Another blank page
Yes, here it comes again — so much white. It ought to be innocuous, oughtn’t it? Instead and in spite of its clean and sterile brightness, it glowers at me. “I dare you”, it says, “come one, spoil me, I know that’s what you want to do — to deface me with your collection composed of myriad mystical, clearly etched and oh so dark strokes that, I suppose, you think have some meaning.”
How can I respond? What is there for me to say? — “I’m sorry, I mean no harm. I didn’t realise that you have feelings or could be sensitive to the physical unburdening of whatever emanates from my neural pathways.”
Have I finally taking the step over the edge from which there is no return? Do I really expect that this blank, brilliant, white rectangle will respond to me? Could it really have feeling and care? Is to defile this purity as destructive a crime as to eat the liver of a young sheep?
Presumably — he says, having little if any understanding of scientific concepts- both I and paper are fundamentally composed of quarks or some even more minute constituent yet to be discovered or of which I am dismally unaware. So, if that is the case, then surely I and the paper are related. Indeed, if matter cannot be destroyed but only changed, (which may, of course, not be the case but rather my *mis*understanding of reality), then some of the quarks within my person may well have originated from the same source as that of this glowering white in front of me. Our previous situation may have been, for example, as part of Queen Victoria, Caroline Chisholm, or Hezekiah Jones.
So, it doesn’t matter, does it?
It doesn’t matter whether there are gods or one God or no God or no gods. It doesn’t matter whether we live or die for we simply go on and anyway —
” they hung Hezekiah as high as a pigeon.”*
…
