The Last Rectangle Read online

  At one time, someone discovered recursivity. Was it not a fact that I went in and registered so many facts? If I added that fact to the previous set, would I not have to add an even newer fact to include the additional fact? All of a sudden people stopped coming to the Libraries. In some libraries far outside town, people went on recording their recursive and additive visits simply because they were not exposed to the seriousness of the finding. It took time for the news to reach them and in time, they too stopped.

  The Day I Almost Broke a Statue in a Museum

  I went through the rooms in the museum, slowly eyeing some artworks while the crowd moved in front of or behind me. Every now and then, I would halt in front of one painting and stare at it for a long time. I practiced a technique taught to me by a painter friend. She said that most people view paintings as static images. They are not. I should browse a painting and get it to live. I could do this by sweeping my eyesight all over its space, back and forth. Then I should stop and stare fixedly at one spot. This would force the images that were being swept over to continue moving due to the momentum I gave them giving the painting a dynamic essence.

  By noon, I entered a rather longish room with a large number of paintings mostly by obscure expressionists. On the wall facing the entrance and to whose left side was a door leading to another hall, the curator had placed two items. To the left, there was a pedestal, 120 centimeters high on top of which there was a redwood statue not known to me at all. A large painting was placed to the right of the statue between it and the right wall. Next to the painting and aligned with its lower right side was a notice written in small script analyzing the painting. The painting was distinctly a Kandinsky.

  I came close to the lovely statue and I found out it was also by Kandinsky. The base curved inwards and was larger than the rest of the statue. Because of its pyramidal shape, it gave the feeling that it was stable although it was not fixed to the pedestal. The statue was not a known work of Kandinsky’s. It had recently been discovered amongst other works that Kokoshka’s estate had stowed away. It was not attracting any crowds as few attributed it to Kandinsky and so they assumed it was by someone minor and hence not fit for much attention.

  After eyeing the statue for a while, I moved slowly to the right to scan the painting the way I was taught. But it did not make sense. I needed to read the notice placed on its side. I came closer and closer to the painting shifting my eyes between the notice and the canvas. I squinted my eyes so I could read the small script. As I was reading, I felt a little tug on my left shin just above my foot. It felt like an insect so I gently kicked my foot around a little only to see the Kandinsky statue start wobbling. The insect was a cable. The cable stretched from the bottom of the pedestal on which the statue was placed all the way to the wall right of the painting. The low lying cable was meant to fence the viewers from the painting. The curator had made 3 mistakes which vindicated the saying that if several things can go wrong, they will go wrong at the same time. The cable was too low to be seen, so anyone mesmerized by the painting would be tempted to come closer and closer until the cable touched his or her shin. The cable was strung between the wall and the pedestal holding the Kandinsky statue. The pedestal was not fixed so any tug on the cable would result in the pedestal being pulled inwards. The third mistake was that the statue was simply laid upon the prop and was not fixed to it. Any little wobble and the statue would fall down. And it did. I had read a story by Thurber about a man about to be hung to death. Between the instant he started falling till the instant his neck snapped, he saw his whole life pass in front of his eyes. That was the first thing I thought of. But my future life passed in front of my eyes. I knew it would be a long time before I would hear the wood hit the floor and get shattered. I expected to see myself arrested, put on trial and sent to jail. I counted the days in my cell. But the statue did not get shattered. It was made of very hard wood. It simply bounced around the hall like an irregular ball. Again, I had read many stories where after something as massively unusual as this happens, the hero would save the author the bother of a good ending and simply wake up from his dream. I didn’t. I was fully awake, at the same time watching my future life and slowly observing the falling statue without any thought to the consequences of my action. I was lucky not many people were around. I picked up the statue and placed it back on its pedestal by which time one of the guards came. Instead of bowing out with guilt, I gave him a hard lecture about exposing visitors to such problems. I threatened to sue the Museum because of the anguish this might have caused me and because the falling block of wood could have hurt someone.

  There was a slight blemish on the statue, maybe more than one. I simply felt I could not face Kandinsky if we had met.

  The Day My Father Gave Me a Carpentry Workshop

  My father got me a Carpentry Workshop. He convinced my uncle to let me use the store room below the ground floor in his house in Baaqline. He also had someone convert it into a workshop and populated it with tools and many blocks of untouched wood. He told me that it took around a month to setup and it was now ready. My delight in the use of traditional tools meant that he had to avoid all types of sophisticated modern machinery. Most of what he could find in the market had to be second hand as few of the tools could be found new.

  I spent the first few days trying out each tool: hand planers, chisels, auguring tools, hammers, vices, cramps and saws. What came out of the practice was not the mastery of the tools but an addiction to the smell of wood: beech, oak, walnut and pine. The little curls that rolled out of the planers and the piles of saw dust that collected on the floor gave out captivating fumes that at one time, I became convinced this was the purpose of carpentry.

