The Humanizing Mechanism

Flowing, fluent. Dead eyes. Black light. Psychedelia, never desired.

And drifting away. Cruising somewhere down around near Miami, out in the sunshine, billboard reads: VISIT MYFLORIDA.COM

Drifting eyes, branches caressing Mary, somewhere lost in thought.

Those dead eyes, dead hearts, in the flicker of the ketamine haze — in that flicker from the light through the trees that induce dreaming in a state on the verge of sleep.

Like incandescent tubes flickering on and off in random patterns, from a dark room, shudder into consciousness.

Cathar at the wheel, through the stroboscope of the trees. Murmured in her sleep:

“I wanna stay just like this…”

Lost in drifts like ketamine haze. Fall, forgot, back, backward, somewhere in time, reordered the events, stroboscope, light through the trees.

Watching all of this on YouTube. Watched it all: the car, the trees, the light through the branches. Watched it on the Internet. Forgot what I was doing.

In a memory. Another level of Maya. Who knows? Who watched the decaying orifices? They forgot the amalgam in burnt-out churches and civic centers, dilapidated, decrepit. No sense of society, no sense of wonder.

I know no language, language lost. Not so hot.

Mary in some sort of Sabbat. With her eyes glowing and her black face behind the dark veil, she assumes the position of the ghoul behind the white lace, in the black light, unwanted psychedelia never determined any of this, she, the determinant.

In the flicker of the incandescent rods, riveting you away from dream.

“Oooooooooooooohhh…”

Like that dark shadowed figure through the wedding lace, there, in the room, with the lamp and table, with the mirror and unnatural thinness that characterized her, sallow cheeks, skeletal in this light, shadowed recesses, he had never quite seen her before in this light, in these jeans. And there was…

Quick change of scenery, back to Miami, 2010, riding in the sunlight, so disaffected. He at the wheel, back in some fantasized vacation video, with sunlight on her cheek, quite the inverse.

It could be: Singapore, passing by the new casino, the ‘Durian’, in the Clark Quay, by night, tropical paradise, “Fried Rice Paradise,” no?

Cathar, impossible, improbable, an anachronism, in space as well as time now. From the little India region, I will be grabbing a cab by night. Have the Volvo shipped over on his employer’s dime. Taking the matter to the global extent. Sans ‘Durian’ on the underground. Which technically couldn’t be fined. He had no real interest in exploring other areas of Asia, no interest in other cultures because Asian culture never experienced would be, like the protagonist in Snow Country, a world in a dream living in a vacuum of some sort.

Looking out over the city by night from the hotel suite. He could draw the curtains, turn down the light, and watch the evening news.

Humanizing mechanism, 2 AM, Seaport waterfront.

Cryptic parsed out messages, view of the Hyatt across the harbor, and Logan, where on that fateful day…

Compressed poetry, sung by Alicia Keys, was transmitted globally, and that first moment of realization was that they were listening to this bright cadence from Southeast Asia to NYC to Orlando, FL.

But here, overlooking the Harbor, with the Hyatt across the way, and the Massachusetts flag at times flowing, at times billowing, at times tangled over the WTC, Massachusetts neoliberal wasteland, the Neo-Medieval relief, so daunting, beneath which we are only ants and earlier that day, wending through the un-remembered byways of Watertown,

The strange lights in the tunnel on 93, just near the exit for Storrow Drive, discrete quanta, a flicker, remembered from childhood…

“I don’t think you understand; it’s fucking encoded in my genes; you’re encoded in my jeans.”

Either on a lonely drive through a Florida backroad, or in a taxi near the Clarke Quay in Singapore City, or JFK in NYC, that globalized, compressed track mobilized, If you ask me I’m ready…

There is, somewhere in all that flicker of the lights in the tunnel that reminded him returned him, but in a dream, in the backseat of a car, in a liminal state, hypnotized as if by the flickering light through the leaves and branches of trees as they passed along Storrow Drive.

Oh, the neoliberal, neomedieval was as romantic as hell, that un-sentimental bulwark, those Holocaust-like stacks.

But the air itself had a quality unlike any other; all things were clearer here, the vision purer.

When she walked into the Microsoft Digital Mixer, a blue surge — it was an electric blue shimmer, like being caught in the dazzle of the projector, like the blue surge of arcing electricity. Something pure, elemental, and in the folds of her blue blouse Cathar saw the depths of the sea, out there, beyond the MIT lab, and the inhuman architectures of the city, the stacks that vented the tunnels along the Greenway, the children playing, frolicking in the fountain, there he sat, alone, in dark corduroy, feeling the cool breeze kiss him through the arch of the Port, and opening his eyes… Ah, the steel and glass architectures, the pure stoic forms, all enfolded in the shimmer of Mary’s blouse, and in the dazzle of her shimmering blue he saw a lifetime, society, culture, construction, the Boston skyline on the horizon and the sailboats on the Charles at dusk. Her entrance transformed the atmosphere of the hyper-mediated meeting space at the Microsoft Labs, and witnessed the vision of a community birthed. He had taken her to see the Edward Goreys on Beacon Street. He could only describe his encounter with her as ennobling.

