EPI(DIA)LOGUE: WITHOUT HISTORY

THE DANCER:
Something happened.

THE SCIENTIST:
That’s a fact.

THE DANCER:
It could have been ... I felt it moving ... it could have been a composition of some kind. But I hear no music. Possibly vibrations, as of molecules, or elementary particles. Where are we?

THE SCIENTIST:
They move through us: vibrating, oscillating, dancing filaments. It is the dance that defines the space; and so, by definition, the space we inhabit trembles, always on that cusp between formation and annihilation. We name it at our peril.

THE DANCER:
It seems to me as though we’re in a house. Or a flat in an apartment block, somewhere in a city. At the back, it overlooks a quiet garden. Perhaps the season is early spring. And in front, a road; some people move briskly by in dark coats, one carrying a ladder on his shoulder. There’s a park where dogs are walked, disappearing into some distance. The distance maybe has grey buildings in it. Some are for sale. Inside the flat, the sound of a refrigerator ceases, releasing silence into the air.

THE SCIENTIST:
We move through this space. Or does it move through us?

THE DANCER:
These are the forms of its presence. I hear the sound of distant traffic. And of men who move on the decaying fire-escape, emptying bins of things we no longer want. They call to each other. And a bird falls silent in the garden. I hear a thump, a cry of pain. I hear the radio or TV playing noise softly, perhaps in another part of the building. A hum of power, as it travels through cables entering the building, to set machines to work. Someone is playing the piano.

THE SCIENTIST:
That can’t be right.

THE DANCER:
Listen: they are crushed chords, gorgeous with promise of inner life. A beam of sunlight aslant on them.

THE SCIENTIST:
You wouldn’t expect image capture to be that precise. And yet extra resolution is available at a cost premium. Recall that the intuitive physics and technical intelligence within the human mind facilitate rapid and efficient learning about the world of objects.

THE DANCER:
But who is it playing? It can’t be either of us. Therefore there must be someone else in this apartment.

SOMEONE ELSE:
I sit at the bay window, playing the piano. Chords and arpeggios emerge spontaneously from the hardware of my fingers, stamping themselves deeply into the matter that we are. I’m overlooking a quiet garden. There’s a ruined hut where nobody goes. A paper bag drifts slowly across the path. New leaves on the shrubs. Vanishing happens.

THE SCIENTIST:
The existence of such an agent can be predicted with a high percentage probability of accuracy.

THE DANCER:
Mistakes can happen.

SOMEONE ELSE:
Yellow blossom is very bright on some trees. Almost everything is a vessel. Birds arrive. The keyboard shares my inner life. A mistake happens.

THE SCIENTIST:
In “mistake” lurks the sense of “self-knowledge”. In “vanishing” lurks the sense of “progression”. In “light” lurks the sense of “memory”.

THE DANCER:
It’s hard to let it be. But what is this “inner life”?

SOMEONE ELSE:
I gaze out of the window as I play, letting my gaze itself play on the forms of presence that arise, an irresistable scrutiny at work on substance, on earth, on leaf and air, on broken chord and ravishment, slipping from interior into distance. The mistake happens. My mistake opens up a whole world. Lemons rot in the ground, sparrows vanish, a bag inflates with breeze. There are innumerable covenants, and then those covenants are broken. A postage stamp, a sycamore, a field of corn. A boy kicks a ball, and a man shouts out to him from across the field. A Grand Unified Theory is slowly constructed; it resembles a vast railway terminus permeated with the scent of scorched sugar.

THE SCIENTIST:
There is no inner life.

THE DANCER:
We only have each other. Talk to me! It may be that.... Did someone else say window? I shall open the window. I believe there’s a window.

SOMEONE ELSE:
And in the middle is the garden, where chords hang, where nobody goes.

NOBODY:
I am in a garden, approaching a building, the object of my long search.

THE SCIENTIST:
There is no certainty that there is a window. How, in that case, can it be opened?

THE DANCER:
There’s the door, then. I shall open it, to find the outside.

SOMEONE ELSE:
My fingers stamp all this, peacefully yet passionately, into invisibility. All these things become, and even as they become, they become invisible.

NOBODY:
I have always been approaching the house, sweating, thirsty, with my rucksack on my back. I think I have come a long way. The sun has emerged, and vanished many times. And now the shadow comes once more. The doorway is dark; I can’t see whether the years have brought any changes. The smells are the same. There is an inner space; I enter the well of it. A flight of stairs, shabby walls that hang with dirt. Somehow, the sounds of outside begin to fade. It costs all the energy I have to mount the stairs. No-one has swept them for years. Now I have reached the landing, where I remember I sat as a child, on the bottom step of the next flight up, waiting for my mother after school. A door. Time, the heaviest of the dimensions, is traversed. My mother doesn’t arrive. A heavy, dark brown door. But I have a key in my hand. Will it fit the lock?

THE SCIENTIST:
There is no certainty that there is an outside. However, evolution will continue after our demise. This era will persist for billions of years. Once the universe has given birth to the last star, the stelliferous era must come to an end. The degenerate era continues while the galaxies remain intact, but everything must die and they too will end when the dwarfs evaporate and are ejected into galactic space. After that, the dark era, for now there is nothing left but atomic particles – positrons, electrons, neutrinos and the odd bit of cosmological radiation.

THE DANCER:
Suppose we were not really here?

SOMEONE ELSE:
Nobody is in the house.

NOBODY:
What if I were to...?