The World is My Mirror by Richard Bates

and stillness in the form of calamity and farce continue to dance around. The court jester we call our life continues to entertain and amuse. We can still cry, we can still smile, and we can still get angry. Aliveness will not be tamed by stories. Aliveness appears as stories. There is no story that will be the end of all stories. Stories are the beginning, the middle and the end of everything.
     
    Nothing needs to be any different to what already is. It is when fantasy seduces us that life can become serious business. Believing that there really are people outside of us, encircling us, placing us in the middle and taunting us, is the stuff of nightmares and dreams. Row after row of other faces, other bodies and other voices gnaw at us constantly. Some throw abuse; others throw sticks and stones. Their eyes seem to pierce our soul. They can see our filthy core. We will never live up to the standard they demand because they will shift the goalposts and reserve their praise for tomorrow or the next day. We try to please and bargain for some respite. We may be granted the odd concession and life may look a little rosier. But remember, roses have their thorns as well. Do not be fooled by the sweet smell of victory: thorns and brambles are never far away to tangle and trip us.
     
    The point I am making is that abstraction and storytelling can take hold to such an extent they can drown us and suck the lifeblood out of us, leaving just the shrivelled skin and empty husk. Timeless being trumps all stories, all fantasy.
     
    The good news is that we can still edit by adding and deleting and make up all sorts of stories. We can believe we were born, we can believe that we will die. We can shake hands with someone, hug, kiss and love them with all our heart. Nothing needs to be any different.
     
    To kiss another person’s lips is to kiss our own. To shake another’s hand is to shake our own. We are only ever experiencing ourselves through everything life throws at us. We can stop pretending; stop believing we’re someone or something. We have played our game and made our point. Suffering and confusion can wake us up in the same way falling from a great height in a dream can. We will never hit the ground in a dream and we will never reach the base of a bottomless pit. Once we see there is only dream, the impact of a ‘me’ having a life becomes as ridiculous as the impact from the bottomless pit. We can pull ourselves together‌—‌there’s no need to pull ourselves apart!
     
    Reading what has been written about abstraction and concepts and socially constructed meanings can be mighty difficult to grasp if we only know and accept what we have been taught about life, the universe and everything. The so-called solid world is perhaps too solid and real to be questioned. The hypnotic spell is taking a long while to wear off. A click of the fingers to be ‘back in the room’ does not seem to work for us. I am going to look at hypnotism in the next chapter, simply because it deserves a good seeing to. I want to end this one, though, with how I see the process of abstraction and the formulation of concepts.
     
    Have you seen the television programme How It’s Made ? They take everyday objects, such as a drink can or a musical instrument, and show you from start to finish the various processes that go into producing it from raw materials at one end to a recognisable, fully functioning thing at the other. Imagine you are in a trumpet factory producing high quality instruments for professional musicians. You are watching the production line where various people perform different tasks and assemble separate pieces, ready to send it on to the next guy down the line. You watch as the brass gets rolled and shaped by the metal worker, hammering and soldering the seams to an invisible airtight seal. Tubes get bent and valves sit nicely into holes. Heating and polishing ensure durability and attractiveness, and the guy has a blow and a