Pathways #4: The End’s Path

Land to Sea
1.
It was almost fifteen years since the night Lauren Wood was sittting across from Victor Ng and she made a moon face (she being naturally pale-cheeked, almost as white as a ghost) so that she seemed as though her aura would just then have been appearing all around her.  Her aura would actually be appearing now, Victor actually thought at the time, but he had never been able to see auras.  But still Lauren’s expression was radiant—she practically glowed with confidence.  “I slaughtered the pigs,” she then said, in answer to Victor’s question.  “Yeah, I was on the killing floor.”  Then she shook her head with a smile.  “But now I can’t eat pork.”  “How did you slaughter them?” Victor asked.  “With a really sharp blade.  Like this.”  She made as though brandishing a blade in her right hand, running a fingertip from her left hand up along where the edge would have been.  And then she took the blade and made as though to thrust it into the animal before bringing the blade up and past the sternum and stopping where the chest would be, before twisting it so that the point could be imagined to pierce and make an incision within the heart and then sliding the blade across the chest to where a lung would be, twisting there also as she had done on the other side.   Victor was stunned, but also enthralled, and Lauren then drew the blade back downward within the animal and into its original position before removing it from the now eviscerated pig.  “See?” Lauren said, “It was awful.”  Victor was relieved to hear her say that, that it was “awful.”  She was still smiling, as though she understood what Victor would be thinking—although they were both aware that Victor was more sensitive than the other guys she had been getting to know over the past few years.  “Well?” she said.  “What else do you want to know?”  Lauren was older than Victor.  And Victor realized just then that he was profoundly, intoxicatedly, in love with her.  Although maybe it was the cannabis they were sharing.  Certainly, that was contributing to his sense of being lighter than air.  Yes, Victor was feeling higher than he had felt ever before in his life.  Did he say the next thing because he wanted to impress Lauren?   He said: “Have you ever been able to imagine, actually like experiencing it for real, something that has never happened before, but that if it did happen, it would mean that you knew, and people all knew for sure, that everything was going to change and that maybe even everything, I mean that we, we, would disappear forever?  I mean, have you ever actually tried to imagine what the actual apocalypse would feel like in that moment you realize that it’s actually happening all around us?   That the apocalypse was for real and that it was actually happening in our lifetime?  Do you think you could ever imagine yourself actually seeing that moment in your mind and actually experiencing it as you realize that, yes, this, it, really is happening?”  Lauren’s expression turned serious then, “I can,” she said. “I actually really can.  It’s really strange because it feels like we could be in that moment at any point, at any time, but that in reality, we also can never actually really be there.   Not really.  We can’t actually be, right?  We wouldn’t actually ever really be able to know, that that was really it, it for sure.”

Sea to Land
1.
When The Dubbed Alexander Little first set foot on the lands’ shores, he became thoughtful of all the lands man had set his first foot upon across all the ages of discovery, in all the ages that had expanded and contracted in the name of humanity’s pursuit of its own survival and progress, usually just outside the pull of the twinkling cataract of its own past oblivions, Alexander himself being a man of reason who had just missed (and so now being a man able to look upon) this latest of inescapable devastations visited upon humankind, this latest instance in full view of all of humanity’s tempestuous history upon the planetary mantle.  That history had also all been discovery, hadn’t it, Discovery being the Lucky Charm and the Dreaded Curse, from New Trade Routes and Columbus upon the “West Indies” to the Age of Science and Technology, the Physics of the Cosmos, and Darwin on the Galapagos?   This species’ history had mostly been about survival, but mainly through discovery, discovery and, yes, most unfortunately, conquest.  Well, survival through discovery, but then primarily in the interests of conquest, until—when was it exactly?  When had the reversal occurred for everyone, when they all realized that dependence on discovery and conquest would eventually set about the conditions for the species’ destruction?  Well, wait just a moment….”For everyone”?  Yes, that was the thing: this didn’t occur to everyone.   It still hadn’t occurred to many, and it was already being forgotten or abandoned by many others.  Well, then, when had the reversal occurred for The Dubbed Alexander Little?  He had known himself to have been interested the least of all in conquest.  And discovery?  We’ve always owed so much more to our ancestors than to ourselves and our own time for what we ourselves discover, and they owed just as much for what they themselves discovered to what their near and distant ancestors passed along to them!
The year was 2047, and this was the first arrival of a human man from the Eastern Shores upon what was once called “Canada,” the first since…since the age of discovery and conquest had been revealed to have decayed its host culture and the material conditions for human life past what was necessary for the possible continuation of a human species in numbers that could be at all comparable to what they had been up to that time.  But it was the Third Great War that had left much of the lands of what was formerly known as “Canada” uninhabited in the present day.  Yes, thought Alexander Little in that speculative but matter-of-fact way of his,  because you see, the species had always been fragmented, but only when it finally…when it finally….But then an unearthly quiet descended all around him, for the sea vessel’s humming had stopped, and then the vessel spat up a spume of mist and sea water before the silence could be said to reign entirely.  Alexander pulled out his handkerchief, took off his glasses, and dried them off.  He pulled his two suitcases and hiker’s knapsack from the cargo hold.  The others would be arriving soon but he was meant to make landfall first.  For the sake of….Yes, for the sake of the historical record, so as to keep all possible parties from arguing over to whom, to whose nation, this land owed its “re-discovery.”  Objections such as, “For we were here first!” the Old World had still not evolved beyond—well, perhaps Darwin was right.  So Alexander Little was stripped of his citizenship and ordered ashore first, but not before being given the title of one man “dubbed” “Planetary Man,” dubbed “The Dubbed Alexander Little,” however long they allowed him to keep those two crosslinked special titles!

