"Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message." - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.
You want to be remembered long after you're dead? Write nonsense. Make sure it sounds tantalizingly like there's a hidden meaning. Do inexplicable things. Write reams of poetry about things so banal that readers of the future will be convinced it's an intricately coded message. Make bold claims, then deny them, vehemently. Talk often with strange people. Make donations to obscure cults. Maintain an unsanitary habit... in public. Be enigmatically different.
Why did this principle work? How did it work?
We have no way to experience a continuous and complete lack of consciousness (by definition). Death is ineffable. Fear of the finality of death forces most of us to search for ways to deny it. The supernatural provides an unprovable and irrefutable arena for exercising our wishful imaginations. The real world with its statistically unlikely coincidences provides fuel for apophenia and reinforces our certainty that the truth is out there. If there is a greater truth in the supernatural, then it's fair to assume that someone on earth knew something about it. Whoever was gifted with this gnosis would surely have tried to: (a) share it with an ignorant world; (b) use that knowledge to achieve some end; or (c) hide it in code because it was too dangerous for everyone to wot of.
Take any piece of gibberish that was written at least a couple of centuries ago. It will fit one or more of the following:
- (a) If nobody today really understands it, then the writer must have known more than we do about something. The text is meant for instruction, but we are too limited in our understanding.
- (b) If the writer is known at all today, then that fame must have arisen from something special about the writer. The existence and availability of the text confirms that the writer was using some power to achieve an end.
- (c) It only appears to be gibberish because it contains so much encrypted information. If the writer went to so much trouble to encrypt it, the knowledge must be extremely valuable.
Of course there only has to be one or two examples of intentionally hidden information in historic documents to make one suspect more. The default explanation -- that the writer was expressing contemporary ignorance or possibly just making it up because it was fun to do so -- is unsatisfying compared with a potential epiphany.
Now I'll let you in on a secret. Those who wrote gibberish that has perplexed readers over the centuries have either cunningly or unwittingly ensured an extension of their earthly influences. They've achieved the best approximation of immortality that nature is prepared to offer -- to be remembered.
About at this point I'd better revise my first statement. Too many people have access to publication. Too many people write gibberish. It's not enough to be eccentric.
You want to be remembered long after you're dead? Either do something of lasting value, or become famous and then write gibberish.
