I

Reception

The sky is an effervescent crimson red wearing a gray-black beret, such that if it were already nighttime in the top half of the sky you could barely tell the difference. Never have I seen such deep, vivid colors displayed as they are up there in all their clouded shades and definitions. [There is seen his very own thoughts and experiences captured by words exact to their retelling.]

Who do you go to and say, “here; I want to buy the sky so it remains this beautiful forever”? Perhaps the one who exists as nature’s fluctuating differential. They would just tell us the price is our own care and maintenance of the world around us, if we can bare that cost. Such is man’s past affinity with nature, the vibrant look of the world outside the house. And its health. Its equilibrium.

Staring out the window of McCloskey’s rail-station-side coffeehouse with a copy of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone in my left-hand, legs crossed, my head snaps over at the happenstance of hearing my name called. “Alex, Alex Sutton.” The barista asked for my full name because there’s another Alex here. Common name with a long past.

I get up and approach the counter. “Yes, that’s me.”

“Iced latte? Vanilla, 16 ounce?”

“Yes; thank you!” I reach out and ungracefully grab my drink, almost pushing it back off the counter.

The cashier gives a friendly, reassuring smile, as though the little moments like this make her workday that much less ho-hum while all the same mundane. “And is there anything else I can get for you?”

“No, that’s perfect for now. I appreciate it,” I read her nametag, “Natalia.” What a lovely name. I smile and walk back to my cozy window seat. I’ve gotta catch the tram back up to Ayr in ten minutes.

The tracks curving back off to the right of the station, the town still looks as though it’s in front of your face from this side of the café. Tight cobblestone streets of mossy market and residential alleyways spread out into the hillside. A flat-faced pasty white house sporting a dark-green roof, with doors and shutters accented the same color, makes good aesthetic use of the moss where it is growing over the painted brick. Not that this whole corner of town doesn’t match its style, but this square little shack catches my eye. Its front steps seem to face directly at the window I face it from. It is sort of juxtaposed on to the end of where two alleys diverge and travel uphill from the winding road they branch off, creating a wedge of the road’s curve where a third, perpendicular alley goes left and disappears into its corridor between the first and second line of buildings alongside the railway.

The look of this front stoop brings me an oddly nostalgic feeling not tracing back to a specific when for me; but I imagine three little children jumping around back and forth in this wedge off side of the road, playing. Their corduroy flat caps and overalls draped over leather shoes cause me to wonder if I’m picturing the 1920’s, which may not have then looked so different here as it does now.

On this pleasant October evening of the year 2004, my mind delineates to how, if it were up to me, I would live in the time of Gabriel Betteredge himself – though he be a humble servant. The Victorian Era was on the precipice of modernity while the world was still natively luscious. Landscapes retained a primitive beauty, a caliber to which is only seen now on the outskirts of society and as bastardized versions of itself in the areas highly traveled between. “Towards dusk, the shutters had been put up, and the doors had been bolted.” A metaphor for our tendency to lily-white the world as we set stand aside and passively let it vitiate. A defense mechanism rooted in welcomed cognitive dissonance, whose result is a quaint but illusory obliviousness only perpetuating the issue by plugging its ears to what our hands allow. And, ironically, we are now more than ever in a position to regulate our own effects. Genius flourishes in the recesses in a time where the predominantly lucky are hailed. I guess the world hasn’t changed in as much. I should go outside and wait for the train; it will be here any second.

I walk outside and watch the 314202 train pull up. Its soda orange sides and yellow front compliment the dulling evening glow as its cars approach from the right. It shudders to a halt, blocking my view of that cobblestone corner. Passengers from all walks of life and gradients of hurriedness exit the locomotive; then I, taking a moment to marvel at its wrought once more, enter the contraption and find a suiting place to sit on its far side. Before we pull off I bask in a last glimpse of that stoop, a seeming relic suspended in time. A man opens its door to start sweeping the steps and watches our train as it starts to pull off. Can I hear him singing from all the way over here? “Che cosa fai quando piove? /Mi assicuro che diamanti dormano…” Beautiful Italian.

—

This afternoon’s colloquium was a smashing success. Being the reason for my sojourn, I was invited to the local library to take up their second twenty-minute slot in this week’s growingly popular discussion hour. During the event, I presented on my article recently published in the academic journal Synthese – much to my elation – in which I laid out how one can apply Nagarjuna’s ‘four-cornered truth-value’ argument to logically understanding in a higher light the manifestation of our perception, among other modern considerations of existence. What science ignites our consideration of, philosophy reminds us where our foundations of fascination originated, developed out of rigorously analyzing the intricacies of possible positions, albeit whole schools of thoughts often debated and diverged over stances on these positions. Nowadays the most commonly recognized school of thought divergences fall on categories like the banality or inherence of skepticism, objectivism versus subjectivism, rationalism and empiricism.

