Cosmos Incorporated (19 page)

It was in this fire that she was born; she is the daughter of this fire. But this fire, as Saint John of Patmos, Denys the Areopagite, and Johannes Cassianus knew, remains invisible, behind an impenetrable fog. It remains in the shadows, though they cannot contain it. And this fire is a manifestation of Logos that articulates itself beyond Good and Evil, even beyond the Tree of Knowledge, because it is the eternal guardian in the form of a whirling sword, this fire that permits the creation of worlds—the writing of them, the narration of them, the giving to them of life. This fire of the World that causes Action is also the fire that burns, destroys, and consumes the bearer of this World.

The fire is both its own ontological limit and the infinite that stretches beyond itself. The fire is energy that devours all the so-called real simulacrums of the world and that endlessly carbonizes the global parameters of the machines that control the destinal matrix of every human on this planet. But it is also the differential that is ceaselessly resuming, and always on the point of creating, ontological danger—the part always ready for sacrifice, the already-written chapter of our own combustion.

He/she lies prostrate on this shitty, last-century hospital bed. He/she is alpha-omega.

This is why she is now
he and she.

He/she has an idea.

He/she has a plan. Or, more accurately, a plan—a secret cosmic war—is being read and expressed through him/her.

He/she has simulacrums to destroy.

He/she has a world to create.

And to do this, he/she must create a man.

In order for any alchemical process to succeed, according to the precious wisdom of the Kabbalah,
one
must become
two.

When you are ready to create a golem, when you are ready to replicate the divine gesture of Creation, when the fire of gnosis inside you is ready to consume itself for another life, you must be two. But in order not to produce a
hybris, an infinitely divided indivisible,
the presence of this sanctifying, reunifying fire is also necessary. You must be one to create. You must be two to divide.
You must be three to create.

She knows this fire. She has known it for a long time. It was born with her, in her, in the hard, clean, blinding light of the sun as seen outside the boundaries of the terrestrial atmosphere—an unspeakable monster, burning its quadrillions of tons of hydrogen per second in the magnificent silence of the cosmos, that immense black ocean stretching across endless dimensions, dotted with white points without the slightest brilliance, the slightest radiance, the slightest optical illusion; semaphores perhaps already dead for thousands or millions of years before their light reaches us. This fire was born in her when she was playing children’s games. She has understood it from earliest youth. It makes her something else, producing a line of infinite tension between her “I” and this “other.” She had rapidly discovered the magnificent and terrible nature of her power—and realized that it would be considered the ultimate danger by the terrestrial society that strives to confine it.

Because you do not create worlds with impunity in this world that is for everyone, where there is one God for each of us.

During these attacks—these terrible moments of
superfusion,
while the network of mechanical disconnections in her being opens out and abruptly covers the star-filled space between her “I” and the “other”—all her transfictional narrative powers are completely sapped. One of the doctors at the center in New Zealand, who apparently read Husserl on the sly, had diagnosed it as an “intensified inversion of inversion” just before their flight across the Indian Ocean.

There is a moment—an “antimoment,” really—when, as the mechanical network of her I-other tries to connect to the infinite line of tension separating them, rather than hollowing out a singularity that would fold this infiniteness over onto its differential gap, it separates from itself and swallows up her entire being. At the highest point of the attack, she is really nothing more than the abyss itself, a chasm of nothingness. She doesn’t need to lose consciousness; that too has long since disappeared, and what seems to remain and evoke the idea of a “consciousness” is nothing more than a tiny kernel of pain surrounded by infinity. The maximum extension of the fold-over revealed to the “world,” the suddenly formatted expansion of her “consciousness” within a matrix of content now coding only itself, provokes in reaction an infinite condensation of the rupture point, a moment when her entire body-spirit is at the point of breaking, a moment when the Nothing-Being that she has become cedes place to the overall invasion of the World, and of the suffering—the physical, psychic, absolute suffering—that comes with it.

This dark side of her state of being, this moment of chaotic superfusion, this moment when the gaps close again, this moment when the machine, coalescing with the World, becomes a program matrix, an antimonad opening to its own closure, this moment when the World takes possession of her, is the tragic other side of the human incarnation of the fire of Logos in her flesh; it is the double edge of the flaming sword that guards the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. The fire tries to destroy her to purify her of herself; it separates her then brings her back together.

This dark face looks out upon the true Counter-World: the alpha-omega phase, the unknowable moment when, brutally, her body-spirit becomes a metaliving, metacosmic, metaphysical generator/narrator.

It looks out upon the moment when narration becomes Flesh, when the written word becomes the Body, and the Word becomes the Act.

The attack lasts two days, like always. It should really be understood as an anti-attack, since it is the devolving opposite face of the true, permanent attack on her body-spirit. She is the definition of duality incarnate. The attacks are the dualist reaction to her Trinitarian transcendence. They are not a phase of infinite division so necessary for the disjunctive trine synthesis to become operative and thus permit the emergence of the creative process. They are a phase of division separate from the process that folds all the other phases back on itself, all the other possibilities, in a devouring, reverberating, antiverbal phenomenon that promises to reunite everything—but on the field of separation, and to separate everything from itself, to cause fusion with the World. Vivian Velvet, and the He/She that she is becoming, can do nothing during the two days of Anti-Creation, the binary days of division looped back on false infinity.

Nothing. Not even sleep, not even thinking, nothing satisfies her so-called natural biological needs.

But when the attack finally recedes, and the third day dawns outside her cell—its light as pale as the face of a condemned man streaming weakly through the small, square Securimax™ window—she is now He/She.

