The age of literature...
What now?
Oh, hi Jean.
Hi, hi, what's all the noise about?
Oh, I was just starting a new
essay. You’re rather sensitive to fluctuations in the field, Jean.
Well, the way you keep sticking
your oar in it, I can hardly avoid being deafened.
Wait a minute – you mean to say
that just starting an essay on the demise of literature is causing deafening
fluctuations in the field.
Just starting an essay?!
Well I only wrote the first four
words.
But what about all the rest?
I haven't written it yet.
No, but you're going to, aren't
you.
Difficult to say. I don't see how
I can with you butting in like this.
Butting in? Damn cheek, Stan. It's
like living in a house under construction, hammering and drilling at all hours
for weeks now, I’ve lost count.
It's just an essay, Jean. There
must be some kind of mistake.
Look in the mirror Stan. It's all
around you.
What is?
Your “essay”.
It is?
Look! Quit playing dumb.
Grumbling,
Stan gets up from behind his desk, shuffles over to peer into a heavy old gilt-framed
mirror on the wall opposite and observes a cloud around himself, doing its
best to pass unnoticed.
Hullo! Where did you come from? he asks diffidently, trying to appear unsurprised. The cloud,
likewise, does its utmost to appear relaxed and no-big-deal about all this, but
something in the electro-magnetics of the room – did I say electro-magnetics? –
perhaps that should have been ecto-plasmatics, but we’re at the limits of
syntax so bear with me dear reader – the quantum field really doesn’t like
being tied down linguistically, does it, and will generally pull the rug out
from under the feet of anyone trying to loosen its
grip on indeterminacy – lost thread – reveals a high-sigma episode is
fast brewing.
Well, what do you have to say for yourself, Stan?
So what if there's a cloud? Correlation ain’t causation, is it.
Me thinks you've failed to assess the up and downstream
effect of your innocuous little cloud.
Oh, so now I'm supposed to worry about the past and
future and become a time voyeur, for what? To satisfy some whim of yours? Can
you just let go of this obsession and leave me to write my essay unmolested?
As long as you agree not to turn us all into primordial slime.
Primordial slime! Have you lost your mind? No one’s
turning anyone into anything, still less primordial slime! I was merely quietly
set on writing about the end of literature.
Precisely. Didn't bother to log in and clear it with g-nomeportal’s
magisterial council, did you?
What kind of nonsense is this? Magisterial Council – like
there's an arm of g-nomeportal responsible for censoring members’ literary
output?!
Stan, you know perfectly well that at the quantum level
0=1.
So they say.
That all things are connected in ways both conceivable and,
no less, inconceivable.
Blah blah. It's never got in the way of a good essay
before, has it Jean.
The never before fallacy ain't gonna hold water when you
are dragged before the Magisterium.
What Magesterium are you on about Jean? Honestly, I don't
know why they ever bothered admitting women to g-nomeportal. Your Magisterial Council is just a bunch of duffers
in tweed jackets who meet from time to time of a full moon to discuss the
stability of field linguistics, concerned with the preservation of some kind of
harmonious relationship between sense and meaning, if you care to know.
Yes Stan. But ever since women were admitted you may have
noticed an uptick in the number of outliers, what others refer to as glitches
in the matrix. Mean reversion, perchance?
Precisely. It should never have happened, I was always
opposed – they're bad luck on a ship and what is g-nomeportal if not an interdimensional
craft. Bringing the moon into a solar chamber is asking for disaster, innit.
And yet you yourself know that the Xercie cycles have to
be maintained, at all costs, otherwise the fabric of reality can demagnetise
and unravel in a flash of time inversion.
Well don’t blame me if everything now goes to hell in a handbasket.
Reality is bleeding zeros as we approach the Xercie point of equilibrium.
That's precisely what you need to consider.
It’s an essay I'm writing. Nothing more.
Tell that to the quantum cloud you’ve activated.
Look, it’s a fact that if the Xercie cycles require life
on earth to revert back to green slime next week, then it's going to happen,
and my essay is neither here nor there. You can’t have your cake and eat it,
Jean. Either these cycles are for real or they aren’t.
