The switch clicked softly, and the lights turned on. For a second, we were standing still and silent, yet I noticed her stare was drifting, looking for something in the room.
“Are you alright?”, I asked, trying to understand what’s going on.
“Yeah..sure”, she answered after a short delay, and smiled. “I was just..”
“Looking for something real enough?”
“Yes, sort of”, she smiled again. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Truth be told, I keep asking myself the same question. I don’t even know you name, and that makes the whole situation even stranger, at least it does to me.”
“My name?”, suddenly, she laughed loudly, almost furiously. “My name? After all I’ve said before? My name, really? Oh god.”
“Uh.. Excuse me?”
“You still didn’t get it, did you?”
“I’m afraid, I didn’t. Enlighten me, then?”
“What difference would it make? Give me a name and change it a few years or minutes later, misplace its vowels, twist it, read it backwards, after all! What would be the difference? As for me, there wouldn’t be any, not even a slightest sign of it. So I just don’t bother – and probably shouldn’t you”
“But how would I call you then?”
“Call me any name you want to. There are only two of us, so I don’t see any trouble or chance to adress your words to a wrong person”.
She kept smiling, and all of the sudden I realized that something has changed. Something in her eyes and motions, even in the way she smiled. Something in her very nature.
“Are you alright?”, she asked from the distant corner of the room. “What is it you’re thinking so hard about?”
“Oh, nevermind”, I replied. “So what’s the matter with the names?”
“You still can’t understand it? Ok then, have a sit. It’s going to be a heck of a night.”
“Something tells me it is. So…”
“So here’s the same old thing, once again. Maybe this will give you a clue. Back at the bridge, I thought I’ve said enough, but I was wrong, as it appears. Ok, let’s do it one more time.
The world itself may not exist.”
“Stop right there. How could it possibly…”
“Don’t interrupt me.”
“Sorry.”
“The world itself may not exist. And I mean the exact words I say. Everything around you could be unreal. The thing is – we won’t ever know for sure. Sounds kinda self-centric, but the only thing you can truely prove to be existing is your mind. Why? Because the fact of a dot asking the Universe about existance of everything else states that the dot IS here, yet without saying anything else is. I’m a dot. And I really wish you are too.”
“But isn’t that.. let me remember the word..solipsism, right? The “I’m the only thing that’s real” point of view.”
“It’s not. You see, solipsist would say that the whole world around him is a fake, made up by his mind. The whole world. That’s the point. A solipsist thinks of himself as of a god, The One and The Only, Alfa and Omega of everything. But isn’t that absurd? Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean – we may sound almost as the same tune, but I can’t stand them. It’s too bloody pathetic, too overwhelmed with self-esteem. It’s almost childish.
I’m sorry, I got carried away from the important things. The solipsist states : he is the Only Thing that Makes and Matters, without the Mind the reality’s gone. I say almost the opposite : we’re not “the only” something, and “The Mind” neither. We’re just people. If we’re gone, the world wouldn’t change. It wouldn’t change at all – at least, I guess so.
You see, the world we know and the world that IS, the world that exists actually – they may be two different worlds. It may be the only one real world we’re somehow floating in, hallucinating or dreaming the Dream we used to call our world. I don’t know what’s behind the door, I don’t even know the shape or the size of the room we’re in now. It’s may be death that awakes us, and it may be birth that takes us away. Everything is possible, and yet I can’t say what’s real.”
“I sound so miserable”, she continued with a faint smile, “I sound so weak, frankly speaking. I feel so weak. It’s like… Just imagine. Everything you’re used to like, or love, or hate, or anything else – everything may be a fake. Everything that worth something may be just a signal in your brain cells. It may be even worse, because we don’t know what’s the Mind is. Maybe we’re just a clouds, drifting in a colossal stream of blazing liquid. Or something plazma-like. Or, for example, everyone, every single one of us is a part of another dream. A dream of something much greater than human can imagine. God, Solaris, the Overmind – our options are limitless.”
“This can’t be true.”
“This can’t be true? How could we even attempt to imagine what’s the real world is?
Picture a child… say, five years old. He plays with his toys, listens and watches the world around him, this way or another. He looks at the toy – and his mind picks up the form. He looks at his parents, so his minds picks up another one. And the process goes on, years by years.
He’s grown now, he has a lot now he never even thought of before. Study, earning money, social activities, relationships, responsibility – you can’t ask his younger version about that, because he didn’t learn the form yet. It’s not that he has no eyes to see, it’s that he stares in the wrong direction.
He grows further. He’s a father now. That’s the form he used to know about, he thinks, but then he realizes that it’s not that simple. He understands that he can’t be the father he dreamed to be years ago – asking nothing, giving everything asked. No, he starts to be a good father – and years after he suddenly appears to be pretty alike his own old man. But as the form is learned, his mind can operate with it, yet the forms could interfere with each other.”
I caught myself sitting with a mouth wide opened.
“What do you mean by interefere?”
“I mean the exact thing the word means. Imagine a movie, a really good one, with strong plot and wisely written characters. The one you really enjoy watching. The first time you see it, it lefts you amazed. The second time you know the ending, yet the movie takes you away – and you forget everything and just enjoy it. But after a several times, the feeling disappears. The more you watch it, the less you enjoy it. You find new details, but you can’t find the same emotions in the same number. And, after all, you may even become tired of the movie, grinding your teeth every time you hear about it. But the point is, the movie hasn’t changed, it’s still the same movie it was when you first came to see it. Reality’s the same, but the spectator can’t agreed with that.
Same thing with the world. The guy that became a father, he thinks of his past different now. He thinks with the mind of grown-up, yet neither past, nor his memories have changed. It’s just the interfering shapes he learned that make the difference.
And now, since you understood the idea of the shapes… I want to ask you a simple question : how could a human imagine something made of parts he has never seen? How could anyone imagine not just the red sky or dark sun, but a place where horizon lies under his feet?”
It was a long silence. It was like trying to catch a balance between the fear and the amazement.
Horizon beneath?
“And what would replace the horizon then?”
“I don’t know. There may be no ground at all.”
“I wish there were”, I thought. “I could really use one right now.”
root 