more the art of literature suffers.

It should be noted that literature itself was once a transparent art(ificiality): if you could understand the words, either by reading them or hearing them, then you knew what the message was, and there was no other way to experience a work of literature other than understanding the work's code, which was 'open-source'. The audience of music usually has no idea what the notes are or how to play the instruments; the audience of film usually has no idea how the filming, editing, and CGI effects were actually done; and even the audience of a painting usually only perceives impressions here and there of what the painter put onto (and in a sense into) the canvas. We cannot examine the remnants of every single brushstroke. But the audience of literature must pay attention to every word, which, if it is read, will be sensible. There is a unique openness and honestly here, with author and audience experiencing the same signals. Jerry Mander writes that 'It is _only_ with conscious effort and direct participation at one's own speed that words gain any meaning to a reader. Images require nothing of the sort.' The spirit of literature is the least artificial — the least artificial in a duplicitous sense — of all arts.

Between the Wars many very intelligent and important writers rose to the challenge of modernity by combating an increasingly complicated world with increasingly complicated literature. This was a valiant attempt; I would not dismiss any modernist literature whatsoever; it is all interesting and worthwhile.

After the Second War, however, the battle was lost. Literature is just another commodity now. It is unique only in its self-importance. To suggest otherwise is to tilt at windmills. With escalating electronic media, the entire zeitgeist of the world can change on a second-by-second basis — So what hope is there for any sequence of words to matter — to really matter, as literature once did? You can get a Beckett or a Borges, weirding out the contemporary reader in several amusing ways, while attempting to pay oblique homage to a European tradition they know has collapsed. Or you can get a Márquez or a Morrison or an Achebe, doing a lot of creative and humanistic stuff, representing their own section of world culture, as they knew it before Western-style modernity and pop culture completely rampaged over everything. All of these writers are great, but none of their books influence life one-thousandth as much as, say, any trashy pop song or bad Hollywood movie does. Thomas Pynchon tried to summarize the meaning of the twentieth century, reinvoking something so antiquated and nostalgic as the 'grand narrative' concept, as if that hadn't proven itself inoperable fifty years previous . . . but he ended up admitting defeat and playing a role on The Simpsons. A very sad loss.

Every other American novelist of the last half century totally sucks. They want to be rock stars. They're lost in the machine, the matrix, the funhouse asylum. Every one of them — by the time they turned eight years old or whatever, they'd already digested enough media to make them permanently damaged, corrupted, skewed, useless and confused. (I'm confused, too. But I know I'm confused, know the extent of the confusion, and I don't set myself up as a hip authority or pop-god! I don't write any of these manifestos disguised as coming of age novels!) Who can take anything these smartass doofuses say seriously, trapped as they are in an unending quagmire of snottiness and supposed irony? Their rambling writing is totally unorganized, or over-organized. (If I am snotty, it is deliberately so, to snap you out of it and wake you up. I do not pretend to be kind and magnanimous the way everyone else does.) Contemporary literature — especially when it is really trying to be literature — apparently results in little more than the suicides of its creators and the cultural irrelevance of its audience. (I am so very, very different!) On both sides of the page, it is all pacification and coping-strategy. Really, besides the profit motivation, it is nothing more than that!

My advice to anyone would be Don't read any fiction, literature, or poetry written after World War II. It is literally impossible for the practitioners of these disciplines to say anything trustworthy or of lasting value. They are only showing off their own vanity and confusion.

If an interest in literature persists — and it has — that only shows how desperate people are to find their own humanities again and to reconnect with something real via this least artificial of arts. As long as we're still technically human, we will want to find external proofs of meaning in our lives, and finding a great novel or poem seems to fit the bill. Unfortunately, because successive generations have been born into an increasingly artificial and anti-human society, it takes less and less real humanity to impress them — overwhelm them really — and they can become far too enthralled with even the smallest degree of meaning: a seemingly profound statement, or a nice heartwarming scene in a novel, something easily perceptible which we can celebrate and then instantly forget in the next the moment — anything like that will do. For instance: 'The lack of content in all of the arts is a deep testament to just how empty our lives have become.' There; just saying something like that. Most modern writing is just such complete shit, one way or the other: either too pointlessly pretentious or too superficial and flimsy. It is absolutely astonishing how bad it all is. None of it is worth reading. And yet the whole literary enterprise has to be bolstered up with more and more awards, more and more five-star reviews — and all the while, any observer with the capacity to compare anything being done now with any work of the past, will notice that obviously humanity is getting shallower and shallower, more and more disposable. We call something one of the best books we've ever read, add this year at least, and then forget about it forever or until nostalgia calls, at which point we pretend that we have been living with and treasuring the book every day of our lives all along.

Literature demands clarity. Great literature was still possible when there was clarity at least on the part of the author if not the readers, which was the case during High Modernism; the readers may have had to struggle hard to find the thread of worthwhile understanding, but that would still be acceptable — that was in fact the case with much high modernist literature. But after World War II? With the development of so much cultural confusion that no writer could ever view the situation clearly, in the first place, before trying to convey artful meaning to the audience? Great literature becomes impossible then.

Gone is the nonchalant richness of language, which came so easily to writers — even mediocre writers — of the past. But why would there be a need for linguistic descriptions any longer? For generations now film and video have captured physical reality perfectly, without any thought, care, or attention to detail necessary. Instead of verbally describing, we can just point the camera. And once black-and-white gave way to color television, all defamiliarization vanished: human psychology interprets these images as reality. What can descriptive prose offer to compete with that? Looking back on it, Dickens' description of the fog in Bleak House, for example, certainly holds up; the atmospherics are astonishing to me, but they retain their power because I know that their author wrote them so long ago. (And I have never read much George Eliot — an oversight — but am told that her pastorals are similarly impressive.) In the modern age — after movies have more or less conquered novels, after pop songs have more or less conquered poetry, after moving images have more or less conquered static words — it seems silly and quaint when an author does not adjust his prose accordingly. I find much of Don DeLillo's descriptive prose, and even some of Pynchon's, particularly pointless. However elaborately constructed, it is all a complete fucking waste, a waste of time, effort, and paper. Novels aren't novel anymore, and in a society obsessed with the new, literature is fatally flawed. It survives as a living dead thing just as humanity survives as a living dead thing.

Inner lives and social dynamics would seem to remain within literature's purview, but here again we must be careful. Authors' senses have dulled here as well, and all too easily do we project the greater limits of our own psychological understanding onto characters and writers who do not warrant any sort of depth reading. For example, last year I read American Psycho. Despite some of its overly violent indulgences, I thought the novel a fun and engaging read, particularly due to the curious blankness of its characters: Their blandness, incompleteness, and interchangeability seemed to say something about the world, society, and City in which they lived. Then I read a few of this Ellis's other novels and discovered, with dismay, that the author simply cannot write distinct, different, coherent characters in the first place, period. Thus, American Psycho does not really say anything indicting about a certain time, place, and type of person; rather, the novel's own pretense, its shortcomings, its ultimately empty shock-value, and its success amongst those who believe it to be far deeper, more considered, and calculating than it actually is — these are all in and of themselves indictments of the author and his company. The author invites you to displace his own shortcomings and anti-humanism onto 1980s Wall Street culture. It all works better the less you think about it. And that is something you should never be able to say about something that calls itself literature.

Besides — Prose? What are these words? That's what they'll say when they pick up an old novel in the future. What is the point here? Words that seem to come from the perspective of someone or no one who never, ever existed? Fiction? A text that just sort of appears and tells you what isn't really going on? Writing a thing like that — unless one makes a lot of money from it — is like something only a crazy person would do. Creative writing will be seen as a form of mental illness, the same way Old Testament prophets are now interpreted as having been definitely schizophrenic.

All that being said, in the past year I have read lot of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami and would recommend their earlier stuff up to a point. I also like a play or two of Alan Bennett's. In the end, I would actually still recommend American Psycho. I would not recommend any of my own writing.

Lastly, it is worth acknowledging that some very great prose fiction is still being written. News articles, journal articles, academic theses, many books called non-fiction, sociology and especially political science: that is where one can find the greatest tracts of alternate reality being written today.

18. Dark Side of McLuhan: As cities cannot be real communities, still less can the world become a village. A 'global village' held together by technology is a total misunderstanding of what real community is: Community is by definition local; community is real and human, not technological and artificial. Global concerns and technological distraction make any sort of authentic village impossible. Artificiality, globally conscious media augmentations, world news reporters and advisors, infinitely more treaties between nations, more Disney cartoons set in wondrous foreign lands — for all their charms and goodwill, these things cannot strengthen any human community in any real way. Quite the opposite, in fact. To suggest otherwise would be like saying that the European colonizers — and what they brought with them — made the Native Americans more Native American. I am not saying that it is wrong to become more globally aware — certainly not — but doing so will absolutely not help human communities. Stop pretending that it will.

Try to understand that what I am explaining here demands no value judgment. Whether or not you like technology and/or globalism . . . whether or not you'd ever care for a more parochial life . . . whether or not you enjoy socializing in communities . . . The point is that a 'global village' is a contradiction in terms — an impossibility, especially when we consider how the bonds of technology needed to bring this 'global village' about are inherently anti-human. 'Global Indian reservation', maybe, full of conquered peoples and their unjust malaise. But not a happy techno global village. You can shake hands across the waters and try to quell the still-smoldering embers of nineteenth-century imperialism — but the non-human system is still exploiting everyone and everything.

Marshall McLuhan, however, posited that electric media would eventuate a return to oralistic tradition, in which we humans could really be something like our natural selves again. Writing and typing had thwarted oral tradition and locked culture into a fixed paradigm in which linearity, exclusivity, elitism, and top-down control shepherded and stifled human thought and communication. But new communication technologies would change all this, refute the stuffy old men and their dictionaries and rule books, free our senses and heighten our consciousness, allow us to express ourselves just as freely, naturally, and usefully as the shamans, bards, and oracles of old. That is what he said would happen.

But, once again, McLuhan got it completely wrong. 'The new electric media' (to which he actually attributes a 'profound organic character' — WTF!) may differ from the written word in that they possess less linearity, staidness, and reliability, but that does not mean they bring with them the advantages of any sort of genuine oral culture. Rather, new media directs oral communications into the same sort of nets that previously could only catch the written word. Because everyone's actions and words (written, spoken, or typed into the ether) can now be recorded and preserved, all expressions become just as fixed, potentially oppressive, and cathected as writing alone used to be, but with none of the cultural reliability that the encyclopedic texts and grand narratives used to provide. Writing is the enemy of the oral. Electronic media are the enemies of writing. But that does not mean that electronic media must then facilitate the reemergence of authentic oral culture or tradition. On the contrary, electronic media push the possibility of true, free-form orality even further away from us.

I should note that, as is typical of most all post-World War II academics who attain notoriety, McLuhan contradicts himself often and speaks in a mixture of soundbytes and riddles. (I have purposely avoided that kind of playfulness in my writing, because this stuff is serious business.) That electric media will provide a pathway to a new orality is indeed his core belief, but at times — offering a paradox in order to beguile readers — he states that this contemporary situation is actually 'speechlessness': a sort of celestial muteness, as if we were all communicating in perfect wordless telepathy. It's not that way at all. Rather it's a loud cacophony of everyone and every thing speaking at once. It is noise, not silence. Everyone has a right — almost a requirement — to speak all the time now. All this situation shares with 'speechlessness' is the sense that nothing of importance is being said, which brings us to . . .

The medium is the message, McLuhan's most famous statement. It is a true statement, but it has a dark side. We know that the form of communication overrules and in some sense dictates content; we agree upon this; the primary element or active ingredient of communication is always the tenor of the medium through which the communication is being conducted. (To cite a famous example: All television shows are primarily educational — but what they all teach us is how to love television.) The upshot of all this is the realization that whatever messages any human might seek to communicate, they must play handmaiden to the communication medium itself. In other words, nothing we say via media can override the drive of the technological system itself, which harnesses all interlocking media. Nothing said within the system can challenge the system, precisely because of the medium-is-the-message law. However carefully human beings choose their words, fuss over their phrasing, and mold their content — all human-derived content is secondary (and a very distant second, at that) to the technological form. Our thoughts and messages simply cannot amount to much of anything compared to the media mindsets in which we frame and receive them. When all humans had were speech and writing, content mattered; content doesn't matter anymore.

And this is why I have gone the retro route, printed this letter out and sent you a physical copy, to try and thwart — hopelessly, as best I can — the media mindset of you just reading this on a computer screen. (If you read all this in that newfangled fashion, I'm sure you couldn't get anything out of it and I would be stupid for thinking that you could. Unlike you, I don't think 'ebooks' are worthwhile; the idea makes me sick.)

These are but a few of the many errors of Marshall McLuhan. If I wanted to try and correct all of them, it would take forever. This supposed guru, from his fantasy world of twisted theory, once issued the proclamation that television should be understood as a 'tactile' medium. He said television stimulates the sense of touch and causes human beings to become more active. Honestly, can you think of a more incorrect or off-base value judgment than that? One really must be a total sucker for anything written in an academic textbook to accept such ideas. McLuhan purports that the 'television light playing against the human skin is itself stimulating'. One must really be unaccustomed to any real activity to consider such a thing; literally any other bodily sensation — raising one's arm a fraction of an inch, feeling a single raindrop strike one's head, sensing that a fly has landed on one's knee — would offer more physical 'stimulation' than the light of a television set landing upon one's skin — not even upon the eye but upon the skin, he says! This is the exemplar of the intellectual who is really optimistic about modern media and digital media! Marshall McLuhanatic! What do you say to someone who misjudged things so completely that you can't even believe anyone ever honestly thought this way?

He once contended the following, which is perhaps the single stupidest statement I have ever read: 'Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you.' Television as thrilling and engaging? TV as a way to activate the human being on deep levels? I had thought that anyone who understood anything would realize that television breeds passivity. You actually need to go out of your way to get that one wrong. And obviously we have all indeed seen TVs function very much in the background of people's homes, restaurants, airports, bars. McLuhan believed otherwise, starstruck as he was by all this wonderful new technology.

He was completely wrong. Yet this is who media students still worship as a god, as if he had a clue about anything. He brainwashed himself by all the media he looked at all day long, then he wrote goofy and paradoxical things about how he was feeling about the experience. He may as well have been a double-agent, hired by television and radio companies to infiltrate academia, mislead smart people who should know better, and figure out how to make them support the mass programming and take dumbed-down entertainment seriously. Universities should have been trying to prevent this; instead they followed McLuhan's lead and did everything they could to make mind-numbing entertainment sound interesting and intelligent. Bromides from the brighter side of brainwashing.

19 i. Rousseau: There Is No Social Contract: I remember when I first began to notice a significant difference between the two of us in terms of outlook and temperament. It was when you were telling me about a class on 'political literature' you had taken. You said you enjoyed Rousseau's Social Contract and that your professor told you that Macchiavelli's The Prince, far from being a real glimpse into the potential malevolence of rulers, was actually 'a satire'. In describing the workings of tyranny, Machiavelli was evidently joking and being absurd. While I did and do disagree very sharply with this reading, it is not my main complaint. (But while we're on this point, let me simply explain that Macchiavelli's intent, whatever it was, does not matter: what matters is how his book was received and whether or not it informed and aided either the rulers or the people whom they rule over.)

Regarding the social contract, an idea which I have good reason to believe inspired you to become interested in politics and public service — I find it nefarious and deceitful. The fact of the matter is: There is no 'social contract'. It doesn't exist. It was a grand sort of lowdown emotional blackmail, a contrivance to put a yoke around humans and enslave them to each other, to the state, and to the burgeoning exploitative civilization of Rousseau's time. What is more, those who want a yoke placed around them are eager to believe in this nonsensical and absurd fiction; sadly, no one has to try very hard to convince them.

The social contract presupposes (quite correctly) a sort of masochism on the part of the citizenry, and as such it reminds me of the contract found in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, the novel which gave us the term masochism. Severin, the worshipful protagonist, tells of how his mistress, the abusive Wanda, 'has drawn up a contract according to which I give my word of honor and agree under oath to be her slave. With her arm around my neck she reads this unprecedented, incredible document to me. The end of each sentence she punctuates with a kiss. "But all of the obligation in the contract are on my side," I said, teasing her.' Considering in the case of Severin, one might say that the signatories of the social contract have a misdirected interest and drive: they think that stripping themselves of personal sovereignty, and giving their lives over to a master or mistress, will somehow serve the greater good. To put this in terms of popular dictatorships, or democratically supported totalitarian sates, we might note that the crueler the master or mistress, the more enraptured the supplicant — and the more likely the supplicant will find his ruler worthy of his affection and devotion.

You may think this overstates things, but we must never forget the very 'Machiavellian' drive behind Rousseau's treatise. He begins The Social Contract by saying 'Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.' But, contrary to expectations and legend, Rousseau does not want to free humanity but rather justify our oppression. Two sentences later, he asks, 'What can make it [social slavery] legitimate? I believe I can answer this question.' That is what the social contract is, an attempt at explaining and championing the aforementioned 'chains', making otherwise autonomous humans feel good about their denigration into a system.

The social contact, by Rousseau's own admission, is a theoretical fiction. No one agrees to it consciously any more than any of us asks to be born into the world. And yet someone's birth is self-evident, whereas the social contract disappears whenever we seek it out. And I think this consideration should be remembered here and now — in the overgrown, anti-human technological society — more than ever. Each of us can look around at this madness and say, 'I never signed up for this.' It is our responsibility to live, even though we never asked to be born; but we are under no natural obligation to support and perpetuate an unnatural society that demands ever more concessions from our humanity. Thus, it pains me to say, the only reason someone would remain in bondage would be because he or she secretly wanted to stay in that position. Late in Venus in Furs, Wanda reminds Severin that he has 'not yet actually signed the contract. You are still free, and can leave me any moment.' So Severin never actually signed up, but nonetheless has been considering himself indentured! He finds it hard to resist his pleasurable slavery, but eventually he does bring himself to leave his chains behind. 'The moral of the tale,' he tells us, 'is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.' But not everyone can attain this hard-won level of understanding, especially not in environments where the human being is so psychologically abused, by turns mollycoddled and debased.

In positing the social contract, Rousseau condones a form of involuntary slavery. This was essentially a cowardly move on his part, and he was driven to make it for his own psychological reasons. He was indeed able to sense that the Enlightenment society of his day was obviously oppressing people's basic nature to an extent that could be considered a form of slavery, and was doing so in ways that the general population scarcely comprehended — so rather than take a real stand, Rousseau chickened out and said that slavery is fine just so long as it is involuntary. He could never accept the notion of 'voluntary slavery' because, as he correctly surmised, giving away one's freedom would render oneself 'something less than human'. That dismaying truth was too much for him to bear. In the mid-twentieth century we find Aldous Huxley describing just this state, where 'people love their servitude, and . . . will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it'. The social contract is a necessary starting point to bring about any such anti-human totalitarianism.

But isn't friendship itself a sort of social contract? And isn't neighborliness also a sort of social contract? Yes. Of course. In small, limited settings there should usually be good reason to expect goodwill from those around you, and for others to expect goodwill from you. But no 'social contract' can function successfully when applied over large groups of people. Democracy itself — or everything good about it — falls apart once the constituencies become larger than neighborhoods in which most people know or know of each other in a general way. It is simply wrong to expect so much goodwill from total strangers, and it is insulting to be told to make so many concessions of one's own freedom 'for the general good' — hypothetically — of an expanding political base that is, inevitably, falling apart and serving everyone poorly largely because of this overexpansion. Even Rousseau's contemporaries told him that expecting a 'social contract' to exist over large groups of strangers was wrong and presumptuous. In the centuries since then, technology, modern infrastructure and development, have coerced such political expansions to an absurd degree, with modern media convincing people that they know enough to vote on matters of which they possess no real, pragmatic understanding. All of this thanks to a supposed 'contract' . . . which no one ever signed, but which is being enforced anyway! Another one of your lawyer tricks, it seems. Another 'legal fiction'[].

I know something about unsigned contacts. I gave my soul away for nothing; a horrible deal. But in general our society has done something even worse: it has sold its soul in order to get hurt more.[] All we would need to do is say, 'Look, we never really signed anything. We were coerced. Actually, our ancestors were. We were simply born into this, a highly artificial situation that's doing us active harm. . . . And the contract doesn't even exist, so how can we have signed it? Look, we're not going to obey whatever it is you've got written down as law.'

19 ii. Rousseau: 'Ruesow', 'Ruse', 'Rose', etc. Parallels: Anagrams and homophones can help you get fun out of life. So can apophenia, as long it doesn't metastasize into something serious.

Of course I always recognized and noted with amusement how much Rousseau's surname sounded like my own, and of course I always recognized and noted with some annoyance how much Sly Society's first name sounded like my own. But I never realized until just now how 'Rousseau' also sounds even more like the surname of the real-life Sly Society. It gave me quite a chuckle, and instantly several other Rousseau connections began to seem more important to me; the man and the name seems like a Rosetta Stone of all of this.

From the beginning I took Rousseau's Confessions as a model for my early roman à clef. Only Rousseau wrote his self-indulgent crap at the end of his career, whereas I — like so many other crypto-narcissists of today — wrote all about myself early on, then had to live down the guilt and shame of putting out such exhibitionistic literature. (Thankfully, only about seven people ever got copies.) And it should be noted that confessions imply crime and guilt.

Of course, Sly Society also shares this exhibitionistic spirit, but his personality overlaps more with Rousseau's interest in 'the fashionable world', Rousseau's sexual frankness, and — appropriately enough — Rousseau as a popular (famous and infamous) figure in society. Sly Society was of course the most popular and proudly scandalous person in our school — in our entire county, in fact.

As noted in the previous section, there's also a link between Rousseau and you because you were inspired by his political writing, particularly The Social Contract. And maybe, dear reader, you have other parallels with Rousseau that I don't know about? Can you think of any, to make this realer to you?

Rousseau reminds me of Dana as well. Both of them went from championing the 'noble savage' to doing an about-face, as it were, and recommending various sorts of societal 'chains' (in Dana's estimation, nothing short of total fascism). Despite his notion that societies began by means of unwritten and accepted 'contracts', Rousseau at first argued that any such 'contract' would always be fraudulent and should have no binding effect on anyone. Then he argued that social contracts should be expanded, insisted upon, and enforced, even though that would effectively kill any residual 'noble savagery' within us. Similarly, Dana at first argued that we must return to a more natural livelihood and setting so as to escape an increasingly automated technological dictatorship. Then she decided that not only was it possible for human politics to overcome the impetus of technology — which both of us had considered totally impossible up to that point — but that a petty human dictatorship would somehow be preferable to any other living situation, including any sort of more natural, less artificial social atmosphere.

And of course, 'Rousseau' also contains 'Rose', the nickname of your then-girlfriend who played into the incident with Sly, as well as the ever-evocative word 'ruse', which makes everything seem like a tricky mystery with hidden secrets.

I should say more about Rosaline ('Rose a-lyin'' as you once called her). You do realize what happened, don't you? You do know that she tried to convince me that you raped her. Funny how she told this to me, your best friend, but not to anyone else. I thought at the time, soon after the Sly affair, that she was trying to drive a wedge between us, as a way to ostracize you. And possibly she was trying to do that — but couldn't her allegation also have been true? Or: Perhaps you didn't rape her outright — perhaps not in some strict, irrefutable, legally culpable definition, which you would know more about than I would — but I can easily imagine that you were forceful and coercive with her. Probably you got very frustrated with her and very frustrated with yourself, due to your own sexual issues. Probably you wanted to set yourself straight through Rose, and when that didn't happen, you reacted very angrily and spitefully.

Despite this, I have no doubt that she meant a great deal to you. After all, back in those days, before the millennium, her nickname was the password to your first email account. Yes, way back when passwords were allowed to be only four characters long. Do you remember how I was your 'internet butler'? How you — for some ungodly reason that I still cannot fathom — allowed and even invited me to go into your email account, look around, and then update you in person about any new messages that you had? You see, this sort of mentality . . . I can't understand it, and I'm happy to go along with it, in my perverse way, but, still, Alex, really . . . This sort of weakness — It's why you don't care so much about your government spying on you, either. You think it's your friend to the end.

20. Fuck: The Fetishism of Commodities: I relate much of what I've said here to an evolution of Marx's 'commodity fetishism' concept. Marx saw 19th-century capitalism transforming the physical nature of raw goods into abstract economic values and drivers. As the technological system developed, however, everything and everyone (not just goods, not just work and workers) became abstracted, not just in terms of economic value, but in terms of power, desire, and interest. This occurred as economics and materialism in general — far from constituting the 'scientific' drivers of history, as Marx claimed — became mere factors within the interplay of autonomous techniques.

A hundred and fifty years ago, 'commodities' meant things like wheat and steel. Nowadays, thanks to electronic media, pretty much everything is a commodity. Ideologies are commodities; memes are commodities; songs, beliefs, friends, lifestyles, attitudes — all have been commodified to an extent that makes Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' seem pathetic and quaint. Once a near-infinite number of reflective screens and media mirrors came into play, the human psyche began to perceive everything as having the function of commodity.

And the word fetish — which didn't have a sexual connotation in Marx's day, but does now — comes from the Latin for 'to make'. A fetish is a made thing (actually a pre-made thing) that fascinates people precisely because of its artificiality, because it holds hidden meaning and composition that the admirer can't understand or break down. It's 'the impenetrable mystery', again and again and again — one 'impenetrable mystery' or another, in objects as well as ideas — that always holds us spellbound.

All of this relates to the 'magic' of technology as well. By our inescapable nature, humans are always bewitched by whatever things we do not understand the workings of, no matter how closely we look at them, no matter how hard we press our faces against the screen. We see the nice surface but do not understand the workings behind it, and this makes us fall for the object of desire precisely because we don't know how it got there or how it functions. There are exceptions to this, of course — many engineers and scientists take an interest in figuring things out, and maintain that interest even after they know how something works — but in general most people always remain far too fascinated by provocative elements and spectacles in their environment that they understand very little about. There is reason to believe that this obsession will prove to be humanity's fatal flaw, now that we have unlocked a constantly evolving non-human culture of cool artificiality, distracting gadgetry, and trendy, exponentially growing bureaucracy — personally I call it 'bureaucrazy' — all of which fascinates us more the less we understand it and the less we are able to maintain healthy humanity alongside it.

The inverse of the logic of all this is found in the Bible. God creates Adam's first wife, Lilith, from Adam's rib. Adam sees Lilith come to form from the inside out. He sees the bones, ligaments, etc., sees how they work together before the pleasing skin hides it all. But because he has seen the inside of Lilith, because he knows what's inside her — because he saw how the magic was done before the curtain was pulled in front of it — he does not find her attractive and does not want to mate with her. Lilith cannot become a lifelong fetish for Adam because he understands all too well how she functions. This is the exact opposite of our situation: we live with our technological society because it fascinates us in spite of the harm it does to us; it fascinates us because we don't have a good sense at all of how this development happened; and the more it develops, the further the technology rises above our heads, the more addicted to it we become. Hardly any of us would ever dream of asking God to take all of this away, the way Adam asked God to take away Lilith and give him something different.

Generally speaking, 99.9% of humanity does not know the first thing about how any of their increasingly complicated technological companions actually work. More than that, they don't care to know, and their lack of understanding only bonds them even closer to the technology. They hang on its every image and even want to 'mate' with artificial objects in a silly but alarmingly real way. For example, look into everything written on cybernetics from J.D. Bernal's 'The World, The Flesh, and The Devil' (1929) onwards, understanding that the term cybernetics was originally used to refer to the symbiotic point at which technology becomes necessary for a human being to not starve to death.[] In that sense, we are all cyborgs now, and have been for about four generations. Without this obsession and unhealthy kinship with technology that we don't understand, most people literally wouldn't know what to do with themselves or what to strive for in life. Increased 'progress', in terms of accumulating artificiality and furthering the concomitant human dependence upon artificial and opaque constructs, usually in the name of 'freedom': that is the force that drives people, and it usually drives them better when they don't even consciously realize, much less understand or scrutinize, anything about what they're so interested in or what they're actually doing to themselves and their world. In almost every case, the less people really understand things, the better the system works.

Usually when people don't know what to do with themselves these days, they fuck. This is the perfect word for our age; it functions as a fetishistic commodity in and of itself. No one — not even etymologists — know exactly where this word came from or how it derived, but we are addicted to using it. There is reason to believe that fuck, like fetish and fake and artificial, derived from the Latin facere, 'to make'; it is yet another (pre-)made thing. The best definition of fuck would be false-make, the concept which has proliferated all over our post-Modernist world: Before we encounter them, all things and people are already manufactured and made up of artificial elements that we don't understand; and almost everything proves false, because genuineness relies on a purity and self-honesty that no one is capable of rising toward or attaining anymore, because there's a flood of new information and crap crashing down on top of us all the time[], and it's too much to process and sort out; we're fucked. The curse 'fuck you' denigrates someone in terms of increased falseness; saying 'fuck you' to someone condemns them to slide even lower than they already are on the scale of authenticity. In terms of its sexual connotation, fuck appropriately suggests 'false-make' again, as most instances of fucking do not result in anything real being produced. Before artificiality took over, sex used to be for producing children, but nowadays, in the fucked world, we don't really think of sex as being 'for making babies'. We transition 'from maker to faker' yet again, indulging in narcissism and instant gratification — and we end up with more and more problems.

