Behind the Mask, the Presence, and Behind the Presence, the Mask

1

Where did the beings go who were the models for the masks, the instigators whom the masks invoke? They were once, at least in their own eyes, as fully physical as ourselves, a pattern of vibration that creates the appearance of solidity. They have disappeared beyond the horizon. They have climbed back through a ten-d donut hole above the clouds. Enfolded within their memories, they no longer as completely occupy what we think of as space. Who knows what percentage of them would ever want to come back? If a few still care, if they don’t all hold our actions in contempt, some pass-not film may still stop them as they’re trying to reach out. The mask allows their presences to manifest, and it recalls a time before the worlds had parted.

There was a time when the sky was just a few feet from the earth. You might turn to look around, suddenly, startled to feel the hand of a messenger resting lightly on the shoulder, the channels of light pulsing in his body, his eyes wide as plates. The future might appear on the surface of the liquid in a cup. Letters would arrange themselves into epics in the dark clouds to the north, with no need for an author yet, with tensions boiling as the scripts divided. Conchs would be blown to announce the commencement of a battle, a battle that was no different from a game. The joyous cries of the wounded would be carried to the Pole Star. Ships would soon unload their cargo of fresh contestants on the coast.

Back then, to see was a fine art. There were traps and happy accidents. A number could be up to something. It was all too easy to insult a god. The vagrant seated at the table, invited in for a meal, might begin to speak with a scope beyond that of the assembled elders of the tribe, in a version of their language that few left could understand. A boy would dream about a city, a city without shadows and with towers you could see through, and it would take him a few moments to sense that he wasn’t still tucked in bed, that he had long since been transported. He would find himself at a window on the far side of the zodiac, a triumphal march in progress.

Like a shaft cored from Antarctic ice, encoding ages of information from the atmosphere, each perfect spring, each continent-covering cloud, the axis of Omphalos held the records of past worlds. Such records were a kind of self-illuminating text. Because humans had not learned to be nervous about death, or that death was supposed to bring with it a state of near unconsciousness, they had not yet realized these worlds were in the past. Back then, all trauma was part of an initiatory process. Time was a convenience, a new technology, a crutch. Space was more or less continuous. There were seed-sounds. There were branches. No catastrophe blocked one’s passage from one body to another. You could reach out to pick from a tree, like fruit, the knowledge of the gods. Much has changed, and our trees are not similar to their trees. Our contemporary knowledge is no more than a souvenir.

Do the gods live in cities on the inside of a hollow globe, so that we stand on them as on the back of a mirror, without their movements being visible? There is some question, to be sure, about just who imitates whom, if their movements determine ours or if ours determine theirs. To see is to become aware of the hard fact of disjunction. Do we actually even live upon the surface of the Earth, the true Earth, or, as Plato argued in the Phaedo, are there two Earths, not one, and it is not we but the gods who live upon its surface?

We don’t know what the real year is, or how, on the true Earth, a century may last no longer than it takes to draw a breath. Heard thousands of miles away, by millions, our YouTube-assisted voices do not carry. No, they do not carry the way they should. They are only aimed at others of our kind. If we have forgotten them, have the models for the masks forgotten us? Or do they wait, like jilted lovers, for a small bit of attention, a piece of food, the scent of blood and rising smoke? Said Homer, “The gods do not require much.” They still do not require much, only all of ourselves, and even that we are reluctant to provide.

2

In our culture we think of the mask as something that conceals, to be used by technocrats at Burning Man or by traumatized killers in slasher flicks, by Southie bank robbers or by Dyak headhunters. We are the way we look, just human. Masks are seldom worn by serious adults. With a smile or a frown, the mask cues a response, even while the motives of its wearer cannot be other than ambiguous. The mask communicates what its wearer would prefer us to believe. Marcusian free-love theorists turn Puritan. Freedom’s heroes serve as shepherds for the Oligarchic Spring. That is to say: the mask distorts. It laughs at the efforts of the thought police, who cannot determine if their target means what he says, or if he says what he means. How to separate known unknowns from totally unknown ones? How sincere can this target be if there are always more layers of meaning to express, when behind his literal words, some alien presence crouches?

How easy it is to turn a fact into a symbol, a symbol into a life or death dispute. The best liars lie to themselves. They do not know they are lying, any more than you do, reader/listener, when you tell yourself we’re speaking the same language. A mask is not practical to wear to work, at least not more than 200 times a year.

Pay no attention to the fallout from your actions. It is true that certain forests have gone missing. Whole populations have been ripped up by the roots. If some sea has met its death by accident, well, what is that to you? The mask that you wear is a testament to the Power of Positive Thinking. We are no more than the innocent corporate henchmen that we seem!

