Dave The Penguin

by Nick Sambrook

  It was a bloke thing.

  6 Dave Down the Rabbit Hole

  Dave wasn’t a religious penguin.

  In fact he didn’t believe in the penguin ‘god’ at all, or at least in any penguin ‘god’ that religions seem to try to describe or define.

  To Dave they all just didn’t make sense, add up, or equate and stand up to any form of logic at all.

  Of course not having any evidence or a detailed explanation of what ‘god’ actually was came as a bit of a stumbling block for penguin religions as well.

  As did all the bad and unjust things that went on in the real world that ‘god’ was supposed to be in charge of, or looking after; things that all appeared to be getting worse, not better.

  There weren’t any logical explanations from religions as to why it was all going so badly wrong, and why it was all frankly a bit rubbish, compared to how it used to be.

  Dave had done quite a bit of reading on the subject of religion, in books, and on the Internet, and like most intellectually structured created thinking forms, they always seemed to end up with the problem of the ‘elephant in the room’ again.

  That elephant of course, as in physics, was that uncomfortably large awkward problem that wouldn’t go away.

  One that required some sort of faith, a leap of logic, or a mental bridge, for the large gap in the plausibility to work, when you clearly couldn’t join up all the dots, as half the numbers you had been given were missing.

  Dave had also studied philosophy, psychology, physics, and a couple of other things beginning with ‘p’, and they all ended up not being able to come up with a big answer, the final solution, the ultimate picture. That of what was really there, what it all meant, who was in charge, what was for, and why we existed.

  Which should all be fairly simple really, and probably not 42.

  Even music, which had a set language and had evolved over time, seemed to be inspired from somewhere else, but music didn’t have the answers either. But it was nice.

  The same was true with a lot of art. Even though the best art was unstructured, untethered and inspired by ‘something higher’ - it still seemed to just end up with not saying anything, evolving into something more and more surreal, using virtual concepts, and non-located expressions over time.

  Even the artists themselves were turning into faceless hermits, ending up producing vapourware placed in remote empty spaces. They were all desperately trying to ‘articulate’ something that they had experienced, something ‘not real’ that they wanted to describe somehow; put the formless into form, which in itself was also evolving.

  The same could also be said about architecture, or fashion in general, which was mostly driven by the mind of the consumer, and in turn was influenced by the changing collective taste.

  Fashion wasn’t really Dave’s thing, it just seemed a bit, well, ‘girlie’, but he did like things to look nice, whatever that was.

  Dave had read in various penguin religious literature, and on the Internet, that long, long ago, the Penguin God had been a great giant seal. He was vindictive, frightening, and ate bad penguins.

  In other later articles the god was a polar bear, which had lots of different interpretations and forms, as nobody knew what they actually looked like or were.

  This had caused lots of fights long ago in the ancient past, with the need to make sacrifices to it to make it feel better about itself, and to fend off bad storms.

  Curiously the shape and nature of the Penguin God always changed into the form defined by whoever won the fights.

  Then, over time, it had changed to become multiple penguin gods all existing at the same time. They all did different things, and had different personalities and roles.

  They also had different feelings, and represented lots of ideas, and far away things. However they all knew what they were doing and had a hierarchy. There were male and female ones too, and they were all there to do different special ‘jobs’. But they didn’t seem to have much of a clue about real people, and used the World as a sort of board game.

  Which sounded exciting and made good stories that Dave liked to read about and watch in films.

  Years later, after many more fights, it had all changed again, and the god had become just one giant penguin that lived on top of the highest mountain on a throne made of pure, smooth, shiny nesting stones.

  There had even been a lot of fights about what colour the stones were, and what the Penguin God had said and revealed. There were also lots of numbers and symbols used, and promises of things being better, and a sense of urgency.

  It was eventually agreed that there were lots of different coloured stones, and that there were fifty different shades of them between white and black.

  Then some time ago, some hero penguin named ‘Dave’ had climbed the mountain to say ‘Hello’, and found that their god wasn’t there at all.

  God had obviously moved, and had even taken the throne and the stones too.

  Now it was an all-seeing, all-knowing, almighty penguin god, who lived up high in the clouds. However, Dave knew quite a bit about clouds, and their capacity for supporting large penguins and thrones, and he also knew about the painful nature of gravity.

  He had tried to explain these fundamental scientific and practical problems to some of the penguin clan elders, and had been confronted with a hail of abuse and ridicule, along with a few small stones.

