by Steven Sills
Chapter 3
What I Know, If Anything
To take the stance of Descartes14 that doubting ultimately proves existence proves nothing other than the existence of an audio of thoughts which are perhaps someone else’s thoughts if not thought loose but diminishing while reverberating randomly off of the fabric of “empty” space like miscellaneous and unidentified carcasses of insects dusted away as “dirt.” But then, as stating that doubting oneself doubting relegates all consciousness to that of a dream to which there can be no real consciousness at all, and so no distinction between opening one’s eyes and rising from the bed or in lying down again and falling into the undulations of REM is an absurdity equal to doubting in infinite regress.
Thus, it is best to remember that we are all a little more than plausible or even scarcely substantiated beings and all decisions that we make are made based on the “reality” of that which most likely occurred, that which is the most reasonable explanation of the sensory input that we have available, if it is to be trusted at all especially after it is processed into the mind, past that it is, but perceived as present, and the likely ramifications of it all; and as consciousness is predicated on interaction, solitary confinement, especially when denied some volition or master control over one’s thoughts, will lead to horrendous hallucinations. Thus Homo Sapiens, and perhaps all of the nine or so earlier human hominoids do and did what they have always done which is to think as little as possible on the subject and engage in physical activity of some sort or another (an arrow to be wedged into a target, the active hunt that might fell an animal, or merely a ball that can be easily manipulated) in a physical prowess altering matter and hormones and adrenalin coursing through one’s veins, making him feel realer than what he in fact is. Civilization itself is the altering of the natural world so as to solidify man, even though the more comfortable existence represses instinctual tendencies and thereby makes him feel effete in manhood, and incomplete as a natural entity that must forever more in this state of society feign godhood. But then there are bloodless sports and the hunt for money, and the pleasure that is to be taken in arrogating from weaker men, so sublimated instinct can trickle out and a man is not completely quashed as a man in such conditions, although mostly he is.
But unfortunately, Einstein’s concept of the reversible nature of energy and mass (energy converted into mass evidenced in speeding subatomic particles and mass into energy attested in the splitting of the atom by adding neutrons)15 is not applicable to the antithetical forces of hope and reality. The hapless mothers desperately hoping that the students who died at Ramkamhaeng University are not their own will find that this does not alter the reality of those slain. Hope is not an antidote of wizardry to alter horrendous fate, or even an anodyne to make it less grievous. These women who will be unfortunate enough to experience such devastating losses inevitably and irrevocably will know from firsthand experience how tenuous life is from loved ones who can be so easily converted into elements again, a fate not any better than if they had been altered instantaneously into bolts of electricity. Our steadiness is unsteady and our unsteadiness steady: we are what we are—something less than real, but real enough that we know that we are one of many in a generation to which generations past are interred and lost in the strata of the burial ground of life. Even the great city of Troy is actually ten Troys with each after some interregnum and changing layers of soil built on older Troys. Our insignificance is with us at every move, even for the most bumptious.
What can I know with absolute certainty? Even that which I, a social creature, attach myself to in order to feel more of a reality than I in fact am can change precipitously as my friend can become my foe tomorrow; and all my attempts to propound and posit that my most logical of pretentions are logic are proven as chemically induced byproducts of an ever mutable being. I am just a being on a long ride of not knowing anything. What I was a second ago is not what I am now; and the line of prose that I am scrawling out now with this pen, this trigger of volition will no doubt have multiple contradictions in it if I am fully alive and none if I am dead above the torso. I do not even know the substance of ideas: ideas—are they these more transferable and more objectified forms of feeling, which is nascent, non-rarefied ante-thoughts like wheat before being processed in a mill, or are they just abated, adulterated sentience? If ideas are the latter (an adulteration of sentience instead of reality fueled by the impetus of feeling), why is it that those who seem inordinately emotional rarely produce anything of genius? It is ideas that are seen as genius and wanton emotional potency the brand of a lunatic. And why is it that I am more than the substance of my ideas but at my demise they, if published, live on and I do not? Also, why is it that every hour of my ruminations (Aristotle claiming that God, if he exists, which of course he doesn’t, would be in perpetual discernment, though discerning what he does not say or why God would have problems from which to discern if he is God16) is killing me? We are creatures of movement and to be a cloister for literature and philosophy brings about early demise when the body needs to exercise. In any case, writing right now is torture like giving birth to sextuplets, and I cry out with the grousing scream of Arthur Rimbaud.
