The Haranguer

Maybe James was stupid, though all he wanted was the truth. She could have told him that,
in fact, she had already addressed each item he just resubmitted as unresolved. In corresponding order: regarding his murder, she told him History wrote the murder and there was no agent, such as a James, who was solely responsible. And as for why she didn’t kill him when he offended her so-called dignity: because she transcends dignity in favor of bonding and sacrifice. Finally, as for the truth about humans, what we really are is something he just, himself, heedlessly reiterated: bodies of a species of nature, being; and not what we think we are, the narratives of becoming. But though this dickering confirmed the need for much repetition, Carrie wasn’t interested in precision, much less winning. She was onto something else. The abridged, abridgement of the Great Hypothesis; not for the getting it ‘right,’ just for the resources it provides for what James needed, a healthy restructuring. Carrie continued, ignoring his comments. He had already lost sight of his own questions. But she must finish the abridged, abridged. That, she knew was not wasteful. “I need to reiterate this at the outset, in case I haven’t, or if it’s unclear.”

Wait, James thought. Outset? What outset? You mean after more than an hour of proffering; she’s not wrapping up? “There is no free will; not only that, but there is no will period," Carrie continued. "True consciousness, aware-ing, is aware of Nature presently being, it’s stimuli and its responses, and that includes its ‘own’ Body and both its organically innate, and organically conditioned responses to Nature being; that is, its so-called own being. Not a noun by the way, reality is a verb restricted to its present participle form: be-ing, do-ing, is-ing, aware-ing. Just listen, Buddy, let it sink in. What is our reality? our x? Easy. It’s X-ing while x-ing without a flash of attention to anything outside of that now. Right now, we are real: that statement is already History.” James, who was already distracted, shifted his mind to her face as she spoke; the dimples, sure, but the shape of the mouth forming smart sounding words, and the warm gentle eyes blinking as if in slow motion. He felt the urge to kiss gently, each eyelid as it briefly shut. She looked happier, more excited than usual, though just slightly, and still mostly sad, a beautiful sad, compared to everyone else James had ever come across, sad or otherwise. And there is always an otherwise.

Carrie waited to let James catch up from his brief detour across her face. Her eyes told him to return to focus; and they noted when he was back. “Ok? You’re right. Anyway, you don’t have to know what I mean precisely, for this exercise; you just have to listen and waste no iota of processing, nor on the processing-of-not-believing-me.” After a pause with a faint smile, she said, “and pay attention to my words, not my facial expressions and what you erroneously speculate my mood to be.”

James smiled, and threw his eyes and his head back, and, while rolling them, lips expanding into a gaping crack. '"What the fuck,” he whispered, "how's she know?" and completed the movement, a Signifier, by placing both lower palms against his forehead, making a clap.

“We did not evolve minds organically,” Carrie continued, “nor do minds develop in the womb, nor are we born with them. They are not, contrary to all efforts and wishful thinking, inherent in the Universe. It could’ve gone differently. We could have evolved into a highly resourceful primate covering the earth, with a half dozen tools, and a few dozen 'words,' in the form of sounds and gestures. Maybe we would've even formed very basic concepts, like death, hunting, gathering, mating. But there would be no Subject and no make-believe Narratives flooding our world with meaning, no nature wrapped in sweeteners, and we would still be governed by drives, not desire. The Signifiers would come and go, not according to Emergent Laws, but as organic processes in natural conditioning. A highly advanced organic system using its imagination skillfully. But like a falcon is skilled at placing its dive. Even those hypothetical, basic concepts would've been tools, not truths. There are no absolute truths or first principles. Truth for us, and principles, though complex, are, like all moving images, made up. Mind is fictional such that it is not of the real world. Nature or God, if there is God, do not recognize it; or if it troubles you to steal from their omniscience, then, sure, they recognize it, but they have no interest in it, they do not deal in it. The Big Bang may not be the accident that wasn’t supposed to happen. But History certainly is.”

“Wait.” James brought his head down, focusing on Carrie, a look of surprise, eyes popping, but a strangely sprouting formation on his lips, a mutation of a smile, the expression, just on the unpleasant side of neutral. He just thought of something. A suspicious sounding tone, dragging his words, he said, “What do you mean, no truth? I thought our Bodies were True or something. You just agreed, I said that.” Carrie had already reviewed the expression, receiving it as a form not of accusation, nor objection, but in the array of confusion; and yet, an impressive confusion; one though triggered by structures already sunk, yet one which can only emerge from the swamp of ignorance on the dragonfly wings of understanding.

