Well, now that I have all this power, why don’t I feel like using it?
We don’t know. Actually, right about now I’d like a few days in Berlin. 1936 was a great year you know. Slash in with a couple of pounds of gold, the time we can have!!
I can’t shake the disgust. How do you guys handle it?
What disgust?
After the ecstasy of breathing that soul stuff, positrons, or whatever it is.
We really don’t get it.
This is the first time you bastards haven’t been twelve steps in front of me. What do you mean you don’t get it? Does this relate to your other fucking miscalculation? A miscalculation I could have predicted in two seconds worth of common sense. I know superior technology appears to be magic to my savage self, but I’m starting to wonder if this superior technology induces superior stupidity.
Look we were in a hurry. Do I need to remind you of the horror that motivates us? And I’ll tell you something else. Remember how Norman was explaining to you how we needed you to take that first blood?
Yea. I was less than thrilled, and at best fuzzy on it. So let me try to put it into words again. He, you, whatever the fuck "you" are, were really only visible to me when you borrowed a layer of your own skin from the past. And this ectoplasm was maintained with the positron pump like this purple pinky fingernail of mine?
Yes. Your flesh assimilated the technology.
Now positrons are electrons running backwards in time, right?
Not really, but it suffices for modeling purposes. The math works like that in an overly simplified way.
In other words, no.
Yes.
But I never noticed a purple pinky on Norman at first.
That’s because the dermis was dead. He had no pinky to be purple.
But if he had no pinky to be purple, why did I see a purple pinky afterwards?
That was a projected purple pinky positron pump. We figured you would not resist the technology if you were able to assimilate it within the boundaries of your subconscious mythological resonance iconography. The pinky is a long resonant human symbol of velocity and elegance.
Since we were becoming both wealthy and quick, it seemed appropriate for intuitive apprehension. We obviated the time prohibitive process of providing you with conscious training.
Projected purple pinky positron pump does nothing to explain my newfound disgust with the whole enchilada. I feel worse than I did after anal sex with a constipated woman. And looking at your own penis covered with feces is not something that makes you want to reach for the whipped cream and go for seconds.
Okay. Okay. So you allow your thoughts to be constrained a bit more by the limitations of your senses than you might like. But you did win the lottery, and you’ve got total exclusivity to a completely new and improved development of human consciousness.
New and Improved? What are you selling me? I hope it’s detergent, because I feel filthy. I’ve basically murdered-
Neither of those events were murders. They were necessary homicides. When you think about it, it was self defense.
Defending what self?
The self you were to become and which you are now.
But I miss my old self.
Like the Israelites in the desert complaining to Moses about how they missed the "fleshpots of Egypt" that they never had a chance to enjoy in the first place. Like America misses WWII. You forget the misery. You forget how much you hated your existence. You and all the others. This did not happen by accident. You and all of your kind prayed for it every day you went to work cursing yourself and all you met.
This is smoke and mirrors. Why me out of all my kind? What’s the uniqueness? Why not the asshole manager, Cracker? He probably hates his life far worse than I could imagine.
But he has no awareness.
You want awareness? Get thee to a Tibetan monastery.
No hatred. No ego substance. Positron potential poor.
So, out of all humanity I seemed like the best candidate?
Best in probably the wrong word. Least likely to fail is more like it.
So have I successfully not failed yet? Do I get to go home now?
Certainly. You are already home, and you are home forever. And home is where you will to be.
What do we mean here?
Home can be that place we-
Don’t talk about. Assuming I don’t call that home, how do I keep that Hellish home away from Home?
Positrons. Lots and lots of positrons.
That sounds like a lot of work.
Of course there’s work involved. And you can understand this better than most. It’s why we chose you.
Explain.
You are unique to the extent that you already have a knowledge of the work of Milton that is quite sophisticated and well researched, and somehow you were such a misfit in the academic community that you were virtually unemployable there. But you did not become overly insane nor bitter. Only modestly endowed with lunacy and cynicism.
Modestly endowed. That’s me. So can’t you trade me in now for someone a little better endowed?
No. Unfortunately the investment we made left only a little overage, and as we now know, that overage was insufficient. You’re it now. But remember, you do get to quit the day job, and we have the entire concentric Rhiemann surfaces of human time and experience to wander in all their suppleness. And as for your disgust, remember that from here on, our prey will be those in the chronological past. The ones on the brink of death anyway.
What’s Milton and his poetic grotesquery got to do with this?
Paradise Lost. You already know the answer. What happens in Book IX?
The Fall.
