The Thing in the Viewer

by The Apeiron Collective

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

Part 3 of the mss: Απειρον

Each day that I worked on the Viewer, I became more certain, for better or worse, that I would soon sight the fabulous forces behind the primal cosmic atom. The Viewer was to produce a visual representation of a state just prior to the Big Bang, as received by the Pre-Bang Telescope. Additionally, I included an audio option, hoping this would assist with the difficult task of data interpretation. On the morning the Viewer was ready, I got a call in my office from Tilden.

“Marlene has called in sick,” he slurred, croaky himself. Thanking him blandly as though this was to be just another day at the observatory, I dismissed Marlene’s absence as due to her attending a campus bar night the previous evening. She had been looking forward to the event, and however the evening had concluded, a chilly morning commute out to Stromlo might not seem appealing. Apart from Marlene, I had told no one I had completed the Viewer, and besides myself no one had even laid eyes upon it.

Having been there almost exactly a year, I needed to act fast before Tilden demanded that I hand over all my work, on the basis that the ANU employed me and was the legal owner of the Viewer. My guess is that he had a key to my office, and seen the safe after hours. Even in the winter months, he practically lived at Stromlo, often being too inebriated to undertake the drive back to Canberra.

Financially, as well, the pressure was on the entire project. Astrophysicist vice-chancellor Ryan Smithers had, despite his area of academic interest, diverted Stromlo funding into a military submarine program. Even among the sun-stroked crew who pry into the demise of the universe itself, Smithers was a grim figure. Beneath a perennial PR smile, he argued that comparatively soon every atom in the universe would fly apart from every other, leading to a heat death from which there could be no “Big Crunch” or “Gnab Gib” (‘Big Bang’ spelt backwards), and no new cosmic cycle. Meantime, Smithers himself seemed intent on encouraging a fore-running apocalypse here on earth.

My thoughts turned inexorably to what I now had to do. Yes! I would find out if the Apeiron was real, and, if it was, what happened when a human being, and a woman no less, viewed it. Given Anaximander’s dire warning, that thought caused extreme trepidation. But I felt it had come to this, after my long and twisting journey from Oxford via a dig in Turkey and a rooming house in Kabul. Taking the now completed Viewer from the strongbox in my office, and aware that the observatory area was usually vacated at this time of day, I marched almost stiffly to what I now had to do.

When I hauled the Viewer into the main observatory, it was only to find that the cradle that slots the Viewer into the telescope had gone missing. A spare cradle was kept in the storeroom next to my office in the largely empty building from which I had just come. I had already utilised this spare to be able to work in private and yet make sure the Viewer could be coupled to the identical cradle, which was almost always connected to the telescope at that time. My naive guess was that the originally coupled cradle had been removed to make adjustments which were otherwise impossible. The pedestal on which a cradle rested awaiting the Viewer was wide enough to accommodate a person’s arm, and had been previously used to check components under the telescope proper.

Chasing up the original cradle would have alerted Tilden or Edmund that I was ready to use the Viewer. The Viewer is bulky, so I was forced to leave it next to the telescope as I went back for the spare cradle, also sizeable. When I entered the storeroom, a stranger jumped out from behind some containers as the fire door closed behind me. Luckily his hiding place was at the other end of a fairly large space. To my right, a battery meant for a winch was charging up. Quickly yanking so that the cord disengaged from both its plug and the re-charger, I whipped the last metres ahead of me, contacting the man as he advanced. The instant short tripped all the switches on that floor, but not before flinging him against the rear wall, unconscious or dead.

The storeroom had no natural light, but thankfully I always carried a penlight in my white coat pocket for checking over small parts. It took me a little time to then find the spare cradle in the storeroom, which was now permeated by an acrid electrical smell. Then I hastened back to the observatory. There I was confronted with further unexpected developments. Even just prior to entering I became aware that the observatory chamber was filled with the most thoroughly over-driven audio output I had ever heard, and I had been exposed to Japanese and other noise music. Entering I saw that Edmund was lying inert on the floor. Then it dawned on me what had happened.

