Thursday, February 04, 2010

Fancy Title

I keep going on about surfaces, titles, names. Names are such a bad idea. Add verbs and pronouns and adjectives and soon everything is covered in names like paper mache covers a cheap lamp. You can't see the thing itself, the absence of the rest of the universe. The reason for this is simple and basic. You can't speak of anything until you can agree on what a thing is. Cast about in your mind for a familiar thing, maybe a monitor. This thing is called a monitor although other things are, too. This is a different monitor, it occupies a certain space and is differentiated from that other space by a surface, which restricts other things from interacting much with the rest of the universe, although some do send out photons, packets of electromagnetic radiation which will display a picture if displayed in a certain matrix. It's all very complicated and electronic. Except it isn't in far more ways you might imagine. First and foremost let's try an exercise in logic: see that monitor there? Yup, you point to it, right there. So I pick up the monitor and remove it from your sight. Now I ask, Right there? and you look confused and turn your head. There! you point at the monitor. There, right there! Well, I say, the last time you seemed pretty sure of yourself. You pointed over there and said Right There. Now you point over here and say Right There! Which is it? Well, it's not the space I was pointing at, it was that monitor in your hands is what I meant. Now I look confused. I'm not holding hardly anything! I have pretty much nothing at all in my hands. And it is the Truth in more ways than you can imagine. Mostly what is in the vicinity of the ends of my arms is differing frequencies of electromagnetic energy, and nothing else. Now you want to try to touch it. Your finger stops moving forward and you say, There! Right There! but I am setting the monitor down on the table and although your finger continues to rigidly follow the monitor in its path, by the time I have stopped moving you have sketched out a wobbly line. Now I have to wonder what kind of thing you are describing. It seems pretty big because everywhere you point you seem to find it lurking. Everywhere I look I see varying frequencies and packets of frequencies and no end in sight. It looks like this monitor is either everywhere at once or nowhere at once, like a paddle ball dancing about the end of a band and occasionally slapping into the paddle of my consciousness. But not a thing, not a where, but a process. A corporation of packets of frequencies changes relationships with the rest of the universe in a coherent or mathematically  consistent ratio of parts. And there you have it. It's too hard to say that in a conversation, so we slap paper mache all over the place until everything Every Thing has been plastered down with names and names of names.

I've always enjoyed paper mache. I always thought it neat to be able to make little heads over a light bulb and then sew clothes for the heads to make puppets. I'd put together plays, with special effects for a smoking dragon and even performed in libraries for kids. Great fun. But the dragon was not a dragon and the smoke was a toasted Cavendish. Still the kids liked it and some young ones were even a little afraid of the dragon. They were afraid to touch him. They'd seen the smoke and heard the words and even though the knight had slain the dragon, apparently "slain" did not mean killed, because here he was, still smoking, potentially at least.

I'm not sure that kid was so wrong to fear a dragon. They have been known to terrorize a community, which does entail eating some of them. So people have been taken into the belly of a dragon, what an experience. Dragons, like snakes, could eat a person slowly from the feet up, or perhaps head first to quickly quiet the prey. Lots of things can creep up on you, lots of ways to die. Yet here we are, tickling the tonsils of a dragon and still wagging our feet at the sky. There is no sulphur to a dragon, contrary to popular fiction. The flames come from methane belches, followed quickly by the clicking together of steel and flint in the dragons teeth. This is one reason they come into human territories, to acquire the steel. The flint they can dig up themselves. It must have been an early, stone age dragon who discovered it could light beleches in the same way a human learned to light farts.

But the picture of early dragons roasting men for dinner does create a lasting image on the collective consciousness of homo erectus. It would collect on the DNA. DNA has that double helix thing, which is interesting in the fact that dragons fly up and descend in a tight spiral, creating a double helix flight path, also the spiral is the path a human takes being swallowed whole by a dragon. It was said that a knight going out to fight a particularrly nasty dragon would eat sausage and cabbage the night before so that if taken by surprise the knight could let loose a huge fart at the wrong time for the dragon and thus blow it's head off, killing both the dragon and the knight. This was the first suicide attack on another species. Since then we've gotten into doing it to other humans. Not the fart, so much, although we do produce a hell of a lot of methane, but the blowing up onesself for ones something or another, usually something invisible.

The funny thing is, all that blowing up stuff is pointless from the viewpoint that there isn't a lot of stuff to blow up, per se. Most of what gets blown up is empty space and packets of frequencies, except, of course, it ain't. IT's not a thing, though, it's things. many things, none with names, none with subjects or predicates, no verbs to offend. These things are called Dark Matter and they are dark because they just don't give a rats ass about the rest of the universe, which is not even nearly as much as the dark matter is. Most of the universe doesn't give a rats ass if everything blows up. It's happened before and will happen again, like a little red rubber ball on the end of a band, smacking some Great Paddle in the Nothing and impacting mostly nothing, but still, the back and forth goes on, sometimes you get a hit, sometimes you are hit. Nothing to get excited about, it's just an exchange of frequencies, some math to balance the Ledger and then you find that dark matter Caused an effect in the rest of the universe, just by being. This darkness is always opposed, but never overcome, because we are in and out of it, like water and oil, spinning in Nothing, forming a Great Yin Yang.

Sometimes the back of a mask is well made, smooth and polished by the foreheads of many actors. Sometimes the back of the mask is crude, chiseled out quickly to produce something for a tourist, or maybe a yearly ceremony, after which the mask is discarded, or sold to tourists. The special masks are painted with blood, smeared with spit, polished with the hair of the creator. Feathers may adorn it, down from a chick, and white dung used to paint the lines. This special mask is never seen, but is buried high in the hills in a very special place, sometimes with a child, sacrifised to be a servant to the God who will wear this mask. The child is always a female. They adorn her face with special signs, drape an expensive shawl over her, give her drugged drinks and then escort her up the hills to the very special place. By the time she gets there she is so stoned she thinks she is a goddess going to marry a god. They take her to the cave and she leans in to see the Special mask worn only by a god and seen only by one other person. Then they hit her very hard in the back of the skull and place her in the cave, seal it up and never return.

No comments: