The Rapture Hat or A Rapture Hat? A Fine Question for Solution Engineers.

Editorial Update

In reference to manuscript sample 3, the editors of The Rapture Hat having grown impatient with complaints concerning the RETRO feel of what so many have come to call “The What. Antediluvial Wig Tree?” and so have written an editorial that we place here.

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First, a defense:

One final retraction: for the past nearly 15 years, we have attributed the following quote to The Institute for Planetary Removal:

“If you've ever seen a paper wasp nest or a bee hive, you've seen a honeycomb. Honeycombs are used to maximize the use of materials. A honeycomb with a shell on each side is one of the strongest structural engineering designs. We use this idea for dome shells, walls, and virtually every other construction.”

However, we were recently sent a letter by one J.K. Mosely that the source of that often-cited quote was actually The Institute for Planetary Renewal. This was an embarrassing mnemonic accident that went too far, affected the entire spirit of our enterprise, and ultimately made necessary 15 years’ worth of detailed retractions and effectively put our previous editing company out of business.

Now we have simplified. The remaining staff and shareholders have restructured into our present company. But simplifying doesn’t guarantee a perfect system. We face already serious anti-We sentiments in the Letters to Us pages of our quarterly report, “First Us, Then You” (Us being, for readers unfamiliar with us, the publicity department of We).

The bottom line to our business is that Us, We, and You are Solution Engineers. Nobody knows more than an editor how passed-around the formalization of arbitrary titles can be, but the title Solution Engineer is a hard-earned one on the part of Us, We, You, and our shareholders billed collectively as Our. So we at the We Central Office don’t believe that anyone can fault Us for taking a hands-off stance concerning the bridge that Us has tried to gap between Us and our readers through our Distribution Department, You.

A recent complaint concerning our primary project, The Rapture Hat:

I am perfectly at ease with The Rapture Hat as a fair and accurate representation of where eschatology and brunch coincide, but I am not at all comfortable with the representation of your “wig tree”. Is this a sort of sectarian joke? As an inhabitant of The Rapture Hat, familiar with its pre- and post-flood zones, not to mention all the skirmishes in the Gulf of Mexico, it depresses me that your architects would see fit to let such an obvious pun go uncorrected.

It does not seem to fit with the established order of gestures. It is neither Good good (it does not avoid self-scrutiny), nor Good bad (it brings pleasure but has no punitive potential), nor Bad good (no revelatory structuring, as the tree’s lumber is merely pants), nor Bad bad (where’s the admirable and straight-talking Fuck You moment? Is a document of human error or not?)

We empathize. We believe this complaint stems from precisely the same sort of mnemonic error as was made with “Removal” and “Renewal,” only at a visual level. We don’t ramrod The Rapture Hat, nor are we its landscapers. However, we believe that as its editors we are gridded in well enough to answer, and correct, glaring misinterpretations. It’s a classic cart-before-th’-horse.

The Rapture Hat is not a document of human error. It is not a document at all, because what it documents does not exist—except in myth, not as myth, because myth refers to a dead system and there is no death in The Rapture. And it does not document human error because in the "Good good etc." grid there is no room for error, only inhospitable gestures that arise from an overproductive ecosystem. Think of a debutante ball, or a Civil War reenactment, or any practice that simulates inhospitality to declassify (thus reclassify) an inhospitable environment. Think of the endgamer environmentalist stance that our ecosystem has produced its own means of extinction. We don't necessarily take that stance, but the same thing probably did happen with the dinosaurs.

Think of whatever you wish. Just don't get so hung up on removal as a gesture, because it ain't in there. The Rapture Hat simply has no removable gestures. Thus, error cannot possibly be documented.

In The Rapture Hat, nobody goes anywhere. Pilots still fly the planes. The trains don't derail. The tillers still till the field. The presses still run.

But In The Rapture Hat, all of this reproduces, sexually and endlessly as anything that knows instinctually of an End in sight but has no actual end in sight. Imagine that a carbon molecule had a genetic memory. It would be one promiscuous molecule! And with no moral compass except "Good good, etc". Now that's living. Where else can one go? Suicide? Suicide is an act performed in defiance of living. But suicide is still a result of the genetic insistence upon improving one's quality of life. And we ARE talking about the genetic grid of the habits we inhabit. Right?

In this sort of pornography—the Permanent Vacation so longed for that is actually already here—does a Rapture Hat not promise a sensual result of the very timed human stay in an ecosystem that will not exist once its inhabitants are gone? Hair that is "a nest for birds?" Or pants-as-lumber?

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