Ferdy Got Away

   

When the professor said, "There is no demonstrable difference between reality and dreams." Ferdy blinked.

"The mind is the only important science", the professor said. "Social life is a fantasy. Even if we allow that the words of others are real, they are conspiratorial. They are attempting to keep a myth alive. They want to keep the world of wakefulness alive. We could just as well sleep. The myth is that our sleep impoverishes the world."

"See how desperately they want you to find mates, to marry, to bear children, to have happy families. They want you to invest in what you are given as real in the earth. They want you to construct the world, not repair it. Every bit of devotion pumps up the balloon, inflates the thin skin of the world. Whereas the natural state of nature is death."

With that, the professor sat down on the stage and crossed his legs over one another with surprising effortlessness, as if the limbs were not boned and stiff. His eyes remained open but his pupils pulled upward so that his open eye sockets were filled with white.

On the other hand, maybe God did create the world. Maybe we have to add our breath to God's to inflate the world. Ferdy looked out over the trees as he left the lecture hall. There was a spider web tangled among the leaves, catching the rays of 10 am sun. Everything was so green and damp with all these bits of life and magic moving autonomously about. Maybe it came about by vacillations of some random hand. But randomness may be our view of the way purpose happens.

The other student was wearing a dress since it was Summer. Ferdy may have sounded like he was young but he was actually old, three-quarters toward the end of his time. A voice came into Ferdy's head asking, “why do I have to include another person in this?” He didn't know her name. She shared the classroom, that's all. The narrative requires two reference points. Should I say it's natural. It's just that we are lost without it.

 

Ferdy wandered down California Avenue toward the basement apartment in the 1900s house at number 1001. He lived alone of course, but surrounded by youthful, noisy, exuberant graduate students. All the students suffered together, though they didn't really know it, through a life of defacto slavery and poverty, there being nothing around them of real beauty, and no time to create anything beautiful. It was a straightforward utilitarian community; although each of them had deep undiscovered capabilities of the spirit.

 

Ferdy half-recalled, almost forgot, there was an old crime. The habit of hiding gave way to the habit of being alone even though the memory did sometimes ooze through the mist in silhouette. He sometimes relived it in dreams. The law forgot about it. He managed to get so far away and it was already deep in time. Someone who looked guiltier, Ferdy smiled as the thought came to him, probably got caught for it and is now probably frantic, trying to escape the punishment. It was a little bloody and unpleasant but so what. Ferdy got away.

 

Ferdy's old people questions about his solitary solution toward life, questions about the ultimate role of reality and body, questions about the role of death in the universe were the questions professors racked their brains about.