Laurence Scott - Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality

A spellbinding examination of the nature of reality, by one of the brightest thinkers of today.

Cognitive science proposes that we have evolved to build mental maps of the world not according to its actual, physical nature, but according to what allows us to thrive. In other words, our individual and collective realities are fictions carefully constructed to enable us to maintain our particular perspectives.

It used to be that our fictions were rooted to reasonably solid things: to people, places and memories. Today, in an age of online personas, alternative truths, constant surveillance and an increasingly hysterical news cycle, our realities are becoming more flimsy and more vulnerable than ever before. Ours is now a zoomed-in perspective, where the backstage is centre stage. We are both camera person and subject, with new powers and new weaknesses. Our personal and political spheres are dangerously merging. How will the form and grammar of our feelings have to change in this over-exposed environment? Should any of our stories remain secret? How are these phenomena changing the way we live? How do we maintain a sense of reality in an increasingly fantastic world?

Picnic Comma Lightning is an innovative examination of the nature of reality in the twenty-first century, one that explores the key ethical, political and neurological forces contouring our inner selves, but also the old influences of grief and desire, memory and imagination. In it, award-winning author Laurence Scott provides a lively and accessible new philosophy for this epoch in Western civilisation, one that will change the way you see the world, and your place within it.

Laurence Scott is a writer, broadcaster and academic. His first book, The Four-Dimensional Human, was shortlisted for the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize and was named the Sunday Times Thought Book of the Year. His essays and criticism have appeared in the Guardian, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, and he is a regular contributor to the FT Weekends Life & Arts section, writing cover features, columns and reviews. He has features and essays forthcoming in the New Yorker, the New Statesman and Wired. In 2011, he was named a New Generation Thinker by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the BBC, and since then has presented feature-length documentaries for BBC Radio 3, also becoming a regular cultural commentator on the arts and ideas programme Free Thinking. In 2014 he won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction. He lives in London.

ALSO BY LAURENCE SCOTT

The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World

Halfway down, I step over some version of myself; a girl of four or six, idling or playing in the place most likely to trip people up. This is where children sit, I know this now; how they love doorways, in-between places, the busiest spot. This is where they go vague and start to dream.

Anne Enright, The Forgotten Waltz

For Rob Lederer

WHILE I WAS in my early thirties, my parents died in impolite succession. My mother first, in 2010, then my father in 2012. He was in his early eighties, but she was sixteen years younger and had no business going anywhere. They passed the illness baton from one to the other, so that my mother died in midsummer and by the autumn we were back on the same floor of Charing Cross Hospital, with the same attendants wheeling the vital-signs trolley up to the bedside. Names in blue marker on a whiteboard behind the bed: patient, nurse, consultant.

Death runs like radioactive iodine through your sense of reality, allowing this reality to be looked at in high contrast, its structures glowing. It has a way of making things very true, but also, somehow, less real. There are many merciless truths: my parents never put their key in the front door, never walk into a room, never send birthday cards. Theyre never waiting at the airport. They dont sleep. They dont tap on the back of ketchup bottles or mispronounce words. At the same time, the truth that they dont do any of this feels less than real. I mean, just look: there they are. They have posthumous opinions on the news; they roll their eyes. I think up puns and my mother laughs at them. She is excited to hear that Lily Tomlin has a sitcom on Netflix. Ooh, great! she says, knowing improbably about Netflix.

Bereavement not only highlights the materials from which reality is made, but transports you into a new one. The change is as clean as the flicking of a light switch, although whether it has been turned on or off is unclear. It can feel like the lights have gone up after a great party, while also being a plunge into the dark. Those who are precious migrate, as fast as the flick of a light, from the outside to the inside of life. They dont trip your senses by hugging you, or by swinging into view over the crest of the road. You stop seeing that car, unmissable among all the others, even at a distance, with its two unmistakeable thumbprint silhouettes, side by side. Instead they live, at least part-time, in your minds electro-charged darkness.

Death brings a new question sharply into the minds of the bereaved: what is a real person? Overnight youre landed with a sudden, astonishing hybrid, made up of memories and intimate knowledge. One of the things Ive noticed about bereavement is how the past spreads itself now across my everyday reality in a more concerted way than before, with two impossible beings occupying my middle distance. They are mythological, time-travelling creatures, who appear in different forms and hail from different decades, brown-haired one minute, grey the next. They mow the lawn, read the paper or stand at a long-gone kitchen counter, as though nothing bad had ever happened. These fantastic companions become, in one sense, the most real people you experience. For unlike an encounter with the living, there is no external reality against which to judge your perceptions. As a character in one of Mavis Gallants short stories says, the only authentic voices I have belong to the dead.

In these last few years, while Ive been navigating this new personal reality, the questions of how we experience the real world, how we access its truths, have become mainstream concerns. On 16th January 2018, during a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, US Senator Orrin Hatch began his statement by taking off a pair of glasses that he wasnt wearing. He raised both hands up beside either eye, clipped them around invisible handles and brought them back down to the bench. He continued as if this were normal, with perhaps just one nervous little cough registering the mistake. The moment was like a Lucille Ball slip-up, a clowns attempt at gravitas. At the same time, it instantly seemed a perfect symbol of our present state of affairs: the unreality of American politics in the wake of its reality-TV president, the deception of the political classes who no longer even feel the need to disguise their deceptions.

The international laughter that followed this footage stemmed both from its pure comedy and from a kind of demented relief. Levels of incredulity, scepticism and distrust in reality as it is presented to us have become constant features of contemporary life. In the last few years we have become primed to ask ourselves: Is this real or not? reality. YouTube formally rejects the methodology of this analysis. So who do we believe? Do we have time to scour the data ourselves? A 2018 study of Twitter, published in the journal