Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-Four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else

MOUSTACHE. Chance! The hell with chance! We’re getting beaten up, slaughtered, looted, robbed, blackmailed, blackfemaled, drugged, AIDS-infected, laid off, bankrupted, impaled, raped, terrorized, crescentized, Islamized, Judaized, intellectualocratized, mediatized, fraudulized, cosmopolitocapitalized, and it’s all the fault of chance!

Consider a first series of facts: I call you, you take your precautions, and then you come onto this public stage in the center of Sarges-les-Corneilles. Now consider a second series of facts: a young black woman, wanting to adorn her window with a potted memory of lush Africa, leans over to water her flowers and, in a gesture that betrays her inimitable inner flame, inadvertently causes one of the pots to fall. Is there any relationship at all between these two series? None whatsoever. We have scientific proof that Moustache keeps a dignified distance from any woman … whose complexion is not that of a purebred Sarges-les-Corneilles sweetie pie. The flowerpot, deriving from the second series of facts, falls in conformity with the laws of universal gravity. Deriving from the first series of facts, Moustache moves forward, in conformity with the laws of French common sense. These two movements are indifferent to each other. But their encounter takes place on the exact peak of Moustache’s head. There is a shattering intersection. Such, my dear Moustache, is chance: the shattering intersection of two series of facts entirely independent of each other.

AHMED. You’ll see: if we begin again, nothing will happen. That will prove that it’s chance. Because, if it had been necessity, it would all begin again. Same cause, same effect, that’s what necessity is. Wait. Let’s do an experiment.

AHMED (continuing to massage Moustache’s head). It isn’t a man, it’s an intersection. The first series of facts is even more independent of the second series of facts than last time. We thought about it, we staged an experiment. And what did she do up there, our supposed divine Black Lady of the watered flowers? Did she watch our experiment? Did she think about it? Of course not! All wrapped up in the joy of her morning, she once more stuck out her voluptuous arm too far and too absentmindedly. And bingo! The pot falls just as Newton predicted, Moustache comes forward slowly, more cautiously and more warily than a minute ago, and, bingo, there’s a new shattering chance intersection on the head of Moustache, who had nothing to do with it. Look, if we try a second experiment, nothing at all will happen. Except for two consecutive acts of chance, without any connection between them.

AHMED. Terrific! Moustache has just rediscovered experimental science all by himself! He varies the circumstances, to keep chance separate from necessity. Moustache, you’re going to get the Nobel prize if you keep going at this rate.

AHMED. Think about it! You’re the one who cooked up this brilliant plan where you come in first. How can you expect the girl to follow you in such scientific ideas? The first series of facts is still and always even more independent of the second series of facts! You, Moustache, you’re thinking more and more, and the black woman up there, let’s call her Fenda, is increasingly absentminded. Things are separating, diverging. It’s total chance!

MOUSTACHE (thinking anew, flushed with concentration). You know what you ought to do, science-wise, my little Ahmed? I’ll stay here, and you, you’ll leave, then come back, then leave, then come back. That’d be great! Maybe that way you’ll see chance up close, you know what I’m saying?

AHMED. It’s conclusive! We’ve had chance three times and now we have necessity. Necessity is when no series of facts encounters another series, just like that, by chance. It’s when everything goes its own separate way, when I go and come back, when the other one, up there, closes her window, and when we’re completely indifferent to each other. No shattering encounter.