Save vs Psychic Warfare
I had my day turn dark early this morning. I was on Twitter with the morning coffee, picking up the social validation feels from the notifications, scrolling through the feeding trough looking for opportunities to score some more, when I slid my index finger up the well polished black mirror and a jack-in-the-box manifestation of the ‘two-minute hate’ nature broke through my land of atrocity shielding.
In the offending tweet was a picture of three white rats treading water in tall cylinders that opened to a story of how, in the name of Science, some lovely fellow timed how long rats would tread water before they gave up and drowned. Then, in the name of Science, he took the next set out of the water after they had given up, let them rest, and timed how long took them to give up and drown if they’d been saved before. Our hero of Humanity discovered they’d struggle around 240 times longer than rats that had never been ‘saved’.
In those moments, it was good I did not have power over that man and his family. Since those moments, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what I’d characterize as a mixture of wroth and righteous indignation.
Now, let’s quickly dismiss what we prefer to remain ignorant of - the amount of trust we give to stories formatted so beautifully with accompanying images. My confirmation bias assures me that of the 6000+ likes reported for this tweet, exactly zero of those people did a cursory search to determine whether or not a person named Curt Richter performed “science” in the Reality we seem to share. Let’s pay no mind to the suspension of disbelief we tread when engaging our literacy.
The wroth that surged through my system when my eyes consumed what the bluebird fed me manifested as a Thunbergesque “How Dare You!”
My imaginarium shifted to a morning at an ocean beach, which human scale cylinders stretching forty feet into the air, with me on a platform that allows me to be at eye-level with the man treading water in the south cylinder, facing the three cylinders on the north. In the three cylinders along the northern edge of the platform, above the treading water on trapdoor platforms are the man’s wife, son and colleague. There I am, wide-eyed and grinning, “Okay Curt, how much longer can you tread water knowing that your fam starts drowning if you stop?!”
Then, another shift, to the backyard. There are some toddlers playing, or pets - they don’t hold consistent form. The toddler’s hitting the pet, the big dog is playing too rough with the little one. I want them to stop. I want to communicate the why of my desire. I want to hit them to instill … what, the concept of mirror neurons - empathic otherness?
The desire to communicate shifts somewhat. The cylinder struggle could be the gift of a dream. Why, there’s no real need to traumatize that Richter fella’s family, it’s he that does not see.
Maybe he does. Maybe his wife endless whittles him at home, and he finds it somewhat personally therapeutic to image the rats in the cylinders are people he knows.
It’s easy to imagine him as an atheist scientist, oblivious to the notion that ‘by the Grace of God, there go I’ or that he’s karmically earning himself an incarnation as a lab rat next go round.
Then I do the hard part. I look at my envy of his detachment. They’re just rats. If Curt were some pimply kid in his basement dropping the rats into his python’s terrarium, I wouldn’t be giving them a second thought. How ‘liberating’ it must be to not empathically cast your imaginary self into subhuman forms.
Not to imagine yourself treading water, seeing the big white blob that pulled out last time approaching again… not reaching in to pull you out… fading into the dark distance again. How many times did they approach in their labcoats where you could see, jot in their notes that you were still swimming, and walk off again?
Did they stand there and watch? Did they joke with each other? Could you hear them laughing?
Another tweet came through the trough, and despite having watched it twice I apparently neither shared nor liked it and thus am unable to dig it up and link it to you here. It was one of those feel good pieces from the animal people.
Some old mama monkey was dying and had gotten to the refuse-to-eat part. She had been raised for some time by a particular human, and he came to visit. She recognizes him with one of those ridiculous chimpanzee smiles - but she’s toothless from being all old and such and that makes it a weird kind of extra beautiful. There’s joy & hugs.
My mind offers up a clip from the documentary on Volkswagen emissions scandal about the “Science” where they pumped diesel exhaust in on chimps to give them the numbers they needed to sell people cars.
This is us, humans.
Oh Grim Oh! What really happens to us, when we sever the links in the chain. Does the Continuum continue regardless making the gap bigger and bigger separating us from them when you look back all you see is a black hole or we all just justify it and move on without looking back , keep hitting the Forward button Progress or Die!