Chapter 16: The Lamenessless Namelessness

16

After a quick few hours at Woodard and Curran that he intends to inflate to seven or eight on his timesheet later, Norman drives back across the west end of Portland, parks in the garage at the edge of Monument Square where Laura rents a space (the magnetic card that lets her in and out unsuspectingly does the same for him), and walks across the square holding his orange leather coat tight around himself. The sun has just recently set and autumn has fully taken hold.
When he passes the place at the edge of the statue where he sat waiting for Laura some month or so before, he winks to it, and doing so makes him chuckle to himself.
He hurries into the Metropolitan building behind a young hippy who is holding the door for him. Norman pulls his bulky white headphones down onto his neck and thanks the man, flicking his cigarette off into the street before he takes the door. He removes the green leather gloves that he borrowed from Laura and puts them into the pockets of his coat as he crosses the tiny foyer to the elevator behind the other man.
“Cold out there,” the young bearded fellow says as the elevator doors close. “What number?”
“Three,” Norman replies as he steps into the elevator with the man, “and yes, it is.”
The young man stands slightly in front and to the left of Norman, facing the panel of numbers beside the door. Norman watches him intermittently through the several seconds of silence that they share. He is probably in his early twenties, with a light blue t-shirt and jeans, no coat. He sways and bobs very slightly as he stands, holding his arms up in front of his chest like a tyrannosaur.
The doors open at the second floor and the man leaves, saying shakily, “Take it easy, man,” without looking back.
“You too, dude,” Norman replies.
Though he knows Laura is home, only a dim light by the door is on in the apartment. Norman locks the door behind himself and throws his coat and scarf onto the small, antique chair beside the door that functions as an informal coat rack. Surprised not to have been immediately greeted, he quietly steps to the bedroom door and peeks in.
Laura is lying in bed with a book (Leave it to Psmith) beside her, eyes closed, mouth unashamedly open, breathing softly. Norman gazes at her for a few moments and thinks about his book, then he puts a cigarette in his mouth, grabs the pipe from the couch and a plastic gallon of iced tea from the fridge and sits down at his computer by the window.
He jiggles the mouse to wake the monitor. As the white light of his desktop fades onto the screen, he lights the cigarette in his mouth, puts his elbow on the window sill and leans past Laura’s plants to look down along Congress Street, which at the moment is vacant of pedestrians. He takes a two-handed swig from the tea gallon and then a hit from the pipe, setting the gallon under his table and the pipe on a small stack of paperback books beside his keyboard (Zorba the Greek, Valis, Ada and Moby Dick). He exhales smoke toward his computer screen. The smoke billows out on all sides when it hits the screen and for a moment Norman imagines a mushroom cloud with his lips at ground zero.
He opens a new, blank document. He holds the screen in view out-of-focus, searching his imagination for a mental spell that will reveal the hidden words yet to be written, but such a spell is not among his available devices.
Norman picks a card from the middle of the deck beside his monitor, hoping to have an inspiration regarding a main character for his romance novel. The card is The Golem/The Familiar. He turns it around in his hand, unsure which way to read it having pulled it out sideways. The picture for The Familiar brings to mind his bat ring, and that reminds him of the little familiar entity he spent time building in his mind and storing in that now-lost bat ring.
He casts his mind’s eye to Laura for a moment, to put himself in mind of romance. He blinks, and in that closed-eyed moment has a vision in which Laura bends down to kiss him proudly on the cheek, a book in her hand.

the Lamenessless Namelessness

We are, he begins typing, but stops. We, what is we? Is there a we? The first person plural – is this not oxymoronic? When does the self become plural? Is not the pluralization the fundamental illusion? The whole concept troubles him, so he deletes the words.
I am, he types, but again stops. He stares at the words, letting that fundamental proof of self in the middle of his thin Academy textbook version of Discourse on Method flash before his mind for a moment, then he continues, typing the words, Norman Newman. Norman Newman, he thinks. I am Norman Newman. Norman Newman. No. This is not about you, he thinks as he deletes what he’s written.
