introducing the planetary office of natural affairs

 …office of natural affairs?

 

That’s right.

 

For planet Earth?

 

Yep.

 

Are you making this up?

 

Merry winces. He seems to be remarkably sensitive to accusations of deception, fraud and or cheddar. Suspiciously so.

          Cheddar – as in cheese?

 

No, Lord high master of meaning-y-matter – as in cheddar – the spinning of false narratives with a view to hijacking, subverting or rerouting a narrative channel – and thus the underlying reality.

 

You mean to say you can actually alter an entire reality by spinning false narratives?

 

Er… how else do you think the Earth became the dysfunctional, cognitively dissonating boloto it now appears to be.

 

Boloto?

 

Russian word – bog or swamp.

 

I wish you’d stick to English, Melrose.

 

Problem is cutting out all the false narratives brings me back to Russian – or partly Russian.

 

Holy crap! Damn conspiracy!

 

Cut it out Merry – I know perfectly well you’re pulling my leg. Since when was there a planetary office of Natural affairs?

 

Since the planet Earth, or Terra as it is rightly called, was first instituted.

 

Instituted? You make it sound like a committee affair. No one instituted Earth for crying out loud!

 

Sorry, can’t be helped. You may hate ‘em, bloody Golgafrinchans, but there’s always a committee lurking somewhere at the back of anything, particularly something as hopelessly messed up as our flat-y-Earth.

 

Oh for God’s sake Merry – kindly avoid lowering the cognitive cultural tone to pre-neanderthal levels. The world is in no conceivable way flat, nor – to the best of my knowledge – is there an office of Natural Affairs, or any empirical evidence of your ridiculous Golgafrinchans for that matter, outside the realm of pure fiction. Besides, who on Earth could have instituted such a department – an Earth creator race, or perhaps God himself?! It’s ludicrous. And how would they, a committee of bureaucratic numbskulls, control nature?

 

No, you could never control nature itself – but nor do you need to.

 

Er…

 

Just the human mind – once you separate it from nature – and convince it that it can, must and should regulate and furthermore improve on whatever it is that nature is intent on doing.

 

But nature has no intentions – merely the instinctive urge to reproduce.

 

Precisely! You see how effective the firewall is? 

Er?

Prohibiting us from seeing nature as any more than an oversized sexual reproduction facility. If it even has a thinking mind then it is merely bent on survival and sex. Is that not so?

Er...

Your mind cannot, must not, will not allow nature back into easy, comfortable, mutual mind-y-ness: a partnership of equals based on common origins, shared DNA and some kind of universal consciousness. No, nothing of the sort. Nature has to be managed at all costs, mentally, as a thing to be studied, to be understood, to be saved or improved, as matter-of-fact, as quantifiable resource rather than extraordinary manifestation of matter – matter which is constantly mutating with every time-y-click beyond inorganic bounds into the realm of pure fantasy, of pure meaning, bifurcating into biology, generating purpose, resistance and cognition which we’re wont to refer to, to perceive thirdly as story, secondly as personification, and firstly as me, the lone and fragmented witness, protagonist and mind errant – vainly looking, searching for unattainable perfection and completeness, known euphemistically as love, as el, or what the hell was that?

 

Er…

 

There is a planetary office of natural affairs – and it is attempting, successfully in fact, to remove all last vestiges of nature’s mutational mayhem from the publichood at large – sanitising, sterilising the space your mind is willing and able to occupy, in order to exact the highest tax payment – the most colossal tribute imaginable – the occupation and utilisation of your mind-y-space for itself – its pale parody of human-ness – the golem – a substitution that convinces every me, every person alive today that things are what they are – nothing is left but what is right – that we are all guilty of ecocide – a planet on the cusp of extinction, little suspecting that the entire planet is, in fact, a platform for "human" consciousness – a generator of almost unlimited potential realities – if and when we're willing to ride the beast we've been running from all these years, the wild untameable force that puts the fear of God in us... and thus you legislate nature into an ever-diminishing square of viability like a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.

 

Have you finished?

Merry momentarily fades to utter silence while universe sighs perceptibly to those with ears to hear. A tender moment of respite... 

Utter bunkum. Never in all my life have I heard such unadulterated balderdash.

 

Happy Zie? now that you’ve given free rein to your “deny and disparage at all costs” fully-automated ego preservation defence mechanism. Happy are you?

 

Ego preservation? What on Earth’s this to do with preserving my ego? We’re discussing the planet itself, and trying to avoid falling into your lugubrious trap of pathological and wilful self-deception. Everyone knows you’re unable to distinguish fact from fiction, and that you have the shocking habit of saying things in order to manipulate the minds of people you’re conversing with, presumably because it amuses you, or else for some more nefarious purpose.

