‘Evolution
is going on right now, perhaps in everything which is systematically
replaceable.’ The zebra crossing has
shuffled twenty feet forward. The bus
shelter, like Zeno’s arrow, has crossed half the gap between its older
incarnation and the stop sign, but it seems to have plateaud in its nomadic
enthusiasm and stuck. Personal spaces
around bodies connect together in a chain between the shelter and the sign, the
people in the queue marking space like buoys, casually dressed by today’s
still-evolving economic systems.
‘Yeah,
everything changes, right,’ I think. ‘For
example, the arrival of a bus spices up the experience of relative motion my
brain is immersing my mind in as I walk along.
What’s deceleration defined from an experiential perspective? How would someone describe that,
phenomenologically?’
I’m
moving down the street, busy like Nebuchadnezzar trying to evolve my universe
in my head, or at least to organize it somehow—being distracted from my
bursting ego-thoughts by the gritty nuances of the fragrance of tar on the
cold air. ‘Not only is this world four
dimensional, and in colour (usually)—you get this spatial idea from vision
integrated with your other experiences, in the category of smell and all the
other sense modalities too. We stick an
imagined sound on the experience, and use this word organically, in the way
that language is kept alive in organic brains...’
Cool
thinking. Sorry, I forgot to mention:
it’s January, about seven o’clock at night, by the tube station. It’s dark but everything has been yellowwashed
with sodium for the convenience and safety of the citizenry, and for the aid
of whatever closed-circuit TVs are hanging about. I think, ‘Now isn’t the time for a big Orwellian trip about the
paranoia of the powerful. If I watch
TV a bit later, I might consider it then...’
Instead I notice the mist from my mouth, the evidence of the seasons
around me and the slowly-escaping moon, ‘See where all our awareness gets us,’
I reflect, ‘Imagine the paranoia in realizing that according to our best
modern theories, on merely one of several equally dubious scenarios, the
Universe we live in never ends—all its energy just sorts of spreads itself out
ever more thinly, forever. But
hey. What if we encoded our minds onto
the patterns of this endless process of energy flow? We could live forever.
Perhaps. But to never know
eternity... And the perpetuation of
imperfect experience and unfulfilled desire doesn’t seem to have an evident
intrinsic point to it. How far are us
free wills merely slaves to our evolved core instincts to survive? Or does consciousness require some sort of purpose also—something to aim for?
I say
to myself, “Meanwhile, in a pub about five minutes walk around the corner, a
woman is reading a postcard, and smoking a cigarette...” I’ve got all this infinite complexity of
mind and the universe stuff to resolve—about truth in all possible categories
of human understanding, and how far the human race can go with that—and I’m
meanwhile also trying to compose a story for the writer’s group I’m going to in
my head. Busy life. Meanwhile, this multidirectional yellow
experience globe—I mean my consciousness of what I’, seeing and whatever other
modes of information and its random reality representation contents my
awareness attends to bobs along, still thinking I know not one thing from
another, really.
That’s
my present experience summarised. Now I
notice that the pubs have TVs in them—so that the isolated people drinking can
watch people in pubs on them, talking to each other. Funny conclusion number sixteen: ‘If you want to go to the limit
of realism on the soaps, you could have the people in the pubs watching people
in pubs on the telly...’ And you’re
telling me you didn’t know beer and TV are the opiates of your potentially
dissatisfied society? I’ve got bread
and circuses to say to you, if you deny that to me.
I
don’t go inside any of the pubs I’m passing, to deny anything at all to
anybody. Bars seem to be very
unattractive places whenever I go in alone.
The modern pine and glass of the set up of the one I pass now would only
slightly temper my anticipation of the imperfection in realized disappointment
I would experience, if I were to venture inside to buy expensive beer and
stand around feeling sexually alienated.
One might go to a coal face to seek a diamond, but I can never even find
any coal... D’you know what I mean?
I
pass an independent fried chicken oasis.
The next random thought to sizzle my mind is, ‘There must be an equation
for the rate of change of the level of viable fast-food units per ten minute
walk, by population density? Imagine
all the categories of information you’d have to integrate and analyse together
to formulate a useful scientific law like that...’ Then I remember that people do make rough attempts at weighing
in all the factors involved in questions just like that, all the time: a man
might ask himself ‘Is is worth opening up a shop here?’ But it’s amazing. It’s like doing complicated multidimensional maths in your
head. Hey dude. Without the maths.
‘Cool
species you moulded here, God,’ I think, ‘No wonder it took such a complication
of spacetime quantum events to write all these sensations on idea space for us
to experience everything. Like,
something like ten or twenty billion years fiddling the possibilities for all
this to happen, right now. Man. See, it all comes back to the question of
evolution again...’
There’s
so many silver BMs sucking the tarmac around here. It seems like a desperate last grasp at self-indulgence by a guilty
population in global denial, this whole twenty-first century consumer
thing. But I may be wrong.
Now I
stop, solicited by a pair of beggars. I
think, ‘Hey, you want to try doin’ nothing off the state, and claiming it as
social evolution,’ as no doubt it could be spun... I hate giving money to beggars though: I’m always convinced they
have more money than me. Admittedly,
not a difficult goal right now: my finances appear to be exploring an entirely
imaginary realm.
Negative
money. The mashed bank account of the
unemployed anti-capitalist sings its siren song: “Hi there, this is increasing
debt...” it calls. I’d need to extend
my overdraft to give this two change. I
just shake my head and move on, feeling resentful about them triggering a moral
shame in me.
Maybe
I do need to go to a pub on the way back, just to make life personally more
bearable, for an instant—if even more psychoeconomically unstable,
personally. Life is difficult, isn’t
it?—and I’m only walking to the library on a Monday evening. I wonder to myself how much I could charge
to organize gang warfare according to games theory, or perhaps write political
propaganda pamphlets. It’s all
crap. So instead I think, ‘Let’s play,
“Let’s
evolve global society, dude.”’ This is my purpose for living, I’ve decided.
So I
push open the glossy red library door, and enter into a brighter baptism of
yellow light, and a warmer evidence of mundane chaos and people. I have my idea for a story for the
group. It’s about my journey here.
Copyright Grant Bartley
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