A legal discursion

“The real reality is out there, but everything you know about ‘it’ is in your mind,
and yours to do with as you like.” ~ Malaclypse the Younger

 

I shall begin, as may already have become anticipated, with something that appears unrelated entirely to the question at hand. FIAT applies, of course.

The story I am about to relate, as with most of my stories, is not my own. It has been suggested that there are, after all, very few stories but a great proliferation of forms - the six-word story famously produced by Earnest Hemingway ("For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.") is composed in a profoundly limiting format, but you will be familiar with numerous elaborations upon it without having to consult your memory for long. This particular story is both itself, and a metaphor for itself, and a metaphor for this writing in which I relate the story, and a metaphor for FIAT itself. That seems to be a lot of freight, and it may not become any less when I confidently relate that you may appreciate it on any or none of these levels and still understand it as perfectly, or imperfectly, as anybody else.

Let those who have eyes to see, then, see this.

Some years ago - it doesn't matter how many - there was a gentleman who took the peculiar name of Malaclypse the Younger (this much of the story is true). He got together with another gentleman, glorying in the yet more peculiar name of Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, and these two gentlemen under the influence of some mellow psychoactive materials produced a book, within which was a great deal that was never meant to be understood. Among the most important of these was the Law of Fives, formulated and stated by Malaclypse the Younger (on page 00016) as follows:

All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or multiples of five, or are somehow
directly or indirectly appropriate to five. The law of fives is never wrong.

Lord Omar was, at some later unspecified time, to sagely observe: "I find the Law of Fives to be more manifest the harder I look," this being a substantially clearer explanation of the law than its statement by Malaclypse.

I didn't say it was a very good story.

Moving from - or, depending upon your perspective, through - that to the nature of being is as easy as listing the distinctly separate understandings of being which collectively inform my usage of the verb...