Primordial: An Abstraction

65

It’s getting late.

I’m getting old.

I don’t recognize my image in the mirror anymore.

I try not to look at it.

I try to remember how many years I’ve been here, subtracting the years I was here the first time.

Decades have passed like microscopic gallstones.

Pornography has more or less eclipsed reality. I no longer recognize it. A genital is a genital is a genital.

To remove the Shoes. To walk backwards up the Slide.

I still have the same roommates. They used to differ considerably in age. Now everybody looks and acts the same, with the same drooping eyes, the same crumpled mouths, the same aching backs, the same overactive bladders, the same fits of insomnia and mania.

Most of my roommates have prostate cancer.

The ones that graduated had their degrees rescinded at the graduation ceremony. In the Gymnasium, the President of the University ordered them onstage and shook their hands with a smile and gave them their diplomas and after everybody got their diplomas they were all called back onstage one at a time and briefly castigated for breaking the rules and misbehaving and their diplomas were summarily confiscated by the President’s henchmen and fed to a tremendous stone-age furnace.

Parents clapped.

Parents cried.

Then everybody returned to the dorm.

None of the faculty retire. They work until they die, often in the middle of lectures, barely able to articulate a coherent sentence or even stand up straight.

Administrators typically retire after two or three years, at which point they generally become fulltime Rotarians, spend more time on the golf course and the tennis court, and live forever.

This is not the case with the President, Provost, and several other kakistocrats.

They never retire.

They remain in office until somebody shoots them and claims their thrones.

I don’t know what happens to the staff. They lack one of two vital ontological components: the power of capital or the awareness of intelligence. Hence nobody at the University cares about them.

I fear a certain dirge of unlearning.

I suspect a certain attenuation of spirit.

My screen of knowledge flickers like a black-and-white TV with bad reception. Sometimes I can only think in zigs, zags, and croaks of static.

And I can feel the tinfoil wrapped around my antennae.

It tastes like iodine.

I may be a Wagnerian kaiju.

I hear the music in the sky. Music is an important part of college life. Students identify themselves via the Song more than the Book or the Information or the Reality or the Bartleby. The Bartleby, above all, is what really matters.

He places the battery to the tongue, short-circuiting the taste buds.

The tongue shrivels in the mad gash.

He can’t imagine the University ever existed without him. He can’t imagine the University will go on existing after he passes away.

Likewise the University.

There is an epistemological intimacy between the two apparatuses. A meaningful connection.

To reboot.

To revert.

Hello! I exist.

Wind.

Cattails and sedges dance across the swamp as I crawl out of the mud and strike a pose behind the lectern.

I am naked and putrid and glorious.

Broken rhizomes slide down the trunk of my pink, ribbed musculature.

The members of the senate clap politely. I point at the moon, silencing them.

I try not to swallow the microphone when I speak into it like a pariah.

“We are all beleaguered by moments of doubt,” I intone. “When in doubt, kill an animal. Not any animal. One of the creatures we have commercialized and eat on a daily basis. A cow. A chicken. A pig. Find one and get a machete. Gaze into its sad eyes for as long as you can. Then cut its goddamn head off. It might take more than a few blows. But you can do it. I repeat: you can do it. Shortly after the kill you will experience a marked withdrawal of the doubt in question. It may or may not return. The good news is that, if it does return — now you know what to do.”