Everything But The Metaphysics:
The Soul Of A White Ant
*Originally published in Duck Egg Green, 1980*
An interview with A. Avery, Psychedelic Duellist.
Man, I just wasn’t sure about him. He looked at me like I was an insect. We were supposed to meet in the Hotel de Christo and he was early. He was annoyed that I wasn’t, said he’d been waiting for ages.
But, I was on time, I insisted.
Which time? He asked me, and then burst into laughter. I come early to everything, always have. It’s like a tic. Or a tock. One of those.
He shook my hand and the insect glare disappeared. I’ve been nervous about interviewing duellists before, but August Avery was something else. You see him in the pits and he might be an ordinary man, doing extraordinary things, but you see him up close, in the world, and you’d have to think some kind of alien intelligence was at work.
I took out my notebook and immediately he was onto me. No notes, no writing. No recording. No tapes. He tapped his head, Memory, that’s all. Give me access to your memories and you’ll have what you need. I distrust the written word.
I told him I was intending to use direct quotes.
Then remember them, he said. No tapes. No recordings. A few years ago, during a duel I was winning so easily I could afford a little me time, I imagined – perhaps hallucinated, though I never liked that word – a world in which nothing could be recorded, ever. Nothing ever written down or put onto tape. No accounts ever, just word of mouth. I say imagined because, of course, this was the world and I don’t see how literature of any kind has much improved on it. Things captured lose their essence, I think.
I nodded, because it felt like that was required, and then, just like that, he moved onto something else. As if that topic was over and done with.
You know that the collected weight of termites is a hundred times greater than the collective weight of humans? Even I’m not sure what that means to us and I’ve been thinking about it for a while.
I read somewhere that the idea that humans were the dominant species on earth was badly misguided, I said.
He nodded at this and dug into his satchel, pulling out several little green cue cards that he’d scrawled on. These are all from a book called The Soul of The White Ant, he said. I’d like to read you some, or maybe get you to read them yourself.
I thought about challenging his earlier mistrust of the written word but something about the intensity of the handwriting on these little cards made me think again. HE passed some cards over and I read them quickly. It wasn’t clear what I was meant to take from them.
“We present to you the following facts: 1 The queen is incapable of movement. 2 The doors of the cell are too small for her to come or go by. 3 The insects cannot lift her.4 Yet she vanishes from one cell to appear in another.”
So, he said, given 1) where does this leave us? Given 4) where does this lead you?
I can’t help you, I replied.
I wasn’t asking.
He wanted to know why the white ant must have a soul, why it couldn’t just be. He was as typically afraid of that verb as any duellist I’ve known but claimed that his fear was more genuine because he’d seen where it could take us.
He passed me another cue card. Said I could keep them. Said he was full of exceptions.
“A little way behind man we find apes, with similar degeneracy and similar results, only in a lesser aside. We have taken a brief and general glance at the two poles, pain and sex.”
I just don’t know, he said, shaking his had, it’s in there somewhere. I’ve spent a little time in there but I need to spend more. See what you think.
I took the cards. This was going to be a long evening.
August Avery is not an easy guy to interview, but that’s why Duck Egg Green is interviewing him. I pressed on, past the termites, tried to get him to talk about anything other and, eventually, he said a few things about that last duel and what happened at Coker and the aftermath of his disappearance, even if he was being vague and evasive.
It seems like he’s been planning something big. A new version of me, as he called it. I’ve decided that the I that I was cannot be, that there are no I’s that make sense in the past, and none that could make sense of the future.
It was not what he expected of himself, not even close. He handed me another termite card.
“That they were forced to use this shaft in spite of their intense aversion to light.”
It seemed too good an opportunity to miss. I dug in and asked about the light aversion. He didn’t seem to want to talk too much about it but, when I pressed him, he did open up a little about the famous encounter, two short years ago now, when he faced (REDACTED) in one of the first white light duels. Man, there’s things on the skin that get illuminated so fully, so perfectly… everyone can see you and you can see everyone. It’s startling. Oh my God, it’s full of stars.
I laughed at this and he laughed back. 2001 references used to be Avery's trademark, before they got used up and abused by all and sundry. Before that stream ran dry.
I pressed him on relationships. He understood the calamity of friendship in the scene and couldn’t see how it could be reconciled. If you have no friends in the scene then that’s exactly the same as having too many, he said, nodding at me as if I would understand. I asked him whether his relationship with Bill before Coker could have had any specific bearing in the outcome but he just shrugged and suggested that Bill had got lucky. I didn’t give him any insights he couldn’t have worked out for himself, he said, sometimes in this game you stumble into someone’s mind and then flail around trying to get back out. On the way out of mine he might have damaged a few discs.
Discs? I asked.
Timelines. You know how it is, he replied. We are all on a path, upwards, along a flat mushroom – aha! – shaped circuit. We are all on the stem, trying to reach the top, trying to find a place to rest, to be. Every person on the planet is either at the top or climbing up the stem; some people are climbing higher than others, some people are slipping down towards the earth, the mulch. This then is our definition of maturity: how far up the tube you've gone; how many of your friends/family you can see ahead of you in the light and below you in the half-light.
And what happens when you get to the top?
You get to the top and you have two options; you stay there and be yourself forever, use it like the platform it is or… you look over to the other mushrooms, the other platforms – do I mean plateaus? I think I do – and you start getting ready for a leap. Actually, I guess it’s more like a stick with a spinning plate… that makes more sense. You can get carried away with the mushroom analogy – blame Terence Mckenna for that. A spinning plate universe! Yes, that’s right, that’s exactly right!
He seemed pleased at this confirmation, and it was obvious that his thinking was in real time, that it hadn’t been thought of before now.
You’re making this up as you go along, I said, only half joking.
I’m mid-air, he said.
Later on, we had a cream tea. Delicious scones, a very pretty waitress who I wanted to fuck. He ate very carefully, slowly, precisely. Each bite meant something. I could have been the other kind of chef, he said, grinning through crumbs. I had that attention to detail. That drive towards perfection. I make this – made this – look easy but so much was pre-planned. So much was worked out in advance. Everything but the metaphysics!