the Event - a short story

It occurs to her that everything she thought was thought is only the surface of things. Thoughts being opinions or judgements that is. You may think you think something and let your mind meander round the thought to pull it into focus and line up with the post rational view point until it feels like something you feel. And yet what if you decide to blur out these kinds of thought and simply feel she thought? The thoughts then become like the gravel on a driveway, which looks to the eye like a smooth surface but you can dig down a few inches to a lower level but still it remains a surface, albeit one with a shallow depth. What if really real life is the event below these thoughts accessed by actual feeling but because we are so convinced by the veracity of linguistic reason we find a way of determining that this is real life and within that shallow surface we can find the statements and equations to prove it. 

 

Growing up she had not worn hearing aids and a moderate degree of missing what was being said became her way of existing. Did this blurry nature of the world make her feel more? This? After all the world is only sharp because of the focus that rational linguistics brings to it. There is of course a different kind of clarity from being inside the event. It occurred to her that being outside the event was how the specific type of humans who refer to themselves continually as humans as a way of somehow excusing the limits of themselves as machines, have decided that live should be lived. Had her hearing loss allowed her to stay inside life as a a continually emerging event she asked herself? She sometimes wondered if her decision as an adult to get hearing aids hadn’t made her vulnerable to the language virus. The language virus being the virulent pandemic that convinced the specific type of humans who refer to themselves continually as humans that being outside the event was indeed real life. What she now thought was that the hearing aids had allowed her to encounter language within the more blurry felt realm she had entangled herself in from birth. There was of course a sense of a sudden realisation of oh that’s what you are all going on about accompanied by the observation that hearing aids make life sound like life filtered through an old cassette recorder with all the hard lined definition and exaggerated edges the sound of the compressor microphone creates. The result of this, she mused, was that now she had a more detailed grasp of language but still maintained the feeling of the digressive blurry region she had always inhabited. This might explain why those who were particularly badly afflicted with the language virus found her writing gave them a headache. She was sure that most of these specific humans wer unaware of how the written word and reason were actually just the shallow surface of feeling which was shaping life or the event. 

 

The problem was of course was that because she had grown up with this failure to accede to the realm of the written word as law it created confusion now that she could keep up with and contribute to conversations. For her language was another material in the expression within the emerging event. It was an additional detail that allowed her to do things she had previously had to be more long winded about. A convenience if you like in much the same way that someone like herself who had trained as an artist before computers were operationally useful to individuals, finding that you could do with a few clicks what would have taken weeks in the screen printing studio was initially delightful and still maintained a great deal of use to those outside the event. This didn’t mean that the temporal substance one becomes entangled with by making a screen print was no longer of use but it was regarded as a specialist pursuit and this specialisation was what gave it its value rather than the temporal substance of being inside the event.

 

Lately she had suffered badly from a syndrome or illness called fibromyalgia. The philosopher Teresa Brennan referred to this chronic condition as a disease of the soul in her book the transmission of affect. Brennan also discussed how as culture progressed the idea that feeling was contained within the skin of an individual advanced in parallel. And so she had now come to think that it was the need for progressive culture to live outside the event that was at the root of her pain and smorgasbord of homeostatic symptoms. Living outside the event requires a separation of the mind and the body, which some specific humans choose to re-connect through deliberate means such as pilates and experiencing what they refer to as flow. Flow she thought was like looking at the event through a two way mirror where you really thought you could reach out and touch it. The event is always emerging and it not over anywhere as nothing is really distant from anything else inside the middle of the event. For here going outside the event and the feeling of meaning was dangerous in the sense that it placed her inside the region of pain. Perhaps a little like going onto an alien planet in a damaged spacesuit the mused? Or like a diver with a leaky mask? Before she had developed full blown fibromyalgia as a sudden break from a more normal body function, she may have intuitively disliked being outside the event but it was not as obviously perilous to her well-being. Now, however, she needed to intuitively find ways and means of feeling meaning inside the event in order not to disappear into a pit of suffering created by the region outside the event. 

 

She asked herself if she had developed ways of appearing to be outside the event in order to connect with the specific type of humans who, due to the language virus, lived like this. Some of them referred to this awareness as meta because they believed the brain and linguistic intelligence were delightful in the same way that a dog likes licking its balls, she pondered. Worst of all some creatives said things like the body is a carrier for the data because they didn’t feel the event of all matter emerging in the middle and instead thought it was wildly daring to think about themselves as complex data – probably because this communicated a sophisticated cachet to those who sought to ease their longing for feeling (it never disappears!) with access to art. To her being inside the event was necessary for not wanting to potentially hurl herself under a bus because the pain and smorgasbord of broken-homeostatic symptoms were too much to bear. It is still possible to collaborate and collectively construct a functioning world inside the event but the specific humans have deigned that this blurry realm of feeling, largely hidden from view, is simply added value rather than the middle of nature itself. And so she gently resolved to stay inside the event and wherever possible to open the door to others that she passed in the corridors of power.