Micromégas III

by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER III

Voyage of the Two Inhabitants of Sirius and Saturn

 

                                                                                                               Illustration by Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès

   Our two philosophers were ready to embark upon the atmosphere of Saturn, with a fine collection of scientific instruments, when the Saturnian's mistress, who had heard what he was up to, came in tears to remonstrate with him. She was a pretty little brunette, barely 660 fathoms high, but her agreeable manners amply atoned for that deficiency.

   "Oh, cruel one!" she exclaimed, "after having resisted you for 1,500 years, and when I was at last beginning to surrender, and have passed scarcely a hundred years in your arms, to leave me thus, and start on a long journey with a giant of another world! Go, you have no taste for anything but novelty, you have never felt true love, were you a real Saturnian, you would be constant. Whither away so fast? What would you have? Our five moons are less fickle than you, our ring less changeable. So much for the past! I will never love again."

   The philosopher embraced her, and, in spite of all his philosophy, joined his tears with hers. As to the lady, after having fainted away, she consoled herself with a certain beau who lived in the neighborhood.

   Meanwhile our two inquirers commenced their travels, they first jumped onto Saturn's ring, which they found pretty flat, as an illustrious inhabitant of our little globe has cleverly conjectured, thence they easily made their way from moon to moon. A comet passed near the last one, so they sprang upon it, along with their instruments. When they had gone about 150,000,000 leagues, they came across the satellites of Jupiter. They landed on Jupiter itself, and remained there a year, during which they learned some very remarkable secrets which would now be appearing in the press, were it not for certain censors who find them too hard to swallow.

   Leaving Jupiter, our explorers crossed a space of about 100,000,000 leagues, and, coasting along the planet Mars, which, as is well known, is five times smaller than our own little globe, they saw two moons. These have escaped the observation of our astronomers. I am well aware that Father Castel will write, and pleasantly enough too, against the existence of these two moons, but I believe those who reason from analogy. Those excellent philosophers know how difficult it would be for Mars, which is so distant from the Sun, to get by with less than two moons. Be that as it may, our friends found the planet so small they were afraid of finding no room there to put up for the night, so they proceeded on their way, like a pair of travelers who disdain a humble village inn, and push on to the nearest town. But the Sirian and his companion soon repented this decision, for they went a long time without finding anything at all.

   At last they perceived a faint glimmer, it came from our Earth, and created compassion in the minds of those who had so lately left Jupiter. However, for fear of repenting a second time, they decided to disembark. They passed over the tail of the comet, and with the aid with an aurora borealis close at hand, alighted on Earth by the northern shore of the Baltic Sea, July 5, 1737.

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Micromégas II

by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER II

Conversation Between the Inhabitant of Sirius
and that of Saturn

  

                                                                                                                                                                                                            

                                                 Illustration by Athanasius Kircher (1671)

   One day, after the Sirian had laid down and the secretary had approached his face to facilitate conversation, Micromégas said, "I must confess that nature is full of variety."

   "Yes," said the Saturnian, "nature is like a flower-bed, the blossoms of which—"

   "Oh," said the other, "have done with your flower-bed!"

   "She is," resumed the secretary, "like an assembly of blondes and brunettes, whose attire—"

   "No, no," said the traveler. "Nature is like nature. Why do you search for comparisons?"

   "To please you," answered the secretary.

   "I do not want to be pleased," rejoined the traveler, "I want to be instructed, begin by telling me how many senses the men in your world possess."

   "We have 72," said the academician, "and we are always complaining that they are so few. Our imagination soars beyond our needs, we find that with our 72 senses, our ring, and our five moons, that our range is too restricted, and, in spite of all our curiosity and the tolerably large number of passions which spring out of our 72 senses, we often feel bored."

   "I can well believe it," said Micromégas, "for on our globe, though we have nearly a thousand senses, there lingers even in us a certain vague desire, an unaccountable restlessness, which warns us that we are of little account in the universe, and that there are beings much more perfect than ourselves. I have traveled, I have seen mortals far below us, and others greatly superior, but I have seen none who have not more desires than real wants, and more wants than they can satisfy. I shall someday, perhaps, reach the country where there is lack of nothing, but hitherto no one has been able to give me any positive information about it." The Saturnian and the Sirian thereupon exhausted themselves with ingenious yet futile conjectures on the subject, but were eventually obliged to return to facts.

