Mind Games by Thieme Richard

Author:Thieme, Richard [Thieme, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780938326243
Publisher: Duncan Long Publications
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Introduction to “Species, Lost in Apple-eating Time”

I have to admit, I love this wee little story. It’s the best I could do at the time, trying to express the unthinkable in words.

It was the unthinkable, I think, that I was thinking, walking around the park near which I live in Fox Point, Wisconsin, thinking, just thinking. Sometimes I think aloud and sometimes I practice speeches as I walk, and I look pretty wild to those who don’t, don’t walk and talk and think with single-minded intensity, focused on what’s inside, oblivious to and not caring how it looks.

Once a young person knows that the meaningful compass is inside, they pretty much own themselves (of course, that inside self is formed in and by a community, we are social animals after all, and the communities we choose do matter, as I often said, preaching to the faithful (more or less) on Sunday mornings).

But I digress. This is no place for exploring paradoxical complexities... or maybe it is, since the walls of a self look like cellular walls inside the self or cell but like modular adjacencies when seen as parts of a whole, making up an organism, and that’s what this story is about... the angle, the point of view, the frame of reference.

Anyway, I was walking around the park, thinking of how as what-we-arbitrarily-call species evolve, the boundaries between them disappear. The names we give them go away. (Are you noticing common themes in these stories?) Think of that long banquet table at which each generation is represented by a person, we are only one person or two away from Einstein and only a hundred or so people away from a neolithic ancestor. Each person can talk to the one beside him or her, maybe to someone a couple of seats away, but pretty soon the conversation disintegrates into gibberish.

Species link to one another in a similar way. And species inhabit the universe like plankton inhabit the seas, by gazillions. Way too many to think.

And as intelligent species (and aren’t they all?) link up, I saw as it were in a fast flash forward mode, they form larger and larger organic unities, mind to mind, the language with which they previously described themselves breaking in the process (as cultures among humans mesh and merge and self-transcend), new languages emerging, until the animated sentient matter inhabiting the entire known universe is like one immense organism, parts of which like living cells articulate each through its own aperture or cultural or planetary or galactic frame a way of seeing and thinking about what exists.

It must be so, as Faisal (the character, not the real one) said in Lawrence of Arabia (the film, not the book).

One might even think the goal of the universe, if such exists, and I know evolutionary theory says it doesn’t, but what if consciousness is both a precondition essential to the emergence of conscious forms of life and an emergent property? and what if the goal is to

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