Omega (1)
OMEGA A Satirical Phantasy 1 At around breakfast, on the dawn of a Suburban day much like every other Suburban day, I contemplated forsaking home to quest for the Truth. As usual, my preparation for the day ahead was a bowl of cereal, two slices of toast with marmalade and butter, and a cup of instant coffee. The television burbled in the background, catching the reflection of the early morning sun slanting through the window. Outside, the Suburbs was stirring. There was the low whir of the milk float, the revving of cars preparing to leave for work, the slamming of doors and the purposeful tread of commuters along the pavement towards the train or bus. Sparrows and blackbirds serenaded each other from the hedges and trees. A postman paced by oblivious to the stream of commuters as he sifted through post that he would dispense with a dull thud onto doormats already cluttered with free newspapers and unsolicited promotions. The Suburbs was where I lived. Semi-detached house after semi-detached house assembled in all directions, harmoniously separated by fences, protected from the street by hedge, lawn, driveway and garage. Each house adorned by television aerials, telephone wires, plumbing, electricity and gas. Each house self-contained, and every Suburban occupant in a world bounded by television and the garden fence. My house was no exception. And indeed I was no exception. Except that today I was not a commuter. Although I was not in the general procession of commuter traffic, I knew it to be my destiny. I was to join the daily regiment heading to the City, briefcase and umbrella in hand, to keep the Suburbs in garden gnomes, Welcome doormats and nostalgic country ornaments. I would stampede, gallop or trot to my destination, intent on a rat-race without which life had no conceivable meaning. I left my house with no purpose and no destination, envying those hurrying by with both. I ambled towards the park to mingle with the mothers with their children and the elderly with their dogs. Here, the orderly rows of semi-detached houses gave way to orderly rows of trees and hedges along well-paved paths. There were children's swings and slides, and ornamental flowerbeds. There were no clouds in the sky and the shadows had a sharpness that enhanced the plastic clarity of the perfect flowers and trimmed trees. I sat on a bench, spaced at regular intervals like all the others, indexed by a number, in this case the number One, and dedicated in memoriam to a dead appreciator of the park. The manicured lawn extended ahead, eventually meeting a hedge which secluded it from a less peaceful world where double-decker buses and family cars drove past. My mind was on many things, mostly inconsequential. What would I need to buy from the supermarket? Should I buy stamps from the post office to enable me to post the bills that needed paying? How much longer should I leave the faulty switch to the bathroom light before it required replacing? Were there really rats under the floorboards? My mind was also occupied by meditation of the Truth. There'd been an item on breakfast television that morning in which experts declared that they felt sure they were getting quite close to divining its nature. They still didn't know for sure what the Truth was, but they had a clearer idea than ever before. Or at least they had a better idea of what it most certainly wasn't. It was a fascinating pursuit, occupying so many of the greatest minds of the time. I was tempted to declare that the Truth already existed and was in the Suburbs. Surely if the Truth was evident in a life as well organised and purposeful as possible, blessed with the greatest degree of civilised comfort, where else but in the Suburbs was there the degree of utilitarian perfection which earned that description? Surely the purpose of life is in the striving towards further perfection of an orderly state. All that was needed was the tidying up of a few lawns, the elimination of litter and better municipal planning of road crossings and bus stops. The striving towards this greater perfection was constant, and, under the watchful eye of good citizens, the perfection of the Suburbs would one day become a reality. However flawless a model of perfection the Suburbs might be, I was not convinced that the Truth was really manifested in this way. The Suburbs seemed to lack something fundamental: an objective greater than its own perfection. I looked around the park and beyond, at the roofs of semi-detached houses and the greenery of privately owned trees. The Truth must be beyond all this. But if not in the Suburbs where could the Truth be found? In Love perhaps? Generations have supposed this to be so. By radiating Love, the Lover receives Love, and the Truth is revealed. One feels OK. One knows everyone else is OK. The heart ascends above the rat-infested sewer of everyday life and gallops beyond the mundane and