Spinny
'neuro-boy' Jones was conceived when a Navaho Indian inseminated a maths
teacher during a thunderstorm in a Dakota shopping mall car park. On his mother's side, genetic contributions
came from Pythagoras, Robert Boyle and Alfred Laplace. His father's ancestors
included Sitting Buffalo, Tree Leaf and Kai Star. From Fourth Century Taiwanese
astronomers to Shiite Arab's and Swiss bank clerks to Russian aristocrats, his
inheritance drew its sources from the cream of our ancestors. If Theo was a neurotic outsider making
cross-referenced notes on the root, manifestation and resolution of the fire of
Being, then Spinny 'neuro-boy' Jones was the sulphurous smell of the match that
was flicked in the first place.
His lungs were woven out of ancient hemp
speckled with vanilla dots, and his kidneys were sand-beans. Instead of
testicles he had two Mayan conkers and his blood was cranberry wine whipped
with petroleum. Sharp green eyes and
torn dungarees covered in paint, he wore red-tinted sun-glasses with fair hair
gnarled into short dreadlocks. He lived in the same baggy t-shirt and his ashen
finger-tips were hard while his stubble gave him a sagely edge as he walked
sideways in smoke forlorn trainers - a red-eyed prophet. His thoughts were haphazard and crashing in
strange. In their chaotic and drunken waltz, they came across unusual ideas.
Stasis was flipped and a multi-coloured cloudiness filled his head. It was rapture and church bells but then
fingernails down blackboards and out of tune radio frequencies.
He had
a curious brain which could not tell differences between space and objects or
up and down. Everything jumbled together and swapped over at random in a
transcendental dodgem carnival. He was unable to tie his shoelaces, could
hardly change his clothes and often ate rain thinking it was lettuce. At the
age of eleven, the unifying power of science drew him in, since it too seemed
to pierce beyond distinctions and touch oneness. In three hundred years, the
monochrome, split cosmos of a single world under the governance of a distant
God had been replaced by a fused universe wild and giddy, riddled with curved
space, squashed time and sexy, whimsical quarks. All this was made possible by
the manuscripts and formulas of Copernicus and Einstein, Newton and Heisenberg. Spinny wanted to join
that shining parade, so he left home and embarked on the world with a notepad. He
had a crack at physics, dabbled with biology and worked in various areas of chemistry,
but it was when he came into contact with the journals of Paracelsus in a skip
in Ohio that
he decided to become an alchemist. A bit
old school and retro, but science proper had forgotten that magic dream of unity
that fuelled Newton
and Einstein and was too narrow.
After three
months, his labours began to pay off. Triumphs included: turning
carrot-shavings into toothpaste, milk into pigeon crap and pencil-lead into
vitamin c. Later, he transformed a tennis racket into a tennis ball, and a
stale muffin into Elton John. Now it was
time for gold, but it proved elusive.
Skimming through more mainstream texts, Spinny realised that no man
could ever have transformed metals into gold.
They were only surface changes or colour dyes. He was puzzled. If no-one created gold, why did alchemists
experience ecstasy? He came to the
conclusion that it is not gold that is important, but the rush of purity in the
soul - posing the alchemists work on wholly psychic grounds. He decided to
combine the thoughts of Carl Jung and Paracelsus like one might combine
boysenberry with mango - for the brain is a micro-cosmic smoothie of the
universal whole. A piercing thought of
wisdom shares its nature with zippy starlight. Melancholy is weaved from
moonshine. The swerve of young love is the formation of new galaxies and the wheeze
of the aged is the entropy of dying suns. He decided to become a
neuro-alchemist, a bio-electrician of the psyche - pricking the spirit with the
needle of matter.
He studied
plant extracts and their impact on synapses; the neurons
[1] as river
beds and consciousness as the combination of psychic energy and tree sap. If moods are the net tapestry of synaptic
connections, then the melting of those connections which drain élan would free
the self. His plan was simple. He would transmute human consciousness into gold
via the natural kingdom. So which herbal
compound would snip the weeds of anxiety riddling the global brain and nudge us
back onto a more sustainable direction?
He would work through the evenings and sleep in the days, going on
month-long benders fuelled with magic mushrooms and gin so that his
relationship with the universe could be one of playfulness instead of
retaliation. He began building
psycho-tropic drugs to expose the psyche to the unconscious forces which drive
it. By disturbing surface ego in order to mellow the stiffness of the adult
mind, he hoped to infuse the population of the western world with a reverence and
light that has been lost after a hundred and fifty years of industry.
[1] Do not be frightened
by the technical terminology. A neuron is basically just a small thin thing.
Synapses are slightly smaller things at the end of them.