…and thence to points unknown

I subscribe to a macabre info feed called Executed Today. Think of it as a house of horrors dressed in literary flourish. It was there that I recently ran across the title phrase:

We don’t have any special research to add on this occasion, but submit [the above photographs] here with great gratitude to Mr. Young, and in the spirit of the uncanny. These small artifacts, from the doomed flesh of a long-dead murderer via two generations of a warden’s family, across a random meeting on the Internet and thence to points unknown.

The phrase sparked my admiration. I like the way it acknowledges the indeterminacy of where what he offers his subscribers will end up, what it may motivate them to do or think, what connections or realizations it will catalyze, in what new forms and under what circumstances it may later reemerge, etc. 

The phrase clearly and movingly captures the true position of the artist, the speaker, the creator, the endeavorer. Even the parent. The children we create shed the tether of the home and proceed to points unknown. The jokes we crack slip the harness that connects wisecracker to listener, thence spreading and replicating on their way to points unknown. There is no way to anticipate the trajectory or the repercussions of a book or blog post whose content is extraordinary, or moving, or deathly dull. As with jokes and children, so it goes with poems, thoughts, dreams articulated aloud–any document of our days that all. The five words in this little phrase seem to me entirely extraordinary for the sense of wonder they inspire, and for the dignified humility before the world and time to which they bear witness.

It is also, notably, a phrase that situates man in the middle, but of what? An inky sea, I would contend, on whose boundless volume we must author our deeds with an appropriate measure of awe and reverence, since the slightest gesture made, the humblest word uttered, is bound for points unknown and unknowable. This is no call to paralysis, but to consideration, meditation, deliberation, and all those internal actions that deepen our relation to our own being and the vastnesses of which it is a fitting shadow.

If Curtain Mustache had a crest or a banner, …and thence to points unknown would blazon forth from it.

Allow me to leave you with a quote cribbed from Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives:

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man’s memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.” 

…and thence to points unknown

“State of Illinois? I’m gonna kill that guy!”

The titular phrase is attributed to me in my seventh year. I spoke it in the hospital the day my brother was born, on learning from a nurse that the time allotted by the State of Illinois to family members wishing to visit with new arrivals to this world was limited to 5 minutes, or 15, or whatever it was. I may have addressed my objection to the medical functionary as she kicked us out, but it’s more likely I muttered the words for my dad’s benefit once she was out of earshot.

In the years to come I was to hear the phrase repeated many times, adduced as evidence in support, variously, of my sound anti-authoritarianism, my worrisome insubordinate tendencies, the anti-statism encoded in my genetics by my father, my portentious inability to understand rational legal precepts, etc. And as with so many of the cyclical sayings and scenes from early family life, the phrase stayed with me, rolling around my mind like an old can year in and year out.

Even now, lo these many leagues and years from the source, it haunts my junkyard mind. So today I decided to chase it down and hold it up to the light, for my sake and maybe yours. It turns out the can is not without content. It turns out that the little relic exudes an abundant soundness of mind.

Momentous transactions of all kinds are conducted when a child is born: Between mother and father. Between parent and child. Between sibling and sibling. Between the new arrival and the eternity from which it was delivered. Between God and man, between family and community. It is altogether a sacred moment.

And yet there was an interloper present as my family conducted its sacred transactions on that day: The State, whose shadow made me resort to a childish boast I could never make good on.

Why did the superficially rational visitation regulation make me mutter that I would “kill” the state of Illinois? Because–and this preemptive crushing of sophistries is why I love writing this blog–to an uncorrupted mind and to a free spirit, the State’s jurisdiction over these matters is illegitimate. A six year old child is fully competent to understand (if not to explain) the vileness of the State’s presumption to intervene, through regulation, in the transactions conducted by man and woman with eternity, by man with woman, and by man and woman with God.

The injunctions imposed in the maternity ward serve a kind of dark liturgical function, whereby the birth certificate designates the new human as the chattel and ward of the State, and where the spurious covenant of the “social contract” is clapped like a shackle on the newborn not 5 minutes out of the womb, with the rest of the family hauled in to stand as unwilling witnesses to the fraudulent contract.

Is it any wonder, in these dark days of the State’s global metastasis, that so many grown men and women should behave as if they had left the womb unwillingly?

