{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

For a split second I imagined being mocked by a roomful of youth who pointed out to me that, most likely, a billionaire political boss living in the lap of luxury would have no motivation whatsoever to find a general solution of the sine function.

I just smirked, since men missing many teeth rarely smile for the cameras, cameras which each youth in the room had on their mobile computer/phone devices.   

The youth said that they wanted fancy cars and hi-fi stereo equipment, and that, seeing that all the studying of mathematics I had done never prevented me from needing welfare from the government, they wondered how or why it was I had not yet found a way to end my life.

They told me that they wanted to be able to afford a dentist so as not to have so many teeth pulled.  They did not care to spend decades studying things which would not lead to financial security, and which, to be honest, seemed to alienate me from almost everyone, more so than recreational drug use.  Why on earth would they ever want to be even remotely like me?   In fact, they insisted that my life was a living example of WHY NOT to study mathematics and why to especially avoid the writings of one Arthur Schopenhauer, who obviously represented some kind of Buddha to me.

And in my daymare I saw myself walk silently from the room, walking down the road passed a liquor store.  I stop in front of the liquor store and consider getting my cry on with a pint of that good hard liquor, walking into the fields to drink down the poison while sobbing under a tree.

And yet, even in this daydream, I am sure not to enter the liquor store.  I behold the books I have gone through over the past few years, and I consider the books I will go through over the next 10 years, God willin' and the crick don't rise.   People in my monkey sphere may pass away, my living situation may change drastically, and I may find myself in want of a place to store my notebooks once again; but the skeleton inside the skin, it must find such visions amusing, these visions of "the shadow world," an idea Holden recently reminded me of.

I was inspired to take some notes from some damn good writing by Greig Roselli from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:

The unnamed prisoners in Plato’s allegory do not have names. They do not have self-awareness. They are drones. They are denizens of a shadow world for the purpose of “the community.”  In the Republic, the prisoners in the cave do not know that the shadows cast on the wall are actually representations of artificial objects, placed there like puppets, crafted, exhibited like a show, or a spectacle.  They only know what has been shown to them to be real.   

The protagonist in Invisible Man only slightly suspects the larger picture and is still at the level of “demonstration” at the novel’s outset. Before his descent into the battle royal in chapter one he has had no idea who the puppet masters are, i.e., the lily white men who actually run the inside workings of his small southern town. He sees for the first time the engineers of his existence, the lily-white men who hold power and control in his hometown in chapter one. He meets the puppetmasters face to face. In Plato’s story, the prisoners are shackled, literally like black people were shackled and sold as slaves. But not only are they shackled, they do not realize they are prisoners. They do not realize who really runs the show. They are blind.

 “They are like us,” Socrates says (515 B). While, in Invisible Man, there is knowledge of a slave past for black Americans, the narrator is quick to remind us that he is not ashamed of his black past. He is only ashamed of himself for at one time being so ashamed. The realization he has of his own imprisonment past and the imprisonment of blacks today is the locus of a premonition the narrator has that he is, in fact, invisible, which we will talk about later. But first, let us look at the moments when “he begins to turn around,” like the prisoner in Plato’s cave who first turns around to see what is behind the proverbial curtain. 

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