by Flynn
The next night produced three more cutouts, and I was still none the wiser. I didn't know it at the time but Anna had solved her problem. Not a sign, however, hinted at the solution. Anna was marshalling her facts and her ideas. Three days passed before she once again asked for the magic lantern to be put on. Three days of cunningly worded questions. Three days of enigmatic smiles, like some half-pint Mona Lisa. Finally the stage was set.
"Now!" exclaimed Anna with complete confidence. "Now!"
The four cutout figures were taken from the book and placed on the table.
"Fynn, hold this one up for me."
I held the cutout in the beam of the light. What did she want a shadow of a shadow for, I wondered.
"Not that way! Hold it perpendicular to the sheet."
"Rightee are," I replied, holding the paper shadow perpendicular to the sheet.
"Wot you see, Fynn?"
I turned to her. Her eyes were screwed tightly shut she wasn't looking.
"A straight line."
"Now the next one."
I held the next cutout perpendicular to the screen.
"Wot you see now?"
"A straight line."
The third and fourth also gave straight lines. Natch! Anna had established the fact that any object, be it mountain or mouse, petunia or King George himself, produced a shadow. Now, if we hold this shadow perpendicular to the screen, then all the shadows of all The objects produced a straight line. There was still more to come.
Anna opened her eyes and looked hard at me.
"Fynn, can you hold a line perpendicular to the screen? In your head, I mean. Wot would you see, Fynn? Wot, eh?"
"A spot," I answered.
"Yes." Her smile was brighter than the beam from Hie magic lantern.
"I still don't get what you're on about."
"That's what a number is."
I suppose the nicest compliment ever paid to me was Anna's silence. That silence I interpreted as, "Well, you've got the intelligence to finish it off yourself, so get to it." I did. Mind you, my mental gymnastics always ended up with, "Do you mean that. .. ?"
It did this time; I started off, "Do you mean to say that...?"
What she meant to say was this: if a number, say seven, could be used to count things as diverse as bank notes and babies, books and bats, then all these diverse things must have something in common. Some common factor, unnoticed and unattended to. What could it be? Things had shadows; having a shadow was a positive indication that something existed. A shadow lost you many of the things that you could not count, like redness and sweetness, and that was good, but it left you with shapes. A shadow had still got too much information attached to it. Since shadows were different, you obviously had to lose some more information. Now since a shadow lost you a lot of useless informa-I ion, then it was reasonable to suppose that a shadow Of a shadow would lose you some more. So it did, if, and only if, you held the shadow perpendicular to the screen, and then all shadows became straight lines. The fact that all these straight lines were of different lengths was something else you didn't want, but the solution to this was easy. Simply make all the straight lines cast shadows and there you are. What all these diverse things had in common, the thing you really counted with, a number, was the shadow of a shadow of a shadow, which was a dot. Every scrap of uncountable information had been lost by this method. This was it. This is what you counted.
Having reduced all the multitude of things to a common essence, the dot, the thing that you really counted, Anna proceeded to unwind things again. With a pencil in one hand, she plonked a dot on a clean sheet of paper.
"Ain't it wonderful, Fynn?" she said, pointing to the dot. "That might be the shadow of a shadow of a shadow of me or a bus or anything; or it might be you."
I had a good look at myself. I didn't recognize myself but I got the point.
She unwound a dot to a straight line, from a line to a shape, from a shape to an object, from an object to a-------Before she knew where she was, she was climbing like a monkey up the tree of higher and higher dimensions. An object, you see, might after all be the shadow of something more complex, and that something might be the shadow of something even more complex, and so on. The mind boggles at the thought. But there was really nothing to it, so I was told. Once you had managed to reduce everything to a dot, you couldn't reduce it any further. That was the end of the line, but as soon as you started to unwind things again, well, where did you stop? There was no reason why you shouldn't go on forever. Except, of course, that there was one thing in this universe that was so complex that it couldn't become any more so. Even I guessed that one. None other than Mister God. Anna had reached the ends of an infinite series of dimensions. At one end of the series was a dot, at the olher, Mister God.
