Taking a hand in both of his, Wizard
Prang lightly kissed a proffered cheek.
'Mi casa es su casa,' he said softly in his visitor's
ear, waving expansively around his tiny and untidy home.
She walked around the room towards the indicated chair in
an unnecessary circle. A clay bowl made by the newest of his apprentices
awaited firing; but as she passed, a bright, brittle glaze enrobed its
surfaces. It seemed that she irradiated the place, even as she took it in.
The wizard was impressed. He often was. Perny called it
his susceptibility. But (dammit all) it is impressive that anyone should
come halfway around the world to visit anyone else. It would have been
discourteous not to be impressed. She sat down, and
crossed her legs in a rather foreign fashion. Wizard Prang indicated the
wine and water set up on the small table beside him, and asked whether she
would join him, indicating his half filled chalice.
'Thank you,' she said in her heavily accented English.
To attempt to present her accent in cold print would be at
best a farce: it would probably be a fiasco. The wizard
poured some wine into the waiting glass.
'Hold the water,' she interrupted him in unaccented
American, and took the glass of wine.
She settled back, sipped, drew her legs up a bit,
obviously unwinding.
'That's right,' approved Wizard Prang: 'Relax after that
walk up my hill while I excuse myself for a couple of minutes.' He rose,
'Hope you don't mind.' 'De nada,' she said absently.
He ducked his head as he entered the little meditation
room, and closed the door behind him. The walls and
ceiling were painted dark blue, the other walls were painted terra cotta.
It is a potent combination. Dotted around on the terra cotta wall shared
with the main room were a number of half inch in diameter black circles.
Most of them belonged to his apprentices, his shishyas. The highest up the
wall was his own: he was taller than they. He stood
before it. The black circle was just above the level of his eyes,
corresponding with ajna, the sixth chakra, the third eye. He stood a yard
away, crossed his ordinary eyes, and focused on the dot. He did the
exercise again, at varying focal lengths from the dot on the wall. There
was no problem: the image was always clear, once focussed. Until it is
focussed, the image may have a brother or a sister shape, slightly
displaced. So there was nothing wrong with his eyes.
Then why was his visitor's body aura slightly displaced? She had stored a
lot of power. She was a Knowledge Woman without doubt. And yet ...
He rejoined her and found her at peace. Even so, the aura
was still out of synch like lips moving on a film that don't quite match
the sounds that emanate from them. They chatted for a
while, and then she said it. She told the wizard why she had crossed the
South Atlantic.
'I no longer fit my model of myself,' she said slowly.
'Or maybe, my model of myself doesn't fit me. Which is it?'
'Neither,' said Wizard Prang.
A mismatched model is not a strong enough pathology to
produce aura shift. Especially is this the case if all six chakras are
spinning evenly and hers now were, after the trouble with the fifth on her
arrival. Thus he remembered to fill her glass: fifth chakra trouble gets
to the throat.
'Your difficulty is not with your model of yourself,
which has converged'
(had it not, the clay bowl would have bent under
misaligned power, and not fired).
'Your difficulty is much more serious or you would have
resolved it yourself.'
She leaned forward, unaffectedly, but he had to wrench his
eyes away from the consequences of her movement.
'The problem lies in your self referential paradigm.'
'I thought that was the model of myself. Of myself,
after all: self referential.'
Wizard Prang comforted her by patting her thigh.
'Self referential' equals 'of yourself all right no
argument. But it's not a model we're talking about, it's a paradigm.'
'Aren't models and paradigms much the same?'
'No,' the wizard said emphatically. 'A model is
negotiable. A paradigm is an infrangible mind set.'
Was that last a mixed metaphor, or was it just a
linguistic difficulty over the Spanglish? In any case she said politely
that she did not understand. The wizard overfilled his
chalice, got up, paced up and down, and waved the chalice around with
disastrous effect. Splashes of watered down wine hit her dress, but dried
instantly. The splashes that hit the curtain would not dry at all. Blodwyn
even tried her up market hair dryer on them to no effect. But that was a
week later, and anyway, "disastrous" was too strong a word: odd, maybe.
