following is a passage from Don DeLillo's 'Point Omega'
--
We sat out late, scotch for us both, bottle on the deck and stars in clusters. Elster watched the sky, everything that came before, he said, there to see and map and think about.
I asked him whether he'd been to Iraq. He needed to consider the question. I didn't want him to believe that I knew the answer and was asking the question in order to challenge the breadth of his experience. I didn't know the answer.
He said, "I hate violence. I fear the thought of it, won't watch violent movies, turn away from news reports on television that show dead or wounded people. I had a fight, I was a kid, I went into spasms," he said. "Violence freezes my blood.
He told me he had all-source clearance, or access to every sensitive sliver of military intelligence. I knew this wasn't true. It was in his voice and face, a bitter wistfulness and I understood of course that he was telling me things, true or not, only because I was here, we both were here, in isolation, drinking. I was his confidant by default, the young man entrusted with the details of his makeshift reality.
"I talked to them one day about war. Iraq is a whisper, I told them. These nuclear flirtations we've been having with this or that government. Little whispers," he said. "I'm telling you, this will change. Something's coming. But isn't this what we want? Isn't this the burden of consciousness? We're all played out. Matter wants to loose its self-consciousness. We're the mind and heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now."
He refilled his glass and passed me the bottle. I was enjoying this.
"We want to be the dead matter we used to be. We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. When I was a student I looked for radical ideas. Scientists, theologians, I read the work of mystics through the centuries. I was a hungry mind, a pure mind. I filled notebooks with my versions of world philosophy. Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end. Animal diseases spreading, transmittable cancers. What else?"
"The climate," I said.
"The climate."
"The asteroid," I said.
"The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?"
"Famine, worldwide."
"Famine," he said. "What else?"
"Give me a minute."
"Never mind. Because this isn't interesting me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this."
I didn't want him to stop. We sat drinking quietly and I tried to think of further workable prospects for the end of human life on earth.
"I was a student. I ate lunch and studied. I studied the work of Teilhard de Chardin," he said. "He went to China, an outlaw priest, China Mongolia, digging for bones. I ate lunch on open books. I didn't need a tray. The trays were stacked at the beginning of the line in the school cafeteria. He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare. There was a North American camel. Where is it now?"
I nearly said, In Saudi Arabia. Instead I passed the bottle back to him.
"You told them things. Were these policy-board meetings/ Who was there?" I said. "Cabinet-level people? Military people?"
"Whoever was there. That's who was there."
I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.
He said, "Matter. All the stages, subatomic level to atoms to inorganic molecules. We expand, we fly outward, that's the nature of life ever since the cell. The cell was a revolution. Think of it. Protozoa, plants, insects, what else?"
"I don't know."
"Vertebrates."
"Vertebrates," I said.
"And the eventual shapings. The slither, crawl, biped, crouch, the conscious being, the self-conscious being. Brute matter becomes analytical human thought. Our beautiful complexity of mind."
He paused and drank and paused again.
"What are we?"
"I don't know."
"We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field."
--
I talked to Elster about an essay he’d written a few years earlier, called “Renditions.” It appeared in a scholarly journal and soon began to stir criticism from the left. This may have been his intention but all I could find in those pages was an implied challenge to figure out what the point was.
The first sentence was, “A government is a criminal enterprise.”
The last sentence was, “In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will listen to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, will ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.”
What lay between these sentences was a study of the word rendition, with references to Middle English, Old French, Vulgar Latin and other sources and origins. Early on, Elster cited one of the meanings of rendering—a coat of plaster applied to a masonry surface. Form this he asked the reader to consider a walled enclosure in an unnamed country and a method of questioning, using what he called enhanced interrogation techniques, that was meant to induce a surrender (one of the meanings of rendition—a giving up or giving back) in the person being interrogated.
I didn’t read the piece at the time, knew nothing about it. If I had known, before I knew Elster, what would I have thought? Word origins and covert prisons. Old French, Obsolete French and torture by proxy. The essay concentrated on the word itself, earliest known use, changes in form and meaning, zero-grade forms, reduplicated forms, suffixed forms. There were footnotes like nested snakes. But no specific mention of black sites, third-party states or international treaties and conventions.
He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter.
He pointed out that words were not necessary to one’s experience of the true life.
Toward the end of the commentary he wrote about select current meanings of the word rendition—interpretation, translation, performance. Within those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory, he wrote, actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked, dressed in black, and what ensues, he wrote, is a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours.
I stood in a corner of the deck, out of the sun, and asked him about the essay. He waved it away, the entire subject. I asked him about the first and last sentences. They seem out of place in the larger context, I said, where crime and guilt don’t get mentioned. The incongruity is pretty striking.
“Meant to be.”
Meant to be. Okay. Meant to unsettle critics of the administration, I said, not the decision makers. Flat-out ironic.
He sat in an old reclining chair he’d found in the shed behind the house, a beach chair out of it element, and he opened one eye in lazy disdain, measuring the fool who states the obvious.
Okay. But what he thought of the charge that he’d dry to find mystery and romance in a word that was being used as an instrument of state security, a word redesigned to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced.
But I didn’t ask this question. Instead I went inside and poured two glasses of ice water and came back out and sat in the chair alongside him. I wondered if he was right, that the country needed this, we needed it in our desperation, our dwindling, needed something, anything, whatever we could get, rendition, yes, then invasion.
He held the cold glass to the side of his face and said he was not surprised by the negative response. The surprise came later, when he was contacted by a former university colleague and invited to a private meeting at a research institute just outside Washington. He sat in a paneled room with several others including the deputy director of a strategic assessment team that did not exist in any set of official records. He didn’t mention the man’s name, either because this was the kind of sensitive detail that must remain within the walls of a paneled room or because he knew that the name would mean nothing to me. They told Elster that they were seeking an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint. His time in government would follow, interrupting a series of lectures he was giving in Zurich on what he called the dream of extinction, and after two years and part of another here he was, again, in the desert.
There were no mornings or afternoons. It was one seamless day, every day, until the sun began to arc and fade, mountains emerging from their silhouettes. This is when we sat and watched in silence.
