Towards a New Ontology

by Luke Jackson

Conclusion

‘What voice?’ she asked, her eyes growing large and disingenuous, as if she did not know.

He breathed out deeply. There was no use telling her how her voice was the exact same voice he had heard outside his window. She would pretend that he was insane, suffering from hallucinations; she would have him committed, where he would be helpless before her.

“I have sacrificed in order to pursue my work, but that is only because I find the work so important,” he eventually replied. “Many great thinkers have isolated themselves in order to pursue their work. Would Nietzsche or Van Gogh create masterpieces if they became one of the herd, started popping Prozac?!” He was so disgusted with the notion, but also afraid of her powers; his voice cracked.

‘I see, the myth of isolated genius,’ she said, scribbling in her notepad. She bit on the eraser tip of the pencil for a few moments. ‘I think it might be helpful if you discontinued the work temporarily, tried to reestablish ties with loved ones...’

“Aha,” he sighed, seeing things clearly now. “You are the voice outside my window. You intend to destroy my work.”

The shrink choked for a few moments, nibbling warily on her pencil.

‘Mr. Jackson, if you are suffering auditory hallucinations, you had best disclose that now. That is a symptom of schizophrenia, which will get no better unless treated. It’s a very serious matter...’

“Now you want me to take your drugs, make me insensate in order to destroy my work,” he said, nodding his head as he stood up from the couch and backed towards the door. “Never, Nurse Ratchet,” he said, growing bolder. “Whoever you really are, remember that: Never. My work is my life. My life is my work.”

‘Mr. Jackson, you are my concern, not your work,’ she replied.

He started running down the hall, away from her office, before she could call in her white-clad goons.

* * *

He collapsed behind his apartment door, gasping for breath and locking the door, deadbolt and chain against the outside world. He would not be leaving until the work was complete.

He had tried to run the several miles back from the hospital, but his burning lungs and side had sent him a clear message that he was in no shape for it. Running was certainly an unpleasant reminder of his pale, pasty bulk and his shriveled, inefficient organs — the way of all flesh. The bustling city streets of cars, crowds and skyscrapers had weighed too heavily on him, and he felt his individual essence erased in the throng. He had eventually collapsed into a taxi, grateful for escape, happy to direct the resentful Pakistani to his apartment.

He knew that the shrink would say that he was developing agoraphobia as well. But his philosophical training let him see what was actually happening: the “anxiety of individuation,” the pain that always results when an individual breaks from the herd in order to become truly authentic.

The brief interchange with the possessed psychologist had him thinking. Either (1) he was insane or (2) something out there was trying to stop his work. Since the empirical evidence available to his senses could support either proposition, he preferred to believe in (2). If something was trying to stop him, that meant that his work had value. It presented a danger to his enemies, whomever or whatever they might be.

Newly invigorated, he took out his pad again, and began writing furiously. A new world was opening before him, thrumming through his pen in an upheaval of known forms. He knew, in a knowledge that was more than rational, that he was creating a thing of beauty and art. It did not matter if the world could not recognize or appreciate him or his work, the Van Goghs always died in poverty while Thomas Kinkades opened mall stores. They would recognize his ideas in time; they were immortal.

* * *

The work was complete, a tattered pile of yellow notepad paper, lit with moonlight through the sliding glass door. How unimpressive it would appear to the lay observer, ignorant of the truths therein!

He cracked open one of the leftover bottles of ’73 Pinot Noir from their wedding reception to celebrate. He had felt a brief pang, when he had first stumbled on the dusty bottle; it reminded him of all that he had sacrificed. He pushed such thoughts down with a conscious effort.

He was almost finished with the bottle. The night was now softer and somehow warmer; the headlights and horns were no longer aggressive insects berating him. They now made a certain sense, a certain music.

With the liquor working through him, loosening him, and the work complete, he found his thoughts inexorably turning back to himself. His wife was gone; the vastness of the work had smothered all human relationships. His apartment was a mess: cigarette butts carpeted the floor of the balcony, and half-rotted food was beginning to draw insects inside.

What he missed most of all was how the work subsumed him, inspired him, and possessed him. He did not want this new freedom.

‘Congratulations.’

“Thank you,” he said quietly. He had hoped that the drink would kill the voice, but now that the work was done, he was surprised to find that he was much less afraid.

‘What do you intend to do with your masterpiece?’ it asked. Did he detect a mocking tone?

“Get it out there. Get it published,” he said softly, not wanting the neighbors to hear.

‘It will never be published,’ the voice said matter-of-factly, and he knew that it was true. ‘How will it be read?’

“What would you suggest?” he asked it after a moment.

‘Give it to us.’

He didn’t know how to respond. He was torn between two emotions: glad that someone or something appreciated his work, and also knowing that his mind was fractured and this was the ultimate, final act of solipsism. Newly freed from the work, he was forced to admit that it had broken him.

“Here, take it,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. He went back inside, gathering up the hundreds of disorganized pages. Out on the balcony, he started throwing the pages out, sickly yellow doves fluttering on the erratic night wind.

“Take them!” he said, his voice breaking into a scream. “Take them, damn you!” He was no longer concerned about the neighbors, they were irrelevant; this was between him and the voice.

‘Thank you.’

He eyed the fluttering pages, his life’s work, dissolving into the black night. All that he had worked so hard to create, that he had given everything for, was now so much refuse. Sartre would say that he was exercising his terrifyingly absolute freedom of will; Skinner would say that he was a rat merely responding to the stimulus of the voice. He rubbed his face, hard, and was surprised to find it wet.

