QUAKER SCIENCE
Peeling an avocado, for the sake of who knows what, just shows . . .
The TRUTH is slippery! A snail with curious eyes on long stalks.
Turning my attention to a tall cylindrical package of Quaker Oats, on top is an obviously satisfied Religious Person, 100% natural, as claimed on the side. White locks cascading down from an enormous black hat. His eyes squint with either mirth or some absurd realization. He is a displaced hippie. And why should this matter?
It doesn't. But when least expected, the truth zags. So let's begin by clearing the field.
Zag! As far as scientific observations go, 95% of everything is dark. That much mass and energy has escaped scrutiny. Ordinary light, however, will not pass through my hand.
We perceive, with our five senses, 5% of all that is. We interpret scanty information.
Vision is important. (Taste, smell and sexual pleasure do not allow measurements with nearly the same precision.)
To form a visual percept, a leaf is perceived, green and smooth. Leaf!
To form concepts, percepts are herded together. Zig! A tree is conceived: leaves, branches, bark and roots. Trees become forests. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, I wax profound.
Time – is a higher order concept. Trees grow leaves in the Spring, drop them in Fall, and Time is inferred. Time is experienced sequentially, in a one-way flow, an orderly concept.
Sensory perception, it might be said, is common sense, like reasoning. What goes up comes down. Something exists or it does not. Objects might share characteristics; marbles and eyes are spherical; but an object cannot be in two places at once.
Just coincidentally? scientific and civil laws share an important property: We are all assumed to be equal before, and subject to them.
Contravention is insubordination, or disorderly conduct, or at least foolhardy. Some examples: Psychic phenomena, enlightenment, telepathy, precognition; these are all subjective, as set off from objective science. They are not 100% replicable, cannot be caused by measurably repeatable conditions, and in the last analysis they are dismissed. Sensory perceptions, concepts of space, matter and time, do not account for extrasensory experiences.
Chopping vegetables in kitchen morning's light, be it dull rain soggy or unseasonable Spring with laughing doves trying to stare me down, in all seriousness from their feeder, which I duly supply with seed. It is Universe.net. Out of nowhere messages arrive which, in haste, are scribbled on ridiculously small scraps of shopping list paper. This is not some crazy, self-imposed discipline, but simply the outcome of an unexplained That's How It Happens.
For instance, the puzzler “yesterlore.” A writerly instinct would be drawn to it, like ants to a cantaloupe rind thrown on the compost. But what to do with it?
There's the fun. OK, Universe – let's play!
Of course by this point in the narrative Reverend Hippie smiles. If he could speak, which he now will, he will say “buckboard days.” It's hard to say who actually starts these things.
Days of mustard weeds under walnut trees, sisters with their horse Sissy to ride in a cyclone fenced corral by the side. But no story, except where tomatoes wept quietly in the vegetable patch. Somehow the TV in the main house was yesterlore, with Arthur Godfrey. He would have wept too, if he had any sense. People being shot, blown up, right there next to him. Of course it was all fiction and safe, all safe, olly, olly, oxen like all the rest and shop early for Christmas.
I didn't dare let a tear drop. Disorderly conduct. Who in the hell could have known anyway?
Yesterlore was a buckboard wagon, the SUV of its rural day, surrey with a fringe. Who would have guessed the Valley of Heart's Delight would vanish into silicon towers, to glint in the sun like Darth Vader's helmet? Morphed into a golf course next to highway 101, flight path for Moffett Field?
Or known that a sub hunter, with black propeller cones boring straight into my eyes, would ditch at the last moment? But I knew, swerving off the freeway. Then a voice inside saying: “not this one.” And nothing but a normal glide over the golfers.
So easy to forget. Whew! But that was not to be. Carrying some photos for a manual that was to be, swinging into the lobby at Moore Systems, everyone staring past me, did I exist? I did, for the moment, and looking over my shoulder saw an immense plume of black smoke. Over the golf course in the distance. Did I really exist?
Maybe better to just disappear. I was already weird. The hippie tech writer. Does such stuff actually happen, or maybe I was just stoned. But I wasn't.
Universe.net, my source, then as now, posting through the ether. Might as well be called that. The now of it inhabiting an operation in my yesterlore when ether was applied – outline of a skeletal red boat bobbing on blue comic book waves. Water. Susan returns from some errand, comes in and says: “Water!” It's coming up out of our neighbor's lawn, running out into the street.”
So I go out to take a look. The voice inside says: “Get a shovel!” Cutting up a plug of sod from around the leak I feel underneath and find some broken pieces of irrigation pipe. How comforting to have the chaos explained, mind at ease. I phone the management company and their gardener, a friend of mine.
If this were supposed to be a story, a poem, a manual, I'm fired. But there is no olly, olly, oxen free. Not even in those famous ox herding pictures, of Buddhist fame, where the rider disappears in the last frame. Only toll house cookies, because of the chocolate chips. Might as well enjoy them.
Oh, Buddhist stories! The one about a guy on a cliff, tiger behind coming up fast, so he jumps and on the way down plucks a strawberry – so delicious! Nuclear weapons above, corporate earth chewers below, a military band playing taps, three sky writing planes spelling out a giant message: CELEBRATE MEMORIAL DAY!
Are we crying yet?
Dark matter, dark energy, demise of the scientific state.
