(go to: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)

The Gardeners didn’t worry about the Pyromaniacs partying outside their gates. They were too involved in their own pursuits. While the Pyros were devolving and discovering themselves, the Gardeners explored the subtleties of their new craft. In the Garden oases, the richness of psychic causality was slowly uncovered.

At first it appeared that psychic power shot out from minds mechanistically. An agent X was capable of influencing an agent Y similar in magnitude to itself. This range of action was always suspect, however, as no plant agents were precisely equivalent to human agents, and from the start enthusiastic enough people could run flower patches and vineyards. An agent X was thus seen to cause variations in a whole field of matter: Y. But the outer limits of the domain Y were still fuzzy. Psychic capability faded with distance and increases in mass, but it never sharply disappeared.

The Gardeners experimented more liberally with their increasing powers, flinging tendrils of thought into unbounded territories and widening the scope of their attention. The beauty of their Garden dances expanded with their abilities and absorbed them deeper and deeper in concentration. They played below the plates of the earth and sent shoots out to the moon. Finally any X was seen to perturb the whole range of existence: Y, and Gardening began to encompass the stars.

But as the Gardeners’ project grew, the ranks of the disenchanted grew alongside it. If it was an exodus, it was uncoordinated. Isolated outcasts snuck away from the Gardens while they were still young enough to be unnoticed. Their reasons were unspoken, and their absences caused no waves. The natural born Pyros grew in number too. Once a Pyro, always a Pyro, and more and more of them lived through the rites of passage long enough to raise children.

For the most part, the Pyromaniacs were harmless. They specialized in night fires and festivals and remained too dissolute for large-scale explosions. They weren’t specifically antagonistic to the Gardens either—they didn’t care either way—they just knew that Gardens surrounded them. Their fires pushed up against Garden walls, and their drums beat over vegetable air. Sometimes they moved against the walls and their festivals treaded treacherously close to an attack, but their spirit expended itself before any harm was done.

Every once in awhile, however, for reasons impossible to discern, a top Gardener would defect to the Pyromaniacs. When this happened, the destructive potential of the Pyromaniacs would reveal itself. A trained Gardener’s power was unparalleled when let out of the gates. His clarity loomed over the Pyromaniacs as the drive they had been searching for. The discipline and finesse of a Gardener were so beyond them as to be magic, and they rallied behind it with superstition and glee. It was a wizard who came to them, predestined, called forth. He unmasked their buried thoughts and purposes, and set them loose on the world—a long awaited conjurer of Volition.

The Gardener, unaccustomed to fervor and affirmation, would rise to the occasion provided him by the outcast masses. Like a contagion, fire would spread from him with no end in sight. The Gardener would burn, for them and for himself, and everything in the reach of his mind would burn with him. The wastelands would rage in a momentary fireball, and the Gardener would perish triumphantly.

The Pyromaniacs were never consumed with their leader. They knew better. It was a game to them, and they were very experienced. Unlike the Gardener, their unfortunate wizard, the ragamuffins knew how to end a fire. They knew when to seek shelter. At the last minute, they would detach themselves from the wizard’s fury and retreat underground.

The Gardens were well-protected from the outside with their walls and their practices, but with each deserter from their top, the rampages crept closer and burned hotter. The cycle of contagion and desertion sped up. The wizard’s anguish burned like wildfire when released over the thin dry tinder of previously charred land and arrived almost immediately at the Garden gates in defeat—but the margin of each defeat became smaller. Every leader came closer to retaining the loyalty of the Pyromaniacs, and every fireball came closer to breaking into the Gardens. The balance of the world began to tremble.

Eventually, a leader would take the Pyros with him to the end and put a stop to the cycle. It was inevitable. The Pyromaniacs would stick with somebody and be destroyed. Their destruction would either break down the gates of the Gardens, or seal them forever. Without Pyromaniacs, the Gardens could last indefinitely and would probably fulfill their own cosmology. But if the Pyromaniacs made it in, nothing was certain.

