Yesterday, I bicycled eighty miles. This is a new milestone for me, my previous one being around 60 miles, or a metric century. There was certainly a wall between going 60 miles and 80 miles. People familiar with endurance sports will be familiar with the concept of a wall. 40, 50 and 60 miles might see me zooming along happily on my bicycle, but at 70 or 80, my body and my mind might become leaden.
And those familiar with physical stress, or mental stress, might be familiar with the euphoria and odd thought patterns that accompany it. Somewhere on the way back, my mind entered a strange loop. Recently, I read 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, in which he described a race known as The Little People, odd and mysterious beings who are never fully described. One of the reasons could be that according to Murakami, they can't be remembered...when you look away from them, details of their appearance vanish. Strangely enough, 1Q84 is not the only place I have heard of manipulative creatures that can't be remembered, although the other instance escapes me.
It occurred to me, bicycling along, feeling the cold wind blow against me, that there may be such a thing as an anti-Tinkerbell effect. It is an article of faith for some that certain things can only be understood after they are believed in. But what, thought I, if some things are only understood when they are not believed in? What if there are things that are blocked from our conscious understanding, that if they were revealed to us as facts, we would deny or forget, but that we can understand and perhaps act on if we understand it to be a fiction, or a joke?
In a mindstate of fatigue and caffeine intoxication, the idea seemed perfectly reasonable, and indeed, there is no way to disprove such a theory, which is why it makes such a nice strange loop. And if disbelief is a prerequisite to understanding these forces that control our life, then happily enough, everyone reading this takes it to be the April Fool's joke of a well known jester.