This is what I have to say about the new (well, not so new anymore) type of post-Marxist commodity fetishism, a concept which one can understand inside-out and which can become a good intellectual companion. Without the companionship of this concept I would not know what to do with myself. It has given me something to think about now that I do not have an actual companion anymore.

Unfortunately, just as the theories above might suggest, I have in fact become more interested in Dana after her fascist turn. I stopped understanding her, so she became like a fetish. An intellectual fetish only, but still a fetish I don't want to have. To get rid of fetishes, simply analyze them until their underlying meaning becomes clear to you. Write it out if you have to; that's what I've been doing.

21. The Technillogical Society as Serial Killer: Some would get a chuckle from learning that Einstein[] once wrote the following: 'Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal.' Some people think that Einstein simply had concerns about the nuclear bomb. No, it was more than that; it was more than a mere concern and it applied to the entirety of the systemic thrust, not just the overtly weaponized crescendo — because you can't have any of this artificial world without taking on all of it, including the very worst and the most dangerous bits. Einstein wrote the above words at the end of World War I, but the sentiment holds just as true during peacetime. And he was slightly wrong, in my estimation, at least when his insight is applied to the situation today: for technillogical society is not so much the weapon as it is the criminal. Or perhaps it is a weapon that has gained its own agency and self-governance and uses them to criminal ends. To put it best, let us say that technillogical society is like a person who must be considered a weapon in and of himself, for his very existence and obsessive pursuits threaten any and all human beings who come in contact or proximity to him.

Thus the technillogical society can be anthropomorphized as a gigantic, all-pervasive serial killer. Perhaps that is why serial killers fascinate us and hold our attention hostage, because they are microcosms of the nerve-racking system in which we live. Serial killers target, torture, and destroy individuals. The technillogical society targets, tortures, and destroys entire cultures, markets, peoples, and individuals. It is said that serial killers puzzle the experts: 'We don't really know why they do it, or what makes them get this taste for killing.' It seems to me that the serial killer, in his narcissism and ambition, comes to identify certain aspects of the system with himself, and so he becomes the system, or at least certain aspects of it — the more malicious aspects of which we do not often speak when in polite company — and he replicates them in his relatively small-scale way, within his own sphere of influence. To escape the wide-scale violence and inhumanity of the system, which is usually quite understated and somewhat hidden, at least for us in the West, the serial killer takes on and epitomizes the most sordid societal roles for himself, making himself the conductor of very real and perceptible atrocities. There is much creativity and significance in his reprehensible course of action. He performs a masterful metamorphosis by becoming the individual human representation of the massive anti-human system. He quite literally carves out a place of his own within that system, where he can find enjoyment in ways that boldly thwart human customs as well as the systemic laws that humans are made to follow. It is as if the serial killer tries to cut a deal with the system: 'You didn't ask me to do this, dear system, but I will perform your dirty work for you, and I will accomplish your anti-human tasks more quickly and ruthlessly than you usually can — if only you leave me alone and allow me to have my own little private world in which I can act out my gloriously insane fantasies. If I become like you, in all your cruelty, won't you let me be me?' Of all the famous serial killers, the current system is most like Jeffery Dahmer, with Dennis Nilsen coming in a very close second.

Both the serial killer and the technillogical society feel the need to keep obsessive tabs on people; to catalogue, collect, and control people; to trap them and not let them escape. The serial killer will not let you leave his house; the technillogical society will not let you get 'off the grid'. The serial killer immobilizes people and hoards their bodies; the technillogical society coerces people to cram into cities and — as of late, in America especially — has made travel difficult, dehumanizing, and annoying. If you think you can leave this place, just try. You can't do it. You are dependent on this system just as a shackled victim depends on his captor to feed him. Honestly, the best thing for a person in that hopeless situation to do would be to rationalize and say that he 'doesn't want to leave anyway'. It is only when one tries to divorce oneself from the system that the system really shows its teeth. It was only when unsuspecting guests tried to leave Dahmer's apartment that they became his prey. Dahmer would invite them inside and play the magnanimous host. They'd willingly stay with him for several hours — and some of them actually stayed to hang out with him for a few weeks on end. Most of them generally liked being around Dahmer, and Dahmer really liked them being around him. But once they decided it was simply time to go back to their own homes and private lives, that's when Dahmer suddenly attacked and did whatever it took to prevent them from leaving his control. It was much the same with Dennis Nilsen: he was an often overbearing, obnoxious host who killed guests in order to extend momentary companionship and render them powerless before him.

Initially, of course, the victim is lulled into a state of bemused complacency. Dahmer would invite his victims over to his apartment, give them soda and alcohol, and watch TV with them. This is not a trivial stage or formality in the process of victimization. Again: Dahmer lured them in with fun drinks, music, and television — especially television — and they would often have fun taking instant photos of each other. Nilsen did this as well: having been a cook in the British Army, he could provide his guests a good meal, get drunk with them, listen to whatever they liked in his gigantic music collection, watch home movies and play with his cameras — but then eventually he would need to control them to and beyond the point of death. This is also what the system does. It is not even a metaphor; this is what the system does.

The inclusion of the camera-containing cellphone in the typical self-portait of the twenty-first-century human being is highly significant: the camera needs to be there, with you, in the photo; just as Dahmer made sure that he would appear in so many photos, next to the happily posing faces of his soon-to-be-victims. Dahmer passed himself off as a proper photographer specializing in artistic portraits of male nudes. Nilsen was obsessed with photography all his life, always having a camera with him from his teenage years onward — it was a way of 'capturing people', of 'stopping people from moving about' — and throughout the 1970s he amassed a large 'home movie' collection. It has been proven that cameras like the faces of psychopaths — most of them prove very photogenic — but the camera is like the face of the psychopath as well. If the entire technillogical society stands as the metaphoric body of a psychopath, then the camera is its head. When we take pictures of ourselves with our cameraphones next to us, right there in the shot, we may as well be taking a photograph next to Jeffrey Dahmer or Dennis Nilsen or Ted Bundy. That is my contention.

Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski, the infamous mob hitman who killed over a hundred men, had a strange habit of tying up some of his victims and leaving them in caves. He did this to people who were still alive, and he would train an infrared video camera on them before he left. He'd come back a week later, dispose of what was left of the body, and then he'd watch the videos of the people as they died and were largely devoured by huge cave rats. Kuklinski (who may not quite qualify as a serial killer) got no enjoyment from watching this; he actually got quite uncomfortable, but he kept watching because, in fact, very few things made Kuklinski uncomfortable: he just wanted to be able to feel something and was fascinated by torture and thought that putting himself (and others) through such productions would help him understand himself better. It never did, but he kept doing it, and we see again how technology and cameras especially seem to go right along with these anti-human 'probings' into unnatural activities. Dennis Rader, the 'BTK' killer, did something similar: photographing not only his victims but also himself trussed up in ropes and bondage gear, with the entire body covered in garbage bags. He then cataloged and lustfully 'studied' these photographs, endlessly romanticizing the documentation of his pathology. The anti-human brain of a serial killer, just like the anti-human system of high-technology, seeks to understand itself by means of enacting and observing human cruelty, obscenity, and callousness. After being imprisoned, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were obsessed for years with obtaining copies of photographs and slides they had taken of their times on the English Moors, where they buried several children. Brady photographed Hindley and their dog posing at the gravesites. They had also made an audio recording of a little girl begging for her life before they killed her. Everything has to be recorded; that is a must-be for the emerging system and systemic mindset.

Both the serial killer and the technillogical society like to dissect life. The serial killer does this literally: First Dahmer was fascinated with the insides of animals, then he moved on to cutting up humans. The technillogical society literally (via scientific research) and metaphorically (via public planning, marketing, statistical research) breaks down everyone and everything, from macroeconomics to quantum physics, analyzing them inside and out.

Both the serial killer and the technillogical society are driven by a megalomaniacal need to control others — and they have a very hard time restraining themselves. They can't resist trapping and subjugating others. Nilsen mused that 'The most exciting part [of his murder routine] was when I lifted the body, carried it. It was an expression of my power, to lift and carry and have control, and the dangling element of limp limbs was an expression [of the victim's] passivity. The more passive he could be, the more powerful I was.' Like Faust, Dr. Frankenstein, and Karl Marx before them, serial killers want to make themselves into their own sort of 'gods'.

Dahmer was an atheist and the technillogical society is atheistic as well. 'If it all happens naturalistically,' Dahmer said, 'what's the need for a God? Can't I set my own rules? Who owns me? I own myself.' Likewise, the technillogical society believes it can keep setting, breaking, and revising its own rules; it proceeds as if there were no higher power and as if nature was made to be stretched and broken. It believes that everything it does in the name of 'progress' is fine. At heart, it does not even believe that any sort of development is 'unnatural', much less 'wrong': many scientists and theorists believe that everything that humanity does to itself, the planet, and the universe, should simply be considered an extension of natural evolution. No matter how artificial, by the standards of the technillogical society, everything is natural. Because the system itself is so artificial, it always derives a sense of what is natural, normal and fine from a reference point that is the opposite of those qualities. And if everything the system helps bring about (which we are going along with) happens to be a 'natural' evolution away from our own humanity — then oh well, that's just how the universe is supposed to 'naturally' play out. Nothing wrong with that.

The rationale here is close to the excuses espoused by Jerome Brudos, the serial killer who was so obsessed with ladies' feet in high heels that he cut them off and saved them in his freezer. Brudos explained that he didn't really 'victimize' anyone: he contended that his prey in a sense 'went along with it' simply by virtue of the fact that they 'weren't able to stop' him. Since he was able to get away with murder, dismemberment, and torture, those things were natural and okay and he had every right to do them, because reality made them possible and the universe allowed them to transpire. Might makes right; or might can intellectualize and justify whatever it has done in order to pretend that it is right. That is how the serial killer thinks, and it is also the rationale of the technillogical system.

Indeed, sometimes the serial killer and the technillogical society both downplay their crimes, talk about them calmly, as if they were no big deal, as if they didn't strip away human dignity, as if they weren't wrong, per se. Alternatively, they are both good at simply denying their crimes. They lie smoothly and are often ready with alternate explanations for their obvious wrongdoings.

There is an alternate reading of the term 'serial killer': it can be understood not only as a murderer of an entire sequence of people but also as a murderer of sequence itself, a killer of serialization. If we understand a person's life as a narrative, a sequence or serialization of events, then a murderer is one who suddenly ends someone's sequence prematurely — and does so in a horrible enough way to taint the entire lifestory leading up to that point. Your lifestory would end abruptly if someone randomly killed you, and that awful act would very possibly trump anything else you yourself had done while you were alive: the first and foremost thing anyone would remember about you was that you were murdered. Likewise, we can see the technillogical society and really the entire Modernization process as a killer of the normal, natural, sequence of human events up to that point; it tends to discredit almost all of our species' past as backwards, bad and stupid — largely because it lacked the anti-human refinements of sophisticated artificiality. With the advent of this level of technological potential, we witness a break in history — a break with history itself, and with all comprehensible, natural, traditional stories, which become in a sense broken, shameful and inherently flawed — a condition from which humanity and planet earth will possibly never recover. And in all of this fascination with murderers we must never forget the sobering fact that real people with real lives were destroyed because of them. What would those victims have gone on to do, had a monster not cut their time on earth short? And what might everyone for the last hundred-plus years have done with their humanity — what true emotions and real, personal accomplishments might we have made — had the artificial system not drained us of so much of human potential?

Both the serial killer and the technillogical society are quite smart. And it must be noted that many supporters of technology, science, and various (but not all) types of 'progress' think they are smart as well. All of these people and entities believe that what they are doing and helping along is a profound process that entails, demands, facilitates, and encourages much intelligence. And they are right. But the problem is that they always think they are smarter and more sophisticated than they actually are. However high their intelligence might be, it has a fatal flaw. Fatal for themselves and for those around them. Because — How smart can it ever really be to lust after your own destruction? The serial killer secretly wants to get caught and usually will get caught eventually. They can't keep their private obsessions to themselves forever; once they become successful enough at these rare and difficult tasks, they want to share their accomplishments with the world. Dennis Nilsen clogged the drainage system of his whole apartment complex with human bones, signed a petition for someone to investigate this clogging, and once he was arrested he immediately began planning a three-volume autobiography. You see, once fully transformed into these rare, capable agents of death, serial killers start to feel a growing need to be given full 'credit' for what they are doing to aid the anti-human process. It is said that the arrest is the peak of a serial killer's career, the point at which he finally achieves the notoriety and attention he sought all along. To this end, he will eventually become as sloppy as he needs to be in order to get caught and thereby earn his glorious crimes the fame he thinks they deserve. Likewise, as should be obvious by now, the technillogical society is chasing after its own destruction. Again and again we undertake societal reforms — e.g., monetary measures involving debt — that dig our grave even deeper. Everything we're doing — everything we can get away with, for now — will only make our eventual collapse all the more spectacular. We are racking up our crimes and abuses as if we were going for an all-time record, much as serial killers attempt to outdo each other's 'high scores'. Our society will be spoken of as the most ludicrous and inhumane in history. . . . But we're all so smart to have avoided our fate and our punishment for so long.

The serial killer objectifies people so as to better deal with them and so as to further his sick functioning and abuse of them. Once a serial killer no longer thinks of other people as real, he has free reign to pursue his sick interests. Likewise, the technillogical society reifies people (literally, it 'thing-ifies' them), treats them as objects, numbers, names and quantifiable attributes that can be databased.[] Brian Masters, author of Killing for Company, says that 'Nilsen was more at ease with objects and machines than he was with people. So [his great interest in] music was a way of being heard. You can't control a person. You can't control what he's going to say or how he's going to react and how he's going to respond. But you can control a record player.'

Aside from the metaphorical parallels, serial killers' actual use of technology would be an interesting study in and of itself. Going back to the sixteenth century, the Early Modern period, we find that the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, who murdered as many as 650 servant girls, often used elaborate torture machines that resembled something out of Kafka's 'Penal Colony'. For instance, Báthory would lock a girl in a hanging metallic cage, designed to spin in circles as automated blades slowly sliced closer and closer to the center. As the girl met her incredibly painful fate, Báthory would be entertained by her confidante, a dwarf named Ficzko, who would dance underneath the cage, call up to the girl with sexual insults, and bathe in the blood as it streamed down.

The serial killer operates under the belief that ten minutes of intense, self-fulfilling pleasure on his or her part is worth another person's entire life. For quite some time now the technillogical society has been conditioning people to always give in and fall for offers of instant gratification. We may protest and say that we do not believe in this and that we have not been doing this, but our behavior, our debt (karmic and monetary), our wastefulness is all another way of saying, 'Yes, we would trade the entirety of humanity's future for a handful of easy decades for us. That would be worth it. And if we could — if we had the option — we would trade all life on earth in exchange for us having some more fun right now.' I have no doubt that if an alien race landed, humanity would gladly trade them ownership of Planet Earth in exchange for whatever super-entertaining technology these beings might have in their ships. The capacity for such lazy, gullible behavior was always in humanity, but the emergence of technology and the concomitant mental addiction to unnatural, artificial behavior poses greater and greater risks. The capacity exists for total victimhood, and we need not fear alien overlords, for we are bowing before our own psychotic technological system that has in effect gained ownership over us. Like the perfect victim of a serial killer, we are effectively saying, 'I agree that technological progress is worth anything and everything. Let technology have its way. Let it have its way with us. If technology decides that it needs to abuse or kill humanity in order to flourish and pursue its own transformative interests, then we will dutifully go along with the process. Besides, our abuser feeds us and provides us with the means for our own instant gratification as well. So, destroy us, domesticate us, have your way with us, and most of all, please think for us — it's easier anyway.' This is the position we hold and have come to find pleasurable. Meanwhile the system takes an interest in pursuing its own course, which in and of itself is unsustainable. But it doesn't care; it is driven to do what it does; just like a serial killer, it can find gratification by no other means than pursuing destructive — even self-destructive — ends. It gets a real rush from the acceleration of technological progress; and, like a predator's perfect prey, so do we!

Dahmer killed his first victim when he was 18; then didn't kill again until he was 27, after which point began killing regularly. Peter Sutcliffe first whacked a woman over the head in 1969; he didn't do it again until 1975, but then it became a chronic habit. Similarly, it was not until the Second World War that our society yielded to the pursuit of unmitigated artificiality, and began trying to act out its fantasies of ultimate control.[]

It was something he did — something he had to do as part of a larger process — but Dahmer did not particularly like killing. Neither does the technillogical society — certainly not on the domestic front; instead, it prefers a warped sort of 'health care'.[] Nilsen bathed his corpses and lived with them for weeks on end. Dahmer wanted to keep his victims near him, putting chemicals into their brains and turning them into 'living sex zombies'. This is similar to what the technillogical society does: it drugs people, zombifies them in all sorts of ways, tries to keep them sexually aroused. What many serial killers actually want is a sort of necrophilia: that is their prime motivation, and all the murder and violence is only a means to that end. And this is how the serial killer cliché fits in with the zombie cliché; this is why our culture has been so fascinated with both these clichés for so long, and why the fascination only grows stronger. For decades critics have contended that we like zombies because we in the West are like zombies. But this metaphor never quite gets at the core issue. Obviously we are not literally dead, so we cannot be too much like zombies. But once again we must note that Dahmer described his captives as 'living zombies' — 'living sex zombies' — and this in fact is much closer to what we actually have become. We the people are the 'living sex zombies' and the technillogical society is our serial killer captor — that is the complete and correct metaphor. And it is not all that much of a metaphor, for it is quite real; it explains and indicts what has become of our whole civilization. Further, the word zombie originally referred to (living) people who were drugged and spellbound to follow someone else's will. That is just what we are. It must be understood that to call undead creatures 'zombies' is to use the word metaphorically. We, on the other hand, are zombies literally; the term, once understood, applies to us directly. It is not a metaphor. (But, of course, the sickness of our whole society is based on confusing and mistaking metaphor for true reality . . .)

I have said that the predatory process is a sort of necrophilia. What is really wanted, by the system and by the serial killer, are purely pleasurable ('safe') sexual relations with beings that lack consciousness. To this end, the serial killer will drug, zombify, or even kill his would-be sexual partner — whatever it takes to lessen the other's consciousness — and likewise the technillogical system continually dampens the self-awareness of humanity and lowers our consciousness levels, all while piquing our sexual desires via mass media. It is as if the media itself functions as a quasi-sexual organ of the system itself, and by tuning into this media we are allowing the system to do strange sexplay on our minds. I really believe that a quite direct sliding-scale connection can be made between what Jeffrey Dahmer did to his houseguests and what, say, the music and videos of Jaime's artists do to the minds of their audience.

Serial killers often refer to their victims as 'projects' and their acts of victimization as 'experiments'. In just the same way, the technillogical society considers the entire planet — all of existence, actually — to be a laboratory. We are conducting an open experiment on ourselves, or rather we have agreed to let an automated laboratory conduct whatever experiments it wants to conduct on us. In the past they talked of 'the American experiment' and 'the Soviet experiment'; now anything that happens to us can be construed as part of 'the human experiment'. The serial killer and the technillogical society both plan their elaborate experiments in advance and enjoy them very much. We are 'toys in the workshop', to use the parlance of the Brudos case, and the serial killer himself becomes a willing, eager, vicious 'tool' of the overarching system of technological dehumanization. The following delusional rationale of Anatoly Onoprienko, who killed over fifty of his fellow Ukrainians, really cuts to the heart of the matter: 'I feel like a cross between a human and a robot. Most of my work was supposed to be done by robots. I consider myself an experimenter, with myself and with other people.' These forays into mad science super-charge the killers. Even the otherwise cretinous Ed Gein was enamored by books on anatomy and told (mostly) disbelieving friends that he sure wished he could find some bodies on which to practice elaborate taxonomy and other 'experiments'. Likewise the perverse, impish impetuous behind our modern world sure enjoys practicing social experiments on the body politic, all in an attempt to satiate its sick curiosity and add to the stock of morbid knowledge and experiences.

And yet, despite all these systematic attempts to learn, these diseased murderers are almost wholly ignorant of themselves. Their entire lives are an attempt to understand their own sickness, but in order to try to do so — in order to provide themselves with experiences to study — they must express their insanity by harming innocent people. The victims in turn are ruined and corrupted, just as so much of humanity in general has now been debased by an out of control system that doesn't understand itself.

Nowhere is this better expressed than in the testimony of Issei Sagawa, the diminutive Japanese cannibal. Standing less than five feet tall, he once followed a tall German woman home and snuck into her home at night, hiding with the intent of eating her. He later attended the Sorbonne, lured a nearly six-foot-tall Dutch student to his room, killed her and consumed most of her body. All his life he felt the raw desire to consume and gain some sort of sick strength from bodies of larger women. He always felt the need to explain himself to himself better than this — much like a modern author or postmodern blogger continually going through self-conscious self-evaluation, painstaking, boring and obnoxious — but he never could reach a fuller understanding, possibly because his psyche really was deceptively simple: weird but simple, and that's all there is to it. Released on a technicality, Sagawa actually became a sort of celebrity in Japan. He acted in porno movies: on camera, the actresses would only learn whom they had just had sex with afterwards, when Sagawa would show them an album full of photographs he had taken of the Dutch woman's partially consumed body. One of these porno actresses actually became Sagawa's best friend. He also authored dozens of books and became an art critic. Towards the end he reflected on how, despite his personal problems, things were going his way in the grand scheme of things. Everything around him was getting disgusting and inhuman but also pointless and vapid, despite the veneer of intelligence and technical proficiency. 'Japanese people nowadays are really sick and dumb,' he wrote, continuing:

They have the same mentality as I, a terrible criminal [...] I don't want to waste my energy on stupid things. But in reality, I have to be vulgar to survive. I'm 61 now, and still can't figure out what this is all about. I don't even know who I am. Nor the meaning of my life. My life will never get better. It would have been much easier to die. I wish they had given me the death sentence. Recently, more than the urge of eating someone, I have the urge to be killed. I want to die suffering, slowly torn apart alive. Of course, I'd rather be killed by a beautiful woman than a man. But I want to eat her before she kills me. Yet again, it's just my fantasy.

Everything Sagawa says here may be read as if it were said by the mouth of the technillogical society. This society does not understand itself, despite so much preoccupation, obsession, and self-involvement. Still less does it understand its victims or how it has effected its victims' lives. It does not understand humanity, only how to kill humanity and how to take pleasure in doing so. It is murderous but also self-hating, self-pitying, rarely happy and vicariously suicidal. All of us are held captive by this creature that — in addition to everything else — is imprinting its own behavior patterns on us as well. Worst of all, it is sometimes said (by our fellow captives who cannot admit to themselves that they are captives) that all of this is for our own good. And where would they get such an idea?

Both the serial killer and the technillogical society believe that in a sense they are helping their victims, perfecting them in a way. The serial killer thinks his prey should, to a great degree, consider themselves lucky that he chose them. The technillogical society coerces you to think that you should feel lucky to be born in its prison, with all the cool gadgets and means for easy living. According to Brian Masters, Dennis Nilsen actually felt a 'tremendous solace and . . . benevolence' after he had killed, 'because he then treated what was now a corpse as a thing of beauty. He took care of it. He made it feel comfortable.' This is what the system is trying to do for humanity: it is killing us but making us comfortable at the same time. As criminologist David Wilson notes of Nilsen's 'good samaritan' act: he 'can interpret his actions as someone who's doing good.' Both the serial killer and the technillogical society make their victims conform to their own twisted standards, a recurring process which ends with the loss of humanity. Nilsen's home movies show him berating his guests and talking over them. His opinion is the only opinion that matters; others should listen and learn from him, for their own good; he enjoyed the company of corpses because corpses don't talk back. The technillogical society coerces humanity into thinking that 'progress' can only mean one sort of future, which is inevitable — because why else would technology exist, if not to amass itself at the expense of humanity? Similarly, Dennis Nilsen spoke of each act of killing as a matter of fate: 'I felt my sole reason for existence was to carry out that act. What I did had to be done.'

As time goes on, more and more deviant behaviors are necessary to satisfy the urges of the serial killer. It is the same for the technillogical society. As the years go on, things keep getting weirder and weirder on every front. You can try and like it. That's what I do. That's what you do too, I bet. And probably that's the best advice we could give to anyone permanently trapped with a serial killer: Try and enjoy it. Learn to like whatever weird, debasing things happen in the next step of the process. At least with the technillogical society, as Huxley pointed out, humans can be taught to love their servitude. You don't have any choice opting out of the system — Do you? — so you should be grateful for the masochistic capacity within you.

Neither the serial killer nor the technillogical society knows what it means to be human, so they have to fake it. But they are usually very good at faking it. They have the ability fit in and pass for 'normal' in many different types of company. They are good at putting on a false face of normalcy. It is a thin disguise but it usually works. We must note that the developments of technillogical society often give significant portions of the public more than a little pause, but then history marches on and people soon grow accustomed to whatever 'new normal' is next — when none of this society is normal. And yet: 'He seemed like such a nice, polite boy' — that is the frequent, puzzled expression. 'He seemed harmless.' Yes, in all these cases our enemies prove capable of fooling everyday people and authorities alike. Many serial killers, including Dahmer, can run afoul of the police multiple times without there being any serious consequences or any truly gruesome horrors unearthed. This is like what happens whenever the government investigates some sort of perceived wrongdoing on the part of elite-level systemic entities: in short, nothing happens except maybe 'a slap on the wrist', and few if any real crimes will be brought to light. It only goes to show that the human authorities are not really in charge: they are not in charge of the system, nor have they proven all that adept at catching serial killers, who skirt their laws time and again, in an effort to prove that they — the anti-human humans — are actually the dominant players within a human society that has given way to the technillogical. Avatars of the system at its most merciless, they take what they want from us and seem to consider themselves a separate, higher species. As Aileen Wuornos said: 'I robbed 'em and I killed 'em, as cold as ice. And I'd do it again, too — I know I'd kill another person 'cuz I've hated humans for a long time.' She ended this statement with a laugh.

Society is supposed to protect us from serial killers. But who can protect us from a society that acts like a serial killer itself? [Answer in section 22 below?]

21a. Serial Killer Motif Contd.: Cannibalism & Laughing: The technillogical society consumes more and more of our humanity, but it can never become human. Likewise, the serial killer eats parts of his victims in a futile attempt to become one with them. It is worth pausing for just a moment and ruminating on this cannibalistic aspect; doing so allows for an influx of more connections with related themes. Complex relational dynamics exist between serial killers . . . the technillogical society . . . cannibalism . . . and laughing. I strongly recommend that the metaphorical implications here be taken seriously.

In the 1950s and '60s, anthropologists began encountering and then studying a severe disease called kuru, or 'laughing sickness', which arose in many tribal peoples, particularly those of Papua New Guinea. Those suffering from kuru would become manic, lose muscle control, experience incontinence, headaches and other pains.[] Most notably, they would seem pathologically insane, spasm, shake, and laugh, wildly and randomly. The cause of the condition was traced back to a practice of intra-tribal cannibalism, which had been instituted so as to honor and 'reincarnate' the recently deceased by consuming their bodies — brains and all — in order to become them.

Profilers and criminal psychologists have noted the similarities between kuru and the behavior of cannibalistic serial killers in their most frenzied states, at the moments of their greatest revelry, violence, and absorption in their macabre tasks.

To exemplify this web of interconnections, I would offer the figure of the Joker, the Batman villain. Clearly this fictional figure fits the 'serial killer' tagline. Further, he resembles a kuru-sufferer in various ways. His primary characteristic is boisterous laughter, which seems involuntary. The Joker is too giggly to maintain social composure. The character has frequently been portrayed as physically awkward, gangly, uncomfortable in his body. To simply make the Joker into a cannibal — which to my knowledge no writer has ever done — would explain everything. From what I understand, the Joker's unnaturally white skin is supposedly a result of his having fallen into a vat of chemicals, which also deranged his mind. But, again, we see how much simpler and more elegant the myth would be if the effects of kuru were posited into the Joker's origin: For it is noted that the digestion of human flesh produces a terrible chemical stink, which emanates out through the cannibal's pores and could (conceivably) discolor one's skin. (For whatever reason, the 'Kafka' report also tells us of a similar stench of 'burning electrical wires and rotten meat'.)

