strangereality148

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.