The Biomechanoid Slouch
Waiting for the sun to rise in his head and at the matte-line of hills and horizon – now dappled with a hint of first rays and industrial smog – he is trying to derive order from the madness of the commonweal’s personalities – alternately raging ignorance and fantasizing nobility when his mechanical lovers sleep without snoring beside him, flickering rainbow lights on the walls and ceiling from between fluttering eyelids, cooing robot dreams.
“You think they are machines because you’re autistic,” one therapist told him, the one who tried to delicately wire him back into the mech-oversoul. “It’s just you can’t understand that affective level of being on its own terms because of the way your head is wired so you have to objectify it. Because it’s a kind of life you can’t identify with, and seems to operate on principles you don’t understand, you call it machinelike.”
“Well and good, and possibly true, but it’s my dreams that first told me I am looking at a biomechanical system and that it is designed to trap souls as effectively as the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix traps minds. And my heart tells me I’m not wrong. The beast has its tendrils in every human being – body and soul and all denominations thereof – using hemoglobin – perhaps, this is just a theory – as a kind of dynamo. And the sad thing is, the beast is not a single will. It’s not even a conspiracy. Because it has no real intelligence. It is a chaotic assemblage of loose entelechies driving toward a singularity Burroughs knows where.
But god-less remains in its heaven. The last rough beast that slouched toward Bethlehem to be born – in 1904 if accounts are accurate – still languishes in narcissistic self-formulation. I feel the need to escape. Into the sky perhaps? Or into the Mind? They are the same thing. “
His rodent-like mind-scurryings are beginning to annoy him. He is trying to lose weight, and has succeeded in quitting smoking tobacco. But the cigar has turned. What was sweet a few months ago lacks taste and luster. He thought that by quitting his job and beginning to live his dream, he would leave the rat race forever, only to discover over the months and after the honeymoon that the rat race still laps frantically inside him, and its imperatives are deafening even when he chooses not to listen.
He wonders if it has stained his bones as effectively as it has his synapses. He thinks, “This is why Hermes gave us comedy.” And watches Rodney Dangerfield.