On Digestible Metaphysics.

—By Daphne Howlsmythe Fashion, Food, and Pet Care Correspondent:

“The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism—the idea that any framework we use to organize our experience is just that: a model of reality, not reality itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this notion outside of physics with the pithy reminder: “The map is not the territory.” Alan Watts, ever the poetic exegete of Eastern thought, rendered it more deliciously: “The menu is not the meal.”

—Robert Anton Wilson, summarizing them all

To Whom It May Concern in This or Any Other Realm,

I had intended to write about linen slacks for pets and spring salads—but then I overheard our Council technician chewing on a schematic and thought, “Well. There goes lunch. And there goes logic.” What follows is my attempt to digest the matter.

And yet contrare to Wilson, Watts and Korzbyski… the map is made of the same stuff as the territory. In a carbon-based world, a map printed on paper—depending on the species of tree it comes from—is composed of at least 50% carbon, around 42% oxygen, 6% hydrogen, 1% nitrogen, and trace elements from the periodic table we all call home. Tell me that isn’t the world.

Homaru Cantu, a can-do chef out of Chicago, once filled an inkjet printer with fruit and vegetable juice and printed an edible menu on starch-based paper. Yes, you could read the dinner and eat it too.

I suppose this is where I remind the reader that I do, in fact, write the fashion, food, and pet care column for this esteemed publication. One wouldn’t expect a girl like me—raised among Boston terriers and bone china—to weigh in on quantum models and edible metaphysics. But I’ve always maintained that haute cuisine and haute philosophy share the same plating instincts: arrangement matters, darling, and so does imagination. My name is Daphne, after all—short for Daffy if you’re feeling cheeky, or Delphic if you’re feeling Jungian. I may look like one of those dames from the 1930s screwball comedies, the kind who wears gloves to breakfast and argues with the help—but I do my thinking with the best of them, preferably while wearing linen slacks and feeding my Pomeranian a locally-sourced duck soufflé.

The ancient Greeks said, “The garment makes the man.” Shakespeare echoed it. Today, even underwear is edible. The things we wear define who we are—or who we think we are—and sometimes, without our knowledge, reveal what we dare not admit. Dress is a visible guide to the inner soul. Linen, wool, and cotton? All carbon-based. Polyester? Refined dinosaur and decomposed tree-fern. The map is the territory. The garment is the man.

The surreal is real because it came from reality’s rib.

That’s not a metaphor—it’s a metabolic fact.

If it sprouted from your dreams, your circuits, your kitchen, your loom, your menu—it came from the same carbon, oxygen, and iron that made your bones. The surreal isn’t unreal. It’s just unscheduled.

Carl Jung saw dreams and visions as rooted in the deepest strata of human nature—not fantasy, but psychic fossils. André Breton, casting spells in French cafés, declared that “the imaginary is that which tends to become real.” Philip K. Dick warned that hallucinations might be just as real as waking life—just broadcast on a different frequency. And Teilhard de Chardin, who saw no contradiction in being both priest and paleontologist, proposed the noosphere: a sphere of thought and imagination, evolving from the biosphere like fruit from a branch. Even our fictions have roots in fact.

We’ve now patently proven: it’s absurd to say the menu is not the meal. Or that the map is not the territory. And they thought Watts and Wilson were the ones doing drugs! No psychedelic could part their veil enough to reveal the obvious: the so-called surreal is simply one more face of the real, rearranged and resonant.

C.S. Lewis once mused that Heaven must be real—because we can imagine it. But that’s a feast for another day. For now, let this outline suffice for your appetizer. There’ll be more meat on this matter to chew later. Promise.

—Daphne Howlsmythe

Fashion, Food, and Pet Care Editor

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