This awareness was at its peak in 1985, the year he entered Harvard despite bad grades, low SAT scores, no extracurricular activities, and a recommendation letter that said: "This person inhales and exhales, can stand up and sit down and walk in and out of doors. I have seen him eating on more than one occasion. I can only assume from this that he most likely defecates and urinates. Beyond that I can say nothing more about this student, even whether or not he sleeps.

"He scores at chance levels on all tests, his papers appear to be random assemblages of words taken from the vocabulary of the topic at hand, as do his verbal 'contributions' in class.

"As far as I can tell he appears to lack enthusiasm for any activity, enjoys nothing, shows no ambition, drive, or even desire to do or be or possess anything at all.

"However, and despite not coming anywhere near any standard of popularity, for some unknown reason he's respected on some unfathomable level by his classmates, from the brightest to the dumbest, and is frequently elected to school councils even though he contributes nothing to them and does absolutely no work -- often, apparently, infecting the whole group with this attitude so that nothing ever gets done by any council he's on, or on any project he's involved with.

"I can only predict, therefore, that upon admission to Harvard he would no doubt commence to do the same for you."

He arrived in Cambridge, on full scholarship, in October, long after the start of classes, but his sudden appearance in History 135 -- The Age of Capitalism - for Math Majors -- didn't seem to upset or disorient anyone, as it didn't when he frequently raised his hand and mentioned how mythology is preferable to history because at least mythology admits it's a lie -- and when told that History admits it's a lie too, responded, Yeah, but History's lying when it says that.

He didn't really sign up for anything and it was unclear where he lived or even slept. He just walked into random classes, usually many minutes late when the professor was already well into his spiel, and, as he sat down, raised his hand and asked some seemingly innocuous question which somehow caused the class, from that moment on and for all subsequent sessions for the rest of the semester, to stop moving through the actual course material and become totally enmeshed in the infinite recursive loop of epistemology -- i.e. what right did anybody have to say anything about anything, given the wack-a-mole relations between knower, known, and the objects and operations of knowing? (Or whatever.)

By 1989 Harvard had to be shut down for repairs, and his class graduated only in the virtual-digital world of Sims. He was given a postdoctoral position in the MIT Psychology Department, based on his Harvard transcript where the 100 occurrences of the printed word "INCOMPLETE!" all had a poorly hand-drawn #2 pencil line through their "IN"s.

Meanwhile, the other members of his class, who'd never known him or even knew who he was, yet had been profoundly influenced by his presence at Harvard, and who, during their 4 years, had done virtually no work, read virtually no books, and though they often sat around shuffling and reshuffling decks of cards, rarely got around to ever dealing out a hand, and when they did, it was always a completely different game from the last hand dealt and no one else around the table knew how to play it -- these graduates were immediately scarfed up by capitalism to become the CEOs of all their high-powered massively successful companies -- which, within a year had all failed.

Cut to 1995.

People live in harmony and happiness and bliss. There are no more stories, so no one can win or lose and no one can have power.

By now he runs a small independent TV station in Cambridge, WBRI. It broadcasts Princeton classes like Physics for Lit Majors, Religion for Engineers, and Chemistry for Divinity Students, set to My Bloody Valentine and The Pixies.

Everyone now lives on their own unique line of history and sociology. Occasionally, these lines intersect and the information space is modified. Occasionally multiple lines intersect and a temporary node is formed, set to Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division.

permanent link to this article