“Our Bodies are true, you heard right. But once spoken, that statement including any idea wrapped up in it has already alienated that truth, whatever that truth is. Truth cannot be uttered. Like you cannot aware in certain dimensions. It is only True in its successively present doing, in being; never when it enters becoming and time on the backs of Signifiers, constructing difference, representation, and significance. Just like saying ‘baseball’ for us, is not playing baseball; playing baseball is not what Nature is doing when we play ball. Nature is ‘moving.’ Nothing within discourse, including all of its fruits, from baseball and Calculus, to Paris, is true, no matter how seemingly insightful. It’s just a flickering of images in narrative form affecting matter, therefore creating the illusion of a something, where there is nothing. So-called insight is only insightful because it is new. Insight is simply a constructive imagination forming a new fabrication. 'True' for us ‘knowers’ is a meaning; meaning is made up. That is what cannot escape fiction. You want Truth? Be Truth. What is Truth for a human? The Body being. You want Truth? be the body. Guess what? You always already are truth. What does that mean? Ah! Now, you’re back in fiction. No matter what happens to your body in History, its only value, its truth, remains and, moreover, remains no less valuable than my truth, or the truth of Ghengis Khan or Mother Theresa.” Carrie could sense more confusion than necessary, “Just go with me, Buddy. I told you, go with it as if I am not speaking in riddles and lies; as if I am reading out loud from a sworn affidavit already cross examined for credibility.” She smiled, raised a quick finger, pointing and jerking like a sharpshooter, “but don’t forget, I’m not. Nothing is prima facie. I’m pointing you in a direction so that one day, you might be at a Real glimpse of Reality, and your poor desperate mind can be reconditioned to finally know, or structure your narrative such, that your body is the truth.” Aware of how ridiculous that must sound to James, poor guy, a product of a fundamentalist culture of fanatical empiricism, mathematical proofs, analytical thinking, objectivity, and skepticism. Being told to accept the formulas for resolving various problems, without the chance to test them is harsh to such a locus in History as James, and ours, we who have been raised under the totalitarian regime of suspicion, of logic, fact and reason.

“Mind is an evolved system of Signifiers which function as human history, transmitting from body to body, and through its manipulations of matter, using Bodies as its tool, changing everything for the human animal, and through them, affecting the earth; operating on the local level as a person or psychology and on the universal level as culture and society, every building you see, every stroke of color, every numeral and letter you read. And how has it come to be, to what end? It grows, resurfaces, expands, prospers, autonomously. A mechanism driven once by its biological placement in the organic imagination and the latter’s ‘inclination’ to project its images in memory; like a heart is inclined to pump blood, and a lung to pump air. Like both, it functions even in our sleep. This once solely organic drive became desire as internal laws emerged ordering its constructions and projections along prosperous paths, and the rest is actually History. But don’t get excited by your eagerness to reify it, swallowing it whole for materialism and science, proving me, your so-called Bitch and her ilk wrong when we claim it is Fictional. Yeah, Buddy, it came from the organic imagination; emerged from reality. But though functional, the stories are not ultimately real. Yet, more than breath, that’s what we cling to. The stimulus has become synthetic and has overshadowed the response. Whereas it is the reverse in Nature. Now that Mind has emerged, it is no longer just organic imagination. It’s that imagination, the Body, unwittingly being used by an autonomous emergence of codes moving as a working system, having only a so-called life of its own, displacing the organic imagination with an autonomous desire to project—a will to be heard—so complex it moves on its own and not as reality, matter or energy. In reality, not a life, a phantom existence, empty; not of its own, entirely dependent upon the Body. Yet, in its function, its body, species, and earth, are affected. It’s a mental system of text which evolved to be functional. Like a program or software. It has no mastermind, no agent, nor purpose, other than its evolved purpose, to grow and prosper, which fortunately requires it to ensure the same for its host. But not directly anymore. As a happy side effect, the body is supported by Mind. But Mind does not cherish the Body, as it should. And we, all of our love and all of our hate, our desires and repulsions, our ecstasy and suffering, our good and evil, and our this and that, are that growth and prosperity in progress. Meanwhile the body is the horse it rides. We who practice the Stages, call that Rider, ‘History.’ Mind is History; not manifested as: is. What structures your mind, signifiers, is what structures History, all minds manifesting outward in a more or less Grand Narrative; mine, yours, just little gatherings of that Narrative in separate bodies. Not with a single purpose: constructing purpose as it goes. It is precisely Indra’s Net; billions of decentralized, interconnected points reflecting meaning to one another to trigger actions and feelings, forming one History, driven, not by Nature nor God, but by desire, a will to be heard.”