The ancient Indians had a rigorously disciplined contemplation of the mind, save for whatever can be said about the feasibility of their premodern universal beliefs. They took stances on whether the mind generates all of reality, has direct insight into an inherent reality, or if the mind must view reality through a filter, this generating its appearance to the self but not generating reality in the first place. They also took stances on whether the self contains an inherent existence extricable from the world around it – that is, atman or anatman? Are we little instantiations of being or literal pieces of it?

In the tetralemma truth-values, both sides of Atman can be understood, though they likely wouldn’t have admitted it then. We are both an emergent phenomenon from, and piece of, the universe. Pratitya-samutpada; in interdependence viewed from a higher vantage point than our own, we are both one with everything and situated amongst it, empty of a separate self yet immersed in the process of experiencing one - as one’s being in dependent origination ‘full of everything else’ is constantly viewed through a mirror of seeming separacy put up by the not-as-well-defined-as-we-think confines of our being and by our imperfect unlocked understandings. We view the world in all its breadth through a pinhole and convince ourselves we’ve glimpsed the full echelon of reality. Plato strikes a similar chord in his Allegory of the Caves, a piece any dedicated freshman scholar has heard of.

But, bringing things back to the Catuṣkoti tetralemma, it is both true and not true, neither true nor not true, true, and false, that our perversions of clear perception have real correlates. Not true in that we are misguided about what really exists, but true in that the generated appearance carried the content it did to us, and that experience can’t be undermined. There is a systemization of our mental filters and hiccups; and a reason why we cause to appear to ourselves the appearance of an inherently appearanceless reality in order to understand it. What really is ‘solid’? Opacity? Singing? But to convey a precise external correlate of consciousness’ content, that is Chalmers’ hard problem. A quandary.

It can also be understood as both true and not true that we have a separate self. True from our side of our existence, atman, but not true from the universe’s side of existence, Atman, following reasoning similar to which I previously laid out. Doubting Atman is like a slap in God’s almighty face. But to access Atman from within our atman and realize atman’s true nature is anatman, that is nirvana. The blowing out of the candle that is our attachment to delusion and separacy, and a transition seamlessly into the ever-pervading hailed by many as a supreme being. Buddhism developed in contemplating the higher truth of anatman. Really, It becomes spoiled by trying to label it, Brahman, the ultimate; “Other, indeed is It than the known, And moreover above the unknown… It is conceived of by him by whom It is not conceived of,” the Kena denotes. The superposition of atman from our side and anatman from the universe’s our side is a dialectic of reasoning as true as they come, two seemingly opposing sides really giving an emergent rise to the whole truth. “It is both the near and the far, the heard and the unheard… it is that by which the ear is able to hear.” Nature and nurture is a dialectic of development, another something not to choose sides on but to grow an understanding for. Most fundamentally, I think it was on mark for the ancients – Heraclitus, Nagarjuna, Nagasena and Menander and the Pyrrhics - to wonder if the bivalence of truth values may not capture an inherent quality of the universe, at least at grander levels. But Heraclitus blindly plunged into the depths of fallaciousness with his considerations extrapolated to the extremes.

—

Passing rolling hills and old Gaelic buildings nestled into the countryside, we should be pulling up to Ayr’s South Street station within thirty minutes. Jade and I have plans to go walk the shore in Ayrshire tomorrow afternoon. It will be our first walk on the beach since last week’s proposal, and I plan to make it a memorable one. A little taste of the happiness to come in years ahead. Bless me, she actually said yes; there is no moment in life more truly nerve-wracking than the few between the plan of execution and her reaction, no matter how sure you may feel. The proposal, too, was highly memorable: walking past Wallace Tower on High Street to Millwynd then over the River Ayr at sunset, we stop for a moment before crossing over to Riverside Place and lean on the railing of the slim pedestrian bridge, facing down towards the Firth of Clyde. The octagonal castle-like top of the Wallace is still in view in the distance off to the side, proudly flying the saltire flag at half-mast. The bell-tower sounds its last tings of the day. The Auld Brig up ahead in the channel, with its four iconic arches, is testament of a relic withstood in time dating back to a year before Columbus’ so-called ‘discovery’ of America itself.

Jade is a sort of living legend around these parts, which came to my surprise when I found out, seeing as she just looks like a beautiful mid-twenties woman coming out of her master’s degree. She says if I knew the history of Scotland a little better I would get it, but seems remiss to talk about it. She assumes a last name other than she legally should because she is from a special bloodline, apparently.

