The Scientific Alternative, from Rabbit-hole to Nutshell

For the big bangers, faith in the black hole is a certainty derived from the imutably unknown. It represents an encapsulated zone of nothingness, sans shell, into which all passing bystanders are sucked. The closer the flyby, the stronger the pull, the faster the fall. The zone is not a hole but the most dense condition of substance imaginable, sucking even itself into its own nothingness. The greater its material increase, the smaller it becomes, which is also to say, it takes up less space and time itself flies by the wayside. Time becomes nothing, and space itself disapears in a fit of logic. It is the end of criteria, the end of points of reference, the end of data. What is left is half a metaphor, a self-referencing dada-esque language game, a lonely ego not at the center of the universe, but the universe itself, in and of itself, consisting of nothing, the Great Oblivion Dude (god).

Since this end of everything cancels its own beginning, it cancels the first law of physics (as an ultimate transgression against the logic and reason operating in former fabrics of timed space), this law being none other than "from nothing something can never come" and its inversion, "from something nothing can ever be". Materialism's first axiom? "It's always something!" This is the premise supporting every calculation positing a material object of local uncertainty leaving no evidence of itself but the reactionary display by others within its regional influence (which is to say, seduced by its gravity), and the entire scaffold of material history which supported the idea falls away.

Essentially, something becomes nothing, and even loses its cabability to transform into pure potential – it is the end of possibility, the problem of peak energy bringing on the end of everything as we know it. Refusing to accept its own demise, Great Oblivion Dude explodes in a tantrum of cosmic scale, like the ejaculation from a glimmering erection sending seminal sparks helter-skelter throughout the great black nothingness, like an autoerotic resurrection of the dead coming to find order in general assemblies to legislate an astropolitical, transactional dance of the eternal return of the economy, but ever in fear of the insurrection of the coming disharmony, afterwhich everyone is lined up against the wall and shot.

Reverse Engineering the Fall or Emergencies from a Rabbit Hole

If we are accustomed to burying our dead in honour of grieve or gravity or even by unconscious habit through millennial repetition, shouldn't archaeologists and others digging holes presume, because of the axiom, "what goes up must come down" (unless one gets too high, in which case to be out of sight is truly out of mind – or off one's rock – except for the hauntings by phantoms some call memory, others fantasy), that in a logical transposition, creatures must come into being from holes in the ground, as if it's their mother, or from mothers as if they're the earth? If one is embracive of orphans, isn't one mother as good as another? Should you wish to speed up the process, expect some resistance – the bigger the tuber, the harder the pull. Should you wish to halt it, expect to be buried by yourself, otherwise, there is some encouragement, even if a placebo, which is Russian for 'thank you' or in Latin, 'to please'.

Sans winds or strong wings, the uprising or flight, as a gravitational transgression (without which the game would end in sudden death; in fact, given time, they all do anyway), is only achieved by foot or by mouth, lest our collective umbilicus break. Anti-gravity is a loss of density, easily sustained by scattering brains or setting fire to your remains. In case of regret, there may be other holes from which to emerge. When Vine Deloria said his people emerged from holes in the earth, it was a case of adopting a new mother, and staying near her as a matter of choice – the previous home was Amnesia (or, like selective service, was never registered in the first place). The medicine wheel or omphallus is a poetic reminder of nurturing mothers and the sun providing galactic inspiration. Such is a poem in the form of a chiasma like optic nerves and chromosomes. The transcendental portal through transdimensional space is the joke by, of and for the people who do not explore their own utterances but chastise mythic poetry as superstition or worse, magical or childish thinking.

But no shit! God made the earth before the starlit heavens it sits in and the only reality is measured with irrational numbers and cities came before the country and you will be smart if you can raise the dough to become institutionally certifiable. For everyone else, there is a tending to machinery toward a material singularity producing such density that the universe has no option but to collapse into itself to the central point of nothing at an ever-increasing rate. Either way, the poets win due to the failure to enact legislation requiring the literal interpretation of anything! Such is the way of natural selection – the survival of survivors, now residing underground, due to fluctuating variability – it's a big pool to draw from.

Prosaic Prose

Like poetry, "anthropology is comparison or know nothing"...
Comparison is a meandering bent and that is a temptation
to psychosis or to sin, a drop off or out from a straight and narrow line.

But on further exploration, an adventure of a kind, one should surely find
the barbaric is the final evolution or stage of termination for each and every line
of prosaic interpretation, not to mention a big bang blasting every civil hyphenation.

What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that 'music' and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it... And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

The joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares to set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind...

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilization alive. The scholar is a quarry-man, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet's insurance against factual error. It is easy enough for the poet in this hopelessly muddled and inaccurate modern world to be misled into false etymology, anachronism and mathematical absurdity by trying to be what he is not. His function is truth, whereas the scholar's is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

– Robert Graves, 1946

Fiction & Taboo

Fort's principle: "People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels."

– Colin Wilson, on Charles Fort

"Of course high among virtues are the honorable lies of Governments. Whether virtuously said, or accurately reported, I don't know:

... if anybody could ever distinguish between righteousness and exploitation and tyranny.

One of the engaging paradoxes of our existence – which strip mathematics of meaning – is that a million times a crime is patriotism. ...If we could have new abominations, so unmistakably abominable as to hush the lubricators, who plan murder to stop slaughter – but that is only dreamery, here in our existence of the hyphen, which is the symbol of hypocrisy...

And almost all liars are conventionalists.

