The Oyster Bay Manifesto

“’I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive…’” – from “Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering”

This shit’s nothing new, the Knights of Malta tracked your moves like GPS a thousand years ago and read your correspondence as it went from brain to quill. They need only your resistance, nothing more, a white to frame their perfect black, a white made by DuPont the great death-dealer, that’s all you now allow yourself, when you’re chasing down the demons They created for your pleasure, that melt just as you believe you hold Them, the final Mephistopheles in your hands. An enemy! What a distraction, how the mind can be harnessed to a task: eradicate evil! What better way to penetrate the secret center and implant the seed, and with it the DNA of mechanical response – fear and longing – engineered? Divine of a kind, the way the assassins never even know who they are working for, or do not know they’re killing, and every effort to mess their noses in the scenery of their crimes only makes them feel more victimized. Thus what would be still can be projected in an arc – the mind is made to differentiate the calculus, as “proof” of fate (the gears below the gears below the gears).

A beautiful pattern, like that made by geese in winter skies, or the distant nebulas destroying all that’s there.

Any metaphors will only serve another God than the one they are attached to: the cathode-ray Jesus, the cinetheodolite Buddha. Nature is changed, but we recognize it as it was, before the spark was stolen, reflexively. All it takes to redirect the hive mind is one drone infiltrated. Once one thing is changed, universes can be reconfigured. Just one story can re-write history and make the mythic supplicant. Slowly everything becomes plausible instead of real – hallucinations ripped away from base perceptions and diseases diagnosed from the output stream of thinking – there are places that you cannot go, those now deemed too natural…

God submits to the conspiracy, plays Her part perfectly: another way to play the game of choice. If this world is seen as an illusion, there’s always a new one, better or at least more airtight. Something about accepting your own immortality. Something about peeling back the layers of distraction to accept the deeper unanswered questions: “Are you making these relentless connections, or merely seeing them?”; “What is pre-set, what do you set in motion?”; “Why the greater the resistance, the greater the temptation?” All’s you know is that the barest intimation of the ruins of Atlantis is all you need to build a house where you can live. The end of knowledge thus is falsity, innocence resolves only to complicity, the mind the unclean organ snapped like lepers’ slates. It must be kept in prison, of obsessively cancelling the x’s out on either side of the equal sign.


Prose in honor of Thomas Pynchon’s 75th birthday today…