Dear A****,
I'm
sorry for disappearing so suddenly a few years back. One day I'm still
there on the East Coast busily discharging the duties of my profession,
while also, I'm sure you remember, circulating in something pretty close
to what you could straight-facedly call a 'demimonde': publishing,
blogging, tweeting and getting retweeted like a star. And then, the next
day, silence. As you probably detected, it was a challenging time for
me at many levels, personal, professional, etc. I've been meaning for a
long time to write to fill you in on what's been going on, but I had to
feel like I was starting to get back on my feet again before I even
dared.
I've got my own place now, in Sacramento. Not Sacramento exactly, but
Carmichael. Which is basically Sacramento. My upstairs neighbors are a
couple of skinheads. It's a good thing I'm white, I guess. They mostly
keep to themselves, always loading asbestos-removal equipment into and
out of their pick-up truck. It's not so bad. I was living with my mom
for the first two years or so out in Fair Oaks (also basically Sac), but
she eventually pushed me to get a job at Best Buy, drawing on some
connections with the middle-manageriate at our local outlet, connections
that also seem somehow to involve Timothy, her Vietnamese manicurist
who always works with a parrot on his shoulder. I don't know all the
behind-the-scenes machinations that went on, but somehow a job was
procured for me, and I guess it's around that time that I started
feeling like I'm my own person again. Actually that's a bit of an
exaggeration: I'm still so steeped in debt I'm not anywhere near being
my own person. I can't afford to be a person for anyone but the
credit-card companies and their collectors.
At least I've paid back everything I owed to Best Buy. That's right:
for about 9 months I was basically an indentured servant, having ruined a
few Bluetooth Cochlears the first week on the job while trying to show
some customers how to insert them (I didn't know you had to have a
wax-removal certificate from an ENT first). They docked the cost of them
from my pay. That was only like half a paycheck, but the real problem
started when some of my co-workers (half my age, of course) figured out
how to hack the Acer Goggles we had on display in order to get high on
the deep-brain-stimulator stuff they were emitting, before the FDA or
ATF or whoever handles this sort of thing put a stop to it.
What a crazy story that was! I couldn't believe it when the scandal
broke, and Acer's CEO held a press conference to admit they had come up
from behind and beat Google at the enhanced-reality-glasses game by
including a little photon beam or whatever that travelled directly to
the limbic system and induced a low-grade sense of bliss. My co-workers
were a bunch of stoner idiots, but to their credit they were some of the
first kids in the country not only to figure out what was going on, and
why all of a sudden Acer's profits were going through the roof, but
also how to up the photon dosage and stimulate the shit out of the
hypothalamus. So picture me: a former philosophy professor, 42 years
old, lying on the floor of the Best Buy break room wearing those stupid
goggles, acering like a teenager, stoned out of my fucking mind, when
the manager bursts in and yanks them off my face. All of a sudden, no
more bliss. Damn. And he says to me: "Hey genius, I hope you know it
breaks 'em when you unblock the photon dosage. You're gonna be paying
that off for a long-ass time, professor."
I'm sure you can recall that I was not always like this. I used to
freak out at exactly 2 1/4 glasses of wine, chattering anxiously about
how 2 is the maximum doctor-recommended amount, and relating all the
dark insomniac thoughts about my battered liver that I already knew
would keep me up later that night. Yet here I was blasting my
hypothalamus into the raisin state. (You saw that exposé where the kids
were talking about their 'raisin brains', didn't you? You know, Alex
Jones or one of those other CNN guys going to that glasses-withdrawal
ward in Tulsa or some awful place? All those kids? How they wouldn't let
them have any wires or straws or anything they could try to insert in
order to rub their brains directly? Holy shit!)
I guess you could say I kind of lost hope for the future. It has
something to do with my precipitous loss of status, but it's not just
that. It's also that I know what they said was not true, and that that
doesn't matter to anyone. The truth doesn't matter! That's enough to
make anyone lose hope.