  He was also about to ask the obvious question that nobody else seems to have thought to ask - the “Yes - but what is it?” one, but after the initial response, he thought better of it.

  Clearly these were special magic clouds, and he should not question the existence or the nature of the great Penguin God. The situation was a bit like one of his favourite Monty Python films, but in this instance it didn’t seem very funny.

  What really confused Dave though, was the fact that no one had ever mentioned that they were magic clouds, or explained how they worked. It then struck him that there was somewhat of an evolutionary pattern forming here, which was also in line with a lot of the evolution of all the other areas he had studied, especially Biology. Something of a trend.

  He also asked what had happened to all the other gods - the ones that they had been so sure were there long ago - and asked why they had changed. He had also explained to the elders that it was all a never ending self-adapting belief and control structure for the scientifically unexplainable, a childish protective mental bubble developed in the unconscious psyche. One which still made no logical sense.

  Then he was really told off….. very loudly.

  They didn’t agree with him. Obviously whatever it was, wasn’t that keen to evolve or change, and had quite a strong resistance to nosey smartarse penguins.

  So he went off and trawled through his collection of 1980’s video documentaries, and behind his mint condition set of David Attenborough ones, he found a set called The Day the Universe Changed. They had been made in 1985 and were written and presented by James Burke, but Dave realised that he had never seen them, which was curious as he liked the previous ‘connections’ ones, and he loved Tomorrow’s World, with all those strange Space 1999 ideas.

  He loved the ones where it showed how we would all be going to go around in cars that flew, that the world would be one big computer, and that we would get machines to do everything, and how everyone would look like they were having a nice happy time and be permanently on holiday.

  Later, having watched them all, Dave came up with many new ideas and started to show the other penguins all the films. He wrote down his thoughts, and drew some artistic pictures (because only some of the penguins could read).

  Dave was all fired up now, just like Moses was when he came down from the mountain with his tablets - which must have been pretty good ones.

  Dave had been energised and began talking inspirationally about what he has seen and how it was all true, and tried to get everyone to see and understand, and most importantly, to change.


  Quite a number of the penguins did like the stuff he was talking about and showing them, but the majority just seemed to be more stimulated by his charismatic energy.

  They seemed to gravitate towards him, and be attracted to his interesting magnetic personality. They were happy to go along with it, watch, and be drawn along by the exciting ambiance being generated by the rest of the crowd.

  It’s what everyone else was doing after all.

  So things finally seemed to be going very well for Dave, and he presented more and more information and ideas, and he became more and more self-stimulated.

  He had quite a bit of a momentum going.

  The trouble began because of the very last thing he said, which was just before the crowd turned on him. It went something like, "This wonderful human being has shown us the way forward and we should all follow him”, and there were even cheers from the crowd, “From this day forward I say we should all call ourselves….. 'Burkes’…”

  ... And that's where it all very quickly started to go very rapidly downhill...

  Then a week later he was standing alone at the base of the mountain, far away from the main group, covered in bruises and sticky plasters.

  Now and then one of the penguins would come past and shout something like “Idiot” or throw a snowball at him.

  It wasn’t a good time for Dave…...

  In Reality, thought Dave, penguins just want to hear what they want to hear. It was hard to get penguins that had been beguiled and hypnotised to believe in something else, to see or understand things from another perspective. It took a lot of energy to get them to change their minds.

  It was too easy, as he had just found out, to fall into the same trap that others had done. Those that had tried to make penguins understand, to wake up.

  It just wasn’t enough to know, you had to be able to explain it in a progressive way, to allow penguins to go from one state to another in easy steps, without rocking the boat.

  Equally, if you were ever to find someone who really knew what was going on and who had proof of it, then due to the collective nature of it all, it was likely that nobody would be allowed to see, hear, or read what they had written anyway.

  Even if they were able to understand it. You also had to step back and ask why this was happening and why what they knew was being deliberately hidden away? As if something was hiding itself in a self-adapting controlling way, and always one step ahead of common knowledge.

  It was a tricky problem.

  Then two weeks later everything changed again.

  The elders met and brought all of the penguins together, in a bunch.

  There were hundreds of them; all packed tightly en masse, all looking up at the elders who stood on a small snow mound that they, supposedly, had made.

  The high elder came forward carrying his sacred driftwood staff; it had a skull on the top and the name of their god on the back, which everyone knew was ‘Skelator’.

  The penguin elder spoke in a deep, assertive voice. He told them that, apparently, the Penguin God had moved again, and that his new home had been revealed to one of them in a vision one night. God was now in some invisible dimension, and he had given a long list of more revelations.