The fateful night came on December 12, 2703. The party outside the gates began crisply, without announcement. The defecting Gardener stepped out of the gates and was immediately enveloped by the waiting crowd. There was no confusion as to what roles were to be played. A thousand blind hands nudged him perfectly to where he needed to be. Cries of affirmation, winks, whispers, and timely collisions ushered him to the center pyre and he rose up unquestioningly. The ritual was always the same, but there was a confident calm this time as the players synced perfectly with their play. As the fervor built, a revelation spread through the Pyromaniacs. As they danced and jeered and burned, the barrier that had remained between them and their creations finally dissolved. In the frenzy of their party, in the convolutions perfected in the thousand iterations, their way was finally cleared. The excruciating friction and heavy doubt of their dealings with matter were eradicated. In that moment, victory or defeat became equally beautiful, and they gave themselves over completely.

In Norse mythology, the destruction of the Gods is foretold. Certain of their deaths, they fight valiantly and perish to the forces of chaos. In another universe, perhaps, the Gardeners could have ended in that way—in a battle and a defeat. But in this universe, there was no such dichotomy. There was no battle, there was only the growing Pyromaniacal declaration—that every molecule in themselves could be excited into pure moment, that it was a simple choice and an effortless unfolding. When their declaration finally made it over the gates, it found its perfect allies. For a moment the fires flickered, as though hesitating, but it was just a trick of lighting. The universe had volition, and it chose to explode.

(go to: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

People had always wondered about the end. The branch of human thought devoted to the development of the universe— cosmology— generally included a section devoted to theories on the end— eschatology. Eschatological speculations were interesting while they lasted. Ideas ran from ascension, thermodynamic decay, tide of chaos, cosmic implosion—to fire and brimstone, battle, peace, glory, and oblivion. Many theories came close to the mark—most theories, in fact. But the necessary determinism of any eschatological answer overlooked a key feature of fate: chance.

Perhaps the universe was doomed from the day Jean Paul Renault unleashed his Principle. Certainly, from that point on, destruction of some magnitude was unavoidable. But if he had initiated the sequence to Ultimate Destruction, its inevitability remained hidden until the last instant. The delicate point of equilibrium required for the universe to explode was attained by the play of such erratic forces that any calculation of an outcome would have been impossible. A hair in another direction and the crucial momentum would have collapsed. Fortunately, after 2299 or so, no one wasted their time trying to guess at ends. Instead, Gardening spread across the world, and with its grand influence, eschatology was dismissed.

The adoption of Gardening as the main pursuit of mankind was the immediate consequence of the murder of Brother Edgar. Renault’s act was enigmatic, but its violence silenced debates over the truth of Edgar’s discovery. The reactionary outburst displayed to the world an immaturity, in the face of progress, that people could no longer stomach. All reasonable people were shocked into seeing that Brother Edgar’s find was of revolutionary importance, unavoidable, unparalleled in human history—and the events transformed a surprising percentage of the world’s population into reasonable people. Thus it was decided by society that the time had finally arrived for all utopian daydreams to come to fruition. Renault was deemed a madman.

After their new beliefs settled, people found psychic projection easy to achieve. Confidence and a little concentration were all it took to get their backyard plants moving. It was fundamental; no one found themselves entirely lacking. A new enchantment with reality uplifted them, and change came swiftly and effortlessly. Local structures transitioned naturally into independent Gardens, almost covering the globe in their escalating glee—ballets of growth and color, swelling plays of form and matter burst out from the plots of land and matured elegantly into writhing webs and towers. Each garden was an individual masterpiece, never constant over time, a unique profusion of harmony and vitality.