What did Milton believe this Fall was about?
There are different readings. I’m partial to Blake. The Fall was necessary. Otherwise the human would be without will, and nothing more than God’s puppet. Blake also analyzed it from the axiom that Milton was of the Devil’s party.
You wrote a paper about Paradise Lost that caused a professor to call you psychotic.
I never did understand that asshole’s problem. All I did was correlate the language of the King James Bible with Book IX. It was a purely analytic study that avoided any broad sweeping conclusion. And yet the son of a bitch had me in his office telling me that I would never work in the field if he had anything to do about it.
What were the two salient points?
Images involving eating and seeing were the crucial components of the exfoliation of innocence. I was certain that Milton had seized upon this when he conceived the work. Andrew Marvell’s Prologue hints at it quite wittily. They were much on the same page.
Why?
Well, the jigsaw puzzle pieces do not make a perfect fit. But if we check Genesis, the key line is “their eyes were opened to the light.” That bothered me, so I reread Genesis from the beginning, and I noticed that before that there is no visual imagery for Adam and Eve.
Their relationship with God is auditory. They are on speaking terms. They are happy. Animals serve them. Even when God brings the animals over for Adam to name, it is God who wants to “see” what Adam will “call” them. They are naked and they have no shame. Life is good. There is no work.
So what was the problem? Why would they eat the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Just because a talking snake suggests it?
Yes. All we get is that the serpent is the most “cunning” of all creatures. Motivation has always been a bit of a lacuna. Why would somebody bollix the sweetest deal in the universe?
And then there’s always the nasty little question of what the Big Guy was thinking when He threw the Tree and the creature in the mix. Could God have imperfectly crafted the whole shebang in the first place? That would be inconsistent for any definition of God to make sense.
Or was it a set up? The Creator toying with the new toys. Neither concept reflects very well on our ability to ideate divinity at all.
The most difficult hurdle for the modern reader to overcome in reading this or any document is the need to reconfigure the implicit relationship between divinity, the mind, the senses and language. Milton was still relying heavily on the Scholastic framework.
Proving God’s validity does nothing for God. It validates the mind and its ability to transcend the imperfection of the senses. A satisfactory and effective proof of God’s existence qualifies the mind to rule the body.
Milton’s commitment to “justify the ways of God to man” represented a resignation to the decay of the human mind and soul. The implication is that recent historical developments indicate that humanity needs proof of the obvious.
We are so inured to empirical scientific notions as pure improvements, that we ignore the consequential arrogance and presumptuousness of our backwards misreading of the pre-Renaissance philosophers.
Eating and seeing. The descent into consciousness? A fall from a state of grace? But what grace might that have been? The innocence of an insect that has no savor for the beauty of the rose upon which it feeds? It’s the innocence of non-sentience. The innocence of a volcano or an earthquake.
In the paper I asked what model does man have for transcendence without Satan. It is often said that Satan’s work is over with the extinction of humanity. Is it not in the best interest to keep the work alive?
I cited how often suicidal zealots have tried to accelerate the teleological process. Suicides from the plateau of Masada onward. Suicides in the name God to induce an Apocalyptic end of humanity.
The human feeds on the fruit of the world, sees the world and manipulates it. Imposing angles to enhance fertility. Predicting tides by learning astronomy. The birth of civilization. But it was a birth bathed in massacre. The same knowledge applied to war and ultimately massive acts of destruction.
You, our new Adam, have spat yourself from the Eden of a vast self-consuming artifact. There is no turning back because now you see there was nothing in the first place. When we visit the Pharos, we visit nothing. We know they are already digested in the devouring insect of time. That all knowing God-man to his people is nothing but a spectral shadow show for our amusement.
So what’s in it for me?
Experience. The alternative to innocence. Just as aging is the only alternative to death.
I was getting plenty of experience already.
And you were sick of it. To such an extent that you were planning suicide on a regular, if not daily basis. You had even chosen the ideal month and place, hadn’t you? You had even figured out how with an unusual attention to detail.
You had even taken into account how to do it so your body would not be found for months, and you would be presumed missing, and would therefore go unmourned.
This degree of boredom coupled with the corresponding hatred, self loathing, and fear gave you a very powerful resonance potential for remorse. You were a massive jump start on the very "negativity," for lack of a better term that primes our technological pump.
And you have to admit that this is a much better set of social engagements.
Well, you got me there. No turning back three quarters across the river. 1936 Berlin could be fun. Let’s cash in some of the fruits of my hideous labor and check it out.
Now we’re partying!