après moi, la tortue

Of course there have been sightings – I won’t deny that: a café in Burns, Oregon, a petrol station in Huddersfield, north of England, a bookshop in Trieste, northern Italy and Dunkirk, northern France.

Please don’t try too hard to read any patterns into those sightings. None of them are confirmed. It’s highly unlikely that there was anything other than an imagined resemblance. Whoever or wherever Zie is right now – you can be fairly sure that the quantum field has bumped up his indeterminacy factor to the point where, even if you were staring him in the face, you’d be highly unlikely to recognise him.

These sightings, however, regardless of whether any or all of them were in fact legitimate, do nonetheless illustrate the powerful nature of suggestion, and that a story once started is almost impossible to end.

What do I mean?

Elementary, dear Watson. Each of us is, in fact, 9 parts story and only one part physicality. Before you are born, the outline of your tale is preloaded into the book of life. This book of life doesn’t have to be anything special – any notebook or scrap of paper will do – but some people, of course, prefer to write in an ancient leatherbound, gilt leaf tome – and who can blame them? The main thing is that once you’ve been put down in writing on paper – the universe is an absolute sucker for stories, and immediately sets about doing everything within its power to get the story off the page and into so-called reality. That’s where the 10^th part kicks in – the so-called physicality we set such store by.

The 10^th part may in fact be considerably less than 1/10^th – it could be 1/100^th or fractions thereof. It’s the basic principle that matters, not the precise numbers. Many of you may discount the shocking lack of the material component in your existence – after all – we all know that we’re 70 or 80% water – don’t we? but there’s still something substantial other than water propping us up, isn't there? – something structural: scaffolding for the watery cells within, a skeletal frame which differentiates us from jellyfish?

True. That there is... but pause a moment and consider atoms... they’re no better – in fact – if you look at them long and hard: they’re shockingly devoid of real hard matter – 99.99999% “empty space”, really nothing more than electric charge and a bit of spin with some kind of separation between the north and south poles. So, not meaning to put a damper on the bonfire of your materiality – it’s just that things are looking mighty lightweight when the spotlight of empirical objectivity is applied to the matter of matter.

Ah – but there’s still that small, but vitally significant 1% or even 0.00001% - however little – isn’t there, which makes all the difference – doesn’t it? you probably hear yourself opining, clutching at straws as the boat goes down. And to be honest, I like that kind of fighting spirit. That’s the kind of attitude that gets Don Juan through the fearful storm and aftermath in the second canto of Byron’s inadvertently allegorical tale. He wasn’t one to give up the ghost, our scandal prone Don Juan, not when he just happens to be the eponymous hero of his very own mock-epic narrative poem. Story wouldn’t allow it, and story seems to be willing to move heaven and earth to have its way – to achieve its ends – no matter what stands opposed, to get itself translated into hard copy.

Let me suggest – if you don’t mind – that we’re a bit like crystals growing in a salt solution. Once we’ve been seeded – well – that’s the main thing, isn’t it? There just happens to be this incredibly salty solution – and no – I don’t necessarily mean sodium chloride – copper sulphate or Epson salts, to name but two, are equally good. So we grow – but what else would you expect if you’re suspended in a saturated solution? The real question, you may ask, is where that solution came from in the first place – or to put it another way – why are the world’s oceans so darn salty? But I digress. Whether we’re crystals, seeds of life or as yet unacknowledged narrative heroes – we seem to have the happy felicity to find ourselves in just the right supportive environment for growth and plot development – but the bottom line in all this speculation and pseudo-science – is that matter is the least of our concerns. The universe really seems to have a lot of it stashed away somewhere, waiting to be put to good use, courtesy of Big Bang – and it appears that she (the universe presumably being female) – much prefers to lend it to living, biological organisms. And whyever not? – when you consider that living, biological organisms are able to carry, or combine much more complicated story strands than clumpy thumpy inorganic matter can. Matter, it might be concluded, loves to provide the wherewithal, to be a part of the story making process, bringing the movie to life, putting flesh on the bones or bones on the breath.

So story it is then – but if stories are present throughout – then that raises the question – what kind of story binds a rock together, or a “simple” amoeba, or any other non-human organism? Are stories a bit like our DNA? Are they full of so-called “junk” that no one really, at present, understands – but which is the entire history of how that story grew and got to be where or what it is 9/10s not, in each, in every particular organism, or lump of biomatter? A blockchain of sorts that records every single transaction up to the present moment? Are they? Do they?

