Life Without The Boring Bits

by Colleen McCullough

  “Pish! Tosh! Rubbish! Get up, you silly specimen! Haven’t you ever heard of a tripod?”

  “I can’t get up, and I’ve never heard of a tripod!” Otto yelled, his head thrashing up and down. “Go away and leave me alone!”

  “Pish! Tosh! Rubbish! Get off your side, Otto. Lie on your belly and stick your front legs out. Come on, do it! None of this misery-wart defeatism! Your name was Otto the Terrible — do you want to be remembered as Otto the Sook, Otto the Weak, Otto the Pusillanimous? Do it!” And while he spoke these unsympathetic words Phluphphy’s eyes roved across his Court. Ah! There! “Lew and Stew, front and centre with Terry and Jerry!”

  Two big, sturdy ginger cats came forward, their rat-companions particularly large, sleek, and well-manicured.

  “It’s a month since the operation, you must have healed,” said Phluphphy. He peered at the dressing, whose corners were lifting. “It’s a simple disarticulation amputation, no real stump, so if Terry gets on one side and Jerry gets on the other side, they’ll be able to pick the dressing off. Air! Air will complete the process of encrustation and soon the scab will fall off.”

  And while he spoke in these crisply lordly tones, Phluphphy kept nagging Otto to lie on his stomach. Poor Otto was utterly terrified, but Phluphphy’s never-ending spate of “Pish! Tosh! Rubbish!” finally irked him so much that he obeyed, astonished to find himself in position, and his exposed wound much as Phluphphy had said it would be — uninfected, encrusting nicely.

  “At first you will need help getting up, but soon you won’t,” said Phluphphy. “You have turned from a quadruped into a tripod. Tripods have three legs and are very sacred. My Court needs a tripod. Now Lew amd Stew are going to help give you some traction as you get to your three feet. Push, Lew! Push, Stew! Upsy-daisy!”

  Without too much trouble, Otto clambered to stand on his two front legs and his right hind leg. He teetered a little, trembling and shivering, but the Emperor refused to let him even think about falling over.

  “Excellent! You are a natural athlete, Otto, which means you will shortly compensate in every way for the loss of your leg. Now home we go,” said Phluphphy, this time leading the way. “I knew a pair of Court acrobats would come in handy! Giancarlo, climb on Marcello’s back, which will make the pair of you tall enough to serve as a crutch for Otto if Marcello walks under the vacant leg. Hey-ho, and off we go!”

  An hour later the exhausted but self-ambulant Otto was in Her backyard, lying on a flat cushion that belonged to Her sun lounge, and wolfing down a tray of gravy beef a small raiding party had obtained from the supermarket.

  “Every Court,” said the Emperor to his subjects, “needs a true and proper religion, and a high priest to administer it. Otto the Tripod, I hereby ordain you Pontifex Phluphphus.”

  It was remarkable what a difference having an official religion and a high priest to administer it made to the Court of the Emperor Phluphphy! If the Reverend Otto found a religious reason for this law or that regulation, somehow it made a lot more sense, though it goes without saying that the Reverend Otto’s dogmata were lean, sinewy, flexible and stood alone on only three pillars of faith: Phluphphy was, Phluphphy is, and Phluphphy always will be.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” She said to her friend one morning over tea and scones, tickling Phluphphy’s tummy and pulling one of Otto’s silky ears through Her fingers. “Phluphphy was in the backyard cuddled against Otto, washing Otto’s face! I had to give both of them a bath. When I phoned old man Grouch, he disowned Otto as useless. But would you credit it, not an hour after that phone call, I had a lout at my front door brandishing a gun! Then this three-legged dog charged out of the side passage, leaped at him, and took a huge bite out of his trouser crotch!”

  “Stone the crows!” said the friend. “Was it horrible?”

  “No!” She said, laughing. “Otto took every layer of fabric but never touched the skin. I could still hear him screaming in horror ten blocks away. So I acquired a three-legged guard dog. He’s the sweetest, gentlest baby in the world, aren’t you, diddums?”

  “He must cost you a fortune.”