He takes another hit from the pipe and holds the softly stinging smoke in his lungs while he looks out the window again at the street. It’s mid evening on an October Thursday night and the air is frigid; the streets are empty of people. Below him a truck passes, stopping momentarily and then turning off down a side street. In the square, strings of white lights sway on the bare trees. The fun it looks like they’re having while they don’t think they’re being watched makes Norman smile in his heart (though his face remains still).
The cold air through the window stings his fingertips as they hover above his keyboard. He wiggles them for warmth and also to simply enjoy for a moment the Johnny-Depp-as-Hunter-Thompson quality of the gesture.
Norman wishes again (it is an old wish of his) that fingers and a keyboard and the time it took to type did not stand between his thoughts and their manifestation. He has often wished for technology that would allow him to effectively dictate with pure thought. His thoughts could run along unhindered and he, perhaps, wouldn’t even need to pay attention to them at the time; he could just sort through them all later or, even, perhaps he could do keyword searches upon their content, and all of this, of course, as pure thought. It brings up an old question for Norman – that of whether it is higher priority to engage in living life or to spend one’s time creating art about it. Sometimes when they know they will have to be typed, Norman’s thoughts refuse to come out of the shadows even though they were peeking through the bars and clanging their cups full of meaning mere moments before he sat down at his computer. How long will this last? he wonders, regarding his keyboard. How long before inputting data into a machine with your fingers seems absurdly old-fashioned? What will it be then – direct neural link? Direct thought translation software? A wireless thought connection to the internet, making it effectively a shared mental space, a visualized noosphere, finally a fully realized, measurable (which is to say officially ‘real’) Zeitgeistdrome?
Norman keeps going back to what Lou told him about how Sony has already patented the technology to simulate sensory experience in the human brain wirelessly with ultrasound. The implications blow his mind. If the sensory input of our world can be simulated, how could one possibly distinguish reality from unreality? These online worlds that we can visit and walk around in and have various alternate identities within would become indistinguishable from normal perception, from real life. So what will it mean to be real at that point?
And yet, Norman realizes, there would still be this fundamental base reality from which we would be projecting into the others. Presumably we would still require movement and sustenance for our real bodies no matter how real the simulations appeared. All those other realities would still be propped up from this one. So some very fundamental characteristics of human existence would still not change; it’s just that from this real world one would have the capability at any point to simply jump in and out of these other virtual environments, even perhaps to overlap them or experience them simultaneously with our super-enhanced brains.
Norman returns his focus to his writing and quickly types the words, There is, but then stops. There is, he thinks. But is there? Is there really? All these things we see and hear and feel, but it’s all just information, really, and what about the things that aren’t there, but seem to be, the things I see and think and imagine?
He deletes the words, replacing them with, It is. He looks at the words for a moment and then follows them intuitively with, the future.
He reads the sentence to himself in his head, then looks out the window. “It’s the future,” he says to the city. He takes a drag from his cigarette. “I’m Norman Newman, and I’m in love with you.” He exhales the words upon his image of the city, but they are deflected as smoke upon a pane of glass. The visual makes Norman feel suddenly alone, his perceived world seeming to shrink and hug itself around him.
For whatever reason, he can’t get letters of transit for the words in his mind; guerilla border guards have put up a new barricade of some sort. He feels the words but doesn’t know how to get them out of his mind. The enormity of all that does not exist, all the possible sentences that he could write, makes his breathing stilted and his teeth bite the inside of his mouth.
He looks around the dark apartment that surrounds him. The room is divided by light into two distinct theaters – the entry area, where the door and the chair beside it with coats piled on top are lit in soft yellow light; and Norman’s spot in front of his computer, by the window, where his queerly-handsome, bespectacled face (which he has never seen but by reflection) is whitely lit by the bright plane of his computer screen. Between the two areas is a river of dark room where all is shadow, uncertain.
Norman, in his current state, does not feel comfortable leaving his computer, as doing so would require wading through this trench of darkness. He can feel the presence of the Heisenburglar crouching under the shadows, hanging unseen just above his field of vision. He is having trouble even feeling comfortable closing his eyes; even blinking feels like another moment stolen from him.
