Showing posts with label The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Show all posts

Sunday 20 October 2019

Not My Favourite Play



Like Gloucester at the end 
of his cliff, eh, Watson?



"The Universethe entire space-time continuum, from big bang to heat death, no less — was not a linear stream of events 
with beginning, middle, and end. 
That was only how it felt from the inside. 
In fact, the totality of existence looked more like a ball of sphincters, constantly moving through itself in a way that was hypnotic and awe inspiring to observe. There was Shakespeare scribbling King Lear 
on one wrinkled fold, and just around the corner from him, 
forever out of his line of sight, was the Cretaceous period and tyrannosaurs padding past his wife Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

And, as if to confirm that ours was not the only universe, it was explained to me that what I was seeing was a nursery of some kind. In order to grow their “offspring,” the chrome angels had to “make” time, because, as they pointed out reasonably, only in time were things able to grow as I understood it. Time was a kind of incubator, and all life on Earth was one thing, a single weird anemone-like mega-Hydra with its single-celled immortal root in the Precambrian tides and its billions of sensory branches, from ferns to people, with every single detail having its own part to play in the life cycle of a slowly complexifying, increasingly self-aware super-organism. It was as if I had been shown an infant god, attached to a placental support system called Earth, where it could grow bigger, more elaborate, more connected, and more intelligent. 
Growing at its tips were machine parts
cyborg tools made from the planet’s mineral resources. 
It seemed to be constructing around itself a part-mechanical shell, like armor or a spacesuit. “It” was us, all life seen as one from the perspective of a higher dimension.

I was told to return and take up my duties as a “midwife” to this gargantuan raw nervous system. It was important to ensure the proper growth and development of the larva and to make certain it didn’t panic or struggle too much when it woke up to its true nature as a singular life form. Incidentally, what we experienced as “evil” was simply the effects of inoculation against some cosmic disease, so I wasn’t to worry much.







Sigmund Freud
Who am I, that your friends should wish us to meet? 

Sherlock Holmes: 
Beyond the fact that you are a brilliant Jewish physician 
who was born in Hungary and studied for a while in Paris, 
and that certain radical theories of yours 
have alienated the respectable medical community, 
so that you have severed your connections with various hospitals 
and branches of the medical fraternity
beyond this I can deduce little

You're married, with a child of five. 
You enjoy Shakespeare and possess 
a keen sense of honour.

Sherlock Holmes
I never guess : it is an appalling habit, 
destructive to the logical faculty. 
A private study is an ideal place for 
observing facets of a man's character --
That the study belongs to you exclusively 
is evident from the dust : 
not even The Maid is permitted here, 
else she would scarcely have ventured 
to let matters come to this pass. 

Sigmund Freud: 
Go on. 

Sherlock Holmes
Very well. Now, when a man collects books on a subject, 
they're usually grouped together, but notice, 
your King James Bible, your Book of Mormon, 
and Koran are separate, across the room in fact, 
from your Hebrew Bible and Talmud, 
which sit on your desk

Now these books have a special importance for you 
not connected with a general study of religion, obviously. 
The nine-branched candelabra on your desk 
confirms my suspicion that you are of the Jewish faith; 
it is called a menorah, is it not? 

Sigmund Freud
Ja. 

Sherlock Holmes: 
That you studied medicine in Paris is to be inferred 
from the great number of medical texts in that language. 
Where else should a German use French textbooks but in France
and who but a brilliant German could understand 
the complexities of medicine in a foreign tongue? 
That you're fond of Shakespeare is to be deduced 
from this book, which is lying face downwards. 
The fact that you have not adjusted the volume 
suggests to my mind that you no doubt intended 
referring to it again in the near future. (Hm, not my favorite play.
The absence of dust on the cover 
would tend to confirm this hypothesis. 
That you're a physician is evident when 
I observe you maintain a consulting room. 
Your separation from various societies 
is indicated by these blank spaces 
surrounding your diploma, 
clearly used at one time to display 
additional certificates. 

Now, what can it be that forces a man to remove 
these testimonials to his success? 
Why, only that he has ceased to affiliate himself 
with these various societies and hospitals and so forth, 
and why do this, having once troubled to join them all? 
It is possible that he became disenchanted 
with one or two of them, 
but NOT likely that his disillusionment 
extended to all. Rather, I postulate 
it is THEY who became disenchanted 
with YOU, Doctor, and asked you 
to resign, from all of them. 
Why, I've no idea. But some position 
you have taken, evidently a medical one
has discredited you in their eyes. 

I take the liberty of inferring a theory of some sort
too radical or shocking to gain ready acceptance 
in current medical thinking. 
Your wedding ring tells me of your marriage, 
your Balkanized accent hints Hungary or Moravia
the toy soldier on the floor here ought, I think, 
to belong to a... small boy of five? 
Have I omitted anything of importance

Sigmund Freud
My sense of Honour. 

Sherlock Holmes
Oh, it is implied by the fact that you have removed the plaques 
from the societies to which you no longer belong. 
In the privacy of your study, only 
you would know the difference.