Had it been similar on the mezzanine of the Westin, overlooking that Neo-medieval architecture, romantic as hell neoliberal architectures?

But seeing in her shimmer the playing children on the greenway, with the cool sea wind blowing through the arc of the port. These architectures themselves were built on a massive scale as if to indicate the future of humanity, two ants and the sunlight cresting over the arc of the Neo-medieval bulk of the convention center, with the stacks in the distance, not the haze of the following morning. Edifices of glass and steel masked the massive architecture beneath. But there was something vaguely human in the attempt to hide them, to mask them, to integrate them, the acknowledgment of the massive scale of humanity, and of the city, and the front upon which future battles for humanity would need to be fought, a kind of rehabilitation, a humanization after all in the architectures.

Somewhere out there, those self-same songs repeated, broadcast in simultaneous streams from satellites that perfectly ordered the most distant locales. Streaming, programmed, in that same cab where he heard that song, it could be New York, Singapore, Orlando…

Now, he just needed time to think. The tessellation of glass & metal in the harbor district was all the comfort he could find. In the lobbies of hotels, in the mezzanine. The glass & steel at twilight, with the sun over the arc of the neo-medieval convention center.

He coasted through the winding streets of Boston, down Berkeley Street, with the John Hancock in the background, the lush summertime gardens, and the sun and brick and row houses.

The roads wended their way across the river, into Watertown, and finding that one singular stone in the graveyard, there was nothing but sunlight and Italian marble and the flutter of leaves trembling in the wind.

Then there was the Quay by night. Cathar made his way from the taxi stand through the main area, a Malay in yellow beckoning, smiling at him from her seat at the pub on the corner. He simply nodded, smiled faintly, and continued on his way toward Attica, beyond the fountains and neon and neon palm trees beneath the plastic-enclosed dome. There were fireworks and acrobatics displays taking place on the river, perhaps dj-ed by Oakenfold. The ooohs and ahs of the crowd, a mix of the club scene and families out for an evening. Once inside the club, he found his way up to the dance floor. The room itself was filled with gyrating bodies, Caucasian and Asian women in tight black and silver dresses cavorting with their tight bodies, beneath the strobe — millennium style, and interspersed among them here a small, older Indian man in a business suit, there a Japanese.

Over on the corner of the dancefloor, his employer, Trapan, bid him join their little group, beckoning with one hand. This Interzone was a black cavern of glitz — of glitter and dark recesses or of mirrored surfaces that glittered like shattered glass in a strobe, diamantine flourishes in a black void. Downstairs, in the chandeliered bar, outside smoking in the patio. It would be the same from here to the Americas.

“Cathar, my good man, have a drink! It’s on the house!” The drop. The lights flared, the silhouetted bodies in motion, and Cathar was on to the next, laying hands on a woman, inviting her into his inner sanctum, here at the club, where Cathar could be a voyeur.

All throughout the Asian peninsula tonight, he reckoned — from the window of a commuter plane, coasting over the Malay peninsula, the moon on his horizon over the wing, and the profound darkness of that landmass beneath — out there, this endless raving into the dawn, railing against the darkness, it would be out there tonight, the broad daylight on the opposite side of the earth, the markets’ opening bell, all an endless machine, boundless, mind-boggling.

To think that out there this very night, they would be raving underneath that full moon, in ecstatic wonder, under black light and endless Milky Way horizons, the rising of a thousand suns against the dark night of the tropical nocturnal beach, gyrating bodies. But Cathar, a mere global Geist, a mere witness to this Global Night that fanned out in its black expanse beneath him, in Sustainable Development Goals for 2050… Which way would it go down, he mused? He put down the Grey Goose without taking a sip. Paused to consider the cavorting bodies. In the jungles, there would be monkeys and crocodiles the size of elephants.

Again, the drop. The lights flared, the mechanical pirouetting of the lights — technologies of pleasure.

Those bodies on the dancefloor exhibited little more agency than the lights — the Full Moon ravers, gazing out at the Milky Way, the dawning of one hundred million suns, the arc spiral arms of the galaxy, the drop. All Tomorrow’s Parties.

The sentient light bioluminescent waters, trails that form behind one’s fingers dragged through the water, the 1,000-year journey in the blink of an eye. What was it that Curtis Mayfield said? “Don’t worry / If there’s a hell below…”

In the flash of an eye, the lights swung through their arc, projecting their dance floor beams, swiveling and arcing on their bases, reflecting the movements of the dancers, those dark outlines…

Cathar observed all of this from his station, behind the red velvet VIP.

They would be out in droves, from the Nevsky Prospect to Brooklyn to the families at the Night Safari on the outskirts of town. And Cathar left to contemplate it all, himself silhouetted in the strobe, a black shadow.

September 18, 2011