Meet a demon

  The sun shines on the ringroad.  As Ballard said of spring in Shanghai, even the corpses look more perky.  Oh no, they are motorists.  Have you noticed, sethren, how the latest display of evolutionary fitness among British males is to sit in your BMW or van with the engine running and the headlights on, staring at a clipboard.  Thus the confusion with corpses, you’re never quite sure whether the internal combustion engine is being used as a suicide device or a space heater.  However, let us not wander off into aimless musing.  There is work to be done.

            Culture      praxis            map               concept         action           thing              demon

  All are composed of demons.  Most demons are composed of demons, which themselves are composed of demons, ad infinitum, though in the end more the infinity of a circle, innumerable, than of the number line.

Take engine, the one in the BMW or van just now.  It flicked on and off in your brain, doing its job but no more.  It registered, just, and was quickly lost in the flow, not to be recalled (Oi! Demon, you, yes you, the engine demon) until I brought it to your attention again. That flick was the flick of a demon, more or less instantaneous and instantly closed down, before the work space became cluttered.

  But now.

  Engine:

Babbage difference engine - Wiki

  What do we know?

  Again, engine.

  See, see, how it draws to itself clouds of other demons from all the engines of the metaverse.

V8, V12, Rolls Royce Merlin (the Spitfire engine) — how they swarm now, those demons — James Watt, The Rocket, Babbage’s difference engine,

  “And that two handed engine at the door

   Stands ready to strike once, and strike no more.”

  The engine of progress, “Engines of our ingenuity”, we’re motoring now.  Shakira says “Libido is the engine of the world”.  The actual engine of your own actual car. Okay, were you to have a car.

  Stop.  Enough. 

  Remember that first demon, engine?  It was just a flick in the brain.  But recall it to centre stage, give it free range, and you have a whole opera.

  Whether a demon is composed of other demons, or rather associated with them in the eighty to a hundred billion neurons in the human brain, with seven thousand connections each to other neurons, trillion upon trillion of connections, hundreds of trillions; we do not know.  Association seems to be a better way of putting it. Yes, yes, I was in grievous error. I take it back; demons are not composed of demons.  Each demon is unique.  That’s the whole bloody point.

  The sun is out.  You wish to go gadding about the town.  Poundland and Primark, your hedonism knows no bounds.  Off you go.  But now, you depart knowing in what manner a demon, that irreducible locus of difference, exists.  I hope.  Tomorrow, drawing ever nearer the truth, we shall ponder the place of demons in the metaverse, and how they associate with each other in their infinite multitude.