Into the Belly of the Whale
2.
So?   When had he realized it, that The End would actually happen?  And when he did, did he feel it “happening” as he had felt it initially that evening with Lauren Wood all those years ago?  Well, he had to convince someone from “that other world,” the world of those who didn’t know, the world that he himself would actually be fortunate enough to escape even before The End could happen to him and them.  Yes, as it turned out, he would have to convince this man that The End was, in fact, not happening, and in doing so, Victor would entirely conceal his own powerful and terrible intuition of the truth.  Because why should Victor set himself into a position of having to go along with this man, as Victor had so often, and strongly, disagreed with him and with the many people who came and went from that man’s camp, including as to whether something like The End could really be known by them, or by anyone, to be truly happening?   For Victor, his reasons were to do with something more important than being “for the truth”–it was about the principle of what people should and should not stand on, of what people should or should not stand for, meaning their standing upon or standing for something purely from belief and, as this often turned out to be, mainly from raw and unchecked emotion.  People in “that camp,” his “old camp,” were always jumping to conclusions and generating a “greater reality” over which they then sought control and sometimes against others entirely for themselves.  But in order to do this, they had to feel they might take control over others by “virtue” of that “greater reality” that they themselves knew and could convince these others they knew better than anyone else.  So while they were opposed to being colonized by others—for what else should their “greater reality” be for them but freedom from this?!?–they were just as colonizing of others as anyone else had been!   So yes, that was happening at the time with respect to what was going on in the greater world, but Victor thought it necessary to convince himself that it wasn’t really happening, mainly for the purpose of maintaining the integrity of the space between himself and that old friend of his, in order to keep that old friend—the man’s name was Talmud Ekking—from thinking he had an inherent right to commandeer The End over others.  But without Talmud Ekkin’s camp, and in spite of the fact that Victor didn’t “really” believe The End was approaching, Victor Ng was all alone, and he knew he himself was all alone in the belly of the Leviathan he truly did feel was something real and true in some aspects of itself if not all.  It was certainly now potentially true.  The irony?  Talmud Ekking actually believed Victor’s lies, that what was about to happen, The End, wasn’t really going to happen at all, because Talmud Ekking was a weak man, while Victor only knew what he knew, while knowing that he was lying to Talmud, that he simply had to lie to Talmud.  Because Talmud Ekking was and always had been crazy!
–But answer the question, man!   The young man interviewing Victor was now taking a different tone, and Victor didn’t like his insolence.  Oh well, no big deal, the interview would be over soon.   The young interviewer: –When you thought about it, and you knew that it was happening, what was it really like?  Was it really like back then, when you and Lauren were getting high, and you first felt it, what it would be or feel like, when you felt it for the very first time?
–It was like that, Victor said, it could only be like that, but only because there could be nothing else that it could be like.  It was like that because that was the only thing I had of it that I knew it could actually be in myself.  Was it, that feeling, really of it?  But it could—it could only just keep happening.  Other things, with things adding to it, or adding up to it, usually only adding toward it, you know?   Toward that first feeling.  It would happen and happen some more and then keep happening until it was all over.  But that feeling, that was the first feeling I ever had of it, and yet, it could not be the feeling for or of anything else, because there was nothing else to draw upon that could be of it and nothing else that could actually be from it.
–Okay, man, yeah.  Yeah, for sure, thanks.  I think I understand what you’re saying.  It’s one of those things that you can only know from the beginning, when you first felt it, but which is really all you can know of it, and whatever happens after, anything at all that might be of that isn’t really possible to connect to it in any way.  But in this case, you knew nothing would actually happen from what you were feeling until it actually started happening, like the war or whatever, and then when it did, when it really did, it would turn out actually to be the same feeling.  Maybe with all that new stuff added to it, but it was the same feeling underneath everything else.
Victor wasn’t sure this was exactly correct—the interviewer seemed to be adding quite a lot to what he had said.  But maybe that was okay.   He thought it was okay if it became something that could make sense for everyone else in just the way the young interviewer was trying to make it make sense for him.   After all, almost nobody else had experienced it for themselves, and so there was no point in trying to correct them on details in something that they could have no way of judging for themselves anyway.

Out of the Mouth of the Whale
2.