And who said there was no profundity in juvenalia? Go now, take that old can rattling around your head, and hold it up to the light. We aim to return with new junkyard dispatches soon.

I’m a reformist. You’re a revolutionary.

I recently had the unpleasant experience of chatting with someone who presumed to speak for me when he mouthed the title phrase of this post. Having mulled his casual traducement for some time, I have decided to extend a similar courtesy to him in this forum.

To business:

You, friend no longer, are a collaborator. Neither a revolutionary nor what they used to call “a dangerous man”, I am nothing more than a man who cannot and will not become a collaborator.

Knowingly or not, by following the path of least spiritual resistance you have aligned yourself with the aggressor-subject of Lenin’s terse summary of politics (Kto kogo: Who does what to whom?), while my heart is sore troubled by the fate of history’s grammatical objects, the endless millions ranged and regimented into the aggressor’s parade of victims.

You are in league with the subject. I stand stalwartly opposed.

You are 1984. We are 1776.

You are a liar. You lie to yourself in order to make your surroundings palatable. While I cannot claim total innocence on this score, as the days pass I try to tell fewer lies to myself and others, and so I see these surroundings for what they are: An outrage and an insult.

Where you see an inspiring leader I see a garden-variety rebel against natural law, a usurper of rights won through war, and a destroyer of man’s two greatest achievements: Law and liberty.

Where you see authority I see only despicable, illegitimate power.

Your mind dances with parlor tricks and propaganda. Mine sees capital crimes.

Where you dream of velvet, I see the fang.

And because of what you have accommodated yourself to–because of what you have chosen to countenance–nothing that you ever do or produce will be of abiding value. I do not presume to attribute that kind of value to what I do. That is a judgment for others to make. But the hope and the possibility of making an enduring contribution to human affairs is part of the bargain that I have made.

I encourage you to be on your way, and am powerless sever you from infamy. But I will not be tarred by a brush that does not know itself. Did you not know that the only sense in which tyranny “reforms” is by multiplying its audacity and magnifying its crimes?

Grill of tartary stubs

Google has nothing in the way of this metaphor, though it does reveal, in a number of car enthusiast forums, that car grilles can be stubby, if not tartary. The image that gave rise to this snippet is that of a mouth filled with mealy, stained, truncated or otherwise objectionable teeth. English teeth, if you like, or snaggle-teeth. “Grill”, as most of us know, is slang for mouth or teeth, particularly as used in black culture and in communities of speakers that emulate black culture.  At Urbandictionary.com you will find any number of glosses backing up this definition of “grill”. Lest the obvious go unrecognized, we’ll note that the usage sets up a parallel between a man’s mouth and the intake grill for a car engine. Somewhat disturbing, especially when you picture, as you are meant to, a car with aggressive styling, roaring forward at high speed, implacable. If I had to guess, I’d say the term was coined by people who had something to do with the Detroit assembly lines of yore.

But the grill in question is not pearly white or kitted out with bling. It’s been savaged by time, smoke, sugar and neglect. That is to say, by the ancient recipe for tartar, and stubbification.

The truth is that “tartary” is not even accepted as an adjective to describe the state of being covered in tooth tartar or the homonymous condiment, but as the place name given by Europe in the late middle and early modern ages to the lonely ocean of steppe stretching from the Danube nearly to the Pacific Ocean. Consequently, what was once Tartary was in former times populated by Tartars, or Tatars, along with their cousins the Mongols, the Turkmen, and so on. Our time may no longer refer to the place–now a forum where greed vies with greed on a scale that is scarcely conceivable–as Tartary, nor to the people–free and feared horsemen no longer, but abject vassals and satraps to a man–as Tartars, but the term still carries a ballast that evokes the old times: Times of mystery and heterogeneity, times when the limits of the earth were shrouded in speculation and legend, times when to be away from one’s home was to risk one’s life.

So when the ideal reader reads “grill of tartary stubs”, he not only sees a caricature of poor oral hygiene, but is carried away by an abrupt plunge down history’s staggering vertical axis, an axis that connects our time–a time in which men are nothing more than machines and machine operators–to times out of mind, times when men were more akin, simultaneously, to both animals and gods. And somewhere on that axis–for this is the secret message encrypted into the snippet–whether on a segment ancient beyond all recognition or on one that our dynamism has yet to inscribe onto that unbounded line, we will find man as wants to be, maybe even–dare to think it!–as he was meant to be.

