For Deep Ledger October 15: The Isolate by Ignatius Star

The Isolate by Ignatius Star 

Linnaeorum scriptorum ‘Exterior Homo’ nec hominem in familia mamaliam nec genitus hominium in veritate, sed in nostris temporibus, illis homines in mundi sciantur in generale homenes esse.1 

         You might laugh or might simply say that I am so very weak. You might even feel sorry for me. Regardless, if you feel sorry for me, or cast the myriad darts and wound me as you come to think of me as being too weak to resist the temptation to laugh at; or you simply ignore me; or you think of me as being somehow hilarious, in that you consider me to be a laughingstock: nevertheless, it is not without entire ignorance in that I have rather valid ideas about my faults, just as well as you might come to have your own ideas about my faults which might be different or the same as my own ideas, but just as valid, and how you may pertain them to be, or not to be, like ideas and validity, in general.  You might indeed come to have ideas about me, which are no less valid and true as my own ideas, and which are derived from this book which I have written over many soulful nights spent wide awake as the Isolate. Regardless, in my lifetime the solar barge of Ra, the Boat of Millions of Years, has been exchanged metaphorically for the Mesektet. Fire spitting cobras guard the gates of darkness and the underworld. 

(To be precise the Egyptian hours required the divine services of that ancient civilization’s priesthood of the gods. The sundial divided the day into twelve hours, which were marked with ten equal divisions. The first and the last hour of the day were also observed by the priesthood when the sundials failed to note time. Each hour of darkness was perceived as a specific region of the night sky of the physical world and the sky of the underworld, through which Ra travelled on the Mesektet. Meanwhile protective deities personified the hours.) 

          Yet, I did not ask for Ra to leave the Boat of Millions of years. I did not ask for that great ancient civilization to collapse. I did not ask for humanity to be destroyed. It just happened. So let me learn of Thoth, the god of wisdom. Let me see his face, the long-beaked bird, the face of an Ibis. Let me be a complete baboon, in homage to Thoth, because his head was often described as resembling a baboon.  

          Let me invoke thee, God, by Thoth, who might then settle all the gods’ disputes, as he was always supposed to have done so, often by tricking them. For I am a dwarf who lives among the underclasses of Toronto, among giant chameleon’s, which effect the shapes of men and women – yet, that which are neither nor. 

For what if there are beings here today who came from outer space? Do such extraterrestrials exist on Earth now, who manipulated the elements, by throwing, mixing, and solidifying; or using heat to liquefy and congeal? Did they transmute into human beings, into ‘Homo Exterior,’ who are apparently only externally the same as ‘Homo Sapiens?’ If so, how many people died, who were incinerated or liquified, transformed, crushed, and congealed, and their chemical properties expropriated by the extraterrestrials, those beings which cooked and devoured Man, referring to him as turkey? Are there any humans left alive? I am uncertain. Nor can I answer the question: “Is humanity extinct?” I only remember from a time before, not many decades ago, that there was an authentic humankind who is here no more. 

But why belabor the point? Why fret? Concede, therefore. Resistance is futile. Praying being an accoutrement of the opiate of a former age En masse. But to speak of gods – as if there are many – somehow like a pagan. Where is your Christ who shall lead you onto a new Christian kingdom and paradise? Or if you are honestly a mystic, by name and race, indeed Iggy the Dwarf, why burn all your tapers for Thoth, instead of succoring the psychic light of the Kabbalah? 

If all you are implying is that I am lonely and alone, I nevertheless shall at once be just so esoteric as a Hermetic philosopher of the occult. Yet are you, in turn, a kabbalistic race of Abraham? I ask you that, because in a thunderclap the sky darkened upon a late summer’s afternoon in nineteen eighty-eight, and that day you transmuted into the people who I have since added up as people who are either long since missing or dead.  

         Humanity died – humanity lived on.  

         No sooner was it the day’s news that there existed young-upwardly-mobile-professionals, and being a ‘Yuppy’ was enviable, that political correctness cleansed the English word “man” from the spoken and written language in the nominative of every job title. No sooner had I begun to suffer from the inertia of deep philosophical doubt of what was even normal or the norm, that when I asked my new peer groups to advise me, they only then replied rhetorically with the very question itself, “What is normal, anyway?”  

          How Zen you now appear to me to be, Howard and Susan!   

          I am referring to the weirdness of the parents of my then new steady girlfriend, who bought a perfectly fine house in Forest Hill and had it torn down and replaced with their dream home, featuring a frontend two car garage on a lot only sufficient for an overly steep ramp for their driveway, and that was only one example of a defective home regarding its overall design disaster, another defect essentially being because they were very new people to the planet acting like they were normal people from Oshawa, Ontario, who had just moved into Forest Hill neighborhood. 

