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Excerpts from 7th Meditation
II: Synthesis
15
Synthesis
There was nothing evidently protean about the combined gentleman that couldn't be settled with a series of strokes and dashes; who smoked, smiled, made wry and playful gestures with the ballet of his hands and eyes. His presence had the peculiar effect in others for them to turn away, to hold dark thoughts at arm's length in the daylight, to be troubled by enigmatic nightmares as vivid as those experienced only in the vividness of childhood, to bear the unmistakable taint of seeing oneself reflected too honestly in another. But the world would give sway to the man, for there was a charisma about him, a terrible charm. In every life, there are those we meet whom we just know carry in them a destiny; it is in their bearing – what more mystically minded people may call an aura. People of this stripe are unsettling at the best of times, and so magnetic. There is that tacit understanding that it is they who will one day come to rule, pressing their dark and deep tracks in history. Such people had free passage, for there was no obstacle as they relentlessly pursued their vision.
And what perhaps irked others about the man, the man who had celestial music playing in his head, was his chosen way of viewing the world. It was his process of abstracting from the most complex to the smaller and more simple, a movement from an outer enclosure of generality to the particular, and then striking back out again to the contours of the concept. The man did not have the need or capacity to love in any petty sense, for love to him was merely an analyzable structure, at times biologically and socially determined by preconditions continuously reinforced by the glut of compounded experience. The love he respected was the blind and transcendental adoration he would inspire in others, a love no less itself a kind of fear. He knew that amor and timor were one and the same thing, a parallel act of cognition. The man found the subconscious most fascinating, the dark and hidden twin of mind. Most people only occasionally heard its whispers. The artist had the courage to turn and face it, to engage it. The zeal to repress it was incongruous with the mounting hunger to release it. Instead, far too many people floundered in a world now designed for the tepid, the weak, the untroubled, the mediocre – all of these damp newsprint wrapped around that which would not be mummified. Beneath the surface surged a rhapsody blindly seeking a leader, someone to give the amoebic drives a purpose and direction. Until now, the desire to emancipate the atrocity in each being had merely been seething to no effect. It needed to be teased out, trained, put to a definitive end under one who would act as its conductor.
The newly made man knew what his appointed role was meant to fulfill. He would cure the people of their sickness, heal them from being at odds with themselves, unleashing that primitive force that would violently consume the constraints of their enfeebled lives, bringing to the fore a blinding luminescence that could make a new history.
In his right hand was the Red Lion sketchbook, revised and severely edited to become the tablature of his proposed new moral laws. Perhaps many before him had tried and failed, but their failure was in allowing their will to flag, or else making crucial mistakes in their methodology. The people were all of a single web, and he had the skill and insight to know how to pluck at their connective threads to make them resonate in a pitch and harmony of his own making. His predecessors had quit their stations too soon, and so the new man felt it was up to him to be the enjambment of their enterprises, bringing to fruition all that they had started but failed to sustain.
To say that he was extraordinary almost to the point of being impossible would be to neglect the fact that he was necessary, that the cruelty of people had summoned a person of his type. For most, destiny is a light that catches someone in its fleeting freeze-frame before letting go and drifting away to someone else – the synthesized man had a kind of preternatural knack for arresting that light. Perhaps prior to this, he had but the seeds of greatness that were not properly nourished or were too untimely. All that had changed, the right concatenation of events had conspired to make his passage into the now a necessary act, a fait accompli. Manipulating the masses could only occur with any success if all the particular conditions were satisfied, and he knew that this had finally happened. He had in his hand the answer to that largest of questions, “What do the people want?”
16
Law
One will, one voice, one outcome. This was the law of the synthesized man. He was already in a good position to merge his practice with a renewed sense of patrimony, appealing to the craven hunger of the Volkgeist. Indeed, his was the mastery and skill of manipulating and directing the spirit of the people.