120

A disturbing thought he had as a child, growing up somewhere in Maryland:
What if there were nothing?
Nothing.
No planets.
No universe.
No space.
No darkness.
No light.
No abstract philosophy to contemplate space.
Nothing.

No space.
No thought of the universe.
No thought.

No memory.
No concrete.
No abstract.
No past.
No present.
No future.
No reality.
No illusion..

Nothing.

You cannot ask the question: what if nothing existed. Or: what if there were nothing. Nothing doesn't exist. It is not a question of Being. It is not a question of Not Being, because there would be no opposition to Being. There would always never have been being.

The tubers he remembers are now no more. Now, the figures are together, despite his having dis-arranged them, delved into them, previously. The group is not a group -- no longer the canyon he has made of them, no longer the vessel of abjection he approached through the synaesthesia of song. No longer the rot. Now, they are individuals, once again. As they always have been. But what they were doesn't exist. And there is no way to speak of it. And this lack of dialectic is/is not finally expels him from the realm into which he has thrown himself. It is he, perhaps, who has been executed.

And now, as before, the table, The Committee, is before him, and he before it.

119

I was looking at the tubers. I had come from the rot. I had thought I had found the eyes, and I had, after a fashion, but they were no longer eyes. They were tubers, because that is what eyes become in the process of ripe and rot. And now the tubers are gone. There is no space. There are figures. There are figures, yet there is no space. There is the representation of figures, but there is no space. There must be space. There must have been space. There should be space in the future. Space has been executed. Space is executed. Space will be executed. But it is not my mind that creates such a thing. Rather, the execution of space creates my mind. And there are the figures, also created. Here, then.

118

He finds that he cannot move them. But The Magnificence can. Here is where the bond shared between him and the machine-organic being that is The Magnificence by way of his chairmanship comes into play, at least in this situation. He does not ask The Magnificence to move the tubors. And yet, they move. Here's the thing: he does ask them to move, and they do move, but he has no memory that they have moved. Nor does he have any memory of having wanted them to move nor of considering how to move them. Thus, he repeats this line of thought, this expression of will and desire, unaware than he has engaged in it previously. He finds himself, anew, at each re-positioning of the tubers.

117

So here he is. Standing on these huge rhyzomes connected from something he cannot see, far behind, to something else he cannot see, far ahead. Same thing up above. Same thing far below. He has found these, yet he cannot see the point at which he has found them because he is here, now. Cat's Cradle. ? Are the rhyzomes moving? Are they being moved? Can he move them? Is he supposed to execute before he makes the final choice to execute, from the committee-wide membership and not simply from those whose innards comprise this realm of stench and tubers. He could execute the moves of Cat's Cradle upon the rhyzomes. If he could move them. The tubers. The members.

116

That's an obvious one. People play Cat's Cradle because they enjoy making increasingly complex patterns. But they don't only enjoy making patterns -- the enjoyment is coupled with another enjoyment: the enjoyment of power. People who play Cat's Cradle enjoy learning how to create complex patterns and how to control these patterns. Further: not only do people enjoy the patterns and the control granted by getting good at the making the patterns, people who are true Cat's Cradle enthusiasts enjoy using other people to help in the process of control and mastery of the complex patterns. Move this thread here, loop it around there. Spread both hands apart. And then, when all is finished, or you run out of thread, one loop is loosed, and the whole three-dimensional pattern network falls limp upon the shag rug. She had a shag rug. It was orange and red with some yellow thrown in, here and there. He would play the yarn game with her and wonder why it was called a game. Could you win? But he never wondered about the game further than this. He never tried to learn the patterns for himself. He just liked watching her manipulate the yarn. He enjoyed hearing her voice and listening to what it wanted him to do. And he enjoyed doing what that voice wanted him to do. But he never learned the patterns, even though it occurred to him that he could learn if he liked.

