“All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.”
March 29; 2021
I’m back in the supermarket. Things have changed. Background radiation. Entropy. The fleeting grandeur of it all. The temporal turmoil of the outside world.
I came here to get tea.
First world lockdown problems.
This isn’t Kenya. We’re not getting shot. The homeless aren’t getting doused in disinfectant.
The virus has reached the Amazon. The indigenous people of the Kokama tribe have not been social distancing. They live eight-hundred miles up an Amazon tributary. This supermarket isn’t far enough up a river to stop the spread.
But I need that tea.
The cashiers hide behind perspex panels six feet high. And N95 masks. The masks are the shape of a bird’s beak. The supermarket looks like it is run by pale-skinned geese.
I go to the hygiene aisle. It’s empty. I feel I should clean my basket so go back to the entrance where there is a table with all the products you need to disinfect your life.
I head back into the maelstrom. Holding my breath. Only I can’t hold it long enough, choke, and clamour for oxygen. I start taking tiny, shallow breaths. People look at me with strange expressions.
Fear and paralysis everywhere.
I see my reflection in the window of an empty freezer that’s long been emptied of fish fingers. I look like a gorilla dragged me through a zoo. I’m not alone.
I find the tea, go back to the entrance, wipe the boxes down with disinfectant and stand behind a white line at the checkout and wait my turn.
Pay.
Leave.
Back at home Alice is re-enacting the Battle of the Somme in the kitchen. Every toy she owns is lined up on the floor. She’s taken everything out of the fridge and is standing inside the fridge throwing Babybel at the retreating German army.
“Alice,” I say, as I place the tea on the sideboard and flick the kettle on. “Very impressive. Last night’s pasta, is that the Western front?”
She says it isn’t. But she doesn’t understand the intricacies of First World War warfare. The Germans attacked the French at Verdun in February, forcing Britain to head the offensive on the western Front. So the pasta is the Germans. Peppa Pig is the poor French.
I tell her to get out of the fridge because it’s time for school.
“Daddy,” she says as she clears up the battlefield. “Can we learn fractals today?”
Amazon still hasn’t delivered the encyclopedia. I look on Wikipedia. It says:
In mathematics, a fractal is a self-similar subset of Euclidean space whose fractal dimension strictly exceeds its topological dimension. Fractals appear the same at different levels, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set; because of this, fractals are encountered ubiquitously in nature.
Maths and nature.
We do the happiness diary (burritos, finding cereal on the floor, drains, talking with grandparents and playing hide-and-seek in an abandoned underground car park less than one kilometre from the house.)
“Alice,” I say. She is sitting, crossed legged, on the rug. I’m opposite her. “What is two add two?”
“Two and two.”
“Yes, what does it equal?”
She stands up, and says, “If you’re a teacher I’m Emilie.”
I rephrase. “What is two add two, Emilie?”
Alice, who now calls herself Emilie, says, “I don’t remember.” And runs out of the room to get a broken wooden train from her bedroom.
When she returns, I teach addition with the German pasta army. I lay four injured soldiers on the rug. Alice who calls herself Emilie jumps on them and mushes them into the rug.
She says, “Two add two equals fish.”
“Alice.”
“Emilie,” she says.
“Emilie, how many fish?”
“Two.”
“How many hearts do you and I have?”
“Two.”
“What is two fish add two hearts.”
“Three.”
And she draws a bird and says, “Heart add fish equals bird.”
We power through the one, two and three times table, subtraction, addition and division whilst learning about battle strategy during the First World War.
You can access fractals in two easy ways. The first is to close your eyes. Try it. Close your eyes. Do you see those yellow and orange and reds dancing in your field of vision? They are fractals. The profound complex shapes that make up the entire living, breathing world.
The second way to see fractals is by ingesting psychedelics. Drop an acid and watch the leaves on the trees melt down into their purest form of honeycomb fractals, lattices of light and electricity distorting and throbbing, wave forms cascading through space.
Try it. Take LSD.
Alice is too young for class-A drugs. Instead, we go outside and find a secret park.
Someone has planted daffodils in the shape of a heart.
Alice stands in the centre of it and covers her eyes.
Fractals dance in her field of vision.
And a profound sense of unity washes across the universe.