constituted the specific attributes required of him not only in his workplace, but even during his previous academic career. This is why Arthur, years after having experienced a brilliant career in the academic and institutional arena, felt quite satisfied with himself and his intrinsic passivity, keeping a very good conscience regarding such behavior and personal traits.
Hence, whenever facing the dilemma of choosing between “Arthur, Phd working for the prestigious CSIC” and “Arthur of flesh and blood” Arthur by making use of such freedom, progressively acquired a greater predisposition to choose the latter. Though, the constant stalking of the latter, that is, the menace of “Arthur of flesh and blood” demanding its own bloody and bodily rights caused him clear symptoms of fear, anginas and ulcers. All these pains drove off Arthur from himself, inducing him thus to spend a lot of time hanging around during the weekends with his friends and respective partners, always accompanied by Helena, who generally wore clothes bought in Massimo Dutti for each occasion.
In the meanwhile, the content's of Arthur´s mind flew perfectly through the Internet and the contents of his life had also been uploaded as images to the planetary cyberspace cloud, and all his virtual friends had the chance to download and share the happiness of Arthur to their smartphones through Instagram, thus happily communing with the affirmation of smiles expressed in the form of thousands of megapixels. During that “belle époque” of his life, Arthur sometimes found himself a little bit angry and furious when becoming aware of the political corruption existing in the city in which he lived, Madrid, and furious most of all due to the fact that the political classes were cutting subsidies to the sector of R&D. Yet during those years thankfully specific social mechanisms and technologies existed that offered him the chance to discharge his rage in popular protests such as the 11-M (the Spanish version of the Occupy Movement) or also offered him sophisticated and fantastic forums in the Internet where our good-old friend Arthur could as well discharge and sublimate his own frustrations by dealing with commentaries of other virtual frustrated individuals and trolls, and thus ultimately returning to the real world in a more calm state of happy sheep servitude, yet to be honest a little more sheared since this repression and sublimation of himself inevitably caused him to get balder and balder as the days passed by.
This way, week after week, month after month, year after year, the specters of “Arthur of flesh and blood” were once and again exorcised and therefore Arthur could passively float in domains where everything was predictable and based on rigorous routines, always surrounded by pink clouds of endearing laughter and smiles.
Up to this point we have introduced the happy official history of Arthur.
Now comes the legend.
Death
And yet one day one of the thickest veils of illusion abruptly was torn into pieces…
All that world full of comfort, happiness, deep passivity and joy along the cosmic merry-go-round at last fell down like a house of cards, and the individual “Arthur” necessarily had to fall flat on his face against the reality of “Arthur of flesh and blood”. In fact, suddenly overnight, “Arthur, Phd working for the prestigious CSIC” had been eliminated from existence… In other words, Arthur had been fired… His labor contract with the prestigious CSIC had been rescinded due to the cuts taken place recently in the scientific institution, even though he was indemnified with monthly payments that would allow him to “get along” for awhile, as long as things didn´t get worse.
In the face of this event, his wife Helena became totally overwhelmed, disconcerted, suffering from uncontrollable nervous outbursts… The life she imagined to live over firm rails traveling on the train of happiness was plunging into a fathomless abyss. And along with this, also was at the edge of a cliff her happy and comfortable train of life… In truth, she merely had married “Arthur, Phd working for the prestigious CSIC” and therefore had exclusively married the lifestyle that this “social I” of Arthur implied. And now that that “social I” had been plunged into the absolute nothingness, she immediately felt that nothing any longer attached her to Arthur, since the only thing that remained of him was the “Arthur of flesh and blood”: middle-aged man, 6 ft 2 in, 250 lb, melancholic character, paunchy, raised by a low-class family, and heavy drinker of packs of beer, and on top of all that, now jobless. Helena didn´t even think twice about it. She filed for divorce and immediately went to live with her mother.
