Llixgrijb
“I was just thinking,” said Coyote/Llixgrijb, “that
maybe I’ve chosen the wrong realm to live in altogether. I created this
physical, temporal realm, and put Brillig in it to experience it for me. But,
really, all this physicality spells nothing but trouble. It seems that
suffering, ignorance, and mortality are the only things that hold the temporal
realm together. It leads to more grief than gratis.”
“Indeed,” said Wolf. “Buddha taught us that
suffering and sacrifice are key ingredients in this realm.”
“Then why stick around? I believe I’ll scrap the
whole thing and move on to the mythic realm—the world of flow, of determinacy.
A world without surprises. I like the sound of that.”
“So are you contemplating destroying our world
altogether?”
“What do you think?”
“Be careful, my friend,” said Wolf. “If you try to
scrap this world, you may find the mythic world extremely boring. There will be
no meaning or purpose to it, without information from our temporal realm
leaking into it. The mythic world is only important because of the physical
world, and the physical world is only important because of the mythic world.
Here, at least, you get to experience the heroic myth of the mystic experience,
because death is real here.”
Coyote/Llixgrijb grinned at him. “You’re trying to
scare me out of it, aren’t you?”
“Besides,” continued Wolf, “getting rid of either
realm would prove rather difficult. Dividing the mythic from the physical or
the temporal is like cutting a magnet in two; the pieces will divide into
physical or mythic wherever you make the cut. It’s either both realms, or
nothing. It’s a cosmic/mythic complementarity. You must have both to have your
dream.”
“I think you’re bluffing,” said Coyote/Llixgrijb.
—physicist Fred Alan Wolf in conversation with Llixgrijb,
from The Jamais Vu Papers newsletter and book by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin.
Reprinted in Jamais Vu Views along with additional material.
from The Jamais Vu Papers newsletter and book by Wim Coleman and Pat Perrin.
Reprinted in Jamais Vu Views along with additional material.
Now Llixgrijb has entered into our own mythology.
Here’s how that came about.
By the time we’d published a few issues of The Jamais Vu
Papers newsletter, we’d talked with several brilliant and open-minded
people, posing nosy questions about the nature of reality, Story, and just what
we think we’re doing in this tangle of phenomena that we call a universe.
Then an entity named Llixgrijb turned up in our story.
We thought we were making him up.
We were wrong.
Here’s the premise:
Living in a reality of which we know nothing, an entity
named Llixgrijb becomes trapped alone in an extra-dimensional cave-in. The
entity is faced with the inexorable prospect of untold purgatorial eternities
of infinite loneliness and boredom. What would you do if you were
Llixgrijb? We ventured a guess:
“You’d create worlds in your imagination, worlds within
yourself. You’d create universes with exotic dimensions no one ever dreamed of
before. You’d become strange creatures, and share the company of other such
creatures. You’d try to make these realms and beings so real you could
completely forget the horror and boredom of your real situation.”
So Llixgrijb created a world—our world, in fact. Real
though we may imagine ourselves to be, we are nothing but intricately flawed
manifestations of Llixgrijb’s imagination. Our reality worked out nicely for
Llixgrijb—an entertaining distraction from its cosmic plight. But Llixgrijb had
one worry. The entity knew that if any one of us illusory mortals should become
aware of its existence, the splendid fantasy would vanish. So how could
Llixgrijb keep this from happening?
The answer was so obvious that you’ve probably guessed it
already:
“It created a character so obtuse, so unimaginative, so dull
and mechanistic that it could never figure out its own true dilemma.”
That’s right—Llixgrijb had to incarnate in the form of a
college English instructor. Thus was created Llixgrijb’s alter-ego, Professor
Joseph Xavier Brillig, the most thickheaded academic in the histories of a
bazillion universes. Having no idea of his true identity, Brillig joined our
cast of characters.
We were a little worried about Llixgrijb. Was the whole idea
too silly for reader consumption? Would our newsletter be scoffed out of
existence? Or to the contrary, might the very concept of Llixgrijb put reality
itself in perpetual danger of unraveling?
It seems that the latter was the case. We started getting
the message when Wim visited physicist Fred
Alan Wolf, hoping to interview him for the newsletter. Wim warily
started telling Wolf all about Llixgrijb, bracing himself for a reaction of
impolite incredulity.
“Oh, you don’t have to tell me about Llixgrijb,” Wolf said. “I’ve
known Llixgrijb for years. Let me tell you all about Llixgrijb.”
The National Book Award-winning physicist then went on to
describe Llixgrijb in intimate detail. Thus was confirmed the independent
reality of a creature we thought we’d invented.
Llixgrijb escaped from the story. It wandered away and
remains at large today. Decades after we first created (or discovered?) the
entity who dreams our reality into being, Llixgrijb continues to crop up in the
infoworld. We’ve come across Llixgrijb …
If you google Llixgrib, you’ll get about 12,000
results. Some are quotes, usually (but not always) attributed to The Jamais Vu Papers, and sometimes
translated into various other languages. Many are said to be posts by Llixgrijb, who apparently speaks
Russian and a bevy of other languages as well as English and lives in various
parts of the world. Here are just a few Llixgrijb links:
… offering to be a pen pal …
… playing
music …
… playing
chess …
… tweeting …
… lurking
…
The lesson is this: Never underestimate the power of Story
to alter the nature of reality. Alas, the lesson came with dire consequences.
With so many mortals aware of Llixgrijb’s existence, how can our reality—time,
space, matter, energy, mortal consciousness, the whole enchilada—continue to
exist? Llixgrijb might zap us out of existence at any second.
Indeed, that outcome seems all too probable …
… perhaps even inevitable.