   "How long do you people live?" asked the Sirian.

   "Ah! a very short time," replied the little man of Saturn.

   "So too with us," said the Sirian. "We are always complaining of the shortness of life. This must be a universal law of nature."

   "Alas!" quoth the Saturnian, "none of us live more than 500 annual revolutions of the Sun." (That amounts to about 15,000 years, according to our manner of counting.) "You see how it is our fate to die almost as soon as we are born, our existence is a point, our duration an instant, our globe an atom. Scarcely have we begun to acquire a little information when death arrives before we can put it to use. I myself do not venture to lay any schemes, I feel like a drop of water in a boundless ocean. I am ashamed, especially before you, of the absurd figure I make in this universe."

   Micromégas answered: "Were you not a philosopher, I should fear to distress you by telling you our lives are 700 times as long as yours, but you know too well that when the time comes to give back one's body to the elements, and reanimate nature under another form—the process called death—when that moment of metamorphosis comes, it is precisely the same whether we have lived an eternity or only a day. I have been in countries where life is a thousand times longer than with us, and yet have heard murmurs of its brevity even there. But people of good sense exist everywhere, who know how to make the most of what they have, and to thank the Author of nature. He has spread over this universe abundant variety, together with a kind of admirable uniformity. For example, all thinking beings are different, yet resemble each other in the common endowment of thought and will. Matter is infinitely extended, but has different properties in different worlds. How many of these various properties do you reckon in the matter with which you are acquainted?"

   "If you speak," replied the Saturnian, "of those properties without which we believe this globe could not subsist as it is, we count 300 of them, such as extension, impenetrability, mobility, gravitation, divisibility, etc."

   "Apparently," rejoined the traveler, "this small number is sufficient for the Creator's purpose in constructing this little habitation. I admire His wisdom throughout, I see differences everywhere, but everywhere also a due proportion. Your globe is small, you who inhabit it are small likewise, you have few senses, the matter comprising your world has few properties, all this is the work of Providence. What color is your sun when carefully examined?"

   "White deeply tinged with yellow," said the Saturnian, "and when we split up one of its rays, it consists of seven colors."

   "Our sun has a reddish light," said the Sirian, "and we have 39 primary colors. There is not a single sun, among all those I have approached, which resembles any other, just as among yourselves there is not a single face which is not different from all the rest."

   After several other questions of this kind, he inquired how many modes of existence essentially different were enumerated on Saturn. He was told that not more than 30 were distinguished, as God, space, matter, beings occupying space which feel and think, thinking beings which do not occupy space, those which possess penetrability, others which do not, etc. The Sirian, in whose world they count 300 of them, and who had discovered 3,000 more in the course of his travels, astonished the philosopher of Saturn. At length, after having communicated to each other a little of what they knew, and a great deal of that about which they knew nothing, and after having exercised their reasoning powers during a complete revolution of the Sun, they resolved to make a little exploratory tour together.

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Micromégas I

by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER I

Voyage of an Inhabitant of the Sirius Star to the Planet Saturn

          

                               

 

 

   On a planet revolving around the star Sirius there lived a young man of great intelligence, whose acquaintance I had the honor of making during his recent visit to our little anthill. He was called Micromégas, an appropriate name for great people. He had a stature of eight leagues, or 24,000 geometrical paces of five feet each, or 120,000 statute feet.

   We earthmen have an average stature hardly more than five feet—one pace—so Mr. Micromégas' world must in turn have a circumference 24,000 times greater than our little Earth. Nothing in nature is simpler, more a matter of course. The dominions of certain potentates in Germany or Italy, around which you can walk in half an hour, compared with the empires of Turkey, Russia, or China can give but a faint idea of the vast disparity Nature has set between different orders of being throughout the universe.

