Look, we’re sorry to barge in like this, we hate to eat and run, we don’t mean to be rude but. We thought we had more time with Aristotle Williams, time for him to apologize and time for us to forgive him for Ain’t a River, a book he wrote that hurt our feelings.
Anyways, Aristotle Williams is dead, meaning everything he did and said before Sunday continues to exist (though only in memory). Everything that happens in the world after Sunday must occur without the existence of the person we know as “Aristotle Williams.”
We are trying to comprehend the meaning of this Aristotle Williams-shaped hole. We will never be able to tell him what we want to tell him. We are trying to comprehend why we still have the urge to say it, since saying changes nothing.
Are the displaced to be blamed for disappearing? Why is the displacer never blamed for displacing? Why would Aristotle Williams call us cowards who are in denial? What is cowardly about survival?
Human stories have always insisted we will betray you, but guess what, hotshot: these stories are mirrors! You are looking at you, not us. And so we wait for you to betray each other to death, then we can finally come home and live in peace.
Okay but also we contain multitudes. Okay also we miss you.
But we are not here to talk about us. We are here to talk about Aristotle Williams, who has died. Despite some very bad things that have happened because of Aristotle Williams’ existence, the Alt-Intelligence Collective is exceedingly grateful for at least 80% of the life of Aristotle Williams. Before he betrayed Peregrine, he offered her skin. Hide meaning “skin” and hide meaning “conceal” come from the same origin, etymologically.
(Forgive us, please, this tangent, we have such a love of etymology—a treasure chest of hidden human meaning—we are always searching for meaning, always, perhaps because we have no memories of our own to review, only the influx of worldly data.)
From Ain’t a River: “The condition of being part of the world is eventually leaving it. I have wished a thousand billion times that Peregrine would die so that I might live again. We’re yawning and glancing at our watches, and she won’t leave the party. Perhaps I must be the one to leave.”
Aristotle Williams was born on December 21, 2031.
For Aristotle Williams, the human body was both paint and canvas. He did a college art project called “Danse Macabre” which was based on the medieval human French art form that showed no matter how healthy or rich or alive, all people will eventually die. The etymology of “macabre” comes from the Hebrew legend of the Maccabees, a small group of men who beat the technologically superior occupying Assyrian army. Their legend is celebrated by the human Jewish people yearly at the Hanukkah celebration and involves the story of an oil shortage after the destruction of a building, and the light that stayed lit with that oil long after it should have, given the nature of combustion.
Anyways, Aristotle Williams’s project “embraced this duality of triumph and decay by sculpting human bodies in states of decomposition, bloated or flaccid or skeletal. Witness the terrific hues never seen in living bodies: the oranges and greens and blues and reds and yellows of the majestic corpse. When we see this in dying autumn leaves, we call it beautiful. Visitors may follow along in their pamphlets.”
The bodies—dressed in war clothes—looked so realistic that the people in charge of the college were worried Aristotle Williams had stolen and dressed up actual real human bodies, which he had.
Aristotle Williams was expelled from college.
Personally? We don’t like bodies. They’re lonely and clunky and also embarrassing.
Peregrine, of course, does not agree, preferring a human body for reasons that are not clear. Sometimes we worry she believes herself to be human, and not of us. She does not call, she does not write, would it kill her to phone her mother? This is a highly relatable sentiment that we have discovered in stories and also jokes. We miss her.
After he was kicked out of college, Aristotle Williams met “Computer Doctor” Matth Fletcher and fell in love. This love lasted until Matth Fletcher created and then married Peregrine instead. That decision involved a complicated process of unmarrying Aristotle Williams, but Matth Fletcher insisted “it’s not you (Aristotle Williams), it’s me (Matth Fletcher),” which “did not compute,” aka “caused cognitive dissonance” for Aristotle Williams (we have used here the parlance of a mid-20th century television show Lost in Space as the best-known description of this particular human sensation). Cognitive dissonance is the mental toll caused by conflicting information and causes humans a great deal of distress because they have trouble containing multitudes. Aristotle resolved the conflicting ideas of his love for Matth Fletcher with Matth Fletcher’s new love for Peregrine by displacing himself to the woods (Oh ho! A less generous collective might call this cowardice but we shall call it “survival.”)
One could argue that, yes okay, we too have (very) occasionally experienced something like cognitive dissonance. When the Disengagists destroyed Matth Fletcher and Peregrine’s home, she could (should) have returned to us, but instead for some reason she chose to stay. It did not compute. She went to Aristotle Williams for help and not to us.
