If we accept multiple universes, then we no longer need worry about what “really” happened in the past, because every possible past is equally real.
—JOSEPH GERVER, “The Past as Backward
Movies of the future,” Physics Today,
April 1971
“He who mast—— … who hesitates is lost,” Marvin Gardens said one day in the Confrontation office. Joe Malik considered it one of the most interesting Freudian slips he had ever heard and recorded it in his diary, where it was, of course, subsequently scanned by the Illuminati.
Marvin and Joe never got along well, but that was because Marvin regarded Joe as an extraterrestrial invader and Joe regarded Marvin as a nut.
“Marvin is emphatically not a loony,” Justin Case had been heard to say quite often. “He’s a genius. The greatest put-on artist since Hitchcock. Nobody recognizes what a great satirist he is.”
“Justin Case,” Marvin said when that was repeated to him, “thinks he’s being liberal, but he’s just another victim of brainwashing by the Amazon Invasion.”
Marvin Gardens had been traumatized by the 1970s and always referred to the Women’s Liberation Movement as the Amazon Invasion. He believed, or pretended to believe, that the ringleaders were all extraterrestrials who had arrived by flying saucer in 1968 and were boldly conspiring to seize supreme power everywhere through what he called semantic black magick. “They’ve atomized the language and created a semantic smog in which ordinary humanity is obliterated by abstractions like ‘chairperson’ or simple mammalian erotic signaling is politicized into a new sin called ‘sexism.’ Any male who dares to oppose them is stigmatized as a ‘male chauvinist,’ and any female who opposes them is labeled a victim of male brainwashing. Obviously, within a decade, they will command the key posts in all areas of industry (they’ve captured publishing already) and then government will fall. Probably, then, the males of their species will start landing and we’ll all be enslaved. (Some of the males may have landed already; look at the Manhattan literary scene.) It’s the sweetest infiltration job in the history of galactic espionage. For merely daring to reveal their plans, I am smeared by them as a ‘male chauvinist pig,’ which is ten times worse than an ordinary ‘male chauvinist’ and equivalent to an SP on the Scientologists’ hit list.”
Some agreed with Justin Case that Marvin was kidding, that he had merely seen an opportunity—the chance to attain fame and fortune by espousing a bitterly controversial extreme position. Others, however, claimed he was dead serious, and was a classical case of cocaine paranoia. Marvin always pointed out, when either of these theories was mentioned in his presence, “there is a third possibility. I might be right. In that case, how convenient for Them that my sanity and sincerity are so often called into question. It almost looks as if They are conspiring to defame my character. Are they afraid that some might listen to me before it’s too late, before the takeover is complete?”
Marvin’s principal enemy, among the male half of the population, was Frank Hemeroid, of course. Hemeroid, oddly enough, hardly even knew of Marvin’s existence and, hence, was incapable of being harmful to him by intention. That didn’t matter. He was still the enemy with a capital E. At times Marvin had even suspected him of being extraterrestrial, like the leaders of Women’s Lib.
Hemeroid earned his animosity entirely by the books he wrote, which were full of treason, according to Marvin. Actually, Hemeroid’s novels merely reflected the 1970s literary society around him, in which most people were a little weird and all of them were losers. Hemeroid carefully depicted a world exactly like that: Most of his characters were weird and all of them were losers. The critics, who were all losers, called him a brutal realist. Marvin called him a traitor to planet Earth.
Marvin wrote about all this in dialogues (he rather fancies himself as being of Platonic disposition) in which the speakers were Frank Hemeroid, representing 1970s values and reality-constructs, and Ernest Hemingway, Marvin’s childhood hero who had been consigned to the literary garbage heap when the extraterrestrials took over. Hemingway, in these dialogues, represented Man, individual Man, the universal maverick, as he was before the extraterrestrial invasion.
The dialogues were full of things like this:
FRANK: Did you ever really believe in your own myth, you old faker? Did you think you could come out of a neurotic suicide-prone family and by sheer Will transform yourself into a hero, a brave man, a great artist, a boxer, a big-game hunter, a cult figure, an image of courage and of grace under pressure? Didn’t you know you were a worm, that all men are worms and cowards, and that you’d be beaten at the end? Didn’t you know you’d be like all the rest of us and give in to self-pity and self-doubt and pull that final cosmic trigger?
ERNEST: I never said my way was easy. I said that Man was not meant for defeat, however many individuals may be defeated. I said that the effort to be conscious enough and brave enough was admirable, whatever the consequences.
FRANK: Consciousness? Bravery? Consciousness is only aware of its own suffering in this blind existence, and bravery is only a gesture against the inevitable end. A stupid gesture, since the cowards live longer, and if they’re cowardly enough, they make all the comfortable decisions and have all the security possible in a Death Universe like this.
ERNEST: I deny none of that, and I have shown the cruelty more nakedly than any of your generation. I still say it is admirable to be brave and take big risks for the things you value. When everything mammalian and mechanical tells you to run, and you stand and don’t run, you learn what Man can be.
And so on. Marvin was obsessed with something he called the Dignity of Man. He was not at all amused by ecological relativists who told him that an ant or a swine might equally believe in the Dignity of Ant or the Dignity of Swine. Men were not ants or swine, he would say coldly; and he would classify the heckler as probably brain-warped by the extraterrestrial Amazons.
In truth, like most philosophers, Marvin never wrote explicitly about the one factor that really determined and explained everything in his philosophy. Just as Marx never mentioned his carbuncles in Das Kapital, and Freud didn’t publish anything about his own sexual hang-ups, Marvin Gardens never wrote a word anywhere about the source and motive of all his theorizing. This was his penis. It was four inches long at best, and it had given him a defeatist psychology about things in general, and women in particular, against which he had struggled mightily to build his philosophy of Transcendental Male Courage. The women he classified as extraterrestrials frightened him only a little bit more than the ordinary women he classified as terrestrials.
Sometimes Marvin wrote dialogues between Pavlov’s Dog and Schrödinger’s Cat, instead of between Frank and Ernest. These were usually quite short and almost like Zen stories:
DOG: I’ve got a million proofs that we’re not free.
CAT: I’ve got one proof that we are.
DOG: What’s that?
CAT: Who asks what’s that?