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Adventures in the Collective Unconscious
No Equals I continues.
13.8
What was customary to be closed is lighted up again. The great eyes of the Amazon are speaking fiery approbation. Blood vessels that glow red are the pink river dolphins, legions of them, seeming to form lightning slashes in the water. Goodbye cetacean thought before we could learn to understand you. One hopes there’s something in the mind of a baleen. Perhaps it’s better that you guard it. If we found a stone rosette we’d unleash the missionaries on you. They’d bring aquariums into their consecrated former sports arenas, put baby dolphins in them, baptize them by the scuba priests. Worst of all they’d not really understand them — consent has never been a strong point for a priest, for the obvious programming. These dolphins released back into the sea would make easy prey for sharks and orcas, but in the meantime they’ll be clicking at their friends about their new prophet/deity derived from Iron Age thought. A lot of mal neuroses will burst forth in the warm-blooded air breathers. When those babies age and have some of their own, all the new anxieties will go into their calves. Movements will spring up in unsalted waters. There will be beachers, those who give up in one way and go out with a statement of their protest in another. They’ll throw themselves onto an equatorial shore and cook their folded brains there. Crowds of our pink river chaps will gather on the delta, wave their flippers, cheer their clicks at brave explorers as they venture off into the open sea. The predatory risks are high — no higher than living near the primates though. The challenge is a round-the-clock gillful of brine and how to learn to filter O2 from it. The river chap’s best athletes test their endurance in the poison brine. Once they did the same around refineries but too many of them had to “join” an HMO after. Now they avoid these altogether. Their medals are first dibs on schools of mackerel and mating chances. Dolphin dames are among the first strictures to be decoded. One can see why religion takes hold so readily. The pilot fish will demonstrate how culture can occur among the predators.
There are junctions where what arises is uncomfortable, yet something in us bids us to return. It is an accounting. That which folks revile they nonetheless make manifest. The hot stove test for the pink river dolphin was seeing how close a juvenile could get to a dominant primate. The result was also the trimming of thousands, or more, of branches from the species’ tree. Food became less plentiful as the river became files to be divided, in the form of concrete dams. People had begun expanding their diet as there were more of them, and they didn’t have as much to eat now either. It started in their mammal cousin’s larders and moved on to the larder keepers them-damn-selves. There was naught to do but swim away. No new place was safe. Deplorable primates were mining minuscule amounts of gold out of the jungle, and their refining chemicals were going in the rivers, and the indigenous who drank from them were being born with flippers, to remind them of the dolphins dying out. The pink river chaps had nothing left to offer but their own existence, so that was what they gave. To be born an apex predator and be anything but a Jain was to be complicit, the river from endangered to extinct runs out in a few paltry days.
Since she was a little girl our heroine had dreamt of horseback riding. Out she was one day when her favorite mount reared and cast off his disguise — he was a magic steed, and he had chosen her. But what about my family? she ached. We’ll be back before they miss you, quoth he, but first there are delights to show and wunderbars to see. She woke up knowing there were incandescent new realities that she had been immersed in. She sobbed til she was hoarse. They were too incorrodible to stay in memory. Her equine totem-Pan came only when she closed her eyes. In a way he was a glitter donkey too. His form was subject to her acuteness of belief. She felt condemned to re-enactment but she put mulch around this mind-thing. With him a rule was writ. For all the good connection, the former was enough to want to leave. An experience never done before is not new if the other person acts the same, to get the same response. She was unable to consider her own role in the repetition, going out for rides, getting drowsy, then the sheer excussion of real life for the Pan perfection. Youthfully she thought she brought a clean slate to a post-breakup encounter, to vistas new but similar, to difficult decisions. Age would show how much her journey matched her parents’. Wisdom is the product of decades of pattern recognition.
A call goes out among the cavalry. Every man reflects that he’s about to fight. All the cables are repeating the word go. Stakeholders receive the reasons not to, it’s no biggie to distract the soldiers from them and ignore. What’s left is picked-through clean.
There is competition in a dump. Milton’s vassals of perdition are rewarded with a goal, subsistence. Populations live in the landfill. Kids are born there. They grow up knowing nothing different. This kind of despair, when felt in other situations, can be terminal. But never in the dump. The vassals cling more tightly to the promise their lives will be better when they’re dead, clinging as they separate the objects in the trash. The man who takes a find of scrap iron from the little fist of its discoverer will be taught a lesson by a group of parents in the night. Even so the competition’s unrelenting. They do not say goodbye, they say good begging. They get a glimpse and reaffirm their memory — then they rise and go back to their labors. They’re told that they are blessed, that they will be rewarded. Not right now though.
