I want to start off this discussion by saying a few words on the subject of machines. Machines are very purposeful, of course. That’s the thing about them. That goes without saying, really. They know what they’re at – they always know what they’re at. ‘Do the thing,’ they say to themselves with their characteristic mechanical earnestness, ‘do the thing!’ Yes indeed, that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? It’s all about doing the jolly old thing. To be sure it is. What else could it possibly be about, anyway? This is how it is with machines you see – they’re awful single-minded when it comes down to it. You can’t dent their single-mindedness. ‘Do the thing lads, do the thing…’ they sing merrily as they work. They know what they’re about for sure – no one can say that they don’t. We couldn’t blame all those folk who say that they want to be machines, could we? No Sir, we couldn’t blame them at all for that, not with this confused, mixed-up, crazy old world that we live in…
You were born to be the next Messiah of the human race and nobody can tell you otherwise. You know it in your water, you know it in your very bones. Your bones know it well, your bones know it instinctively. You yourself are very far from wanting this particular burden however. Very far indeed. It’s too onerous – nobody wants that. None of us want to take up that mantle. It frightens the bejesus out of us and that’s a fact! We’d put up with any ignominy rather than going down this particular road. We would rather have pins poked under our fingernails, we would rather have a great big handful of angry scorpions let loose in our underpants. To be sure we would. We’d consider ourselves to be getting off lightly, in such a case. We’d be thanking our lucky stars….
The days come and go in rapid succession and no one knows what to say about it. What do you say? What can anyone say? The best thing is simply to shut up and keep on with whatever it is you’re doing. Keep on pretending to be a machine! Pretend for all you’re worth. Keep your head down and don’t upset the boat. You have to learn to play the game of course and that’s the important thing. Your colleague comes up to you and gives you a meaningful look. ‘Play the game, old boy’, he says (without actually saying it). ‘Keep on playing the game, there’s a good chap. Keep on playing the jolly old game and you won’t go far wrong…’
Underneath your pretence you’re deeply unhappy however, the same as us all. We let on that we’re having a great time, but we aren’t. We’re actually as miserable as sin. Boy, are we ever miserable! You’d wonder what was wrong with us, wouldn’t you? How do we bloody manage it? How do we manage to screw things up so much every single time? Some people blame the devil, of course. ‘It was the devil’s fault,’ we say – ‘nothing to do with us!’ We were just minding our own business, doing all that stuff that is so important to do, doing the stuff that we’re supposed to be doing, when along comes the devil to create a whole lot of badness out of nowhere. For no reason at all! Just for the fun of screwing things up. Just for the fun of spoiling some poor bastard’s day. Satan’s like that, you see. You bet he is! That’s just the sort of thing he likes to do. He’s a bad ‘un and no mistake…
Everything will be made right in the end because it’s all going to be fed into the Scrunger, I wrote. The Scrunger always makes everything right, I wrote. I was writing in my book, you see. I was writing my notes. Feed them into the Muncer, I wrote, feed them into the Muncing machine. Feed them into the horrific maw of the terrible and delightful Scrunging Machine. I covered several pages with this and then I drew a detailed diagram of what I thought the Muncing Machine looked like: the intake portal, the belts, the engine housing, the incapacitators, the flanges, the decarbonizer outlet ducts, the waste removal tray, and so on. As I scribbled away, I started to perspire heavily – thinking about the Muncing Machine always makes me perspire. It makes me come out in a cold sweat. It makes me feel all shaky and weak on the inside.
Everyone has their own ‘thing’, their own ‘issue’, however and so there’s no point in being embarrassed by it. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. Everyone has something to be ashamed about – everyone has some kind of a thing that they don’t want anyone to now about. We’re all the same that way. Put the ‘fuck’ back into ‘What the fuck do you think you are playing at’, right? As always, I’m playing to the gallery. As always, I’m looking for validation from the crowd. It’s a trick I learned back when I was only a little ‘un. I’d regressed back to an embryo you see and that was that. I was ready to start again. Some people say it’s good to move forward in life, others that we ought not to be so hasty, and that the safest bet is to stay where we are and count ourselves lucky. Others again say that what’s really important is to always do what the Creator Deity tells us to do because if we don’t then He can make things very difficult for us. On the other hand, I think I should point out that you can’t go around listening to what people say because people are well known for being the biggest morons going! Tell me that I’m wrong, I dare you!