A condition that in turn seems to imply strong teeth, contentedly gnawing on the bones of some animal culled from the herd by the hunter’s ruse.

Behind the shower curtain

A man is in the shower. There is a slight noise and a minor rustle of the shower curtain as an agent of the State enters his home. The man is wanted, not necessarily for questioning. As the State’s agent draws near, the man begins making exuberant shower sounds. He hopes that the tuneless humming, the busy sound of soap shuttling between ass-cheeks and the active rustle of the curtain will somehow make the agent, who must also have showered in the morning, see him as just a man, a fellow like him. He hopes that it will make him reconsider. It is ridiculous to suppose that it would, but there is something interesting about the man resorting to feigned domestic blitheness in the moment of ultimate danger.

It says: Mercy is the only hope, and recognition. Hope not for him, for he will be shot through the curtain and left to commingle his blood with the bathwater–but for the race itself, and for all the future pairings of executioner & victim, through this reflexive iteration of humdrum humanity, his refusal to play the role of victim. He hums not to camouflage his location from his killer, but to mask his own status as victim from himself, and in so doing leaves open the possibility that his killer, in recapitulating the sequence of the hit in his field report, will be confronted with the monstrosity of his crime. It is by this horribly thin thread that all of man’s hope has ever dangled. Be sure you hum to beat the band when it’s your turn; or that you carefully go over what you saw, and the steps you took, when you sit down to compose your report.

Obituary as resurrection

Like the other arts, storytelling is a reflection and an intensification of the life underlying. I would argue that it also goes a long way toward constituting life beyond the sphere of bare biology and mere physical survival. One might say it’s a matter of life and death. Storytelling’s origins in time out of mind have to do with the preservation of collective memory and the institutionalization of the clans and tribes who passed down stories like treasure chests containing their laws, their tales of origin, their habits of thought and remembrance. Telling stories that impart meaning to life has always been man’s way, par excellence, of distinguishing himself from the animal and inanimate worlds, and of casting himself as the subject worthy of a story that might be told.

I have long been fascinated by narrative frameworks that explicitly mine the continuum between storytelling/authorship and the preservation of life itself. The immortal example, of course, is The Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherezade’s hold on life is only as good as the stories she tells her tyrannical husband from one night to the next. On the one hand, one may choose to be struck by the arbitrary cruelty of the arrangement. What kind of beast arranges a production line for the lopping off of women’s heads if, as they must, they fail to satisfy his storytelling needs? But we should not overlook solace where it is to be had. After all, Scheherezade’s magnificent tales did manage to spare her neck. Also significant is that she was given a bona fide opportunity to talk her way out of her own beheading in the first place, which I believe should be read as an abiding affirmation that even the harshest, most arbitrary power–that’s right folks, we’re talking about Oriental despotism here–is on some level susceptible to the charm of the word. Surely the myriad innocents who stand accused by the implacable tribunals of our time would prefer the slim opportunity given to Scheherezade, which after all rested on the exercise of her specific virtuosity and love of life, to the certainty of being subsumed into an impersonal mass whose only apparent purpose is to lubricate the gears of juggernaut bureaucracies (and the self-esteem of the mediocrities who staff them).

From time to time I have mused about inscribing my own ideas onto this continuum. Years ago I was seized by the notion of writing a fictional suicide letter where my character would drone on at such length about the slights of circumstance that had driven him to despair that, by telling his story, he would at length be able, if not to overcome, at least to put the sutures of deep thought in his trauma. What began as a suicide letter might, after hundreds of pages, trail off into something like a halfway affirmation of life. Or we might imagine the process of sorting through the shambles of his life bringing to light some external culprit, so that, in saving himself, he condemns the other by vowing revenge. What interests me is that the attempt to account for a rupture with the social world actually reconstitutes the relationship with that world. Just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in… My narrative vehicle notwithstanding, it should be noted that for those who truly wish to die, not even the longest suicide note will thwart them from their purpose.

