Alphabetti-Spaghetti

YOURE MAKING A TERRIBLE MISTAKE

Increasing conservatism and rigidity being pushed in the Western social world means behaviour is policed by the least curious, least imaginative and least brave of us all. It got me thinking about the way we create meaning and the consequences of eccentricity and thoughtful individuality. This week’s The Crow is a more lighthearted and comical contemplation of our strange times. I hope you enjoy :)

Credit: Pawel Czerwinski

1.

The letters floated like yellowing bones in a viscous pool of shiny reddish gloop. There was no mistaking them, no possible misinterpretation. He wondered if they had been arranged by the kitchen staff? Maybe it was a thing they did here, some sort of a joke?

He looked around at the other diners but no one else seemed to be reading their plates. Maybe no one else had been given the Alphabetti-Spaghetti in the super-trendy restaurant “Comfort” where they “brought back the refuge of childhood” with hugely overpriced dishes designed to “place you in the lap of security.”

Diners weren’t offered a menu, but rather, “Dining Instructions,” which informed them that they would “get what you’re given, just like Mummy used to do.” It seemed strange there were drinks available, wine, beer, spirits, but he supposed the restaurant didn’t want to push their quirky concept too far. People did like a drink after all.

When his drink came it was a beer, which he accepted with a guilty expression and waited for his lunch to arrive. Eventually a bowl of Alphabetti-Spaghetti, two rounds of perfectly browned toast, a pottle of butter and a strangely phallic arrangement of asparagus, arrived.

He had always hated Alphabetti-Spaghetti, didn’t really like asparagus, and was about to say something when he was shushed by a waggling fingered waiter. “Ah, ah, ah,” followed by, “If you eat all your dinner you might get some desert.”

He had walked through the city, a little preoccupied, heading nowhere in particular, surrounded by busy-headed people seemingly on serious missions, their demeanour’s weighty and severe, when he entered the restaurant on a spur-of-the-moment impulse to get out of the rain and kill some time. An impulse he now regretted. Especially at these prices. Comfort food was one thing but paying lunatic prices to be treated like an infant, that was something else. The waiter sauntered off and it was then he noticed the yellowing bone-like letters formed into a sentence, floating about in the Alphabetti-Spaghetti sauce: YOURE MAKING A TERRIBLE MISTAKE

At first he assumed this must be an eccentricity of the restaurant, like a twist on fortune cookies.

He rose in his seat a little to check if anyone else was reading their lunch but he was the only one who had been given Alphabetti-Spaghetti. All his fellow diners were heartily tucking into various letter-less dishes of different comfort foods. He looked back at his plate and read the sentence again, YOURE MAKING A TERRIBLE MISTAKE

He found himself noticing the missing apostrophe in YOURE and laughed out loud at his fleeting pedantism and heard himself saying to his plate, “The mistake is actually yours”, before glancing around feeling suddenly unnerved and foolish.

He was about to take a swig of his beer but stopped. Maybe drinking the beer was the mistake. He had an odd feeling of being watched.

He’s always been a rational man. Always. He had a balanced and analytical view of the world which didn’t include messages being relayed through bowls of Alphabetti-Spaghetti. He looked at his beer again but couldn’t quite muster the courage to take that sip.

He ran through various scenarios in his head where he’d turned the whole thing into an amusing story, heard himself saying, “In the end I didn’t even touch the damn Alphabetti-Spaghetti,” but then suddenly felt foolish for having to admit that he had believed the message might, just might, actually be a genuine warning. He could hear the ridicule, “Oh yeah, who sent the message, the spirits of tinned pasta?”.

He tried to calculate the odds of 26 letters arranging themselves by chance to form a meaningful sentence and wondered if it were billions or trillions to one. Thousands maybe? Maybe less. Surely in some universe every single time someone ate Alphabetti-Spaghetti a sentence appeared in their bowls by pure chance. What was the likelihood of other universes even having Alphabetti-Spaghetti?

He chewed his lip and was surprised how quickly his confidence had deflated. Had he been told about someone confronted by a message in their Alphabetti-Spaghetti he’d have dismissed them as a nutter, most likely deranged, the whole thing a mere coincidence, messages don’t appear in lunches, that’s not how the world works.

But there it was. Right in front of him. YOURE MAKING A TERRIBLE MISTAKE clearly written (written?) in his bowl of Alphabetti-Spaghetti.

He really needed that cold beer, but still he couldn’t quite bring himself to drink.

2.

“So what did you do,” she asked.

“Well, I called the waiter over, I just pointed at the message, you know, to gauge his reaction.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, and I’m not joking, he said, Don’t play with your food!”

She stifled a laugh, “He actually said that?”

“Yes he actually said that, so I told him I hadn’t, it was like that when it arrived, I said he must have done it.”

“What did he say then?”

“He said, and I quote, Liar liar pants on fire.”

“He said, Liar liar pants on fire?”

“I swear, he told me that my tongue would split and every little puppy dog would have a little bit.”

“And what did you say?"

“I said it must have been someone in the kitchen then, because the odds of this being by chance were astronomically low. He just stood there and then he said, the likelihood is around 0.0000364, which is, yes, astronomically low.”

“He actually worked that out?”

“How would I know?”

“What happened then?”

“I said that I understood this restaurant had its quirky theme and all, but could we just drop the act for a minute because I was beginning to feel, you know, freaked out.”

“What did he say then?”

