Don’t toilets glow in the middle of the night?
I know it’s really because they’re white,
but aren’t they such places of solitude?
I mean it—not simply being crude.
There’s a touch of the confessional
despite the lack of religious professional.
One can think
next to the sink
and sort things out
and shift their thoughts about,
without worrying about approvement.
It is a place of spiritual movement.
Some pour it out at the tomb.
My preference is the little room.
Today, I learned more about the third (or past unreal) conditional, a grammatical structure I used to teach as of more than ten years ago. It goes like this:
If I hadn't come to Ecuador, I would never have tried encebollado.
This is a counterfactual statement which tells us that a) I did come to Ecuador, b) I did try encebollado and c) my trying encebollado was contingent on my coming to Ecuador.
So far so good, here's what I added to this today courtesy of the philosophy of Luis de Molina, a 16th century Spanish Jesuit priest, jurist, economist and theologian:
In producing any counterfactual statement, we admit the possibility of other hypothetical realities. In the case above, these are the realities in which I did not come to Ecuador. The number of these realities must be infinite due to the limitless number of possible lives I could have lived outside of Ecuador.
In the statement, what we are saying is that, in no one of these hypothetical realities, did or do I try encebollado. This is patently untrue. There are any number ways to eat encebollado without coming to Ecuador, and if the number of realities where I do not come to Ecuador is infinite, I must have found some way to eat encebollado in at least one of them.
(And due to the natures of permutations and variations, if in one, then in many, most likely an infinite number, albeit a subset of the aforementioned infinite set.)
Therefore, what I must mean in making the above statement is that, of the admitted infinite number of hypothetical realities in which I did not come to Ecuador, of those which are most like the one we are experiencing, except for the stated counterfactual condition, I did or do not try encebollado.
(And, I can't help wondering, is there a line drawn between the realities sufficiently like ours to count and those which are not and, if so, where? Or is it more of a gradient of similitude, and even if so, where is it?!)
In conclusion, we have a sentence which implicitly refers to an infinite number of hypothetical realities with one specific difference from the existent one, implicitly ring-fences a group of these which otherwise resemble the existent reality, and then states something which could not happen in that reality but did in this one, or vice versa.
I think it is quite amazing that a humble 12-word sentence can make phantom realities rill out as far as the internal eye can see, only to pack them all away before we reach the full stop. It is elegant, it is tidy, and I approve of it.
On Monday morning, he awoke, not realising that the shambling unbeast was not under the bed. He thought there was plain old nothing under the bed. As he got ready for work, the unbeast didn't emerge. It wasn't seven feet tall. It didn't smell of deer carcasses. It didn't carefully tread downstairs. It didn't terrify itself with its ghastly appearance in the landing mirror.
As he ate breakfast, it didn't climb into the passenger seat of the car. Obviously. It didn't exist! It didn't fiddle with the radio channels. It didn't accidentally play prog rock so loud the people in the next block could hear it.
At work, it didn't hide under his desk, pointing out the desperate futility of trying to make order in a vast and chaotic universe. When he went to a meeting, it didn't sit next to him and whisper hilarious insults about everyone else there present. It didn't eat the apples from the staff room fruit bowl and spit the pips out all over the floor.
It didn't pick up his smarmy boss and hang him out the window by his feet. It didn't hum TV show theme tunes annoyingly when he stayed late. It didn't ride home on the roof of his car making nee-naw sounds.
When he got home, it didn't sit next to him on the sofa, talking over the events of the day, trying to help him make sense of a life which technically belonged to him even though it increasingly didn't seem to. It didn't insist on double helpings of ice cream at dinner time. When he went to bed, it didn't stay up watching TV until 3 in the morning and drink all the beer.
At 3, it didn't creep upstairs. It didn't stand at the end of his bed, looking down at his fragile sleeping body. It didn't lean in closer, revealing its huge fangs. It didn't breathe the smell of rotten meat all over his face. Its stomach didn't rumble. And there, in the slumbering darkness, it didn't give him the tiniest little kiss, and then it didn't climb back under his bed. And as the light brightened behind the curtains, the unbeast didn't blink and simply disappear.
It didn't do that because it had never been there to start with.