Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

millennium: noun. The thousand-year reign of a triumphant…

Millenarianism,a form of eschatology (eschatology: noun. The study of last things…), addresses the purpose and final prospects of the human community. It asks: What will be the final destiny of this world and its inhabitants? Will mankind ever succeed in reaching the earthly paradise that it perpetually approaches and expects? What are the final prospects and purposes of the human estate?

(estate: noun. 1. A piece of land or property…)

In its specifically Christian version, the millenarian formulation takes two forms: pre- and postmillenarianism. In the first, a shattering return of Christ will end history and usher in a last, thousand-year period of transcendent righteousness before… In the second, worldwide unification of faith will climax in Christ's return and a final harrowing…

Belief in the imminent completion of the world infused the early Church, and predictions of the fast-approaching end of time erupted repeatedly throughout the Middle Ages. Yet millenarian expectation has increased steadily in modern times, concurrent with the bewildering expansion of human affairs. The settlement of the United States is shot through with millenarian models: the City on the Hill, Manifest Destiny, the Social Gospel movement, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," Fundamentalism in its many forms, the War to End All War, the New Frontier, the Great Society…

Colonialism, imperialism, and the various industrial-age crusades to establish a world order typically sport messianic hallmarks. Marx's historical apotheosis of communism, although secular, bore an obvious millenarian cast. Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich was a revival of Joachim of Fiore's medieval apocalyptic vision. The radical political fervor characterizing the present international community — from the Red Guards to the Islamic Revolution — is perhaps best understood not in economic but in eschatological terms…

Throughout history, millenarianism has centered on common themes. First is the belief that we have entered end time, the last days, and that portents visible around us warn that the completion of history is a matter not of lifetimes but of years. Although despair and excitement flourish around the ends of centuries, the date of the end has been variously set at 948, 975, 1033, 1236, 1260, 1284, 1367, 1420, 1588, 1666, 1792…

Formulas deriving the onset of the new age tend to produce dates on the immediate horizon. Millenarian feeling is often accompanied by an upsurge in occultism: belief in reincarnation, purification rituals, visits from otherworldly creatures, out-of-body experiences, alternate dimensions…

The most common hallmark of millenarian thought is the conviction that civilization is just now entering its moment of truth, an unprecedented instant of danger and opportunity, of universal calamity and convergence…

Militant expectation flares up in periods of social upheaval. The transforming stress of the nineteenth century produced an extraordinary number of prophetic cults from divergent cultures. The Mahdi of Sudan dealt the British empire several spectacular defeats and established an Islamic millenarian kingdom before being crushed by Kitchener in 1898. Isaiah Shembe, the Zulu messiah, preached the coming of a New Jerusalem exclusively for believing blacks. The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians awaited the floods and whirlwinds that would level the earth and remove the threat of annihilation. Tens of thousands of American Millerites awaited the Second Coming on the night of October 22,1844. In Europe, a gathering sense of end time infused the anarchist uprisings, theosophy, salvationism, the…

The most devastating millenarian movement of the century was the Taiping Rebellion. A failed Chinese civil service candidate named Hung learned in a vision that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Proclaiming his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, Hung gathered more than a million devoted followers. With this militia of believers, he surged down the Yangtze Valley and captured the city of Nanking. The move precipitated a decade of civil war during which the millenarians nearly toppled the Manchu dynasty and wrested control of China. By conflict's end, half the country was wasted and as many as twenty million lives had been lost: the second bloodiest war in human history, just behind World War II, itself an eschatological Last Battle.

Our own moment of dislocation has produced a wave of imminent expectation, from New Age movements to island cargo cults whose jungle runways and ritual wooden planes guide the Delivering Spirit safely to earth…

The idea of a progressing history may itself derive from the hope for a new heaven and earth. Prediction of the end, like historical "progress," is eternal. And yet, millenarian eschatology is not static; rather, it may steadily escalate. Just because expectation has been wrong up until now, the faithful maintain, does not mean it will be wrong forever…

Millenarianism is born in the longing for confederation and the fear of collapse, in the desire to know where the world is going, in the need for closure. We seek consolation of our own otherwise-random histories by linking them to a common destiny. But our end, eschatology insists, lies in the seed of our beginning. Predictions of Parousia frequently feature children as central protagonists. History is a propagating myth of missing innocents, carried by catastrophe to their forgotten bequest…

(bequest,checked off in minute, ghostly pencil.)

Surely no plot could be so sadistic as to end, arbitrarily, its sole chance at continuance. The epidemic of child abduction, abuse, and exploitation taking place throughout the world seems to many to be that long-awaited harrowing that presages the return of final innocence. "A holocaust of children," shouts Captain Hook, one of the quintessential millenarian reapers. "There is something grand in the idea!"

CHAPTERSEVENTEEN: When Wendy Grew Up

… as if from the moment she arrived on the mainland she wanted to ask questions…

He was a little boy, and she was grown up… Something inside her was crying "Woman, woman, let go of me…"

… and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

heartless: adj'…

A girl is screaming. Through sheets of graphite, conducting air, annihilating paradise darkness, a scream trickles. Something young, as green as freshly cut grass, panic-whispers over night's dead receiver. Sound seeps into the eardrum, too curdling to face, too remote to locate or answer.

Its grace note mimics a playground giggle. But by second syllable it twists, like that beautiful young line drawing, into the hag hiding out inside it. Rattling clamps itself hideously to his building walls. It inches along the brick, reaches and taps at his bedroom window like a man clutching the outside of the rushing room as it speeds through midnight's mountain tunnel. The scream taps at awful intervals as if already dead, a hand automatically nail-scratching the glass, its twitch reflex still beating feebly against the pane to be let in.

Panic, as always, pitches itself up into soprano, a voiceless terror stuck in treble. A reedy panpipe issues from a girl lying in the deserted street, her legs snapped back over her neck, her belly stenciled by a tire tread. Or moans at gunpoint, stifling a shriek that she knows will make her panting assaulter kill her. A girl calls out from under a column of countless cubic feet of water, the words past making out, wild in the upper registers.

Chooses night, naturally, the old narcotic, always eager to assist in these matters. The wail taunts, under cover of darkness: Come try your inalienable rights, your annual increments to the GNP against me.