iscourse on Suicide and Dreams
The van looked had no camouflaging projection for him, it just loomed white incongruously perfect in the alley against the chipped white-gone-gray of the dilapidated garage.
As they climbed into the car and buckled themselves in, he rounded on Roman, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, “So… what was that?”
“A suicidal plot to blow up the Assembly. Or wasn’t that clear?”
“Can opioids really keep emotions low enough to prevent the Mindstream recording from switching on?”
“I think there are some rather obvious problems with that idea. And much of the plot is already compromised from various angles. It’s not possible to hide something of significant magnitude from the Mind.” His eyes were dark and quick, searching the road for aberrations. “A plot like this is either a psychic tumor or a lacuna: if it does not exist, in its non-existence it exists, like a hole. The question is always one of interpretation.”
“So why are they doing it?” Isaac was looking over at Roman.
“That remains the question, my pupil. Why indeed?” Roman made brief eye contact. “There is nothing that is as it seems in vacland, all psychologies wind like a labyrinth toward a disappearing center. They cannot be satisfied and this is what keeps them both controllable and dangerous. Remember that. There is no center for the vac, only a gaping hole where the Mind should be.”
“But I digress,” he continued, turning left, the wheel sliding through his hand as sought the straight course. “There is an ultimate motive for all things, and what appears to us as a hole is simply an infinite need that is directed at something, which, in dreams, is parceled out in snack-sized bits. The lúcido overbalances and simply gorges. The normal vac, well, he walks a line. In this plot there is no line, no rational center, only a desperate, rushing urge for martyrdom. And that reminds me of the lúcido rushing to the death of the everyday in dreams.” He paused, looking pensive.
“I do not believe in suicide.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “The self cannot imagine that it dies. It merely deludes itself that it will reach a better place. ‘Nothing’ is just a dreamless sleep, it is not true absence. Absence cannot be conceived of. There are no true martyrs, only daywalking dreamers: there can be no understanding of death, so none can choose it. Martyrs choose an illusion constructed of pieces of life.”
“So, what, you’re looking for a rational motive?” asked Isaac. “A false dream? Or are you saying that the plot is actually a screen for something else?”
“Precisely, my pupil. Young men animated by Marx and testosterone is hardly a plot. It is a single psychic shape superimposed over either a complex matrix of individual delusions or over single psyche larger than all the others. There is no revolution of the proletariat, only death and power. Note that,” said Roman.
“Noted.” Isaac raised his eyebrows sardonically “Death and power. So who is Marx?”
Roman glanced at him sharply, then his eyes returned to the road. “I forget your education scarcely includes the literary giants of the 19th century. It could, you know, if you choose wisely. Pretty picto doesn’t matter to all of us. Marx taught that the poor should overthrow the rich and build a new government where, ‘from each according to their need, to each according to their abilities.’ Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
“Sounds a little like what Pastor Dan used to preach on from the prophets,” Isaac said.
“More like the Maccabees.” His eyes were thoughtful. “I suppose that’s what you’d compare it to, given your background. In fact, some say Marx was a Jewish heretic.”
Isaac paused for a moment, querying. “So I just searched for Marx and I didn’t find any translations of the original works. And nobody says he’s a Jewish heretic.”
Roman laughed. “You’ll hardly find a less desirable book to read in picto. I would enjoy watching that one. Perhaps the ideas could be enacted by cats in costume? That would be popular. But beside the point, boy, that book is banned.”
“Banned? I didn’t think any books were banned. Information wants to be free!”
Roman clucked three times, grinning. “Of course it does, little chick. Except that information which desires to enslave us, and that information desires to be burned like a good little self-denouncing heretic atop the pyre.”
“So how are the vacs getting it?”
“Oh, they have their ways. An audio recording, no doubt, smuggled about on a flash drive. Or some anonymo with a hackscreen is torrenting. Or someone has a copy and they’re reading it together. That would be awfully boring. Probably distilled excerpts from the Communist Manifesto, like ‘Marx’s Top Ten Maxims’ or some such tripe. Nobody has the patience anymore for literature, let alone the time,” said Roman. “Which begs the question. I don’t think Marx has anything to do with it. Our Bob is alluding more broadly to a historical movement toward utopianism and the smashing of the current order, not literally informing us that our plotters are trudging through 19th century economic theory.”
“Huh,” said Isaac. “Doesn’t the Mind know this?”
“There are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns. This is the latter. I am not privy to all that the Mind knows. We are but tiny eyes floating in an oceanic panopticon. True, the Mind knows all that passes through the vac’s eye in a fever, but most books trigger the rational mind and lull the limbic core to sleep. The Mind would have to guess whose vision to stream and process, and anyone being streamed is on their best behavior,” he said.
His eyes were distant. “The totality of the vac mindscape is like the pattern of the storm. Meaningless, beautiful, and terrible,” he said. “Mulatto beast and human figures swarm in the mist like the margins of medieval manuscripts. They signal disturbance but nothing more. Thus, it is possible to see the shapes coalescing around a collective disturbance.”
Roman’s lips pursed. “But picto makes for legible thoughts, even in dreams. By contrast, the Mind’s representation of the integro mental landscape is as a Bach fugue blowing over carefully cultivated gardens. Both are worthy of reflection. Order is only known through disorder, and civilization only through barbarism, my noob. Note that. Sometime I will show you.”
And Isaac did reflect on it, all the way back to school.