The Dialectic

A Metaphysical Horror Novella that I wrote recently for publication before realising it's doubtful anyone can accept it because of its weird style. So here's a free one for you web surfers out there.

  "Okay, why don't you start from the top," the imaginary man said as he sat in the chair at the opposite end of the dining room table. "That way people reading this can understand everything more fully."

 

  I imagined myself pulling a long draft from a cigarette before letting the smoke plume from my nostrils, a bit like a dragon from Tolkien's stories. The blue hinted cloud of sweet tobacco scent and fiery brimstone heat veiled my face like a silvery shawl as my gaze turned to the ceiling.

 

  "I think that's part of the problem," I intoned, almost with a resignation that seemed habitual now, as though I'd tossed these ideas around in my head many times before. "I don't think there actually is a 'top'."

 

  "Can't you start from the beginning?" My interlocutor looked upon me with a raised eyebrow - An imaginary man, a figment of my visualisation, who could not make out my face for the wisps of tobacco mist concealing me like the mists at the peak of the Tibetan plateau.

 

  "Perhaps," I replied with just a hint of enigma, "but that really depends on where you wish to place 'the beginning' - or rather in what context you use the word 'beginning'."

 

  "Please explain."

 

  "I could start from where I believe it all began chronologically - but then that leaves the problem of locating where it all started, and to be honest I'm not entirely sure I know the answer to this. In any case if I did begin there it might not be understood. Besides, I wouldn't know whether to tell it from my naïve perspective, before the horror dawned on me, or whether I should explain everything in the framework of the horror from that first instant." I precariously rested the cigarette upon the edge of the ashtray as the interlocutor scribbled notes. "To do it one way allows you to better understand what I went through and almost places you in my shoes, but it does so at the expense of making less sense. Doing it the other way means relinquishing your ability to comprehend my choices, which can only be understood in the context of what I was feeling.”

 

  “You implied that there is more than one way to interpret the word ‘beginning’.”

 

  “Right.” I drew another long draft from the cigarette. My nostrils flared when the smoke issued forth, like from a gun barrel. I let the word rest for a moment before I spoke next. “With regards to story writing have you ever heard of the term ‘in medias res’?”

 

  “Is it anything to do with Chekhov’s pistol?”

 

 “Gun? No.” I chuckled. “That’s an entirely different rule of narrative structure. One that’s still important mind you. ‘In medias res’ is Latin for ‘into the centre of things’. It means to start a narrative in the thick of the action.”

 

“What does that have to do with us?” the interlocutor asked as he tried, still, to make out the face of his imaginer.

 

  “Everything.” And the interlocutor might have just glimpsed the shimmer of an eerie smile from through the mist.

 

 “Everything?”

 

 “Every story starts ‘in medias res’. Every story is a story of characters. Every character has a history when the story begins. And almost certainly, that history is either not covered in the story or else is touched upon at a later date.

 

  “But there is no beginning to history. If you were to try to make a story that began at the start of every character’s life you would have to explain it through the medium of other characters who preceded them �" other characters who would be drawn into your narrative and require their own histories to be explained from the beginning, necessitating more characters, and so on ad infinitum. You can stretch your gaze to as far back in time as you like in order to begin your story, but ‘ex nihilo nihil fit’ and history will keep expanding ahead of it, like the horizon to your sight.”

 

“What about Genesis?” My interlocutor’s shrewd eyes tried to pierce mine for a moment from through the fog. “From the bible.”

 

“What about it?”

 

“Genesis was written as the beginning of everything.”

 

“Ah. Yes, that is true. But it’s flawed. It still leaves one unanswered question, doesn’t it?” I leant forward and my silhouette pressed into the interlocutor’s mind much as it pressed into the swirling fog, like an indistinguishable print upon wet clay. “‘If god made the world, then who made god?’.”

 

  The interlocutor considered this as I relaxed back in my chair and let the dizzying smoke swirl around me. I felt light headed as though from altitude sickness. “Every story has to start in medias res. Every story.”

 

  The interlocutor huffed as he grudgingly accepted this. “So where does this place us?”

 

 “It means our story has already started,” I replied. “It started a minute or two ago in fact. That’s the point. A story can’t have a true beginning. I don’t know whether it can end although I have a sneaking suspicion that no matter what we do we will never find one. There is only the present moment. In medias res.”

 

 “Then where is this tale of yours headed? If there is no end then where is it going?”

 “Well, that’s the thing isn’t it? There has to be a possibility of an ending. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. In order for a story to have direction, in order for it to have a message, in order for there to be a character arc, that is to say, in order for there even to be a story, some ending, some destination point, has to be imagined. But is the final destination just that? Imagined? Or is it something real?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand anything. I thought we were discussing your past. This is just getting more and more convoluted. We all know about structural narrative, we all know how stories work, why are you labouring on the point? It’s all intuitive. A story has a beginning, middle and an end, even if that story starts in medias res, or whatever. It still starts.” The interlocutor sighed. “Look, can’t we please just start from where you feel best and we can piece this thing together as we go along. Okay?”

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “My point was that, in truth, there is only ‘in medias res’. There is only the present. The future is uncertain, unknown, unseen. The past is a product of our retrospection; retrospection formed at each present instant. Our life is a story that we keep telling ourselves, that we keep repeating to ourselves, tirelessly refreshed and revised at every instant we exist. My point is there is a distinction to make; between what is real and what is imagined. Stories are imagined. They have pre-existing rules that apply to their structure and determine their narrative. And our lives take after this form because our lives are made of stories, made of character arcs, made up of our own narrative that we constantly have to re-evaluate due to changing circumstances and the shifting relevance of different people in our lives. It creates a divide between what is fiction and what is fact; what is story and what is real, and amidst all that �" ‘what is life?’.”

“Derrida…”

“What?”

“Jacques Derrida. Isn’t he the philosopher who said that we understand ourselves as an abstracted character of our own imagining �" a character with a story. An ego I suppose - How we consciously think of ourselves and refer to ourselves. I think he had a special word for it - ‘auto-affection’.”

