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Bartalan Brennan was a Hungarian-Irish professor who held a fleeting tenure at Durham University between 1910 and 1912. He was a self-branded scientist-poet who in his time was welcomed by neither sect – a fact of which it seems he was inordinately proud. The collected lecture notes from his tenured period have recently come to be in our possession by way of a bemused librarian at Durham, who could find no evidence of Brennan’s time at the university in their databases.
These notes are our sole source of information on the man. Many of their pages are given over to repeated railings against the ignoramuses he took to be his oppressors. At no point is it specified what course exactly Brennan taught, and it is difficult to see how his ideas could fit comfortably onto any university syllabus. Whatever his field may have been, we can assume that the popularity he claims to have enjoyed among students was largely due to his evident eccentricity.
However, among the combative diatribes that make up a disproportionate amount of his lecture notes, we find the occasional treatise of exactly the sort we at The Decommission seek out. One such example is his theory of the gastric multiverse. Though to an early 20th century mind, and still to most today, the theory seems entirely absurd, it is becoming clear that we are living in a world whose rules do not conform as consistently as we had previously thought with our own conception of them.
Wild as Brennan’s speculations might appear, if we are to entertain the core idea seriously, then we must admit that the fundamental changes befalling our universe mirror what could be expected during the digestion process of one of the ‘fruits’ of which he speaks. If nothing else, Brennan presents an interesting and certainly unique vision, though at this point in time we are not equipped with the adjunctive material necessary to examine how empirically warranted was his assurance in his own correctness, and how much we should simply attribute his certainty on the matter to his inflexible character. Nor can we be sure to which sympathetic souls he refers when he speaks of a ‘we’. We are completely in the dark as to what prior information led him to develop the theory, but we believe it to be a valuable document of this newly emergent history of which it is our mission to record.
And so, in the increasing spirit of absurdity that is coming to define our times, we have given over our second issue to the publication of the theory of the gastric multiverse, as put forth by Bartalan Brennan. Printed below is the first known lecture given on the topic, edited with an eye to preserve Brennan’s characteristically rambling spirit. He is no rigorous metaphysician – it is quite typical of him to shake free of the shackles of his own systems of logic to engage in feats of unencumbered imagination. We have also done away with some of the more tedious scientific explanations and diversions into collegiate defamation which our readers would surely find superfluous.
Sept. 19th, 1911
Outside the membrane of our world there is another world of rectangular gardens separated by hedgegrowth. In every garden there is a tree, and a beast who eats of the fruit of that tree. When a beast digests its first fruit a universe is birthed in its stomach, and each subsequently eaten fruit propels that universe through a certain developmental gateway seeded within its particular core. Our conception of the cosmos would be so much richer if only the astronomers would abdicate their position and allow the true heirs of universal knowledge to take up their observations – the gastronomers. But belief in the gastric multiverse is fringe at best, despite the existence of the beasts having been proven to all of those with any intuitive feeling for such things.
Each of these creatures has a different fundamental constitution relating to one of the classical elements – earth, water, air, and fire. The beast within whose stomach our universe exists has a base temperament of air, hence the propensity of our solids – from planets to pebbles – to spread out and separate with time, gaseousness being the molecular constitution to which they all aspire.
For the sake of familiarity, we will refer to the fruits of the trees as apples. Our best estimations suggest that our universal host ate first of all the apple of light, secondly the apple of form, next the apple of consciousness (though there is much debate as to its position in the chain), the apple of evolution, the apple of civilisation… and so on, until we arrive here today with the scroll of our history in its proper order behind us. It might surprise you that this order seems to be a relatively harmonious one, if the frequency of consumption is anything to go by; our beast is a mild and sleepy creature, and its undemanding appetite leads it to hunger only sparingly for the fruits.
We can only assume that there are other beasts of a much wilder nature. But it must be borne in mind that any value judgement – in this case harmoniousness, wildness, or the desirability of a peaceful beast – can only be made from within the set valuations that our own world has bred into us. In the hearts of a civilisation for whom the dawn of philosophy preceded the dawn of form, or to one granted sight only after their definitive discoveries had been made, we can but guess at what incorrigible moral laws might stand. And we must guard ourselves against the tendency to read any kind of primacy in our own laws when taken beyond the bounds of their remit.
We could not even be sure that those abstractions of nature which we have come to use as our units of ethical measurement – justice, wisdom, virtue – are the same as those which the quarrying minds of another civilisation would draw out even from the same source. Virtue is the beauty of the soul, it has been said; to us perhaps, but poetry translates poorly even among our terrestrial languages. We can, in the end, know nothing of the souls of those living within the other beasts, but knowing what little we do, we at least have the means to speculate on the ways that their worlds might be, and in doing so elucidate a relational understanding – an appreciation even – of our own world.