“But the real us is not History. Trust me, if aliens or A.I. take our minds and place them on digital memory sticks, they haven’t preserved us; we were left behind with our feelings, other sensations and drives. The sticks are empty. Here is the natural state prior to the emergence of mind; what we, prehistorically, already evolved with as an animal species, what we are born with, and what we generally share with several animals...” Listening to Carrie closely for retention, the way she spoke, James was reminded of lectures he had found, saved on discs, watched on computers in the prison library. “Now listen closely to this, Buddy, ok? Nature may not be patterned and predictable, though we construct it to appear that way for assimilation to our linear form,” she continued her aria, without breath, “it is not predestined, but it wants to run on a system of conditioned response. It wants to create order and repetition. It grows more efficiently that way. It's most functional and avoids messiness and chance that way. Pre-historically, a human animal functioned organically, stimulus and response—unlike organs, sensations and drives, which evolved to come preconditioned, already installed—most actions, physical and of the memory/imagination, were conditioned responses developed as they go, following the first action emerging as a drive, including the one we call curiosity, then run through various degrees and complexities of, simplistically put, reward and punishment, until a pattern emerges which is reliable and efficient. A few snap shots are taken, filed, and called up in various structures when functional. The cycle repeats, and feelings are released to promote it. Using that inner sensation, imaging and memory, these initial stimuli were constructed by the imagination, into signifiers, stored, and utilized as shortcuts, triggering conditioned responses thereafter; reliable and efficient reactions without always having to wait to encounter the actual physical stimulus, or drive, to pre-emptively trigger the most functional responses. The Brain was an organ which evolved to be partially adaptable, conditional. You're not born to run simply from the presence of a Lion. But you also don’t have to be chased by one every time to trigger running; it can also be triggered by an image of the lion stored in memory, triggered by its scent, a roar, or a fresh pile of turd. Look, simply, Mind was built from signifiers constructed by the imagination as a fast track to stimulating already tried and true responses. Processes evolved to happen. You say, 'yah, but I can choose to go against my conditioning.' And we who follow the Great Hypothesis and Stages on Life's Way, say, that is also conditioning; Mind has projected structures which trigger your body to so called change its mind. And structures stating you did willfully change your mind. We say all of these are no different than lion roar means run.

“So, for example, the first time a rat bites you, and you are in pain, or get sick, your imaging sense, or imagination, constructs an image of rat, stores that, and links it to a feeling: fear; and then to a drive: run. There is no ego telling it to do that. There is no intention to categorize and classify; no knowledge at all in that organic process. It is built into the body by evolution. There is no Subject nor formal language allowing for any extension of that stimulus and response loop into time. Simplistically—I’m always oversimplifying to get her done, the abridged abridgement—next time a sign of a rat appears, that signifier triggers those feelings without delay. But prehistoric you didn’t walk around with the image anticipating a next time. Of course, I’m oversimplifying; this is the abridged, abridgement; twenty years in twenty minutes. Take it. And stay with me. If you listen only, you will have the necessary structures to build upon. You need not understand. Yet.” She waved a finger, “but don’t let your attention wander off. Listen. And believe. Taste and see that the word is good!

“Today a child can be born into developing a rat phobia never having faced an actual rat. Follow?” Carrie presented James with a blazing smile. Didn’t matter whether or not he was following, the smile filled him with joy. “Over maybe a hundred thousand years, the human 'Pavlovian' conditioned responses, or shortcuts, developed into a system transmitted from body to body for autonomously triggering feelings/drive/action/imagination, and displacing sensations with perceptions and emotions; drives with desires and decisions, a dynamic process, a system, with laws and mechanics we find our so-called selves and our so-called reality in; smack dab in the matrix of this empty code, this incessant churning out of fiction. And because of that, a rat is not rat-ing, but an R A T with the thousand mostly demeaning varying triggers it holds; and a Lion is King of the Jungle. And we are not be-ing, but, in that matrix of narratives, always becoming.

