When Alexander was little he had an epiphany that would stick with him for the rest of his days. It was summertime in Bavaria. The world was shot through in a rave of whipped colours, whites and pinks and yellows and ultra-violets. Winter had finally released its ascetic grip to give way to spring and now the first signs of a bountiful summer. Compared to the joyless blues of earlier months, life was now a flourishing bonanza. The bonanza sprouted from the black earth carpeting the hilltops and dells in waves and waves of tussocky grass. The bonanza seethed below the soil toiling away with quiet industry - fortifying and recycling. It bloomed Brilliant White atop decomposing bodies and on dead tree trunks that looked like twisted wreckage. It flew through the skyways; its droning and buzzing barely audible above the swish and swash of leaves twinkling on and off like light bulbs. The wheat fronds were nodding piously towards the sun their benefactor as the wind rattled their chubby stalks and enraged the aphids that sat on them. The buttercups were out chasing the bees, and the bees in turn were gorging and stupefying themselves on the sweet nectarines; after which they'd slumber in the sun exhausted, and if they felt particularly wicked or mischievous they’d go bother some humans.
There was however one bee that was particularly troublesome. Not troublesome to humans mind you, but to his fellow worker bees. He was a pariah, an outcast and didn’t fit in. The reason for this lay inside his head – literally. Embryology had gifted him with much to be proud of. Like a shapely abdomen, fantastic yellow stripes that we’re cool and little bee-wings that we’re nifty. They were small and agile but made up for size in their whirring speed. He could use them to fly up oh high, and he did. He strayed from the regular bee routes that were choked with bee-traffic. He’d go as high as he could, beyond the forbidden cloud line (where no bee dared) just to see what it was like. Just to see what it was like.
But there was something else too, something unforeseen that embryology had given him in addition to his wings and stripy bottom. Something grotesque and unnatural - self awareness. What was wrong with him? Well, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with him it was just that, unlike the other bees who mindlessly, automatically, did what bees do; which is chase after flowers and get drunk on nectar, this bee who we can call ‘Alex’ stopped in its tracks one day and asked itself a question. Yes, a question. Which was:
‘Why?’
Now lets make it absolutely clear right away that this is something that bees don’t usually do. Bees don’t normally ask questions, especially ‘why?’ questions. But this was Alex. And he was odd.
It just so happens that at this moment of exalted lucidity, at the moment when the ‘Why?’ question popped into Alex’s brain, he was in mid-flight returning from one of his cryptic jaunts. The shock (and it was a shock) of the thought sprouting was profound. Brain power that was normally used for controlling flight muscles, making minute adjustments to pitch and tilt, basically precious brain capacity that was used to keep him up in the air was now being siphoned off and diverted – to feed existential musings.
Poor Alex tumbled out of the sky until finally squishing himself onto the lens of a binoculars, the last neuron that fired before his untimely death had one thing on its mind: ‘Why?’
However, as so happens in a universe that is enmeshed with the fibres of cause and effect, faith and destiny, the binoculars belonged to a young Alexander who had been watching the bee in mid flight all along. Watching the little thing coursing across the brilliant blue canvass, its yellow stripy bottom in the throes of turbulence, before it suddenly lost control, fell out of the sky and smashed into his binoculars - Just like that. Curiously, (and many would suggest grander forces at play here), Alexander was so moved by this, for it affected him so deeply; the whole pointlessness of it all, that he too stopped in his tracks and wiping the green splattered smudge of Alex from his lens, he too uttered the cryptic words:
‘Why?’
Unlike Alex, whose life had ended at the moment of lucid discovery, young Alexander went on to not only answer the ‘Why?’ question, but also farther to answer the ‘How?’ question and when he’d dispensed with that he moved onto the next logical question which was the most important of all ‘where?’ question - as in ‘now that I’m done with all this philosophising, where shall I go for lunch? - All this by the age of thirteen no less and still fresh in his teens. This was remarkable going.
So the young Alexander Von Nutterboffin, of Bavarian parentage had considered and surveyed all. His gaze had entered the crypts of histories great Philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell, and with a petulant sniff of the nose he had dismissed them all in one insouciant breath: ‘theoretical tourists’ was his dismissive remark at the time. So he invented his own ‘Philosophies’ to rival and surpass those of the greats. These he wrote down in the form of a ‘Principia de Sum’ (principles of Existence). Which were as follows:
1) The vast majority of people are inherently stupid. There is nobody more stupid then a man who thinks that he has nothing else to learn
2) The vast majority of people are amazingly boring. That is because they are stupid and think they have nothing else to learn
3) It is rare to find a person who is not boring. If you ever meet this person you will instantly know, because you will fall in love with them
4) Love is blind
So it was that the young and brilliant Alexander Von Nutterboffin completed his transformation into an arrogant, insolent and brutish misanthrope who dismissed the company of people:
‘There tireless whinings, their stupid questions, their irksomeness…these non-entities, these so called men of Cain, these sanctimonious schmucks!’
The religious order too we’re not spared the wrath of his fiery tongue:
‘Pious busybodies, these exalted sexually oppressed old men with their lurid fantasies of bondage to the sky god, their false perdition, their false guilt’
As for women:
‘These coquettes with their profligations and their sluttings, and the besotted rabble that chase them in a paroxysm of nympholepsy…I have no time for this tediousness’
So it was that Alexander grew to wince whenever he suffered the humiliation of the company of men, the sanctimony of the church and the flirtatiousness of women. But that is not to say that he didn’t get noticed. He did. He was rather handsome, in the guise of a modern-Greek Adonis. Women flocked to him like pigeons, intrigued by his aloofness, his rebuttals, his disparagings and his rapt and brilliant mind. But he just swept them aside, like flies getting in the way of the grander stuff of life.
After his monumental Principia de Sum (which he characteristically kept to himself), Alexander moved onto his next project. He began spending inordinate amounts of time staring at things. He’d stare at the most bizarre things; objects you’d never bother looking at like rusted copper coins, or whirlpools on wall-paper, crinkles in napkins, goose-bumps, crusted faeces, peoples bottoms and he’d spend hours and hours doing it. Of course, this was not just fanciful idleness. There was a great discovery lurking, as always, behind this studious gawping.
The idea was that if you stare at something hard enough, which usually meant for long enough, than it no longer looked familiar. It morphed into something new and terrifyingly strange and alien. And then you could discover it all over again as you did for the first time as a child! But unlike a child you could now put to use an array of sophisticated mental equipment to unearth it, to snuff it out, to tinker and play with it. Just imagine discovering a bottom for the very first time! You can apply the same idea to words; look at them long enough and they start deforming and melting into unfamiliar shapes that you no longer recognise.
Alexander coined this phenomenon cognitive dissonance and then in a stroke of genius took it into a wholly new direction – the realm of the Human Condition. Look at humans long enough, stare at them long enough, marvel at them long enough, and they will unravel themselves before you. Untwine like threads. All there complexities thus reduced to a few bullet points.
And so we have the inimitable genius of Alexander Von Nutterboffin.
Coming soon...Part III – The vaults of the museum of modern-antiquities