  “I can afford him. He gets best quality braising beef, great big marrow bones, and an occasional small roast turkey or haunch of mutton, though I notice he winces when he spots the mutton.”

  My Empire is now as rounded as even I could want, said Emperor Phluphphy to himself as he listened. He opened one eye to see Jim sitting on his ferny portico, one arm around Ophelia, nursing again. He’s doing very well, is James — a share of Otto’s braising beef as well. My very own rat-companion …

  “But now,” objected the friend, who really disliked happy endings if they weren’t hers, “you have gigantic Number Twos to clean up. Not to mention all the places where Otto cocks his leg — I know you, you’d wash them down obsessively.”

  She sneered. “Otto uses the outside toilet, Phluphphy taught him how, even with a missing leg. And how can he cock a leg that isn’t there? He sits down to do his Number Ones. Don’t forget that he’s tall enough to put his rump on the toilet seat, and his tail is docked, so there’s nothing to get in the way.”

  “Huh! Therefore all you have to do is flush.”

  “No. It’s an overhead cistern with a chain. Otto pulls it himself,” She said in gloating triumph. “More tea, dear?”

  TIME

  Time fascinates me, going all the way back to the days when first I began to struggle with the concept of Spacetime as a continuum, of Time as another axis forcing a fourth dimension upon our comfortable old three-dimensional world. Yet the Spacetime hypothesis has succeeded so well that even the most ordinary, unscientific people now accept Time as the fourth dimension. They don’t understand it, but the boffins say it is so, therefore it must be so. I can’t pretend to have the mathematical genius to grasp the mechanics of it either, but I do have some ideas, and a theory of Time that I suppose is more philosophical than mathematical. Since philosophers are allowed to question any and all other intellectual disciplines, I am safe.

  In this third millennium the string theorists and a few other kinds of particle physicists are starting to maintain that Time cannot be treated as a simple dimension turning Space into Spacetime. Arguments flare about the inflexibly forward direction of the “Arrow of Time”, the contention of these physicists being that Time must also be able to flow backward: the Arrow reversed. Without the divorce of Time from Space and a Time also flowing backward, the equations of particle physics cannot be married to the equations of Relativity — a consummation devoutly to be wished. If Time is treated as a separate and reversible entity, the equations fall into place and we look like having that Holy Grail of all physics: the Unified Field Theory.

  Unfortunately to liberate Time in this way detracts from Relativity, and the argument is raging fiercely — who are these miserably few people want to let Time slip its leash? Why, they’re weirdos studying particles that pop in and out of existence! And to compound the multiple insults to Relativity, the state of — um — being wherein the argument rages is the event horizon of a black hole. Nor is Time the object of the exercise. That is Gravity, for around the event horizon of a black hole something called Supergravity appears and Relativity Goes West. Time is a sort of by-product of the general drift of the theory. Time? Poof, pooh! What is Time, after all? Supergravity is the thing! Who cares if Time flows backward near a black hole?

  Meanwhile, wherever we look in the sky, the spectrometer betrays a red shift that tells us every galaxy we can see is receding from us, and that this fugitive motion is accelerating. Will continue to accelerate. Will never not accelerate, until and beyond where the fabric of Space is so vast that every one of its billions of galaxies will be out of range of any other galaxy at any conceivable wavelength.

  Naturally the astrophysicists are hedging their bets by announcing that this mad acceleration may suddenly cease for no reason perceived in the equations. But if it doesn’t stop accelerating, eventually the speed of the U
niverse will hit the speed of light, a traffic hump so huge it’s a brick wall.

  My question is: When the speed of light is attained, will everything come to a screeching halt, perhaps leading the Universe to go out with a bang or a whimper?

  I have a second question: When the Universe hits the speed of light, will some utterly unforeseen phenomenon occur that wafts it onward faster than the speed of light, accelerating to infinity? Superluminal. What an amazing word.

  Where is Time in all this?

  I can’t make sense of it.

