All Fiction

"This is entirely fictitious."
"Entirely? But a word here, a word there, surely?"
"No, entirely."
"But that's impossible."
"Impossible it may well be, but that's the way it is."
"But truth, fiction- enmeshed inextricably, etnwined utterly...where one ends, the other begins, who can say...?"
"No, it's all fiction."

Better Again

"I look across, not up, and sometimes, often even, even down."
"You are to be envied."
"No, you misunderstand me. I state this as a fact, not out of pride."
"Better again."
"No no, I repeat: as a fact, not out of pride."
"You are to be congratulated."

Within the Sphere

Within the sphere of his activity he was a master, granted- even if this granted is only for the sake of argument, or perhaps concision- but the nature of the sphere... What kind of sphere was it?

Shadows of Wood

Lines, lines, lines, lines, lines. Lines of shadow crossed by other shadows, also lines, the horizontal emanations of more lines, vertical ones, upright pillars of wood. And if you took a saw to one of these pillars of wood, effected a removal of it, in would spill floods of space to fill the empty space, though so quickly that there would never actually be an empty space, space without space. No, space would always fill space, so amorphous, elastic is space.
There would, for instance, be no perusing of the unoccupied territory, followed by a thought, a decision, an invasion. Nothing so anthropomorphic. No, space is much more innocent, more spatially omniscient than that. Does it enter then the reconquered territory, the erstwhile colony of matter, gleefully, triumphantly? No, innocence again. Such notions of vindictive glory, the supposedly rightful and justified accompaniment to space's reconquest of space, as it were: are not such notions precisely such occasions of hardened matter, colonies of impurity, residues of selfhood superimposed upon innocence? Not that I imagine such thoughts of space's hypothetical wallowing in self-glorification when engaged in the re-conquering of spatial territories temporarily having been annexed by accretions of matter, are especially commonplace. The thought that too many of us fall prey to just such intellectual temptations is a doubtful one.

Shadows of wood crossing shadows on wood.

Chamber

There was a chamber, so small from the outside did it look it could hardly be conceived a man could fit within; but once inside- and getting inside seemed a strangely effortless movement, you didn't even notice yourself going in- how vast it did reveal itself, even if, admittedly, it still appeared tiny from the outside. But the outside- what was that? From the inside it had all but disappeared.

Certain Heights

"A certain height. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Another height below that height. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Two different heights. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Co-existent, but not contradictory. Yes?"
"Yes."
"The higher height dependent on the lower height. The lower height not dependent on the higher height. Yes?"
"Possibly; but why not the other way round? The lower height, I agree, seems to exist without the higher. One gets to the higher by reason or pathway of the lower. And so the higher is dependent on the lower, not the lower on the higher. Without the lower we wouldn't get to the higher; wouldn't have a higher. Or so it seems. But perhaps the lower has simply eroded away, in time. Was higher, is now lower. Wouldn't be lower if not for having been higher in the first place. And so the lower dependent on the higher, not the higher on the lower."

Exhaustion

He had exhausted his faculties- temporarily. Or at least he hoped temporarily. For if not temporarily how could he be expected to live with exhausted faculties? Not well. Not at all. Think of it: life without your faculties. You can't even think of it, for what would you be doing if you were thinking of it but exercising your faculties. And that starts to give you an idea of the degree of exhaustion involved- the fact that you can't have an idea of the degree of exhaustion involved.

Fly

A man outside on a chair. A fly on the arm of an at least superficially identical chair a few feet away. The man reading a book, now watching the fly. The fly...though what can we say about the inner life of a fly. Many will even deny the inner life of a fly. I am not so crude however- not to imply that this lack of crudeness is any great virtue- but anyway I am not so crude, so totalitarian, as to deny the inner life of a fly; but even then what I can say about the inner life of fly? Nothing. It's alien territory.
Perhaps through some strange immersion into the deep silent spheres of being I can somehow sink into some existential commune with that worldess space of being that is the inner world of a fly, or any organic being for that matter, animal or vegetal, but even if I can- unpopular or at least unorthodox though such a notion would be- still this, as said, inner world is a worldess space, and so, also said, alien territory- the realms of wordlessness naturally alien to words.
But anyway, the man looked at the fly, as far as I know unthinkingly- perhaps not even much irritated by the fly, if at all- but suddenly up flew his left leg, so suddenly as to suggest a reflex action, unpremeditated- and kicked the underside of the arm of the chair atop which perched the fly- if perched is the word- and simultaneous to this kick, or as near simultaneous as to make no difference, off flew the fly.

Equal Validity

An idea extremely prevalent in the current era is that everything is equally valid. For instance you cannot, you will be told, say that one work of art is greater than another because of this equal validity of everything. So a quick look at the logic in play here.

