I'm Not Crazy. You're the One Who's Crazy. (You're Driving Me Crazy!)

Don’t read me: I dare you!

See, I know a secret. That’s the secret of my cocksurety: a secret. The secret: you are reading this.

Here is the matter: I admit to allowing the accidental, and mere, seeming of a hostility toward the reader in those first six words, above. Yes, it is also deserving of note that the exclamation mark might feel like a crowning insult. It is not, and there is no insult at all to crown. Still, to sound so cavalier and contemptuous—to merely sound so—is like writerly suicide.

And yet it remains: that either I still have your attention, or I have lost it. In the latter case, these very words are mere trash-canned elocution to nobody—and such mere unread patterns of pixels, or patterns of ink on crumpled paper, are absurd, are an abortion of language, are language conceived, concocted, encrypted in print—but unreceived and so, at once, ceasing to be language. They’ll therefore have no sense, no reference, and, most notably for my present point, no truth-value. From this, I believe, it follows that you are still reading.

Consider the proposition “You are still reading this.” Let this be our topic, presently. One of the fundamental laws of thought has it that, to deny this proposition requires proposing its negation—to negate it, you must propose that you are not reading this. Please note that I am not even talking, right here, about the trivial fact that you are indeed reading this—that is merely a state-of-affairs, which might as well have been otherwise, whereas I am concerned with logical necessity. I am trying to draw your attention to the fatal contradiction implied in any argument against our topic proposition. To clarify that, let me please mention myself instead of you—it might be anybody doing this brief meditation on the proposition “You are still reading this.” So let’s say “I.” Should I try my hand at negating our topic proposition, I must assert its negation: I must assert that you are not still reading this. But of course, I cannot assert this latter, contradistinct proposition without negating the reception, and therefore the linguistic-ness of my language, and therefore any semantic content at all to my hopeful counter-proposition. Unequipped with such an impossible assertion (only language can assert, and language into the void, as writing to non-readers, is something like a twin without a sibling—it rapidly un-becomes itself), I cannot possibly negate our topic proposition. In asserting its contradistinction, I pull the semantic rug out from my own feet, thereby finding my assertion impossible to assert, in virtue of that very assertion.

I believe, and hope you will agree, that I have proven and demonstrated that it is necessarily true that you are still reading. I flatter myself, probably, but cheerfully, by supposing that I am the first writer ever to so prove and so demonstrate the necessity of being read—I feel I have fuddled with the metaphysical, and in fact ordained the necessity of my readership. Not even Goethe was ever—strictly, logically—so assured that anything he wrote would be read. He, and all the writerly world before, and around, me, had merely, at most, fantastic popularity, et cetera, to stack probability greatly in their favor, in finding readers for anything they would write. Mere probability! I chortle at probability. I have dealt, am dealing, in necessity. That’s what god does!

Perhaps you are snickering at me now. Well, snicker: but you cannot disprove my point—and, yes, after all (let’s admit the trivial, but true) disproof (of any deliberate sort) requires cognizance—disproof of a written point requires readership, and there remains, in addition to the strictly logical argument above, the miserable little, inescapable matter of you actually reading this. Should you set your mind on disproving this point of mine without ever having read it, should you spontaneously know that I write what I am writing, should you prove yourself unaccountably aware of the abstract point of this piece of language or hopeful-language, I might want to bow out and surrender to such an apparently preternatural opposition, which would certainly seem enormously admirable, which would certainly steal my affection and respect. Still, I would be obliged—logic always obliges us, after all—to be assured, by my lucidly logical meditation on our earlier proposition “You are still reading this,” that I am right. And it is necessarily so. And sure, it is, as arithmetic.

And let me double back a bit, and consider the mere, but almost-necessary, state of affairs which has you, indeed, though accidentally (not necessarily), actually reading this. I figure it is almost certain, barring something like telepathy. Disproof (of a written point), as we have said, requires readership: so, disproof invalidates itself, if my point is that you are still reading. And it is. And I needn’t add that you are, also, reading, as that is implied, strictly and surely.

But: you are. It is necessarily so.

Perhaps you think I am slipping away toward half-madness, or into early madness, into delusions of grandeur. But I have only pointed out the fabulous truth: that I have asserted astounding, logico-metaphysical powers unrealized yet by anyone else, ever, probably. Thus I prove and require my being read. And, behold: you readeth!
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and
despair.

Now I descry mine self, ecstatic: lo, here is Me. Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes in holy dread:

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the Milk of Paradise…
(thank you sincerely for your time),

Christopher Lantz.
(a great big batshit-insane lunatic bastard, only faking: this has all been make-believe. I am very bored, and so singing songs of a sort.)

...and the songs that I sing,
they’re not supposed to mean a thing!
(La dee da da. La dee da, la dee da da…)