by Неизвестный
“Empires and dinosaurs have their similarities.” Leo has begun to cross to the far side of the fine line between genius and insanity and continues to spout random chains of thoughts into the empty air. “Just as the world once viewed by the dinosaurs has disappeared, the world viewed by empires has also disappeared.”
I can hardly tell if Leo is whispering something or just breathing heavily.
“It could be that the human race is being expelled from its current cognitive niche.”
The human race has evolved to the point where it can comprehend the process of evolution. Though it may seem natural now, this is something that is anything but self-evident. Even if one is completely unaware of evolution, the process of evolution proceeds anyway. Trains run without having any awareness of logic, and we humans are able to think about things. The day we become unable to think about things unless we know how we are supposed to think about them, that will definitely be the day we no longer have time to think about anything.
The term cognitive niche is also something the old man dug up from the ancient texts; it is not a new invention. For something to be cognizant of something else is about as natural as for something to eat something else. Living things compete with one another for limited resources. This is the way it is, so that in the daisy chain of edible objects, one finds the most suitable niche of prey species among the many possibilities, and pointless competition can be averted. If two species exist that eat the same things and have the same fighting skills, they will not be able to occupy the same niche. They will have to settle in different locations, to enhance the efficiency of the whole. Of course, this expresses the process in reverse: the less effective one will be forced to go on a drastic diet, and it will starve to death. Or it will simply be eaten. Isn’t it obvious?
Applying this idea to the cognitive process, one arrives at the idea of the cognitive niche, which is where we say, “This means that.” A person looks at an apple, a bat looks at an apple, a donkey, a dog, a cat, a chicken can all be friends and observe apples—that is when the apple really starts to shine. That’s the way it is, so that an apple can really feel more like an apple. Someday I’d like to ask Leo or the old man what that really means.
We are the ones who took the places of some newcomers who were already occupying this niche. That is the opinion of the pair who are able to see Orion turn. Those two, who can observe Orion look to the left, think human consciousness is moving into a niche that was previously occupied by some other life-form. Or else this: the human cognitive process is invading something somewhere, rendering the transformation of our consciousness inevitable.
Our capacity to process information does not extend to fully processing the data input by our sensory organs. Right now, in the night sky above our heads, countless stars are shining. I can look at each one individually like this, but I cannot remember them all individually. If one of them should be extinguished tomorrow, or if a new one should be added, I wouldn’t notice. And somehow or other I think that is how the number of stars increased so dramatically, while we were not paying attention. I live my life unaware of the hairs that are quietly saying sayonara to my father’s scalp, until one day I notice that his hair has grown very thin. As I grow, my eyes get higher above the ground, but I can’t say I’ve noticed that as it is happening.
We waste information, letting it flow from right to left without really processing it. It might move us a little bit, emotionally, but that’s about it. With all that freely leaking information, people say something else is chowing down on it. Something that is better than people are processing it.
Two species in the same niche is one too many.
For ordinary thinkers, doubting one’s own thoughts is probably the sane thing to do, but Leo and the old man are powerful thinkers, and they can’t abide that kind of sanity. They are the kind of people who can look at a nonsensical universe and remake astronomy itself.
“But matter is solid,” I argue back lamely. Even if most people think the earth is flat, that doesn’t make the earth flat. “But it does look flat,” Leo says. Or one might think earthquakes result when the earth’s crust slips on the sweat of the elephants that are holding it up. “We are free to sense whatever we want. I’ll give you that,” I say. But Leo says that is not the case. “Sensations are not like thoughts. We are not free to believe we did not sense whatever it is we just sensed,” Leo says.
“We can only think that we sense it by mistake,” Leo says. “If there is such a thing as detecting the existence of molecular particles, or sensing the effects of evolution, that is just a mistake. ‘Molecular particles’ and ‘evolution’ are just words that were created to help us understand. They are something we recognize, not something we perceive. It is because we cannot sense them that we thought them up. But if we feel them as actual sensations, that fact itself is unassailable.”
“But matter is solid!” I repeat, without any intention of fooling anyone. “Or numbers are,” I add. Even if humans get so stupid they can no longer count any higher than three, that doesn’t mean numbers don’t exist anymore. This is not a matter to be decided by majority rule. I would rather believe it is something that is not to be decided at all.
“Well, so, how about that then?” Leo is pointing quietly to the sky.
Today again there is a huge full moon, and the pupil defined by the city on the surface of the moon is quietly gazing down upon us. Even I can certainly see that eye. And it certainly seems to be winking.
According to Leo’s record of astronomical observations, the length of time Orion faces left is gradually growing longer.
This is an indication, in other words, that our universe is gradually approaching either the edge of the universe or the center of the universe. Not right away, of course, but bit by bit, something is about to happen. At least in Leo’s mind, that is. Even the two of them have no idea what might happen when we reach the edge of the universe. The old man is fine as long as it happens while he is still alive. He has terrible shakes from not drinking, but even he does not know if that day will be in the near future or in the distant future.
