# [D11:6M] Vision: [[Acausal Decoupling in Midnight’s Jalopy (after Dubuffet)]] Hexagram: [[Eleventh Hexagram]] Trials: [[Eleventh Trial]] Symbols: #car #black #committeeofforbiddenthoughts #four #chimera #arms #face #back #two #bead #one #TwoVersionsOfASelfsameLife #twin #darkwindow May 10th, 1934, 2034 I. The dark car at midnight pulls out of the empty black office lot of the Committee of Forbidden Thoughts. “To call a story a true story,” Nabokov once wrote, “is an insult to both truth and art.” And so we will not say this is one.  We will prefer to call it a _punctum,_ not a story at all, but a rough account of a certain sort of rupture taking place deep inside the story, which has its implications for the reader, from slight unease to deep psychological distress.  If, let’s say, a story must start and end, let us here decouple the pair, as sometimes happens in reverie.  Let us call this, then, not the truth, or a story, but an eye-poke of reverie. Look here.  Behind the dark glass.  A driver called Humbert.  A slump in a suit.  Eyeglasses so serious Humbert becomes a cartoon in them.  The sort a museum curator might wear, post ironic or post sincere, or both, but in Humbert’s case, neither.  In Humbert’s case, nothing but a pure clear accident having more to do with nervousness among shoppers and shop workers than anything else.  Humbert, god bless him, is not so much a man of the people as much as he is a shape without dimension inside of a dimension of hovering shapes. II. Do you know what Humbert is thinking?  As he drives home to his wife after a long day at Committee Offices, do you know what poor, sad Humbert is thinking?  Humbert is, you see, quietly enslaved by his very own thoughts.  We should say, in passing, that, matter of fact, there are two Humberts but let us put a pin in that remark and come back to it as the reverie allows.  For now, it is enough to know that this Humbert, Humbert Number One, is lately overwhelmed by a crushing nostalgia.  In short, Humbert misses his youth, but worse, the life he dreamed of and never had.  Was never _allowed_ to have, if you ask him.  That’s Humbert, silently sniveling and passing the buck.  This nostalgia of his is like a reel which is always reeling, burning, but never burning up.  It plays automatically, nothing he can do about it.  He can’t sleep.  He eats little.  He nowadays does his work poorly.   And what is his work?  He works as a secretary drafting cease-and-desists, districtwide, to unverified thinkers, local citizens and tax payers caught/monitored/surveilled while thinking without the proper license or other special allowances and certifications.  And though you wouldn’t know it to look at him, Humbert was, until recently, a man of quiet but boundless appetite, and lethal with the office stationary.  Threatening letters.  Insidious letters written in twos and threes, fours and fives.  Operating at the very extremities of legal recourse.  Promises of damage to reputation.  Firings and demotions.  Credit dings.  Seizure of assets.  Even home foreclosure.  Potential jail time?  Yes. But now?  Gutter brain.  Slang for a known but little discussed occupational hazard in which a committee secretary might find himself given, from time to time, to a new, more salacious type of thought-thinking.  Not the fault of oneself of course, but of, say, five or six years of documentation slid across the desk, enormous stacks, sizes, shapes and colors, and then finding an idea or two has gotten stuck in one’s own little thought-thinker, thoughts no longer under one’s own control, but caught like a cold in a sticky thought-net that the stick can’t get gotten unstuck of.  These types of thoughts would, in Humbert’s line of work, fall under the heading “Nonregulatory.”  In other words, these are thoughts so errant even the Committee can’t categorize it. III. In earlier societies, before the era of Public Thought Forbearance (PTF), unregulated thinking was quite casually, and usually rather politely, tossed aside, ignored, excluded.  Let’s say, for example, reader, you wanted to apply for grant funding for a public art project, and the project was a bit too arcane or esoteric, in other words “out there,” for a grant committee to neatly and easily sum up for themselves and each other in a five-minute discussion of said project.  Well then, one might expect to receive a polite and encouraging letter of rejection calmly and pedantically explaining that the Committee was unable to specify, for example, what timely and relevant questions the project is asking, or how it might interrogate and intervene in this or that and so on and so forth, or, even, and perhaps most importantly, to ascertain the parameters of just how the broader community might interact with it, and this kind of public-good, common-sense box-ticking sort of thing.  For, in those days, it was simply understood that things which are difficult to understand are understandably misunderstood by most members of the _community_, which, if we’re honest, was a word/concept in itself, _community_, not very well understood, if not always but often because the academic members of the committee might themselves misunderstand the very _community_ _members_ they liked imagining themselves to be, but weren’t, and therefore placated, so as to limit the indignity, their own, of class disparity. Fast forward thirty years or so and here come the PTF’s and the Humberts and all the rest, and, to be sure, this is not the Humberts’ faults, they didn’t invent the Corporate Marxist Thing, or the Oligarchical Orwellian Thing, or the Academic Problematist Thing, and certainly no one could have predicted how all the Things would come together like a perfidious tail-whipping fang-piercing chimera on the loose, because, remember, it’s Humbert’s very own enfeebled mind which has itself been colonized by all the Things.  