Orientation 1
Sometimes you think that you see a man in a corner of your office. He looks at you with clear eyes. You have not commented about this to anyone else in your organisation. The strangeness with which you imbue a stranger has less to do with the way they act than the way they react to you. You blink carefully. You like the world to be like you imagine it.
This morning, you carefully straightened your tie in the mirror before walking into your garage and easing your car onto the street. You executed the turn onto the main road with a calm demeanour on your face. Mild jazz music played in your car. Even though it would be getting quite warm later, right now it was cool and by then you would be in your office, carefully arranging your affairs, the affairs you have been charged with to ensure the continued smooth operation of your organisation.
You like your work and though this liking is a very complex differential of the many benefits you feel it brings you, first and foremost among these is the satisfaction you derive from helping to bring order to the world. After all, you are performing a small part of the operations which are, collectively, making the world a better place.
The traffic moves quite smoothly at this time of the morning and the service vehicles crawling along the footpaths instil in you a sense of calm, as if your doctor had reported the results of your tests, confirming that you were so extremely well-balanced physically in all respects that he couldn’t help but smile at the thought of your long and happy future.
You believe that a healthy body is part of the key to a healthy mind.
On the passenger seat of your car lays open a magazine, which is reporting the remarkable similarity of appearance various celebrities bear to each other. If you were to read this magazine, you would think this to be curious, and if you were in the company of someone with whom you had an existing relationship, you might direct to them a remark designed to convey your sense of curiosity.
Your life includes various relationships with people, which, if you were to reflect on them, provide a fabric of support that you feel very comfortable with.
As you pass through the main street you glance occasionally at your reflection floating alongside in the glass buildings. The glass is subtly coloured with shades of pink and orange and the sun itself can be seen glowing in the light haze on the horizon, between the buildings, past the outskirts of the city, on the other side of the car.
You like the feeling of complex potential this time of the morning brings, though several days ago when your wife asked you sleepily whether you enjoyed rising so early, still, after all these years, you said yes, I do, without elaborating, as you used a white towel to carefully absorb the moisture left on your skin by the shower.
As you made love with your wife last night you thought about how much you appreciated your relationship with her, a relationship which is centrally important among the others in which you are embedded.
When you see a fracture in a café window after stopping at a red light, the lines distended from the point of impact, you do not worry about the rise of vandalism in your town, because you are well aware that there are people in positions of authority that exist in order to manage exactly this sort of thing. You also are well aware that people have reached positions above your own through patiently and conscientiously fulfilling their duties, and you are confident that you will be rewarded in due time for your efforts within your own organisation.
The café is probably frequented by a small community of which the central members know each other very well, and it is probably a very comfortable place to enjoy a cup of coffee during a break from the stresses of day to day life. Should you ever go into the café, you imagine that even though you are not a member of the small community of its patrons, you would nevertheless be welcomed; and if you were to go back regularly, surely you would end up being quite familiar with many other customers, not to mention the proprietors of the business, who would be openly friendly without respect to any ideals of customer service.
If someone asked you to name the shape that described the organisation of the society in which you live, you would reply, after a time of consideration, that this shape is a tree. If you were to reflect more, you would smile to yourself at the aptness of your metaphor, lives being drawn through the trunk and flowering in the leaves, for instance.
The interconnectedness of it all.
An upside down tree, is what you would have imagined.
On your last ballot paper, you voted for the incumbent candidate.
The sun has risen, and the city slowly stirs in a warm glow.
It is beautiful.
Orientation 2
The tinted windows of your car prevent ultraviolet radiation from the morning sun from damaging your eyesight. If your eyes were good enough; if you were not concentrating on the road; you would see that you are reflected from the glass buildings back off the tinted windows of your car and back and forth and back, light travelling fast enough that these reflections appear as if instantaneously.
Right now if you were asked to divide the world into two, you would identify the world outside your car, and the world inside your car. Listening to the jazz from your stereo speakers rippling around the ankles of your consciousness like foam, you like to make out the different components of the composition, each expressing an air of individuality within the confines of the whole.
Asked on a questionnaire if there are moments when you enjoy being alone, you might be puzzled, finding it difficult to identify or remember any such moments.
In turbulent atmospheric conditions, it is important to tighten your seatbelt and secure any loose items, it being important to think ahead. Even so, things tend to happen in the same way they have always happened, always.
It is nice to be surrounded by people who know what they are doing.
If you had to describe the way you normally feel you would say that you are quite happy. Asked to state the happiest moments of your life, you would probably name your wedding day before anything else; although privately, you have enjoyed brief moments of near ecstatic happiness that have been imprinted into your memory far more permanently. These moments occur at the strangest times.
