Richard May, a.k.a., May-Tzu,
not even forgotten
in the cosmic microwave background (CMB),
writes for beings which do not, and never will, exist
— something for no one.
You can meet him if you go to an empty room.
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If you find the Buddha killed upon the road,
call the street sweeper.
May-Tzu
Dr. Capgras Before the Mirrors
I’ve been replaced by an emulation, i.e., an exact copy of myself, down to the subatomic level. At least it looks that way. I’m actually not sure how many times these replacements of myself have occurred: once, ten thousand times, one of Cantor’s inconceivable transfinites or maybe an imaginary or surreal number.
Am ‘I’ actually strobing moment to moment among the shadows of shadows … of shadows of uncountable Buddhas in a quantized stream of time or recurring endlessly in some fragmented eternity? Will these replacements of myself happen in the past or have they already happened in the future?
I’m not certain if my replacements have occurred in seriatim or multiple times simultaneously or both; in each of Everett’s Many Worlds; in this universe alone. And are the replacement copies of myself really exact copies? Or am I being inexorably deleted bit by bit, inexactitude by inexactitude, memory by memory? What is there in me to be replicated in any case?
But who or what is the observer, here before the mirrors, and who or what is the observed? What could replace the shimmering image of Narcissus in the stream of water or of time? Who or what is it that thinks I’ve been replaced by an exact copy of myself? Where or when am I? Can I, or maybe it, recognize or even see myself? Maybe an imposter now asks these questions. Perhaps some unknowable number of imposter copies have also been replaced, a potentially infinite regress of self-replacements in time. Even worse, what if I haven’t been replaced?
What then is consciousness? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know. — — Oh Lord, give me consciousness and awareness, but not yet.
😉 May-Tzu
Someone asked me what Stains Upon the Silence — something for no one was about. If I knew what it was about, I wouldn’t have written it. An editor once suggested that these writings are an admixture of what Tibetan Buddhism calls “crazy wisdom” with sane folly.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6
Maybe the act of trying to understand what I have written changes its meaning, as the act of making an observation or measurement at the quantum scale changes the very phenomenon being observed. G. I. Gurdjieff maintained that all knowledge was material. Presumably then, if he is correct, knowledge and information would be subject to the conservation laws of physics.
If information in the universe is conserved, i.e., can neither be created, nor destroyed, neither added to nor deleted, then what are the implications of this for the acquisition of knowledge by individuals and perhaps even of wisdom, however defined, or for the persistence of memories?
Richard May
The unclassifiable ruminations of the author of the present work, Stains Upon the Silence — something for no one, blur the lines between philosophy, cosmology, poetry and humor. Perhaps they are conceptual free verse, surreal, pithy, sometimes sardonic. May wanders in a hyperdimensional Garden of Forking paths throughout a hologrammic Library of Babel. Each letter of his writings, and certainly the spaces between the letters, themselves, and all possible combinatoric arrangements of these, are clearly isomorphic to each point in the Cosmic hologram; linked by reverse causality to all information which exists on the future event horizon, in this series of divagations, a conceptual Drunkard’s Walk.
If May is an atheist, then he writes only for God. Aspiring to become a popular writer, he writes for beings which do not, and never will, exist. He recognizes that reality, a Rorschach ink blot interpreted as if it were a geometric theorem and a geometric theorem interpreted as if it were a Rorschach ink blot, has made parody obsolete. The libraries of the ‘future’ in each of Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds will be strewn with uncountable numbers of sublime corpses of amortal beings, who spent their endless lives attempting to determine the most optimal order of the 52 factorial arrangements of the subsections of this work, in order to extract each particle of meaning. This is certainly infinite time well spent.
“I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s palm … … … the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.” — Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, page 3
If, contra J. W. von Goethe, everything that does not exist is a symbol of the eternal, then this is certainly true of the wisdom of the present work.
Professor Kadam Isbe, Transontological Studies, Kafka International University, Akkad