115

But not her. Them. This is not about her, and it never was. It was about the committee. It was about becoming a member of the order. It was about being able to ask questions because he had been elected to the order. She has been his guide, but she had not been anything more than his own constructed memory of her -- at least not for a long time. He sees a parallel, but he fights against seeing it. And so he sees it all the more. There was nothing that said she was his guide. She was his guide because he decided to define her in that way by following her. The parallel is that in this foul realm of metaphysical potato-rot blooming from the innards of a handful of committee members, the rhysome has been a guide, as well. And it, too, was not a guide until he decided, moments ago, to see it as one. Or, perhaps, as many. There are many guides around him.
Why do people play Cat's Cradle?

114

Her.
Again. The same her that he followed down into the town before requesting sanctuary at the church. He cannot deal with this, now. He cannot deal with remembering how she used to play Cat's Cradle and how she would ask him to hold the yarn while she moved the string through and around itself making one string look like a network of strings. He was a young child. Six, maybe. She was a few years older. He doesn't remember. Of course he does. She was nine. But he cannot be thinking of this, now. He has to follow the rhyzomes. He has to pull the caves together and back into people. Because that's how you do it. The eyes make the rhyzomes, the rhyzomes connect the parts of the people, and he can pull on the rhyzomes and collapse the caves, the spaces between rhyzomes, back into people. And then he can go the opposite direction -- not into the people, not into the stench, but back out to the surfaces. The faces. The people on the outside. The person on the outside.
Her.

113

He has come to a point where numerous rhyzomes are seen, everywhere. They of different thicknesses: threads, strings, twines, ropes, cables. They replace his perception of walls and ceilings. They lead him to perceive the place where he is as not a cave but a web. There are no longer reference points such as floor, wall, ceiling. Now, there is this rhyzome in relation to that one, over there. But web is not the right word, he thinks. A child's game he had once seen her play comes to mind. Cat's Cradle.

112

He comes to the eyes, through the rot, but the eyes are not eyes, anymore. They have grown into rhyzomes. He remembers from his youth the little black pellets that you'd put on the sidewalk and light a match to. The pellets would hiss and sputter like the fuse of a cartoon bomb, and a great big phallus of carbon would snake its way out of the pellet until the pellet was gone -- gone into the snake it had made and that was made of it. Made of the pellet. Same with the eyes. The eyes are not eyes anymore because they have made something else. Consumption and creation. Suicide -- Transformation -- Birth. [Suic]Eye[d] -- ove[t](r)-[ans]r[f](o)i[rmat]penes[ion]s ... Birth of?

111

The rot makes the eyes better. The rot makes the eyes purge themselves. He is submerged in the rot and the rot leads him to the eyes. The eyes have grown runners. The eyes have connected. The eyes reach out and connect. All because of the rot. Follow the rot to the eyes. Follow the rot to the eyes. Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the rot to the eyes.

110

This place is made of people. This place is made of rot. This place is made of eyes. This place is made of yes. He has put the people together, and this place is the result. He has made the place from the people, and now he cannot find the people. He must find them and then execute. He must find them and carry them out.

109

A rotten potato in the hand is worth two in the ceiling. But it's still a rotten potato. And what can a rotten potato actually worth? It is worth rot. There is rot in his house. It is abject. It is that quality that causes the body to purge. It is the subject and the verb. Purge. The eye looks away from itself and, in doing so, brings the image back to itself. Do dreams do the same? Wish fulfillment. We dream and purge ourselves of our wishes. Imagine, he thinks, what it would be to vomit one's dreams. Can a thing that rejects, that causes rejection, that is itself that rejection, have worth?

108

eyes
yes
potato

It is a haiku:

Eyes fed with grim rot
O fertile rhyzome say yes
to ongoing life

or something like that. He has added the positive note: "to ongoing life" as opposed to, say, "decay and death." What can he say. He is a cock-eyed optimist.
Eyed.
But, back to the potato. What, probably, did he do with the it? Certainly, he didn't plant it. But he could have. And, actually, he still can. Carry it out.

107

Why was the potato in his ceiling?
Who put it there?
Why did they put it there?
How long had it been there?
Well, these, apparently, were questions that The Magnificent likes, because as soon as he asks, another warm burst of energy floods through his blood. But The Magnificence does not provide answers. There is no Internet citation to answer this question of personal history. There is, instead, a quite vigorous positive, compulsive response from The Magnificence:
yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes
which hunter then begins to hear as a related stream of sounds and letters:
yeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyeseyes
yes
eyes

?

