John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.
How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.
INFLUENCES
One of the few kid’s books I actually remember reading and which I never stopped thinking about. I’m going to just write about this from memory. I don’t want to be corrected.
The premise is relatively earnest. Three kids discover the world is on intergalactic trial because humanity is just too dangerous to exist! This is after two books in which the three archetypal kids (introvert, bully, ‘girl’) have uncovered a plot that begins with a suspicion about their teacher and his motives.
Anyway by the third book they’re given a chance to make a case for humanity’s right to continue to exist.
The kids get taken on a tour of the globe by their former teacher, who had initially wanted to save humanity but had recently lost faith in the enterprise. The teacher just seems really disappointed all the time. The feeling you get is…he tried. He wanted to find something redemptive there but couldn’t. Anyway, the kids bear witness to poverty, war, famine. Probably they’re given a lesson in history along the way.
The kids get depressed af.
The alien who had formerly been their teacher asks them something along the lines of ‘What kind of species is this? How can this ever be justified?” etc
They get more depressed.
One of the kids, who had formerly been “the bully* but who changes profoundly over the course of the series after having his intelligence boosted by alien technology, comes up with a predictably great idea.
(*This was the first note of fascination. The possibility of redemption, the nerdish struggle to forgive, and the fact that intelligence and empathy were depicted not as oppositional but rather wholly relational. There is something here I wanted to hold onto…that we might evolve into something better if only we were more imaginative)
Anyway, the former bully, I think, proposes that in order to solve the problem of humanity they use the Intelligence machine to fully unlock their mind’s potential. If there was an answer they just needed to be more intelligent to find it. Voila.
Obviously, the machine and their minds have to get pushed to breaking point in order to find the answer. It’s a difficult, borderline intractable, problem after all. At least in the way it’s framed.
Anyway, the result is telepathy and an understanding of the fundamental oneness of all humanity that allows them to make, what strikes me, as a rather fallacious plea for mercy on the grounds humanity is always already an endangered species. Humanity, they argue, isn’t evil.
Humanity instead was more like an insane and traumatised child unable to stop self-mutilating. At least that was the implication.
Or that the self was a kind of mutilation. Something along those lines but unstated.
Regardless, their point was since humanity was singular it needed to be preserved. The aliens would have to re-educate them.They had a responsibility Especially since television had been an alien technology leaked to us by an alien liberal. etc etc
That part was ok. Pretty good, even if the argument didn’t really make much sense to me.
But the section that blew my tiny little mind was the explanation for why humanity had lost its connection to itself in the first place. The explanation was that consciousness had been telepathic but that this evolutionary development had essentially been too painful and we had become estranged from our collective nature in ‘self’ defence. The notion of individualised consciousness as the agony of becoming a self creating thing, was something i’ve never stopped thinking about.
This and my childhood phobia that people could tell what I was thinking informed HIKTUM’s perspective as much as anything else
SPINOZA
(Spinoza) is understandably dissatisfied with a kind of solomonic carve up of the cosmic baby.’
ME TOO.
….
Katherine N Hayle’s ‘How We became Post Human’ was probably the pivotal text in terms of research.
EXTRACTS
To trace the evolution of Maturana’s epistemology, let us turn now to the seminal paper “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” In it, Maturana and his coauthors demonstrate that the frog’s sensory receptors speak to the brain in a language highly processed and species-specific. To arrive at this conclusion, the authors implanted microelectrodes in a frog’s visual cortex to measure the strength of neural responses to various stimuli. At this point the frog’s brain became part of a cybernetic circuit, a bioapparatus reconfigured to produce scientific knowledge. Strictly speaking, the frog’s brain had ceased to belong to the frog alone. I will therefore drop the possessive and follow the authors by referring to the frog’s brain simply as “the brain” (a phrase that eerily echoes the title of Norbert Wiener’s short The Second Wave of Cybernetics / 135 story discussed in chapter 5). From the wired-up brain, the researchers discovered that small objects in fast, erratic motion elicited maximum response, whereas large, slow-moving objects evoked little or no response. It is easy to see how such perceptual equipment is adaptive from the frog’s point of view, because it allows the frog to perceive flies while ignoring other phenomena irrelevant to its interests. The results implied that the frog’s perceptual system does not so much register reality as construct it. As the authors noted, their work “shows that the [frog’s] eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light upon the receptors. “12 The workled Maturana to the maxim fundamental to his epistemology: “Everything said is said by an observer” (AC, p. xxii). No wonder the article was quickly recognized as a classic, for it blew a frog-sized hole in realist epistemology
…
Let’s say I see a blue jay flash through the trees and settle on the birdbath. I may think, “Oh, it’s getting a drink.” Other species, for example those lacking color vision, would react to this triggering event with different constructions. A frog might notice the quiCk, erratic flight but be oblivious to the blue jay at rest. Each living system thus constructs its environment through the “domain of interactions” made possible by its autopoietic organization. What lies outside that domain does not exist for that system. Maturana, realizing that he was fighting a long tradition of realist assumptions deeply embedded in everyday language, developed an elaborate vocabulary as a prophylactic against having anthropomorphism creep back in. The necessity of finding a new language in which to express his theory was borne home to him during the student revolution in Chile in May 1968. It was then, he wrote in Autopoiesis and Cognition, that he discovered that “language was a trap, but the whole experience was a wonderful school in which one could discover how mute, deaf and blind one was … one began to listen and one’s language began to change; and then, but only then, new things could be said” (AC, p. xvi)
….
