My name is Mbelenzi Zasusthra Nzinga. I’m walking down River Road now, and all I can see are the women lined along the sidewalks. There are also other kinds of people, but they are invisible. Perhaps only God knows what kind of existential situation this is. There’s a whirlpool of superimposed issues; each striving to reach the surface of my being, yet each is also trying to bring the other down. But I guess the worst experience is my research program facing headwinds at the Ministry. And now I’m walking with my right hand pocketed, to conceal my phallic cravings.
I know I can only manage a congress of eunuchs from the ladies of pseudo-pleasure. No touching and no connection at all; just the clang of teeth struggling to keep each other off, when the flesh is weak. A limping penetration, and Pavlovian release at the ring of an indifferent bell. But who cares if the great force is a desire for union with the prime objects in my life – womb, breast, vulva, and potence; even in their counterfeit forms?
Something is wrong at the Ministry. Or am I projecting too much on a fictitious entity, in the wild hope for salvation? I’m growing more ambivalent as I approach ‘Port of Good Hope’, my favourite pub and eatery. Here you can have all you want; food on the plate and on the bed. I haven’t chosen which body form to devour as yet. My fantasy has been someone bordering on grandmotherly. But it all depends on how I’ll feel after having my ugali. The stronger I feel, the bigger my challenge.
“Ugali beef”, I say to the waitress. She’s not on the menu. “Ancient Akamba knowledge has no valid basis, beyond the herbs registered at the medical research institute.” That’s what Mrs. Makumbo told me at the meeting. The food arrives in a meagre portion. No way to wrestle the big guns.
“There’s a discount on second portions.” The waitress says. I peer at her tag, and shock on me as I find ‘Ada Muthoni’ written on it.
“I bet you’ve read or heard of Ruheni,” I reply.
“Which Ruheni?”
“There’s only one, in Kenyan literature.”
“Sorry, I dropped literature a long time ago. I only do anatomy and pleasurization.”
“Why aren’t you on the menu, then?”
“It depends on your ambition”.
No. I can’t take such a challenge. At least not before I cast a circle and strum the Nzevu. That’s the correct way of doing things. “Value production is not as abstract and arbitrary as Nietzsche would have you imagine.” I told Mrs. Makumbo. “What I’m presenting is a result of the science of overcoming the mind, and the science of objects as they are. We no longer need to make appeals to human authorities on anything. All contests are resolvable by simulation of universal principles.”
“Look, Mbelenzi …” I could tell she was searching for something. Ah! My name. “Zasusthra. You want us to trust your knowledge, but where does it get its legitimacy? Besides, who has jurisdiction over the kind of knowledge you’re speaking of, save yourself? Can what you’re saying be ‘falsified’?”
“I know coitus is the only way to resolve my existential crisis. But this portion is too small for your challenge.” She’s now looking at me closely.
“Are you distressed?” She asks while receding from me.
The congress of eunuchs. Yet how beautiful the forms are! “I won’t touch you; I’ll penetrate you,” I think as Ada walks away. Thoughts make me because they link objects; things that I desire, and projections of winning strategies. And so I muse if I could only get into congress, and get to one orgasmic moment when I can say “I am”.
It’s vain. Pure rubbish, to speak of such things as the main political question being about how to adapt to life after birth, and to make peace with death. And oh God, what’s that political position I seek rather than that of post-coital embrace; the very circumstance that brought me here in the first place? I ask myself how I know this is true. Or even, how I can ever get to know what’s true.
I experience it, therefore it is true; and because it is true, I am. That’s why I’m seeking the purest experience ever, and my body seems to know what’s needed as if instinctively. There’s a woman and lover out there that I need to join with and experience my identity. That’s a prompt in my soul that I can never repress enough. I know of such a woman from the past. She’s my mother, but I lost her to politics as I grew older. And ever since, my life has been directed by the objects of my memories with her, when it was really her.
There is no way I’m going to work on the morphogenetic equations embedded on the chess board matrix. I guess I have the torpor that comes with too much wanking. Nothing moves till karma posts me a smile. After all, how daunting can a purely logical and rational system of the universe be? A universe that always seems to prohibit universals.
I’m in this drift among and between tenses and states of being, for a week; till I hear my phone ringing. “Mbelenzi…” It’s Mr. Nderitu from the ministry. “We’d like you to come to our offices.” I can feel the sweat building up. Could they have changed their minds about sources of knowledge, and its appraisal?
“Allow me to come tomorrow, first thing in the morning.”
“You’d better be here by 7. So that you can meet the director.”
I wake up early to meet Mr. Nderitu and the director. The director opens up the core business after introduction. “The British have decided to return items that have been in their museums.” He paused as if to let us feel the gravity of the moment. “Mr. Nderitu said that you wanted us to have a copy of Jung’s expedition to Mt. Elgon. It might just be released to us. Meanwhile, there are other objects that have been handed back. Some of them are from your ethnic background. We want you to tell us what you make of them. ”
“Why me?”
“We are looking for the best outlandish interpretation. Well, which has a smattering of cogency. Most of academia has already given its thoughts. But it seems we need something more.”
I’m squirming deep inside, and my belly is granite hard. “I’d be pleased to show that some of our ideas are gropes in the dark,” I mutter.
The director writes me a note, sending me to the national museum.
