SL/fiction 12.15.08 | VISUAL RHETORIC
VISUAL RHETORIC
2564 words by Stanley Lieber
Thomas Bright's disembodied head regarded me from the other side of the port hole.
I made a little waving gesture and he smiled.
"Don't just stand there," he said. "You've got to help me!"
- First of all, they're not voices.
In the fall of 1980, fast approaching my twenty-third birthday, I had become enamored with the irrational certainty that something dramatically and disturbingly... well, bad... was going to happen during the course of the coming year. I had weathered a series of nightmares about tornadoes and hurricanes, which had lately been joined by a progression of graphically detailed plane crashes. Eventually, the two dream-streams collided and morphed into a single, recurring narrative. The twin tornadoes (one comprised of dust and the other comprised of water) inched down a gravel road to demolish a giant diorama of Manhattan. This diorama had been laid out like a room-sized map across the altar of the Methodist church I attended as a child. Curious, right? I could see the whirlwinds of destruction making their way slowly towards the church. A seemingly random sampling of individuals I'd known throughout my childhood each knelt down on the floor with me, playing with an assortment of plastic military toys -- planes -- flying them around the diorama city. We would throw the toy planes like footballs and crash them into the buildings. This distracted us from the impending arrival of the tornadoes. The floor of the giant map was complete with a legend, compass, and an elaborate island airstrip (which seemed to be noticed only by me). Usually, the dream cut off when I spotted the island and walked over to stand on it. I would invariably become convinced that there was something of great importance buried beneath its surface. The last thing I would see as I woke up would be an outline of the bold script of the name of the island, stubbornly obscured by my feet. I could never quite make out the words...
Earlier in my childhood, I had convinced myself that a number of disembodied intelligences (perhaps the most intriguing of which was a sentient idea referring to itself as the avatar of Sarcasm) had repeatedly, and quite insistently, presented me with the opportunity to become the living Anti-Christ. The world would be delivered to me if only I were willing to perform a series of simple tasks that would demonstrate my dedication to the sentient idea's service. Horrified, I vehemently refused, and took measures I believed would prevent my proposed political career from ever getting far off the ground. To this day I still can't secure a credit card. The tasks I was given were to have been a simple set of mundane actions, which would have harmed no one, and which would have caused me no undue personal hardship. And yet, I was not enthused with this idea of becoming the personification of a Scriptural prophecy whose study had generated such distress in me as a child. Sarcasm was amused, and -- well -- it would sarcastically counter my adamant refusals by drilling vivid images of the nuclear holocaust described in the book of Revelation directly into my brain. I have to say, it didn't take long for the Biblical stuff to wear thin. By 1975 I had become convinced that these images depicted the aftermath of attacks perpetrated against the United States by Islamic terrorists. I was certain that these attacks would occur sometime within the next fifty years. I privately told my girlfriend at the time that the next major war involving the United States would be centered upon Iraq, and that I hoped conscription would not be re-instated (as it had been in my 'vision,' or whatever you want to call it), because I was certain that I would be called up by my father's employers and sent off to... well, there was more. Let's just say there was more. In light of all this, I wasn't sure I could keep saying no to Sarcasm forever.
Of course, while I was well aware that this was all make-believe -- made-up nonsense -- the impact it had upon my disposition and outlook was similar to what might have been expected if the situation had, in fact, been real. The metaphorical tabs had started fitting into the metaphorical slots and they had become impossible to ignore, as the resulting papercraft devices had begun to made themselves apparent everywhere I looked. I was starting to detect the seams in the walls. Stress points in theoretical structures I had never before thought to examine.
Perhaps here I should pause and explain how this communication between myself and Sarcasm most often took form.