Feeding the ducks in the park the next day, I asked her how she had gotten on to the idea of shadows.
"In the Bible," she announced.
"Where in the Bible?"
"Mister God said he would keep the Jews safe under his shadow."
"Oh."
"And then St. Peter."
"Wot about St. Peter? Wot he do?"
"Made people better."
"How'd he do that?"
"He put his shadow on ill people."
"Oh! Yes. I should have known."
"An' Old Nick."
"How did he get in?"
"Wot's his name?"
"Satan."
"Another one."
"The devil?"
"No. Another one."
Finally I hit on "Lucifer."
"Yes. Wot's it mean?"
"Light, I think."
"How about Jesus?"
"Yeah, how about Jesus?"
"Wot's he say?"
"Lots of things, I suppose."
"Wot did he call himself?"
"The Good Shepherd?"
"Something else."
"Er—the Way?"
"Something else."
"Oh, you mean the Light?"
"Yes. Old Nick and Jesus—both the Light. You know what Jesus said, don't you? 7 am the Light.' " She stressed the word /.
"What did he say it like that for?"
"So's you won't get muddled."
"How d'you get muddled?"
"Two kinds of light: a pretend one and a real one. Lucifer and Mister God."
Anna's second idea flowed naturally and easily from ] the first. Shadows were indeed seen to be of the utmost 1 importance in the proper understanding of Mister God and consequently in the proper understanding of 1 Mister God's creation. First we have Mister God and 1 we know that he is Light. Then we have an object and j we know this is Mister God's creation. And finally I we have the screen on which shadows are formed. The screen is that object that loses us all the redundant I information that enables us to do things like sums and geometry and all that.
Now you don't think that Mister God wasted all this miraculous stuff just on simple sums and simple geometry, do you? Oh, no. First of all, you can place the screen at an angle to the beam of light, or you can move the source of light about. The shadows distort, but you can still talk about them in a reasonable way; you can still do sums. Then, of coarse, you can distort the screen in all sorts of interesting ways, and still you can talk about the shadows in a logical way. Also, you can put the light inside the object and cast the shadow onto a screen, and that is really very interesting. If you make a shadow of a shadow on a screen, then distort the screen, why, a distance like an inch might collapse into nothingness or maybe stretch to I don't know how far. Once you start distorting the screen, well, there's no knowing what kind of sums you might be able to do. That's what Anna called real God stuff. But you can do none of these tricks with a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. That's such a tiny little dot that it won't distort at all, no matter what you do with it.
Anna's final shadow revelation was delivered one wet and windy winter's night—a night that I haven't; quite come to terms with in thirty years. I was sitting
comfortably and warm by the fire reading. Anna was fiddling about with paper and pencil when it all started.
"Wot you reading, Fynn?"
"All about space and time and stuff like that. You wouldn't be interested."
"Wot's it say?"
"Lots of things about space and time"—and then I made my mistake—"and light."
"Oh!" She stopped writing. "What about light?"
I started to get itchy under the collar; after all, light and shadow were Anna's province.
"Well, a fellow called Einstein has figured out that nothing can go faster than light."
"Oh," said Anna and went on writing. Suddenly she flung over her shoulder, "That's wrong!"
"So it's wrong, is it? Why didn't you stop me?"
The joke misfired.
"Didn't know wot you were reading," she replied.
"All right, then, tell me what goes faster than light."
"Shadows."
"Can't do," I countered, "because the light and the shadow get there at the same time."
"Why?"
"Because it's the light that makes the shadow," I was beginning to get a bit muddled. "Look, a shadow is where there isn't any light. You can't have a shadow getting there before the light does."
She digested this for about five minutes; I had gone back to my book.
"Shadows go faster. I can show you."
"This I've got to see. Start demonstrating."
She hopped off the chair and put on her outdoor coat and macintosh and picked up the large torch.
"Where we off to?"
"Down the cemetery."
"It's pouring with rain and it's perishing dark."
She waved the torch at me, "Can't show you the shadow if n it's light, can I?"