Let us speculate, for instance, that in the garden just over the hedge, another beast with a base temperament of fire has eaten first of all the apple of consciousness, second the apple of form, third the apple of industry, and only then the apple of civilisation. Thousands of years of blind discovery would be the lot of those emergent beings provincial to its innards. Open the picture-books of your minds and imagine them as they feel their way along the walls of pitch-black factories, breathing the fuel of unseeable machines; feet hardened to the tread of metal, ears attuned to the whirr of gears beneath them and the thunder of engines in their skies. We are bound to imagine the objects of such a world to approximate our own; resemblances of ramparts, rails, platforms, holds, conveyor belts, chutes, the snouts of idle vehicles in rows – the apple of flora not yet eaten, remember, the inhabitants outside of any nature we would recognise, their bodies and souls unconsummated, discovering retroactively, by the work of hands, what they in fact are – knowable to themselves only through the adaptive comprehension of what has preceded them; their patterns of thought obeying laws of combustion and conveyance more suited to catalysis and the transportation of liquids and cargo than the formation of concepts.
And then suppose that their beast was to ingest the apple of light. We might assume that a universe belonging to a creature of the temperament of fire would possess light as a given, but why should fire and light be as intrinsically bound in other universes as they are in our own? Dark flames, burning in worlds we will never see! And don’t forget that the beast in question has not digested the apple of evolution, so there would be no mercy of a gradual adjustment to the light on the part of its creatures. Madness! What else could ensue?
The madness of sudden sight would send them into a paradoxical dark age. All progress would be halted; they would shield their sensitive eyes from the glare coming not only from its direct source, but gleaming and reflecting from the continental pipework and appendages of their world. Only those who went blind would continue as normal, cured of the destabilising plague that had befallen their kin. Would their beast cry out in torment at their fate? Or is this simply a normality from which we have been spared, yet no better or worse, in the final analysis, than our own?
Let us imagine another world. In a neighbouring garden, a beast with the temperament of earth has eaten first of all the apple of commerce, second of all the apple of light, and thirdly the apple of flora. What would we think of a world whose greenery was boundless but whose elementary existence was predicated on economic principles? Bartering and evaluation would arise as instinct in the foliage of such a vegetable marketplace. Each shoot that arose, each flower put forth, each limb extended would have as their most basic drives the twin needs of acquisition and forfeit. The impulse for self-preservation would be synonymous with commercial desirability. The base nature of this twin-flamed commerce would mean that, to our eyes, it would appear an orgiastic universe of the most unremitting sensuality; every plant, leaf and blade of grass crawling one over the other to sell themselves, to make themselves desirable and to devour with their own desire, to inspire the lust of all the world.
And let us not forget that in this universe the apple of form has not yet been eaten, so the arising plantlife would have no stability or consistency, and therefore there would be no possibility of classification and no basis for valuation. All things would arise unspecified in a shifting display of extravagance. Every blossom, every thorn, every tree (though of course no such nomenclature could hold) would aspire metamorphically to the highest principle of that world – beauty, we might assume – because in order to sell itself or in order that it may make purchase, each thing would have recourse only to itself as currency: expenditure really could mean only the expending of life.
What a field of competition this would be! Towers of fluctuating greenery in pure ecstatic rivalry, the principle of the marketplace laid naked, each individual strand of floral existence aspiring so that it may not expire but instead absorb – to have all other lives expire into it, to establish itself as both the supreme value and the supreme consumer, to elevate itself to what must in such a universe equate to what has been called God in our own – the totality of all existence, the vessel of all value, the summation of all units. But could such a tangle of competitive writhing ever resolve itself into anything so homogenised? Perhaps the very nature of such a world would, while igniting this striving in all its beings, maintain the impossibility of its fulfilment – for commerce is competition, and there is no ultimate economic victory. So we must assume that this universal grasping at unity would be in the end futile, and this world would remain as atomised as our own.
Yet if, in time, the beast of this universe plucked again at the branches of its tree, and there came to be stability to its forms and intelligent eyes with which to see them, what visions would result? And let us not forget that these intelligent beings would by the laws of their universe be directed by the same commercial drive as the plantlife. There would be no end to the transactional behaviour – every word would be measured and priced before it was spoken, every limb would move in a bartering dance of its own estimation of itself, every impulse would be towards the eclipsing of the fellow man. What state could such a civilisation live in but war?
And if there was an outer space in this world, what would its creatures see if ever they could find the respite to look up from the mercantile battlefield? The stars would be as the high-blown seeds of dandelions, having come only late in their existence to stasis – perhaps their journeying of light through time would present to those watching eyes an infinitesimally slow ballet of the congealment that had taken place only after the apple of form was digested. Stars settling gradually into arrangement after aeons of unrest like cosmic dust on the floor of the sky, positioning themselves not so much in spirals like our own Milky Way, but in trade routes and pathways most suited to efficient transportation. More like the lamps of a nation than the stars of a firmament. And what zodiacs might such commercialised starscapes convey? Surely this is a world under the tilting scales of a permanent, inverted Libra – the very principle of unbalance.
