Finally I looked back at the screen and it wasn’t as dire as I’d thought. The date and timestamp were there as always, on the right: Kay’s message hadn’t been sent the day she took the pills; it had gone into my spam folder two days before.
Still, five more minutes passed before I was willing to click on it. I sat on and on at Solly’s desk, counting the rows of yellow squares hovering midair, wondering what forms of life moved in the darkness of the park below.
The problem is, now, were going to be nothing BUT surface language. & no safeties, no backups, no checks & balances. The future is nothing but language, see, not languageS but language. Monolithic. The little ones are dying off @lightning speed. Programming Language, ad talk, 1 speech for all, a juggernot, that’s where we’re going Anna. All the native languages dead, all we’l have left is shells & false things & tongues spoken for profit &/or by machines. Don’t u c Anna this is the tru end of God. When everything that lives the deep language dies. This is the end of God and not the fake god made up to look like us, not that fake god anna, the real god, the god tht IS evolution & speciation & Life, a god that did make the world, u see?—b/c this god is the beautiful unconscious, it is billion processes & intuitions under all of biology & personality & art, the thousands and millions of cultures of both Man and Beast. We’re killing that deep god ana, the speakers of false language are suffocating the deep, they are the oil on the water beneath which all suffocates & dies
Satan is God weaponized
God weaponized by man
Now is the point of danger b/c true language is the Soul Anna, tru deep language the soul & the soul can be ruined. God needs us Anna, as much as we need god
I WONDER IF Ned’s allies are mostly true believers or, like him, mere opportunists.
Will believes, like Don with his geese and songbird migrations, that I found my way to them via some kind of homing instinct, since a couple of others over the years have showed up without prior contact. He thinks it’s part of the background orchestration of the deeper language, an urge that underlies our patterns of survival.
It isn’t that I learned nothing at the motel, only that as soon as I learned it I seemed to always have known it, yet still feel I know nothing at all. Burke with his speaking tree, Linda with her theme-park whale, Kay with Infant Vasquez—I picture Burke’s maple in its arboretum, planted halfway across the world from where it evolved, a lone specimen with a plaque in front of it bearing its names, both Latin and common. So unlike the aspen that grew not far away from that arboretum—those cloned aspen, connected underneath the earth, that lived as one for what could be millennia . . . I watch a pigeon strut around on Solly’s windowsill, dirty but free, and wonder about the orca in its pool, its home only twice the length of its body.
They did have something in common, all those the voice spoke through: they were captives. Even Infant Vasquez, who quickly died, or Lena, who lived on and spoke. All infants are kept creatures, after all. I remember how snatches of poetry were given out to unfortunates when we passed them; I think of prisoners and victims and martyrs, the persistent notion of their closeness to God. I think of how a tinge of the divine rests on the hurt or unfortunate, how so many of them wear a kind of halo of gilded pity.
But if the injured and wretched are closer, what does it point to? Likely we give the poor and weak and sick their halos reflexively, I think, to make it easier to detach from them and not have to do fuck all. We give them sympathy in the place of help. We say they’re not like us, they’re sanctified and only half-human. They might as well be on a cross.
I recall acutely how abjection makes you a part of a herd. The kidnapping left me feeling robbed, not just of my assumptions about freedom but of my personality—no one has personality when their leg’s being amputated, no one has personality when their eye’s being poked out. You don’t have any selfhood when you’re suffering extremely: in suffering you could be anyone. Whether that makes you everyone, though, is a different question.
And I don’t like the proposition that suffering puts us closer to each other. That suffering isolates the sufferer—this is equally valid.
So Will has comforted me over Kay. He’s trying to be kind, of course, and I’d do the same if our positions were reversed, you don’t question the rightness of trying to comfort someone. As behaviors go, it’s universally acclaimed. Yet he told me there wasn’t anything I could have done, when in fact there was: I could have done more than nothing.
I think of the duress that can be brought to bear on a soul, how selfhood, which we depend on so completely, is a luxury good.
I turn my palms up reflexively, thinking of those who suffer their whole lives. As though the gesture would make me one of them.
WE LEAVE SOON, after one last hypnosis session. Kay has been moved to a hospital in Boston, near where her parents live. We will visit her there on the way to see my parents.