From the viewpoint of the autopoietic processes, there is only the circular interplay of the processes as they continue to realize their autopoiesis, always operating in the present moment and always producing the organization that also produces them. Thus, time and causality are not intrinsic to the processes themselves but are concepts inferred by an observer. “The present is the time interval necessary for an interaction to take place,” Maturana and Varela wrote. “Past, future and time exist only for the observer”
….
DREYFUS, Heidegger and AI
Around the same time as this I discovered Heidegger’s influence on artificial intelligence. Heidegger is obviously odious but I found the account of Dasein to be quite beautiful and unexpectedly moving. Ironically, it didn’t seem at all tethered to the concept of human consciousness but only the necessarily relational structure of any consciousness to its environment. The refusal to say human pointed to the possibility of different consciousness.
Anyway, a professor Hubert Dreyfus (not Richard as I wrote in the first draft of this)…. Pointed out that Heidegger’s basic insight was that the world comes first. Which undoes the dualism which permeated ,and continues to permeate, a lot of our understanding of the world. How we instrumentalise our bodies. We develop through our relation to the world
I began to read around this time a lot of Deleuze and Guattari who are more interesting than Heidegger and whose concept of virtuality was super important to me in terms of thinking about potential. How things emerge from the possibility space of virtuality into the actual creating more potential, more difference, more emergence etc. Thrilling stuff.
According to Hayle’s Maturana account of Autopoiesis struggles with evolution. This is baffling to me because the solution seems so apparent. The permeability of certain systems. How the world seeps through,there is always an orifice, always something that can be crossed. It seems extremely strange that Maturana in particular was committed to a position that the organisation of a system was non-relation to that which was outside of it.
Harun Faroki – Serious Games
‘In his video installations Serious Games I–IV, Harun Farocki explores how the U.S. military employs video game technology to train troops for war and to treat an aftereffect of war, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Filmed at the United States Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Serious Games I: Watson is Down pairs footage of soldiers at computers engaging in combat-simulation training with scenes from the video games. In Serious Games III: Immersion, Farocki presents footage of a role-playing exercise in which military psychologists demonstrate how to use the PTSD program on their colleagues, who describe traumatic wartime experiences. On a second channel, their descriptions play out as virtual renderings.
(https://www.moma.org/collection/works/143767)
I love Faroki’s work and how it straddles or constitutes itself as a border between installation and documentary. Seeing this exhibition was probably the genesis of the book in terms of ‘I want to do something with the ideas in this’
Serious
Games III (Immersion)
(Review)
Natasha Eves
(extracts)
Therapy is lucrative, if publicly underfunded. The limitations of the software become apparent in the film’s final demonstration, where Kevin, a civilian therapist, speaks of his “first assignment” with Jones. The VR falters, the tracking goes awry either staring at the ground or spinning into the sky. In spite of this, the therapist’s performance never falters, delivering what is assumed to be a personal experience.
Kevin hijacks this technical, political, and commercial document as a carrier for his own intense process, or performance, as a traumatised soldier. His performance may not be false but, Rodowick writes, “the absence of the event is redoubled, for in the end Farocki reveals that we have all along been watching an actor simulating reactions to a simulation.”
Through entertaining the notion of being a soldier traumatised by war, as demanded by his job, the full utility of this corporate warriorship is realised the fantasy inspires his performance, his full investment in his investors.
Military training is designed to adapt the soldier to act calmly and methodologically in disturbing situations regardless of the psychological impact. In contrast, the training of the therapist enables him to perform psychological distress in a contained manner. Kevin’s closing jest that “some of the nausea was real” relates only to the faulty tracking and not to the recollected experience.
