chapter four: big decision

going to martha's vineyard for christmas. ought to be fun.

going sledding today with girlfriend. ought to be perfect. would be more perfect if I were able to sleep at all tonight. just staying awake. sick. tired. how does that song go? something by jewel or some bullshit.

couldn't get the thought out of my head: "condemned to freedom." what does that mean? all I came up with was an idea for a story of three thousand words or more. starring, of course, the devil and the everyman.

the devil's got his everyman locked up in a jail. cuffs around his wrist draw blood every time he moves. bread and water only once every day. he's put into stress positions, with his arms behind his back, bent forward, chained to a chair. left that way for hours. (of course, a modern version of the hellish prison would resemble guantanamo bay.)

but the devil isn't satisfied with this jail. not cost-effective, and too expensive to be imperfect. so he sets and thinks a while as his everyman is tearing his rotator cuffs. "what," thinks the devil, "is the most perfect, inescapable prison in the universe?"

his answer: a man's heart.

one night, after passing out on a waterboarding gurney, the devil's everyman wakes up to find his arms and legs unbound and the door to his prison open. he walks outside, sheepish, unsure if this is some sort of test or trap- but no. he hears nothing outside, no sounds of life, no footsteps, not even the heavy breathing of his torturers which he'd grown to fear.

he slowly, carefully walks out of his cell, then slowly, carefully out of the prison.

why did they let him free? he asks himself. what did he do? where did they go? did they really go?

not knowing any of this, he'll instead try to think back to the reason he was first imprisoned. what had he done? surely he'd offended his jailors somehow, and surely they'd discovered their mistake, that it was only an accident, his offence, or that it had never happened at all, and, upon realising this, they'd gone, abandoned him, in case he decided to sue them for their criminal actions.

but why didn't they warn him not to seek them out if this were so? if they were barbaric enough to torture him so, surely it wouldn't be beneath them to threaten him. and it was certainly in their power to kill him, should they so decide. if they could abduct him in the first place, they could probably have him dead any day they chose to. with that sort of character and that sort of power, he expected some sort of threat, but nothing came. they just left, all of a sudden.

that was frustrating, but that wasn't the new prison. the new prison was what the devil's everyman was supposed to do now. in prison, he had something to define himself against. he was not the torturer, he was the tortured. they abducted him, they tortured him. he hated them. now that they were gone, what was he?

his definition of what life was had been so altered by his internment that he could barely recognize normalcy for what it was. indeed, he suspected that normalcy no longer existed for him- it only occurred in short gasps of his life spent outside a cloying, unnameable fear. it was a memory.

as misshapen and warped a definition as that was, the devil's everyman will soon realise that, for all its flaws, in spite of it lacking any resemblance to reality, it was a definition. it was clear- in it, there was a place for him, and a place for all other things. he has none of that now.

eventually, he'll find something to struggle with, but it won't be that thing. it'll be the search for something to struggle with. that's his prison: seeking out an adversary. looking for some new devil. when he finds one, oh, it'll be swell, he'll have his side, the devil will have his own. it'll be so clearly, cleverly defined.

in the meanwhile, what will he have? existential stasis. nothing will change, because it won't have to: he's free, after all. isn't he?

chapter three: the worst part's almost over

the bus was late, half an hour, when it got here had to wait another hour and a half, got to northampton, tired, hungry, bored, out of tune, red, throbbing note stabbed into the chord of downtown, night was dirty, not yet snowing.

there was a guy playing steel drums. wondered how the wet snow changed his sound. muffled it. distorted it. wondered what that would be like: to be a drop of water in the bowl of a steel drum, shaking from top to bottom every time he hit the drum, wanting to freeze, being annoyed. can't stop shaking, can't begrudge the steel drum player: it's his job, and how could you hate such a mellow vibe?

never-ending amount of shit to do. shopping. studying. writing. sick of eating. hate the fact that I sleep. habits, man.

here is a finite perception of infinite judgment:

it would happen in the present. (the present being within three seconds of the event. or, sin.) it would happen in suspended animation: the present wouldn't freeze, it'd be like a clip on a loop, the same three seconds neither in motion nor in stasis, moving only as much as is needed to qualify it as both suspended and animated. the full context would be reapplied. the immediacy of the event (or sin) would exist again, independent of the passage of time or memory or exadduration or any mortal effort to undermine or understate its importance. if everything is infinite, if nothing stops, ever, if what happens in the present doesn't really cease, but just stays there, like a line of a poem, then neither should its judgment. neither should its most final analysis.