The one quality that the lower animals have not in common with human beings is creative imagination. Neither a man, nor a dog, nor an oyster ever has had any. Of course there is another view, by which is seen that there is in everything a touch of creativeness. I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Though I have classed myself with some noted fictionists, I have to accept that the absolute fictionist never has existed. There is fictional coloration to everybody's account of an "actual occurrence," and there is at least the lurk somewhere of what is called the "actual" in everybody's yarn. There is the hyphenated state of truth-fiction. Out of dozens of reported pearls in stews, most likely there have been instances; most likely once upon a time an old fiddle did turn out to be a Stradivarius; and it could be that once upon a time somebody did get a ring back fishwise.

But when I come upon the unconventional repeating, in times and places far apart, I feel – even though I have no absolute standards to judge by – that I am outside the field of ordinary liars...

"GOOD MORNING!" said the dog. He disappeared in a thin, greenish vapor.

I have this record, upon newspaper authority.

It can't be said – and therefore will be said – that I have a marvellous credulity for newspaper yarns.

But I am so obviously offering everything in this book, as fiction. That is, if there is fiction. But this book is fiction in the sense that Pickwick Papers, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species, Genesis, Gulliver's Travels, and mathematical theorems, and every history of the United States, and all other histories, are fictions. A library-myth that irritates me most is the classification of books under "fiction" and "non-fiction."

And yet there is something about the yarns that were told by Dickens that set them apart, as it were, from the yarns that were told by Euclid. There is much in Dickens' grotesqueries that has the correspondence with experience that is called "truth," whereas such Euclidean characters as "mathematical points" are the vacancies that might be expected from a mind that had had scarcely any experience. That dog-story is axiomatic. It must be taken on faith. And, even though with effects that sometimes are not much admired, I ask questions...

Everywhere is the tabooed, or the disregarded. The monks of science dwell in smuggeries that are walled away from event-jungles. Or some of them do. Nowadays a good many of them are going native. There are scientific dervishes who whirl amok, brandishing startling statements; but mostly they whirl not far from their origins, and their excitements are exaggerations of old-fashioned complacencies...

It seems that my reasoning is that, under some circumstances, if something is highly unlikely, it is probable. John Stuart Mill missed that...

Said Dr. Hastings H. Hart, of the Russell Sage Foundation, as reported in the newspapers, May 10, 1931: "Morons for the most part can be the most useful citizens, and a great deal of the valuable work being done in the United States is being done by such mentally deficient persons."

Dr. Hart has given very good newspaper space for this opinion, which turned out to be popular. One can't offend anybody with any statement that is interpreted as applying to everybody else. Inasmuch as my own usefulness has not been very widely recognized, I am a little flattered, myself. To deny, ridicule, or reasonably explain away occurrences that are the data of this book, is what I call useful. A general acceptance that such things are would be unsettling. I am an evil one, quite as was anybody, in the past, who collected data that were contrary to the orthodoxy of his time. Some of the most useful work is being done in the support of Taboo. The break of Taboo in any savage tribe would bring on perhaps fatal disorders. As to the taboos of savages, my impressions are that it is their taboos that are keeping them from being civilized; that, consequently, one fetish is worth a hundred missionaries.

– Charles Hoy Fort, Wild Talents

The Fortunate Wheel

A golden rule's unneeded when one notices surroundings: "what goes around comes around, no worries". Augustine found so abhoring, a pain to privilocracy – mid-age peasants knew full-well from pagan stories told from old that chance is only half of it, the other's steared to make one's destiny.

Chance is fickle, so they say, though it can help decisions because faith believed in all the way presents but one direction. But as a starting point, we say "so what if it is?" When you come around again it's likely fallen quite a way.

This points to Lady Tyche or Fortuna's spinning wheel, casting out lines like spiders inviting vitals to grab on and calling crawling feet a rudder if in lieu of boat, to help one's fate along.

Or globe she's spinning with her fingers like a basketball or underfoot creating day and night. In middle ages, a game of ferris wheel or rolling heel for gypsy wagons with a compass for an orphan – it's compassion, never any kleptomania – to remind it's not just chaos makes a cornicopia and sometimes like the snail, chew with much less haste so's not to forgoe taste: there will be plenty but not if you'd stand still, waitng till you're more than twenty.

The tiller is as well a weaver's beam some call a transom but sometimes it's a club not made by joinery or ransom, and a transit views a steady rod or two or stadia and makes a road as if a star to steer by.

Where six hundred seven feet's a single stadium and the rod is sixteen and a half (or ten for shorter craft), the same for any cranium or tub we call a boat and the rod is the handle of a rudder and a perch or pole.

Pull the oar or turn the sail from transom, tiller shift and tell a tale concerning it in case your mind's adrift. Viewed from a perch a pole shift's just a turning of direction and if you're six feet high a league is to the sea's horizon.

The wheel is great if taken as a symbol, but as a tool for getting there from lake or stream or ocean, nothing's more impressive than a boat & oar or sail – now that's quite an invention – like a symbiosis with a whale, like to cross a scary stream land-lubbers grabbed the milk-cow's tail.

Divination presents a chance for wandering perusal; the oracle – it's like a koan – removes the rut beneath the wheel and in that spell enlarge your perch upon the universal. Blow your mind with this: sometimes beauty isn't just an ordered academia but sublime as any in- or outer spatial psychedelia.

And as for time there's none at all or ever not enough except in Math-time most would call real and that's when things get tough. Myth-time's simulteneity for sums and differences. Math-time's that old religion 'cause when infinitude is ever added to finality the sum is cross-eyed, absolutely certain death, and no one recognises but the dead who may know all or nothing to surprise us. Time goes nowhere yet still a question for the square and hip; going is for mariners by foot or truck or ship.