AFTER WE’VE FINISHED EATING, ADAM comes out to the cloisters with me so that I can have a cigarette. The cloisters here consist of a small grassed quad – currently iced with snow – contained within four thin grey stone walkways. As Adam explained, it’s like being outside inside, or the reverse. When I asked, he said he wasn’t sure if smoking was actually allowed in the cloisters, but that no one really bothered the guests here, anyway. So now I’m standing here drawing toxic smoke into my lungs, thinking about the cloisters in Russell College, and how people only use them to smoke in: most of the students wouldn’t think cloisters were for anything else.
‘You’re quiet,’ says Adam, leaning against a stone pillar.
‘I just feel so out of place here,’ I say. ‘As though I’m going to be struck down any minute for smoking or swearing. Or worse – for caring about stupid things like being struck down for smoking and swearing when really I should be feeling guilty about your face, and the fact that my being here puts you all in danger and . . . And as well as all that, I’ve got to work out how to get away, and where to go.’
‘You could just stay here,’ Adam says.
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘There’s someone I need to find.’
But I don’t tell him who, and I don’t tell him how I’m planning to find him.
‘Is this connected with the book?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘Yeah.’
‘I suppose I can’t ask you about the book?’
‘No. It’s probably better that you forget there ever was a book.’
Adam shrugs. ‘Oh. Well, I’m glad I saw you again, anyway.’
‘You can’t be,’ I say. ‘Look at what’s already happened to you.’
‘But I don’t mind that,’ he says, looking away from me. ‘At least pain is real.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I say, after a pause.
‘Do you?’ says Adam.
‘Maybe not,’ I say, blowing smoke out into the cold air. ‘But I have . . . I don’t know. I have an odd way of looking at things. It’s yet another reason I feel out of place here . . . And with you, actually.’ I clear my throat, and it feels as if my words are being swallowed back along with all the phlegm and junk. Everything I want to say (and also don’t want to say) contracts into one sentence: ‘I’ve done a lot of bad things.’
‘Everyone’s done a lot of bad things.’
‘Yes, but there’s a difference between forgetting to buy your grandmother a birthday card and the kinds of things I’ve done. I . . .’
‘Whatever you’ve done doesn’t matter to me.’
I can’t explain my sexual deviance to Adam, so I throw my cigarette end into the snow in the quad, where it sinks like a monster’s eye. ‘I’m a self-destructive person,’ I say. ‘Or at least that’s what I am in magazine-speak.’
‘Self-destructive,’ Adam says. ‘That’s an interesting term. I suppose I’m self-destructive, but in a more literal way. It’s what the Tao asks you to do: to destroy the self and get rid of the ego.’
‘So being self-destructive can be a positive thing?’ I say. ‘That is interesting.’
‘Well, since I lost God . . .’
‘You lost God?’ I say, half my face dimpling into a smile. ‘That was careless.’
Shit. This isn’t the time to make jokes. Ariel, for God’s sake, don’t be offensive now. But Adam just looks at me for a second and then, suddenly, he walks the couple of paces towards me, pushes himself against me and kisses me hard. I kiss him back, although I know we can’t do this here. His lips press against mine with a cold urgency, and then he’s using his teeth: biting my lip, almost tearing my flesh.
I pull away.
‘Adam . . .’
‘Sorry. But you do things to me.’
I look at the ground. ‘I don’t mean to.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘No. Look – I know what you mean. I usually do mean to do things with people, or even, as you put it, to people; but not you. You’re different.’
‘What, because I managed to lose God? Or because I ever had God at all?’
‘I am sorry I interrupted. What were you going to say?’
He sighs into the air: a frozen cloud of uncertainty. ‘I was going to say that I lost God, and then I lost myself. You know how religion usually helps people find themselves, and find God? I managed to lose everything. I thought that was the point. All the books I read about losing desire and losing the ego . . . The whole thing was soul-destroying, literally. Nothing prepared me for it. Nothing prepared me for what it would be like to be aware, objectively, of religion without being a part of it. The Bible just became a book, like any other book. I could still read it and make opinions about what this or that bit meant, but I couldn’t believe in it.’
‘Soul-destroying. Like self-destructive.’
‘Yes. I experienced being truly selfless, and it was fucking terrifying.’
‘Adam . . .’
‘Connecting with other people; losing yourself in them; becoming “at one”. It’s hell. Who said that hell is other people?’