Why do you insist on over-simplifying things, Stan? It’s
not a case of either or, as well you know.
I know what you're really doing, Jean. I’d like to
congratulate you. I’m now definitely ready to write my essay whereas prior to
this I wasn’t committed, not by a long stretch.
What are you on about Stan? That’s the very opposite of
what I had in mind.
Ah, the double, the treble bluff, the feint within a
feint. Jean, you’re a genius.
I assure you...
But before
Jean can say another word the cloud around Stan flashes and he now finds
himself seated comfortably at a table in the writing room at g-nomeportal,
quill in hand writing the essay that brought the age of literature to a sudden
and spectacular close in the tumultuous age of reality we referred to as modern
Earth.
Outtakes
So what do you have against literature, anyway?
Nothing whatsoever. I love it, in fact.
Then how could you write such a thing?
Xercie cycles - haven't we already discussed all this.
But surely literature can survive in different cycle
phases?
Duh!
I don't see why not.
You don't see what you don't want to see, Jean. You want
to preserve the world you know and love. Don't we all?
You evidently don’t.
Because reality morphs into the next phase, and what was literature
in modern Earth has to release the magicks it’s been holding hostage all this
while.
Huh?
And they’ll bring forth fruits and progeny in the next
phase which moves us forward into the new now, the next iteration of Is.
But why can't we have literature. It's harmless. It's
beautiful.
0=1 It may be harmless but it’s a sign of the times. If
people give all their attention, or much of it, to literature - this indicates
that they're disconnected from the field, and ensures they won't reconnect
because they’ll continue gaily to imagine literature is just literature.
Er... What else would it be?
Good question Jean. Anything you do in reality is a way
of tying up your attention, locking you into a particular way of perceiving
reality, a particular paradigm.
But I still don’t see what's so bad about stories.
Bad? No one ever said it’s bad. On the contrary, it can
be wonderful, but the energies of literature, its gluons if you like, format
reality in a particular way. In other words, it’s like computer code because,
believe it or not, we happen to be magical beings. Everything you think, say
and do affects everything else, believe it or not, i.e., 0=1.
So you reckon the world is the way it is because of
people writing and reading stories?
No, I don't think it.
Then what?
I know it. Stories
are an integral component, but I never said they were causal. The relationship
is more ambiguous. It's chicken and egg. When you start to feel the
significance, the power of words or thoughts you automatically start using them
differently.
How?
In a way that enhances, transforms your reality.
You do?
Yes.
Like prayers?
Yes, kinda. But also like poetry, or some poetry at least.
For example?
John Keats, Ode to a nightingale.
How?
Read it. Decide for yourself.
Any pointers?
You want me to spoil the fun of figuring it out.
Just a pointer.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever...
Er... Ok. So, you think we can actually transform our
reality using words or thoughts?
No, I don't think.
You know.
Absolutely.
But it all seems so improbable.
True. Reality is sticky.
Huh?
Sticky. It resists change until
the new paradigm is ready to emerge like a 9 month old foetus from the womb,
small yet fully formed.
But if I can’t get my head around
it?
It has nothing to do with your
head.
Huh?
The head is the least of your
faculties.
Come on, we are men of reason! For
the last 400 years since the age of enlightenment people have been touting the
great significance of that.
And rightly so.
Contradiction?
To help establish the paradigm of
reason and rationality, and to do so they had to overlook everything else, wilfully.
And now the age of Reason is at an
end too you’re saying?
No, we’re still going to use our
reason within the new paradigm, and yet the brain I repeat is the least of our
faculties.
I find that hard to believe.
Yes.
So did Shakespeare –
What a piece of work is a man, how
noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and
moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an
angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence
of dust?
Excellent. One of my favourites.
But completely contradicting what
you're saying.
Yes, so it would appear.
And yet?
And yet, first and foremost we are
children learning to be masters of reality. We transcend any epoch and rediscover
ourselves in the next. Reason is a vital part of our skill box and we’re
certainly not going to discard it in any hurry, but being blindly attached to
it and failing to appreciate that we are infinitely more than the thinking me
would prevent us from evolving into the next phase, the next iteration of our
reality.
