all of the above

Want to know something ridiculous? When I was a kid I used to worry about how to spell letters. I would say the letter and then I would write down how to spell it. This posed a problem however, the challenge being that I would then have to spell each letter in the word that I had just made to spell the letter. And so on. Ad Infinitum. I theorised that the way to solve the problem and defeat this damning loop of exponential letter growth was to spell a letter without using the letter itself, so that it’s existence was justified purely by its counterparts in the alphabet. The letter ‘A’ was encouraging and easy, ‘ey’ made short work of that. But then came the letter ‘B.’ Not so easy. A real challenge. However I began to think that even if I could spell each letter without the letter itself, what would that prove? The letters would be justifying each other by relying on each other. Even in my young mind I could see that the foundations weren’t solid on that logic. I needed a keystone, some firm foundation which everything else could logically flow from, some source of absolute alphabetical authority.

While I was never able to get any further with my letter proofs I think what this does prove is that if there was ever a boy in need of a nintendo it was me.

The picture below reminded me of those previously forgotten childhood thoughts. Unfortunately I do not know the origins of the picture, if anyone knows then please enlighten me.

All this touches on something that I have been thinking a lot about recently. Something to do with scale and perspective. I don’t rightly have it in verse in my head so bear with me as I try and communicate it. Possibly the best way to relate it is to tell another tale about my childhood. I used to have a recurring dream that was always different in subject but similar in style. I think it may have been a developmental artifact, my brain growing and learning and sometimes hiccuping. I would often dream as if everything was a close-up.

And not just a close-up. A close, close-up. What I would see would always be different, but I would always be so close that it was unsettling and vaguely uncomfortable. I would not be able to pull back or change my perspective in the slightest. Whatever small minutiae it was that my subconscious had decided to focus on would all of a sudden be of such infinite scale as to appear to be my entire reality. It was visceral and sensory. For all intents and purposes, while I dreamt, it was as expansive and as broad and as infinite as the concept of infinite space.

And like many of my dreams I would experience them during the waking hours as well. This may be because I have never had what you would call a normal pattern of sleep, but sometimes like a switch being flicked in the back of my brain I would be staring at some trivial thing and it would hit and I would stare. For barely a few seconds the feeling would take me, but suddenly my perspective would shift and the two rocks in soil that I was stuck staring at would become my entire world.

This is of course, an inadequate explanation. To convey it properly I would have to find some way of inducing it on you. And short of experimenting with hard drugs I’m not sure there is a way. I’d be interested to hear though if anybody had experienced something similar.

And so that is what I have been thinking of recently. The one letter filling the world with its spelling, and then the spelling of each letter in its spelling and the spelling of each letter in each of the letters of each of the spellings. Or the one small crack in the glass window which from a different perspective and scale is a vast and unforgiving chasm with tall sides and an unending series of twists and river bends. And this brings me to yet another thought, but I will leave it there.