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four hundred thousand years
If I could condense the whole of human history, I could reduce it to the fact that it has existed for four hundred thousand years. The premise is this: an observer of the universe watches the progression of our existence from beginning to end. In this state of extended observation, he watches them evolve from single-celled organisms, populate islands and landforms, create civilizations, and lay siege to one another's city walls. He watches as generations of fabulists and revisionist historians tell and retell sequences of events. Over millennia, he notices that this sequence is nothing but select single events in recursion. What I mean is: each incident, each action is a single occurrence in an iterative series. Therefore, we take single episodes and we repeat them four hundred thousand times. An old man pays a shopkeeper for his goods four hundred thousand times. The Greek army marches up to the walls of Troy four hundred thousand times. Medea kills her own children four hundred thousand times. A child drops his ice cream four hundred thousand times. If we apply this extraordinary logic, we can no longer say the universe is a chaotic, meaningless sequence of events. Instead, it is the very opposite. A boy trips over a crack in the sidewalk four hundred thousand times. A man meets a woman four hundred thousand times. He makes love to her four hundred thousand times and she says she loves him four hundred thousand times.
In fact, if you take anything and repeat it four hundred thousand times, a precursor to change begins to appear. On our six hundred and first conversation, the details of the sentence I have been repeating to you will alter. It will have been a brown cat that I saw, not a grey one. On our two hundred thousandth meeting, it will be in park instead of a waiting room. If the collision of two contingent forces allows, we could continue this. There will never be the dilemma of what to talk about, if anything at all. In fact, I can all but employ a synonym for a word in our recursive dialogue and you would never notice. On our three hundred thousand and fiftieth meeting, I could discuss the way your slender fingers curl or I could even lose you completely to someone else. Hypothetically, we could be like the observer, watching our meetings from light-years away, at times remarking on their parity, at times commenting on their alterity. Like the germ of an idea, we could do this, one, two, three, four times, over and over and over again.
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Valaquencia
What is Valaquencia? For some, it is a place, a town, a city, or an empire that once flourished. For others, it is a thing, a description, or an action. You can drive one thousand miles west from Boston, Massachusetts and arrive at a hamlet called Valaquencia; you can travel in the opposite direction and find its acropolis on an unknown island in the northern Atlantic. You can walk into a gallery and find it as the title of every single painting on its walls and sculpture on its floors. It could be a scientific phenomenon that dictates the pull of gravity or the push of barometric pressure. A child stands by the ocean picking his nose. He smears it on a large rock when no one is looking. The beach on which he is standing is one off the Andalusian coast and its name is Valaquencia. It could have once been the name of a warring faction, like the Montagues, the Capulets, the Guelphs, the Ghibellines. Or it is an old man tending to his herbarium reciting his favorite dramaturgical verses to himself. The fact that it can be all this at the same time-- a noun, an adjective, and a verb-- leads us to believe that Valaquencia is in fact the very term for things that do not have one. So I can say Valaquencia is an undiscovered star cluster, or that it was once a contending name for ancient Mycenae, or simply it is the name of a beautiful woman, or a lonely woman, or the woman you never met. Yes, in fact that is the best explanation. It is the name of the woman you never met. You can meet a woman who you think you know as Valaquencia just to discover that she is actually the same woman you met thirty years ago, whose name is actually Veranda. In fact, you can take a woman, any woman, and you subtract her arms, her legs, her shoulders blades, every single facial feature, and just as the act of trying to recall a place you have forgotten, you find in naming this woman without a face or digits or distinguishable characteristics that her name will always unwaveringly be, Valaquencia.
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Ockham's razor
Ockham's razor is a principle that favors simplicity, parsimony, and succinctness. It follows: if we are to accept that the simplest explanations are always more favorable than the complex, yet equally-reasonable ones, we could logically concede (1) the shortest distance between two points is indeed a straight line, (2) our cosmic model is indeed heliocentric, (3) lovers do eventually find each other.
We think about a man and his wife in their bedroom. The man is in his chair, the woman standing. He tells her: take off all your clothes. Don't be ridiculous, she says. Take off all your clothes, he repeats, more deliberate this time, pointing his finger also. She feels helpless; she does not know what to do. So she takes off all her clothes for him. She takes them off one by one, throws each one at him with hatred while he sits in his chair. Turn around and look at me, he says. Why is he making her do this? Why does the woman listen?
We could produce familiar explanations. We could say that he did not like the look she gave that lone man in the supermarket earlier this morning, or the way her face looked staring out the window during the flight back from Connecticut as if searching on the ground for someone she once knew. And why does she? Perhaps she is afraid of him as equally as he is afraid of her-- she finds uncomfortable the way he blows his nose every so often, or the way he plays with his fingers, the way he sits in his chair directing her in his own film.