As noted, the tribal peoples consumed the deceased in order to keep integrating their past into their present. So while serial killers share traits with kuru sufferers, and while our technillogical society may behave like a serial killer, our society does not make continuous attempts to identify with its past the way tribal societies have always done. Quite the opposite. Our society hates its past. We are conditioned to assume that our ancestors were ignorant, stupid, brutal human beings. But serial killers are concerned with reviving the past in terms of their own special, personal histories, traditions and rituals. Every further murder reconnects them to their private history and legacy. We see how again the serial killer bargains with the technillogical society, doing its dirty work in order to be allowed a sort of 'cannibalistic tribe of one' existence.

I have said that many kuru characteristics apply to the predators (serial killers, and by extension technillogical society) but in some ways they also apply to the prey (us, the more or less willing victims) as well. It is said that those afflicted with kuru are 'emotionally unstable. They are depressed, mopey, frequently sullen, and dejected. Yet they are given to uncontrollable sporadic laughter, and it is this last symptom, which has come to define these very sick and hopeless people: "the laughing sickness".' This is how most of us are now, is it not? This is how humanity is now, especially in the Western world, with its chronic and growing need for antidepressant drugs on the one hand, and its interminably sarcastic, goofy, 'ironic' culture on the other. We are stricken with a profound and usually miserable aimlessness, and yet, so often, it seems that our real problem is that we're far too silly, ninnying and superficial.

It seems as though both sides of this illness reinforce each other. The contradictory and otherwise parasitic symptoms have figured out how to live in symbiosis, with us as their mutual host.

Like the Joker, the kuru-sufferer will laugh and continue laughing without cause, motivation, or cessation. This mental state, as well as the societal metaphor derived from it, is a trap without escape. The Joker is his own worst hostage. (He can't escape himself, doesn't know if he even wants to get away, but he still ends up getting himself and others killed in the process.) Aldous Huxley said of the entertainment-addicted culture that 'The problem arises not when we become accustomed to laughing so often, but when we forget why we're laughing.' George Orwell said that 'A thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.' One might just as easily say that every laugh is a failed revolution, and our airwaves are full of them.

21b. Further Addenda to Serial Killer Motif: Ted Bundy & The Joker: Think of the following as an offshoot web of connections, with two or three threads linking back to the already tangled mass I have spun so far.

Towards the end of his life, Ted Bundy tried to blame pornography for his crimes. To be more accurate, he said that he accepted full responsibility for the dozens of murders he committed, but he wanted to underscore the idea that he would not have been brought to that point of violently lustful rage had he not been fueled by an addiction to pornography. The only problem with this explanation is that pornography was never found to be in Bundy's possession whenever he was arrested and his homes and cars were raided. All they ever found were the sorts of magazines that young teenage girls might read. For masturbatory purposes, Bundy evidently liked to look at pictures of innocent (clothed) cheerleaders. Nevertheless, when the cameras were on him for the last time, Bundy blamed porn and told an anecdote from his childhood that can't possibly be true: He said that when he was a boy he and the other neighborhood kids would search through garbage and waste bins in order to find extreme 'hardcore' pornography that, by his account, was readily available at the time. But Bundy was born in 1946; it wasn't until late 1953 that Playboy was published. And Playboy, the first of its kind, was quite tame — certainly nowhere near as extreme as the sort of pornography that Bundy was describing. Was Bundy simply lying? Or could he have been exaggerating something in some way?

Interestingly enough, in response to Bundy's allegations, several figures in the pornography industry pointed instead to comic books as the serial killer's key, negatively formative influence. Frequently, through a wide variety of studies, I have found a similar conclusion arrived at by many researchers and biographers of the serial killers who grew up in the 1940s and '50s: as children, they all read 'detective magazines' which often featured innocent figures (usually attractive women) who are abducted, tied up, and menaced by knives and/or men threatening to choke them. For whatever reason, the researchers consistently use the phrase 'detective magazines' to describe this type of mid-century reading material, but more often than not what is actually being referred to are gruesome crime comics. In all, these contained hundreds if not thousands of tales of insane criminals kidnapping innocent people, threatening them and terrorizing the city, until either the cops or an intrepid vigilante can, time and again, piece together the necessary clues to save the day. And of all these stock villains, which one recurred the most often and which one most closely resembles serial killers as society would come to know them? The Joker, of course, who appeared many times in Detective Comics starring Batman. When he was initially proclaiming his innocence while incarcerated, Bundy once told a reporter: "Am I guilty? Sure . . . guilty of stealing a comic book when I was five years old!" and then he emitted a big fake laugh.

I think Ted Bundy would have made a great Joker. He was always smiling a lot, even when in custody — even at his own trial — smirking and always trying to have a good time. Bundy was very charismatic, and some people (usually they were attractive women) felt an inexplicable attraction to him, even after they knew what crimes he had committed. This reminds me of how there seems to be an inexplicable attraction that society at large feels regarding the Joker. I don't understand why so many people like the character, but they do. He isn't even funny.

Even stronger connections between the Joker and Bundy are found when we consider the latter's parentage. His mother never revealed who his father was. Bundy was a 'bastard' when the term really meant something. His mother tried to shield him from the shame for as long as she could. Bundy grew up believing that his maternal grandparents were his real parents, and his mother pretended to be his older sister. Eventually, of course, the truth was revealed to him, and Bundy was extremely shaken and hurt; he never forgave his mother. This is the exact same scenario in which Jack Nicholson was raised, and Nicholson didn't find out the truth — that his 'sister' was really his mother — until well into his 30s. Bundy went on to become a serial killer. Nicholson went on to play the Joker in the 1989 Batman movie, but maybe sometimes the Joker played him. Compare pictures of a smiling Ted Bundy with a smiling Jack Nicholson. Look at pictures of unshaven Ted Bundy, then look at stills of Nicholson in The Shining. The same spirit seems to inhabit both men.

It has never been substantiated (and how could it?), but researchers in the 1980s became fairly convinced that Bundy's grandfather actually was his father, that he had been the product of incest and that, in a way, yes, his mother was his 'older sister' as well. I think that would be a great Joker origin. Sometimes it is hinted at that the Joker had an awful childhood, but details are left out so that readers' imaginations can run wild. I think the parental origin that makes the most sense for the Joker, based on what we see the character doing and how he acts and his personality, would be this same parental origin (similar to Jack Nicholson's) that Ted Bundy endured.

If one posits 'The Joker' as a metaphysical entity, one can even trace his series of possessions, from John Wayne Gacy (who dressed as a clown), to Dennis Nilsen (who would cover his body in talcum powder, paint his lips, look in a mirror and masturbate to his own clown/zombie image), to David Berkowitz (the 'Son of Sam', who also smiled and smirked for the cameras), to Ted Bundy, to Jack Nicholson, and maybe then to the serial killer who shot Gianni Versace, Andrew Cunanan (known for his hyena-like laugh and for creating multiple aliases and 'origin stories' for himself, much like the Joker in DC Comics). The spirit of the Joker almost seems to have hopped into these men's bodies and helped add a smilingly devilish flair to what they were doing at the time.[]

I don't think I really believe in any of this, but I would also like to call your attention to how much Ted Bundy (at one time an enthusiastic worker for the Republican Party) resembles a young George W. Bush. I'm surprised that, within the vast swathes of conspiracy theories posted online, no one has yet speculated that these two figures could in fact be the same person, and that Bundy's execution was simply faked so that the same actor could go on to play George W.

21c. Final Addenda to Serial Killer Motif: It may be remarked that serial killers are in the process of being one-upped by a new sort of system-serving maniac: the mass murderer, or mass shooter. We should note the emptying of meaning that is inherent in this transition. Horrible as they are, serial killers wax poetic about their killings: they take care to make sure that what they do means something very particular and very specific. They save newclippings of their crimes. Their every victim is treated serially, as an individual, and mementos are usually taken to mark each occasion. With the newer type, however — the mass murderer — everything is streamlined. They attempt a high body-count all in one go, and they scarcely care who they shoot on an individual basis. The particular identities of the victims are meaningless to these killers; they may as well have blank faces. The shooters (or bombers) often commit suicide in the aftermath (or as the climax) of their mayhem: unlike the serial killer, they do not want to 'get away with it' or revel for a long period of time in the knowledge of what they have done. There is nothing to revel in, for mass shootings are truly senseless crimes. With a serial killer, there is at least some measure of logic, perverse though it may be.

Having thus drawn the comparisons, it seems obvious that the advent of the mass murderer is a great complement to the serial killer, in terms of how the technillogical society can, in effect, hijack insane people's bodies and minds, to have them act out the most particularly anti-human systemic drives, literalizing these drives in atrociously violent ways.

It occurs to me that the continual rise of computer technology and surveillance systems has almost certainly given troubled persons the incentive to develop themselves into mass murderers rather than serial killers. If you know you're going to get caught, you may as well embrace it and go all out, all at once. In the 1980s it was remarked that the Yorkshire police force could not catch the Ripper because there was simply too much data, too many files on too many possible suspects. Many times after the fact, those who worked on the case have said that if only they had more computers to process and collate the information, then they could have seen all the clues pointing to Peter Sutcliffe much sooner. So we see how technology in the mid-to-late 20th century actually allowed serial killers to function better, by waylaying the authorities in swamps of paperwork. But on the other hand, as technology advances and crime-solving software improves, it may well have the effect of encouraging spree killers who know that there's no hiding anymore anyway. Things began to change in 1985, when an FBI agent named Donald Allison (there's that name again) developed a large computer database called ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which would collate the commonalities of various unsolved murders nationwide in order to see which ones could be the work of individual killers with signature motifs. The system was a staggering advancement in building profiles and catching traveling murderers. Finally law enforcement knew what to look for and could trace the movements, patterns, and decadent progressions of these criminals. Hannibal Lecter had yet to appear on the big screen, and already the heyday of the serial killer was dying, even as the myth was still in ascendance.

It is the difference between the television age and the computer age in terms of morbid crime. The serial killer Edmund Kemper explained that he was able to elude the law for so long because he had watched so many police dramas on television, and thus he knew all of the mistakes not to make — for example, he made sure never to attend the wakes or funerals of victims, and he made sure never to ask too many questions about the murderers, never to be the one who brought them up first in casual conversations with people. Eventually Kemper turned himself in, after he finally killed his mother and so eliminated the source of his murderous drive. With serial killers it is always a question of if, not when, they will ever be caught — and to their credit, many of them do find ways to stop killing on their own terms, for their own sake and for everyone else's. With spree killers, however, there is a virtual guarantee that these individuals will be caught, very quickly, alive or dead. The increasingly technological milieu makes it impossible to elude detection, and this in fact makes the killers more dangerous, more harmful, as they feel they have nothing to lose, since they are throwing everything away anyway, and so their goal must be to record a dramatic bodycount. They aim for as much killing as possible, as quickly as possible, as impersonally as possible — and there is something completely artless and psychologically disappointing about that. But there it is. The Panopticon allows for no deep, dark, personal, intellectual crimes; instead it encourages psychopaths to hurriedly kill as many of their fellow inmates as possible before the guards can enter the cellblock.

21d. One Last Quick Thing: There's nowhere else to put this: I often get the impression that serial killers have a warped obsession with 'wordgames'. We see this in the so-called 'Kafka' case, most famously: Whoever was behind that business obviously had a malignant fondness for using language — and breaking it down — in strange ways. We see this also in fictional serial killers such as the Joker and the Riddler: they are always punning and coming up with linguistic clues into their crimes. Hannibal Lecter also teases the FBI with some wordgames in Silence of the Lambs. In the real world, the lesbian nurses Cathy Wood and Gwen Graham attempted to surreptitiously murder a series of patients whose initials would spell out M-U-R-D-E-R. The Zodiac killer and Son of Sam also included bizarre wordplay in their letters to police. And, once again, Dennis 'Bind, Torture, Kill' Rader did something similar, including word-searches and allusive poetry in his correspondence with detectives and the media. There are a million examples of this. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley wove a code into their seemingly innocuous prison correspondence. Brady recorded the burial locations of the Moor murders in code, and Hindley also worked an allusive code into her poetry. The Unabomber, who also kept a heavily coded personal journal, would cryptically sign his letters 'F.C.' in a deliberate ploy to get the FBI to rack their collective brains for years (with their best guess being 'Fuck Computers'), before he finally revealed that it was supposed to stand for 'Freedom Club'.

And so once again we see a case of the lone, neurotic, word-obsessed individual hiding behind the conceit that really his work is the product of a mass, communal effort. This conceit — really a deceit — amounts to a meager effort to shirk personal responsibility: the individual is in some way embarrassed or ashamed of his strange actions or creations, and thus he attempts to say that really a larger group of people, perhaps even the general culture that he frequently opposes, is in fact to blame for what he has wrought. See also James Joyce in his Finnegans Wake period, when he kept insisting that really it was not he 'who was writing this crazy book. . . . It is you and you and that girl over there and that man in the corner. . . . This book is being written by all the people I have met or known' — and one must remember that the most formative aspects of Joyce's development were his acerbic criticism of 'the rabble' and his individualist credo 'non serviam'. The kinship-cum-animosity between Joyce and his brother Stanislaus is well known. Turning back to the serial killer parallel, it was reported that when they were younger both Ted Kaczynski and his brother 'loved word games, and Ted punned incessantly.' (Think of the battle of the brothers Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake as an echo of the rivalry between the Kaczynski brothers, or as an echo of Franz Kafka and his 'brother' Max Brod for that matter, or as an echo of our difficult fraternity, Alex — betrayal is always involved, I think, betrayal by both parties.) The Unabomber purposely created false leads, ciphers that meant nothing, and planted false clues in his bomb packages (such as pubic hair he collected from the floor of a public restroom in a distant city), all in order to mislead the FBI and waste their time and resources. Kaczynski found this practice funny. Likewise James Joyce, with good Irish humor and with traditional Irish temperament that resented authorities, smirked as he included 'so many puzzles and enigmas that [the book] will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I mean.'

Regarding commonalities between serial killers and word-gamers, I must also mention the textual reappropriations that went on during the 'Yorkshire Ripper' case of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the midst of Peter Sutcliffe's career as a murderer of prostitutes and female students in the North of England, a hoaxer named John Humble began sending strange letters to the police, and even delivered an audio message to them as well. His letters were signed 'Jack the Ripper' and were written from the perspective of the serial killer at large. Thus the press began to refer to the murderer as the Yorkshire Ripper, but what no one realized at the time was that Humble's letters actually contained long passages copied directly from the missives allegedly written by the real Jack the Ripper nearly a hundred years earlier: there were obvious interpolations, deliberate misquotes, and creative paraphrases. Humble, who hated authority and was obsessed with serial killers, clearly wanted to insinuate that the real Jack the Ripper had returned from the dead to commit more murders. But few people picked up on the sick joke. One of those who did was Detective Inspector David Zackrisson, who would later explain: 'We were left with the fact that the [alleged] "Ripper" had no real originality. He was reading up on a man who was operating almost a century beforehand. Does some psychopath who gets gratification through murder really need that sort of [crutch]? Does he need to borrow the phraseology?' The stubborn top brass of the West Yorkshire police, however, could not be made to see that the letters had come from a hoaxer. They insisted that these were words directly from the killer and made the letters and the audio tape the central clues of the case. They would not admit that a massive scam had been pulled on them and they had fallen for it hard. To no avail, language consultant Stanley Ellis tried to tell them: 'I've been troubled by the thought that, rather than hunting an actual murderer, we may be hunting a writer/recorder.'

This entire hoax seems to have been played upon and reconfigured in the more recent 'Franz Kafka' murders. In this case no texts came back from the dead, as Jack the Ripper's had done, but rather a literary author himself was said to have been resurrected. With the backing of the media and governmental decree, a modest majority of the public were indeed led to believe that Kafka had somehow conquered death in order to kill a bunch of innocent people. What an improvement in the effectiveness of propaganda, once it has real backing, money, and power behind it! No matter how hard the individual citizen John Humble tried, no matter how cunning his quoting or how good his impression, it never even entered into anyone's head to suspect that those murders in Yorkshire were actually being committed by a reawakened version of England's most famous killer of prostitutes. But in recent years we saw people fearing, looking out for, and trying to hunt down a dead writer, as if he could hurt them, and as if he were still walking around this earth.

22. Sideways for Survival: 'Who can protect us from a society that acts like a killer?' It certainly isn't going to be someone like Ted Kaczynski, someone who tries to fight the pathological, anti-human system by engaging in pathological, anti-human behavior himself. That war plan makes no sense; it culminates in a bizarre sort of irony in which the man who screams 'Technology is killing humanity!' begins to develop ever more complicated bombs to kill people himself. Kaczynski becomes a serial killer in order to fight a system that acts like a serial killer. That tactic works no better than Bob Marley's wrongheaded model of using 'the tools of Babylon to fight Babylon', i.e. using the media to fight the media. In all these conflicts, the winners turn out to be: serial killer mindsets, Babylonian tools, and media themselves. The would-be rebels and revolutionaries end up either augmenting or becoming the very forces they engage with directly. Like the old Nietzsche quote: 'Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.' Or as Philip K. Dick said: 'To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. . . . Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus . . . thereby it becomes its enemies.'

(And it is also ironic that Kaczynski cut off all ties with his family, and it was his family — his brother — who turned him in to the FBI. Really it is the technillogical society, in its pursuit of the artificial, that has put the family (the smallest genuine social unit) under so much stress. The technillogical society happens to tear families apart; it actually defamiliarizes the family by distracting individuals with wider, extenuating concerns (money, jobs, favorite media programs, internet life, trendiness, etc.) One would presume that the Unabomber would want to have created a new society in which healthy family life could flourish, and yet he actually abandoned those closest to him, continually rebuffing his brother and mother's overtures for reconciliation, and declaring that he never even 'shed any tears' over his father's suicide. Earlier than that, in 1982, he sent a note to his parents saying, 'I hope you both drop dead before Christmas.' In his own way, he chose a rural existence of isolation and anomie — which actually replicated the alienation we find in the 'lonely crowd' experience of modern cities. The Unabomber seems to have been a case of an egomaniacal individual saying 'I can destroy my family, and use technology to kill people, on my own, better than society can! That'll show the system!')

Neither arguments nor assaults can work in humanity's favor. The technillogical system cannot be reasoned with or reformed, not even by force. Whatever hard-won political solutions might improve conditions for certain groups in the short term — these are nothing in comparison with the across-the-board damage that the anti-human system does to everyone. And it is silly to think that guerrilla counterprogramming and/or education — much less something as outmoded as the written word — could overcome the endlessly cycling torrent of system-oriented media, which conditions everyone to behave in ways that ultimately prove disastrous for human civilization. Nor can any sort of violence eventuate a positive outcome. Violence against human beings, whether the victims are 'part of the elite' or 'part of the problem', only serves the interest of the anti-human system: if nothing else, such violence provides the basis for even more security and surveillance measures. Physical violence is simply incapable of attacking an enemy whose ultimate reality resides in the intangible ether, in the form of trends, imagos, and self-perpetuating propaganda — for it is technique itself, not the resultant technology, that has harnessed the soul of humanity.

So what is to be done?
I am reminded of various lectures of Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB officer specializing in psychological warfare, who eventually defected to North America in 1970. He had been stationed in India, and his job was to plant pro-Soviet propaganda in foreign media and to help undermine the natural culture of other countries. He was also tasked with giving foreign journalists tours of the Soviet Union, and he could never believe how gullible they were, how willing they were to overlook obvious atrocities and believe that everything was wonderful for the Russian people. After Bezmenov fled to Canada, he lived under an assumed identity and began devising a way to safely speak out against the Soviet Union, and particularly against gullible leftists (who all seemed comically delusional to him) and the many shortcomings of communist ideology put into practice.

What I am struck by in Bezmenov's work, however, is the diabolical omniscience that he attributes to KGB officers, particularly in their theoretical methods of how to 'bring down America'. Bezmenov gave many lectures in the early 1980s; and to hear him tell it, Walter Mondale would very possibly be swept into the White House in 1984, and that would trigger a communist revolution, lasting no more than a few weeks, after which point Washington would be subservient to Moscow. Many KGB agents in many dark and secret rooms for many years had planned this to perfection. In reality, of course, Reagan won 525 electoral votes to Mondale's 13, and the Soviet Union began its slow, formal dissolution in 1985. This is not to say that Bezmenov's political understanding was fundamentally flawed. Very likely there were some KGB officers, as well as many international fellow travelers, who were (hopelessly) working toward the destruction of Reagan's America just as Bezmenov said. But all sides were actually experiencing cognitive dissonance: people looked at different aspects of the self-propelling technological system, with its near-autonomous machinations, and mistook them for proofs of their own political will. The system simply does what it wants to do and organizes human life around itself: The Soviet Union gave way because the Western model was outpacing it in terms of technological development; the Soviet economic model experienced pressure to change and become more compatible with the West, simply because the systemic imbalance had grown too large and it had become obvious that it was no longer meeting its potential. Likewise, most pro-socialist messaging in the American media — before and after Reagan — has comparatively little to do with communist agents or deliberate propaganda on the part of mouthpieces and actors; these leanings and strivings naturally result from a technological system which, like doctrinaire socialism, seeks to domesticate human beings and treat them more like pets ('But pets should be treated well!' the socialists say, thinking I have insulted them).

But here is the key point, applicable to our current situation when faced with technillogical disaster; here is what Yuri Bezmenov said the KGB agents thought they were doing to bring down America

'The tactic of subversion is similar to the Japanese martial art. If an enemy is bigger and heavier than yourself, it would be very painful to resist his direct strike. If a heavier person wants to strike me in the face, it would be very naïve and counterproductive to stop his blow. The Chinese and Japanese Judo art tells us what to do: first to avoid the strike, then to grab the fist and continue his movement in the direction where it was [going] before, until the enemy crashes into the wall.'

The Soviets agents thought they were using American freedom against itself, in that they could exploit 'freedom of speech' protection to insert subversive messages and directives into media. Similarly, many American forces thought they were using Soviet socialism against itself, helping the Soviet economy crash itself once it had proven unable to maintain itself in the face of Western capitalism.

Before and after the twentieth century, in fact, various people and forces have expected various concepts and institutions — everything from capitalism to socialism, from war to religion, from vegetarianism to meat-eating — to simply exhaust themselves of their own design. But they never do. And for the last hundred years especially, the actual controlling force of history has been the ever-more-out-of-control artificial development, which renders all these political and lifestyle rearrangements subservient and incidental.

The semi-visible attacker standing before us, throwing his fists toward our heads, is the technillogical system. There is not much time left before impact, but using the judo tactic we should try to sidestep this assault as best we can, taking our bodies and psychologies as far out of harm's way as we can manage. Our attacker seems hellbent on crashing into the wall anyway.

It would not even be necessary to run away to the jungle — as Dana tried to have us do — because there may not be time enough to do that on a significant scale anyway. If anyone wants to leave, that's fine, but there may not be any real need to do so. As long as one avoids the 'cutting edge' of society, one can live within it quite safely and fairly sanely, I have found.

And as silly as it might sound to some, I think Bruce Lee's advice to 'Flow like Water' would help us as well. Water can fit into the cracks of the system. Water conducts. Water supports life. Water can also grind down mountains. 'Flow like Water' absolutely isn't the same as 'Go with the Flow'. The latter is the equivalent of giving up, of turning your brain off; 'Go with the Flow' is passive and servile. 'Flow like Water', however, entails calm cleverness, cool intelligence; it is a series of oblique strategies. Most importantly, whereas anything solid would be pummeled against the wall by the oncoming force, water parts whenever an oncoming force tries to batter it. The tyrant of his day, King Xerxes, didn't get anywhere by ordering his men to whip the sea, and our oppressor won't get anywhere if we learn the strength of water and thereby become immune to his lashings. Technillogical progression cannot be stopped by human hands, but we can get out of its way until it eventually becomes too unstable and falls in on itself. The falling debris will not hurt the water below.

So never let it be said that I have a problem with technology or progress. Let them go. Let them drive themselves into the wall. And everyone who wants to go along with them, go along with them — that's their decision. Everyday, in so many little ways, they keep deciding to go along with so much of this, even though the picture's getting clearer and clearer that this isn't going to end well for them, especially not if they're so psychologically invested in artificial matters.

Still, You can't fight O'Brien. You can only hope to dodge him indefinitely, until he passes out, exhausted.

23. The Future Isn't What It Used To Be: Your experience may have differed — and if it did, I'd sure like to know about it — but when I was younger I remember the future being framed in terms of brightness, prosperity, and discovery. Science was supposed to make everything possible. The only stumbling block was the Soviet Union, supposedly, but once that was gone we were all going to be happy and things were going to be great. Onward and upward forever, toward heaven, with more peace, harmony, and prosperity all the time. (I remember thinking as a boy, 'I doubt I'll ever die. Probably by the time I'm old they'll have figured out how everybody can just live forever anyway.')

One particular future-myth flourished like none other during the second half of the twentieth century: humanity was going into outer space and we were going to explore and possibly colonize the universe. That dream has died. The distance between solar systems is far too great for humanity to traverse. It would take too long and consume too much energy. And by the time a spaceship — full of robots or full of hibernating people — could reach Alpha Centauri, civilization on Earth will have probably collapsed anyway. Human expeditions beyond our solar system would simply not be feasible. It took decades for this disappointing fact to sink into our thick skulls, but we've finally had to admit it. We may eventually take some furtive steps toward other planets in our solar system, under the dubious protocols of tourism or resource tapping, but colonizing outer space now seems as far-fetched and pointless as building bubble-houses under the ocean. Science-fiction films depicting interstellar travel are less and less frequent these days; they seem quaint now and carry a tinge of nostalgia; they show us the way the past thought the future would be. In reality, this is Earth and we're stuck here. In this respect there is no getting off. Sorry.

The only way we could explore the universe would be to first exterminate our humanity so successfully that we weren't us anymore. Only cybernetic organisms, with minds unburdened by free will and with bodies immune to organic decay, would be able to operate well enough, reliably enough, long enough, to maintain the listless homeostasis needed to survive even one journey (let alone journeys) between star systems. Full agency and control of resources would have to be given to the starship computers, which would probably be linked in with the robotic crew, and it would be their hardwired programming, not anything humanistic, that would be organizing the trips, doing the work, getting the credit, and maybe bringing some kept humans along for the ride. Humans themselves simply do not have the lifespan or the machinelike patience and precision in them to explore the galaxy. (To suggest otherwise would be like saying that the microscopic organisms living on Christopher Columbus's body were responsible for navigating the Atlantic.)

But none of that will happen anyway. The rapid evolution of the system has become too precarious. At this late hour we can see that most of the cards have been dealt, and a utopian future is simply not in the offing. Whether it would be a sort of techno-wonderland in which human beings all live calm and intellectual lives as enlightened gods on earth, or a sort of posthuman world in which 'spiritual machines' rise to create a heaven on earth — both forecasts seem ludicrous now. Maybe some top scientists always knew better, but for so long a good, very influential portion of the public seemed to believe that our position on Earth should be looked at as a challenge or game: We had limited resources and limited time, and the goal was to manage and stabilize these circumstances — via science and technology — in order to harness the full power of our solar system, and use that as a stepping stone to infiltrate the universe at large. That idea would be the fulfillment of the human ('all too human') will to power. But that idea operated under the false assumption that we, human beings, were the point and benefactor of progress. The transhumanist ideology then arrived, to console the disillusioned techno-utopians by saying, 'Okay, scientists, you can still have your paradise, but you won't be human anymore.' Oh, you won't be human anymore, alright — you and everyone else is getting less human everyday — but it isn't going to be a paradise. It is not going to be much of anything worth writing about.

What would be worth writing about would be a new round of Nuremberg trials, in which the scientists who offered us this cosmic utopian future — with the flying cars and the free robots to wipe and lick our asses — these scientists, many of whom are very old now, could be hauled before the public and made to answer When did you know that this utopia was a lie that was never going to happen? and Why did you keep letting billions of people believe that science was going to fix everything and let us all live forever in spaceships? I've studied the literature and throughout the last century and a half these types of shills always and consistently told humanity that the fantastical techno good-life was just 'twenty or twenty-five years away'. These types need to be made to answer for the horrible and misleading lies they told us.

The closer we get to the future, the messier everything seems. The utopias dreamed of in the past — everything from Plato's Republic, to Bacon's New Atlantis, to Star Trek — always valued order. The dystopias were very orderly as well — everything from 1984 and Brave New World, to the rigidly rationalistic and robotic forecasts of the Terminator movies — and of Ellul's work as well. And yet as we approach the future, as the system rushes ever closer toward a point of no return, we see no order developing. This is why I modified Ellul's 'technological society' into a technillogical society, for we can no longer say that the technological system is even looking out for its own interests anymore. Ellul called technique 'an ensemble of rational and efficient practices', but what is happening now does not seem rational or efficient even from the perspective of the system itself, which now drunkenly races toward a brick wall. It is an ill logic that approaches a zero-point ('nill') and must constantly ward off nihilism.