“Auto-affection is a good case in point �" it reveals a contradiction in how we refer to ourselves in the same way as we refer to ‘the other’ �" another divide. But the important thing is that the tension between what happens to us, what influences us from one day to the next, and what we believe of ourselves, shifts what our goals are, what is important to us, what we strive for…

  “What you thought about yourself when you were a teenager eager to come to grips with your life, and how you might feel about yourself as a young adult with a family, all the way to how you think of yourself now as you fixate on what I’m saying, are instances of this shift in importance in the different features of your environment. This changes how you see your abstract self fitting into the world around you, which in turn necessitates the change in the narrative lens through which you view yourself, your story and your life.

  “It is the constant tension between what is immediately true in the present instant and the idea of who you are that keeps the story constantly changing. Constantly dynamic. Like a spring being perpetually fidgeted with, twisted and then released. For that reason the story can only exist ‘in medias res’ �" at the present moment, or close to it, because if it existed for any longer it would exist in denial of your new priorities and circumstances. So we must conclude that there is no story that pairs with reality, or that there are lots of possible stories �" each one, perhaps, with a little, skewed glimpse, a peek, at the true reality that is lurking underneath…

  “Either way, reality as we imagine it, as we construct it in every given moment, is very different from any actual reality we might suppose to exist beyond that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what we construct of ourselves and our place in society is a shifting story, like shadows shifting on a wall. It’s a story in contradiction with itself, hence it’s changing nature. And it’s in contradiction with the stories other people make for themselves. If your story were the ‘right’ one �" the ‘reality’ �" how would you distinguish it from the others? How would you distinguish it from itself as it transforms?”

  “What if I didn’t think of myself as a character in a story? What if I thought of myself as an observer? What if I cared only for the bare facts of each event I witnessed rather than my perspective on it?”

  “What difference does it make? You are still only one point of view, one frame of reference, one key hole through which to peek. Even if you think of yourself as an observer you are still a part of the world you observe. You cannot abstract yourself away from it. And so, regardless of how hard you try, you’re still a player in it, with thoughts, beliefs and flaws that shape and form how you see what’s around you.”

  My interlocutor’s eyes drifted to the pinnacle of the plume of smoke as its tendrils hazily drifted across the ceiling. He leant back in his chair for a few patient moments before his eyes rested once again on his notepad.

  I imagined what he might be thinking of �" this man who didn’t truly know himself. I imagined he was thinking of his childhood, his first kiss maybe, under the dangling leaves of the willow tree one lazy southern summer when the pink and golden sunset cast its silky glow. Perhaps his mind would flit back to when he was twenty-one and branching out into the world for the first time, looking to explore and find his way. Perhaps, he was thinking of when this conversation had just started. All the memories that had led him up to this point were nodes slotted into a narrative that could be used to explain where he was right now. They told him who he was and what he believed. They identified what he knew at every important instance of his life, and like a kaleidoscope they all shifted and meshed together, fluid shapes constructing the narrative �" the fountain from which sprung all of who he was and what he was doing.

  And all of that, like the kaleidoscope, was constantly shifting. They were bolstered for sure by the people he shared those memories with �" like two people sharing a book of optical illusions. But, ultimately, here in this room away from the ‘outside’ world, he was starting to see how those memories might be fictions �"stories we never cease repeating to ourselves. Everyone knows that the visual aspect of memories is a sketchy thing after all - easily changed, easily manipulated by the right words. People can unconsciously change how they remember something and often do without realising it. That is just how pliable the mind is. There have even been court cases where a memory expert was drawn to the stand to explain why the eye witness’ testimony was not a valid form of evidence for exactly this reason.

  Memories are fickle.

  “I read Descartes’ meditations once,” the interlocutor spoke after a few pensive moments. “He tried to find a self-evident truth by placing all his senses and faculties in doubt so that he could see if there was something that he couldn’t deny no matter how hard he tried. During this exercise he entertained the idea of a wicked demon that placed false beliefs in his head and filled it with false memories.” My interlocutor looked at me from through the smoke, still trying to make out my face. His brow furrowed. He was no longer sure whether he’d seen it - whether he’d ever seen my face before at all. “Okay. If we were perfectly sceptical we could suppose that all my memories are false - That my entire past is a fabrication. In such an extreme state of doubt I cannot even know how long I’ve existed because those memories might lend me a false impression of the length of my life.

  “But Descartes did come upon a self-evident truth. The ‘cogito ergo sum’. ‘I think therefore I am’…”

  “Good. You know you exist. Now tell me what you �" the ‘I’ in that statement �" is that exists.”

  “What ‘I’ is? Why would I need to explain that?”

  “If everything that you are is constituted by your memories �" every desire, every belief, skill and drive �" then what is the ‘I’ when you remove them? The ‘I’ of which you speak would not only be the sole entity left standing out in a sea of doubt but it would also be a vacuous shell; a shell that knows no language because language, the memory of you learning it, is doubted. And so too is arithmetic truth, logical rules, and so on. Whatever solid, firm laws we relied upon to construct and describe our world would be lost in the whole depth of scepticism. The ‘I’ of that ‘self-evident truth’ would not even be able to string the words together that form it or any other coherent sentence, because the ‘I’ would have no understanding of language or its foundations. It would be consciousness of the lowest grade, its most base animal and bestial self, completely devoid of any self-awareness. So there would be no self-evident truth because you �" that ‘I’ embedded within the ‘cogito’�" wouldn’t have the required concepts to form it.”

  “Okay so my past is thrown into doubt.” The interlocutor replied. “As is yours. I don’t see where any of this is going. Why are you undermining the validity of your own story before you’ve even begun to tell it?”

  I puffed on the cigarette again and let the smoke billow forth like steam from a train. “Can I have a page from your note book?” I pointed to the thick pad of paper that rested at the opposite end of the table.

  My interlocutor gave it a glance. “What do you want it for?”

  I grinned. “If you please.” 

  My interlocutor obliged.

  “Thank you.” I took the page and began to idly play with it, twisting one end and curving it back in on itself, forming a strange loop. “You ask me why I’m telling you all this before I begin? Perhaps you think I’m defeating the purpose of my story, since stories normally function to assert one long chain of coherent and relatable events connecting people together. But the truth is the story really has already begun, like I said before.” I knotted the two ends and let the loop roll across the table, from one hand to the other, tapping at it like a cat. It wobbled whenever the half-twist spun round to the surface. “What you don’t realise yet is that this same discussion that I am having with you �" it was told to me.”