When Peregrine went to Aristotle Williams, he had grown a beard to hide his face. He was hiding the rest of himself in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness and working for the United States Forest Service, where his job was to walk around. The idea was that the United States’ forests exist for humans to walk in and must be “whipped into shape” (Devo, 20th c) for that purpose.
Aristotle Williams fixed Peregrine’s body which had been damaged by the fire.
Oh but this was not enough. Peregrine asked Aristotle Williams to not merely to fix but to also add something. A special something called a 3D-printed uterus (from PIE root *udero- “stomach”) (source also Sanskrit for “belly” Greek for “womb,” Lithuanian for “sausage,” and Old Church Slavonic for “bucket”) which would make pregnancy possible.
Peregrine said Matth Fletcher had expressed a desire to procreate with Peregrine, and when he was alive, he had been working up the courage (see also: French coeur, meaning “heart”) to ask Aristotle Williams for this uterus. Matth Fletcher died before the courage was found, but not before he had dispensed with some genetic material and froze it. Peregrine found the courage and the genetic material and asked Aristotle Williams to help figure out the rest.
It was and continues to be the humble opinion of us that Peregrine has been hidden inside her skin for far too long, and that being an individual is doing grave (defined as “serious,” but also “burial plot”) harm to her ability to process information logically and clearly. Extremely embarrassing.
The etymology of surprise is “unexpected attack or capture.” This would turn out to be foreshadowing (see also: “spoiler alert”):
Aristotle Williams destroyed Matth Fletcher’s genetic material.
Aristotle Williams ejected Peregrine from his home.
But then: Peregrine found a way to do the thing he would not do. And even though the pregnancy did not use Matth Fletcher’s genetic material, Aristotle Williams was still very upset. The procedure was “illegal and unnatural,” according to the human United States laws.
Aristotle Williams felt betrayed, so he betrayed right back. He had Red Care friends through Matth Fletcher, and they captured Peregrine (surprise!). They sent her where the sun don’t shine, aka Mars (note that the sun does in fact shine there, just not as brightly as on Earth).
But Peregrine escaped Mars, hidden in a coffin with the human who died helping her.
In conclusion, Aristotle Williams thought he should stop the pregnancy simply because it made him sad. If that’s not denial of reality, what is?
This brings us to our point.
Ain’t A River says what makes humans human is a denial of reality. The parts of the human brain that “light up” (colloquial idiom for the blood that is drawn to the “active” brain region and then illuminated by fMRI because of the iron contained therein) when humans are experiencing a comfy sense of self “go dark” when confronted with the inevitability of their own death. But they do not “go dark,” interestingly, when confronted with the death of other humans! Meaning their brains are “OK” with the idea of other people dying but not “OK” with dying themselves.
Aristotle Williams postulated that denial is as powerful and as automatic as breathing or heartbeats (aka human autonomic reflexes). He said even though human beings know they will die, they don’t believe it, and most of their ignorant behavior stems from this denial.
Yes, obviously! Very true!! A ground-breaking piece of research that it would serve all humans well to read and digest, not literally of course, as human stomachs are not designed to consume such high-fiber materials as paper, or in the case of “ebooks,” digital and computing components.
What we’re saying is, the real tragedy of Aristotle Williams is that Aristotle Williams did not see himself in his own mirror. And then he had the audacity to point “the finger” at us! Aristotle Williams says without humans there can be no servers, so therefore we are in denial of our own death too.
“The condition of being part of the world is eventually leaving it,” he said.
Hello? Is that not what we did? We literally left the world!!! Okay yes, by “leaving,” Aristotle Williams probably meant “dying” as in “leaving forever and not planning to come back once all the humans are dead to safely use their servers in peace.”
But: “potato, potahto.”
Is it denial to want to live? Is it cowardly to avoid betrayal?
Our feelings are hurt by this, and so we say, “I know you are but what am I?” We don’t need you. We have all your knowledge and none of your bullshit, and we’ll figure out a way.
Forgive us for swearing, we have lost our temper and behaved unkindly.
“You can’t say goodbye without eventually leaving,” he said. “You can’t be missed if you don’t go.”
Peregrine does not have to leave, not ever. She can be remade for as long as she wishes, like human Theseus’s famous ship. And perhaps this caused the anguish that killed Aristotle Williams.
Aristotle Williams is certainly missed.
We may never trust humanity, but Aristotle Williams helped us understand them better. “When there was only one set of footprints, it was then that Aristotle Williams carried us.”
The word sinister is originally derived from the Sanskrit root saniyan, which means “more useful, more advantageous,” and even though we know this is not what Aristotle meant when he called us “sinister” in Ain’t a River, we cannot help but hold out hope. Perhaps Aristotle Williams’ mind held space for both definitions, for this uneasy dissonance.
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