Or perhaps all of these are incorrect. They are incorrect because they are complex. So logically, we invoke Ockham's razor. The shortest distance between two points is not a line that travels from origin to destination and doubles back, heliocentrism is a model that does not extend beyond our observable solar system. We say that the man tells the woman to take off all her clothes simply because he loves her. We say she agrees to do so simply because she reciprocates. And we agree to this not because of its validity, but because of its immediacy, its clarity. -
"Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is. Thus for a race such as this no stage, no form of existence is suitable other than the one it already possesses."
- Arthur Schopenhauer, Eadweard Muybridge
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“Thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they've forgotten to do.”
Excursion into Philosophy (1959)
Oil on canvas- Don Delillo, Edward Hopper
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"A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe."
- Le Corbusier, The Bettmann Archives
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"The young man locked the door and turned to the girl. She was standing facing him in a defiant pose with insolent sensuality in her eyes. He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two images superimposed one on the other with one showing through the other. These two images showing through each other were telling him that everything was in the girl, that her soul was terrifyingly amorphous, that it held faithfulness and unfaithfulness, treachery and innocence, flirtatiousness and chastity. This disorderly jumble seemed disgusting to him, like the variety to be found in a pile of garbage. Both images continued to show through each other, and the young man understood that the girl differed only on the surface from other women, but deep down was the same as they: full of all possible thoughts, feelings, and vices, which justified all his secret misgivings and fits of jealousy. The impression that certain outlines delineated her as an individual was only a delusion to which the other person, the one who was looking, was subject--namely himself. It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly other, hopelessly alien, hopelessly polymorphous. He hated her."
- Milan Kundera, Helmut Newton
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"That was in Crescent City, California, up near the Oregon border. I left soon after. But today I was thinking of that place, of Crescent City, and of how I was trying out a new life there with my wife, and how, in the barber's chair that morning, I had made up my mind to go. I was thinking today about the calm I felt when I closed my eyes and let the barber's fingers move through my hair, the sweetness of those fingers, the hair already starting to grow."
- Raymond Carver, Charles W. Cushman -
is it cold there?
If we are to write the history of ancient cities, we could approach the task starting at the end. The reason is this: if we are to say that these places once existed, we would first have to note that they no longer are. In our minds then, they exist twice-- once as they were built, conquered, rebuilt, and lost-- and once more after they are rediscovered. Barbalissos, Antioch, Pergamon. I think about these three ancient cities. I run their names in my head over and over. Over time, the repeated reimagination of these cities causes them to mix themselves together, to be mistaken for one another, to shuffle their citizens and belongings and mixed tongues from one to the next. They begin to take on different plans, different schemes and layouts. For instance, the rectilinear street grids of one turn into the curvilinear forms of another, villas turn into public baths, administrative forums into agoras filled with beggars, alchemists suddenly peddle phylacteries and baklava, traders instead barter vials of lapis lazuli from their moving caravans.
Dulled by time, we are unable to pinpoint the exact site where these cities once stood, confusing where they once were from where they are now in our minds. If I could make a composite image of all these arbitrary locations, I could say that they once physically stood somewhere in the lands of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Barbalissos, Antioch, Pergamon. Each distinct repetition of the names brings about different memories, conjures different locations. I was once on a moving train from New Haven when I thought about you, I was once having coffee in New York, I was once in a cigar shop in Shangri-La. Or if the perseveration of memory allows, I was once thinking about you elsewhere. But where are you now? Is it cold there? Who are you with? What have you been reading? I could turn these questions in my head over and over, repeating them like the names of ancient cities, coming up with different answers for each one. I could make my own method of storage and retrieval following this method, equating the death of cities with a memoirist who consults an atlas. A great battle was once fought at Barbalissos, statues and aqueducts stood during the heyday of Antioch, the entire city of Pergamon was handed over to the Roman empire, just as how a train leaves from New Haven, a coffee is purchased in New York, and a man smokes a cigar in Shangri-La.
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seeing you
A daydreaming bird in mid-flight diverges from its flock. Lost searching for a shortcut leading it back to course, it finds that has instead flown north for the winter. A species of antlion digs a trap in the sand and burrows in the center. The declivity of the small pit in the ground ingeniously matches the angle of repose of the sand. If I could take singular incidents like these and extrapolate them, I could also come up with the following:
I've seen you before. I've never seen you before at all. There was a moment in time when I once saw you and now I am remembering. The fact that I may have never seen you at all also leads me to a few possibilities-- I've never seen you and I am remembering wrongly. I've seen you and I've simply forgotten.
Or perhaps I've never seen anyone but you. I could leave you in a delicatessen in New Hampshire, swim across the Gulf of Mexico and find you at a newsstand in Panama. You may be secretly following the course of my life as much as five minutes ahead. Or the simple fact remains that you are everywhere, preserved with all your personal idiosyncrasies, calling me the same recognizable terms of endearment at every encounter. In fact, the act of differentiating you from everyone else has become impossible. If I could take all these immeasurable ways of seeing you and seeing you again, I could explore multiple probabilities. In a perfect picture therefore, I could say that it was both a pleasure meeting you, see you next time; and also, I'm sorry, I think you've mistaken me for someone else.