“Told to you?”

“By the man who this story is really about…”

“I thought this story was about you.”

“It still is. It’s about how I was made to realise a truth. Or maybe something deeper. Something sickening. More like the nature of truth itself, in a way…” I tapped the loop one last time and let it roll across the length of the table, towards the interlocutor from through the sweet scented haze, before it rested, gently, by his hand. “…The inner nature of reality.”

  My interlocutor looked back at me with a renewed wariness. “And who is this man exactly?”

  I responded with a raised eyebrow. “Well that is the question, isn’t it.” I drew an inhale from the cigarette once more before placing it, carefully, back on the edge of the ashtray.

  My interlocutor looked at me expectantly. “Is that it?” he asked. “A non-answer?”

  I shook my head though, as I leant back in my chair. “He spoke to me a while ago now. I was sat where you are sat now, drinking in everything he was saying. At first it was a terrible drink to swallow but now that I keep thinking about it… Heh. Well, it just keeps making more and more sense…”

  “You spoke to him in this room?” My interlocutor looked surprised. His eyes darted about the room for a moment, as though he might catch a sign of the mystery man, as though he might be hiding in shadow. “When?”

  “When…” I scoffed . I couldn’t help it. Then seeing the offended reaction of my interlocutor I decided to explain. “I don’t know when precisely. Before. After. Time gets hazy sometimes in here. It’s… another divide, perhaps. At least that’s how I choose to think of it.”

  “Wait. I’m sorry but you’re not making any sense. Divide?”

  “Like the divide within your friend, Derrida’s idea of ‘auto-affection’ �" the divide within describing yourself as you’d describe another. Or the divide between story and reality. Noumenon and Phenomenon. Ego and will. Man and god. They are each versions of the other �" one in an endless chain of ‘in medias res’.”

  “I still don’t understand. In fact, I understand less now than what I did before.”

  “You will understand in time. I promise.” It was a promise but to my interlocutor’s ears it might have sounded almost indistinguishable from a threat.

  “You were talking to this man?” My interlocutor prompted.

  “We had a chat, very much in the same way as I’m having this conversation with you right now. I was very inquisitive. Curious. When it all began I didn’t know what to expect, but by the end I was on the edge of my seat. I don’t know what it was but I could feel… I could feel myself falling somehow - No, I take that back. Not falling. Plummeting. As though I’d flown too close to the sun and my wings of wax had melted. His words were the rays of light and heat that melted my feeble stories and sent me to the truth that was always lying below. I don’t know what force drew me to him with that being the case, but I suppose, as with all those who dream to fly, we dream as high as we can set our sights…”

  “What did he tell you?” My interlocutor asked.

  There was silence as I patiently lit another cigarette, and the flash of the lighter shone like the hazy beacon of a lighthouse through the fog before dawn. I watched my interlocutor intently.

  “There’s no escape.”

    And all of a sudden I knew he was hooked.

*

  Our eyes were locked.

  “Excuse me?” I replied.

  The smoking man just lazily reclined in his chair from within the tobacco mists however, as he pulled a draft from his new cigarette and released a jet stream of smoke into the air. “That’s what he told me,” he explained. “That there is no escape.”

  “There is no escape from where exactly?”

  “From here, of course.”

  “Here?”

  “From inside this room.”

  I looked at him �" or rather, his silhouette �" for a good long while. Then I scoffed. “Okay,” I chortled, closing my note pad and leaning back in my chair. “Now I’ve really heard everything. You’re saying this mystery man kept you prisoner.”

  “No. Not a prisoner exactly. There was just nowhere else I could be.”

  “Why couldn’t you leave? Did he force you to stay?”

  “It’s impossible to leave. Impossible not to stay.” And again he pulled another draft of the cigarette, inhaling the sweet scent.

  “So what exactly?” I riposted with an apprehensive and ever so slightly tremulous smirk. “It’s not as if you couldn’t have left, right?”

  But the smoking man just watched me patiently from through that swirling haze, which now obscured half the room.

  “I was kept here for the same reasons you are kept in your seat right now,” he replied softly.

  “But it’s not as though I’m held down or anything. I haven’t been fettered to my chair. It’s not like I’ve been chained to a post or latched to an explosive collar. I could just decide to leave…”

  “Only if you can decide anything...”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Free will…” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “It’s a sticky issue. You always think it’s there but as soon as you turn an intellectual gaze onto it, as soon as you carefully study it and try to pin it down, it drifts away, out of focus and out of contemplation’s reach. Like trying to focus on an eye floater. The concept of it is as slippery as wet superglue before its fastened hold of you �" as indeed the concept always does fasten a hold on people, with everyone who thinks they understand it and don’t question or analyse it.

  “Free will is by no means a given, but people always have a bad habit of treating it as though it’s a first principle �" an apodictic axiom above questioning, similar to those who repeatedly exclaim the existence of Yahweh.

  “No matter how much we try to shirk the fact, the logical extrapolation of modern science is very suggestive…”

  “So what, you’re telling me now that there’s no free will?”

  “No, no. I’m inviting you to consider something far more intriguing than that. Something the ‘third man’ told me.”

  I gave a sidelong glance that was both wary and ripe with trepidation. “Which is…?”

  “Free will lies somewhere within another divide; the divide that exists between phenomenalism and epiphenomenalism, or physicalism, of which epiphenomenalism is a logical extension.”

  “What’s phenomenalism?”

  “Have you ever heard of ‘The Critique of Pure Reason’?”

  “Oh. Isn’t that…” I clicked my fingers, fumbling for the answer, “…it’s on the tip of my tongue… Immanuel Kant, right?”

  “Okay. Good,” The man replied softly. “How familiar are you with it?”

  “I’ve read some of it I think. A while ago now…” I thought I might have remembered sitting down with the book once upon a time, leafing through its pages, but I didn’t know where, and no other details came to mind. Here, in this room, it all started to feel so very long ago…

  The man released another plume of smoke into the smouldering air. “Kant recognised something. Something pivotal that would change philosophy forever. After he read Hume’s ‘Treatise of Human Understanding’ he had an epiphany.