“The matter of repatriation of these objects has been delayed by many legal issues and it’s only after the British museums gave them to us voluntarily, and through non-judicial mechanisms that we’ve accessed them.” I’ve just arrived on time for a presentation. The speaker is well bosomed and her glittering lips make each word roll off her mouth with succulence. Maybe I should go and have a private word with her. “Give me her brief,” I think. I peer into her face and notice how close the eyes are to the brows. “She can’t fake it,” I say.
I try to catch her attention: “Excuse me, madaam; what are the grounds for such benevolent action?” I see a tall caucasian with arms folded, making faces. I sweat a bit.
“Sorry Mr. …”
“Mbelenzi. Zasusthra.” Am I successful?
“The reason for voluntary and non-judicial restitution is regret, and the realisation that the objects don’t serve much use in their present locations. As Dr. Fleming has already said, the French let the cat out of the bag already. Their presentation in the museums only serves to show how political domination is distributed.” I saw a glimmer of sweat on her neck, and her cheeks were flushed. Damn, the things that arouse us! “Dr. Fleming…”
“Yeah, perhaps I might also add that what the British public needs is a kind of re-identification and redefinition of our politics and culture. And that’s the challenge of the moment.”
“But not all are willing to restitute voluntarily. The restitution can’t be completed!” A man behind me is now speaking. “I welcome this act of generosity, but we want all our ancient objects! Period!”
“Calm down, Sir. What we have here is just the beginning of this process of conversation and restitution, and anyway, that’s why you are here.” The lady speaker says. I look at her tapered waist and shapely legs. Why do I have to be so perverted? I ask myself.
In mitigation I ask, “And is there restitution for ancient forms of knowledge and knowing?” The lady blushes and I either hallucinate or she says it in fact, “Come and discuss that issue in my office.” It’s too noisy for me to make out what she’s saying. So I edge towards her. “Hi. I need to see the following items,” I say.
“Do you have clearance?” She asks. I hand over the note, and we soon find ourselves in uncrowded spaces.
“That was a powerful presentation. It shows the contradictions between you and Dr. Fleming.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah. We need a more cogent way of looking at things. I can share some of these ideas, if you don’t mind.” She gives me a quick top-bottom glance. I sink my hand into my pocket unconsciously. I hope she can’t see the bulge. “It’s psychogenic,” I explain.
Perhaps she ducks her head under exhibitionist fire, and says nothing. We are soon in a room with scattered boxes. She takes me straight to one corner and I see that most of the boxes there have items from the Akamba people. I see that there’s an arrow, a bow, necklaces, amulets among other everyday items. “We already have some of these items in our museum collection. But these here are special because they’ve been restituted. Let me know what you’d like us to do with them.” She leaves me in the room.
My plan for the objects is rather simple. The idea is to capture the photons on the items and to recapture their informational contents. All I need to do is come with the Nzevu – an instrument that has been used by ancient Akamba scientists – a modified electromyogram and a few other paraphernalia inclusive of sensitive electrodes. I will then check on each of the items’ photon residue to envision the transactions and information deposited from their creation to their restitution.
It’s now two weeks after setting up a temporary lab at the national museum. The setup is relatively simple. The human system is anomalous to that of any other atom in the universe. Hence humans and atoms can communicate. Or rather, the human individual and species are atoms of different but interlinked energy values. And given known principles as the Pauli exclusion and Bose – Einstein statistics, we infer that if the law of inertia is disrupted for any particle or network of particles, then we end up with new behaviours that can be observed using an instrument like a photonic sensor.
Everything went on well for a while. Each of the items could now give binary information from a Young’s slit sensor and into a simulator. And I could show a consistent spectrum of energy activity through my body-mind system. The problem was that I couldn’t capture any of the items’ photon clouds via my body-mind. Therefore I couldn’t envision each items’ information. It was important for me to have direct contact with the objects; man is the measure of all things.
Wilhelm Reich could have settled one of the greatest ethical concerns had he succeeded with his ‘orgone generator’. If all human behaviour and states can be computed, then the links to objects in the world are exposed. Given the conditions for true knowing in my ancestors’ world, where truth could only be found through self-sacrifice; I’ve come to see, sexual energy must then be a matter of quantum dynamics. Such that I infer that the agent computations generate social organisation and its quantum dynamics, revealing a subject’s and object’s psychology.
Given that the human body-mind system is described in information and energy structures, there has to be a set of interlinked and optimal energy-information states across its spectrum of being. And one of these levels entailed what the ancients described as “dying on the tree.” It didn’t take long to determine that the way to die on the tree is to perform rituals of de-objectification. These are rituals that stand beyond good and evil, or pain and pleasure, and subscribe to a universal law and system of appraisal.
The restituted and repatriated objects at the museum are now valuable living items, agents, whose behaviour can be used to understand our more universal values and methodologies of knowledge. Besides, I can now analyse my social quantum dynamics at a more elaborate level. I pause and fantasise. “It’s a big O.”
But the data I have from my encounters with ‘otherness’ also show an anomalous pattern, suggestive of the possibility that relations are marked by changing objects and the values assigned as we negotiate novel contexts and situations. After all, how could I explain the almost seamless transitions among my lovers, across time?
No matter how I consider it, I realise that I can only appreciate each of these objects for what it is, by de-objectifying it; and through losing all my expectation, and sense of urgency that appropriates meaning according to expediency. It’s probably a kind of natural law theory, this time linked with a scientific system that goes at least to the nano-particle level. I don’t know exactly what I’ll find when I access the souls of the restituted objects, but I find comfort in the principles lighting my path.