He thinks for a moment about the Heisenburglar’s sudden appearance at the divine congress; the way his terrifying blackness spread across the sky and even the gods seemed to tremble. Even a god can be forgotten, Norman thinks, and can a now-forgotten thought or moment really be said ever to have existed at all?
Nothing has any characteristics until it is perceived, and then once it is, all things that need to have happened for it to be that way retroactively happen. This is Heisenberg’s big idea. But the resulting state of that-perceived is random, based merely on probability and not specific causality? That makes no sense to Norman. Randomness makes no sense. There must be an answer to every why. And here it seems to Norman that the answer must be choice. And if this is true, then we control the entire universe around us with pure will. Collectively we create it.
So really, if identity can be defined as anything over which one has direct willful control (one’s body, technology one is using at the time like a car or virtual presence, et cetera) and that over which you have direct willful control expands to embrace the entirety of existence at least to some degree, then really all of this is me, and I am it, Norman realizes. Our localized, pragmatic concept of identity is essentially just proximity. The closer it is, the more I think it’s me, the more I relate to it. One cares most about oneself, then one’s family, then one’s neighbors, then one’s countrymen, with an exponentially growing fuck-‘em¬ coefficient the farther out you go. But really these other people, these are all just parts of me. All these gods, all these swaying trees, all these buildings and computer game universes and random thoughts of others; it’s all me.
Yes, he thinks. Yes.
Norman looks at his hands and mentally scolds them for not having typed any of that. They hover mindlessly above the keyboard, awaiting doubly signed orders.
Some subtle movement in the shadows to his right startles him. He snaps his head around and sees nothing amiss in the dark, yet when he looks at the other theater of light across the room by the door he notices that the different layers of his vision seem to float about contrary to normal laws of perspective like mismanaged background elements in a puppet show.
He looks back to his hands, which still hover suspended above the keyboard, his white skin glowing in the light of the monitor, making his hands look severed against the hard edge of his black sleeves. He sends a particle of will to wiggle those fingers, and while he has that circuit pressed those fingers wiggle, and he becomes aware of the way the sensations of his body surround him like a coat.
On a whim he doffs that coat with a single spiritual sigh, and finds himself sensorially naked and no longer where he had been.
Norman seems to fall for a while through some kind of dark tunnel until he realizes gradually that he is actually just motionless somewhere dark, suspended and immobile, like he is caught in some kind of web.
Towering in front of him is the colossal pale face of the Heisenburglar, all big black eyes in shapeless white. Norman recognizes it instantly, but is nevertheless still overcome with a powerful, shuddering fear (uncertainty).
“What are you looking for now?” the Heisenburglar asks Norman with disdain through a mouth that only appears when it speaks.
“Just words,” Norman says, struggling futilely against whatever force has frozen him. “All I want is a few more beautiful sentences. I know there are some, some kind of holy sentences that will be the ones to help people understand, but my mind can’t find them. They’re dying down there. I don’t know what else I can do. I have to believe nothing is inevitable.”
“Everything is inevitable,” the Heisenburglar retorts, “and it’s all mine in the end.” The piercing black eyes grow larger against the white, as if they are moving closer to Norman. He tries to recoil from the approach but cannot seem to affect his position here. “I like you,” the Heisenburglar whispers into Norman’s mind, “so I am going to ease your worries by giving you the information you so invisibly and pathetically beg for.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You. And the universe. The meaning of it all.” For just the briefest of moments, what appears to be a grainy television image of a vague infant form appears in white-on-white on the Heisenburglar’s borderless white face/milieu. His big black eyes blink, and this strikes Norman as curious.
“Actually, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea about that already on my own,” Norman declares with challenged confidence. “What I’m more interested in is why you just blinked. What are you? Where are you?”
“I’m the end of your story,” the Heisenburglar says. “I’m where you can never go. You know, you should listen to everyone else. Might make things a lot easier for you.” Norman can tell that it is mocking him.