predictable. You do only the best for others. And in return others do the best for you. Great though Love is, I thought, surely Love must be focused on an object. I regarded a woman walking purposely by on the business of her day. Behind her the sun heightened the greenness of the grass. A thrush hammered at the ground, no doubt equally in pursuit of its own business. It then took off and flew like an arrow into a tree. Perhaps the Truth is to be found in meditative contemplation of the world. The Truth is the immanence of all the world's beauty. All beauty and all reason must be in the ordered perfection of nature: the balance of the ecological order and the struggle for the most fit to survive. But is that the Truth? It is at best only the manifestation of it, not the Truth itself. And aren't there many evils in the natural world? Is it not brutish and for those not most fit rather deficient in its bounty? Divine Truth must then be the answer. I could see the spire of a church above the television aerials casting a shadow on the houses beyond. Could it be that God is the personification of the Truth? One would achieve knowledge of the Truth through God. One would become one with the omnipresence, omniscience and wisdom of God: the answer thoughtfully provided by the prophets. A Truth, however, which required Faith. And without Faith (and which Faith?) where then is the Truth? And if God personifies the Truth, what is that Truth? Religion purports to give the answer, but an answer that needs to be believed in. Not a self-evident Truth to persuade the otherwise unpersuaded. And if religion does provide the answer, then why the continued search for the Truth? And why the competing interpretations of what it might be? Ants were filing past, almost invisible in the cracks of the path's tarmac. Everywhere you look there are insects! There are more insects than any other phylum. Everywhere in the world there they are: beyond the Suburbs where the Truth lies. The world outside was totally unknown to me. I was certain that I really wouldn't like a great deal of it. Insects, for instance. I'd heard that some were really rather large and frightening. But if I were to find the Truth, I would have to face that and many other hazards. I considered other aspects of life beyond the Suburbs. I had often been told of its horrors, but some of those horrors actually sounded quite good fun. How can one know the Truth until one has lived life to the full? Which one cannot do in the Suburbs. The orgies and bacchanalia all exist elsewhere. Perhaps the Truth could be found through a life of indulgence and pleasure? But if this were so, then why have so many warned against it? Over the millennia, there have always been arguments for moderation. Perhaps a policy of moderation would lead me to the Truth. Maybe I should be content to listen to those older and wiser than I, who have learnt from centuries of history and experience, and have divined practices and customs that enshrine the Truth in tradition and received wisdom. However, although I was no historian, I was certain that there was no occasion in the past when the Truth had actually been found. And I was equally certain that traditional ceremonies and rituals were not the result of profound insight. Indeed, in the Suburbs at least, they appeared to trivialise such insights. But what is timeless are the thoughts of the great philosophers over the centuries. And perhaps one could attain knowledge of the Truth through philosophy. Perhaps there is an a priori Truth that could be found: a tautologous statement containing a greater Truth than that of its own linguistic construction. I mused on this for a while, not noticing the gentle brush of the wind on my cheeks, the insistent yapping of a nearby rat-like lapdog, nor the rumble of the Suburban traffic. I couldn't be certain that pure thought in itself could discover the Truth. The Truth must be prescriptive as well as descriptive. It is not just as an account of what there is, it is also a recipe for how to lead one's life. And there, of course, lies the role of politics, also known as the Art of the Possible. It is the means by which society organises itself to achieve all that it can do. Contemplation is wasted when action is required to improve an inequitable, unjust and inefficient world. It is necessary for trains to run on time, for people to have faith in the financial institutions, for the poorest to be provided for by those who are most able to afford to do so, for the maximisation of the greatest good for the greatest number at the most economical cost and the best internationally competitive advantage. Knowledge of this Truth must be provided by the education system. And that incarnates the pursuit of knowledge. Perhaps then, the Truth is the embodiment of knowledge, personifying all that there is already known, all that is to be known and all that it is