Jade has never been to America. I promised her I’d take her one day. She wonders if it is in all a rude and hopelessly rushed place. I tell her this is a typical generalization, but that really everywhere has its bustling and peaceful zones. Its good and cruddy people. “What about me, eh?” I say and smirk.

She smiles. “You’re right. Even here one finds the same varieties, even if the flavors seem different.”

The end of the month will mark my fourth year in Scotland, having grown up on the coast of Maine in Ellsworth and finished out my Ph. D in ancient and modern Metaphysics in California. “It is hard to top the beauty of Acadia,” though, I tell her, “but anywhere as long as I’m there next to you may stand up to the test.” A blush and a smile of the type that I live for.

“Oh, hey, did you just drop this,” I get down on one knee like I’m searching or something for a second. I grab her hand and look up at her as she gasps and puts her other hand over her mouth, having realized what is happening. I open the little velvet box concealing the ring in my other hand and start: “About two and a half years ago in the Cosy Corner Tea Room, that little back alley café not too far from where we are now, I mustered up the courage to walk over to you and say y’mind if I sit here with you? in my innocently demeanor. But you saw through that demeanor directly to the man loving freedom, adventure, and wonder. I admired that same essence in your eyes and smile but couldn’t put my finger on it; that je nais se quoi. The rest is beautiful history, and hopefully becomes the future’s history… I want you to marry me, Jade. Seeing you then, I knew I had to know you. Knowing you now, I want to have a life with you.”

She crouches down and flings her arms around me, holding back tears. She grabs my face and kisses my lips twice; “oh, Alex, of course I want to.” She hugs me again. “I’m so glad we met too;” we get up and continue looking toward the Auld Brig, “I remember I was studying for my last semester’s midterms and had looked over my notes until my head spun that little shop around. My mind needed a break; and then I spotted you from across the way. Shy looking but dashingly cute,” I smile, “my heart started pounding, and I couldn’t believe when you stood up that you were coming over to me. You wanted to sit, and I was flattered and delighted all at once.” Of course, it still took me two months from then to ask her to be my girlfriend. But that, too, is in the past.

I put my arm around her. Her brown-red hair glistens in the falling light, and my arm fits snugly around her figure. Her crystal blue eyes mirror the world. We continue our walk across the bridge, an engaged couple, and make our way over to my apartment on Strathayr Place. Our apartment. She moved in with me last year.

—

On one side of the train we are passing a beautiful lake nestled in the valley. It looks serene in the thin of the night. On the other side the dark green of the land climbs up at a fair gradient, curving over each individual hill bend. We will be arriving soon.

At the colloquium I was queried as to why, not simply how, it is that the four-cornered logic system may better succeed to capture reality. “Good question,” I started. “Well, by Aristotelian up through most modern logics, the tetralemma, as technically fallacious, can be extrapolated to prove anything. Which is actually a problem for it,” I chuckle; “and yet we find perhaps that the qubit utilizes both this and not this, 0 and 1, in order to store more vast amounts of data than was ever thought actualizable, thus utilizable, by the supposed ‘logical’ logic. Sometimes by dropping our humanly imputed conventions we breach further to ideas or scales we never conceived possible. You see, the idea is that through four-cornered logic, used warily, we can better understand the nature of reality in part or in whole. When an issue or idea is looked at from either multiple perspectives or multiple levels of perspective, what isn’t true at one level may be emergently true at another, or vice versa, rather than trying to instantiate it to one moment in the same fashion at both levels, getting opposing answers, and that being a fallacious contradiction by modal logic. You may see, however, that the Catuṣkoti seems interestingly connected to expressing emergent phenomenon and dialectic reasoning.”

Another hand. “Yes?”

“So, what is an example of something which would be not true at one level, but emergently true at another?”

“Maybe the tetralemma itself,” I reply, “active perhaps at a quantum level and large levels, in ways, but apparently not our, where conventional bivalent logic seems to rule the accord of our everyday external affairs. To be honest, the topics that may fall under this category, when laid out too plainly, can cause controversy and outrage among those for whom it attempts to shatter their comfortable illusions. Perhaps that is why it’s so crucial to consider them at the same time. I just need to be careful about how I explain them, I guess.”

A moment of silence and attentively blank stares. “Nevertheless,” I go on, “ if it is in fact the case that there is no god or the universe itself isn’t alive – if anthropic activity is also an emergent phenomenon of the universe’s intricacies rather than an inherent principle of the universe – than good and evil, right and wrong, do not actually exist extricably from the occurrence of life-apprehending. What is opportunity for the lion is danger to the elk, except I guess when they’re both in danger. There is nothing that is truly good or evil that isn’t either biologically instructed or societally and intellectually constructed.”

