This article was posted to the fnord-l mailing list in February 1996. While fnord-l was notionally about the ideas and humour of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, devotees of dada, surrealism or cheerful paranoia felt free to post whatever occurred to them. Pseudonyms and sock-puppetry were almost the norm, but everyone was in on the joke and it ran a bit like a private Marx Brothers movie. I rarely posted, mostly just enjoying the cut and thrust of others' posts. As was the norm in those times, it was composed and presumed to be viewed in a fixed font; it's formatted as such here, but if that's not what you're seeing then I suggest you copy and paste the text somewhere that allows you to do so.
I started out on fnord-l not long after I first got onto usenet, early in the 1990s - when the Internet was a smaller, wilder place, but all the more civil and interesting for it: before the great wave that was Eternal September broke over us all and washed away the old world forever. Fnord-l was obscure and odd enough to mostly carry on as a relict of a bygone age; but occasionally we'd be discovered by newbies who would sometimes get the joke but more often just leave, scratching their heads.
This post was inspired by a user who posted as Jeff Iverson, who showed every sign of not getting the joke - seemingly oblivious to the point (which was, none) or culture of the list - but who, for some considerable time, showed no sign of leaving: engaging innocent weirdos in arguments about the folly of resisting logic and urging submission to a materialist objective reality. I think most of us suspected he was just a sock puppet for one of the group regulars, but it seemed like there was no punch line and no-one ever owned up; so eventually I posted this by way of rebuttal, in a prose form as obscure and now-obsolete as the group itself.
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.fnord-l Date: Thu, 8 Feb 1996 21:42:06 +1030 Reply-To: New Ways of Thinking List Sender: New Ways of Thinking List From: John Pearson Subject: Dismembering an Old Friend (was Re: Introduction) To: Multiple recipients of list FNORD-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 06 Feb 1996 13:43:00 -0000."I'm sorry that I didn't respond to 5's post earlier; things have been fairly busy in the last couple of weeks in the P. household. I've read a number of 5's posts in the meantime and am, in hindsight, surprised to find a naive materialist (such as 5) at loose at such close quarters. The post that initially caught my eye was along the lines of a philosophy essay question: "men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism), or that it is available without effort (mysticism)". Initially I tossed this aside more or less casually, pointing out the fallacy embedded within the question itself, but as time passed it became apparent that our correspondent is *serious*. He believes in an absolute reality that can be observed directly; he also (here I make some inferences, based on his subsequent posts) thinks that all that we can, or need to, know about the "real" world is available by the application of rational thought to sensory experiences (provided, of course, that those experiences be "genuine" experiences of the real world, and not some other kind of experiences, distorted by hallucination so as to be invalid). I was going to reply with a long, reasoned essay setting out some reasons for believing in a subjective view of reality, but I don't think I will (well, perhaps later). Instead, I think I'll tell you how, yesterday, I dismantled my sofa ("lounge" to you essaiens; my apologies in advance, arrears and any other direction for any misunderstanding; I speak English like a native, but my American is, sadly, the result largely of endless reruns of The Lucy Show and Happy Days (can you still get VitaMetaVegarin? Did Potsy & Ralph ever...you know...? And what about The Fonz and Mrs C.?)). But first I'll fill in some of the background to the events that took place. My wife goes to school during the day, on the other side of town; it's a mature-age school, which she likes because classes are small and full of people who want to be there, so they're all fairly sociable and keen to get on with it. One of her friends there was a young mother of two, who was from Ireland and, after a failed marriage, was going to return there. Her plan was to drive from Adelaide (here, in South Australia) to Brisbane in Queensland, where she would stay with some relatives for a time before flying home. She did have some things to sort out: she had picked up quite a lot of stuff while she was here; some she had to sell, and some she would take with her. Unfortunately, her car was a small four-door sedan that was built in 1979, and didn't have any airconditioning; she couldn't fit her stuff and her children in it at the same time, and driving across half of Australia in the middle of summer, with the windows wound down in a car that was... well, getting on was not an inviting prospect. "It's no good," she confided to my wife "I'll have to sell this car and hire a nice one for driving to Brisbane. Not that I'll get much... I only paid $750.00 myself, although I've spent a bit on it. It's annoying, as I really need to get rid of it by the end of next week. If only someone I knew was looking for an old bomb. Runs fine too - just don't look at the body." My wife pricked up her ears. She'd got her licence the previous year; she set out to get a motorbike licence, but had ended up getting a full licence because the system here made it convenient. Riding her bike was her favourite way to get around, but the times when she needed to take stuff to school, or wanted to drive into the country for a weekends' camping, had taught her to appreciate the advantages of car ownership. So, after some quick negotiating, a deal was struck. She spoke again: "If only I knew someone who wanted my modular lounge suite. It seems a pity to just throw it away; it's in good shape." My wife said "Oh! Well, actually..." In just a few moments I was unwitting owner of a 5 piece brown velour modular suite for the sum of $60, as well as a chest freezer for nothing, because she didn't think it the sort of thing people bought at garage sales. But I'm getting ahead of myself again; we really need to go back 15 years, to before I got married. My parents noticed that our tiny one bedroom flat had just two small armchairs for visitors, and so they resolved to buy us a lounge suite as a wedding present. So one day my wife and parents drove to the local emporium looking for the largest most tasteful lounge suite, from the cheaper end of the market that would fit in our diminutive lounge room. They found a great broad hulking 3-piece suite that would seat 5 people with lots of elbow room, and still somehow fit into our flat. Still hot with the first flush of youthful passion, we spent a lot of time on that sofa: even if we were just watching television we would sit side