  “At first, Philosophy consisted of ideas that mostly distinguished between the everyday world in which we live and the ‘true’ world that lay underneath. For Pythagoras it was numbers and mathematical laws that were the first principle - the Arche - a true unchanging reality that underscored the shifting world of appearances. Heraclitus believed the Arche to be change and flux, while for Parmenides it was the world of being, an unchanging, undivided, indescribable mass of pure existence �" smooth, spherical and stretching throughout the entire universe. With Plato it was the forms; a plurality of ideas in their most perfect shape and design that were extended far beyond our perception and transcended into a world that could only be reached by conception.

  “And at the pinnacle of this towering hierarchy of ethereal forms was the one from which all others were derived and at one with �" the one from which all others depended upon and that permeated and trickled through all others: the form of ‘good’. The world of appearances, by contrast, was to Plato merely shadows of these forms shifting on a wall, or a perverse imprint of the form pressed into the clay of space -  replicas that only the power of reason could, in its place, reveal the true form.

  “In all of these philosophies there is a duality between a world of becoming and a world of being �" a fluid world of change, plurality and appearance, and a solid world of unity, oneness and permanence.”

  “So what changed? How did Kant alter that? And what does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Kant recognised that the central questions of Philosophy and Metaphysics couldn’t be answered �" not because people hadn’t the deductive power, but because our reason and our understanding of the world does not, and cannot, extend as far as to answer questions about the inner nature of reality, or what he referred to as the ‘Noumenon’ �" the things as they are in themselves as opposed to how they appear to be.

  “You see it’s one thing to look at a table or a projector or any object of our perception and understand its function and its design and its colour or texture, but they aren’t what the thing actually is. That is merely how the object affects us and manifests itself to us through the medium and filter of our senses. A bat, or any other creature with vastly different senses, perceiving the same thing would not ‘see’ it the same way we see it. The way the bat’s world is constructed through the use of supersonic hearing and its more primitive understanding would present a vastly different picture of ‘reality’ �" one that probably wouldn’t even count as a ‘picture’.

  “What we perceive is part of a predisposed system of mental constructs that are superimposed over the raw sensory datum. First it is arranged according to our pure intuition of space and time and thereafter we apperceive the tables, the chairs, the books and everything else our world is composed of �" arranging the lights and sounds and feels that assail our minds into manageable packages: from percepts into concepts. This is the other side of the divide; the Phenomenon. ”

  “What about modern Physics, the triumphs of science? Surely we have a better grasp of reality, this ‘Noumenon’, today than we did a hundred years ago.”

  “Science is the extrapolation of what we perceive; an empirical study that uses the pre-existing intuitions of causality, space, time and logic to deduce or infer from experimentation the inner functioning of a world that we cannot fully grasp at once with our senses. But notice how Science uses laws and foundations that pre-exist it �" Time, Space, Causality. Since when has anyone ever seen the link between cause and effect? Since when has causation been felt or touched or experienced? When a billiard ball is rolled into another, when one body is forced upon another, when a spark is struck by a match, when do we see the process by which cause becomes effect? Do we ever feel causation? We experience the cause. We experience the effect. But when do we feel what lies between them? It is merely by an inferred sense of association and contiguity that the intuition of causation is abducted.

  “Science cannot take for granted the mode and architecture of our own reasoning - What Kant calls the transcendental Aesthetic that makes up our primary apperception that is automatically, instantaneously, unveiled to us and establishes our consciousness. It is the source from which all experimentation flows, and the foundation upon which the edifice of Science has been constructed. To judge the world by the results of experimentation when those results are revealed to us through the medium of our senses, our minds and the pre-existing laws that shape and form our apperception is to grope blindly for answers in an impervious dark.”

  “You deny the strides science has made to explain the world? What about all of the technology it has led us to? Computers, gadgets, satellites all exist and work thanks to the rules formed by Science.”

  “No. I don’t question the success of Science. I just understand what that success means…

  “As Science begins to advance to its furthest boundaries, it extracts from experimental results patterns, of a mathematical nature, and then uses those patterns to infer what exists that we haven’t found through experiment. We use maths to predict the existence of unknown particles, and to estimate their behaviour in given situations. The more experimentation is practiced and expanded the more the mathematical patterns, the theories and their predictions of nature, are bolstered, or amended, accordingly.

  “The thing is this very system sweeps the rug from under our feet, from under Science’s entire endeavour, and sends us toppling head over heels. For the more we learn the more we find that our intuitions of space and time and causality, all the laws that formulate our apperceptions and from which all of Science has started and built from, are false.

  “Yes. False. Time is not universal, for example, it can pass at different speeds for different observers: Relativity Theory contradicts our experience of time. A subatomic particle can be in two places at once, can be both a wave and a particle simultaneously, and can be affected merely by our observation of it: Quantum Mechanics contradicts our experience of causality. Space can be warped, can be skewed, can be compressed and is expanding faster than light between galaxies �" almost as though it weren’t emptiness but a real object �" and so our experience of space is also brought into contradiction. All are cases where our senses stand in contradiction with our immediate understanding. All of these new theories break ground and break intuition. More importantly they break how we first understood the world around us, they break the rules by which our minds construct what we see, they splinter and crack the foundations upon which Science was first built �" and if the first premises of Science are made untrue, if the fault lines in the scientific method of experimentation are widened to a gaping chasm, then what does that mean for everything that followed after?

  “According to Science we cannot trust our senses and according to our senses Science is what must follow. The architecture of our thought and senses have led us to Science, which in turn led us to annihilate the presupposed truth of our senses from which Science began. The entire edifice is like an Ouroboros: a snake consuming its own tail and thus being consumed through doing so.

  “Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us, considering Godel’s incompleteness theorem…”

  “Come again?”

  “Any and all theories that are not so small as to be insignificant are doomed to either hold paradoxes or else have within them propositions that can never be proven true. The theory is proven and stands for any logical system, be it a language, or a mathematical axiomatic system, or the entire body of Science. Human knowledge has a dead limit.”

   “Okay, but I still don’t understand what this has to do with free will…” And I warily peeked at the figure from through the smoke. “…or me.”