Outside it was as black as pitch and the rain wasn't waiting to fall down. It was just solid water.
"What are we going to the cemetery for?"
" 'Cos of the long wall."
As the cemetery road led to nowhere in particular, and as the road was bounded on the one side by a railway fence and on the other side by the high cemetery wall, the road wasn't very well fit, and nobody used it very much—I hoped. Reaching the midpoint of the wall, we stopped.
"What now?" I questioned.
"You stand here," and I was stood in the road, about thirty feet from the wall.
"I'm going up there," she continued, "and I'll shine the light on you. You watch your shadow on the wall."
With that explanation she trotted off into the dark. Suddenly the torch light flipped on, fingering about in the darkness until it found me.
"Ready?" came the yell out of the darkness.
"Yes," I yelled back.
"See your shadow?"
"No."
"I'll come nearer. Say when."
The torch bobbed nearer, transfixing me in the middle of the beam.
"Righty ho," I yelled as I made out my dim shadow away down the far end of the wall.
"Now watch your shadow."
She walked a path parallel to the cemetery wall about two feet further away from it than I was. I watched my shadow, staring into the darkness. It zoomed toward me at a fair rate of knots, certainly much faster than Anna was walking. It slowed down as it passed me on the wall and then speeded up again. Anna was walking backward with the light still on me.
Suddenly she was by my side again.
"See it?" she questioned.
"Yeah, I saw it."
"Goes fast, don't it?"
"Sure does. How did you work that one out?"
"The cars. The lights on the cars."
I agreed that my shadow was moving faster than she was walking, but certainly not faster than light, and I said so. I got no answer. By the light of the torch I could see that she was miles away. The outside experiment now finished, she was busy setting up some internal experiment.
I grabbed her hand, saying, "Come on, Tich, let's go to Ma B.'s for a cuppa tea and a bite to eat."
On the way we met Sally.
"You daft?" she said. "What are you doing taking the kid out on a night like this?"
"Not taking," I answered, "being took."
"Oh," said Sally, "one of them?"
"Yes. Come and have a cuppa at Ma B.'s."
"Suits me," replied Sally.
I'd just about finished my pork pie when Anna's internal experiment came to an end.
"The sun," she said, "it's like the lights on the cars."
After a few more moments' thought she stabbed in my direction with her unused fork. "You," she said, "you are like the earth—the wall is—the wall is— squillions of miles away, but it's only a pretend wall." She returned with a bump, and noticed Sally for the first time.
"Hello, Sal," she smiled.
"Hi, Tich," replied Sally. "What gives?"
Anna transfixed me with her eyes. "The sun makes a shadow of the earth on the wall—the pretend wall."
"Well," I replied rather doubtfully, "I'm not so sure of that."
"Well it can," she smiled, "in your head it can. If the earth goes round the sun, and the shadow goes on the wall which is—"
"—a squillion miles away." I finished off the question for her.
"How fast," she grinned, "how fast does the shadow go on the wall?" She jabbed her fork into her meat pie and circled it around her head like the earth going around the sun. Her head tilted to one side, and with a big grin she dared me to give an answer.
But I wasn't going to. I wasn't going to say squillions of miles a second, at least not until I had thought about it a bit longer.
I knew I was right, that nothing could go faster than light. I believed it completely. I was certain that Mr. Einstein hadn't missed it.
Looking back over the years, I realize just where I went wrong. Not with the sums, I mean, but with Anna's education. You see, I didn't teach Anna the Right and Proper way to do things. Oh sure, I showed her ways to do things, funny ways, quick ways, hard ways, and all sorts of ways, but not The Right Way. In the first place I wasn't at all sure myself what the Right way was; so naturally Anna had to find out ways for herself. That's what made it all so difficult for me.
* * *
eight
I suppose that the most frequently used words in Anna's writings and speaking were Mister God. Running them a close second were the words that she called the "whuh" words. Whuh words were those words that began with wh, and these, so far as Anna was concerned, were question words. What, which, where, why, who—all question words—the well-behaved question words. There was, however, a rebel question word; it was how. How was undoubtedly a question word, and according to Anna, should have been spelled whow, or more exactly who. But we'd already got a who, so it was obvious to her that somebody must have taken the w from the front of the word and simply stuck it on the end. How was a more or less well-behaved word; it did at least contain the letters w and h, which indicated that a question was coming up.