A related idea visited me more recently as I was reading an obituary that was long-winded to the point where, somewhere in the middle, I forgot that the man had died. What more appropriate way to honor and mourn those whom we have loved, I thought, than to attempt to recreate some scenes from their lives in such a way that the spirit of those so honored comes off the page with all the force of a living being? It is true that biographies serve this function for a select few, often thoroughly despicable people. While stopping short of claiming that such posthumous laurels should be the right of commoners who have done nothing to distinguish themselves among the living, I do hold that it would be amusing and perhaps meaningful to write a fictional obituary whose narrator, having at length exhausted himself in the pursuit of some trivial details from the life of the person he is eulogizing, enters a kind state of ambivalence about who is alive and who is dead. This process would to some extent mimic the sorrow of aging, where the sheer quantity of time traversed overburdens the mind of the timeworn person to the point where, in her mind, the dead are no different from the living.

To return to the pulse behind this post: Storytelling and its absence are of primary importance to our lives today. Certain theoreticians and penurious but worthy bloggers would claim that Western societies have lacked authoritative stories to account for the shambles they have made of civilization and of life for several generations now, and I would be inclined to agree with them. The stories we tell each other are increasingly cheap, childish and unbelievable. It is precisely this lack of any inherent authority that accounts for the bristling police states enacted to safeguard the vile stories in general circulation. I do believe that we need better cosmologies and cosmogonies, better civics, better psychoanalysis, better self-knowledge, better historical frameworks, better movies, better poems, better novels, better religious services, and certainly better reporting and propaganda. But what we need above all is the latitude and the indulgence afforded to Scheherezade, who told a thousand stories to save her life. Particularly, what to me holds out the hope of a way forward in this time of gravest crisis is for the stories of those who have hitherto been denied a voice, to finally be heard.

In that spirit, I say let a million charismatic voices rise in opposition to the clumsy lies that sustain the hegemonic ambitions of their graceless narrators, and in so doing constitute a life worth living for themselves and for the rest of us.

Tragedy and statistics

The first days of this week were marked and marred by similar events, diverging widely. Both involved buses and preventable death. Monday saw the cold-blooded slaughter of 19 passengers on a bus in western Ethiopia. Tuesday followed up with a grisly coach crash in a Swiss mountain tunnel that untimely snipped the threads of 28 souls, most of them children.

Tragic death, temporal proximity and the mode of transport are where the similarities end. It is not my intent or wish to amplify or diminish either event, although there are a few notes to be made about the reporting of both that I will undertake to formulate at the risk of seeming to do so. First I should mention two facts which I myself would consider prejudicial if concealed. The first is that I am much closer in culture and appearance to the victims of the Swiss crash. The second is that I have been on coaches in Ethiopia, oddly enough, but not in Switzerland. I mention both by way of a prefatory clearing of the cache, short of recusing myself.

Now let’s sort through the wreckage. What struck me first was that the reporting of the Swiss crash came packaged in a comforting narrative that managed to wrap in words the (presumably correct) sentiment that the loss experienced by the families is not susceptible to faithful verbal description. It is a narrative constructed primarily to comfort the outside reader not directly bereaved by the tragedy, but who is Western, likely white, and wishes, naturally enough, to take part in the collective of the bereaved. And who would contend that it is anything other than eminently human to dispatch a sentiment and a correspondent or two to those who have lost the most? The coverage of the Swiss crash offers embellishing details about the idyllic mountain setting, mournful sentiments expressed by ministers and heads of state, and even, heartbreakingly, the most recent Facebook updates by children who are now dead. Readers are told that the investigation will be thorough and transparent, with a view to forestalling the unforgivable repetition of the unthinkable. All very well and absolutely what should be offered to a society that prizes individual human life, as we ought to. Nor do I have any doubt that it will all be conducted just as they say, perhaps in time succeeding in creating some slight improvement in road safety, even a semblance of comfort for those whose loss can essentially not be soothed. By way of segue, I’ll mention that one first responder at the scene spoke from his heart when he said it was like something “out of a war”.