Permit me one more flight of fancy – a beast of air like our own, but which has eaten first the apple of morality, then – to make things easier for ourselves – the apples of form and light, and if these were followed by the apple of architecture what world might then result? Endless landscape of heart-hewn stone, but whose heart? On what precepts could morality exist in a world as yet unpeopled?
Quaint professor that I am, I can’t help but imagine this architectural universe arranged in the manner of an enormously vast college of learning, empty in the light of summer, but from the engravings on its walls down to the last page of every book in its libraries anticipatory of the minds that may later come to populate it. In place of modest courtyards immense Grecian forums. Space for the mind to breathe. Desert planes of immaculate limestone tiling colonnaded by monumental pillars, dividing all around the sky into a gallery of contemplative segments, each one containing its own star formation like stations of the cross around the perimeter of a cathedral. Dormitories and dining rooms with all furniture arranged in an undivided circle so as to banish notions of hierarchy and inspire conference of mind. Echoing halls ready to receive and amplify the enunciation of wisdoms. Corridors in their length evocative of the eternal path.
A moral architecture would have to embody a certain lawfulness within its spaces, and yet not with the severity of a courthouse or any structure in which law must be enforced. Emergent law. An aesthetic ethic! Even empty, it must be the rightful house of noble creatures. It must, by its own arrangement, exist in a pre-emptive, patient, and thoughtless contemplation of nobility – a silent, stony summoning of the very beings it longs to hold within itself. Its cool rafters tranquil dream-pools in which thoughtful gazes are invited to rest, its doorways grand enough to sermonise by stature alone on the sanctity of thresholds, its staircases rising boldly into heights while curating with care their own shadows below themselves, the light of its evenings lengthening through windows of coloured glass in streaks redolent of the immaterial truths…
But I must confess, I have slipped into that all-too-tempting error I warned against; I have been distracted by a dream of beauty and imposed my own preconceptions onto the framework of an alien world. Who are we to presume what forms morality might take were it the very first thing to appear, were it the moulder of itself and not instead employed as a tool for already developed minds? Might not its architecture prepare interminable trials for its future inhabitants? In place of well-laid tables set for harmonious discussion there may exist torture racks, instead of bookshelves brimming with benevolent wisdom there might be arranged mirrors revealing the most grotesque reflections – and those reflections might not be unfaithful; where galleries of light might have stood, pits of sharp rock awaiting the unlucky step of an ignorant itinerant. And of the visions of those two opposing worlds I have provided, how could we say which natives would be better off? By what metric could we know the needs of their souls?
These contemplations do not even begin to encompass the possibilities of those worlds which may exist. The only fruits open to our conception are the ones already eaten by our own beast. This is a dearth of whose magnitude we cannot conceive. Even more than this – we know that the fruits exist, but our classifications of them must by necessity be approximations limited by our own inadequate comprehension, and we cannot even know for certain how many fruits are currently at play in our world.
For example, there is much dispute when it comes to the fruits of weather: is there a fruit corresponding to each weather condition? A fruit encompassing weather itself? Or is weather merely a by-product of other fruits? I like to think that the first is true, if only because it pleases me to imagine that we may once have been without rain, or snow, or fog, and that there may be other worlds in which there is only fog, in which everything has taken shape within the context of conditions suited only to the gradual revelation of appearance, in which everything appears first of all as its own shadow, perhaps even wears its shadow as its primary face – it being preferable in such a world to present more truthfully in obscurity than in a clear light. And there may be a world whose beast has eaten only the apple of rain. Dark clouds raining into a dark sea. Only the pattering in darkness. A world where life may emerge only to hear; only to witness the rain. Blind frogs perched on lilypads, listening. No light to glint on their wet skin.
An aesthetic exercise I would advise: observe the world, and then begin to subtract one by one the elements that stand in the way of you and the thing you most desire to witness, in all its bare primacy. It enchants the world to ruminate on what it may once have been without, and in this harmless game of enchantment we are free to choose what to subtract. Bring yourself by this process face to face with only one thing. Alone in the universe with the object of your contemplation. The fruits teach us to appreciate everything that we have, for we can never be sure which elements of our universe arrived alone, born into a world of already contingent matter and forces – there may have been an apple of joy, of mountains, wind, reflection – all of these things we can orphan in our imagination if we so desire. And suddenly everything seems so tenuous, so melancholy, so precious.
In truth, we know nothing of the other fruits, and little of our own. But exercises such as this can teach us of what we are not, and what we would and would not desire to be. As we are now, we are awaiting the next change. What we know of our beast is that it remains in its infancy, and there are many fruits that still hang uneaten from the branches of its tree. We cannot know the future of our universe, but we can presume that we are not yet far along our path. One day our beast might seek a mate, it might wander far afield into other gardens where different kinds of trees bear different fruits – our stability is no stability at all, only a siesta in the life of a creature who will surely once again feel the pangs of hunger stirring in the stomach which is our world.