The Stochastic Man

31

In waking dreams I imagine a time when I am truly able to see. My vision pierces the murky invisible sphere that surrounds us all, and I penetrate into the realm of light. I have been asleep, I have been imprisoned, I have been blind, and now, now that the transformation has come upon me, it is like an awakening. My chains are gone; my eyes are open. About me move slow uncertain shadow-shrouded figures, blind and stumbling, their faces gray with bewilderment and uncertainty. These figures are you. And among you and about you I dance, my eyes luminous, my body ablaze with the joy of new perception. It has been like living beneath the sea, bent under a terrible pressure and held away from the tantalizing brightness by that membrane, flexible yet impenetrable, that is the interface between sea and sky; and now I have broken through it, into a place where everything glows and gleams, everything is haloed with radiance, shimmering in gold and violet and scarlet. Yes. Yes. At last I see.

What do I see?

I see the sweet and tranquil earth upon which our dramas are played. I see the sweaty struggles of the blind and deaf, buffeted as they strive by an incomprehensible fate. I see the years unrolling like the long uncoiling fronds of spring ferns, bright green at the tips, stretching away from me into infinity. In brilliant flashes of intermittent illumination I see decades sprouting into centuries and centuries becoming eons and epochs. I see the slow processions of the seasons, the systole and diastole of winter and summer, autumn and spring, the whole delicately interlocked rhythm of warmth and cold, of drought and rain, of sunlight and mist and darkness.

There are no limits to my vision. Here are the labyrinths of tomorrow’s cities, rising and falling and rising again, New York in lunatic growth, tower piled on tower, the old foundations becoming the rubble on which the new foundations rest, layer upon layer down below like the jumbled strata of Schliemann’s Troy. Through twisted streets scuttle strangers in unfamiliar clothing, speaking a jargon beyond my understanding. Machines walk about on jointed legs. Mechanical birds, twittering like creaky gates, flutter overhead. All is in flux. Look, the ocean recedes, and slippery brown beasts lie stranded and gasping on the naked sea floor! Look, the sea returns, lapping at the ancient highways that span the city’s margin! Look, the sky is green! Look, the rain is black! Look, here is change, here is transformation, here are the whims of time! I see it all!

These are the eternal motions of the galaxies, dim and fathomless. These are the precessing equinoxes, these are the shifting sands. The sun is very warm. Words have become needle sharp. I catch quick glimpses of great entities sprouting and rising and decaying and dying. These are the boundaries of the empire of the toads. This wall marks the place where the republic of the long-legged insects begins. Man himself changes. His body is transformed many times, he becomes gross and then pure and then more gross than ever, he evolves strange organs that tremble like tuning forks from the nodes of his leathery skin, he has no eyes and is seamless from lips to scalp, he has many eyes, he is covered with eyes, he is no longer male and female but functions in the form of some intermediate sex, he is tiny, he is vast, he is liquid, he is metallic, he leaps across the starry spaces, he huddles in moist caverns, he floods the planet with legions of his own kind, he diminishes by choice to a few dozen, he shakes his fist at a red swollen sky, he sings frightening songs in a nasal drone, he gives love to monsters, he abolishes death, he basks like a mighty whale in the sea, he becomes a horde of buzzing insectlike toilers, he pitches his tent in blazing diamond-bright desert sands, he laughs with the sound of drums, he lies down with dragons, he writes poems of grass, he builds vessels of air, he becomes a god, he becomes a demon, he is everything, he is nothing.

The continents move ponderously about, like hippopotamuses doing a stately polka. The moon dips low in the sky, peering out of its own forehead like an aching white blister, and shatters with a wonderful glassy ping ! that reverberates for years. The sun itself drifts from its moorings, for everything in the universe is in constant motion and the journeys are infinitely various. I see it slide into the gulf of night, and I wait for it to return, but it does not return, and a sleeve of ice glides over the black skin of the planet, and those who live at that time become things of the night, cold-loving, self-sustaining. And across the ice come hard-breathing beasts from whose nostrils fog issues; and from the ice come flowers of blue and yellow crystal; and in the sky shines a new light, I know not from where.

What do I see, what do I see?

These are the leaders of mankind, the new kings and emperors, holding their batons of office aloft and summoning fire from the mountaintops. These are the gods yet unimagined. These are the shamans and warlocks. These are the singers, these the poets, these the makers of images. These are the new rites. These are the fruits of war. Look: lovers, killers, dreamers, seers! Look: generals, priests, explorers, lawgivers! There are unknown continents to find. There are untasted apples to eat. Look! Madmen! Courtesans! Heroes! Victims! I see the schemes. I see the mistakes. I see the miraculous achievements, and they bring tears of pride to my eyes. Here is the daughter of your daughter’s daughter. Here is the son of your sons beyond reckoning. These are nations still unknown; these are nations newly reborn. What is this language, all clicks and hisses? What is this music, all stabs and snarls? Rome will fall again. Babylon will come a second time, and lie astride the world like a great gray octopus. How wondrous are the times to come! All that you can ever imagine will befall, and more, much more, and I see it all.

Are these the things I see?

Are all doors open to me? Are all walls made into windows?

Do I look upon the murdered prince and the newborn savior, on the fires of the destroyed empire burning on the horizon, on the tomb of the lord of lords, on the hard-eyed voyagers setting forth across the golden sea that spans the belly of the transformed world? Do I survey the million million tomorrows of the race, and drink it all down, and make the future’s flesh my own? The heavens falling? The stars colliding? What are these unfamiliar constellations that shape and reshape themselves as I watch? Who are these masked faces? What does this stone idol, tall as three mountains, represent? When will the cliffs that wall the sea be ground to red powder? When will the polar ice descend like inexorable night upon the fields of red flowers? Who owns these fragments? Oh, what do I see, what do I see?

All of time, all of space.

No. Of course it won’t be like that. All I’ll see is what I can send myself out of my own few scruffy tomorrows. Brief dull messages, like the vague transmissions of the tin-can telephones we built as boys: no epic splendors, no baroque apocalypses. Yet even those blurred and muffled sounds are more than I could have hoped to have when I was asleep like you, when I was one of those blind and stumbling figures moving in clumsy sluggish lurches through the kingdom of shadows that is this world.