possible to know. Perhaps the Truth is nothing more than the spirit of this pursuit. But can it also be other things? Or maybe the Truth is all things, including things it cannot be. But then how can it contain things that are not True? My mind protested and I looked at my watch. It was now 11 o'clock. Oh well! I thought, it's time for elevenses. I'll treat myself to a coffee in a café. Whatever the Truth may be, it can surely wait for that. Lunch, dinner, tea are essential signposts of the day marked by food, celebrated and served at the Archer Street Café in pounds, shillings and pence. Coffee at 17 shillings. Tea for a ten shilling note. A traditional Suburban breakfast for £2 7/-. And for me a cup of coffee and a small slice of cake for just over a guinea. The café was quite typical of the Suburbs. It was adorned by flowery wallpaper, pictures of distant meadows and valleys, a vase of plastic flowers on each Formica covered table and plastic chairs secured firmly to the floor as a precaution against theft. The café was neither empty nor full, maintaining a comfortable middle ground where there were people to look at, but none with their elbows up against mine. The customers at the café hardly warranted any attention, being the usual collection of shoppers and shift-workers either alone like myself and avoiding eye contact at all cost, or in company and focusing their eyes exclusively on each other and their ears to the affairs of the Suburbs. The state of the roads. The perennial litter problem. The rubbish on television these days. But almost all conversation came to an uneasy halt when the door of the café tinkled open and a black woman entered. There are very few strangers who ever visit the Suburbs, and usually they're visitors from other suburbs. But a black person. Very rare! This in itself was remarkable, but her impact was compounded by her wearing rather more skimpy clothes than is normal for the Suburbs. In fact, the unspoken thought reverberating among the blue rinses and hairpins was that she was barely decent. Perhaps by City standards she was positively modest, but one isn't to know much about that. All her clothes were white in significant contrast to the blackness of her skin: a white slip supported her substantial breasts, but revealed all her midriff, a short flared skirt that just about obscured her knickers, short white ankle socks and white tennis shoes. She looked as if she might have just finished playing tennis on an exceptionally hot day. Her beaded hair dropped onto bare shoulders, obscuring the straps of her slip. She walked nonchalantly to the counter and ordered a cup of tea, handing over a ten guinea note and expressed delight at all the change she was handed in return. She then picked up her tea, balanced a plastic spoon and several white cubes of sugar on the saucer, and then, for the first time since she'd entered, looked around the café. She gave an amused smile, strode towards my table and sat in the seat opposite me despite there being several other empty tables. This woman was definitely not Suburban! No one from the Suburbs would ever be so presumptuous or intrusive. She put the plastic spoon into the cup and started stirring the tea, while looking directly at me. "Hello, my name's Anna," she belatedly introduced herself. "You don't mind me sitting here do you?" "No, of course not," I said warily. "The Suburbs are jolly odd!" She announced. "I've never been anywhere so blinking reserved. You come from the Suburbs, don't you?" I nodded. "Me, I come from the borough of Baldam. Near the University City of Lambdeth. I've been travelling around, and made it to the Suburbs." She glanced around her at the porcelain ornaments of country people on horses. "And I wonder now if it was ever such a good idea coming here. What do you think?" In the Suburbs, one is never asked such direct questions. Especially not from people you've never met before or who introduce themselves without the usual excuses of circumstance. However, I coughed a little. "The Suburbs has its own virtues. I'm sure there's some aspect of it you'd like." "It's so boring!" Exclaimed Anna, ignoring my comment. "Perhaps that its appeal. There just doesn't seem to be any life here at all. It's dead! And no one wants to know you. Honestly, everyone looks at me as if I've arrived from the moon. I'm not that odd! I don't have four hooves or a furry tail. I don't have claws and sharp little teeth. Everyone here looks so much the same. And they behave like the whole world was the Suburbs. They're jolly polite enough, if you ask them the way, but they say as little as they can." Anna looked at me past the condiments in flowery plastic containers and grinned very broadly. The whiteness of her eyes and teeth penetrated through the Suburban air like beacons, tantalising advertisements of another world of attitudes and lifestyle. "Er, what do you do?" I asked, not