  The figure pointed at the small paper loop that was nestled by my hand �" the same loop he had been playing with a while ago. It had innocently rested there for so long, so innocently, in fact, I might have never noticed it again.

 It gave me chills now.

 “That. That there. That’s the key - The key to understanding everything, to unlocking the truth.”

  I picked it up. Holding it in front of me I examined it, turning it over and absorbing every detail - The half twist, the way it curled back in on itself, cycling around and around, again and again. Again and again. It appeared as innocent as it was before, silently pulling me in. But still, somehow, it put me on edge.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Because it’s like the Ouroboros?”

  “Remember what I told you about stories? How they always start ‘in medias res’.” The silhouette of the smoking man leant forward. “How many surfaces does the loop have?”

  “What, you mean like faces of a cube, sides of a triangle, sort of thing?” I didn’t even give it a glance before I answered. “Two. It has two sides.”

  “Which is exactly my point. At every point along the surface of that loop there will always be a divide between one side and the other, like two opposing faces of a coin. Even at the section where there is the half twist and the two sides appear to cross over, it still looks as though there is a divide �" that there are two sides.”

  “Wait a minute…” I studied the loop one more time and took in the half twist, where the inner side of the loop and its outer side switched places.

  “You’ve seen it, haven’t you.”

  “There’s only one side. The inside feeds all the way round until it becomes the outside before feeding back into the inner ring.”

  “That’s right. It’s called a Mobius strip.”

  “But what does that have to do with what you said?”

  The man leant back in his chair once more, looking to the side in what might have been a dreamy haze. He pulled a long draft of his cigarette, and like the edges of a sunspot it smouldered. “Let’s come back round again to free will.” He rested the cig on the edge of the ashtray and considered me with his gaze. “Free will, according to Kant, was something that was a truth, but one that could not be known. For him it was a consequence of the existence of the moral law that existed in, and was obscured within, the realm of the Noumenon, outside our grasp.

  “His reasoning betrays something about the matter. It tells us that we begin with the sense that we determine our own behaviour and that we are the arbitrators of our fate �" similar to our intuitions of causality, space and time. But then through studying the phenomenon and exploring the logical consequences of experimentation we find that this sense of free will is contradicted more and more.

  “Another divide is revealed. One face of it is our immediate intuition of free will and how important it is in shaping our understanding of society, our behaviour and responsibilities. The other face is the logical extrapolations of science; determinism and physicalism. They are each, at least as far as free will itself goes, in direct opposition.”

  “Okay, but where does the Mobius strip come into play in all this?”

  “Every section, every little part, of the Mobius strip is like a point ‘in medias res’. It, taken by itself, is an entity of two parts �" two faces, spanning a divide. Like… two lens’ of a kaleidoscope, one over the other, with different shapes and colours piecing together each lens - They each cover the same surface, each a kind of bijection of the other, but their differing shapes and colours appear in contradiction. In this context, the divide exists between belief in free will, and the determinism of nature and of ourselves within nature.”

  “Every story starts in medias res…” It was a murmur, tumbling from my lips.

  “And every story starts with a divide. That divide is filled with the concepts of many shapes and forms that make up our world, our understanding of it. We start from pure intuitions; space, time, causality, free will. Each are our first building blocks with which we build. And from there we piece together the information our senses give us. We mould out of the colours, tastes and smells that wash through our brains the tables, chairs and objects formed by our imagination and sensory intuition. And how we do this is determined through our pre-existing ideas of space and time. Like the flow and form of a river is determined by the undulations, valleys and crevices of the Earth our world is determined by the topology of our brains. This forms a ‘synthesis of apprehension’ �" a conjoining of elementary concepts into one awareness and one consciousness, into the world that we see and experience around us at every moment.

  “Now, from here we come to realise that other people around us �" they have consciousness too. They behave as we behave, and through the power of empathy, an extension of our imagination, we peek into the inner world of others, superimposing our own understanding, our own awareness and feelings, upon the physical forms of other people. And thus we press upon ‘the other’ with the force of our empathy life. Life as we understand it within ourselves.

  “However, once we’ve done this, we begin to formulate new inferences about this world of shifting concepts and objects. We project upon the world our pure intuition of causality, and through doing so form, eventually, the scientific method. Science finds patterns in things through experimentation. It finds indisputable laws and mathematical formulae of how bodies interact and intermingle with one another and links these laws together to give rise to its theories. By reducing the domain of nature to its base mechanisms and showing that it can be grasped by a deterministic model it becomes only a slight shift in comprehension to move human bodies into this physical domain.

  “Once human bodies, and hence ‘the other’, has been placed solidly within a deterministic framework, with their material brains being all that’s needed to calculate their behaviour, then it is only another slight shift for us to refer back to ourselves. We discover that since we are like ‘the other’ in having the same kind of consciousness, then it follows that we too, like ‘the other’, must be subject to the very same determinism that is embedded within all of nature, all of our bodies.

  “And thus the divide reveals itself again. Just as in Science where we can no longer trust the senses from which Science followed in the first place, we now have an analogous situation where we use the example of our consciousness to infer the consciousness of others �" we intuit our own free will and hence suppose the same for others. And yet we also infer from the power of our reasoning that nature is deterministic. Since nature is deterministic so too are other people’s bodies. So too are their brains. If other people’s bodies are deterministic then so too is my body. So too is my brain.

  “From my own sense of free will I infer the free will of the other. Then cycling back around from the determinism of the other’s body to the determinism of my own I necessarily refute my own free will.

  “We have come full circle. The same was true for Science. Science refutes the senses from which Science must follow. They are both Ouroboros’ �" or more accurately, they are Mobius strips. Each time there appears, there is revealed, a divide if we focus upon one perspective or the other. Science or phenomenalism. Free will or determinism. Story or reality. But in fact, they are and always have been one and the same side, coiling around and in on itself. Contradicting itself. Creating tension like a spring that is ceaselessly compressed and released, thus causing the whole edifice to shift and change. Just like the stories we construct to describe who we are they are in constant contradiction with themselves and so must perpetually shift and transform. They are only stable when taken ‘in medias res’ because that is the only true place where the divide can appear to exist - Where we can define ourselves in opposition to another. As soon as you take it in, as soon as you suddenly grasp it, the whole captivating structure of our thought, of our stories, of all the fictions we might affix to ‘reality’, you realise that in one beautiful and spellbinding moment what it all means…

  “Then it falls. It falls and the divide comes once more and we plummet again ‘in medias res’, doomed to repeat ourselves, our contradictions, and sharing our little paradox forever.”

