The Sage Forge

As a thirteen-year-old sitting in the car window waiting for my parents to get finished with shopping one day I had a sort of epiphany. I had been reading my father's Scientific American magazine on the subject of particle physics and it occurred to me to consider the nature of the existence of a single particle in an otherwise empty space. Parental shopping was probably more interminable in a decade when one could safely leave one's children sitting, elbows on the car roof, in a parking lot. In any event this position gave a lot of time to consider that lonely particle's lot in life. Given the way my mind had framed the issue it didn't take long to understand that the difference between being in the empty frame of reference and not existing at all was pretty slim.

Being involves more than a consideration of being. The particle, all alone in the empty space, experiences nothing. It is irrelevant whether it is traveling or standing still. Space itself has no meaning. The particle has no challenges. It cannot recollect the non-events of the past, nor can it anticipate non-events of the future. If it were sophisticated enough to ponder there would be nothing to goad it into the effort of doing so. That scary scenario is the very essence of the word "annihilation".

Conflict is the key to existence. The particle in a room full of particles has a place. It is revealed by the fact that any other particle trying to be in the same place at the same time is compromised in some way. It has to be slowed by our hero's momentum, bounced away, or in some other way denied that exact spot. All those others also make possible a context beyond the particle’s place. In so doing they define the space around it. The incessant jostling our particle, lets say a molecule of oxygen, experiences at the behest of all its fellows may be inconvenient, but it is also defining and affirming. Others affect it. It experiences its effect on others. If it is sophisticated enough to ponder it now has a reason to ponder.

Mr. Pedigo, my high school writing teacher, used to challenge us to show him the conflict in our work. He had had his leg shot off in the Spanish Civil War and had earned some insight into conflict. (His prosthesis gave him quite a little cachet with starry-eyed teen-aged writers, too.) For a story to be interesting, said he, something had to go wrong. He said there had to be some storm and stress. People had to die. Hard hearted people had to do well, at least a little. The lesson he taught was that, as we played god with our own little worlds, if nothing ever challenged our characters there would be nothing to keep a reader interested in our abominable prose. (Cachet could entice us to put up with a lot.)

I recognized from his teaching that, in some imagined perfect story world, the absence of conflict was an invitation to lonely particle status. A lot of work would be an-nihil-ated. For the work "to be" some witness or witnesses, have to keep bumping, as it were, into it. Welcome to gravity, in a literary sense.

When you remember are the memories of the unencumbered beating of your heart? When you anticipate is it about maintaining your body temperature? Probably not on both counts. Now, for the rest of the day do you think you will be able to remember where you were for the last four minutes? Might it be because something challenged you?

If so you can say "I was jostled into thinking, therefore I am".