I’m going back to what I do the best however – writing about the Scrunging Machine and how we’re all food for it. Every last one of us. As I write I perspire heavily and my hands shake like crazy. They shake so badly that I can hardly read what I’m writing. That’s not important though – what’s important is to always do what the All-Powerful Creator Deity says we have to do. It kind of makes sense that we should do this, after all. It makes sense that we should always do what the Supreme All-Powerful One commands us to do…
I have without any doubt been writing up a storm in recent months. In rapid succession, without ever taking a break, I completed three magnificently insightful and innovative novellas entitled, in order, ‘The adventures of the hard-done-by ego as it launches itself into the world and tries to make a name for itself against all the odds’, ‘The further adventures of our hero the hard-done-by ego as it struggles against an unkind fate and strives mightily to prove to the world that it isn’t the Greatest Loser of All Time’, and the final instalment in the trilogy, ‘The deeply regrettable denouement of our eponymous hero the self-deluding generic ego and its consequential humiliation, and how it attempts to spin this humiliation as some sort of perverse victory’. All in all, I feel confident in proposing that this trilogy of works represents a major contribution to the anals of world literature. As usual of course my critics elected to disagree with me on this point – their ridicule rings in my ears. Time will prove them wrong, of course. Time will always prove them wrong. Time – I do believe – will prove everybody wrong…
My mouth is a Swirling Maw of Darkness, my eyes Blank Portals into a World of Horror and Despair, whilst my ears are Revolving Radar Turrets possessed of the Very Greatest Acuity, picking up the treacherous thoughts of my enemies with Unfailing Accuracy. Picking up the thoughts of my enemies with near supernatural accuracy, I might even say. The tumult is of course all but deafening. On a different note, I can’t help noticing that I have become very superstitious of late, and this is galling for me, having a scientific background as I do. I am a man of science, after all, with many glorious research papers to my name. I have made many important discoveries, and all that sort of stuff. Why – just the other day I discovered that the universe is a malicious hallucination produced by one of the Forgotten Gods of Ancient Antiquity (although I don’t know which one it was). I proved it beyond any shadow of doubt. I have proved many things beyond a shadow of doubt. I’ve lost track of them many things I have proven conclusively proven. I conclusively prove something new every second – I’m literally brimming over with proofs. It seems to be a gift of mine, a special talent, one might say…
Perspicacity is never quite what one wants it to be, wouldn’t you agree? It’s either too much (which is alarming for everyone concerned) or it’s not enough (which is a bore, which is a tiresome waste of time). We’re all alike in this way, I think – we’re as nosy as hell in that we want to hear all the news before anybody else does, and yet at the same time we are wilfully deaf and blind when it comes to anything that actually matters! We’re such extraordinarily self-contradictory creatures, are we not? We are perverse in our ways, acting against ourselves in just about everything we do, and yet at the same time arrogantly claiming to have been made in the image of God, and yet at the same time regarding ourselves as representing the very pinnacle of the evolutionary process. When we band together we are a curse that afflicts the earth in the vilest, most horrible fashion, a curse which reduces everything we come across to share unadulterated nonsense. Viciously pestilential nonsense, in fact. We all know this very well indeed and yet at the same time we pretend that we don’t know anything about it. ‘Is there any hope for us at all?’ I hear you ask. ‘Probably not,’ I feel bound to reply, ‘almost certainly not…’
I took a nibble of the muddler, and I was muddled fine and fast. I was as muddled as muddled could be. I took a sip of the fuddler, and I was fuddled before I knew it. I was as fuddled as fuddled could be. I was as fuddled as fuck…
‘I’m muddled out of my brain!’ I cried out excitedly – ‘I’m as muddled as muddled can be…’ I am muddled in the morning and I’m muddled in the night. I am muddled the whole time – I don’t know what it means not to be muddled.
