The authorities yet search for pathology, something to isolate as a cause of the murder of 58 people in Las Vegas.  Surely something caused this individual to step out of the matrix of time and place to impersonally wreak chaos upon the attendees of a country music festival.  He orchestrated his own Ragnarök*.  His collection of automatic weapons sang a deadly song, randomly striking down victims, –the “End Of Days.”

I propose that the perpetrator was an inordinately successful American.  He made lots of money buying and selling real estate.  He had sufficient resources and skill to gamble without worry over losses.  His affluence permitted travel at will.  He shared his largesse with family and friends.  He was “a hail fellow well met.”

Consider these words:

It is the death of sensuality
when the organs that fuel it
are chaotically crowded
with stimuli
as if you were dodging signs,
sounds, and pedestrians in the Ginza,
or being punished by a rock concert
and its cavorting kids,
or furious with your government,
or overcome with guilty memories,
where shame, noise, confusion,
outrage are in command—-
serenity and secure enjoyment
is impossible.

The senses enjoy themselves best
when they rejoin
the other functions of awareness.
To be too full of sensation
is to be like a cup
made of its own drink—
a miracle—-
but impossible to hold.

Sensuality (the richness of wine)
is a tertiary quality, inherently adverbial;
the quality of a quality
depending on the perceiver
and upon the thing perceived.

Sensuality extols sensation
to revel in the quality
of our consciousness
is to value the quality
of life.
Only when conscious
am I alive.

—excerpt from Not About the Money by William Gass

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*Ragnarök – From old Norse, literally “The Doom of the Gods” a cataclysm by which the cosmos is destroyed and recreated.