The Cerebral Catalyst

The tower came to be built when a terrible sound, like a scream, was carried on the breeze from the mountain down to the valley where a young boy was playing in a brook. Frightened, the boy ran home, where he told his father, who told his neighbor, who told the tax collector, who told his lord, who told the king, who asked his advisers and philosophers to explain the phenomena. The spies and poisoners who had infiltrated his court (quite a number at that particular time) overheard the report, and they told their own kings, who asked the same of their advisers and philosophers, and so on, until word of the screaming mountains reached the ears of every king and warlord in every nation. Many theories were proposed, favored and dismissed, only to be favored again.

Some said that a great war was being waged over some mysterious treasure: a great pearl, perhaps, the size of a man's head, or a sapphire the size of a woman's. Others were convinced that there was a contested river of molten gold, flowing from a deep gash in the mountainside, and by merely dipping his ladle into that fiery stream even the poorest of peasants could build his own empire in one afternoon. Still there were others who believed they were hearing the sounds of a great injustice being committed against humanity, and the favor of the gods could be found in liberating the faceless and shrieking population. Those in more primitive kingdoms (whose gods had not yet become abstractions of philosophy but still lived in the thunder and lightning, in totems and shrines or in sacred caverns and trees) believed that the underworld had been thrust upward by a cataclysmic earthquake, and the souls of the dead were seeping upward, and it was their duty to force them back down from whence they came for the sake of universal equilibrium and to prevent a pre-emptive apocalypse.

Regardless of what anyone speculated (and ultimately everyone did), eventually all the kings sent their armies to conquer the mountain. Given what was at stake (wealth or sainthood or both) no kingdom spared any expense: whole treasuries were emptied, and all industry turned its hand to war. Farmers took up pikes and artisans turned from their traditional crafts to make swords, arrows, shields, and armor. Indeed, the risks were considerable, but so was the lure of finding new territories and booty.

Soon it became necessary for the smaller kingdoms to create alliances with one another, even between those that had been enemies for millennia. These confederations made alliances with larger states to support one another's efforts. At first meetings between heralds, messengers, and diplomats were fraught with anxiety, but soon fearfulness gave way to friendly embraces and laughter. The politicians saw a bright future of universal peace. It was understood by all that each would probably slit the other's throat (so to speak) to claim the whole prize when the time came, but given that many were making war on religious grounds, such eventualities were to remain undiscussed until the appropriate time. Oracles were consulted, interpreted, and the prophecies carried out exactly as they were predicted: eagles meant storms, turtles meant impending economic depression. Laws and regulations were passed to support the unified nations, some as complex and daunting as some of the engineering projects that began rising from the valley floor into the sky.

Trade sped along. Every sort of vehicle, from the smallest ass pulling the ricketiest cart loaded with blighted tubers to the most opulent juggernaut crushing its adoring throngs of believers, rolled and clattered and rumbled over the newly constructed roads paved with white stone.

Languages died or became meshed together, until eventually there was a single common tongue between all the peoples of all the lands. This all took place over the course of a few generations; the great effort's capstone achievement was the construction of a tower, as tall as the mountain itself, which some surviving texts call Babel. It spiraled up to such a dizzying height that only the heartiest dared climb its innumerable steps, and when they reached the top they saw such wonders that they never came back down.

2.
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Today I will hunt the pandas. They are easy prey, sitting on their asses in the forest, stuffing themselves with bamboo, completely self-obsessed, each muttering to themselves that the other pandas are all too fat to fuck and besides I don't want no damn kids.

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Hope and Faith was cancelled, but sometimes you'll see it in syndication, scheduled late-nights on unremarkable television networks between infomercials for storm windows with the shades built right in. Sometimes it will come on when I can't sleep and I think about having sex with Kelly Ripa, and I wonder if you breathed on her hard enough and in the right place, most of her would go away, though you'd still hear chattering.

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An old man sits on a boulder masturbating loudly to a snowdrift that reminds him of Gloria. He has a steam-powered device that allows him to filter his piss and convert his effluvia into edible compounds. He says he believes in God more than anybody else on the planet.

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Shangri-La is not a golden city. It is true that it's way up there in the Himalayas, so it kind of lends itself to a sort of forlorn majesty, I guess, but it's no paradise, if you ask me, and I work there, so I should know. Its only notable contribution to the world is that it's the birthplace of Sado-Masochism. There were some monks living up there, and they had this whole "pleasure and pain is the universe" bullshit worked out. I was supposed to learn about it on training day, but the VCR was broken and we never got around to it. Anyway it used to be, I think, like hundreds of years ago, rich people, like kings and queens and such from all over, would go there to be beaten with rocks, or punch each other in the face, or whatever people did to feel closer to God back then. Kind of like a medieval health spa. It's where that Marky guy got most of his ideas, at least that's what they tell us. It was pretty classy by their standards, but when the Industrial Revolution hit, loads of regular people started showing up, so it's mostly tourist traps now; you know how these things go. I mean, it's nice I guess if you're into that sort of thing. They got a local history museum with a fake dungeon on the main drag, and a log ride for the kids. My job's pretty easy. I walk around in a foam-rubber suit that looks like Mickey Mouse, that is, if Mickey Mouse didn't have ears, wore a ball-gag, and liked getting spanked with a big leather paddle while having his picture taken with a bunch of retirees in T-shirts. Oh, and there's a Wal-Mart, too, right next to the Denny's.

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Yale R. Deskins is an MFA candidate at Columbia University, specializing in poetry.

posted 02.11.08.

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