Toilet Sitting

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.

English Grammar and the Phantom Reality Explosion

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.

The Unbeast Who Was Not

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.

On the Naming of Port Moresby

Ever since I realised that the protagonist in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky is named for the capital of Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby, I've had a bee in my hat about it. In the following text, I will recount the common interpretation of this choice, my own uneasiness with it and finally reconcile myself with the author's choices in order to allow the bee to flee. Whether it does so or rather clings more deeply into my hair remains to be seen. This text contains spoilers.

Port identifies as a traveller, not a tourist, and - at the beginning of the novel - is in search of a place unspoiled by civilisation, an authentic and anonymous experience. Unfortunately for this wanderer, he possesses the name of a distant established place. On the surface, this looks like a joke. Or perhaps it is an admission from the writer that, yes, he is the puppet master and that he is determined to show his authority over the text, albeit capriciously. Most apparently take this as an irony. He wishes to wander aimlessly in the desert to find himself but his name is pinned to the map. And that may well be the fact of it.

However, I wondered if the symbolism went deeper than this. Readers of the Sheltering Sky will know that Mr. Moresby is ill-fated. He will get sick; his marriage will fail when his wife refuses to care for his disease-ravaged body, and then he will submit to death itself. Thus, does having a name which is 'on the map' imply that his end is also destined, that he will always have been travelling to this distant established place, a port indeed, an entry to another world? In that case, this novel, which was published in 1950, seven years before On The Road, will carry a similar message to its better-known cousin: that the search for meaning, although it can be seen as a kind of adventure story, does not inherently anticipate success. Indeed, gambling the coin of self-meaning in the casino of universal indifference may be an excellent way to ensure one's stake is not returned. (Kerouac, put your pen down!)

Well, this is all very well, very deep and very satisfying, but! -- this whole interpretation rests upon the eemis stane of nominative determinism. This is a school of thought whose most famous early exploration was by Plato in his dialogue Cratylus. The rolling 'r' sound of rho, ρ, is well suited to words signifying motion or flow, while plosives like 'd' and 't', which stop the tongue, are appropriate for words describing the end of motion, and so on, and so on. The reasoning that supports the link between the phonic item and its meaning rests in introspection, a feeling about a sound, which is to say - not an empirical observation, not a result found in a repeatable experiment. Try using the reasoning in the Cratylus on translations of the Cratylus itself! It therefore belongs in the group of intellectual activities that also contains numerology and astrology, often labelled 'pseudosciences' (for non-arbitrary reasons).

So what do we have now? A man with a funny name and a nasty conclusion. So far, so ignorable. But they remain together for the duration of the novel, like two words in a sentence. Bowles himself does not explicitly engage in any deterministic or other magical thinking (other than some elements of magical realism perhaps), but he leaves the reader in the company of the two, knowing - I presume - that 'This is a quirk' is not a result that will satisfy the reader of such a profound work. Coincidence places us in a dark room with two poles and allows us to connect them unobserved. It is rather insidious.

It is possible that that is it, that we, the readers, are simply the butts of the writer's dark joke. However, I will attempt a more optimistic conclusion. As can be seen by the inclusion of astrology in the group of pseudosciences, these carefully reasoned intellectual activities lean in the direction of mysticism, a system of religious belief which holds that there exists knowledge not accessible to the intellect. This is consonant with philosophical scepticism, a school of thought which, although secular, holds the same in a somewhat inverted manner, namely that true knowledge may exist but anyway is not available to us.

So, what if we employ this scepticism in our interpretation of Bowles' naming of his central character? Then it remains that the man is doomed to a miserable end and that, while his name may exist as a signpost to that destruction, the reasons forwhy Mr Moresby is star-crossed simply cannot be known. He just is, and it is his seemingly capricious naming, founded in the logically insubstantial practice of nominative determinism, by which the author communicates this impossibility.

This final interpretation may miss outright optimism. In fairness to the writer of his essay, I am looking for hope in a tragedy, but I believe I have found something resembling it. By this last effort at explication, Port Moresby's naming is neither caprice nor a joke on the reader but a meaning whose logic is seated deeply in the text and one in whose making we can be complicit with the author.

Hopefully that will be sufficient to release the bee!

The Sonic Slice

Imagine, then, another world, layered over this one, but separate and distinct, a slathering of peanut butter over tessellating pieces of cheese.

The first, you already know; things there take the form of mass, but in the second, things take the size of their sound in the first.

And so the mosquito, who is small and ugly in the first world, finds itself a large round ball of warm fuzz in the second, carrying with it a static charge that makes you shiver.

And people would be tiny stick figures, drawn by children, with giant mouths, and we would all be wrapped round the immense ticking of the clock, a giant metal cricket, breeping from the upper corner of the empty cubes we live in.

And when we walked, our heels would explode to the size of planets as they made contact with the ground, our Jupiter talons then shrivelling like party balloons as they flew up and returned to earth.

At night, an insomniac would slide into the three millimetres of space between the splashing, groaning merry-go-round of domestic appliances and the sudden roar that blasts through the city like a laser bolt, probably a motorbike in the first world, but in this one? More like a run-away jet-powered crocodile!