My problem is that I constantly have to check up on myself to make sure that I’m still here. I have to reference myself to stuff that’s going on so that I can in this way validate my existence by reverse implication. I have to make the stuff be about me so that I can then make a reasonable claim to relevance to the general scheme of things! Sounds kind of clumsy when you say it out loud but you know what I mean. Of course you know what I mean. Self-referencing – we all do it but we just don’t like to admit to it! It’s just that type of thing. There’s something not very nice about self-referencing, I suppose. It sounds kind of creepy I guess, but hey – we all do it, right?
The thing about self-referencing is that it’s all very unobtrusive, all very much behind the scenes. You know how it works: we come out with comments about stuff, hundreds and hundreds of opinions about absolutely everything under the sun. That’s good I say. That’s not good. That’s ‘so so’. That’s a pile of shit. That’s good thing, that’s a bad thing. That’s a dumb thing, a stupid thing. That’s a great thing. That’s a terrible thing. All very normal stuff like this. All very ordinary, nothing you’d blink an eye-lid at. It’s basically a programme for introducing contextualization; a programme for unobtrusively introducing the commentator into the picture. If I’m there commentating on the picture, saying how good or how shit it is, then I must exist. If I’ve got something to say about what’s going on then I must be part of it, and I’ve always got something to say about it! What I have to say may be pretty dumb, but who cares? Dumb doesn’t matter – dumb is alright. Dumb will do the job just fine, thank you…
I’m worried about holotropic intrusions, you see. That’s the big threat – any moment a holotropic intrusion could suddenly appear and then that’s all my good work gone down the tubes in a flash. All of my valiant efforts at self-referencing gone down the plug hole. The more nervous I get the more I wrap myself up in a narrative – I know I’m here because of the narrative, right? The narrative’s about me – it’s all about me – and that’s kind of reassuring for me because it implies that I exist. I’m contextualized by my own narrative. I’m referenced into everything.
The ongoing narrative thread is how the ‘self-referencing’ programme works: it all happens quite autonomously, the programme runs nice and quiet in the background the whole time and no one has to know about it. I don’t have to know about it. What happened to me earlier, what’s happening to me now, what might be going to happen to me later on… Will it be good stuff that’s going to happen to me or will it be bad? Who knows? You can fill in the blanks yourself – or rather you can let the programme fill in the blanks. You can rely on it to do that. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a good narrative or a bad one – it works equally well both ways! It works fine no matter whether I’m sewn into a winner narrative or a loser one, a hero script or a villain script. It proves I’m here either way and that’s all that matters.
The narrative can’t be stopped. It can never be stopped now. It proliferates virally – it rolls on and on, it bifurcates and it extrapolates. It feeds off itself; it reacts to itself; it loops and twists around itself in the most tortuous fashion imaginable. It references itself to itself in endlessly intricate tangles. There’s no stopping it now because the programme has long since gone rogue, but who cares? I don’t care just as long as it keeps on protecting me against the possibility of a holotropic intrusion. I have created a universe of me (or at least the programme has) and holotropic intrusion would make shit of that. It would ruin everything…
“So what the hell is a holotropic intrusion?” you may ask. You may well ask. And I have to admit that I don’t actually know – I don’t know what it is, I just know that it’s bad…
