SWEETHEART COME

If you look at things close up, really close up, they cease to be what they seem to be. A person stops being a person with arms and legs and a torso and a head and becomes a vast epidermal surface instead. Look even closer and even this understanding is lost. Closer up than close up, everything becomes an indivisible hubbub of subatomic particles. We might see a room but really there is no furniture, no ceiling, no floor, no window and no door. At the most micro of micro levels the room is all just trashing static but on our macro level it takes on the illusion of separate objects. It's like a Monet painting, it's an incomprehensible mess close up and only makes sense at a distance. This distance from real reality is the range we operate on. We all know it but we put the knowledge of the eternal fuzz out of our heads. We operate under a required interpretation of 'reality' that is actually an illusion. We pretend that the world is an arrangement of things with contexts. To approach existence in any other way would drive us crazy.

Are you with me? Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you agree? You kind of have to agree. You've no choice. It's the truth. It's reality, really.

The above image is an extract from a letter written by a German woman called Emma Hauck. Considered insane, Emma was committed to a mental institution where she lived out what remained of her life. Emma had lost the ability to see things on our macro range. All context had broken down for her. She was being swallowed by the subatomic hiss, the eternal fuzz of what reality really is. It must have been like sinking in quicksand and she was calling out to be rescued. She was calling out to the memory of the thing that gave her life meaning. That thing was love.

On proper examination, you can make out that Emma wrote the same two words over and over and over again; a simple phrase in her native language, 'herzensschatzi komm'. It means 'sweetheart come'. Emma's letter was to the father of her two children. Emma sat and wrote 'sweetheart come' over and over and over again. The words, the punctuation and the letters merge and end up looking like the static snow on an old television screen. Did you know that the snow on old televisions is leftover radiation from the Big Bang, the Big Bang that created all reality? It is. I'm not sure if that's relevant but I thought I'd mention it in case it is relevant. Very relevant. Anyway, Emma wrote a great many letters like the one pictured above. She sat and wrote them all day. All day, every day. None Of Emma's letters were ever sent.

Now, I want you to imagine that you're sitting and listening to static emitting from a receiver of some sort. I want you to imagine that you are listening out for the voices of those trapped in Limbo. Imagine you hear the words 'sweetheart come' repeated over and over, lost amongst the hiss. Imagine you hear this pleading from a ghost. A ghost trying to communicate to a memory, a memory of a meaning, a meaning called love.

'Sweetheart come, sweetheart come, sweetheart come, sweetheart come', over and over in the eternal fuzz. Oh my. My oh my. Tell me now about this reality. Has it broken your heart yet?

ARSES

Who are you? How do you define yourself? If something, anything, happens do you respond to it based on the values and social norms that were downloaded onto your cranial hard drive as you were reared and socialised by family, school, religion, media, and all the rest? Is that really your response or just an instruction? Is your sense of 'self' merely a construct formed by external cultural and societal forces? What are you other than a range of predictable responses and a few personal memories and traumas that you have placed into a formalised context that depends on the aforementioned external influences? Is there a self there at all? Are you there at all? How free a thinker are you? Do you even really think and, if you do, do you ever find yourself thinking something and then stopping yourself thinking it because it seems disconcertingly transgressive or embarrassingly absurd?

Do you think you're a rebel because you dress like a rebel or are you actually a rebel? What is a rebel? What are you rebelling against? How are you rebelling? Is that really the best you can do? Is that actually rebelling? Are you just playing the part of the rebel in an agreed upon cultural game?

I went to art college. They asked me to make something and to give of myself so I shat on the floor. I was following instructions but interrogating those instructions and showing them up for what they were by carrying them out. Why? Because we must be constantly awake and make no lazy assumptions. Every moment of every day our true selves are smothered by the externally constructed selves imposed upon us by whatever culture presides at the time. We must remove the blinkers. We must reject and then we must reject rejection and learn to accept nothing. Does that make sense? Why not? What is sense? Ceci n'est pas une pipe!

Language too is blinkers. What is language but a way of placing boundaries on thought and expression? If we could ditch language and communicate telepathically we could say so much more. Dogs are more genuine when they snarl and whine and sniff each others' arses. We are just trading agreed assumptions and myths. Even when we're telling the truth we are lying.

Last week I held a protest against protesting. It turned into a riot against rioting so I threw a molotov cocktail at a molotov cocktail. Then I told a woman that I loved her but that I didn't know who she was or what love was and neither did she and she said that love was a feeling and I said that I didn't know what a feeling was and she said it was just a feeling and I said that I had a feeling she was just told that by someone who heard it from someone else. Later we got married and divorced at the same time and then I sniffed her arse and whined and then I snarled.