“You will never succeed in convincing me I’m unfree,” Norman assures the Heisenburglar. “I’m doing just fine how I am.” Despite his claims, however, Norman finds doubt threatening to kick out the pillars he intellectually stands upon. “Don’t speak to me of ends,” he spits, a uniquely human righteousness welling up in his heart. “I’m not susceptible to your traps anymore. I see through them.” But rather than snapping his fingers, as he instinctively attempts to do as punctuation for his last sentence, a limb of Norman’s spirit is tugged by whatever is binding it, sending a sense of powerlessness and a twinge of despair through his spiritual veins which he has to take a few moments to dispel.
“You have no idea,” the Heisenburglar mutters with dispassion. “I am behind everything. All of this is mine (me). You and everything you know will be mine. Nothing can escape me. You’re an individual; that you’ve proven. But you’ll never be free. You may be able to know yourself, but nothing else will ever know you. There is nothing else. Just you and me.”
A force begins to hug Norman’s spirit like a giant invisible hand slowly crushing it, injecting him with what feels like gallons of despair within a single moment.
“Yeah, but you’re not real, dick,” Norman grunts with frustration, tearing off his headphones and pacing quickly away from his computer, through the dark area to the light by the door, then back through the dark area and this time when he is there he focuses the sights of his intent on every little crevice around him which he has not yet perceived and he shoots little fuck-you middle-fingers in thought bubbles into them. He can feel, for a moment, the Heisenburglar recoil from his awesomeness, and it raises his spirits a bit, but this lasts only a few moments. The Heisenburglar’s spell was a potent one.
Norman stands a while longer in the dark area between the leather couches and the TV, then sways back over to his computer and sits down heavily. He leans past Laura’s window plants again to see down along Congress Street. Cold wind shakes the bare trees in front of the Key Bank building. No one is on the street. Whenever he can’t see anyone where there would normally be people, Norman begins to wonder if everything thus far has actually been a dream and he is actually alone on the planet. He looks out again; there is no evidence in this moment that anyone but him exists.
“Where are you?” Norman asks the Zeitgeist, the Reader, this moment’s God. “I don’t feel alone.” He looks around himself, up into the dark corners of the ceiling, back into the tiny bedroom. “Will you really care at all whether or not I did this for you? Do you even exist?”
As soon as he asks, he feels embarrassed that he did, imagining all his most adored artists – the Henry Millers, Philip K. Dicks, Salvador Dalis, Vladimir Nabokovs of the world – thinking the same thing to his unborn spirit many years ago.
“Of course I do,” he replies to himself. “Of course I do.”
He begins to type, and as soon as the first few words appear on his screen, his typing becomes frantic and he barely takes the time to even think about the sentences, almost as if he is channeling the words as they come.

I’m Norman Newman, and I am in love with you.
I’m in love with everything, as a rule (it’s a feeling I could never go back from), but I hold a very special reverence for the way that I love you. It is epic and all-consuming; it’s the greatest love I’ve ever known.
I can’t see you, I don’t know you, and yet already I can feel you growing around me, wrapping your mind around me like a warm blanket. I can actually feel your warmth. (If you feel a chill right now, could it be because that heat passed through space and time and reality to me?) And just as I can feel your presence surrounding me I can feel myself growing inside of you. A little zygotic thought cell that steadily splits and grows with each word that you read, growing, pulsating.
Your soul is my womb. You are my miraculous conception.
This is a call from beyond the grave, a message sent back in time from a future when Humanity has destroyed itself and/or petered into inertness of spirit, when the last remaining scientists just before the end sent a single quantum of information back through the centuries, the millennia perhaps, and here now you see the fruition of that delicate pricking of space-time’s skin in the form of this work, yours and mine, feedback from the future, a meme, a ghost, your dream, my apotheosis.
One spinward motion and all distinctions of time and identity have become meaningless under the logic of my love. Here you are, reading, and here I am scraping the edge off a curve of molecule, sculpting a universe that you and those who live in your Reality will hopefully never know to have been different from mine.
Were it not for this.
I can no longer recall how it felt not to know how all of this will end.