(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/26t834v1)
BIOTECH
Team builds first living robots—that can reproduce
November 29, 2021
AI-designed Xenobots reveal entirely new form of biological self-replication—promising for regenerative medicine
‘“This is profound,” says Levin. “These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding.” In earlier experiments, the scientists were amazed that Xenobots could be designed to achieve simple tasks. Now they are stunned that these biological objects—a computer-designed collection of cells—will spontaneously replicate. “We have the full, unaltered frog genome,” says Levin, “but it gave no hint that these cells can work together on this new task,” of gathering and then compressing separated cells into working self-copies.
“These are frog cells replicating in a way that is very different from how frogs do it. No animal or plant known to science replicates in this way,” says Sam Kriegman, Ph.D., the lead author on the new study, who completed his Ph.D. in Bongard’s lab at UVM and is now a post-doctoral researcher at Tuft’s Allen Center and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
On its own, the Xenobot parent, made of some 3,000 cells, forms a sphere. “These can make children but then the system normally dies out after that. It’s very hard, actually, to get the system to keep reproducing,” says Kriegman. But with an artificial intelligence program working on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Core, an evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation—triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish—to find ones that allowed the cells to be more effective at the motion-based “kinematic” replication reported in the new research.
“We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man,” says Kriegman. “It’s very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it’s not something a human engineer would come up with. Why one tiny mouth? Why not five? We sent the results to Doug and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent Xenobots. Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren.” In other words, the right design greatly extended the number of generations.
Paralysed woman able to ‘speak’ through digital avatar in world first
‘The patient, a 47-year-old woman, Ann, has been severely paralysed since suffering a brainstem stroke more than 18 years ago. She cannot speak or type and normally communicates using movement-tracking technology that allows her to slowly select letters at up to 14 words a minute. She hopes the avatar technology could enable her to work as a counsellor in future.
The team implanted a paper-thin rectangle of 253 electrodes on to the surface of Ann’s brain over a region critical for speech. The electrodes intercepted the brain signals that, if not for the stroke, would have controlled muscles in her tongue, jaw, larynx and face.
After implantation, Ann worked with the team to train the system’s AI algorithm to detect her unique brain signals for various speech sounds by repeating different phrases repeatedly.
The computer learned 39 distinctive sounds and a Chat GPT-style language model was used to translate the signals into intelligible sentences. This was then used to control an avatar with a voice personalised to sound like Ann’s voice before the injury, based on a recording of her speaking at her wedding.
Spin
FALLOUT 3
I watched my wife play a lot of Fallout. The illusion of agency and this idea of choice as a skill, how this might link to reading and telepathy, and the difficulty of maintaining a coherent identity even in play was really interesting.
Narrative
I wanted to see if I could write an ostensibly narrative driven novel which remained interesting to myself. I also wanted to write something entirely different to The Autodidacts which nonetheless might connect to it thematically.
If the Autodidacts was in a way about writing, i.e how the act of creation seeks a form that fails to contain its existence then Hiktum is about reading I.E POSSESSION. If The Autodidacts was about emotion then HIKTUM was going to be an analysis of the conditions for emotion. If The Autodidacts was going to be externally fragmented and internally unified then HIKTUM would be externally unified and internally fragmented.
Lines from HIKTUM feature in this collaboration with Musical Artist Extraordinaire Matt Lynne
NICE THINGS SOME OF MY FAVOURITE CONTEMPORARY WRITERS HAVE SAID
Thomas Kendall’s sentences form beautiful crystals that render the soul transparent. In How I Killed the Universal Man, (somewhat science fiction, somewhat philosophical thought experiment) Kendall imbues the rational anticipation of the near future with searing insight into what it means to be human. Mind-altering drugs, technological human enhancement, and a really cool video game lay the groundwork for explorations into consciousness that expand our empathy toward our future selves. – Charlene Elsby, author of Bedlam and The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty
A moving, penetrating, dystopic meditation on autonomy, identity, and meaning. A warning from the future, but also from now. Daring and prescient. – Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere and What Are You
Febrile, menacing, and alive with portent, with a grotesque and hyper-dense image repertoire that fuses Bosch and Cronenberg, How I Killed the Universal Man takes us deep into a near future where mind, body, and environment have merged in ways we can, from today’s vantage, just barely comprehend. Kendall’s nuanced and humane prose never abandons us on this journey to the end of consciousness, though neither does it offer any false consolation. Picking up where A Scanner Darkly, Strange Days, and Children of Men left off, this epic new masterwork immediately assumes its place in the cyberpunk canon. – David Leo Rice, author of The New House and The Pornme Trilogy
SOME EXTRACTS
Extract 1
She stands up and retrieves something from a draw in the desk behind her. She opens her left palm in front of Lakerman as if she was holding out a treat for a dog.
