The Total System of Everything (Blottisham’s Last-ditch Attempt)

Dramatis Personae

• Professor Quillibrace — patient, dry, relentlessly precise

• Mr Blottisham — heroic, desperate, yet increasingly absurd

• Miss Elowen Stray — amused, reflective, watching the unravelling

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Blottisham (standing, with a flourish):

Enough! If the world will not yield, then I shall construct the ultimate solution:

Behold — the Total System of Everything!

Quillibrace (tilts head):

Oh? Pray tell, does it come in physical units, or is it purely metaphysical?

Blottisham (ignoring the jab):

It contains:

• All phenomena, past, present, and future

• All possible systems

• Every cut that could ever be made

• Every symbolic structure

• Every meaning, value, and law

• All relations among all things

Elowen Stray (softly, to Quillibrace):

He seems to have mistaken a checklist for a system.

Quillibrace:

Indeed. And a very final checklist, at that.

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Blottisham (triumphant):

Observe! Nothing is missing. No perspective is ignored. Totality is now achieved!

Quillibrace (folding hands, unhurried):

Let us examine it.

(Pause.)

You have enumerated distinctions as though listing objects in a warehouse. But each distinction presupposes a cut.

You cannot list cuts exhaustively — each cut generates its own phenomena.

By listing all of them at once, you have erased the very instantiations you claim to include.

Blottisham (confused):

But… if I include every cut, then…

Quillibrace:

Then you have included nothing.

Elowen Stray:

Like trying to photograph a wave while claiming to capture the ocean itself.

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Blottisham (voice rising, heroic):

Then I shall include the rules for generating cuts, the rules for instantiation, the rules for systems…

Quillibrace:

Ah yes. The classic infinite regress. By adding rules to create rules, you merely shift the cut up one level — and still claim completeness.

Blottisham (desperate, flailing a notebook):

I… I shall even include second-order symbolic systems! Language, mathematics…

Quillibrace:

Splendid. And now you include them all, all at once, under a single perspective?

Blottisham:

Yes! The Total System shall encompass everything!

Quillibrace:

And by doing so, Mr Blottisham, you have invented a category mistake of cosmic proportions.

There is no perspective from which all cuts, instantiations, and systems appear simultaneously.

You have substituted illusion for discipline, and abstraction for actuality.

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Elowen Stray (smiling faintly):

So the system is total… only in its own impossibility.

Blottisham (sinking into a chair, defeated but proud):

I… I suppose the universe resists being listed in a single table of contents.

Quillibrace:

Indeed. And that, my dear Blottisham, is why ontology must stop where it does — with phenomena, cuts, systems, and second-order symbolic structures.

Not totality. Not completion.

Blottisham (muttering, gazing at the notebook):

Perhaps I should have just started with tea…

Quillibrace:

Wise choice. Tea survives all total systems.

Curtain.