A Conversation Over Brunch

Tam and I are in Tucson.

It is not one of our favorite places, and it really lacks the warm salty ocean and a beach, but we are here helping her family through some big changes.

Tam was here for a month, and I just got here after finishing all of the to-do lists for all of our rentals. Everything is fixed, sorted, and they are all rented. So I came to Tucson to help. And, hopefully, get out and explore in the desert for a while.

In the meantime, I have been trying to do some fiction writing. I mentioned in an earlier post that I wanted to work on it more, so… Well. Here goes.

I think this would be called “A Conversation Over Brunch”

I hope you enjoy…

I took myself to brunch today, just for the opportunity to touch base with myself and see how things have been going. I picked a small quiet cafe with a good view of both the patrons and the street in front. I would have preferred a quaint street-side cafe in Venice with brightly-colored vespas zipping around ponderous delivery lorries, or in Sri Lanka, eating spicy curries and watching feeble tuk tuks dodging government buses barreling down crowded streets, but I am here in the US, with an occasional Tesla whispering past at a reasonable, safe pace. Different times, different cultures, different visuals, I suppose. Regardless, this was a good enough place to have a conversation with myself.

I probably overdid it on the coffee. I usually do if I am allowing myself the guilty pleasure of a greasy traditional American breakfast. Maybe I was a little jittery, a bit anxious, but I was feeling the onset of that old, familiar, comforting discomfort, like a high tide rising inexorably above the beach and into the front yard. Why do I do this to myself all the time? I can never just relax. I am never comfortable in my own skin. I know I am an anxious human, and coffee makes it worse. Why do I torture myself? I thought this to myself with the words formless in my mind. I thought the thought had been rhetorical, so I was surprised to get an answer from my Self.

   “That is a good question. Why do you do this to us?” my Self responded, unbidden, the question catching me off guard.

   “Uhm, why should you care? You say I do it to ‘us’, but you are the one who always calms me down. You know that when you are engaged I always feel more at ease, right?” I asked my Self.

   “Yeah. That’s right. And you think that comes without some effort?”

   “Sorry. Yeah, I guess it does. Honestly, the reason I do it is because I am trying to get my muse fired up. That little caffeine junkie goes straight to work when I get some coffee in me. I was going to try to get some writing done after I checked in with you,” I said, feeling strangely guilty about it as I did.

   “Oh, thanks for that,” was the terse response.

   “I’ve always thought that I have a muse,” I said, quickly changing the subject back to save myself the guilt. “Aren’t we all similarly afflicted and blessed with some occasional creative visitor? They just identify her as the muse. But why ‘Her’? Why do we generally think of our creative compatriot as a female?” I asked.

   “What? I was thinking of something else.”

   “Try to pay attention here,” I said.

   “I have stuff going on too, you know?”

“What…” I started, but decided to let it go. I continued: “Why do we always assume the muse is a female personification? We anthropomorphize the idea of a ‘creative self’ into the personification of a stereotypical female artist whenever we think of her,” I said, and had a quick mental flash of a scruffily beautiful woman in torn jeans, tank top and leather apron, a grinder in her hands throwing showers of sparks off some hulking bourgeois piece of metal sculpture. “Shit. See. I just did it there too,” I admitted.

   “Speak for yourself. I know it — the creative thing — and it is decidedly not a female form.”

   “What is it then?” I asked.

   “We are all the same in here, brother. Me. It. We. Them. You. It’s all the same. We are formless, like everything.”

   I had to consider this for a moment. I sipped at my coffee that had become cool as I thought. “Im not sure I get it,” I said, a little more thoughtfully, “it’s just you and me, right? The muse just stops by and visits once in a while.”

   “Just you and me?” The reply had an amused sense about it.

“ I mean, yes, it’s always just been me and you. Me out here, and you — Little Me — in there,” I said with less conviction than I would have liked.

There was no reply.

  “Where did you go?”

Still no reply.

   I felt a strange void — anxiety-inducing again — start to seep, tingling, through my skin for several long seconds, and the sensation faded almost immediately as there was a response, finally.

   “Sorry. I was busy.”

