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A DIGRESSION ON AN ABSENCE OF FACT
A NOT QUITE ECLOGUE
(A quiet glade in the Outer Realms. Hilarius Hilaricon
floats peacefully over the stream of nothingness, meditating on
abstruse tangles of being. Something sparkles on the nothing-stream.)
H.H. - Hello there, who are you?
H.B. - One who is tormented with existence, harried like
a hare by the dogs of knowledge. My
name is Boson, Higgs Boson.
H.H. - My friend, what is your problem?
H.B. - Until but a few years ago - how long it all seems
now — I was happy, at peace and non-existent - I had no problems
then - but then the Higgs appeared and forced me into name and
the scar I bear to this very day.
H.H. - Are you telling me it was your father?
H.B. - Father, creator, inventor, discoverer - it’s
all alike to me. It prised me from the contentedness of nothingness,
weighed me with gravity, squeezed mass from my cries, discontented me
into content.
H.H. - But that’s being born. We all must endure it.
H.B. - Not if you do not exist. And I don’t. Yet I am
forced to be. I am but a simple particle, my friend, my needs are
few, my resources little, yet the Higgs and its kind would entangle
me with everything, from the birth of the Universe to the surface of
sandwiches. I am not made for this. I haven’t the strength to bear
it.
H.H.- So the Higgs turned you from a simple Boson to a
particle in great demand?
H.B.-
Even the Boson came with the Higgs.
H.H.- But why? Why are you persecuted so?
H.B.- For explanations.
H.H.- Ah, I see.
H.B.- They have plans for me, you know. I feel so
- so - hunted. I can sense them at every turn, they’re
looking everywhere for me, they’re out to get me.
H.H. -Please, please, take a hold of yourself.
H.B. - I can’t, I don’t exist.
H.H. -You’re beginning to sound paranoid.
A SIMPLE FRIENDSHIP
H.B. - I know they’re after me, I’ve seen them. I am
not, but am becoming.
H.H. - So why do you not go to the Higgs and its kind,
speak to them, try to come to an
agreement, to make a pact on your
emptiness.
H.B. - Because I do not exist.
H.H. - But the Higgs and its allies plot to make you
material?
H.B. - Yes, yes, I never was and they will make me be. I
was thinner than the rarest air, less than the
shadow of a molecule, slighter than the skimpiest verse, more
negligible than the dressings of economists. I can’t, I can’t
take the weight of it all. The Higgs and its creatures want to hurl
things at me underground, where others cannot see their crimes, to
prove their equations, to make me count - I, who have no knowledge of
mathematics - shooting their numbers ever faster towards infinity and
me, until I am forced out of nothing by the bombardment.
H.H. - That sounds very painful but ....
H.B. - Have you ever been hit with a hadron?
H.H. - No, but I think the only thing you can do is wait
until you exist and then talk to them. Surely they want to
understand?
H.B.- Talk? I shall do more than talk. I shall change
into a wave. I shall drown them with in-existence, I shall submerge
them in apparitions.
(Hilarius Hilaricon brightens at the last word and
floats higher in the air. Interest animates his voice.)
H.H.-
Apparitions?
H.B.-
Yes, my friend.
H.H.- Call me Hilarius. You mentioned apparitions?
H.B.- Yes, Hilarius, my friend, I too am a ghost. You
are the ghost of the living, I am the ghost of an idea. You are the
haunted, I, the hunted.
H.H.- We shall talk further on these matters.
(As the darkness falls on the page, they merge into the
thickening nothing, entering its non-existent folds, like shepherds
plodding homeward, into the brotherhood of a void bucolic.)
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