dry grass singing

private universe

"I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelike sprite..."

(from 'Holy Sonnets', by John Donne)


"It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working - bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming - all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned - reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less."

(from 'A Hanging', by George Orwell)


There are times when the most dazzling of epiphanies dawn on you with all the everyday banality of a peanut-butter sandwich, and you know that any attempt to communicate these insights would come across as being equally trite. So the epigraphs attached to this piece serve the twofold purpose of demonstrating that my latest banal deep thought is not too commonplace to escape the notice of people far more talented than myself, and of showing the manifold possibilities of language in the hands of the masters.

i've only just begun to realise the enormity of the fact that each of us not only sees the world in a way that is uniquely, unequivocally individual, but that we actually carry within ourselves entire worlds that differ completely from those of the people around us. Consider the implications. A desultory group of strangers waiting for the bus at a bus-stop - multiple worlds spinning in their own orbits of loves and hates and indifferences; two people engaged in a conversation - two worlds colliding and meeting in an extraordinary warping of space and time never to be repeated again till time should turn in upon itself and all the stars burn out.

Add to that the possibility that all matter is derived from the remnants of a Big Bang that took place tens of billions of years ago - and the idea that everyone is a world in miniature suddenly takes on an even more startling meaning. Because what this potentially means is that all of us are made of what used to be bits of random stellar matter - stardust, as the Romantics would have it - and that we are thus literally 'worlds' in the physical as well as in the metaphysical sense.

The road to this particular epiphany started with my fascination with the problem of perception, which in turn was first manifested in an essay on madness in the work of Browning and Tennyson that i wrote in third-year university. At that time, i was particularly struck by the possibility that a simple blue square might look different to different people, and went about rather obsessively asking various people (whom i conveniently categorised as scientists and artists for ease of reference) what they thought of that proposition. Interestingly enough, most of the scientists thought that the same blue square would look the same to everybody, whereas the artists tended to think the opposite. Which confirmed, much too neatly i felt, the objective-sciences and subjective-arts dichotomy that so many thinkers nowadays are trying to move away from.

It's been years since the blue-square experiment. i have spent most of that time in the penumbra of a dull sadness that shaded everything i did or saw or thought about, so much so that it eventually became my reality. Years of living in shadow ain't nice at all, let me tell you - but it does enable you to appreciate the light all the more deeply when the light finally does break through. And that, really, is what triggered this latest revelation: i realised that the world looked different, and thus was different; and that if my simply perceiving the world differently could actually result in the creation of a world that was qualitatively different in so many ways, how much more would each individual person, at each moment of his life, also be perceiving and creating and being an individual world that is uniquely, ineluctably his own.

This goes beyond the recognition that everyone has a different worldview and perspective on reality. The truth is that each of us is a different reality - and when our own individual reality interacts with everyone else's reality, new composite realities are created that we all instinctively recognise as separate and distinct. That is why we have different social worlds, and that is why moving from one social world to the next can have the effect of travelling to a different, suddenly alien planet.

The concept is not new - the Metaphysical poets held it as a truth upon which they built their work. Still, it's a dizzying, dazzling idea, both in its depth and in its simplicity - as the best ideas often are. i love the sense of possibility it affords - the notion that there is an infinity of worlds to discover and explore, and some of them living, breathing, walking, talking, right next to us, every day, everyday. It's exhilarating, and frightening, all at once. And one of the main reasons why there will always be more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in anyone's philosophy.

posted by eothen @ 9:43 AM