the irony here is that, if such a judgment is really objective, if such a judgment is concerned only with the binary of "what is right" and "what is wrong," only with whether or not the event (or sin) adheres to the rules, be they dictated by god or some other infinite construct our finite means struggle to comprehend, if the goal of this judgment is to separate the wheat from the chaff, reward what's right and punish what's wrong, if after this process which could and should be prolongued into infinity, if everything it judges is itself infinite, how can you deny anybody heaven? after reliving every last action, every last decision, sin, boon and inbetween, every fucking thing you've ever done, what benevelent god would throw your immortal soul in a lake after putting it through that horse shit?

oh, then, of course, comes the counter-argument that in this infinite world, time does not exist, and the whole process will occur in less than the blink of an eye (interesting, that cliche, as though the blink of an eye were the smallest colloquial unit of measurement when it comes to time. I use three seconds for two reasons: in any given culture, one line of poetry is no longer than three seconds long, and when describing an event in the immediate present, the present tense is exchanged for the past tense after a waiting period, which usually lasts for three seconds.). convenient, that whole omnipotent-and-omniscient thing.

to which I respond: yes, but that undermines our infinite souls. sure, they're freed from our finite bodies. they're both on the same level, have the same perception of time. if that's so, both are unable to judge something that neither believes to exist. what I'm arguing is that to judge everything, even the smallest of things you've done, would be a torturous process, independent of time. perhaps because it would be independent of time.

yes, that's an opinion, based on a finite understanding of what time is, and only a conjecture about what time is to the infinite. but goddamn, that would be a drag, wouldn't it? to have your soul fractured into a million little pieces, divided equally throughout your life, haggling with god over why your name should be on the list. especially if my suspicions are correct, and he doesn't have a sense of humor.

chapter two: meanwhile, one year and one day in the future

here is an inventory of my blog:

- I've gotten views from most continents.
- I've gotten views from a collection of Western European countries, including Great Britain.
- I've written at length about Steve Wilkos, Jonestown, David Foster Wallace, The 99, sleep deprivation, Hillary Clinton, Jay Severin, Lou Dobbs, omelettes, excercise, school, writing and faith. - What's the twist, you ask? Oh, Sam, I'd love to know what all this buildup was for. What have I been reading for? What truth have you been dying to reveal, all along?

brace yourself, home slices. here it is. I'm going to indent this, so you'll have to scroll down. way down. if you want in on this particular bit of enlightened tomfoolery.

ready? ok. seriously? no jokes. this is serious time.







I'm really indenting now.


seriously.

it was all about this guy.

don't you feel silly! here, you thought I was making it all up, but no! word for fucking word! go, look it up. I guarantee you. I should know, shouldn't I?

chapter one: wear dark, wear layers

the theme for this week's english class was henry james, who was bisexual.

here is what I would like to know. here is what I would love: for somebody to explain to me- maybe an english professor- maybe even a classics or geo-sci professor, at this point I find it hard to distinguish- I would like them to explain how, why, to what extent, and exactly which areas of my liberal education are directly affected by henry james's bisexuality.

that would be fantastic.

in the meanwhile, it only makes sense to ignore all other things said about henry james, this week, at least, while the theme of the class is "henry james: a bisexual person from a hundred years ago." and I know, absence of presence is not presence of absence. I'm not saying it's unimportant. I'm saying I don't know why it's important. the two statements are not the same.

fast forward to next week's fine selection, "raymond carver: a tough guy exterior masking a lifelong obsession with having sex with the rectums of men." followed by "franz kafka: the metamorphosis was really a later draft wherein the word 'penis' was replaced by 'beetle.'"

do I want to blame it on freud? yes. yes I do. how convenient would that be? to pin every logical fallacy of the twentieth century on sigmund freud. he fucked up one generation, didn't he? well, jesus, obviously he must've influenced eugenics in some sinister way. no wonder roe v. wade was founded on such a bullshit compromise! look at the interpretation of dreams, it's right there!

here is my thesis: a biographical interpretation of a text devalues it of any importance or pertinence to the society it critiques. if understood primarily as a symptom of the author's psyche, a text becomes too personal to mean anything past that. it's a lazy way to read, the only goal of which is to say, "hmm, that's interesting." nothing more is even attempted.

there's a paper I'm in no hurry to write.