Which brings us to the Ethiopian bus fatalities, which objectively were something out of a war. It is not far off to imagine the ideal audience of the first news item taking umbrage at my juxtaposition of the Swiss tragedy with the African one. To which I would say I think that is interesting and bears looking into. There is in fact something revolting about the juxtaposition. But what is it that makes me feel this way? First, it must be mentioned that the African passengers were gunned down in consequence of a political struggle about which the reporting reveals precisely nothing. Lacking any foothold in fact, speculation rushes to fill the gap, casting the gut- and headshot men as fodder for an inscrutable insurgency in which it is easy to imagine that no one is innocent. Which is precisely where the revulsion comes in. One feels the juxtaposition cheapens the deaths of the young and innocent children. But I would contend, speaking only for myself, that this feeling of cheapness springs not from the act of juxtaposition, but from the depleted context in which the African reporting is offered. We are told that some men died, and where. The rest, as behooves its setting, is darkness. The victims are statistics, not objects for compassion or pity. Certainly not the subjects of investigative journalism, which, like so many festering spots on Africa’s surface, might end up revealing more than Western audiences and opinion-makers are willing to stomach.

There is much to say here, but the trick is to say just enough, leaving you to proceed the rest of the way alone. It would be unproductive to claim that the revulsion could be resolved by allocating equal coverage to the African event and the Swiss one. Shutters snapping and words pouring over dead bodies are not the issue. One minor point may be that our operational indifference in the face of one tragedy effectively diminishes the pain we profess to feel in the face of another. Another minor and painful point is that every day on our planet of green and blue is soaked in red orgies of preventable and unjust death. The main point would seem to have something to do with the notion that, if we were but curious enough to grasp at what these stories had to tell us, we would lead lives diametrically opposed to the ones we live now, creating a civilization in everlasting repudiation of our current shambles. But we are not curious. All we hear is the call of the conductor, as if it were best to tunnel our way into the grave as quickly and incuriously as possible.

All aboard!

Man: A devilish definition

Years ago I stumbled across a very good definition of Man writ large. I found it in Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, a book that was then capable of stimulating considerable excitement, even in translation, and in widely varying audiences. I seem to remember it addressing many of my own poignant absences at the time: Adventure, fellowship, love, meaning. It also happened to address the biggest issue of all. Mankind, humanity, the species being of man and woman, the collective of all featherless bipeds, etc.–what are we? A character in the book supplied a devastating answer: Man, he said, is a hole through which time blows. Or ‘is blowing’, for as long as you’re around to experience the continuity of the action.

I found Cortazar’s definition compelling on a visceral level, and still do. Sometimes we read words without understanding why they move us, contenting ourselves with the gut-thrill or spine-shiver they inspire. In this case the shiver comes back every time I recall the phrase. But now that I’m older and maybe also a bit wiser I think I understand something about the phrase’s appeal. We all know very well that our lives occur along a segment of time bounded by eternities on either side. To say that man is a creature ‘blown apart’ or ‘dissolved’ by time is to dress up the commonplace in the garb of profundity. Simply put, the allure of the thought comes down to the hole. At first blush, the image of man-as-hole is repugnant. Neither men nor women want to conceive of themselves or be thought of as holes. Furthermore, the metaphor obviously lacks literal truth value. Its value is to be found precisely in the multifaceted dread it inspires, which captures a great deal: A visceral fear of mortality, a sense of nearly vertiginous insignificance before the infinite, the damnable fact that the foundations of our communities and our own selves are constantly shifting beneath us, the utterly human vanity of ascribing permanence or any kind of abiding meaning to our actions. And so on, ad nauseam. But really, why go on? We could throw thousands of words and fears down the hole Cortazar traced in those few words, and it would swallow every one.

Recently I happened to coin my own, related definition of what man is. And recent though it may have been, I don’t remember how exactly it came to me. You have to remember that I’m just a hole through which time is blowing. Or booze, as the case may be. But without further ado, let me introduce my own Devil’s Dictionary 2.0 definition of Man:

Man is, without exception, an eminently evictable tenant in the flophouse of time.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not generally the type of fellow to ruminate on the nature of my own being or existence generally. Those constantly scrambling to secure a slender purchase on their own physical and pecuniary existence hardly have the time to think about the nature of being in the abstract. Not that I don’t think it a worthy pursuit, or one to which I’d lend more of the time remaining to me before my ultimate eviction if my pecuniary existence were more secure. Indeed, ontology would seem to be the only discipline by which we might hope to actively and abidingly join our beings to the continuum of human existence, and so be worthy of the hope and promise that even now has not entirely vanished from the species-being of man, the vacuous flophouse tenant who is and has always been capable of anything.

