StrangeReality

Work again. Thoughts racing through my mind - or better to say, objectively, that I (whatever I am) was aware of the phenomenon that I have been acculturated into believing is my mind undergoing the kind of activity that I habitually, reflexively, without thinking, call 'racing'. In actuality there is just one thought succeeding another, overlapping, mirroring, apparently influencing; phenomenologically speaking, there is no reason to infer a consistent, pervasive entity such as 'mind' at all, but I have probably irritated the reader enough for the moment, so getting back to the point - I decided I wanted a cup of tea. I stood up from my desk and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" said one of the ladies, quite aggressively.

I work late shifts at an office with several middle-aged women. I sit in one corner, doing my job; they sit in another corner, doing theirs. We don't really get on.

"I'm going over to the restaurant," I said. "Just getting a cup of tea."

A cup of tea at the restaurant costs 50p. It's also a longish walk there and back. I was intending to have an illicit worktime cigarette en route. I was further intending to enjoy the fresh air, the late evening sun, the few minutes of silence and solitude. The two most luxurious elements of life: silence and solitude. 

"Why are you going over there?" said another one of the ladies, a red-head with an incredible crash-helmet hairstyle, the kind beloved of women of a certain age. "Why don't you just join our tea club?"

As is well known, most workplaces, especially the nominally British kind, operate an informal collective whereby members club together to pool their resources, and purchase large quantities of tea, sugar, and milk, at the start of every week or month. My office's tea club was a monthly affair. It cost £1 to join, payable on the first of every month.

I had declined to join the tea club on several occasions. As was well known by the ladies, and, presumably, obscurely resented. 

I was halfway to the door. I needed a snappy comeback. I said: "I would never want to join any club that would have somebody like me as a member."

A very well-known and humorous quotation by Groucho Marx. But not all that well-known, as it turned out.

The reaction was palpable: the ladies group-flinched, simultaneously all managing to look at each other, and at me, askance. They had genuinely never heard of what I thought (and still think) is a very famous saying that everybody should know. From where they were sitting, I had merely said something weird in a peculiar, stagy manner, for no apparent reason. The reaction was one I have come to know very well in my dealings with people: confusion, suspicion, unease. They looked as if they expected me to pull out a couple of pistols and start shooting the place up.

I did not linger. It's best not to, I have found, under those kinds of circumstances. I have been making people uncomfortable for more than three decades now. I know the signs. I know how to handle aftermaths. Deliver a slightly self-ironical smile; bow the head slightly; exit quickly, let them forget about it. They always forget about it. The impression remains, but the concrete instance is forgotten.

When I got outside, even I had forgotten. These moments occur so frequently that they are no longer anything special. I only remembered it just now, when I was tidying my DVDs. I found a copy of Duck Soup that I bought for a few pounds in a  bargain shop a few years ago and have never watched. I turned it over and saw Groucho on the back. Then I remembered. 

Early for work, I traipsed up to the staff restaurant and sat at a table with a cardboard cup of tea for a few minutes. Then I got up, walked back to the counter, and bought a bar of chocolate. I ate the chocolate and drank the tea, then headed off to the office. When I got there I said hello to the previous shift, who were now released from duty by my arrival. Also present in the office were several ladies attached to another department. My colleague started to pack her stuff away. I had chocolate on my hands. I'm a messy eater.

"Half a minute," I said to her. "I just want to quickly wash my hands."

"Hah," she said. "What have you been up to?"

"I've been masturbating, of course," I said loudly.

Nobody laughed. Even my colleague just stared at me in a  kind of trance of shock. The other ladies in the office looked at each other and exchanged meaningful nods, as if I was only digging deeper into an already-deep hole. They didn't laugh either. People in the real world never laugh at things like that.

I was eleven years old. It was a day toward the end of my last year of primary school. The teacher's name was Mrs Smith. She was feared and loved in equal measure. In the middle of the afternoon, apropos of nothing in particular, she called the class to attention.