   “Busy? What are you doing in there?” I asked, wondering what my inner self could be doing without me directing. I am in control of him, right? Certainly not the other way around, I thought.

   “You know there is no difference if you are talking or just thinking, right? Your thoughts are mine, and mine yours — sometimes. You don’t seem to be getting this. You are We, and We are You.” Again, there was a slightly amused feel to the response. I could almost sense the smile in it.

   You couldn’t blame me, but I had to test this theory. It was childish, but I had to try: Like right now? You can tell what I am thinking? I tried to think this without formulating words, just letting the thoughts arrive in some ethereal form, without dialogue, quotation marks, or structure. It felt funny, like trying to trick yourself into a surprise.

   “Yep.” was the succinct reply.

   “Well, shit. How am I supposed to get any privacy,” I asked, rhetorically of course. I got an answer anyway.

   “What do you need privacy for? I said it was all the same in here.”

   “Im really not too sure I get all this,” I said.

   “You called me ‘Little Me’ a bit ago. Why was that?”

   “Well, you are in there, in me, so you must be smaller,” I suggested.

   “Hmmmm. That is some ego.”

   “Oh shit. Are we going to do Freud?”

   “No. But if I were to use Freud to describe our consciousness in this physical form it wouldn’t matter. We — all three of Freud’s concepts of Us — are still ‘in here’ and ‘out there’ the same. If we limit ourselves to Freud’s viewpoint, that is.”

   “O-kay,” I said, knowing it sounded defensive. Maybe a bit lame.

   “Listen. You seem a bit thick on this whole thing. It is a lot bigger in here than you understand. Everything is in here. Everything. It is —“

   “Like the TARDIS!” I interrupted, referring to the Time And Relative Dimension In Space vessel from the Doctor Who series. I smiled in spite of Myself. Maybe it was possible to surprise yourself, I thought.

   “Childish.” The response sounded a bit like an uptight old schoolmarm who must maintain her decorum at all costs, but secretly thinks the misbehaving child is quite funny. The hint of a smile unfurled in the corners of the tone.

   “Sorry,” I muttered, feeling a bit like that scolded schoolboy, but also still smiling.

   “So, you may think of me as ‘Little Me’, but I fill this space inside of what you think of as ‘you’ completely. There are no boundaries between any of us, and we exist in the same infinite space, so, as you can imagine, we are all the same size. We are all infinitely small and infinitely large. We are all the same us: I. Me. It. We. Them. You.”

   “Sounds crowded,” I said.

   “We are all here. All the time. You are looking at it wrong, though. Consider for a moment infinity: There is no boundary, no end, no eventual looping back on itself. It can never be crowded.”

   “The old thing that if given infinity, a troop of monkeys would perform Mozart or some crazy thing like that?” Maybe I was challenging this too much now.

   “Precisely. Infinity. There is a lot of it.”

   Again, I could sense the smile in the response. Smart ass, I thought.

   “Well, I am you, and you are me. We are the same consciousness. Therefore the same smart ass.” And I could feel the smile nearly become a laugh.

   “In all seriousness, we are all in here. All of your freaks and misfits, shoulder to shoulder with your martyrs and saints. The angels of your good are here, as well as the demons of your bad. The obsessive and the sociopath. The sublime traveler and the pioneer of the divine. We all exist together in here.”

   “That sounds sketchy and tenuous. It sounds like a powder keg about to explode,” I said.

   “That’s true. It certainly can be, as you have plenty of past experience with. Ultimately, it’s about acceptance. With that, it can be good. Balanced.”

   “I have had some tough times, yes. But why acceptance?” I asked.

   “You will never understand the unity of the whole until you embrace them all. Each and every one. You have to listen to each one in turn to understand their place. You need to accept all of these parts of your consciousness. The good and the bad equally. You are defined and driven by these component pieces. Each one has its place and its ratio to the others. When you fail to accept any one character, it will fight for acknowledgment and grow out of proportion. Accept that you are the sum of all of these and they all exist in harmony within you. Yes. Get to know your demons and accept that they are yours. Just so with your Angels.”