In smallness I am the composite of mitochondrial DNA that is foreign to me and of me, bacteria the same, and a smaller group of these more human cells. I am my white blood cells flying over selected bacteria and viruses like living drones, and consuming their prey like hunters, and these white blood cells that save me deny me of all pacifist aspirations. I am in fact a killing machine; and the civil strife, red and yellow, that I abhor and denounce in Bangkok right now is, I know, or sense, the historical materialism expounded by Marx17 that will be the only way for this society to evolve. Should I weep over a man’s death? Should I weep over the plethora of cells that will die when I go out jogging tonight along the fetid canal—jogging at the stadium or the university I will refrain from doing at present. Every cell in my being probably senses itself as the highest and most autonomous of things, and is totally unaware that it is part of something larger. And likewise in largeness, this tiny diminutive substance of the gamut of me is part of the planet that is part of the solar system and a galaxy that might just be cells in the tissue of the universe of this thing called God. If this is the case, atheists to which I am one, and religious zealots which I am not, are both on the same page of scripture: one denying the existence of any anthropomorphic god concocted out of the limited intelligence and imagination of man and the zealots who are right all along in saying that there is a god, although they never conceptualized him appropriately. I don’t know. A helicopter I see hovers around this area at a distance. Why it is there, I know not; why I was born, and to this brief generation, I know not. My own insignificance and mortality makes me something vastly less than a herald. I am a mortal being of seven billion human beings now alive in 200,000 years of hominoid species to which there might have been nine or ten, as I mentioned before, tracing their lineage to Australopithecus, the chimpanzee with less prehensile limbs that walked upright.
“Hmmm! Reality to the masses of living creatures is what they have to do at the very moment to ensure survival, what gets them through the day,” said the gecko as it held the pages against the artificial light and kicked a leg, urinating a stream that slid down the lamp shade. I did not understand then why it, which is a she, did that but now it seems to me that when a female has had the shit kicked out of her through death she becomes more masculine than what she would be otherwise; but then as in the living realm I have met up with plenty of bitches in my time, maybe the issue is more complex than that. “Reality is picking mangosteen from a rich man’s orchard, developing an allergic reaction to the pesticides, and spending what little one has received in hospital bills. And so, this debating of the reality of reality is way too arcane for my taste. It is also dubious unless you got a degree in astrophysics since I was last ali
ve. To be frank, a physicist, and not you, needs to explain reality if he can and I have yet to hear of one who will broach on this matter. This is tantamount to a child pretending that he is an astronaut. All you are saying in this thing, I think, is that as things change they cannot be of solid substance. But as every three year old child knows from a game of peek-a-boo with his mother that what is hidden from the senses might still be in existence and that the world of forms changes as children do grow up, your treatise up to this point is at times infantile even for a three year old.”
“I have had enough derision from you-- a first family was enough for me. You were worse. I married you reluctantly.”
“You knocked me up, as they say.”
“Maybe I should have knocked you down.”
“I think you did once or twice which is why I miscarried in the pregnancy. You were always free to leave if you needed to, so stop complaining. Let’s not be mean spirited. I mentioned a certain flaw that you should be aware of. That is all. It is not a reflection on your overall vision and not the end of the world having a few peccadillos in a creation bestirred and begotten in pain. Ideas seek to be more real, to be semi material essences through human receptors, and in so doing they make humans ideal and noble in the process. There is this reciprocity in the symbiotic relationship, and hence, there is absolutely nothing you can do about the situation, or even your situation, until I tell you to quit.”