A morning of golf with your financial advisor, there is a cool sheen of sweat on your skin. Your arms hold the club poised at the end of your swing. The tiny white ball rises endlessly into the perfectly blue sky. A quiet night as your wife dreams. You stare at the tiny vibrations of her eyelids. A single leaf that didn’t fall in the autumn.
There are things you feel but find very difficult to express. You feel this is perfectly natural. Your feeling watching television static being one feeling you find difficult to describe.
Normally after returning home from work in the evening you have a clear idea of what you will do until you sleep. Should there be a change of situation, there are always the things you have listed lower in your mental plans.
It is never too late to et cetera.
You often take time out of your busy schedule to et cetera.
Things are nearly always exactly how they seem.
One never has excuses.
It has been a wonderful life.
Complication
An airplane had emerged from within the morning sun, ascending. When you had flown to the last divisional meeting, the nearly perfect uniformity of the meals that were delivered by the polite air-hostesses were soothing, as if their minute variations indicated the vanishingly small possibility that you might fall out of the sky.
When the young man ran through the intersection and turned towards you with his gun, you were very surprised. After he shot you, you felt your head draining away in fragments. You had never had this feeling before, and it was curious that you had time to think about your wife, and her social network, which would inevitably be extremely valuable for her after you were all fragments in your car. Glass fractures distended through your vision. A network so efficient, and caring, that you were sure she would have carefully bereaved you within several years, though still feeling a sense of loss when reflecting on you. You wondered if there was someone in your society who looks remarkably similar to yourself. Your wife is very lucky, her network will barely allow her to fall, fall, fall,
How do you feel?
These moments occur at the strangest times.
Result
Between the bullet leaving the gun and entering your head, the bullet moved with rapid even grace, while (and you would have marked this with curiosity, had you entertained the thought) if we had looked from the tip of the bullet towards you while it moved, your time would have slowed, for us, the equation governing the difference in elapsed time vis-Ã -vis your body in relation to us here with the bullet being in fact well known[1], expressible as
here t being the rate of time experienced by your body, t’ being the rate of time experienced by the bullet, c being the speed of the reflected light of the sunrise as if in a vacuum (this speed being experienced as identical to your body and the bullet (another quite remarkable result, had you, like us now, the time to note it), and v being the speed of the bullet, relative to you. The sum of which being the result that since the bullet is travelling extremely fast, we can watch from it like afternoon television your last moments.
All of which being entirely irrelevant to you over there inside yourself, of course; but here’s the curious thing. While your body experiences the bullet approaching withall the haste of physical law, what you, yourself, your story, experience, is quite another thing altogether. There being, in fact, a lesser known equation governing this process[2], involving the variables already described as orientation (in which agents and prominent objects are introduced, and which can be thought of as a type of start position for a dynamic system), complication (in which a series of events contributes to a more global evolution which reaches a climax), and result (a second series of events resolving the dynamic situation found at the climax, tending towards a situation of relative rest, this tending being where we find ourselves now); and now the really curious thing about all this being that the equation turns out to predict “a cuspoid process with a catastrophe of change. [...] The global catastrophe consists of the transition between phase (b) [complication] and phase (c) [result] which constitute a bipolar dynamic field governing the overall evolution of the narrative. The climax of the story [...] corresponds to a slowing down of the process in the environment of the catastrophe. ” (Emphasis ours; we are alive.)
And here is what is seen. Your head is lying collapsed facing the glass buildings. A man with clear eyes floats across the intervening space, and he does not blink as he reflects off your car window and floats back again. He moves slower, and slower, and you have time, and more time, to reflect him as he reflects you, but you do not react to him, nor he you. Until finally, as everything cracks and disintegrates, you are no longer he and he is no longer you, and like the fragmented reflection of the sun playing off the smashed windscreen of your car, and like all analyses falling somehow short of capturing their goal entire, there is in the end for you no more world merely pieces of it falling away, and yet each nonetheless bears something along with it, no matter how intangible, and so, and so,
You are gone; everything is fine.
Notes
fn1. Since A. Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, in Annalen Derphysic, Vol. 17, Num. 5, 26 September 1905, pp. 891–921.
fn2. Since W. Wildgen, Catastrophe Theoretic Semantics: An Elaboration and Application of René Thom’s Theory, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1982, pp. 108–109.
i find the paragraphs below “result” to be confusing;† alot of physics jargon i can’t completely comprehend.† the writing until this point is simple but conceptually inventive, which i like.† simple for me is better cause i can read with images coming into my head rather than trying to work out what you are trying to describe. but that’s just me.
Your sparce metaphors are very effective. Control seems to be the key here.
I love the dynamic evolution from the point of conflict. The disembodiment of the reader is a great parallel to that of the supposed character that we have been imagining. Wait a minute. It has been us all along.
Supurb.