Generally, I do not think in words. Cognition for me has always involved a series of images which fit together as multidimensional shapes, each distinguished by size, color and texture rather than by subject matter or meaning. For example, for as long as I can remember, I have associated certain colors with the numerals zero through nine. Zero is white, one is black, two is yellow, three is orange, four is blue, five is red -- and so on. As a youth I would store and retrieve long strings of arbitrary numbers simply by arranging the colored blocks into an appropriate collage and committing said collage to visual memory. So, groups of numbers naturally took on an aesthetic as well as a symbolic meaning. Four quarters (yellow-red, yellow-red, yellow-red, yellow-red) made up one dollar (black-white-white). Adding or subtracting blocks of colors was faster for me than learning 'real' math. It was mostly a subconscious substitution, but it worked approximately up until middle school, when we started to be taught branches of mathematics that cannot typically be solved 'all in your head.' I had read an article in Popular Science or Scientific American or some other magazine around this time that stated the structure of the human brain made it impossible to solve complex algebra or geometry problems by simply thinking about them visually. Well, this had the unfortunate stink of truth about it, whether it was true or not, and I was sold on the idea from that moment forward. To this day, the colors go dead when I try to envision linear equations. Silly, right? Anyway. Incoming ideas typically flow across the ridges, valleys and other topographical surfaces of my consciousness and are, as I said, molded into multidimensional shapes that are then stored as visual memories. Reasoning and deduction are simply a matter of arranging these shapes into aesthetically 'correct' sequences and compositions. Somehow, this visual logic seems to map. It's a firm validation of the Platonic whateveryoucallit. Placing all of my shapes into their natural positions, and then abstracting that visual record into a sequence of English words and phrases which are human-readable, seems to produce lucid thought that I am often told is remarkable for its clarity and insight. Or, perhaps I'm merely deluding myself and I'm only mimicking the bits of language that I've managed to pick up from normal humans after hearing the words repeated over and over again. Maybe this is all crap. Either way, I've somehow managed to scratch out a modest living for close to twenty-seven years. No one has had to help me wipe my own ass. I often wonder if other human beings process language the same way that I do, but have merely failed to articulate the process in a coherent manner. Perhaps they create descriptions of their thought processes out of the more typical, flawed vernaculars, which unfortunately proceeds to shape their cognition and leave them striving to fulfill those false accounts with aggressive phenomenological action. All of this would of course be at the expense of their own more naturally occurring mental rhythms. The virus of language is a parasite feeding on the fat of the human mind. In my case, my own communications with the archetypal concepts of Sarcasm and Messiah seems to have occurred on the sub-linguistic level of colors and shapes, which I have come to believe is nearer to our wetware than the instruction sets (in this case, the English language) with which we are trained from birth to hypnotize ourselves. What if, through some fundamentally subterranean mechanism, we are unconsciously grouping items into structures that alter our English even before it bubbles into our internal stream of consciousness? This is to say nothing of what inevitably comes spurting out of our mouths. It was a sudden preponderance of recognizable patterns in my own linguistic reflexes -- it seemed that someone had been sleeping in my bed, if you will -- which, when decoded into English, produced a convincing resemblance to direct communication between myself and an outside force. Was it apophenia? Well, who can say? While it is true that there is an element of divining at play, the elaborate motifs which seemed to emerge in my reflexive patterns of thought cannot merely be dismissed as broadcast irritants, disrupting my mental space like so much rumbling of bass from a car down the street. These patterns I've been describing would also respond to my probing. That is to say, they would respond intelligibly. Two-way communication was observed to occur. Hence my references to a running dialogue between myself and the constructs. Hence my mention of their offers and of my rejections.
Back at the end of the world, having taken several months to mull over the myriad of proportions and relationships which were emerging, screeching like peacocks from the amorphous collection of data swirling about in my brain case, fall, 1980, finally clawed its way into view. I awoke one September morning full of the realization that I had somehow crept into my twenty-third year, relatively healthy and still firmly planted upon the surface of the planet. Characteristically, my right-brain responded to this happy circumstance by cutting loose a sudden inundation of random stimulation. Quantum foam fired in the widest possible distribution pattern. My left-brain, shocked that this affront had issued from its own squirrel-in-the-wheel sibling, spontaneously divined a slipshod, though astonishingly practical organizational grammar with which to categorize all of the incoming data. A dazzling display of battlefield competence, to be sure, but the flow of information was steadily increasing. My left-brain, bristling now at how quickly its attempts at order had fallen into ruin, burrowed itself ever more deeply into the heaving bosom of... labor politics. To whit: lacking further resources, the faculties of my mind voted to enact an emergency work stoppage.