It must be a diversion, to stretch the bounds of adaptability.
13.9
Stakeholders do this as a service. They should be thanked, or frankly worshiped. So as not to go to jail, we do not kill. This emboldens them. Perhaps in a few more generations, desert peasants will evolve a hump that stores and carries water. That would be useful — in fact, exploitable a.f. It will be proof that shoving populations there has had a spear-head benefit. And we never would have evolved the humps that soothe our planetary over-heating had we not, in their cyclical catastrophes, stuck resolutely to the stakeholder’s will. Right away the humps are fetishized. There’s a benefit for all — new ways of little-dying on the mounds of men. We always are in need of novel entertainment. The stakeholders will see the signs and put the new advantage in their pocketbook.
It didn’t cross her mind how certain males could help or hinder based on favors she’d bestow. It was a matter of public record — which like all young adults she did not read. Still she would not cross a line against morality. She’d never had to e.g. put her children first at this age. Later she would come up to the line and note that their survival depended on it. (At least temporarily — she’d never face a civil war, or have armed drones hovering a hundred feet over her head. Never observe cartons and cartons of supplies turned over, spilled chaotically, stolen, the rest trampled. Then wait begins, the next delivery. But everything is canceled without warning.)
She kept a network who would help her, but our hero was not so action-prone. There would be many moves before anyone would let him drop his burden in the dust. Perhaps he should have looked beyond what other depressed introverts had valued. It was tough to say what would have satisfied him, as he’d put everything on her — that is, as things really were instead of how he wanted them to be.
Conversations began cracking to the center. One side’s collapsed already but he’s been too wounded to notice. To some degree the way he saw things never varied, but at the same time nothing was more teetering. It took only a plosive spoken consonant to send his beliefs crashing from such heights that nothing in them would resemble what they had been before. He’d held onto this maxim as his right leg went dead for want of cruise control on the long drive to Nebraska — confronting himself in his idea of her, a picture that the person whom she was did not reflect. It had been sad to see such Sadducees in cars unmoving in the lane. It was as bad as when during their love she’d changed her preferred effervescence. That required a home adjustment, his closet smelling like her candle-labeled mood.
14.0
Perhaps exposing man for what he is will be a pleasantry. Folks will line up in the summer sun to thank the street haranguer for the wisdom that they didn’t have to live through to attain. The fêting will go on for days, but it will be a lifetime til we loosen up our clothes. Change is coming fast but not at once. The frustration will swamp us over once again. Even in this period of rapid change, most things progress incrementally. We must continue on, as though we have a choice to. We’ll always learn and be drawn back to reconstruct the paths that were bulldozed many times before. Machines are gonna operate the way that they know how, especially when they’re put in motion at the level below thought. We fight each other because we so much fight ourselves. We’ve gone a thousand rounds with everybody’s moral wanting and their drives before we ever step into a ring. We’re twisted with causality. We’re born to follow patterns. Others, to reject them. Yet all the piquant doubling of armories can never halt virtuous action.
Every gun that doesn’t send projectiles into flesh is teased and called a vegan by the rest. That’s no way to live a life a weapon never asked for. Are all the story beats in motion yet? Heretofore unblemished handle grips will be teased as virgins. The tone of voice in guns that killed suggests unblemishment isn’t what a gun should want to be. Of course it is asserted by their fetishists. This is a species that can craft an identity from obsessive possession. To possess every gun worth having means they won society. What a shot of dopamine that is. There are more guns in the US than are people, joining guns with sex toys and eyelash bacteria as things we cannot live with only one of. It sure proffers a heady sense of ultimate control, handling one of these carefree ignitable devices. Dignity alone suggests we should not have such power over life, except perhaps the control over our own, where dignity shifts to back another point. We want the final say in arguments, knowing that we’ll lose some. One place our final say’s definitive is owning lots of guns. The will is tickled to no end. It is a pleasuring sensation, knowing if one had to, really had to, one could have the final say. The kind there ain’t no comin back from. One seems bigger than the body one is falsely stuck in, when one holds a gun. One holds a baby, one holds a gun. Happiness is transferred to our gadgets. It doesn’t get more serious than one that turns a life into dead meat, or the other that does not need to factor in another’s dignity, only the want of the gun-holder. In the age of minority groups demanding their rights and agency, it says something how America supports and spreads such hand-held final-saying want-machines. If only the US had not been peopled by the Plymouth pilgrims, who were the undesirables of much older lands, who fled England because they bothered everybody, whose baffling illogic continues to govern the US today. They showed up in the new world and they started dying. More than half their 90-number died on their anchored boat. For months they never disembarked. The sick, mostly adults, stayed on the flower boat, in their petri dish out of the wind and rain. The children went ashore, cut timber, started building. Their descendants are still putting down indigenous rebellions to this day.