Gasps like that of rich people from the 1920’s walking past the poor on the streets of Manhattan. “I know, right!? Crazy. But it’s not actually so different than saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder; and yet the world does seem to spur symmetries. Fractals…” I pause for a brief, barely perceptible moment. “It is also the case that if probability isn’t actually an inherent quality of the universe but rather a mathematical formality tied to predictive power, a paradigm wrapped up in the happenstance of the observer effect, a descriptive tool tied to our mathematics for capturing possibilities from a limited scope a priori or an attempted understanding scope a posteriori,” a deep breath, ”then we both do and don’t have free will and destiny. The don’t is on top and the do ever-under it within instantiated perspective. We don’t because if the synthesis of a whole moment can exactly derive the next and that one the next, like dominoes falling with a momentum, well then, that’s just how it is. But we do, because as the ones who live through being ourselves within the grand universe, it is our very nature to feel as though we choose and experience from within our own being. You can’t actually do something that wasn’t supposed to happen, but it is not that this should push someone to think it’s their destiny to go kill a bunch of people, because good and evil don’t exist right?” More blank stares. “Rather, it is to be used with the utmost pure intent and hope for flourishment, to surmise the ideal. Do what is good for you to do, while you can. It is exactly because good and evil don’t technically exist that we must hold ourselves to a high standard and be twice the people we ever were. If we don’t who will? Some of the best things and lessons in life only work if they’re applied the right way. Take for example, the very idea that there are interconnections between everything. DaVinci said, ‘Study the art of science. Study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.’ But this quote, if applied unwarily, is essentially bullshit. It’s trite. One must attempt to see through to the truth behind it, to the way it is meant to be applied. Realistically. It advocates, literally, learning how to see. Discovering the connections behind how everything happens and affects each other, not denying it with a turn to pseudo-science. Progress doesn’t forget the past it builds on it. We moved from myth to logos. Flat-earth conceptions to a round non-anthropocentric view. Newton’s approximations to Einstein; Einstein’s equation for kinetic energy converges to Newton’s ½mv² when expanded with a binomial expansion and considered at everyday, small, non-relativistic speeds. But modern physics exposes real, deeper interconnection. Ones needed to explain physical chemistry more accurately. Bremsstrahlung… As the species of higher thought we can create the world waiting for us to achieve it, a harmonious world, if we culminate and integrate the power of our knowledge, technology, productivity, and producibility. We can create the world waiting to prosper along with us; not that it may not take work and maintenance. Forward thinking and technological advancement. Out of the box application and tenacity. We just have the potential for so much more than we credit ourselves with, and we’ll never accomplish it if we keep thinking that way. Especially if people keep fighting, and we let corruption, ignorance, complacency, and forgetfulness continue to dominate the world, while not popularizing interest in science progression like we do in lieu of pop culture and fashion. Don’t get me wrong, everything has its place, but some things are revered to the wrong high degree while crucial others are belittled… Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent.”

A pause like they weren’t sure if I was done talking, then, having to move on to the next talk, the production operator comes over the speaker; “ladies and gentlemen, Alex Sutton.”

A standing applause. I was honored, bowed, and exited the podium. I suppose their reaction was a bit hope inspiring. I wanted to stay for the next talk then socialize with the scholars and lay-crowd afterwards, but I had to run to catch this last train of the night.

So, you see, we live the same way either way; if good and evil exist or doesn’t, or if fate does. There’s really no pragmatic application to the consideration rather than to simply marvel at it. Like I told them, it is exactly because good and evil don’t technically exist that we must hold ourselves to a high standard and be twice the people we ever were. We are pulling up next to Smith Street now.

—

We step off next to the pleasantly historic Station Hotel. It doesn’t take much longer than from Wallace Tower to get home, but I make it a slow walk and enjoy the look of the town on my way. Jade and I plan to plan a little engagement getaway over the next few days. A sort of pre-honeymoon.

Walking in the front door of my condo, it is unexpectedly dark and quiet inside. It seems Jade decided to retreat to the bedroom early this night. I turn on the light and walk the long entrance hallway to the boudoir centered between my living room’s double-sided entrance. I take off my tie whilst looking in the mirror, and upon setting it down on the table I notice I am putting my hand on a piece of folded paper.

I push my tie off to the side and the paper makes a light uncrinkling sound. I pick it up. My first name is the only thing written slanted across its outside. I unfold it twice so that it is completely open, and it reads as such:

Alex,

I’m sorry. I’m not sure I’m ready for all of this. I’ve decided to move back in with my Mum out on the Isle of Mull while I think things over. Please don’t try to come see me. I can only hope that you will understand.

Best, Jade Cathcart.

That elation lasted long. There’s nothing left to really do now but try to relax, go to sleep, and reconvene my thoughts tomorrow. Maybe have a glass of whisky.