Everything is equally valid. Therefore all statements are equally valid. And an example of one such statement within the totality of equally valid statements is that:
Everything is not equally valid.
And so if everything is not equally valid, then the first statement that everything is equally valid is false. So the statement of all being equally valid contains within itself its own disproof.

This is an extremely important little intellectual matter. It will be argued, once you extend the thinking here from the page to its implications to "real life", that this is a disproof of democracy itself, or liberalism, but this is a false, defiled version or interpretation of democracy where everything is permitted, and given the falseness of this notion, then the society that permits itself everything will inevitably become falsified, defiled, made decadent and collapse, partly or even significantly effected by those people who will then impose the apparently necessary subsequent harsh order on the collapsing society- most obviously the propagators of the dumbing down of that society's members through the forms of the mass-media. The Weimar period of something like absolute liberalism followed by the totalitarian period which had exploited the weakness of the misconstrued or false "liberalism" or democracy of the Weimar period. A long earlier piece here.

Ditch

A man was hacking away at the corner of a ditch up behind his house. The ditch was all in disorder and so it was time it went. So hacking away he was with a pick and shovel, throwing away into a trailer over the wall the rocks, briars and soil, some of which soil wasn't bad at all, but so mixed in with all the unwanted rubbish was it that it was easier just to be done with it all, throw away the lot, and so away all the lot was going.
He dug in his shovel and took a chunk out of the ditch, and out swarmed a load of bees who must have dwelt in a hive in the midst of it all somewhere, but though the ditch was clearly going this clarity was as yet not so pronounced to the bees; and anyway it wasn't in their nature to just fly off- this was their home after all- and so the man, who wasn't keen on being stung by such creatures, backed off. And yes incidentally, even if this stinging would as likely be more the death of the bees rather than him, still he wasn't interested in such vengeful consolations, and so retreat.

But anyway, this was his ditch and he wasn't going to be defeated by a bunch of bees, however irate, and he came back soon enough with a smoking cloth, dipped in diesel, and stuffed it into the ditch, and so what choice did the bees have but to leave their ditch or suffocate and die in it- in other words no choice, not for bees anyway, uncontaminated as they are by romantic notions of useless heroism- and so off they went, all scattered, for now at least. Perhaps in time they would meet up again and gather in some new ditch. Though perhaps not- I won't pretend to be an expert on bees. Their behaviour is a mystery to me. A mystery I'm not particularly interested in unravelling.

Addictions

A well-dressed man was speaking through a megaphone by a pond:
"We fill the holy space of consciousness with intellectual constellations: static points around whose gravitational pull we orbit, lost in these products of our own minds, chaotically encircling these eddies of distraction. And with all addictions, one tries to consummate the attraction to this gravitational centre in an ultimate act of union, but because the process is ultimately internal, a physhiological and psychological process in the addict, then the external centre that one is trying to attain is illusory, and so the craving is never satiated. Freedom from the addiction can only occur in the non-participation within its sphere of activity, by remaining outside of its orbit. Any temptation to conquer the foe from within is only that- a temptation, a seduction, a means of drawing ourselves back into its temporarily fatal gravitational pull."

Slave Not Slave

"So you're saying man is a slave?"
"No, I'm saying man isn't a slave, but the problem is he thinks he's a slave."
"So he has to learn to think he's not a slave?"
"No, who needs to tell himself he's not a slave except a slave? It's the thinking he's a slave that makes him a slave- it's an act of creation or pseudo creation, but the process isn't half so simple. He doesn't think he thinks he's a slave. He thinks he thinks he's free, whereas in fact, unknown to himself, he thinks he's a slave."

Complimentary

They complimented each other perfectly. What did? Their stupidity and their vanity.

Nowhere

He was halfway to nowhere. How could he be halfway to nowhere? He must be somewhere or not somewhere, nowhere or not nowhere, surely. And one can't, nowhere being nowhere, find one's way towards nowhere, because if you're going somewhere, then it's somewhere you must be going, and not nowhere. So, no, it seems he wasn't halfway to nowhere at all, but halfway to somewhere.

Madness Is

Madness is the confusion of reality with the words in one's head. Where perception and raw experience have been ousted, insofar as humanly possible, by incessant interpretation of perception. One is in a permanent state of selfhood, but while this "selfhood" may suggest that this state is one of reality, it is in truth imaginary but invested with the semblance of reality by the fact of the mind-body organism that is conceiving of it. Reality for the subject of the madness is, to a catastrophic level, a matter of words, an incessant interpretation of reality, but this human subject is, despite his best efforts, himself a real living being, and so is potentially able to invest and manifest a dreadful 'external' dynamism to the mad, false ideas.