Question words were odd in many ways. Perhaps the strangest thing about a whuh question word was the fact that if you substituted the letter t in place of the letter w in a question word, you were face to face with an answer word—well, for the most part. Answer words were words that indicated something; they pointed at something. You didn't point with your finger, you pointed with your tongue. Any word that began with a th was a tongue-pointing word. What is a tram? could be answered by That is a tram. Where is the book? is answered by There is the book. When and then were also a couple of question and answer words. The problem of which and thich, why and thy, and who and tho were obviously problems that could be cleared up, given a little time. Ann was satisfied that whuh words were, and were meant to be, question words in the same way that thuh words, like that, the, those, there, etc., were, and were meant to be, answer words.
With regards to language itself, Anna was convinced that it could, by and large, be divided into two parts: the question part of the language and the answer part of the language. Of the two, the question
part of the language was the most important. The answer part had a certain satisfaction, but was nowhere near as important as the question part. Questions were a sort of inner itch, an urge to go forward. Questions, that is real questions, had this about them, they were risky things to play about with, but they were exciting. You never quite knew where you were going to land.
This was the problem with places like school and church; they seemed to be more concerned with the answer part of the language then with the question part of the language. The problems that places like school and church raised were absolutely tremendous because of the kind of answers they gave you. Certainly you could make up the question from the answer given to you, but the trouble was that so often this kind of question had no real place to land; you just kept on falling forever and ever. No, the mark of a real question was that it landed somewhere. As Anna said, "You can ask the question, Do you like skudding?" It certainly looks like a question, it certainly sounds like a question. "But it don't land nowhere." If you supposed that it was a real question, if you supposed that it really landed somewhere, why, you could go on asking questions about it all your life and still get nowhere.
Anna was certain that heaven was, certain that angels and cherubs and things like that were real, and she knew more or less what they were like; at least she knew what they were not like. For one thing, they weren't like those pictures of angel's with nice feathery wings. It wasn't the wings that bothered her one bit; it was the fact that they looked like people that bothered Anna. The possibility that an angel could, let alone would want to, blow a trumpet, filled her with the deepest dismay. The idea that, come the resurrection day, Anna would still have the same number of legs, still have eyes and ears, still be generally constructed after the same present pattern, was to her an idea too monstrous to contemplate. Why was it that grownups insisted on talking about where heaven was? The whole question of where heaven was was neither here nor there; it was immaterial; it was nonsense. And why, oh why, were angels and cherubs and things like that, and goodness me, even Mister God himself, represented as human people? Oh no, the question of where heaven was was one of those non-questions, it had nowhere to land, and therefore was no question fit to be asked.
As Anna saw it, the question of heaven was not concerned with where, but it was concerned with the perfection of the senses. Language was hard put to it when trying to describe or explain the concept of heaven, but then language depended upon the senses, and it therefore followed that the grasp of heaven was also dependent on the senses. These pictures, these statues, these stories about angels, simply shouted aloud the fact that the perpetrators of these monstrosities had no idea what they were on about. They merely showed quite clearly that angels and suchlike were simply men and woman with wings on. They were burdened with the same kind of senses as we were and as such were not fit creatures for heaven. No, whatever the description of heaven was, and that was really most unimportant, it didn't describe a place but the inhabitants. Any place could be heaven where the senses were perfect. Mister God's senses were perfect. Well, it stands to reason, to be able to see us over impossibly immense distances, to hear us, and to know our thoughts were not unreasonable characteristics of Mister God, or for that matter the angels either, but to represent them in stories, paintings, or sculptures with ordinary ears, ordinary eyes, and ordinary shapes was childish in the extreme. If the heavenly hosts had to be painted, then they ought to be represented in such a way as to show the perfection of their senses, and since language depended upon the senses, the perfection of their language too.