A Tribute to Jenny Everywhere on the Occasion of Her Twenty-Fifth Birthday

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition: This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, that others might use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

An awful lot of writers are presented with an etymology and immediately go quite red in the face and start pressing their legs together and thinking of all sorts of lovely things. This is why so many start essays with them.

The word “everywhere”, I am informed by the wonders of the internet, stems from two middle English words, “æfre” and “gehwær”. No prizes for guessing what each of those means. “Gehwær” seems to have meant much the same thing for a rather long time, but let us look at the meaning of “æfre”, or “ever”, which, it appears may have (may have, for nothing is ever quite sure) come from a contraction of the phrase “always in life/existence”. Therefore it is a very base sort of a word, full of these all-encompassing concepts of life, place, always; far bigger than we can quite get our heads around. Everywhere. It’s inconceivable.

Lowri Llewellyn, who I am eminently fond of, despite our many irritable disagreements on various subjects, has for a solid while held that by all rights everything should really be a Jenny Everywhere if you actually think about it; logically in an infinite multiverse there are Jennies who are also versions of, say, Little Red Riding Hood – but then, surely, all versions of Little Red Riding Hood must also be Jenny Everywhere. And of course one can extend that further and further, and so on and so forth until you see that really everything that there is is a version of Jenny Everywhere. For rather a long time this idea rather annoyed me, but I think I now see where she is coming from.

Jenny is everywhere. This is the basis of her character; it is her name. Moreover it is in her status as not simply a character but a meme, a living idea, whose lifeblood is in the minds of those who know of her; everything she touches, she is in, and so she transcends the usual boundaries of fiction and fact and becomes something altogether different. She’s in the twinkle of that old man’s eye; she’s in the light of the rainbow where it fades from orange to yellow; she’s hanging about in the white space between panels in that comic over there; she’s somewhere in that tornado on the horizon, whirling like a dervish; she’s sitting in this paragraph grinning right at you – if you look hard enough you’ll see her.

But must we go as far as Lowri and say that not only is Jenny everywhere, but moreover everything? Well let me quote ibn ’Arabi on the subject of the nature of God to you: “He is the One without oneness and the single without singleness… He is the First without firstness and the Last without lastness. He is the Outward without outwardness, and the Inward without inwardness. I mean that He is the very existence of the First and the very existence of the Last, and the very existence of the Outward and the very existence of the Inward. So that there is no first nor last, nor outward nor inward, except Him, without these becoming Him or His becoming them.”^[1]

Now, I do not mean here to compare Jenny to God precisely, even as I teeter on the edge of blasphemy (certainly I think she might be slightly annoyed by it if nothing else; secondly she is ultimately a thoroughly feminine archetype, even as opposed to the supposedly-genderless-but-usually-masc-coded-despite-that-technically-being-blasphemy Islamic God, but this essay is already quite long, and I can’t get into the gender aspects or we’d be here all day); I merely mean to suggest to you the nature of certain spiritual matters, whereby a thing may be a thing and not a thing all at once, where separation and unity lose a certain something; even just on a conceptual sci-fi level if one considers an infinite multiverse in the Twainian/Llewellyn vein then surely, we think, there must be universes whereby the normal laws of logic do not apply, where Jenny need not be constrained by the ordinary laws of one plus one equaling two (indeed, I think, this may not necessarily hold true even in the supposed imaginary ‘gap’ between universes, the margin where things slip through, but this is all getting a trifle conceptual), and therefore universes where Jenny does not and can not make sense from our little laws of physic and logic, all of which must logically filter through to other Jennies, and the amalgamation of Jenny altogether, so that we may look at the conceptual entity of Jenny Everywhere and say “That does not make sense”. Which is, in short, all a very complicated way of saying that no, Jenny may be everywhere but she is not everything, despite in some obscure sense containing everything; if she were everything then she would be nothing and there would be no Jenny at all. She is in everything but not constrained by everything, nor does she take on its aspect as part of her overall self necessarily.

By and large this is a lot of mumbo-jumbo and only means so much, but really what I suppose I’m saying is Jenny Everywhere is pretty neat, if you think about it: she breaks down all the barriers, she throws open herself and says “Look at me. Use me if you dare. But who’s using who? Only time will tell. At any rate, it’ll be a lark, and that’s what life’s all about isn’t it? So up one to them stupid twats with their fancy cars and their corporations and their exploitation. Soon I will be Everywhere, and there will be a reckoning.”

So here’s to a quarter of a century of Jenny Everywhere. May she never die.

[1] Muhiddiyn ibn al-’Arabi, Treatise on Unity, tr. T.H. Weir, originally published in the Journal to the Royal Asiatic Society 1901, modernised Muhyiddin Clarke