I have a friend named Aaron who often urges me to explore what he calls the void at the core of the self by way of advancing my writing. To the extent that writing should be understood as a placeholder and heuristic for the spirit’s journey through space and time until the moment of its eviction, his suggestion is sound. In that spirit, I dedicate this post to Aaron, fellow time-blown hole, fellow flophouse tenant.

Hapless servitor

I like this little pairing. Other than in my own work*, it appears in an 1897 volume of Fores’s Sporting Notes & Sketches:

It also comes up in Skrynnikov and Graham’s The Time of Troubles:

And in an 1873 volume of Tinsley’s magazine:

The first snippet appears to be a reboot–to make use of parlance that has only lately soaked into my muddled brain–of the last.

But to business. What is a hapless servitor, and what is good about the expression? A way of accounting for the phrase’s valence that comes to mind at once is that it describes somebody whose expendability is in some sense defined and even ratified by servitor’s Roman heritage. The Roman Empire not only had but was itself constituted by strictly defined ranks of personhood that ranged from caesar to chattel slave, and even if the word itself appears to be a Vulgate coinage, to invoke it introduces shadows of the ancient authority the Romans attempted, successfully for a time, to impose on the world. I won’t go over hapless in detail, but in its current cornered usage it seems to be lacking in descriptive precision, serving mainly as a scene-setter meant to predispose the reader to view whoever is described as hapless in a certain way–one might generally imagine as a figure of fun, with all the “hap” denied the servitor squarely on the side of the amused reader. When paired with servitor, the word draws subconscious attention to the servitor’s expendability, probably serving to excuse readers caught up in the adventures of a more dashing protagonist for not feeling bad about the poor schlub’s death.

* “When we’d pulled up to the lobby entrance he took the keys before I could hand them to the valet, shooting the hapless servitor a contemptuous look as we brushed past.”

Special feature: Memorandum to select corrections and law enforcement officials concerning SHART

Ever wonder what a maximum value-added corrections facility would look like? What it would mean to harness the true dynamism of your caged human resources? Or what it would do for your institutional prestige and street credit to be able to boast total allegiance to the lodestone of unchallenged institutional authority? So did we. In fact, we’ve been asking those questions with you every step of the way here at Adaptive Dynamics, a certified Homeland Security provider and enterprise collaborator. That’s why we’ve set out to put “correct” back into the corrections system.

The old thinking held that it was enough to put an offender behind bars and give him a chance to think about what he had done to offend the laws that bind him. The old thinking said that once an offender had done his time, his life was his to dispose as he chose. The truth is that the old thinking won’t cut it in today’s dynamic threat environment. We all know that paroled felons never change their ways, only too well. So let’s call a spade by its name. The people directly served by the corrections system are a burden on the rest of us both before, during and after the time during which they are so served. But what if we could get back all the budget dollars and peace of mind that this criminal class has stolen from us–in spades?

It’s questions like these we pay our Big Ideas team to ask in their hutches here at Adaptive Dynamics. And after years of painstaking R&D, we have an answer. The key, simply laid down, is to make the corrective process less personal. In a word: Reform, not revenge. Received penitentiary philosophy has addressed itself to the impossible task of correcting the incorrigible. Or rather, to the institutionalization of failure. Judges and wardens outdo each other paying lip service to reform and redemption, but all are only too keenly aware of the part they play in what is essentially a costly punitive charade.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At Adaptive Dynamics, we’ve pioneered ways to transmute the vile core of an offender into something new and socially useful. Essentially the service we provide is to rewrite an offender’s social contract, with a little help from the biotech industry. As a legal subject, the offender is offered an encounter with SHART (SubHuman Adaptive Reform Tunnel) in the form of a deal. The offer may be made mid-term or as early as the plea stage, and empowers the offender to regain his liberty by submitting to a proven course of selective gene expression and cognitive repatterning therapy. That is to say, as a moral agent and provider of social utility, the offender is refurbished. We preserve just as much of the offender’s primitive personality as is required for him to maintain his moorings in the phenomenal world, with the excess shed as antisocial ballast.