“Mind is that matrix. And we, the subjects, the you and me in discourse here, born into History, are zero percent flesh, entirely mind. Even though it is reverse. We, the beings born into Nature, from a fertilized egg in an amniotic sac, are one hundred percent flesh, and there is no Mind born into Nature with us but exists only as a highly functional figment highly efficient at affecting Nature. We have everything ass backwards.” They both laughed a little, James suppressing a yawn which Carrie noted and ignored. “Not only do we think the Mind is real, but we also actually deny the body and think of mind as having a privileged status in reality, even morally, we credit it as having the reins, with God-given Reason, over the greedy craving wild flesh. When really the seven sins for example, are all caused, not by the body, which like the rest of nature, has evolved to sustain an efficient equilibrium, within an environment of balanced supply and demand. Animals don’t sin. There is no lust in planting and gathering seeds, nor in mating; but only in stories structured out of empty pictures signifying x but are in no way x themselves. We altered the truth by saying, 'let x be any other letter.' If there were no Mind, our bodies would seek food and eat when hungry, mate when mutually aroused to, hold onto what is necessary, rest when tired, bond and thrive. Are you a murderer? This idea of Homo Sapiens the inherently murderous ape, is an entertaining exaggeration. We are, embarrassingly, Homo Sapiens, the accidentally conceited ape. All of us Narcissus, the ape seduced by its own reflections, consumed in its own imagination.

“Like everything, Mind grew and evolved, because it evolved mechanisms for its own growth and prosperity. The desire to be reflected, to be heard. That’s what really makes the world go around. Love, money, and the so called will to power are not the driving forces; they’re just loud voices that get readily heard. Yes, insightful, this ‘will to power.’ But why? Because power gets heard. This being a multi-level abridgement, I won't get into the details of desire of Signifiers to be heard, the root of all human desire, the attachments to the Subject, the force driving the movement of Mind; nor the role of difference arising out of naming this and that, the opportunity, the primary condition necessary for mind’s movement; differences, evolving into dialectic to resolve them into perpetual temporary settlements called belief; and the Subject to attach them, reifying them and giving them the illusion of a lingering substance, as opposed to the flowing emptiness these Signifiers are. I will also have to defer any meaningful discussion of Time, the fabricated plane upon which the movement flows, because difference makes it necessary; like the development of Grammar, Logic, the Laws restricting its movement, and out of them, the linear Narrative and the Subject to resolve the differences and move things along, experience; and knowledge occupying the organic memory with its tacky, yet prideful constructions, like a colonial invader, replacing all that was native, with tight corsets, strangulating neck ties, and gaudy wigs. There is so much I won’t get into.” Carrie watched James as he stood up to stretch. Reaching the floor to scratch his foot as he resumed sitting.

“Is there a documentary? Or at least a book?” James asked. “I mean. I’m interested...”

Carrie shook her head, smiling, as she continued. She knew he was overwhelmed, dizzied by a fast-spinning ride at the midway that should’ve ended more than an hour ago. But this was not a functional point of adjournment. If he could just do enough to register the whole abridgement-of in a single sitting, it would download better. He could kick his feet up and listen to Chopin, or whatever, later. Finish the chapter, James. It will be over soon, and you can get back to working through your story. “For Mind, the structures most fitting for growth, which means they serve the most needed function at any given locus, are the ones which get projected, building both history and each local story, personality, so-called identity, self. That is, Mind is structured by these Signifiers, constructing and projecting themselves as stories into the world out of first, a desire to be heard; and through an evolved process with dynamics, mechanics and laws, it has developed to ensure optimal use by the Body, or for itself, growth and prosperity. And I’d say it has succeeded at both evolutionary drives. I mean look around you, History’s growth and prosperity. As for the body as beneficiary; Eight billion of them, consuming the planet, and anxiously counting. Inevitably, Mind will construct the fitting structures to project it and its made-up world, History, further into the solar system, galaxy, and universe. And it can only do so, symbiotically, with our bodies.”

