Monk Quixote

I was think­ing this morn­ing. Dan­ger­ous occu­pa­tion. Can lead to all sorts of unin­tended con­se­quences. Such as real­is­ing that ‘unin­tended con­se­quences’ is kind-of the theme of this post.

I was think­ing about duende. Again. Duende, in my little-bear brain expla­na­tion, is the spirit of self-annihilation that we all carry around within us. The bat­tle with duende is what gives us great art, music and dance. There is less said about duende and lit­er­a­ture, pre­sum­ably because this is based on the oral tra­di­tion of Span­ish gypsies.

But the idea is still the same. The strug­gle sparks or feeds the muse. Who lives next door to the gypsy duende. But is prob­a­bly Ital­ian. Or French. They don’t get on. They quar­rel and bitch about each other’s recy­cling. And res­i­den­tial park­ing per­mits (you can tell I live in the burbs).

Any­hoo. Duende. I was think­ing that if one engages in a strug­gle with said destruc­tive crit­ter, that one must occa­sion­ally win, and one must occa­sion­ally lose. Oth­er­wise, there is no strug­gle. Or at least there must be the oppor­tu­nity to lose.

So now we’re on to more straight­for­ward ter­ri­tory. It’s prob­a­bil­ity. Which leads to con­se­quences. And all sorts of dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions with the muse’s father. Any­hoo. Prob­a­bil­ity. So — for any given task, includ­ing cre­ative ones, there is a prob­a­bil­ity of it being done, or not done. And for the sake of argu­ment let’s say all things that are done are done suc­cess­fully. Give it what cri­te­ria you like. But ulti­mately it can be expressed as a like­li­hood, a num­ber, a frac­tion of a whole.

And that num­ber will tend towards 1, or 0, depend­ing on whether you sub­scribe to the world (or strictly speak­ing — time) being infi­nite or finite, ie do you believe in an infi­nite num­ber of number-crunching mon­keys? Which again, will cause all sorts of con­fu­sion for the muse and the gypsy and the dwarf already liv­ing in your head. But they may well get on with the muse’s father if he’s lib­eral with the sherry.

So, we have mon­keys. We have num­bers. I make that reli­gion o’clock. Because ulti­mately, the big ques­tion, which is not how many mon­keys will stick their fin­gers up their arse at any given time, is how does this relate to me? What is the mean­ing of life?

Well, ulti­mately, you see, as I hope I’ve already proved, it will relate to you even­tu­ally. Because of the 1s and 0s. No, not binary, despite its ten­dency to hang around like a lost teenager at par­ties. Prob­a­bil­ity. All things can be expressed in terms of their like­li­hood. A con­cept ably exploited by the sadly departed Mr Adams as a vehi­cle for lit­er­ary fan­tasy. (Can you see what I did there? Can you? Sigh. Give the mon­key a peanut).

Any prob­a­bil­ity will, in an infi­nite timescale, will be 1. Absolute zero must be reserved for things that we sim­ply can­not imag­ine. Or are hap­pen­ing in other dimen­sia or cable chan­nels that nobody watches. I mean, if an army of but­ter­flies decides that it wants to write the words of Shake­speare by com­man­deer­ing an army of magic sherry-drinking dwarves, who am I to tell them it can’t hap­pen? But that is pretty close to absolute zero.

So on an infi­nite timescale that is the same as say­ing that I can do any­thing. Because the prob­a­bil­ity of every­thing will tend towards 1 over infin­ity. You might get bored in the mean­time. But you will win three oscars, a grammy and go to bed with triplets in stripey stock­ings. Where was I? Stripey things. So — prob­a­bil­ity dic­tates that these things will apply to me in the future. But because the future is infi­nite it is the same as say­ing it applies to me now, tomor­row — con­stantly in fact. So I am a triple oscar win­ner in bed with triplets. EVEN THOUGH I’M TYPING A BLOG POST.

It’s tricky, I’ll grant ya. And depends mas­sively on whether you’re in the 1 camp or the 0 zero. God, you ask? Well, I’m get­ting to that par­tic­u­lar badger.

Now, your stan­dard reli­gious believer has a com­plex rela­tion­ship with time. Because they cheat. They have one set of time here, and another, usu­ally infi­nite length of time over there »>. Wher­ever ‘there’ is — often a safe dis­tance from the muse’s father, I find. But I digress. So, their view on ‘does this relate to me’ is NO, until they pop their clogs, by which time it is a resound­ing YES. The rules and your behav­iour are entirely pred­i­cated on being over there »>

Although in the strict lit­eral sense, you are no longer being. You are a 0 who believes you are a 1. Although again, in the strictly lit­eral sense, you are an infin­ites­si­mally small num­ber before you get to absolute zero, who still holds out hope of being a big fat 1, and all dec­i­mal points in between.

Ergo, if you do not believe in the uni­ver­sal rel­e­vance of all things and that I am cur­rently in bed with triplets, then you must believe in God. Or a small man who lives in your head.

So yeah, my tube jour­ney was kind of boring.

PS I would like to apol­o­gise for any or all of my teach­ers, friends, fam­ily — any­one who knows me (and I have already proven I must know every­one if I believe in 1 — for the logic in this post. How­ever, I think you’ll agree that apol­o­gis­ing is a waste of time as we are all con­nected by the apol­ogy and the poor logic in a kind of con­tin­u­ous vor­tex of non-sense.

Seri­ously. It was a really bor­ing tube journey.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 5:49 pm, is filed under flimflam and tagged as: bollocks, duende, God, logic, maths, muse, notenoughtime, the other place, toomuchtime, tubejourney.. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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