Can(n)on
from Experiments in Belief
Some evidence that I spent a little too long studying writing at academic institutions . . .
This story alludes to an Age of Terror, but it was written before September 11, 2001—sometime in the late ‘90s. Around that same time, I created an Islamic police officer as one of the main characters in my novel, γ—an indication of just how established these cultural tensions were long before the real War on Terror.
These are not the words of an unstable mind. If I had an unstable mind, my attacks would have no name, no content, no value to the American people. They would have the peripatetic quality of children's games.
I am a deliberate, alloplastic organism, which means-hear me, aimless worm, blind to the very design of your life-which means the material of my body has no bound. The shattered window of Candy Sampson's car (to anticipate your first question) was-and is-my body. The gas bombs and corpses are my body. The word on the page is my body. The cum I leave on the window sill is my body. You, listening, are most definitely my body.
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.
*
92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard . . .
. . .
115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural patterns of human behavior . . .
. . .
116. Because of [this] constant pressure . . . there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society's requirements . . .
. . .
146. Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the methods of controlling human behavior that modern society is developing . . .
. . .
152. . . . Each new step in the assertion of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem that faces society . . .
- Theodore J. Kaczynski, The Unabomber Manifesto, 1995, found on Trevor Pritchet (among other books) after his death.
*
The hurricane wake of human phylogenesis is also my body, our body, the sum total of all human bodies: the faces of men in stone, the seed-crystals of cities, the alloys and fires, an earth bent by us the way dense stars bend space-time. Like morons in the service of gods, we work to give our rocky world softness, lability, sentience, even crude velleity. I seek to become the densest star of my time, a black hole to draw all stars into one, so that we can invaginate this pitiful world-design and throw off the gods that wove it into our beings.
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.
*
Just mentioning his name gives Trevor Pritchet the victory he sought. A "time capsule," he called it. We might as well call it the same. The materials he duct-taped to his naked body still orbit all discussions of that deed, its motivation, and its impact. His philosophical writings, too-worn in paperback on a chain around his neck-lead us back to his notion of an Age of Terror. Can we see his time as anything but that? The architectonics of exchange and transmission remain homomorphic-if not isomorphic-to those of 2002, and the ideoplasm (can we even mention culture without use of Pritchet's term?)-the ideoplasm only grows, as the stain of human consciousness widens and seeps deeper into the microstructure of material things. We speak to each other by marking and scarring in ways Pritchet could have only imagined. The rape continues. The hats on our heads are the plunder of millennia. Our voices unfurl like thunder in bombs, plagues, suicides. Our ideas shatter the bodies and structures that try to contain them.
- Henrietta Montegue, Thunder of the Word, 2057.
*
The notoriety of that one incident obscures the nature of my project. I am not cruel or sadistic or anything Yale, the courts, or the press would have you believe. The injuries I gave Candy were the clumsy by-products of a simple desire to control her, to just hold her still. The wrist must have broken when she fell onto the road, the black eye-well, maybe she hit her head on the door or something, I don't know. The point is, I was there not to hurt her but to do what my body demanded. In general, I give in to my urges. I am true to the life-force within me, which is what frightens most people. I listen. The old chemistry is strong in me, the cyclic reactions faster, mightier, needing more solar energy. Like us all, I am a dissipative structure for the sun's heat, an eons-old whirling fluid, only my turning is tighter, quicker-I feel it. I let it build. I take off my clothes in my back yard or down by the creek and let the sun soak into me. How my body loves the heat of sunlight. This is the feeling behind all of my thinking: my naked body in the wide-open sunshine, stretching, turning, blooming, my hope and fear of eyes hidden behind the vines and black oaks . . . see me, my body cries, arching skyward, knees spread in the air, hips lifting to God . . . You see, my time in jail brought coherence to my mental and physical urges. My desire is the primal desire for Other, for the archetype of Other. On my back facing the sky, I impregnate all forms everywhere. The collective lust of civilization is my lust. Form-giving is my bodily purpose, deep, hormonal, necessary: the lust of the ancient demiurge. Listen! Now! You, too, are a demiurge, unconscious, rapacious, a befouler of the Other. Every striation of my thought, every mail-bomb murder you see on the news, every orgasm-even the rape of my former teaching assistant-yearns to teach you that one principle.
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.
*
your achievements are unsurpassed you are highly ordered mass
BUT YOU CAN BET YOUR ASS YOUR FREE ENERGY WILL DISSIPATE
two billion years thus far now mister here you are an element
IN A SEA OF ENTHALPIC ORGANIC COMPOUNDS
you're only as elegant as your actions let you be a piece of
CHAOS RELATED PHYLOGENETICALLY TO EVERY LIVING ORGAN SYSTEM
they're siblings don't you see the earth evolves and will
ROTATE WITHOUT YOU CONSTANTLY
- "The World Won't Stop" by Bad Religion, from No Control, 1989, a CD taped to Trevor Pritchet's left breast.