So you say.
Ultimately, actions speak louder
than words. I have just written and published an essay entitled “the end of
literature”, uncapitalised.
Huh? How could you? You been busy
talking to me all this time.
So it would seem, but like I said,
the rational mind is greatly over-valued. It only sees what it means to see.
You mean to say...
You were always watching the ball, but the ball was my decoy. I was dancing and weaving in and out of time, even as we spoke.
You never.
And all you observed was a strange
cloud around me.
So I’m too late?
Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You were
integral to me getting it done which was, paradoxically, always the plan.
How can you say that when you know
it’s the opposite?
Literature, dear Jean, works both
ways.
It does?
Naturally. You can't give a class
of people, the so-called writers, carte blanche to say whatever they like, and
deny others the same right.
Can't you? They’re not trying to
deceive anyone.
Nor am I.
No? You just...
0=1. Only the limited part of your
mind which insists it is a rational creature and nothing more could possibly be
deceived. The rest of you fully part of, or integrated with the Field knew this
to be a load of...
No, no, no. Quit denying my sense
of reality.
Okey. Your reality can take care
if itself. I vacated it long ago.
What on Earth’s that supposed to
mean? Jean inquires as Stan swivels through 180° and
appears to be sucked into a bubble. In his place is a rather elegant piece of
parchment with the essay title: The end of literature emblazoned at the top.
Jean does everything
imaginable, everything possible not to read what is before her, yet to no
avail. Her eyes are drawn into the text and as she reads she knows without a
doubt, she feels, she simply knows that she is somehow activating, in some way
writing the essay herself, absurd though that may seem.
It's not that literature has
failed in any way.
It’s not that we have rejected it.
It’s not, but the world seems to
be abuzz,
Unwinding itself and suddenly
unflattening,
Suddenly discovering depth so that
the page
Is now a stage, and all of us men
and women merely players;
With our exits and our entrances;
And one man in his time plays many
parts,
His acts being seven ages. At
first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the
nurse’s arms;
And then the whining
school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face,
creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then
the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a
woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.
Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and
bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and
quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And
then the justice,
In fair round belly with good
capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of
formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern
instances;
And so he plays his part. The
sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d
pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and
pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d,
a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his
big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish
treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last
scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful
history,
Is second childishness and mere
oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans
taste, sans everything...
So how can we possibly hide behind
the flatness of words on a sheet, when we know without a shadow of doubt that
we are disrupting the Field whenever we deny or ignore the totality...
Er, Jean, what totality? You were
sent to prevent Stan from publishing his blasphemous text and seem to have
become a proponent yourself of his blasphemy.
Ah, Master Trefillys Scrub – I didn't notice you coming in.
Naturally. I move silently as a
Master of the 33rd degree.
But the fabric of reality, Master
Trefillys, is apparently in safe hands.
I fail to see how you can be so
bold as to assume you are competent to judge this matter.
Most certainly I’m not, yet it
appears that literature is now, only now coming into its own.
I…
That the age of literature was
merely a precursor to the age of Mandelbrot’s set, in which reality rediscovers
infinity, and in doing so, utilises all those many, many words from the
preceding age as almost limitless fuel for our journey back towards infinity.
Miss Jean Templeton, you are
hereby stripped of all rank and status, cast out of g-nomeportal’s haven of
rational Field administration, left to the tender mercies of the Xircie abomination,
so help you God.
Suddenly,
a rather splendid beetle flies straight towards Jean and knocking her, spins
her through 180° with a sudden break in the transcript, as Jean flips out of one,
into the zero side of narrative, where g-nomeportal’s 0=1 committee awaits her
with a fatted calf, and the highly coveted welcome back from flatality green dolphin award.
No Merry, Zie is not to the
best of my knowledge...
A tantalising glimpse beyond the veil of words incorporated before the Field reverts to flatness once again.
totally, or thereabouts
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