  But practice and indulgence were hurdles and I had to move forward. I realized that I was not in the workshop for functional purposes. I had not asked for the workshop so I could construct furniture and shelves. But then nor was my aim the creation of sculptures and mobiles. I worked without external purpose. The forms first took shape in my head, but not always. Sometimes, a part of the final form became clearly visible and I would have to build up the form layer by layer or surround the initial conception with more wood. Blocks veered into blocks. Lines pointed outwards and joined in far off space. I became a wizard of alignment and misalignment. Wood became like words, notes or paint as I applied my tools to create forms. I made three dimensional Mobius strips with a square cross section. I copied forms from Escher and made them real. I copied forms from real life and made them unreal.

  But it was not art works that I was building. Art works come with quotation marks around them. Fiction is presented in a book and given a name: a novel, a short story. Paintings are framed and signed. Sculptures are given a base with a name and a date. Dramas take place in the intimate confines of a theater. Readers and viewers get told beforehand to pay attention, this is a work of art. That was never my intention. Nor was my intention art for art’s sake. There was no sake in this. And there was no art, whatever that was. There was passionate process. There was method and material. There were constraints, some natural, some staged beforehand and fortuitously. But when does work on the work end? It ends when the work becomes mulish, resisting change not because it can resist change or because I failed to change it but because the options and alternatives get fewer.

  The Day I Replayed Silence

  I developed a digital audio recorder to record those periods during the day when there was total silence. It took me two years to perfect the design as I had a lot of trouble with the noise internally generated by the electronic components I was using. Since their noise was randomly generated, I could not apply noise canceling by feeding the negative of the noise into the amplifier to cancel it out. I had to resort to a very unusual procedure. I came to know that most of the noise was created by electrons crossing uneven or contaminated semiconductors. So I worked hard to find and use highly purified material. Moreover, the speed of the electrons was
causing high frequency sounds as they whizzed around knocking into other atoms. It became clear I needed an amplifier which operated in very low temperatures so I had to build a cryogenic enclosure to place it in.

  All this worked as I wished and all for the aim of recording total silence. I am sure someone will ask: why not turn off the input and then record? That won’t be a true recording of silence. Furthermore, I was quality conscious and would not have accepted to use the recorder without proper testing. I designed a segment of the amplifier to compare the recorded silence with a recording without input. Whenever I found a difference between the two, the recording was deleted because it was not of true silence. That was my only test.

  I built the recorder with the care of the builder of model ships inside bottles. It was ready for use by the beginning of October, a good time as the weather was peaceful and extraneous sound levels were low.

  I began recording spates of silence, periods that I did not even realize existed before I started work on the recorder. The silence before the storm, as they say, was no silence at all. There was a whirring sound, the buildup to the storm. What a myth. Silences were found where you would not expect them to be. I found one between the time my dentist looked closely into my mouth and the time when he started the drill. Total silence, very exciting. I found another between the time a hammer hits a glass pane and the time the glass starts shattering. The longest period of silence I found was 2 seconds long and I found it by chance. I was calibrating the recording levels when the green light came on indicating that it had found a silence. I kept recording and dismissed the calibration. I froze in my place as I did not want to add any noise to the recording. The green light then went off and I stopped. What was that? Or rather, what wasn’t that? I could not tell. The silence was not associated with anything. It was a random event. I did not want to let go. I had my suspicions so I turned on the recorder all day long, in almost the same environment. I recorded it again. Since this time I was in total darkness, I observed a dark blue hue coming out of the space two meters away from the microphone. I had recently heard that physicists have stipulated that empty space, the void or space itself, has energy. It followed directly that any measurement of that energy would disturb it and anytime energy levels change, they produce photons, hence the dark blue hue.

  All other mythical silent times, as in the case of the lull before the storm, were terribly noisy: the time just before you sleep, the period between the raising of a conductor’s baton and the first note as he brings the baton down. All of these were fraught with noise: your breathing, the conductor’s coat shuffling and other noises from the instruments of the orchestra.

  In the evening I play back the silence clips. They are small but very intensely silent. I join them together for a longer effect, except for the clip with the dark blue hue.

  The Law of Negative Inference

  It was one of those dark and foreboding mornings we got used to having in February. Even the weathermen had expected it. So it was all a matter of expectation. And it happened as expected. And the morning gave all it got in terms of rain and wind. But where was the expectation? Where was it located? Was it a law of nature? Or maybe even a routine in our brains that makes us expect something or was it something we learned to do from others? Our culture taught us that if something has happened many times before, then it is more likely to happen again. This was the Law of Inference. Everyone says only culture produces such constructs. Really? Was it the culture of gazelles that taught a particular specimen to perk up its ears, straighten its head upwards and freeze when it heard a worrisome noise behind the bush? Earlier, his ancestors had been naturally selected because they had happened to have this facility. Without it, they would have been vulnerable to predators. In their turn, these predators had also been selected because they could tread softly. The rest vanished by hunger. Now tell me that the gazelle and the tiger had learnt it from their culture.