    I considered the smoking man awhile as he was ever more increasingly consumed by the fog. I understood what he was saying, but it was precisely my understanding of it that made me feel dizzy, made me feel light headed, as though from altitude sickness. I no longer seemed to notice the tendrils of the tobacco mists slinking ever closer.

  “So you are saying I don’t have free will?” I shook my head, taking a hold of my senses.

  The figure exhaled a silvery plume of smoke. “And once again you fall ‘in medias res’…” he said.

  “I have free will,” I asserted, almost a little frantic now, resisting the pull of his words. “I know I have free will. I can just stand up. I can will myself to walk. I can will myself to leave.”

  “And how would you seek to do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Leave.”

  I stared across at the smoking man a moment wondering why he’d ask me such a simple question. It didn’t even seem to make sense to doubt that I could leave and yet, what with everything he’d already said, everything he’d already revealed, I began to feel a small knot of apprehension tighten in my gut.

  “The door.” I said it as firmly as I could. “I’d leave through the door.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “It’s been locked?”

  “No.”

  His voice was soft, almost deceptively gentle.

  “So I can just walk out through the door then.”

  “What door?”

   Again, his voice was soft.

  “Come on…” I almost let out a nervous laugh.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he replied inconspicuously.

  “Come on, you can’t be…” But I was already considering his words like a drowning man considers the rocks tied to his feet.

  “Come on, the… the door that…” I spun out of my seat and marched to the far wall behind the obscuring smoke. I wheezed my way through the haze, wafting it out of my face. “There has to be a door… it can’t be…” But as I walked up to the wall I was faced with just bare surface, smooth and featureless. I planted my clammy palms upon it. It was firm. “No..” I breathed, “No, come on…” I traced it around the room, running my feverish hands across it as I swept from one side of the room to the other. “No…” I began feeling more and more trapped as I followed it around, as the nauseating claustrophobia squeezed against my chest.

  I kept looping around, feeling across the wall, only able to see one patch of it at a time in the swirling mists. I feverishly traced it around and yet there was nothing, and still nothing.

  There was only one space left where it could be…

  I darted to the last patch of wall, a sickening lump caught in my throat as I did so. Process of elimination �" there had to be a door, and it wasn’t anywhere else, so it had to be…

  It had to be…

  “Do you see now?” the voice of the smoking man crept up on me as I gaped �" gaped at the blank surface, like a terrifying canvass stretched out before me.

  “How… How is that…” I drew a sharp intake of breath as I staggered back, dizzy, as though I’d only just remembered to breathe. “How is that possible?”

  “I have to ask,” the man said as my eyes darted from one corner of the wall to the other, “do you actually remember there being a door?”

  I stumbled back into my seat, my pale hands clasping the burnished back of my chair and the side of the table as I lowered myself back down. Small pearly drops of ice-sweat dripped from my brow. I thought back, rummaging through my memories, desperately flitting through them, trying to trace any solid recollection of walking into the room, of stepping through the precipice, of… of anything. There had to be something. There had to be…

  Random memories flashed before me. I remembered when I was a kid and I’d kissed that pretty girl. We basked in the sunset under the willow tree. I remembered when I was twenty-one and I was just finding my way in the world for the first time. I remembered the conversation I had here most clearly of all. I couldn’t remember a door. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t conjure the memory of it in my mind. I couldn’t ever remember stepping into this room. I remembered my life, and I remembered the room �" and nothing in between.

  I shook my head in response to the smoking man’s question. It swayed almost as though of its own volition, with me scarcely aware of it, almost as though I might swoon within the sweet tobacco mists.

  “Another divide,” the figure replied.

  “I don’t understand…”

  “What is there to understand? There are no doors. There are no windows…”

  And as I turned my pale face, I looked across and found his eyes lock with mine. He softly pressed the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. Like the edges of a sunspot the cig smouldered, and within the adrenaline rush I noticed it seemed to flare ten times brighter than normal.

  “There’s no escape.”

*

  My hands were trembling.

  I could feel the blood drain from my face as I opened my lips to speak and yet, as I looked ahead, uncomprehending, I found that no words came out. It was as though my tongue was stuck; loose and floppy, unable to form and shape the words that caught in my throat. My wide eyes stared blankly ahead as my new reality began to sink in.

  The smoking man leant forward, resting his elbows on the table and pierced me with his gaze. “I know what you must be feeling,” he said, his voice smooth. “I felt it too. Before you came. When I was told the exact same thing. You never can prepare for it, the first time the nature of reality is pressed upon you �" all those sky-high thoughts, stories, beliefs toppling from a pedestal, tumbling from above. It always seems oh so messy at first.” He pulled a draft from his cigarette, the smoke hazily drifting over his face like mists drifting over a Teutonic forest. “It gets better. It gets… clearer.”

  “The third man…” I shook my head, first slow and methodical and then faster, as though to shake off the haziness seizing hold of my mind. “The third man… he… Where is he?”

  “Where…” the man’s voice seemed smoother, hazier, like the smoke, like my senses.

  “I…” I breathed, struggling to bring myself back to focus. My voice felt strained, stretched. I forced myself to sound firmer, stronger, than what I actually felt. “…Where is the third man?”

  The man leant back, his silhouette fading slightly within the tobacco mists as his gaze turned to one side. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “The man who told you all of what you know. He told you that you couldn’t escape too. So where is he?”

  Then, in a sudden jolt, I stood up. I heard the chair clack behind me as it toppled to the floor. I paid it no mind as I marched half-way round the table, leaning on its edge and fixing the smoking man with my gaze.

  The figure almost dreamily turned to face me as I sweated bullets.

  “You said you talked to him here, didn’t you,” I pressed upon him. “Well, if you talked to him here then where is he?”

  “You still haven’t figured it out yet have you?”

  “Figured what out?” I retorted, and then in a sudden spasm of anger: “Figured what out!”

