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

night. From his solemn stare I surmise he must be gazing out at the tombstone of his mentor Socrates. Just a bit farther down I see Aristotle with his notes and specimen samples but I don’t approach. My destination is the outer branches and although I am torn with curiosity I push on, finding footholds carefully in some places, while in others I can proceed at a steady stride. The order of the tree is not always what I expect, although in general it obeys the hierarchy of the sciences: philosophy and mathematics at its base and then physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, and sociology (these branches seem flimsy and enervated at the very top). I linger over Leibniz and race past Rutherford, then have to backtrack until I find Galen standing next to a cot where a diseased man clutches something—a cross? Galen is whispering soothingly in ancient Latin. After a few more figures I come to William Harvey, who stands next to the ghoulish vivisected body of a horse strung up between two thin offshoots of the tree that form an X, a Roman crucifixion, with the valved and chambered great equine heart struggling to contract in the dim light of candles, and he says to himself— “It’s a pump that circulates. A pump! And the body is a complete circuit.” Higher up, William James is here. He’s alone and well-dressed but in near-total darkness along an empty section of a branch of the tree. Quiet and kneeling he does not turn to me as I pass but I hear a continuous murmur. I think he is praying. Tracking sideways a bit, finding a connecting branch, I come upon Francis Crick. The confident thirty-five-year-old is seated at a small table with a half-full beer and is sketching on a bar napkin under a single illuminating bare bulb and I can make out the twist of a helix in bleeding pen. And near the end of the branch Antonio Moretti is on the tree. Perhaps him being here is just a personal affectation of mine, or maybe the tree has some sort of a fractal structure, whereon, zooming in on a branch, more branches are revealed, endless, and in the end everyone is somewhere on the tree. Regardless, he is here, looking just as I knew him. He has in his hands a chewed pencil and sheets of paper which contain causal diagrams and logical mechanisms and information theory terminology. He is impeccably dressed in a sports jacket and bolo tie. He turns from me as I approach and will not look upon me. At times I switch temporal perspectives, flipping back to being on the ground gazing up at the tree’s enormous arboreal outline before I have climbed it—it is then that I am enraged by the tree, I attack its base, I scream at it and tear at the impenetrable armor of its trunk. I think of ways of chopping it down, each more outlandish than the next. But I know that this is mere release, catharsis, as I could never truly injure it. I have neither the tools nor the will. But I do prostrate myself on my knees to beg, to asking pleadingly—where on the tree? Where on the tree would a theory of consciousness be placed? On what far and tangential branch? On physiology as it turns to neurology? Past computer science toward the arcane side of information theory? Off of mathematics and physics? From where would it grow? An extension of analytic philosophy? What of the far tuft that is complexity science and the language of state-spaces? The only question I ever ask it as I beg or rage—where on the tree? Where on the tree? And what figure will be paused there frozen in the discovery of it? A face illuminated by the revelation, yes, but the eyes clouded cataract white, struck blind by the Damascene light. For no revelation is without cost . . .

SUNDAY

Carmen wakes up having slept only lightly. Lying in the hotel bed she is just able to snatch at her last dream’s end and, by focusing on the last scene, is able to rewind and recover it. In the dream she had been in the CNS, trying to find Kierk. Or rather it had looked like the CNS, had all the surface appearances of the normal everyday building, but somehow everything was different. The building had the same relations, the same designs and shapes and hung scientific posters and corkboards, but there was something in the deep structures, some presence she could sense not in her base perception but rather solely through whatever apperceptive means she normally identifies intentionality, teleology, mind, life. So moving through the building she had also known it was a façade for something actually organic, biological. She had been aware of this but unperturbed and unfazed and her attention had been entirely on finding Kierk, hurrying after him to deliver a message, some discovery that she could not articulate now while she’s awake but had fully possessed in the dream. So she had searched through the hallways that were not really hallways and in the stairwells that were not really stairwells until she heard, around a bend, an elevator door ding open. Turning a corner she had seen in front of the elevator doors a macaque in its plastic box, set like a totem to greet the opening of the elevator. Carmen had paused, watching it from afar as it writhed within the box, the skullcap on its head vibrating obscenely as its body scampered about. And from the elevator had come the form of Kierk, a stooped and harried figure, cautiously approaching and leaning in as if to listen. For a while he just held an ear to the macaque’s lips, then with a sound as loud as a gunshot he had rocketed back sporting just the ragged remains of his skull. The bang itself had woken her up, but