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Storm
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Tim Minchin
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1
Inner North London, top floor flat
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All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
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Rice Paper partitions, modern art and ambition
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The host's a physician,
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Bright bloke, has his own practice
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His girlfriend's an actress, an old mate of ours from home
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And they're always great fun, so to dinner we've come.
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The 5th guest is an unknown,
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The hosts have just thrown us together for a favour 'cause this girl's just arrived from Australia
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And she's moved to North London and she's the sister of someone or has some connection.
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As we make introductions I'm struck by her beauty
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She's irrefutably fair with dark eyes and dark hair
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But as she sits, I admit I'm a little bit wary 'cause I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy tattooed on that popular area just above the derriиre
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And when she says "I'm Sagittarian", I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
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And is immediately filled with pigeon when she says her name is Storm.
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Conversation is initially bright and light hearted but it's not long before Storm gets started:
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"You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion!"
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She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon, vis-а-vis some unhippily empirical comment by me.
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"Not a good start" I think
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We're only on pre-dinner drinks
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And across the room, my wife widens her eyes, silently begs me: "Be Nice"
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A matrimonial warning not worth ignoring
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So I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door
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Or the window on her second floor.
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The food is delicious and Storm, whilst avoiding all meat happily sits and eats
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As the good doctor, slightly pissedly holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
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When Storm suddenly insists:
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"But the human body is a mystery! Science just falls in a hole when it tries to explain the the nature of the soul."
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My hostess throws me a glance
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She, like my wife, knows there's a chance I'll be off on one of my rare but fun rants but I shan't
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My lips are sealed, I just wanna enjoy the meal
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And although Storm is starting to get my goat I have no intention of rocking the boat
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Although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle because - like her meteorological namesake - Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:
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"Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
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They promote drug dependency at the cost of the natural remedies that are all our bodies need
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They are immoral and driven by greed.
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Why take drugs when herbs can solve it?
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Why use chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve it?
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I think it's time we all return-to-live with natural medical alternatives. "
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And try as I like, a small crack appears in my diplomacy-dike.
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"By definition", I begin,
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"Alternative Medicine", I continue,
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"Has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work.
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Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work?
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Medicine. "
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"So you don't believe in any natural remedies?"
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"On the contrary Storm, actually
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Before I came to tea, I took a remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree
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A painkiller that's virtually side-effect free
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It's got a weird name, Darling, what was it again?
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M-masprin? Basprin? Oh yeah! Asprin!
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Which I paid about a buck for down at the local drugstore.
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The debate briefly abates as our hosts collects plates
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But as they return with desserts Storm pertly asserts:
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"Shakespeare said it first:
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There are more things in heaven and earth than exist in your philosophy...
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Science is just how we're trained to look at reality,
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It doesn't explain love or spirituality.
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How does science explain psychics? Auras? The afterlife? The power of prayer? "
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I'm becoming aware that I'm staring, I'm like a rabbit suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
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Maybe it's the Hamlet she just misquothed or the 5th glass of wine I just quaffed
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But my diplomacy dike groans and the arsehole held back by it's stones can be held back no more:
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"Look, Storm, sorry I don't mean to bore you but there's no such thing as an aura!
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Reading Auras is like reading minds or tea-leaves or star-signs or meridian lines
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These people aren't applying a skill, they're either lying or mentally ill.
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Same goes for people who claim they hear God's demands or Spiritual healers who think they've magic hands.
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By the way, why do we think it is it ok for people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
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Isn't that totally f****d in the head?
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Lying to some crying woman whose child has died and telling her you're in touch with the other side?
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I think that's fundamentally sick
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Do we need to clarify here that there's no such thing as a psychic?
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What are we, f*****g 2?
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Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
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Do we still believe that Santa brings us gifts?
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That Michael Jackson didn't had facelifts?
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Are we still so stunned by circus tricks that we think that the dead would wanna talk to pricks like John Edwards?
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Storm to her credit despite my derision keeps firing off clichйs with startling precision like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition
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"You're so sure of your position but you're just closed-minded
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I think you'll find that your faith in Science and Tests is just as blind as the faith of any fundamentalist"
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"Wow that's a good point, let me think for a bit.
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Oh wait, my mistake, that's absolute bullshit.
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Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
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Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
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If you show me that, say, homeopathy works, then I will change my mind
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I'll spin on a f*****g dime
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I'll be embarrassed as hell, but I will run through the streets yelling
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'It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
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Water has memory! And while it's memory of a long lost drop of onion juice seems Infinite
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It somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it! '
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You show me that it works and how it works
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And when I've recovered from the shock
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I will take a compass and carve 'Fancy That' on the side of my c***. "
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Everyone's just staring now,
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But I'm pretty pissed and I've dug this far down,
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So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:
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"Life is full of mysteries, yeah
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But there are answers out there
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And they won't be found by people sitting around looking serious and saying 'Isn't life mysterious? '
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'Let's sit here and hope.
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Let's call up the f*****g Pope.
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Let's go watch Oprah interview Deepak Chopra. '
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If you wanna watch tele, you should watch Scooby Doo.
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That show was so cool because every time there was a church with a ghoul or a ghost in a school
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They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
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The f*****g janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide.
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Because throughout history every mystery ever solved has turned out to be
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Not Magic.
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Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you?
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Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-f*****g-pedia might enlighten you frighten you?
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Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural so blow your hippy noodle that you'd rather just stand in the fog of your inability to Google?
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Isn't this enough?
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Just this world?
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Just this beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world?
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How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?
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If you're so into your Shakespeare, lend me your ear:
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"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet... is just fucking silly"
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Or something like that.
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Or what about Satchmo!
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"I see trees of Green,
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Red roses too, "
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And fine, if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu in a post-colonial, condescending bottled-up and labeled kind of way then whatever, that's ok.
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But here's what gives me a hard-on:
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I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant bit of carbon.
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I have one life, and it is short and unimportant...
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But thanks to recent scientific advances I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncleses and auntses.
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Twice as long to live this life of mine
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Twice as long to love this wife of mine
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Twice as many years of friends and wine
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Of sharing curries and getting shitty at good-looking hippies with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties.
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And if perchance I have offended
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Think but this and all is mended:
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We'd as well be 10 minutes back in time, for all the chance you'll change your mind
Prejudice by Tim Minchin
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