Magic Castles in the Sky and the Unconscious Grendel

Magic Castles in the Sky and the Unconscious Grendel:

In the latter half of the 19th century when Charles Darwin was collecting samples of sea turtle species in the southern hemisphere and post-romantic poets were transposing his ideas into the realm of social determinism, there was another thinker out there on the fray (maybe on a ship somewhere) who was composing volumes and volumes of what he called Modern Cartesian Theory. This seaman, if you want to call him that, was called Charles Fourier.

Fourier understood the libinal side of things as Freud would have it. He knew what it was to sublimate something and he had a more acute sense of the constructs of what “reality” was before him or ever since. C.F. knew that “reality” was something, a room a space, that the human psyche constructed outside of itself, an elliptical extension if you will.

(The writer of this article will admit that he is tired after being up for many consecutive nights and is remembering in a weird way some of the lyrics of a Rod Stewart song, “Maggie”---something about his coffee being cold and having to get back to work---well anyway my coffee is in fact cold and it isn’t because I am drinking iced-coffee. The reason is very simple. I have been up for many consecutive nights. I have been visited by Charles Fourier or one of his entities or whatever you want to call it, and am not entirely sure that it is my fingers that are typing…maybe they are his).

Back to the sailboat and the human psyche. C.F. would swear by the fact that when he was so far out there in the unchanging blue canopy of the Pacific Ocean and had not seen a landmass for several days, that looking hard and fearlessly into the sun, he would close his eyes after and at once he was able to see his multiple alternate identities.

Identity number one could have been Beatrice, Dante’s second half in his efforts to leave Purgatory and identity number two could have been George Michael, a British pop icon who came way after. As he closed his eyes way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean far away from anything that even closely resembled land, he watched as they danced. Vaudeville with canes; tap tap tapping, spinning and smiling, all of his remote identities.

It was clear to C.F. and he would later profess in no short order of pages (The writer of this article would like to take a moment to acknowledge the invisible work that he has done, reducing the gargantuan corpus of C.F.’s work into a very manageable compendium…it is being printed as we speak and will soon be in circulation) that he had multiplied himself across time (the writer would like to emphasize footnote number 17 in the translator’s introduction that he feels divided is a more appropriate word). In essence, he had multiplied his genetic sequence many times over and in his uninhibited gaze towards the heavens had seen this sequence multiplied several more times and occupying several different bodies, each of which he believed to have only one distinct signature, or variation in the genetic sequence.

But we all know as members of the 21st century human race, how irrational we can be from time to time. No, I am not talking about C.F.’s firm belief that his genetic sequence could be (divided) and reproduced. Why dispute what has already been proven? What I am saying is that C.F.’s project was doomed for failure the minute he understood the nature of what he was doing: dividing himself, or, in a figurative sense grafting himself into the anatomies of remote cosmic bodies spaced out over centuries if not millennia.

It was the ebb and flow, the unpleasant side of harmony, that visited him in his nomadic tent at night. That specter would come and wrestle him down until he desisted and admitted to himself and it (the specter) that he could engender, but never under any circumstance alter these disparate identities. The atom would always be perfectly balanced between positive and negative. If not, relativity would exact change until this equilibrium was established.

C.F. understood in these moments of heightened perception the fact that he was undeniably the master of his own undoing. If there was to be a Roland of the Vanguard there would have to also be a Grendel. This menacing presence might lay dormant for some time before rapping at his door. But he would come. He would come and blow fire into the porthole of every one of Fourier’s vicarious spaces, wiping everything out and bringing his cosmic proliferation back to nil.

Much credit has been given to those around him, but we must pause to reflect from time to time on Fourier’s contribution to mankind. Reality plus one, was and always will be a reminder to us about the impending visitor at our door. The tax collector, however you want to think about it. Modern Cartesian Theory tells us about harmony, but it does not and cannot ever explain how harmony can be isolated (like a chemical compound), no matter how far out at sea each of us might be.

Jacob Darway for "Modern Illuminations of Science and Thinking"