 

Zie, you have said enough. Now that I know your true mind I shall simply withdraw and leave you to your proud, unassailable tower of cognitive objectionalism.

 

Huh? Objectivity – is that what you meant to say?

 

Why do you think that?

 

Because “objectionalism” is not an English word, unless you meant “objectionable” – and I hardly see grounds for accusing me of that. I merely happen to know you too well – and that your "office of natural affairs" discretely managing every ecosystem on this planet is pure fantasy – otherwise what kind of world would we be living in...

 

How do you mean?

 

A world in which politicians or technocrats make up rules for plants, animals, birds and even bacteria or fungi?

 

And? What of it?

 

It wouldn’t be workable.

 

Why ever not?

 

You’d have wonks trying to decide how things ought to be done, as opposed to allowing nature herself to get on with managing her own affairs.

 

I don’t see…

 

Simple things like leaves falling off the trees, or the riotous pandemonium of pollination, not to mention genetic mutation – they’d be trying to control or curtail everything random, everything that involves fractals as opposed to squares and straight lines. Imagine – forest fires – no way would that be allowed. Every leaf would have to be assigned a unique number, to ensure it didn’t transgress the spatial limits of its particular tree progenitor's legal bounds.

 

Well, I don’t see what you have against numbering things? It’s useful to keep audit trails of matter and materials – if done with good sense and without prejudice.

 

If sheep could fly. Your office of natural affairs would have the whole of the natural world in lockdown before you could utter – bloomin-biodiversity!

 

You seem to have an inveterate bias against technocratic solutions – Zie.

 

No, Merry, I’m all for managing human affairs unnaturally – otherwise there would be nothing to write tragedies or comedies about. The left brain is almost infallibly able to transform paradise – an oasis of opportunity – into a living hell of dictatorial bureaucratic overreach – not because it’s evil or out of control…

 

No?

 

Not at all. For every left hemisphere there must be an equal and utterly asymmetric right one – which by definition, if you don’t pay too much attention to the provenance of my right hemi-spheric definitions, must be a match for anything the left hemisphere is able to come up with.

 

So, the two are always in perfect opposing harmony?

 

Yes – up to a point.

The point being?

 

A potentially infinite capacity to generate false harmonics – which are able to deceive the rational mind almost without fail, but which never can, could nor will deceive the ultimate un-divided mind.

 

Wait a minute?!

 

Yes?

 

What undivided mind? You just said it’s divided and totally asymmetric.

 

Yes.

 

So dun’t follow, does it?

 

Oh that – I see what you mean.

 

You see? Well perhaps you’d like to explain, if it’s not too much trouble.

 

There’s really nothing to explain, is there.

 

Logically, the burden of proof is wholly on your side, as you're blatantly contradicting yourself  that the mind be irrevocably and asymmetrically divided.

 

Right. Logically. And what if logic although a seemingly straightforward protocol, was actually designed to gloss over or eliminate from mind's sight the asymmetric nature of everything we experience, perceive and think we know here in 3D reality?

 

What if pigs were chickens?

 

Precisely. It’s a logical impossibility, is it not. One thing cannot be another – unless time, space or z, a key factor utterly overlooked by logical analysis which strangely alters everything, is taken into consideration.

 

Er…

 

For example – a flower cannot be a seed, or compost, or fire, or pure energy unless you either alter the x, y or z axis value – that is, time, space or thirdly, the what the zed was that manifestation of weirdness – an apparent anomaly in the field.

 

Well, anomalies will happen from time to time.

 

Will they?

 

Well, yes, nothing’s perfect you know. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to bzzzzz – Zie flies around the room a couple of times looking suspiciously like a beetle, before reverting back to a more familiar outline. Merry sees and registers this while Zie's logic circuit immediately disqualifies its possibility and furthermore, immediately expunges it from the public record of memory.

True... Big bang, after all, was something of a whoopsie-daisy Hail Mary anomaly – wouldn’t you say?

 

Well, I’d prefer not to discuss Big bang, if you don't mind.

 

Really? I wonder why?

 

It was a unique, one-off event.

 

Was it now?

 

Yes. It’s not every day the universe is created.

 

No?

 

Of course not.

 

Unless you start playing with time – zooming in or zooming out.

 

Look Merry – time is not something you just mess around with, ok. It’s not an infinitely fungible value. It's a vital biorhythm: the heartbeat, the pulse, the meter of mind, or damn well ought to be. Every moment matters. Every moment is unique.

 

The fact is Zie, that in order to answer your perfectly legitimate question about the nature of logicality – and whether things ever can be or are in fact, in any way, shape or form really, truly logical – I simply need to triangulate or, conversely, untrifurcate reality.