*
Most appalling of all are the servile mewling academics who go pawing over every little scrap of refuse Mr. Pritchet left on the ground. Forget the copy of Moby Dick that hung down near Pritchet's crotch, forget The Ecology of Commerce, forget Kafka and J. G. Ballard-you want to make your mark (nothing new about this), go cut your teeth on the virgin texts: the 2600 T-shirt he wore like a bandanna, which bore the circuit diagram for a "red box" (who cares), the various CD's taped to his skin, that Carter Scholz story where a man has sex with his furniture and finally, out of general despondency, leaps out of his window (puh-lease), the DVD of the movie 1984 (how original), the scraps of poetry, platitude, and popular nonsense made into ugly green tattoos, like this:
I'm so agitated,
I'm so convoluted,
I don't know what I know,
But I'd just like to shoot it.
- Electric Eels
Okay, so maybe he wanted to blow his brains out. Big deal. We don't need top scholars to tell us this. We don't need eructations of Errour like this:
A most delicious irony appears in the third verse, where we might say that Graffin and Gurewitz undercut the very spirit of Pritchet's project:
HEY MORAL SOLDIER YOU'VE GOT RIGHTEOUS PROCLAMATIONS AND PRECIOUS
tomes to fuel your pulpy conflagrations
Yet we must not forget that Pritchet saw himself primarily as a pacifist and eco-terrorist, regardless of whether the two are reconcilable. While he injected saccules with nerve gas in his basement laboratory, he probably hummed right along with the chorus, delighted by every word:
I WANT TO CONQUER THE WORLD GIVE ALL THE IDIOTS A BRAND NEW
religion . . . I'll do away with air pollution then I'll
SAVE THE WHALES WE'LL HAVE PEACE ON EARTH AND GLOBAL
communion.......
- I. E. Mellon, Decussations: The n-space of Trevor Pritchet's Last Communication, 2009.
The last thing we need is a professor from Yale-the institution from which Pritchet was cast out in the first place-elevating a terrorist's music collection with scholarly discourse. (Erroneous discourse at that: Mellon, a delectician of irony, entirely misses the ironic intent of the above song
1.) Let Pritchet die. He was a nut, and the junk pasted all over his body was the shopping-cart rubbish of a homeless schizophrenic. Please, everyone, discuss something else. 1 see my essay "Give Up the Goose," New Directions, LXII, v.3, 2016.- Frederick Cone, "Shut up, Everyone," Harpers, 2019.
*
If you ever want a face-to-face encounter with evil in our time, go talk to my probation officer, Luziana Lopez. The gradual liquefaction of our planet-which will lead us past humanity, evolution, and organic matter to a senseless, form-generating, planet-wide ocean like that on Solaris-has already entrained the mechanism of Ms. Lopez. As she reviewed the police report of a streaker in the Greenbelt, her fingers scrolling the paper in regular increments like wheels of a printer, I could see the hulking structures of intellection subdividing the muscles of her face: the written code of law, guidelines, operating procedures. Ms. Lopez lifted her huge, heavy eyes and said, "Mr. Pritchet, the incident bears resemblance to episodes of your past behavior."
A heavily rouged death-mask spoke these words, a servomechanism, a mouthpiece for cross-referenced psychologists' records, confessions, rumors in the tabloids. Touch yourself near an open window, especially on campus at a top university, and you will be made into a hated monster. "The notion of selfhood," I began, daunted by her mind's inertia, "which allows such comparisons, has a short time to live in our monadized culture. Moment will soon contain self, just as one pixel value already conveys the full weight of contemporary art."
"I'm not a cop, Mr. Pritchet, but let me give you some advice. If this is you-I'm not saying it is-but if this is you-" She tapped the yellow paper-"I'd go right to Dr. Hornby. Because if you cross the line again, you'll be on ice for more years than you've got left."
So I stared into the eyes of cold intellection. Know this: abstract thought has its own priorities, boundaries, and minions. "Ice comes in many forms."
Ms. Lopez set down the report. "Are you listening to me?"
"The coming changes are of such an ecumenical scale that my one life is a dust speck in a mountain of clay. We'll all go where abrasion sends us."
"I have to be honest. Your response regarding this report does not reassure me. Have the police talked with you yet? You are the prime suspect."
The cops had come the day before, looking like undead cyborg front soldiers, agents of the Borg, but I had hidden in the study. "No," I said.
"They'll probably ask some questions. You should take the inquiry seriously."
"Ms. Lopez, I am the only truly serious human being that has ever lived."
Ever since the written word freed cognition from the flesh of individual organisms, a second primeval sea has rested on the bedrock of our bodies, assembling its own amino chains and apomorphic progressions, apparent to us only as uniforms, fractured ideologies, and the cold looks of the assimilated as they execute Cognition's will. Ms. Lopez glowered, rolling her tongue behind her closed red lips. "My role here is not to interrogate you or second-guess your mental health. However, I do think it would be good for you to see Dr. Hornby prior to the regular check-up. How 'bout I call his office?"