But that's all.
yes
eyes

106

He has smelled rotting potatoes, before. Perhaps when he was a child growing up in Maryland. He dimly remembers. Dimly remembers the circumstance. There is nothing dim about his memory of the smell. Perhaps he had smelled something in his house. Perhaps he had smelled it in the morning, had left the house for a bit, had come home, and the smell had been more insistent. Yet not enough to compel him to find it and do something about it. Perhaps he had gone out, again, toward evening, and come back to an overpowering offense that led him to snoop around a bit, testing the various corners and closets, and behind furniture, and even poke his head into the refrigerator and the oven. He had smelled the odor coming vaguely from the kitchen but, once in the kitchen, he sensed that it was elsewhere -- beyond the kitchen. Possibly in the small ante-room on the far end of the pantry. But no. Actually, there was a guest bedroom beyond the ante-room. He has not thought of this for years. There was a water-stained ceiling panel in the room. Perhaps he remembers the core of the smell coming from above him. And maybe he brought out a step-ladder, climbed up to reach the panel, and found the shrivelled, white-mold covered potato, part-liquid. And perhaps the smell brought him out of himself as only the most powerfully abject artifact can do. Artifact. Remnant of something. Of a history.
Why was a rotting potato in his ceiling?

105

But can he manipulate this process? Can he cause The Magnificence to impart power to him by his thoughts, his desires, his emotions, his movements? Probably in a limited way. The Magnificence will not impart him with any knowledge asked for in any old way, whatever. No, either his questions have to be asked about a certain allowable array of subjects, or his questions need to be asked in a certain way.
He decides to experiment with the realm of smells. He decides to abandon the round and to plunge himself as deeply into this fetid area of abjection that the area -- the vision -- the environment -- allows him to go. Man the torpedoes; full speed ahead!

104

He asks another question: Which of these seven definitions of "execute" should he use. There is no response. He loathes the idea of putting someone to death. Even interfaced with The Magnificence. The warm feeling has dissipated. Not in an unkind way, necessarily, but, he is realizing, any sort of intoxicating effects of the interface are very quickly assimilated by his own body, normalized by his metabolism -- or whatever the physiological term is -- and thus given a greater tolerence. This does not entirely please him. Yet another thought, a correlary of this one interests him: his growing tolerence of the effects of the interface reflects a growing capacity for whatever information and energy The Magnificence chooses to impart to him. Or, less gently, he is becoming less resistent to whatever garbage The Magnificence wants to pump into him.

103

He asks these questions and, immediately, the answers present themselves in his mind, and he knows that they are not his own responses but those of The Magnificence. The answers come with a feeling of warmth and calm. An energy through his vains. Not a drug, but a charge. The charge is enabled by his interface with the Chair of The Magnificence in which he sits and of which he has become a part.
Answers:
Is stench bad? Yes.
Is decay bad? Yes.
Is disease bad? Yes.
What does it mean to execute?
1. To put into effect; carry out
2. To perform; do
3. To create according to an existing design
4. To make valid
5. To perform a designated task
6. To put to death
7. To run (in the context of computer programming terminology)
(courtesy of dictionary.com)
The Magnificence has sent him a definition from the Internet. The Magnificence is connected. Of course it is. There is nothing that is not. But this is a freakish thing because it means that wherever he is, there is Internet service, as well. He wonders whether he has access. He asks, mentally, about The Magnificence. Nothing. He asks about The Committee. Nothing. He asks about The Order. Nothing. He asks about what it means to execute, and is, once again, presented with the seven part definition. The Magnificence is his Net Nanny.

102

Is stench bad?
Is decay bad?
Is disease bad?
What does it mean to execute? What is he supposed to execute? One can execute good, one can execute evil.
What is he supposed to execute?

