Page 82 - The Myth and the Moment

Evening

specifically designed not to become mythology for future generations.
Just the facts (as I see them). A translation of our snarled complexity
into very simple terms, ready for future translation back into the
language of another sophisticated culture—one perhaps not on a
path to self-destruction. But that hope is the child’s desire to cheat
death: I’ll shoot this arrow in the air, where it lands I know not
where, and I don’t care, it’s not fair, and bombs away!
All right, all right, I admit it! I do want to reach beyond the span of
my life, touch the next set of minds to pass this way. Would I have
been so driven had I not so clearly seen The End approaching? Now
you’re really digging, Nathan. C. Wright Mills must be rocking in his
grave, if he’s tuned in to this drivel. Is it paradoxical that my personal
identity could be so strongly identified with a culture I despise that I
would destroy myself to preserve some traces of it? Have I mistaken
the salvation of conscience for the salvage of consciousness? Did I,
godless, go to the mountain and come down with a Truth deniable by
nobody—since dead men tell no tales? Oh, please, an edgewise word
here from the Old Existentialist: so what? It boils down to a question
of control. The thing exists: The Myth, ready to roll. Either I do what I
want with it or Phil does what he wants. Which is what? Shred and
flush; or set to ferment in the muck and mire of Hollywood, later to
emerge as the plot of a half-hour fantasy series. Yes, I can almost
hear the formulaic gears grinding: man sends message to future;
aliens intercept it and travel back through time; man fights aliens to
save future; aliens tricked into attacking their own past and
destroying themselves; man returns to job as stockbroker, lives
happily ever after. Gak.
So, what does that prove? That I’ve stumbled on my hubris, been
hoisted on my own petard, had my words warped and wefted into
someone else’s tissue of lies, like all the others? Should I feel humble
at joining such an august assemblage of bumblers and victims? Profit
and loss, prophet and laws. Nate, you don’t know the value of your
own labor. So you say, Phil, and regretfully relieve me of my assets.
There is the dilemma: how can a poor man ransom a priceless
hostage? You can name the dollar value of everything you hold dear,
can’t you, Phil? Everything dissolves in money, the universal solvent;
first objects become interchangeable, then people, then ideas. Trade
one for the other, use the surplus value to trade up again. Pretty soon

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