From a small mountain town in central Oregon, this old tramp writer occasionally receives a parcel by mail. Within is a book, neatly wrapped in meticulously folded brown-to-mauve packaging paper. A green index card is signed, in considerately slanted fee-hand, unusual for such a young man, an art lost to most men born after 1960: “Thank you, James -Andy”
Twice I have read King of Dogs and twice Crowbar. The first is a highly structured survival story, the second a genius-level action-mystery-thriller written with no apparent plot devices beyond the eye of the author, something intentionally beyond the realm of artificial game intelligence.
Abstract Operator: A Speculative Manual For Inner Survival, is a thin volume, which makes the claim of Odysseus, in his device as the beggar in the doorway of his own grand house of Squaretime power, even as he swoops in from a Dreamtime tower guided by divine forces in his return. Abstract Operator declares itself as a work of fiction—which is to say of truth rather than lies—in the guise of a personal gift to a fictional operator. This operator is understood to be an actor in one or more of the above novels, mainly Crowbar. Within this truthful tale cloaked in story, much like Odysseus feigning to be an anonymous shipwreck on the seas of Fate, rather than the target of divine wrath and mortal greed, Andrew frames truth as it is, encompassing “reality” and dream, the divine and the pedantic profane.
My first reading of Abstract Operator was done in extreme pain and despair, as seizures of the eye set me beyond the writer’s door in a purgatory of pain. I found it helpful for the soul to read in those few hours when the eyes could see. This brief 121 pages is broken into two sections, a brief three-part overture, and four four-part briefings along a rising spiral of awareness. I will only address the three-pat overture: 1-Cartography, executed according to Aristotle’s dictum of a three-fold truth beyond the grasp of mere historic [investigative] “facts.” My goal is to promote the use of this book by men who find the worldview presented in Cartography tolerable. Many men, and all but a weird few women, must, MUST, look away and opt out of the meta-reality that Andrew describes as a game.
From 1998 thru 2020, I wrote some sixty books on physical and masculine autonomy placed within The Machine in which we have been incubated, inducted and conducted by The Enemy. Our three-part, cultivated corruption, meant to separate us from the divine, the sublime and our own mind, is often fought in the plane of madness, resulting in our temporal damnation as a square-time commodity tainted with taboo awareness. Andrew, through his Odyssian device, advises us on navigating the membranes of our fact-based and philosophically debased “reality” in a manner intended, not calibrated, to place the Operator [the inner truth-seeker] in coherent contact with this material world of illusion and the functional world of dream.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer, in the Theogony, Works and Days and Shield of Herakles of Hesiod, in the poetry of Theognis, Solon, Simonides, Archilochus and Tyrteus—even in the epics of Gilgamesh, the Psalms, Beowulf and the Song of Roland, Dreamtime and the solitude of the afflicted seeker, even the woe-fall of the strident hero, are informed, blessed and avenged thru the divine hand reaching into the mind through dream and trance. I shall humbly attempt to promote Andy’s work by amplifying his axioms, navigation notes and superior prose with observations of obscure congruence from Antiquity.
During my career as a self-help writer addressing physical combat within our distorted reality, the actuality of instinct, rhythm, evil and of hate-thirst injected from beyond our material plane, of the splintering of our identity to facilitate our digestion, encroached over two decades. Me, this misbegotten suburban child failed and fallen into urban spiritualcide, slowly stumbled through gross encounters with hundreds of hereditary, racial and systemic foes, into an involuntarily inducted understanding of my Great Enemy, looming ever invisible beyond the blue claws and brown tentacles sent for my body and soul. What this goonish fist and knife survivor learned in hundreds of violent encounters with the underthings of The Enemy [1] without understanding the mechanisms, as a musician who cannot read music but rather mimics and repeats fortunate interactions, Andrew Edwards is to that evolved survivor, a professor, a mind versed in reading the notes that the gutterman has grown to mimic and than wonder at his own success from his witless recess.
My lady here, has just arisen from her apartment [2] to sit by me and asked of what I write, of Andrew, of his book. She asked for an explanation, and I gave it just now as such:
“This is an educated man, versed in philosophy, who has managed to exit the economy and found a family in the world that we know is so designed to destroy our family.”
She nods, both of us poor, street survivors, having shielded our children from the violence we endured, yet estranged from our economically inducted and conducted children.
“The basic concept is that Evil, The Enemy, holds the upper hand in this world.” She nods, having been forced three times, from subsistence-level jobs for the unforgivable crime of defending younger women against sexual predation by coworkers and customers in retail settings, “Step away from the young lady, Sir,” she snarls to a towering, lust-spewing, menacing exemplar of America negrocity, in a public setting with many witnesses. The brute steps away from the tear-streaked petite. End of day, a customer complaint by said public rapist to the White store owner, gets my girl terminated, her unemployment blocked by an employer willing to call witnesses to her untrammeled aggression and racial hate. All of this is encapsulated in her nod at this kitchen table.
I now say to her, “Imagine all of these terrible jobs we have had, jobs that place us in harms way, in which we were not permitted to defend ourselves, or the weak.”
She nods, ‘Yes.’
“So, those dozen people who came at you this week, at the cashier’s desk, threatening you, cussing you, cursing you, spitting at you, blaming you for all manner of things not in your power. They are elements of this evil system, the hounds of The Enemy, there to draw you out so that you can lose your livelihood, your social media status, or, for a man like me, my freedom for enforcing my physical autonomy with my hands. Every time a person such as you who does good for others and protects the weak, is punished and disabled economically for good acts, the system gains more power. These screaming negroes and evil crackers spitting in your face, might be acting on impulse, but that impulse is an expression of a higher, evil power. Andrew here, gives men advice on avoiding direct combat with this High Evil, while reminding us that there is a higher power, that is Good, that is God; that even alone, a man in his trailer wondering when The Beast will let its hounds loose from their leash to feast on him and his, a man without a meat-made friend, is not alone.”
She nodded, “Baby, I just wish you could kill ‘em all while I fixed your dinner.”
Back to bed she went, seeking a dream beyond the hate where her pauper life has been spent.
Abstract Operator is a very near American brother to Jethro Randolph’s Digital Anarch, crafted in a smaller, starker reality prison.
From page 21: “Mastery in a manufactured dream is not true mastery.”
Notes
1.) Read 40,000 Years From Home
2.) Living in an apartment is a true sign of a spiritual incarceration in this prison