101

And yet he must do something. He cannot simply wade through this morass of abjection for the sake of wading through it. He must judge; he must execute. He has lumped this group together, as is his ability, for the sake of discernment and/or organization. But now what? The group lumps together extremely easily, and at present, he cannot actually discern one being from another. There are only different aspects of the Foul. The aspects are different and yet they fit together ... harmoniously? A harmonious collectivity of stench? A fugue of odors. A fugue. A more advanced for of round, different from a round in that each voice, though beginning with the same melody nevertheless branches out to become its own melodic line. The same thing here, with odors.

100

Each of these people is a pit. Together, they are a cavern. A cavern of smells and all the horror the bad smells mean. He keeps the song in his head and joins the smell, plunges himself down into the cavern. The cavern and everything about it, except possibly for the smell, which is the offshoot of it -- everything into which he plunges himself -- is human. And, as he has already discovered, everything about the place is life. It is not for him to judge, he realizes, what is good and what is bad about the place. His gut says it is bad -- and was is this it? Always that question: what is the it? There is something that is his to judge, of course -- this business of execution -- but this is not really his, either, now, is it? Something inside him, something inside that mental voice that can sing the four, the five, the six and more voices of the round and keep track of them all -- something inside him, inside that voice twitches. He has been given something to judge, and he has been given it apart from his own will. Against his will, he has been elected to a position as chair of the committee, and part of that position involves choosing committee members to execute. The sense of right and wrong, he still has. And yet, another sense of right and wrong has been overlaid. Thesis Antithesis ... Yields? And against his will? Any of it? He isn't crippled or hog-tied, as a grandmother, long long ago used to say. None of this has been against his will, he decides. Except maybe for being here, wherever, in the first place. And if this is against his will, for sure, he might not ever know. What is the point, he wonders, of asking whether something is by his will or against his will?

99

down the stream gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream life is but a dream life is but a dream life is but a dream life is but a dream row row row your boat row row row your boat row row row your boat row row row your boat row row row your boat gently down the stream gently down the stream gently down the stream gently down the stream gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream life is but a dream life is but a dream life is but a dream life is but a dream row row row your boat life is but a dream merrily merrily merrily merrily gently down the stream merrily merrily merrily boat gently but a stream row row row your merrily gently but a dream life is but a dream merrily merrily row your boat gently row row your stream merrily merrily merrily merrily row row your dream life is but a dream merrily merrily merrily merrily gently down the stream row row row your boat gently row your boat gently row your boat gently row your boat gently row your boat gently

98

He has learned the song as a small child. He has learned that you can sing the song at the same time that others are singing the song, and that you can sing it starting at different times. He has learned that a song that you can sing in this way is called a round. Any number of people, of groups of people, can join in, and, if they come in in the right places, it always sounds correct. The song grows in power. It swells. It hypnotizes, it makes everyone one voice. Different rhythms -- secondary, tertiary, and on and on -- begin to make themselves known, begin to differentiate themselves. The song begins to sound different than it did at first, and it continues to sound different in different ways. So long as there are new voices, new groups of voices, adding to the song, the song can continue indefinitely. He has thought of the children's song, the round, at first as a defense mechanism against the stench of this group, this group into which he must venture. But, perhaps the round is not a defense mechanism against, but a forward gesture into the group. The round, which he is starting to be able to hear in his head -- much as he has heard the double speak, earlier, with The Great Magnificence and others on his journey -- brings him into the group. It replaces the smell. It replaces it but does not obliterate it. It is his smell, recognized by the group -- and, unlike the other people, individuals, whose minds he has seen, the group is aware of his presence and is able to react to his presence -- the song is his smell. The song is acceptable. And he must be made acceptable to this group. The song, the round, his singing the song, the round, the hearing of the s(s)m(o)e(n)l(g)l, the round teaches him some of what he must know, now.

