Cleave the Sparrow

by Jonathan Katz

Appreciate the question, says Crick, which reveals with great efficiency the depths of your ignorance. Clearly, we’ll need to blow up the cosmic projector that manifests the Earth, which is precisely what my tech delivers. But it’s expensive—$7 trillion for the prototype, hence my need for high office and this humiliating grovel of a debate. Can I ask you a question now?

You know women can size-up potential mates in less than a tenth of a second? You know how that’s possible—because it’s not a goddamn analysis. It’s just biochemistry. There’s no love story for us. You’re always gonna want that, and it’s never gonna happen. It doesn’t matter what you do. That’s your heroin, Tom. That’s your heroin.

But as my old mentor the Stonefish once said, there’s only two ways to live this life—open or closed. Open yourself up, and pretty soon you’re waiting in a van outside Howitzer House, with a bag on your head, duct tape over your eyes, and an unenforceable waiver in your pocket. You know it’s going to hurt like hell, but you always finish the burrito.

So everything I think I know is based on faulty data collection? — Garbage in, garbage out. — And recognizing my own ignorance is the start of true knowledge? — 95% of the matter and energy in the universe is dark, Tom. It’s inaccessible to human senses. Best case scenario, we see less than 5% of reality. For you, it’s probably less.

THE YEAR WE ELECTED the robot president, everyone was getting high all the time.

Course you weren’t, she says. Because there’s only one path for you, for any of us. And you can walk down it with your eyes closed if you want to. But you’ll bump into a lot more shit that way, and when you get to the end, you’ll have missed everything.

The body is one but has many members, she says. We are the meek little bird and the executioner, both. The knife and the sparrow. We are the microscopic cells in its anatomy, exploring the world as cells do, as beautiful fleeting bits of life, dancing into and out of existence like cosmic foam, forgetting and remembering and forgetting our connectedness to the whole. In and out. Again and again. Over and over. And you can know this, Tom. You can know it but divide it not asunder. For to find ourselves, we must always cleave the sparrow.

Odd, don’t you think, that everyone always talks about killing baby Hitler, but no one ever talks about going back to comfort him, help him through art school, and so forth. It’s always kiss kiss bang bang with time travelers.

Donald Hoffman, back in our century, posits that spacetime is simply an interface—an abstraction manifested through human evolution that helps us interpret the reality of monads in ways our primitive brains can better understand. He compares spacetime to the desktop on your personal computer. Those little icons aren’t real, of course. That’s not the way computers actually work. There’s no tiny recycling bin inside the monitor. But if I took away that interface, and now you had to toggle millions of transistors on and off, every time you wanted an eggplant emoji, you’d never get any emails done.