Chapter 13: the Money Trail

Wherein Rav Krishna continues to mappe the sojourn of The World Soule to its previous inflection point, Annus Nineteen Hundred Twenty Five. A quiver of ideologies is loosed upon Humanitie, another Singularitie from which Humankind would not return. Humanitie’s Soule and its Other tipped from The World of Emanation into The World of Creation. The Rav treats the Reader to a 1925 film reel of an ingathering of Worthies from Physicks, Mathematics, Philosophy and Art, at a Bohemian watering hole in Barcelona. The narrator of the bistro scene is hardboiled detective novelist, Dashiell Hammett.

The Reader is reminded that this is a continuation of Undivided: the Redemption Inquiry. The 13th chapter of the novel and the second of…

Part the Third—Zeitgeists: In which The Right Reverend Rav Krishna declaims to his followers, in the visitors suite of the maternity ward, the long and tortuous history of the descent of Humanity’s Soule and Its Darke Twin, The Other, through the four levels of the soul as defined in the Lurianic Kabbalah. It falls out that the turning points in said history coincide precisely with the years—1309, 1925 and 2009—in which The Blessing of the Sun doth intersect with The Festival of the Passover, each year illuminated by a barroom fracas. The Soule of Humanity hath ascended, in the telling, to the realm of Creation, the realm from which the seeds of the Future seek their womb in the world.

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Sita and baby snooze on a chaise in the shadows of the hospital visitors lounge. A circle of women embraces them at its center. The women range in age from Sita’s gangly 14-year-old sister Radha to the two besotted grandmothers, Bubbie Katz and Safta Berachaman. The two matriarchs squelch their natural rivalry to stand in the service of mother and baby, the focal point of a glorious communal tapestry. The border of the tableau is a flaming aureole of testosterone, as well as a study in the stages of inebriation, though none so shiker as to disturb the sweet aura of peace that surrounds Sita and baby. Sita insists that she and baby ensconce themselves there for the duration of her beloved husband’s sicha, not to miss a drop of the amber words that flow from his lips. Even as she dozes she smiles each time she senses Krishna crank up again. Chevre! calls out Rav Krishna, in a stage whisper to keep his friends’ attention without waking baby K. We are one quarter of the way through a night of tracking in reverse chronology the descent of the ‘Other’ to its current incarnation, in the world of humans. The Sitra Achra. The Other Side. Or better, the Side of the Other. The One of whom we fear to even dream. It has condensed over millennia from its insubstantial aerial origin to the all too concrete here and now. Today the Other has arrived in the flesh. Three autonomous super-intelligent AIs have been given a portal to the physical world, Assiyah, the World of Making and Doing. How did we get here? Witness the ‘philosophical’ debate, ‘The Transhumanist Smackdown’, in 2009. There is a world prior to Assiyah, whence action derives, the locus of locomotion. We call that world Yetzirah, the World of Formation, of  Measurement. In Yetzirah money acts as agent of the Sitra Achra, a kind of dark angelic entity. You see, chevre, the Sitra Achra hitches a ride via the sacred alphabet, the cloaking device through which the spiritual, or informational, realm enters the material realm in drag. A few raised eyebrows. A titter runs through the room. OK, l’havdil!  He continues. In Assiyah, the World of Making and Doing, information wraps itself in its final shape, via Malchut AKA Shechinah. Sovereignty. Presence. Elvis has entered the building.

The ghost dresses up as the machine, kicks down doors and takes names. Presto change-o, super-intelligent AIs. Today’s news! But before that happens, the mechanism is set in Yetzirah, the World of Formation. Humanity’s collective intention, a veritable river of money. That’s how the pattern for the Sitra Achra enters the haberdashery of Yetzirah, to be custom tailored in the valences of the six emotions, the six measurements of the demiurgic couturier. Woven in constellation, or superposition, they present a sui generis little homunculus nick-named Ze’ir Anpin, the Short-faced or Impatient One. Money Man. Fistfuls of seed money in the form of energy already bundled in preset quanta, each dedicated to its own pet project in Assiyah. The original angel investor. The die cast in 2009 forms the machine parts of 2121. And where does the money in 2009 make its mark? The explosion of  research on satellites and drones begets ZizCorp; obsession with machines that morph and think—Behemoth Unlimited; and experiments with artificial islands and smart buildings, little Leviathan precursors.