I was too muddled to know what I was saying anymore – too muddled by far, too muddled by miles. ‘I am the one who shouts in the dark’, I expostulated grandly, ‘I am he who wallows gloriously in the dismal slurry of his own confusion’.
‘I am he who…’ I whispered sorrowfully, losing my thread entirely at this stage. It had never been much of a thread in the first place, but now it was gone entirely, leaving me out on a limb with nowhere left to go.
‘I am he who, I am he who…’, I breathed out, having run out of things to say. I’d reached the end of the line and that was that. There was nothing more I could do.
I’d lost my bearings and was all adrift in a stagnant sea. I was tied to the revolving wheel of my constantly recycled thoughts. Nothing new ever happens here – my life had softly collapsed in on itself. It had quietly imploded and no one had noticed.
Auspicious one moment, ominous the next, the clouds track across the sky like a solemn procession of strange heraldic animals. The sight signifies the end of all things, I realize. ‘I’m sad to see you’, I whisper, ‘but I’m also glad.’ ‘I’m so happy to see you’, I whisper again, after an indeterminate length of time, ‘but I’m also very sad…’
When I look down at my arms and legs I see to my surprise that my body is made up of tendrils of clammy fog. There’s nothing solid about me at all. Before very long the sea breeze will come and blow me away.
Worry not my friends, for I am here. I am here and yet I am not here, both at the same time. I’ll help you but I won’t. That’s my party trick, if you will. I’ll solve all your problems, and yet I’ll leave them with you as well. You’ll be saddled with them forever…
I’m always looking for new things, and yet I get tired of them the very next moment. I’m always hungry for novelty, and I’m also sick to the back teeth of it, sicker than you can possibly imagine. I am sickened by myself, sickened by the sickening attitude I have towards myself.
The ticket inspector is approaching where I’m sitting in the carriage and my ticket is nowhere to be found. It’s a bad moment. It’s OK though because I’m not really here at all. It’s always like this – there’s a moment of horrible raw panic, a feeling of things closing nastily in on me, followed by the unexpected and distinctly humorous relief of discovering that none of it really happened anyway. Nothing happened, and it didn’t happen to anyone.
I am tortured on a daily basis by the exquisite tedium of my own horrifically sterile existence – events come around according to a routine that no force can change. The events of my life come around with the type of superb predictability one might associate with the finest Swiss watch, and yet at the same time I can’t help knowing that it’s all just some kind of joke. It’s not what it seems at all. Somewhere, someone is laughing…
I express many fine sentiments, sentiments that are expressive of many different and varied things, and yet expressive of nothing at all. My words and phrases – although polished to perfection – are only there to cover up the greedy void that lies within me. It’s not really me, you see – it’s just the void talking through me. It’s just the void talking through me, trying to keep itself company. Trying to keep itself company throughout all those unspeakably vast and lonely Eons of time. Eon after Eon after Eon. Eons without end.
I am myself, and yet not myself at all. I am awake but at the same time fast asleep. I know exactly what I’m doing, but at the same time I haven’t a clue. I know and I don’t know. That kind of thing. I stare absently out of the train window, watching the trees and ponds and fields flash by, and as I sit there I find myself suddenly overcome with a strange sadness because now I know that I’m not really there at all.
It’s very important to be pliant and obedient all of the time, just like toothpaste in its tube. Going where it’s squirted. That’s what I’ve always been taught anyway, and I don’t care who knows it! It’s kind of the key thing in life really, and that’s no word of a lie. Once you understand this basic principle then everything will go swimmingly for you. You just have to comply with whatever it is that you’re supposed to be compliant with… I still remember the day this became clear to me – it was like a magnesium flash gun going off in my head, it was like a big brass gong being struck with a hammer by a giant. The reverberations resounding throughout my entire body, and since then – as they say – I’ve never looked back…
It’s very important to think the thoughts you’re supposed to think and dream or the dreams you’re supposed to dream. Dream them well, my friends, dream them well. Sign on the dotted line. Take the pledge. Subscribe to the monthly newsletter. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. Don’t disturb the beast, isn’t that what they say? Don’t get up its nose because you’ll be sneezed out if you do. Amidst a conflagration of mucus. Infected mucus, at that. It’s very important to compete hard for the prize, even if the prize is only a slap across the side of your head with a dead haddock. A dead and stinking haddock. A haddock that had seen better days. It’s very important to always compete hard for the prize. That’s what I always say, anyway!