"We've been having trouble with the taps in the boys' toilets being left to run and causing floods," she said in her sternest manner. Everybody went silent, became still. You didn't want Mrs Smith zeroing in upon you in particular, not when she was in this kind of mood. She allowed a few moments to pass, ratcheting up the tension.

"Neil," she said to the boy sitting nearest to the door, "go and check the taps in the boys' toilet and make sure they're all turned off."

Neil departed at speed. Mrs Smith watched the door shut behind him. Her entire demeanour changed as she spoke to us all: "When Neil comes back I will say that we are going to stage an experiment. I am going to knock on my desk and I want all of you to count the knocks. I will knock seven times, then I will ask you all to say how many knocks you counted. But! You are all to say that you counted eight knocks. When I ask Neil how many knocks he counted, I want you all to listen to what he says..."

We didn't know what to make of this. I didn't know what to make of it.

"So, when you hear me knock seven times on my desk, you are all to say you counted eight. Does everybody understand?"

We did understand the plan, if not the purpose. I was still thinking about it when Neil returned, out of breath. Everything was fine in the boys' toilets, of course. It was just a ruse.

"Thank you, Neil," said Mrs Smith as he sat down. I wonder if Neil was conscious in any way of the 20 pairs of eyes boring into him, wondering what this was all about, why he had been singled out for whatever this was.

Mrs Smith let a decent few seconds pass. Then she announced the experiment: we were to count the number of times she knocked on her desk. She perched on the edge of her desk and very deftly, with much theatricality, she knocked on it very loudly, seven times.

"Alison? How many knocks did you count?"

"Eight, miss," said Alison.

"Steven?"

"Eight, miss..."

And so forth. I was in the middle of the pack.

"Lord Strange?"

"Eight, miss," I said with a catch in my throat. I'd had a long time to think about having to say my piece out loud as part of the conspiracy. I felt overwhelmed.

Neil was called upon not long after me. How many knocks did he count?

"Eight, miss," said Neil without hesitation.

Mrs Smith smiled at him.

Of course, Neil had counted seven knocks, as he freely confessed. He said he had changed his answer to eight after hearing everybody else say eight, and concluding that he must have miscounted.

Mrs Smith addressed the class. I stared at Neil (who seemed oddly proud of his role as the stooge in the drama). I felt the full electric charge of a full-scale revelation. I knew what Mrs Smith was going to say before she said it. But I listened anyway. She lectured us on the importance of not going along with the crowd, of trusting our own perceptions, of resisting the urge to embrace what everybody thinks solely because everybody thinks it. The majority is not automatically right just because it's the majority, explained Mrs Smith in a gentle kind of fashion, one suited to a schoolroom of 11-year-olds. I thought about Mrs Smith's experiment for days. I have never forgotten it, or her.

I was seven years old. It was my birthday. My sister bought me my very first proper book. By 'proper', I mean that its ratio of pictures to text was firmly in the latter's favour. It was The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. I read it all in one go, at one sitting.

My childhood birthdays did not feature children's parties. They featured books, which I read.

It was a sunny spring day. I was on the sofa in the living room. I had read this long book all in one go and I had a very adult headache. There was lots about the book that had confused me. For one thing I did not know what a 'grin' was. The characters in the book, especially the child characters, had often grinned at each other, and I didn't know what it meant. I had also never heard of ginger beer. Alas, I was too young to derive amusement from one of the adult characters being called Aunt Fanny.

I recall the next few moments very clearly - they comprise one of the tragically few experiences that anybody can distinctly recall from their childhoods. I had my first experience of reality as strange.

I rolled over onto my back and looked at the ceiling. My mother was out in the kitchen, doing something. All at once I had a sense of myself as a discrete entity in a vast continuum; it felt as though my body was made of wood, or stone, and 'I' was an observer floating inside it. Then it went further. I felt as though I was not in a body at all, but was a disembodied viewpoint floating through a material environment. I had no thoughts or language to re-present this experience to myself at that time; I simply experienced it as experience.

I felt scared and looked down at my infant's torso stretched out on the couch. I slapped my arm to jolt me out of the episode. It worked. I rolled over to look down at the book on the floor. I was 'normal' again.