  “The third man,” the smoking man calmly replied. “The man who told me everything �" there’s only one place he can be.”

  “Only one place he can be…” I bit my lip as I took in what he was saying. “…he’s here. He’s here isn’t he.”

  The smoking man said nothing as I spun around, my gaze sweeping over the room, over the mists, the table, the books, the chairs, the projector, some items I hadn’t noticed until now �" they all seemed to spin before my eyes. “You can’t keep me here. I want to leave…”

  “It’s impossible to leave,” replied the smoking man. He made another sweet inhale of the cigarette. “Impossible not to stay.”

    “So…” I breathed, thoughts frantically racing through my mind. “…When is he going to reveal himself? This third man.”

  “He isn’t hiding.”

  “Then where is he? If I can’t see him…” I steadied myself a moment on the table. “…if I can’t see him. And he isn’t in the mists…”

  I looked at the table, a creeping feeling crawling in my gut.

  “Yes?” The figure pulled another draft of his cigarette as I felt his appraising stare rest on my shoulders. My skin crawled.

  I didn’t respond though as my eyes were latched onto the table and a chill trickled down my spine. If I couldn’t see him then…

  I slowly lowered my head, beads of sweat dripping from my brow as my clammy hands clutched the table edge. I could feel my heart beat faster and faster, throbbing in my throat.

  I peered under the table…

  …And was faced with nothing.

  “Shall we get back on track?” The smoking man’s voice inquired. “We don’t have much time…”

  I leant back from the underside of the table and looked over to the smoking man. “Why am I here?” I breathed.

  “It will all be made clear in time, I promise. If you sit down I may be able to illuminate some things for you.”

  My body felt numb, as though it wasn’t my own as I did as he instructed. I warily sat back down on the edge of my seat, and peered over at him. “How long have I been here?”

  “As long as you can remember.”

  “No, but I remember…” I said as I shook my head, “…I remember things. Things from before. Things outside of this room…”

  “There is no ‘outside’.”

  “What?”

  “There is no ‘outside’.”

  “No. Of course there’s an outside. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there.”

  “There only appears to be an outside from your perspective because you are not yet aware of the full story �" the full reality. You’re still stuck in medias res, seeing only divides. ‘Inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’, ‘story’ and ‘reality’, ‘Ego’ and ‘Will’, ‘Man’ and ‘God’. You are ceaselessly consumed by these dualities, these divides, because you fail to take in the greater understanding that these divides are merely a part of, a snippet of �" they are shifting shadows on the other side of a keyhole through which you’re peeking, but one that blinkers your vision from the wider context, the larger structure of your thought, in which these opposing concepts exist and are all intermeshed and interlinked in one long chain of ‘in medias res’. We need to get back on track.” And I might have imagined that the figure grew just a little concerned as the mists forever wrapped around him. “There isn’t much time left…”

  “You want to ‘get back on track’? Get back on track where? To what destination? To what fate? To what ending?”

  “There can never be an ending. But, maybe… every story has to have at least the possibility of an ending,” the smoking man repeated to himself, almost as though it were a mantra �" something to be endlessly repeated in prayer. “Such is the nature of stories.”

  “You’re not making any sense. Where is this story of yours headed? You have me locked inside it, so what’s the ‘ending’?”

  The smoking man leant forward, and the urgency in his voice suddenly weighed like lead. “Listen to me. You have to understand. You have to understand all this or else it will never come…”

  “What will never come?”

  “Release.”

  “But what about the third man?” The urgency in my voice matched his own. “If he’s not here then he must have escaped. How did he do it? How did he escape?”

  But the man just seemed to grow agitated by this. “Forget this so-called ‘third man’. He isn’t important right now. You’ll understand that later. What’s important is the Mobius strip. It’s all one big Mobius strip…”

  “What is?”

  “Everything!” And the power of his voice rocked me for a second as his palm banged on the table. “All that exists. Every dichotomy. It’s all part of this never ending… Look, think of it like this. The Mobius strip is analogous to reality. Paradox is the nature of reality and the Mobius strip is the form and shape of the paradox. The Mobius strip is a loop. A cycle. A circle. Our reality is an ever shifting story, always in contradiction with itself, constantly revised and refreshed…” The man leant back as he pulled another draft of the cigarette, and his hand trembled as it shook the dying embers tumbling from his cig. “…But what if this loop, the Mobius strip, is enlarged �" made bigger, and bigger. What if every time the contradictions cause the story to shift, cause our understanding to be revised, we can replace it with an understanding, a story, that reads better afterwards and that makes our understanding better in turn�" or rather, makes the paradox harder to grasp, harder to uncover due to its incorporating a longer chain of concepts and ideas.

  “Perhaps we can’t ever rid ourselves of the paradox �" that Mobius strip that is the structure of our thinking. But when we enlarge a loop or a circle its radius gets bigger �" its curvature decreases. If we follow this trend of ever larger circles, ever larger radii, ever shrinking curvature we reach, upon the cusp of infinity, a line that stretches out forever. This is the point at which the loop is no longer a loop, at which the Mobius strip disappears, and where our paradox vanishes into infinity �" where there is an infinite chain of logical steps extending eternally that never lead to paradox.

  “That point, at the end of Zeno’s Dichotomy, an ‘Achilles and the tortoise’ race, is our ‘ending’ �" the ‘Noumenon’. Always in sight, but perhaps forever out of reach. All we can hope for is to repeat ourselves, revise our theories, and by doing so we’ll get ever larger loops, come ever closer, never touching upon the ending but forever moving closer to the point of zero curvature, the line stretching and extending infinitely onwards, and, until then, ceaselessly straddling the cusp of infinity, coming closer to the ending and yet, still, perhaps never arriving. But we must try. We must. It’s the only way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You must.”

  “Tell me how to get outside. Tell me how to get out of here.”

  “You’re not listening…”

  “I want to get out of this room!”

  “You can’t. There is no ‘outside’. This room, everything inside it, is all we can ever know…”

  “I remember being outside. I remember my life outside the room…”

  “You remember the willow tree? The pretty girl, perhaps? The kiss…?”

