our demoted god, A Human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 286
286
Once upon a time, when Instance made love to Repetition ... unto the great Cerebral, the one and only God, two children were born, with equally convenient names, Fact and Ideal. Now Fact took after Instance, and Ideal was the spitting image of Repetition. Both grew in perfect harmony:
“It’s all yours,” said the Fact to the Ideal.
“And yours too,” said the Ideal to the Fact.
“After you,” invited the Ideal.
“No, after you ... I insist.”
Now our God, like we mortals, had two organs for perception and was pleased at the sight. In one eye He was nearsighted, seeing only Fact. In the other, He was farsighted, seeing only the Ideal. And so it was that from this perfect distance and direct point of view, He could see in perfect harmony, Fact and Ideal, as they frolicked side by side.
I must tell the reader that it was out of love and not mistrust that He drew nearer to embrace His children. God was completely innocent, for upon arrival, only Fact had remained, only the immediate was embraced. The Ideal, so it seemed, had refused His love: God was completely blind to the Ideal at this distance — for in His approach, in His eagerness to touch, only the exception to the rule stood out, only Fact remained palpable. The Fact and only the Fact could be verified.
So it was that God was frustrated by His unrequited love for the Ideal. In bitterness, He cast himself down from heaven and dwelt among all of the other beasts of the Earth, and out of his strict and sincere honesty, made a solemn vow to crush all his precious “idols” ... all his most cherished “falsehoods.” This destruction, however, presented him with a problem, for the Ideal, “not existing in reality,” could not be grasped, let alone struck. As the reader would guess, it was not long before this cleverest of all the beasts had the solution: in short, his bad eye had offended him and so he plucked it out. And he did so in a rather brilliant manner: he walked around, set his vantage point askew of the duality ... aligned himself in such a way that the unverifiable Ideal — the idol of the mind — vanished from view ... eclipsed by Fact.
Needless to say, our demoted god felt compensated for the loss of his Ideals; the corollary to the loss of Error, or so he thought, can only be the acquisition of Truth. Real truth! He, as mortal, was pleased and congratulated himself on this perfect and necessary “refutation.” He fixed himself to this vantage point, while his one and only visible child, Fact, marched lockstep down the path, premise after premise, conclusion after conclusion, gaining distance from the fixed vantage point and adding up to ... accumulating into ... and it was just then, from his fixed vantage upon the real, that he could begin to see, step by step, the Fact repeating itself. In the next instant, a sliver of the Ideal pealed off from behind the Fact! The Ideal emerged just as when the crescent sun moves out and enlarges itself from behind the dark moon! Our error, returned! — and with a vengeance, forming a new whole and perfect repetition! Fathering that ... that mistake! “Dear me!” — the mortal shouted in a panic of rationality. “It looks like ... it appears ... This will ruin all! It is only an appearance — I am sure of that — but this new and more perfect Ideal is beginning to look like ... my Geometry ... Away! The Fact, in betrayal, embraced by the “inherent” geometry of the mind. Away with all geometry! Move! Askew! The world is absurd! It can only be seen Askew!”