  Time is spoken of as linear — a straight line. Except that nothing in the Universe is straight. Even the straightest line will curve if the person observing it can get far enough away from it. Light bends — Einstein proved it. The lens effect in the most distant galaxies (those farthest back in time) is there in the Hubble photos. So why is Time thought to be straight? Why can’t Time be curved?

  Some astrophysicists are now postulating that the nigh infinitude of the Universe may be a false premise: that, in fact, the Universe is much smaller than we think. These vastest of all abstractions can, I suppose, only be grasped by those who have such an exquisite mathematical understanding that no one less well endowed has the slightest chance to understand. An insect like me just wonders.

  Time is the opposite of Eternity.

  In Eternity, nothing moves. Nothing happens. Nothing is. Nothing was, and nothing ever will be. Eternity exists outside the realm of Time, and nothing can exist outside the realm of Time. Time imparts movement, a state of being, a life of some kind even if in no more than the buzzing throngs of particles inside an atom. When Time stops for anything, it ceases to exist. That is not a description of death as distinct from life, but of non-being as distinct from being. As long as there is Time, substance exists. Whereas Eternity has no substance, it is nothing. It begins to sound like a mantra, doesn’t it?

  Time goes forward, pushing everything in the direction of death, also called entropy, or chaos. What a physicist means by chaos is not Logan Airport in the throes of a blizzard, or an area of devastation after a massive earthquake. To a physicist, chaotic entropy is purposelessness, having no mathematical meaning.

  We have three words to delineate Time: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The past is yesterday and the future is tomorrow; what lies in between is the present, today.

  Think about the present. The last breath our lungs drew in is already in the past, and the next breath our lungs will draw in is still in the future, unbreathed. What lies between is a minuscule pause, the thinnest of all possible interfaces. That is what the present is: the interface between the future and the past. It’s next-to-nothing, measured in quadrillionths of one millisecond. The present is so short it cannot be appreciated as a quantity of time. Death lurks in the future, and stops a life in the present; from then on, all an individual thing owns is a past. Yet while its substance lingers in existence, it still is. Thoroughly out of your depth? So am I! That is because, of course, sentient human beings cannot divorce their own selves from the great conundrums: God, life, death, and all intangibles.

  That Time flows is easy to discern. It marks its passage in externals like greying hair, creaking bones, failing organs. And all around us are evidences of Time’s flow — the annular rings in a tree trunk, the layers of fossils in rocks, the ebb and rise of oceans, seas, lakes.

  We have but one instrument whereby to measure Time: the clock. But all a clock really measures is itself, or perhaps better to say it simply repeats the same interval over and over and over again. A certain number of repetitions sees the Earth rotate on its axis once, a different number sees the Earth rotate once around the Sun. But the intervals are numerically untidy, which ought perhaps to tell us that Time cannot really be measured. If the clock is fast, does less time go by? If it is slow, does more time go by? I mean, how do we honestly know? We can’t touch Time, or see it, hear it, smell it, taste it. Time is an imponderable, a genuine mystery.

  I firmly believe that Time flows at different rates, that how one denizen of its ocean perceives its passage is as valid as any other denizen’s, and that no two denizens will experience it as exactly the same. Nor do I believe that Time has ever heard of mathematics or the Unified Field Theory.

  The future does not exist: Time hasn’t been there yet. It writes itself at the interface we call today. It’s the vehicle takes the Universe on its ride from the present into the past. And we know far less about it than we do about Space or Gravity.

  What sentient Earthlings don’t seem to understand is that with every breath they suck out of the future’s supply, predetermined by our genes and our living habits (both properties of the past), they literally make their future. It cannot be predicted because it happens a sliver at a time. The future truly does unfold.

  Think of it in galactic terms. About 400 million years after the Big Bang or the Beginning, the atoms of the gas cloud became so squashed together that they fused in a chain reaction that liberated a positron and some raw energy. The stars turned on and began to shine in proto-galaxies. They made a future when they didn’t have a future. About 10 billion years later than that, the Sun turned on and planet Earth was born. The Sun made a future for itself, and dragged Earth into it. Now, 4.5 billion years farther along, sentient Earthlings are busy making futures for themselves where no futures had existed. Such an interesting premise, that one can pluck something out of nothing! They say it can’t be done, but clearly it can, and is. The whole Universe made a future for itself out of nothingness. One further question: Is the Universe merely a figment of someone’s imagination that doesn’t exist in anyone’s reality? If the sleeper awakes, will there be a Universe?