In the cheer and spirit of Gardening, a cosmology was put forth whereby the universe would never die. The universe had Volition and could choose to continue, just as man had and could. Simplicity and clarity guided the Gardeners in all their thought. With some experimentation, they found that metaphysics remained pleasantly consistent when cut down to three concepts. Volition, one, was the combination of the other two: Will and Willing-but-Willed Action. This was the simplest and clearest schema they could maintain. Within it Renault’s Principle was inconceivable. When the issue arose, the Principle was muddily dismissed as both immoral and impossible, but it rarely came up. There was no room in the magnificence of Gardening for the agitation, the meandering desires and frustrations that would nurture such a dangerous idea.

But in the wastelands outside the Gardens, reasoning was not so easy. There was an element in the world that remained incurably aloof to the beauty of Gardening. Like everyone else, they turned to plant work, but the movements they created couldn’t succeed in captivating them. Everything fell flat. There was a distraction which defeated their focus and left their dances uninspired—a nagging image of something greater. They were unable to shake the stubborn notion that it was the spectacular Renault who was the real revolutionary, not Edgar.

Unfortunately for these outliers, there was no immediate answer to their doubts. Distrustful of the repression of the Principle, they couldn’t buy into the Gardeners’ notions of utopia. But neither could they provide a strong counterpoint, a decisive inflammation of the Principle of Equivalence. The driven clarity an explosion demanded was elusive, and impossible to muster from the scattered confusions and suspicions they had been left with. Incapable of incorporating themselves into the new world, they became unattached, solitary vagrants, making their way through the scraps Gardening had left behind.

The endeavors of these wanderers were torn. Fires flickered but never consumed them. Forms and dances flowed effortlessly but never gripped them. On one side a wild, luminary impulse taunted them, while on the other the melancholy escape of psychic play called to them. In the uncultivated lands, their drives flailed for direction then atrophied in the unforgiving elements. Their gifts seemed destined to flounder, steps toward something that could be, but that they could never lock onto.

Some lost themselves in wonder, hypnotized by the responsiveness of life their new powers revealed—the world would give under their look and they would give right back, falling into the pulse and undulation of every moment. Some laughed uncontrollably and made dances that mimicked fires and little fires that grew like plants. Some became lackadaisical, others turned angry. Unchecked in the open wastelands, the outcasts grew wild. They were maniacal with time, or they were broken.

But when nothing mattered anymore, and every one of them agreed on that, they finally found their answer. The fire-mad look in their eyes had drawn them together and wound them so tight; their lunacies had flared so colorfully and ridiculously for all to see—there was no other option. They began to Party. They were Revelers of course, Hedonists, spectacular growths of their own making with a limited time on this planet. They called themselves the Pyromaniacs—their party lasted 400 years.

(go to part 6)

(go to: part 1, part 2, part 3)

The unforeseen development was ludicrous but unshakable. Every media outlet on the planet visited the Brothers’ garden to independently verify the news, hoping perhaps for an end to the display—after which there might be room for more reasonable scrutiny. But the tree kept dancing and the Brother kept beaming. Skeptics and rationalists were flown in, but the evidence before their eyes was irrefutable: there sat a man; there danced an oak tree. On sight, the scene was too dynamic to deny. A hoax was impossible.

The preposterousness of the turn sent many people off the edge. The more rigid minds melted to putty under the attack, their capacity for sophistication blown away. Dutifully they had to concede the facts but after that surrender they were lost, never again sure of their own two feet. The loosest minds slipped entirely. The streets filled with trumpeters of all the other ridiculous claims of the ages—aliens again, resurrection, super powers. Only a few people in a clear-sighted middle ground could see it for what it was: a simple expansion of action. And no one but Renault could see its full potential, its disastrous pinnacle.

Jean Paul saw the connection to his work immediately. The Principle of Being—the Equivalence of Orgasm—the Brother’s rapture: the active impulse missing from his thesis, the means of excitation, had been discovered by Brother Edgar. Only the final violence of the act was missing.

