fluxcracker

This is a fluxcracker. It is made of the milky, muddy stuff of fantasy. It comes from a store that has everything you want and nothing you don’t.

I imagined the store a long time ago during a [1.] superficial nighttime daydream.

In middle school I didn’t have much of a fantasy life. I still don’t, when I’m not dreaming. One night when I was twelve or thirteen, in bed before falling asleep, somehow free of the scholastic, introspective and hormonal curiosities that accompanied those days, I had a strange, shallow fantasy.

The ordinary nighttime thoughts I allowed myself back then were deeply practical, i.e. planning what level of deviance I could comfortably get away with that week or priming myself to beat the pants off the rest of my soccer team (except for that one girl) in our next long distance run. For whatever reason, that night, I imagined, wished for, a store that was just for me; it would appear behind the wall of my room opposite my bed and would have everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t.

Initially my store was filled with clothes, book bags and wonderful Japanese and Korean-imported mechanical pencils and pens – and I didn’t stop at me – I imagined everyone had his or her own store. The stores were small, one room, because they were person-specific, appearing silently beyond walls stared at from bed in the stretched minutes between day and night.

The idea was immensely practical and absolutely impossible, and lying there I felt flush with the sweetness of vanity and the low, deep pleasure of knowing: were this simple, impossible thing possible, life would be easier and happier for everyone (my age and older too).

Eventually I considered the sci-fi and alternate make-believe means by which this room could be, and more interestingly I imagined how the room would come to know what it knew, how it would know regardless of what I consciously knew, and why it filled itself with what it did – why I wanted what I wanted.

If I could’ve left the room alone, maybe it would’ve wandered itself into my fiction in some way – not that it’s a particularly clever or profound invention but, novel, for me, so I returned to it, asking too many questions and eventually running into the unquantifiable complications of [2.] special, general and human relativity.

The problem with the room is that it’s biased toward a holistic view of people and the world, when in reality nothing is static and everything has moving parts. There is no objective preferential vantage point for measuring and explaining personhood, the mysteries and whys underneath our identities and desires.

Of course, pragmatically, we don’t think like this. We tell our stories. We own our memories and organize them routinely and creatively into shapes that we recognize as ourselves. They’re reconstituted in a thousand dotted lines in a zillion moods for an unknowable number of reasons.

Living for a certain length of time, if one looks closely enough, cognitive dissonance and inexplicable contradictions can be found in our minds and hearts.

Some people feel steadier than others, than I do. Me, different worlds feel one conviction away from where I plant my feet and I often feel capable at any moment of convincing myself of extreme or bizarre truths – but those untroubled by extra-dimensional spaces or time dilation, less incised by gaps between perception and cognition, undismayed by the messy braiding of instinct and free will, still feel an occasional unsteadiness, a shimmer on the hard lines of facts. The room would not be the same for most at 13 and 35, which is at least a glimmer of a shimmer.

I know more now than I did in middle school. We know more than any other human civilization in history but we’re uncertain what this means or what to do with our erratically and rapidly increasing knowledge.

But we choose. As individuals, even if we don’t know what’s in the room, it’s full of our things. Things we like.

[3.] The French: j’ai craqué or j’ai craqué sur means something like: I really liked it! It killed me! I was so into it!

I didn’t hear this expression when I lived in Paris after college, either my French friends were lingua-purists (they’re French) and not fond of the colloquialism or I just wasn’t listening. Now, when I listen to France Culture podcasts, I hear it ten times in twenty minutes.

The verb, craquer, is traditionally used to describe creaking floorboards or snapping tree branches. I like how similar it sounds to crack or cracker, to English-speaking ears, and I like that it means: to like a lot, to an overpowering degree.

I like that however massive our knowledge, whichever direction consensus sways on mind-body-spirit issues, neuroscientists, philosophers, theologians – whoever throws a hat into the ring and emerges fist raised – I like the idea that the ground beneath my feet is unstable, that my room is out there in the land of just-before-dreams continuing to change.

Is there hope we’ll ever figure things out, really, that we’ll quantify our chaotic lives? Answer impartially and undeniably why the store with everything and nothing is filled with what it is? Who knows.

Maybe change (flux) is the only real truth and we should crack on it – continue to crack into it and enjoy what we find.

[4.] A fluxcracker:

is always delicious – whether it tastes like strawberry revenge or if it starts a melody playing in my head.

Amid all of the uncertainty in the world it can be a great pleasure to find what we like, even if it’s in an imagined place. The idea of cracking on a fluxcracker is a comfort to me, even if it’s not real.

What I like most of all is that the longer we live the more opportunities we have to keep cracking, to find real answers to real problems. The fluxcracker is a portable piece of the room I can bring along with me.

A math teacher at my high school had a poster, black on white, which read something like:

[1.] Superficial Understanding

[2.] Confusion

[3.] Deeper Understanding

[4.] Knowledge

Meaning, you learn something, you learn further and get confused, if you stick with it a more meaningful understanding emerges, and then you can say you know a thing.

This story here goes: imagination, complication, decision, tentative understanding - probably to be followed by continued confusion. 

I think, with math maybe the story can stop, but in life you may need a superficial fantasy or two. The end. For now.