Douglas Mercer
December 5 2024
Continued from Crow (Part Eleven)
DEPARTURE TIME
550AM LOCAL TIME
Sargasso Sea
July 1 1969
In 4 Hours From Now
I bring you a great new truth, the truth that has been hidden for ages. I did not become a hermit, and I did not go to the Himalayan Highlands, I did not become a seer or a holy man. Rather I was a man driven to dire straits by circumstances—driven to a calm sea caught halfway between death and disaster, but I did not give up on my god which is logic and I never for once doubted it paramount. My wife always said of me that I was someone who in any situation, no matter how difficult, I could come up with one thousand and one solutions—but it turned out I needed only one. There is no limit to the human capacity for intelligence and if there is any failure it will be the failure of imagination. I am very proud that that was not to be my fate.
And so I bring you a great new truth, I bring all human kind this truth, it is an old truth I suppose and a simple truth. There is no good and no evil but only truth. And this truth is not just another perspective or another opinion in a world gone mad with perspectives and opinions, no the truth is neither the one nor the other—it is a silver bullet. For the truth is not a perspective.
The story of Eden is the fable of the system—the fairy tale meant to keep men in eternal darkness. It starts out with man being born in a Golden Age, in Paradise—but that is the first lie and the cart before the horse, man was born in the primordial ooze and was born of struggle and battle. The second lie was that there existed something called good and evil, something which was meant to overawe man and which was meant to keep him in a state of fear. In this just so story men would have been better off not to have eaten of knowledge—but even what it called knowledge—good and evil—was a lie. And then an Evil Figure (a snake! A serpent!) appears and tempts man with the lure of him becoming god. This desire on the part of man to know and to become gods is depicted as the root of evil and the cause all man’s trouble. And so the truth is inverted---man is not born in paradise but is destined to arrive there by his own merit, good and evil are said to be knowledge when in fact they are lies, and men are not to become gods when in fact that is destiny. That my people have been so long in thrall to such childish nonsense grieves me; but I have arrived to tell them the truth.
Nearing his madness Friedrich Nietzsche (whom I became enraptured with for a time as one of my many manias) was the first to proclaim the nonexistence of good and evil. But he erred in saying that truth was an illusion. He also said that man must become god but contextualized it as a form of expiation, when in fact no sin had been committed, our distance from god was the foreordained path of our struggle to become god. Nearing his madness he signed himself God and said the thing which finally sent me reeling down the path to the truth—he would sign his raving and rambling letters: I AM THE GOD WHO MADE THIS JOKE. This is exactly correct, for if music is the food of love then laughter is its queen---and life is a joke or an amusement or a lark or a caprice—if one with serious intent. It is this game like nature of life, that it is an exercise or a rehearsal and is not real in itself that god had to conceal---for it would hurt too much. For to consider all of human pain to be predicated on a game would outrage the millions. And so god concealed this fact from man, but knew that it was for our own good, for only by means of work and struggle could we become gods which is the nature and purpose of the game.
This is now but Theology 101 and is of no interest to me now, having bigger fish to fry.
How to manage the Great Escape? How does man become a disembodied being? First off I did what I always did I entertained any proposition no matter how outlandish it seemed but asked myself: is it true? And then I let logic be my guiding light.
Never consider the source, in two senses. Never go on a wild goose chase for ultimate origins—that way madness lies. That is a secret which one trusts one will be read into when one is read into the cosmic ground plan. And second: never consider the source when it comes to who says what; that is listen to the words that are spoken not to who says them, for even the most despicable of men or the most unknown can say the truth and truth it remains.
In my black magic days—mercifully brief—I read about that old bluffer Crowley—the wickedest man in the world they said. He said we should do what we will---and that he could bilocate. This means that by means of the will we can disentangle ourselves from the present state of being and move about freely and at will. And of course he counseled to write backward—which set me off thinking of Leonardo, another free mind who wrote backward and was a fanatic of flight. And when the computer is fed enough information it can begin to make correspondences and come to solutions at rapid and lightening speed. When the time is ripe for it to gel it enters into a kind of field or solid state of circuitry and one piece of information can swiftly transform it entirely.
I ripped up the book Relativity—it was no use to me then I had my word: stipulate. And like a lawgiver I moved more rapidly still.
God does play dice with the universe—but the dice are loaded, and the house always wins. The die are always being cast on the winds.
For the truth is reality is real enough—but not real in the way we think of it. Rather it is a projection of the minds of cosmic beings and we are game players in the projection; and in the right state of mind we can manipulate and shape reality at will. A brain is a radio or a transmitter but when it comes to be a solid state it comes to be—a broadcaster.
As I understand it normally with such technology as this visualization people wish for health or prosperity—but when you are trapped calm in the wild Sargasso sea, which is the fiercest calm you will ever experience, and you are caught halfway between death and disaster and are perched atop a diaphanous sea; well then you realize that there is no one in here but us chickens and think about flying the coop.
They say that the mind is a delicate and precarious mechanism and that one can easily lose one’s balance but I don’t believe that; and they say that imagination is the most dangerous drug—but I don’t believe that either. And they say also that when it comes to vaunted imagination, when it comes to dreams, that when reality sets in it’s one slip and that’s it. But I know from personal experience that is wrong as well, when it comes to the imagination it’s one slip and you’re home free.
And when the time comes, as soon it will, I will go up on that prow, think about the Misfit and its forlorn flight, and when it all seems clear I will go ahead and disappear.
At the official inquest the verdict was that he had met his end by suicide or misadventure, the latter being defined as death met by the folly of one’s own voluntary decision to venture into dangers that one cannot stand up to. For the layman it was decided that the mystery of his disappearance was inexplicable. As for the boat (the nest of fame) it was found unoccupied and ghosting and now rots away on some island near Bermuda. After the boat was found search teams fanned out over the sea but invariably found nothing.
The big bird will take its first flight from the sea filling the universe with amazement; it will fill all the chronicles with its fame and lore and bring eternal glory to the nest where it was born.
This bird had flown.
DEPARTURE TIME
550AM LOCAL TIME
Sargasso Sea
July 1 1969
RIGHT NOW
THE END
***
Notes:
One of the last owners of the Teignmouth Electron before her abandonment said he believed that the ship was haunted, that when trying to sleep below in the cabin he routinely heard footsteps moving across the unpopulated deck.