Compete for the prize my friend, compete for the prize. I know that’s always worked for me! It’s the key to success, in fact. The key to fame and prosperity. I’ve written a great many books in my time but none of them were particularly popular. I never broke through to the ‘mass market’, you see – I never had the breakthrough that I needed in order to launch my career. I was never invited onto any radio show or daytime TV programme to talk about my ideas, and that hurt. I don’t mind telling you that that hurt a lot. More than I would like to admit. My pain was great. It truly was. And over the years it turned into a particularly potent form of bitterness, which is very often the way (as I’m sure you know from your own life experience) …
Compete for the prize, my friend, I instructed myself dolefully, reciting this tired old formula to myself more by force of habit than anything else at this stage. I had long since forgotten what the prize was, you see. Was I competing for life, or – as seems more likely – was I competing for the means of avoiding it? They dress it up as something magnificent, of course. They always dress it up as something magnificent. Something truly spectacular. It turns out to be nothing of the sort, of course. It turns out they were lying to you. Lying is the name of the game, after all. They call it the Ocean of Lies, do they not? Indeed they do, indeed they do. We’re all bobbing up and down in the Ocean of Lies my friends, slowly but surely drowning in it, telling ourselves the whole time that some great and spectacular future awaits us…
It’s all to do with Satan and all that kind of stuff, I said knowledgeably, ‘it’s all to do with the Wickedness of Satan and how he tries to make us all do all that bad stuff and how we have to fight against him as hard as we can. It’s all about how we should only do the stuff that God wants us to do. Thank God for Satan, that’s all I can say. If it wasn’t for him then we’d have to take the blame for all that bad old stuff ourselves and no one wants that. No Sir – no one wants that. That’s heavy shit.
Satan’s got a lot to answer for, in my book. He’s got an awful lot to answer for. He’s a real scumbag. It’s no wonder we all love to hate him so much. He is the Author of all our Woes. Thinking thus, I became full of righteous wrath – perhaps I should become a street preacher, I mused to myself. Laying down the law. Maybe even a prophet. Everyone likes a prophet, after all. Being a prophet is instant kudos. You’re a cut above the average gobshyte then.
Thinking in this way, I took to banging my fist vigorously on the table and roaring, ‘Down with the Evil One! Let’s all go and teach him a lesson…’ Before long I had the crowd whipped up into a frenzy. You know what crowds are like, after all – it doesn’t take much. They’re just waiting for someone to come along and whip them up into a frenzy. That’s when the crowd comes into its own you see – otherwise they would just be a collection of people standing around looking stupid, looking like a lot of dopes, looking like a bunch of aimless gorms…
The crowd wasn’t really there, however. The crowd was only in my head. The crowd is always only in my head. The filthy dirty crowd. ‘Yeah – the devil really is a bad egg’, I told myself, ‘he’s the worst person in the world so someone really ought to take him out. Someone ought to put on the Armour of Righteousness and then go out there and stomp him. Someone ought to stomp him good and proper. Teach him a lesson that he won’t forget. Put the big hurt on him…’
It wasn’t going to be me though, I decided. I wasn’t going to take on this role – I’d had second thoughts about it. I’d lost my appetite for the job, you see. Prophets often tend to get hurt, after all. That’s just the way it works – you stick your head out and then someone comes along and knocks it off. Someone comes along and takes the head clean off you. What else would you expect – you’re kind of asking for it really, aren’t you? You’re bloody asking for it. The thing to do is keep your head down, therefore. Keep your head down and make sure you don’t stand out. Merge with the crowd. Merge with the crowd as hard as you possibly can. Merge as you’ve never merged before…
“I am the Purposeful Doer,” I stated proudly, “I create purposes and then I go straightahead and I realize them. I enact them, I carry them out. Pow!! Just like that!” I was full to the brim with myself, I was over the moon. “Yippee!” I cried out exuberantly, “watch me do all this cool purposeful stuff. Watch me realize all my great goals…”
I was feeling fine about myself for sure. Never finer, never finer. As I went about my house I sang a little song to myself, a little song about how fine it was to be feeling fine, about what a gas it was to for everything to be a gas, about how great it is when everything is great. That kind of thing. That sort of idea. You know what I mean. “Yes, yes, yes”, I said to myself with satisfaction, “everything is very fine for sure…”
It didn’t last long of course. That kind of thing never does, does it? Before long my mood unaccountably sank like a stone that has been thrown into a deep, dark well and the next thing was that I found myself in some kind of a dismal subterranean cavern, shivering in the sudden chill. There was a smell of decomposition in the air, I realized. Something had obviously died. Some poor wretched unfortunate creature had met its end here, in this dreadfully dank and dismal hole of a place. The thought of this was too much for me and I burst into tears. “Is there any chance of me ever getting out from here at all?” I cried out piteously, “What is to become of me? Can no one save me?”