Conspiracy theorists may posit a hidden hand that controls the proceedings from out of public view, making 'order out of chaos' in some way. But I see no grand order at work here, no order of any sort emerging; the top politicians themselves seem increasingly stressed out, as do the elite. How could the elite plan for a future that is out of human control? Within this increasingly non-human society of hyper-reality and media-created insanity, chances of mental health and happiness generally decrease for everyone, for the rich and the poor, for the insiders and outsiders, for the celebrities and the fans. Look at the most famous faces: it's obvious these people are being driven insane by the pressures of their respective positions, which we the common people still ludicrously envy. The rich, famous, and/or powerful smile through the pain as best they can, and evidently they need to supplement their lifestyles with rampant sex and drugs in order to cope. The exceptions to this rule are few and far between. These people are manifestly insane and usually cannot keep their decadence in check for very long, before it results in another broken relationship or addiction scandal. We are in a sense their victims, but they are quite self-destructive as well. The so-called elite of this world cannot even create 'order' out of the chaos of their own lives, let alone create and maintain a new orderliness for the entire world. They may try to do this, but they don't seem capable of succeeding nearly well enough. And why not? Because the elite themselves are very susceptible to the disorienting experience of the uncontrollable artificial system their wealth unlocked. There is no way for any human to exist within an unnatural system and not be misled, confused, and mentally damaged.

Lastly, it bears considering why we should even want to colonize the universe and subject its laws to our own prideful whims in the first place. At times this cosmic voyeurism borders on the lurid. Haven't we better things to do, for our sake and for the wellbeing of the universe? As Huxley said in 1962, when considering the ramifications of unstoppable scientific and technological progress:

'It might be sensible to think less about the problem of landing two stupid astronauts on the Moon, and rather more about the problem of enabling three billion men, women, and children — who in less than 40 years will be 6 billions — to lead a tolerably human existence into the next millennium. As television trains us to become increasingly obsessed with rare and privileged spectacles, I fear that our commitment to daydreaming will allow the moonlanding event to happen but will prevent us from seriously and collectively considering more realistic, useful, and existential matters, at least until it is too late and maybe not even then.'

24. PPL R GETTING STUPIDR: A Review of Brzezinski's 'Strategic Vision': There should be no doubt, generally speaking, that we are getting stupider. One need only trace the culture that people have produced and enjoyed consuming over the last few centuries; here we find a cheapening and a simplification of thought. In media and art, we see and hear increasingly superficial versions of what a human being is: the representations of 'normal' personalities tend to be narrower and more deranged. (The demographics become more diverse, but, independent of that positive development, the actual psychological range narrows.) This is so for two reasons: First, the potential audience of each communication is larger than ever before, due primarily to electronic communication; and the larger the audience, the stupider the content tends to be, and the lower the level of discourse. These are virtually scientific laws of communication; an apt metaphor would be the plight of a person needing to speak to a crowd: if any communication is to be done in this situation, it has to be through yelling, short sentences, and simpleminded statements. Secondly, the artists, actors and writers of today, as compared with those of decades and centuries past, have lost much of their humanistic range, depth, and intelligence, due to their own immersion within the media matrices of an increasingly artificial environment. Further, one need only consult archived tests and essay assignments that were given to high school students of the 1940s: they posit an intellectual caliber superior to many freshmen and sophomore college examinations of today. Or: one need only attempt to read the popular novels of the 1800s: a fairly uneducated mass audience was eager and able to grapple quite well with all of their nuance, long sentences, and plots that took real concentration to remember. But in recent decades we have seen the phenomenon — which has become normalized — of middle-aged adults and even the elderly proudly reading children's books. People are obviously getting stupider. As our environment gets increasingly complicated, the regimentation of the human mind must simplify, must retreat into laziness and creature comforts. Television is always a passive and stupefying experience, no matter how 'involved' we get in its latest well-produced dramas. We can play on computers all day, operate a dozen gadgets at once, but to expect deep concentration and dedication to humanistic pursuits — that is asking too much of people like us.

I have personally interviewed upwards of a hundred 30- and 40-somethings who literally cannot read the same 1980s comic books that they read as children. When they were eight years old or so, they calmly read and reread these same picture stories; but now, in the twenty-first century, they find the process far too taxing. The most common complaints run along the lines of 'There are too many words on the page. The writing is too wordy. The sentences are too long.'[] These are middle-class professionals who tell me this, people with multiple academic degrees. There is no doubt that generationally and personally, collectively and individually, we are getting stupider by the second.

It is true that the 'Flynn effect' has shown certain quadrants of IQ — en masse and on average — to have increased since 1900. Several disclaimers, however, must be given. Firstly, we must make a distinction between intelligence and IQ: while IQ tests do measure various quantifiable intellectual attributes, they should not be taken as evidence of human intelligence in any broad sense. What the Flynn effect has shown is simply that during the twentieth century IQ scores in the Western world continually rose within two areas: problem-solving and experiential recall. This news seems like it should be cause for celebration and optimism, but all it amounts to is this: Rats in a contrived maze eventually learn how to run through the maze faster. That's all. That is what's been going on here with us. All such tests amount to artificial situations and simulations. Each generation can play video games better — and can play more complicated video games — than the generation before it. That scenario is the short and long of how we are getting 'smarter'. Just look at the state of things: Can anyone really believe that we Westerners are getting better at solving problems and learning from past experience? We must also note that the Flynn effect seems to have a limit: around the turn of the millennium, roughly, the IQ scores in these two areas stopped rising and in some cases regressed. Why? In general terms, I suspect that beyond a certain point the artificial environment became too complicated for human beings to 'learn'. There is a limit to human beings' capacity to remember and navigate through an increasingly complicated world. In other words, if you keep making the maze more and more complicated, eventually the rats will stop rising to the occasion, will stop being able to run through the maze faster and faster — will stop being able to ever figure out how to traverse the maze even once, even if they had their whole lives to solve it. That is what happens once the maze becomes so complicated that its intricacy exceeds the peak capability of the brain. If it is any consolation, however, I would argue that the rapid escalation of the system around us makes our intellectual descent look worse than it actually is. (We are not getting that much stupider; rather, the artificial world is simply getting that much 'smarter' [than us]. We celebrate this fact.)

Obviously, in many ways for many people, the last four centuries removed much ignorance and superstition from the human condition. The extent to which new forms of ignorance and superstition have, in the last six decades, begun to take their place, does not enter into the current discussion. Prior to the early twentieth century, Westerners were much more ignorant and superstitious; that does not mean, however, that they were stupider. They followed their instincts — unscientific and prejudicial as they may have been — and they and their culture survived. They sometimes behaved irrationally and often discriminated without cause, but their skepticism and silly organizational rituals saw them through life and preserved what they wanted to preserve about themselves for the next generation. In much the same way, many equally silly superstitions and convenient lies would effectively help humanity survive at this moment ('Everything "cool" is bad' being potentially the most helpful religious dogma, if it could ever take hold on a global scale). For all their ignorance and negative traits, the many generations of humans who existed prior to the twentieth century knew how to survive; humanity in the twenty-first century, however, for all its enlightenment and databases of knowledge, seems to have lost its grasp on the most fundamental and vital of all mental faculties: the know-how of self-preservation and the preservation of the species.

But to float another potential criticism of the idea — really the terribly obvious fact — that people are getting dumber: One might point out that today there are more people, and a greater percentage of people, who are educated than ever before. Obviously, however, a distinction between education and intelligence should be made. We must also take into consideration how the technological society simply created more stuff to learn about. If people have been thrown into a sea of information, they must try to learn how to swim in it. That does not prove that the swimmers are any smarter than the people who can live a nice life safely on shore. No matter how clever the swimmers are, they are still in a worse position, at least until they swim to shore — if that is even possible. Much has been said in recent decades regarding the concept of 'life-long learning' — And here again we catch a funny double-meaning by noting that our entire society has been turned into a school, like a school of fish, always being forced to swim. And it seems as if our society of knowledge-swimmers must deal with a waterfall of new information crashing down upon them all the time: Beyond a certain point, they will drown, or exhaust themselves, and no amount of academic medals, or 1st-place swimming awards, will keep them afloat. Humans simply cannot survive by breathing information; and attempting to 'grow gills' in this respect would not be smart, or possible — it would be in vain. We cannot evolve at a fast enough rate. We are drowning in (mostly pointless) information.

Another way of looking at it is to consider educated humans as the equivalent of trained dogs. If an animal has been domesticated, it is in its best interest to be trained and trained well; that is supposedly how one's family 'gets ahead' within an artificial environment: through education. But is the trained dog in the house any smarter or any better off than the wolf in the wild? That is debatable. Indeed, recent studies (see Crabtree at Stanford and de Nijenhuis at Amsterdam) substantiate the claim that the human race was smarter before urbanization and the weakening of natural selection. '[T]he average Athenian from 1000 b.c. would rank among the smartest and most emotionally stable in today's society.' 'Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.'

But instead of bashing the masses, I think it more interesting to focus on an individual known for his astonishing intellect and ability to understand and untangle many complicated, worldly problems: Zbigniew Brzezinski, formal National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, informal international security advisor to every president since, co-founder (with David Rockefeller) and first director of the Trilateral Commission. Brzezinski was also instrumental in 'opening up' China and orchestrating the decade-long conflict between the Afghani mujahideen and the Soviets.[] In 1970 Brzezinski wrote Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, which reads like an American response to Ellul's Technological Society.[] Though it has not proven an especially prophetic work, Between Two Ages stands as the greatest English-language-first study of its sort since Bertrand Russell's seminal Impact of Science on Society.[] The only other American-made volume offering a comparable societal scope and depth would be B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It is most enlightening and amusing to contrast the discourse provided in Between Two Ages with that found in Brzezinski's most recent offering, 2012's Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power — for surely this shows us just how susceptible the intellectual and political elites themselves are to the technillogical 'dumbing down' process.

Simply put, Brzezinski's Strategic Vision reads like a confused, childish mess. It is written on a moderately high level, in terms of vocabulary and sentence complexity, and yet the tenor resembles that of a kindergarten teacher talking to five-year-olds: Brzezinski does not exactly 'talk down' to them, but one gets the impression that this adult has spoken to a gullible, doting audience for so long that his own understanding of the world has become trapped in a sort of child's logic in which everything he says must be taken for granted and applauded as a matter of course. He certainly does not expect his audience to be capable of noticing any of the glaring flaws in his arguments — moreover, due to the dumbing-down process, he probably doesn't even notice them himself.

Despite some attempts at surface-level continuity, many points in Strategic Vision seem intellectually disconnected if not outright contradictory. For instance, twice Brzezinski namechecks 'green' and renewable energy, stressing their importance and potential; but twice he also argues for exploiting the untapped oil resources of Alaska — and none of these passages (sentence fragments, really) have even as much content as could be gleaned from a 20-second propaganda spot produced by an energy company. Far from offering coherent — much less pragmatic — advice regarding America's energy concerns, Brzezinski's insights contradict one another and their depth amounts to nothing more than someone saying, with a shrug: 'Yeah, I think "clean energy" or whatever it's called could be a good thing. I've also heard there's oil in Alaska?'

Similarly, Brzezinski wants to have it both ways regarding China. Either China will surpass the United States or it will not, but Brzezinski can't make up his mind and ends up saying nothing, just spreading vaguely erudite confusion. He spends many pages telling his American readership (probably a few hundred academics and older journalists) not to worry, that China's rise is fraught with peril: its geographic location is not as advantageous as America's; its continued economic success is to a significant extent dependent on America remaining strong; most of its people do not speak the global lingua franca of English; and its rulers feel that they should refrain from outright imperialism, continuing to adhere as they do to lingering traditions and philosophical maxims ('Observe calmly . . . never claim leadership'). And yet within all of this, Brzezinski sneaks in the following: '[T]he basic reality is that China is not yet — nor will it be for several more decades — ready to assume in full scope America's role in the world.' What consolation is this? What does it even tell us? Does Brzezinski assume his readers might suspect that China is fully ready now? The obvious concern has been over if and how soon China might surpass us. Brzezinski posits a ludicrously longterm 'several more decades' prediction — and in so doing slides in the admission that, yes, it will happen, even though for pages before this he has been scoffing at those who are concerned about it happening — and then he couples the admission with the alarming notion that China will replicate the 'full scope' of America's global position. Again, the obvious concern has been regarding China's raw engine of power, particularly in terms of economics; and while the spectacle of the Chinese military has given some Americans pause for concern, I have never heard of anyone foreseeing a day when China will station troops in 150 countries, as the U.S. has done for some time now. Did Brzezinski intend to suggest that China will replicate and replace this major aspect of 'America's role in the world'? Or did he not consider the implications of his words before he wrote them? It is difficult to say. Throughout the entire book, one gets the impression that the author, while writing any given section, has let the statements and intimations of all other sections slip his mind. (It is a long, rambling, self-important 200-page mess. The 30 or so sections are poorly organized; their subject matter overlaps and swirls around, and one wonders what the point of the whole production ever was in the first place. Now who wants to read something like that?) In the end, what does Brzezinski tell us about China? A bunch of contradictory declarations and contradictory prophecies. The best he can do, ostensibly to calm Americans' fears, is to tell us that 'a rapid decline of America's global primacy would produce a global crisis that could devastate China's own well-being and damage its long-range prospects'. So instead he offers the prospect of a longer, slower death with optimism. Moreover, he offers it with the hint that America's current position is in fact enviable, because if we really wanted to spite the Chinese, we could just kill ourselves quickly and bring China down with us. What a sad sort of power. — And whatever happens in reality, however the events play themselves out, one thing is for certain: The people living 'several decades' from now will not look back on Brzezinski's thoughts on China and say 'We should have listened to him' — There is nothing to listen to.

The strangest and clumsiest passages of Brzezinski's Strategic Vision have to do with the significance and consequences of technology use by young people. When reading these pages, I first thought, 'No . . . He must know better. Brzezinski is putting on an act, playing stupid, only pretending to be gullible.' After a while, however — and after listening to some of his recent speeches — I had to conclude that Brzezinski is not lying, that he is not joking, that he really believes in what he says in these matters. He shows naïveté far beneath his paygrade and reputation when he proclaims that 'the Internet and cellular phones liberate these young adults from their often-confining local political reality.' What a nightmarishly unqualified, thoroughly regressive statement for us to take in, especially since it comes from the man who once wrote Between Two Ages. Firstly, the concept that electronic media technology 'liberates' human beings should be considered dubious and looked at askance by anyone even capable of understanding Ellul's work, must less by someone who effectively wrote Ellul a long loveletter in 1970. Certainly technology has advantages and should never be dismissed as totally bad in every aspect, but to pair digital media so cavalierly with a blanket notion of 'liberation' strikes me as Pollyannaish and irresponsible. Secondly, the Brzezinski of old would have caught the Huxleyan overtone (and Orwellian phrasing) of what it might mean to be 'liberated from one's local political reality'. In other words, as instantaneous media connects people to a projected (and largely imaginary) global sensibility — filled with half-truths, spin, false faces and simulacra — it simultaneously alienates and defamiliarizes them to what is actually going on around them. Yet Brzezinski here champions young media addicts and calls them part of a 'political awakening': they are 'the equivalent of Marx's concept of the "proletariat" '; they have their faults, but their 'often-inchoate sentiments' can be 'focused' and 'legitimat[ed]' via media, presumably in order to — somehow — get something real, good, and lasting done.[] Later on, however, Brzezinski bemoans the 'cumulative effect of such widespread ignorance' which derives from the fact that 'What passes for news tends to be trivial or human-interest stories.' Does he not see the contradiction here? Does he not realize that the content of young people's phone and text communications are even more trivial and narrow-minded than what can be seen in news stories? It is no accident that the news media, by and large, have become softer and sillier over the decades; it happened due to diffusion of technology, the increased domestication, and the mental laziness of both the audience and the journalists. — Does Brzezinski not understand that any serious attempts at politicking via 'social media' (which are already diffused and debased) would be doomed before they began? The world and its problems become more complicated all the time. New media leave little room for nuance or calculation, and thus no one should rely on them to redress real-world problems in any comprehensive or lasting way. In almost every case we see scarcely anything but viral, addictive ranting, and ever more flashes in the pan, but nothing of substance, no new foundations on which to build new, true realities. We must also note that Marx's proletarians actually worked — that was the whole point — and they had a dearth of luxury. Yet Brzezinki does not see any problem with comparing them to disillusioned university graduates, who are underemployed but who have an overabundance of luxuries, the most emblematic of which are the cellphone and the Internet, through which the disillusioned hurriedly seek out . . . ever more illusions.

Again it is almost as though we are led to expect technology to simply solve our problems of its own accord. There is a very naïve, underlying sense that if only a third-worlder could be given a smartphone, then he could simply place the device before him on a table and ask it to magically make his life better.

My criticism of Brzezinski in these issues has little to do with whether or not the political causes and grievances of cellphone revolutionaries are righteous and legitimate — neither he nor I would take a hardline stance either way, because every group and circumstance would be different. No, my criticism has to do with Brzezinski's contention that this intersection of youth, technology, and politics has substance and represents a 'rising consciousness'. In the aforementioned passage of Strategic Vision, Brzezinski speaks of this phenomenon in mixed but generally favorable terms. In recent speeches, however, he characterized the phenomenon as much more problematic.

Compare the following two excerpts:

'[F]or the first time in all of human history, mankind is politically awakened. That's a total new reality. It has not been so for most of human history, until the last one hundred years. And during the course of the last one hundred years, the whole world has become politically awakened. And no matter where you go, politics is a matter of social engagement, and most people know what is generally going on in the world and are consciously aware of global inequities, inequalities, lack of respect, exploitation. Mankind is now politically awake and staring.'

'I am deeply troubled that a very vague, emotionally stated, semi-theologically defined diagnosis of the central global menace [i.e., terrorism] is obscuring our national ability to comprehend the historically unprecedented challenge which is being posed in our time by a massive global political awakening; and thus is obstructing our ability to deal effectively with the global political turmoil that this awakening is generating.'

These are extremely complicated matters. To put it most succinctly, Brzezinski misinterprets his observations and conflates problems and solutions. His greatest error is to characterize large-scale psychological shifts within the masses as an 'awakening'. Simply because people no longer sleep soundly does not mean they must be awake. Rather, they are dreaming, so to speak — dreaming with their eyes open, perhaps, but staring at video screens nonetheless. Conspiracy theorists have interpreted these comments of Brzezinski's as if they signified an acknowledgement on the part of wicked, nigh-omniscient elite overlords that 'the jig is up' — that humanity has finally 'woken up' in the same way that these nomadic researchers into, for example, the JFK assassination, Freemasonic symbolism, and 9/11 believe they themselves have 'woken up' to the secret truths of history. But this is not what Brzezinski is referring to: he is referring to changes in the general population. On that level, it should be clear — both to Brzezinski the insider and to fringe conspiracy theorists — that the masses have not 'woken up'. Rather, the psychological change here has to do with a permeation of media into people's brains: that news and politics fit into the programming schedule is not at all significant when considered within the context of the larger trends: the growing proliferation of media, humanity's growing obsession with media, and the absolutely unstoppable rush towards increasingly superficial content, including news responses of the misleadingly glib, snarky or self-righteous varieties. The American and French Revolutions were accomplished with only a small fraction of the population fighting for something that was real and would generate lasting political change and significance. — So what does it matter if almost all people know something about politics, something they may or may not fight for, when the international and technological system that exists around everyone has developed — and overcomplicated itself — to such a degree that all revolutions are necessarily short-lived and insufficiently well-informed? Brzezinski & co. have supported many third-world revolutions over the past 40 years. Most of them have gone wrong. And yet the same elite pundits continue to speak of foreign wars and revolutions as if the next time around they might finally result in tidy advantages for Western powers. The truth is that with every passing decade international actions seem to go further awry. The truth is that all three of the contentious factions — the 'emotionally stated, semi-theologically defined' nationalism within the West, the 'central global menace' located in the Mideast, and the alleged 'global political awakening' in total — all amount to overlapping ideological products of the same developing technology, particularly of out-of-control media communications. Many commentators would note the factor of communication technology within each of these cases, but they would not realize that in many ways it is actually the common causal factor for all three of them — and it is dismaying to see Brzezinski making the same mistake. The foreign terrorists and the 'emotional' protestors at home are all 'politically awakened' by the same types of media. And the general 'trouble' posed by a 'politically awakened' world, which also takes into consideration those who are not dissidents, stems from this same mass of technology. It is the developing media which has spontaneously generated all of these related changes in consciousness. Humanity has not really learned anything; it has simply had different program-choices to consume, and different protestations to start 'acting out'. All of this is simply what happens to different groups of people, from different places and with different historical grievances, once electronic media (and in some cases weapons and weaponized technology) become readily available. It is ridiculous to suggest that the elite players, to whom Brzezinski gives council, would be able to separately redress these three different factions of humanity — as if the new problematic aspects involved were so vastly, qualitatively different that they simply could be untangled. The actual fact is that these matters are blurring and 'obscuring' one another for a reason: they are all very much part of the same technological trend. Of course the people themselves are different, but they aren't different in the regard that they have contracted the same addiction to technology, which 'empowers' them to enter into much confusion. The old concerns have acquired new aspects simply because they are being filtered through the same techno floodgate. The elite are finding these various groups difficult to handle and manipulate simply because the technology itself — the driving factor involved — is rapidly escaping all human control and management. The CIA may assist 'freedom fighters' and good-spirited rebels to link up via social media . . . but the terrorist groups recruit in just the same way.

Moreover, information technology has affected and infected the elite themselves — dumbing them down just as it does everyone else — and Brzezinski himself is no exception. The Brzezinski of old would not have theorized in the simpleminded and self-contradictory ways shown above. He too, like everyone else, has gotten stupider. While he may not consume much, if any, mass media, still someone like Brzezinski would certainly be using the internet and would also be engaged in reading academic journals and governmental studies, written by increasingly unreliable people who either consume generic media themselves, or rely on the reportage of those who do. In other words, even someone like Brzezinski would be susceptible to the mind-numbing effects of artificial culture.

Brzezinski must have forgotten about it, but a passage in Between Two Ages already hinted that this would be the case, that the elite themselves would not be able to protect themselves from the negative and disorienting effects of a society filled with developing technology. 'Television in particular,' he wrote in 1970, 'contributes to a "blurred," and much more impressionistic . . . attitude toward world affairs. Anyone who teaches international politics senses a great change in the attitude of the young along these lines.' Forty-some years later, we now have multiple generations who have very much been raised by television. And it should be noted that Brzezinski himself has made numerous appearances on cable news shows in recent years. Whenever he walks into a television studio in preparation for a sometimes demeaning and always contrived interview, one has to wonder how (or if?) he squares the function he currently performs, as a talking head and disseminator of soundbyte logic, with the sure-handed understanding he once had of electronic media as a means of control and self-deception[]. Does the Brzezinski of the early 21st century really believe that his own perception of events can maintain focus and integrity while he willingly journeys into the wonderland of screens and cameras? He seemed to know better years ago, as evidenced by the continuation of the same passage from Between Two Ages:

'Instant but vicarious participation in events evokes uncertainty, especially as it becomes more and more apparent that established analytical categories no longer adequately encompass new circumstances.

'The science explosion — the most rapidly expanding aspect of our entire reality, growing more rapidly than population, industry, and cities — intensifies, rather than reduces, these feelings of insecurity. It is simply impossible for the average citizen and even for men of intellect to assimilate and meaningfully organize the flow of knowledge for themselves. In every scientific field complaints are mounting that the torrential outpouring of published reports, scientific papers, and scholarly articles and the proliferation of professional journals make it impossible for individuals to avoid becoming either narrow-gauged specialists or superficial generalists. The sharing of new common perspectives thus becomes more difficult as knowledge expands; in addition, traditional perspectives such as those provided by primitive myths or, more recently, by certain historically conditioned ideologies can no longer be sustained.

'The threat of intellectual fragmentation, posed by the gap between the pace in the expansion of knowledge and the rate of its assimilation, raises a perplexing question concerning the prospects for mankind's intellectual unity. It has generally been assumed that the modern world, shaped increasingly by the industrial and urban revolutions, will become more homogeneous in its outlook. This may be so, but it could be the homogeneity of insecurity, of uncertainty, and of intellectual anarchy. The result, therefore, would not necessarily be a more stable environment.'

In this last part we catch a hint of the truth that Ellul, fifteen years before, had failed to foresee: that the technological society of the future would absolutely not be robotically rational; it would be more unstable and chaotic. Still, Brzezinski seemed — and seems — to think that the elite could probably maintain order simply by using technology to manipulate the masses. Being part of the elite himself, of course Brzezinski would want to believe this. But he failed to learn from Ellul the clear fact that post-modern technology is the user of humans, including the elite. For while humans — especially the elite — may continue to use technology, there is always blowback and they always end up serving the system more than the system serves them.

How could it be otherwise?

I am reminded of a particularly delusional passage of Charles Galton Darwin's already delusional The Next Million Years (1953), a tome which should always be known as Exhibit A in the case proving the megalomania of the spoiled children of the scientific elite. C.G. Darwin's expertise was in physics, but he dallied in telling fairy tales about how a tiny number of rulers could gain total control over the masses, for instance, by 'compulsory administration of [a] "contentment drug" '. But rather than fall into the lovely medicinal stupors themselves, the wise guardians of Planet Earth would retain a vigilant, genuine, and at times even 'wild' sensibility:

'To produce effects of these kinds there must be a master, and the master must be above and not subject to the procedure he is enforcing on his subjects. The dictator could not afford himself to take the "contentment drug" because if he did so his capacity for rule would certainly degenerate. It always comes back to the same point, that to carry out any policy systematically in such a way as permanently to influence the human race, there would have to be a master breed of humanity not itself exposed to the conditions it is inducing in the rest. The master breed, being wild animals, would be subject to all the fashions, tastes and passions of humanity, and so would never have the constancy to establish for generation after generation a consistent policy which could materially alter the nature of mankind.'

In other words, whatever 'fashions, tastes and passions' the elite fall prey to would simply be the 'natural' inclinations of humanity. Meanwhile, Darwin concludes, these guardians would be able to preserve the integrity of the masses and keep them from becoming too domesticated or debased. — But of course this is all bunkum and wishful, perverted thinking on Darwin's part. What difference would a 'contentment drug' make, when such a tool would exist within a larger artificial context? It is the full scale of autonomous technique — the advance of science and technology — that dictates, through infrastructural shifts and effective incentives, how humanity shall organize itself, and to what extent we shall be domesticated, changed, or dehumanized in the process. The elite themselves, standing in many ways closer to the machine than anyone else, are certainly effected by this process at least as much as anyone. To speak of any 'wildness' here is simply to misinterpret mental illness and the effects of artificial living conditions. Are the global elites 'wild' because they can get almost anything they want, travel freely, and indulge in hot sex with almost any commoner they desire? This would be like saying that those urbanites who commit violent crimes, on the one hand, or those urbanites who gather together to loudly protest governmental policies, on the other hand, are simply 'not civilized'. Nothing of the sort. In both cases, the 'lawless' elite and the 'unruly' peasant behave uncouthly (as one might term it) because the technological system drives them to do so. They are but loud, yippy dogs — but dogs nonetheless, still quite well domesticated. Take either of these types of people and put them into a forest and see how long they'd survive. They're not wild.

But to return to Brzezinski: How could a privileged and increasingly out-of-touch elite not sink into madness and self-delusion? How could any human being, no matter how smart, traffic in so many silly political platitudes and self-important foreign policy directives, repeating them over and over again for decades, without eventually coming to believe that they possess far more reality than they actually do?

To illustrate this last accusation, I shall call your attention to a rather annoying aspect of Brzezinski's Strategic Vision: his habit of making up future international partnerships, just for the fun of it. At one point he speculates that there could be a China-U.S.-Japan partnership. Then he amends this future scenario by offering instead a China-U.S. partnership, but hastily adds that in that case it would need to be a 'very informal G-2'. Elsewhere he speculates that there could be a 'Weimar triangle' of France, Germany, and Poland. But all of these countries are already bound by multiple treaties, trading partnerships, and informal and formal political ties. Nonetheless, Brzezinski just seems to like drawing these different lines on the map for no real reason. There is no reality here. This planning is totally arbitrary.

