Chapter 9 — Reality Check
The rules of chaos, a contradiction in terms, express themselves in poetry, express themselves in art, but they don’t waste their time trying to refashion the human mind, they sneakily bend around it, hiding behind truths, behind half-organized concepts, behind the things we take for granted.
They make you see exactly what you expect to see; when you change your mind, you see something else and know things have always been that way. Whatever you think you see has never been there: it was always in your mind.
You make meaning for things that don’t need it: nothing in the universe requires justification outside the human mind.
We are slaves to our need for rules, for reality to make sense, and define that sense based only on our familiar turf, and we endlessly churn faulty models of the world and get very pleased with ourselves.
How did the human mind get burdened with the crushing effort, mostly wasted, of bending reality out of shape into whatever we believe it should be like?
Naturally, he discovered a language, because it was familiar, because it wasn’t scary, because that’s what humans used to communicate.
Reality graciously realigned itself to give him what he needed, the patterns and meanings that only existed in his mind.
So a language it became, one he developed doing the same thing over and over, for how many days, years, or decades, he didn’t even know. We humans measure time by how much things change. The secret of eternity resides in repetition and congruence.
He assumed language to be human language, so reality conceded, and sent him tomes of poetry, and catalogs of patterns, which he studied devotedly and with unmovable focus.
It sent him structure to satisfy his need for connections and adventures to quell his curiosity; it sent him down the rabbit hole of every human emotion, experienced more or less in the abstract, in the absence of memory. It sent him everything it had to offer, but couldn’t answer the question that plagued him: the why. There is no why in reality. Reality just is.
For him, it was a language, but it could have been anything else he might have deemed important: religion, wisdom, the affirmation of will.
Reality opened a doorway for him to pass through, and then self-healed behind him, gently cocooning him in his personal bubble of understanding, one that behaved according to his thoughts.
A womb of potentiality that protected him from the uncertainty of outcome, but limited him to a rather small range of possibilities, as not to overwhelm his biological machinery, limited in its processing speed by the electrical resistance of its wiring.
When the beautiful panels became so crowded with this multi-verse poetry there was no space left to edge in another word, he started cultivating the realities that afforded him the means to document his journeys, and started filling up the muzak lounge with catalogs of panel destinations and annotated journals of his travels.
In the realities with friends and families, he became Helmuth, and took upon the obligations that came with his persona, but for the most part being just kept churning new contexts and new worlds every day, an endless array of possibilities in every combination of details.
Some worlds were so beautiful and so bizarre he spent days, sometimes weeks, going through the same panel again and again, trying to get back to them, and the quantum probabilities translated as refrains, turning the corresponding lyrics into old-fashioned French poems, strewn with repeating lines.
The largest archive of poetry in existence, which had all written itself, was carefully collected and organized by the only being ever to need order and reason — the human it carried in its womb.
Sometimes he sat on top of a mountain somewhere, eyes closed, trying to sink beneath his thoughts, hoping to find a lost memory, any inkling of who he used to be, but if there were any there, he never found them.
He made friends; he had lovers; he created projects; he made himself lives in these realities, all the way knowing that every one of his journeys would end at a door leading to the only place that seemed permanent — the muzak lounge.
He’d started wondering who were the strangers who occasionally got stranded ‘at his place’, as he got used to calling this eerie room. He attempted no contact with them, and if they happened to be there, he made himself scarce before anybody had a chance to interact.
He fantasized these odd encounters were some overlapping of realities, an accident of superposition where the worlds involved passed through each other, out of phase, in ways that didn’t touch.
He often daydreamed of what would happen if he dragged somebody from his endless reality iterations through that fateful door that marked the end of his journeys.
Would they be able to return to their respective worlds eventually, or would they become trapped with him in Neverland?
He resigned himself to bringing back news, social events, fragments of situations that only applied locally, according to the customs of the world they belonged to, and which rarely showed any commonality of principles or meaning.
He brought back with him the world according to each school of thought and moral system, none of which applied to life as whole, but most of which sort of made sense in context. Their collective body of wisdom was no more coherent than the random poems that wrote themselves.
‘Who are you?’ he stared at himself in the mirror every day, and a person named Helmuth stared back.
He didn’t know this man at all, this man whose life he’d lived in almost any configuration possible. He’d been gay and straight, rich and poor, he even went to jail for murder once. He collected prizes and degrees. He took to the wilderness. He acquired wisdom.
Helmuth acquired wisdom, not him, because he wasn’t Helmuth. Helmuth was his wardrobe, the collection of garments he attired himself with each morning to meet his many worlds.
He learned to lie so well he surprised himself sometimes, and his life became so much easier and more pleasant as a result. Conscience becomes a useless burden when one sheds the consequences of life at the end of each day.
He often asked himself if he’d always been this callous, but there was no way of knowing, with no baseline personality to compare his present self to. He didn’t want to compare himself to other people either, since he didn’t share their lives. He just glided over their surface, like a dragonfly barely leaving traces on water, before he disappeared.
‘Who are you?’
His reflection haunted him, and he could feel, when he looked in the mirror, that from behind the Helmuth mask a witness watched him intently, studying his every gesture, assessing his every mood.
‘Answer me!’ he lost his temper and slammed his fist on the sink, in a childish gesture both painful and embarrassing.
‘I’m Helmuth,’ the witness behind the stranger’s gaze quietly answered, very matter of fact, as if he’d been waiting for the question for a long time. ‘The real Helmuth.’
