Rising Above the Fuzziness

Take a random fraction of an existing piece of writing and try to use it for something else. This sounds a bit like an oblique strategy and indeed it is an attempt to spark something for this entry. However, it has all lost itself in a fuzz of uncertainty and I can't really decide where I want this entry to go. At this point maybe I should give up and go and fly a kite or something. There is a mind map far away which describes this exact state of mind; it is the prettiest thing I have ever seen on paper. It is my own mind described and coloured into something lacking any meaning whatsoever. Each sentence here is a fragment of that map, a tiny sliver broken from the main flint, a stand-alone artwork describing some memory of mine from long ago but which cannot be re-constructed. Its existence is a link to its source but cannot be used to find the starting conditions.

I look back through the lifetime of memories, searching for something to record in another medium, but there is no signpost, and no lighthouse to flag up the special places. Everything sinks back sown into the fuzzy mist and links with general hum of this society and culture.

I remember some really empty days when the build-up of expectation on what I should become in the world was overwhelming. It seemed that all the people I knew just accepted the flow of their lives without any plan but that was not enough. But now, I cannot see any plan; I have become like all those dark rumbling shapes in the fuzzy mist, a reactor and not a catalyst. There is no defined interaction between me and anyone else. It all just happens. The routines change gradually but never in ways that make me feel disjointed or disconnected from the rest of the world. It seems like you are born on a pedestal, seeing the whole world and you at the centre. But as you see further, the whole patchwork of the fields close to you joins up with the darker cities and then the seas and other countries until you see the whole world. The light that travels from the far places, bounces like radio waves to make a planet sized mirage, all places as one and joined up on the other side. If you get a powerful enough telescope you could see the back of your own head.

I was sitting waiting for the train this morning, just staring at the platform, thinking when this act of staring made me think of where I was actually looking. Sometimes, at night I think of the whole world below me; I travel in my mind through the bed and the floor and our sitting room, under the house through the Earth until I emerge in the ocean at the Antipodes. I only assume that it is ocean; I have no globe and no way of calculating. Maybe there is a small island directly underneath our house. I think of the fish that I might pass in that ocean as I travel to the surface. How many have not been seen by humans. Anyway, on the station platform, I tried to work out where I would have to look to emerge from the line of travel in various places around the world. Moscow would just be a quite shallow glance while Bali would be a deep oblique stare, off to the South West somewhere. And then those bomb-test Atolls, as fragile a piece of land as can exist and still be called an island. The most beautiful places on earth, one of the few places where we have a chance to keep it like it should be and we fracture it with our obscene weapons until this, a whole island, a home for birds and fish, cracks in two and sinks.

The dark cracking sounds of some speaker have interrupted this, like the Nuclear bombs almost. I have lost a thought I had which is worse that losing the paper on which that thought is written. There is a chance that the paper may be found but a thought gone from the mind is gone forever. But then again, we are not supposed to forget anything are we? All the weird ideas I have had over the years are still floating around in that mush, being shuffled and amended until I can no longer be as sure of the past as I am of the future. Now is the only definite thing. The instant I press the 'a' key is the only thing you can be sure of at the time you read it. The rest is a fuzziness, of things you would swear had happened but of which you have no proof and the mist of things that you are sure will happen but again must do so before anyone will believe you.

Someone may be feeding this pile of senses to me. I may be just lying while some machine conditions my brain to accept the sensory stimulus it is creating. I may be the only mind and some tinkerer has created my mind to see how it reacts to his gameplay. It would not be difficult to do. The state of my mind is determined by a few thousand external factors and the way my mind reacts to them. But if my mind has been created how has the "program" of my reactions to the stimulus been created? If I create a game and design in the reactions of the artificial players, are they not just extensions of me? You may then take a further step and let the entities learn; you are performing a type of mete-teaching, which hopefully removes your own personality. Every muppet was left handed because Jim Henson was.


That sounds like paranoia. I know it is not true. Occam's Razor would suggest that the simplest solution to what we feel is the best. Simple and elegant solutions are always the answer and the answer here is the one to which science has always worked towards with a few backward steps. This does not remove the fantastic from the universe but it does lead us to accept rationality as a source for our own stability. It would be sad to remove all the spiritual side. You can accept certain levels of belief and still be totally rational. A deep understanding of the cutting edge ideas on cosmology actually opens up the universe to time and space outside the universe, before the big bang. But are these dimensions the same as ours. They cannot be. We could not take a spacesuit and travel to these regions. They would probably not be understandable in terms of our interaction with them. Know the tricky maths and you might understand them intellectually but never become connected or you not only die, your atoms will end up transformed into something altogether different from the matter here. Time will not run. There will be nowhere to send the wreath. Worse still, a single particle interacting with this "other space" may indeed bring about at the very least, the transformation of both spaces into something different from either. At worst it may result in the destruction of both.