Doors into other worlds

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 September

Picking up where I left off, I assume that, if I have a brown, double-glazed, PVCu door it will not turn overnight into a red-painted steel door with no window - or an ostrich. (If it does, though, someone is playing a prank: which is what Gregor Samsa thinks in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, or K. in The Trial.)

And the world routinely does not abuse our expectations. Some 35 years ago, my friend Roland imagined a moment involving a teapot (of a size suitable to sit on a tea-trolley, waiting for many to pour out their tea during a break, and for it to be available to them without any more delay than involved in the pouring).

When, instead of inclining the teapot to the cup, he (or the person whom he imagined) did the opposite, a magic is performed: wherein the tea nonetheless flowed, without the teapot being tipped, but, instead, the receiving vessel.


The comparison is with our world, which, despite the fact that a universe is supposed to exist in which every event occurs, continues to be very normal, and so Cindy Crawford (or a chinchilla - NB I am not suggesting that there is a link, and a chinchilla is more cute, of course) is never in my spare bedroom when I go in there looking for something, or Woody Allen (or my long-dead grandather) behind the counter at the Post Office.

Rather, things actually continue, rather boringly, as they are, and, if I lose something, I may not remember where it is (and it may have visited Neptune in the meantime), but it turns up consistently with where I eventually look for (or find) it, depending on whether I have a recollection of leaving it there, or because, by then, I am already looking for something else.

Why isn't the world, if it is just one of an infinite number of worlds where everything that could happen happens, one where more random events occur? If, when my order for a medium iced latte has been politely given and taken in Costa®, one possibility - out of my hands - for the fate of that coffee is for the same barista to throw it in my face, and get a promotion, not the sack.

And it cannot, can it, just be that we are so programmed - deterministically - to behave as expected (or that we exercise extreme self-control), because it just should happen that, if I go to put some money in the bowl of someone on the street, her dog is the one to choose to fish the money out and gives it back whilst she dozes, or a pilot just decides not to go anywhere and to order everyone off the aircraft once in a while?

An invitation to ask whether it all seems just a bit (a lot?!) too predictable to be simply one of an infinite number of worlds in which every event occurs - or do we chance to be in the most 'normal' one, where so many 'possible' outcomes resolve uncontroversially?


Or should I spend time elsewhere with Voltaire's Candide, and not ask at all?

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