If only the US had it figured out as well as the old countries of Europe. But it’s such a rush, bro. Wherever there’s a rush there will be people going after it. It really puts an office guy in touch with his hunter past. To pull that trigger pulls away the ground beneath his feet. Nevermind the ground is there to catch the target. Before sex, a boy’s best fun is blowing something up. “Take that, world,” is what his subconscious says with each ignition. Gun preferment cannot properly be termed a culture, no more than a corporation can claim to have a culture. But gun preferment is not about the indigenous hunter’s prayer of thanks to the dying animal. It’s about the only promise they have left.
In the middle distance our heroine will light up every room. Even those who disparage her on sight snap their heads around to see what light has come into the room. Military guys were all over her before she got to college. They continued their persistence for many years to come and were the cause of her shutting down every interaction with a stranger. After graduation the only guys she favored were those who’d weather her initial storm good-humoredly and display their qualities in many gatherings for months or years before she’d soften, and of those only two had the security to drop the past and place intent upon her grown reality, and also disturb her need for ctrl by taking the wheel from time to time after she had driven them and their talk so long, as well as the casual relationships they had with other women, because the young soldiers who can do the former will surely do the latter (they are not Pollard’s kind of soldier). Once, she had a vacation fling with a monied benefactor of her art. She’d had the unsubtle urge to pry into the penthouse suite, the yachts and private jet. When an acquaintance reported to the clique about the food aboard and the obscenely priced purses she’d been given and what a time she had, it was her no-big-deal coolness that made our heroine competitive. So while pursued with shiny objects on old skin for months, she finally gave in and took the jolly rogering that was exclusivity’s male due. He was a patron of the arts. Folks humbled themselves before him. He’d done this many times before. This time it was a long weekend on a Caribbean tax shelter. They went there on his plane, had the penthouse of the chic resort, and partied on gaudy rafts in the still-nursery coralic waters. She set herself against sleeping with him to see if she could. But one evening on a gorgeous property with the whole world, or a significant portion of its wealth, groveling at her feet, she allowed the drive to make him happy, twice. That promissory Monday he gentlemanly begged her pardon but was afraid that he’d been called away. He sent her back to wild Nebraska, alone, on the jet, and took another to the nicer parts of Goa for his next tithing to his glands. A way to get in touch again had not felt right to be broached. He had the wealthy bearing that made her wonder whether everything she said was gauche. He ended sentences with the feeling of finality. Never having been intimate with them before, she did not know how to behave beyond her supercilious confidence and readiness to attack. She was left wondering if she’d not followed to the letter mistress’s rules for fancy breeding, and had he hid his wince when she picked up the wrong fork for the salad course? She’d met on some anchored yacht among its polished banisters and the biggest mirror she’d ever seen some competitors of his. She had quite a swell hoo-rah with the ol’ jet set, and would have finagled more invites but for the creepy feeling of the staff, who had subsumed their own humanity to a startling degree of unpersonhood, and even more strikingly to her, but for the other young women on the trip, who were unmatched in both pulchritude and their fatalistic sense that they were part of a transaction. It made our heroine feel uncared-for, to be around them. Associating with them was devaluing her self, where being around the swells was not. Such inveigled neighborhoods will see their legacies defined by what they owed the people she returned to, bored, on someone else’s private jet. She would sharpen her apprenticeship elsewhere. She regretted not sustaining what she’d tasted, but it would become a favored memory.
Our hero saw the climax of his quest, to follow our heroine from California to Nebraska, find out why she’d left him, and get her back, as an attempt to answer everything he was uncertain of. A youth, he thought he could. Yet if it was her nose via pheromones that had brought the two together, it was a bit of fomo that had her sniffing out new scents. She sensed in wealthy folks the things that she had never sensed before, once her sneezing circle widened. He couldn’t understand how her self-interest diverged from his own. She didn’t get it either, at the realm of conscious thought. Her mental space was in the room that he had furnished. There was still a lot of him in there, generating meaning. Because of that she could not quickly torch the place and be done with it. That was clear but what she had not noticed at their start, but was apparent now, is that the room had narrow windows, floor to ceiling, which opened with a weighted pulley, letting even donkeys pass right in. The wooden frame around the glass was thick with decades of layers of paint. In the humid summer the wood swelled making the window stick, tough to open. It felt tacky to the touch. In the dry winters she could lift it open with her pinky. And as every breakup happens in the winter, regardless of the season, she found that she could walk out through the narrow space without resistance.