How do you operate your body – [I] via an encapsulated ego-mind unit, [II] via randomly distributed muscle memory, [IV] via non-local networks or [IV] via the wind and the clouds and the gravitational pull of the moon? These are just some of the many and varied questions that I like to ask people when I’m doing my research. I’m a very keen researcher you see – I’m collating some very important information. The endeavour that we are engaged in is the endeavour of engaging in the endeavour of engaging for the sake of engaging. Those are some questions from one of the questionnaires I give out in order to obtain the valuable information that I require. It has to do with people’s relationship with their bodies.

I had moved on from considering the first thing that I had been considering and now I was considering the second thing. The first thing had been infinitely tiresome and the second was worse again. Time dragged as I considered the thing that I was considering and I felt half faint with weariness. ‘How slow the weary millennia creep’, I moaned to myself, ‘how very slow’. The first age of man had come and gone, as had the second, the third and the fourth, and things were worse now than they had ever been. I wouldn’t have thought it possible but there you are. Life is full of surprises. How very slow the weary millennia creep by, and how full of rubbish is my head…

This gave me is something new to consider – I could (if I wanted to) consider the rubbish that was filling up my head. Not only could I consider the particular type of rubbish that was passing through my head, I could also consider the fact that there was and is all this rubbish! That constitutes the existential fact of the matter to me.  This existential fact is a very interesting thing to consider to be sure, absolutely it is. Why is there so very much rubbish passing through my brain all the time – what’s that all about? What’s the essential significance of that fact? Here is my head, like a pumpkin blown up out of all proportion – and it’s rotten to the core with garbage filthy rotten stinking pestilential garbage. My head is a planetoid, vast and bloated, and it is infested with the vilest garbage known to man. Bad thoughts swarm all around my brain like flies swarm about a pile of gone-off meat and I’m wondering why this always has to be happening to me. Why do these thoughts target me like this? Did I do something wrong?

That’s the old guilt trip coming on, of course. What crime have I committed? Am I being punished? Was it a very bad crime? I arrived on earth on a comet. The comet carried me across the silent cosmic vastnesses and then dumped me unceremoniously here. On the planet Urath. Was that because I was a criminal? For a long time I believe myself to be a hero, sent to protect the human race from all the foes that are ranged against it. The vampires, the undead, the psychic parasites, the bad aliens, and so on. The false gods and the false messiahs. The workers of evil. Although physically weak, I could fool my enemies by pretending to be stupider that I really was, and this almost always worked. No one ever saw through my disguise.

And then the next thing was that I realised to my horror that it wasn’t a disguise after all. I hadn’t been fooling anyone; or rather I had only been fooling myself. I was up for being fooled and so I was the right candidate for the job. My skull was vast, like an ancient dilapidated music hall or amphitheatre, and it was full of ghosts. I had crash-landed from space under unfortunate circumstances, confused as to my real identity. I was a giant planetoid, crumbling slowly but surely into rubble. I came through a dimensional portal and as I tumbled through it I heard a great voice that cried out ‘This is the universe of never-ending decay – what part will you play?’ There was a joke of course, there was never any doubt on that score…