Primordial: An Abstraction

78

Weary, I sleep for at least a fortnight.

A monkey attacks the University as I lay unconscious.

It is not a big monkey but it is a powerful monkey and a purposeful monkey and the administrators don’t know what to do. They’re scared. And yet everybody more or less likes monkeys. Even the evil, destructive ones.

Prudence is required.

Faculty and staff don’t have an opinion on the matter. They left the University long ago. Or died.

Nobody here notices when people die.

Meanwhile the monkey wreaks unmitigated havoc. How are we to negotiate its hambone antics?

Right now the monkey is tearing across campus throwing bricks through all of the windows that have not yet been shattered by drunken students, deranged faculty, choleric staff and bored vandals.

“That’s no bonobo,” remarks the President, and takes refuge in a bomb shelter. .

. . inevitable postapocalyptic dreamscape clinched by the flexed biceps of Logic. When reality gets hairy, the best medicine is Hard Science.

Hard Math in particular.

Consider Euclidean geometry, namely the Pythagorean theorem — my theorem of choice:

a² + b² = c²

But even the monkey can perceive the holes in this pre- Socratic-addled configuration. Euler’s Identity presents a greater challenge:

e^iπ + 1 = 0

See how the monkey swings from the bowed undercarriage of Pure Energy to the collapse of numeric stability and the beginning of rawhide code. .

The question remains as to what is the most popular square root.

This ushers us into the realm of cubic functions.

My typewriter lacks the capacity to format seven-story equations on a mere sheet of paper.

I will need a CAD processor.

Does anybody have a CAD processor I can borrow?

Does anybody know what a CAD processor is?

Anybody? Anybody?

In any case the monkey has confiscated my typewriter and smashed it over the head of a prominent trustee, one who has donated upwards of ten million dollars to the University in the last five years alone. Needless to say the trustee is dismayed and rallies with a crowbar, but the monkey has anticipated a rejoinder and fled to the bell tower, where it attempts to dismantle the primary carillon and hollow out the upper shaft.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I am flying above a catacomb, and I am committing arson upon the haunted house of my psyche, and I am contemplating an equation related to dark energy, a (non)substance whose ontology flirts with that of the Lacanian Real.

Generally the equation makes sense.

I understand at least three-fourths of it at first glance and I can envision certain integers and combinations of integers flowing down the fiberoptic waveguides of its machinery. Integers stall periodically when they pass through the sphincter of Hubble’s constant, and the final, bottommost plateau is deceptively conspicuous in terms of its moral stance. A bird’s eye view reveals that the equation is a hoax, a kind of anaphoric pop melody that tries to be smarter that the summation of the dumb molecules that comprise its bawling physique.

The monkey excitedly concurs. . and then dies.

It loses its footing and falls twenty stories down the shaft of the bell tower into the cellar.

One wonders if the primate committed suicide or if its demise was a bona fide accident.

Unexpectedly aggrieved (yet admittedly relieved), the administrators go downstairs, gather in a wide circle around the corpse, and wait for somebody to say something nice, sipping spoiled wine from makeshift decanters.