Had I read this book without context, I would have suspected that it was something Brzezinski had just tossed off — written off the top of his head, without stopping — over the course of a few weekends. In the acknowledgements, however, he makes a point of thanking several editors and a team of research assistants from Yale University. For this book? The content probably wouldn't even earn anyone an undergraduate degree in political science at a mediocre college. (I hesitate to add Or maybe it would, these days.) Further, almost an entire year passed between the composition of the book and its publication. This was not something just 'tossed off'; they really thought they had something substantial, and no doubt worked hard at it. And that's indicative of the entire culture lately: They work so hard to make something out of next to nothing. It goes to show that even Zbigniew Brzezinski cannot escape the dumbing-down process. And, 'Yale University' — If you're so enlightened, with all your resources, why can't you prevent the societal collapse, or forestall it in the least?[]

When I talked about all of this with Dana, months ago, she suggested that perhaps Brzezinski didn't even believe in the book and that it was released as some sort of propaganda. I have to reiterate, however, after considering this long and hard, that I think Brzezinski does believe in these vague, pointless, contradictory statements of his. And I fail to see how Strategic Vision could be of any propagandistic value: as noted above, Brzezinski's reading audience is simply not that large, and, moreover, the book itself does not point its readers in any sure direction. Pretty poor propaganda. (One might as well sit potential readers down in front of a television, play five or six commercials, and then send them on their way; that would have just as much — just as little — effect as Brzezinski's 200 pages here.) Aside from his personal and professional vanity, I cannot imagine why the book was even produced. And even if he were lying, attempting to manipulate on a very complex level — what difference would that possibly make if the end product is simply so poor and ineffective? But, beyond that, what difference would it make even if the latest book was as good as Between Two Ages — or as good as The Technological Society itself? Like his fellow countryman Kaczynski, Brzezinski can write anything he wants — it won't do any good or make the system conform to his personal imagining of how everything could or should be. Writing is useless.

After finishing Strategic Vision I decided, out of curiosity, to check in with Brzezinski's counterpart on the right, Henry Kissinger, to see if the other ancient American mastermind had also declined intellectually, in keeping with the rest of us. Kissinger's latest was On China. While this book is written better and smarter than Strategic Vision, all Kissinger has given us is a rather dry memoir of his dealings with China in the 1970s. I didn't finish it, but from what I read the book seemed more honest and realistic about China's irrepressible rise.

Shortly afterwards, however, Kissinger appeared on my television screen, during one of those rare instances when I have it on while eating dinner. After a few rapid-fire questions about the fly-by-night politics of the day, the interviewer devoted most of the segment to FIFA and the World Cup. Kissinger had apparently been asked to help the world soccer body tackle problems by becoming part of an 'anti-corruption squad'. This is apparently how the talents and intellect of the most influential statesman of the last half-century should be used. 'I am a sports fan,' Kissinger said, 'baseball, football — and I go to a lot of international soccer matches and to all the World Cup games. . . . I'm a great soccer fan.' The interview was cut short, because Kissinger was late for his birthday party; but regarding FIFA he made it clear that 'the contribution, if any, that I can make, is to ensure that there's never any dispute about the ethics in which decisions are made about a sport that billions of people watch.' The temptation to contrast this to the ethics of Kissinger's political associations is too great. (He evidently cares more about ethics in sports than in global politics.) Most of all, however, I was simply struck by the fact that even the great Henry Kissinger evidently has fallen prey to sports fanaticism, the pastime of the masses . . . this shameful obsession with children's games. At least in Rome, long before technique became autonomous, the gladiatorial arenas concerned matters of life and death, and the emperors and senators used the games — the offer of 'bread and circuses' — without succumbing to the spectacle themselves. (And in this regard, they — the rulers of the past, not the forecasted rulers of the future — were more like C.G. Darwin's 'wild' guardian class.) But I've seen the last two American presidents spend inordinate amounts of time at sporting events . . . So it's easy to suspect 'They're playing this up for the masses, pretending to be just like the fans in the stands.' And to an extent that's probably true. But if someone like Henry Kissinger is obsessed with sports, then the cultural 'dumbing down' really has worked its way up to the highest levels. It would be funny if it wasn't so scary, to realize that the most powerful people in the world are so distracted, delusional and silly. (It's a world of trickle-up silliness, with the avatar of Joker sitting on the throne.)

25. My Own Stupid 'Awakening': It happened about five years ago, when I was still studying in Japan. It was the very long, very rainy summer, after I had completed my thesis but before I had to defend it. I thought I had finally freed up my schedule enough to do some extensive traveling on the islands there, for basically the first time since I'd arrived, three years previous, but then I became bedridden.

It was brought on by a strange eye condition. It felt as though an air bubble were trapped behind my right eye, pushing it outward. There was a similar pain above the eye as well, toward the center of my forehead; it felt like something was pushing outward from within my skull. I stopped wearing contacts and went back to glasses, and that helped a bit. But wearing glasses has always made me feel disoriented, if not outright 'high', so this wasn't a very good solution. I found a salve cream, the sort of thing athletes would put on sprained ankles or pulled muscles, and I would rub that onto my forehead and into my right eyelid; that would make me feel a lot better, but probably it was just the stinging sensation distracting me from the usual irritation.[] I think the condition developed due to my being out in the wind so often that spring. There was always so much wind, coming up from the rocky shore, when I would walk down to campus. My eyes hadn't felt right in months, but in July the severity of the problem just exploded. I was awakened one night by intense pain in both eyes, mainly in the right. There was orange pus all in them and they were extremely sensitive to light. I kept them shut as much as possible, put icepacks on them, and that helped to an extent. The pus never returned, but the 'air bubble' problem worsened, and to make matters worse I felt interminably drowsy, and lousy. I couldn't shake it, and I had nothing to do with myself anyway, just waiting for my thesis examination. All of my friends had left for the summer, and I was stuck there. Having become ridiculously sensitive to light, I began sleeping — or trying to sleep — during the day. I tried to become nocturnal.

Sometimes late at night I would go out, and either do some shopping in the small 24-hour convenience shops, wearing sunglasses — like a dumbass — as I did so, because those places are always so brightly lit; or else I would break into student housing complexes, and steal food from the shared kitchens. (I still had working passcodes from one of the buildings I used to live in and from the building where my 'aunt's' office was.) I won't lie to you: I only felt a little bad about this. I could talk about how pressed for money I was: I could say that I didn't have enough to see a proper doctor about my eyes, for example (not that I'd want to see a doctor anyway). Or I could impress upon you how absolutely overstocked the students' refrigerators and freezers were; 'They didn't need all this food,' I could say. 'They would probably never eat it all and end up throwing it away.' Or it would be very easy and pleasing for me to romanticize how lovely it was for me to slip into these places at 3:30 a.m. or so, and not have to turn any lights on to do my business, because the silver moon would always be shining brilliantly. But, honestly, mostly, stealing was just something to do that was practical and exciting. It fit in well with my lifestyle that summer. I remember taking a lot of frozen pizzas and parsnips, in particular. I ate parsnips for the first time then because they were there to steal.

When I wasn't sleeping or stealing, I'd usually be lying in bed with my eyes closed, listening to audio recordings of an old radio show from the early 1980s, Open Mind with Bill Jenkins. By chance I had found an mp3 archive of this online, and I downloaded the entire catalogue. I needed something to listen to, because my eyes hurt so much that I couldn't read. I'd rub some athlete's salve all over my head and eyelids, pull the covers over me — never knowing what time it was — and play four-hour episode after four-hour episode of Open Mind, all about such ludicrous subject matter. Looking back on this period, the strange thing is that I don't think I ever laughed at any of it — my flatmate would have inquired into that, I'm sure, would have asked me what I was laughing about, like a madman, all day long holed away in my room — but it seems like I did, it seemed like I was laughing through all of it. I'm sure I must have had a frozen smile on my face; I was sure as hell laughing on the inside. Open Mind came out of southern California at the height of the New Age craze; the broadcasts featured serious (i.e., ridiculous) discussions about alien visitations, out-of-body experiences, ELF (extremely low frequency) mind-control, past life regressions, and conspiracies of all sorts. Bill Jenkins was totally genuine, but also totally gullible, believing any outlandish story or theory that anyone had about anything, as long as it was weird. He would patronize skeptical callers, audibly rolling his eyes at them. But he was a great host, usually very friendly and personable. He had a great warmth in his voice: 'Living where the living's bright . . . In the gorgeous California sun . . . We call the show Open Mind because we feel you need to have one. Every week we try to get you to use your imagination . . . to discover what's really going on in this fantastic universe of ours. We like to say that everyone has their own little reality box in which they understand the world. Well, I'm Bill Jenkins and tonight I'm going to try stretching that old reality box of yours just a little . . . bit . . . wider . . .' It was a wonderful, hilarious, very creative program, and I would have to recommend overdosing on Open Mind to anyone else who might find themselves in a position resembling the one I found myself in that summer.

I never really came back from it, though, locked away with Open Mind. Or, I came back from it in the sense that I got through it, but I wasn't remotely the same person. There's a temptation here to make another sort of play on words: I found myself but lost it, or something like that. After a certain point, I couldn't not listen. I had to go forward, and I couldn't come back. Different factors in my life — some of which I can't mention here — were coming together, combined with my strange sickness and fatigue — and I do feel that Open Mind was a major catalyst. Even though I never really believed in anything I heard Bill Jenkins and friends say — I was laughing at them more than with them — their words still did something to me, simultaneously activated and shut down different processes inside me, put the key in my lock or whatever — a lock I didn't realize was there, and maybe it had been locked for good reason.

But, sad to say, it was Batman that turned the key.

I had ventured out one rainy afternoon — and they were all rainy afternoons that summer — because it was so gloomy and cloudy that my eyes didn't hurt, and I went to the local comic shop. It was the first time I'd been in one of those places in a good ten years. I had cashed in my check from the psychology department; they couldn't ever find me a placement, but they'd been able to give me work for an hour a week, making photocopies and stapling them together. It came to about 9,000 yen, or $100. That's what I made in an entire semester, my last semester as a grad student. I blew it all on a Batman comic — a hardcover collection of them, actually — that had just been released. It was a gigantic tome, an 'omnibus' edition they called it. The clerk — young, friendly, balding, and wearing a Superman t-shirt — smiled to himself as he rang up my purchase, as if he were laughing at what a miserable existence my life was as I stood there, soaked, incommunicable, inconsolable and not caring, wearing sunglasses on the blackest day of the year. Opening the door to leave, I folded the shopping bag over and stuck it inside my jacket. It was still pouring out and I didn't have an umbrella.

It would develop into one of the greatest obsessions I have ever known, but the first time I read this Batman story, I was only moderately impressed. I was pleased with my purchase and happy to know that comics with a fairly literary sensibility were still being written. But nothing more. It would take a few more weeks alone in my room, ducking my flatmate as he came and went, listening to a hundred more Open Minds, undertaking a dozen more burglarious excursions in the twilight, until I began to think back to the comic book, replaying the narrative and looping its phrases over and over again in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that there was something not quite right about what I had read. To try and describe it — It was the death of everything I had known up to that point in life. What terrifying secret was unfolding? It was a curious insanity that beckoned me onward, with the promise — offered for a limited time only — of showing me a shattering truth meant only for myself. All of this from a comic book full of costumed characters and onomatopoeia.[]

The best way to explain the actual story would be to say that Batman was attacked by a figment of his imagination that had become real. Or at least, that's what it seemed like to him at first. The story was full of opaque symbolism and portentous phrases. The Joker had experienced brain damage, having been shot in the head by a Batman impersonator, and was placed in custody; but everyone — Batman and Robin and all the police — suspected that perhaps the Joker was somehow still orchestrating many criminal events from his jail cell. His mad ravings sounded like the wailings of a Delphic sibyl. He talked of being in league with the Devil himself, and none of the heroes could be certain how figurative or how literal that statement might prove to be. The surface-level fisticuffs — it was a comic book, after all — pitted Batman against a shadowy criminal organization that seemed to originate in an old black-and-white film — a fiction within our fiction — that Bruce Wayne had watched as a child. Batman was in disbelief about all of this — 'It was just a movie!' — especially when the villains began to hint that they knew his secret identity and everything else about him. He suspected that this was all a big bluff, but after a certain point he needed to, in his words, 'consider a particular possibility that had always haunted me. What if there were an ultimate adversary out there, unseen? An absolute mastermind, closing in for the kill. An insatiable foe who'd calculated every weakness. Who had access to allies, weapons, tactics and resources I couldn't even imagine. A villain whose plots and grand designs were so old, so vast, so elaborate, that they went unnoticed by humanity, unnoticed by me . . . until it was too late. How could I possibly deal with that, if it were real?'

Now I look back on this description and see it as a foreshadowing of technique as described by Ellul.[] Batman feared that an invisible, omnipotent adversary would work behind the scenes to trap him in a net. Technique has become a similarly invisible adversary of humanity. For more than a hundred years now, most people (yourself included, I'm sure) have often had a vague but probably important sense that 'something's wrong'. Something's gone wrong in the world, but we don't know what. Some of us have been swayed to blame everything on the communists, or on the Republicans, or on various fundamentalists, or on the greedy rich, or on the lazy poor, or on the Jews, or on antiquated white people, or on immigrants, or on any other scapegoat. And anyone who falls for any one of those explanations can see, very easily, how most of the other explanations are flawed. And none of the freedom fighters who have crusaded against their favorite scapegoats have really improved the world. It's been technology, the physical outcropping of technique, that's given us — some of us — a better world, a better life, in some ways, sometimes, to an extent. But there again too, some people such as Kaczynski have chosen technology itself as the culprit — because they can see it, and it's all around us. But the driving force, the secret agent that has stolen agency from humanity, is invisible. That's why people, in their frustration, have been compelled to mistakenly blame everything on villains they can see. And really, technique isn't a villain; it's an autonomous force playing itself out according to its will and whims. Unlike Batman's ultimate villain, technique does not have emotions; it does not hate us and want to do us harm. But, also unlike Batman's ultimate villain, unfortunately, technique is real.

The end of the comic didn't provide any real answers, not even to its own internal mystery. The mastermind, if he existed, remained behind the scenes, unproven, and maddeningly speculative. Were the Joker and the mastermind one and the same? Was the Joker only pretending to work for someone else? Was he executioner and judge and condemned inmate, all in one? I guess everything was 'to be continued' in the next installment, which wasn't available yet, not in Japan anyway. Maybe my recapitalization here doesn't do the material justice, doesn't convey just how deeply I was taken in by the uneasy poetry — I really would use that word — of the story, the provocative puzzles, the powerfully incomplete statements, with an inchoate wisdom that seemed to be a better, a fuller artistic expression — precisely because it was all left unfinished.

All told, I must have reread that comic book fifty times in the next month. But then I didn't read it through from cover to cover; instead I would focus on individual chapters and scenes. Sometimes I'd open to a particular two-page spread and just stare at it, literally, for an hour. Reading by lamplight, not caring about the pain, I'd drag my sore eyes slowly over and over the same lines and drawings. The writing seemed more curious the longer I looked at it. The Joker's prophetic rantings always seemed odd, but after a while everyone's dialogue seemed like a series of oblique statements, hinting at something that the characters could never bring themselves to say, maybe because the real truth — the real menace behind it all — was too unbelievable for them to realize, like it literally didn't fit in their heads or couldn't be expressed in human language. I should mention that the way the dialogue looked on the comic page, broken up in the little word balloons — just a few words per line, in other words — began to read like Modernist poetry to me, blank verse, non-rhyming . . . abstract.

Eventually it dawned on me that I needed to learn more about symbolism if I was going to have a better chance of understanding the story. There were chessboard patterns all throughout the comic, and the Joker kept alluding to them ('White and black, the joke and the punchline, nonsense and meaning, randomness and order — and the funniest thing, Batman, is that you'll never know how much of it is intentional, how much of it is a planned pattern vs. how much of it is happenstance!'). There were also a lot of occult designs, and the henchmen of the criminal organization wore grotesque, animalistic masks — each one a bit different, but all of the same style — like something out of Eyes Wide Shut. That movie of Kubrick's kept coming back to me, then. Do you remember when we saw it together in the theater? We were both very moved by it, but couldn't say exactly what it did to us or what it was actually trying to say. I had seen it several more times over the years, and it always gave me that uneasy feeling, because it seemed incomplete in a worrying way. The supposed movie Bruce Wayne had seen as a child — it too was also about two lovers whose lives and fidelities were toyed with by an impossibly wealthy, devilish and nefarious organization. The Batman comic threw in a gambling aspect: the villains were said to gamble on human souls, sometimes betting on how well they could toy with their prey and how much they could corrupt the innocent, but usually their game of choice was poker. Investigating every aspect of this, I learned that playing cards were based on the tarot, and every suit and number had a meaning.

Trying to glean anything that could add to my knowledge of the Batman story, by this time I was watching dozens of documentaries about supposed occult symbolism, particularly as it appeared in advertising and (apparently) in politics. But I was having to discount so much of what these 'alternative researchers' were saying, because so much of it seemed ludicrously paranoid, positing grand, omnipotent conspiracies to a degree impossible for humans (or any sentient lifeforms) to orchestrate. These presenters were indeed the heirs of Open Mind; much of the time I laughed at their silly theories regarding how reality really worked and how everyone alive is trapped in a holographic matrix of symbols and codes.

One day, though, spurred on by the Batman comic again, by Bruce Wayne's nagging suspicions about invisible masterminds and intangible but dominant forces, I finally got around to asking myself, 'Who really is in charge of the world? To what extent and how?' Then I had to reconsider a lot of things, and suddenly I had a lot more questions. It was an election year then in the U.S., and right at this moment of personal uncertainty I saw a clip of a presidential candidate telling a roaring, supportive crowd[] that, if elected, he would create a domestic security force just as powerful as the U.S. military. Hearing that sent me into a tailspin of fear and worry, which I'm not going to recount in much detail. I began looking into every conspiracy theory. And while I never believed that a race of interdimensional shape-shifting reptiles secretly ruled the cosmos and bribed our own leaders to enslave humanity, I still made plenty of time to entertain such ideas. Because they were entertaining. So I learned all these wacky theories, and then learned to laugh at them.

I started that summer by sleepwalking through life, so to speak, but by the end of it I felt like I was awaking up for the very first time. In a strict sense, I didn't snap out of it until I encountered Ellul's work, which instantly triggered and emboldened every reservation I had about the conspiracy theorists: No one is really 'in charge of the world'; there appears to be more collusion and surefire planning than there actually is, simply because all of it exists within and is provoked by a near-autonomous technological system. Most people don't really even think about how the world is run; so once you start to think hard about it, it's easy to opt for all sorts of elaborate explanations involving dark cabals and thousand-year-long business plans. The truth is a lot more horrifying: No one's really in charge; the system is largely running itself — probably running itself into the ground.

As the days wore on, I would still relapse into reading that Batman story, again and again. My conspiracy research had told me about the MKULTRA mind-control program — which was very real and which Bill Clinton actually apologized for — and it was useful to view the comic from that angle. The Batman figure who shot the Joker was an imposter — an impersonator — just a lunatic dressed up in a costume — but he had been 'programmed' to do this, to try and do something Batman himself would never do: use a gun and kill someone. The Joker is said to know Batman better than anyone else, but even he was evidently fooled by the shooter. 'You broke the rules!' he tells the real Batman. 'You shot me! Blasted me right in the forehead!' 'That wasn't me!' Batman pleads, in a strange act of begging the Joker for forgiveness. And there were other 'MK' resonant elements in the story as well. There were other 'replacement Batmen', Gotham City cops who had been brainwashed by the Army to automatically become Batman — really think that they were Batman — once a certain signal was beamed into the sky, or once a certain radio frequency hit the airwaves. The government had created this precaution because the existence of Batman had become integral to social cohesion, and thus they would need someone to fill in if Batman ever faltered or fell.

Then I began wondering, What if the same thing had happened to the Joker? Was that the secret of this comic book, which didn't make sense? Previous stories had implied that the Joker had some sort of multiple personality disorder, because sometimes he was more or less an innocent prankster, but sometimes he was violent and deadly, and his M.O. from case to case seemed to have no pattern, only the suggestion of a pattern so large that no one else could quite see it or predict what he was going to do next. But was this story implying that, just as there were replacement Batmen, there were replacement Jokers as well? It wasn't a case of one lunatic acting radically different all the time; it was a series of different guys, and the joke — or one of the jokes — was that they had fooled everyone into thinking that they were the same person every time out. There had to be multiple Jokers. How else could he have survived a pointblank gunshot to the forehead, as he had seemed to do after the first chapter of the comic? That Joker must have died then, but a new one must have taken his place, between issues, or even between panels. Oh, in his next appearance they showed the Joker with a circular wound between his brows — almost a 'third eye' — but that could have been done with makeup.

It seems more likely that the Joker should be understood as a role or a title, like a president or author or artist or devil. Different people, in different times and places, fill these roles. And to a large degree they become the role: sometimes they understand themselves to be the role that they are taking on; sometimes others insist that they be understood as occupying the role that they're assigned; and sometimes both dynamics occur simultaneously. For example, no matter how untalented or unoriginal a singer might be — no matter how little he or she contributes to the actual song — the record industry has an information field on each of its products that says 'artist', and anyone who can get their name in one of those slots can start to think of themselves with as much pretension as they want. On the other hand, we have someone like Elvis, who didn't care to be thought of as sophisticated, and didn't write the songs that he made famous — but many industry and pop culture experts insist on calling him a great artist. Or take the role of devil: for quite a while now, Adolf Hitler has functioned as our society's devil. Would he want to be thought of that way? Probably not. Would he want to be the devil of people like us? Possibly. Did he ever enjoy thinking of himself as evil in any way? In the end, it doesn't matter; he is simply our devil, no matter what the intention behind it or the accuracy behind it. For us, he is as bad as Satan once was. — The point is, as I've hinted at before, I think 'Joker' should be thought of similarly, as an almost parasitic role, an honorific that jumps from person to person, onto whoever is meddling with the system most at any given time. Maybe Ted Kaczynski was playing the Joker for a while. Alston Chase, who wrote a study on the Unabomber called A Mind for Murder, noted that Kaczynski enjoyed being interviewed via letter, that he was 'an indefatigable correspondent' and that his communications had 'great humor' in them. Nonetheless, when the Unabomber got caught and went to jail, then it seems that Osama bin Laden became the Joker. Roland Jacquard's biography notes the Saudi terrorist's 'dark humor'; elsewhere there are anecdotes about Osama's men bowing in prayer, then flipping their robes up to moon the silent American helicopters watching them overhead; and recently it was revealed that bin Laden used to wear big, goofy, clownish cowboy hats, to hide his face from drones. And after Osama, I would say that the next Joker would be Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, who infamously said that super-bankers like him did 'God's work'. He later insisted that he intended the comment as a joke, and he probably did. A newspaper reported that 'behind closed doors, Blankfein likes to joke (but not really) that he has "attained perfection" '. A Joker should always make insane claims like that every once in a while, especially right after he's helped wreck the world.

And I should underscore the point that I don't even like the Joker. I never have. I've found the character tiresome, tacky, gimmicky. But I think that's sort of the point, or at least it should be. The Joker isn't funny. The Joker laughs at other people's misery, and that's bad. The joke is that there isn't any joke — just as there wasn't any second password in Eyes Wide Shut[] — and it's a mistake to think that there's something more to it, or something to redeem here. The point is, these tricks exist, and this madcap manipulation, brutalization, and dehumanization of people does go on; but the very last thing the public — the prey — should do is consent to laugh at their own destruction. The point is, there's a gleeful force that's abusing humanity — The Joker can be seen as an anthropomorphic representation of this force — and the last thing you should do is learn to laugh along with him, or want to become him, empathize with him, apologize for him.

These were the sorts of things I was thinking about towards the end of summer, as I stirred from my slumber and idleness, as my eyes started feeling relatively normal again. To some degree, running these ideas through my head helped. But in a more specific, realistic sense, I snapped out of it when I had to defend my thesis that fall, and directly after that my 'aunt' got me the assignment with Jamie, to interview and diagnose and indict all the artists, and then to ghostwrite for them, all of which lead me to find Dana.

26. False-Face Fascist: 'There's no reason for obesity to be legal.' This is something Dana wrote on her website. 'Do you want your nation to be known as a place full of fat, lazy pigs?' she continues.

'Gluttony shows a lack of self-respect and a lack of consideration for community. People should not be allowed to flaunt their unhealthy lack of self-control before the eyes of the public. By doing so they drag down societal standards and also lower the morale of everyone who encounters them. No one can benefit from seeing another person's disgusting, sickening lard.

'Those who are overweight can first be given a stern warning by the state. Some subsidized assistance with diet and exercise programs will then be made available to them, for a limited time. If they are unable to show improvement after a month or two, they will be treated to an all-expense-paid vacation to a forced labor camp. There they can break rocks in the hot sun until perhaps they learn their lesson — sweating away enough of their gross fatness to earn re-entry into general society. Such internment will also teach these lazy slobs the value of work — real, hard, useful work.'

It sounds like a joke, right? It should almost go without saying that Dana herself had never held anything remotely resembling a real, hard, useful job in her entire life.

At first I did think she was joking when she said she'd become a fascist. I thought maybe she had learned that Jamie was planning to release some of her old material, repackaging it for another singer; and possibly she wanted to sabotage the project, because it'd no longer be marketable if the public thought the songs had initially been 'written by a Nazi'. But this wasn't the case. Dana didn't know that Jamie was reusing her songs, nor did she care about anything 'his dirty, disgusting, Jewish music industry' was doing. When I asked about the why of all this, she shrugged and said she viewed her new fascist philosophy as 'a natural extension of everything we were talking about before. You'll get here eventually. Or, you would and should, if you don't pussy out or purposely get in your own way.' It didn't make sense to me then and it never will. To hazard the best guess I can offer, I think Dana changed in this big, awful, political way simply because she had been traumatized so much by the modern world. She needed to settle for an easy answer, a self-satisfied outlook, a bold and truly counter-cultural platform: fascism. Stupid, deplorable fascism.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to figure out this whole globalized system, to any real degree? The most complicated (profitably overcomplicated, redundant), most confusing, ever-changing social system ever on the planet? Do you have a sense of how daunting it is to try and figure it out, without settling for these contrived explanations that have naturally arisen in our artificial culture, these partial explanations which effectively protect and hide the whole picture from exposure? Do you know how hard it is to look past the distractions, to understand something about what exactly this mess you're seeing is, and then put it all into words?

As I said, before her fascist turn she had a manifesto, but then her computer crashed. And that manifesto wasn't 100% accurate in its explanation of reality — but she was close. She was close, then; she was real close. (Honest!) If that holy document wasn't lost, there'd be no need for this letter. Her manifesto would have manifested, would have effected — and I do mean effected — the world. A new, better world. Maybe that's a dream, but if it is . . . I can't wake up from it, can't shake myself awake. Believe me, I'd like to shortchange all this and say it was no big deal, but it really did feel like we — like she — was on the verge of changing everything, with a manifesto that she could put into practice while showing the world an obviously better alternative. I wanted to help her as much as I could, and I tried.

At first, however, it was a huge relief to both of us when her files were lost. She was tired of writing, of trying to explain all this so even an idiot might be able to understand some of it, with every qualification made and every counter-argument thought of in advance and addressed — but then she didn't have to struggle to figure it all out anymore. And for my part, I thought, 'So now we can just live, without having to theorize all the time.' (Because I really hate theorizing.) But what neither of us realized was how reassuring that writing, that stockpile of reliable words and formulas, had been for her, as a background presence — there to consult when she needed it. And now it wasn't there; now she had no rulebook to refer to whenever she needed to reinforce her own hard-won beliefs. It must have been disorienting and disconcerting for her, especially now that I had convinced her to come back to first-world civilization, to live with me in America — rural America, but America nonetheless — where she was forced to be faced with exponential artificiality and insanity, without a bible with which to bash it and combat it and ward it away from her mind. 'I know I'm right to dissent from what I see here, but I have forgotten the exact phrases and spells with which to renounce and banish these troubling modernisms from my mind.' That is how it went for her and eventually, despite my attempts to keep her in the small space of sanity we had made for ourselves, she lost the tether and all of a sudden was thrown into the maelstrom.

That's when she became vulnerable to Nazism, because it was a way out of the chaos. By embracing it she could still reject the rest of the system, in much the same way that she had been doing, while finally receiving the psychological reassurances of a convenient ideology. She had held back for so long. I know how painful it is to be alone in the ideological wilderness like that, refusing to throw in with any of these parties. I was and am at home in America, however, while she was a fish out of water here. It was too much for her. So finally, because the system is too big and she needed to reduce it in order to be able to say something specific and nasty about it, and gain a thrilling confidence from doing so, she agreed upon a drastically reductionist point of view.

Do you understand this, the logic behind what happened here? The world of ideas — of bullshit — has gotten too big; the feeling is there — present in all of us, and in the system itself — that it all needs to be reduced. We rightly decry any 'reductionist' thinking because we know that it doesn't take everything into account and that it is ignoring important things — and in our excessive world there is so much now that seems important. But at the same time we know on a very deep level that all of this is overgrown and out of control and needs — for the good of the planet and for the good of our own wellbeing — needs to be reduced. And the system will reduce things, eventually; eventually, it will fall apart, and probably take a lot of us with it. But many human beings, who are very much involved in the world right now, cannot wait so long. The strain is too great, especially upon the sensitive types who know something is very, very wrong. They need an ideology, the more reductionist the better; and if they can't reduce the actual system, whose materiality is insanely complicated and fixed in place, they will at least reduce it all in their minds.

