OK folks, we’re doing the eighth dimension today — the lesson will be much the same as the last few; the words I’ll say will be different and the sentences will carry different meanings, but their essentials, compared with previous lessons, will remain the same, and I will still occasionally say hoo.
But I must say, I am getting very tired of this.
I’m going to level with you, humankind. Enjoy it while it lasts, because it’s the closest we will ever get to truly communicating with one another.
The problem that faces me is that this whole thing — these lessons and even speaking in general — wasn’t such a great idea after all. As I prepare each of these lessons I’m swallowed up by a growing hollowness, the volume of which extends far beyond my own oblong dimensions. It comes a little more noticeably with each idea that I try to explain, inflating itself from within the pit of my chest.
It started as just a silent pocket in my breast, but now I find myself shrinking with a start at the mere trace of it. As soon as I catch wind of this predatory space it expands violently around me, enveloping me in the depths of a depression that, I fear, only I may truly know. It is the hollow realization that these lessons will get me nowhere and, hoo, communicating in general can only, for me, ever be another way to pass the time before death takes me away.
I’m quite certain that I am the only owl who can speak, and you pea-brained humans are the only ones who will hear me. Sometimes I think Edna understands as she swivels her head toward my laments. Our eyes meet and my heart leaps, but then her head just keeps on swiveling right past, almost as though she hasn’t even seen or heard me at all. What, I ask you, is the point of understanding the complexity of 11 dimensions if one cannot romance over their beauty with equals? I’ve always known it was pointless, but I can’t stop myself; it’s all I’ve got. So here we continue to meet, lesson after lesson, like a couple of tired old lovers who know nothing better than to keep on living in each others’ company.
And that is, practically speaking, the same soup that my Edna and I live in together. The futility of teaching you worthless people has awoken that hollow feeling and now it follows me when I go home to sweet Edna. Oh, hoo, some days I just fill up with rage and have nowhere to place it but into these vacuous lessons.
Now as I search for the words to begin this lesson I’m heaved into that same old hollowness, that same cavernous presence. All of these lessons, all of the questions they beg to be asked, which, let’s be frank, you could never think to ask nor whose answers you could ever understand — for what? Just to pass the time? So I can make believe that you are companions?
Perhaps its because the eighth dimension has always been my favorite (I bet you don’t even have a favorite dimension). Now that I’m called upon to teach you about something so very close to my heart, the futility of it all shimmers across every wasted word.
If we owls all had voices, how would we use them? I suppose some of us would sit with guitars outside of coffee shops; some would become tycoons, selling opium from yachts on the Mediterranean; some would have their own 11-dimensional bordellos. Me, well I think I might write a book. And with Edna I would speak at great length. On into the deadest hours of the night we could go, examining our love, never really reaching the core, but never really wanting to. A gaggle of you humans could pass by the window below and we could laugh at your monkey noises — certainly not try to explain spatial dimensions beyond your comprehension. But, as it happens, you humans are the only ones with an advanced language.
If we owls, even for only an hour, just one hour every day, if we could speak to one another for one little hour, just imagine.
Never mind that. On to the eighth.
Think of, oh I don’t know. Think of a table with, let’s see — a table with a cup on top of it. Yes, think of a table with a cup on top of it, and inside the cup is the same cup, so you can’t even really see that there are two because it looks like one, because in essence, it is one. So, actually, you can just literally take a cup and place it on a table and take look at it. There you go. Now you’re getting it.
The eighth dimension is where space folds in upon itself. In a sense, it is the dimension that occupies the empty space taken by mass. So, we have a cup on the table that is a cup, but it is also not a cup; it is also a fold of empty space that is shaped exactly like it and positioned just so, but is not it. It is, in some sense, the “storage” dimension. Certain multidimensional beings could use the eighth dimension for holding their most dangerous criminals or their unwanted toxic waste. It is why, if you were to use a jet car equipped with an oscillating over-thruster, you could pilot straight through a Texas mountainside.
That, of course, is taken direct from one of the fruits of your civilization, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Had you been listening to any of the lessons I have been trying to give, you would know right off the bat that the eighth dimension, like the seventh and the sixth and so on and so forth, is a spatial dimension that sits contrariwise to all the other ones. Remember? Up and down, left and right, back and forth, in and out; it’s another one of those. Remember? Dimensional analogy?
No, how could you? You didn’t understand in previous lessons and you still can’t now because for some reason you are not equipped to comprehend those dimensions. You’ve got three and that’s it. No more, no less. But you’ve got that pharynx, that language. Well, try to understand this, hominid: one way or another, I’ll find a way to harness the power of speech for owlkind. Then we’ll see who runs this planet. Your days are numbered, humans.