The old man asks, grumbling, if I am alone today. I pick up a whiskey bottle and show it to him.
“Couldn’t you at least tell me what it is you expect to happen?”
“But that’s why I’m thinking like this, so’s I can understand what’s going to happen.”
I take the bottle and grip the hand of the old man, who is buried beneath a pile of calculator paper.
“This idea about Orion switching around is just some fantasy the two of you have.”
The old man eyes both me and the bottle, and clucking his tongue he says, “I do not deny that possibility. If someone were to say it was just a coincidence that only me and Leo can see it, there’s nothing I can do about that. Some fantasies can be contagious. Synchronization is a basic strategy of living things.”
The old man squints to check the label on the bottle and then shakes his head as if to say he has no interest.
“What is it that you want to know?”
“About the moon.”
“The moon, eh?” the old man says. Folding his arms and shifting his weight to his rickety spine, he slides down the pile. “The logic should be very simple. Grand phenomena can only be achieved through simple logic.”
“Simple,” I mumble, not really speaking, but he ignores me and smiles a slightly awkward smile. It seems a pleasant enough expression, but at the same time it is ominous.
“Even now you want to hear some outmoded term like ‘quantum mechanics’?”
“No, not at all.”
“Well then.” The old man smiles and coughs. “No matter how you slice it, that was never anything more than a figure of speech. The truth is really very simple. Through the act of someone observing something, that something exists.”
Lifting his heavy eyelids as high as they can go, he stares at me to see how I might respond.
“That sounds to me like
a pretty arrogant way of thinking.”
“Precisely.” He nods with an air of satisfaction. “But it is only arrogant if we think it is only humans who have consciousness at their disposal.”
Silently, I begin to count the crevices carved in the old man’s face. He asks me, “Why is it we should think that only humans possess consciousness?”
“Because we are the ones who sense things.”
“Hmmph,” says the old man, putting on his thinking face. “What about the idea that it has been observed that we believe we sense things?”
“Well, I sense that I believe that we are here talking and that we are moved to speak words.”
The old man, seeing that his sneak attack has been thwarted, blows his nose and waves his hand to indicate I should go away. I am sure he is thinking that I am right. I leave the whiskey bottle on the desk.
At one time, everyone thought that what had hardened into a single eye and floated up into the sky was the moon that looked down upon us.
Whether the retina of the moon that had been created in this way was the product of our awareness and aspirations, or that of the squid or Antarctic krill or arachnocampa that would someday take over the cognitive niche that we have slid down into, is something we will never have any way of knowing.
I realize this discussion has become a bit involved. We are cognizant of the eyelike moon. But it could be that really it is the moon that is cognizant of us, and that moon is something that somebody else cogitated. It has been observed that we believe we are observing the moon.
And why should it be that that someone did not cogitate us directly, but rather did it through the moon of all things. I would like to ask that someone directly, but the address to which such an inquiry should be sent is unknown. It is also most highly probable that they did not waste a minute thinking about us. They probably just wanted some kind of machine that would be able to see them objectively.
As I try to arrange these various things—if they are like that, then we must be like this—into some sort of coherence, all sorts of contradictions come burbling up. Our universe has this sort of a form, like a piece of knitting where the first stitches were somehow wrong. And just as everything is spinning out of control, the whatever machine keeps going blithely around and around. The blind watchmaker made it just to see what he could do, and now it keeps on recreating itself, to the point where it is no longer clear if it is a watch or just what kind of machine it is. Only the parts made now and then by the watchmaker himself resemble timepieces.
As for the reality of the guys observing the moon, as they are now, I can add one sleuthlike observation: what makes Orion appear reversed is looking at the celestial sphere from the outside. It’s not that the moon is floating outside the celestial sphere on which the constellations are plastered, but if you think about it that way, the constellation Orion cannot be observed from anyplace else but Earth.
But I’m sure that Leo and the old man realized all this a very long time ago.
I find it a little bit amusing that those who put that city on the surface of the moon by thinking it, and who are now looking down on us, seem to have imagined the celestial sphere or something like it. When I think that their astronomy must be a little different from ours, a little thrill runs through me.
Any fairy tale like this can go from the dull to the endlessly complex, but that would be a pain, so I’m going to stop. Well, I’ll go just a little further. That full moon that is looking at us was in all probability born somehow from the dreams of humans and other things like that; it was created from the unconscious of those of us who recognize a need for a transcendent or transcendental overseer. Just like thinking that by observing that moon we bring it into being, we are also observed by the moon we are observing, and we find that to be reasonable, or something like that. I think humans are nothing more than a highly overvalued delusion.
Actually this isn’t even really a fairy tale, it’s more like a load of hogwash. Just what we perceive as fairy tales and what is mere bunkum depends to a great extent on our own process of perception.
The old man pops his head down through a door-shaped aperture, and shouts at my back, “Don’t forget!”