While the world reeled, Renault pondered carefully. Was his secret a danger, or a blessing? Should he bury his work forever, or reveal it immediately—and how could he do it? He felt the grimness of his final vision, a vacuum—that what had seemed to him the essence of life was now, very clearly, the destruction of it.

But the more he stared at Brother Edgar’s grinning face in the videos, the less he struggled. He became filled instead with a strange kind of glee which grew and grew. Finally, Jean Paul—he said to himself—you have done it! The glee built until he couldn’t control himself any longer and began laughing, tears streaming down his face. You‘ve done it—he said—finally—you have gone mad! His life-long quest was clearer to him now, revealed, a simple, delightful choice there for the taking: insanity. He had searched for it long and hard. And now here he had arrived—Jean Paul Renault—not just insane, not just any madman, but the luckiest madman who ever lived!

He was a madman in a world of dancing trees and psychic monks! The most educated madman in history—in a world of jugglers and discus throwers—the most interesting world, the last such world! He was a madman in the springtime. The whole delicate spectrum of achievement had unfolded and now rested colorfully, just waiting to be overwhelmed. He knew his task now, his Luciferian mission. The Great Jean Paul Renault! It was fate. Wild but lucid, he sent a post to the press and the academy explaining his behavior and the Principle, then set off to the monastery with a flamethrower.

Renault entered the garden confidently. He had figured out precisely what had to be done. He didn’t approach the oak or Brother Edgar but went instead to the edge of the garden and began slowly setting the enclosing shrubs on fire. The smoke rose and the tree seemed to dance harder, clearing its air. He paused, making sure not to outpace the Brother—it was imperative that Brother Edgar not give up. Renault set fire to the flower patches, one by one, then the bushes and the saplings. He let the smoke gather. He needn’t have been worried—Brother Edgar was intent, and the tree began to swirl violently, creating a vortex of motion to push away the smoke and heat. Renault watched for a moment, letting his smile grow as wide as the Brother’s. Laughing once more, he finally aimed his flame at the tree. A moment elapsed, and then the garden exploded. Ten square miles went with it. The fate of the universe was sealed.

(go to part 5)

(go to: part 1, part 2 )

On May 7, 2298, three months after Renault’s paper began obscurely circulating through the stalest academic circles, The Brothers of Botany discovered—-with certainty—-humanity’s psychic powers. It must have been inevitable given the persistent spiritual rumblings through the centuries, but no one had seen it coming. Psychic powers were down there with purple elephants—unseen and by now untrue.

The Brotherhood had not intended to release anything so spectacular on the scene. They had been established fifty years prior to explore a quiet pursuit: vegetative attentiveness—they embraced the pun wholeheartedly. The Brothers concentrated on vegetation vegetatively, hoping to observe something new about the nature of the plant kingdom through intimate empathy. They were a dedicated sect, a lifelong commitment, and as the end of the century approached their first generation of elders was maturing. For the first time in human endeavors there existed plant-watching adepts, disciples who had spent their lives honing the skill.

Brother Edgar was one of the oldest elders, and the most revered in the order. He was the strictest member and rarely spoke. Unlike most other beginners, Brother Edgar had not started his practice on an eye-catching vine or sapling. Arriving in the first few months of the Brotherhood’s existence, Edgar had situated himself in the very center of the group’s garden and planted a single oak seed. It took two years for his seed to germinate, but he didn’t seem to mind. Everyday he would sit in the center of the garden, waiting patiently, the same before it sprouted as after. He didn’t sing to his plot of land as some brothers chose to, and he didn’t name his tree. He didn’t prune the branches or rake the leaves or stroke the bark. He just sat. For decades he watched as his oak spurted upward, hardened, and slowly twisted outward. Leaves fell around him building a thick blanket of detritus; a few branches snapped. He remained, inscrutable.

But subtly over time he did begin to smile at the tree. It was imperceptible at first, but every year the smile grew a tiny bit. For awhile, his smile reached an appearance of beaming serenity. Was he enlightened in some fashion—-the brothers wondered—-had he seen something they could see? They pondered in awe for a few years.

