We men exist in space, or more correctly a number of spaces. What we may call the space of immediate effect (that is, the space in which a man can immediately effect an action and simultaneously ensure that it is done – say, peeling an onion, making a friend turn his head or strangling a cat) extends roughly as far as the voice can reach and dissipates at a distance where words become intelligible. At the outer periphery of the space of immediate effect, we see a general warping and perversion of this space. A policeman running behind a school-bus, waving his hands and shouting “stop” (maybe the driver has run over a child?) may accidentally impel the driver to accelerate. It may in fact so distract him that he hits another child – thus creating a victim of the deterioration of the space of immediate effect at its furthest limits.
There are exceptions to the range of the space of immediate effect. More frequent than exceptions to this range, however, are mistaken exceptions. Men of power commonly mistake the extent of the space of immediate effect, both with relation to themselves and their minions. That is, they overestimate their own space and underestimate their subordinates’. It is striking that subordinates often possess a much more accurate view of their own range, and their superior’s. The difference between the superior’s own estimate of his space of immediate effect, and his subordinates’ estimation of the same, is called the ridicule gap, or alternately as the envy gap. Many also mistake the distance at which they can still be seen as the extent of their space of immediate effect, when it is in fact this space plus another space called the space of mistaken effect, or misunderstood effect. UFO sightings, lust-at-a-distance and window shopping exist almost exclusively within this space.
True exceptions to the range of the space of immediate effect usually occur in instances when environmental conditions severely hinder the voice, such as underwater, in outer space, in inclement weather or when behind the wheel of an automobile with 100 horsepower or more. Another exception is the instance known as the creation of space of overordinate effect, which occurs only when a large group of people use their voices simultaneously. This space covers a much greater distance, including that from the cheap seats of most stadiums to the pitcher’s mound, free-throw line or 20-yard-line, or from the households of victims of an atrocity to its perpetrators. Military and industrial activities open up for numerous possible exceptions to the space of immediate effect, be they snipers, deepwater drilling platforms or satellite telemetry. These actions, however, actually fall into the space of subconscious extension, sometimes also known as the space of vainglorious instance.
Novelists, physicists and technicians traffic in the space of subconscious extension. As opposed to the space of immediate effect, which has a roughly spherical form depending upon physical surroundings, the space of subconscious extension can be properly explained only via metaphor. Imagine a man who, looking for his lost iguana in a wintertime forest by night, employs a powerful beam of light (he may have run a cable from the cigarette lighter of his truck, for example). The beam casts about in every direction and even up in the trees, where – striking branches – it creates a latticework of lit twigs, which extend further into the darkness. If we simply replace this winter forest with the psychic, metaphysical universe of our iguana-owner, we could say that that space which the beam illuminates at any particular moment is his space of subconscious extension at that same moment. Obviously, the effects of acting on the space of subconscious extension can be messy, as anyone at the trigger end of a powerful weapon, at the keyboard of an editor’s desk or on the other end of a customer support telephone can testify. The correlation between the space of subconscious extension and reality is tenuous at best.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this space is the proportion of individuals who reject its very existence even as they – at the same time – live entirely within it. Anyone who has been in a relationship can immediately understand the “I am not shouting!” irony here. This phenomenon stands behind at least 85 per cent of doctoral dissertations, 98 per cent of newspaper columns and 99.9 per cent of sales pitches, which as their common factor all possess the quality of novelty. As these people cast their metaphorical beams about in the dark forest of their minds, they have a tendency to take fright. It is at this moment that one is predisposed to scream, or write a Ph.D. dissertation (or try to earn a buck). This screaming alerts others, who subsequently cast their own beams in a similar area of the forest, and – for a few moments – the space of subconscious extension is filled with the spirit of false novelty. Only after the fright wears off, aided by the fleeting sensation of fellowship, does the synchronization of spaces of subconscious extension get disrupted. To general discouragement, the feeling of novelty and the supposition that everyone was looking at the same thing are discovered to be false.
It should be noted that, unlike the space of immediate effect, the space of subconscious extension does not exist in the real world, even though some are willing to believe that it is, in fact, the real world (almost, as if one were to mistake the written word bologna for the actual thing – bologna). It should also be noted that the space of immediate effect can immediately impact the space of subconscious extension, but not vice-versa. That is, you can direct your neighbor’s attention to the county’s most recent zoning regulations (“Hey, did you read that article in the paper about housing rules?”), which may result in the neighbor reading about the regulations. He will not clip his hedges, though, or repaint his house any other color than lime green. This fact commonly gets the epithet “The Teacher’s Fallacy”. In effect, trying to use the space of subconscious extension to influence the space of immediate effect will only cause you to pull your hair out and call the movers.
The final space available to us consists of what is prosaically called the universe, but can more accurately and technically be called the space of haphazard responses. This space is, as has been reported by the physicists operating in the space of subconscious extension, in fact expanding. Put simply, it expands as the exponential nature of mankind’s flakiness compounds. One may note the expansion of the universe every time one hears the expression “That’s some seriously stupid shit, man”, or “Do you have nothing better to do with your time than fill my ear with this kind of nonsense?”. College students, the unemployed, musicians within the soul and jazz genres, sufferers of ADD and any other person with a dreamlike bent are pioneers in this universe expansion work. Their disparaged efforts on the edges of that which can be comprehended, measured, laughed at or given a beat to provide the moral space which later generations will reclaim as space of subconscious extension.
As much as it pains us, we must grudgingly accept that empirical study has revealed that no space has any sanctity, or, alternately, that space has no sanctity. At the microscopic end of the space of immediate effect, in the realm where bacteria are subsumed by ever-aggressive competing amoebae and ribosomes carry proteins around the hollow spaces of nuclei, the only divine impulse seems to be a petty and corrosive hunger. Unless we’re willing to equate our gods to dogs competing for a bone, this space’s sanctity collapses. In the space of subconscious extension, our shouts for meaning tend to bounce back in the form of greeting cards, unwanted pregnancies, late-night television programming and a literature riddled with anxious aphorisms. Lastly, there is the space of expanding flaky equivocation, which has been held up as the most likely candidate for a divine repository. If God can be found anywhere, it was thought, he/she must be in the unexplorable vastness of the universe. So far, our metaphysics haven’t been up to the task. The most recent and grandest exercise to establish contact with the deity took place at the half-time show of Super Bowl XXXVIII, which featured a number of non sequiturs, mock sacrifices and general absurdities. Even after the most rigourous and scientific examination of such a flaky display no God-like aspects were revealed. Most observers have drawn the inevitable conclusion that mirthful, idiotic laughter does not illuminate the deep.
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