‘Sartre.’
‘He’s right. I didn’t realise: ripping out your soul and offering to share it around isn’t at all like giving Communion, or taking some old clothes to the charity shop. It’s like going into the park at night and taking off all your clothes and waiting to be pissed on.’
I think about Wolf, and his useless attempts to get beaten up.
‘People can’t be all bad,’ I say.
‘That’s not what I’m saying. I . . . I don’t know what I’m saying. This is what I wanted to explain to you the other night, but I’m not doing a much better job now. I told you I’ve had a breakdown?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. I . . .’
‘It’s part of the same thing. The self destructs; the self breaks down. It’s about exploding the self until there’s nothing left any more. But I couldn’t do it. I completely failed. I broke down, sure, but then before I’d even had a chance to look into the abyss and see what it was like, I started putting myself back together again. I tried being “normal”: drinking and swearing. It was quite fun. But now I’m not sure who I am. I use this word “I” and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know where it begins and ends. I don’t even know what it’s made of.’
‘Ah. Well, I can help you there,’ I say. ‘Everything in the known universe is made of quarks and electrons. You’re made of the same stuff I’m made of, and the same stuff the snow is made of and the same stuff this stone is made of. It’s just different combinations.’
‘That’s a beautiful idea,’ Adam says.
‘It’s true.’ I laugh. ‘I don’t usually say that. But it’s as true as anything can be.’
Once I did a class with my students about working with meaning. It’s supposed to be the little introductory session I do to get them thinking about Derrida. We do Saussure and all that basic stuff, and then I show them a photocopy of Duchamp’s Fountain – the urinal that was voted the most influential piece of art from the twentieth century – and ask them if it’s art or not. In this particular class, most of the students started arguing that a urinal couldn’t be art: two or three of them became quite angry about it, and started talking about Picasso, and how their children could draw better pictures; and the recent Turner Prize-winning installation with the light going off and on . . . I’d thought that it would be quite an easy class. All I’d wanted to demonstrate was that something that is called a ‘urinal’, which we understand to be something that men piss in, is only different from something that is called a ‘painting’, which we understand to be paint on canvas, because we make it different in language. And whether or not we choose to group either of these things in the category ‘art’ depends on how we define art. But the students were having trouble getting it and I became frustrated with them. I remember thinking, ‘Fuck you. I’d so much rather be at home right now, drinking coffee in my kitchen.’ I explained to them that everything in the whole world is made up of exactly the same quarks and electrons. Atoms are different. Sure, there are helium atoms and hydrogen atoms and every other sort of atom, but they’re only different in the number of quarks and electrons they have and, in the case of the quarks, which way up they are. I explained that, therefore, the urinal could, in a very real way, be said to be the same as, say, the Mona Lisa. I told them that what they thought was reality was all relative to the position from which they were looking at it. Under a powerful enough microscope, the urinal and the Mona Lisa would look identical.
It’s not just space and time that are fucked up. Matter is energy, but more than that: matter is already grey sludge; we just can’t see it. Now I think of the Troposphere and I wonder what that is made of and, even if it’s only in my imagination, what my imagination is made of.
Adam comes back to my room with me. I immediately get on the bed, but he paces around for a while, peeping out of the curtains, then picking up the Bible and putting it back down. I think he’s going to sit on the wooden chair, but eventually he comes and sits on the bed next to me, with his head resting against the headboard about two inches from mine.
‘So if we’re all quarks and electrons . . . ,’ he begins.
‘What?’
‘We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together.’
‘Better that that,’ I say. ‘Nothing really “rubs together” in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons.
So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.’
I hear his breathing take on a slightly different rhythm as he puts his hand on my leg, just where the material of the dressing gown is hanging slightly open.
‘And what would you call that? I mean, if it’s just atoms repelling each other, then it can’t be worthy of note, really. I mean, why should anyone mind?’
‘Adam . . .’
‘What makes it real at all?’
For a moment I think about pain again: about forcing friction; forcing atoms to exchange electrons; forcing something to become real. But this is about something else; something beyond that.
‘Language,’ I say. ‘Everything from the existence of the word real to the existence of the word fucking to the existence of the word wrong.’