But Brother Edgar’s smile continued to widen, until it looked more goofy than serene. Then it got wild…gleaming, knowing…almost naughty. If anyone asked him what he was doing he would reply—-waiting for the right moment. His left eyebrow began to rise suggestively and his breathing became heavy. It was a curious energy to be around, and a few of the brothers gave up their own plants to sit with him around the oak. They breathed heavily too, trying to summon whatever arousal had hit Brother Edgar.

One day, out of nowhere, the right moment came. Brother Edgar sat down without ceremony, as he did every morning, but this time he sat a little closer, looking up. He sat and he waited half the morning. The brothers were tense with expectation. Then with a sudden intake of breath, Edgar’s nostrils flared and he whispered to the oak, “Dance for me.”

It was as though the tree had suddenly un-paused. The natural curves of its limbs began to carry throw in a hypnotic flow of motion. Its trunk swayed towards and away from the brothers, guiding the weight of the branches. The tree danced.

(go to part 4)

(go to part 1)

For the next fifty years, ecstatic union remained dormant as a cultural theme. The subject had become bloated and ungainly with the movement, and anyone approaching it was easily dismissed as a ‘hopeless One-Lobe’—–no one bothered with the mess. It took the millenium’s best and last metaphysician to resuscitate it.

The great Jean Paul Renault was French, with a German mother. Raised on rotten cheese and the memory of German spirit, Renault never felt comfortable in the 23rd Century. The world was a strange place then. People would later view the time as a calm before the storm—a bubble between the listlessness of Before and the drive of After—–but within that bubble there was such a sense of stillness it seemed permanent. Having survived the 21st Century, humanity had drifted into prosperity and, as though given a second chance, wonder. Monklike organizations, splintered sects of extreme interest, cropped up in dedication to every imaginable pursuit: fire spinning, glass arts, dancing, architecture, memorization, food preparation, jumping, computing, screaming—–everybody seemingly fell into something.

Gradually, the world had become more fantastical, and Jean Paul sensed that from the quiet of his small mountain town. But something in the practical devotion of his peers distanced him and turned him inward. The multitude roared, but the call of any one vocation felt faint. Jean Paul, painfully observant, felt he perhaps tendered the last flames of frustration, ineffectiveness: the last blocked dam, the only one left with any pressure able to wish for release.

There was an idea out there they were missing, he thought. Things were settling without a piece of the puzzle. He’d wander the woods in the morning and read in the fading afternoon when the bellowers practiced in the hills. The diligence and practicality of his times were his only tools, and so, with the kind of dedication that can only expect death, he pursued his atavistic longing for explosion down every dusty register of philosophy, through the overlooked byways, the forgotten digressions, the concealed corollaries—-searching.

After thirty years of study, with a stream of circuitous convolutions only his mind could hold in entirety, Jean Paul Renault was finally able to prove The Grand Principle. It was a Principle of Being, he said–—a principle rather than a truth. It was at once a declaration and a creation. The Grand Principle stated:

If every element in a universe is excited together into Pure Moment, said universe will explode.

His dense work would surely have been ignored had it not been for the most spectacular coincidence in the whole course of reality.

(go to part 3)

On Dec 12, 2703 humankind finally blew up the Universe. Their devastating success can be traced back to the formation of a small sex cult in the early 21^st Century. The One-Loves, rallied by charismatic British guru Bhagavan Lito and inspired by an indecipherable blend of pre-millennial traditions, proposed—–for the first recorded time in history—–an all-powerful Preeminence of Orgasm. Adherents to the doctrine believed that if the instant of orgasm were spread to every living being on Earth at once, a fantastic event would occur. The nature of the event varied: implosion, transcendence, enlightenment, eternal life, and alien revelations were major theories. Though the movement was largely incoherent, eventually collapsing under its own confusion, the original pronouncement of Bhagavan Lito was shockingly precise:

THE ULTIMATE CONVULSION IS THE EQUIVALENCE RELATION THAT BRINGS EVERYTHING TO NOTHING.
BOM SHIVA.

