Archives: May 2014

Indecision : Jane and the Mayor

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I am shocked to report complaints that this fine gobbledygook doesn’t make sense ! Pish and nonsense ! Try this :

I can’t decide on account of this indecision, whether this story ought to be spelt in the way it sounds, or the way you was taught to. Personally, I tend towards the ludicrous. That is why people like me are always tittering like a silly schoolgirl.

Once upon a time there was a nice little girl called Jane.
Jane lived in a little cottage on the edge of a big city.
The mayor of this city was totally bonkers. He was called Boris.
Jane grew up in the same street as the mayor’ house, so Jane knew a few little secrets Boris would have rather not be known.
Boris decided to kill poor Jane.
When the mayor got to Jane’s house he discovered there was no-one in. Furious, the mayor ordered all the police to find her and kill her.
Jane’s Mama and Papa heard about the mayor’s evil plan, so they sent her to live with a friend.
For days the mayor searched all over the streets but Jane could not be found, so he arrested her peace loving Mama and Pop.
When she heard how Boris had thrown her poor folks in the slammer Jane wrote a letter to the mayor which said :
Either you release the parents and resign your post or I tell everyone what you done sir.
The mayor realised that she wasn’t going to let him off and he set them free. He then scarpered and was never seen no more.
Jane lived happily in the city and when she grew up she became a politician.

Absolution

The curved edge of the blade tugged urgently at the underside of her skin as he swept his hand across the side of her neck. If her heart had still been pumping, blood would have obscured his view, but she was just dead enough for him to cut with precision and not so long dead that her skin had lost its feeling of life.
Each line he drew formed one side of a shape. A pattern he could see while she had still been dressed and breathing. A vivid lattice of white and rose and purple and red. Human marquetry – just walking around, blithely breathing in and out, in and out, waiting for the form of the art to be discovered. Blind to its own role in the production.
He worked quickly and yet with great care. It was the early hours of Sunday morning but he did not have the advantage of darkness as his cloak – that was reserved for the hackers. He needed bright light so he could clearly see the next line, the grain of the muscle under her skin, the overall design taking form.
He needed bright light once he was gone too so that those who stumbled on his gallery could fully appreciate the majesty of his work.
The last section, the speckling of her cheek complete, he stood to consume her with his eyes for the last time.
As he cleaned his blades and placed them neatly in their roll he felt the elation reserved for a fantastically small number of artists. Painters did not have to catch their canvas, sculptors did not need to subdue their clay, even glorious cabinet makers do not kill their own trees. How many others felt as he felt now ? He knew of no-one.
The site prepared he turned away from her and walked purposefully in the direction of home. It was a long way, and now that he was no longer creating, he felt the chill of the small hours seeping in. He could not afford to be seen hurrying, just walking as if he had an absolute right to be going from one place to another, so he could not speed up to warm himself. Soon enough the chill extended to his mood. The thought of Sunday morning and trudging to church with his wife because she needed to go and feel the glow of God’s forgiveness beaming from the priest’s beatific chubby face.
A glow he knew was not his to be felt. Forgiveness was something no man could bestow upon him. No man could begin to fathom how much there was to forgive.
He quietly opened the back door and walked into the kitchen where he sat down to take off his shoes.
His dog looked up at him, got up from his bed, walked to where he sat and gently licked the back of his hand letting him ruffle the top of his head before slinking back to bed and curling up to sleep.
His dog knew he was free from blame and worthy of love. Maybe if he asked the dog nicely he’d put in a word for him with the big Dog upstairs.

Spacetime

Man has not yet conquered time and space.
In fact it is unlikely that he ever will.
His approach to intergalactic travel is to burn tonnes of liquefied dinosaur in huge rockets in a furious attempt to build up enough speed to loose the bounds of gravity. So far, he’s thrown some metal objects away from the planet, sent a few people to his own planet’s solitary satellite and lots of folk have gone for a quick spin in orbit.
Interplanetary travel it ain’t. Describing me chucking a ball of paper in the bin as ‘intercontinental’ gives you some idea of how close we are to intergalactic.
Even in his fantasies Man talks about harnessing great power to achieve ‘warp drive’ and conquer the vastness of space.
Spacetime doesn’t want to be conquered.
Spacetime is not ‘all about straight line speed.’
She is curved. Pliable. Unbreakable strong and exquisitely beautiful.
To the meek she is terrifying, perhaps a vengeful goddess. She encloses us, we are of her and we cannot bend her to our will by force.
By force no. Of course not.
What idiot man ever thought he could persuade a strong woman by blunt force ? She might let him play at boss for a while, but she will not give way to mere push.
No, to overcome the forces of Spacetime and truly cross galaxies we need someone who understands how to exert great influence, not just smash her with brutality.

Jen’s approach was novel. To be honest, Jen was pretty novel for an astrophysicist. For a start, she didn’t expound her theories on blackboards or whiteboards or cover the walls of a lecture theatre with mathematical hieroglyphics. Jen wove her theories with multi-coloured threads and her studio was filled with origami models and swatches marked with galaxy beads.
I’m not sure I fully understand everything she was doing, but the general gist of it seems to be that instead of trying to accelerate our way across the warp of the universe, we should be folding the universe onto itself, and so reduce the distance we have to travel to a little hop across the weft.
“The trick,” Jen said, “is to know where to fold so you don’t disrupt Spacetime too much. If She feels crumpled She tends to shake out the crease and smooth Herself down.”
The best science doesn’t look like science at all. It looks like art.
On the wall in Jen’s studio is her masterpiece. A handmade tapestry of Spacetime. A flowing run of thread and beads representing everything she knew about the fabric of our being.
On it are long chalk lines – the kind of line a seamstress makes on a piece of cloth she’s going to work. Chalk lines sweeping across the universe – origami folds planned on a grand scale.
That’s how we found it anyway. We stood there, just gazing at its beauty for hours, wondering where the hell she’d gone.

A #FairytaleFriday story inspired by the keyword ‘weft’