He couldn’t conceive of returning to the workaday world, days in front of flickering monitors in small cubicles. Returning to the social ladder, the mating rituals — it seemed alien, and sick, to live that way, willful ignorance after a life in pursuit of truth. He realized that he was nothing without the work.

Then he jumped into the blackness.

* * *

Vlrax held the pages softly between thin, translucent fingers. He was entering his male mating stage, making him more sensitive and prone to poetics. You had to be, to lure females.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he thought, reading over the primitive human language, put together in such strange new philosophical forms.

‘It will work,’ thought Zlemen, feminine and concerned with efficiencies. Her frail body had grown thick and strong, in order to assist in the egg production that had been long outmoded as a means of reproduction. ‘It will be very popular among the young.’

‘Of course,’ continued Vlrax, his huge, multifaceted black eyes rapt with wonder. ‘We were worried for so long. The philosophy of this planet is dying. The French wave of popularity has receded. Pragmatic materialism cannot take its place. Should never take its place.’

‘We don’t have to worry about that, now,’ Zlemen reminded him.

‘But it’s a thing of beauty, in-and-of-itself. Such a strange species, capable of such complex beauties, never recognized by any of the others. Too concerned with war, sublimate athletics, insensate sound patterns.’

‘Their sensory apparatus is geared towards the visceral.’

‘Yes. But you didn’t have to torment him.’

‘Pain is necessary for them to create beauty,’ thought Zlemen, always concerned with cause-and-effect.

Vlrax kept fingering the pages, knowing that this was true. ‘It is unfortunate that we could not materialize on his plane.’

‘Our genetic insertions were the maximum penetration achievable,’ Zlemen reassured him. ‘We made him different, which was enough.’

He nodded to himself, listening to Vlrax and Zlemen, seeing their refracted eyes in the dark eyes of the gawking onlookers. At last he had what he had always sought: recognition and respect for his work. This was how it should end.

* * *

That was not how it ended. He returned to consciousness reluctantly, opening bleary eyes on a generic off-white hospital ward, his limbs intertwined and penetrated by plastic tubes. He was angry that his perfect ending had been ruined. Martin Heidegger sat near his bed.

“Mr. Heidegger,” he said under his breath, sick of hallucinations and not wanting the other sick people to hear how sick he was.

“Yes,” Heidegger replied in a thick German accent, leaning his bulk over the bed and peering down behind prominent nose and bushy moustache. His gaze and his manner were cold.

“Why are you here?” he whispered, wishing he could know at last if this was real, if this was the afterlife, if this was madness.

“Causation of my presence is irrelevant,” Heidegger stated curtly. He paused for a moment, rubbing his fingers over his moustache. “It appears you have misconstrued my work.”

“Me?” he asked wonderingly. He hadn’t expected this, of all things; he thought he had understood better than all of his peers in the seminar.

“Because it affected you strongly does not necessarily mean that you understood it perfectly. Indeed, even I have come to question what I have created, what there is to understand. Much is learned upon leaving here.”

“If you could tell me there is life after death, that would resolve one major philosophical question,” he said excitedly.

“It would resolve nothing. You would never know if I were merely a hallucination. One of the drawbacks of being a creature connected to the world only through sensory apparatus,” Heidegger replied.

“You are right. Once I begin questioning what I perceive, I cannot accept any of it. It is all madness. I am insane.”

“Perhaps,” Heidegger intoned, startling him by reaching forward and taking his hand, careful to avoid the IV protruding from its back. “Caught in the trap of solipsism. But if there is one thing I want people to take from my work, it is the importance of Being-in-the-world. Life is lived in action, usefulness, not in the rarefied air of an isolated mind. I had hoped you would at least take that away.”

“Yes,” he replied quietly, disquieted by how Heidegger’s language was changing, his English becoming more perfect and sibilant. “But...” He had to think a moment, as Heidegger was forcing him into strange new mental territory. “But if I am merely a direct physical actor in the world, doesn’t that strip philosophy of its meaning? It becomes a meaningless abstraction... and my life’s work does, as well.” He gazed up into Heidegger’s small, slightly beady eyes, hoping to glean some hope or inspiration from them.

“Perhaps it does, Mr. Jackson. Perhaps it does. But Camus was right, you know, about the question of suicide. Either be in the world fully, or don’t.”

Heidegger delivered his command with stern solemnity, hair and ruddy flesh slowly dripping from his face and paunch, his eyes growing larger and brighter.

He resigned himself to more hallucinations, to a life of entropic thought and disintegrating meaning, eventually institutionalized or wandering the streets, shouting philosophy into filthy alleys. He was resigned, but he was still startled when Heidegger leaned forward and put dry lips directly on his mouth.

“I have always loved you,” Heidegger said as he drew away, now looking surprisingly like his wife, grown much thinner and longer of hair.

“I love you too, Heidegger,” he said, knowing that he meant it platonically, unsure if he meant it in the homoerotic sense.

“Heidegger?” Heidegger, or his wife, asked, staring into him strangely.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me, Kim. Thank God you’re here with me now.” He reached out his pale, clawed hand and grasped his wife’s firmly, as an anchor.

“Don’t worry,” she soothed him, “we’ll get through this together.”

She looked down, away from him; he listened to the strange chemicals steadily dripping from the hanging plastic bags into his bloodstream. He looked around at the broken and twisted figures, also wired to intravenous machines, populating the beds beside him. They stared at him with quivering and encrusted eyes, their messages unintelligible to him. The machines hovered over their victims, mindlessly administering strange red and amber fluids, the corporate names VLRAX and ZLEMEN prominently displayed on their sides.

“There is no I, only the One,” he said, quoting Heidegger again, closing his eyes on the diseased extraterrestrial emissaries surrounding him.