The others arrived shortly after Alexander found the camp site and pitched his tent.  He was in the process of getting a fire going when he saw them appear, four, five, and then several more, so that there were a total of nine of them, including Alexander.  They were all seamen for the most part, except for Alexander’s two colleagues, one from Belgium named Benji and the other from Sweden named Erik.  Alexander was from England, which was the only country among the three that had not been caught up in the eventual war from the very start.  They all spoke English.  The rest of the men kept together on the fringes of the site, a site that had been a campground following the great exoduses from the cities of the region.  By the time the sun went down, they all realized how alone they truly were out there.  It was an experience unlike any they had ever had, and they all shared exactly just this much with one another–it was shared almost unwillingly, distrustingly, in spite of them all having experienced, in spite of them all having been on the same side in what they were now calling, the Third Great War.  Alexander thought of taking a walk at one point and then he realized that he didn’t dare.  It was unlikely that, by this time, anyone living would be seen by them.  But it was the dead that he was afraid of seeing.  Alexander confided this to Benji, who laughed and said, “Ah, you are an imaginative one, I suppose.  English men, I thought, real English men, didn’t imagine such things.”  What did imagination have to do with the dead they’d see?!?  Alexander then realized that he didn’t know either of these men at all.  They hadn’t even had a chance to familiarize themselves with each other’s resumes or personal histories.  And this became even clearer when Erik spoke up and said, “The English are no different than we are, my new friend.  It’s just that they are far more reserved about the things that they see coming from the other side.”   Was any of this true?!?  Yes, who were these two men?  And why did they insist on thinking he related to the dead as “ghosts,” as beings existing in another realm beyond this one?   And why were such “visions” of dead spirits what they both associated with Englishmen?   Had he missed a conversation?  Well, the two of them had come over on the ship together, so something might have been shared, perhaps about him at that time (or perhaps about the English).   And while it might be true of Alexander that he possessed something of an imagination, or so Alexander supposed, their boldness, their brazenness in offering comment on this in such an indelicate manner made him feel even more alien in truly alien surroundings.
Of course, soon they would see the dead for real.  The decomposed or skeletal remains of what had formerly been real people.  They would have no choice but to look and even to examine some of them.  And he wondered who among the three of them would become ill—who among the three of them would have to spend the rest of their time for exploration under mild sedation at camp?  Because that, Alexander then thought to himself, I have seen many times before, and perhaps especially of such men who are taught to appear fearless, to appear of one mind in total confidence, but who are unstable or even cracked at a yet greater depth, as either (or both?) of these two men before me could turn out to be.

Act Clueless
3.
The feeling wasn’t always the same though, was it?  Another feeling that became very familiar to Victor—although it was probably by then familiar to a lot of people–was the acute anxiety of “needing to know what would happen next.”  And then there was the feeling of disappointment right after, the “let down” that, in spite of what one actually knew, there would be nothing he could do to change or influence anything that happened anyway, and there was not even any valid reason for motivation for expecting anything better of anyone.   He followed the news, was following the news every single day at the time, and he simply felt without any conscious effort that almost everyone was.  You couldn’t know what would happen next, although it was dreadful to think that there could be anything valid or substantial in the thought that things would simply keep getting worse.   That is, until….“Valid” though?  That was the standard in his practice he was stuck with for his premonitory sixth sense when it didn’t strike him as referring to “The End,” when he felt “more normal” about everything.  But other words struck him as oddly wrong in a way that they hadn’t ever been wrong before.  “Merit” was “the big one.”   Was there any “merit” in thinking something that might somehow, eventually maybe, serve you well in trying to make someone else feel better about what was happening?  If you didn’t think positive, then you’d have nothing positive to share with someone when they might need it, no?   Hmmm, Victor had thought during one particularly anxious week, chances were, people weren’t going to go for that kind of thing because everyone had to pretend that “there was nothing unusual going on right now,” so there was no reason to need to feel better from what someone else shared or chose not to share.   Nobody seemed to believe in “merit” anymore anyways.  What did they believe in instead?  Anyways, you could try to make someone feel better, and you might feel for a time that there was “merit” in that, in making the effort.  But then people might do something to make you feel that they only thought you were “strange” and your meritorious deed might even “get people talking in ways they shouldn’t,” perhaps even “bringing more negative energy from this hellbent universe down on everyone’s heads.”   So that would strip away the benefit of any possible merit for you yourself right there, wouldn’t it?  Because genuine merit should end in a state of greater beneficence overall rather than in any negative sanction or any negative social consequence which would then require a (mild to moderate) sanction against the person responsible.   There certainly still seemed a genuine lack of merit in always thinking that things were only going to get worse though.  And in that, there seemed to preside the one reason that you were expected to act “completely clueless” about everything that was happening.  Because there was more “lack of merit,” or “negative merit,” floating around in the world at this time than there was the possibility for “actual (positive) merit,” again, as demonstrated in the example of people undoing any expected merit through their own (perhaps at times questionable) social actions in their effort to maintain the social equilibrium at any given time.   You’d certainly be considered crazy if you were to say anything at all that might cause an implosion, or worse yet, an explosion.  Most of the time, one simply felt that there was no such thing as “merit” whatsoever, the conditions for “merit” becoming unwound by the involvement that was required of others in the status quo or social order.   So “merit” had become a “dead concept.”  The planet was revealing itself to be simply a different kind of “bio form,” something unsettlingly “other,”  something “peculiarly alive” that with us humans having been here for perhaps too long, doing always simply “what humans tend to do,” was now seeking its own survival over that of the human species as a whole.  It wasn’t even discriminating among us as individuals, between those deserving of merit and those not–not at all.  It might even have seemed on certain particularly unpleasant days to be actually trying to wipe us out through our “most innocent” actions and deeds.  Was there such a plane as somewhere beyond such a reality anymore—and certainly we (but how many of us really?) deserved it, didn’t we?   We would all agree with this, no?  Was there still somewhere where something that contained “possible merit for us humans” actually existed in a “substantial” way?  One would be between wondering what would happen next and realizing that there was nothing anyone could do about it anyway.  That space in between, for Victor, it all had to do with the erasure of “merit” as anything rational or sensible from “our” human wheel of time.