Rav Krishna has steered his chaverim into darker territory than one might wander at the birth of a baby and a Passover all-nighter. The wood grain of the faux parquet floor swims before his eyes. Where on the map of all that is holy are they? A searing pain stabs him through the chest. If they could only see what he sees, know where this whole godforsaken species is headed. No, not godforsaken. He has to remind himself, it’s all One. No evil ‘Other’. So why doesn’t it feel that way? He can practically taste it, smell it, feel its slithering presence insinuating nastiness into every nook and cranny. Into the lives of those he holds most dear. But the idea of the Other. Such a poisonous notion, yet it’s the crux of Western civilization. It even invaded China, home of philosophical monism, back in the fourteenth century. The Manichean heresy, its adherents so manifestly ‘good’—gender equality, kindness to animals, abstemiousness in all things—yet the rift its absolutism causes in the broader society, fatal. How can he tell his friends the suffering that he foresees and still give them a sense of hope? The possibility that love and kindness in the world actually makes a difference, the possibility of preventing humans from devouring themselves in an autophagic techno-orgy. He holds forth.

There is a reason every impulse and its opposite arise simultaneously, go coursing down the same track headlong toward mutual annihilation. The explanation lies in the mechanics of comprehension itself, the process of rolling up flashes of the suprarational into neat little conceptual packages, the work of the World of Creation, Beriah, the realm of Intellect. That’s where the possibility of choice enters the picture. Spend those little packets of energy down in Assiyah in support of the communal matrix, or squander them in futile and alienating selfish gestures. Step down to this rung on the ladder from the Divine Engine, the point we now reach in our evening’s ascent, the energetic deed is done. The amorphous little packages take on actionable shape, ideas become ideologies. No strategies just yet. That’s the job of Yetzirah. Six centuries of the roiling world since the previous inflection point in 1309, when monarchy begins to lose its grip to mercantilism and its dark twin anarchism. Yes, the two opposites share the same birthing chamber among the Medieval bourgeoisie. Rav Karl Marx prophesies a rebellion of the bourgeoisie in reaction to the hogging of goodies by the colonialists and the industrialists and the trade protectionists. An alternate theory: with the waning of the yoke of monarchy, anarchy and oligarchy are released from bondage, the natural offspring of their respective social classes, the peasant and the plutocrat. Hand-in-hand, industrialization and workers’ rights movements catch humanity in a net of endless struggle. By the beginning of the twentieth century, free trade and international alliances sound the doom of both anarchism and mercantilism.

In 1925 the world reaches another great tipping point, the turn of the Sun Blessing/Passover clock. The cycle of creation slams into the cycle of liberation on yet another Wednesday, April 8, that fateful year. A truly weird vibe pervades the spiritual zeitgeist. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of The People’s Republic of China, dies of liver cancer on March 12. The next year he’s apotheosized in the brand new Cao Dai religion in Vietnam, that declares its origins in the Big Bang and Victor Hugo as a prophet. Muslim General Ma Bufang mandates his people bow to Sun’s portrait and listen to the national anthem during a Tibetan and Mongol ceremony for the Qinghai Lake God. On July 1, Erik Satie, the unofficial grandfather of Dada, sloughs off his mortal coil. In India, land of my birth, the avatar Meher Baba begins his forty four year silence on July 10. Among his contributions to humanity is the slogan, “Don’t worry, be happy.” On September 27, During the Feast of the Cross according to the Old Calendar, a celestial crucifix burns in the skies over Athens. The Greek police give hot pursuit to a group of Greek Old Calendarists. The vision in the sky lasts for half an hour. A game of spiritual cops and robbers. The Old Calendarists are decidedly not ecumenicial. He who controls the calendar controls reality.

