Degrees of Separation.

The day is like syrup, sweet and heavy, with the birds suspended from the thick air. I cannot tell the time – the lights are on but it could just be the afternoon of a thick storm. This is a high street, seemingly busy with activity and commerce but empty of people. I have been searching for someone to whom I am attracted but I have forgotten her phone number - it comes to me in segments which slip away like egg white when I try to pin it down so I have had to actually come out to find her. Now the timing of all this activity is not quite clear in my head. It is possible that what I am describing after now actually happened before I left the house for the search. I do know that my house is a strange balcony around a central room. One part has a tiny arched door which I have to squeeze through sideways and as usual my house has no roof and probably no walls.

The street has a normal mix of shops and businesses, but they all seem vaguely foreign to me, though at the same time I remember them from some time ago. Maybe they are from an alternative world that I have already made up once in my head. I reach the door of the place that I know this woman to be. It is some sort of performance place, with a huge arched front, pierced by dark, stained glass windows, possibly in the form of writing which I cannot remember or might not understand. I knock at the main door which has a large clear glass window and the person I am search for appears behind it and too one side as if she has walked through the front wall to my left from a magic room which exists in a different space to the pavement outside. She is pleased to see me contrary to my normal quests in these circumstances. All things are finished and resolved.

But yet there are events which happen after now, in this place which I remember from before the time I first got there, quantum resolutions perhaps, the door opening and ending the story, is just the collapse of some equation. My new friend and her family perform a stage show for me. It involved real actors and what are obviously robots performing in the pit of the theatre round which the audience sit, though the actors come and go through the audience as if they are not there, walking like ghosts into the scenes. The robots amongst them are marked with a hazy white label that hovers around them – just the writing, no surface onto which it is written, like a computer game to indicate that they are indeed mechanical. I am not aware of a plot or even of dialogue though there is music from films and the whole thing appears to be a choreographed battle, with the ugly robots being easily circled by the beautiful real people who do nothing more than this. There is no contact, just this weird ballet without meaning but it is beautiful and absorbing and makes me love the real people.

And then it hits me that everyone in this act is a robot of some sort. The woman I have come to see, although she seems happy that I am here, does not seem entirely simpatico as she did to my blind eyes earlier. No one tells me this – it just becomes a fact in front of my eyes, the trashing of the brilliant idea of this quest and in its place the knowledge than any affection is the result of a program, a neural net which has been trained using saps like me. And this is the real end – the last event that happens in either my house or the theatre of robots. I am possibly part of an audience, captive or otherwise but drawn into staying here for ever by the discrepancy between the beauty of these people and the simplicity of their behaviour, the trusting affection that now seems abhorrent. There has been no love in this transaction. But maybe some understanding of the world and how we fit into it has made itself clear.

Some dreams like this leave me happy despite the sadness they carry deep down and some with overtly violent or miserable natures, leave me happy simply because I wake up happy that they are over. The description of limbo, which by God will not exist for long in any of my universes, has us all in a quiet, calm place with infinite sadness. I am sure that this creation is designed to justify the glorification of ancient infidels on whose knowledge, the wonders of the renaissance were based. Here is Virgil, the guide, and all those philosophers who were born before the possibility of enlightenment. And here is the link with my dream; if God is all things at all times, can he not lift these clever, laudable people from their heathen times and bring them into the light? Time is only for us humans and outside that we have no understanding.

Venerate Plato and Aristotle.