James was beginning to tire. Carrie must proceed only to the threshold, but also, she must not retreat prematurely. “The desire to be heard, I will mention; desire, the mechanism that drives Mind, churning out these incessant arrangements and rearrangements of what was once balanced, organic images stored to expedite response: the question should not be why did this desire emerge? It’s happening right now. You cannot shut me up because History’s only purpose is to project, what is functional to its precise locus in History; and then from locus to locus, each mind is like cells in an organ. I’m firing off a synapse for you to receive and because it has a specific function we have implicitly mutually accepted; you cannot stop me. And when you do, that's because a synapse functioned to stop me. Only it's not bio-electrical charges passing from cell to cell in the Brain, but Signifiers, code passing from locus to locus in History. Although, like I said, there is an organic explanation, I won’t elaborate, except to reiterate, the brain evolved in humans such that this efficient trigger response system operated by the imagination, developed to ‘want’ to create and use these shortcuts because they were efficient. And, not out of the organic drives alone, which, though they are real, also get filtered and translated into fiction and the narrative form; but, out of this want to represent, a desire beyond the drives, and for the fiction, and thus, all ego desire emerged.” Carrie looked out the window, to see what was out there suddenly so captivating to James, “it’s taking a toll, I don’t blame you. Hang in. Buddy. Hang in. Believe. And I’m wrapping up. The way to look at it is in reverse: desire for these constructions to be projected, coupled with the brain power to process it, pretty much sealed the deal for the system’s growth and prosperity. That’s why we have Mind, and are subjected, without escape, to our autonomic Imaginations flooding every moment with meaning, driving every moment with desire, and secondarily, attaching every moment to an imaginary Subject, such that the moments linger into one another and compete, on the structural level as dialectic, stretching into hours, days, years, and lifetimes, and then, construct and project a yearning beyond a lifetime, projecting desire forward into the equally constructed and projected forever, all of it feeling so real, when there is only now, forever is only now, the comings and the goings aren’t real; but all of that too, not now.

“Now let’s go back to the real body without mind for a second, and I’ll be done. Ok? Does it not have consciousness, the real body? Yes. Perfect consciousness. It doesn’t have it, it is consciousness, aware-ing feelings, sensations, drives, movements. The Body is not divided. Nature is not divided. Where do the air and water and carbon stop and the body start? Mind divides it, and displaces the part it categorizes as ‘consciousness,’ that simple and True aware-ing body, with itself, with mind’s Narrative, with I/me. Mind floods you with fiction frantically structured to promote its merchandise, joy, humor, excitement, envy, anger, suffering. But the Body is the source of these constructions, offering the flesh to operate, to sense and to feel. In its natural state, unless disturbed by a drive like fear or hunger, the Body is pure Bliss. Body is nature sensing nature; both in the form of itself and its environment. It makes no distinctions. It is enough for Body that it feels the bliss of being. We want to give that bliss meaning, so we make up joy, but we also make up suffering; it’s how we move Mind through difference, and its keeper, the necessary dialectic. We exist as Signifiers. Therefore, we want Body to know that it has bliss, and further, what that bliss is. It’s bliss!” Carrie laughed and raising her arms dramatically, caused James to join in. “Bonding for instance, like eating and mating, is a drive. Natural evolution encourages it by making us feel good with others, and not good alone. But we define the drive. Love, and romance, relationships, families, friendships, chess clubs, and AA, Laws of the father, and of matrimony, reproductive rights, and genders, and of states, kings, queens, ceremonies, institutions, complications, arguments, intimate partner violence, divorce, crimes of passion, prisons, these are projections by fiction, all of them displacing natural bonding. All of the organic drives, the organic sensations, sharp and potent, the silent, uncluttered organic imagination, and consciousness of feelings pure, unclouded by language made emotions, are what have been hijacked and displaced by Mind. And I am not rejecting or even evaluating Mind. Good or bad is silly. Both are defined within, and only there, relevant.