Wizard Prang collected himself. Sockets, shoulders,
elbows, knees all intact; he sat down.
'What are you, professionally?' he asked her.
'Economista. Doctora en ecomomia.'
'Well now,' the wizard settled down. 'If I said to
you that in your country we could apply a Keynesian economic model, and
that you could bring down unemployment by a programme of public works
that would consume labour, what would you say?'
'Inflation.’ She had almost spat the word. 'I see.
And if I said that in your country we could apply instead a
Friedmanesque model, and that you could bring down Inflation by strict
control of the money supply, what would you say?'
‘Unemployment.’ No spitting this time.
Wizard Prang focussed his eyes at a very great distance.
His visitor looked at him strangely: he seemed to have ... gone. But he
was only acquiring data. As he pulled his eyes and
himself back to base he was doing some rough sums. Then he spun a few
figures off to her. He proposed an increase in public spending according
to Keynes, and suggested what inflation would result from bringing
unemployment down to an acceptable level. Then he forecast what
unemployment level would result from a monetarist policy designed
according to Friedman that would hold inflation down.
She was amazed at the accuracy of the wizard's ... guesswork.
'That is indeed our problem,' she said warmly.
'That is indeed not the point,' responded Wizard Prang.
'You notice that the models are contradictory. Neither is satisfactory
on its own. You notice too that we have no difficulty in moving from one
to the other, examining and comparing the consequences of each. That's
what I meant when I said that models are negotiable.'
'Caught you there,' she cried, 'there are important
politicians who take on the monetary model as an absolute creed. They
will not negotiate the model in any way.' 'I know it.
It suits them to be thus blind.' His voice was dry. 'You must expect the
powerful, whose allies are the rich, to protect the value of money and
property at anyone's cost. But the net philosophical effect is to turn
the model into a paradigm. As you say, it has ceased to be negotiable.'
They broke off the conversation to go for a walk and watch
the sun setting. Flights of birds were returning to their nests in the oak
trees behind the cottage. There was a nip in the air. When they returned,
the cottage was welcoming. The freestanding fireplace had been full of
logs when they left. These were now burning merrily and obviously had been
for some time. Who had got the fire going? The wizard said vaguely that it
was "sort of automatic". She looked around for apparatus of some kind, but
there was none. They settled down again, comfortable together by this
time. 'This word paradigm,' said Esperanza. 'It seems
to be a new idea in logic or epistemology or whatever it is. Give me more
to grasp, and go back as far as you can I mean, have we encountered
paradigms only lately?' Wizard Prang put his hands
behind his head and did some time cycling. You could see by this act of
bravado that he was not holding the handlebars.
'Consider the case of Father Suarez, then. Let's see, it
must be the end of the sixteenth century. Far enough back for you?'
'What was he up to?' 'He was the
leading Jesuit of the day, who revived the mediaeval scholastic
theological philosophy: St. Thomas Aquinas and all that. Poor old
Galileo ran into all the consequences of that resurgence ...'
The wizard was silent and reflective for some time. Then
he pulled himself together, took down his arms, and poured for them both.
'Ah yes. Yes. One of Suarez's great precepts said: God
can do everything except that which involves contradiction. Now, I
wonder how Suarez knew that?' 'Well, surely,'
Esperenza objected, 'this gentleman would not want to make God look
silly. S/he must surely be exempted from the prospect of undertaking
something impossible.' 'Look silly': the wizard came
close to sneering. 'Impossible - to God? Don't you see? It's poor old
God now, as well as poor old Galileo. What Suarez is doing is to inflict
his own paradigmatic certainty on Universal Omnipotence. How dare he do
that? He could just as well have said that God did not create the
universe out of nothing, because that's impossible. Happily for God,
Suarez's paradigmatic inhibitions did not include that prohibition.'