 

What on Earth…

 

Which is easy enough to do if you recognise that, ultimately, there has to be a logical constant, if logic is to mean anything at all.

 

Ah – a logical constant – that er… sounds logical.

 

But which ain’t attainable anywhere in an asymmetric version of things being things.

 

Well – I don’t see why not.

If logic itself is part of and reinforces those asymmetries.

 

I... er

Unless we accept those values are fungible, or to put it another way – if x, y and z are able to give and take, to flex and bend relative to each other – in order to ensure that neither side of the asymmetric mind is able to take complete control and dominate the narrative.

 

Ah.

 

Because – if one side were able to – if, for example, so-called "bad-guys" were able to actually and or ultimately take control of things – it’d be game over – caput – done – finished – finite la comedia – would it not – for the quantum wave of certain uncertainty would now have collapsed irrevocably and, dare I suggest – irreparably – which would be a logical impossibility if things had been set up within or by a postulated quantum mind.

 

Wait a minute – didn’t you call it the un-divided mind?

 

Yep.

 

But then you’re contradicting yourself again.

 

Without a doubt.

 

For the quantum mind – if such a thing exists – is always going to be divided to the extent that it has to allow superstates – like the particle and the wave to coexist simultaneously – until or unless observed.

 

That kind of thing – yes. Divided – undivided – how on earth can you meaningfully quantify these unthings – if they’re in fact quantum – and not yet collapsed waveform certainties. We’re back in Schrodinger cat territory again, ain’t we – neither either dead or alive until proven empirically.

 

So… so you’re claiming…

 

Yes, logically

 

Wait – I haven’t finished – let me have my say

 

Of course

 

Shut up!

 

Ok

 

That it’s actually a reality that the universe is both for-real and totally not – but cannot be known, ie. ascertained within 3D reality – because that would screw up the asymmetric balance between right and left hemispheres?

 

I don’t know

 

You mean “yes”

 

Do I?

 

Ah – you see – you’re agreeing, aren’t you – in the only way permissible.

 

Really?

 

Ah ha – I’ve seen through your ruse.

 

Have you? Really? Good for you! Prove it.

 

Huh?

 

Prove it, clever dick.

 

Prove it? How?

 

The only way you possibly can or could.

 

How on Earth could I prove what cannot be proven without collapsing the entire unified or quantum field of reality?

 

I have no way of knowing – unless – perhaps – you were willing to go full Kahuna and stake your life.

 

What?

 

Because – you couldn’t or wouldn’t be able to die – would you, could you – if dying involved collapsing irrevocably the wave form, the great oh-fk

 

I beg your pardon?! Did you just say what I thought you did?

 

I have no way of knowing – without collapsing the separation between the two of us – but if you’d be willing to allow me to conduct an experiment in the name of true science in order to determine for once and for all the nature and status of Schrodinger’s cat, and whether logic can be and is, in fact logical beyond the utter insanity of asymmetric hemi-spheres…

 

Wait a minute – before we do any experiments – which I’m always keen to conduct in the name of science, in the footsteps of the great Socrates himself – how the blazes did you get to the idea that the asymmetric hemi-spheres of a divided mind can be or are insane or counter-logical?

 

That’s easy enough to see, empirically, if and when you’re able to observe reality from both sides of the hemi-spheric mind.

 

And you are?

 

You have no way of knowing and I have no way of showing this – without invoking finality – as in the big D. Merry actually contradicts himself by flipping full-Q and replicating himself 16 times, knowing only too well that this demonstration of zed-shift will be utterly rejected by any logic-gates in the vicinity, and utterly fail to register on the flat radar screen of reality, nor the fact that 12 items in the room, including Zie's socks, which have now changed from red to green, have undergone various forms and degrees of mutation will be allowed to interfere with 3D immutability – until a convenient cause or break can cover up these flagrant discontinuities.

 

Why does it always boil down to death, for you, Merry? What kind of twisted, demented necrophile would insist on…

 

D as in death if you’re stuck in the 3D state of mind – ie the divided mind – or else 5^th essence if you’re able to slip beyond that rather awkward state of cognitive dissonance which is, by necessity, bound to see things incompletely, from one very left or right-of-centre perspective.

 

Ok, ok. So, the divided mind is insane because it refuses to see, to accept or acknowledge the patently obvious fact, as you’re suggesting, that it is in fact undeniably divided.

 

Yep. Half a shoe. Is it a shoe?

 

Well, it’s certainly half a shoe – so it must have within it the shadow, the potential of shoe-y-ness.

 

Correct. Half a water molecule….

 

Ok, ok. I get your point.

 

So, are you willing to put up and shut up – or do you want to simply talk the talk?

