Thinking
By Simon Barget
- 73 reads
What people think. Ok, what they think about you, then. What they actively actually think. You and your proclivities. Wouldn’t you like to know. Of course they won’t tell you. Oh they might, but not to your face, your silly cock-eyed face. What are the things that people are thinking about you, with reference to all the things you did and will do from now till eternity? My god, they are thinking, they’re doing next to nothing else. All these people are gathered in a hall with equipment and popcorn with you blown up on the screen with their continuous seminars about how to think about you and no one else, you as the person to be gutted and filleted, all the methods ands procedures which need to be employed to be a correct thinker of you, having regard to the involuted tradition of Kafka to Kaufmann to Truman maybe even to Narcissus, and other stupid self-involved chumps dating back to iniquity.
How horrifying, what an affront, that you are capable of transmitting observable information via all the things you do and don’t do and that all these people can use their senses and draw their conclusions. What an affront that you can’t just go round unobserved in a bag? It should not be their right only a privilege, it should be available only to those who can refrain from thought. What is their verdict then on little old you? How have you failed. Clearly you have. But it’s worse. They won’t even explicitly tell you; they’ll hint at it.
People are thinking about you now if you’re lucky. What exactly are they thinking? Which thoughts are crossing their mind? In this maelstrom of chaos we’re all subjected to, we can say with downright certainty that people, in general, the people, normal functioning people that you think might be thinking about you now or anon, whoever these people are, they are, as anticipated, invariably thinking about you. Perhaps not people from Africa or the prairie. Perhaps not people too far removed to know how to be thinking about you in this particular moment. Not people with jejune living practices who fail to own more than one iPad. Not people that you don’t really bother to think about, no, no, not them of course. Ok. It is only the people you value whose opinion you value and these are the people thinking about you now, we fear. The ones with fangs. If you looked in the mirror they’re pointing back sneering or smirking. Now: what are they thinking? Oh. My. God. Gulp, deep breath. Do you really want to know? What are they thinking?
If thoughts were concealed weapons. It would be better to know what all the people who are thinking about you now are thinking, it would be better for it to be public and open source. It would be better for it to be heard, for it to be one grand wholesome echo chamber. It would be better for it to be broadcast on a screen so you can follow and not be left wondering about all the wonderful and terrible things people are thinking about you right now, or nearish enough to now if you will. What if they are not thinking? Come on just conceive of it, allow the possibility for a second. What if they, all the people we have spoken about above, bar the people in Africa and Greenland of course, what if they are not thinking about you right now or near enough to now? How could it be? But then they will have thought, they will have thought and they will have thought, and we have to know these past historical thoughts, they must be considered and gone over and tagged on to the copy book.
All these people, damn them, these other people who are not you, goddammit, have thought so many things about you at some point in the past and you cannot stand it, rightly so, how dare they think and judge and think and judge and think, how dare they tell you you’re not good enough, how very dare they, these thousands of millions and billions of people. It hurts you know. Don’t they all realise it hurts?
These people and their inner thoughts, hidden thoughts about you, to hell with what they think about you or others. These thoughts that they are able to fully or partly keep to themselves. These thoughts which they have discretion over and for which they are accountable to nobody. Their capacity for dissimulation. Their capacity to hurt to kill to maim, to blow you away. They don’t even have to be thinking right now, they have thought before and that’s enough, oh my how they have indulged and thought. In the comfort of their homes. How they’ve sat on their chairs with that graven face of thought, how they’ve questioned and wondered about you, been bemused by you, exhibited expressions showing their bemusement, have they not got anything better to do with their time than think.
If only you knew, if only you saw, if only there were warnings or buzzers or red dots on a huge overhead domed stadium-sized map, covering the entirety of the ceiling like the night sky, each thought popping up real-time in Poland or Perm or the Eastern Seaboard or the ghettoes of China, each little thought flashing across the domed ceiling for you to see, all the content of it, the heart and soul behind it, the origin, the grimy and dirty origin.
You wish you knew these people who make it their business to think things about you, to actively and arduously think when they could so easily be not-thinking, they could be doing all the things which are not close to thought, devoid of it, and then you would be so free, so unencumbered, so breezy, so whole. You would like to be able to take yourself away from their thought loci, remove yourself from their circumference or purview. You don’t care for any ‘positive’ thought, they have never existed, you just want a cease-fire, a clean slate, a moratorium, you want some sort of cast-iron guarantee that that’s it, it’s finished, no more being thought about from now on to eternity, no more judging, no more not-knowing, being shrouded in darkness, no more endless speculation, doubt, fog, blindness, Chinese whispers, no more having to pretend you don’t already know. And then all the people who are thinking about the people thinking about you, a third degree of separation, a universe apart. Whilst they are thinking about you, the first set, the second set embroiled in thinking about them and so on, and then all the lines get crossed and who knows who is to be thinking or thought about, who can keep a clear head?
- Log in to post comments