Unwanted Wisdom

What does reality look like when it’s at home? What flavour does it have? What does it smell like? Does it have a distinctive texture? Experiment with it if you will – poke it and see if it pokes you back. It might do, you know! That’s called the ‘irritability test’ biology – is it irritable? That’s one of the indications of life, you see. Another is the capacity to reproduce – you have to watch it for a while to see if it buds or fruits or makes spores or eggs or babies. It has to do that. I can’t remember what the other indications of life are, or how you would go about testing for them. So go ahead and give reality a poke and see what it does. Have a good old look at it and then see if you can predict its behaviour. Maybe that’s another test for life – life is unpredictable. Could you – for example – predict an armadillo from the basis of a universe with no armadillos in it? Or any other living things in it either, not even amoebas. You’d be pretty smart if you could do that. Maybe you can do that, I don’t know. Maybe you really are that smart. How smart can a person be, after all? The point that I’m getting at here however is this – if we don’t know what reality looks like, smells like, tastes like etc, then we have – without any doubt – detected the true nature of the catastrophe. We’ve stumbled across something there. The true nature of the catastrophe is – some say – buried deep in the unconscious. Other people say something completely different. I personally tend towards the view that it is buried deep in the unconscious however – I myself would go along with that theory. The consequences of this are tremendous, needless to say. Have you ever noticed how very fast time passes when it passes real fast? So incredibly fast, so incredibly fast. Unbelievably fast. What does it mean to live our lives so incredibly fast, we might well wonder. We were born – that’s a certainty if we sitting here talking about it – and then we fly like arrows to our deaths. We fly like unerring arrows to our deaths – there’s no erring here, is there? No erring at all. It’s already decided, right from the word go. As we all know of course. These particular arrows are so damn fast that as soon as they are fired they are already there – they’re already embedded right at the centre of the target the moment they get released. You’ve got to agree with me on that one – that’s pretty fast! Fast, fast, fast – so very fast. So what does that tell us about the nature of reality, that’s what I’d like to know? Maybe it doesn’t tell us anything about reality, maybe we’re just looking at things the wrong way around as usual. We’re looking down a telescope from the big end and we’re wondering why we can’t see anything. My theory – for what it’s worth (and I’ve been waiting for a chance to come out with it) – is that when we are anxious or haunted by some uncanny sense of impending doom then that’s because the catastrophe has already happened. It’s already happened but we don’t know it yet. The news hasn’t caught up with this yet. We are afraid to know it and so our denial makes to see everything backwards. We see the catastrophe as being in the future but really it’s already happened. Yes sir, it’s a done deal, a thing that can’t ever be changed. We still think that we have a chance to escape the catastrophe – if we squirm enough! Which we do of course, which we do. We’re squirming fit to burst. We still think we can escape (which is of course a very sad thing) but at the same time we can’t help knowing better. Secretly, despite ourselves, despite all our protestations to the contrary, we know very well that our desperate squirming is never going to do us the slightest bit of good and that is called ‘unwanted wisdom’…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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