Dana knew that all popular and trendy and publically accepted outlooks were contrived (or 'kosher', as she would call them now). But after a while she forgot certain things and began to suspect that fascism wasn't nearly as contrived as all the rest. And in fact the other contrived ideologies, the more popular ones, the ones that are still present in a big way — all of which are bullshit — they all really, really hate fascism. So, by her logic, by contrast, fascism started to seem like the answer.

There was a discrepancy here in that — as I tried to point out to her several times — the autonomous technology that has arisen will thwart any individual or collective human effort, fascism obviously included. But Dana would simply say, 'No, a fascist leader would be able to impose laws that curtailed technological development and its anti-human effects.' Nevermind that the Nazis themselves embraced television and spectacle more than anyone. (In 1936 they wheeled early televisions around the country, so that the masses could be held spellbound by the silly Olympic Games that were going on that year.) And nevermind that Hitler and Himler themselves, among many other top Nazis, fell for all sorts of occultist fads — which are, of course, quaggy mental-masturbation techniques. (I have often thought that perhaps British intelligence, for whom Aleister Crowley sometimes worked, developed the trendy spiritualism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries simply as a self-propagating, weaponized technique to cloud the minds of otherwise formidable foreign powers. The rise of someone like Hitler becomes far less troubling once you know that, well, he has bought into a bullshit occult philosophy that will progressively tax his capacity for rational thought and affect his military judgment.) But, no, Dana thought that a fascist superman would indeed be able to withstand and even circumvent the corrupting influences of technology and technique. She was simply mistaken. The fascist ideals, as they emerged in the twentieth century, are themselves contrived, nostalgic, artificial byproducts of evolving technique. The fascists think that, no, they are getting back to the blood and the real. But this pretense is just as false and wrongheaded as the supposedly 'earthy' hippy movement, which was also an artificial reaction of technique and by technique. Whatever real might be there — and I will grant that there is some — has been well harnessed by technique.[]

My contention is that humanity must confront the technillogical problem — even if we lack the agency to change anything, we must at least face the true source of our oppression — rather than blame everything on political enemies and/or Jews. But Dana — who, it may not surprise you, is a quarter Jewish herself — likes having real faces to blame for her problems and perceived victimhood. And, yes, we are all victims, make no mistake. Within an anti-human system, all humans are victims. But the sad thing is that humans like to blame each other for problems that stem from higher powers and realities. And that is not surprising, for at no time in our history have humans ever had to deal with such an unnatural and artificial threat as the one we are living under today. You will find this statement shocking, but until the Modern age man's prejudices against other men actually served him very well, overall. That's simply the truth. Prejudice, distrust, and suspicion were there for a reason. Animal instinct is not to trust those outside your pack. In a natural world (which we don't live in anymore, I know), prejudices like those were more often than not wise. 'Better safe than sorry. Better to err on the side of caution.' Mistakes were obviously made, injustices performed — but it was all collateral damage compared to the assurance of maintaining the structural integrity of human livelihood. That is how it was in the more natural world, in which every human, animal, and species is quite right to distrust everyone and everything else. Things have changed, however, after we've become more domesticated and civilized. Still, it remains in fact more natural for people today to try and blame other people for their problems — because until recently, it often has been other people's fault. That natural instinct now often does us a disservice, within the context of artificial society. So it is a shame that we evidently enjoy blaming other people so much, at this dire point, when we are all collectively at fault for letting this inhuman behemoth continue to grow so large and take ever more control over our society.

To return to our story: Even though I knew we were drifting apart, Dana and me, she still changed so suddenly that it seemed unreal. When we broke up, it seemed fake but it wasn't. At first I thought she had to be playacting and for some reason needed to maintain the act even in my presence, so as never to break character, so she could honestly claim to be a neo-Nazi. My tentative conclusion was that she hated Jamie more than she loved me, that she wanted to tear down his music company more than she wanted to build a life with me, and I didn't like that but I could understand it. Maybe that's the right way to look at things after all: in her, hate and resentment are stronger than love and hope for the future. (And hope may be weak in me, but it is stronger than hate.)

Probably — after all I've written above — you'd think it laughable for me to claim this, but for the last few years I have indeed been extremely optimistic, happy, and excited for the future. Yes. Really. I felt that way before I meant Dana, before I fell in love with her, and those good feelings were raised even higher once I first got to know her. I didn't know I had it in me to be so positive about life, until her rising negativity and dissidence brought it out in me, as a response, at which point I had to try and help her see things in a better light. I was the one always encouraging her, suggesting she look on the bright side, appreciate all the many good things that were still in the world, even as we tried to get to the bottom of what was wrong with everything: 'Yes, there's still plenty of ways for people to live good, happy, authentic, fulfilling lives. I'm sure of it. I know it. I'm beginning to live that way, especially now, with you.' That's what I said to her. She had a hard time believing that such a situation was or would be possible, for me or for herself. But it was the truth. The last year — from the day I met her to the day she left me — was the best twelve months of my life.

Since then there have been times when I couldn't stop myself from asking the stupid question: Why did God or The Universe give all that to me, give it to me so completely, give me so much hope and enjoyment and feeling of belonging to someone else — only to take it away, instantly, cruelly and completely?

Everything good that I had is all gone now; it's all over and it's been over, and I'm still shaken by the jolting loss. (The loss of a nutcase, you might think — and you would be correct — but a nutcase that I loved and felt such kinship with — the only other relationship of comparison was . . . well, the friendship I once had with you.) I feel as though she deliberately ruined things, ruined herself and her reputation, simply in order to prove me wrong — to prove me and my slight but crucially important optimism wrong. From time to time now I find myself thinking, 'Okay, Dana, I guess you were right. You insisted upon it and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy that you made happen: Both of our lives are indeed hopeless. The world is horrible and nothing's worthwhile and it all needs to be burned and everyone is irredeemable and dismaying and evil. You — the woman I loved most — you in your self-destructive mania have finally proven all that to me, by wounding me, shitting on me, and leaving me alone to starve to death. That's how you would leave me, and if you would do that to me — you, after all we went through — then I have a hard time believing in much less fighting for humanity or any human, including myself.'

I want to be very clear in something. I'm sure you've nodded and agreed with me in many of the instances above in which I have criticized and insulted fascism and Nazism. But let me be perfectly honest in a way that I hope you will be mature enough to respect: I do not simply criticize fascism and Nazism out of hand. I do not put them down and throw them out due to the sort of typical Pavlovian response that has been ingrained into every schoolchild in the Western world for the last seventy years. I reject fascism and Nazism not because they are politically incorrect but because I have really, really looked into them, considered all sides of the relevant issues, double- and triple-checked everything, and have continuously arrived at a series of tentative and then final conclusions which tell me that there really is nothing at all to be gained — and so much to be lost — by going in for that sort of ideology.

It follows, then, that I should make the following series of admissions, which are implicit in the above, but which really deserve to be brought out and stated with complete certainty: If I thought that fascism and Nazism would save humanity, then I would become a fascist and a Nazi. The love of my life joined that cause; she wanted me to follow her; my conscience and reason wouldn't let me. But to continue: I should say that I would do whatever it took at this time to save humanity, but I can simply see no course of action, no matter how bold, that would do any good. I want to stress the lengths to which I would go: I would kill almost anyone[] if somehow that meant saving humanity . . . but the fact of the matter is that killing does no good. And I can really see that now, not because authority figures have told me that killing is bad, but because I have gone to a point where I would kill . . . and I can see that it would do no good. I can understand everyone from the American soldier, to the terrorist, to the violent anarchist, to the true communist revolutionary, to the Nazi, to the crazed murderer very well now; and I have been driven along this course, which causes me to understand them, simply because it is the way my life has gone, a series of circumstances, following other interests, most of them purely aesthetic, some of them sexual. I can understand how someone can go in for any of those things, even though I never would. I never had it in me to join the army, but now I know why I never would. I would never have become a Nazi, but now I know why I never would. I would never kill anyone, but now I know why I never would. I can see the psychological and sociological landscape of all these bold decisions people make. And yes I know there's a difference between soldiers called upon to protect one's homeland and lone-wolf killers, but I wouldn't be either of them: I wouldn't be a killer, but I wouldn't be a soldier, either. Call me a coward, but I am not an intellectual coward. (An intellectual idiot, maybe, but not a coward.) I am risking a lot here; I have gone the lengths to understand these processes.

What I do not understand, however — and perhaps I should hope that I never come to understand this — is what leads people over the last inch of the edge, what causes them to decide that murder would be worth it, that it would effect change or lead to a personal catharsis, a feeling that one has done one's duty and flourished by snuffing out life. I do not believe that these various types of murderers got to a point like the one I'm at now and then somehow took a step beyond. That sort of mental geography does not outline the situation. I do not stand with these murderers, nor do I stand where they once stood, but I feel as though from my vantage point I can trace their mental journey, see the path left by their footprints, up until the moment before they decided to throw in for mass murder. But I do not have a real, clear sense of where they went — or why and how they went there, psychologically speaking — in that next, last step.

I do have a hypothesis, however.

We know that every sort of working ideology or lifestyle only functions because of the power of narrative. Anyone from cult members, to followers of political moments, to cognizant citizens, to soldiers, to terrorists, to any combination of the above — they all need narratives to believe in and follow. It doesn't have to be a detailed story; it can be a very vague or nonsensical story — even a story that the adherents themselves hardly think about or scrutinize — but it needs to be there. The West, part and parcel, has experienced an increasingly fitful and frustrated malaise over the last generations because its great narratives have broken down. Modernity gave the West a stockpile of unprecedented power, with the stipulation that its binding narratives would eventually unravel. — And it is no accident that the literal Modernist narratives — the great works of High Modernist literature — themselves had fractured narratives, or were seen to lack coherent narratives. To give perhaps the best example, Kafka actually left his novels incomplete: no final chapter, or else chapters would be missing toward the end, and he was seemingly content to have left things this way, having evidently grown bored with writing each work beyond a certain point. Is it within such ideological narrative gaps, fractures, incompletions, that murder can enter into a would-be adherent's mind? Does that explain some of the murderous types listed above? They see the world as they understand it to be breaking down — for their narratives are failing — and so they become convinced that shocking and violent acts will somehow redeem their ideologies, give certain stories much-needed, flourishing endings. Is that how it happens? Literal gunshots to fill in the ideological holes?

•

'These American politicians — I would rather kill them than vote for them.' This is something Dana said to me toward the end. How would you like to wake up one clear spring morning and bring your lovely companion breakfast in bed, only to hear her casually mouth those words, apropos of nothing, as she peppers her eggs?

I'm still interested in her . . . platonically, in theory. Why? How? I don't have much animosity toward her. You have to understand, I still tolerate and not infrequently enjoy the company of other people . . . those who vote, whose elected representatives actually affect reality, often in a negative, insulting, and indirectly violent way that is truly harmful for humanity. Dana's ideologies, on the other hand, while ruder and more threatening on the surface, actually influence very little of reality (thank god) and in truth have little to do with reality, period. She sits on the internet all day, effectively creating simulacra in which the outpouring of fascist rants can potentially make her and a small circle of likeminded space-cadets feel great. Is she dangerous? She is vaguely, potentially dangerous. Meanwhile, those who actually vote for major politicians bear real responsibility and can really be connected to all sorts of scams, wars, and technologically-assisted anti-human measures that these politicians are moved to put into place. What I'm saying is that, from where I'm standing, you are worse than her, and your ideology — today, in reality, not in theory — is worse than that of a Nazi, because unlike a Nazi your ideology actually has teeth and a real presence. Fascism is totally irrelevant, hopeless and pointless at this point, and that is in fact a major part of the reason why Dana's new allegiance disappointments me, because she has not only dedicated herself to an ideology that is ugly, but to an ideology that is impotent.

Remember, I was supposed to go to the Philippines and bring her back to be a big popstar, someone who was relevant. Even if her music was all silliness, still it would have been very, very relevant to many people's lives. I never intended to do that, never intended to help her become a popstar, and she never really wanted that anyway, even though that sort of major fame and influence was right there for her, for the taking. I deceived Jamie by telling him I'd try and do the job as it was offered. I wanted to bring Dana back out of the jungle for a selfish reason: in order for she and I to get through all this shit together, to help each other live and navigate through the corridors of this thing called life together. Instead, as it turns out, I brought her back so she could become a keyboard Nazi.

Originally, I wanted to be confronted with her, with her intelligence and what she was saying at the time when I first read her essays, which impressed me so much. I looked up to her, figuratively more than literally (for she was tall but hated heels). I admired her in more than one sense. When you looked at her, saw her proud, defiant stance, and the gleam in her eyes, it was impossible to think that her cause wouldn't triumph over any adversity. Regarding her (previous) philosophy, there was no theoretical difficulty that she couldn't explain away. Regarding a prospective 'return-to-nature' mass migration, back toward a life in the wild, there were no pragmatic concerns that she couldn't give you the confidence to see beyond. 'I'm sure they'll work themselves out,' she would say of any alleged problems. 'After all, deep down we all know how to live in a more natural way; if we simply focus on our truest instincts and do whatever seems right, every step of the way, we'll reach our goal.' She was equal to any task, and there was nothing that she seemed afraid to confront, no idea that her way of thinking couldn't gently strong-arm and commandeer, no opposing or perpendicular line that she couldn't make parallel to her own — to our own — trajectory. It was so beautiful that it was frightening, like she had the ability to change the tune of any other song, harmonize it with her own, and triumph over it. I never 'worshipped' her or thought of her as a 'goddess', the way some men grovel before women, but it was like meeting a real hero. — And so I guess if I look back on it, maybe it was doomed from the start, if that's how I was trying to think of her, not as a goddess but as a heroine more than as a woman, as a figure more than a person. But now . . . I don't want to be 'confronted with her' anymore. I don't go to her new websites or read what she has to say. It's sad to see her doing this to herself, banging her head against the wall forever. It's just a waste of time. If anyone on earth could make fascism work, it would be her — she has so much charisma — but I know that it's all going to waste and she won't succeed. Thankfully.

It was an inside joke between us, but sometimes I would call her 'Kurtz', after the Joseph Conrad character who broke out of the corporation's control, went into the jungle and set up his own primal stronghold. Kurtz adapted to the ways of the natives while simultaneously causing the natives to follow him as a god. And looking over trivia the other day, I saw that Apocalypse Now (based on Heart of Darkness) was in fact filmed in the Philippines. Dana's time there always seemed unreal to me, so maybe that's what she was doing there in the first place, filming a movie or acting out a strange sequel, without knowing that the cameras, the recording devices, were rolling, and that she was — and perhaps still is — documenting a sort of disaster movie.

Or probably she was never actually in the Philippines at all. She was just living off of her mother in Seattle the whole time (or in London with her father), pretending to be a bigshot on the internet, waiting for a sucker like me to come along.

27. Batman as Sublimated Serial Killer: There are people for whom the Batman/Joker dynamic seems almost the quintessential human relationship. They think it really says something, though they never really get around to explaining exactly what it's supposed to mean. In fact they give no detail whatsoever, besides sometimes making very vague allusions to something about 'good and evil' or 'chaos vs. order'. One would think that the most important character conflict in the history of literature and art (supposedly) would offer us something more precise. Yet the nature of the Batman/Joker duality remains unclear: at the center there seems to be something there, but it is occluded by childishness, nostalgia, and cartoon violence — and this obfuscation persists precisely because it is the stuff and nonsense that these people enjoy. The half-hearted aspiration toward something more — the prospect of perhaps someday actually investigating a profound meaning that allegedly exists behind the comic strip — is simply an excuse to read comic books and watch action movies. Nothing more.

As noted before, I have never been a fan of the Joker. I used to enjoy the concept of Batman, but the Joker always ruined it for me. I prefer the serious Dark Knight, and the inclusion of the Joker's silliness just seemed to . . . ruin and cheapen everything. I for one — and maybe I am alone in this — cannot indulge in angst whenever something or someone like the Joker is around. And probably that is a good thing.

In the process of this long investigation, however — for that's what this letter has become, an investigation — I believe I have hit upon the truth behind 'Batman/Joker'. It's not order/chaos; it's fear/humor. Both Batman and the Joker experienced childhood trauma: When they were young and innocent, something or someone imprinted them with an intense inner fear. The Joker reacted to this trauma by laughing, by learning how to have a good time while doing things that traumatized and scared others, preferably innocents. Batman, on the other hand, made it his business to strike fear in the hearts of the guilty — because it was a criminal who struck fear into his young, innocent heart by killing his parents in front of him. Both characters' tactics are shockingly similar to the rationale of a certain category of serial killer, the sort — usually those who experienced abuse or violent trauma as children — who want their victims to suffer. Batman definitely wants his victims to suffer — but his escape cause, of course, is that these victims are criminals, so probably they deserve to suffer anyway. And Batman does not kill them, so Batman is not like them in that one, defining attribute. He is completely different from criminals, that is what he tells himself. And he is right: Batman isn't like a generic criminal — Batman is more like a serial killer who has done his best to sublimate and find a fairly acceptable way of justifying his need to hunt, surveil, entrap, and inflict pain and judgment on those whom he considers obviously guilty. The fact that Batman targets criminals is actually arbitrary — a happy coincidence. If a doctor killed Bruce Wayne's parents, Batman would target doctors — or perhaps even people he suspected of being doctors. If a clown killed Bruce Wayne's parents, Batman would target clowns. All he needs to do — the root of his passion — is to keep transferring the fear and trauma he felt as a little boy onto the sort of person who made him feel that fear and trauma in the first place. What else does Batman do? He sends fathers and husbands and sons away to jail for a long time. In other words, he breaks up families — just as a criminal once broke up his family by killing his parents.

I'm not saying that what Batman does is right or wrong. I'm simply saying, this is the dynamic; this is how he would work, psychologically. He's a sublimated serial killer. He can't kill because he does not want to become the very thing that traumatized him; rather, he wants to get revenge on the killer. Whereas the Joker becomes a serial killer by twisting the emotions involved — switching fear into laughter, using his laughter to cause others fear — Batman replicates the same fearfulness, projects it onto his chosen targets, and in the process becomes something that is somewhat more socially acceptable than a serial killer or common criminal.

The conflict between Batman and the Joker is basically an argument, between two different types of psychopath, regarding how one's childhood trauma can best be dealt with going forward via cathartic violence and lawlessness. The tactic of the Joker is one of sarcasm and denial. The tactic of Batman is one of resentment and obsession. I'm not here to decide for you which would be healthier; I don't have enough experience with childhood trauma.

28. I Don't Blame the Politicians . . . I Blame the Voters: The leaders of each and every nation play big games because if they didn't someone else would, and these games — especially the wargames — seem to be an awful lot of fun for them, even if many of them are based on (what I would call) 'pretentious fakeouts' and grandstanding. It's all too much devilish fun. The grandstanding itself must be a lot of fun. When these leaders make speeches — it may as well be like when Kafka read The Trial aloud: The speaker is on the verge of laughter and everyone in the know, who gets the joke being played on the public, is also on the verge of laughter, and the funniest thing about the whole situation is that in fact many in the audience tend to take it seriously. Pundits and professors in particular go far out of their way to try and take politicians' words as seriously as possible; they play a game of seeing just how seriously they can take all of these arbitrary words and promises. That is really hilarious to the politicians themselves. They are laughing at you behind your back when you take them seriously. Yes, they are.

It no longer matters whether politicians lie or not. Perhaps it never mattered. What they say functions only due to its level of propaganda value. Whether the politician believes what s/he says is completely irrelevant to the process. I suspect that most of them — the best of them — behave as 'method actors'; they become the role they are expected to play, and then they attempt to utter with the greatest conviction whatever words they sense the system to be incentivizing and demanding from them at any given moment. If you took the greatest actors and politicians and hooked them up to lie detectors, they would be able to tell the wildest fantasies and nonetheless be judged truthful. You could say that they are quite skilled at double-think; probably the politicians themselves can, at times, become willfully confused enough to believe in the obviously absurd and contradictory things they say. Why shouldn't the politicians themselves be capable of believing in it all, especially when they must give speeches at certain key moments? Wouldn't the system need to produce operatives who can become true-believers on cue? And after all, most of the people believe these same statements when they hear them. Most of the people most of the time are fooled by whatever is put forth for their consumption. That is a truism. That is how modern democracy functions: with the majority always being fooled; that is, with the majority being made fools. Voting is always a contest between two or more competing flavors of propaganda; whoever fools the most people wins the office. (And think about the sort of people who would try so hard and fight for something as boring and manufactured and anti-human as an office.)

The scandalous fact is that the people are just as corrupt as the leaders — more so, in fact. Are the elite deceitful, greedy, wicked, decadent? Yes. But it's clear to me that most any of the general public would instantly succumb to all of these delightful vices just as quickly, if only they were given the opportunity. The problem, of course, is the system itself, which naturally offers rewards to those managers able to expand the system — to open up new markets and democracies (i.e., new opportunities for brainwashing techniques) — always at the expense of humanity.

Democracy was never anything more than a popularity contest, and a popularity contest is the concern of insecure teenagers still 'finding themselves'. It's about people on stage pretending to like and be like the people in the audience, so that the people in the audience can feel like they themselves have a touch of star power. It is not about ground-up movements; it is about the ruling classes conspiring to generate consent amongst the masses. It is very sick and patronizing. Democracy is like a vampire: it just has to fool you into giving it your consent — get you to invite it into your home — and then it can do whatever it wants to you and feel no moral pangs. 'Hey, you voted for it. You voted for these scoundrels. Or you voted for the other scoundrels who lost — but you still endorsed the voting process. So now you have no choice but to legally accept whatever they do.' It's almost too obvious a point, but I'll make it anyway: vote and devoted come from the same word. That is the correct etymology. To vote for someone is to become devoted to that person. Everyday people who willingly become devoted to other, more famous, narcissistic people make me sick. Modern democracy is a sick business in which every person involved must be forced into contending that they could possibly know what was best for everyone else. It's about the conceit of you telling everybody else — people totally unlike you, who live great distances away — how to live. Many of the people heavily involved in it have completely dysfunctional personal lives, but they want to tell everyone else in their country, or in the whole world, how to live. — For my part I'd say that there are many different types of people in the world, and different people have to figure out how to live differently, in whatever ways suit their sort of people. You can't have people who don't understand each other trying to tell each other how to live. But that colossal hubris, that huge arrogance, becomes an intrinsic part of democracy once mass media are introduced. The mass media by their very nature trick people into thinking that they know more than they really do about other people and other places far, far away from them.

I could at least entertain the possibility that democracy was still the best governmental system available — until technological progress unlocked the capabilities of mass media. Then, as I have said, democracy became mediocracy. Successful, genuine democracy posits free will and the capacity for reasoned thought among the voters. The press and news, communication in general — even in terms of word-of-mouth, person-to-person discussions, debates amongst friends — these things were natural facets of life, aspects of humanity upon which a decent democratic system could expect to depend. The people needed to be able to tell each other what was going on, so they would know enough to vote on certain issues — and so they could have a realistic sense that they didn't know enough to vote on many others. When sensible people find themselves talking with someone who obviously knows more about certain subject matter than they do, these sensible people tend to shut up and not insist that their obviously less-informed opinions should count just as much as anyone else's. People with real working experience and proximity to certain situations under discussion should always have greater say — but the media convinces us otherwise. With the advent of mass media, it was game over for anything resembling a genuine, workable democratic process. The media system exerts a heavy, domineering influence over people's thoughts. Every event becomes simultaneously known and defamiliarized — unreal. Thanks to mass media, the people always think they have a better idea than they really do about how the world works. Socrates' insight that I know more than you because I know that I don't know becomes so much gibberish under these conditions; people cannot understand it. They become addicted to information, misinformation, and disinformation — without any clear demarcation between the three — and they champion and hold fast to whatever voices in the media repeat the types of spurious ideology they like to hear. But you can't have freedom of speech without freedom of thought, and the introduction of mass media into a society severely dampens the population's capacity for free thought and free will. Only in local elections, in which most everyone knows the situations and candidates personally, can democracy ever function well for humanity; only in certain small local elections would I ever support the voting process.

People in democratic countries want a better life for themselves. And they are forever trying to figure out how on earth their standard of living, general happiness, and quality of life keep falling, no matter which party is in office. But I ask myself a very simple but difficult question: Do they — do we — deserve a better life? No, absolutely not. I look around myself and see many deplorable human behaviors, many contrived human behaviors, a lot of going-along-to-get-along, a lot of attempts to rob one segment of the population to pay off another (though somehow the intended recipients rarely get the money or benefit in any lasting way). But I see precious few attempts of people trying to improve themselves in genuine, laudable ways. Honesty is not rewarded. Very few people get up in the morning with the intent of putting in a good day's work — simply for the sake of accomplishment that such a strange act would entail. And why should they? Every effort that a human being might try to exert is now circulated through a complex, interlocking, interdependent, nonhuman 'social' network. There is hardly any way to do work that directly benefits oneself, one's family, or one's community; it all has to be go through an elaborate filtering apparatus (and I'm not just talking about typical bureaucracy) until there is nothing real left anymore. Despite some good intentions on the part of some people, one must look at the entire operation and conclude that of course it would make no sense for these people to receive better lives. We simply do not deserve a better lot, and it would actually be unjust for some wizard, some alien, some god, some president to magically give us better lives, which we have absolutely not earned. We are to the point that we do not even know what these 'better lives' might entail. More money? More material wealth? More drugs? Longer lives to fill with more meaningless entertainment? We wouldn't know what to wish for that would really improve our lot anyway. We are lost, totally defamiliarized from what the goal of life ever might have been. Sulking, we dispute whether or not there was ever a purpose to anything. And yet we still vote, holding up the pretext that it is worthwhile and that some good might come from it — and that is what I find most sickening. To say nothing of those who vote strictly based on dehumanizing hatred of 'the other guy', who is wicked and so different from 'their guy'.

Finding out that a person has voted in a national election disappoints me as much as, for example, finding out that he has committed murder. When I find out that certain acquaintances have voted — I would rather have heard that they randomly murdered someone for no reason. That's how disappointed I am in them — in you. Why do I say this? Because by voting, as far as I'm concerned, you're basically giving your consent for the destruction of the entire human race and everything that was ever good about it. The fall of mankind may happen anyway, but the least you could do is not go along with it, while thinking that you're actually doing something else, something good.

There's a particular passage of international law that I used to hear Noam Chomsky cite all the time. Something like 'the leaders who commit a war crime bear responsibility not only for the deaths and destruction that they cause directly, but they are also responsible for all of the other hardships that result as fallout from their egregious action.' In much the same way, I believe that voters are responsible not only for what they thought the elected politicians might do, but also for any and all supposedly unforeseen actions that the politicians might make while in office. And that goes, by the way, not only for the politicians that you have voted for and put into office, but also for the politicians who made it into office even though you voted against them. By voting at all you are endorsing the entire process, giving your consent, and in my eyes bearing responsibility for anything and everything any national or international politician might do, whether you approve of it or not.

So, I'm not saying you should beg forgiveness for giving your consent to the further dehumanization of future generations. I'm not saying you should write handwritten notes of apology to everyone and everyone you know who is more immune to propaganda than you are (as proven by the fact that they didn't vote), apologizing to them for what you have agreed to put everybody through. I'm not saying that you should chastise yourself, feel ashamed of yourself everyday for being so gullible, such a useful tool, and such a despicable example of humanity in its late hours, self-righteously pursuing its own destruction and bringing all of creation down with it. By now it should be obvious that you are simply too gullible; you are always falling for some new trick; and for the good of humanity you should now step aside, try not to influence anyone or anything around you — because your influence is always negative — and be very, very quiet forevermore. But I'm not saying that you should ensure the cessation of the harm you've been causing ever since you thought it'd be a good idea for you, who are dysfunctional in and of yourself, to start telling other people how to live. I'm not saying you should be mortified by very serious shame and guilt. I'm not saying that you should consider voting to be the only other action akin to — and even worse than — the selling of one's soul for nothing. I'm not saying that you should probably have to stave off an enormous amount of self-hate and shouldn't ever trust yourself again, because at this point there is absolutely every reason to expect that you will be fooled yet again, the next time around. You have never not been fooled by something. (Someone said that the first step on the path to wisdom is admitting that you've been misled in the past. If you voters don't start apologizing for your bad decisions having hurt the rest of us, how are you ever going to improve yourselves?) And I'm not saying you should also consider sewing your mouth shut, so that you can be sure to prevent any more regurgitated propaganda from belching forth from it, every time you feel the need to repeat what your favorite media pundit told you about some worldly fact of which you have no working experience. I'm not saying you should do any of those things. But I would, if I were you. And that's the honest and miserable truth.

