Writing

I’d been living not long in the world, when I started to notice something seriously amiss. As a toddler and even at school I assumed it was something to be expounded upon in due course by the powers that be, along with such mysteries as death, girls, and indeed boys (I was never entirely sure I belonged to that denomination). But in due course I came to understand that the reason I was never offered a reasonable explanation for this particular oddity was that nobody else had noticed it.

It happened mainly in my peripheral vision when I was in motion, although several times I was allowed the opportunity for a direct observation. And because it also tended to occur when I was distracted with schoolwork or lost in thought, it was a long time before I could accept the phenomenon as fact and not hallucination. Certain moods and circumstances seemed to enhance and accentuate the evidence; it would never happen first thing in the morning, for instance, but after lunch I learned to be on the alert, particularly when walking outdoors. As a teenager, I explored the subject tentatively with a few friends, but from their uneasiness quickly concluded that it was not to be spoken of until I was absolutely sure and prepared to stand or fall by my conviction. It’s taken me until now, nearly twenty years later, to finally feel ready to divulge my theory to the world. I expect ridicule, that is once I have crossed the first hurdle and convinced people that I am not joking. But without strong ideas and individuals intrepid enough to wave them before the cannon mouth of public opinion, humankind would still be scrabbling in the dust amongst insects and baboons.

I have dissected my thesis into three claims, and I will finish by suggesting some immediate courses of action which can be taken in light of my discoveries.

The first claim is most easily broached by a description of the events which led me to it.

The earliest evidence I can remember is when, as a small child, I was being led from my grandmother’s house to the playschool in the village. I had been quite happy experimenting with the coloured straws kept in an old pasta jar on the bookshelf for my visits. They could be connected together by means of plastic yellow hubs and spokes, and I constructed models of everything from the Titanic to Oscar the Grouch with a dexterity and flair that even my uncle Peter, an architect, found remarkable. This, along with the fact that I had no friends and several enemies at playschool, had made me obstreperous. I had to be manhandled out of the gate screaming, and my mother held me by the wrist so that I scarcely touched the ground. As we passed the postbox on the corner, I saw in the edge of my vision what can best be described as a hole in the earth by the bushes lining the pavement. It wasn’t a hole dug in the soil by a spade or foot, but rather an area about a meter square between the shrubs and concrete where there was nothing there. In Zen Buddhism, it is said that heightened states of consciousness cannot be accurately described, but only experienced; spiritual teachings are but a finger pointing to the moon, and not to be mistaken for the moon itself. Similarly, I have no way to precisely convey a phenomenon of which I am to date the only observer. But I can offer some approximations. A section of the earth had been omitted, and the result was a dark, pulsing blank. I believe my young brain was struggling to process this information, for I saw in succession a black void, a trembling and translucent membrane like a jellyfish, then a writhing polychromatic blur which seemed to be racing away from me while never getting smaller. I stopped crying at once, but was swept away in my mother’s grip before I could see any more.

The experience was repeated often throughout my childhood. Once on the bus to town for Christmas shopping with my parents, I saw a gap in the façade of an office block where a doorway seemed to have been erased. Pedestrians whisked by without taking any notice. At a football match to which I was taken, reluctantly, by a friend, I saw a dark vacuum occupy the space of three seats in the opposite stand. On hillwalks I would see cavities in the clouds and once, on the shores of Loch Ness, while my companions scanned the deep sardonically for monsters, I was transfixed by a vast chasm which split the water in two and sliced off a surrounding wall of Urquhart castle. As much as I wanted to scream ‘Nevermind the damned monster, there are holes in the universe!’ I kept silent. My friends at college had been hard-won, and I had learned to keep my more original thoughts to myself. I am sure many of the world’s visionaries have experienced similar conflicts within themselves; the integrity of one’s insights must never be compromised by the desire for popular acclaim or the prospect of sheer relief in telling all, even before the world is ready to listen. It is an intensely lonely road.

The Gaps, my adopted term for the phenomenon, always occurred in inanimate objects. I was never faced with the horror of a man without a face or an animal with an erased torso, although I often dreamt about such things. Because of this, and the fact that my gut response to the Gaps had always been fascination and attraction rather than terror, I began to suspect that the purpose of my being afforded these visions was benign. This was no aberration of nature or evil portent; I was being asked to learn something. I considered the possibility that I was a first-hand witness to so-called Dark Matter or black holes, and concluded that this was plausible but somehow irrelevant. The questions I had to ask were more human and philosophical: what did gaps in the fabric of our normal experience of reality say about that reality? Was the world merely a stage with flaking paint and rubber nails? I also surmised from the difficulty of communicating the experience to others that the riddle I had been appointed to solve was very profound. Despite my exceptional skills in sculpture and painting, I have been unable to produce a good likeness of the Gaps despite years of trying.

It was during art school that I finally found my metaphor, the key which has unlocked my most revolutionary insight. I had been studying impressionism and modernism, Monet, Klimt, Kandinsky. I felt a deep connection with these artists, as though they were trying to communicate to me a specific message. It was the notion of multi-perspectivism that finally burst the dam. Studying Picasso’s ‘Still Life With Bowl and Fruit,’ my eyes saturated with the burnt browns and oranges, I suddenly hit me. I had been focussing on what the Gaps were themselves, when the answer lay in what the Gaps said about the rest of the world.  When Van Gogh paints with thick vulgar strokes, he forces us to see not just the picture, but the paint with which it has been made. The Gaps I had been seeing since childhood were likewise designed to make me see the hand of the artist who created everything surrounding them. God was an artist. Not only that, but they wanted us to know They were an artist. They left me the Gaps so that we would finally understand.

The first part of my thesis thus runs as follows:

1)    God didn’t finish the world.