Look for Clues
3.
Alexander didn’t know what to expect.  He didn’t know what kinds of sights he would see.   He had never been to what was formerly known as “Canada” ever before in his life.   And what would he discover that could possibly be worth the toll the past twenty years had taken upon humanity?  History was said to be over and done with.  Nobody who knew anything about it could even stomach it anymore.  But there was nothing new to take its place.  How do you even begin to replace something like  “history”?  How had “human history” itself, as a living and material phenomenon over and against us in its own right, even arisen to be one of the most significant factors and conditions in who we became in shaping, influencing, or determining who we would actually see ourselves as being?
It overwhelmed him.  History was not God, but God had not appeared to anyone sane with any answers with respect to the “mould” of “our” history either.   There was nowhere outside history, it seemed, nowhere especially in God.   Sigh, look for clues, Alexander told himself.  Look for the goddamned signs of what life once was in the muck and debris of these forlorn and doomed campers’ traces.  Maybe you’ll find something for yourself or someone with an idea from which we can escape our hopelessly interdependent and interconnected, our just-as-tragic, collectively inescapable destiny that always lies lurking for us, stalking us–somewhere here too already certainly, waiting for us all in this past also.
What history lesson would these clues become part of?  And what are the clues we need that we have long been actually missing, if this could be something said of something real that was not simply overindulgent and vain hope based in desperation.  What had we maybe been missing at all such points of catastrophes and monstrous excesses like this one or even all along?  Can we find these now?  Here?  That defies all possible probability, Alexander thought, that they would be something I discover in
my own fieldwork out here in what is all very clearly the bric-a-brac signs of an unconscionable and perhaps unprecendented human failure.  So what’s the answer?  To look anyway?  And see what we see?  Because we know what we’ve already seen, and perhaps we’ve seen everything that can be seen, so this, these artifacts, this evidence, what we find here, must not be the same thing.  It all must be different somehow.  Because we must now–we on this planet right now simply know we must–see it differently than it has been seen in the past, throughout so very much of our history.  Our survival likely now depends on this.
But does it matter?  It should not, should it.  For it is not what is to be seen—for that never could be, and never has been, any different.  There never could be any difference there, in what our seeing inevitably makes out to be the same old things or objects they’ve always been across “our” history.   But maybe how we must see, or how we can see, is why we’re here.  Yes, it is likely that somehow that is the “place” we must truly seek for that for which we are here, Ground Zero For First Sighting, to take first glimpse, to take first sight of, and to then discover a possibly different place, a different realm in history, for human beings.  And especially to apprehend that which we are seeing (…as though…) for the very first time!

Even Though It Could Very Well Be The End of the World, Whatever You Do, Don’t Lose Your Mind!
4.
Victor took the bus downtown to where he thought the hotel would be.  Harrison Summers would be in his room by that time, as, although Harrison had had other commitments that day, his plane had been delayed, and he admitted on their call that he was using that as an excuse to check into his room as soon as he arrived so could take a much-needed nap.   The bus ride was pleasant enough, but Victor had never been very fond of committing exact addresses to his memory.  But he never minded walking an extra block, or even two, if he didn’t get the address exactly right.  So he let the bus make the turn from Keller Drive onto Broad Street and enter the underpass and then, when it was inside the underpass, he pulled the cord to notify the driver that his was the next stop.  Upon exiting the bus, he unlocked his phone and looked at the address of the hotel once more.  He was one block too far and so he would have to walk back to Keller Drive through the underpass and head over to the next block.  It was when the underpass came into view, when he was approaching the intersection before it, that he saw the young man who was approaching the same corner and heading for the underpass himself.   He was walking along with a dirty purple knapsack of the kind that a child would wear to kindergarten and he was walking at a strut.  It was obvious he was someone from the area, an unimaginably poor part of the city, somewhere Victor then realized, actually growing faint from the thought in combination with the heat of that day, that it would be impossible to bear one’s own soul there, not without eventually going completely insane, perhaps then killing oneself or even somebody else.