'Where do you stand with all this, by the way?' she was
interested to know. 'Do you believe in God?' 'I am
not so stupid as to define the name God so that it would be possible to
disbelieve in that existence.' 'Isn't that a cop
out?' 'No' the wizard pronounced the word without
emphasis, with a rising inflection, in the tone of voice in which one
says lightly "Friday" when asked what day it is. 'I
deal in knowledge, not belief, and knowledge comes only from personal
experience. Names, such as the name God, or the name of God, if there is
one, are not experiences, but terms in theological philosophy. So all of
that is a model for me which I can use or not. If the model turns into a
paradigm, it ceases to be negotiable, and people end up being burned at
the stake. It really is a strong distinction that we are drawing out.'
'Why do you say theological philosophy, and not just
theology?' 'Because mystical theology is not a
philosophy, and comes closer to experience than philosophical debate.'
Esperanza came back to the topic of her concern, and asked
how it was possible for careful, thoughtful people to fail to keep their
models negotiable, and to become trapped in paradigm instead.
'You left a car down in the village,' Wizard Prang
declared as if it were an impropriety.
She agreed, although puzzled by the turn of events. He
asked for the ignition key. She fumbled in her bag and gave it to him. As
he had expected, the key was attached to a plastic disc bearing the hire
company's initials and the address in London whence she had set out.
The wizard sprang out of his chair, fumbling with the
keys, and went out of the front door to get a better light in the dusk. It
was a mistake, because there were a number of whatneeds-blessings (maybe
whats-need-blessing is more correct) waiting patiently outside, and he
could hardly pretend not to notice. Anyway, he eventually returned,
holding the separated key and disc in one hand, and waving the split ring
that had joined them in the other. He gave her the
split ring and the key.
'The key is the key to your whole life, we shall
suppose. It must be kept safe, and properly located, or you will lose
it. So everyone agrees upon the value of a secure infancy, and the
training in walking and talking and so on that goes with that. However,
there is a price to pay for any sort of security, and especially in
infancy and early childhood. You get locked on to a particular way of
doing necessary things which is to say, a culture.'
The visitor, following the gestures of his hands and head
split the ring open with her thumbnail, and locked the key onto the sprung
wire. She could very well see what was going to be the outcome. She slowly
and reflectively moved the key through the first ninety of its three
hundred and sixty degrees.
'Stop!' commanded Wizard Prang and Esperanza looked up.
'How old are you now?' She hesitated. 'No, I mean, take a look. You have
used about a quarter of your life say twenty years. Any predictions?'
'Well, I am on a track, obviously, which will determine
that my key stays on this ring for good. Yes, I had made some plans by
the time I left the university.'
The wizard tossed her the disc that had been on the ring.
'Put that on the ring too: It says what sort of life is
yours, for you are already typecast by your early background. The disc
will follow your key right round the ring and you'll have a devil of a
job to shake it off. Shake isn't the word once the ring snaps shut:
you'll need a hacksaw.'
Wizard Prang grinned as he asked his Latin American guest
if she knew the meaning of the initials printed on the disc.
'Yes, I do remember, as it happens. They mean Wogan's
Auto Service Products,'
She was puzzled by the question.
He laughed this time: 'And I thought that they had you
down as a White Anglo Saxon Protestant.'
She laughed too, but not waspishly flashing dark eyes and
white teeth. She swept the key and the disc on together
for the rest of her life, and then click. It was all over in five seconds.
Esperanza pulled a face. Well, whatever it is, it's on my tombstone now.'
'That's it. Read the paradigmatic obituaries. Once you
know that the poor chap was an eminent brain surgeon, you could write
the whole thing. You would be wrong in each detail of course, but I bet
the newspaper reader who ploughed through the fictitious obit would not
spot anything wrong. The obit epitomizes the paradigm, just as our hero
personified it.' 'You mean he would have predictable
qualifications, would have been consultant to eminent hospitals, and won
the appropriate honours.' 'I do. But Information can
be valuable, even when negative, because it helps to adjust selection
entropy.’ 'Dios mio,' breathed Esperanza. Out loud
she said: What exactly do you mean?' 'For instance,'
the wizard replied, 'we know that he will have a long list of
publications, and we could invent lots of plausible titles that would go
unremarked. But we also know that the list will not include a book
entitled: Teach Yourself Neurosurgery.'