   Given his Excellency's height, any sculptor or painter would agree his waist should, proportionally, be about 50,000 feet around. His nose being one third the length of his handsome face, and his handsome face being one seventh the height of his handsome body, it follows that the Sirian's nose is some 5,714 statute feet long.

   His mind rivals the most cultivated among us, he knows many things, some of which are his own inventions. He had not yet reached his 250th year, and was studying, as was customary at his age, at the most famous school on the planet, when he solved 50 propositions of Euclid—18 more than Blaise Pascal, who, after having, according to his sister's account, solved 32 for his own amusement, became a pretty fair geometer, and a very poor metaphysician. When Micromégas was about 450 years old, and already passing out of childhood, he dissected, with the aid of powerful microscopes, many little insects less than 100 feet in diameter; he wrote an interesting book about them, which got him into trouble.

   The mufti of that country, much given to hair-splitting and very ignorant, found in his work statements they deemed suspicious, offensive, rash, and heretical, and they prosecuted him with bitter animosity. The question in dispute was whether the substantial form of which the fleas of Sirius consisted was of the same nature as that of the snails. Micromégas defended himself spiritedly, and had all the ladies on his side, the trial lasted 220 years. At last the mufti had the book condemned by judges who had never read it, and the author was forbidden to appear at court for 800 years.

   He was only moderately afflicted at being banished from a court full of trickery and meanness. He composed a very funny song ridiculing the mufti, which in turn failed to give the latter much annoyance, and he himself set forth on his travels from planet to planet, with a view to improving his mind and soul, as the saying goes.

   Those who travel only in coaches will doubtless be astonished at the sort of conveyance adopted up there, for we, on our little mound of mud, can imagine nothing beyond our own experience. Our traveler had such a marvelous acquaintance with the laws of gravitation, and all the forces of attraction and repulsion, and made such good use of his knowledge, that, sometimes by means of a sunbeam, and sometimes with the help of a comet, he went from one world to another as a bird hops from bough to bough. He traversed the Milky Way in a short time, and I am obliged to confess that he never saw, beyond the stars with which it is thickly sown, that beautiful celestial empyrean which the illustrious parson, Derham, boasts of having discovered at the end of his telescope. Not that I would for a moment suggest Mr. Derham mistook what he saw, Heaven forbid! But Micromégas was on the spot, he is an accurate observer, and I have no wish to contradict anybody.

   Micromégas, after plenty of turns and twists, arrived at the planet Saturn. Accustomed though he was to the sight of novelties, when he saw the insignificant size of the globe and its inhabitants, he could not at first refrain from that smile of superiority which sometimes escapes even the wisest, for in truth Saturn is scarcely 900 times greater than Earth, and the citizens of that country are mere dwarfs, only a thousand fathoms high, or thereabout. He laughed a little at first at these people, in much the same way an Italian musician, when he comes to France, derides Lulli's performances. But, being a sensible fellow, the Sirian was soon convinced that a thinking being need not be altogether ridiculous because he is only 6,000 feet high. He was soon on familiar terms with the Saturnians after their astonishment had somewhat subsided. He formed a close friendship with the secretary of the Academy of Saturn, a man of great intelligence, who had not indeed invented anything himself, but excelled at describing the inventions of others, and who could turn a little verse neatly enough or perform an elaborate calculation.

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Broken Head

by Shaun Lawton 

                                                                                     illustration "Cell" by Cal Leckie 

   With fragmenting thoughts spiraling in his imagination, Callíum Lecky found himself sliding day by day and tumbling further away from his ordinary lot. Peering with his mind's eye deep into the shifting continuum of his memory, he looked upon himself commuting on the filthy streets with a tiresome dedication toward a full time job processing various prescription drugs for the elderly. Gazing day by day past the bus's grimy window at the brick and concrete buildings blurring by outside only emphasized the feeling he was going nowhere. Despite this daily grind things never became altogether unbearable for him. He was still there nevertheless, sweating over the company desk in front of the glare of the streaked-clean plate glass spectacle before him. Beyond it the city lay spread out, an austere study in shades of grey. That drab view was one of the few genuine perks of the trade.