  The elder read through the list, and the Penguin God seemed to be using the same sort of words and ancient way of speaking as he had used when he spoke on top of the mountain. He had also become angry with those that had questioned his existence and his nature.

  Anyone so doing so in the future, he continued, would spend all of eternity in the deep, dark penguin volcanic lava toilet cave under the ground…

  There were gasps.

  Everyone knew about the fiery toilet cave. Everyone…

  Then, slowly, they all turned and looked straight at Dave.

  Dave took a step backwards into the space that was now clearing all around him, and suddenly the bruises on his body were the last thing on his mind.

  Now Dave was good at thinking on his feet, which considering he rarely, if ever, laid down, was just as well. He recognised the somewhat frosty glares, the uncompromising ignorance, the collective resistance to change of several hundred penguins all of one mind. He also noted the multitude of rocks and stones around, and decided to ‘take the initiative’.

  “I will,” said Dave tentatively “Venture forth and find this invisible dimension and humbly apologise to the almighty Elephant Penguin God, and beg his forgiveness, and I shall not return until I do.”

  That got them….

  Dave could sense the logic gears churning in the minds of the penguins, trying to work out if he was politically outsmarting them, if he was genuine, or in fact for the most part – what the bloody hell he was going on about.

  What else could he do? They weren’t being allowed to see things from his perspective, they couldn’t or didn’t want to come out of their programmed comfy quilt bubbles of belief and control. They could not see things from his viewpoint, it was too ‘difficult’, too ‘unprotected’, and they were much happier being safely inside their protected hypnotised terra firma perceptive couch potato worlds.

  Change, after all, was always difficult, especially when you didn’t know any different, when it wasn’t necessary, when you couldn’t see anything wrong, and when you were programmed to do set things.

  Yet before they had even got onto the metaphysical discussions with reference to the elephant, Dave had already decided not to wait around.

  He didn’t wait for the interrupt protocols, the logic circuits of the mental control and belief structures to resolve themselves and invoke action, along with the accompanying rocks and pitchforks. He simply headed in the direction of the hills in the distance at quite some speed; at a rate that was impressive even for him.

  He was in an even worse place now. After several hours of waddling he reached the base of one of the smaller hills that formed part of the foothills of the largest mountain in the area.

  He didn’t have a clue why he had walked that way; it was just big, and there, and something to head for, away from trouble.

  Now his feet hurt and he was tired and hungry, and he was breathing hard.

  He stopped to catch his breath; he felt quite giddy. It was surprisingly beautiful here, quiet, unspoiled, pristine. The giant rocky snow- covered mountain above him was mirrored in the ice sheet before him.

  It looked just like two mountains, one the upside down mirror image of the other. It was so clear and bright and sharp that it was almost impossible to tell which mountain was real and which was the reflected image.

  It was then that he saw a pure powder-white arctic hare (which was very strange considering where he was). It ran straight towards him and then dashed past him, almost as if he wasn’t there, and then disappeared down into a hole in the side of the mountain and vanished.

  Curious thought Dave.

  Now Dave was sensible, and he knew that what he was seeing wasn’t real, but as he hadn’t taken any recreational drugs or hit his head, he needed to know what it was all about.

  Without thinking first, he went into the entrance of the hole and fell in, and then down, down, down, just as expected.

  Down, down and more down the tunnel he went, Which is quite logical, thought Dave, as he fell.

  Even though he knew it was imaginary he still kept his wings and feet tucked in; it was always hard to get out of habits, and the hypnotic effect of illusions.

  Still, there’s no harm in that, always better to err on the safe side, you know, just in case it turns out to be real, even if it is a different sort of ‘real’, he thought

  Then logic went out the window as he emerged with a thump on the floor of a very large, white, well lit square room.

  There were stairs going down to a basement, and lots of strange things all around him, including a brightly coloured chandelier swinging from the ceiling.

  This is all in your mind Dave told himself. Which was quite a big thing for him to realise.

  Dave had also wo
rked out the truth in his mind; it wasn’t a great penguin in the sky after all, it was just an elephant.

  It was now looking at him from the other side of the room. It was really there - he could see it out of the corner of his eye - in the corner of this large room; there, large, awkward, and big.

  It had an embarrassed, guilty look, suddenly realising for itself what it was, and expecting him to sort the problem out.

  To resolve the awful chaos in this ‘Haven’ place in which it stood. Dave knew it was called that, as there was a sign above the entrance where he fell in.