The Reflecting Pool is Looking Back

Retirement looms ever more closely. My retirement savings are captured in what I’ve come to understand over the years is an alternate reality of wishful thinking and, let’s be frank, guesswork. Not to mention suspected witchcraft. The current stock market is – and I’m forced to severely self-edit here – a crapshoot of disbelief and dismay, not just day to day, but hour to hour. Some of us check its status far more often than is healthy for any value of emotional stability. Capitalism is all well and good until one has to, you know, capitalize on it. I self-measure the market fluctuations in retirement terms relative to the size of the carboard box I’ll be living in and the brand of cat food I’ll be able to afford to eat. I’ll use one of my favorite shrugs here: it is what it is.

In my subconscious, my career of thirty-five years was only a placeholder until I could do what I really wanted to do, which was to collect those such as yourself, sometimes known as a “Dear Reader”. There are, and always have been, innumerable authors whose works are never shown to anyone, which makes it effectively impossible for the authors to collect Dear Readers. Think of an anguished Victorian poet who keeps their poems unseen, locked in an ornate wooden box, which is to be burned, without having been opened, in the event of the poet’s death. It’s safe to say the poet won’t have collected Dear Readers with that plan. An author collects readers only by virtue of two critical elements: writing something for others to read, and then making those writings available for reading. In order to connect to readers, an author’s works must be made available to those readers, whether by handing the cuneiform tablet to another priestly scribe or by providing a manuscript to a publisher for printing and distribution. (Side note – when I think of myself as being a published author, there’s a joyous mental shower of rainbow glitter. Thus is my personal reality formed.)

Speaking of realities, personal or otherwise, one of the underlying concepts in my writing is considering what sentient beings believe to be reality. This is a theme that has been addressed philosophically by many authors over thousands of years, and more recently (over only hundreds of years) in science fiction, and even more recently than that, in quantum mechanics. One of the constructs of “conceptual” reality is that our “objective” reality is the combined effect of all of us believing in the same construct for the same purposes. For example, we can all believe that a chair is a chair, or that any other element of the physical world has the same meaning and use for each human observer, but we can only assume the sameness. We can never know another person’s reality, because we would always be in the position of observer. In order to know another person’s reality, we’d have to be that person, but then we’re no longer the observer. It’s not enough to be able to see through their eyes; as observer, we’d have no choice but to use our own brain to interpret what their eyes see. If we were to use both their eyes and their brain to interpret their concept of reality, we would then have no other view with which to compare it – again, no longer the observer.

So, what is the “real” reality? Honestly, to me it looks like it’s turtles all the way down.