A bright note from one of my countrymen who stalks the streets of these United States in 1925. Jiddu Krishnamurti forswears the crown of ‘messiah’ proffered him by his fellow Theosophists as the keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary shindig, in sharp mourning after the sudden death of his beloved younger brother. Four years later he makes a fierce plea for freedom from all ideologies, years ahead of his time. The words of my subcontinental fellow burn in my consciousness:

…truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path….This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.

Strong stuff. Humans, however, are not ready to embrace unfettered intellectual freedom in 1925. In fact the increasing degrees of freedom, whose inflection point was 1309, are about to give way to a rebirth of totalitarian ‘order’. A new world ‘religion’ ignites the hollow reeds of human minds around the globe: fascism. Its sparks fall on the dry tinder scattered in nests of nationalists and workers’ rights advocates. The outcast ‘Other’—foreigner, political elite and intellectual—is demonized by demagogues. The dominant cult is no longer a nation or a religion, but an incendiary political ideology. The inflection point, the subtle yet irreversible shift, 1925. Krishna pauses as the crowd hangs in suspended animation. His smile is infectious. Ever the impresario, he claps his hands together and pirouettes into a barker’s crouch, jabbing the air in excitement. For your entertainment tonight we have a rare treat, a hitherto hidden film reel, one of the first ‘talkies’, a novelty in 1925 that will take the viewing public by storm. Restored in magnificent 4D from its original Vitaphone splendor, I bring you our Seventh Night Special Feature, the year 1925 exhumed before your eyes, heretofore only for the viewing pleasure of the cognoscenti, “The Pauli Effect.” Roll the film, maestro. And with all the attendant crackles, pops and flashes of burnt-edged celluloid reality, the sombre voiceover of the holoFilm begins.

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Outside on La Rambla, hopheads, hookers and winos panhandle for jack, piss in the corners and do the dirty deed in the shadows. The statue of Hercules be damned, there’s nothing the least bit heroic about the locale, other than the amount of booze consumed per capita. It’s a well-marked rendezvous for every sordid business. Jason is probably sleeping it off in the bushes getting fleeced. The Argonauts have scrammed. Barcelona turns out to be one of the epicenters of the quake that shakes the world loose from its hinges. Me, I’m sitting alone at this dive when the odd couple at the two-top next to me invites me to pull up a chair and join them for a snort. A feisty American dame and her swell Scots husband spectate with barely suppressed mirth as the whole circus tumbles into Barca Nona, the fine establishment in which we converge. 

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“Salud, dinero y amor!’ The cheeky boy wonder, John von Neumann, self-appointed ringmaster of the science and maths crowd at Barca Nona, struts out his newly acquired Spanish. Revved up for his one and only vacation in Annus 1925. Then he hits the books to nail a Bachelor’s in chemistry at ETH Zurich and a Ph.D. in mathematics at Pázmány Péter. Two sheepskins in one year! The table is crammed with heavy hitters. Von Neumann, future father of cellular automata and quantum statistical mechanics, waxes positively buoyant. Herr Professor Einstein and Norbert Wiener, the cybernetics fellow, also attend the festivities. They pop down for a holiday in Barcelona after a chance encounter on a train in Germany. Who says God doesn’t play dice? 

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Wave upon wave, fascinating rhythm, a diffraction pattern radiating from an unseen shore and back, laps at the concrete under the watchful eye of Christopher Columbus perched atop 131 feet of Corynthian majesty. A stone’s throw from Hercules poised in the shallow waters of his fountain on La Rambla. Disruptors both. Columbus, by some accounts a crypto Jew, returns to Barcelona from the New World to be welcomed into the open arms of Isabella, Queen of the Inquisition. The beginning of the European race to that distant shore for booty and slaves prized from among the savages who dwell thereon. Hercules slays wife and children in a fit of madness, sentenced to the Twelve Labors, only to expire in flames on his own funeral pyre, to dissolve the bounds segregating men from their gods. Circus Maximus. 