  But everyone kept on insisting that the Law of Inference was cultural. And we have the audacity to call it a law as if we had created it. So I decided to question that law. I started with the hypothesis that it was natural after all. Going back to the minutest multicellular organisms, they had responses to various natural signals: heat, light, noise, humidity. With time, evolution sophisticated their responses by selecting those with better expert systems, systems that could analyze external signals numerically. Surely, it would be a minor extension to the expert system to count the number of times a specific event took place and then point to the expectation. But does the increase cause the event to happen? Is there a law in nature somewhere that makes something happen just because it has happened a lot before? Not at all. We tend to generate false dichotomies by thinking that anything without a cause cannot be natural and hence must be cultural.

  Usually, one way of showing something is wrong would be to assume it was right and then see what happens. So I decided to play along with everyone and assume the Law was cultural after all. I accepted the thinking that our minds communicated with one another and with time, initiated the expectation process. But deep down inside I could not see which cultural constructs caused a school of fish to swerve in unison to avoid a stream of cold water.

  So if the Law of Inference were indeed cultural, it should be possible to change it in the same way it was generated: through communication. I got to work. I would reverse the Law of Inference. The more times an event takes place, the less likely it will take place in the future.

  All I needed was to spread a mental virus that replicated itself from one brain to another. That virus would infect other brains with the cultural construct that from now on we should infer that if something happened many times, then it is likely it won’t happen again. Ignoring for the moment what pragmatic results this would bring, most everyone got infected.

  In spite of the past few days being cold and drab, I woke up next morning and forced myself to expect the reverse. I proceeded to reverse all my other expectations. I was happy that everyone was doing it too. People went out in the street and got drenched because they were now learning not to expect rain although it had been raining for six days. Everyone burnt their meals because they stopped expecting that turning the knob clockwise on the gas stove would result in a stronger flame. Pragmatically, this was not a situation to enjoy. But trust people to find the funny side of things. They were getting accustomed to the wrong results of reversed inferences. Life became a set of punch lines that we all enjoyed but not for long.

  Soon, a breakeven point was reached, for some people, at least. I did not reach it. I got the virus from our neighbor one day. In the old times, it was normal for him to expect his brother to be late for lunch. When my friend first got infected with my virus, he had to learn to reverse this and other expectations. So he told me: you see? Now I have a new set of expectations. Should I not start reversing them too? Should I not start expecting my brother to be late again? And if I do, won’t I just revert to what my cultural thinking was like before your virus contaminated our lives? He was right and that infected me badly. So I assumed everyone would start reversing their reversals and the world would go back to its normal state. Wrong. Some people were slow in recognizing that reversals could be reversed. Others were simply immune to infection. Some with staid lives did not even go through enough events to reverse their original expectations let alone reverse their reversed expectations. I even learnt that there were people who were chronically infested but had such an active life that they had already gone through their fourth or fifth reversals. It was not the first time I had observed social turbulence when during a transitional period different people were left in different states or out of phase with one another.

  Pragmatically, things had to slow down. If a joint decision was to be made, it was never clear which way the inference would pull. Bakers could no more assess how much flour to order resulting in confused productivity in the bakery and in the mills supplying the flour.
This would result in hunger in the streets. Similarly, for people who relied on regular transportation, the situation grew to be so disjointed that few knew what buses, taxis or flights to expect and when. Bit by bit, things did actually slow down. Oil was not being refined. Farmers neglected their crops. Education, the main engine behind our culture, wound down. With teachers and students being in different states of reversals, how could students learn anything when they could not predict what was considered important to learn? More and more, things were becoming unstable and unpredictably so making it even more difficult to infer, either way. Fewer people were left with enough clarity of mind to debate with me my initial hypothesis that inference was a natural process we could locate in our brains and that we had not learned.

  Before the infection, we had assumed a relatively stable ecological environment that we were slowly unsettling leading to what we thought would be catastrophic environmental changes. What a picnic that would have been.

  The massive change in the status of man due to the reversal of the Law of Inference influenced natural processes which started to spin wildly out of their courses. Species became extinct and new species were not able to survive. Without stability in the surrounding nature, all man made constructs deteriorated and in time were wiped out by sand storms. I was not there to witness it.

  Lenders and Borrowers

  After years of lenders and borrowers maltreating one another, there slowly emerged a practice that suited most. It was not instituted by the Municipality or by the rulers - - - nor by joint agreement. It somehow grew in place by convenience. One day, a Thursday, a lender went to the main square and waited to meet his borrower, knowing, or rather expecting well that he would not show up. As a ploy, he waited in one of the streets feeding into the square, one that he knew his borrower would not use. But out guessing others never works.