Kaleidoscopes

I am not in a very creative mood today. So for my K post, I am going to delve into the archives. When I was recovering from the accident I described in Close call, I did a fair amount of writing. It started with a random creation story, which began developing on its own. Over a period of time an actual story with the potential of being a book emerged. Unfortunately, it got to a point were I had to actively take the story over, and I have since stalled. Maybe now that I have been practicing again, I can try to finish it. Anyway, this is another excerpt from that story, a “chapter” I guess:

Kaleidoscopes

We’ve all used them. Picture one of those kaleidoscopes that are really nothing but a tube with a single lens on one end and a multi-faceted prism on the other (this may be painful, but try your best). When you look through it you see multiple versions of the same image. With this kaleidoscope, you are looking out your front door. Now you see many versions of a quite familiar image. Now imagine that each version is somehow different. Some may be upside down. Some may be inverted. Some may be like looking at a negative. Yet all of them are still recognizable as a variation of the familiar scene. Do you have the picture so far?

moebius strip #1
Image by CARMENRUETER via Flickr

Now picture a Möbius strip in your front yard, big enough for you to walk on (for those of us saying, “Huh?!” right now, a Möbius strip is a one-sided closed loop. If you have not seen one, don’t try to picture it, because you really will hurt yourself.). Walk along this strip with your fancy kaleidoscope. As you move along the strip, you peer outwards through the kaleidoscope, seeing the altered but familiar images from various angles. Continue doing this until you have made a complete circuit of the Möbius strip. Of course, to successfully navigate the strip, you had to alter the law of gravity, but let’s not complicate things. Now comes the hard part.

View all these images in your mind. Now try to picture perceiving all of them, every different image from every different angle, at the exact same moment. Not only do you perceive everything at the same instant, but you also understand how every image relates to every other image, and how the whole shebang relates to existence as you know it. Do you have a headache yet? I know I do.

Not to worry. Even if you are capable of performing these perceptual gymnastics they don’t even scratch the surface of Gusty’s experience. For an instant that seemed eternal, Gusty was “one with the universe”. He understood “Why?” He perceived patterns beyond our conception. He perceived non-patterns having no conceivable order, yet somehow he understood them. He knew everything that it was possible to know, and he could imagine the rest. All of this happened the instant he stepped out the door.

And in the very next instant it was all gone. Now all he perceived was an incredible sense of loss. That’s not quite true. He also perceived an intense wave of dizziness. This sensation was much easier to deal with than the sense of loss. He simply grabbed the railing next to him in an attempt to steady himself. Unfortunately, there was no railing next to him. He pitched forward, and found himself with a fairly intimate view of the front lawn. The sudden shock of impact with the ground succeeded in knocking his reeling senses back in line. The sense of loss seemed also to take offense at such jarring motion and quickly hid itself in some dusty recess of Gusty’s mind. He lay there for a moment, wondering what the hell just happened.


Having regained his composure, Gusty stood up and brushed himself off. He then looked around to make sure nobody had witnessed the incident. Nobody was around. Good! He really didn’t want to have to explain sudden swan dives into the front lawn. Enough people already thought he was odd. Gusty continued to look around. Something wasn’t right. Well, obviously his mind wasn’t right. Something else seemed out of whack. He continued to scan the area, trying to determine what exactly wasn’t as it should be. After a few moments he realized that two things had changed.

First, the lawn that he had so recently been intimate with was not his front lawn. For that matter, it wasn’t a lawn at all. Actually, he was standing in the middle of an immense field that seemed to go on for miles. That would probably explain why his railing had failed him in his time of need. What self respecting railing would want to participate in the fantasies of a mind that had obviously taken an unplanned vacation from reality? Gusty blinked a few times to see if his current delusional state was just a passing thing. Apparently it wasn’t.

The second change was a little less disconcerting.

Gustavius Oliver Deeter wasn’t bored anymore.