I was able to recreate the sensation at will for a couple of years thereafter. I lost this seeming ability to wilfully create strangeness in myself at around the age of ten. For a few years, any time I wanted, I could generate the sensation – an actual, palpable sensation, as opposed to an abstract concept or thought experiment – of myself, and reality, and the whole shebang, as being something utterly strange and unknown.

I always had to shake myself out of it - fearing who knows what? What would the consequence have been to that little boy, had he decided to push on, and see what else – if anything – might arise? Perhaps I would have died. Or perhaps I am living the consequences of having gone even that far. Perhaps I will think of an elegant and impressive way to end this.

I left the house without a coat for the first time in seven months. Spring was out in full force in the churchyard beside the bus stop. The trees were in leaf, the flowers in bloom; the very gravestones were newly invigorated.

I lit a cigarette and looked back down the road. No sign of my bus yet. I have been reading a collection of Zen writings. Zen asserts the impermanence of all things, and draws what is a logical conclusion: Nothing really exists.

This is a ludicrous assertion to the rational mind. "Of course things exist; look, here is a table, here is a chair; if you punch it, your fist will hurt and you will hear a noise; therefore existence exists."

Truth is not obscure, not concealed: it is the most obvious datum of reality. Something in plain view is invisible to those who believe it to be hidden. There is no need to conceal something that nobody is looking for.

The bus came - bus #2048 of my life. There was nobody else on it. The driver wore mirrored sunglasses. Two reflections of me dropped two bus fares into two ticket machines; behind me two churchyards began to vanish as the bus accelerated. I sat down and opened my book.

I was on my way to the hardware store to get some batteries for some reason (I forget precisely what). It was a nice day today and I felt happy.

A man aged about 60 years walked toward me. He was short, almost dwarf-like in stature. He wore an incongruous trilby-style hat, of the kind that nobody wears any more, and possibly never did wear outside of old films. Facially, he resembled Burgess Meredith in the Rocky movies: wizened, wrinkled, bulb-nosed, but tough-looking.

My eyes passed over him. My mind had already filed and forgotten him.

When he was almost level with me he stopped dead and spoke to me. “Lord Strange!” he said. “How are you?”

Life breeds certain instincts into one; city life in particular breeds specific, useful instincts.

“Hello,” I said without stopping. “Fine. How are you?”

“Good, good,” said the little man, turning his neck to watch me walk past. “It's a lovely day.”

“It's great,” I said. I hadn't stopped walking and was now far enough past to decently stop looking at him. Which I did. I went into the hardware store and got my batteries.

I had never seen that man before in my entire life. I have no idea who he was.

This kind of thing happens to me all the time.

Well, that's an exaggeration. It doesn't happen every day. Maybe once per year, or once every other year. I'll be walking along, minding my own business, and I'll be hailed by strangers who seem to know me.

The only plausible explanation is that in reality we are all somehow living backwards in time, and the strangers who so greet me are people I haven't met yet.

It isn't often that I emerge from my ivory tower and deign to notice, much less pass comment upon, events in what the reader almost certainly thinks of as the 'real' world. I have spoken before, in my trademark pompous fashion, about the will-'o-the-wisp status of the 'real' world of news events – that world whose cumulative profile is mediated to its avid member-consumers via the sophisticated and formidable apparatus of mass communications/word of mouth/simple societal mutual support and collusion... (This is scruffily expressed, but I decline to spend any more time polishing the language, as I have a yearning to get back to my ivory tower, pronto; suffice to say that I know what I mean, and anybody else who knows what I mean will also know what I mean).

An hour or two ago the Iranian president announced the immediate and unconditional release of 15 captured British sailors. This is the news story that you will not have avoided hearing about over the past two weeks, you avid member-consumer of the 'real' world, you.

In reality nothing has happened.

I do not deny the phenomenal reality of certain events: of people in boats upon the sea, and angry words exchanged, and politicians grandstanding on television screens, and reams of newspaper copy, and so forth. All of these things certainly happened.