Edmund had decoupled the original cradle. Of course he was planning to deny any knowledge of the thug that he had paid to perhaps murder me, and who was supposed to have left the crime scene immediately. Security at Stromlo is lax. Original cradle in hand, and hiding in a small office in the observatory area used for ordering parts, Edmund would have seen me leave the Viewer next to the telescope to go back for the spare cradle. He must have then scurried out and re-coupled the original cradle, afterwards slotting the Viewer into it, hoping to be the first to peer behind The Big Bang. He must have been informed how close I was to achieving this goal by none other than Marlene.

Edmund did not survive to enjoy any fame. If the dire warning on the lip of the smashed kylix is to be heeded, his final super-sublime experience is a matter about which there can only be unhealthy speculation. Edmund would have struggled to interpret all the things of the universe imploding shockingly together. Alongside pure qualities, and suggestions of galactic sheets and seemingly impossible life forms, perhaps he relived memories of his mother. If so she would have been vilely fused to other associations, mocked by blithering mouths, and ogled by rolling eyes passing into inanimate materials. Whatever the case, an overweight fifty something, Edmund had gone into massive cardiac arrest. By the time I re-entered the observatory area, his face was already a mottled grey.

The audio activated automatically when the Viewer was slotted into the cradle, and a demonic babble representing all possible sounds still ricocheted through the observatory. Sometimes, within the overwhelming cacophony, I thought I could hear some kind of nonsense phrase, as though the Apeiron was speaking to me, beckoning me like some pre-cosmic divine lover. Beyond all the utterly overblown white noise punctuated or, better, infused with what could have been gasps and crashes with the raw blasted sound of a sheer lump of madness, I thought I could discern a nonsense phrase looping. It said something like “ho heck huffney ha ha.”

Now I, too, was drawn to the Viewer. This must seem like madness given that Edmund’s sad fate so strongly suggested that Anaximander’s dire warning should not be simply dismissed. But Edmund may not have properly slotted the Viewer into the cradle, and I wanted to believe his death the result of user error, such as electric shock if he was in contact with the Viewer while peering in.

More unconsciously, perhaps the sonic super-sublime overcame my volition, as do certain religious rites involving gruesome images of crucifixion and reanimation. The horrifying image of a bleeding heart encased by thorns exerts a strong compunction on many of the faithful. Indeed I felt as though I was in some kind of trance, no doubt primed as I was by a decade of waiting for this moment. My aural faculty had by this stage completely fatigued. Perhaps, too, there is an analogy to be drawn between my stiff march towards the Viewer and how heavily distorted music leads fans of extreme noise to blindly destructive dancing.

Why ever it was that I marched automatically towards the Viewer, at the very moment that I bent to stare, the Viewer shut down and the audio cut. Examining it after recovering somewhat from the sight of Edmund and the mind-altering dose of polyrhythmic all-tones, I found that the Viewer had indeed been improperly slotted into the cradle. It was necessary for the Viewer to click in place in order to provide a secure coupling. Edmund would have been unaware of this fact. The hellish vibrations from the audio output must have exacerbated the misfit, severing the complex information flow to the Viewer after a short time. If Anaximander’s dire warning was right, it was only this that saved my sanity, and, indeed, maybe my very life.

Part 4 of the mss: Resignation

Perhaps every day we all experience something very like the Apeiron. Explaining what I mean by this macabre statement is a fitting way with which to close this account of my repossession of the Viewer from the pre-Bang Project, or of any account. Of anything.

Nothing could be done for Edmund. So I detached the Viewer from its cradle and left. Worried that the thug may recover from the electric shock I had administered him, I cautiously made my way to my office in the same largely disused building. I peered around every corner first, and more than once looked over my shoulder.

Entering my office, I shoved my sketches, laptop and all the backups of my work into a hiking pack, making sure I had all the secret material relating to the design of the Viewer. Then, laden as I was with the Viewer and the pack, I made my way as quickly as I could to my convertible. It was with extreme relief that I accelerated away into the chilly mountain air.