I place enough emphasis on the word wrong that he takes his hand away from my leg. I close the gap created by my dressing gown and cross my ankles. I know why I can’t do this, but reason isn’t the same as desire, and I am aware of my blood pumping purposefully around my body, preparing me for something that can’t happen: Adam’s lips on mine; his dark, hairy chest pressed against my smooth, pale breasts; penetration; oblivion. It’s like starving and feeling you have to eat. I’m starving and someone’s just presented me with a bowl of food and told me that I can’t eat it; that it might be poisoned.
Adam gets off the bed and walks over to the window. The curtains are still closed, but he doesn’t open them; he just stands there looking at the beige fabric. He sighs.
‘This language stuff is what you study, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s very different from theology.’
‘Is it?’ I say. ‘Some of that stuff you were saying the other night at Heather’s . . . It made me think about Baudrillard and his idea of the simulacrum: a world made up of illusion, of copies of copies of things that don’t exist any more; copies with no original. And Derrida’s différance and the way we defer meaning rather than ever really experiencing it. Derrida talks about faith a lot. He wrote a lot about religion.’
‘It’s still not fun, is it? It still has the power to tell you what to do.
It’s like: nothing means anything, but you still have to follow the rules. I want something that tells me I don’t have to follow the rules.’
‘Oh, well, maybe then you’re back to the existentialists. I think they have more fun. Although the problem there is they don’t really know they’re having fun.’
I think about Camus and The Outsider. I think about the scene where Mersault drinks coffee in the funeral parlour and the way that this is used, later, as evidence that he is a bad person. Having sex in a priory would therefore make you what sort of person?
‘So Derrida is not an existentialist?’
‘No. But it all comes from the same background: Heidegger; phenomenology.’
‘And what does that say about life?’
‘What? Phenomenology?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Um . . . This is all stuff I’m still thinking about, and the way I understand it might not be quite right, but basically it’s to do with the world of things: phenomena.’
I think back to Lumas’s story ‘The Blue Room’, about the philosophers trying to establish whether or not ghosts exist. It reminds me of the time I was first trying to properly understand phenomenology (a process still not complete). I’d been reading Levinas’s Discovering Existence with Husserl – Husserl was Heidegger’s mentor – and I was trying to come to grips with his work, but it was very difficult. I was lying in the bath, trying not to get the book wet, and, as a thought experiment, asking myself the old question: ‘Is there a ghost in this room?’ I reminded myself that if I were a rationalist, I could answer no, quite confidently, as long as I had already established that ghosts don’t exist using logic and a priori statements. You can be a rationalist with your eyes shut. I know ghosts don’t exist, so there is no ghost in this room. If you’re a rationalist, and you’ve made your world out of a logic that says that when things are dead they are dead and that’s it, then you could be there in a room full of screaming ghouls and still conclude that there is no ghost in the room. If I were an empiricist, I’d look for evidence from my senses: I would see that there was no ghost in the room and conclude that if I was not experiencing it, then it wasn’t there. I’d got all that. But phenomenology, it seemed to me, wasn’t interested in whether or not the ghost was there. Phenomenology seemed to be asking, ‘What the fuck is a ghost, anyway?’
I try to summarise this for Adam.
‘Basically, phenomenology says that you exist, and the world exists, but the relationship between the two is problematic. How do we define entities? Where does one entity stop and another begin? Structuralism seemed to say that objects are objects, and you can name them anything you like. But I’m more interested in questions about what makes an object. And how an object can have meaning outside of the language we use to define it.’
‘So everything’s just language in the end. There’s nothing beyond words. Is that the main point?’
‘Kind of. It’s not just words, though. Maybe “language” is the wrong term to use in this context. Maybe “information” is better.’ I sigh. ‘This is so hard to put into words. Maybe Baudrillard does it best when he talks about the copy without an original: the simulation. Like, you know the way Plato thought that everything on earth was a copy – or a shadow – of some “ideal object”. Well, what if we’ve created a world in which even that shadowy level of reality isn’t the final copy? One in which anything that was ever “real” is now gone, and the copies that referred to things – in other words, the language, the signs – don’t refer to anything any more? What if all our stupid pictures and signs don’t make reality at all? What if they don’t refer out to anything else, but only inward towards themselves and other signs? That’s hyperreality. If we wanted to talk about it in Derridean terms, we could talk of a world that constantly defers the real. And it is language that does that. It promises us a table, or a ghost, or a rock, but can never actually deliver one for us.’
‘Isn’t it depressing?’ Adam asks.
I laugh, but it sounds hollow in here. ‘Surely no more depressing than your idea that everything is an illusion?’
