SEE ME

“The point is: what happens in heaven?'

'Unknowable wonderfulness?'

'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.'

'If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.’”

― Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

“… there is such a thing as the smallest possible unit of time. And it must exist, mustn’t it? Consider the present. It must have a length, because one end of it is connected to the past and the other is connected to the future, and if it didn’t have the length then the present couldn’t exist at all. There would be no time for it to be the present in.”

-       Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time

I have been reading the Discworld series since my husband died last December. I’ve been taking them slowly and reading other things in between, and savoring them. I’m convinced the Discworld series is a perfect way to work through grief, beginning from that improbable inconceivable irrefutable proof of death. The books remind me of the old saying about how a society so relatively primitive compared to ours would see our advanced technology as magic.

So, why not the other way around? We’re so magically primitive that a fantasy about a magical place seems like magic to us. Discworld exists “only just this side of total improbability”. Get it? Like death. The above is from a book in the mid 20s of a series of about 40. I’m pacing myself so I should finish the series about one year after my husband died.

Anyway, both these quotes are about how there is a theoretical single smallest sub-particle of time that is the present. No. one is more about what happens to time after we die. The present is always now everywhere, but we can’t stay there. Which makes me think that’s why I’m finding these books some sort of magical consolation. They help me understand how a death that happened in the past is always here in the now.

But that’s not the point of the title of this post. At one point in Thief of Time a schoolteacher receives an unsigned note on her desk saying SEE ME. And that’s what this post is about. And happy birthday to Martha. And our parents made us crazy.

Suddenly, I had this blinding flashback to receiving such notes from a species of nun that no longer walks the earth and all these repressed memories flooded back. The chipped metal desks and chairs painted some institutional eye-save green, the smell of the green mulch-like stuff the janitor used to push around the linoleum tile halls until the red and yellow speckles shinned like glitter against the brown background. And acid-washed papers and books beginning their long slow slide down entropy’s slope of decay to atomize into the very air we breathed.  (Note to self: consider class action suit for people who breathed that air K-12. Catholicschoolestosis? I have the classical symptoms of paranoia, rage, good timing, lying, selective hearing and listening loss. I have Terminal Bad Attitude. I have the intelligence. I just don’t fucking apply myself.)

(Seriously, I think that’s where my irregular heartbeat problems began, so I arguably have actual damages to support tort claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress. Why was fear their weapon of first resort? Were they so young, so alone, so unequipped that the power drove them mad? Did they grow up disappointed and bitter old atheists regretting our life choices? Coincidence?)

Then I remembered how the time I totally cheated and didn’t get caught was on a Religion test of all things. It was one the priest taught. They only brought in the big guns to talk about serious shit like sex. But we had to know the books of the Old Testament which was - in some twisted alternative probability - as important as sex ed. Hence the priest instead of the nun. There’s like a million books in the OT, seriously. Not the like the NT, you know? And some of them seemed to be mostly genealogy lists that did jack for saving my soul so who cares? So, I wrote them down in very light pencil on a piece of ruled paper. Then I put a clean sheet of ruled paper over that when it was time to take the test. The wooden desks were so scratched and gouged it was SOP to use a sheet underneath just to make your paper smooth enough to write on. When I pressed down to write I could see the letters beneath, but I was pretty sure you couldn’t see them otherwise.

I remember the priest walking down the long aisle on my right, behind the end of the row and back up the aisle on my left. He was looking at what we were writing so menacingly I felt his glare on the back of my neck as he approached from behind. I was sure I’d been busted because I paused writing and lifted my hand from the paper as he first approached, appearing to be too deep in through around book 1,844. This was the smallest unit of time I have ever experienced and there was a lot of fear concentrated there. I had plenty of time to consider and discard the crying strategy and instead I determined to adopt the brave attitude later re-discovered by Norma Rae. Then he kept on walking up the aisle past my desk and life resumed.

So what is the point of this post? That when a book includes a scene where someone in a classroom gets a paper with the words SEE ME scrawled in red pencil, it should have some sort of trigger alert.