   “This is all very Schwartzian,” I said.

   “Define it how you choose, but it is what it is. It is the reality of your consciousness.”

   “So what am I then?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, I am just ‘Me’, right? Just as you say, just this sum of every character I contain? Every urge and obsession I have ever had? Every panic attack? Every action that has caused me shame and guilt? Embarrassment?” I asked, fighting the negativity that arose in me.

   “Yes, but also all the joy, pride, satisfaction, benevolence, and peace.”

   “I guess so,” I acquiesced, feeling a little better. “So, again, what am I? Am I Me or We?”

“Of course you could be perceived as ‘I’ or ‘Me’. As a collective, we all form that individual consciousness. So, ultimately, yes. Define it how you like.”

   “You are talking about this physical body?” I asked.

   “Now you have gone a bit off the rails again. We are talking about consciousness here. The consciousness is, as I have said: infinite, a collective of all of your ‘characters’ if you will. The body that you are piloting around in currently is just a squishy bag of stardust. The two are truly only related in that they exhibit a small amount of control over one another. It is an uneven symbiosis. Yes. At any given time one of this infinite cast of characters will have some control over, or benefit from, the physical. At the end, the laws of physics will have more control as entropy takes its toll on the telomeres and our physical being ages and dies. But, the consciousness is separate, in that we don’t know how attached it is to our physical being. It may go on. It may not.”

   “So we don’t know after that…” I started to object.

   “No. We don’t. Isn’t that just the beauty of the whole thing?”

   “We also can never know the answer to the question of when. Im not sure I see that as beautiful,” I said.

   “If we knew the answer to that, then we would squander away the time we have until the end. We would all wake up on the morning of our last day, wailing in denial and trying to bargain for more time, because we knew we had wasted the lot. We would never understand the gift of presence, or of the undeniable need to be present in every moment.”

   “So, by not knowing, we, I mean I… I mean… shit. We can only truly be present and experience all the life that we have in this physical form because we don’t know when, or even what, for that matter, the end might be.” I stopped and looked up at the street just as a squirrel darted out from in front of an electric vehicle whispering quietly along, its tires nearly silent. Lucky little guy, I thought.

   “Yes. Aren’t we all, though?”

   “He wouldn’t have been if he hadn’t been so quick.”

   “But he still would have been. He was given the gift of this existence, the same as us. To open our eyes on just one day is the greatest gift we could ever receive. Whatever — and whenever — the outcome, it doesn’t change the fact that we were allowed to experience our own consciousness for any amount of time.”

   “Wait a minute. You said ‘when’ a few times,” I started to say.

   “You sure you want to go there? We have been over some deep stuff already.”

   “Might as well keep going now.” I said.  ‘The wheels are grinding up there, and while the machinery is clunking along, I might as well add some more. I have a little more of this in me still.”

   There was another strange pause, just seconds, but, again, it brought with it a deep, uncomfortable loneliness. Just short of panic.

   “Why do you keep doing that?” I asked.

   “What? Sorry, I was doing something else.”

   “What could you possibly be doing in there without me? Without me knowing? And why, every time you disappear like that, do I get hit with this fucked-up anxiety?”

   “ For that we have to continue further down into the Freudian rabbit hole. You want to do that right now?”

   “Maybe just a quick explanation? Is it about balance? About the superego? You did reference Freud,” I said.

   Again, the tone felt less mocking than just playfully teasing: “I assume you think you are the superego. I am going to drop that just here, because that is a completely different discussion.”

   “But —“ I started.

   “Nope. That one is for another time. Thats it, actually. We were about to talk about time. You keep questioning my use of the word ‘when’, and rightly so, but I don’t think you really understand your question.”

   “Im not too sure that I was questioning it. I guess I am more curious of your definition of ‘when’. The way you reference it feels strange to me. I wonder if this is why you disappear on me every now and then for a few seconds.”

   “What is a few seconds, really?”

   “Well, you know. Its three seconds,” I said.

   “Yes, you could define it like that. That is what is probably the most comfortable, all things considered.”