‘But I was talking about an illusion that covers something up. Some definite reality. You’re talking about a world where nothing is not an illusion.’
‘Well, maybe I do want to believe that there’s something outside the simulacrum. I don’t know. But it is exciting to think about it. Like finding out that everything is just quarks and electrons. I find it exciting because everything you learn about the basic units of things – language, atoms, whatever – you find that they are absurd. That stuff I was telling you the other night about quantum physics: it’s so crazy, it can’t be true. And then what you were saying about truth existing outside reality: I found that exciting as well. There’s always another level that we just don’t know. The scientists have it down to the quarks and electrons, and the various weird variations of them that come down in cosmic rays and so on, but they don’t know if that’s it, if they have found indivisible matter – what the Greeks called atomos. It could even be that there’s infinite divisibility. And there are still these big questions that no one can solve: what came before the beginning and what will happen after the end? The fact that these big questions still exist is exciting. No one really knows anything very important – and there’s still such a lot to know.’
‘So now we’re back to religion.’
‘I thought you said religion was part of the illusion. I mean, it’s made of language like everything else . . .’
‘But faith,’ he says now. ‘What’s faith made of ?’ Adam touches the curtains, but doesn’t open them. ‘But you can’t base anything on faith. Nothing based on faith is true.’
‘Isn’t it? You could argue that we all have faith. We have faith in language, for example.’
‘Faith doesn’t always pay off, though, does it? You don’t always get back what you want.’
He turns and looks at me. His face is pale, and I remember what he said about not feeling ‘so good’ at the moment. But he’s still probably the most attractive human being I have ever seen, and for a second I can’t believe he is here in this room with me, with his long, unwashed hair and his old greyscale clothes, like there’s so much more to him than flesh, so much more than just atoms. How easy it would be to just close my eyes and let him in. But then he’d go away again, and I’d be left with what I’d done. I don’t want him to go away. I can’t have sex with him, so I’m going to have to keep him talking. And then maybe we could just go to sleep in each other’s arms? Don’t be stupid, Ariel. Here, that would be as bad as fucking.
‘You could say we have faith in a shared culture,’ I say.
‘Based on what?’
‘Shared language. I mean, we do share a culture, and that culture is made up of things that we’ve broken down and labelled, like the way the nineteenth-century natural scientists classified everything. Of course, people still debate all those classifications. Are two similar fish actually one sort of fish or two? Is everything different from everything else or the same?’
He’s looking at me with the most sulky expression I’ve ever seen, everything on his face pointing downwards, including his gaze, which now drifts to the floor. But I’m still thinking that I want to drown in him; I want to drown in a pool of sulky, pissed-off Adam. I want him so much more now that he’s cross with me for not agreeing to sleep with him. It’s as if the lines of force between us have become elastic, and they’re trying to contract. Are we different from one another or the same?
He doesn’t say anything, so I carry on.
‘According to what criteria can you say this thing ends there, and here’s where another thing begins? What exactly is “being”, anyway? Unless you go down to the atomic level, there seem to be no spaces between things. Even empty space is teeming with particles. But when you look at atoms closely, you realise there is hardly anything but space. You must have heard that analogy that an atom is like a sports hall with one tennis ball in the middle? Nothing is really connected to anything else. But we create connections between things in language. And we use those classifications and the spaces between them to create a culture such as the one we’re now in, in which we both understand that it would be wrong to sleep together in a priory in which I am a guest.’
Adam’s eyes are hard, but his voice is now soft.
‘Why is it wrong?’
‘Come on, you know why. We’d offend everyone here, if they knew what was going on.’
‘But surely that would be their fault for not understanding about the atoms?’
‘Would it? That’s not what culture says. Imagine using that as a defence for murder. “But, judge, I didn’t really stab her because the atoms in the knife never touched the atoms in her body.” We can’t just exit culture because it doesn’t suit us. Well, we could – or we could tell ourselves that’s what we’d done – but we’d feel guilt, anyway.’ I sigh. It’s so easy to talk like this, but it’s not easy to explain what I’m actually feeling. What would I say? Adam, I want to see you naked. I want to suck your cock and lie back and let you fuck me, but not in a priory because it makes me feel dirty and evil and I’m probably going to die soon, and even though I’m not sure I believe in heaven, I have seen an entity that claimed to be a god recently and so I don’t want to mess up my chances at the last possible minute.
