Future Perfect

by Douglas Mercer

WILLIAM PIERCE WAS an avid reader of both Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw, though there is no evidence that he deeply studied the thought of Martin Heidegger. Had he done so, he might have written of a stage of being beyond even full self-consciousness, beyond the Creator’s completion, and shown how it will occur.

It was Heidegger who postulated that after the preparation of thought became complete, perhaps one or the other of us would ascend from these foothills and make a mad dash into a kind of thought far beyond what that word signifies now; into, finally, truly, thinking new worlds into existence.

If, as Kevin Strom has proposed, we are the Universe become self-conscious, or Nature become self-conscious (one and the same thing), if we are the conscious and activating part of the Creator who is willing himself into being right now, then sooner or later the Creator will have willed himself into being and will be fully present.

It all has to do with the change of tense, with the change to the future perfect tense. It all has to do with diction and grammar. Word is nearly same as world, and in the future perfect it is with words that we will will worlds into being, with words that are commands.

It was Heidegger’s idol and forerunner Nietzsche who said that we shall never be rid of the gods until we are rid of grammar — that is, we shall never be rid of grammar. It was Heidegger who said that language is the house of being, that language is the master of man; that man does not speak, but language speaks — speaks through man as its chosen conduit. That is, language is a living and self-conscious being that, like a virus become a god, spreads from speaker to speaker until what it wants to say finally stands present in its imperious finality.

It will be at this time that the Creator will spring forth full-blown in his completion; will reveal himself fully to his creatures — one of whom, in the end, had the honor to bring him forth out of his concealment. For the gods, like grammar, are built into the nature and the interstices of things, are latent until they are made manifest.

And what will this complete future be like? Let us let language speak for itself, language which is older than time, and which time worships: the word grammar is the root of the word glamour: a radiant splendor. And radiant beings, who may well descend from us, will stand above time and space, issuing words as commands and creating always-new worlds and new beings. It will be a Universe above all Universes, of pure consciousness, beyond the Nature we know now, a world of pure and instant creation without end.

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