The Thought-Fox

Firstly, let me be so bold as to add those links, dearest KP...

R.A.W. on Quantum Physics and R.A.W. on Acceleration to 2012.

Now, on first reflection, this is a guy I thought I could get on board with. It seems entirely logical (I'm uncertain if this is the mot juste) to me that when assessing all explanations/concepts/arguments/interpretations of reality, all we're really experiencing is the instrument through which it is being explained/conceived/argued/interpreted. That said, given the many layers of space-time and the myriad instrumental platforms in-between R.A.W. saying those things and then eventually me hearing them, how can I be certain that he actually said those things in the first place? And even if he did, surely I'm only hearing and interpreting what my reality tunnel enables me to hear and interpret. He might have said something completely different. He did! He might not even be a 'he'.

Confused, disoriented and in faint hope that there's light at the end of this particular reality tunnel, I find myself reminded of the old Donny Hathaway song "Everything is Everything". I'm finding it increasingly more unsettling to realise that I really don't know bleeping anything, and yet that in turn only provokes me into reaching for some all-encompassing theory to cling to. Far be it from me to suggest that the work of the late great soul star is in any way more profound or more true than the teachings of every religious, spiritual or scientific endeavour, I will however stick my neck out and say that Donny certainly is more succinct. He cuts to the chase, makes his (what seems now) very salient point, makes it sound bloody good, and then shuts the hell up. In 3mins 29 secs, Mr. Hathaway establishes something that I really can get on board with. How else should one look to explain anything at all, other than with that phrase? How else can we really, truly, come to terms with A.A.T., Quantum Mechanics, multiple hairless cats, disappearing ones, bellicose sofas, and everything in between? By answering each and every question by repeating the title of said song, and then generally get on with everything else. All this examining of my own consciousness and reality has really got in the way of me doing anything with them.

Momentarily paralysed by this realisation, I somehow mobilise and find inspiration from another artistic source, that monolith of 20th Century poetry, Ted Hughes. Recalling secondary-school English lessons past (but uncomfortable with the supposed reality of memory), I offer "The Thought-Fox" as a low-level and approachable stepping-stone to support Donny's argument. In six beautifully efficient verses, Ted convinces us that at any one time the poem is the thought, the thought is the fox, the fox is the reality, and so on, in ever expanding and self-referencing circles. Here is is...


The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Hughes was renowned for his appreciation for the animal kingdom. I'll suggest that one reason for this is a jealousy at their freedom from consciousness. Hughes work - the very interpretation of his consciousness, abounds with subjects most of whom are devoid of just that. He marvels at the pike (in his poem of the same name) for having "a life subdued to its instrument". Instinct, action, thoughtlessness (in its truest sense) are all qualities which Hughes prized above all, and yet spent his life lost in the conscious, relatively inactive, contemplation of these attributes.

Which brings me back to R.A.W. Ironically, "The Thought-Fox" certainly supports the argument that particles organise themselves only when we look at them. They can be all things at the same time. Hughes, cleverly, includes himself in the poem thereby factoring in his own nervous-system into his appraisal of that particular universe.

This perception is a gamble of course, but I'm going to put forward this entry as the first in a series of ultra-brief literary criticisms sprung from the deep well of Quantum Physics. Who knows, we might end up with a whole literary theory reassessing the canon and redefining literature on a quantum level. Now that's not something I thought I'd write when this began...

RF