—“You can ingest or inject.” Her right hand sweeps over the two prizes held in the flat of her palm.
—“I feel like they should be presented on little velvet cushions.”
—She doesn’t laugh.
—“What’s the difference?”
—“You strike me as someone who would know.”
—“That’s an obviously memorable quote.”
—“It’s going to be the least memorable thing you can imagine soon enough.”
He rolls up his sleeve.
He scans the doctor’s face for any trace of animosity as she turns his forearm over with her hands. No words pass between them as the tip of the syringe sinks into his arm in a quietly satisfying motion. The needle is greeted by skin, enveloped in the formalities of entry level wounding, and takes up residence in his flesh via the body’s logic of acceptance. The metal integrated, sealed up in the border.
Lakerman’s already totally transported by the time the syringe is half emptied. Thoughts and feelings rise from fields of neurons like crickets at sunset. And what will they devastate in this swarming oneness? The sense of time he is experiencing just hits space differently. It is not subjugated to distance and there are no words there and it is impossible to measure. Time turns recognisable now as the needle is, he notes, extracted out of his arm. The tip of it beaded like rain. Lakerman feels a lucid joy, one his consciousness keeps waking up in and noticing. He doesn’t think this waking is associated with any kind of forgetting, as you might suppose, rather he’s existing in a constant state of realisation. The total contains the possible, he thinks. Lakerman looks around and sees that the surface of each thing in the room contains its own glowing firmament, a sun and a sky given to giving out life. Dr Christoff is kneeling in front of him. He feels he is laughing uncontrollably and yet he is also aware that his expression remains calm and neutrally composed.
“So from what I can see on the screen you’re well into phase one. We’re taking a reading. I’m going to monitor you on this and I’m going to at times suggest images to you while altering the way the antidepressant works. Now, from what I understand you’re an orphan with a significant experience of trauma?”
He tries to open his mouth but the world is already in there.
“Now, I’m going to… This experience, remember, is therapeutic. It’s not really about pleasure. Let’s see what we can pull up.”
—“I want to know that beauty is something my body can do.”
—He hadn’t intended to say that.
“Unexpected. You’re going to feel a lot of things now.”
It’s like he closes his eyes but it isn’t that. Lakerman sees himself as a seven year old boy walking towards a barbed wire fence in the distance. There is refuse stacked waist high either side of him and a lake covered in mould the colours of a gasoline rainbow. The sensation for Lakerman is somewhere between memory and experience.
“Roscoff?” Andrea says but her voice is wind and sky.
Extract 2: The Most Certain Possibility
The car pulls up in front of the border. Lakerman watches people staggering towards it like heal me, I’m sick. The border is augmented with a hologram of a gothic church. The towering buttresses and gargoyles flicker and glitch to reveal the dense, squat, cuboid of the warehouse beneath. Lakerman watches light tremble with bass, weightless forms and heavy sounds colliding. Lakerman gets out of the car. As he scans his ticket an automated voice informs him that the border consists of three floors or ‘moods.’ The first floor of the club is The Threshold. The second Inner Space. The third: The New Liminal.
* * *
Lakerman’s surrounded by bodies and trying to make sense of The Threshold, warbled with beats as his mind is. Everyone’s dancing, their sense of themselves as selves all bent and quivering around a grain of finitude, bodies signing time around the temporary becoming of beats. Mad drums. Each body’s a flickering set of coordinates alternating under metallic lights that map, in real inconstant time, velocities of emergence and change. Lakerman watches the hard surfaces of light gleam around tranced out skulls, their neon eyes polished by sweat, concavities of cheeks armoured with shine.
—He heads to the bar and orders a vodka tonic that arrives lukewarm.
—He moves through the room, navigating the clustered bodies. There are cryptic messages in the heat packed air, information in the rendered sweat. From what he can make out, each body was expressing that:
—What they might see meant everything.
—What they could see was possibility.
—What they would see was another matter.
For a while it wouldn’t even seem like a disappointment, Lakerman thinks. To be what they were in their becoming. That would require reflection. He takes the stairs to the second floor, enters Inner Space.
* * *
Inner Space was filled with people who looked like they were doing ableist Stevie Wonder impressions as they massaged one another. There was zero irony in the room. A club rat approaches Lakerman. Leads him to a corner. The club rat stops and looks at Lakerman very earnestly in the face. She is a young woman covered in neon glitter. Lakerman feels a tremendous surge of empathic warmth towards her. The young woman opens her mouth.
—“It’s the drug you know”
—“What is?”