Did
you hear what happened? I usually just suppose people found out, what
with the way information travels these days. But who knows? To put it
succinctly: I was fired from my job for fabricating, so they said, a round-the-world voyage taken by Immanuel Kant. Can you imagine: Immanuel Kant?
The philosopher most famous (i) for having a name that kind of sounds
like 'cunt', which is the source of endless ribaldry from the Borscht
Belt to the frat house; and (ii) as absolutely everyone in the world
knows, for never once in his entire life having left his home town of
Königsberg? They say I made up a bunch of fake sources to prove that
Kant's mature critical philosophy was largely the product of his
encounters with native peoples along his route. Well, guess what? Kant
really did fucking go to Sumatra. I proved it before, and I'm not in the
mood to do it again. I'm over that.
But in any case the Kant part of it is just the tip of the iceberg,
the bit that provides a nice satisfying story with a happy, or at least a
poetically just, ending: professor makes stuff up, professor gets
fired, professor moves in with mom and gets a job at Best Buy and turns
into an Acer junkie. But you have to ask yourself: why would anyone
care? Academics make false claims all the time, sometimes billions of
dollars hang in the balance, and yet they almost never get punished for
it. I made a few claims about some guy's travel plans in the 18th
century, and I got fired for it. Don't you think that's a bit
strange? Well let me fill you in: there are some people out there who really don't
want certain facts to get out, and who have the power to shut you down
if you start to let them out. I understand this now: I would never
choose to re-fight this battle. It's just not worth it. But I'm telling
it to you in private correspondence, only because I trust you and I
trust that you understand how important discretion is in this case.
It's not the Sumatra part that gets to them. You might have read, in
the original post in that one open-access journal (which was quickly
taken down, but of course not until after they'd deposited my $300
publication fee), the part about Kant's sojourn on the Arctic coast of
Russia, where he lived among the Tlängit people of the Taimyr Peninsula.
This is all documented in Benno Klopp's 1873 book, Die geheime Sumatrareise Immanuel Kants (which
has disappeared from nearly all research libraries in the world, for
reasons that will become clear). You might also recall the part about
the Tlängit concept of nâk, how it means --or at least how Kant thought it meant-- something like 'necessity' or 'fate' or 'weather', and how Kant, d'après Klopp, had taken this concept and placed it at the very heart of one of the antinomies of pure reason in his first Critique.
Are you still following? Good, because as I've said I really don't want
to have to go over all this stuff again. It's still an open wound for
me.
Anyway it's not just about Kant and the Taimyr Tlängit. This is not
some obscure question for Aral-Ultaicists and transcendental idealists.
No, it is much, much bigger than that.
Have you heard of the Kelpius Brotherhood? They are the followers of a certain Johannes Kelpius,
a Bavarian mystic from the late 17th century who established a commune
in Pennsylvania, which eventually grew into a whole community with its
own private university called 'Wissahickon'. Kelpius was out of his
gourd, a sort of L. Ron Hubbard of the Baroque. He combined the crudest
understanding of Christianized Kabbalism with an eclectic hotch-potch of
already outdated alchemy, astrology, and a fervent belief that
Pennsylvania was destined, in the coming new age, to be a religious
utopia. He is said to have been in possession of the philosopher's
stone, as in, that object of the great alchemical quest for deep
knowledge of the mysteries of nature and existence and God and stuff.
Supposedly he threw it into the Schuylkill somewhere outside of Philly
shortly before his death in 1708. Crackpots like Kelpius were a dime a
dozen in colonial America, of course, but he managed to make his legacy
endure by developing a tight organization, bound together by oral
tradition, secret vows, oaths of loyalty. To this very day Wissahickon
has something they call the 'Sub-Brotherhood for the Enforcement of
Kelpian Doctrine', also known as the 'Kelpies'.