97

Row, row, row your boat

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

Life is but a dream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream

96

This must be what it is like to be a dog. A world of smells. A map unseen, unknown, to the usual human awareness. To be aware of the hidden symphonies of odor, the blind cacophonies of fragrance. This is all too much. Overwhelming. He hadn't smelled it, before. The senses are as much your friend as they are your enemy. He is powerless before such an assault. But it is not the smell that is assaulting him. It is the newness of his own ability to sense the smell. His own abilities are assaulting him. He, that which he has become, that which he is becoming, is assaulting him. It is an assault without any direct physical pain or damage. It is an assault that is harmless to his body. He does not fear for his body. Or if he does, the fear passes quickly. He fears for his mind -- for the depth of anxiety and loathing into which it has entered in the abject awareness of the nose, of his head, of his lungs, of his body. For now, the smell is beyond the physical (if physical it ever were) and into the metaphysical, the mind, the spirit. It is a smell beyond smell. He fears for his mind. Yet, even in the midst of this fear, he can feel that the fear will pass and he will, in all likelihood, become stronger for it. He attempts to embrace the smell. To let himself flow into it, be bullied by his own mind's reaction, to be bullied by his own senses, to lose his fears in his own fearing, to lose his anxieties in his own penchant for anxiety. And he will try, he realizes, to enter into his own sense of the abject with no confidence in ever coming out on another side, no conviction that he will be able to transcend, nor even that transcendence is an available option.

95

He knows from the way his own mind works that smell is the closest of the senses to memory. If that's true for everybody, then this stinky lot has more memories than the Museum of Natural History. If, to the contrary, it is only true for him, then he can use this connection that is part of his mind to come to whatever conclusion is expected of him. And he can do it on his own. he is strong enough to do it. But what is this bit about being strong enough to do it? This is new, he thinks. It's as though what he is supposed to do is a good thing, a moral thing, the right and upstanding thing. The sacred thing that you are supposed to know, deep down, is correct in of itself without anyone else telling you. The type of thing in which you know it and you know that you know it. This thing that he is supposed to do he knows should not feel right -- it should not feel miles within feeling right -- and yet it does. Is this brainwashing? Probably. He wonders what he would think were he to stand up from this chair in which he is currently being embraced by The Magnificence. Damn but this group smells bad... It is not a funny thing, either, like the intrusive and comic odor of flatulence or of a near empty plastic gallon of milk that some chuckle-head leaves out but hidden behind the couch so that he can step on it and leave the people in the room wondering what the hell the smell is. This is funny stuff. The smell of these visions, of this group of people, however, is far from funny. It is tragic. Or it could be tragic. It could be the smell of an on-coming tragedy. A potential tragedy. Of something on the way to becoming a tragedy. He couldn't smell it before he had come into these visions. He could not smell it simply by looking around at the group -- at the committee -- that he had joined. But by golly he smells it now. And it is not the smell of death. It is the smell of life. This is the understanding that comes of the sense, and this understanding cannot be avoided, as it is brutal and cloying.

94

Up until now, the visions he has seen -- the histories and tales of personal psyche to which he has been privy -- have been, well, visual. And, for the most part, narrative. Except, perhaps, for the committee member whose existence is defined by fear. He imagines, however, that there is a narrative pretty close to the skin were he of a mind to seek for it. Unless, of course, that member were utterly psychotic, which would not be entirely out of the question. For any of them. Bunch of loons. I mean, he thinks, what the hell kind of committee is this, anyway? He has yet to find a logical, rational one in the bunch. But maybe that is the point. Maybe The Magnificence has put this group together for reasons other than executive, judicial, or legislative. And he is now in a position to understand The Magnificence in a more ...intimate... manner. Obviously, his sitting in the chair that is one and the same as The Magnificence, and being at least in part consumed by that chair, means that, somewhere down the line, he and The Magnificence are the same. Artificially, or cybernetically joined, but by whatever means, the same nonetheless. But he is still able to think as he has, before. But there are extensions. He is no longer himself, but he is also still himself. He is not himself; he is The Magnificence. He is not The Magnificence; he is himself. The Magnificence is himself and no longer the Magnificence. There are t(o)w(n)o(e). Townoe. Nonsense word. Means more in writing, he realizes, than in the actual being. And yet he envisions the collating of two and one and this will have to do. But do for what? Fodder for further philosophizing, in which he has no doubt he will further indulge, and at the first idle moment he gets to do so. But somewhat more urgent... no, somewhat more interesting... things immediately await. Such as this particularly disgusting smelling group of committee members. There is no sense among this lot -- he can see even from here, without delving into their minds -- no sense but smell. And in this realization, he discovers a manner of shorthand: he can lump all of these malodorous folk -- the half-dozen of them -- into one being, one collective identity. He imagines he can do this with the previous five, as well, and knows that he has learned something he can use in his new rule as chair and executioner. But for now, on to the Smelly One, as he now calls the collective unsavory group.

