Friday, November 11, 2005

Future underwhat?

As a writer of sci-fi/fantasy/horror and dream journals, "Future underworlds" is a good summation. Looking forward, looking around, looking under the rocks at the side of the driveway ... and for a subdomain "unfuture" is my disturbed sense that the future is going to be a mess if we don't keep an eye on the chaos and the selfish elements.

Then again, the future is (as far as we can tell) unwritten. So every future we can think of is also an "unfuture", a thing that will never happen (until it does).

That reminds me of a helpful analogy for how we can tell a true infinite value from one that merely takes a long time to count. We're playing billiards now. A countable value is the number of words we hear muttered in the background while playing. An infinite value is touched in those moments when we're setting up a shot. We get glimpses of all the possible ball movements, all the possible outcomes, and we try to choose one that will win the game. A touch of the infinite. And then our hands usually find a way to screw it up. All those shots that never happened, those are "unfutures", forgotten a moment later.

Is it odd that we can almost visualize infinity, or is it natural that we navigate our way through infinities and somehow end up with a simple life, free of obstacles?

Thus the name(s).

;-)

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