A Story so Untrue You Have to Believe It’s Real

On foot from Edinburgh to Canterbury for a once-in-a-decade conference on ‘What It Means to Be a High-Functioning Humanzee in a Mythological World’, we are discussing the cultural fallout of ‘phase three scholasticism’, which has rocked the academic world and the Catholic Church in Ireland, and is responsible for the suicide of at least five university deans and three bishops, as well as the war between the Irish and the Brits. The discussion is heated and many of us are on the verge of tears. What’s worse is that this discussion has little to do with the nature of the humanzee in a mythological world, a topic which unites us all in disgust and/or excitement. For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the humanzee, I recommend you read the outstanding work of short fiction entitled (rather imaginatively) as The Humanzee. 

My name is Lubbert Das (and not Ebeneezer Badfellow as my birth certificate erroneously states). As I said, my friends and I are on our way to Canterbury. The UK is a warzone, or at least it was until the British capitulated to the demands of the Irish. But even now Irish warplanes are mopping up the rebels in Belfast and the north of England. Our excursion is being documented by the infamous writer Henry Applewheel who has taken a curious interest in matters relating to what he calls ‘escalating post-historical hybridity on the move’. Applewheel, as some of you may know, is the author of a Spenserian sonnet-cycle about St Francis’s dialectical engagement with Benedict Spinoza in 18th-century Berlin. Sadly, Applewheel’s poetry has received very poor reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and there’s nothing you can say to convince the philistines in the media that St Francis and Spinoza not only knew each other but knew each other intimately. That this is true is easily verifiable and is a matter of public record in the Berlin archives. Germans, though they may not talk about it much, are taught at a very early age that the venerable saint and philosopher met weekly at a beer-house (long since destroyed) and were known to local drinkers as ‘the two schmucks’. It is unfortunate that so-called learned people outside Germany know next to nothing of this. 

Also joining us on our journey to Canterbury is Timid Timo, a self-declared ‘committed bijection specialist’ who departed his father’s piggery for the last time on Easter Sunday. Some days he can think but not walk; other days he can walk but not think. (It is a genetic condition and should not be held against him.) Today, however, he is walking and thinking. This feat can be attributed to the healing properties of a new strain of marijuana grown in the hothouses of Scandinavia. What is Timid Timo thinking? His thoughts are often ridiculous and today is no different. He is thinking of eating an ostrich egg, the shell included. His thought is true in all worlds, he says, including worlds where ostrich eggs do not exist. That is the kind of absurdism I am talking about.  

Some of the consubstantialists among us have particular ideas about what is and isn’t the case, and Timid Timo’s thought about an ostrich egg is evidence that linguistic repression in childhood does not mean cognitive aptitude in adulthood is “necessarily noxious to the point of tedium”. This, of course, runs counter to the thesis put forward by the medical journal The Lancet, which last month published a paper claiming to have found evidence of a “noxious strain of tedium” in the brain of Latvian prime minister Arturs Alberings. This is the very same publication that in 1974 boasted of having found undeniable proof that Abraham Lincoln didn’t exist in the real sense of the word. To be fair to The Lancet, the idea that Lincoln wasn’t properly real is a belief still held by the majority (79%) of Russians, according to a recent survey conducted by respected pollsters in Belarus.  

Also on our journey south is Big Jim Cooper, recent recipient of the Order of the British Empire. “Twenty times this summer I’ve handled rough edges like they were old friends”, he boasts to my wife, who is not listening because she is still unable to disprove Christopher Marlowe’s theory that short people are liberals and tall people are conservatives. (I should have mentioned earlier that my wife had joined me on this excursion but she’s a very private person and doesn’t like the publicity.) Political categories are not my wife’s strong point, though there’s absolutely nothing she doesn’t know about Marlowe’s time in the libraries and whorehouses of Manchester where he met Shelley and Keats and became a committed nihilist (alluded to in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent).  

