The Mumbly-Jumbly Man

People get all jumbled up in my mind. They get all mumbled up. Jumbled up, I mean. Everything gets jumbled – jumbled and mumbled. I’m the Mumbly-Jumbly Man and you can be sure that wherever the wind blows, that’s where I go! I’m the Mumbly-Jumbly Man and there are days when the wind doesn’t blow at all. The sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow and wherever the wind doesn’t shine the sun is sure to blow… My mind was entertaining me with stories but the stories weren’t entertaining any more. They weren’t entertaining, they weren’t anything. It was like someone coming up to you on the street and screaming pure nonsense right in your face. The world is full of such magnificently rich entertainment and yet here is my mind barking incoherent inanities. Here is my mind subjecting me to its insufferable bullshit. It’s not even bullshit – at least bullshit pretends to be something and if you want – if you really want – you can make the necessary effort to believe it, to save you from having to witness the lies for what they truly are, but with the out-and-out shyte that my mind was churning out there was no chance of that. There isn’t even the thinnest veneer of pretence. People get all mixed up in my mind – I see someone coming up to me on the street and I don’t know if I know them or not. I don’t know if they are me or not. Maybe they are me pretending not to be. Maybe they aren’t me and they’re saying that they are. Maybe they’re trying to catch me out. I’m the Mumbly-Jumbly Man I shout but then end up taking a wrong turn and find myself walking down a long dark corridor. The air is close and foetid and there is a faint but nevertheless distinct smell of burnt toast, disinfectant and old urine. I know where I am, I think, I’m back in Pagoda Ward, but no sooner had I had this thought then it became quite meaningless to me. I didn’t know what it was that I had just thought. My thoughts were like short-lived subatomic particles I realized. They were like pions and leptons and muons, decaying in a thousand billionth of a second. I knew that if only I could refine my attention enough to appreciate their astonishingly brief lifespan then I would discover a whole world of wonder there – a world where rivers flow upstream and pour into the sky, a world where rainbow fish swim about in the air, a world where invisible soul-birds nest deep underground in the earth’s core, a world where no one has bodies anymore and you only have to think of a place and you’re there…

 

 

Art: Fishfood by 13PaVel

 

 

 

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