Victor was behind the young man by seven or eight steps at first, but the young man’s step struck Victor as unusual in an unsettling way.  The young man seemed content to be free of any care or concern for anything at all around him.  Victor realized that this young man’s relaxed and “intelligent” confidence meant he had probably been a street kid, what Victor’s piano teacher would have ironically called an “urchin boy,” for most if not all of his young life.  The young man was just walking along carrying his filthy purple nylon bag over his shoulder, with a bemused expression and an indifferent attitude that Victor actually found himself feeling something like admiration for given the straits to which this young man had obviously become acclimated.   It was clear he was poor, but was he actually homeless?  How could he possibly not be?  Victor let him walk further ahead, slowing down to let the young man gain four or five more steps over him.   Then, when Victor was well-inside the underpass and he heard the squeaking and crying of mice and bats all around him, and the noise struck him all the more as an utter misery when he thought of what it would be like to sleep inside that sorest of I’m sorrys for a shelter with that noise in one’s head all night long, the young man did something that struck Victor as all the more memorable, as even more remarkable really within the encounter, for Victor’s having noticed the young man in the way he had at all.   Victor himself had seen it out of the corner of his eye when it was about fifteen steps ahead of him and about five steps ahead of the young man.  It struck Victor as curious, although his awareness of it was quite dimmed.   It was a paper McDonald’s bag, the largest one they used, and it was clearly stuffed full of garbage and was sitting just on the edge of the pedestrian walkway, under the railing, where there was enough space for it to tumble onto the street where cars were passing by.  As the young man actually approached the bag, the bag returned to Victor’s awareness, so Victor saw the young man as he kicked the bag over to the other side of the walkway, right next to the wall, where it would sit safely well away from the walkway’s edge above the driving lanes.  Victor was actually touched by the young man’s show of concern and his deliberate act of ensuring that the bag not fall onto the lanes where it might land upon a passing motor vehicle and could then even cause an accident should a driver become startled and veer away from it to avoid whatever its contents would be, unknown for certain as those contents would be to any driver.  The young man then simply walked on as though there was nothing more natural for him than such a magnanimous act and as though there were nothing remarkable about it for the times everyone was in at all.
Supper was a short walk away from Harrison’s hotel.  It was an East Indian restaurant that had once been very popular and whose sauces had become renowned within the city.  Conversation with Harrison wasn’t exactly difficult or strained—Harrison was in high spirits.  But Victor was still feeling the heat of the day—the crowded bus and the walk under the stifling sun had somewhat compromised him.   But compounding this unpleasant feeling was that Harrison was discussing the playing of a virtuoso who was about their age, an accomplished concert pianist whom Victor knew to have been spoiled rotten as a young prodigy, his parents having spared him no expense.  One of the most publicized pictures of any player in the country in the last twenty years was that of Reynold (“Renny”) Ferguson seated at a grand piano at the age of seven, which everyone knew his parents had bought for him brand new for his fourth birthday.  Few had ever objected to this photo or detested Renny Ferguson—but rather, Renny had only become more popular from the photo all the more quickly, an instant star seemingly on what the photo and the affinity of his personality with it said about him.  Why Harrison should be talking so enthusiastically about this young paragon of an elitist and the shallow industry of yes-people around him, of insipidly uncreative gate-keepers lacking in genuine human substance themselves, who can afford for their favours to be entirely self-serving, so that these favours were usually kept on reserve for only those who could make something they thought respectable of their own hopes and desires for their own “careers in music,” make something perhaps even “sacrosanct” of their own aspirations, and maybe even perhaps make the longings they had had for one day having some talent themselves seem all the truer for their being “respectable critics” (with the criticism itself usually being nothing more than a bright and colourful screen through which they could “help others believe” in the player’s (and their own) possible “breakthrough” with a disenchanted public), wasn’t a question Victor was even interested anymore in answering, much less thinking about.  “Renny Ferguson is a cliché,” Victor wailed instead, “but a popular cliché!  Don’t you see?”  What really irritated Victor was that the only reason Harrison spoke admirably of Renny Ferguson was because he too was becoming someone more appealing to those in the media world who wanted their own work widely read and frequently cited, so they had convinced Harrison to perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the city that evening for a small gathering of (what Harrison called) “interested people from the public.”   Of course, Harrison had to show, as was widely known at the time, “the right appreciation” and “the expected acumen,”  “and in that order.”  “You’re just…uh, upset that…my God, these portions!  Where’s the meat?!?  For crying out loud!”  It was true, there was very little lamb in the Curry Lamb and very little chicken in the Butter Chicken.  “Well, they are clearly not surviving right now,” Victor said sympathetically, “The sauce is as extraordinary as it’s ever been, but they are—well, look!”   He gestured to the space of empty tables around them.  It was true.  It was supper time and they were the only diners in the restaurant, perhaps the only diners in all of that four block section of downtown.   “I still don’t see why you can’t just…why you can’t…just lighten up, Victor.”  “Because…because…”—the young man he had encountered on the way to Harrison’s hotel then reappeared unbidden in Victor’s mind—“I just can’t.  These days?!?  How can—well, fuck music!”  Harrison then made a face, not an unfriendly face, but an amused face, which somewhat relieved Victor, but from which he then felt a pang of shame.  Because Harrison’s expression said: Oh, don’t worry, I’ll still be your good friend.
On their way back to Harrison’s hotel where Victor would call a cab, on the corner of the intersection, while they were waiting for the lights to change, another poor young man appeared who was so similar to the young man from the underpass earlier that Victor thought they might be brothers.   This young man had a wheeler with a small flat-screen television set secured to it with a man’s black leather belt.  The feeling of déjà vu at the sight of the television on the wheeler was so profound—it was like Victor had seen the exact same sight before, a young man with a wheeler and a television set belted to it—that Victor found himself also admitting that such a sight had to be quite common in cities around the world.  So this thought, which felt uncanny, even sublime, almost like revelation, seemed also to be at the same instant entirely ordinary and of highly dubious significance.