There are, of course, other types of masks that do not look like masks, but instead, let’s say, like a stealth bomber or a GPS satellite, which from a distance allow us to destroy. To rename things is to be able to reclassify our shadows. See, it is those Black Block Anarchists who wear masks. We do not have any need of them ourselves. Our faces are wide open. The objective world itself is a kind of mask, for a consciousness that withdraws to a dimension of its own. Who knows what we feel? It only matters how we look. The gods themselves set the precedent for our sociopathic coolness. We cleanse the fields with plausible deniability from a height, to broadcast to the world our love for children.

The mask provided to the victim is that of a perpetrator inverted through a lens, static on a screen, a red and blue heat outline targeted inside a building. On the World Wide Web, we can create for ourselves, with some help from our massive data system, a different interactive mask for each virginal demographic to be conned, for each tweak of our Neo-Darwinist agenda, for each jumpstart of the corpse of Calvin, for each faux-Caliphate that we want to overthrow. One keystroke by a nerd in Denver could surgically remove a hospital in Kabul. To grow is to progress, to annihilate the not-self, to promote the self-as-brand. To progress is to joyously outsource our own lives. From the many: one, the greatest good for the smallest percentage. May the force be with you. May the odds be ever in your favor. Free suicide nets will be provided at the Foxconn iPhone factory in Zhengzhou.

3

About the military-industrial-infotainment-complex—enough said; the name itself tells us everything that we might want to know. Oceania is at war with Eurasia, and it has always been at war with Eurasia. So too, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, as all user-friendly sources agree. Wars are always against bad actors, who must be induced to attack us. No end-game need be specified or imagined. If a hero gets shot, it is only in the shoulder. The stars are handsome and/or beautiful. Stocks go only up.

This is not to say that no fluctuations are allowed. Any downward movement, however, should be seen as just a blip in a long-term upward trend. The masks of abundance are traded back and forth. The economy is a tower conjured out of masks, with a gyroscope on the 52^nd year. We have placed a value on this tower of 40.3 trillion, and we have cantilevered it to withstand a shift of mood. Up and up it goes. See it go, but our mood is only as stable as all moods tend to be. There are those who hate our tower for its height, who have been sent, they claim, to enforce the law of gravity. The planet proves a schizoid mother. How odd it is that that our efforts do not result in success. From the mouth of each mask on the tower, there shoots a flaming tongue. Winds whistling through the giantwork prompt a bottomless nostalgia.

And then there is no tower, only wind. The sky smells like the murder of world. The ash smells a bit like sandalwood. Who can pick his or her mask from the many strewn about? The wind has hands enough, yes, to sort them from the wreckage, but to use these is a skill not easily acquired. Our bones are cold, and a scar forms on the site of our removal. There will be no further updates to our programs. What sort of god is empty space? Skewed harmonies from before the Big Bang swell, growing louder and more frightening by the minute, and then more frightening still.

4

Many previous imperial technocracies have existed, both in this world and in others, the great majority of which have left evidence of no more value than a Rorschach blot. There is no way to count them. There is no way, that is, if we want these cultures to stay put, if we plan to get the same number two times in a row. Each functioned according to the physics of its period. The laws of nature are set as bait for the unwary. We see what is put before us; we do not see what is there.

It is 1976, let’s say. The spacecraft Viking One transmits photographs from Mars. Top experts at Cape Canaveral do not recognize the Pharaoh’s mask, staring back at them from the bare plains of Cydonia, as an artwork made by humans like themselves. Later photographs, taken by the MGS spacecraft in 1998, are shot from a much different angle, with blurred details and few shadows. It is feared that the release of sharper photographs would not put an end to the controversy. They are then processed through two filters by the JPL staff at NASA, further flattening out what is left and thus nipping all conspiracy theories in the bud. Is the Face on Mars a monument? Is it actually even a face, or no more than a digital artifact, seen one way in 1976 and another in 1998? It is, at the least, a clear test of our motives. There are a great many things that we do not want to know.

Seeing is believing, yes, but true vision is quite different from belief. We must think in terms of a front and a back, as in a mirror and its mercury, as in a god’s face and the darkness underneath. In the same breath, we must think in terms of the fragile and illusory surface that divides them. Holy terrors slip from one side to the other. We are ambushed by some violent form of enlightenment from behind. We see in one direction, only, or at least in one at a time. We no longer see from each and all of the 360 degrees of a circle.