  These days the physicists talk a great deal about dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter consists of ninety per cent of the Universe’s total matter. Sentient Earthlings don’t see, hear, smell, feel or taste the dark matter, and it responds to no gauge or analytical instrument yet invented. So tenuous and ghostly is its premise that it is mathematically inferred as having to exist. Without dark matter, we are led to believe, the Universe would have undergone the Big Crunch or another Big Bang long ago. Nor do sentient Earthlings see, hear, smell, feel or taste the presence of dark energy. Nothing in the Universe has ever been zapped by a charge of dark energy and had it recognized as such. Dark energy, presumably, confines itself to interaction only within dark matter.

  I have to ask it! From whence comes the energy that fuels Time the vehicle on its manic ride? Time performs work, therefore it consumes energy from a stockpile of matter. Tomorrow doesn’t become today and today become yesterday without massive pain and effort. Dark matter and dark energy are uniformly distributed throughout the Universe. Nothing else is. Except — Time.

  THE SEPIA BLUES

  Sepia is a particularly uninspiring brown that lends itself to a neutral palette from its most diluted beige through to the solid pigment, near-black. Cuttlefish and some related species squirt it, turning translucent turquoise water into an impenetrable fog that soon saw these talented tentacular beasties hunted for their ink. Over the ages, cakes of sepia dissolved in water enabled Man to write down his thoughts, calculations, inventions, dreams, sketches and philosophies on paper or parchment. If the ink were properly prepared, Man’s symbols on paper would last for millennia. Added to which, sepia became a pigment utilized in the painting of pictures.

  So what is sepia? It’s the color of the writing on the wall, of skins and skunked skies, of shit and shadows, of pollution and putrefaction. It has no innate personality of its own.

  If hemlines can reflect the economic climate, what can colors do? It’s my opinion that they point up people’s moods, the mental attitude of the populace. Study them and their effects, and the investigator will discover things that have the ability to surprise or even to shock. It is not for no reason that scarlet-red is the color of rage, and also the color of the harlot, who is called a “scarlet woman”. Because of the astronomical cost in ancie
nt times of obtaining a dye called Tyrian purple, the color purple became the prerogative of sovereigns. And while the phrase “the blues” to describe depression is a modern one, it has always been known that too much of a vapid shade of blue causes the human mood to flatten: which is why theatres are not painted blue inside — bad for favorable reception of the plays. Being the color of healthy plants, green cheers, and orange implies the destructive violence of flames. Whereas all the shades of sepia have no mood at all. The main reason why they are so popular in interior design: what provokes no emotion cannot be called in bad taste.

  Here’s an example that really gets the color ball rolling. The colder the climate, the darker the color people tend to wear. Sometimes I used to travel to Hamburg, Germany, all the way from my sub-tropical isle and its jewel colors. Invited out for dinner, I would don an outfit that, if it turned heads at all back home, would generate pleasure. Something made of pure silk, say, beautifully dyed in reds with slashes of acid-green and magenta. When, wearing this, I strolled into the Hamburg restaurant, all conversation would stop dead as both men and women stared at me in sheer disbelief. My colors shocked them; every woman present wore black, or dark brown, or dark grey, or grimy tweed. I inspired not pleasure but unease, discomfort — not exactly disapproval, more the reception given to someone from Mars. I decided that I was a tropical creature, some brilliantly hued reef fish cast up in the midst of North Sea sardines.

  One would think it ought to be the opposite. The colder the climate, the brighter the colors, if only to cheer people up as winter grinds on. However, my example is extreme. Canadians and Americans don’t dress so drearily when it comes to color; it seems to be more a European phenomenon. But I freely admit that I deliberately saved my most lurid outfits for dining in Hamburg restaurants. It was such a hoot to still the place.