At home, Victor made himself a large whisky sour.  He sat at the piano and played one of Chopin’s mazurkas.  He played and drank some more and soon became quite drunk.  He then began playing Rachmaninoff, the third piano concerto.  He drank some more and his playing became less and less like Rachmaninoff and more like…whom?  Was the playing his own?  No, in spite of (or perhaps, because it was) coming from him in a way that he had never experienced before, it was not.  He felt that it somehow could not be his.  He found he was becoming even drunker and his playing was becoming less and less intelligible to his ears, the piano no longer even seeming like a piano at all, perhaps because it didn’t feel like he was the one playing on it.  He got up from where he sat and poured himself a final drink and then laid down on his couch.   He woke up a few hours later having had a dream of being in the city shortly after the bombs had dropped, of walking through the streets, and of encountering a famous American comedian whose show he had gone to one night at the amphitheatre the year before last.  This comedian’s legs were missing and the skin and insides of his torso had melted and he was fused to the asphalt, which had also been partially melted to his body.  The comedian asked him for help in a comic voice—the comedian seemed out of his “right mind.”  Victor pulled and pulled some more on this comedian from under his arms, trying to free him.  The comedian seemed to find the whole thing to be rather funny, his comical expression reminding Victor of that painted upon a ventriloquist’s dummy, which is what the comedian then actually became in the dream, a ventriloquist’s dummy into whose back Victor then stuck his hand, finding a lever there to make the comedian talk.  That was when the dream ended and Victor woke up.  For a moment, Victor tried to remember what the ventriloquist dummy comedian had said.  Victor wouldn’t remember what this was until six or seven months later, when the war had started and he was already by then in Iceland.

Whatever You Might See or Experience, Don’t Lose or Forget Yourself, For Only You Yourself Can Divine the Providential from Chance or Higher Ground from Chaos!
4.
They took the choppers up and over what from above looked like slightly more organized settlements.  Only later on, when they landed and walked among them would Alexander mark the differences between these sites and all that had existed in memory from the time before the Third Great War.   From up above, he made sure to make observations based on what he could tell were distinctions between then and before.  For instance, at one site there was a large cross and at another a star of David.  And then: the shock he experienced when he saw another symbol, a  new symbol, one he was entirely unfamiliar with, a symbol the creation of which the war and the displacement themselves had likely occasioned.   He marked the coordinates of the site on his map and vowed to return to it later to explore this particular site further.   What did the people who had tried to survive there together believe together?  Was it “simply a cult”?  What was it’s story?  What had happened to that particular site’s inhabitants?   What had they thought in their more personal or private moments?  Had any of them left any writings?  Might he even discover something new, some new concept for belief or some new piece of “sacred” wisdom, in determining the meaning of that symbol?   Yes, who were those people who had originated something new to relate themselves to God or to the cosmos?  He said nothing to Erik or Benji of course.  They seemed nothing better by then than a couple of useful idiots—Alexander at first wondered how they had managed to get chosen to visit the sites, but then he realized that being on these lands likely would not have been their choice.  The people they worked for would have wanted nothing to do with such a voyage and so they most likely sent them instead.  Erik was there to collect samples of the soil and water for some conglomerate of land development companies interested in resettling some of the territory for some reason and Benji was the eyes and ears of a well-connected mining magnate, that man’s nephew apparently.  They were the furthest thing from scientists, and so Alexander’s interest in them had utterly faded.  Alexander made sure to pay attention to the landmarks, the features visible on the map.  The symbols visible to them from above had all been made out of what appeared to be limestone, fieldstone, masonry and materials from abandoned houses and buildings from the nearby towns, but also from other materials from whatever had been disassembled or otherwise reduced.  Those were the sights that had so deeply moved Alexander—although those other two seemingly had no capacity for the expression of human emotion toward them whatsoever.  It was all something they probably merely compared to things in films or television shows they had seen.  They were not capable of being moved at all, it seemed, and Alexander then felt foolish for having earlier thought in mockery that they might lose their minds at the sight of the dead.  For these two men seemingly had no minds to lose—they were there merely for profit, someone else’s profit.  Alexander became lightheaded with this thought as he gazed upon the settlements below—he was becoming learned of it himself, was he not?  Was that not why he had been ordered to also write a full report for some government secretary of some department or other?  It wasn’t what he was seeing among the dead, but rather what he felt at present among the living that convinced him that, no matter what he was able to produce in his report, no matter what he would lecture on for the next ten or fifteen years at respected institutions around the world, it would be utterly impossible ever to avoid a tragedy of this scale in the future.  And he would be all the more popular among the learned for repeating: “This will simply keep happening.  Forever.  Perhaps everywhere in the universe where there is so-called “intelligent life.””  Seeing this “from above,”  his time on the ground at the settlements themselves would only further re-enforce this view: people live and relate to life as though death were not the end, or at least in the hope that death not be something absolute and an unfailing equalizer among us all.  What is the cost of this exactly?  “Death must be seen and truly, gravely, respected as the only certainty that awaits us all,” he wrote at his own camp that evening (but surely, this would not go in his report!), “and this knowledge must include all of what we do and feel and think in how we seek escape from it, from death as an absolute reality in and of itself.  For in escaping this, we forgo or reject all the knowledge that we require of our human condition to survive and flourish in the face of it, mostly because of others who refuse to inherit or acquire it as necessary knowledge for us all to survive, because of those who refuse to respect death or anything of it in life, and so for this reason they come to pose an absolute limit upon us ourselves.  So then, when all of natural law comes to serve this reality, we must seek our knowledge for survival primarily through the eyes of the ignorant and blind, for only then can we relate to our own future, to a certain condition upon us, by their claims over our lives.  This death, the death of us in them, through them, becomes everything we can then become, this ignorance of our oppressors to the cycle between our life in death and our death in life, and it ultimately becomes our inevitable and total annihilation.”

