Tag: Kensington Gardens
Ponderage
There are, I come to realise, an infinite number of infinities.
When I put this to my young Mathematician Friend as a question, he interprets it mathematically and gives me an explanation I do not comprehend, but of which I have a faint feeling it appertains to something entirely different, though nonetheless relevant and important. Maybe I did not phrase my question well, and he did not understand it. Or very possibly he did fully understand the question and gave me a perfectly valid answer, but one that makes sense to his young mathematician mind more than it does to mine, which is twice as old and really not scientific at all.
I have enjoyed my young Mathematician Friend’s company, and I miss him and think of him often. He has a lovely smile, though it be slightly downward inclined, which makes him look just a tad sceptical when he smiles. Then again, he is a mathematician, so he has every right to be sceptical, and his smile is no less lovely for it.
I am fairly convinced that since there are more infinities than just one, there may well be several, and if there are several, there may well be many, and if there are many, then conceptually it strikes me as obvious that most likely there are an infinite number of infinities. Not being a mathematician, or at all scientifically minded, I only know of three infinities, two of which are of the same kind, and a third that is of an entirely different kind.
The reason I know that there are more infinities than just one is that there is the infinity of rational numbers, which perch on the unending line in the plus/minus direction where you can always add one more or take one more away. This means you in a sense already have two infinities, a positive and a negative one, but they are, in character, the same and should therefore probably be considered, if not one, then of one ilk.
But there are also the irrational numbers, which, like anchor points or switches on that line stretching from negative infinity into positive infinity, branch off into another direction, or even dimension, by leading into the unending sequence of never repeating numerals after the decimal point, which we can’t simply add to or take away from, but have to calculate, and which is therefore specific but unpredictable, but predictably unending.
So, simply looking at these two types of infinity, which are easy enough to understand though they may not be instantly recognisable, my hunch is chances are there are perhaps—I would venture quite probably, so probable as to seem certain—other infinities that may be even less easy to recognise, but that are nonetheless real, as real as these two (which could be looked on as three); and so, since there are an infinite number of numbers and an infinite number of ways we can configure these numbers to express an infinite number of things, there are likely, I like to think, to the level of this being probable, and in fact quite possibly so probable as to seem certain, not just two, or three or four, or one or two dozen, but an infinite number of infinities, not least because there are bound to be an infinite number of universes.
The thought that there are an infinite number of infinities to me is beautiful because I like the idea of infinities, but it is also tiring, because while I can imagine the one or two infinities that I’m already familiar with, I can barely conceive of any beyond that; and right now I wish I could have my young Mathematician Friend with me and curl up with him, just to feel his calm body in the presence of his beautiful mind and know that there is someone who may not see the world quite as I do, but who can handle abstraction and make something of it.
We spend some time together at the Science Museum, and on my terrace, and in my bed, and then he goes back to Austria, where he’s from; and I think, this is true: we actually met on a park bench in Kensington Gardens. It feels like we’ve known each other for years, but we really just met last Thursday by the Italian Fountain, when he asked me for a light, and we talked and exchanged numbers.
I lost sight, a little, of my young Mathematician Friend, after he left London, but he didn’t entirely escape from my mind, and so we met up again a few months later, this time in Vienna. That was a little strange, because now a few things had happened—none of them to do with me—that had troubled this beautiful mind of his, and while he was better again, in fact well, I now worried about him, and we talked about all manner of things, but not infinities. And then we spent a whole night together, first going out, drinking many pints of stout in an Irish pub, and then at a nice little hotel, and I thought no more of or about it, until it occurred to me that this, probably, is what most of life is mostly about: chance encounters, and where we take them, if anywhere at all.
We didn’t take our encounter much further, my Mathematician Friend and I, but that matters not; what matters is merely that we made ourselves some memories on a pin prick of an infinite number of possibilities, and for that alone I like him still.
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9 Memories of the Future and of the Past: Walks on Water
Linearity, unhinged. The flashforwards keep coming: not premonitions. Memories of things that haven’t yet happened. I have no explanation other than that I’ve stepped outwith the continuum, I know not how. Time and space disjointed. Perhaps that’s what comes from not taking either too seriously, ever.