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.
*
On his return the configuration of his furniture seemed to repudiate his advances. From his parcel he withdrew the wine, paté, and cold fowl he had bought at a gourmet shop. He sat familiarly, but with tenderness, on a chair as he spread his meal on the kitchen table. When he finished eating he buffed the tabletop with lemon oil, and read calmly through the paper.
Despite good intentions again he behaved like a brute. He attacked the chairs with a knife, since that seemed the only access through the synthetic leather to their innards. This violation was irrevocable. He moved about the room, avoiding only his bed, with which he was already intimate.
- Carter Scholz, "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor", CRANK!, v 1.1, 1993, Xeroxed and taped like a greave over Pritchet's shin.
*
The forces of intellection approach. The noösphere, like a body, can isolate the location of an antigen and dispatch lymphocytes. My appointment with Hornby, on Monday, will be the hour of my catabolism if I do not take action. You see, my understanding has gone so far beyond that of a normal person that I can no longer even communicate with people of my time. My only hope is to speak to the future, when the sheer power of information to break lives and shatter materials may awaken a few human organisms to the presence of danger. These few will almost definitely lose their battle, but who knows. I must try.
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.
*
You've got to be kidding. Why should I feel any guilt? Pritchet did to me what Hitler did to Nietzsche-he fed my work to the pigeons. No, I don't concern myself with the fate of my ideas in the popular press-or in the cosmogenies of lunatics, to be more specific. The arena for my theories is the academic press of, say, one hundred years from now. My writings will survive intact, as will Pritchet's early works, the respected treatises on sociotopology. The rest of this nightmare will blow away with tomorrow's loose newspapers. Pritchet is dead now, thank God, and he will be buried in ever shrinking footnotes until his seven inches of shelf space in university libraries will be his whole world again. He's a very small man, really, in the history of ideas. His name may continue to circulate in specialized circles, but the blemish will be removed from my work and from the misappropriated work of other scholars-though perhaps not from our age, which may in fact be remembered as an "Age of Terror." Your pens will see to that, I suppose.
- Anjalia Mehta, press conference in New York City, 2002.
*
The day is here, the day I will annex my territory in the realm of mental artifice. Truly, that has been my realm all along, even when my body most wanted engagement with the world of things. The greatest fallacy I leave behind is my body, its desire to cause explosions of need in onlookers like what I feel sometimes, looking on. What a joke! A daily forgetting of myself. All my bodily need has brought just one end, that vertiginous, emetic moment when a prostitute's beeper goes off and she calls back to base, says that she's fine, and leaves with a week's worth of your small salary-the moment when you know how little you mean to her, or to anyone. Meaning has been mine only since I began gassing top intellectuals. A corpse can fascinate like no living thing, so the essays I include with each bomb, mass mailed to the press, have all been widely published and discussed. You all love me now. "The dark angel of our subconscious," Dr. Wilbur Longwood has called me. "The Devil among us," said Ralph Reed just last night, smiling with bottled glee on my TV screen. I have single-handedly revived eschatological discourse, which was my bitter, solitary goal all those fallow years at the university.
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.
*
His choice to attack a dinner funded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences-in particular, a gathering for Nobel laureates and their families-shows just how completely Pritchet's talent for apropos spectacle endured to the very end. Not only do we have the terrorist's life-long hostility to academics in this macabre scene, but also we have the issues of violence, progress, and power, rendered in all their anfractuous ambiguity. On one hand, you have a celebration of intellectual achievement resting on Alfred Nobel's oil money and the money he earned with patents on dynamite, blasting gelatin, and ballistite. On the other hand, you have a man in opposition to the energy-burst of progress and intellection who himself employs bombs-albeit, gas bombs-and intellectual works. We can only conclude that he intended this irony, perhaps as a way to expose the depravity of the technocratic order, perhaps simply to use our tools against us, or perhaps because he wanted to demonstrate something arcane about meaning and the violence of its creation. His journal hints at all these explanations and more. All we can do is follow his bidding and wonder.
- Claude Nector, Journal of Deeds, 2025.
*
Inside my coat, I will be naked except for the knowledge I carry into the future. A human time capsule, I will shoot my personal canon of cultural artifacts into the heart of the new millennium. I will throw off my coat, jerk my string, and brand my image on the chirographic exostructures that comprise this glacine Ice Age. You will see who I am. You, who have hated and ignored me. You, who fear nothing. You, who know so little. You will see me. You will see! Let the cameras find the bodies. Let the voices reify my naked corpse. You will see! You will watch and listen and you will cherish what I leave behind. For you are my destination, and inside you I belong.
- Trevor Pritchet, Last Diary, 2002.