reality
xeniot 1999-04-22

On the Creation of Reality

That is, if Orpheus imagined Eurydice as surely as if she were alive, if he knew the color of her skin and the location of every strand in her hair and the way light and shadow could fold themselves around her body in the slender edge of sunset, then did he need to go to Hades to recover her? NOT BEING a god he could hardly have known where the mouth of the shadow lands were. If instead, he progressed into the underworlds of his mind, past the strange demons guarding his soul from such introspection, if at last he came to Time, the keeper of his memory, and called up with the only perfect poem to be written the LIVING flesh of Eurydice, then the trek into the light of day was not so much a trial imposed by fate but the arduous and impossible process of finishing the picture without destroying the one last, inarticulable memory he still had.

The gods of the twenty-first century, being proud of their accomplishments, commissioned a sculpture of their great city: the first of its kind, a tremendous achievement of architecture, technological progress, social planning, and political draftsmanship. The artist was to construct this sculpture, a model of the city, in the very center of the city, at the center of the city square. Science being what it was, and the MAGNITUDE of the gods' interest in this project being so conducive to the emptying of their pockets, the sculpture was to be a perfect atomic replica of the city itself, compressed into a height of a mere six meters by all the powers of quantum mechanical devices and relativistic-statistical machinery. It was the finest work of the artist, a grand understanding not only of the city's outward appearance, but of its place in the struggles of history, its dreams, and the dreams of every citizen. It was at once both dirty and sparkling, rounded and cubical, tall and sprawling, a child of the EARTH and an ethereal vision. The artistic influences on its making were modern and postmodern and neo-realistic and classicalist and romantic. As he painstakingly placed each atom into place with his simple tools, pedestrians would walk by and peer into its depths. They PLUGGED themselves into its circuits and saw it from a thousand angles at once. The rumor arose that everyone saw what they expected to see. The truth is more that everyone saw everything the sculpture was meant to convey, but in an effort to explain what it was they saw, were forced to use the terms of their own peculiar philosophy. When at last each atom was in place, when the quantum STATES of all the electrons were aligned and the tiny images of the people began to smile or frown their peculiar smiles and frowns, the gods inspected the statue. One by one they pronounced their satisfaction, but as they filed past it the artist became increasingly nervous. He began to rummage in his bag for his tools, and one of the gods asked him if he was unsatisfied with the sculpture. They had a tremendously difficult time getting AN EXPLANATION out of him, but at last he said hurridly, \"Don't you see? I gave these atoms the sky, the earth, the confusion, oh, and fury, of the human life. If the whole city were wiped away it could be reconstructed using this as the model, except. Except for this statue. No one would know we had ever looked at ourselves. Here:\" With that the artist plunged into his sculpture and adjusted the city square so it AT LAST contained the sculpture, and a tiny artist working on its last touches.

There are three possible ENDINGS for the story. No one knows which one is true because this has not happened yet. In one version, which provides the most scientific explanation, once the quantum state of the sculpture was precisely that of the city, it became as impossible for them to be in any proximity to one another as it is for two electrons in a single atom to have the same quantum state. The artist and his sculpture were either flung into space or into some other universe, where, being hundreds of times bigger than the citizens of the city, he ruled over the gods. In another telling of the story, the sculpture itself contains an artist, who constructs a sculpture in the center of his sculpture, and so on, until the final sculpture in the series simply does not exist. Once the people realized that the world of their gods could be compressed into nothingness, they killed the gods and left the city VACANT. Finally, the story may be told in the same way, but at some point in the infinite series of increasingly smaller cities, the slight chance of failure in the quantum mechanical machinery is multiplied into a certainty. This failure causes the decompression of the city into its true size. The sculptures containing that sculpture fail in turn, and so on in an infinite series of expansion that fills the universe with the rubble of the last city of man.

It is fitting, of course, that Hamlet should use the stage to examine his ghost, for he, after all, is a PHANTOM of the theater himself. What might be the trickery of the demons, he expects to dissect with the knife of a somewhat humbler trickery. What might be the trappings of our own minds we somehow hope the play will confirm. Hamlet conjures the ghost of his father, the image of his death, and the guilt of the murderer; Shakespeare has created out of even thinner stuff the life and death of a man who never existed, torn over a death that never occurred. Hamlet's father, like Eurydice, mere shade, appears with the frightening FORCE of a memory. The more closely he resembles the breathing substance of the man who was Hamlet's father, the more compelling he is. Hamlet almost grasps for the ghost before it sinks into the earth. So too, in that long journey out of death, as Orpheus becomes ever more aware of the SOLIDITY of the woman behind him, the more difficult it is to keep from holding her in more than his mind. And the prince of Denmark, when he at last leaps into the fray, destroys Ophelia, himself, and his father's kingdom.

If it is indeed true that what we possess we destroy, there are but three endings to this small tale. In the first ending, the silence of space is reproduced. In the second, there is at least a smaller or greater flame before the ashes. But in the third ending you yourself are caught in the explosion, so that what you lose is your own uncertain form.