Militant Butterflies

Questions. That’s what I have. I discussed your pensive fox business with, well, anyone who would let me talk at them for five minutes without walking away or poking their fingers into the soft bits of my cheeks in a slightly annoying fashion. I think you must be right about the ‘everything being everything’ business. Or at least that kind and clever Mr Hathaway is. Although I don’t know him and that song isn’t on Spotify - which I think means that it might not really exist. Or it does exist but somebody else sang it and you got it wrong. Which to me seems unlikely but who am I to argue the case when it is so clearly absent from that place which plays me tunes. I spoke to Father about it and he cast me a glance which I can only interpret as either abject disappointment or mild indigestion, and, with that, sloped out of the room accompanied only by a metaphorical hair swish and a swallowed rendition of ‘Where is the Love?’ Where is the love I ask you? Certainly not here in the kitchen and, judging by the lyrics, most definitely not with that Roberta Flack lady and that nice chap she’s singing with. I wonder who he is.

If everything IS everything then why do I not like cheese?

That was question 1.

Now then...when I posed the proposition the other day I was met with a response that didn’t caress the question at hand in the slightest but it was quite interesting. In answer to my question about, well, everything you said, he offered me another question. And here it is:

Why is it that when one is in something (i.e. in a room, in a car, in a dark cupboard that you didn’t want to go into in the first place but that fat kid with the big pony tail said it would be fun and then she locked you in, in a submarine etc Actually not the cupboard. It has to have windows), one experiences the sensation of being within the space but looking outwards. I.e. the space surrounds them. And they are in the space. So when I am in my car (which is rare these days as I leave it at my parents’ house) I feel like I am in my car looking through the window at the world outside - and indeed I am - so it’s fortunate for me that both reality and my perception of it, in this instance, correlate. At no time do I feel that I and the car are the same. Now here’s the rub - although I am within myself looking outwards it doesn’t feel the same as when I am in my car looking at the world outside. If the car-space is an analogy for the body-space then why am I not aware of inhabiting my own house and where exactly is the thing that gets the boot to open? According to this chap, and many others too, this is because the soul doesn’t actually live within the corporeal realms. In fact the body is merely a transportation device which makes everything look normal, when, actually what I am is a weird wafty waft-like thing that floats throughout my dwelling place and all around it and, most of the time, outside of it. I’m making a right pig’s chin trying to explain this but I think it means that, whilst my body houses all the bits you can touch and all those bits are speaking to each other through the grey stuff at the top that I don’t want to touch as it might make me feel a bit sick, my reality tunnels are only receptors to what I am actually perceiving from without myself, i.e. the wafty matter outside the body structure is what is experiencing my reality and it relays the info to its small, brown-haired trolley device. So I am never really within myself at all – or I am but only as I’m wafting along. I’m kind of hovering all around me. Which I suppose is why my skin doesn’t feel like a costume or my face like a mask. Because I don’t really feel like I’m inside of it. Maybe that’s what an aura is. I bet it is. Oh it is. This whole investigation was a big fat waste of time. But my hands look really weird now.

If we are all mainly waft then what would your waft look like? Mine, I think, is shimmery and cannot be limited by colour.

That is Question 2.

Question 3

If time is a blob and everything is happening right now –meaning that the past, present and future are all happening in this moment, then why did someone ask me where the toilets are? Surely if he went to them in the future then he already knows where they are now? Was he simply mocking me? Please explain.

Question 4

The same chap who talked to me about how we are never really in ourselves, and also calls me ‘the communist’, summed up his belief system in the tidy phrase, ‘no action without reaction.’ I loathe word-play. To exemplify this principle he gave me the whole, ‘If a butterfly flaps its wings in Papua New Guinea then somewhere there’s an earthquake. Maybe in Mexico.” He couldn’t be sure. This troubled me. If that’s what happens when a butterfly simply does what butterflies do best, then what happens when a tawny owl goes for a quick flit? They have a one-yard wing span. And that’s nothing. What about an eagle? Is there a hurricane in the Far East whenever a pigeon gets going? Is it just the winged and feathered ones? Could the land-bound folk or the aquatics cause such a catastrophe? When an otter splashes about in Panama is there an avalanche in the Peak District? When an orca whale surfaces in the Pacific is that what causes monsoon season in India? If so why don’t they hold the orcas down? It seems to me that they’re constantly up to no good. What happens when a horse goes for a trot or a gorilla decides to take a little stroll? If a gazelle goes for a good old run in the Serengeti must a tornado inevitably follow suit? In fact why restrict it solely to movement? If everything is everything, and everything is energy, then thought is exactly the same as action. In which case, right now, am I causing a small plumbing emergency in, say, Slough?

When I asked all these things (and more) I was reassured that it is just butterflies, and, only then, in Papua New Guinea. I have a feeling I was being handled. I researched the area, and, whilst there are many colourful species of butterflies happily in residence, nothing suggests that they have any intention of sparking off environmental emergencies. I asked my informant to elucidate and he explained that all the bad butterflies across the globe are rounded up and sent to Papua New Guinea in a ‘convicts to Australia-like’ fashion. Papua New Guinea is rife, he tells me, with bandit butterflies up to all manner of criminal larks whilst sporting berets and smoking incessantly. A heavy percentage of them, he believes, are forced into dodgy dealings with the more violent cartel but don’t actually want or intend to create destruction and devastation across the globe. Unfortunately whether it’s pre-meditated or not is by the by once the earth is up and quaking. This, I speculated, is a ridiculous notion. Why would they send all the bad butterflies to the very spot where they can cause damage on a global scale? And with only one flip of a wing? Why not send them to Belgium? Or Geneva? Where, after serving out their sentence – not a long one as I don’t think they have a lengthy life-span, an hour let’s say – they can then be rehabilitated? Why would they allow butterflies in Papua New Guinea at all if it’s such a hotspot for cross-continental earthquake activity?


That was question 4 but I think I titled it as such so this will be of little surprise.

Also – when considering the whole issue of particles disappearing, possibly into other galaxies in a rogue like manner, does this mean that when, say, a small cat tries to have a go at your eyebrows with a quick flick of retractable claw motion, just for example, will a planet in another solar system die? If so I should probably have a little chat with someone and also consider the use of this theory if I ever have to sabotage my sofa whilst it’s on one of its inter-galactic quests for universal supremacy.

Please get back to me swiftly. My mind has gone into hyper drive and I’ve just heard on the radio that the M25 is blocked. I think the two might be linked.

KP