—“Whatever you’re feeling or thinking or imagining this is. The room has a particular frequency of transmission if you get what I’m saying”
—“How do you know I’m feeling anything?”
—The club rat looks at the ground. Smiles at it, shrugs. Applies some lip gloss. She looks up again at Lakerman with concentrated sincerity, her eyes manically glittering.
—“Listen, I’m out of money, I want to score and you look like you need to soon.”
—“What can you get?”
—“Everything from N to N.”
—“You can get Noumenon?”
—“What do you think we’re here for?”
—“I’ll buy it if you let me interview you.”
—“Interview…I don’t think.”
—“I’ll use a fake name.”
—“All my names are fake. Interview for who?”
—“For donkeyWolf.”
—“No shit, donkeyWolf? Ok, yeah. Drugs first though, I’ll be more interesting then.”
—He wants to deny what she said but doesn’t. She looks at him vaguely impressed.
—“The vibe of Inner Space makes it pretty easy to fleece people once you’ve got a hold of its mechanisms but really, I can get stuff.”
—She leads him over to another club rat, a terminally sullen looking young man (even when doused in glitter, Lakerman notes.) The young man’s pupils have collapsed into two concentrated points crushing the world in front of them. His brain maybe wanted the world to be as understandably complex and recognisably beautiful as a diamond, Lakerman thought. —Scratch that. Delete. Lakerman ‘trashes’ the note.
—That would never make it past the line editor.
—The girl lowers her head in front of the young man.
—“This guy is going to buy for us”
—The young man doesn’t say anything.
—“Now I’m buying for all three of us? This isn’t the dealer?”
—“This is my boyfriend. I can’t take you to the dealer for reasons that should be obvious. You can wait with him, though. Just transfer me the money through gladhand.”
—“How do I know you’re going to come back? That this is even your boyfriend”
—“I’m still high enough to feel compelled to. And he is my boyfriend and he’s wonderful. You should listen to him”
She puts out her hand. Lakerman shakes it. He notices a leopard print of freckles on her exposed shoulder. The last of his expenses are transferred. The girl leaves and Lakerman finds his arm involuntarily rising towards the space she has just occupied. Weird. Lakerman sits in front of the young man. Lights a joint, offers it. No response. The young man hasn’t acknowledged Lakerman’s existence enough for this to count as a rejection. Apart from his eyes the rest of the young man’s face is unexceptionally there. Unshaped, though not gormless. Not even that. Lakerman didn’t think it was possible to be so expressionless. It’s almost shocking. It has something to do with the lack of relationship between eyes and face, he supposes. Lakerman is imagining snapping his fingers in front of the vacant face when a warm voice, rich in feeling, begins to speak through the young man’s body.
“I suppose you’ve heard the theory that we’re living in a simulation, that we’re the conscious scenarios of our future ancestor’s past? The maths is solid. My take: we’re an attempt to work out what the fuck happened. Disaster world numero whatever.”
Lakerman maintains eye contact with the blank face out of which this ventriloquized voice speeds. There’s no recognition of his presence.
“I find this idea totally romantic and meaningful. What went wrong? How could things have been different? What if this were the simulation where things worked out? And we happen upon ideas and technology that our future ancestors don’t know about? What if we could retroactively save the planet, life? Imagine a world that isn’t hell. I heard a scientist say that if you rewound and played back time then evolution wouldn’t happen the same way twice. Is that what we are? A recording subject to change? I hope this is a simulation. The idea of a simulation lets me believe in the future and Free will as a determined variable. Which is something I need. It makes me feel like my life means something even if it is a total wreck. I exist. I contribute to existence. I’m worth as much as a rock at least. Though my father would say ‘Little difference’. Listen, I know you’re out there. Here’s something you should know: I’ve always loved drugs, for as long as I could love. As long as I remembered it: love. As long as I remember. To think that could mean something…imagine. The point is I don’t love drugs anymore, I love this and it’s different.”
The young man shuts down, his intensity shrinking to a hard dot. Lakerman takes another hit and finishes the flat vodka tonic. Ten minutes later and the girlfriend is back and grinning. She pulls a small folded triangle out of her back pocket. The young man’s head turns towards her. She begins to speak to Lakerman, the boy, herself, no one.
****
Extract 3
You do not care enough about this storyline to take action.
