increpare games

A Brief Fantasy

I woke this morning some time shortly before 8:00. It was 26.5 degrees Celsius outside, according to the weather reports. After quickly tending to myself, I went out across the hall to shower; I would have to be in town by 9:30 for an appointment with my manager.

I lathered, rinsed, soaped, towelled myself dry, then put, as best I could, on my suit; I could hear the buses starting from the terminus outside my house, and departing, every fifteen minutes; another one was due in about ten minutes.

The sky was clear for the most part, some fair-weather cumulus clouds were in the sky. I fully expected that this would be the sort of day when fifty wars would find their genesis, where many men and women would be beaten, where hundreds of millions of people would cry profusely, and several hundred million would get their hair cut.

And I wondered to myself ‘What sort of day is it today?’

After a quick mental calculation, during the rather laborious task of tying my shoelaces, I figured that I wouldn’t have time to prepare breakfast, so I dashed to the nearby newsagent to purchase a small, foil-covered oatmeal bar and a newspaper, before jumping on the bus that was just waiting by the shelter when I got out again.

I made my way to the back of the bus, put down my case, and unwrapped the bar before, taking note of the nutritional contents before surreptitiously disposing of it under my seat. I then took a breath, and opened the papers.

“TERRIBLE SORROW”, I read; the article explained that there was a deep, deep anguish in certain people at the moment, and anger also, more more intensely-felt than yesterday’s relatively mild depression. I sat back and thought about that for a moment; it’s very easy to just read what one reads in a newspaper, but one must let it sink in to achieve full effect; surely there were a good many rapes involved, also murders; maybe defaulting on loans accounted for a good amount, maybe legal bills for the rest. It was probably financial in nature, I figured, maybe the market crashed again.

On to the bottom of that page “Malaise turns to Infinite Regret”; I read – reading in more detail of this drama, that “the sense of cynicism in many had lasted for what had seemed an eternity, but now they felt that worst had come to pass and suddenly it seemed that they had no more hope of happiness for the rest of their lives”, I was able to reasonably infer that it related to a much-debated change in taxation laws in Pakistan that was probably passed due to political pressure from large companies that was to leave many of the struggling poorer classes more destitute than ever. Or maybe it referred to the opening of a rather unpleasant factory whose construction had long been opposed by local residents on entirely unreasonable grounds; I know one can only read so much into the factual content of newspaper reports, but I like to think that there is such a thing as empathy. Saying this, it can be rather amusing to mistake the emotional content of a marital breakdown with that of a civil war; but I’ve never been through a civil war whereas I have been through two failed marriages, so allow me my projections.

Near the back: “A large proportion of Irish people are feeling rather jolly today; rather happy; rather as if they have few worries indeed”. Surely a weather report. No forecast though. No need for them anyway; people make their own weather.

Isaac, dearest,

I was leaving through the recently published memoirs of Christopher Columbus (curiously written in the third person; surely such an odd style cannot have been introduced by the translator, whatever other factual errors he makes), last year, and I felt you might be amused with the following story; at least insofar as it contrasts with your recent proof of the finiteness of the the geometrical space in this universe.

Ah, no point faffing about; I will just quote the passage from near the end of the book you now

Columbus sat in his study, overlooking Cádiz, with a Bible on his desk. He stared across to the horizon, and thought.

“How terrible it must be,t o be a highly situated savage, to see the world about you to the horizon and think there nothing more, to feel one’s self trapped on so small a disk of earth”.

Though, then he fancied that maybe a normal man might be able to live feeling so encaged, but not an explorer such as he.

“God has set forth, he had been told, a bigger cage for us in which to live, many orders of magnitude larger than the disk to our horizon, yet finite nonetheless. More than enough to go on exploring for generations”, he reassured himself.

And yet, he felt he could not accept this: How could God imbue the greatest of his men with the spirit of exploration, if there might be some age, maybe in a few centuries, when there will be no to explore, to discover, to find, on this planet. He would have verify this himself, to see the edge of the world with his own eyes, or alternatively spend the rest of his life travelling farther and farther out, boundless.

With this monumental task in mind, he petitioned the king for enough gold to sail for five years continuously west and, after five years petitioning, he was granted this sum.

