of Solipsists, a religious group whose devotees believed that no one existed except one’s own self. Naturally, meetings were contentious. In this lively atmosphere young Lucius grew up, steeped in the debates of the age: Is there a God? Well, where is He, then? In the cupboard? This cupboard? What, he’s in the jam jar? Why the hell did I marry you? The influence of these heady debates cannot be underestimated.At the age of 16, young Lucius was dealt a cruel blow. En route to court a young lady, he was flung from his horse and impaled on a statue of Cupid. Doctors were compelled to remove much of his lap, including his private organs, thus condemning him to a life of celibacy. Some men might have withdrawn after such an event, but it seemed to fill Lucius with new fury. He became fixated on what he saw as the prime corruptor of the modern age: Irony.
Why a Cupid-gelded man of Priapus who went by the simple name of Dick Peter Strochwacker should fixate on the concept of irony is something biographers have never ascertained. A chance conversation with a stranger? A tract pressed into his hand by some itinerant advocate? The sight of his girlfriend marrying a sculptor of Cupid statuary? Conjecture is all we have. But from 1887 on, we know that Strochwacker was a man possessed, a man on fire, a man whose brain crawled with so many notions and ideas he could barely sleep. What possesseed him? Head lice, it turned out. Kerosene treatments were employed. But from 1889 on, Lucius had a cause. He believed that things ought to be regarded exactly as they present themselves; any conjecture of additional meanings ran contrary to the nature of the thing you observed. He called this philosophy "Luciousopticism," and spent several years promoting it, refining it, and mostly spelling it over and over again to people who didn’t get it the first time. He eventually renamed the discipline “Magnetic Realitism.” To quote from his first great work, "Realitism and Tomorrow:"
If a thing is what a thing is, then that is the thing that the thing must be. Looking behind a thing to discover something else - another thing, a cluster of things, several small red things with tails and odd scabs - not only goes contrary to the nature of the thing, but presupposes the existence of a thing that is not within the thing at all. First impressions strike the eye with lusty, swelling, eye-poking empurpled vigor; second impressions & speculative conjectures are invariably timid, slack, nervous, prone to Rosicrutian heresies. If a picture shows a woman who smiles, then she is happy! If a song is in a major key, then it is merry! If a man thrusts his fists into his pants pockets, then he means to grip his fecund orbs and manly lance! All things are as they seem. They wouldn’t sell trousers with a fly in front to a man with no penis, would they? It would be idiocy to suppose they did.