Certainly, had I not been such a neophyte amnesiac of the post-apocalypse, I would have known that they were not cool people, and neither was my girlfriend a cool person. Accurate memory of the loud bang in the late summer sky of the previous year might have perhaps saved me more time and spared me the humiliation and angst of my young adult life from not having the slightest idea why everything was not even cool anyhow, before it never again would be that sick for me, either. Good thing the paint job came with the house Jennifer, or it might have cost the whole neighborhood a lot of money. 

 Just like everything I might outright deny as even being humanly possible by now if I was really paying attention at the time – and not honestly suffering from being an amnesiac dwarf – that family and their home that seemed like everything else just to blend in back then, and not shout out, “‘Homo Exterior!’” might have in retrospect however, caused me to become not so much the make of the odd man out.   

          But since I just brought up the subject of the Kabbala, and that incongruous topic right after I asked permission to invoke thee, God, by Thoth, I have not forgotten that I have much to learn about my own good taste also and being a true human being. Since every Kabbalist says it is a certain fact that, “As above, so below,” the least of which I have learned is that there is a cause for every effect. Moreover, I should pay attention to my polarity or feel even worse off about a time for which I had much to be grateful despite it all, Lord. 

          Yet I purpose, from the Beginning, to say a few words which illustrate my first impressions about the spiritual heritage of all Mankind, the Kabbalah; that it predates and therefore eludes Post Humanity of the discovery to identify it with any religion, nation, or ethnicity; that it is a corpus of spirituality, wisdom, and lessons; that it is neither mastered by rote obedience to laws and commandments, nor by adherence to literal interpretation of scriptures; that it is often defined as the mystical tradition of Judaism; yet, it is not a “religion” of any Lord, who by His divinity brandishes His mightiness with bouts of punishment to cause Man to fear the consequence of, and therefore prove in his subsequence, life’s paradox and logic. That is because when the Creator brought the world into being, it was not His intention to include pain and suffering. Indeed, if it teaches us about the temptation and fall of primordial Man, it also teaches us about chaos that always surrounded him, and made him captive, and that his unity with the Creator is something that can always be regained. If a great squid seeming to always stand upon its many limbs at beckon call to ‘Homo Exterior,’ conveyed those beings to our skies in a scene that seemed to portray a shadowy Octopus’ Garden, then every creature capable of such magnitude on Earth, has now perforce been killed; that creature, appearing in natural light to be a green color, was completely motionless and offered no defense at the time of its death. ‘Homo Exterior’ who was conveyed here and a multitude of planets before, all the while devouring and causing extinctions as it leaped through space tempted by gluttony, which has left the Earth all but void of ‘Homo Sapiens,’ has ended its journey here. Any survivors of its debauch, must trust that in a paradox that its vanity to sustain itself in the likeness of its latest prey, shall not cause widespread damage to more populations of substances on Earth. Yet, how shall such appetite and life on Earth find satiate and constantly subsist? Allowed to escape the earth, its journey through space would have continued to cause extinctions in galactic proportions, and the Earth remains a place of all that temptation now affords its kind.  

Kabbalah, in common with other spiritual traditions, teaches that the negativity that afflicts humankind came about through the temptation and fall of primordial man. The kabbalists have used the word chaos to describe the negative circumstances that surround us – the “Murphy’s Law” environment in which things will go wrong if they possibly can. Chaos is indeed an apt word. It is the opposite of harmony with the Creator, or more precisely, the unity with Him that once existed and will one day be regained.

🧾 Editorial Review: The Isolate

From the Deep Ledger Archive

In The Isolate, Ignatius Star does not describe loneliness—he inhabits it. The piece is not a lament. It is a cartography of silence. A map drawn in the margins of connection, where the borders are soft and the coordinates are unspoken.

Star’s writing is spare, deliberate, and quietly defiant. He does not ask for sympathy. He does not seek rescue. He simply observes: the way solitude bends time, the way a room becomes a mirror, the way absence can feel more present than presence.

The isolate is not a victim. He is a witness. To the flicker of memory. To the hum of the unshared moment. To the architecture of withdrawal.

What makes this piece resonate is its refusal to resolve. There is no redemption arc. No sudden burst of light. Just the steady pulse of being alone—and the strange clarity it brings.

In the context of Deep Ledger, The Isolate is a dispatch from the outer edge of knowing. It reminds us that solitude is not emptiness. It is a frequency. And sometimes, the clearest signal comes from the quietest room.

Let this review serve as a threshold. The isolate is not gone. He is simply elsewhere. And elsewhere is part of the archive.