“Don’t forget what?”
“That you came to see the lunar eclipse!”
Only then do I remember that Leo and the old man have been working on those calculations. That had been a formal pronouncement of theirs, I concede. In a universe that has lost its sanity, they have discovered laws that govern this activity, and they have predicted the next manifestation. The logic of delusion is incapable of predicting actual results, but if Leo and the old man’s astronomy correctly forecasts this lunar eclipse, then it must contain at least some part of the truth.
Of course what I expect, though, is that the eclipse will not come about as forecast and that Leo and the old man’s astronomy will be cast aside.
Of course there is no reason why the lunar eclipse predicted by Leo and the old man’s endoastronomy should be known to the other local residents, so the town is in a bit of an uproar. For this to come up all of a sudden, it is easy to see why they might think the end of the world had arrived.
“First time in fifty years, right?” the old man says. Out of the old man’s shack we have brought every cushion we could find, and we lie out in the grassy field of the night. We can see Saturn’s rings around the round moon.
“No matter what anyone says, Saturn can’t be there, can it?” I complain to the old man, but Leo kicks me in the side and I shut up. Saturn’s rings are slowly sliding above the moon, and Saturn itself is slowly starting to cast its shadow on the moon.
“Pretty much as predicted, right?” the old man says.
“Right,” Leo responds.
As the two of them exchange remarks matter-of-factly, once again I doubt, from the bottom of my heart, their sanity. I am in denial of something I am witnessing with my own eyes.
“Actually, something is not quite right. If we are saying that Saturn has now interposed itself between the earth and the moon, we should have been able to see it approaching before this,” I say.
“But we have been seeing it. For weeks. For a long time now.” Leo’s reply makes me forget what I want to say. But the next words after that practically make me stop breathing.
“Even before that, we should have been skeptical about the fact that the moon we see is always full.”
This is information I am simply letting go of. The moon revolves around the earth, and the earth revolves around the sun. This is just common sense. The moon we see is always full. That too is common sense. There is no connection between these two pieces of common sense, but for whatever reason, we still hold them both to be common sense. The bridge binding these two islands of common sense has been washed away by the senses, and now there is no more connection.
As Saturn gradually obscures the moon, it becomes a black disk exactly the same size as the moon, creating a crisply defined corona facing in this direction. From the far side of the tracks, flames blaze up, and shouts can be heard faintly from the direction of the village. The light of the moon fringes the black disk. A terrestrial blaze threatens to obliterate our horizon. Our village, said to be one-fifth of the way from the edge of the earth. The group of us, hoping to become merely those observed by a universe possessed of a different consciousness.
“Are you coming with us?” Leo asks.
But that is impossible.
With the universe now looking like this, there is no way anything more can be done. This is now a universe that is apparently making a showy display of crushing the laws of physics, and unquestionably even the concept of numbers is perhaps on the verge of collapse. And Saturn is the adversary. Can there still be room for human thought in a thinking universe where our adversary might even be a living being? I think not.
“You’re wrong. We can definitely solve this,” Leo says, still looking up at the night sky.
A strong statement, without founda
tion, and extremely paradoxical. We are seeking, using our own logic, to know the mechanism that will expunge our own logic itself. This is not a matter of translating some foreign language into our own language. It is very nearly an attempt to translate our own language into some foreign language we ourselves cannot comprehend. Actually, it is more serious than that. We are not translating some language of aliens. We are almost trying to bury our own language within a circumstance where only alien language exists. Just thinking about it makes my head spin.
“There is no way we can do that.”
“Quit your bitchin’.”
At some point the old man got up, and he is looking down on us.
“Aren’t you two a pair!”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I start to say, but before I even get to the end of the sentence, Leo leaps up and shouts, “What’s that?” The old man crouches lightly and, in a surprisingly swift martial arts move, avoids Leo’s kick.
Not that anybody had tried to hide it. Just, nobody had thought to mention it, thinking it had nothing to do with the current storyline. It’s just that in the language of the country of Leo’s ancestors, no one thought it strange to give a name meaning “lion” to a girl.
“No matter what anybody says, that’s just how it is. Nothing in this world is more effective than simple things.”
The old man is even now attempting to whistle, and Leo stares hard at him before turning on her heel to walk away. Squaring her shoulders and jerking them up and down, Leo waves her arms in rage and sets off at a clip, as if to cross the unending dark plain on her own. She heads away from the town. At a right angle to the tracks.
“Aren’t you going to chase after her?” the old man says.
“This isn’t like that, at least I don’t think it is,” I respond.
The old man makes a face as if to say, “What an idiot,” but I ignore him.
“What will happen if I don’t go with her?” I ask. I can’t even see left-facing Orion. I am not even fully aware of how completely deceived I am by crazy nature. This is not a problem of thought. It is not even a problem of feelings. It is merely a problem of awareness. I am simply not one chosen in this way by this universe.