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Mihai Criste, The Germ of Unconscience
I had overstayed my welcome at St. Peter’s Parochial High School. Its’
one virtue was its location in an ancient house, with many irrational
crawl spaces. The smells of oiled wood and chalk dust were of more
interest to me than my courses. Both teachers and classmates struck
me as proof positive that the race did not evolve. Faith had pinned the
intellects of some. Others had been locked in the cabinet of science. Of
one thing I was sure: that the servants of Earth’s cybernetic reich had
been planning to remove my neocortex. Better embalmers than they
had tried! It was difficult to get each scrap without damaging the nose.
My supernatural weapons were in storage. A wind preceded the
philosopher’s stone, whose energy had been hidden behind the two
hands of a clock. My teachers were concerned about my psychological
health. I did not dare to obey them; no, because whatever the
consequences, a voice more frightening than any of theirs had also
issued ultimatums. I observed myself from a corner of the Van Allen
Radiation Belts. The voice spoke, and I did my best to perform the
actions that it specified. There were times when I succeeded. There
were others when this performance was only in my head.
“Drop your pencil on the floor,” the voice said, “whenever you see the
headmaster coming. He is a recruiter for Opus Dei, an evil sect, and he
will almost certainly criticize your hair. Insist that he lead by example,
as did Christ. Leave no evidence behind should you choose to hang
him from a cross.” Or, “Demand to know: If Mary had sex with the
Holy Ghost, who is usually pictured as a dove, then why was Jesus
born without a beak?” Had I not tried to behave? It was only by
accident that I had broken such a large percentage of St. Peter’s rules. I
left, with a strong push to the back from a secret board of judges, at the
end of my sophomore year.
A revolt against causality had been launched. Ghosts pointing to the
collapse of the third dimension congregated. No act of will could
restore my freedom of association with the Double, who was then
present only in the form of an abstract shadow, as a threat made in a
language that I did not understand. This was a language that only the
dead spoke, the stellar dead, not the makeshift versions. I was alive, in
a manner of speaking, a bit more here, a bit less there, though not in
the sense that the Ancients would have understood the concept, not in
the sense that I would later come to use the word myself.
I did not yet know enough, of course, to call this abstract shape “my
Double,” any more than I could pierce the psyche of a naked Siddha in
a cremation ground, any more than I could grasp the instructions in
the Egyptian Book of the Dead, however much they had been left
specifically for me. I knew this Double only through his impact on my
sanity, as a promise that I would get what I deserved. On the back of
my head: cold breath. He was the sum of things unknown and abilities
untapped. If this figure was close, his motives were obscure. I was not
yet free to associate with him, only to go where his finger pointed. That
freedom would come at the end of a long war. It would be necessary
for a designated enemy to prepare the way for my breakthrough. The
dream that we called waking consciousness was a joke, whose
punchline had not yet arrived.
Victor Brauner, Oubli de la Mort, 1952
Current humans were just variations on the prototype of the object.
They were person-shaped bundles of stimulus and response. They
were designed to perform a set variety of functions. They were objects
that could move, upon which corporations could hang the latest styles
of clothing. Such humans were less real than the powers that
consumed them, who were themselves only real in their own minds, by
virtue of the shadows that lent to them their strength. Fate would
orient the phallus of the wounded god. My socially-constructed self
was a necessary evil. It was, as I would later come to understand, the
contraction of an eight-armed sphere, the plaything projected by an
earlier but still present state of omnipotence. Was I conscious? Not at
all. Did my body not look much or anything like a sphere? These were
no more than temporary setbacks, glitches in Enoch’s gematria,
permutations in the occupational status of the One.
Instructions had been broadcast from a star, from the depths of the
night sky: “Get out!” It was time for a change. Milkweed pods,
sprouting from the junk of abandoned lots, broke open. My sail
swelled. Bright with hope, I said goodbye to working-class South
Worcester, a neighborhood of factories and railroad tracks. At the age
of 15, I transferred to Doherty Memorial High. It was at the time a
brand-new school, in the low, expansive style of architecture common
during the 1970s. The complex of buildings was enormous, resembling
more than a bit a shopping mall. The corridors were brightly lit and
long, going off in all directions. Vast crowds migrated when the bell
rang.
From my perch at the corner of the Van Allen Radiation Belts, which
some might describe as the doorway of my homeroom, I observed the
drifting of the ghost-like students through the complex. In their
hunger, they migrated without knowing where they went. They saw
without knowing what they saw. They heard without knowing what
they heard. They felt without knowing what they felt. They consumed
without knowing who or what they ate. By doing no more than
shuffling from one foot to the other, they went in search of a symbol
that existed before birth. They went in search of the key to industrial
-strength sacrifice. They went in search of the loved bodies that they
left on a crumbling shore. They went in search of the magnet of
Mohenjo Daro. They went, without knowing more than the room
number towards which they were turning. Such was the arcane path of
their migration.
It is not that I believed that I was other than a ghost. I was, if anything,
even more of a disembodied remnant than my classmates. Unlike
them, however, I could feel the breath of the emptiness that was
waiting to engulf us, the emptiness that several ages ago had eaten our
souls for lunch, even as we continued to be driven by our habits.
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