>>> Item number 35478 from WRITERS LOG9408C --- (111 records) ---- <<< Date: Thu, 18 Aug 1994 18:35:02 JST Reply-To: WRITERS Sender: WRITERS From: Mike Barker Subject: ESSAY? Stone Cold Sober weirdly wondering... strange tink ------------------------------------------------ Stone Cold Sober Copyright 1994 Mike Barker The Real World Start with a simple rock. I pick it up, and contemplate the shiny quartz, the weight in my hand. And then the mirror cracks... What I hold is a great nothing, spotted at widely separated locations (only partially decided) with tiny twists of energy clotted so thickly that they bend the nothingness wherein they dwell. These twists come in various flavors, spins, and odd colors, interacting with each other in weak or strong ways. Along the outer reaches of what I see as a solid, but which in truth is little more than nothing with a scattering of energy, war goes on! Blasts of loose energy interact in a complex way with some of the twists. Some of that energy is turned around and freed again, wandering across more emptiness (some being lost to twists lurking in that space, but most avoiding complications) into a denser region of twists. Here the energy is bent and slowed in its mad rush. More energy is lost, but a fraction wins through to a broad mass of very dense twists where it is captured and excites chemical exchanges (more fancy dancing from the twists!). These slowly carry the excitement into a web of neurons, where the energy dance is gleefully compared with similar excitements in the past... Some of the twists also have interacted with other nearby twists and the overall field of warped space, in ways that excite nerves, muscles, and all the rest of this protoplasmic lump into thinking about "weight" and "texture" and other illusions. I probably don't even notice the tiny wanderings of traitor twists from the solid into other solids or gases and vice-versa. As far as we can tell, that is the "real" world--not at all what we ordinarily think of. Looked at in fine and across time, the "solid objects" we often imagine are neither very solid nor nicely set apart from the rest of the matter and energy and space which flows and roils here. Liquids, gases, and all the rest also have their oddities. As for social, psychological, and other dogma, verse and canticle--as real as a wisp of nothing, and almost as likely. Abstractions heaped on generalizations and based in specious postulates and acclamations may be enjoyable, may be thoughtful, but rarely are they real in any important sense of the word... Philosophically, the problems are even worse. That past, or future, which you may happily think of--there is no evidence, no way of proving that either exists. Even the rather elaborate farce known as the scientific world "out there" is basically unprovable--I may be dreaming the whole thing while carefully and lovingly wrapped in my metamorphal cocoon in the second bunk, room 425, in the intensive psychiatric care ward of the Lords of the Sluggish Hordes. Note that this in no way forbids us enjoying the play. But as long as we are in the system, we have no way of knowing what it is... So, my poor little rock is not so simply real after all... The Only World Do you believe in the Antarctic? Have you ever been there? Do you have personal experience? For that matter, do you believe in my little rock? You haven't seen it, yet it exists in a fashion in your mind. Most of the world in modern societies consists of places, events, and so forth which you have not personally experienced. The tiny shell of personally experienced reality is there, but it is supplemented and all but lost in a vast array of other worlds experienced second-hand through the accounts of others and through the expanding channels of media. And the "world" of an accident presented by Channel 7 and Channel 9 are not quite the same worlds! Similar, but as disturbingly different as the views from your right eye and your left eye...the world jumps and shifts when you look at one, then at the next. So many, many worlds--one for each person, more for each sensation scratching and piercing our thick skins, still more for the pins and needles crawling up our spine, and yet more for... The World Worthy of Art Ah, me, the temple of the profane asked to hold the limits of the imagination and the sacred abstractions? Let me just mention that I don't even have a rock. And art may justify your world... or destroy it. That's the way art is. Somewhere along that path. "Temple walls keep falling on my head, But I haven't got the time to pull apart the pillars, Flying's not for me! Those temple walls keep falling, they just keep on a falling... Because I'm free..." ------------------------------------------------