This gang consists of 200 or so men, mostly local Wissahickon rabble,
but also a few recent graduates of Wissahickon's philosophy department
who find themselves as unemployable as the day they finished their
K-through-12 Kelpian home-schooling and as a result become radicalized
in their commitment to the Brotherhood. They have long beards, which is
peculiar, since Kelpius himself was beardless and never said anything at
all concerning facial hair. But on their understanding the hair
'emanates' from the face in the same way that the world emanates from
Ein Sof, which is the Kabbalists' term for the divine. Not every man is
expected to have a beard, but only every educated man, whose very face
now symbolizes his knowledge of the relationship between God and world.
It is for this reason that if a man shows himself to be foolish, or
speaks against the officially sanctioned doctrine, the Kelpies will show
up with a pair of scissors and exact their punishment.
Now
you are about to become one of only two outsiders in the entire world,
along with me, who knows this little secret (if you do not wish to be
burdened by knowing too much, then stop reading now, my friend): there
is a belief, passed down from Kelpius to successive generations of
Wissahickon initiates, according to which the Hebrew יהוה is just a
ruse, a decoy that distracts the benighted from the true name of God,
which is (and you can probably see this coming): נךּ. This is totally
insane, of course. Technically the word transliterates as nk, and the suppressed vowel could in principle be an â, but this combination of letters doesn't even look remotely like an acceptable lexeme of ancient Hebrew; the kaph with the dagesh dot
in it (indicating a voiceless velar) barely even occurs in the entire
Old Testament. But whatever. Kelpius claims to have extracted this bit
of knowledge from an esoteric reading of the extremely rare 2nd edition
of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's book, Kabbala denudata,
which appeared in Nürnberg in 1686. Now Knorr von Rosenroth was one of
the more, shall we say, imaginative of the early modern Christian
Hebraists, but he was not sloppy, and he knew not to make stuff up out
of thin air. As I'm sure you're beginning to see, the same cannot be
said of Herr Kelp.
So anyhow we've got this situation where the Brotherhood takes nâk, or nk,
to be the true name of God, where they want to keep this information to
themselves, and so really don't want outsiders holding forth with
competing interpretations of their cherished little monosyllable. And
again, you can probably already see what's coming next. At the time I
published my piece, or posted my piece, or whatever, in Knowledge4U (now
I remember the name of the online journal!) on Kant's Arctic sojourn
and its relevance for Aral-Ultaic linguistics, I was teaching, as you
probably recall, at Misericordia University up in Montreal. One night,
about a week after the piece went up, Ayelet and I were sitting at home
in our apartment on the Plateau, a quiet evening, watching videos on
YouTube of animals doing things not usually associated with their
species, having a good time. There was a knock on the door; I assumed it
was some Canadian humanitarian thing, some campaign for the environment
or recycling or something, and I begged her not to answer it. But
Ayelet was always a better community member than I was, and she
insisted.
They say that the real art of fiction is knowing how to get your
characters in and out of rooms, but this is fact so I'm just going to
cut to the chase. The Kelpies pushed into the entryway and immediately
started making snipping gestures with their scissors, right in Ayelet's
face (as she told me, weeping, later that night). I heard a tussle and
for some reason imagined the notorious Mom Boucher and his band of
Quebec Hell's Angels (les Hells, they call them). But these
were no Hells. There were five of them, the oldest no more than 22, all
with pathetic whiskers hanging in strands from their faces. Three of
them had unusually severe acne. All were decked out in what I only know
as 'urban wear' or 'street fashion': those oversized baseball caps with
the stickers still on them, sweatshirts that say things like 'Zoo York',
and other signifiers of utter cultural impoverishment. And yet,
somehow, through these markers of entry-level social status, they also
gave off the air of deeply religious, indeed fanatically religious,
young men. It may have been that they were wearing their urban gear as
disguises, that they had gone undercover to move inconspicuously in the
big city. Underneath it they looked, mutatis mutandis, like the
riff-raff who used to go around the streets of Riyadh calling
themselves, as I recall, the 'Committee for the Preservation of Virtue
and the Prevention of Vice'. (Do you remember them? Before... Well, you
know.) They looked like typical religious enforcer thugs from anywhere
in the world, except with a distinctly blue-collar Pennsylvania air
about them. In other words: terrifying.
I had no idea who they were or what was going on. (I would only learn
a few days later, when one of the five suffered a crisis of conscience,
indeed of identity, and called me to explain the whole thing. It's only
thanks to him, to little Gunther, that I was able to piece it all
together.) You can imagine my confusion as I came running towards Ayelet
and they began shouting, "Where's Bieber!? We're looking for Justin
Bieber!" I'm Justin, I said, but this didn't silence them. "Hey Bieber,"
the one who was evidently their leader intoned, "do you know what
'Justin Bieber' means? It means 'Justin Beaver'." They were,
evidently, making fun of my name by riffing on the name of that Canadian
pop star. Do you remember him? The one they caught smuggling polar-bear
claws for the Chinese mafia after his charity tour of Nunavut? That was
weird.
Anyhow the Kelpies seem to have wanted to offend my dignity by
associating my name with beavers, which would not in itself have been so
bad, but then one of them, the smallest one with the worst acne, with a
face that was nothing but pustules, really, started muttering something
about how I didn't have a beard, how they had been told I had a beard,
how all philosophers have beards. "We came to cut off his beard so he
could no longer emanate the cosmos like the Godhead does," little
Gunther said (though I did not yet think of him as little Gunther).
"Well where's his dang beard, Eberhard?" The Kelpies, it would turn out,
did not even know it was possible for a philosopher to not have a
beard, so isolated were they at Wissahickon. As Gunther would later tell
me, they were even taught there that the hairs of one's beard are a
direct corporeal reflection of the ideas in one's mind, so that the
longer and thicker one's beard is, the greater one's philosophical
attainments are thought to be. The idea of a beardless philosopher, on
this understanding, is simply a contradiction in terms.
But the boys had come to cut something, and in the absence of that
thing they were looking for, they cast their eyes around for something
else. And this is the part where the story grows dark, and I don't think
I have the stomach to retell it: the part where the Kelpies turned from
merely rough, to simply evil. Their sights landed on Ayelet's beautiful
black curls.
Naturally, in the weeks to follow she and I were hardly in good
spirits. She insisted she didn't blame me, but I could tell deep down
she would have liked for me to have kicked all five of their asses at
once. She mostly stayed in the bedroom and read the Pravda archives
online (you might recall she's an old-school Kremlinologist). I slept
on the couch and let my hygiene lapse. This made her even more
disappointed in me those few times a day we passed each other in the
hallway, and out of some bizarre self-defeating stubbornness I can
barely understand, her disappointment only exacerbated my neglect. For
the first time since my undergrad days, I stopped shaving. To my great
surprise, the sparsity that had tinged my twenty-year-old beard
experiments with emasculating shame was no longer, at forty, a problem.
All the empty spaces were filled, and within a few weeks I had a proper
'ensign of manhood about the face and neck', as someone once said. I
could have applied for the job of ayatollah! "Well hello, Mr. Ein
Sof," Ayelet hissed as we bumped into each other in the doorway of the
bathroom one morning. "Isn't that a nice cosmos emanating out of your
fucking face."
Ayelet's mockery gave me an idea. As long as I was starting to look
like a Kelpie, I thought, maybe I should take a little trip down to
Wissahickon and see what I can find. In any case I had been placed on
unpaid leave, and was being investigated by a disciplinary committee for
fabrication of research evidence (the Brotherhood has friends in high
places). Ayelet was treating me like a stranger. I figured I had nothing
to lose.
There followed a series of lengthy phone conversations with little
Gunther, who explained everything I would need to know in order not to
be found out. "Don't walk with your hands in your front pockets," he
explained, for example. "Unless you want to have clumps of grass thrown
at you by a bunch of guys shouting 'Onan!' 'Onan!'." Also: "If anyone
asks you if you want a sip of their Red Bull, which they only drink out
of straws, you have to say yes. It's considered impolite to use your own
straw, but some people do it anyway." And: "Whenever anyone mentions
the name of the great Johannes Kelpius, you have to pause, look toward
the Schuylkill, and say, 'Quod erat demonstrandum'." That doesn't make
any sense, I interrupted. Saying someone's name doesn't prove anything.