   Most of the day, he was at the machinery. He was a damaged man enclosed inside a cramped work-space, answering calls by way of a shoddy headset and dutifully processing orders with a computer keyboard that ought to have been replaced a year ago. He'd been thinking how he'd been repeating the same morning ritual, commuting to and from the nondescript building every weekday, for the past two years. What it seemed like to him was wading through a noxious haze in a strong gravitational field. As if he were passing into a gelid mist with an anesthetizing effect. Traversing it was like gliding within an ethereal fog on another planet. Even the lighting appeared to be filtering in from an unfamiliar sun. That is a nearby star.

   Cal felt as if he'd been wandering across a stolen world that others punctured, that he was stumbling over its garbage. In the dark sheds that the seasons ignored. It left him feeling dazed at first, then eventually just bewildered.  Walking toward and away from the subway he perceived he was treading a smoldering vapor as if it were an atmospheric seam nearly three feet deep, hovering at waist level, spread out and undulating in all directions as far into the distance as he could see. As each day dragged by, the more extensive this sensation became, until he was convinced it was no hallucination. 

   He felt this layer of the atmosphere provided a mysterious polarization, and regarded it as having compelling galvanic properties. Since he rented a studio apartment on the first floor and his bed was raised to waist level on its metal framework, every night as he climbed onto his mattress and slid under the sheets he could feel the gentle lapping of the faintest electrical field outstretched just beneath him. It felt to him as if he were laying upon an empyrean waterbed. The soothing rippling sensation helped lull him to sleep better than anything he'd ever experienced before. Soon he'd transition from nightmares of beak and claw, stranded on a dying world with phantom figures shrouded in steam that evaporated upon waking. With no remorse it was a reminder he was no longer under the spell of the evening's trance. He held the levers that guided the signals to the radio.

    Every morning he prepared and made his coffee, then off to slide and stumble out the door again. He'd ride and tumble, slide and stumble, back from work and to his flat. Back and forth and back to nothing. Every night since the advent of this elemental condensation, he slept as if floating on a gentle lake outspread into deepening twilight. He dreamed so intensely that it wasn't so much a matter of remembering or forgetting their impressions upon awakening, it was more as if he'd traveled somewhere so remote that it remained beyond his capacity to fathom it. He'd awaken with such gradual precision into conscious lucidity that the ease with which he arose from his bed startled him. But the words he received, random code, broken fragments from before, kept him moving through his door.  

   He often felt that he must've visited a hidden sanctuary of the noumenon. Or in some unprecedented manner, accomplished something extraneous to conventional human experience. If such were the case, there could be no association betwixt there and here, nor comprehension that there could have been something to be recollected in the first place, since that would take recognition; Cal understood that very well. Yet the certainty lingered in his head that he had visited a principality outside of time. The remembrance of it kept him tidy, kept him humble. Out in the trees. My reason deserting me.

   It also helped explain why he felt infinitesimally more tainted every new dawning that woke up to go to work. The province he awakened from with increasing regularity was so much more immaculate. It was as if an electric charge were growing in him every night. In the back of his mind, he knew that the progression of its transformation was not unlike a geometric one. It was easy for him to appreciate that the next expansion would occur in less than the blink of an eye. He would stare at his hand on his way to the bus stop. He practiced karate chops for no good reason, without having ever taken classes or been trained for it. He thought he could get ahead of the rest. Chop and change to cut the corners. Oh, the dark stars cluster over the bay.

   No matter what part of town he found himself strolling in, if he closed his eyes he could imagine himself plowing into a strange frigid purgatory of deadening detritus, as if constantly breaking up a floating crust of intangible debris. It cast his perception toward the idea of being an explorer drudging along the welkin pith. We all trudge within the shallows of the troposphere. Its all we've ever done. Of course nobody thinks of it that way ordinarily, because their heads rest tall upon their shoulders. As far as he knew, it was more commonly understood that few people bother to look upward. Looking down at the concrete sidewalk sliding underneath, that was a different story. The more he began doing it, the more he noticed occasional flashes, sharp as razors, shiny razors. Then in a certain moment, I lose control. 