Thus the dangers of all matters of false collective idealism- of some political bent- where the subjects of the malaise of thought attempt to force reality into the dimensions and parameters of thought which they have decided life really ought to fit into if it is to be truly reality or the desired version of such. And since the subject, speaking in the singular, is certainly bound to find in reality in the flesh immense obstacles to the reality in his head, the most extreme measures will be used to effect the necessary changes, and given the lack of success he is bound to meet with, ever more extreme measures to push obstinate life in the desired direction.
This all-pervading idealism or madness is not to be confused with the practical healthy idealism of someone who, for instance, thinks efficient sewerage systems are desirable for a community and effects the necessary changes. Here the ideas are intelligent fragments of life, whereas in the former case life as a whole is substituted for an idea of itself, some artificial simulacrum.

Tasted

"It tasted like muck."
"Why is that?"
"Because it was muck."

The Road Was Closed

The road was closed. The road was always closed. Why was it always closed? Because there was work being done. There was always work being done. Yes, but why was there always work being done? Noone knew, or at least noone seemed to know, but did anyone even ask? As far as one could discern or deduce nothing was ever finished, but all carried on as if this never-ending work was normal, and of course it was normal, for if something is always so then what can this be but normal?

Except that this is all lies, or if not all lies, as good as all lies- for the sake of appearances, some kind of metaphysics, some facile parable of despair and absurdism. For the truth is that the road wasn't always closed. It was closed now, true enough, and had been for a week or so, or perhaps even two, but what is a couple of weeks in the great scheme of eternity, and even allowing for the incompetence traditional to such work involving roads it can hardly be long before the road is back in its customary state of being open, even if, due to the mentioned incompetence, it should have to once again close for some stupid unforeseen reason or other.

A First Line

All I need is a first line and the rest is sure, or at least likely, to follow. But without that first line nothing can follow. You can't do without it. Though you could argue that the second line is also paramount, for without it you won't get a third and so on. But without the first you wouldn't have gotten the second in the first place, so the first is still the key, and without the second you'd still at least have a first, whereas without the first you'd be void of anything. Though mightn't this all seem a bit coarse, utilitarian?: the linguistic structures of sentences being reduced to their importance and function within chronological systems. But noone here is making such reductionist claims. Chronology may be an aspect of these sentences being, but a kind of abstract one and not their essence.

What is the essence of this sentence, for example? Not its place within a sequence surely- that's nothing to do with the concrete sentence itself, even though it itself is a sequence: of words one after the other. But again this idea of the sequence is a set of values coming from without, an external intellectual lens refracting the sentence into something else altogether, reducing it to, or defining it as, a place in a system, within which system it supposedly has its 'meaning,' its whole essence, and ignoring it in the concrete of its own words and what they signify. But what do they signify? Well, we could transpose this significance of the words into some other linguistic structure- instead of: "What is the essence of this sentence, for example?" replace with: "What is the pure meaning of this sentence, for instance?" and say that this is what the words meant, but then you could do the same with those words- replace them with other words, and so on ad finitum.

No, ultimately the words mean some internal process in the mind which cannot be reduced to anything else, otherwise for some bizarre reason we're trying to eliminate a mind from an experience which is entirely of the mind. And even the notion of the sentence being refracted into an element of some intellectual system, chronology or some such; in fact no refraction is going on at all, for the sentence isn't being refracted or changed in any way. It remains just as it it, for no matter how much 'refracting', placing it within other systems you do, if your eyes go back up the page or screen you'll find it just as it was, not refracted at all, and so all the refractions are simply other sentences masquerading as these refractions, but are in truth simply themselves; not truthful approximations of these other things at all, but, like those other things, just themselves.

So all I need apparently, or so claimed, is a first line and things will progress from there. Some matter will inevitably be furnished, ushered forth, given the nature of the mind involved, cause and effect, etc. And, yes, a first line did indeed usher forth some great spillage or other, but is the 'ushering forth' a tad misleading? Suggests perhaps the erroneous idea of all that followed somehow predetermined by, all somehow contained within that first line? It seems to me I could quite easily have written utterly different things in the following of that first line.

Science Fiction

I won't pretend to have read any science fiction, but in the spirit of egalitarianism I've decided I might as well try and write some, so here goes:

"Has anyone seen my bunsen burner?"
"Never mind your bloody bunsen burner. Where the hell is my litmus-paper?"
"It's over by that pile of test-tubes over there."
"Oh thanks."

It's About Time

It's about time I wrote something. Why about time? It's a subject like any other. Well no, not like any other. It's a subject, being itself, like itself, whatever that self might be. And so, either way, why not write about it? Unless, of course, you've nothing to say about it. But even then maybe it isn't until in the actual active saying of nothing about it- as opposed to the passive simply not saying it- that you find out you have nothing to say, and until then, not having tried to say something, dwelling in the passive not saying, you had no idea of the nothing of which you had to say- were convinced you had plenty to say. But anyway, I offer no apologies for writing about time, and don't imagine I'm confessing that it turned out I had nothing to say. I was merely speaking generally, about cases in general, and perhaps, for all you know, I had plenty to say.