As an ordering principle, we felt we had been working mainly with appearances of tables, despite being well aware of the fact that tables did not actually manifest. We never saw ourselves as being in the more specialised field of holistic creation, and we still don’t. Advocacy of that kind of thing remained as mystical to us as this-worldly optimism in the capacities of complete strangers. Nope. At best, we propagated subtle illusions. We secreted effects endlessly, until, after many years secreting, a particular world began to emerge. This was a familiar world – very everyday insofar that did not contain any tables of any description – but a world wherein the appearance of tables might be formed fairly easily. (We would love to tell you how, but that’d be unethical.)
Most complete strangers were not too bothered whether or not tables actually existed; they were far too busy worrying about, and listing, every single possible cause of the weather. The existence of tables, never-mind rites pertaining to tables, were of little concern. But if any of these strangers were to have asked any questions about what we were really up to, we planned to stare at them intensely while making general statements re: the valorisation of the Coiolis effect.
This monolithic fixation with the weather was really useful: it freed up resources for ritualising subtle illusions, resources that used to be sunk into boasting. In such circumstances, busily forming the appearance of tables was win-win. And that’s where we should have left it. World seduced. Consciousness changed. Move on and munch that growing pile of muscle-reading.
But, we weren’t satisfied were we? No. We had to see if there really were tables, other than, of course, the innumerable appearances of tables, appearances we knew existed (‘cause we, kinda, made ‘em.) Surely a table would, ultimately, have resulted from the many apparent relations we had conjured?
Through a friend-of-a-friend, we heard of a glimpse of a hidden table said to inhabit a hermetically sealed vacuum safeguarded by favourable conditions. This, it was rumoured, was a table that could be glimpsed secretly. The secrecy surrounding this table was such that it remained deeply mysterious even to those who were sympathetic to the possibility that some random stranger may have caught a glimmer of its virtuous residue. Whenever we attempted to further investigate this so-called enveloped table, all knowledge we thought we had gathered would put on a disguise and, improvising, convince us that it was something else entirely.
So, now it seems to us that, due to its constantly changing character, what we thought had been an ordering principle, may, in fact, have been something we could never have encountered in the first place.
