Experiment Eleven

Languages with a clear distinction between the tenses provoke its speakers into believing that these are separate domains. The past has gone, is finished. The future remains hidden, unknown. But, as I understand it, Japanese is not like that – time does not travel like an arrow through past, present and future. Everything is all at once.

There is a sense of impermanence about Japan. Earthquakes and tsunami destroy neighbourhoods. The architecture of the country reflects that, as does language: the Japanese live in a permanent now, although there is also an aesthetic of ageing, of wear, wabi-sabi.

Your task is to imagine a domestic scene where past, present and future coexist. You could walk into a room and find it as it was last week, last year, a hundred years ago. Maybe even find yourself in an open field. Or the house is in decay, derelict, your belongings covered in dust. You are dead, gone, still here, not yet born. Depict an immediate and everlasting moment, past and future superimposed.

This vision could awaken a sense of your own mortality. Or, as you reflect on this, something more mundane interrupts, a smell, sunlight on the wall, a text from a friend, a sudden pain in your chest.

Experiment Ten

Create a prison for your character. Your character has committed no crime and his or her prison is not a confinement but a limitation for you to bring them into being. The prison is a kitchen or a small garden, a workshop, a car stuck in traffic, a boat on the ocean, a space station whirling out in orbit.

Now create a problem for your character. One simple problem. This will obsess you and your character. He has to make a meal from only a few ingredients; she has to decide whether to cut down a tree to allow light to nourish other plants. The boy in the workshop is told he must not go near the forge while his master is out, but the forge seems to be getting far too hot. The woman in the car sees a long lost friend in a line of traffic. And so on.

Your character is imprisoned in place but also in time, let’s say an hour. Everything must be resolved within that time. No flashback, no unsettling shifts in perspective. Everything from one point of view, within one hour, in one place. You must begin now and I expect your paper on my desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.

The Mapmaker’s World

This is the way the world will be, he thought, grasping the inked vellum, holding it close to his face, a world without people, without life, without light, no night and day, no seasons.

The mapmaker shook his head. Of course not, he replied. The world is as it is, this is a just a representation. A simplification.

But why simplify it? For what purpose? Once a world like this can be imagined it won’t be long before this is how the world will look. This depiction of the world is the servant of our masters. And these masters would see us gone, if they could.

Not at all, no, replied the mapmaker, sighing quietly. Yes, I was commissioned by a wealthy landowner, but he cannot stop day and night, hold back spring. He is not a god.

But once we see the world as if viewed by a god, some of us will believe that is what we are. This image of the world you present, it is remade by you, it has no hills, no valleys, it is not the land I know, it is the world with everything superfluous to the new master’s needs erased. He smites people, animals, light, day, night, sunshine, rain, the seasons, birdsong, hills and valleys. And why? So he can remake it as he wishes. This is his Flood. You are his Noah, gathering what he instructs you into your ark of vellum.

And what is the Flood? asked the mapmaker, smiling at what he thought of as the absurdity of the suggestion.

Just as the Flood reduced the world to simple surfaces, to one vessel containing everything deemed worthy of preservation. This Flood is the deluge of simplification. The reduction of the world to the vision of a few deranged masters.

I am not an artist, said the mapmaker, I do not seek to show the world in all its complexity. And there are artists who do this, I know of one. His paintings describe all those things you say I dismiss.

And to whom does this artist sell his work? To the masters who make their money from destroying what is captured in those same paintings. They like to believe that the world is still an Eden while they pull it apart. They preserve it for themselves as they destroy it. Both of you, mapmaker and artist, reduce the world to dangerous fictions. There is no art that captures the world as it is, now, before your maps lead to its division, no art that breathes like the living earth, that sweats like the labour of human beings, or that is filled with the chirp and buzz of the air. Every time a man like you tries to reduce the universe to his vision, he kills a part of it.

He placed the map on the mapmaker’s table, pulled open the door. Light flooded in, a stir of a breeze rippled through the room.

I don’t like this new world, he said, gesturing at the sheets of vellum, at the inks, the pens, the rules. And with that, he stepped outside and pulled the door behind him.