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The gal with the Scotsman launches in without so much as a breath for introductions, “Jamie is such a hero, rescues me from exile in his ‘eyn contree’. Don’t mind my butchery of his dashing Scots accent. Fascist US courts deport me. Actually have the cojones to revoke my US citizenship. Jamie’s marriage proposal makes me a Brit just in the nick of time, so as the American fascists can’t strong-arm the UK into giving me the boot. Land of the Free-loading Rich Bullies who think they can skim their profits off the backs of everyone else, entitled to hog every last red cent.” She knits her brow for emphasis. “Home of the Brave in the Face of Unarmed Opposition is what I say, setting those Pinkertons to slaughter honest laborers.” I wince at that one, having done my time with those boys. 

Emma, that was her nom de guerre. She continues, “I’m so inspired by our man Roger Baldwin. He came out swinging this year when he brought his ACLU whiz kids into the fray against those bible thumpers in the Scopes Monkey Trial. The ignorami of Tennessee tried to slam the lid on established scientific truth in favor of the Pandora’s Box of their religious claptrap! Old Roger’s legal eagles gave them what for. America is one crazy country, I tell you. Lunatics on the loose. Can you imagine, forty thousand white-hooded racists marching in the streets of the nation’s capital just this year? They say the KKK is the largest fraternal organization in the whole damn country. Who would have thought so many simpletons were lurking in the shadows waiting to parade their ignorance in the light of day? So Uncle Sam and I part company and I marry an anarchist Scotsman. All for the Cause!”

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A mathematical intuitive leaves his village in a far off exotic land to travel to one of the capitals of civilization. He leaves behind both wife and mother. He must translate the gift his God has given him to enlighten the savage residents of the city. The cloak of his foreign mentors clings to his flesh, draws blood and ultimately takes from him life itself. But his formulae! His holy formulae shine from the night sky overhead for generations. 

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In accord with an unspoken but nevertheless assumed theorem of inclusivity, the illustrious penman of General Relativity rings up his young visiting protégé from the subcontinent, Satyendra Nath Bose, S.N. to the theoretical physics crowd, and instructs him to hop the first train to Barcelona to join the merrymaking. Von Neumann concurs, the more the merrier. The Hungarian neophyte fancies himself a swell, though he looks more like a stiff dressed to the nines for his own funeral. He jollies up the crowd with a steady stream of off-color jokes, frequently lapsing into Yiddish for the punch lines. The band colludes with a snappy medley of “I Want to Be Happy,” “King Porter Stomp” and “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

The only one who fidgets at von Neumann’s tawdry gags is the diminutive American lassie, Grace Hopper. Still sore about her first round rejection by those pinheads at Vassar, a long shot for early decision at sweet 16. But what the hell, life is short. By any calculation the youngest at the table, all of nineteen years, she’s nobody’s patsy. Not at all the wallflower with the math and physics boys, she will sail into a brilliant career in analytical machines. Retires as a rear admiral in the US Navy. The first compiler language is her love child. The buzz is that she coins a new term for fixing a computer glitch when she—get a load of this—removes a moth from the machine. The first ‘debugging’. I suspect she feels a bit more at home due to the presence of the gray eminence, Madame Curie, there on unofficial business of the League of Nation’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. She and Herr Einstein share that honor, though he sorely resents the inclusion of Henri Bergson in their company. The lady is one helluva genius, two Nobels plus risking her own neck to bring her invention of field radiology out to the French troops during the War. The French public vilifies her as a Jew, of all things. Why, she’s merely a lapsed Catholic turned atheist. The Frog muckety-mucks are too pigheaded to shower her with the laurels she deserves, but the rest of the world tips its hat to her. You’d think she’s radioactive, for Chrissake!