sure whether a question that would in Suburban circles be almost as automatic as a reference to the weather or the dreadful traffic was really appropriate. Anna openly laughed, and somewhat loudly for a Suburban café. I could feel heads turn and eyes gaze malevolently towards us. I'd never be able to eat at this café again in anything like my former anonymity. "Goodness! What a jolly funny question! I just do what I blooming well like really. Shouldn't everyone?" I persevered. "I mean, what do you do for a living?" "Oh! This and that! Whatever makes enough money, you know." She beamed in paroxysms of silent mirth. "I suppose you're also going to ask why I'm in the Suburbs? You people are so predictable!" She picked up her cup and sipped from it. She put it down with a look of mild disgust. "The tea's so strong here! And the coffee so weak! I'm in the Suburbs because I just like to travel about the country. Get out and about, you know. I suppose people in the Suburbs just never do things like that!" "You just travel about the country?" "When I'm not staying in my flat in Baldam, or with friends in the City, that's what I do. I spend about a half of my life in Baldam. It's a fantastic city. The rest of my time is divided between the City and the rest of the country. There's just so much to do in the City that just staying there's like travelling the rest of the world. Have you ever been to the City?" I shook my head. "It's very expensive..." "Incredibly expensive! Fabulously expensive!" Anna exclaimed. "Everything's so much cheaper here! And whenever I'm in the City, I always earn a bit of money. Then I've got more than enough money for everywhere else." She fiddled with a gold ring on her finger which looked like it cost quite a few guineas. "But there's everything in the City! Everything! You've got to be jolly tired of life to be tired of the City! You can find whatever you want. All of life! Everything you could ever possibly want!" I couldn't help wondering whether the Truth could also be found there, but I was sure that if I'd confronted Anna with that question she'd probably just think I was trying to be amusing. "If you want to know anywhere that's the opposite of the Suburbs, then just look at the City," she continued. "Where it's so predictable here, it's totally flipping inconstant, erratic and varied there! Where it's quiet here, it's bedlam there! Where there's nothing to do here, there's everything to do in the City! And yet," Anna surveyed the Suburban world through the curtain-draped café windows, "it's mostly people from the Suburbs who work in the City." She frowned as if perplexed by this paradox. "How is it," she asked me, running a bejewelled hand through her hair, "that Suburbanites can go to the City every day and never seem to have ever been there? It's as if they go there, but never actually see the place they're in." Anna laid a wrist down on the table and studied her silver and gold bangles. One was shaped as the head of what looked like a rat eating an arrow-headed tail. She looked up at me. "Yes," she grinned. "They are worth a bit, this jewellery, but I'm not rich. I've just known some really wealthy people. You do, you know, going to Night Clubs and things in the City and being, you know, an Independent Woman. But although I wouldn't say no (not flipping likely!) if someone offered me a lot of money, I just don't think that money's what I really want out of life." "Why's that?" I wondered, hearing for the first time what was heresy in the Suburbs. I'd always believed that one could measure the success of one's life by the eventual size of one's pension at retirement. If material wealth wasn't the object of work, and if work wasn't the object of life, then what could be? "I don't know," Anna answered noncommittally, perhaps sensing the discomfiture her view had caused. "I just think that the actual pursuit of wealth gets in the way of enjoying it. And how much more enjoyment does a billion guineas give you that a million guineas couldn't? No! It just seems like just too much flipping trouble to me. And people who're rich ... okay, they're not exactly miserable, but I don't think their happiness is in direct relation to how much they earn." "What makes you happy?" Anna grinned with a quizzical furrowing of her brows. "You people ask the oddest things! What makes anyone happy? What's happy? But in the City I like going out. You know, there are oodles of Night Clubs in the City. There are Night Clubs for every taste you can imagine. Night Clubs for the wealthy. The young. The old. Students. Everyone. But not," she glanced at a blue rinsed couple nearby, "I suspect for people in the Suburbs. I just like to go out and dance the night away. And there are all sorts of music. Bebop, House, Kora, Tango, Flamenco, Fox-trot, Waltz, Lambada, everything. What do you expect me to do?"
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