Metaphysics: The Would-Have-Been

The Would-Have-Been

And underneath what is, like the deeper currents beneath the ocean's face, is the would have been.

The would have been, too, is made of forms.

They present themselves to the mind: look, here ought have been a cat; here, there could have been a table; here, but for that which intercedes, a person would have died.

The would have been is more personal than the is.

The forms shift; they are ambiguous; they are keyed, in respects, to the mind that watches. They are ghosts and shadows. But they are not unreal. Any fairy can touch upon the would have been, see into it, pull pieces of it closer to the surface or push them farther down.

Something is, beneath the is. Something is, that would have been.

We can say, roughly, that there are two large categories of things that fall into the would have been. The first is myth and story. These are great underdeep currents, powers that shoulder their way in and about the is, things constantly seeking to disturb reality with themselves. These are the things that wish to be and they impinge on the mind as things that we feel, see, believe, but know at the same time they are not true.

These are the closet monsters; these are the triumphs of righteousness; these are the perfect towns that exist somewhere in the country, the perfect lives, the perfect people. These are the killer bees. These are Elvis, still alive, and just a little over at the gas pump next to your own.

And then there are the actions of the fey that fail to be true.

When a fairy seeks to act, and is prevented, then their action falls into the would have been. The fore-echo of their intention still lingers in the world. The thing they would have achieved still hangs about them like an aura in the air. It lives. It is like a snarling cat, retreating with reluctance from the good food of the world.

The marks it leaves as it departs the real become a portion of what is.

Then last there is a spare small scattering of forms that emerge on their own into the would have been. It is always possible, after all, to come upon a person and realize, "They would have been a car!" Or to find an apple tree and say, "This would have been an orange!"

Here, there would have been a building---if the project hadn't failed.

This cup! It would have broken, if the floor hadn't been so soft.

These things are unique in their behavior; they have no characteristic quality; they do not organize themselves into rivers of myth or partake in the actions of the fey. They are simply padding in the would have been---things that came close to happening but did not; things too strong for the might have been.

And the meaning of all of this is simple: that the forms of the world, and the actions of the fey, conduct themselves with a certain mindfulness to the thrumming currents of the would have been below. They are shaped by them, buffeted by them, mindful of them: though they are not the same, what is knows what could have been.

It can be denied truth, but not existence.

It lives and piles up in echoes within the substance of the Mist.

Metaphysics: The Layers of the World

The Layers of the World

To live in a world of fairies is to live in a world where shards of purpose and story impinge inescapably on your consciousness: where the indivisible and ineffable continuum of existence is host to patterns (ideas of "what happened" and "what is present") that are so thoroughly alive as to force themselves on others' experience.

To put it another way, there are experiences that are shared by all—

Greenness, ineluctable; the presence of a cat; the riot on a certain day on a certain time in a certain place; the height of a specific person; the fashioning of a dress; the experience of what it is to sleep and then wake up—

That are certainly limited in scope, for the blind do not see green, but which are in some sense universal to whomever apprehends them.

This is not a world where the age-old question, "How may I know that anyone else perceives anything at all like what I perceive? What if when I look upon a cat, my friends and neighbors see an elephant, only, an elephant that relates to them in some fashion like a cat?" applies.

Rather, though there are some places where these curtains of form fall away before the great all, there is also the occasional point of certainty.

This is a cat.

Its cat-nature is perceived in different ways by those you may know to be blind, or not blind; to love the cat, or see the cat as a stranger; to have an allergy to the cat or not to have such an allergy; but fundamentally, and consensually, to be a cat.

And that is and must be an illusion, for a practitioner who studies deep Zen insights or daydreams away the cat's existence or presence or is otherwise reducing the forms of experience into a vast and unbounded sea can free themselves of that greenness; that cat; that riot; that height; that labor of fashioning; that experience—

But yet in addition to that boundless ocean, there is a shard of form.

There is the undifferentiated truth, and there is the concept and reality of the presence of the cat.

This idea—

In Fairies—

is expressed in reference to what is. What is denotes those things that stand out from experience as expressible to and understood by all, shards of truth that impinge on the mind's conceptualizations.

If there is a table in a room, in what is, then that means that we need not endlessly dispute the implications of its being mostly empty space; we need not reductionistically consider whether it would remain a table with three legs, two, one, or no legs at all; we need not think about what would happen if we replaced the table piece by piece, or took it away like thieves in the night and replaced it with a table identical in every fashion; we need not wonder what tableness would be there if the people who used that room were unable to apprehend its tableness, were constrained by brain damage or some peculiar power of intangibility to be unable to recognize it, were forced by that circumstance never to sit at it, never to eat at it, never to walk around it but always respectively over and through—

If the table is part of what is, then these questions are irrelevant, because its placement in the registry of what is is sufficient to answer the question, "Is there a table?"

And this is something we shall use, repeatedly, to give weight and strength to the arguments of the fairies; to their actions and Attributes in the world. It is because of what is that a fairy may be said to accomplish things using their Praxis Attribute, for instance: the fairy decides that they shall go to a certain place, hunt a certain enemy, create a specific spell, manifest a blizzard, ace a certain test, or otherwise enact some prophecy—

And if they can place that in what is, then it is done.

If they can place it in what is, then the undifferentiated vastness of experience yields in an instant to the presence of that form; and only the power others have to rework that form through analysis, embellishment, and acts of reckless interpretation can cause any reduction in the power of it.

Interpretation?

For yes.

More than anything else, the shards of what is are not things or events but they are words or pictures. They are visions that reveal themselves to a sense or multiple senses or to the narrative constructive sense that is the audience in the mind. It is literally the solidity and visibility of a table—or it is the statement, the words, the sentence, "there is a table." One of these things, and each of them susceptible to new interpretations.

That is the what is:

Sentences and pictures that stand like the spars of endless shipwrecks in the vastness of the world, or rocks that jut forth from a stream.