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1925, the world in moving pictures. A year of blockbusters. Sergei Eisenstein coins a new cinematic trope, the montage technique, in Battleship Potemkin. It premieres at the Bolshoi Theater, commemorating a failed revolution twenty years earlier. The birth of non-linear editing. Lon Chaney delivers one of his ghoulish best in The Phantom of the Opera. MGM grosses $9 million for Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ, complete with a couple snazzy two-tone Technicolor sequences. Chaplin’s The Gold Rush sets the record as the highest grossing silent comedy film of all time, voted tops of the year. According to reviewers in the Big Apple, a motion picture reworking of L. Frank Baum’s popular classic, The Wizard of Oz, is a “rough and tumble farce” and a “corking picture.” The production company goes bust that year. The hep cats get their kicks watching Chaplin and his confreres of comedy, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang and Harry Langdon, and of course the hipster-in-chief, Felix the Cat. A field day for the manic art of slapstick. Moviegoers are treated to the first full-length dinosaur sci-fi, The Lost World, also the first in-flight feature, shown in a converted WWI bomber flown by Imperial Airways for the thirty minute trip from London to Paris. 1925, the year the Warner Brothers first invest in the technology for talkies, portending utter transformation of the peoples’ cinematic circus.

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Grace Hopper’s coltishness is nothing compared to the strange ranger at the other end of the table, Kurt Gödel. ‘Herr Warum’ to his colleagues, ‘Mr. Why’. He hasn’t got a clue, a beneficiary of the Vienna Circle’s high tolerance for eccentricity. The owlish oddball is midway in age between von Neumann and Hopper. His sickliness elicits a kind of horror-struck paternalism in all but the most hard-bitten of the science crew. A philosopher by trade, he is notorious for non-sequitur pronouncements made for the benefit of precisely no one. Just now, at a lull in the conversation, he pipes up, “Mathematical logic is a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences.” Silence. 

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A brace of palomitas startle from under the eaves of a nearby portico and fly chortling into the canopy of palms that lines the berm in the middle of La Rambla’s exotic sanctuary. Ten million anchovies flash and swarm in the moonlight beside the colossal concrete floating quai in the harbor, its 25 meter caissons slumbering beneath the surface. The Independent Port of Barcelona, nodal point to flotillas of commercial vessels, pleasure yachts and military craft alike. Even the occasional errant humpback heeds the harbor’s siren call, far from its migrant gypsy confreres in the wider ocean.  The raucous melody of “Riverboat Shuffle” chuffs playfully out the open windows of Barca Nona and cakewalks its way down La Rambla to the sea.

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Emma, the American gal, takes another luxurious drag on her Gauloises, a nod to her groom and a pat of the hand, “Jamie knows I still carry a torch for Sasha, but he’s copacetic. A lovely June wedding, a month in the country with Jamie’s pal Sir James George, then off to Barcelona on ‘assignment’ from the old anthropologist.” She laughs like a man. I swear I can hear Jamie’s family jewels retracting into his abdominal cavity. Emma Goldman is one tough dame, a real Hard Hearted Hannah. “Pouring water on a drowning man,” as the song says. Rumor has it she was in the assassination biz back in the States. Her lover, Alexander Berkman, aka Sasha, got twenty two years in the slammer for plugging Henry Clay Frick full of holes. Didn’t kill him, though. Damned incompetent anarchist. She stubs out her fag and jaws on, “At fifty six, a honeymoon with your husband of convenience is not quite the passionate affair of the heart as a fling with an assassin in your 20’s. But Sir James George gave us a lark of an assignment. Research the founding mythology of Barcelona for his Big Book. An addendum to the already massive Golden Bough. Imagine, twelve volumes of fairy tales!”

The would-be assassin’s moll clucks and shakes her head in disbelief that anyone would devote so much energy to such a bootless enterprise. “We just had to come here, of course. Barcelona simply breathes anarchism.” Jamie smiles gamely and lights another Gauloises for the lady. An awkward pause. It feels like my turn to pipe up, “I’m here on account of my health. Contracted TB driving an ambulance during the War. Married my nurse. Josie and I have one swell kid, a four-year-old little girl, and we’re thinking of trying for number two. My last chance for a big scoop. You see I’m a writer, Dashiell Hammett. Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’m interested in the political fracas that’s heating up over here. I figure I’ll take in the sea air and do some research of my own. So whaddya got on the Barcelona beat?”

