The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

“What holes?”

“I sent you that review, by William James, of Spencer’s notion of the conformation of inner relationships to outer relationships. James’s critique is pretty devastating.”

“It’s a hundred and fifty years old.”

“But we’re just retracing the same ground all over again. We’re just repeating history. Over and over we keep making the same mistakes. Everyone who works on consciousness does.”

“You are lazy.”

“I’ve been trying to get a clear view of all this—”

“To be a scientist, to be anything of caliber is difficult. In fact, it is nearly impossible. You wish to study consciousness, you must, as they say, do the time. You must do boring, menial work, sometimes.

You must finish papers.”

“I’m trying. I stopped writing fiction, like you told me to. I haven’t written a word since you told me to stop.”

“You are clean. As drug addicts say.”

“Yes, I’m clean.”

“Good. One cannot be an artist, and a scientist, and a philosopher. To be that is to be a monster. A centaur. A freak.”

“I understand.”

“How many times have we had this conversation?”

“If you’d let me do it my way I could—”

“You must stop reading as well. No literature. And you must not, must never, read philosophy. It is especially dangerous for you to read philosophy.”

“I’m just trying to help, to shore things up, to focus on the foundations.”

“The foundations can be reexamined forever, an eternal return. We must progress. Or what are we doing here? Or more specifically, what are you doing here?”

Later, back in Madison, Kierk trudged across the dark frictionless expanse of the Capitol Square at some late hour of the night, craning his neck to occasionally look up at the golden angel. Beneath her the dome of the capitol building was breaching snow and wind like the rounded head of a great white whale. There was a notebook clenched in his cyanotic fingers. Not dressed for the weather, Kierk couldn’t stop shaking.

“NOTHING LESS!” Wiping at his nose with his sleeves, his eyes darted around in the freezing dark of the square, chasing phantasmagoria.

“I WILL ACCEPT NOTHING LESS. AND YOU DON’T HAVE IT. BUT INSTEAD OF LETTING ME SOLVE THIS PROBLEM YOU MAKE ME POUR WATER INTO BOTTOMLESS JARS. BOTTOMLESS—” Coughing. Kierk couldn’t stop coughing. His lungs felt like they were burning up from the cold.

Trudging back to his apartment he was a solitary figure weaving down the emptiness of State Street. At the door his hands were so chilled he couldn’t put the key in. Finally inside the building, he had a violent shivering attack on the concrete stairs, sprawled out, biting down so hard he thought his teeth might crack, his legs kicking and curling in an automatic attempt to generate heat, followed by the intense cramping pain of blood coming back to every limb and digit.

Then on to his little studio apartment he’d moved into just the month before, where the sink always dripped and the kitchen countertop was peeling off in rusted strips. Nothing on the walls, no posters or pictures, no furniture, just a nest of clothes spread out across the floor between tottering towers of books. At the center was a yoga mat with a comforter laid over it. Tiredness had hit him like a wave and he collapsed. In the closing of his eyes, there was the unhearable sound of a choice being made by someone young. Tomorrow he would confront Antonio about the irresolvable problems in his theory of consciousness, telling him the truth Kierk had kept hidden so long, and damn the consequences.

FRIDAY

Kierk wakes up and the world imposes objects and is in turn filled by them. The first thing he does is lie quietly and inspect himself, examining his mind. Right now it’s merely a dollhouse set in plastic, and while he knows the basement is flooded and heaving with crocodiles, they are confined for now. This is not depression but realism. Bouts of realism that can last anywhere between a day or a week. Once one stretched into a fully agonizing month. In the mirror he examines the bluish hue that is a half-moon arcing along his right zygomatic arch.

Of course he knows that he could be diagnosed, that there was some box in the DSM that, once checked, would allow him official approval to oscillate between periods of euthymia and dysthymia. He knows what the research on the statistical link between creativity and depression or bipolar disorder is. But Kierk thinks that drugs for mental illness are more like chemotherapy—the medicine was not actually targeting what was wrong and correcting it, but rather both the mind and the disease were poisoned and it was hoped that the mind could withstand more than the disease. Besides it all seemed rather non-neural and pretty psychologically obvious: Kierk’s capacity for self-hatred was as expansive and powerful as his ego. In fact, one necessitated the other.

It’s already late afternoon, so when he does finally get to work Karen has left for the weekend. Kierk just sits down in his chair, seeing only a few other souls in the office, and right after he sits the lights automatically wink off for the weekend and he is illuminated only by the blue light of his computer screen, his head now hanging in his hands. There are seven missed messages on his phone.

The strolling group is a slow aggregation of bodies, a disordered row, an isolation of some, a coupling of others. Eventually all the Crick Scholars are present. There are many lights and suddenly they are all very young. Mike walks with Jessica, both laughing easily. Alex lights up a joint and passes it around. Only Greg turns him down.

“There’s a hookah bar south of Houston that’s supposed to be good. Follow, boys, follow.” Carmen leads the way. In front Atif is so tall he has to bend underneath the low-hanging crossbars of construction scaffolding. The rain begins to play its small hands against the pavement. Everyone’s hair gets wet as they traverse the glistening pavement,