Yeah, if I ever voted for any of these national mainstream candidates, I'd hang myself in shame. For real.

For years now, I have indeed thought that hanging specifically would be the right sort of self-punishment for voting, if I ever succumbed to that deranged weakness. Maybe something about how asphyxiation and choking would prevent not only breathing but speaking, and a person who votes should not speak his unhealthy views out into the world. It is as if the lungs of voters have been changed through social atmospheric conditioning: they are only able to breathe in propaganda — thereby fortifying these deceitful and deathly messages by imparting them with some of their own life essence — and then they breathe the propaganda back out, passing it on in a contagious fashion, from mouth to ear, again and again. Instead of 'hoof and mouth' disease, we have 'ear and mouth' disease. If only this process, in which these ephemeral contrivances sap personal and public vitality, could be stopped. I think of cutting off air to the lungs, and it reminds me of how Kafka, the great terrorist and pamphleteer himself, was treated for lung tuberculosis in 1917: if it had killed him back then, as it should have if the world was just, he wouldn't've been able to go on to do what he did. At least, that is the logic that should follow from the official story.

Honestly, I would not be able to live with myself had I ever voted for any of this. And by now you must know that I really am crazy enough to mean it. (Don't you? You should. I am deadly serious here. Yes, really. Really. You must believe me!) But think of what I'm saying and what it says that you would be disgusted by this passion in me. Sure, it would all happen anyway, without your vote — while you are guilty, you are not necessarily to blame — but if someone has given his assent, repeatedly, for the slow and painful destruction of humanity — even and especially if that person was so gullible that he did not quite realize what he was doing — Why should that not cause a potentially fatal amount of shame in someone? It should. You should be ashamed of yourself. You have every reason to be.

29. All Anyone Needs to Know about Politics: The Left mistakes domestication and dehumanization for an enlightened evolution that is meant to proceed in a one-way-track fashion. Both the Left and Right are very 'programmed' (i.e., conditioned by the always developing artificial system). The Left is naïvely enraptured by cutting-edge social programmings; the Right is mired in the programmings of the past. Neither side recognizes its own programming — let alone the basic programs present in everyone who lives in any Modern civilization — but each side can recognize the programming of the other side. Those on the Right can sense the most unnatural programmings of the Left very, very well, and they are quite annoyed by them, knowing them to be artificial, hype-driven, trendy, and overly prideful. But those on the Right do not sense their own, more old-fashioned programmings; they mistake those qualities in themselves as if they were the perfectly natural and fine ways of humanity. Those on the Left see the outdated programmings of the Right and scoff at them: 'The Right is so obviously brainwashed by the stubborn remnants and lingering aftereffects of . . . the Church, pig-headed patriarchy, bull-headed nationalism, unchecked capitalism, etc.' In their enthusiastic criticism of their political enemies, each side enjoys insulting the other far too much; they never get around to looking in the mirror, then looking at the big picture, and realizing that the entire technological movement is behind all of this, that human beings and their ideologies resemble groups of fleas living on the back of a gigantic beast, and that the political movements have simply had to move around in relation to wherever the technological behemoth decides to go. As flea circuses go, however, human politics still holds my interest and is worth understanding.

The Left represents the leading edge of the human domestication process, while the Right is a catch-all that brings up the rear, carries along the stragglers who are still relatively wild and untrained. I say 'relatively', but in truth there is only about a 10% difference between Right and Left at any given time. It is nothing to speak of, really; I would not say that the Right was 'significantly more authentic'. No, the Right is backwards and it does not know what it represents; it thinks that if it could simply 'stop progress' at any given point in the Left's meandering march, then things could be conserved and preserved and everything would be okay. No. Preserving an idyllic Americana vision, or stopping time in any other way, would not make everything okay, even if it were possible, which it isn't. Conservatives do not consider how technology would continue to progress even if liberal 'progressivism' were stopped — and yet it was the former that actually created the latter and gave it such cultural sway. Both sides simply lack a perception of what is really going on: technology is driving everything. Every victory the progressive Left thinks it attains is really a victory of technology over humanity: you are not winning 'freedom' or 'dignity', you are winning domestication and patronizing condescension from the technological system. The system gives you toys and playtime, because you are like a child, and you think you have earned something by virtue of your own effort or self-worth. Nothing of the sort.

I say that the Left keeps winning, but, ah, remember the old supplement that the Left always needs to hear but never remembers: 'Be careful what you wish for.' Or perhaps more accurately: 'Be careful what you think you're wishing for.' Miserable people, they are almost always unhappy with what they get, even though more often than not they voted for it. Somehow the exploitative anti-human drives always seem to reemerge and triumph. The Left is confused by this, because they are always under the impression that they, the people, are on the verge of winning what they want to win, when really it is the system paying them off in order to strip them of more and more personal agency.

Perhaps most important of all is to realize that Communism does not exist. It never has, never could, and never will. I refer, of course, not to the socialist totalitarian societies that have purported to strive toward that aim, but rather to true or 'total' communism, genuine communism, or 'stateless communism' (a phrase which should sound more redundant than it does). No communist state has ever or will ever exist; 'communist state' is a contradiction in terms. Have you never heard about — (no of course you haven't heard about this, but I'll tell you anyway) — how the Soviet leaders would field this question whenever it would come from the peanut gallery of true-believers in the Party: 'When will real communism arrive?' That was the question. 'How much longer will this transition take?' Early on after the revolution the leaders would respond: 'Oh, not very long at all! Ten or fifteen more years, and then you shall see it!' But then fifteen years would go by and again some annoying, naïve members of the Inner Party would ask the Premier: 'When will real communism arrive? We can't help noticing that the state is not "withering away" as predicted. Quite the opposite.' The response then would be more indignant: 'Don't you realize that we have just fought a World War or two? This has delayed the process a bit, but it will still only be about fifteen years until true communism. You will see it in your lifetime. Only twenty years or so — and I will put that down in writing for you.' But then a few decades would pass, and the questioners would timidly ask again: 'O Great and Wondrous Leader . . . How much longer will it take?' 'Don't you know that we are locked in cold conflicts with foreigners on all sides? Don't you realize that there are financial crises? Nonetheless, we are still making progress and it will only be another twenty-five to thirty-five years before you see the emergence of genuine communism. It will be something for your children to enjoy. I will even put it down in writing: "I promise . . . that in . . . no more than . . . forty years . . . real communism . . . will exist . . . and the state . . . and the wickedly moneyed society . . . will have . . . VANISHED!" There you are, comrades!' — Now do you blame the Premiers for patronizing their constituents this way, or do you blame the Inner Party members for being so gullible and accepting these answers — which were, after all, promises for the manifestation of an obvious fairy tale (true communism)? I blame the party members. I always blame the voters and supporters and those who willingly give their consent. As far as the actual 'communist' leaders would go: I would be keen to discuss things with them and pick their brains. I would be interested in what they had to say for themselves. Even Stalin, a mass murderer — I would agree to sit with him alone in a room, and even drink with him — maybe only water for me, though, and then I'd have to sniff it first. I think these sorts of people, much as I despise them — and I do despise them — would actually have something interesting to say, because unlike any voters or partisans they would know quite well that ideologies are not real, that they are just techniques. No one who believes in communism can possibly have any sort of worthwhile grasp on reality, political or otherwise. (Certainly my highly abstract ideology gives me a much better handle on how things really are, because . . . it just does.) And it goes without saying that those who fear communism are just as bad. 'Communism would be horrible for humanity! That system doesn't work!' No: That system doesn't and can't exist. The issue isn't that communism can't work; it's that communism can't exist. The arguments for and against communism — the arguments for or against the attempt to institute a fairy tale — have caused so very many problems.

In that respect, the hammer and sickle was a great symbol, because it represented the last level of human progress at which any form of socialism — or any form of democracy — could have actually worked for very long, and worked for the public's benefit. Hammer and sickle: the last level at which man could actually control his simple tools rather than be controlled by more advanced technology. It is often remarked, with quite a lot of veracity, that conservatives are 'stuck in the '50s'. But socialists are stuck in the '40s — the 1840s, 1848 to be exact. You can't honestly hold any of these ideologies anymore; you can't manifest them. Technology has made whatever reality they might have had obsolete. All ideology — all politics — is simply propaganda, programs running on loops because these loops are good for putting around people's heads and roping them this way or that.

And 'the free market' is and always was just as illusory and impossible as real communism. There is no such thing as a free market. It couldn't happen. No matter how convincing the arguments that libertarians make for the benefits of the laissez-faire capitalist system, there will always be political influences, conditions, taxes and bribes, no matter what. How could there not be? It is very similar to the case of 'communist' leaders, who never give up power, no matter what their Marxist bibles say about a supposed transition to a stateless state. Human nature prevents these things. So, you know, they're all fighting over a lot of delusions, including 'freedom' as it's naïvely understood. You would have to do away with human nature itself to realize any of these utopias. That is why the system itself pressurizes and attacks human nature. Unfortunately, much as it will disappoint those who would die for utopia, I do not believe that human nature will ever be totally eradicated. (You see, I am still an optimist.)

The most in-your-face statement in the so-called Communist Manifesto is the plank that demands the establishment of a national bank. Do you think that kind of bank is ever going to give up power? Do you think that bank will ever say, 'Okay, guess it's time to get rid of massive sums of money that reside in the hands of the few, because the theory says so'? No! But people actually follow this and think it could all work out and that the whole thing wasn't a propaganda mind-fuck on them. In their attack on capitalism (note: not on capital itself), socialists have served as tools for the technological system to open up new avenues of exploitation. Where once human beings could exploit each other in a simplistic way — by means of monetary profit and reward — now the entire human being, all s/he does and thinks, can be exploited and harnessed by media and other developing techniques. As technique overrode and harnessed the power of capitalism — harnessed the power from capitalism — socialists and liberals, by using their ideology to describe the entirety of life, effectively aided the new master in penetrating into those areas of existence theretofore untouched (relatively speaking) by the monetary profit motivation.

For example, Marx also calls for the 'abolishment of the family' — he proudly admits it. And yet so many proud self-described 'pinkos' wonder why their families are so dysfunctional, hypothetically wish that their families were better and happier and more together — and yet still they think Marxism's quite 'sexy'. Of course, it isn't really Marxism or socialism or capitalism or politics at all that's destroying the family — it's the grinding anti-human aspects of the entire autonomous technological society that's doing it, with the Left (as usual) riding the system's coattails, thinking it's getting what it wants due to the manifestation of some aspects of its own ideology. If the right hates really it, it must be good and I will pretend to be okay with it. And I'm sure, actually, that it has been a comfort to some of the more intellectual leftists — after their messy divorces, after their children announce that they never want to speak to them again — to be able to look at the Communist Manifesto and see that it does call for the abolishment of the family. 'I guess it's ultimately a good thing,' the defeated man says. Like all literature, leftist screeds function as coping strategy. Whereas right-wingers often adopt a contrived and often problematic love for the nation (an abstraction), left-wingers often seem to care about others, foreigners, undefined strangers, and people radically different from themselves — to whom they cannot honestly even relate very well — more than they care about their own country, or even their own family and friends, or even themselves.[] None of this is malevolently contrived — much of it is even admirable — but all of it stands in accord with the 'abolition of the family' edict.

Why is this mass masochistic agenda undertaken? Why have Moderns pursued such noble 'selflessness'? In a word: guilt. In two words: original sin. As those in the West stopped honestly believing in religion, they needed a new abstract guilt to replace the one they used to feel, which had for so long been associated with The Fall. Thus they blame themselves and their ancestors for historical crimes whose reality has taken on a mythic quality. With this noble selflessness — and at root it is quite noble — they manically attempt to elude the despair and self-flagellation that they would otherwise have to put on themselves, since they no longer believe in The Parents or any sort of true sin, much less any redemption. They think that by trying to help (abstract) others, in hopelessly naïve and impractical ways, an orderly heaven on earth might result. They nonchalantly think that they will be able to use science and technology to this end. But they misunderstand their place in things; their pride blinds them from noticing man's new relationship with these tools that now control him. Moderns (leftists especially) want to create an orderly heaven on earth; instead, through runaway technology and technique, what arises is a chaotic pandemonium.

Marx himself was supposedly an atheist, but he composed an awful lot of second-rate (though somewhat amusing) spooky poetry that went out of its way to insinuate the very real existence of God, whom Marx hated, envied, and resented. I'm not sure how atheistic communists (if that isn't a redundant term) have ever squared that in their minds. How can Marx profess such detailed animosity toward an entity that he doesn't believe exists? Then again, many feminists have thought that Marx was on their side too, even though he defined his 'favourite virtue in woman' as 'Weakness'. As with any religious movement that has gotten lost and veered very far off course, there are a lot of things about their old, unkempt idol that leftists don't know and don't have any interest in knowing or taking seriously, even though they'd excoriate anyone else for making statements half as hateful, sexist, racist, etc. (But maybe Marx was joking when he wrote these things? Oh sure. That must be it.)

Marxists would think that I was insulting their god when I called his poetry 'second rate'. But second-rate is better than most, and I would judge Marx's poetry far superior to the poetry (or prose) of virtually anyone who has cited him as an influence. That's for sure. For that matter, he is better than most other creative writers, period. He was indeed fundamentally wrong and his outlook lacks any sort of psychological dynamic to speak of: it seems he really did believe that most human beings were nothing more than simple robots. But given that the nineteenth-century world he lived in was far less complicated and disorienting than what has followed it, his words can be considered less wrong, his outlook less dysfunctional, than most every other piece of politically tinged poetry written in more recent times. Let's put it this way: The only reason why an Allen Ginsberg would have even come about in the first place was because leftists by the mid-twentieth century needed something even more dysfunctional and insane to read and purchase. And Ginsberg seems positively godlike, saintly, sane and rational, compared to everyone else now. You guys should have just had the stomach to stick with Marx's overt hatred and direct challenges to the natural universe. In saying that he literally wanted to smash the world to pieces and romance the abyss, at least Marx was being honest and heroic in his own way. Even I can see the heroism in it! He was not a simpering sniveler like so many of his followers turned out to be. Men and women 'of words', 'of letters'. As someone who cares about literature, there is something I find despicable about those who smother it to death in their embrace. And I can see why Marx would eventually say 'I am not a Marxist', because he saw the once relatively sharp edges of his critical thought being dulled, the punchlines of his poetry being softened, by all the sniveling 'phrase-mongers' and recreational Satanists.

Do you remember when we went to his grave there in London? Highgate Cemetery. Funny how when we were in Paris we couldn't find the time to see the apartment where Proust lived and wrote, but you had to see where Marx was buried. (You know Dennis Nilsen used to have a routine of walking his dog to that cemetery and worshipping at Marx's tomb. Wonder why that curious little fact hardly ever gets brought up in the documentaries.) And why have I conflated politics and literature? Because it's all just pointless coping strategy now — Can't you admit that yet?

There is prescience and meaning in the name Marx: those vulnerable to leftist thought can indeed be described as 'marks' (suckers; the intended victims of confidence tricks). How funny that they describe themselves as 'pro-choice', but display very little no free will, offer so little resistance to whatever new trendy orthodoxy happens to emerge next. Give me the next hoop to jump through, and I'll pretend I always wanted to jump through it and in fact jumped through it a long time ago. Leftist do-gooders are like the reverse of Goethe's Mephistopheles: they are always trying to do good but end up accomplishing bad, with their every forthcoming 'freedom' or goodie from the system always ushering in a mess of 'bureaucrazy', unforeseen consequences, and infantilizing directives.

(I could have written just as much against the Right, but you are on the Left, and the point here is to tell you just how disappointed and disgusted I am with you in that regard, for being so pathetic and gullible. If you draw up one of your legal documents, promising never to vote again and apologizing for ever having done so, sign it, and present it to me on bended knee . . . I would truly appreciate that and consider it a good first step for you. It isn't that I actively hate all voters. I don't hate you. It's just that you should know better. — Or maybe you shouldn't. After all, who were you in our Great Gatsby play? You were Tom, appropriately. An 'Uncle Tom' of the human race: going along to get along, a traitor to everything you came from and everyone who knew you way back when. — Still, you're smart enough and had a good enough upbringing. But still you fell for so many scams. It makes me so angry and disappointed with you. I don't know what the remedy would be, because you've gone wrong in so many ways. You have so much to unlearn and undoubtedly have way too many distractions in your City life. You really need to be put in a new sort of concentration camp — I mean, a camp where they teach you how to concentrate.)

In short, all politics is largely a waste of time: humans cannot govern themselves anyway — not anymore, because the throes of technology are so large now that they direct everything anyway, continually deciding and then changing the shrinking boundaries for human society to fit into the ever-altering architecture of the system. The Constitution even says that 'Congress shall . . . promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. This gave way to an artificial, technological, scientific system that usurps human affairs and uses our politics against us. Politics themselves have long since been quite unreal, insubstantial . . . and there is only so much to say about them because they constitute the incredibly complicated propaganda to which human beings have succumbed. As with art and media, my interest in politics is simply academic. I like to consider the incredibly complicated structure of all this propaganda — internal and externalized — and search for patterns in it. And that's all; any insight I get from any of this isn't really good for anything. In other words, I'm just a glorified amateur. The real experts are those who parrot and anticipate every development of all of these disciplines without giving them much thought at all.

But when all is said and done, our largescale democrazy is still the best political system possible in the world today.

30. The Man Who Laughs [at his Father]: Here we are at the final section I had planned to write for you. It was to be a section devoted to saying, in as certain and as authoritative a manner as possible, that our fathers were better men than we were, that the past was better, that the old men were better, that we should have left them in charge, should have studied them (naturally studied, as all young animals do) and learned from them, actually learned how to do more real things. And yet here today, just before I began writing this, I heard the news that your father had been arrested, for horrible alleged acts that I'm not going to mention. He was arrested . . . and then what happened then, happened then.

I don't know what to say to this. I feel bad for your father and I feel bad for you. Still the imp inside me wants to remind you: You weren't there for me, when I was going through hell this past spring, when I told you Dana had left me. You weren't there for me, so why should I be there for you? Why should I send you any word of sympathy or reassurance, when you, in any of our correspondences in recent years, never bothered to ask me — even in a casual way — how I was doing, never even bothered to say to me — in a casual way — that you hoped I was doing well.

I did always like your father and I never gossiped about him or said anything against him. There are people now who are laughing at him, and that makes me angry and sick.

Whenever I would call your house and ask for you, often your father would ask who I was and get my name confused with Sly Society's (because our first names sound the same).

Your father called me 'the movie guy', so there is one last movie I will recommend to you.

The Man Who Laughs, a silent black-and-white French film from 1928. The story is set in the late seventeenth century. An Englishman offends the king by refusing to kiss his hand. The son of this 'proud rebel' is then made to suffer for his father's rudeness: the court surgeon slices and disfigures the boy's face into a horrible, painful, permanent grin. The idea is that now the boy himself must 'laugh forever at his fool of a father.' The father is then sentenced to death and killed by an Iron Maiden. I won't give everything away, but later on in the film the boy — now a man — goes on to offend the next English monarch by seeming to smile sarcastically in her presence: 'He laughs at the Queen's commands! He laughs at the House of Lords!' The protagonist of this film, who is gentle and kind, despite his horrible grin and his perceived anti-social bent, was actually the inspiration for the Joker. The comic character's co-creator, writer Bill Finger, watched and liked this old movie, took the heroic, misunderstood protagonist and turned him into a pure villain who at times, dubiously, solicits our sympathy.

. . .

The point is, the father was right to rebel. What the father rebelled against was worth rebelling against. And it is worth noting that the son didn't even want to rebel, but the ruling class thought he was a rebel simply because he smiled. Ironically, it was in fact the previous monarch who had given him that smile, and this forced smile was supposed to be directed at the father — because that is what society wants us to do, to laugh at the Old Man — but then the state (with its guilty conscience) comes to perceive the smile as a sneer directed toward itself. There is something in that. The rulers get angry because they always miss the joke — even when it's an old joke they made themselves long ago. They're so touchy, easily offended. And even when there isn't a joke, they still miss it.

I have bad-mouthed my own father in front of you. You have bad-mouthed your own father in front of me. We don't do that anymore, but then again, we haven't seen each other in so long anyway, so . . . no chance of saying something regrettable in the other's presence. Our fathers were real working men. We are not. Our fathers were real men. We are not. Our fathers and the men like them did real work, useful work. We do not do real work; we do ninny work. They built homes and families, only to see caricatures of men like them demonized and lampooned on every single sitcom ever. We sit and pick and take potshots at them and at each other and have friendships based around liking the same media and the uneasy need to admire and be admired. And then we get pissy and complain when certain people admire us too much.

31. The Only Acceptable Way Forward: Kindness, generosity and as much empathy as possible with those around us with whom we can be in authentic human relationships. Everything else deserves to be shunned or ignored; we each deserve, for ourselves, to ignore the rest as best we can in order to live positively for ourselves and those around us. The first step toward recovery and rapprochement would be an acknowledgement of how far we've fallen — fallen away and fallen apart from each other — and an acknowledgment of how much of our humanity we've lost, how much of all this is indeed our fault — as distinct from however much of it isn't our fault — how much is still worth preserving, and how to best utilize, enjoy, and encourage what remains of ourselves, separately and together, however close or distant, on a shared planet. And just as I cannot forget Dana, we should not ignore the sort of truths she had to tell us; the old statements remain true, no matter what she is saying today, no matter how much she may have lied about her true activities or whereabouts. There remains the prospect of a heroic, innovative naturalness, a circumspection that welcomes adversity with a smirk, for it is concerned with living right there, in the face of the empire — winning, thriving, and surviving through oblique strategies. In a direct war, a deadly serious conflict, humanity always loses. In a game of attrition, humanity can win the future. How? By finding a way of existence that uses the clock to our advantage. It may take all our memory and concentration to do it, but we can beat the computer by letting its over-redundant programs build up until they stalemate themselves. We would, of course, lose any friendships and social connections that existed only on the internet, however. Thank goodness.

Oh — When going over the serial killers, I couldn't find a place to mention Charles Whitman, who shot 49 people, sniper-style, from atop a tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Pathologists scanned his brain after he died; they discovered a tumor of a certain type — gliobastoma multiforme — known to cause hypographia, the uncontrollable urge to write. Whitman kept obsessive journals and tortured himself trying to figure out what strange compulsion was forcing him to record so many psychotic, incriminating statements. It seems that the official biography of Franz Kafka is being changed now to include this aspect as well. They are saying he had this same sort of brain tumor. In that awful movie Kafka Strikes Back! they even show Young Franz pausing to bang his head on his writing desk; he mutters that something alien is growing inside his brain, and the menacing look in his eyes then is meant to foreshadow the murderer he'll supposedly become. — It's all bullshit. But . . . Hypographia. They said Dostoevsky had it, and he probably did. James Joyce definitely had it, and as a writer Joyce (to me) seems a lot like Charles Whitman: shooting his enemies from afar, from an unfair location, without any gentlemanly forewarning. That's what Joyce did when he moved to continental Europe in order to write about Ireland, to kill the things his crazy, spiteful self both hated and loved — And yet, such angry missives can be seen to double as confessions of his own transgressions. Every criticism you make becomes a self-indictment of how mean you are — that's how it works, right? And you can't have a confession without a crime. — But then it's almost like John Humble's phony 'Ripper' letters, in which the writer recounted crimes that weren't his: The Yorkshire police each time wondering Is this a real letter, or is someone faking it? . . . Isn't that a funny question to ask? What does it mean to look at a letter, hold it in your hands, and think Is this a real letter? John Humble — great name there, because humble is human — writes a letter as if he were someone else, taking credit for someone else's crime, as a private joke. And in Humble's case, the fake confession was the crime. He impersonated someone long dead — Jack the Ripper — maybe someone who never lived at all. Isn't that what writers of fiction do all the bloody time? That should've been Humble's alibi. He should have said that the letters he sent were a sort of postmodern performance art. Humble is human and all he's doing is playing a bit of a prank, one that's sort of insightful, and it's not his fault if others take him too seriously, is it? Or is it? Peter Sutcliffe — the real Ripper who was only called 'Ripper' because that's how Humble signed the letters — actually changed his M.O. and made sure to commit certain crimes that Humble effectively predicted in his letters to the police ('Old slut next time I hope maybe round Manchester'). Do you understand the interplay between text and action, identity and fiction, human violence and systemic violence? All of this is nasty, and tedious, but it is happening and we must diagnose it and stop it somehow. I think — yes — You can fight O'Brien. You can wait him out, shame him, or get him to leave the room. Get him to vaingloriously confess his crimes and then . . . and then bring the law in and hope it works.

Sorry.

I do not have hypographia. I just write things sometimes, and am happy to take a good long break now that this is over. It's worried me awful to think of all this. Last night I had a dream in which I had to figure out how to dispose of a body — just a dead man's torso, in fact, wrapped up in clear plastic, which had somehow come into my possession. I ended up furtively sneaking it into the back of a garbage truck when no one was looking. Then — next scene in the dream — two policewomen (identical twins) arrive at my home, holding the awful thing and asking if it's mine. I say it is, ashamed of myself and trying to think of an explanation. Both policewomen then breathe a sigh of relief, place the torso on a desk and begin to unwrap it. 'Look,' they say, after all the plastic is removed. It's actually just a torso from an old marble statue. Greek or Roman. Ancient and amazing. 'Don't know how you'd grade it,' one of them says, 'but since it could be worth millions, we had to find the rightful owner.' I'm not the rightful owner — not really — but before I can decide whether or not to admit that, the dream ends.

Wish I could've seen your face a minute ago when you first read the sentence about me dreaming I had to dispose of a body. What did you think? 'Fuck, he has lost it'? Ha. Thinking of you reading some of this stuff, and wondering if I'm joking, has sometimes made me chuckle.

I hope this letter finds you well, Alex, and that you are able to find some happiness these days. After having written everything down like this, I'm compelled to think more of our early boyhood together, and to think of it fondly. What passed between us was a thin strand of love and humanity. Very thin now, but still very important. The good times we had together still exist in our memories, and they are no less happy due to more recent disappointments. I pass the burden of these words onto your shoulders, but I won't be offended if you shirk it all off. I am honestly not that important, and life is stressful enough to handle as it is, under these bizarre conditions. Satire, irony, and sarcasm have become omnipotent, but impotent and pointless, because social reality itself has gotten so strange, dysfunctional, and proxified that almost everything seems like a joke. So if any of the above has needled you too much, simply pretend that the entire tract was something a political science professor showed you and told you was a satire. Because after all, it is just that. Everything I've ever written has been a lie, including this sentence. Words, if you look at them long enough, can surely fictionalize just about anything.

Sincerely,

Sylas T. Ruesow

* * *

The above document has been presented as part of the Confidential Report "A" Packet for new cadets. It was acquired by the agency as a gift from the 'friend' to whom it was addressed. Despite its rambling nature and the sections that have been blacked out and redacted (for good reasons of international security), its example should still provide trainees with an idea of the sort of malignant elements and quagmires they should keep an eye out for when in the field.

•

Appendix 1: Lost Snatches from the Manifesto of Dana O.

Humanity is the piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit on Planet Earth, much less in the universe as a whole. 'The stone that the builder refused' — that is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to say that because we are so out-of-place we stand as the prime actors in all of existence: this is something to be proud of, but it is also a challenge. Humanity does not blend in seamlessly with nature; other lifeforms fit into the grand scheme intuitively, but we cannot coexist with the default natural world even when we consciously try to do so. Humanity, ever since it was humanity, has always been infused with artificiality: rituals, songs, language, myths, abstract thought, arsenals of tools, etc. And it says something very profound about human beings that the only way we have ever been able to catch and kill wild animals was and is by means of weapons and techniques. This point needs to be underscored: Without some degree of technique we humans would only be able to eat raw vegetables, fruit, certain insects — and each other. A modicum of artificiality was always absolutely necessary for our species' survival. The major problem only arises when the artificiality grows out of control and seems to develop an agency of its own, at which point we cannot control our creations and become their servants. The stake of humanity has always been to figure out how to overcome and build a society on top of environments that often turn harsh. In that respect the current situation is nothing new. Only now the techniques by which we have subjugated nature have begun to subjugate us.

Satisfaction and contentment were available to primitive people in a way that they are presently not available to us.

Technology is the determining factor in absolutely everything that happens in the modern world. Any oppression, conducted by the managers and politicians onto the general population, is simply the necessary means of ensuring that technological society does not collapse.

We need to differentiate between large-scale technologies that require specialization/division of labor vs. small-scale technologies that require only an individual with hands. We shall call the first type of technology 'organization-dependent'. Organization-dependent technology requires the apparatus of civilization to exist. Without a basic surplus of food production, people could not even begin to imagine the building of complex technology, as they would be too busy moving around, finding food, and living lives in which their actions directly played into the natural cycle of life and human culture.