by side, reassured by the gentle brush of our partner at our side, and the solidity of our sofa under us. Our sofa saw just about every detail of our social and private life over the next ten years; we ate, read, talked, wrote, studied, drank and smoked on it. It came to be like another member of the family; its personality developed, as it acquired stains, sags and bumps, soft spots and hard, as we all do over time. We moved often, and each time we went looking at new places to live we would consider, along with how many power points there were and whether there was room for all of the books, whether there was a place to park our sofa. Funnily enough, there always was. Still, all things must pass, and a couple of years ago our sofa's personality developed to the point that it could no longer be relied on to be hospitable to our guests; when that happened (really, about a year after that happened) my wife and I had a quiet but serious talk, in the kitchen. We moved our beloved old friend into our "library", a room full of books that served as somewhere we could read or whatever quietly sufficiently far from the front door that we could be undisturbed unless we chose to be. We bought a lounge suite with a more easy- going personality for our lounge; for a while we could have our cake *and* eat it too. For a while, at least. However habits change, and we often now find ourselves entertaining in our library; our grumpy old sofa was again the cause for some mild embarrasment. So when my wife's friend (remember her?) started talking about throwing away her own perfectly good lounge suite, my wife exercised her acquisitive drive. Anyway, the new lounge suite arrived about a week ago: we'd talked it over, and I had moved our "good" lounge suite out to the library; our old, familiar sofa was stood on its end against the wall leaving room for the new lounge suite. We were undecided as to what to do about the old sofa; finally we decided to see how much room was left over after the new lounge suite was in place. As it turned out, there was not much room left over at all with the new lounge suite in. I had always thought our lounge was quite large, but the room was filled almost from one corner to another by a large, L- shaped wedge of brown velour. Our TV and a heavy bookshelf cut us off from the kitchen at one corner, and our familiar old sofa, leaned against the wall, completed the job on our other flank. After re-arranging the furniture I opened one route to the rest of the house, but it was clear that I had to decide what to do about the sofa *now*. So I considered my options for a couple of days. The council has a regular "hard rubbish" collection, but regular here means once each October, and we weren't in a mood to wait. As to giving it away to someone, we didn't know anyone that desperate. The new car worked fine, but there was no way that our old sofa would fit in it. My wife said, "Why don't we take it apart and just throw it out with the regular rubbish?" I said it would take us forever, but she said there would probably be a lot of padding, and not much actual wood inside. I tried but failed to think of any reason why we shouldn't. So, we determined to dismantle our old sofa, friend and witness to a dozen happy years of our life together. It was an aweful prospect: the sofa had been a silent member of our personal household for as long as we'd had a household. It had been witness to all of our married life; it knew things about us that noone else did. Yet, when we decided to take it apart we realised that, as closely as we knew it, we knew nothing about how it was held together. We pushed the new furniture to one side, and stood the sofa on its feet. My wife started out, taking the fabric off of the back support, and removing a single wad of foam padding about six feet by three. With the covering pulled back, we could see the wooden framework, and how it was constructed. It was obvious that it had been constructed in the shortest time possible; everything that could be attached using wire staples, was. Thousands of them: little, 26/6 wire staples holding the fabric to the frame, two tightly-packed, angle- parked rows anchoring each piece of webbing (the attractive diagonal pattern presumably a compromise between labor time expended and load bearing acheived); heavy, long, evil wire staples fired two inches into the pine, perhaps a dozen for each join; and a few extra-nasty wire staples, made of wire about 3mm diameter, for those heavy-duty bits. So I sat on the floor and started removing staples. After about two or three hours I had stripped the fabric from the wooden frame and, in the process, found an old bridge hand (written down of course), a pen knife my wife had almost forgotten owning (let alone losing), and an old-style bus ticket (an article of some small interest, at least in SA). Then I prised the members of the frame off piece by piece using principles of basic mechanics that I had studied in Physics IHM, but that I had somehow miraculously been using, seeming instinctive, for years and a stout screwdriver; when some join would not budge, I'd check and find a long, countersunk phillips-head screw (phillips-heads are easier to insert using drills): I found a grand total of eight screws, and two glued joins in the entire frame; however, I got a *very* impressive (well, at least, when measured by weight) pile of staples. By the end of the day, we had a collection of a dozen or so planks about 6 feet long, a bucket full of bits one or two feet in length, a garbage bag full of fabric (my wife took the foam padding and cut it up into bricks, and offered it to school for use in the lab; apparently it wasn't very absorbent but they took it anyway, because the price was right) and a big pile of staples. So, what did I learn from all of this? - Statistically, it appears foolish to argue that there are more trees in the world than staples; - They don't make sofas like they used to (should that be they didn't use to make sofas like they did before that?); - There exists a niche market opening for a small cheap, rapid and automatic machine for removing staples; - I really can go on like that for a long time; - What it's like to dismember an old friend. What? Well, what did you expect? It's my sofa, and I took it apart; all you've done is read. My palms are bruised by removing umpteen thousand staples with a screwdriver, yours are not; I'm the one who's rendered a part of his life down to so much kindling, to be thrown out with the garbage. It was a deeply spiritual experience, in its own way. You aim to learn something, take apart your *own* furniture! Brings to my mind something that an old friend of mine once said: "You never *really* know someone until you've been to the autopsy". John P. "I fucking love Moravia, | john@huiac.apana.org.au Moravia's fucking great; | jpearson@frisbee.net.au It shits on fucking Poland, `------------------------ It's Europe's greatest state." -- Keith, the Swearing Bear