Daniel James
One day my name will be associated with the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before it on earth518.
We were living inside a lie. I understood that now. Maas intended to wake us from this dream, from this hallucination of reality.519 He was going to reveal the lies and tear down the prison walls we didn’t know were there. We were slaves, but Maas planned to free us from our bonds. He had looked back at the origin of language in our species one-hundred-thousand years ago, and he had come to the conclusion that it was a parasite. Language had spread like a virus from country to country, taken root in our brains and forever separated us from the world. We no longer experienced the thing-in-itself,520 but instead saw a representation filtered through language, a system where one thing could also be another thing. Reality had become a matter of opinion, and fiction was born, but in a participatory universe where observations defined experience we were left with a fractured and schizophrenic existence.
It was all about control. After God created Adam, he instructed man to name the animals. This would give man dominion over nature. Language was reductive, and the act of naming carried a ritualistic power. From the beginning, words have been weapons used to control. When man had the audacity to try and reach the level of God by building the Tower of Babel to break through into the vault of Heaven, God scrambled the languages of all the workers, creating discord where there had been unity. The inability to understand one another, linguistically or psychically, sent man back to the dark ages. In Maas’s eyes we had descended even further into darkness since then. The 20th century was an unprecedented crisis. We had never been more fragmented, more splintered, or more dissociated in our relationship to reality.
Technological advances, the interconnectivity of the all-seeing, always online, electronic world, saturated with information yet devoid of meaning, the proliferation of alternative facts by a mass media divorced from reality – we were living in an age where truth had lost all meaning. For Maas, we were seconds away from midnight.521 The decision to disappear a few short years into the 21st century came as the clock was about to strike. If God created language to control us, Maas would remove it to free us. He saw himself as a saviour, a radical, a rebel, ‘a reality hacker’522 who would guide us to the New World.
MT Stuart had talked about a “real-life trauma book”523 to “restore our true selves”. I hadn’t made the connections at the time, but he hadn’t been far from the truth. Maas’s own notes in his Soho apartment talked about the neocortex, the most evolved part of the brain, being capable of imagining and creating multidimensional structures and spaces. A four-dimensional world was hard to comprehend, but Maas talked about worlds of five, six, or more dimensions. He said that shadows were two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects. What if we were merely shadows of greater beings and more complex worlds?524 Language imprisoned our minds, defining even our conception of time and space. Maas would free us, reuniting our conscious and unconscious minds, and allowing us to experience a higher world. If the universe and our conscious minds were part of a “closed-network-loop”, as believed by Maas’s friend, the physicist John Wheeler,525 then a change in consciousness would cause a corresponding change in our experience of and connection to the universe. At least that’s what he believed. And as far as Maas was concerned perception was reality.
I didn’t know what was real anymore, or how much of this was my own invention. Was I seeing the truth of Maas’s plans at last, or had my desperate search for answers, for meaning, for truth, in a world that yielded none, caused me to fill the gaps with apocalyptic visions? No…this was real. It had to be. I had come too far and given up too much. This was really going to happen unless I did something about it. Only I could stop it.
I recalled something Maas had supposedly said as a child,526…that to be reborn into life, Dionysus527 had to be first cut into pieces. Maas had to destroy us in order to start again. He had started with me. In his eyes, the first step towards sanity was madness. Maas had tried to break me. The world was next, but how did he plan to reach everyone? Maybe Sam and I had it right when we said it was all about the book? Had Maas used me to create his weapon? If that was the true purpose of this book, of these pages, how could I end it?
Notes
518. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo.
519. A phrase used by Jean Baudrillard to describe how today “political, social, historic and economic reality has already incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation”.
520. A thing-in-itself, a term defined by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, is an object as it would appear to us if we did not have to approach it under the conditions of space and time. Using Kant’s definition, as well as ideas from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche explored the division of the world into appearance and the thing-in-itself (the unknowable behind experience).
521. The Doomsday Clock was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947. It symbolically represents the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe. In January 2017, it was moved from three minutes to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. It is the closest the clock has come to midnight since 1953, when the minute hand was moved to two minutes away, following hydrogen bomb tests by the US and Russia.
522. In the words of Timothy Leary.
523. See ‘Daniel James Chapter Sixteen’.
524. Maas’s example echoes Plato’s analogy of the cave. Plato wrote that we are like prisoners chained to a low wall in a cave, unable to turn around and see free people, going on with their lives. We can only guess at what their world is like based on the shadows flickering on the wall of the cave – the shadows of the real – Anonymous.
525. Wheeler believed that “mind (inner) and universe (outer) were part of one system” – Anonymous.
526. See ‘Ezra Maas Chapter Three’.
527. In the book Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light, Leonard Shlain compares Apollo and Dionysus to the right and left hemispheres of the human brain. He writes: “When the vision of the revolutionary artist, rooted in the Dionysian right hemisphere, combines with precognition [in the left], art will prophesy the future conception of reality.”