Big Jim (OBE) is set to deliver a keynote speech at the Canterbury conference but all he has so far is the title, which cannot be broadcast for legal reasons. Without a speech, Big Jim will resort to stories of his past life as a female wrestler in ancient Japan. That is all well and good, but such stories get us no closer to the role medieval myth played in the war between Ireland and Britain. Indeed, if it were up to me I’d take this text and expand it with fallacious gossip about the Catholic Church in Ireland and present it as a lost document from 11th-century England, a document that proves for all time that Máel Sechnaill mac Máel Ruanaida, was none other than an upper-class English gentleman groomed by the Irish and installed as the first king of Ireland in order to secure a lucrative trade route between Cnoc na Teamhrach and the semi-autonomous region of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (England). 

There is a legend (or at least a rumour) that Máel Sechnaill, whose real identity is Mountjoy Scott, the Earl of Ardenforde, spent many a happy year on the Old Kent Road (formerly Watling Street) in South-East London. At the same time, a political operator known as The Eye did spy on Lord Ardenforde as he preached political unification between the Irish and the English. And all South-East London did listen most attentively to his wise sayings. But The Eye, a jealous man with a hook for a heart, did gather false evidence against Lord Ardenforde. There was a great howling and gnashing of fangs in the citadels, and The Eye was tasked with arresting Lord Ardenforde on suspicion of being an IRA terrorist and arranging his deportation to Ireland. For it was at this time that Ireland and Britain were edging towards war, there being mistrust on both sides. Meanwhile the Scots were preaching war against the English and the Irish for reasons that have never been made clear. However, the Scots, though derided by many in England, were considered a useful bulwark against the monstrous doctrines of the Irish, but only if Scotland could be purged of its troublemakers and made to bend the knee at London’s door. And that is how the Glasgow riots of 1759 started, with the sad result that ten thousand men and four hundred oxen were put to the sword. 

Now if Applewheel had considered the consequences of dictating this text to his secretary he probably wouldn’t have done so. His secretary, know to her friends as Agnes the Axe, immediately passed this document to the local police. On the plus side, Agnes the Axe’s betrayal does at least demonstrate to the authorities that I am serious when I say that some stories are so demonstrably untrue that a suspension of disbelief is a quasi-religious requirement. This dictum, which is my invention, shows two things: (i) Language speaks in ways that are beyond any person’s conscious control and (ii) The Eye was on the money when he disclosed to all and sundry the truth-telling properties of falsehood. And if falsehood and being are indeed correlated (as the mighty Wittgenstein himself declared at a seance hosted by the Prince of Wales), then we can say (with some certainty) that fiction=reality, and that the war between Britain and Ireland never actually happened.  

But I digress. Many of you have asked me to explain the meaning of ‘phase three scholasticism’. Indeed, I only became aware of the term when I bumped into Big Jim at last year’s headline set at Glastonbury Festival. (Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Nancy Regan were on fine form that night, especially Nancy whose spectral presence and rendition of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ moved the audience to tears.) Big Jim (who is no friend of Bono’s but did team up with Allen Ginsberg on backing vocals for the second night of Springsteen’s legendary No Nukes Concert in 1979), admitted that the concept ‘phase three scholasticism’ was entirely fabricated by the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s but not shared with the academic world at large until it was safe to do so. (The threat of litigation no doubt lies behind the decades-long secrecy.) From what I could gather, it was a politically-motivated hoax (since debunked; see below) designed to trick the Vatican into believing the Protestant Reformation was a masonic plot dreamed up by anti-papists in the bedrooms of Luton some fifty years before Luther. The Vatican, however, took the hoax seriously and instituted the New Inquisition, which so destabilised Britain that its people voted to leave the European Union. The government, on the backfoot as usual, deflected attention by declaring war on Ireland, citing evidence from a sexed-up intelligence dossier that alleged Ireland was planning to invade Wales. 