The Future Now Makes Our Horizon Entirely Impenetrable but for Possibly the Single Point Upon Which We’ve Come to Stand and (Perhaps) Apprehend What Exists Around Us Merely From Being There in Time and Existing as Ourselves
5.
–So you didn’t have any idea really about what would happen to your country.  The young man sitting across from Victor had wanted to share Victor’s story, but Victor knew that the young man couldn’t actually, that he wouldn’t truly understand.  Only Victor could tell his story.  Or, maybe, the young man could tell it just fine, but only in so far as it could not ever actually be understood the way Victor himself knew it.  So it was too late, no?  Victor had already given his consent, and most of the details, a version, that could make up a story, probably anyone’s story with some of the same details as his own.
–I’m here mostly because my mom and dad thought it would be a good idea for me to leave the country for a while.  To leave Canada.  Iceland was just the right place for me at the time, I guess.  They would have me so long as I boarded with someone I knew from my student days.  When I was in school in Canada.
–Garth Schull.
–Yes, Garth Schull.  He taught here—he teaches here.  Music.  But he is someone who has connections in the music department at the university.   So, here I am.  Unable to return home now, of course.
–Lucky.
–Yes, but I lost everyone.  All my family.  And all my friends.  Except for Garth.
–But you’re alive.
–I am alive.  I am alive and well.  I suppose.  I never was an optimist or someone who felt unbelievably happy in life.  But I am truly grateful—I am becoming more appreciative of life, or trying to.  Although the cloud of what has happened hangs over me also.  Probably in a different way than it does over everyone else.
Victor stopped speaking then, folded his hands and placed them on the table to indicate he was done talking.  And with that, the young man, named Curtis, pressed Stop on the recording.  They were finished.  Curtis had what he needed, what he had paid for in his view, which was nothing at all like what Victor thought would do justice in his view as his own experience.   It wasn’t quite “a story,” was it?  What was it?   It was much more than that, no?  A movement in existence and being, a movement in human existence and being, in real life true to one’s very own reality.  What could do a “movement” of that kind any justice?  Music could, could it not?
The bodies in the room moved to music that was playing over the speakers, music that Victor found interesting because it seemed only to further cloud the spaces between us all.  It seemed to be trying to make something happen in space and time, not “there” though, between us, between us all as selves—the music that was popular around here, in these rooms, didn’t know anything at all about the “there” that Victor now knew.   It didn’t know the spaces between people, the space that comes to shape and influence who we are in relation to one another and what exists and shapes who we are beyond ourselves.  This music, Victor knew from his experience, was “deaf” to the spaces in humanity that were shaped by the history of love and hate, the desire for life and the uncertainty of death.   Of all that this became in people and between them as selves.  Would he embrace the chance to create such music?   Or would he falter and wither.  Would he be the mind, heart, and soul creating music that understood but ultimately failed at apprehending—yes, that understood all the better in its failure to apprehend–the events leading up to and that then became the Third Great War?   Eventually, it had erased “Canada.”  He would have to give humanity another chance, no?  He would have to hear the sounds of human voices again through music and not disown them for their usually seeming ignorant of what would always happen, of what would always become of us all through human life and human death.  But now that he had failed to tell another person his story, now that another would fail to tell it from what he could only try in vain to communicate, Victor felt like trying his hand at a form of composition he could make entirely real through himself and the spaces that were made up of what lived and died all around us all.   He knew then that, no matter what, he would make his music tell of everything he himself would need it to tell.

The Past Became a Land Frozen Beyond What Could Be Understood as Both True and Real In Any Present–It Was Impenetrable Because of How the Past’s Present Would Generate the Future Manifolds of Its End at Every Point Within Itself, In Spite of All We Could Think That We Could Know and Do
5.
He was no longer “The Dubbed” Alexander Little.  Just “Alexander Little,” an underpaid academic eating fish and chips in his car on a rainy London day.  They would give him a raise of course.  And tenure.  And he had already been extended several invites to dinners with colleagues, people who had barely spoken to him before he had gone on the voyage.  They wanted to know, of course, what the Old New World was now like, before it became a New New World.  They especially wanted to see any images he had captured on his Stylolens.