Our bodies are the masks for vast energies that we cannot hope to investigate, not most of us at least, and that we can, even with the right help, just barely learn to control. We would prefer to mask these energies. How easy it is to pretend they never did exist, these energies that turned an egg into a fetus into a person in nine months. And should we once more start to feel them bubbling up, we may still tell ourselves that there is not much going on, that such energies are ours to do with what we will, at least until we are called to set aside our habits. Minutes, days, or years may then go by, not that there is really any difference. All at once, we are seized by the hair. The sky opens like a camera’s aperture, and then sticks open. A tiny bird from the preexistent light steps forward with an outstretched hand, upon which is a talking stone. He has come to serve as substitute teacher, as a guide. If we dare, we are free to formulate a question, and the stone will either answer or destroy us.

We find that obscure glyphs have been tattooed on our chests. Our science is flawed. Our arts are superficial. We reek of genocides. We have much to answer for. We do not know if the light will reciprocate our advances. We are hesitant to approach it too directly. And yet, how absurd we are. Our mistake is in thinking that we have some way to hide, that there is no cost to ambivalence, that the gods have lost all interest in our actions, that the light would ever allow us to say “no.” In spite of our reluctance, we find that we have travelled much farther than we should.

5

Our ears ring. Coasts collapse beneath us. In the distance, we can see the pulse of the derelict reactors, and we find that we have travelled much further than we should. As we glance up from our feet, we can see the stairs that stretch to a megalithic platform, the top and smallest one of five, with its 80-ton blocks, scorched with flame, heaped with treasures from where an ocean has withdrawn. There, we confront the Holders of Our Breath, the Fearsome Catalysts, the Nine, whose eyes are blank. They have come from the depths to invite us to a contest, a contest that is always just about to start.

Should we take part, or refuse? To refuse is to decide that the Earth is far beneath us, that our only goal is joy. To refuse is to leap beyond space altogether, and there stay, in a realm of guarded light, to gain knowledge but lose the capacity to act. To accept is to be swept in a circuit towards Orion, to fight terrifying battles, to know an even greater joy, only to find that we must subtly return, to something like our human form, to the labyrinth of mirrors, to share what we have learned. In the end, perhaps, there are not two paths but one. Should we shrink from or yearn for what coils in the abyss? Should we fear or laugh? Should we cling to light or take part in the Games? The mask in our hands will inform us of its answer.

What occurs when we climb the steps to the fifth platform, when we dare to confront the Holders of Our Breath, our Fearsome Catalysts, the Nine? We are not there an “I,” nor are we quite a “We.” We are the reenactment of a half-remembered promise. We are they who must complete the story that we told. There may not, after all, be tens of millions of competitors. There may be no more than a fraction of a fraction, a few to the one side, a few more to the other. These have come, like the Nine, to start the Games again. In their museum crates and hypogaea, noseless statues start to breathe. Our wounds just barely hurt. How wonderful it is to once more see in all directions. From the depths, the cries of the dismembered swell, as the waves even now begin to lap the platform’s edge. The horizon is cold. A red glow kisses it. The Games darken almost as soon as they’ve begun. Few rules won’t be broken. A fascist youth stokes the Olympic flame.

6

Are the masks in the Museum of Interstellar History? No. They are not in the Museum of Interstellar History, or in the Museum of Racial Flux, or in the Museum of Atlantic Fog. Tribes, the rumors of whose deaths have been exaggerated, have returned from books to take them from the walls. Smoke pours from the miles of burning oil rigs in Sumer, as the U.S., heir to Carthage, dreams of bombing Greenland. Russia, the Fifth Rome, plots to expand to Dublin in the west, to Cairo in the south. Luminous orbs appear, for no good reason, by the thousands. China bars all access to the pyramids on the Guanzhong plains of Shaanxi.

Why isn’t the Global South content to pay homage to Ophiuchus, why must they trespass north? Such questions have been asked not once but many times. Forced migrations will rename all cultures in their paths. Cars will be swept from their overpasses. Tornadoes will tell secrets to those with ears to hear. The Holders of Our Breath, the Fearsome Catalysts, the Nine, have no real interest in the outcome of the Games, none that we, in our media bubbles, are now prepared to understand. A war has been declared on hard technologies, on the state, on structures that cannot be folded up. The masks are works of art in progress. Rising up from the cold sea, they live.

7

To say to a visitor exiting the museum: “Excuse me, sir or madam, but a mask appears to have attached itself to your face. It is not yours; please take it off. You look dead. You have had, for one incarnation, perhaps enough excitement. Here are your complementary dark glasses. A German Shepherd will be provided to lead you to a star. Beyond that is the lightning void.”