In many societies of the past, the fact of becoming a social outcast or an exile was the worst of all punishments, even worse than the death penalty, and in the case of the industrially developed world the condition of unemployment was of course contrary to the dictums of mobilization and incessant technological development, which demand the full integration of the individuals as efficient producers and consumers. Hence, during recent times, the fact of becoming unemployed implied the adoption of the social condition of outcast, or what in India for instance was called a pariah, in which it is tacitly accepted that one no longer has the right to mingle with friends, to gain does of happiness, or sexual domestic satisfactions on the part of one's spouse. Therefore, the whole of the society that worked 24/7 for advancing technological and industrial development adopted with regard to the unemployed an attitude of superiority, compassionate indulgence, and efficient marginalizing, yet contrary to the lifelong rejection in relation to the pariah that occurred in other previous cultures, in the case of the industrialized societies the rejection of the outcasts, unemployed or pariahs was characterized by therapeutic, diplomatic and social assistance techniques, since such methods in the best of cases succeeded in a matter of months to professionally recycle the unemployed and thus integrate him/her once again in the huge megamachine of production/consumption, eventually allowing the pariah or outcast once again to be granted the chance to become someone with doses of respect and deserved doses of happiness, to who later can also be granted the opportunity of being invited to parties, fancy dinners and Champaign.
Hence, after becoming a social outcast and citizen riffraff, and after having abruptly experienced what it actually is to be marginalized and socially rejected, Arthur felt worse than if he had been condemned to death. Besides, he had also broken all the umbilical cords that connected him to his friends, which all provided him with protection and security, and because of the latter also were abruptly broken all chances of releasing from the tensions, fears and anxieties that were embedded in each one of his diverse “I”s by means of group dynamics techniques, this is, by means of celebrations, parties, meetings and social gatherings that took place after the workday.
So the sudden and electrifying shock experienced in solitude by “Arthur of flesh and blood” and the unexpected volatilization of all that safe, artificial and stable world provided by “Arthur, Phd working for the prestigious CSIC”caused “Arthur of flesh and blood” to face in a matter of hours his true self, his fears and his inner ghosts, and this experience caused him very high levels of anxiety, panic and stress that had a brutal psychosomatic impact in little more than a couple of days. In effect, Arthur suffered an acute myocardial infarction and had to be immediately hospitalized, apart from suffering very intense pains in the abdomen which caused him intense dizziness and vomiting. The diagnosis was almost immediate: coronary artery disease, ulcer and cirrhosis… What a black picture…
Probably because he was affected by the medical; complex, or perhaps because of causes that are of the most fathomless and mysterious, what´s key to point out here is that while laying in the hospital bed Arthur had a dream; an absolutely lucid dream where the previously mentioned concept of the “I” on one hand fell into pieces, other times fused with the “I” of other individuals (sometimes it even intermingled with the “Socially nice Helena”…), other times fused with the dialysis machine he had in front of him, other times became the thoughts of a goat or an orangutan, and other times was trapped in hellish domains where an enormous Dragon had imprisoned his most “fearful I” by means of a t
errorizing amount of energy and power.. Yet overlapping all that chaos of impressions that were playful to a large extent, suddenly there emerged a superhuman figure that dominated and synthesized all that polychrome, kaleidoscopic and psychedelic collection of diverse experiences related to each of the “I”s or modes of conceiving reality.
Later, and once returned to a normal state of consciousness, Arthur couldn´t help but compare this figure to that of Son Goku of the popular Japanese anime “Dragon Ball Z”, surrounded by halos of light and power that corresponded to the culmination and synthesis of all the fragmentary elements of reality and modes of conceiving experience itself.
Son Goku, of Dragon Ball Z
After this dream experience and already awakened to a completely radically new form of conceiving the whole universe, Arthur, while still laying down in the hospital bed due to very powerful sedatives, experienced a strange mix of emotions and feelings that were combined with moments of outrageous euphoria, despair, and instants of deep illumination. By all means possible he intended to