Ventiak
an island somewhere in the brain
I am not sure what Amanda meant yesterday about eccentric. I think we're all pretty normal. Mad but normal. Except for Trevor, perhaps. Trevor does have some of the makings of a true eccentric.
Take the way he gets dressed in the morning, for example. First he puts on his underwear, then his shirt. While he buttons his shirt, he does his morning exercises, walking briskly up and down and doing the occasional squat to stretch his calves and thighs. Then he sits on the edge of the bed. He puts on his right sock, puts his right leg into his trousers, and then he puts on his right shoe, doing up the laces with a double knot. Then he puts on his left sock, slips his left leg into his trousers and puts on his left shoe. Finally, he stands up and does up his fly and belt.
How do I know all this? Well, I once had the misfortune to share a motel room with Trevor. We were on a trip north together in his old Austin Seven. Trevor, I should explain, drives no other car. It was bought in 1938 by his grandfather, inherited by his father, kept on blocks in a shed on the farm for almost forty years, and finally passed on to Trevor, who decided it was a perfectly adequate vehicle for his purposes. I must say, it is in remarkably good condition, although it has cable brakes, which can sometimes be a bit dodgy, and an engine with all the automotive power of a medium-sized sewing machine. Top speed on a flat surface is 64 kph (40mph on the Austin's speedometer). It causes some consternation (that might be a euphemism for road rage) on the open highway but it is normally extremely reliable.
Not on this occasion, however. We broke down somewhere in the centre of the island in a place the name of which I have forgotten. There was one motel with three units, two of which were taken (I think there must have been a major civic celebration going on - a birthday party, perhaps.) Trevor telephoned Felix who told us he'd be puced if he was going to do anything about rescuing us until the next day.
Thus, it was that I learned of Trevor's strange morning ritual. I also learnt of his habit of standing on his head in the middle of the night. The motel was almost on the road side and every so often a car would go past, emerging out of the silence in a whining crescendo, flicking into a lower tone with the Doppler effect as it passed the motel and fading into the night. During the brief moment of its passing, it would send crazy polygons of light careering over the walls of our room. Waking in one of these moments, I was disconcerted to see a strange object, propped against the wall. It took me a few moments to realise it was Trevor, stark naked with his feet pointing towards the ceiling.
Later I asked him why he engaged in this activity and he explained that he liked dreaming and that sometimes, when he woke in the night, he stood on his head to encourage the blood to run to his brain. This, he believed, made his dreams more vivid.
Oh, and why does he put his socks and shoes on the way that he does? When I put that question he just shrugged and said it seemed logic to finish one side before starting on the other.
As I expected, there are repercussions from my discussion of my site statistics.
'It's perfectly clear. You should give the entire thing over to us,' Amanda said. 'We're twice as popular as you are.'
'Why don't you go and start you're own blog if you want one and leave mine alone?' I told her.
'Ha! You'd never survive without us. This whole ridiculous enterprise would be dead in the water.'
'So, you're taking over for my own good, eh? That sounds pretty dodgy even for a socialist.'
'Give us a chance. All we're asking is a little equality of opportunity. We have ideas, too, you know. We just want a little space in which to express them. I mean, it's all probably a waste of time but, you never know. Even the most misguided and ill managed enterprises sometimes turn into something useful.'
Finally, I agreed, if only to keep the peace. Once or twice a week, someone else would get the opportunity to put their ideas across. I'll remain in control but I'll allow them to express their opinions or ask me questions about mine. Who knows? It might be a good thing.
'At least it won't be so unremittingly eccentric,' Amanda said.
I have just looked at my site statistics. 140 visitors in February! And it was a short month, too! That's almost a fivefold increase over January. If it keeps going at that rate I'll hit 400,000 by the end of July. I'm almost tempted to tell Amanda, although I know she will manage to put some cynical spin on it, like asking what the pattern over the month was.
And I have to say that is not as encouraging. There were more visitors at the beginning than at the end. The peak was the 7th and 8th of February - fifteen visitors on those two days. The 7th was the day of my book launch and so that little hump might be explained by the fact that all those fine people who bought books went home and had a quick peek and then got hooked and couldn't put it down and stayed up all night reading and were so convinced by the world I had created that they just had to google 'Ventiak' to see if it really was real and finished up here. And all that would be a good thing, of course, if it were true.
I have just had a terrible thought, though. The week containing 7th and 8th of February was also the week of the Rebellion. Could it be that they proved to be more interesting than me? The 7th was Janice and the 8th was Trevor. Or worse still, the peak might be a result of people talking about the post on the 6th - Rupert's homily on the political benefits of science. I don't think I could ever live that down.
I console myself, though, that I am not doing this for a large audience. What would I do if I had 400,000 visitors a month? Good God, I might feel responsible for the contents here. I might start trying to give people quality. I'd have to manage everything better and make sure no unruly elements took control. No, I take consolation in a small but highly discerning group of enthusiasts. As I was trying to argue the other day, such cells of good taste are the true nurturing ground for the creative spirit.
