Friday Project

Her profile is almost perfect – she is sitting to the side of me, eating a sandwich from a plastic box, gently and unobtrusively sweeping up loose crumbs and consuming them much in the same way the vicar finishes off the bread after communion. While she does this, she is reading the ingredients list from the box, a long list which must contain so much that is bad for her, though it does not seem to have affected her yet. This gentle meal seems so perfect here among the fumes and noise of a British City centre and yet the thought of how anonymous this woman is to me brings on a wave of depression. I cannot know anything more than an infinitesimal fraction of what happens in the world or of all the people who exist and all of the rest is beyond my control. On the other side of me, an older woman, over-made-up, is causing me more annoyance simply by being there. Her perfume is strong and unsubtle, like waves of some chemical WMD which masks its destructiveness by trying to fake “niceness”. And what do they both think of me? They think nothing because most of us just do not see anything either side of us. We think in groups of two or three and leave anything else for the mathematicians because they like fives and complicated numbers with decimal points. The beautiful woman finishes her sandwich and I wonder which perfect number describes her. She is the sum of her factors, a balance of eyes and mouth that makes her face just right while the complicated formula of the ersatz perfume on my other side is defined in some patent from hell.

My mind is empty of anything outside of what I cannot see. I live in a world that expands as I get higher above it so when I sleep even I cease to exist. My own proprioception may well tell me where bits of me are relative to my head but when I sleep even this sense goes and I do not exist. Sometimes I wonder if some form of illness could steal away the bits of my mind that make me who I am just when I sleep so that waking up I am blank again, having only the memories of the day I inhabit. Is it worrying that this possibility of the effective end of my existence seems comforting? Who would vote for immortality? Who would want to live forever? That young woman might while she still can enjoy herself without worrying about fatigue and the failure of her pretty skin but I could not. I want a standard span and sometimes think in my irrational moments that I know when that will end. But that can never be. I can give you results without even being switched on, like a quantum computer. I can tell you the future while asleep, in that delicious, black zone of no space and no time, only divided up by random and intense dreams about people I thought I had forgotten about forever.

Like a TV screen looks black until compared with something white, this place seems to be silent, despite the traffic and the continuous background hum. No one in this little area speaks to anyone else; they keep eyes on nothing, the far distance or on papers or the ingredients of sandwich packs. I am lost to all of them, so obviously not connected in any dimension. We are all separate consciousnesses, never trapped or linked but broken from each other the moment our gametes are created by mitosis or whatever special process gametes use to create themselves. Understand the world and understand other people and you have the world before you. Sometimes I feel like a machine, wishing to know my exact response to every stimulus and erroring out whenever something new causes the following on an unknown path. It is all chemicals in the brain, little molecules manufactured by the body from mundane things like sandwiches that keep those neurons and synapses firing happily and keeping us happy too. If it is all so chemical, then why to good things makes us happy and bad things make us sad? The body is too complex to leave us with an answer to that. Some day we will understand how those little gaps between brain cells link into creating our minds and consciousness but for now we have only theory of mind and psychology. Thinking about it makes me happy; I have stepped out of the melancholia that sometimes covers everything and by analysing it have made it fade into the general grey that marks all the background to here. That perfect profile is a single positive in my day, a beautiful thing made from nothing, made for no more reason than to cheer me up in this haze of fumes and commerce.

Everything in boxes, kept out of sight with lids; that’s the way to live. Open only one box at a time; read only one book at a time and do not be distracted by the pretty labels of others. They all scream for attention, sometimes through claiming to be positively good and sometimes by demanding a response in order to avoid some terrible disaster. I know that the good and the disastrous happen anyway. We cannot avoid them other than in most basic ways and yet I live a super-cautious life, not doing things that are dangerous at all. Maybe that is what happens in super-depression, the desire to avoid doing anything that might remotely lead to a negative outcome leaves you under the duvet for ever. I’ve never been that bad but I can see why it happens. And then the duality of not wanting to move and not being able to sleep bites at me with vigour. While I am awake I can still at least think that the rest of the world exists even if I cannot see it.