re: CREATION
It now occurs to me that The Blues Magoos once and forever sang:
One day you're up and the next day you're down
You can't face the world with your head to the ground
The grass is always greener on the other side, they say
So don't worry, boys, life will be sweet some day
We made enough mistakes
But you know we got what it takes
Oh, we ain't got nothin' yet
A song about Nothing. It was featured on their debut album, Psychedelic Lollipop, which is... the first record to have the word “psychedelic” on the sleeve?
“To fathom hell or soar angelic?” No doubt.
But I still don't quite know everything about omniscience.
This heptavalent confession begins with 0.
Everything begins with 0.
Everything ends with 0.
Took them long enough to figure that out.
How could they have missed it?
After more than 1500 years of frequently inaccurate calculations, the Babylonians finally devised a special sign for zero, which came into use around 300 before the Common Era. Most people surmise that this sign signified a great deal for accountants. But the Babylonian bean counters only used their symbol as a place holder and they didn't have the concept of zero as an actual value; so their clay tablet accounting records couldn't say something like "0 bananas," but instead they had to write out something like: "Yes, we have no bananas."
The use of zero as an actual value began in India around 600 CE. Nobody seemed to get negative numbers until they torched the city, immolated the slums, and flushed out the vermin, which cleared the way for the construction of ...
The Illuminated Tenament!
As recently as the eighteenth century, the Swiss genius Leonhard Euler believed that negative numbers were greater than infinity, and it was common practice to ignore any negative results returned by equations because most folks assumed they were meaningless.
Only nothing is completely meaningless. It's always the little things that get you in the end.
I once believed that we're all conceived as perfectly rational numbers. I LIKED believing that. Unfortunately, that delusion lasted about as long as faith in Santa Claus. Moms. Dads. We all have parents to contend with. My Old Man, the humourless yet surprisingly enterprising computer engineer, had nothing to say. There was no connectivity. His signal was always weak. He was incapable of affection, but he knew how to demonstrate. He had no idea that his cohort had disconnected everything.
MOM [Beware of those who say MOTHER!] encouraged me to study music when I was only seven. Too young! But school was a cakewalk, sweet and neat and covered in frosting that could be sickeningly sweet. Then came the inevitable fourteenth birthday, and preparations were made for a concession or succession.
(Dad had decided to abdicate.)
Using pure mathematics I developed an alphabet for deciphering the unknown and accidentally discovered the directions for knowing all dark things. At the outset, I intended to prove that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line.
Aha, its whole, its seventh, it makes nineteen!
You should never expect a simple yes or no from anyone. But near the end of the last dance at the high school Prom (which I missed but didn’t miss at all), I discovered an unconventional solution to the ultimate problem:
Should I continue?
© 1995-2021 Brian Mattys / OrpheusEnd Inc.
NOTES: This is probably the only book (of any real substance) that I’ll ever write, so I thought this might be a propitious time to publish, once and for all. Most of the research was done c.1990-1994 and the first draft was completed in 1995. The last two chapters were rewritten in 2021.