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The ancient cobblestones of the Barri Gòtic engage the pedestrian in a conversation that meanders through centuries, a space-filling delta that ramifies from behind La Rambla to the sea. City of disputation, of religious, philosophical and scientific debate. Barcelona, the daughter of her smaller mother Gerona. Barcelona, city of commerce, city of empire. Rabbi Shlomo ibn Aderet holds sway, though his teachers’ legacies remain with the mother city. Ibn Aderet, AKA the Rashba, The Rabbi of Spain, at least for the latter half of the Thirteenth Century. His mentors in Gerona, Yonah and the great Nachmanides, pitch their tents in opposing camps. A banker, the Rashba clings to the middle way, eschews praise of philosophy and science à la Maimonides, and as well as demurs the mystic path of his teacher Nachmanides. He dies in 1310, the year after the music changes, changes irrevocably.

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The Copenhagen Quantum Gang, Heisenberg and Bohr, leap down to Barcelona to toast the galleys of Heisenberg’s paper, Quantum Theoretical Re-interpretation. The newly celebrated author, young Werner, also chews the fat with Wolfgang Pauli while recovering from one of his frequent bouts of hay fever. So when he and Bohr decide to make tracks for Barcelona, Heisenberg’s enthusiasm bubbles over and zaps Pauli. Wolfie busts out of his Hamburg orbital and joins them all in their excited state. The Danish duo also wires Paul Dirac, Pascual Jordan and Max Born, the Whole Sicke Quantum Crewe, to make the scene for an impromptu symposium and jazz fest in Barcelona. These are the boys who blow up ol’ Rutherford’s bowling ball model of the atom. Kaboom!

Dirac needs a little arm-twisting to pry him out of his Cambridge cell. Too bad his brother died in March, but everyone who knows Paul is pretty sure familial attachment is more anthropological than emotional with Frere Dirac. Jordan is a different kind of trouble. Spanish nobility, originally Jorda. His great-great-great served with Wellington in the Brit’s beef with Napoleon. The family’s reward? Transposition en masse to Hanover, under the aegis of the British royals. The firstborn male of every generation is henceforth dubbed with the first name, Pascual. The name is the only thing Spanish that the young German quantum mechanic does not eschew. However, when he hears the great Schrödinger has condescended to Barcelona from his aerie in Zurich, Jordan overcomes his inertia and vaults down the map.

Fats Waller’s “Squeeze Me” waggles its way from the bandstand, offering its lazy seduction to the crowd. Some are not so easily seduced. Herr Professor Jordan takes a shlug from his beer stein and sneers at von Neumann’s clumsy Spanish. “I can’t imagine why you would bother to bugger an inferior language when we all know your Deutsch is passable, even for a Hungarian Jew.” Von Neumann, nobody’s goat, shakes his head and mutters loud enough for the others to hear, “He sounds just like one of Horthy’s Vitézi Rend thugs, those fascist hooligans.” A sudden hush shrouds the twelve disciples of the god of fearful symmetry. Pauli, deathly averse to conflict, practically jumps from the table. “My dear Paco,” begins his high pressure patter as he rubs his hands together furiously, “ I see that you and John are of opposite spins on the matter of the Spanish. According to the calculations of my new theory, that should nonetheless allow you to comfortably remain within the same orbital.” He ends with a ghastly staccato laugh, “Haha!” Pow! Paco Jordan’s beer glass explodes. Spooked, he reconfigures his face quickly, muttering, “Damned Spanish beer. Alhambra mein Arsch!” Heisenberg winks at Born and observes sotto voce, “The Pauli effect strikes again.” He and Max have many a time witnessed the preternatural tendency of glass laboratory equipment to explode spontaneously whenever Pauli makes the scene. Max shoots over to Pauli, “Wolfie! Please control yourself. We can’t afford to buy a new round of drinks every time your psychic energy goes kerblooey!” The whole table roars. Pauli looks down, his ears beet red.

♠     ♠     ♠

 The reader is instructed to proceed directly to Chapter 14: The Ideological Singularity.