Babylon Black Box

There are too few appropriate microcosms. Most end up being far too pretentious, and then nobody likes you, and nobody reads you, and people get frustrated with these links you're drawing, and you give yourself an ulcer from both stress and aspirin. But you soldier on. This one concerns a wee mouse, kind of like that poem Of Mice and Men.

Oh, wee mouse! You were born with defects in your brain because cruel demi-god masters (the ones that pick you up at seemingly random times of day) wanted it so. You were kept in a cage where they shaved you as an identifying mark. Last week you spent most of the day in a dark soundproof box where popping noises made you jump, really made you leap against the confines of your immobilizingly tiny cage. This is what we wanted you to do, and because of your brain deficit made you extra-twitchy, you were the darling of the demi-god hunched over the equipment delivering what he called the "stimulus", but what you probably would have called "what the fuck was that!?". Other equipment reduced your experience to a tracing on an oscilliscope screen.

What you don't know, wee mouse, is that these all-powerful cruel demi-god experimenters are caught in a box of their own, except it is a box more appropriate to them. Your box is the startle chamber. Their box is caleld Babylon. So these boxes are internersted, as you see. In Babylon the cruel experimenters walk around and get their own shocking stimuli (but Babylon is more of a longitudinal experiment). POP! A child's murder splashes out on every newspaper page. BANG! Sirens walining in the night. POP! Darfur militias charging across the Saharan plains. POP! Tupac got shot. Biggie died. The natives on the corner are getting drunk just like every day all day. Victorian houses are burning down. BANG! Hurricanes. Appropriations hearings gone haywire. (And more subtle backround white noise, much as you have to get you prepped for the stimulus.) What about your mortgage? Will your job be here next month? How will you pay tuition? You have to get groceries? Did you remember to lock your door? Don't you hate that eyesore of a fence the neigbours built?

Wee mouse, don't think that I wouldn't connect to you. If I can, I will scatter your body's ashes, but we'll keep your bain fixed so we may learn something from you. Because you are teaching us.

Consider: "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."