For those not prepared to lay down and surrender all autonomy to the Borg, what I am saying is the only game in town.

Neither a world government nor a national dictatorship could control the dictatorial level of technology that has arisen. A world government in particular — and all post-Modern governments, period — should be seen as the product and handmaiden of dictatorial technology. Every reform that humans think they have thought up on their own is actually a new method, devised and opportuned by the autonomous system, of mitigating circumstances so that the current system can progress in a slightly different way. Just the general idea that technology can be regulated is ridiculous. There is not a single instance of this ever happening to any notable or lasting degree, and no indication whatsoever that it ever will. Technology is not subject to human laws; it just finds a way around them, in short order. Asking human authorities to curtail technology is like asking some of the bigger fish in the ocean to do something about water pollution.

With all of this material, after a while you run into what I like to call 'foundational paradoxes' (I didn't come up with the term myself; I saw it in a book somewhere). To give one example: The system generally runs very strongly against individuality and is definitely anti-self; yet at the same time it piques the selfishness and narcissism of each individual, which are aspects of self. Usually this is done by means of consumerism. What you decide to buy (or buy into) is usually self-serving, in terms of individual transactions. But the entire 'psychological economy' in which these deals occur is profoundly anti-self. That is one of these foundational paradoxes. To give a second example: We all know that the technological system domesticates human beings. And yet more and more often we see that various people in society are misbehaving or acting rudely. How to explain this phenomenon? A colleague of mine says that it is like the misbehavior of yippy little dogs: these pesky pets are loud and annoying, and they may even bite you, but they are nonetheless thoroughly domesticated in that they must live in a house ('system'), have all their food provided for them, and have their needs administered to them. They could never make it on their own in a natural environment. They are far from wild animals.

Celebrities function as the barely-human face of the non-human system. People love them for bad reasons. They might not let us get close enough with rocks, but for the life of me I don't know why these hordes of doting fans don't all of a sudden start throwing cellphones at the celebrities' heads.

•

Appendix 2: Last Letter of KierJones

I don't know if this is ethical or not, but I wanted to relay to you the last message I ever received from KierJones, because it is so fantastic. We had gotten back in contact about two years ago, right before he disappeared, presumably on a trip to Vietnam. It is not fair for me to be the only one who gets to read this. I know you used to appreciate him a lot, a long time ago, when all of us were friends and we sat at his knee and listened to him say wise but fucked up things. So I'm using that memory as an excuse to share this with you. I don't present it here as just some sort of joke, although it is funny in a way, but . . . His actual thought process — it is incredible, that someone really thought and wrote this, and gave it to someone else to read. With enough training and peace and quiet I think he could come to understand the sounds and movements of the forest, the planet, the universe. Maybe.

Anyway. This is what I want to leave you with. This is what someone else you left behind really went through.

No, that's too accusatory. This is simply what this modern life did to someone else, someone who was very smart and sensitive. This is how someone else reacted to everything that's been going on.

Kierjones wrote:

'There are many reasons for saigon, first of all i have kind of been guided there by inner thought and light. asia was a thought in me already around age 30, wanted to go there, then i have been guided there by a man who called me on the phone sometimes late at night and lived in vietnam, and told me to go through cambodia when i was going to vietnam, because there was a girl there he wanted me to collect for him, i never went, but he told me about it, vietnam and saigon, then when i was in deep depression when i had a divorce what kept me going was the rambo movie which i think is made in cambodia or vietnam, and the little woman, i think she was vietnamese, i still remember her, and rambo said, i am expendable, its like, you are invited to a party, but it doesnt matter if you dont show up, these things have kept me alive at hard times in my life, then my daughter decided to stay with me so another 9 years passed i took care of my daughter, then when my daughter left me i entered deep depression of a psychotic kind again, here i experienced contact with a spirit that eats human flesh and when the authorities hinted that i should just starve to death when i didnt work i saw visions of a little girl walking on the street outside and me cutting out the liver from the little girl and frying it in a pan and eating it, i told psychiatry about it and they gave me a contact person and told me, it is not that we dont want to kill you, it is that we are not allowed to. then i read about cambodia and vietnam and saigon and about the custom of eating the defeated enemies liver in martial arts (because you eat the live-r of those who have died) and that someone who had been eating human flesh was freed by vietnamese authority because there is no law against cannibalism, then i have practiced trancentental meditation for 7 years where i sit for 30 minutes twice a day, i dont do this any longer because of the spirits who found me and are attracted to me, now trancendental meditation is similar to buddhism but it is started by a hindu, and vietnam was traditionally hinduistic but became a form of traditional buddhism, then i have had an anger problem here in the us towards certain people and this has included seeing knives and me cutting up people and doing a columbine and also killing myself now the viet cong made all of this look like normal stuff, and maybe the american soldiers at the time made cruelty seem normal as well but i dont think they were cannibals even though the serial killer arthur shawcross whos from our area in upstate ny actually claimed to cook up and eat the kills he registered as a solider in vietnam, but more likely the soldiers were known for doing lsd and smoking weed and then i have been named a weed by people who hate me and by eugenicists, so in a sense i am the weed and the weed smokers were possessed by the weed and so they kind of smoked me in a sense when i was exposed and kind of made fun of and laughed at cruelly, now the vietnam guy who called me sometimes on the phone was on a high from cannabis also, saying that i dont know him but he knows me and has messages for me specifically, then i have felt like i have a little girl inside of me, a little girl that is prostituted by the system, this is the girl that they have been raping that has made me end up in contact with psychiatry, the same little woman in rambo and also probably the girl in cambodia that the voice in the telephone told me to collect for him, and psychiatry did save me from the unemployment office so it was good and nice, and ending up in psychiatry means i couldnt be fitted into the normal hole of society that i dont fit in, then all these weed smokers show up around me and talk to me, contact me on the internet, invite me to a forum, tag me on social networks, poke me, call me, i seem to be a magnet for them, now vietnam is the weed smokers paradise where you can get weed, and now i seem to be the weed smokers paradise since they like me and i basically have to isolate myself from them to stay away from them, now i talked to this guy who is definitely psychotic and has chronic symbolic thinking and he kept suspecting that i had smoked weed, which i have never done, and he also suspected me of being a murderer or hitman for hire, which I am not, then a woman at the local government that i worked under who also had a psychotic problem, she saw someone sitting behind her in the car on the way home and she entered a dream world when she was going home and she also wondered if I had smoked weed, even though i havent, i love vietnam already even though i have never been there, and it feels like it is my destiny to make the trip, if i dont do it god will punish me, there are too many signs.

'so i believe i have a little girl inside me and she is a vietnamese little girl who has been pimped by the system and they have only ever given her slang to describe her self and her reality with.

'the little girl who doesnt exist has been raped literally, while i am raped in a sense by having social contact with people, which is what the psychiatrists keep making me do, but i experience most social contact now as a rape, with my life leaking out of me.

'then also i have been promoting the mayan calendar which really is a communistic agenda of the world order and vietnam is communistic, no matter what they say.

'then i have also talked to this guy who has a similar disability as me but on a spiritual level, basically he has diagnosed schizophrenia but wants to be diagnosed as having a psychotic personality with symbolic thinking.

'people with symbolic thinking are abused by our society, because none of the symbols make sense any more.

'i would like to be in vietnam, and i see the picture of it in my head, and i am through trying to find a compass to handle things mentally. I learned that to create a good symbolic compass you should define yourself in terminology that is not of the system. the system has called me a weed so that is what i am to it. So as a mental compass the little girl works for me. Also vietnam works for me because everything fits regarding vietnam and me. I am vietnam and my life is the vietnam war on the mental plane whether I like it or not. But i am also a weed too in the sense that it is important Sylas to know your weaknesses, your achilles heal can be more important for you to know than anything else. At this point I have no plan of my own for the future. I just spent all my time making sure that the futures own, which is nwo in reverse, secret plan for me couldnt come true. I dont know what I am going to do next. I sit in my little house, I talk on the phone to the invisible man and I sit and play some video game and eat at a restaurant. I want to leave this place, probably partly because the system is treating me scientifically to kind of absorb my mental energy into it, using scientific methods they are making notes because the autism spectrum has social treatment methods. that is not paranoia, that is what my doctors and their twenty students getting on the job training are actually doing to me, analyzing me like a specimen and they actually call me that because at least they are honest. But my dreaming is still taking place here with dreams leaking out of me to create a sea of dreams or really nightmares, and i have gotten thrown off and lost in the flood, but still my mental compass is the vietnamese girl. I am the vietnamese girl. My method of dealing is similar to the vietnam war and I am not more mentally ill than vietnam itself ever was. So this is what I have learned, to kind of find your own mental compass that is defined in terms not of the system. This is in order to gain some spiritual immunity. All the best sylas the stylus you dirty basturd you and have a good day, I am going to the restaurant now to eat some flesh.'

No one that I know of ever heard from him again.

•

NOTES

[] When will this happen? My answer is: not anytime soon. It is not worth worrying about. I am not any kind of 'doom-n-gloomer': we are already in the new Dark Age. Society will not collapse any time soon. The machines will be able to run themselves for a 'good' while longer. Things will just keep getting worse and weirder (more anti-human), with no end in sight. There will not be the kind of dramatic and obvious crash to which so many hopeless souls have perversely looked forward. Only after the system has slowly broken down, only after the batteries have run dry, only after the gears have grinded each other to a halt — only then can humanity figure out what to do next. As it is now, humanity's every ingenuity is necessarily co-opted by the anti-human system — because the system, while it still exists, is always in every instance the dominant, controlling factor, which effectively owns and turns our every ingenuity and breakthrough against us, to its own advantage.

[] Forensic: We almost always encounter this word when it is linked to with 'psychology' or 'science', but it is worth pausing here in order to note and draw out two other connections. Forensic specifically suggests processes that are suitable for use in law courts — thus, it is connected to you, the lawyer. And in the popular consciousness, forensics is associated with the task of hunting down and incriminating serial killers — another one of our themes here. So Allison wanted to stop serial killers and she wanted to do work that was palatable to your legal system. Further, it should _not_ go without saying that forensics must rely upon techniques and technology to accomplish anything. — And what are we _doing_ here anyway? What _should_ we be doing in terms of cultural study? Since our culture is pretty well dead, any investigation would have to resemble a forensic examination of our collective cultural corpse: 'How did this body die? Who or what is the serial killer who transformed and mutilated the once living body of our culture?' All serious study is now a sort of forensic study of our own collective demise.

[] I think his statement of 'We are all Jewish since the Holocaust' is actually quite silly, and probably it would offend some people. But it is one of those statements that just sounds very meaningful to say, especially if you can say it in a voice like that of Orson Welles.

[] A related idea that I must stress: Somewhere the inherent and prima facie limitations of Marx's 'dialectical materialism' credo must be emphasized. In other words, communism was always and socialism remains to this day just as materialistic as capitalism ever was. It is like the old line about the thief respecting property as much as anyone else: the thief absolutely respects the concept of property; he just wants to make the property his. Marx liked capital, as a reality, as a concept, and as a tool; the communist would note the evils of money, but never wanted to abolish it. And in practice, communists and socialists never actually get rid of capital; instead, they use it the way they want to use it. They have found that, instead of formally making your private property their own, it is easier to use what's yours without ever actually calling it theirs. It is a funny word game. They think if they just say that 'government', 'public', and 'the people' are all the same thing, then they, the leftist politicians (and almost all right-wingers as well, of course), will simply get to use the money as their own, once they are elected to represent the people. And at that point, what recourse do the people have? None. They voted for it; the plundering was done by their will and, hilariously, on their supposed behalf.

[] The torture machine of 'In the Penal Colony' is a notable exception. In that story the technical psychology is given a mechanistic embodiment.

[] Here again in a commonplace word we can find more than a little irony. Customs are supposed to be the ways and behaviors of humans — distinctly human behaviors that are familiar in the sense of 'like family'. But nowadays customs have more to do with the transfer of goods and people, usually via the annoying bureaucracy of airports, the long lines outside offices, etc., etc. And perhaps customer too did not always carry such formal, hollow, guilty overtones. It is only the increasing artificiality, across the entire spectrum, which has allowed for such commodification and reification (literally the 'thing-ification') of people and concepts as if they were goods and services, all on a market that has somewhat more to do with systemic desires ('the psychology of robots') than with economics in the usual monetary sense.

[] It is worth contrasting Kafka's impressions with those of my very favorite author, Marcel Proust, when he saw aeroplanes for the first time: 'I was as deeply moved as an ancient Greek on seeing for the first time a demi-god. I wept — for I had been ready to weep the moment I realised that the sound came from above my head . . . at the thought that what I was going to see for the first time was an aeroplane. Then, just as when in a newspaper one senses that one is coming to a moving passage, the mere sight of the machine was enough to make me burst into tears.' Thus Proust wept with joy over new technology. You might expect me to find that shameful, but I find it hilarious. You have to learn to laugh at this stuff sometimes. Later on in his great novel, Proust anticipates a famous scene of Apocalypse Now by recalling the 'moment of apocalypse' he would experience when hearing air-raid sirens in Paris: '[C]ould they have been more Wagnerian, and what could be more appropriate as a salute to the arrival of the Germans? . . . one had to ask oneself whether they were indeed pilots and not Valkyries who were sailing upwards.'

[] And, appropriately enough, Warhol never even did any silk-screens of Campbell's alphabet soup. There is no hidden message inside for the Batcomputer to help us decode.

[] He has a good surname. 'Burn-all'. After reading his work, one can imagine him as one of those people who would want to set the whole world on fire, just out of spite, if their utopian dreams never quite come true.

[] The case of Bob Marley is particularly amusing in this respect. A Jamaican reporter once confronted the singer with the following: 'There are some Rastamen who would denounce using the fruits of Babylon, so to speak, to build up any kind of organization.' 'The fruits of Babylon?' Marley scoffed. 'Babylon no have no fruits.' The reporter continued: 'By using the methods that you are using—' 'Noah fathered three sons,' Marley interrupted, 'Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Japheth him give wisdom of technology. See? And so right now, technology — we need technology in ourselves, really. There's no way you can walk this earth — This earth is not like it once was.' Due to his own 'Babylon programming', one might say, Marley thus confuses 'intellectual enlargement', which is what God gave Japheth in Genesis 9:27, for some sort of 'technology' supposedly given to Japheth from Noah. This is a very indicative erroneous statement, for natural or God-given wisdom has indeed given way to manmade technology. Marley notes that the world has completely changed from what it once was . . . So why did he even try to justify his use of modern technology by citing the Bible in the first place? It is all confused thinking. His statement about Babylon having no fruits might well have a lot of truth in it . . . but in effect all he is saying is 'I can do whatever I want to do, and reserve the right to justify it all with ancient religion, even if that doesn't make sense anymore, since the whole world has changed.' The case of Bob Marley, perhaps even more so than that of Bob Dylan, is all about injecting apparently genuine, spiritual, organic content into an artificial medium; the medium itself, with its false ways, will always win the day and change the behaviors of people who remain spellbound by the sweet, uplifting 'filler' content.

For more on this sort of thing, see everything Jacques Ellul wrote regarding the falsity and endemic icon-worship of televangelists.

[] I would recommend John Holt and Half Pint as superior reggae artists. Their music holds up and does not sound nearly so trite and gimmicky today. Of course Marley had more talent; but his voluntary submergence into the cultural simulacra neutered, ruined, and co-opted most everything that was good about him.

[] Don't you dare talk to your fellow passengers! That is the rule, there in your wonderfully communal City. And yet I'm the anti-social one for living in the country, where I have conversations with lots of different people everyday, and encounter absolutely no one with whom I couldn't expect to exchange greetings? The artificial society is a contradiction in terms — that's the point of it, and you live in the heart of it.

[] This is despite some urbanites' trendy and futile concerns about climate change. There is nothing more hypocritical than self-described environmentalists who live in exponentially artificial habitats. — Well, actually, perhaps there is one thing more hypocritical. I once knew a few vegetarians who were overjoyed when they found out that human meat was for sale online. They ordered some and told me it tasted like pork.

That reminds me — Do you remember when KierJones talked about 'meatatarians'? We had organized a barbeque for about 30 people, but Rick was being a bitch as usual, and we had to go pick him up. I hid my tape recorder under some hot dog buns and turned it on as we were leaving the party. Later we listened to the audio. KierJones had sniffed out the recorder about a minute after we left, and you could hear him smile as he called me a 'dirty, dirty, sneaky, sneaky bastard'. But for some reason he just left it rolling and people kept talking. Someone brought vegetarian hamburgers, and this caused KierJones to speculate about what a 'meatatarian' would be like: 'Like a person who only ate meat. And he'd have pretend vegetables, made out of meat. Meat shaped into vegetables.' — Is there something more in that idea? Are we humans shaped into something non-human?

[] Was it also 'legal fiction', by the way, when you plagiarized me? Was my original 'novel' really even legal in the first place? What a strange concept, when the only illegal fictions would be fictions that aren't fictional in the first place.

[] Now what sense does that make? It doesn't make any sense. It makes even less sense than what I did. And, yes, as I have admitted to you before, there is indeed some masochism in me — but how much more masochism must there be in the general public, and yet they don't admit it! Later on in this very long letter I will tell you that in order to save humanity I would indeed kill people — if that would somehow save humanity (it wouldn't) then I would do that. My very acknowledgement of that fact may seem scandalous to you, but again I would respond much as I did previously: I would kill in order to save humanity, but your sort has killed and has built all of our dead ancestors into a monument against humanity. I would do anything I could to save humanity; meanwhile so much of what you are supporting is part of humanity's long, torturous murder. But I would be judged far crazier than you, by the rules of this mad, suicidal society. Because, yes, I would fight for freedom if it would do any good. I would be prepared to do whatever it takes — any means necessary, and all that. The entirety of casual culture for the better part of a century now has lionized this stance in theory, but isn't it funny that when an actual person puts it into words and says it ('Yes, like all culture-heroes of the past, distant and recent, I would kill enemies if it meant saving and freeing my people'), then it all seems beyond the pale, because the reality of any actual action seems scary to us. But it doesn't matter, because at this point it's almost like: We wrestle not against flesh and blood . . . Maybe it has always been that way, but now it's that way more than ever.

[] Bernal said that 'We badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies, eyes for infra-red, ultra-violet and X-rays, ears for supersonics, detectors of high and low temperatures, of electrical potential and current, and chemical organs of many kinds.' This was all written about a hundred years ago. He talked about creating a 'corporate personality' by 'connecting a nerve ending in a brain directly with an electrical reactor, then the way is open for connecting it with a brain-cell of another person. . . . The minds would always preserve a certain individuality . . . only communicating with the others for some common purpose.' This is old stuff. He was one of the most lauded scientists of his day. Everything he wrote about, including the forecast that humanity will split into several radically different species via genetic and technological enhancement, will absolutely come to pass if the technological system can maintain its structural integrity for a little while longer. As bizarre as this stuff may sound, try to imagine what our current world would look like to the average person who lived a hundred years ago: we are 90% of the way to Bizarro Land now.

[] 'It is a fundamental principle of this system that you have nothing under you, no reliable base; everything is on top of you pushing down.' – Dana

[] The poor man whom our society has transformed and worshipped as a hollow idol (for those are the only sorts of idols we have now), who is remembered for being something like just a goofy professor with one famous lesson the actual contents of which we've all forgotten. (People know the formula E = MC2 but do not know what it means or signifies. I don't really even understand it myself!) And evidently he liked to stick his tongue out a lot. For this is how we remember him, and it says a lot about our ability to consider real humans and humanity when juxtaposed with the technologically received imago of science and the idea of acquiring knowledge.

[] We are often cautioned 'not to treat people like things'. But our agency doesn't trump the agency of the system; and it is a system of things that's treating us like things. Meanwhile, lost in simulacra — with our growing attachments to various types of brands, images, and anthropomorphized devices — we begin to treat things as if they were people.

[] It might be worth investigating a parallel here with the fact that, just as the Second World War has been the central organizing narrative of the post-Modern world, the great conflict of the Classical world was actually the second Trojan War.

[] I have always suspected that these artificially prolonged lives of our modern era are overrated. People used to really live more in 35 or 40 years than we do in two or three times as long. We sit around for several decades, all told, watching electronic screens and thinking about simulacra and news reports. Remember: 'John Keats was dead at twenty-six!' Orson Welles was twenty-five. Joan of Arc was a teenager. And lots of people lived and died in just a handful of decades, after having children, seeing their grandchildren, and carrying on honest livelihoods — and if you feel a decent amount of ache and pain along the way, that's just part of living. You don't need all this prosthetic existence, with everything geared toward everyone getting indignant once they find out they really aren't going to live to be 150, in perfect health all the time, able to have childless sex twenty times a day forever. Just because the 'Rockefellers, Rothschilds,' and other celebrities get to do that doesn't mean we should do it — and maybe we shouldn't even want to, since after all it stands to reason that such lifestyles simply constitute another aspect of elite decadence. This is what Freud called the tyranny of Eros, the narcissistic overconcern with life-drives which actually become malignant. Everyone concerned with health and long living . . . but no one sure how to live at all in anything close to harmony with anything or anyone around them. Eros and Thanatos are no longer in balance: in our world now, generally speaking, we have a tyranny of Eros domestically and a tyranny of Thanatos in third-world nations. The technillogical system has orchestrated events so that both drives can have full reign over humanity as long as they stay out of each other's way.

[] I imagine this must bear an awful lot of similarities with St. Vitus Dance. You remember that, right, from any one of the twenty Andy Warhol documentaries we watched together. It was the boisterous and debilitating sickness he had as a kid, which gave him time to stay home from school, watch '50s TV shows, read comic books, and drown himself in pop culture all day, until he became the zombified artist of crass commercialism he turned out to be, for which we have admired him.

[] You can also see this 'smile' symptom in two wife-murderers: Scott Peterson, whose smile is more subdued and creepy, and Drew Peterson, whose smile is more bold and maniacal.

[] This same sample group, however, has no problem with reading more contemporary comic books, especially those written in the more 'decompressed' style of recent years: fewer words, bigger picture panels, 'cinematic' storytelling. Note that these more recent comics are written for adults between the ages of 30 and 40; that is the demographic to which the industry now caters. So, to summarize: comic books written for children in 1985 are far more difficult to read and require more concentration and human thought than comic books written for adults today. That is the absolute truth. And somewhere in here there's a pun along the lines of: The more collectively guilty a society becomes, the more the people try to avoid long sentences.

[] As Dana has it, Brzezinski also 'brokered the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] Treaty for the World Trade Organization. He was into some serious shit. He met with Osama bin Ladin and trained him in the late 1970s. There are pictures of this.' For the record, I should say that I can find no evidence that Brzezinski negotiated GATT; and I believe that the alleged pictures of Brzezinski showing bin Ladin how to shoot a gun are either forgeries, or else — more likely — the bearded Middle Eastern man in the pictures is not actually bin Ladin at all. Nonetheless, Dana asked me (and it's a good question): 'Why doesn't Brzezinski write about that stuff, instead of the silly things he writes about now?'

[] In Between Two Ages, Brzezinski quotes The Technological Society several times, glowingly and at length. In 1980 Ellul wrote a sequel of his own, entitled The Technological System, in which he made it known that he was not impressed with Brzezinski and took exception to the latter's emblematic portmanteau, 'Technetronic': 'Come now! Isn't electronics technological? . . . The traits that Brzezinski discerns in his technetronic society are actually the traits of a technological society. . . . [H]e simply went along with the fad of making up a seemingly esoteric vocabulary in order to give the impression of coming up with something new. What he says (in the first two sections of his book) is quite standard in regard to technological society. And all that is new here is the word "technetronic," which is unjustified. "Technology" amply suffices for everything he discusses.' For my part, I have arrived at the term technillogical very begrudgingly; I do not like portmanteau words — they are very, very tacky — but a radical term like this simply must be used to call attention to the systemic dissipation of logic which has occurred since Ellul's heyday. My technillogical is way different and so much better than Brzezinski's technetronic. The only term that might top mine would be something like technironic.

[] Russell's The Scientific Outlook is quite good as well. I do not mention Huxley's superlative Brave New World Revisited here for two reasons: because it is a compilation of articles, not a proper book; and because, despite possessing several almost incomparably powerful insights into certain aspects of Modern society, BNWR is not a full-length study; it is scarcely 100 pages long.

[] This prospect is increasingly difficult, as Brzezinski should know by now. The follies of Western forces who provoke Mideast uprisings has shown us that would-be revolutionaries cannot be relied upon to effect lasting change, whether in their own interests or in the interests of the West. The long-distance manipulation simply doesn't work very well anymore, for the simple fact that the orchestrations of the international system, including the ground level of the 'Arab street', depends less and less on carefully plotting humans and more and more on out-of-control technillogical development.

[] From Between Two Ages: 'In the technetronic society the trend seems to be toward aggregating the individual support of millions of unorganized citizens, who are easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities, and effectively exploiting the latest communication techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason. Reliance on television . . . creates a somewhat more cosmopolitan, though highly impressionistic, involvement in global affairs.'

[] The same goes for every university, every college, every academic, myself included. If you're — if we're — all so very, very smart, why are you presiding over the greatest, widest, most dramatic culture collapse in the history of the world? When people look back on you — if they look back on you — on us — they will survey all these works and books and vanities, and they will say, 'Yes, those are the sorts of things that human beings were doing, saying, fooling themselves with, and celebrating themselves for as their society fell all around them.'

[] If you're wondering, the university doctors were totally useless at diagnosing my problem. They literally told me, 'We don't know what it is; nothing we can do,' then showed me the door. But, wow, thanks to my health care plan that great advice was free.

[] Somewhere in here there's a sense of irony in that the 'comic' book in question was actually quite tragic: Bruce Wayne feels as though his world's falling apart, and there is no happy ending — no ending, period. Batman disappears and his friends think he's dead but readers are led to believe that he probably isn't. It reminds me of what 'Kafka' said in 'Sokmon's' report, about the original meanings of comedy and tragedy. In that strict sense, as long as there's no death at the end, you could say that any prose book or novel is in fact a 'comic book'.

[] Of course, Ellul wrote decades before this comic book was published, but I'm speaking in terms of my own personal reading history. I didn't first read Ellul until a year and a half later.

[] Or was the audible reaction just a bunch of canned applause added into the audio stream afterwards? . . . This was the sort of question I had to start asking myself.

[] Literally, in Kubrick's script, no second password exists. One can speculate on whether or not, in the imaginary world of the movie, a second password may have existed. But this is pointless indulgence, and we have precious few real clues to go on, either way. The brilliance of Eyes Wide Shut is that it can seem so much deeper than it really is. The film tricks inquisitive viewers into thinking they have seen more than they actually have.

[] The good intentions of groups and believers, as well as their enthusiasm and their effort to work for a cause, will always be used against them, and will be used by the developing infrastructure of the system to bring about the opposite of what these noble, naïve believers intended. The hippies of the 1960s directly and indirectly elected Reagan. And the Republicans who theoretically favor smaller government always seem to grow government when they are in office. Etc. Etc.

[] I am very aware of the fact that I would not kill my parents, even if it meant saving the universe. Have you ever contemplated a question like this? Would you kill someone directly related to you if, somehow, it meant saving the world? It's similar to the story of Abraham in the Bible. God commands him to kill his son Isaac, and Abraham has so much faith that he decides to do it: The way I remember it, Abraham ties Isaac up, puts him on a sacrificial altar, but then just as the knife touches the son's throat, God says 'Just joking' and stops him. This is God's sense of humor. It's either the very best or the very worst practical joke ever. I'm leaning toward the former.

[] Certainly, I have noticed this trait in you, Alex: You have undertaken much effort to care for and support big unions and 'workers', though you yourself have scarcely done any real work in your life, and always shirked your father during the summers, because you did not want to work — really work — with him and his crew, though they needed the help. Your father never ran scams, got grants, or went hideously overbudget to take advantage of unsuspecting taxpayers, as big unions have sometimes done — practices that you never even realized were possible, until you finally interned in Washington for a summer and saw just how scummy some (not all!) union bosses are, and how they can scarcely be said to look out for workers' longterm interests. They look out for themselves, and soak up adulation. Your father, on the other hand, was a real working man. But you only support 'workers' in the abstract. Please understand what I am saying here, and what I am not saying: I am not saying that it is bad to support workers, or unions. I am saying that it is bad and problematic to support them in a wholly artificial, hypocritical and naïve way, as you have done. So there.

•

### •

###  About the Author

Don Lashomb was born in upstate New York on December 26, 1981. He holds a PhD in English & Related Literatures from the University of York (UK) and is the author of several other works, including Analog Austerity, the Complete Stories poetry cycle, James Joyce Reincarnated: The WordGuru Glen Kealey, and Akrasia.

donalashomb.wordpress.com (now)

www.donalashomb.com (soon)