 

You mean, am I willing to commit suicide, potentially, in the name of science – in order to have a close encounter with an 86 year old bloody cat?

 

Yep.

 

Not really. I think there must be better causes worth dying for.

 

Absolutely.

 

There must be plenty of other things I can learn and study before throwing my life away.

 

Er…

 

Mustn’t there.

 

Er… I hate to say it…

 

What?

 

Having arrived at this point – where your x, y and z axes are now, have now, are now in the process of converging, it’s really either now or never.

 

Er…

 

There’ll never actually be another convergence window in your life.

 

Er

 

It’s a rare occurrence – like when you have a planetary parade and all of ‘em are suddenly aligned.

 

Oh-fk

 

You see! Your untrifurcation hath spoken.

 

No it hasn’t you bloody maniac – that was…

 

Without you realising it, of course – the sacred oh-fk has been uttered and now you are irrevocably committed. Prepare yourself. The entire universe is now honing in – bringing your 3-axes and itself – the ineffable unknowable only-beable mind-y-mind into the place which is logically referred to as “death” – the place where zero truly equals one – where Schrodinger’s cat is truly, happily able to exist in every possible state, which presents not the least difficulty whatsoever for the unforked, unfurkled, un-my-D’d end.

 

The un-my-D’d end? Holy cow? You mean to say…

 

I mean nothing whatsoever unless you choose to imagine that in some way, some how I can ever replace or substitute your direct knowledge of the infinitely simple, impossibly logical truth.

 

Oh shit. Why did I ever get myself into this ridiculous logic trap. Merry – I don’t suppose there’s any way we can just rewind and head back to our completely innocent, comfortable conversation about mother nature – and why, in fact, you were absolutely right in suggesting that it’s a manifestation of the other mind, meaning that I never was, never could be, never will be in any way, shape or form separate or divisible from nature herself – and that the bureaucratic technological impulses of an evidently unbalanced left hemisphere must, somehow or other, be a perfect adjunct, perfect corollary to the asymmetry of a left-right hemi-sphericality – a kind of wavy, meandery mind-y-ness – should I simply quit assuming that things are in any way separate and apart from my direct experience of reality, of them individually, in plurality or in general, and allow those experiences to converge at the fulcrum that is mind-y-mind – in order to experience the totality with absolute abandon, and completely logical uncertainty, completely illogical certainty, so help me time, space or God.

 

Ah.

 

Ah what?

 

Ah-fn-ah

 

Ah-fn-ah?

 

Hvn-da

 

Hvn-da – as in “da” your annoying Russian yes – or “duh” your dummy-dum?

 

Zie – for God’s sake – quit fooling around. You’ve just achieved quantum totality. Don't you realise?

 

Quantum totality? Ridiculous.

 

Here – dodge this.

 

Somehow Merry manages to pull out of nowhere a ridiculously large rapid fire machinegun, like the one in the Matrix fired from the helicopter when they’re trying to rescue Morpheus – which is now firing directly at Zie. Zie appears to be utterly unimpressed as the bullets either pass through him or around him or thirdly – simply un-bullet themselves while in his proximity. Merry doesn’t despair. He whips out a computer game console and hits the P button. Rocks are fired at Zie from all angles. The same nothing. A light sabre now in his hand – Merry slices off Zie’s head – only it stubbornly refuses to disconnect.

 

Are you done fooling around Merry. This silly virtual reality computer game is a little uninspiring.

 

Yes. I see what you mean. Here, catch this.

 

Merry throws Zie an original notepad – the very one on which Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian-Irish physicist, wrote out in 1935 his notorious quantum conundrum. Zie catches it without even looking and for a moment reality seems to fizzle as three lines branch off to infinity – all contained within the bubbly-space that Zie seems to be emanating… alive, one cat, dead, the other, and thirdly… a chicken an egg – a caterpillar butterfly – a tadpole frog – a man a woman – a word a book a tale and silence – in which no word, no book, no tale inhales, exhales the otherness of it, anthropomorphically.

 

Darn.

 

What’s that.

 

Darn. I said.

 

Yes. I heard. Not to worry. Great things usually come back down to Earth with a little squelchy bump, you know.

 

Yes, I suppose so.

 

Come on, let’s go for a stroll. The wood awaits.

 

Oh yes. That sounds…

 

Infinitely inviting.

 

 

 

This story is dedicated to all the bureaucratic technocrats, Golgafrinchans included, who have done everything possible in the greatest way imaginable to bring us to this wonderful moment of now, in which, without a doubt, uncertainty is once again able to exfoliate and sporulate magically, inconceivably and er….

 

thirdly

 

ah-fn…

 

 

 

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