The strangest thing about the whole affair is that despite a thorough investigation by The Guardian proving the conspiracy was a silly hoax, several academics and high-ranking clergy went on to take their own lives out of fear of reprisals and/or shame. Nor did the report satisfy the warmongers in Dublin and London who continued to act as if every word of the hoax was true. As this was something that neither common sense nor international law could abide, both sides were required by the UN to fight harder until one had destroyed the other. Only then could the world move on to the next conflict. With Britain’s total capitulation, it seems this emerging philosophy of war does indeed have legs.  

Talking of legs, the next conflict is all about legs and arms and bodies and bone. Ever since the celebrated Dr Franklin Ahab of Massachusetts successfully underwent the world’s first-ever species-change operation—the result being Dr Ahab is now half-human and half-chimpanzee—the humanzee has been a hot topic, particularly in the States, with American celebrities lining up to undergo the transition. (This is what Applewheel means, I think, by ‘post-historical hybridity’.) Unfortunately, a trend that has so excited the cultural elite has contributed to a startling rise in ‘chronic anxiety syndrome’ in the middle and lower classes. Suicide and murder are now commonplace. Thefts of televisions have risen 200%. At least a dozen ‘churches’ in Texas have been raided by the FBI following intel that a network of doomsday cults planned to contaminate the water supply with a hallucinogenic substance that can only be sourced from Paraguay. With America on the brink, the good folk of all fifty states now demand unfettered access to the White House where a petition (demanding the immediate cessation of hybrid experimental surgery) will be presented in person to the President. 

What the American people don’t know is that the President himself has transitioned, but with terrible consequences that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats wish to make public. You ask how I know this. My accountant, an employee of the respected Swedish Alarm Clocks Trade Division, has just returned from an all-expenses-paid holiday to Washington DC where he witnessed for himself the hideous sight of the President leaping across the Oval Office in full-simian fashion (and without clothes) before being taken away in an ambulance. All witnesses to the event were made to sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement and asked to leave the country immediately. Evidently, the President’s transition was a step too far, with no ounce of humanity left in him. 

What worries analysts is an American civil war in which humanzees and natural humans fight for dominance in the hills of Los Angeles. The appalling incident on Sunset Boulevard last week is no doubt a sign of things to come. However, I am in the minority when I say that I welcome the prospect of a civil war, however appalling. The news these days is a bore. The Ireland-UK War has been no fun at all. But a hair-raising conflict played out in real time on the streets of Hollywood—and broadcast in high definition by Fox News—really whets my appetite. Only then will a new world be born. I will state my case at the conference and ask for a show of hands. (If there’s anything a conference is good for, it is the showing of hands.) I will encourage our American participants to return home and be evangels for civil conflict. 

Anyway, here we all are, on foot from Edinburgh to Canterbury for a once-in-a-decade conference on What It Means to Be a High-Functioning Humanzee in a Mythological World. But it shall be a miracle if we make it there without being arrested and placed in an institution for the criminally insane. If such a thing were to happen, then I call on you (yes, you!) to share on social media my opinions about the first king of Ireland and the desperate need for a new kind of conflict involving the humanzee. Petition for our immediate release. Demand Big Jim be given a round of applause for his services to the Empire. Shame your elected representatives into submission. And if they don’t listen, make them listen. Tell the authorities you will go on hunger strike. Turn up for work dressed only in a cowboy hat and high heels. Burn your identity papers in the street and scatter the ashes at the ballot box. Act strange. Be weird. Don’t let your government fill your head with lies about us because we are (for the most part) quite sane. Demand war and more war on the streets of America! Not only that. Agitate for war in Europe too! Ensure The Lancet ceases publication if it refuses to restore the good name of Abraham Lincoln. Call on the food giants to give away free copies of Marlowe’s Collected Works with every box of breakfast cereal. Even if none of what I say is true, at least act like it is true and proceed accordingly and, just as importantly, get others to proceed accordingly. That’s what fiction is all about, after all.  

Remember, nothing is real. No, nothing is, so whatever. 

Your friend (and hero), 

Lubbert Das.