But what do they mean – not to the 'ordinary man in the street' (God save us, or rather me, from 'the ordinary man in the street'), but to the conscious individual, or the would-be conscious individual, in this strange reality?

They do not mean anything. In reality nothing has happened, because reality is not the news. Reality is not the news. The news is a collection of 'stories'. Even the producers and consumers of news call its contents 'stories'. On some level perhaps even they know that the news is of no lasting significance or importance. There is only one news 'story' that would be of concern to the individual: the news of the end of the world. Until that 'story' opens, there is no point whatsoever in watching news, reading news, talking about news, or believing in news.

Watercooler moments: an informal term for those random eddies of everyday conversation with friends and/or colleagues. The past few weeks have seen me observe many such moments, where outraged persons of putative 'British' identity express varying degrees of outrage and hostility and bellicose determinations. In other words: people have been spoiling for war. People who, a week before the 'crisis' percolated out of the news vortex, were decrying the war in Iraq, and lambasting Britain's faint echoes of imperialism in the 21^st Century. (I can't believe I'm actually writing about this junk.)

The point I came to make is a relatively simple one, and I've decided I'm just going to toss it out and have done with it. My tower calls.

People are operated by the news. Like puppets. People live and have their entire being through news. Their senses of self are totally invested in the chimeras of national/cultural/racial identity as mediated to them by news. The perceived fall and rise of their national/cultural/racial identity as mediated to them by news is reacted to and may in turn influence the flavours of news that comes to them.

Nothing at all has happened. The sun has risen and set. The trees across the road have started to leaf. The air is lighter and milder – spring is sprung. Watching news, reading news, hearing news, talking about news – this is not reality.

News is a manufactured product – as artificial and studied as a packet of sausages or box of soap powder. It is assembled and disseminated by news professionals. Its vital role in manufacturing the bogus worldview held (and cherished) by billions is, in my unhumble opinion, indisputable. It is indisputably true that the news world is not the real world. The world is not what a majority of people agree to believe that it is. It is what the I, the self, sees for itself without any partiality.

I have had enough of writing about this. I haven't written well about it. I've been all over the place. I haven't taken my usual care. The reason is that I don't care about news. I don't believe in it, and I regard those who do believe in it – who go so far as to have emotions about it – as so many pitiful dreamers, fast asleep and not planning to wake up any time soon.

 Imagine that you woke up one morning and everyone was talking about the world of The Lord Of The Rings as if it was the real world. That's what it's like for me, living in a world where reality is taken to be the reality depicted by news.

As an experiment, the curious reader may attempt to give up news for a week. For one whole week, do not read a newspaper, do not watch a TV news bulletin, do not listen to radio news.

It is not your 'duty' to be aware of news events. It is a major aspect of the news delusion to believe that it is, somehow, your duty as a human being to be aware of every disaster and geo-political quake and tremor that 'occurs'. But it isn't.

Give up news for a week, and see what happens. If you can make it through the first day, there's a chance you might one day be invited for tea at my ivory tower.

Which I must get back to now.

Deja vu, that most overused and abused of phrases, is defined by no less an authority than the Urban Dictionary as A chain of full nude strip clubs in the USA, which does not serve alcohol, for 18 or older, a great place to hang out with friends and enjoy watching beautiful ladies dance around naked.

That's the tongue-in-cheek definition, of course. At least I hope it's a tongue. Ba-boom-boom-bish. Other vox populi definitions on the site do a better job of covering the confusion and reality of the phrase. Deja vu in French means, simply, 'already seen'; it does not necessarily connote a certain eerie feeling that one has previously experienced a moment of time or sequence of events; the popular deja vu is a load of hokum that can be easily 'explained' by placing it within the bio-mechanical model of brain consciousness, where some kind of temporary lag between perception and ratiocination can be assumed.

My take on deja vu, which I will not be adding to the Urban Dictionary, is that it may easily be accommodated within the concept of Eternal Recurrence.

Eternal Recurrence is a theory of reality which holds that the universe is akin to a giant heart. It is in a constant cycle of systole and diastole, from Big Bang to Big Crunch and back again, eternally expanding and contracting, going through the exact same cycle of events each time around.