A rhetorical picket line was hastily erected between the two cranial hemispheres.
Turning to all of this hubbub consciously for the first time, I (that is to say, me) examined said goings-on, and after a certain period of solemn consideration, decided that union busting was more trouble than it was worth. I would simply pretend that the situation did not exist. I would ignore my predicament and avert my attention to whatever new, interesting and (no doubt) more entertaining thoughts were sure to come traipsing along. My left-brain and right-brain could resolve their differences without my help. My friend, I say this plainly and it is true: ideas are a dime a dozen. Ignore one, and ten thousand spring up to take its place. If I do not care for the direction of a given narrative, I delete it. Even if the ideas do address me audibly and directly, well, that doesn't mean I am bound to listen. I don't owe them anything, least of all a reply. Life is too short to indulge every pointless discrepancy of visual-spatial logic. Let them try to overload me. They can't force water into a plugged drain. Getting drawn into these whirlwinds is simply a waste of my time. Better to pull the hood down over my face. Place my hands over my ears. No, I am not available to come to the phone right now, and please do not bother me again. Thank you for your consideration. Pray, what's for dinner?
The year slunk by. I gained skill and efficiency at ignoring the stacks of interlocking realities. Under the stern tutelage of that conscientious ringmaster, ignorance, the serendipitous connections began to fade. Mind the gap, right-brain, the ringmaster would shout, and so on. This system checks and balances kept the situation neatly under my control. Over time, I devised a further arsenal of rhetorical tricks for identifying and severing new visual-spatial connections even before their roots could take hold. My techniques proved surprisingly efficacious.
Almost before I knew it, my twenty-fourth birthday was upon me. I looked back on the previous year with a certain contempt for the time spent culling all of this useless cruft from the stream of my thoughts. I was not getting much else done. But overall I retained a sense of accomplishment. The occasional ray of satisfaction seeped through. Gently drawing the curtain, the fall sunshine felt good in my cold, gray room.
The morning of September 11, 1981, I awoke alone in my bed. I pulled sweet breaths through a sincere smile and let the top of my head rest against the cool metal bars of my bed frame. Before opening my eyes, I mashed my face back into my pillow and relished that I was finally (almost) home free.
One more day to go. And then it would all be over. Goodbye, twenty-three; hello, twenty-four with an "l."
I relaxed, sighed richly, and thought to myself (in English), Well, I've made it. Nothing horrendous is going to happen to me just because I've survived to twenty-four years of age. I guess it's time to outgrow all of this superstitious nonsense about the number twenty-three and get on with my life. So what if the symbols and syntax of temporal reality continue to combine obvious configurations that seem to beg acknowledgment, comment and/or intervention? I will ignore it all, straighten my posture and affirm that, on the contrary, all of this 'clairvoyant' horseshit and 'spatial reasoning' bollocks has been nothing more than a series of convenient hallucinations.
It was really quite simple, in the end, to walk away from the flood of data and to get on with my life.
So now then, I admonished myself, let's get up, shave our face, and get the hell in to work before we're late for our shift.
I should say, it was quite a relief to finally be rid of the shit-flinging, psychic monkey on my back. No more looking for the seams in things. No more seeing those seams whether I wanted to or not. From that morning forward, with the aid of my trusted ringmaster, ignorance, I would resolve to translate the multidimensional shapes and colors of my thoughts into English prior to becoming aware of them. I possessed the machinery. I could ignore it all. Let God or the Devil sort it out. Life would prove so much easier.
Groggily, I pulled on my socks and made my way into the living room. I clicked on the television just in time to see a jetliner bury itself into the World Trade Center and explode.
I guess you could say that in that moment, everything changed.
So much for my upcoming vacation, I thought to myself.
Sarcasm had always been a great practical joker.
I edged backwards, unconsciously.
Presently, awareness resumed and I leaped for the curtain. Tom's babbling was cut off by the downward arc of my sleeve. I straightened. I had barely escaped with my life.
Then nothing. Silence.
After a few moments, it seemed that the disturbance had faded. I decided to take another peek. I inched over to the porthole and slowly drew back the curtain.
That proved to be a mistake.
To be continued...
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