And then I think of Derrida again. It’s as though I’m in some kind of auction and my last bid for purity is this: I’m thinking about his cock in my mouth, but I’m not speaking it and I’m not doing it. I’m not letting the atoms get too close.
Adam turns to the window again. This time he opens the curtains and looks out.
‘Is it still snowing?’ I ask. That reminds me of some quote: ‘Tell me, my dear, does it still snow?’ But I can’t remember where it’s from. Maybe in the quote it’s not even snow. Maybe it’s rain.
‘No.’ He sighs. ‘I should have stayed at your flat on Tuesday.’
‘I wouldn’t have slept with you then, either.’
Are you listening, God?
He nods. ‘You don’t find me attractive.’
‘It’s not that. I think it’s more that I don’t find myself that attractive.’
‘That sounds like shit to me.’
‘Sorry. You’re right. But I just can’t. I want to – but I just can’t.’
Now he turns around again. He doesn’t look me in the eye, though. There’s no connection – whatever the hell that connection is when someone focuses on your eyes and you focus on theirs and for a second it feels like you’re machines plugged into the same socket, or even that one of you is the machine and the other is the socket. Machines, sockets, electricity, lines of force . . . Our eyes might not connect, but all the other lines of force are still there, pulling me towards him.
‘But you do want to? You do want me?’ The way he speaks is as if he’s been told that he’s got a terminal illness but a year to live. Is it possible to take sex this seriously? Is it possible to take sex with me this seriously? Patrick says I ‘do’ things to him, but all I really do to him is implicitly promise to provide what I always provide: dirty sex with no strings. But if he never saw me again, I don’t think he’d care. Do I want Adam? Well, that’s easy.
‘Yes. But I can’t have you. I’m wrong for you.’
‘You know that I’ve never . . .’ He lets the sentence drift away, like a snowflake that melts before it lands.
‘I know. That’s why as well. The thing is that I have. Thousands of times, with hundreds of people.’
‘Ariel, for God’s sake.’
‘What?’
‘Why are you saying it like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re trying to make yourself seem . . . I don’t know.’
‘Like a bit of a slut?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’
‘No. You’re too nice.’ I bite my lip.
‘Oh, fuck off. You think I’m nice because I used to be a priest. I don’t want to be nice. I want . . .’
‘What? You want to be like me? You want to be unnice? You want to be dirty? Well, come on, then.’ I start undoing my dressing gown. ‘Let’s fuck in the priory. Have a little bit of what I’ve got. Look: here’s some of what I’ve got.’ I hold up my arms, wrists facing outwards as though I’m pushing something away. ‘That’s what happened last time someone fucked me.’
Adam walks forward, and for a second I imagine that he’s on his way to rip open my nightdress and push me down on the bed. Is that what I want him to do? Or do I want him to feel sorry for me, with my fucked-up wrists and my hundreds of sexual conquests? But his eyes are as still as fossils as he walks right past me and out of the room. Whatever I do want, I’m not going to get it. He’s gone.
Half an hour later I’m still alone in the cold room and I get under the covers of the bed to warm up. Then I swallow some of the tincture from the vial and put it down on the chair next to the bed. I lie back and look at the black circle until this reality begins to shift into the one I’m starting to prefer.
This time it doesn’t take long to go through the tunnel at all. But when I get out the other side, it’s different. The street I am so used to isn’t there any more. Instead I am in a cluttered town square with grey cobbles, which looks tiny compared with the mansions and castles crowded around it. There must be hundreds of these buildings, although objectively I can see that this should be spatially impossible. Nevertheless, they are ‘there’. Some of them are built in pale stone, others are rendered in a dark, rusty-looking brick and have gothic spires and turrets that seem to reach into the clouds, as if they were trying to claw their way to heaven. Clouds. That’s bizarre. There haven’t been clouds in the Troposphere before. But it’s still night-time here; maybe I can only see the clouds now because of the full moon. But then I realise that the moon hasn’t been here before, either.