The answer wasn’t long coming either. It came via a flat dead little voice that spoke out eerily from somewhere in the dim recesses of my deeply melancholic mind.” No,” it said emotionlessly, “no, there isn’t any hope for you. There’s no hope for you at all and so you should just suck it up and quit whining like a fool. The offensive odour you can smell – that’s you. You’re the poor wretched unfortunate creature that met its end here. You’re the one who’s stinking the place up…”
I had somehow managed to manufacture my very own hyperreality, you see. I didn’t know it at the time of course but that’s what had happened. I had inadvertently closed the circle of my thoughts and now my mind had started to feed on itself. It fed and it fed and it fed and the more it devoured itself the hungrier it got. It was on a journey to hell, and it was taking me with it! That’s what always happens in these situations, as you yourself know very well, I’m sure. You’re not a fool after all. You’re not an idiot, despite what people might say. What I’m talking about here can hardly be called unusual, it’s pretty much par for the course – there’s nothing unusual about it at all. The mind loves to devour itself and once it gets going then it simply can’t stop – it has to see it through, it has to continue until the bitter end.
We shouldn’t let stuff like that get us down though, should we? No, no, no – indeed we shouldn’t. It’s best to keep a stiff upper lip under trying circumstances such as these. A quivering lip is no good at all! Loud and piteous lamentations are no good either – where’s that shit going to get you? That’s just dumb. You can wail and lament as much as you like but it’s not going to do you any good. Absolutely it won’t. You’ll just annoy everyone else. You’ll irritate whoever happens to be around. You’re creating bad vibes you see and no one likes that. No one likes the old bad vibes and that’s a fact.
Obsessed with necromancy as I was as a young man, I never made very many friends. The ones I did make were not true friends at all but were – on the contrary – simply looking for some advantage at my expense. They were in it for what they could get, in other words. They were simply parasites and scavengers. In retrospect, I can see that my way of life had not been a healthy one back in those days, not by any means. Not by any stretch of the imagination had it been healthy. But at the time – what can I say? I was obsessed, possessed even… My mind was not my own – I was driven by dark impulses. I wasn’t responsible for actions in those days, you see.
I am – I suppose – implying that things are different now, that my lifestyle is appropriately healthy, and that people actually like me now, and don’t despise me, and so on and so forth, but that isn’t strictly true. That’s not entirely true. You could quite justifiably accuse me of lying if that’s what I’m trying to imply and I’m not going to insult anybody by denying it. Of course I’m a liar and I would be a fool to deny it. I lie all the time – I freely admit it – but at the same time I do have certain standards. There are certain things that I won’t lie about. Such as for example the big question as to whether Reality itself is a dirty stinking lie. Or whether it isn’t. Or whether it is. Or whatever the hell. I would never lie aboutthat you can be sure. Never lie about the important things, that’s what I always say. That’s my motto. It’s important to have some kind of moral code in life, after all. Or at least, it’s important to be in a position to be able to make that claim in some kind of a semi-believable way. That’s called ‘having standards’, that’s called ‘being a decent human being’.