Norman sits back and reads what he has just written. Part of him still feels like he is trying to write a romance novel, however his attempts thus far have all met the same demise. The narrative voice he creates, be it first person or third, omniscient or limited, inevitably becomes self aware within the first few sentences and the whole endeavor crumbles under the weight of its own meta by the third or fourth paragraph.
Like he has done many times before, Norman pulls close a sheet of paper and makes a list of his artistic works to date in order to remind himself of who he is, what he is doing, and where within that process he is at the moment. He writes:

Prometheus a novel 14
The Planet Fenris a novel 14
Seven years worth of flat visual work, all lost (to me) 14-20
Various college art assignments that everyone thought were brilliant
Thanatos a short film (video) 17
The Deadly Life of Pirates a short film (DV) 18
Scores of obtuse, sample-heavy but lyricless Box songs 18+
X-COM:UFO Defense an absurdist screenplay 19
based on the video game
The Turing Registry a screenplay 20
Death and the Ladies a screenplay 21
The World’s Original Man a two-disc album 22
Illegible Signatures... an album 22
The Thing That Understands an album 23
The Then-Future an album (unfinished) 23+
Under the Undertow a novel 24
Enter: Norman (or whatever it is to be called)

“I’ve just begun my second book,” he says to himself, then realizes that there is nothing present to capture his voice. He takes his little digital recorder out of his pocket and holds it up to his mouth, pressing the record button with his thumb. Very quietly, he whispers into it:
“Norman feels most like a writer when he has writer’s block. When he is writing, he is his characters, his location, the very words themselves; when he has writer’s block, he’s just a writer sitting at a computer.
“The problem is he sometimes finds himself intimidated by the lack of any apparent impact he has made so far with his art,” he admits to that meta-entity that may or may not be listening behind his recorder. “He has produced three full albums of music that he makes on his computer. None of his music has been published, of course, though he has sold a few copies of his first album, The World’s Original Man, to old students of his from the Academy. In collaboration with Lou, he has written three screenplays and shot two short films, not to mention the ten-to-fifteen various future film projects they plan to make once they get rolling (or, balling, as Lou would say). He was an accomplished painter in his youth (read: adolescence). His degree is in painting, but he hasn’t painted in years now.
“Since he finished Under the Undertow, in fact, Norman has hardly produced anything at all. Norman would be the first to admit that nothing is more important to him than his art-life, and he wonders now if any of the people who are close to him realize how troubling it is to him to have not produced anything in a year.
“Norman has to believe that there is a purpose in his life. Here is his reasoning: either there is or there isn’t a purpose, and if there isn’t then it doesn’t matter what ones does but if there is then it does. So one might as well assume there is. The logic, for Norman, progresses thence thusly: How could I know what that purpose is? Well, all I get in this life is the perception of the outside world and the enigmatic rushes that govern and inspire my heart from within. I, like all things, am an essential part of the universe, here to do my part, and as a being of freewill my part is clearly whatever feels best, whatever seems appropriate, whatever my heart and reason tell me I ought to do. Norman’s heart, his whole life, compels him to learn about the world and, as he grows wiser, to imbue the world with beauty and to appreciate the beauty of everything (because, after all, if none of this is being appreciated, what is any of it really worth?).”
He leans back in his chair, feeling very comfortable and cool in the moment he’s in. He feels confident and potent. Unbeknownst to him, his dictation slowly rises in volume from the original whispering.
“These are, then, his goals, his highest priorities,” he continues. “Beauty, enlightenment, art, compassion. It seems to Norman that the only real evidence there is of anything is the self’s sensory information like sight and sound and touch, and there are no innate attributes of good or bad or evil or righteous or beautiful – things are just things, and all judgments are imbued by us. So what reason could there possibly be not to judge everything beautiful, truly believe that, and then just live in the world where that is truth?
“Of course, the problem with such universals, like ‘everything is beautiful’, is that the very existence of anything is in its distinction from everything else, and so any characteristic that everything shares might as well not exist; it relatively cancels itself out. But, like the unity of awareness which Norman also holds close to his mind, it is a truth he can remind himself of, get a brief glimpse of, and then feel alright about pretty much everything in our world for a while thereafter because really at the heart of it all, nothing can be wrong within the same logic that everything exists.”