Adaptive Dynamics’ selective expression therapy is predominantly focused on hierarchical socialization. By hardwiring an offender’s allegiance to a legitimate source of authority to replace the anarchical font of crime, we are able to harness that individual’s skill set for the social good. It is by this process of positing an unequivocal highest good that we are able to transmute lead into gold, or, to put it bluntly, robbers into cops.

Before getting into the specifics, a word on the humanist worldview underpinning this alchemy. As indicated, our approach differs significantly from that of traditional carceral philosophers, whose thoughts turn on vindictiveness and outrage. Of course we have no beef with the proper punishment of offenders; that’s what we’re here for. What concerns us is that in their zeal for punishment, the traditionalists have punished offender and victim alike. The financial cost to society of running a colossal penitentiary system is well known. But there is also the moral cost, too little considered, of keeping a man alive only so that he can be punished. We once had a name for this: torture. What then–liquidate them and be done? Far from it. We at Adaptive Dynamics believe in the surpassing value of a single human life. We believe in second chances. We believe, in short, in reform. Which is precisely what our selective expression and repatterning therapy now offers as a real possibility for the first time.

Petty detractors have claimed that real reform hinges on an act of the will, or of faith, and that our therapy is therefore false, tawdry and cheap. And yet, is that very act of the will not in evidence when the offender signs his name to the covenant authorizing his repatterning in exchange for a residual lifetime of service on the police force? Of course it is! In validating the covenant, with all the enumerated and numinous powers of the State as his witness, the offender enacts the entire course of treatment that follows. The act of signing the covenant is entirely of a piece with the profession of faith that enacts the religious conversion–some might say miraculously–entraining with it all the redemption and salvation that flow from that blessed source.

A further quibble prefatory to a process engineering exposé: We’re not being blue-sky dreamers when we say these offenders are precious human beings whose lives have value. If you consider that offenders often embody the qualities sought after in a peace officer, less a tweak or two here and there, I think all reasonable officials will see that our view is eminently practical, in addition to being augustly humanitarian. Stated very briefly, street felons are alert to threats emanating from the urban terrain, comfortable with the tactical use of force, able to identify cash flows and assets for forfeiture, familiar with the command structure employed by police forces and criminal syndicates alike, and schooled in the discharge of unpleasant tasks that may conflict with their primitive personal preferences. All of which is to say that given the proper lodestone realignment of the authority allele and the hierarchical hippocampus, a convict stream represents the perfect recruitment feedstock for a hungry police academy. And this, in conjunction with the clear economic benefits to ourselves, is the reason we have designed the latest Adaptive Dynamics convict reform system in the form of a subterranean pipeline. SHART is literally designed to run from penitentiary to police HQ.

As a biological subject then, the offender encounters SHART in the form of a pipeline that conveys him from the cesspool of crime and disorder to the green fields of order and lawful force. Again the thankless task of responding to detractors real and imagined rears its ugly head. For the hundredth time no–no, we’re not processing people into a slurry at one end only to reconstitute them at the other. The pipeline has been drawn as such based on the complementary realities of overcrowding within the prison complex at one end and voracious demand for police cadets at the other. The pipeline runs underground because of the potential for sabotage and disruption inherent in what segments of the street-level population have not yet been allocated to the offender or officer cohort. As a matter of pedantry, it is only possible to claim that the pipeline is being used to convey a “liquid” to the precise extent that human morality and allegiances can be said to float on a spectrum from crime to order. Adaptive Dynamics’ SHART pipeline moves offenders through the phases of this moral spectrum even as they transit the physical space between the penitentiary and the police station.

Without divulging trade secrets, this is how it works: After putting their names to the covenant at the resource inlet, convicts are provided with a themed set of lodestone literature developed by our in-house reform philosophers. This literature leaves out most of the intimidating flourishes people rightly associate with the term, preferring to focus on core takeaways such as the ineffable nature of lawful authority and the duty of all lodestone disciples to submit to it. In Phase II, i.e. pipeline Interlock 2, the preceding literature is enacted through a series of liturgical performances wherein offenders are conditioned in the exercise of and submission to lawful authority. These exercises are rigorous, robust and highly enhanced. Think of Interlock II as role-playing under the influence of proprietary epigenetic catalysts. Those who fail Interlock II’s crucial liturgical conditioning component are discarded from the  production stream. The pipeline has bleeder valves, but is not equipped with countercurrent flow. The amount of product wastage at this stage will vary from batch to batch, but the trial rate registered around 16.7%. In other words, not bad. Besides, it is important not to get stuck on the negatives given that we are dealing with a value proposition that offers its institutional investors nothing less than the wholesale transconfiguration of morals.