The One-Loves carried on for around a century after the death of Baba Lito, thriving in the political and social upheavals of the time. Followers reveled in public nudity but kept their impassioned fornication rituals strictly private. New members were drawn in by the mystery, especially alluring to the curious, confused, and adolescent. For a few generations traditional culture watched, appalled, as the familiar counter-cultural arc of youthful rebellion burning to middle-age dissolution played out with unprecedented overtness. The most vital and enthusiastic were worked into gibbering, unbearable sexual and superstitious frenzies. Mimicking the previous century’s calls for a ‘politics of ecstasy’ and riling them up to new heights, they would repudiate their old society with unforgivable masturbatory acts and disappear for a decade of underground orgies. When their juices ran dry, they would reappear on the streets—-swollen, middle-aged orators, continuingly drawing in the impressionable with their irrepressible ramblings and provocative wrinkled nudity. The spectacle of their jiggling, exhausted elders eventually smothered the appeal of their mystery, and by the mid-22^nd Century the One-Loves had mostly dissipated.

(go to part 2)

Dear Luki,

I have no illusions of a hippy victory on this front. The ratchet of progress is irreversible. Gradually, no doubt, we’ll all become robots, the more so for having an entrancing artificial scent.

The next step in our transformation will occur when people start saying that thick, flamboyant layers of makeup are themselves an indispensible medium for self-expression, that the bare face in daylight is a Gorgon to behold. Nevermind cases already where it takes 15 minutes and a scouring pad to discover the landscape beneath.

As for gesticulation and poetry. A gracefully witty expression, improvised on the spot, is worth a thousand exquisite bottles of commercially-bought perfume, in a million creative combinations.

Ben

Roberto the Clown smoked his cigarette in front of the mirror, gazing somberly into his mottled painted face. Clown meeting at 10 AM on the Westside. Then he would man the afternoon shift at the corner of Swift and Ingalls and Amuse.

It was a deadly game. Three clowns has been killed this last month. The people were sick and tired and sometimes the laughter cracked something ugly. Just hold back a moment, let ‘em breathe…but it was the Clown Imperative to keep pushing, grow their ranks.

Roberto had broken a year ago, on a hot fall day on the downtown shopping strip.

“Gelato for you sir?” the clown had asked, spooning a tub of bright green gelato bit by bit onto the smooth bricked concrete. “Gelato for you?” He was a wry one, with piercing eyes. Roberto hadn’t meant to make eye contact, but something inside him twitched. “Gelato for you?”

Roberto stopped, considered, and took the tub from the man. “Gelato for me,” he announced. He could have walked on then, he was still safe. Tell his friends the story, over gelato. But something in him twitched again. He reached into his back pocket and felt his spoon sticking out. Why had he brought soup for lunch that day? He pulled it out. The clown’s eyes twinkled. “Gelato for you,” Roberto told him and dropped a spoonful of the green cream on the clown’s head. “Gelato for yoooouuu!”

Hours of hysteria later the spattered clown–Jerry was his name–took him back to Headquarters.

Roberto took another drag and blew the smoke on the mirror.

How now, brown cow?

Jerry had been killed in February–blew bubbles on the wrong suit and got a knife in the gut. But the clowns were winning. Only the dead could hold out. The wars. The plague. The alien attack. The weather shifts. The grasp on things was breaking apart. The Imperative was the only reply Roberto’s dwindling energy could summon. Shuffling through the street, chainsmoking, rasping out the ditties; dirty old clown.

He would try public indecency today. “Roberto for you?” he was considering asking, in tribute. He winked at himself in the mirror. A little stubble. A strong jaw. Sturdy suspenders. “For you, little lady?”

Robert for you. It was a death wish.