Felipe Alfau - Chromos

The fundamental postulate makes no such assumptions; it is the springboard for the first systematic attack upon a problem that has no right to be as old as it is.

I turned to the last pages and read:

It is easier to imagine all the complications which evaporate when our concept of time is eliminated than to explain these things, and this is the only business of any hypothesis in science. Our language is hopelessly inadequate; it implies time in most of its parts and the moment one tries to explain, one falls into contradictions. Verbs — one of the strongest tools of our expression — are essentially time. The thing is impossible and must be expressed in mathematical language. But whether such ideas may or may not be stated in everyday language is immaterial. Once understood, questions of beginnings and endings become simple questions of structure. We conclude that there is energy of highest availability at one place and its complete degradation or utmost thermodynamical equilibrium at another, within a structure that always shows more entropy away from us, along a fourth coordinate, regardless of the direction in which we measure it. Conflicts between science and religion cease to exist or at least become exceedingly weakened as both views grow considerably stronger. The problems of what was before everything was created or after everything ends dissolve once the concept of time, as we conceive it, is removed and become considerations of what is not or what might have been. Why the Creator did not begin things before, or what he will do after, is meaningless and, having discarded the tenses, which are but ways of looking at the infinitive of our own making, the Creator emerges as the verb in the present indicative.

Garcia had come in and sat down, his head buried in his chest, his legs, one over the other, stretched before him, in one of his characteristic poses. The Moor looked at him and for a fleeting moment his face registered a sad fondness. The Moor could be very warm sometimes, enough to make one forgive him his many faults, and he was sly. He knew that Garcia abhorred his scientific leanings as much as he loved his music, that in his presence he was always in a dilemma, unable to reconcile both activities which he considered as radically opposed. The Moor said to him:

“About the question that worries you, I will try to answer in a moment. Now I want you to hear this from the master of reiteration. Perhaps it will answer you.” He was playing the slow movement from a sonata of Schumann: “You can learn more literature from him than from any writer, to reverse his own saying.” The music went through a passage of appeal that verged on despair: “This is one of the most concise modulations in musical literature,” and through it the music became serene once more. “Now you are in the presence of greatness.” The music grew, invading the keyboard, expanded to its natural fulfillment, to end in exhausted finality.

What point had he made? I don’t know, but he had fully made it and won Garcia over. The Moor spoke to him:

“Perhaps the reason for not accepting these theories completely, for not taking the decisive step, for not lifting the frame of the little machine, is fear of what they might uncover behind.” He laughed again but the sound was not derisive: “The corpse of free will, of the free will they have exercised so well and yet does not let them buck the moralists. That is what the denial of time and motion, as we feel them, implies: no free will, and man will buck anything but that.” He paused a moment and swept us all with a blank stare:

“And yet, there is a way out of the difficulty. We can have scientific consistency and at the same time save face and human dignity.” The Moor could speak as directly as he played music when he chose to and I wish I could remember his words because, aside from his playing, this was the only thing I would have cared to remember from that depressing day of painful revelations.

He used the analogy of a sculptor working on a block of stone. It contains all possible shapes, all statues, good or bad, inspired or mediocre, and it is the decision of the sculptor which one he wants to carve out of all that infinity by removing and ignoring all the rest, to leave only that one. His statue was there all the time, yet no one can deny his creation, his discovery, his choice. What we remove, what we do not want, is what we call empty space and no time, what has not been and what might have been, and we remove by simply ignoring. We see the shapes in their fourth dimensional extension as moving things, things created, born, growing, becoming old, dying, disappearing, even ourselves, all of it cast as one with the static universe. We are at once good and bad and constructive and destructive and beautiful and ugly. It is what we choose and what we inspire others to choose and be conscious of in us that determines what we appear and the moral code or conduct on which we decide. This permits the concept of free will in a universe which is set and where past, present and future coexist. Our freedom consists of our selection of a shape out of an infinity of possible shapes, even if that shape, once selected, still contains within itself another infinity of possible shapes. In this manner determinism is not opposed to an illusory free will. It is up to us what somewhere or somewhen we conceive in this continuous extension of existence.

“And there are six degrees of freedom: three dimensions of space and three of time, all we need for our complete realization,” the Moor proclaimed. “Six coordinates at most are all one requires for a full simplification and understanding of all cosmology, of the whole shebang, including ourselves, because the sixth coordinate, the coordinate of consciousness, of thought, also points to the legend: ‘Everything that is possible exists already,’ and this is the mysterious field of metanthropy and the stereochronic sense.” He spoke like one making astounding revelations. I don’t remember his words but in part it went something like this, if I understood him right:

The man of genius is a mutant; he advances ahead of his time, beyond the frontiers of knowledge and common experience, into the blackness of the unknown, but he does not want to be alone and his achievements are his way of illuminating the darkness that envelops the future, and they are also an appeal for understanding which is a call for company and for help, because alone he feels futile and lost. Following his light, others follow hesitantly with painful misgivings, reaching out to him until he finds himself once more surrounded by those he has taught to be his peers. That is what makes the genius do his work: the fear of loneliness. His work is an explanation and an explanation is a call for spiritual company. Then comes the fermenting stagnant period of recapitulation, a relative recoiling recession, and the process is repeated by someone else and thus the race advances to the next stage by discontinuous eruptions. It is a racial syndrome of mutation.

And this is the stereochronic sense of life: to change, to retrace and to advance, to sidestep oneself and join one’s other past, present and future selves, and by undergoing this displacement along the axis of possibilities, to raise the curtain of man’s next stage and let consciousness flood our total identity which remains invariant under all transformations. This is metanthropy.

Yet, when I left the Moor’s house that day, I was not altogether convinced in the broader sense. Perhaps I had not understood him well. I fear that now, or perhaps I hope for it. There is such a thing as preferring to be fooled when it suits our purpose. I think it was Dr. de los Rios who said once: “Reason pursues the truth whether convenient or not. Common sense finds the convenient whether true or false.” And that day also, de los Rios had summed things up quite well. He said that whether it was motion or extension, or time or fourth coordinate, it was only a matter of names and what we meant came down to the same thing, as I remember the Moor himself had implied in his notes. Whether we call a certain color a rate of vibrations or simply red, we mean the same thing; the vibrations strike us as redness even as the fourth dimension strikes us as time and the inclinations in it as motion or as all simultaneous universes, existences or identities appear to us only as possibilities. It is only a matter of nomenclature. But the Moor replied by accusing de los Rios of temporizing as usual and said that it was not only a matter of names but of thinking of things in different terms which made our concept of reality more clear, and then Dr. de los Rios said: “And what is reality?” and the Moor looked at him with mocking, glaring eyes and said cryptically: “Someone asked you a similar question about two thousand years ago. What was your answer then?”