Janice is right. There is something very strange about contemplating one's non-existence. Much easier to think that something will continue after you die. What, though?
The old idea that we wake up in a new world replete with its own set of new experiences (good or ill) seems a little bit unsophisticated. Presumably, those worlds are, in some sense, physical places but if they are, then where are they? They must be in the universe somewhere. What's a world if it is not a physical place? And what's experience if you don't have a body to experience with? Wouldn't the Islamic martyr feel a little bit cheated to discover that the thousand virgins he was promised turned out to be virtual?
And yet, if we don't accept this fairly literal version of the hereafter the problem seems to get a bit vague. What is it that survives? A soul or a mind? As I said in my talk with Janice the other day a mind without a body is a very odd notion to come to terms with, especially if it doesn't actually exist anywhere physical.
Let's suppose, though, that it's a form of energy structured in some way like an electric storm or a radio signal. It could be that these things exist in our universe and we haven't discovered them yet. Indeed, we might imagine that this is an explanation for ghosts (I'll ignore all Rupert's justifiable protests here) and that occasionally we plug into these things. The ghost of Hamlet's father speaks to him.
The key question here, though, is: does the ghost or the energy thing have a point of view? Holograms and tv pictures speak to us (sometimes in the portentous manner of ghosts) and yet they don't have points of view. If whatever it is doesn't have a point of view, then it isn't alive. If it does have a point of view, then, in the manner of Thomas Nagel, we have to be able to ask what it is like to be that thing. If the answer is, I have no idea then it's hard to see how this thing could ever be me. But I have to confess, and maybe this is a complete failure of the imagination on my part, I just can't imagine what it would be like to be a post mortem soul unless, perhaps, it's just the same as being a pre mortem person. But if that's the case, then I'm back with Paradise, with or without the thousand virgins.
The notion that we survive death is very hard to shake off but as soon as I start to look at what this might mean it seems to become a nonsensical notion. On the other hand, though... Either way (although in two different senses) it doesn't bear thinking about.
'But isn't there just something very strange about the idea that you cease to exist when you die?' Janice said.
'The World ends,' Trevor answered.
'How do you mean?'
'The World ends for me. All I know is what I experience.'
'Rubbish!' Rupert said. 'There is such a thing as objective knowledge.'
'But I experience that, too. When I die it all disappears.'
'You mean the world ceases to exist?' Janice asked.
'For me.'
'But not for me,' Rupert told him.
'You worry about your business. I'll worry about mine.'
'Well,' I said. 'I agree with Trevor in a way. There is a paradox here, isn't there? Image the universe with no one to experience it.'
'Can't be done,' Trevor said.
'Why not?' Rupert asked.
'If you're imagining it, you're experiencing it. Contradiction.'
'The power of scientific reason establishes an objective reality.'
'The power of scientific reason establishes an explanation,' Trevor said. 'And explaining the universe is experiencing it.'
'This is just a confusion between epistemology and ontology,' Rupert said.
'Between gibberish and gobbledygook,' Amanda said, looking up from her crossword.
'I think it's very interesting,' Janice told her.
'Well you might.'
I fear I have to agree with Trevor, though.
As we are wont to do of any evening, some of us were musing recently about the beginning of the universe, wondering what there was before the Big Bang.
'Nothing,' Rupert told us.
'Yes,' Janice said, 'but what does that mean. How can there be nothing before something.'
'That's what the mathematics say,' Rupert answered.
'Makes no sense to me,' Janice said.
'Maybe it's a matter of perspective,' I suggested. 'If you think about the Big Bang you imagine some kind of vast explosion, as if you were looking out into space, say, and seeing it happen. Like the destruction of the Death Star in Star Wars. But that's probably the wrong way to think of it. You can't see the Big Bang because if you were, you would be outside the universe and that's impossible. the only way to imagine it is from the inside.'
'I don't think that helps,' Janice answered.
'Well, think of your own experience. You go further and further back into your life but then at some point... What's before your first memory? Or before you were born?'
'A Big Bang,' Trevor said.
'Don't be stupid!' Janice told him.
'I can remember before I was born,' Felix said. 'I was a noble in the Court of Charles the Second and before that I was the poet Chaucer.'
Rupert gave a scornful laugh.
'Reincarnation?' Trevor said. 'Felix, my friend. Why do you suffer so?'
'I suffer not, sir!'
'Every child that's born today is the reincarnated spirit of someone else, right?'
'Indeed.'
'But there are many more people living now than there were two hundred years ago and a great deal more living then than a thousand years ago. If we're all reincarnations then many of us are reincarnations of the same people. So sometime in the not too distant past, it's highly likely I was you and you were me and we were both Rupert. Or Amanda.'
'God, preserve us!' Felix said.