The radio was on and the hourly news was being broadcast.  “Emotions in Parliament ran high today,” the voice was saying, “when Opposition leader Grant Boyko challenged the Government on its proposed plan for the re-settlement of former Canada.  “You have not demonstrated that you have been impartial in your allocation of lands for future settlement!  We demand an audit of applicants and we demand an audit especially of all whose settlement is being undertaken with any assistance of public funds!  We demand this now!”  The government stuck to its position, however,” the voice continued, “that the Opposition is incorrect.  “We repeat, and we repeat once again: We have not vetted future applicants for land in former Canada on the basis of any criteria other than physical and mental capacity for settlement and on the basis of fitness for opportunities that will ensure former Canada becomes once again a proud and strong member state of the British Commonwealth.””
Yes, Alexander thought, it would be easy to see how things would stay the same.  That had always been easier for most people.  But in seeing this way, Alexander thought, perhaps things were far less likely to change a little and more likely to change a lot, and then also catastrophically.  The compulsion to sameness flowed out and over us all from every point in space and time—it was psychic and physical at all levels of being in the human world.  It flowed over one, and one could access it whenever one wanted to with the greatest ease.  Allowing things to be the same or simply to go along with them had never been a problem or an issue for anyone.  But that then became the problem.  The little concentration it required behooved one to give in to it as a general rule, for exerting the least effort required had always been considered the natural predisposition, or even the standard inclination, of ordinary people.  So how did one come to regard the present or future from the perspective of what might be or what could become different?  If this was desirable or necessary, which it very often was, it would have to be equally felt, it would have to become equally immanent, in all points in space and time as the sameness that usually reigned for seemingly flowing of natural causes and laws across the surface and down to the untold depths of all of us.   One couldn’t know anything else—not really.  That was the truth—that one mostly or usually didn’t.  One mustn’t, no?  We still didn’t know anything besides what has remained the same even though we had always known everything we needed to know to prevent events like the Great Wars from happening at any point where the toxic, no, the deadly, smog of sameness met the feeling that we truly wanted, we really deserved—and we even absolutely required–something different from what was and has always been.

        Okay, so I lied.  When I shared the previous pathway several weeks ago, I said that that would perhaps be the last pathway ever, but certainly the last to be posted for at least a few months.  Not only is this new pathway one shared only a few weeks’ later, but it is one that I myself created.  Still the idea of using a special structure in narrative, in story-telling, to suggest the unique pathway for any period in which the Anthropocene or the threat of another great war reappears struck me as a compelling image and metaphor for the idea of bearing witness and “trying to be good observers” in our everyday lives, from the ground upon which we (must) stand, within a human history that will certainly set itself over and against us at such times.  As an actual narrative, I tried to create what might offer something poignant and perhaps even valuable for the highly trying, impotent or anemic, and disappointing position in which “having to merely observe” leaves us all (who will, in this position, lack any “real” or “true” agency to make a significant difference to any meaningful outcome). 
         I certainly didn’t anticipate coming up with the idea for what would be the next pathway myself.  The End’s Path came to me initially as something steeped in that in which I have long held an interest throughout my writing career, the ugly, sad, and terrible times in which humanity has faced or found itself approaching the brink of its own extinction.  These times especially seem to many people to be simply that.  Perhaps at moments in history such as these we might believe things should be guided or directed or steered a certain way, depending on what the conditions requiring or permitting this might be, but what I think comes to be just as important as guiding humanity away from the brink (assuming this is possible) is that these moments in our history also seem to test the meaning in what we have lived with or desired to live with in our relatively short lives as human beings–that is, what we wish to save or keep safe for our own benefit or growth, regardless of any likely existential threat.  Or, perhaps the meanings things in our world possess come to require more of ourselves to maintain or to keep them from being submerged in conditions more anomic or precipitously unsympathetic to our own lives than is normal or acceptable.  It can certainly be a time for reflection, for examining oneself and for soul-searching, but I think this pathway shows that one is always caught between the idea of impossible self-possession within history and the idea that one’s own survival and the return of everything to normality will generate a false sense of control or power over the conditions of the future (these being the two paths in narrative forming the “one dual pathway” making up The End’s Path).  Do we ever learn to make up for some lack as a species that makes a possible single path through The End of History not simply “the other half” of a bifurcated (i.e. “split”) failure?  Perhaps that learning can be somewhere in ourselves (and I do suggest that, in having survived being “inside” The End, Victor Ng can now embark upon such a path for himself and others through his own music).  But the conditions generating a sense and even a distinct presence of The End as a kind of “Visitor” in one’s own mind and body are nothing new in history.  I have tried to show the “dual path” forming the “split” that precludes true resolution for oneself within history when one is merely “witnessing” or “observing along” the two paths being taken.  These two paths will make up a single reality and the idea in this is that that reality shows humanity ever-returning to those precipitous conditions again and again, and also to these two paths winding their way toward and away from The End.  But perhaps knowing the “dual pathway” allows a person to navigate both parts of it at once and then be done with it so that one can then continue on in one’s journey toward some end that can then become—or that can be made–one’s very own rather than simply being that by which Humanity’s (Perpetual) End of History comes to utterly possess and devour the greater numbers of human beings and lives as it tends to do in “all our” history.