I am most awake when I am asleep. I will not sleep in a building. I will not live in a house. A house is a contract and a house is a series of assumptions. When I lived in a house I slept in the bath, I shat in the kitchen sink, and I ate my dinner from the toilet bowl. When it got dark I hung my pyjamas over the windows and I dressed in curtains. Then I sat in the fireplace and set fire to the rest of the place. I will not live in a house or an apartment. Apartment. Apart-meant. Where we are 'meant' to live 'apart'. Apart from others and ourselves. What is a roof but a blindfold?

I live in a forest. I eat nuts and berries and when I eat the wrong berries I get a sore tummy. I shout and roar as I endure the cramps but I do not call a doctor because a doctor will just say this is a stomach, this is poison, this is illness, and then it will be decided that my stomach is ill because I ate the wrong berries and that I ate the wrong berries because my head is ill and I am not adhering to the all powerful Adherable and I should be locked away. I only trust one type of doctor. I only trust the proctologist. The proctologist sniffs people's arses and so knows more than any other because up our arses is where our heads can be found.

We only think we are people in the same way that we think that there is a world and there is a universe. That is all just an idea. It's not even our idea, we were just told the idea. The truth is that there is nothing. The Big Bang was just an idea that got out of hand and spread out into the void. If we think about something else maybe it will all just go away. What will we think about? We will think about nothing. Nothing at all. We will think about nothing and it will be easy because even when we think that we are thinking about something we are thinking about nothing.

And now I must go. Using language has made me feel cheap and dishonest and besides, I've still got a pain in my stomach and it's really getting bad but maybe that too is all in my head and my head is up my arse and everything is a load of arse. Someone call a proctologist!

THE MULTIVERSE WILL GET YOU ON THE TELLY

(above: Professor Brian Greene, being a bit of an arsehole to be honest)

Brian Greene, professor of physics at Columbia University, says that he and others have used String Theory (a.k.a. difficult sums that fill up massive blackboards and show how everything in existence works) to make a massive breakthrough that reveals our Universe to be one of an infinite amount.

Greene says that some of these other universes are very different to ours, others are identical in every detail, and others are everything in between. If they are infinite in number, they must be infinite in variety. So, one universe could be identical to ours in every detail and another could be identical in every detail but for one tiny aspect, something as trivial as that universe’s version of you preferring a different flavoured ice cream or that universe’s version of Wile E. Coyote catching and eating the Road Runner in the very first cartoon and spending all the following cartoons wandering around the desert bored.

Other universes would be very different to ours altogether. Just think, if there are infinite variations there must be a universe out there that is nothing but a giant vibrating flan or one that is solely populated by three foot Ryan Tubridys with beaks and monkey arms or something. Not only must such absurd realities be out there but the fact that there is an infinite amount of universes means there must be an infinite amount of these absurd universes. An infinite amount of universes that are just vibrating flans! That’s a bit mad eh? A bit too mad!

It’s getting difficult to accept Professor Greene’s assertion now isn’t it? It gets even harder to swallow when you consider that, of all the infinite universes out there, there must be a universe in which there is only one universe. Do you follow me? There must be a universe where there are no alternative universes. If just such a universe exists, it follows that there are no other universes. How could there be because that would prevent the universe where there is only one universe from existing and it must exist if there is truly an infinite amount of universes. This paradox collapses Greene’s proposition. Consequently, we must conclude that there is only one universe and it must be ours because we are obviously here, with me writing this shite and you lot looking at it.

So, Professor Greene, if you are reading this, and I’ve a funny feeling you are, it’s back to the blackboard for you. Get your duster, rub out all those numbers and funny symbols, get out a new stick of chalk and try and find us something better to believe in. I mean come on Professor Greene, a giant vibrating flan? I know you’ve got a new book to promote but you can’t be serious. Do you want to get on the telly is that it? Do you want to be a little star in your own universe? Is that what the photos of you looking all moody in the fancy jacket are about? Do you want to present the science programmes in your fancy leather jacket and get all those beautiful geek chic style women to fancy you and show up at your book signings? Well, it’s not going to happen as long as you keep on with this giant flan nonsense. Honestly, you’re behaving like a bit of a gobshite. An absolute gobshite in fact. Would you cop on to yourself now and come up with something half decent? Oh yeah, and one other thing, you can shove that jacket up your hole while you’re at it.

Right, that’s String Theory sorted. NEXT!