"Don't ask," Gunther replied.
I set out to Wissahickon by Greyhound, passing through Scranton,
Wilkes-Barre, and many other places that until then had been just names
for me. While changing buses in Allentown the teenager at the snack bar
handed back my change with a 'Happy travels, grampa', which ordinarily
would have infuriated me, but under the circumstances made me feel old
and wise. I had a bit of grey showing in my long beard, and I knew I
would blend right in once I arrived among the Kelpies.
Wissahickon looked like any private liberal-arts college with a hefty
endowment: lots of green space, distinguished red-brick buildings in
the Georgian style, a few mistaken modernist complexes inserted here and
there. The Kelpius Library was one such mistake, but it was at least,
to its credit, unusually large for a campus such as this. The library
was by far the largest building at Wissahickon, an irridescent
flash-cube tower dwarfing the little brick schoolhouses around it. In
front was a sort of cubist statue of Johannes Kelpius himself, holding
his own head in his hands, a beaming smile on his face, with some sort
of glistening silver garlands coming out of his mouth.
I was nervous, and naturally worried I'd be turned away at the door,
as I lacked a campus ID, indeed any plausible explanation of what I was
doing there. But I kept little Gunther's advice in mind: always reply to
salutations by simply echoing back the same words. The library was
guarded by a beardless man wearing a jumpsuit, who hailed me with a
loud, friendly 'Q.E.D.!' as I entered. Now this made no sense at all, as
nothing had even been said, but I remembered Gunther's words and
answered, 'Q.E.D.!' I passed through the turnstile without incident.
Do you know how in some restrooms the spaces between the tiles are
filled with grout-themed graffiti? Like, little plays on words about
'The Grout Gatsby' or 'The Grout Wall of China'? ('Groutfiti', I think
it's called.) Well you can imagine my surprise when, staring at the
cracks between the tiles in the bathroom of the Kelpius Library, I
noticed that some Wissahickon smart-asses had filled them with nâk jokes, about seeing a red door and wanting it painted nâk, or about how white folks live in fear of a nâk planet. One clever nâk-fitist had even made oblique reference to the band responsable for the 1979 hit, 'My Sharona' (The Knack).
I didn't make much of all this; bathroom walls are there to be
written on, after all. And I had work to do: having formulated a precise
reconnaissance mission during my conversations with Gunther, I had
determined there were two things in particular I could learn there in
the stacks. The first was to finally have a look at Klopp's book on
Kant's voyage around Eurasia, which up until then I had only seen
mentioned in one other place: Erkki Künnapu's History of the Printing Press in Estonia (Toronto,
2004). The Kelpies had eliminated all circulating copies of the work,
but they could not possibly purge all bibliographical references.
They had, sure enough, just as Gunther promised, kept a copy for
themselves at Wissahickon, right there with all the other Kant books,
under that beautiful B2798 Library-of-Congress number I had come to know
so well in grad school. It was everything I'd imagined it would be: an
exhaustive, rigorously documented account of Kant's day-to-day doings
over the entire five-year period of his voyage: the supplies he bought
in Yokohama, the illness he contracted in Ceylon, the Indian he met in
Surat who wondered how they get so much foam into beer bottles. It was
all there! I photographed all 1200 pages with my iPhone, the whole time
beaming with a feeling of elation I suspect only researchers can know.
My next task was to move to the rare-books room to request to see
what I believe is the only extant copy of the 1686 edition of Knorr von
Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata. There, too, I met a beardless man
in a jumpsuit, who greeted me with a hearty 'Q.E.D.!' And there, again,
I answered in the same manner, and was waved in. I was made to deposit
all my possessions in a locker, and was given a pair of gloves, but
there was no more scrutiny or suspicion here than in any other
rare-books collection I've visited anywhere in the world. I even managed
to slip my iPhone into my front pocket and to pass into the reading
room, with my hidden camera, undetected.