Eternal Recurrence holds that we have indeed all lived before; we have all had an infinite number of past lives - but not as Joan of Arc or as Kaiser Wilhelm II or as Elvis Presley. We have all previously lived, an infinite number of times, as ourselves. Only Joan of Arc and Kaiser Wilhelm II and Elvis Presley have lived before as themselves – and will do so again, in time.

The universe in this worldview is a rigidly deterministic machine, which never changes by even the tiniest quantum-sized fraction from one iteration to the next. We have been here, right here, before.

You have been you an infinite number of times already, and will come back as you in another 30 or 50 or 70 billion years, the next time around. You have read this sentence before. I have been born, lived, and died as myself, as Lord Strange, before; I will be born, will live, and will die as Lord Strange again, and again and again. The process of recurrence will go on for as long as there is a universe, which is likely to be forever. Hence the eternalness of the recurrence.

Deja vu, then, can be seen as a momentary palpitation of the eternal recurrence. It is a fleeting disturbance of reality's 'heartbeat'. Deja vu is a memory of our own past lives.

I don't believe it myself. For one thing, I do not want to believe it. I would hate for Eternal Recurrence to be true. I would hate to relive this life over and over throughout eternity. Because the key component of the theory is that nothing changes from one repetition to the next. You are obliged to repeat your life in exactly the same detail, over and over. It's kind of the point.

I bring up deja vu - and, tangentially, Eternal Recurrence - here and now only because I have another photo to show and tell.

As I thought about making this post, I was convinced that I had already made it. I spent fifteen minutes trawling through past posts, here and elsewhere, looking for the previous posting, which I am still convinced that I made. I turned my PC upside down, performing multiple Google Desktop searches. I checked every message board that I am still a member of (dwindling in number as my offline indifference to people and alleged communication with people takes hold online: I contribute less and less to the internet these days).

I haven't found the photo and its attendant commentary anywhere else. So I must conclude that I am mistaken, and have not posted it anywhere before. But I still feel that I have. And this is a kind of deja vu that relates to a putative Eternal Recurrence scenario. Perhaps I am not remembering, or feeling that I am remembering, posting the photo in this lifespan; perhaps I am faintly remembering the infinite number of times that I have posted it in my previous sojourns through the universe as Lord Strange.

There's a lot more to this Eternal Recurrence thing than I've covered here. Some variations of the theory contend that change is possible, to varying degrees. Curious readers may Google to their hearts' contents to uncover more.

Enough. Here's the photo. In some ways it's a shame that I've burbled on about one of my hobbyhorses – this strange reality – for so long, as the photo is somewhat canonical vis-a-vis Lord Strange himself. (I am nothing if I am not presumptuous.)

It's a photo taken within that celebrated supermarket – the supermarket that features in about 97% of all my blog entries.

I took it with my camera phone about a month ago. I recall that I wandered around the supermarket, planning to take the photo, but not wanting to be seen taking it. I didn't want anybody to see me taking the photo and think I was doing something weird.

So I walked up and down the aisles for a half-minute or so, and then seized the opportunity to take the photo shown above. As I pressed the button, my phone made that loud shutter-noise, and a lady nearby - just out of shot to the right - who'd had her back to me, a plump lady wearing a beige Columbo-style mac, turned and looked over at me with sudden interest.

Hastily, I pocketed the phone and feigned nonchalance and insouciance – my all-time favourite public combo. The lady watched me carefully until we were out of one another's sight. I left the shop without buying anything.

It was only when I looked at the photo later that I saw I'd probably looked as if I was taking a photo of a display of children's toys - and, thus, was a paedophile.

What I was really trying to take a photograph of was that checkout area, beyond the children's toy display. The place with the message hanging above it, part of which can be seen: Thank you for shopping with us.

The cumulative evidence of this blog would suggest that I have spent half my life in this supermarket, and half of that time standing at that checkout, waiting to be served.

Living the same life over and over, an infinite number of times? I'll pass.