Originally written to be spoken, online or on the radio.
You can’t hear me from where you’re sitting. No. You can’t.
That noise you think you hear is simply a cascade of atoms. Ripples that conspire to give the illusion of sound. It’s a trick. A surge of molecules, electronically captured, stored as a series of ons and offs then beamed across the world as radio waves, or worse.
This storm of vibrations is translated by an army of boxes on kitchen tables which gently nudge the air around them – causing domino after domino to fall, just so, battering your ears in a pre-designated pattern where this rain of physical objects are de-coded in your cranium into something that can’t possibly be true.
It’s an executive toy of chain reactions. A timpani on your ear drum at one end and my infernal plotting at the other.
I’m not even in the room with you, although I dearly wish I was. Unbelievably I’m not speaking now, despite the fact that it seems that way to both of us. This recording happened some time ago and now we rehash this moment from an unidentified hour in an anonymous location and yet you say you hear me speaking? Come off it.
Considering the complexity of the universe and the profound manipulation of physics required it’s a marvel that we can communicate at all. A true wonder, literally as ancient as time and more futuristic than any of those sci-fi spectaculars, so tied to ships and strictly delineated exoticism that they might as well be Hornblower novels – never attempting to stretch the periphery of our universe, such is the deep conservativism of the genre.
I digress.
You may not be hearing me, but that’s no reason we can’t talk. Talk about how we got here. About where we’re going. About the precarious edges that we live our lives upon, sometimes balancing, sometimes unbalanced.
But before we get there let’s discuss this letter. I don’t doubt that it exists, I’m not unhinged. But I do suspect the ink. Scattered into semi-regular shapes these markings are designed to draw us into untruths. At least they’re untruths if we choose not to believe them.
Take this patch of markings here. Five simple shapes. An E, a V, an I, a C – oh the unimaginative creep who wrote this filth – and to top it off a T. Of all things.
What am I to make of it? If anything?
What might an “Order of possession” even mean? Are my possessions in an order? What order? Alphabetical? Numerical? An order of preference or price? What a ludicrous exercise.
If people are going to go to the effort of writing me a letter why not write one that will make me happy? A J, like at the start of jaunty could have raised a smile, that would have been something. What about an X, as in X-ray? No, no, I’d have seen through that.
OK, OK, I’m sorry but when you consider that human beings of one kind or another have been around for what? Two point three million years? How old can a joke actually be? Particularly one about X-rays. I doubt the early homonids got beyond slap stick and fart gags. But that’s speculation I suppose. Perhaps Homo Habilis had a sophisticated and nuanced sense of the absurd as she battered stones together to make the first flint tools. Was that first axe head a delicious joke that simply got out of hand?
Let’s get back to this so called letter and it’s frankly pathetic attempt to make me believe I’m to be dislodged from my lodgings. Who’s to define what anti-social behaviour really is? It’s not a thing, it’s an interpretation. Isn’t it? I’m part of the social aren’t I? How could anything actually be anti-social if I do it? It doesn’t make sense.
It’s not as if I owe them money. After all, how can one person owe another person an abstract concept? It’s maddening is what it is. If we could all just agree on these simple, indisputable truths then everyone would be happier. At least I would.
Let’s forget about this silly eviction nonsense. It’s all so petty.
There are billions of stars in the galaxy, and we sit on a speck of dirt circling just one of them – and not even a particularly interesting one! There are plenty of stars hotter, or bigger, or younger or older, there are twin stars caught in a mutual orbit of blistering fire. Imagine that.
I remember she took my head in her hands. Tenderly she turned my face to the sky. She asked me to pick out a star, any star that I could see. I thought about it for an age, my back resting against her legs. It was a crisp, clean country sky. There were so many to choose from. I scorned the brightest, the clearest, the sharpest, the ones right above or those seemingly hovering over our home like celestial signposts.
At last I picked one, my star. I was faint and off to the side, but these are tricks of perspective, the rotation of our planet, the distortion of our atmosphere. I pointed. She squinted, paused, and told me “Even that one is better than here.”
Even that one.
But I couldn’t hear her. I just thought I could. Through cold hands over my ears and the bewildering distances between us, around us, captured in the hail of atoms that made up her words, rippling through her fingers as if they were real.
So how did we get here? I’ve never understood why people are so obsessed with monkeys. It’s not much of a leap is it? A person being descended from some sort of ape? Come on, they even look like people. Admittedly, the sort of character you bump into down an alley, gives your heart a little jump, but turns out to be charming after all.
It’s more surprising that that ape, and all mammals, were descended from some tiny mouse-like thing. Why is that never remarked upon? Human beings are the progeny of some ridiculous rodent – surely far more astonishing than something that actually looks like a very hairy person? And that’s before we consider the fact, the scientific fact, that this amazing mouse, grandmother to us all, was itself descended from a sponge.