“He said, Do I think the spirits of tinned pasta are messaging me?, then he said Ok, fair enough, no one here would have done that, the likelihood of anyone doing it is astronomically low.”

“Ok,” she said, “but someone must have done it, because either that means this astronomically unlikely event actually happened, or…this really was a message from…?”

“Yeah but that’s the thing, it doesn’t really matter, all that matters is my perception, right? It’s my perception of the world that creates truth and meaning for me and nothing can really supersede that, can it.”

“Well,” she said, “you could draw a conclusion on the available data and the mathematical odds.”

“Mmmm, or accept that it’s ok to live in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts.”

She said nothing and just stared at him, then she said, “So what happened then?”

“Well then I just paid up and left.”

“And what conclusion did you come to about this apparent message?”

“Well, that’s the thing.”

3.

The man exited the restaurant in a state of low anxiety and confusion. Even the rain, still coming down in buckets, seemed to be trying to tell him something.

He had a strange feeling that he wasn’t living in the same world anymore. That something fundamental had changed. It took him by surprise. He felt a kind of vertigo, as if he had always just been going through the motions, half-asleep, blind and deaf to something obvious. He began to wonder if this was what losing your mind felt like. A crow sat in a plane tree and watched him as he walked past.

Could a bowl of Alphabetti-Spaghetti actually hold real meaning? Where does meaning come from after all? Does anything hold meaning? Does, everything? Does nothing?

The crow followed him, leaping from branch to branch as he walked through the crowds of umbrellas. The man stopped and leant against the grey-green trunk of a plane tree to shelter from the rain. The iridescent crow took a leisurely swoop, landed and hoppity-hopped, sidling toward him with those awkward little bounces, then with its coal-black beak drew a line in the sandy earth beside the tree trunk.

He stood and looked at the crow and the crow stood and looked right back at him.

Then, in a delicious moment of surrender he slumped down against the trunk and began to talk to the bird, to unburden himself about his longing for things lost, things that seemed to reside deep in his bones, important things that had been snatched away and replaced with superficialities, as if his life had been stolen and a cheap simulation of a life had been put in its place. He told the crow about the restaurant and the message and how maybe he really was making a terrible mistake because much of his life seemed like he was living in a theme park, shallow and infantilising with no real depth or authenticity.

It was the blue lights that broke his concentration and caused the crow to retreat back into the high branches.

4.

“And the crow was also conveying a message to you, just like your Alphabetti Spaghetti?” she said, placing her pen down on her desk.

“No, what? No, the crow wasn’t conveying any message to me. I’m saying that if I thought the crow was giving me a message what difference would it have made?”

“Don’t you believe in the truth?”

“Look, I believe some things are true. But some things can’t be described as true or not true.”

“Mmmm, l ike what?”

“Well, like love for example, in what sense is love true? Sure, it’s a real thing, a feeling we experience reducible to a neuronal brain state, but when you love somebody, when you feel the way you feel it’s not merely a configuration of neurones is it. You know that. The way you feel creates meaning.”

“But if you can assign meaning to anything then anything could be true. Terrible things could be true just because we assigned meaning to them.”

“Exactly, terrible things are true just because we’ve assigned meaning to them. All kinds of terrible things.”

“Like what?”

“Are you kidding? Look around. You don’t see all this destruction and cruelness and death and stupidity? That’s all because of arbitrary meanings we’ve assigned to things. Everything we do is filtered through the lens of randomly constructed meaning. You think we act this way because it’s the only possible way to be? Because we’ve divined some objective truth? You think our social perceptions have anything to do with actual reality?”

She wrote a few notes down in her notebook and settled back in her chair and said, “Lets get back to the crow…” but he wasn’t having it and continued on regardless.

“Look,” he said, his voice charged with an authority that surprised her, “Forget the crow. The crow’s irreverent. All that matters is the meaning I give to the crow, right? Like the meaning you’re giving to everything I’m saying right now. You’re not interested in some objective truth, you’re only interested in getting me to accept your version of the world. But look at what your version of the world has done to all of us. Your technical rationality is seeking to control everything, and by doing that, you’re destroying everything. The world doesn’t operate according to precise calculations, does it, no, it’s a cascading pattern of tiny interactions and perceptions and actions and reactions and random events and outcomes all happening at once and all affecting each other and all flowing into my mind, and out again. It’s beautiful and chaotic and unpredictable. You can’t control all that, you can’t even understand it. All you’re doing is reducing the world by projecting your own agenda and eventually that’ll destroy us all.”

He took a breath and stared at her searching for understanding.

“Everything that happens is connected to everything else,” he said, “the meaning we give to things makes a difference and if we don’t accept that, if we don’t embrace the complexity and the chaos then we lose creativity and beauty and love and the deepest essence of human relationships and to everything and that, that, that is a terrible mistake. Don’t you see, it doesn’t matter if my Alphabet Spaghetti was talking to me or not, all that matter is I stay attentive and engaged with myself and with the world.”

The doctor put down her pen and smiled. She’d heard quite enough for today. They could resume their session tomorrow, besides, she had booked a table at Comfort that evening and her mind wasn’t on the session. She was looking forward to enjoying a predictable evening in the lap of security. This insufferable romantic crow man could wait. Imagine, she thought, the madness unleashed if we surrendered to beauty and love and creativity and the mystery of being intimate with our own intuition and insight, I mean, how could we impose unilateral meaning on all that chaos? We’d all end up in a psychiatric ward, and she disguised her laugh with a small fake cough as she informed him that his time was well and truly over.

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