“I've heard about it, sure, but I haven't gotten up there yet. According to Sean, Coprolalia hasn't taken the time to visit it, either.”
“Ah, Professor Winchester: The St. Peter of Coprolalia—Sapientia ex cathedra.” He smiles. “I don't mean to be too disparaging of his insight into the artist, but, if you see him, could you please tell him that the piece about the emperor who couldn't weave has nothing to do with the design of his cloth.”
“What does it really mean?”
“It's too difficult to get into.”
As Patrick had not censored himself on any subject up to this point, Tomas and I decide not to press him. He is certainly a wealth of information, but, at the same time, he seems so giddy that I've found it difficult to believe much of what he says. It’s an odd variety of tergiversation.
“You were saying,” Tomas says with a roll of the wrist.
“The beer garden. Ah, yes, it is a fantastic place. Probably the best bar in Queens with the exception of the water taxi bar in Long Island City.”
“The water taxi bar?”
“Yeah, right where the Mohawk Building is,” Tomas adds.
“It's a tremendous place: lots of seating, very cheap drinks…girls….”
“…To eat,” Tomas says under his breath.
“But where is the beer garden?”
He shoots me a glance as though I've struck him. “I'm not the bloody yellow pages.” He turns to Tomas. “He's a rather impetuous one, isn't he?”
“It's day number sixteen and you're his only lead, man,” Tomas replies. “I guess it's understandable.”
“Can I ask you boys a question?” he asks (ha!).
“Shoot, boss,” Tomas says as he toasts nothing in particular.
“What do you see when you close your eyes?”
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?”
“It's an exercise.”
“I guess darkness,” I shrug.
“I see nothing,” Tomas chimes in with his eyes closed. He smiles as he places his hand over his eyes to better emphasize his participation in the experiment — a virtuous acolyte of Galileo blinding himself for the sake of science. There is silence for a moment. It is soon broken by a pleasant, 6-5-4 progression that will reveal the plight of a semi-anonymous Brandy. “Great choice, by the way — I fucking dig this song.”
“I obviously share your fondness for the rare materialization of Looking Glass's brilliance.” He laughs a bit, drinks deeply from his cup, and continues with his thought experiment. “Back to the question at hand. If someone were to ask you to put your hand in front of your face, not just close to your face, but so close that it blocks out any light — and with your eyes open, mind you — (Tomas opens his eyes and removes his hand from his face), would you still say you see nothing or,” as he turns to me, “darkness?”
“Okay, I see what you're getting at,” Tomas begins with a tone of alacrity that seems hardly justified. “In other words, when you close your eyes, you're really just seeing the back of your eyelids. That's great Plato,” he says with a torpid blink. He turns to me. “This sounds like one of those annoying emails my mom sends me.”
“Yes, I am well aware of the rather childish nature of the thought experiment. All it is supposed to do is elicit certain responses out of different people. It's a bit of parlor psychology, I know, but I feel as though the question effectively reveals how a person views his or her relationship to the universe.”
“What did our answers reveal?”
“It's not an accurate test, of course. Someone I met once said that an individual's favorite condiment was the most revealing portal into their soul.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that ketchup says one thing about a person, vinegar another, mustard something else.”
“I see.”
“Mayo is the only bad one.”
“Mayo?”
“Gluttony — the ultimate virtue in a decadent society.” He pauses before expressing himself in verse:
The appetites of the edacious—
intractable, chaotic, audacious—
foment in perverse and Stygian shades,
and lust the demise of the Palatine's glades.
“What the hell was that?”
“I think Petronius. Regardless,” he continues after a brief pause, “Mr. Faxo said that the previous thought experiment I brought up reveals not only an individual's metaphysical leanings, but that individual's degree of…well, I'll be blunt — narcissism. You can infer what you will from that.”
“So Tomas is a radical Berkeleyite?”
“Was that an insult?”
“I wouldn't say no,” Patrick laughs.
“Okay, so how the fuck did you respond?”
“The same as our friend here.”
“This is such a bunch of bullshit, man,” Tomas replies. “Not only do I resent the implication that I'm some fucking self-absorbed dick, it makes the eyelids response out to be the right one, which means the bullshit test puts science and math on a fucking pedestal.” He sighs in disgust and reaches for his gin and tonic.
“It's not that there's a right answer exactly; but the eyelids one certainly does make more sense. It's not like anyone is capable of seeing nothing unless a lot of very difficult conditions are satisfied. Even if it's a common thing that one hears, the sentence only makes sense because it has been granted a colloquial meaning, not because its semantics are valid. Light penetrates your eyelids even when it's dark, right?”
“Yeah,” Tomas replies, defeated and incensed, “But what if there's no fucking light anywhere? What then?”
“Well,” I begin, “It wouldn't really matter if your eyes were closed or not: you're not going to see anything anyway.”
“There is always light, Tomas.”
He scowls.
“But going back to what was said earlier, it depends on how you define the word 'see'. I mean, if 'to see' is defined as the 'the images the eyes relay back to the brain,' then I guess the eyelids response would always be the correct one. However, if it's defined as 'the illuminated image the eyes transmit to the brain for processing', then I guess 'nothing' could be somewhat correct. Then again, darkness is always right because it simply means the lack of light. It's a relative term, like fast or slow; a is x and b is y only because of the relationship between a and b. It's dark because there's less light than when one's eyes are open.”
“Yeah, well, there may be no absolute lightness, but there is an absolute darkness, an absolute fastness, and, though I'm not a fucking Einstein scholar or anything, an absolute slowness.”
“Still, a car going a hundred kilometers an hour down a residential street is considered to be going fast. Like I said, it's a relative term; the word just needs to accurately apply, given the context, in order to be considered correct. '“A” is “A”' is a universally sound proposition if and only if the pragmatic elements of language are ignored. For example, if Curious George were to steal the hat of the Man in the Yellow Hat, it would be false to refer to the Man in the Yellow Hat — a proper noun — as the man in the yellow hat. This is akin to a puzzle devised by either Russell or Frege—”