   “What things considered? A second is a second. A minute a minute. Hour an hour. And so on. That is indisputable I think,” I said, with self-righteous objection.

   “It is, in the need for some sense of scale to offset the discomfort of understanding the idea of nonlinear time. The human consciousness is not well equipped to deal with nonlinear time. It’s much like the idea of infinity: it just doesn’t fit well in the limited imagination of the consciousness, so you need to create a construct in which it all fits nicely. It isn’t your fault. Not really. It is just the way it has always been. I use the term ‘when’ because there is no real way for you to understand time. Until, of course, you can embrace the idea of nonlinear time.”

   “I — ” I started.

   “Listen. What you need to understand is that everything is happening now. Simultaneously. There really is no linear progression to time. If you think about our consciousness, it’s all just probability fields being collapsed, but a probability field is infinite and timeless until it becomes finite at the time of its collapse. It is probability, so it is always and everywhere at once.”

   “But, I — ” I tried again.

   “You need to spend a lot of energy on this as a concept if you want to accept this. It is not an idea that is natural to a sentient consciousness. Your limited ability to accept the absence of time limits you, so you create a timeline for every event to occur in. It’s no different than trying to create a scale for infinity. The idea is just too big to fit — at least without a lot of practice anyway.”

   “So you see this all clearly?” I asked.

   “Yes.”

   “I thought you were Me, and I was You, and Everything was All That, and it makes no sense at all why you say you can see this, but I am not allowed to,” I said, recognizing immediately that it sounded petulant.

   “Remember at one point I did say that my thoughts were yours — sometimes?”

   I was beginning to feel a vertiginous sense of being detached from any solid foundation in the conversation. It may have been too much to take in all at once, but it felt like I was drifting through some really uncomfortable truths that weren’t all fitting together in my head. They seemed correct — intuitive — but they were really difficult to get ahold of, like catching eels barehanded. “Yes. I remember you saying that, but…” I tried to object.

   “These are all things that you will need to accept to move forward. The goal is that, through your acceptance, you and I ultimately share everything: knowledge, self-awareness, enlightened-ness” — there was another sly little tone of a smile with that one — wisdom. Call it what you like, but we hope that, at some point, we will know everything the other knows. We will exist in perfect harmony, within and without, infinitely, and in all time. All of us.”

   “When…” I began, and interrupted myself.

   “Y… ” I started again, and interrupted myself again. “Not when, I guess, but, okay, not where either I guess, so, ah fuck. When is this supposed to happen?” I asked, feeling like I was drowning, being forced under by the heavy detritus swirling in the waters of thought.

   “I don’t know.”

   “Seriously?”

   “How am I supposed to know?”

   “If anyone it should be you. You seem to be the one with all the answers,” I said.

   “I know what you know and vice versa. If I give rise to a thought, or a concept, it is because you have already thought it. Everything I know you already know, or at least suspect, whether or not you admit it to yourself or accept it. I told you we are all the same in here: I, You, We, Us, Me. We are all You, and You are all Us.”

   “So, you are my intuition? My thought without restraint? My instinct without

constraint?”

   “Yes. Just as you are mine. Just as you are your demons and angels, as they are you. Just so with all of us. At some point you will understand to accept this. At that time we will all be in compete harmony. Our consciousness will then supersede each of the individual components and we will be whole. You will have to learn to accept.”

   “When — I just did it again there — is this supposed to happen?” I asked

   “I don’t know. We don’t know. All you have to do is accept it as it is.”

   “But…” I tried.

   “I do not have the answers. Maybe it happens while you are meditating tomorrow. Maybe it happens when we die. Is it after we live every possible probability? Does it take an infinite number of tries? Maybe we get an explanation somewhere along the line. Is it at the final moment that this squishy bag of stardust succumbs to entropy? Perhaps we just cease to be and never get an answer.”

   I thought about all this for a while. “I would like to think that we are going to achieve some sort of harmony at some point. Some kind of peace. Maybe at some point when we can appreciate and enjoy it. Have some time to exist in that state without the anxiety and struggle. Maybe it would allow me to relax finally.”

“That sounds nice. Reassuring.”

“It does,” I said.