Omnicide by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh & Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Author:Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh & Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh [Mohaghegh, Jason Bahbak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2019-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

6

Or—oh God!—had he gripped the beast by the horns, done what he himself had so often warned his son never to do? Nothing, his father had said, drove the waddan to frenzy like gripping him by the horns. It didn’t matter how strong you were, how stirred by the hope of victory. If you once tried that, then the battle was lost. The waddan’s madness lay in his horns. All his hidden savagery would wake, would boil over, and he’d launch his ferocious attack. The waddan was trying to escape now—he’d veered off toward the mountain. The wadi was getting deeper, the mountains higher. The waddan was drawing him on, toward that ugly, mysterious summit!

Ibrahim al-Koni78

We encounter our sixth kinetomaniac through the following triangulation of subject, object, and space: the beast; the horns; the summit. The scene before us is perhaps the most astounding example of manic certainty: a hunter-father leads his son through winding mountains in search of the legendary creature he has sworn never to harm again, and yet upon sighting the dreamed-of animal takes it by the head and wrestles it furiously toward the precipice from which they will ultimately somersault together below. Perhaps this display is meant as a final irrefutable warning to the son, issued in such lethal manner as to definitively foreclose any future attempt to capture the wild being; or perhaps the hunter-father’s passion compelled him into a desire for shared death-by-entanglement, his own once-steady legs tripping into the other’s cloven hooves to produce a panoramic kinetomaniacal collapse across the sill and into the mid-air nothingness.

Nevertheless, what really catches our attention here is that the author’s terminology of ‘frenzy’, ‘madness’, ‘ferocity’, and ‘hidden savagery’ should not be perceived as a generalized indication of the creature’s essence (for it is otherwise totally serene). Rather, the kinetomaniacal impetus is concentrated entirely in the horns; in fact, the horns harbour the one extreme sensitivity that overrides nature (becoming the runaway). What is the implication, then? That a single protrusion could stockpile the stuff of which madness is made? If wisdom is supposedly stored in the owl’s eyes, vulnerability in the hero’s heel, thirst in the vampire’s teeth, terror in the rattlesnake’s rattle, and cruelty in the scorpion’s tail…then why could not mania equally lodge itself in the horns, awaiting activation? As such, let us attempt to take this observation away from so-called natural experience and into more futuristic plateaus wherein we could conceive the aforementioned ‘ugly, mysterious summit’ not as a psycho-emotional return to delirium, but rather as a deliberately designed technological propulsion toward delirium activated by a single manic button, switch, or device placed strategically in a single physical-sensory area. Following the horned model, could we envision the construction of an artificial manic flux, its trigger secreted in a precise spot on the body, a contrivance invented to induce technological beastliness? Neither id nor superego, neither pleasure principle nor reality principle, but an alternative scale of fury stirred by a preset movement-principle (killer-drive disguised in a single sharpened pin); the digital signal or voltage that would scramble mental transmissions.

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