I
spent a good 4 hours with that book, poring through it for the
slightest clue that might help to explain the peculiar Kelpian
interpretation of the true meaning of nâk. I found nothing. Or,
rather, I found almost nothing, yet way too much. Two of the pages of
the book were thoroughly stuck together, the way I recall books checked
out of the public library being, after some careless disgusting kid
before me had eaten his apple sauce or wiped his nose while reading Shel
Silverstein, say, and then closed the cover and thoughtlessly returned
it. I pried the pages of the Kabbala apart, and to my revulsion
I found that they had been sealed together by some unidentifiable gunk,
some excretion or waste matter of human or animal, God only knows. And
next to the horrible stain, a stain so revolting I could barely stand to
look at it, someone, God only knows when or why, had written (you
guessed it): NÂK!
Was this whole thing a huge fucking joke? What the hell do the
Kelpies think they're guarding there? Is the stain in the book supposed
to be the secret name of God? Or was this just more graffiti? I had no
answers, but nor, from the very second I pried those pages apart, did I
any longer have a desire for answers. I snapped a quick photo, removed
my gloves, and headed as fast as I possibly could back to the
Wissahickon bus station.
Ayelet, whose beauty had easily adapted itself to her new pixie cut,
went back to Israel around the time I was slowly slinking home, via
Pennsylvania, to California. This was of course before Damascus happened
and there was as yet no radiation-zone map you had to check before
making travel plans. Last I saw it had moved north pretty much all
across Anatolia and up as far as Skopje and Tiranë. (Do you remember in
like 1996 at Columbia when we were wondering whether there would be a
nuclear attack within our lifetimes? You said yes and I said no. Or
maybe it was the other way around. Anyhow one of us was wrong.) Ayelet
survived, I know that much. I saw on Donky that she went to Sochi with
some guy, whom I of course picture as a beefy mafioso in one of those
shiny track suits-- the Russians call them 'sportive costumes'. I
noticed on Puckr they had kids (alright, I admit it: I even used an
illegal Puckr Portal to get into her private feed). Am I jealous? Yes,
but I wish them the best. I hope they didn't turn out like those kids in
the orphanage in Oman with the polydactyly and the greenish-blonde hair
(did you see them on that PBS infomercial for the new thyroid drug?
Again: holy shit!)
I figure there's about a 50% chance by now that you believe all of
this, and a 50% chance you're thinking: OMG, my old friend has
completely lost it. You could well be thinking I sound like some goddamn
birther-truther-Sandy-Hooker-CNN-reptilian type. But I only know what I
know. I hate turning into a conspiracy theorist more than anyone. I
especially hate that my particular tale involves Kabbalah, the secret
name of God, etc., etc. As if I were a fan of that awful serial fiction
the community-college kids read-- do you remember, that pulp about the
Illuminati that the boys who are always speaking up in their philosophy
classes like, the ones who are constantly invoking Schrödinger's Cat and
'quantum effects' even when these plainly have nothing to do with
anything? But I'm not a community-college student. I'm a professor.
Anyway I used to be a professor back before, well, you know the story.
Like I said, it's an open wound.
The world is a different place now. The uninhabitable part of it
grows bigger every day, and the survivors have mostly just retreated
behind their goggles to watch meta-porn and hyper-cat loops. I don't
know why it should matter anymore who went where in the 18th century,
and the truth is I don't even really see why it's so important to know
the real name of God, let alone to guard it like some precious secret.
To keep it secret only in order to make a big obscene joke out of it
with the other secret-keepers: that really is too much. Again, I've kind
of lost hope. But it's at least a small consolation to know that
there's still such a thing as friendship.
Ever your,
J*****
Carmichael, California
11 March, 2018
--
Note: No rare books were damaged in the making of this story. Everything else, however, is entirely true.