There are certain things in life that we’re not supposed to lie about, wouldn’t you agree? Things can get very dodgy very quickly if you do and – furthermore – you’re not going to get much sympathy when you come a cropper. Folk will say that you deserve everything you get. They will be delighted to see you get your comeuppance. They’ll be dancing in the street. They’ll be crowing over it, but that’s just the way folk are. Your pain will be their joy. Folk are small-minded and vindictive in their nature, rejoicing in the misfortunes of others as if that were the best thing in the world. People are such awful creatures when it comes down to it. You’d be wondering what got into them, wouldn’t you? You would be wondering just what the bloody hell got into them. What’s their excuse for being so malicious? What’s their excuse for being so horribly toxic, for being so viciously, unpleasantly small-minded? How is that supposed to be OK?
They were trying to take the good things away from me, I realised. They were coming across all friendly and easy-going – with all the backslapping and the banter and the camaraderie and all of that – but really they were just after my good things. I let out an almighty roar, I let out a roar that would have split a mountain in two and gathered up all my things together in my arms. “Get away,” I bellowed, “get away from my special good stuff…” I was blind with rage and laden down with malice. My voice shook with passion and my face was brick red with indignation and outrage. Never in my life had I known such outrage. I was more than just indignant and outraged, I was visibly apoplectic. Every single molecule in my body was vibrating with anger, vibrating like a rattlesnake’s rattle does just before it strikes.
There was no one there trying to take my good things away from me, however. What’s more, I didn’t have any good things for anyone to take! What the hell would I be doing with ‘good things’, anyway? I had nothing of value, nothing that anyone would ever want to take. All of that was just in my head, all of that was just a ridiculous fantasy…
Underfoot, there was a dull clanking and rumbling, as if of ancient underground machinery that was starting – at long last – to fail. Above my head wheeled melancholy seagulls, only they were long since dead – decomposing corpses and nothing more. Bits of them fell off around me as they flew. I was full of terrible, frightening guilt – I knew I was guilty of an unbelievably dreadful crime, but I wasn’t able to remember what it was. A crime against nature, a crime against life itself… a Cosmic Crime – a crime the enormity of which was beyond my limited ability to grasp.
The important thing was to make sure knew no one could associate what had happened with me, I realised numbly. I had to somehow dissociate myself from the crime, whatever it was. I had to distance myself from it as much as I could. I had to remove myself from the scene, and not waste too much time about it. If questioned, I had to deny all knowledge, I had to make sure no one could ever pin it on me. I had to find myself some sort of alibi.
He was a person who had put a huge amount of effort into not acknowledging to himself what a sly, good-for-nothing bastard he was, and that – in my book – is exactly what made him such a sly, good-for-nothing bastard. That could be true of any of us of course. It could be true for any of us but in this particular case it wasn’t. In this particular case it was me. It was yours truly, and this was the first time I’d ever admitted it to myself. ‘It was me all along,’ I cried out, without being able to help myself, ‘it was me that did it!’ I didn’t know what it was that I has done, however. I was shooting in the dark…
The moment of madness passed, and I duly came back to my senses. I came back to my senses with a jolt. ‘What have I done?’ I asked myself – ‘what mess have I landed myself in now? What had possessed me, to give myself away like that. I hoped that no unseen ears or concealed recording devices had overheard me. All the silent however, all was still. No life stirred and after a while I allowed myself to relax a little. ‘Never give the game away’, I told myself severely, ‘whatever else you may do, never ever give the game away.’
The moment of madness had come and gone, and I was left sitting there in the semi-darkness in what appeared to be a burnt-out bunker. I felt hideously exposed. I had dropped the ball this time and no mistake and – despite appearances of all being well – I couldn’t allow myself to believe that had been lucky enough to get away with it. No one gets away with anything in this world, you see. There’s too much surveillance for that. Spy bots disguised as harmless bacteria crawled all over my skin. Psychic probes nosed around in my personal unconscious, discovering stuff about myself that even I didn’t know. I’d be the last to know of course. I’d be the very last to know.