   The scarcity of those who really scrutinize the ground passing under their feet was lesser appreciated. It's not common at all to believe we're dwelling at the bottom of the world, hardly moving, never trying. Not in this dominion of self replicating memes, mused Cal, advancing the narrative of the conquerors in competition with one another. Since time immemorial... No, the top of the world is a region so high in the sky it's been dared in tragedy before by eagles, and much less by humankind. Is something a challenge just because it's interpreted that way in the minds of men? Cal walked along the favored paths of his city not because they beckoned, but rather, because they didn't refuse his passage. Never moving, hardly trying. I was just a broken head. And at last, I am part of the machinery. 

   He had no reason to believe his existence was warranted unless he explored the desolate alleyways of these dirty boroughs.  Except there was no figuring the deadening sensation this warm salt bath in the aether had rendered unto him. The real question was, why did it only begin a few months ago? It dawned on Cal that this lower level he wandered over, the bottom of the sky so to speak, was one of the first microlayers of the planet's atmosphere. He shrugged off the thought with a lazy yawn. If so, he only became sensitive to it in recent months. I stole the world that others plundered. Where are you?

   He had never thought about it before. He could stand in this insensate echoing pond all day or he could get a move on. The choice was his to make and it took extreme effort on his behalf to send and then receive the signal from his brain to his legs to lend them the nerve to move. Now I stumble through the garbage. He'd begun drinking his coffee black a few weeks ago, mainly because his window of time to prepare for work was diminishing the more he lay paralyzed in bed each sunup recharging. His mind remained intent on the envisioned hyperlayer in the troposphere he waded hip deep in ever day. He wondered sometimes if maybe he converged upon an oilslick of dark energy or matter, something along those lines. A stupefying spill of nanocrystals wavering along a microgravitational membrane in alignment with the electromagnetic spectrum. And the light disappears.

   Callíum Lecky only stopped thinking about all of this while his coffee beans were grinding. As if the sudden burst of power and noise displaced his thoughts. For six seconds each day he was rendered catatonic while the fresh whole beans were ground into powder. He was running out of time for this morning ritual. He hated missing the bus. He couldn't afford to punch in late to work again. Cal wasn't the only one in his flat slowly waking up. The colony of cells in his body were doing so as well. It made sense because he was their host. They'd been vigorously growing along with him all this time. After all they depended on one another. They hinged on one another like a chain reaction. It was all in their self interests to complement each other at their level best. Greater opportunities had yet to come along. Together they were augmenting their harmonic song. Slide and tumble, slide and stumble. As the world makes its circle through the sky.

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by François-Marie Arouet

 

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The Mystery of Z

mini paintings by Drew Roulette

 interpretation by Shaun Lawton

     

 

  

     Former evangelist turned beekeeper gets hypnotized by one of his own pigs that is really being used as a remote dummy by a master ventriloquist who died twelve years ago. This ventriloquist used to run moonshine across county lines and doubled as a Mexican wrestler with a bad smoking habit. One day while swimming in the Rio Grande river, the beekeeper was approached by a strange young mermaid just as an elephant arrived for a drink of river water. He was so startled by the lovely half-fish half-woman creature, he dropped his gun and it accidentally went off, killing a young blonde girl who's parents owned the elephant and lived by a seaside cafe half a mile down the beach. When the young girl's father learned of the accident, he exacted revenge by knitting a stocking for the beekeeper and hiding a venomous snake in it, but not before cursing the serpent with voodoo magic he'd learned at a tropical bird resort while vacationing in Haiti seventeen summers before. The snake bit the beekeeper alright after being slipped into the gardens during a party while he had gathered friends over and they were all listening to Dark Side Of The Moon for the last time in his life. To this day the only one who knows the identity of the real culprit behind this twisted mystery is a hummingbird that saw the whole thing while flying over and remote viewing a seashell in an ashtray hidden away in someone's darkened parlor. The ghost of the master ventriloquist continues to haunt the area nonetheless and is reputed to still be controlling things behind the scenes. It is said his eyes are everywhere, even in the pigs and potatoes. All the neighbors stare but no one dares to say a thing, whether they are knitting or watching television.

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