They left wet brushstrokes, sometimes didn’t colour right up to the edges of the canvas. These omissions were what I had been seeing all along. This may seem outlandish to some of you, but to me it was like switching on of a torch in the darkened basement of my lonely life. It was simple, inevitable, holy and true. I spent three days in bed after my epiphany, gazing raptly at the ceiling whereon I saw myself dancing in perfect circles with my partner clasped to my breast, united at last by destiny.

Soon though, the implications of my discovery pressed in upon me. God being infallible, why would They leave evidence of an unfinished creation? These were not the shortcomings of a second-rate eighteenth century landscape water-colourist, they were the formal flourishes of a modernist master, designed to draw attention to the act of creation itself. The fact that I am the first person in history to see these Gaps leads me to infer that they reflect a recent decision of the Almighty. God has simply been too good an artist. Grown impatient with our inability to see Their art as art, They have allowed me to observe his brushstrokes upon the void, or rather the places his brush did not reach. This means that They want us to think of the world not as something inevitable, but as something proposed by Them from Their own perspective. No doubt there is rich scope for theologians in the apparent contradiction of a boundless and omnipotent Being having a limited point of view; I leave such matters to them just as I leave the black holes to the scientists.

Shortly after my first revelation, it occurred to me to try to answer a question which should have long been obvious, but which I had never properly addressed: were the Gaps permanent or temporary? During lunch hour, I went to the bottom of the stairwell in the main building where I had last seen a Gap beside the janitor’s cupboard. It was now nowhere to be seen. The plaster of the wall under the stairs was smooth and solid to the touch (it may have been my imagination, but I thought it also have smelled of new paint). This intrigued me enough that I caught the bus home to my parents, verifying along the way that all the old Gaps of my childhood, including the very first one by the postbox, had disappeared. I spent the weekend mulling over the new evidence at home, and catching up on homecooked meals and laundry.

I am now convinced that the reason for the filling-in of the Gaps is contained in the next claim of my thesis:

2) God isn’t finished with the world.

By this I mean that God obviously came along (in whatever manner the Divinity deigns to come along) after I had visited each of these places, and simply painted over the Gaps. It didn’t take me long this time to deduce Their intention: They wanted me to know that They are not an absentee Creator, that still around and working on Their creation. Further, They want us to appreciate the created, called-forth nature of the universe. Reality as it stands is not inevitable; by revealing to me its status as a work-in-progress, They invite us to consider Their choices, and their technique. God invites us to critique Their work. If They painted it this way, could They not have painted it some other way just as well? By leaving a breadcrumb trail to the door of this realisation, the Creator clearly wants us to consider the possibility of the world being otherwise. And by emphasising the issue of perspective, They invite us to see that They are not the only entity in the universe that can adopt a perspective and create from it. What God is driving at, I now feel certain, is that by bestowing liberty and creative instincts upon humankind, They have given us the means to shape reality from our perspective.

This, then, is the final claim of my great thesis:

3)    God wants us to realise the metaphorical nature of our reality.

God, an Impressionist, does not want us to take the world literally. It is more a suggestion from Their own point of view. They paint the world in broad strokes, mottling and swirling with stucco, oil and mud, Their brush sometimes drying and missing spots completely. They do this to encourage us to finally take possession of our free will and have a go ourselves. When They manifest a tree or a loch They are saying ‘See? It’s easy. Now try for yourself’. That humankind is at liberty to change the laws of physics and causality, to dabble with nature and the very rules of life with no boundaries other than the artistic, and that all we have to do was realise it, is the mighty thunderclap with which I now propose to wake the whole human race. I trust that in the face of my already overwhelming evidence, my MPs and representatives will present my theory immediately to the government so that no time is wasted in integrating my discoveries with the workings of societies everywhere around the globe.

I am presently at work on a full exposition of my theory in book form, but as I fear it will take some years to complete I have offered this short outline of my life’s work so that our best minds can be put to work on the task of drafting the new constitutions and structures which will obviously be needed in light of my findings. I take no great credit for any of this. I have been at the most a cryptographer, and a slow one.

I would like to conclude for now with some brief proposals for first steps towards the new World Order. I am much too modest to pretend to be the best qualified person to oversee this, but as I have been living with the new truths longer than anyone in government, I feel it is my duty to offer my observations on what needs to be reformed. I have restricted myself to the most radical and fundamental overhauls, although I suspect my discovery will ultimately leave no corner of human life unchanged.

A full review of the laws of physics must be conducted. Possible adjustments include the abolishment of gravity in favour of a less restrictive and more aesthetic force, such as the attraction of objects according to the harmony of their colours. The laws of force, heat, and mechanical and electrical energies must be scrutinised similarly. In general changes should be made in favour of greater human freedom, so that the world responds more to humans’ will and artistic desire than their physical capabilities. If humankind decides that the Earth would be better placed in closer proximity to the centre of the solar system, for instance, it seems frankly churlish to disallow it the means to do so.

On the biological front, I could suggest numerous improvements on the conditions imposed upon human beings. Chiefly, I would scrap the need for both sex and defecation. These two acts alone have done more to demean us and keep our minds in the gutters than centuries of human cruelty and avarice. If we are to focus our species-mind on creativity and art-as-life, we should take more care of the spectacles to which we daily subject our minds. It is difficult to consider noble artistic evolutions from a lavatory block.

Lastly, in the area of governance and organisation of the species: no existing form of government provides an adequate model for our new reality. I propose the abolition of traditional rule in favour of a rotating panel of World Art Critics. The main job of these officials will be to appraise the artistic visions of our foremost individuals in a laboratory setting. Those artists whose work is found to hold the most elegance, functionality and overall benefit for the human race will be approved for public commissions. In this way, we can ensure that our striding Picassos are given the reins and not our fumbling politicos.