“Mind became so complex, so effective, that our aware-ing of nature is perpetually being flooded by this dynamic system of triggering signifiers. Not only that, but the system evolved by trial and error to set the linear narrative form as its standard formatted structure. It was fitting to project the images constructed by the imagination and stored in memory as stories moving in a single direction through time. That form best promoted growth of the projections; and to allow for that, necessarily came logic, cause and effect, identity, order, unity, and grammar and a Subject to signify the affected body’s place in the narrative, and to unite the perpetually elusive, illusive becoming(s) which must necessarily progress in single file. In effect, but not in truth, reifying them. See, what happens in the stories is not really happening to the body, to nature, or on the level of the real world, this physical universe. When the Eiffel tower was built, the reality of the iron remained. It only took fictional form. Get it? When I scratch my face, whatever that is, the moment either of us attend to it, it is inexorably wrapped in ‘scratching my face,’ make-believe layering over reality; truth taking fictional form. And when we lift the cover, we still want to see the fiction, perhaps some purified version, 'I willed scratching my face,' or 'my soul was involved.' But really lifting the cover means everything stops talking, and we’re back at whatever scratching is, as it’s happening, stripped of all meaning. Body falsely identifies with Mind. Mind doesn’t mis-identify as anything. Mind is nothing; yet it displaces the real organic aware-ing with the stories it constructs and projects into the world it structures, unifying them to the avatar of the stories, the subject, I. And bam! Buddy. Now the body is trapped in, reduced to, the subject of a sentence, and correspondingly whatever the predicate says the Body apparently does, burdened by the corresponding meaning and the suffering attached thereto.

“But none of it is real. Just SIMs, signifiers in motion. And that’s what all the false, misplaced, fuss of existence is about. That’s why while all life feels pain; suffering is unique to people. Suffering is pain delivered in narrative form allowing pain to stretch out and linger, allowing for attachment, bringing the balance perpetually forward with difference, perpetually deferring now, thereby, forsaking the present, reality, being, for a ride down the river, for becoming. Sentences. ‘I had a bad day. My sister hates me. I am poor. I hate what he did to her. I’m going to stop it. This toothache is hell. That was insulting. He's going to pay. I’m a murderer.’ And extensions of things like that carried along as if the organism had any natural relationship to these empty arisings, as if they had any material existence (even ascribing to them a superior existence), any basis at all, in reality and truth, where the body is eating and breathing. What a distortion of Nature!

“Finally… I know. This is hopefully my last, last finally. This thing we are not only fanatically obsessed with, but pride ourselves in as differentiating us from all of nature? That one thing we live by. It is not truth. No. Never unless by coincidence. It is a settlement projected outwardly as belief. Knowledge/small-t truth/choice/belief, the temporary winner in a competition among signifiers, subjected to a dialectical process and settling at the synthesis most fitting to surface. What are the criteria for fitting? Many. All of them to do with function, the function required, having been triggered by a previous projection, and so on, in all directions, good luck tracing any of it back to any original Truth represented. And if you did, the moment of discovery, is a moment in language and so, already, inevitably, a representation. From prior input, body stimuli, like sensation, drive or feeling, convention, logic and ethics, convenience, need, desire, to the circumstances, to the evolved parameters of Mind, i. e., difference, meaning, dialectic, the Narrative form, linear time, grammar, the subject, and the locus in history, etc. etc. In the end all contributing structures delivered to a given locus for its meat to process, lands upon what is most fitting to trigger a real feeling, conditioned already by the signifier, which in turn triggers the fiction to surface belief, which triggers the settled feeling for the body. And we think we are this agent pulling the strings in the process. We are the strings. And they are Fictional. Just puppet strings pulling themselves. We are Fictional. Only the puppet is real; and the puppet chooses nothing yet bears all of the suffering from the inevitable failings of the strings incessantly pulling in opposing directions and settling. To belabor the analogy—which remember, is imperfect, a factor of a thing so abridged; and, of a thing expressed, period—remove the strings, and the puppet turns out to be a Real boy, capable of moving on his own; to have always been that the strings were never essential to the real boy. It was the strings which lied, made him see himself as a puppet. Do you see, Buddy?”

“I see.” James wasn’t lying. A few moments back, when she promised the final, final, he got back, fully on track. Even though his tone sounded like that of a smoker having just sat through a two-hour lecture without a smoke break. That last bit, he felt he understood.

“It is never about truth when humans think, and reason, and choose. The truth is in the aware-ing body in its present being; not in the becoming that which we think we are choosing but actually just constructing and projecting, making and believing. Ok?” James nodded. “And yet this phantom of the so-called truth has been a razor-sharp weapon in the hands of the empowered, used not just to slay enemies, but also to shred up all of the structures used by such enemies in forming competing narratives. Like stupid or not, murderer or not. Real or not.”