Norman leans forward and looks at what he wrote previously. After a few seconds of scanning it, he deletes everything except the words the logic of my love. He likes that.
He raises his recorder to his lips again, still leaning forward, his face close to the words on the screen. He considers the idea of fictionalization, the fictionalization of his own life story.
“There is a very real body of artwork that is extensive and self-referential and spans a century or more that hangs constantly above every thought Norman has. It is his own artwork – his own great life’s work. Thus far, he has written one novel, produced three albums, written four screenplays and directed three fragmented short films. He is twenty-five years old. He has also given the world two or three hundred various paintings, drawings and prints.
“At some point through the course of his painting, which was the first of his media, the works began to become inter-referential with each other. Implied connections began to appear like neurons between the works. When Norman discovered electronic music, this became a platform for his poetry and songs emerged which referenced the paintings, which were full of text, and all of it began to grow in his mind as a single macrocosmic work of art. In his dreams, Norman could make it into a shape and hover above it with strings on his fingers, moving the pieces about and playing with little moebius connections between the metaphors within. He was learning about the world, studying his own existence, and building a reflection of what he saw in this magnificent web of art and meaning that he was weaving between his pieces. When he gave away all of his paintings after Amsterdam, for several weeks thereafter he actually felt the tendrils of his voice writhing into the zeitgeist. He felt like an ancient priest burning a corpse in sacrifice to a god as the paintings left his world but entered the outside world, the real world, where their influence then as art pieces could slowly begin to spread.” At these last words, Norman wiggles his fingers in front of himself like they are writhing tendrils.
Norman is startled by the sudden appearance of arms wrapping around his shoulders from behind as Laura says sleepily, wearing nothing but a pair of panties, “I’m sorry baby, did I interrupt your spell?”
He leans his head back to kiss her on the lips. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I wouldn’t want to miss you being here,” Laura whispers sexily into his ear and then kisses it. She looks up at his screen and says with sleepy glee, “Have you been working on your book?”
“I was trying to write a romance novel,” Norman admits reluctantly. “It seems to have turned into something else.”
“Maybe you should work on this other book, then, if that’s what’s on your mind,” Laura says, crouching beside him and looking across him, out the window at the Key Bank building across the street. “You know. You should follow your inspiration.”
“Yeah,” Norman sighs, leaning back in his chair and looking with dismay at the words on the screen. “I’m just sick of creating these gorgeous pieces of art that the world may or may not ever even know exist, let alone care about. I need to make something popular to get my name out there, to get some recognition.” He groans with frustration. “But it’s harder than I would have thought to write trash.”
“That’s a good thing,” Laura assures with a smile. She sweetly pets his thigh. “You’ll get your recognition. It’s a matter of time at this point.”
“Anyway, it’s not even recognition for myself that I want. I just want the work to get out there. I feel like I’m doing holy work, work for Humanity. I want people to be able to find and know about my shit. Like, I feel like I’m doing some important literary/philosophical/artistic progress here, but no one would ever know because they’re not going to see this shit on Oprah or CNN or whatever. Fuck. I’m sorry for venting upon you like this.”
Laura pushes her soft hand under his shirt to touch the skin of his chest. “Do you maybe want to lie in bed with me for a while?”
“That sounds lovely. Do you want to smoke a bowl first?”
Laura goes and sits with her feet curled under herself on one of the leather couches, where she picks up her Sherlock Holmes pipe and begins to pack a bowl from one of the baggies of weed that are sitting in a pile on the little coffee table. She pats the couch beside her and Norman joins her there, sitting also with his feet underneath him, leaning close to her sweet-smelling naked skin. He softly caresses her side and breast with his knuckles, causing her to smirk and moan softly while she finishes packing the bowl. She leans in close and kisses him passionately, while on a stage below, her slender fingers are guiding the pipe into his hands. He smiles out of the kiss, catching her glowing eyes for a moment just before he lifts the pipe and lighter to take a hit.
