muted thud of the tide at the cliff face, way below me. The seagulls seemed to have settled down for the approaching midday heat. The sun shone warmly on my back, making me strip off my shirt. Then hands upturned on my extended knees, I fell into a deep sleep like state.
From deep within, a flurry of images came and went, some were shapes with bright colours, others were of figures in dark outlines that had the taint of anxiety in their furtive movements. They were not of me, or belonging to me. The images existed without and had the coldness of the other. I could not put words on them, as they seemed beyond words. They were formless forms in an unspecified background. Rather than words, I felt emotions attached to them. Again, it was impossible to put words on the emotions but I knew they were there, as I felt them deep in my chest, or was it in my head. Scents wafted strangely before my nose. I smelled the incense burned in the church before a coffin. The smell of irises and leather mingled unaccountably. The disturbing smell of semen pervaded all. I felt the scents washed away by fresh pine leaves as they are squashed underfoot. Soon the light appears through the tall forest trees. The rays shoot in straight lines, and where they intersect the air is teeming with bright silver flies. They turn blue and the buzzing becomes loud. The bottles are strewn outside the backdoor for all the neighbours to see. I cringe in shame. Am I like that drunkard that spent his life holding up the walls at the West Bridge - avoided by all the townspeople. I do not want to be excluded. Shunning is my greatest form of insult. Too much pride has been my undoing. Bottle it and ship it off to foreign lands, from whence it cannot be retrieved. I can do without a barrel load of it as I have it aplenty. Where, on my journey through life, had I garnered such narcissism. I never saw myself as other than my ideal, but in actually seeing my ideal reflection in the mirror, I was cut off from it and doomed never to achieve it. I spent my life chasing a phantom of perfection that always eluded me.
The images were now a blurred, swirling mass of emotions. They were like a frenzied vortex that constantly changed direction, and cascaded into itself in incredible fury. I had no control. The power of the emotions was unstoppable. I felt hunger. Powerful erotic surges displaced the pangs of my stomach. I searched for relief and was now sucking at my mother's breast. Total desire was washed away by the sweet liquid. I became one with her and she was part of me. Together we became it - total desire, the ideal forever sought. A range of pleasant emotions raged through my mind. I was aroused, sated and complete all at once. The anxieties of life had not only disappeared, but I felt that they had never existed. I no longer wanted. I no longer doubted. Fear, love and hate had all merged into one colossal emotion. I could indulge and let free all my animal desires, for they now were no longer animal or brutish. They were natural. They were one with reality, with no past, present or future.
The vortex grew smaller and shrunk down to a line. The line was two dimensional, stretching from an infinite backwards to an infinite forwards, but there was no identification of either direction. It had motion, but yet had no form or colour. All it really had was a blank emotion, like a mental hunger that was never going to be satisfied, or even identified. I concentrated on this image, as it finally transported me back to consciousness. As my consciousness awakened so it receded. I opened my eyes, and vainly tried to reconstruct my thoughts, but I was in a different world. I was a different person. The flood of emotions, from my real world, flooded back to regain control. I felt the power of gravity push my weight onto my extended knees. The ache of my muscles made me want to stretch. I longed for the touch and caress of Sorcha. I wanted to smell her musky thighs, yet I hurriedly forced such urges into the background, where they belonged. I regained control from the world I had just left. I realised that I had been in a state of total lack of control, of which, now, I had only fleeting memories. I had disturbing memories of total violence, followed by carnal ravishing. The details were not there, but the feelings were still lingering. The feelings were strangely not ones of self disgust, but of fulfilment of animal desires, done without moral attribution. Only the ghostly figure of my father, hovering in the background seemed to be curbing the worst excesses.
The line had disappeared and I felt disturbed and anxious. I sought refuge in the memory of my father who was always a major figure in my life. His early death had cemented his stature, as a totemic figurehead to be aspired and looked up to. At times like this, it was always possible to regain calm, by setting his image before me. I identified my childhood with him, much more so than with my mother. He had been the role model on which I had set my emerging identity. In a way I became him, just as he faded from my life.
I thought of him now and where he was. If I could meet him, would I want to? Would he be disappointed in what I had done with my life? The more I thought of it, the more I felt that I wouldn't want to meet him in an afterlife. We had both moved on, and there was no current relationship on which to build. Where could I start to explain my life, and how could I put up with his probable disapproval?
Approval, disapproval are human traits. They do exist, in reality. Curious, how easy it is to use such a big word as reality. Reality encompasses everything, even the word. "First there was the word." I always felt that that had some special significance.
"The word, the word - the king of all birds."
The silly miss-rhyme rang out in my head. What are words? I call a tree a tree, not because I recognise that particular tree because of its beautiful pink blossoms, but because I recognise the category called "tree" - one with certain attributes: size, rootedness, shape, life - the list goes on.
When presented with an image, I can only identify it with a word if it can fall into an already identified category or set. If there is no set, there is no word to fit to the image, and in a sense, it doesn't yet exist, for if I try to talk to a friend about it, there is no common vocabulary to pinpoint it. We would have to resort to describing it in terms of the attributes of other sets or words. My friend might eventually remember that he too had seen something similar to my description, and we for convenience might decide on a word - let's say "zuon" - to recall it further in our conversation. The zuon has been brought into reality together with its set, comprising the agreed similarities, that my friend and I had established. The set is in effect a one to one mapping, from my experience to that of my friend - we'll call him Al, for convenience. So, Al and I examine further the set members: the colour, shape and so on of the zuon. We set out to apportion a degree of agreement on each attribute or element. For instance, I might maintain that the colour had a certain hue that differed, to some degree, from Al's impression. We agree to differ and in compromise apply a weighting factor to the colour, to signify our level of certainty or agreement. If we are more certain the weighting will be nearer one, and if less certain nearer zero. We can do this for all our set members, and in effect, we have established a mathematical relation between our two experiences, whose resolution is the word 'zuon', whose reality is defined by the set attributes and their respective weightings. The seasoned mathematician would replace these weightings by normalised probability distributions, and use multivariable functions for the similarity mappings, and the zuon takes on the more complex, mathematical existence experienced by a word or object with an infinite number of comparators and an infinite number of potential observers. Reality now takes on the expected complexity that natures presents us with. Unfortunately nature does not limit the number of comparisons, or degrees of freedom, that exist to define a set or an object. This limitation is what prevents us from ever fully boxing reality into a complete set. We can only guess at reality and, in some bookmaker fashion, agree on the odds that our individual sets tally. That is what language is: an agreed list of sets on which the formal odds are fixed at any one time, but which can change as the number of observers, or indeed the discovery of new degrees of freedom changes. True we have many different languages - each of differing grammar or syntax, but each can be mapped to each other by dictionaries. For mathematicians, this is like
having differing local co-ordinate patches on a space-time manifold, where the dictionaries must be used to move from one patch to another - in effect these are mathematical functions linking the co-ordinates across the boundaries. Just as there is no universal language, there is no universal co-ordinate system - or preferred system, as the physicists say. There is no absolute space or time.
Underlying each language are the agreed sets and their uncertain similarities. It is only when we all - and I mean past, present and future - are subject to a common experience that a real objective reality will exist. Then we can dispense with the uncertainties. We will be seeing in a transcendent, godly way but not quite as God, because the infinities of the set members will forever be a denied limitation to us. Maybe God is the universal observer who can see around the corner of infinity.
Did I say God? Me an avowed atheist! I do not believe in a god, in any format whatever, not even a mathematical, resplendent, remote, transcendent being. Yet how easily I use the word god to cover those areas