Adam Levin - The Instructions

I pray that we are just.

If we are just, then tomorrow a new holiday will arise.

Rabbi Gurion

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“So far, Tanach aside, The Instructions has predominately been concerned with things that general readers, and even most scholars, were not aware of prior to reading The Instructions . The majority of the exceptions haven’t required any correction: the previously published texts **have appeared as they were written; the differing opinions of editorialists — those of academia and mass-media both — have been enough at odds as to mutually nullify one another’s authority; the facts of the War and my earlier childhood have, for the most part, been reported accurately by the press.

In cases where facts have been made up, misinterpreted, or warped by proximity to the agendas of those presenting them, ***the lies and warpage and misunderstandings have been easy enough for me to correct in passing by simply telling the story of the Side of Damage and the Gurionic War as I experienced them, free of nearly all reference to what was to come.

At this point in the story, however, owing to the motives that I’ve since been erroneously ascribed for having written “Sudden Holiday”—motives universally ascribed to me, by my supporters as well as my detractors — I have to look forward, however briefly, in order to correct you all directly, friends and enemies alike.

In case the reader is scratching his head, unaware of the misconstrued motives to which I am referring — whether because he has been living in the wilderness between the end of 2006 and the present, or, more likely, because the present in which he is reading this is far enough ahead of the present in which I am writing it that The Instructions has become hegemonic, and the miscontruances thereby forgotten — he’ll just have to take my word that I am justified in temporarily (as temporarily as possible) breaking the mostly old-timey flow of the narrative here, in Book 18 in C.E. 2013, and push on like a good soldier, a good scholar.

The rest of you are certainly aware that “Sudden Holiday” has been regularly cited as material evidence that I, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, had been plotting since at least the night prior to that YouTube-crashing geologic razzle-dazzle which far too many people ( one would be too many) have taken to calling “The 11/17 Miracle,” to execute what is currently known by my supporters as “The Damage Proper” and by my detractors as “The Gurionic War.”

Once and for all, friends, and once and for all, enemies: While I do accept full responsibility for bringing the Damage Proper, I did not plan the Damage Proper until minutes prior to the Damage Proper. Furthermore, I had no idea that there would be a Damage Proper. No one did. Not even Eliyahu. Not until I planned it. How could we have?

Yes, it is true that the recurring themes of Main Man’s ramblings contained what might now be construed as the stuff of prophecy; that had we understood his words to be prophetic, we might have better predicted what would happen on Friday. But — with the exception of Eliyahu — we did not understand his words that way, I least of all. Or no moreso, I should say, than I understood my vision during the Electric Chair wager or my dream of the Tower of Restraint (to be described shortly) to be prophetic. I will not deny that these three phenomena seemed to me to be possessed of insight, nor that I trusted and eventually acted upon those perceived insights to a certain degree. However, because they could all, as well, be mundanely explained — i.e., “Williams Cocktail Party Syndrome leads its sufferers to engage in a novel kind of verbal behavior characterized, for the most part, by ‘mash-ups’ of previously overheard statements” ****to explain the utterances of Main Man, who split his time outside the Cage between Pentecostal Mass and marathon sessions of network television, and fell asleep at night listening to mixes Vincie’d burned him; an oxygen-deprived brain to account for the Electric Chair vision; a combination of latently understood evidence and my not-so-latent desire to salvage my friendship with Nakamook to account for the Tower of Restraint dream — I did not take it for granted that Adonai was trying to tell me anything.

Seven skinny cows cannibalizing seven fat ones as dreamed by a man who’d never dealt with cattle: that, with its crystal-clear one-to-one relationship between the symbols and what they corresponded to — and without anything extra, without spilling a single drop— that is what I believed a prophecy was supposed to look like.

Though wholly beloved, Main Man was retarded, and, as with no few other famously compelling lies — e.g., beautiful girls can’t get dates, powerful men father weak sons, terrorists are the new freedom fighters, enmity breeds respect, no one hates the Jews more than the Jews, etc. — the lie that being retarded inherently makes a person closer to Adonai only seems true because it describes an irony. So even though, on reflection, Main Man’s weird utterances seem to have been obliquely prophetic — and maybe they were — there was no good reason to believe they were prophetic at the time.

“But what about Vincie Portite?” ask both the haters and scholars alike. “What about what he said to you on Thursday’s intramural bus?”

What Vincie Portite said to me on Thursday’s intramural bus was that he, Eliyahu, and the rest of the Side believed, to varying degrees and for nebulous reasons, that something big was to happen soon; whether as soon as Friday or not, no one but Eliyahu seemed to be certain at all, and even he, as he has himself since testified, “was somewhat less than reliable due to [his] overwhelming state of verklemptness” when he told Vincie, “There will be no Monday.” Furthermore, the “something big” that Vincie and the rest of them believed was soon to happen, was described to me as “the destruction of the Arrangement.”

Now, it is true that when Vincie described it, I quickly came to believe he was correct. I quickly came to believe that “the destruction of the Arrangement” was imminent. I knew it to be true the way I knew Adonai was real and I was in love with June, and I will not deny that. However, what this phrase meant to me—“the destruction of the Arrangement”—was hardly comparable to what ended up happening on Friday. I imagined we might arrive at a means of action that would cause Botha to quit his job, or Floyd to be humiliated, or Desormie to never desormiate again. I thought certain deserving basketballers might receive some come-uppance, and that maybe, if I was lucky, I might find justification to cause our local up-and-coming young popstar to bleed a little, or even get deformed. In sum: I thought of Vincie’s and Eliyahu’s use of “the destruction of the Arrangement” as a kind of overstated euphemism for such events. Kind of like how when a toughguy in a movie threatens his enemy with an “I’ll break every bone in your body,” and everyone watching, as well as the toughguy and the guy he has threatened, knows full well that if there is a physical confrontation in which the toughguy is victorious, there will nonetheless be enemy bones — many, if not all of them — which will remain unbroken; and furthermore that none, let alone all, of the enemy’s bones need be broken for the toughguy’s threat to come true. The every-bone-threatening toughguy who acquires victory by way of any act of violence — a single blow to his enemy’s windpipe, for example — is not considered a liar, let alone called one.