There’s a statue in the centre of the square, shining in the moonlight. It seems to be a copy of Rodin’s Le Penseur: a man sitting on a rock with his chin resting on the back of his hand. But as I walk closer, I see that this man has a mouse face. It’s a statue of Apollo Smintheus without his cape on. An owl hoots and I jump. Last time I heard sound in the Troposphere it wasn’t a good sign at all. But nothing else happens, so I decide it’s just an owl. How many buildings are there here? An impossible number. It’s very hard to describe what is in front of me, but there does just seem to be too much stuff: too much information, all packed into such a small space. As well as the scramble of turrets and spires, I can see drawbridges and moats, mounds, smoke from fires, a rainbow bridge and various flags; behind the buildings are mountains and clifftops and lakes, all jumbled together like a bunch of landscape photographs overlapping on a crowded wall. In between these grand buildings are other, more familiar places: a couple of tea rooms, a small bookshop, and a shop selling magic tricks. They all seem to be closed, though. One place seems especially compelling, but it’s not a building. It’s an overgrown garden with high walls and a wrought iron gate. Inside are a bench and several trees. I want to go in there, but it’s locked. The other places here are also closed. Anachronistic neon signs glow pinkly all over the place. Closed. Fermé. Closed for Renovations. Closed. Shut. No Vacancies. What kind of place has gothic castles and towers with pink neon signs everywhere?
Console?
The thing comes up.
You have no choices, says the female voice.
Oh, great. This again. Has the whole thing crashed? Did those men do something to this place that means I just can’t access anything any more?
You have one new message.
What?
You have one new message.
Can I get the message? There’s no response. Where’s the little envelope that you click on? What is the equivalent here? How do I retrieve a message in the Troposphere? Who would have left me a message, anyway? For a second I imagine some brown paper package with red, green and black wires coming out of it: a bomb from my enemies. But this doesn’t make me feel anything at all, and I remember that this is what I like so much about this space: no hot, no cold, no fear.
Something now glows in the console and I notice that’s it’s Apollo Smintheus’s mouse-hole. I didn’t notice it before, but it’s there now: sitting between what looks like Valhalla and something called the Primrose Tea Shoppe. Am I supposed to go in there? I do want to see Apollo Smintheus. I switch off the console and walk through the white archway and into the room I recognise from before: the empty tables and shelves and the nest in the corner. There’s no sign of Apollo Smintheus. I walk through to the other room. The fire is out and there’s no one here. But there is a booklet lying on the table.
A Guide to the Troposphere, it says on the cover. By Apollo Smintheus.
Is this the message? I open the booklet.
You now have no new messages, says the console.
So the booklet is the message. OK. I sit down on the rocking chair and begin reading. The whole document is only about three pages long, but the script is large.
The Troposphere is not a place.
The Troposphere is made by thinking.
(I am made from prayer)
The Troposphere is expanding.
The Troposphere is both inside your universe and outside it.
The Troposphere can also collapse to a point.
The Troposphere has more than three directions and more than one ‘time’.
You are now standing in the Troposphere but you could call it anything.
The thought is all thought.
The mind is all minds.
This dimension is different from the others.
Your Troposphere is different from others’.
You achieve Pedesis via proximity in Geography (in the world) Tropography (in the Troposphere) Ancestry (in the mind) The choices the Troposphere gives you relate to proximity alone.
(Except when information is scrambled) You can jump from person to person in the physical world (but only if the person is at that moment vulnerable to the world of all minds).
You can also jump from person to ancestor in the world of memory.
This is all memory.
The Troposphere is a different shape from the physical world to which it (loosely) corresponds. For this reason it is sometimes more efficient to travel in the Troposphere and sometimes more efficient to travel in the physical world (see diagram).
INSERT PIC
Disclaimer: This diagram is a scaled-down version of a higher-dimensional calculation. It will be correct for journeys of a short or non-complex nature. Pedesis that takes the ancestral route over many generations will (probably) lead to inaccuracies.
Note: Units of distance/time in the Troposphere work out as roughly 1.6 times that of their equivalent in the physical world. An ‘hour’ in the Troposphere will last for 1.6 physical-world hours, i.e. ninety-six minutes.
Converting time to distance should be done in the usual way.
Distance is time in the Troposphere.
You cannot die in the Troposphere.
You can die in the physical world.
‘You’ are whatever you think you are.
Matter is thought.
Distance is being.
Nothing leaves the Troposphere.
You could probably think of the Troposphere as a text.
You could think of the Troposphere that you see as a metaphor.
The Troposphere is, in one sense, only a world of metaphor.
Although I have attempted it here, the true Troposphere cannot be described.
It cannot be expressed in any language made from numbers or letters except as part of an existentiell analytic (see Heidegger for more details).
The last point could have been clearer. What I mean to say is that experiencing the Troposphere is also to express it.
End.