One year of eager preparations passed before he was ready to set sail to see if the Atlantic actually had an edge. Six months at sea and land ahoy! What joys he experienced, what vindication: some islands, then a whole new expanse of land – the Vatican said that there was nothing west of Europe: they were wrong, he now knew!

This meant for him one of two things: We live on a much, much larger world than the Vatican claim, or alternatively, and his personal theological views led him to regard this as being much more likely: the world is infinite in extent, that one can travel forever in any direction without reaching an edge – this would be the only possible world he could see god having created – otherwise what a cruel fate would await the noble pursuit of exploration!

Okay, so here there’s a big chapter about America, which I’m not going to quote for you in full, but essentially what happens is that I decide that I must move south along the coast, because, even if it does go on forever in both directions, the only alternative is to give up and go back and there’s no way I’m gonna do that. So we travel down around, and west for a few more months, until hitting land again. Bang. And they anchor. And, lo, what’s this? A VILLAGE. Sweet. Then:

Shortly after entering the village, he found that he himself did find the people look quite familiar, some words of their language, their customs, from his travels east of India; had these people, from the other side of Europe, travelled here first, made these vast journeys? The very notion seemed impossible; the Indians and Chinese hated sailing, he knew. And yet, as his crew went further inland, he began to find more and more similarities until there was no doubt left: they were in China.

This world repeated itself then, he realized – it was not Rome’s disk, nor was it an explorer’s world – “What a cruel trick to play”, he thought “To think, if you had a powerful enough telescope you might catch sight of yourself, looking away, that the world was, despite all of it’s illusions, really finite in extent; that one might still sail west forever, but never come across anything new, that the world was finite – there were no barriers to travel, but, nonetheless, there was only a finite amount to discover in it – how cruel a discovery for an explorer to have make!

Of course, *everyone* knows that Galileo believed the earth to be shaped like an aubergine. So this casts everything, really, in to the most terrible of doubts, don’t you think? But then again, it is a charming story, neh?

Anyway, I hope to see you in the new year.

Yours,

xxx

Nicolas

I was alone, and in darkness. It stretched out forever, and yet it was not a vertigo I felt at the feeling of this expanse, but rather found myself suffocating at the immediacy and intimacy of the blackness.

I fell asleep to find myself standing on an interior wall of a cube. There was no gravity it seemed, though I was, it seemed, bound to walk on it’s surface.

This was not too small a chamber; it stretched almost a hundred metres in each direction, and the isolation or artifice of this situation did not in and of itself worry me. But, after a few minutes of exploration had passed, I noticed that this cube was not as spacious as it had seemed to me at first glance.

I stood at one corner and asked myself “Would it matter me if I was to stand at any other corner?” With this thought I could feel the space I had perceived contract about me. I thought “At this corner, is there any difference between facing one other corner, or any other one?” And with this, and all it’s variations and implications, I felt my freedom disappear, to be replaced with a noose, tightening about my neck.

It took me some time to get to sleep that night. When I did, my fears blossomed into a nightmare:

I was, alone, in a dining room, with a heavy mahogany table and the walls were covered with a rich velvety wallpaper. Silver service laid on lace tablecloth, adorned about with plates of food.

In contrast to the evening’s fears of expanses, I now began to feel uncomfortably contained in my body, in this oppressive room; my apprehensions grew with every breath, and then I noticed some changes that restricted my enclosure upon me in a way I could not have expected:

There were no straightforward physical barriers developing, nor did the walls begin to close in on me; rather I began to perceive things differently – or rather, the reality of the situation changed. I had been looking at the contents of my plate, glancing fearfully away from it up to the ceiling every so often, lest it come crashing down upon me. But then the changes began: suddenly, the lampshade on the ceiling and the plate on the table were not separate things, but rather one thing; still the lampshade and the place, but now thoughts of separating them were impossible.

I pulled my eyes away from this transfiguration, allowing my sight to escape to the door, only the door was now not only the door, but simultaneously the lower shelf of the bookcase on the opposite end of the room, and then the bookcase as a whole became the bookcase and the table; this room was folding in on itself, but in no straightforward way; I tried then to look down, and found that the floor had become the floor and the ceiling, and then, all at once, up was combined with down.

I suddenly awoke, with the thought “What must be becoming of me?”