Interlock III is where we go under the hood, tweaking each conveyed asset’s brain chemistry to better accord with the lodestone. Interventions at this stage are conceptualized to be as noninvasive as possible. Our proprietary algorithms always privilege chemical pathways over excision, low-voltage implants over hemispheric electroshock, the cleverly cast lure over the undiscriminating dragnet. Without prejudice to the generality of the foregoing, no corrective options are left off the healer’s table, though the default preference is to preserve as much of the primitive personality as total subordination to the lodestone will permit, a quantity which varies considerably from conveyed asset to conveyed asset. Product wastage in Interlock III is currently around 5%, though this should improve and begin approaching zero as we perfect our arsenal of designer viruses tweaked to express low-morbidity lodestone allegiance proteins.

Interlock IV consists of an inpatient rehabilitation clinic where conveyed assets are supported and observed as they recover from  Phase III interventions. Recorded recidivism into primitive personality forms repugnant to the lodestone has been low throughout the clinical trials. Interlock V consists of a branded regimen of rigorous physical training accompanied by epigenetic enhancers such as involuntary fasting and sleep deprivation, lasting a full month. Trial assets exhibited zero failure in this phase, although there have been a few fatalities resulting from the “nutcracker drill”, whose appropriateness is being reconsidered by Adaptive Dynamics’ Board of Legatees.

Interlock VI is the final phase. More or less a scene by scene recapitulation of Interlock II, it serves as the final quality assurance link in our production chain. Unlike Interlock II, it is performed without the confounding factor of psychopharmaceutical boosters. It is a rousing testament to the effectiveness and benevolence of Adaptive Dynamics’ SHART pipeline that although our simulations predicted an apostasy/backsliding occurrence of 5%, the human trials elapsed with zero recidivism. What are we saying? Simple: In these trials, the finished product could reliably be called on to dispose of the pipeline wastage accumulated in previous interlocks through techniques of enhanced interrogation, asphyxiating compliance holds, and the controlled application of lawful force.

At this stage of the resulting cadets are ready to go through pro forma basic training at the Academy, but this is only necessary as a morale booster for non-pipeline recruits. In theory they are ready to be deployed into any policing scenario requiring higher-than-average conquest of the primitive personality in order to maintain lodestone allegiance. Demand for these units will skyrocket once they have been battle-hardened in urban conflict zones and as the shockwaves of criminality, recidivism and contempt of lodestone continue to reverberate around the planet. Contracting penitentiaries and police forces are therefore advised to plug into our infrastructure as soon as possible.

A word on economics. Initial outlays for police forces will be significant, but ROI is accelerated through the elimination of all salary, disability and pension claims. Commanders can also be sure that precisely zero asset forfeiture cream will be skimmed off the top of any asset-assisted hauls–lodestone assets only compete for distinction through service, never for private gain. Over time, departmental bottom lines are also larded by the fact that, as accounting items, lodestone assets are eligible for standard depreciation schedules. Supplying prisons are compensated by signing bonuses as well as a percentage of asset forfeitures and the inevitable departmental payroll savings; they may also elect to hook into the wellhead for their own manpower needs. Assets will never be deployed to their previous correctional facilities, but randomly assigned to other service points, since direct pipeline feedback might stay the hand of those otherwise inclined to sign the reform covenants and enter the pipeline.

No matter which end of the pipeline your institution taps into, the potential for savings is abundant, not to mention the prestige that accrues to affiliation with such a future-oriented Homeland Security initiative. It should probably go without saying that Adaptive Dynamics has already pioneered kindred solutions for the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, but we’re not ones for modesty or hushed rumors. We have. What you do with the liberated savings, cellblock capacity and institutional prestige is yours to determine. Whatever your game plan, Adaptive Dynamics urges qualified institutional clients to pull up to the wellhead and hook in to the main line before this bonanza gets tapped out.