What we speak of when we speak of the unspeakable

Or what good are thoughts and prayers?

The strangest thing about moving a body is how ordinary it is. It’s just another job, only this one’s dead. You do it as well, as carefully and respectfully as you can, but don’t stay in that cold formaldehyde mist any longer than you have to.

The humour, always dark, never mocking or disrespectful, reflects the situation. Avoiding denial without descending into despair, helps preserve your sanity. Sliding a human body into a fridge feels wrong. Instinct tells you not to shut the door, they might suffocate or get hypothermia, and there’s no room for them to sit up. I’m sure every porter, whether they admit it or not, whispers their own prayer. Maybe just ‘goodnight mate, take care.’

Which makes me wonder, why? What makes this inert mass different from the meat in a supermarket deep freeze?

Credulous scepticism

“Coincidence is the most prevalent superstition of the scientific age” — Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus! Book one — The Eye in the Pyramid

Facts are not autonomous entities. They are inventions that offer the best possible description of consensus reality during their natural lifetime. Science has no agency; it is not truth revealing itself. The millennial motto ‘because: science’, is a smug meaningless pronouncement of ignorance.

Rational humanism, as is often the case with religious doctrines, says there is only one god: us. And just like the medieval church, it destroys, or ‘debunks’, any whisper of heresy in Twitter crusades and Wikipedia purges. Any diversion from the dogma is dismissed unquestioningly by ‘sceptics’ as credulous as any con-trick medium’s mark. There is no difference between God exists, it is written, and no he doesn’t, he just doesn’t.

Emotions can be mapped on brain scans and understood as hormonal secretions and jolts of electricity, but the thing that perceives them can’t. There is, as of yet, no organic explanation for consciousness, so it is conceivable that it does not rely on biological means. The possibility that a flicker of awareness follows along the necropolitan avenues of the hospital basement means the patient deserves the best possible care even after death.

I’ll cry if it wants to!

We feel like we have free will because we make our own choices, but we don’t choose what those choices are. I didn’t choose to enjoy writing, if anything did, it was some deeper autonomous self within, or external to me. “I” am just the subjective point of view that observes a reality I have no control over. And that deeper self within me, if it exists, must have another in it, either infinitely, or until it reaches a communal All Thing, at the centre of everything.

Compelled by unknown forces, we are little different from the un-living virus currently stocking the fridges. We think we do what we want because we want to, but that is an unsatisfactory explanation. Schopenhauer talks of the Will-to-life, a “blind incessant impulse without knowledge” whose wishes are distinct from our own, which explains why we keep doing such bloody stupid things. We are that same thing which causes our bodies to decompose, our intelligence is a cruel joke.

So I am not putting a separate individual in that fridge, but an iteration of myself. One day another subjective point of view will put the thing I consider to be me into a fridge. Suddenly that quiet, “all the best mate” really does feel like a secular prayer.

But like anything, capitalism co-opts prayer, strips the meaning, and uses it to perpetuate itself. When there are fires, rather than upset the oil industry and tackle the climate change that exacerbates them, or building contractors whose greed and negligence multiply the deaths, politicians offer ‘thoughts and prayers’. Rather than improve the pay and conditions of NHS workers and carers, politicians perform clapping rituals. Platitudes become curses when the people saying them have the power to change the conditions that caused the tragedy, but choose not to, condemning the future to the same fate.

So what good are thoughts and prayers?

Pascale’s reality estate agent

If there’s nothing but nothing, wagered Pascale, there’s nothing to lose, but if there’s any kind of something, get to church or there could be hell to pay.

Ignoring the false binary, Pascal’s god sounds like some war time profiteer or spiteful child. Instead of Anubis and the feather of truth, he has Alan Sugar demanding an explanation. I can’t understand prayer as currency with which to barter a cosmic wide boy. One thing I would like odds on though, is the possibility prayer creates the deities some of us pray to. It needn’t limit them, or preclude any supernatural retro-causality.