You are looking around for Mr Hardgrief. He is nowhere to be seen. Your mother points out Charles Darwin to you. Out of frustration you fantasise about sleeping with him for the scandal. He is well into his sixties but the fantasy is immensely satisfying in a manner you had not bargained for. Time is unlocking. As you think this Darwin breaks from his conversation and pierces you with a long searching look as if he has somehow intuited the reactionary nature of your desire and is gently puzzled by its source. His blue grey eyes, half ringed with wild eyebrows, contain not a trace of judgement despite their clarity. There is a warmth and friendliness to them thawing your frozen body. Charles Darwin is not a sad man, he seems to want you to know this. As Darwin looks at you the bruises on your arms from Maman’s pinches, your arms themselves, your legs, your eyes, the submerged flutter of your heart, the strange matrices of your skeleton, the separation of toes, fingers, hands, your vulva, the world outside of your body, other bodies..become infinitely regressing archipelagos teeming with life and waiting to evolve. The air is just the sea you live in.
You activate a charming rebellion with a daring selection of repartee.
You ease Maman off of your arm in front of the local priest while levelling a witticism at the general crowd that creates a pocket of laughter and murmurs of appreciation that allows you to entirely withdraw from the group while Maman feeds on the praise you have generated. The local priest is both enchanted and confused. Everyone agrees you are a young woman of some promise.
You are walking towards Darwin and through your own divergent history. Each step moves you through time, pours you through the shared and unlikely progeny you create together, your life and love for them crystallising in the the stories they tell of you, the way these stories grow more curious over time, until you become a laugh echoing through time, a close reading observing slight characteristics developing through generations, the line of a nose, the endless softening of hands, your expressions evolving in a child and going on and on and until almost nothing recognisable remains…
And then there you are again, something else, something like a footnote in history half excavated, rediscovered, first marginalised and then rescued/consumed by the centre. But what does it say? The Curious Young Wife of Charles Darwin: The origin of attraction. It is not enough, perhaps you might still become other than this attachment, might make your own discovery to eclipse his.
Could you convince Darwin to send you on your own voyage? To support your own claims to genius. Might this be a worthy aim for a life? You wade through essays in which you are both icon and villain, hero and serpent. Forever. What sadness. Comments beneath online video streaming sites denigrate your existence and deny your worth in the coarsest language imaginable.
You see, as you approach this venerable old man with the cane pocking the soft earth, (Darwin stabbing it down hypnotically in time with each of your flighted steps) another option signalling itself to your left.
You choose left.
To your left you see Mr Hardgrief casting his gaze around, his glare finally seeming to fix upon you. Darwin wanders off. You step towards Hardgrief. He looks at you, startled, flustered. You are about to offer your hand. There is an entire language hiccupped in his throat. A woman, a decade your senior perhaps, appears from behind and kisses Mr Hardgrief on the cheek. She turns and looks at you, hanging from his shoulder and waiting expectantly for an introduction that might double as an explanation.
She is introduced to you as Mr Hardgrief’s fiance. You find her to be a commanding and beautiful woman and in relation to her you feel a desperate shame and inadequacy. She is a woman, you sense, full of mysteries.
Mr Hardgrief begins to recount the nature of your ‘inopportune’ acquaintance as you nod along smiling quite stupidly, utterly transfixed by this Baroness. Her name is Agatha Greatwill.
“He was a perfect gentleman,” you say.
“But not much else I’d wager,” Agatha replies.
She smiles at you. There is a touch of ruin to her face. It was a sign that she would age well. As she aged the ruin would grow more beautiful and commanding, it would develop a sovereign position in its fidelity to its vanished referent, as the reference of beauty disappeared the signifier would more and more assume the likeness of the absence till there was only this leer constructed within it and pointing back to some preternatural form of knowing … it would prove her beauty through its stasis as all around it life was proved in death.
Agatha Greatwill says that she is charmed to meet you.
Might you fall in love with her too? Scandalise society, flee to Italy, wait for some war. There is always a war. You see each of you older now, tendrilled with lovers but arborescent and rooted in one another, feeding your twinned bodies with the field of experience. You would become antecedents to modernism, haunting the present forever in the rejection of your own, becoming the feverish night sweat writing itself across Djuna Barnes dilating vagina.
And Mr Hardgrief? You could corrupt or destroy him, be betrayed by him. Perhaps marry him for his money and then poison him one night… Or you might become pregnant. How would you treat the child? Drown it in a sack or else raise it with Agatha alongside you to be a great poet? Perhaps abort it with a fall from a horse?