As happens in winters on the Southern Tablelands, the sun was bright despite the cold, its rays more visual than tactile. As the initial relief faded I began to think how it was that the same sun owed a debt to something human eyes should never have to see, and human ears should never have to hear. As mentioned, I have kept salient details about the Viewer secret. Rest assured that the Viewer, and related material are now well hidden. As for myself, as I returned to my Florey residence, the sound of a post office tricycle and banging letter box indicated a letter had arrived.

In a bare front yard of a Canberra winter I read another photocopied hand written missive from a certain blurry allusive scholar. Shamass had written:

“Academics value the products of intellect and intuition: theories, articles, art. For classics or literary studies, certain pieces of literature are revered and analysed. The poetry of Homer for instance, or the martial history of Thucydides. Or, as once for you, artefacts may be what are curated and discussed. Amphoras. Architectural works. Paintings and statues of vanished ideals. A kylix.

“All theories are the result of human activity. In the case of the study of past or present culture, human activity is also the subject matter. Human activity came out of a society that itself came out of nature, which in turn came out of the Apeiron.”

In the desolate Canberra suburb, I let out a slow steamy breath. Shamass’s text continued:

“Culture seems comfortably removed from the Apeiron. Even taking an ancient theory like Anaximander’s, which is directly concerned with the Apeiron, Anaximander speaks Ancient Greek and almost 14 billion years after the Big Bang.”

The script then smudged into a coarse ink blot, but here is how I interpreted the copperplate:

“As iconoclastic logician William Van Ormand Quine has shown us, the mind is a spider in a web of culture that can be restrung in different way and still hook on to the world. This web then offers us a tangle of cultural possibilities. In this way, by creating our own cultural Apeiron, we all worship our Pre-Big Bang origins. Just as any bastard-child universe does not exhaust the Apeiron, so, too, specific cultural products in no way exhaust cultural potential. Any determinate form of culture that exists could have been otherwise produced.”

Reading this zine missive in my bleak yard, I thought I understood. If one person had not been responsible for a theory or other cultural work, someone else would have been. Darwin was prompted to publication by the fact that Wallace was threatening to go to press with the same theory, arrived at independently. If the celebrated epic poem had not been penned by Homer, it would have been penned by his uncle Homer.

It must then be asked: Why are specific instances of culture so important? If certain individuals had not come up with the ideas demanded by what else had formed out of the cultural Apeiron, another would have. No doubt in some altered and possibly superior form. Given the cultural Apeiron, all that is needed is already there.

So what of this very account? Well obviously I have printed it up mainly to inform the public why I took the Viewer. But I can only conclude with the debt this account itself owes the Apeiron. A year earlier, as I travelled to Stromlo for the first time, I had listened to Elvis’s “The Edge of Reality” on a jukebox. Even then, I reflected how, five decades after The King’s death, there are uncountably many more rock and pop songs. Much of what surrounds us is not more than cultural background radiation. There are theories multiplying faster than the insistences of a schizophrenic. Architectures, genres of fiction and much more. Must I not now be silent in the presence of the cultural Apeiron to which, finally, someone has done justice?

Here the mss breaks off. Scribbled notes also found in Florey residence:

If the Apeiron is all things, could it also be, or rapidly produce, some kind of mind, that could then work through the history of the universe? Like the nous of Anaxagoras?

The cosmic Apeiron is also the cultural Apeiron! The Apeiron uses consciousness to recreate itself in its own creation. To describe the Apeiron in too much detail, to understand it too deeply, is to recreate it as an idea that then comes to embody the violently sublime substance! That is why the name of Anaximander is so hated.

It’s got INTO this page, and now it’s trying to get OUT! PLEASE DO NOT READ THIS. If you have skipped to the end first for the whereabouts of the Viewer or if you have only skimmed so far, I repeat PLEASE DO NOT read this mss. ho heck huffney ha ha ho heck huffney ha ha ho heck huffney ha ha.

This last nonsense phrase is scrawled erratically over and over again on the remaining sheets of paper.