Questions hey? – endless questions – which begs the question whether questions themselves reveal the impetus, the manic need to make stories from unstoried, gender-neutral, uncharged, unpolarised so-called “dark matter”, the narrative void, hidden in plain sight, present throughout? Q, the question, the chicken or egg, perhaps causes, or else results from charge separation, from differentiation that somehow unvoids the void –  is thus, perhaps, the spermatozoid of stories – or else, perhaps, the as yet unbound, footloose and fancy free electric charge that’s secretly desirous to get in on the act of biologising at the first available opportunity, taking inorganic matter to the next level of paradox.

Yes – that begs the thought – does it not – if in fact thoughts can be “begged”, whether we, in our endless questioning – are vehicles or mechanisms by which unbiologised thought – background radiation or free floating charge – is able through us to incorporate into a larger story – a story with mass – which has legs – which can carry the initial impulse – the initial cleaving to life force – to become part of a larger conglomerate or galaxy of like-minded questioning – to ride on the turtle through the void – a kind of template which can take those little question sparks – those will-o'-the-wispy free radicals of unassigned code, and incorporate them into something deep and very stable – a living world – a turtle of tale in the telling – swimming through the galactic ocean of utter indeterminacy – and there’s the rub – for suddenly – the friction caused by the interaction between the two – between a story that, by definition, has to have a beginning, a middle, an end – somewhere, somehow – and the ocean of utter-indeterminacy – the void – the infinite – in which you can have anything whatsoever – any vision – any dream – any truth or squiggley squiggle – just as long as it does not interrupt the one thought that cannot be thought – or being thought, that cannot be known – or being known, cannot be expressed – or being expressed cannot be comprehended – or being comprehended cannot be – period. ERROR_MESSAGE – tale incomplete

Yes – you’ve probably realised that at some point you’re going to run into a zone or period of instability – a flippening when the two sides do a switcheroo – two sides – being said in the loosest of mathematical senses possible – in which the indeterminable ocean of pure mathematics – pure unadulterated disassociatedness – suddenly collapses into a single point – or perhaps we could use the term “a singularity” – just to keep our science community happy – and if I said that this singularity was like the death and rebirth of the entire universe – it wouldn’t be strictly true – would it? For you and I both know that our universe is in some way – some how never quite the story you think it is – that when one has ended you’re already considering another – which was growing up behind the previous one – just waiting to come into view when the preceding bubble pops.

So Zie, being dead and buried at sea –

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,--ding-dong, bell

the Tempest

 

tis hardly surprising that the narrative refuses to give up the ghost – for are we not all just prisoners here of our own device?

 

The story has ended. The curtains have descended. The world that we knew and loved, or hated, is no more – I have put it to bed and have not the least intention of reviving it. I care not for your clamouring plaints. Unlike you, best beloved readers, I have a desire to see what the turtle can and will, or will not reveal when suddenly the world resting upon its shell un-big-bangs itself – and flips to the dark side – suddenly sensing sounds and words aplenty out there in the ocean depths – tales and tales galore – beyond ken and wit – tales and tales galore – in realms our tired, over-baggaged minds cannot yet grasp or comprehend.

 

Merry and Zie may have taken us to the very gates of infinity – but to proceed, if proceed we are to – needs must we now ourselves – alone, all, all alone! And if that breaks your heart and fills you with fear – tis only natural – for who would willingly dive back into the oceanic void, the waters of the deep? Perhaps indeed, fear in conjunction with the bioluminescence of spirit tis the only safeguard against complete disintegration and loss of the light you carry when all else is stripped away, when nothing remains, as turtle takes us to the very depths of our tale in which an idle, good for nothing formerly known as Zie is seen washing car windscreens at a long-wait traffic light in Hampstead Heath with kung fu precision and an obstinate, unshakeable belief that he's somehow, now,  in direct communication with a nearby sparrow whom he mistakenly believes to be Merry – to the delight of children sitting in some of the cars, who sense what the adults seem unable to see – an odd looking chap with a feather in his cap prancing around pretending to be a bird, somehow able to evade the rubber strings and magnetic coils of gravity, bouncing from tree to tree while conducting an orchestra of car engines on the flipside of the story screen, which appear to be sitting attentively, dressed for the occasion, violins, oboes, clarinets, back and forth, back and forth time oscillates obligingly, stretching the moment indefinitely until the lights turn green and Zie backflips into... But then again – what do children know? I hasten to add.

 

 

0=1

Cuckoo la la