93

Hmmm. A regular smorgasbord of the wounded human psyche is what we have here, he thinks. And I have to choose one of these poor schmucks or schmuckettes to execute. I wonder whether the word "execute" means "to kill" in this fucked up place as it does in the world that I come from. And, as he ponders this question, his mind, his own dear, pathological mind, itself now a wonder of human psychosis, returns to the dull, tiresome ache of a question that had previously been dogging it: was there a world from which I have come previous to this one? What is the existential puzzle -- am I a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I was a man? Well, I'm sure as hell not a butterfly, am I? He has only managed to get into the minds of about half, maybe a little fewer than half, of the committee members. This is wearing me out. How do psychologists do it? Maybe that's what he is: a virtual world psychologist. But I have no answers, he thinks. I have no therapeutic abilities. I just view it all, just feel it all, as though looking at some huge mental 3-D smell-o-vision. Except for the fact that he doesn't smell anything in the viewings of the minds. But the analogy still fits nicely, he thinks. And, as for the smell-o-vision, well... little does he know how soon he will be wishing that he had no nose, so horrid are the odors he is about to encounter with the next group of committee folk he will be examining.

92

The fifth. A story.
It is either late at night or very early in the morning. She has gotten off the train and taken a cab to the house. When she gets to the house, she walks up to the door and stands there, motionless, for a moment or two. She does not knock. She does not live here. The lights are off and a car is in the driveway. She breaks into the house, but her memory does not indicate to him how she manages to get the door open. Inside, there are stairs directly in front of the door. Her memory gives him no clue as to whether she has previously been inside the house. But she moves about with a mixture of confidence and ... joy? She climbs the stairs and finds the bedrooms. She opens a bedroom door. A woman sleeps in a large bed. A California King. Gently, the committee member whose memory he is picking, approaches the bed and bends over the woman who is sleeping in the bed. She touches the sleeping woman's shoulder and, with a subtle and yet commanding movement guides the woman to rise from the bed and to walk out of the room. Whether the woman is still asleep he is unable to discern. It is early Summer and, therefore, there is no need to wear a jacket. The committee member continues to guide the sleeping woman out of the house and into the back yard where there is a very large wooden crate. The crate is open and the door (cover? front?) lies against one of the inside walls. The committee member guides the sleeping woman into the crate and then enters the crate, herself. There is a mallot and some nails on the floor of the crate. The committee member repositions the door. It is the type of door that can be nailed into place from the inside which is what the committee member proceeds to do with a deft expertise that suggests to him that this might not be the first time she has done this. She accomplishes the nailing with complete silence. When the crate has been nailed shut, his memory shifts automatically from the committee member's perspective to his own. He watches the crate. Nothing happens. Then, he can see no more. Like a film that has come to the end of its reel, the memory ends abruptly and he is jerked out of the woman's mind.

91

Moving on to the fourth committee member. Fear. Nothing but fear.
Fear of rejection.
Fear of acceptance.
Fear of failure.
Fear of success.
Fear of alienation.
Fear of intimacy.
Fear of speaking.
Fear of keeping quiet.
Fear of sleeping.
Fear of insomnia.
Fear of eating.
Fear of drinking.
Fear of starving.
Fear of thirst.
Fear of swimming.
Fear of flying.
Fear of walking.
Fear of running.
Fear of sittiing still.
Fear of suffocating.
Fear of hyperventilating.
Fear of forgetting.
Fear of remembering.
Fear of dogs.
Fear of cats.
Fear of horses.
Fear of birds.
Fear of insects.
Fear of spiders.
Fear of germs.
Fear of mollusks.
Fear of spaghetti.
etc.
etc.
etc.
etc.
The one thing, apparently, that did not fear, was death.
Perhaps he had not thought of it, yet.
Perhaps he would suggest this fear to him.

...Where did The Magnificence find these people?