Usually we think of everything in two parts, objective existence and subjective experience, but actually they are the same thing. We organise sense data into the world we live in.

I struggle with this, so explain it to myself like so: Though the past no longer exists, it is objectively no different from the present, apart from our perception of it. Our mind is the perception of reality, and reality is what the mind perceives: they are one thing, subjectivity is the twine that binds reality.

Regardless of whether you can quantifiably measure their existence, gods are as real in the minds of believers as the demons that torment the delirious. And they do, I’ve heard the screams.

Even denial gives substance to the negative space in which they exist. Every time Richard Dawkins says god is a mental illness or a hangover from intellectual childhood, by giving psychic weight to the concept, he is in effect praying. His career is a litany to that detested un-thing squatting in his mind.

Balancing the cosmic ledger

We have a sacred responsibility to future generations to leave the public finances strong, and through careful management of our economy, this Conservative government will always balance the books. — Rishi Sunak, Conservative Party Conference Speech October 5th 2020

Doubting Rishi Sunak’s economic literacy is too generous: this is sadism wrapped in disingenuous piety. It’s also bollocks.

The alchemy of quantative easing creates money from nothing. The Bank of England issues currency to buy government bonds, i.e. debt, exactly in proportion to the money created. The difference is creditor and debtor cancel each other out because they are effectively the same thing.

Money is debt, an absence of itself, what does not exist is identically equal to what does, the universe is infinite zero, that’s the magic money tree, the books balance themselves Rishi baby!

Who are me?

The self is a neat party trick. Even if we’re not convinced our consciousness is a lonely outpost of a great All-Thing observing itself, we can see we only exist in relation to other people. There is no other satisfactory way to define ourselves.

We are the person everybody else isn’t: a tiny hole in the fabric of life. This helps make sense of the riddle of reincarnation; if the self is illusory, what is reborn? It can only be life itself, the Will, from which my subjective experience dangles, a temporary annoyance, like a haemorrhoid on the arsehole of existence.

In some eternal present, it’s me in the chair I’m pushing, catheter bag full of blood, bucket of bile on the window sill, lungs gasping, wits fading, scared and confused, only sure of the pain and shame of my crumpled decaying body. Suddenly not sure what I’m doing in a fridge.

Nothing from nothing comes nothing — a fool to the world

The Will must be the same thing as random chance, so who better to ask what all this means.

I drew three cards which explained, with more clarity than I could manage, a concept I have been struggling with for weeks. Nothing, way the space inside a circle cannot exist without the space outside it, always implies something. The duality of nothing and something creates a trinity because nothing and something together is a third thing. From that trinity more permutations and dimensions implied and all of creation tumbles out of itself.

The first card was the fool, zero in the deck, outside or at the beginning, neither or both, infinite potential.

The next card was the world which is everything and the final card in the series. So from nothing, we get everything.

The next card was the emperor, number four in the deck. Which I took as authority, the Will that drives everything. Then I noticed the dawn sky behind the fool, the world at mid day, and the emperor in the evening, suggesting a cycle.

Looking closer I noticed a pattern in the numbers. We start with the fool, zero, in the first position, followed by the world, number 21, in the second position. In numerology two digit numbers are often added together, in this case making a three. Next came the emperor, number four.

This gives us 0,1,2,3,4, which is a sequence of five.

The nothing to be afraid of

If happiness is an absence of suffering, we could see the abyss as a reward.

But when I drop someone off at the departure lounge of the void, their non-existence implies existence elsewhere and, like the fool to the world, the whole thing starts again. Buddhists call release from this cycle of birth and death, suffering and desire, Nirvana, the non-existence of which paradoxically confirms its existence.

This is obviously not satisfactory; try as we might, we cannot bottle the ineffable in words.

But when sense breaks down, I remember the Muslim gentleman in A and E with COVID saying, “god bless you” and wonder: does his God pray for me?