The weed smoke curls like tendrils into his brain, pulling apart the lattice of his perceived surroundings to show glimpses of the world behind/beyond. Little orange joy spirits cling to the underside of space-time in a cluster around the two lovers and the whole room, in Norman’s stoned sight, breathes softly with them.
“I need you to know what I’m doing,” he whispers against a remnant of the Heisenburglar’s uncertainty. “I need you to know who I am.”
“All I want is to know you,” Laura whispers, “to love you, to be with you. And I love the fact that you’re an artist.”
“I might not necessarily be what I seem,” Norman whispers back, quivering with apprehension. “There might just be something real going on. Something I am going to have to do, and not just think about. I can feel it. It’s going on right now. My book, I mean. The second novel. It’s all this. It’s about love and you and me, and real life, but it also seems to be about something much larger.”
“I love that you’re writing your novel here. I love knowing you’re here writing whenever I have to be elsewhere.”
“I guess what I’m trying to say is: I need you to understand that there are all kinds of metaphorical things that I can see happening – spirits of things and minor gods and goddesses and existential weather patterns – and it’s all part of a very real matrix of unreal things that I’m sort of starting to climb up along into the cosmos, and I’m finding some pretty unnerving things up there.”
“In the cosmos?”
“I think maybe we’re approaching a critical transformation, in a lot of ways. There’s this ascending curve of evolution and technology, and it’s coming to an asymptote. What will that mean for our daily lives? The Mayan calendar runs backward, or something like that, and ends soon, or like this phase of it does. We are looking at a fundamental phase shift of the whole paradigm of existence, and without a macrocosmic self-awareness of that, it could go any number of bad ways, I imagine. And as things are now, the majority of the population is held asleep and numb by some shadowy macro-scale force with fingers in government and religion and media and roaming our neighborhood streets.”
“Mm,” Laura muses.
“I see myself, since I am aware of all these things, as having a sort of call to duty, as it were, toward the righteous goal of awesomeness, of reason and beauty, tolerance and peace, and I see myself as sort of a messianic warlock in whatever realm I find myself. And more and more, I seem to be finding myself above all this in some sort of imaginary Valhalla where the gods are strategizing our collective spiritual suicide.”
“Wow,” Laura says, her eyes wide.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong – I’m not really concerned; I have no fear at the logical heart of it all. Because whatever is is and there will always be balance by simple perception-relativity, and all lack is simply illusion. It’s a game of summation, existence. I can and do judge all things beautiful by their very nature as part of all this, but as far as awesomeness goes, I definitely have aesthetic preferences when it comes to the evolutionary path of Humanity.
“It seems, sometimes, as if in everything there is the dual potential for lameness and awesomeness. Every object, every act, every snippet of existence can be judged either way, depending on how it is processed by the mind, and in an equal but opposite manner, the doer of a deed has the power to imbue any act or any word with awesomeness or lameness just depending on how they choose to rock it. Satire, or mocking, for instance, is almost like a sort of alchemical process for turning lameness into coolness.
“But really, underneath it all, there is everything, and the judgments of awesome and lame are relative to a thing’s imbued identity, which is not innate. It’s almost like, if you took away all the names, if you took away the centuries of meaning that have been attributed to each different thing-type we see, underneath it all would be this, this sort of lamenesslessness of namelessness…” Norman speaks the words slowly, very carefully, as if grasping them with shy but linguistically lustful hands in his mind.
“The lamenessless namelessness,” he repeats.
He finds a sheet of paper and writes the words THE LAMENESSLESS NAMELESSNESS once, looks at them, then writes them again.
Something about the absurd words makes Norman feel like there is power of meaning there – a clue or a tool of some sort for his coming battle against the Heisenburglar. I have seen It, he realizes as he repetitively writes. It has spoken to me.
He is writing it for the sixty-fourth time when Laura finally comes up behind him, robed and smelling of a recent shower, puts her arms around his neck and whispers, “Come to bed, would you? You’ve worked enough for tonight.”