Pull your finger out creationists! If you want to sow the seeds of doubt don’t deride the fact that we’re the children of apes. Mock the fact that we’re related to something akin to a flannel! It won’t wash. That’s something that would make even the most die-hard devotee of evidence and scholarship wary… even though it’s true. Consanguineous with a squeegee? I should cocoa! At least that’s what I imagine they’d say.
All of these fundamental transformations took place in a fraction of the history of this clod of muck we call a planet. So when you consider all of that who are we to say what is or is not anti-social behaviour? Not I!
When grandmother mouse (Juramaia Sinensis to give her her scientific name, it means “Jurassic mother from China.” Which is lovely. China is a beautiful place to visit.) when grandmother mouse was giving birth to the litters that would go on to make every horse, every bear, every woman, every weasel and every kangaroo little did she know it would all end in this ridiculous eviction notice. She’d be turning in her little grave she would, God bless.
Well, not God. I don’t know what God would think, apart from a general sense of surprise at existing in a universe where, at best, you embody sets of rules, not the programmer but the programme itself – where you actually are the commandments that govern gravity, the speed of light, the nature of time. What an uneasy feeling that would be, if it’s possible to have feelings without glands, without hormones and chemicals sloshing round a corporeal being, mucking it up, making everything untidy.
I digress. Again.
I’d happily pay my rent if someone could give me a satisfactory explanation as to what money is. I mean actually is. And if I had any. So you see we may as well leave it there. Draw a line under it. No harm done. We both go happily on our way – although of course that doesn’t involve me actually going anywhere. Quite the opposite. That’s just a metaphor for me not being evicted.
When we parted she left me here. If she came looking this is where she’d expect me to be, here, in this spot. If we can even say ‘here’ when the wet rock we’re travelling on is spinning at 1,070 miles per hour, it’s zipping round our star at 18 and a half miles every second, our solar system is zooming away at a whopping 155 miles a second within our galaxy which itself has been vomiting along, from its very birth, at 185 miles a second – so where is here? In a way we’re all being constantly evicted from where we were just a moment ago. Well, it makes me dizzy, I don’t know about you.
The largest stone, the most sedentary rock formation, no matter what appearances may say, is not stationary, but hurtling faster than Apollo Nine, like an unguided missile through space.
She left me here and, if I’m no longer here then I’d be lost. Perhaps I am already. Are we within reach of what was here a moment ago, let alone years before? Here makes no sense in a universe defined by its motion. It doesn’t seem credible. You can see my problem.
Well, you can’t see it, you can’t even hear me, not really, we’ve established this surely?
We’ve built a world of illusions around us to help us cope with hard, unknowable physical facts. Illusions that date back to grandmother mouse and possibly before. Who knows what great grand-mother sponge would have to say about it all. Very little I suspect.
When that little mouse brain said to itself “I’ve seen that seed. I’ve tasted that seed. That’s a good seed. Yum.” Her brain was indulging in a useful trick that has served so well that we’re still doing it 160 million years later. We’re still keeping up the pretense that we see, hear, touch and taste when really it’s all just clashing molecules, well designed receptors and neurons firing in such complex formations that we had to create thought just to make sense of them.
Her old scarf plays me for a fool. It has me delude myself. It’s a bitter deception that turns my stomach – at least I think it does. Her fading perfume is the essence of everything that’s gone, that died with her, residing as a tenant of the past. Once we have abandoned a moment does it not leave a residue? Is a life consumed, or is it set in aspic – never to be changed, never erased? If she’s gone, why does her presence hurt me so hard?
This is my question to all you eavesdroppers.
Does the past exist? Or, like these splashes of ink or the farce we call money, is it only true if we all take it to be so? Mediated by common understanding, a shared codebook of thought and behaviour. Does she lie back there, in the time before now or is her absence final and absolute? Could it be that she’s close at hand if I believe she is, living in my memory, her presence caught in a trap of firing neurons, hot sparks conjuring phantasms. Or is her only truth that she is absent – a bleak hole that helps define the edges of the light around it?
This paw print in wet sand is transitory evidence that she walked upon the Earth. That she loved me.
Grandmother mouse. What do you say? Where is my mother now? Is your daughter lost so far from here, as we hurl ourselves forwards, always thousands of miles from where we were an instant before? Does she weep for me, or are my tears unreciprocated?
When they come to lever me from this shell, will I get a better sense of where I’m going than where I’ve been? Or will I lie on the street looking at the night sky, searching for a star that points nowhere, is a little too dim and lies, sadly, to the side of the sky.