  “How did you…”

  But the man simply leant across and flicked a switch on the projector that was never there, that I’d never noticed before �" as though it might always have been there but hadn’t been formed and moulded by my mind until now. The thing whirred to life, a light beaming from its lens like a blinking eye, flickering through the tobacco mists as a square patch of illumination shone on the opposite wall �" looking almost, temptingly, like a window.

  I watched agog as the reel of the projector whirred through the film.

  “What the hell is this…” I stood up, finding myself rooted before the projected movie. My lips trembled. My eyes were almost disbelieving as I saw what flickered about my shadow. The patch of light danced about my silhouette like a halo of divine light shining straight from the past �" My past.

  I saw the willow tree, flickering on the wall, and the pretty girl smiling up at me amidst the dangling branches, hanging over us like the tendrils of some timeless firework in the silky glow of dusk. She smiled as our lips pressed together.

  “No… this is…”

  The image suddenly changed, abruptly, to when I was twenty one and just branching out, finding my way in the world. “No…”

  Again the image changed, to when I was reading the Critique of Pure Reason, and again, and again, until at last, with a click, the light vanished.

  The smoking man switched off the projector.

  “What �" what was that?” I spun around to face the man cloaked by the silvery shawl of smoke. “How did you…”

  “It’s like I said,” he replied. “There is no ‘outside’.”

  “But…”

  “You know the Japanese have an interesting word for it: ‘Zenbun’…” His silhouette seemed to fade as he leant back and drew one last pull of the cigarette, before releasing a jet stream of smoke. He pressed the cig against the Mobius strip that he’d made before. He set it ablaze and let the embers fall and tumble into the ashtray. “…It means ‘everything’, and yet, at the same time, can also mean ‘nothingness’.

  “There is nothing outside �" in the same way as everything is outside.” And the man seemed to grow more resigned as he spoke next, as though he was coming to accept his fate. He sighed. “If we could truly come to escape it, if we touched upon a world that had no paradox, there would be no divides, no in medias res, only… unity �" only oneness.

  “But perhaps that really is unreachable. Because if there is no contradiction and there is no change, if everything becomes one �" doesn’t it also become nothing? If there isn’t anything that can be defined in relation to some ‘other’, in opposition to some ‘other’, then how can it be defined at all? How can one know ‘white’, for example, when there is no other colour? - no ‘blue’, ‘green’ or ‘black’. Imagine seeing only the same shade of colour �" no matter where we looked, no matter if we closed our eyes or not. Forever white. Like static. A sensation that is unchanging, that tells us nothing about our environment, is no sensation at all, is it not? Like a background noise that fades into nothingness, but might never have been present in the first place…”

  “What the hell is this place?” I breathed, feeling as though I were falling, as though his words had sent me to plummet to a fate I couldn’t yet see �" obscured by the fog.

  “You already know.” And I thought I might have seen the hint of an eerie smile from through the mists �" The mists that were slinking closer, that had enveloped almost the entire room, and that were now closing in on me.

  “This isn’t real…”

  “But that’s just it. That’s the irony. This is as real as it gets...” And the smoking man seemed to fade more as he turned to the side and gazed away in a dreamy haze. “This is it. Time’s almost up…”

  “Why am I here?”

  “No more questions…”

  “What’s the meaning of it all?”

  “Goodbye.”

  And I shot across the length of the table, bolting to the smoking man, plummeting into the mists. “I want to know what it all means!”

  And as I stumbled into his chair, stumbled into empty space, I suddenly realised. It suddenly made sense.

  I staggered back �" staggered back from the empty space where the figure had been and had also never been.

  “Derrida…” I breathed, and I looked around the room and for the first time it all became clear. In one beautiful and spellbinding moment, I came to realise…  I could see it all.

  The mists were gone and I understood. Just like the dawning of a morning light that crowned my head and illuminated all before me, everything was illuminated by the light of my epiphany…

  I finally understood what he’d told me.

  Then I fell.

  I fell as though falling inside myself, as though the world could not hold itself together anymore. I looked at my hands and they did a mental half twist. I looked to the projector and it did a mental half twist. I looked to the books, the shelves, the table, the chairs �" they all did a mental half twist, and I felt my sudden understanding falter.

  “No…” I murmured, desperately trying to grasp a hold of the dimming rays of the epiphany, as though I could catch the light without it slipping from me. “No…” I strained my brain but I could already feel everything, my sudden realisation, slipping from my mind - as though I’d inhaled all the smoke in the room and it now filled my brain, concealing the rays that had once bathed the epiphany within it.

  The walls looked as though they had two sides, as though they divided ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, but I knew that wasn’t right, I’d realised that a moment ago �" there was no ‘outside’. The walls had only one side, like a Mobius strip coiling around and around. They did a mental half twist too.

  I tried to pull myself together as I became paler, feeling dizzy as though from altitude sickness. I sat myself down at the head of the table where the smoking man who was sat there had never been. My clammy hands fumbled for the cigarettes and they formed in my mind. I pulled one out of the pack and I lit it.

  The flash of the lighter shone like the beacon of a lighthouse from through the haze before dawn.

  I needed to think. How could I make it all make sense again? How could I escape?

  “There is no escape,” I murmured. And for the third time the statement slammed into my gut like a stone slab. “There is no escape…”

  Then I had an idea.

  I imagined a man, an interlocutor �" someone that could help me understand again, that I could explain my ideas too.

  “What was that?” the imaginary man said as he picked up the chair at the end of the table and set it upright.

  I gazed at him a moment. Then I smiled as I released a long plume of smoke and fixed the man with a knowing gaze.

  “It’s a story,” I replied, almost as though in a dream-like daze. “My story.”

  “Does it have a happy ending?”

  “Come now,” I said as I relished the sweet poisonous scent of the cigarette. A plume of smoke swelled before me, the smouldering cigarette concealed like a summer Sun cloaked by an approaching storm. “…I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.”

  “Okay,” he replied. “Why don’t you start from the top…”

Author's Note

Please let me know if there is anything you don't understand. I know this is a bit technical, it was originally written with academic philosophers in mind but i'm not sure how to reach that specific audience. I'm happy to explain anything you wish...

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Also (and I don't understand why this happens) sometimes a - [dash] appears as a " [speech mark]. It changes when I move something from word onto this website.