How else to pay a mortgage and all that. IV. But you see, if history has taught us one thing, it’s that colonizing never fully works out.  Think of the Catholic Church and its longstanding strategy of syncretism.  You know: let the natives have some of the stuff they like, and then wrap your shit around it and hope they don’t notice the difference, what with all the killing and so on commanding most of the attention in these parts.  Well, pretty soon the folks whose geographical area it actually is might take some of their earlier shit and wrap it around some of your retarded shit and then settle in the middle somewhere and call it a day.  Then what you have is not Catholic but not not-Catholic.  It’s the not not not.  Three negatives making a slightly less negative.  Not the negative you want, you know, if you’re the colonizer, but the negative you don’t want. Forgive me if we’re losing our train of thought here.  We think what we’re trying to say is colonizing is sort of like an 80/20 proposition.  Try as you might, you can only take over a maximum of 80% of the Humbert and his thought-thinking.  But now that squirmy 20% you were too up-your-own-ass to notice, by force of nature, must leak out somewhere.  Like, you can’t stuff a car full of Humberts and not expect arms in faces, knees in backs, butts on laps, and the occasional inconvenient erection.  You see, the erection is part of the 20% leak.  It wasn’t part of the plan but now here it is, a definitional aspect of a stuffed jalopy.  If you don’t want the erection, don’t stuff the car.  See what we’re saying?  No one car is the right car for every Humbert.  And that’s where we are in the story of western culture’s self-hatred right now, and that’s what makes Humbert so fucking precisely Humbert. V. Now, let’s return to the matter of the second Humbert.  There’s a second Humbert.  A free Humbert.  If Humbert Number One is 80% colonized by the CFT’s and the PTF’s, and his nostalgic yearning is sort of like a dying libido, then the sticky thoughts he’s gleaned over too many years in admin, those many depraved and coprolalious delights, are the 20% leakage.  But what Humbert One doesn’t get that Humbert Two does get—the latter rides around unnoticed as a shadow with the former everywhere—is that the thought you can’t get rid of is not the bondage but the bullet.  The bullet that will finally, mercifully, lovingly, painfully, blow your fucking face off.  The 20% leakage, as Humbert Number Two would tell Humbert Number One, if #1 didn’t hate both his masculine and feminine aspects like a bargain basement neuterpuss for just one little second and listen, is that who you are dying to become is dying for the death of your colonized self.   Sure there will be people who hate you, Humbert!  When you quit your job and proclaim yourself free of dumb-dumb school!  They’re still hoping dumb-dumb school will make them acceptable to themselves!  Fuck ‘em!  How can they fire the man who already quit?  Let them ding the credit, Humbert!  Pull your cash out of the bank and hide it under the house!  You’d be suprised how little you need to live on!  Spaghetti and broccoli, Humbert!  Everything you need can be found in spaghetti and broccoli.  Your reputation?  Are you serious?  Humbert Number Two is from the future.  Humbert Number Two can tell you that in the future you will be a hundred times better off without a reputation of any kind than to be a nerd with a good one.  Someone with a good reputation, Humbert would tell Humbert, is nothing but a rube and a daffodil about to be trampled in the mud.  Everyone and everything dies.  Open yourself up to the inevitable.  It’s what you most deeply and desperately want. VI. The Committee of Forbidden Thoughts behind him, Humbert Humbert races through the darkness.  The yellow lines streak past as he zooms free as a bird, eager to please his wife.  Do you know why the lines glow in headlights?  Because mixed with the paint are millions or billions of little glass beads which reflect light.  Glass beads put there when you sleep.  Replaced as they shed under the tires of anonymous midnight drivers.  Dream beads glowing in your mind’s eye.  The secret source of all freedom. Humbert Humbert has a depraved mind.  Cease-and-desists already chase him through the mail.  Humbert: the Fugitive at Peace.  Humbert: Death’s Best Friend. His wife sometimes likes to be surprised at night when he rubs his not-huge-but-big-enough  erection against her still-pretty-firm little butt.  She runs a lot still.  When he caresses her arms and hip and silently nudges her top leg forward—she’s a side sleeper—and lightly touches her pussy, like from behind, but on top of her wet thong, she starts to shift a little, like, _yeah wake me up and let me act grumpy but spread my legs and bury your textbook regular-size dickadeedoo in me anyway and just turn your head the other way if my breath is bad._ Where once he was two, now he is one. Two versions of a selfsame life.  Twin Humberts forged in the neoliberal pits of contemporary middle-aged bullshit.  Whatever the future of his nostalgia, he’ll remember this moment, the night he fucked is wife as if for the first time and scared the cat out of bed.  Humbert Humbert: unfashionably unoutraged, calm as a regular cucumber, a statistical ghost, no reputation of any kind, free as the dead, knowing and accepting that, even in freedom, a car drives, a road ends, and a cliff is high.  It’s what happens in the seats that counts.  What passes by the dark window.  What to stop for.  What never to stop for.  What you run over and back up and run over again. Humbert Fucking Humbert.