I walk through the snow in Kensington Gardens: about three inches of a softish sluggish powdery white that has its own decorative whimsy, now that it is sodden and trodden through. People have spent the weekend rolling snow balls and leaving them dotted around the park. Plus the occasional snowman. Mostly though only accumulations of snow the approximate size of an average snowman’s rump.
I wander and ponder my diagonal position in life. I use too many words, I am told. Frequently. All the time. Words words words words words words words. I use seven when one would do. But would one do? Would one word, would one word do? Would it now. And would it do what? And for whom? And says who? Rhythms and patterns. And repetitions. Nobody likes them as much as I do, it seems. Relishing words, for the love of words, words in their own right, to no end and no purpose, propelling no plot, describing no thing, put there for their very own sake. Superfluousness:
Abundance.
Words for what they are, not what they’re worth. A picture paints a thousand words; a word, when pictures in their thousands fail, may say it all. Nobody gets that. It follows that nobody gets me: I am my words, that’s what I am, they are me.
I’m little else, nothing. Else. Really. I am obviously not my body. The ways in which I neglect my body are subtle, I don’t actively abuse it. I don’t damage it, or only slightly, sometimes, and not wantonly. I’m not vain, though I am, I perceive, as I tangent the bedecked lawn with its broad traces of snowballing on it, a tad narcissistic. I don’t want to be, but I am a little in love with myself. Damn, another unwelcome insight. But I have to be a little in love with myself: I’m single and somewhat singular. If I don’t love me at least a little then nobody loves me at all and that would be heartbreaking, sad. The differential between lone and lonesome; lonely, alone. Now that I know I am troubled, troubled I see that nobody knows the trouble I see. In all likelihood it is true: I do have a bit of a Messiah complex as well, but then so did Jesus.
I remember walking through the snow in Kensington Gardens once before, though there wasn’t as much then, snow. There was ice, however, on the Round Pond, and my girlfriend—my girl friend, then girlfriend—and I came up towards it in deep conversation, and we liked the idea of walking on ice, it was a London park in January thing to do, and I was new to London in January and she was visiting me and we tested the ice just a bit and found it sufficiently strong and so we started crossing the pond. There was magic abroad in the air, or would have been, had I felt towards her quite as she did towards me.
She was, I believe, in love with me, deeply. I liked her. And found her likeable and attractive as a human being, but I wasn’t ‘attracted’ to her. We came to the middle of the pond and looked around and enjoyed the ducks and the geese being clumsy, and then we walked on, and shortly before we reached the other side we happened upon a sign that said “DANGER THIN ICE” and we laughed and we came off the ice and continued our walk, talking.
That’s how young we were, how unencumbered. I’m a little in love with that boy, that lad, that young man. I was never really a lad, I don’t think, I was hardly ever a boy, I was a very young man though. I certainly was never a guy or a geezer. I was earnest and a little pretentious, in fairness; maybe a lot. And possibly just on the borderline end of marginally autistic; maybe just eligible, by today’s standards, for on-the-scale Asperger’s, though of that I can’t now be sure.
And now I know that within seconds I’ll be sitting opposite him, that exact young man, of exactly that age, who still, I imagine, thinks of that girl as his girlfriend, even though he already knows he can’t love her, not in the way she loves him. Shall I tell him? And if I tell him, shall I tell him also not to walk on the ice, as it’s nowhere near thick enough and he and his girl friend might die? That would be the responsible thing to do, surely, to warn him. After all, this isn’t just about me any more, this is also about her! Imagine how I would feel today if we’d crashed into the water in Kensington Gardens and both of us had drowned. Or worse still, if I had survived, so I could feel something, anything at all, today, but she had drowned, and try as I might I could not save her?
My heart feels a jolt of guilt and remorse at not having saved her, though sincerely I tried, when I remember that we walked off that ice and laughed. And that laughter I remember completely. That is a memory of the past. It is real and proper and warm and good. We were a little in love with each other, perhaps, after all. That laughter, that unencumberedness. That not looking back on the ice in horror to check how thin was it really, that just walking on. Hand in hand. Laughing. I love him for that, I love her for it too.
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9 Memories of the Future and of the Past: Walks on Water
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