Extract 4
Interview With An Abstraction
Lakerman opens his eyes. Darkness again but something else too. Tangibility. Rude confirmations of gravity. A plurality of body odours. Rough shapes. Skeletal calamities. Lakerman knows he is in a corrugated steel shipping container on the back of a truck with forty other people heading towards a destination he can’t guess at. There is a sense of lives lived too close to one another, a humidity of skin that turns the air swampy and primordial. Possibilities of new lifeforms, basic and antagonistic, work through the probability of their existence at a rate of infection. There is a limit being reached here. The truck comes to a halt. Bodies brace themselves then teeter and skim forward over similarly tensed bodies. Lakerman feels hands fold over hands in prayer. Prayers chanted like songs without joy though the combination of hope, frailty, and fear in them is tangible enough to weigh a life with soul, he thinks. If a soul were just the clear space created by erosion, the slow cavity of intimacy held in the clenched fist of the earth.
—There is an unholy sound of metal squealing against metal as the container’s doors are unpegged. A single square of hard, tan, light floods their prayers and erases any connection to God. The brightness permits only the vaguest smear of colour and shape to warble in Lakerman’s eyes. Everyone begins to exit the shipping container. Jostled by their bodies, he follows. He still cannot see anything beyond the glare as he drops from the truck to the earth. Sand reforms and retracts around his feet. The sky’s the warping, fluted, blue of a flame. His eyes focusing, Lakerman sees a caravan of mobile homes up ahead and six large barbeques set out on imported lawns, lawns perpetually freshened by sprinklers attached to large water tanks half dug into the ground and almost hidden from sight. Behind the barbeques people come into view. Pink faced and seemingly in good cheer, sipping bottled heinekens that perspire seductively around their soft hands. It takes Lakerman a moment to realise that there are only five different types of face repeated across the group. The generic faces rise from their lawn chairs, almost as one, smiling and waving. The smell of fresh steaks and cookies roil around the desert air. Above the grills air shimmers, leavened by heat.
A voice rolls across the sky. The world skips and freezes and fades away.
“They were labour. For an unlicensed data farm, alternet servers, and a biotech laboratory. Migrant workers recruited with the tacit approval of governments whose silences were the first indication of the atrocities to come. Even Twenty, twenty five years ago, you needed bodies. You needed labour. I know you won’t believe this, but I had about as much choice as they did. There were some things I could have done differently, that’s true. Like, just kill myself. That was always an option. One that was easy enough to forget and I did. Meanwhile, I had my work. That was something, I thought. I wanted to believe the worst wasn’t inevitable. That, I think, was my real crime.”
A montage of images unfold, resonant with a nightmare’s strange duration. Lakerman sees: Slack jawed digging machines grinning savagely like unhinged household pets. Cement flowing like boring lava into subterranean caverns. Welders giving the thumbs up and holding a toothbrush of flame. Seeds being sown into the desert. Great rubbery trunks of Stomata emerging from the arid ground. Climate change occuring in real visual, before the eyes, time. Clouds and rain and ice. The desert turned arctic. A few migrant deaths. Continuums of corridors constructed in timelapse over the bones of the dead. Corridors rushed through like a water slide. Every claustrophobia inducing corridor marked by rows upon rows of lockers filled with malignant looking machines set out in ‘layered replication’ and plugged with thousands of cables in hundreds of different coloured hues, conjoined in what appeared to be an intestinal mess but which were really the basis of a whole reality, Lakerman knew. The last image is of a woman’s face. The face grows larger and larger as if it is approaching some ultimate surface. It becomes a landscape. The desert. Light. Light itself.
Lakerman doesn’t understand. There were Stomata plants there. Stomata wasn’t supposed to have existed then, how could it have been there?
—Lakerman finds himself in the living room of one of the mobile homes. It is as if he has just ‘woken up’ within himself from an intense day dream. He is sitting on a long retractable couch that is built into the wall. He can hear a woman’s voice but he does not know what she is saying. He looks down. It is the woman from the montage. She is stretched across the couch, her head in his lap. Lakerman begins to stroke her hair in a rhythm of sleep, his hand surfing from her hairline to the skull’s low curve, his thumb coming down as a secondary note on her temple and then gliding, after the pass of his palm, around the outer curve of the saucered bone before knowing to lift, hover back, and start over, again and again in a time-signature viscous and Non-Newtonian. His finger pads occasionally pausing on specific areas, retreading a groove, imperceptible muscles and distresses of bone braceleted by circlets of his fatty thumb pad, a passing continually occurring within the passing, circuitous, contiguous and concentric so that there is this sense of a wave cycling endlessly through the tender voids of relation. His hands interpreted all of this via an order of thought he’d been unaware he possessed. This was love then, Lakerman thought.
The woman is talking and he is not paying attention to the words but to her, to the feelings in her voice and the half life her expressions housed, and yet he felt he was hearing everything perfectly clearly. When he tells her this the next day she will accuse him of arrogance.
