From Jester To King LX

The analogy is this. You’re on this cliff edge, this promontory. You’re on the top of this cliff being pulled towards the edge at which you know you will plummet. Ever so slowly and gradually. You’re on the top of the cliff sort of almost static but infinitesimally moving, it’s like a travellator or an automatic walkway, it’s as if someone has one of those levers at the side of it, and his job is just to keep on turning that lever, and the lever is connected to all these cogs and wheels and gears out of your eyeshot, and this whole machinery keeps the top of the cliff on which everyone’s walking slowly moving. Always moving. And so you and everyone else is on the top of this little piece of land, on this moving piece of land being pulled to the edge of the cliff, and you know the edge is coming, but you don’t know exactly when, you can’t see the land in front of you so well, you can hardly see in front of you at all, all you can see at any one point is that there is land and that you’re not just about to fall off and plummet.

But you also know that the cliff edge takes on the rough shape of an inverted U, or like one of those bell curves, so that the people right in the middle of the cliff have the longest distance to go ahead of them, the cliff will reach out that bit further into the sea, but the cliff, and the land of the cliff for the people on the sides is much shorter before they fall, in fact it can be very short indeed, and it can very well be that the land in front of them ends and they plummet almost as soon as they’ve started out. Which seems a bit unfair, but the cliff is the cliff. And the standard delusion is to believe that you’re one of the normal and fortunate ones right at the edge of the U. And because you have some idea of how long the cliff extends outwards at the further points of the U, you have some idea of how long the land might extend for you. But not everyone can be at the furthest points! But most are though, right? Well yes, but not everyone. And the delusion says that the people at the other parts of the U are not people like you and that they’re somehow different and you don’t need to concern yourself with them.

So everyone sees everyone else plummet, or at least they know about it; at the very least, they can see the people around them, and they can see what happens to them, so long as they haven’t fallen first. But the land isn’t uniformly U-shaped, not at all. That is to say that there are completely random niches and ruptures, faults and depressions in every single bit of the land, even at the longest bit of the inverted U, so that you can be going along very nicely with everyone else, until very suddenly your bit of land ends and you fall off. And in this case, whether it’s you or the next man, you really didn’t see it coming. You’re just gone, finito. And that’s generally how it works with the cliff; the cliff top is always moving towards the edge, and as you go on, you know you’re getting closer but you can never know exactly when, you can only infer from experience, from the experience of what has happened to the others around you, from hearsay, and as you get closer, more and more people around you start falling off, look, POP, she fell off and then POP, him, and then POP, her, and at the very outset these are people you hardly even knew and then as you go on it’s your parents and then your brothers and sisters, POP, and as people are POPPING off willy-nilly, you really start to wonder how much clay and soil and whatever’s under you in your particular tract of the cliff can go on holding you, can hold until it comes to the edge. But you don’t have time to wonder, because all your wondering and dawdling happen exactly as everything else happens, meaning they happen whilst the cliff-top is moving, when the lever’s turning, so that the illusion of sorts of putting it to halt when you’re reflecting is completely an illusion, and nothing’s going to stop that man turning, that lever revolving, the cogs never fail and it keeps on revolving.

Sometimes you actually see the land going in front of you and you’re struck with a fright, you think the land’s ended and you’re going to fall. But you don’t immediately; somehow it holds for a bit longer and you know you’re on borrowed time. But the land at the edge is very unsteady and unstable, such is the nature of the soil at the every edge; as you see you’re right at the edge, you still haven’t dropped yet, the land is still holding, but you’ve no idea how long it will hold for, because you have no idea of what lies beneath it, and you might look to your immediate right or left to see if the cliff’s at the edge there, to check if the soil has held there, but there’s no guarantee since the soil is different in every single place, there’s hardly any pattern at all, although you might like to think that the soil right next to you must be connected.

And some of the worst cases are these: where someone comes up to you from nowhere and tells you out of the blue that the land ahead of you won’t last another few years. And everyone else’s land is fine but yours, well there were unforeseen structural issues, and then they try their best to repair it, they engage in all sorts of emergency repair activity, all sorts of things that appear to you at least to make the land much worse than it already is, but it is, they say, making it worse to make it better, but still there can be no guarantees, and there can be a lot of reviewing and assessing the land by these specialist contractors all while they’re seemingly trying to get in back in good repair. And perhaps they do succeed for a bit and the soil is made good, for a while, but then sure enough, they call you back and tell you that the disruption and the crevice hadn’t gone from the land and although it appeared to have gone, it was unfortunately still there and it had caused fracture and breaking and the land was opening up big time and they could try their special repair regime but this time it was very unlikely to be able to work at all and could even make the land liable to fall and break up much more quickly, at which point you’re faced with the Hobson’s choice, do you risk the repair or just let the land go its course, let it erode, break, let gravity do its work, and just sit by and watch in abject fear.

But the weird thing is; at the beginning you start off not knowing about the edge of the cliff at all, completely and utterly oblivious, soon you realise, soon you learn, you are told at least, but even though you know, you kind of pretend you don’t and you make absolutely no preparations for the plummet, no one does, perhaps a tiny minority of eccentrics do, it’s not as if there’s much you can do though, perhaps learn how to fall, jump, find out what falling is like, but still, despite the fact that no preparations can really be made, you and everyone else carry on regardless, and yes the further along your bit of land you go, the more concerned you become, but still you’re wont to disregard the end of the cliff, still you forget it, and then a few next to you fall, and you catch your fright once again, but then if you’re lucky enough to carry on for a bit longer, you completely forget about them too. Such is the cliff.

And it is not as if you actually see the others falling. Perhaps you get wind that someone’s land is unsteady, perhaps you see them flailing, struggling to stay on, perhaps you turn round to look and they’re just no longer there but it’s quite rare to see the moment of falling. The moment of falling is ugly and unbecoming, somewhat private for the faller, almost akin to the privacy we sometimes seek at the moments of vomiting. Yes that’s a curiosity of the cliff; you see the aftermath of the plummet more than you see the plummet itself. And then if you’re stupid or brave enough to try and look down from the edge of the cliff to see what’s happened to the fallers, to all the fallers, well it’s just so hard to see down, call and there’s no response, shout and scream all you like, and the drop is immense almost never-ending, all that you’ll be able to make out is a big dark black hole.