Another
can finally have a body. Another that was born here, in Health Containment Camp 77 in the city of Hong Kong, but who will not achieve existence until later, when he/she has decided to grant it—or, more specifically, when the narrative dictates it. Until then, he/she will carry him, in the deepest part of himself/herself, and thus he/she will integrate him into a world that is often cruel and pierces him/her to the core.

Because this Other now exists in him/her; he is the agent of a singular narration. He is the
he
of his/her symbiotic metamorphosis, but transmuted by the supermechanical device in which she is the
she—
that is, by the quantum leap represented in the incorporation of the Fire-Being, of the narration itself. This Other is becoming independent now. Neither a he nor a she. It seems most like the fire-spirit that tears them apart while encapsulating them. It is becoming the agent of a narrative that can predict the future, because this narrative is prophetic. It is formative. It makes Acts out of Words.

It is more than a “story” that she carries within herself—more than a character—more than a series of situations or more or less contingent intrigues. She carries a World, and she carries its Counter-World.

She carries a Man.

She carries the Man from the Camp.

The words of a book she read in the Ring during her late adolescence, shortly before her departure for Earth, come back to her in a flash of light, a lexical fire of shining glyphs glowing on the writing desk of her brain. The words are from the only book that gave her even a little understanding of the state of the world she was living in, the world she would soon be living in Down There. The book deciphered the central experience of the twentieth century, and demonstrated—with rare intellectual vigor—how this event was not a “moment” separate from all others, but rather the physical opening of an entire era, one that began to fade away at the same moment it was born. The one, in fact, that forged the world of UHU. The book put it this way:

Our inability to claim the effects of our actions as
ours
is not only attributable to the excessive scope of these effects, but also to the outrageous
mediating
of our processes of work and action. The aggravation of the current division of labor means nothing more than this: we are condemned, working and acting, to concentrate on tiny segments of the whole process. We are enclosed in the phases of the work that affect us, like prisoners detained in their cells. Thus detained, we are stuck with the idea of our specialized work, and therefore excluded from the representation of the machine in its whole; from the image of the work process as a whole, made up of thousands of phases. And most importantly, from the image of the result as a whole, in the service of which the machine is placed.

The book was called
We, Sons of Eichmann.
The author was called Günther Anders. It had been on her nightstand for months; she had read and reread it dozens of times, until she knew it by heart.

What I want to emphasize—I know this thesis may seem daring—is the fact that
our current world, as a whole, is being transformed into a machine. That it is about to become a machine.

Health Containment Camp 77 of the district of Hong Kong, despite its humid cells, dilapidated from much use in a world that cannot even “progress” in a
technical
sense, is one of the most modern facilities of its kind in United China, the world’s most important pro-UHU power. With one in three of the world’s inhabitants being Chinese, the model planetary democracy of the governance bureaus and the planetary resource management corporations perfectly suits the system that China put in place at the end of the previous century. For the UHU, it is a bottomless source of managers, officers, bureaucrats, and specialists of every sort.

The globe’s other great nations are important too, he/she knows perfectly well, but postnational breakdowns and Islamization have made them less competitive in the race for command posts. However, voluntary servitude is probably the only truly infinite strength man possesses, and most of these countries, even the ones still involved in more or less latent conflicts at, or beyond, their borders, such as the Islamic States of the Global Conference of Dar al-Islam, have accepted the permanent reign of the UHU over this humanity on its way to extinction.

It is as beautiful as an apparition of the Devil in his red velvet doublet. It is as beautiful as a dead young maiden stretched out on a bed of light. It is as beautiful as the end of a world. And where the Devil shows himself most ingenious is in the multitude of “rebellions” that are already brewing in the Human UniWorld. All of them, except the UNE, are in his service. In a rebellion, remember, the Devil is always one step ahead of you. You realize the extent of his power when you see that you are at least two matches behind him when it comes to control.

She must not think anymore. She must not even write on the poor-quality Indo-Chinese student tablets amassed in a humanitarian shop en route to Vientiane, or on one of the antique portable pods she managed to pick up at some souk or market in Maputo, or Mogadishu, or Aden, or Goa.

She must

Be

SILENT.

Silent.

Anyway, she cannot write, or talk, or think about the real meaning of her “existence,” which is as paradoxical as that of the entity called Nothing, because to do so would be to negate her intrinsic and conclusive anti-existence, her absolute negativity. Nothing can be said, or sensed, or sketched about it without the Nothingness disappearing, without warping the meaning of each word, or thought, or dream.

The silence isn’t passive; nor is the nothingness. Both of them are abysses, black holes. They are inaudible and invisible, but they can be detected by the energy disturbances they cause in their environment. They are, in a way, visible as negatives. They are lines that connect Being to Being via the absolute compression of her negation. This negation is not static, but neither is it dynamic in the sense of a “relative” and independent object across a space that is itself differentiated.

The negation is
metastatic.
Silence is the anticreative moment necessary for Creation. It is what precedes every birth and what hushes every noise. It is the acoustic and mental equivalent of the Luminous Shadow of the medieval Faith doctors. It is what contains the world without being able to hold it.

He/She is this silence. He/She is no longer. Anything.

Finally, as if after millions of years of petrifaction in the lithosphere of what is neither body nor spirit, but the residue left by their infinite division looping backward on itself, here it is—Illumination, Opening, Light. Freedom, the sensation of absolute freedom. Her absolute reality, the one that breaks down every wall of every cell in every camp.

She is there. She has risen from this metastatic tension between Being and Being, between her “I” and her “Other.” She has risen not only from the nothingness, but also from the light that is contained in her at the bottom of the Abyss, the Light hidden in the Shadow, in the deepest depths of the black hole. And this freedom—this absolute faith in the Created World—this freedom is not a state, or a right, or a civil contract, or a gift, or a livelihood, or even a mania. This liberty is a weapon. A virus. A fire that will spread at the tiniest spark.