SYSTEM ERROR: CODE 190012. ERROR._TEMPORAL_GLITCH__SUBJECT_POSITION_CONFUSED TENSE LOCATION FAILURE’\][=-(
WHEN IS NOW/HERE?
ATTEMPTING PATCH. FALSE PROBLEM.
A sudden jerk and her booted foot rides his thigh before sleep ruffles her nose. The sound of sawn wood rubs against the muffled beat of his heart. Lakerman watches her skin, slack and without a trace of self-consciousness, slope away from her face like soft rubber. It keeps going. Dripping to the floor. He notices a small black pin prick appear in the middle of the room. It seems to be deflating reality. She begins to elongate, to stretch out towards the internal horizon of the room. Her bones unlock and distend, the blood in her body rising to the surface, leaving bald spots inside that cause the skin to well and cave. Her body becomes a dappled scream, it feeds into nothing. The room dims and the walls tilt inwards, bending towards impossibility, everything withdrawing in front of Lakerman to this single black density eating the tips of her hair. Lakerman catches his reflection as the world distorts itself around him.
Available here (and through bookshops and the usual places)
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/200568338-how-i-killed-the-universal-man
*
p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog rolls out its red carpet (aka itself) for the new novel by the brilliant Thomas Kendall, author of last year’s bigly acclaimed novel ‘The Autodidacts’ and a kind commenter on this blog for ages, the blog is proud to say. I’m reading ‘How I Killed the Universal Man’ right now, and it’s really fantastic, so please scour its welcome mat up there and consider adding it to your head. Thank you, Tom, for the privilege. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Sure, my pleasure. Oh, my brain is pretty hyperactive. I remember when we were shooting our film out in the desert, in the rare moments when we weren’t busy doing that, and when nothing was happening, there was this total silence and nothingness that felt like this pure moment with no input, but then of course I immediately started thinking about how interesting that was, so that killed that. I guess people who meditate or sit in orgone boxes and stuff say they can find that dead headed state, and it sounds very romantic, but I think the best I can do is try to imagine what that would be like. You sound more like me. I mean, it could be worse, right? Maybe we’ll be among the lucky ones to avoid Alzheimers. Crackpot theory there. I’m sure there’s still plenty of exciting things that could be done with a dead body, so I accept love’s gift, thank you. Love making the head cold that suddenly commandeered and stuffed my noggin last night fuck the fucking fuck off, G. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. No, I’m allergic to the idea of writing a memoir. It just doesn’t suit me or my little talent, I think. Some years ago my agent and publisher of the time were pushing me to write one, and I said I would only do it if a ghost writer wrote it and I could just fiddle with the final draft’s prose a bit, but they said no. If someone else wanted to write a bio about me or something, I might be okay with that. I’d prefer to talk about my past than write about it. Strange, I guess. My knowledge of Lana Del Rey remains pretty light. I got its thing but it doesn’t really suit my listening tastes of these days, so I don’t find myself wanting to hit Play on her things very much. So, I don’t know. But, yeah, from what I do know, the Cindy Sherman thing makes sense or at least thinking about her via that comparison makes her seem much more interesting. Huh. ** Steve Erickson, Continued vast commiserations, Steve. Are you going to go see them, or … it must be hard to know what the right thing is to do. Not to mention your arm. Makes my semi-nasty head cold du jour seem like a stocking stuffer. My weekend will depend on how my head cold develops or hopefully doesn’t. My French publisher, Editions POL, rightly considered the greatest French publisher, is having a 40th anniversary event tonight, and I’m going to that assuming I don’t have a big wad of tissues plugged to my face by that point. And we’ll see what else. What are you up to? Everyone, Mr Erickson reviewed Chrisman’s DOZAGE for Artsfuse here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, Yeah, the puppet portion of ‘Annette’ is incredible. I’m not 100% into the love story part in the middle, but apparently Netflix forced Carax to build that thematic out against his better judgement, and I wish they’d left him to his own devices. But it’s a fascinating film in any case. ** Misanthrope, It’s heartening to hear that you continue to cut paper even if only monthly. I do sometimes miss cutting paper and Whiteout and old school papery things like that. It’s very cold here, very wintery, and only a teeny bit wet today so far. If my head cold doesn’t defeat me, I’ll bundle up and go out and watch them put up the Xmas decorations, I guess. ** Sypha, I will do my utmost to make that game the coolest thing you can do in Paris, the #2 activity after going up the Eiffel Tower. Watch me. ** Right. Mr. Kendall’s book and the outlay that is introducing it up above should be more than enough to keep you people busy and happy and reaching for your back cards or Paypal accounts, etc. for the weekend’s duration, or I hope so. See you on Monday.
Now available in North America 