Philosophic theology, economics, life, professionalism.
All very heavy stuff. They did some frivolous things. All very
paradigmatic stuff though, too. "Mi casa es su casa"
had turned out to mean that Esperanza was by now allowed to do the
pouring. Wizard Prang had his feet up, and waved his
chalice in the air. She watched with bated breath, but nothing happened.
'I was standing in the street,' said the wizard,
'wondering why I was not somewhere else....'
He paused, and frowned.
'Ah, yes, selection entropy again. I knew where I was,
you see.'
Esperanza stayed quiet. She hoped he would just go on. He
did.
'Anyway: a small boy came up to me and gazed at my
beard. "Were you in Noah's Ark?" he demanded accusingly. I denied the
possibility. "Then," he said with a note of triumph, "why weren't you
drowned?"'
Esperanza convulsed herself, and it was she who spilt her
wine on the floor, the wizard noted with quiet satisfaction. Then he
noticed (Mark 2, or deutero noticing) that the wine evaporated the instant
it hit the tiles.
'That's not true,' she finally managed to say.
'Oh, but I assure you it is true.'
There was a silence.
Wizard Prang had an afterthought: 'Of course, if all you
meant to say was that it didn't actually happen, then you're quite
right.' Eventually she said: 'Even the small boy was
already trapped in a paradigm. You were right to say that the key
arrives on the key ring at birth. But is there no way out?'
'Certainly there is. First, refuse to give the paradigm
any rights over you. Systematically devalue your paradigms into models.
They then become negotiable. Second, observe that the models that
generate paradigms, or perhaps degenerate into paradigm, are usually
based upon dichotomies. If you meet a dichotomy, kill it as the
Buddhists almost say.' 'The dichotomies support
unresolvable contradictions, like either being in the Ark or in the
water or, to take my semiprecious science of economia, like having
either inflation or unemployment. But another paradigm, sorry, model, is
obviously available for the Ark story. It takes in the evident
possibility that you weren't around at the time.'
'That is indeed a possibility,’ Wizard Prang replied gravely. 'But if I
assured you that I was around at the time, you would have to contrive
something else, some other model more. They are infinite in number
y'know.'
He was inspecting his fingernails.
'No, I don't know. If it's not a combination of Keynes
and Friedman, who what is it? Adam Smith?' 'He is not
around at the time,' intoned the momentarily wicked wizard, hiding his
hand. If a dichotomy yields contradictories that need to be combined,
kill it. What use is a dichotomy like that? You are relying on a wrong
model, which means that this model has to be changed not messed about
with. You need a new structure, one that does not generate nonsense. And
if the model is not negotiable, if it is in fact a paradigm, structure
is the very thing you cannot alter.' She became
excited. 'So that's why I can't see any alternative. None exists within
my paradigm.' 'That's it. Let's go and tell the prime
minister over here, or your president over there, or indeed any
politician.' After some rapid reviewing, Esperanza
said rather plaintively: 'Aren't any politicians capable of seeing
this?' 'Well, I have known one or two. They are
called by funny names if they are countenanced at all. Socratic gadfly,
for instance. That neutralizes them pretty effectively.'
'Then why the hell do we elect politicians who are
locked into paradigms? And I thought that the usual complaint was that
they are pragmatists.' 'Steady,' the wizard said.
'Everyone is locked into his own particular paradigm. Point one. Point
two is that we actually pay politicians extra for the potency of their
paradigms. It's just the politicians who "know" who command respect, and
are held to provide necessary leadership. We won't elect them unless
they're quite nuts, that is to say.'
Esperanza noted how her host relished juxtaposing
technical and academic jargon.
'What happened to the claim to pragmatism? To "politics
as the art of the possible"?'
Wizard Prang did his chuckle slap thigh routine.
'The claim to pragmatism is part of the paradigm. It
does not exist outside it.' 'Phew,' she said in
Spanish.
There was a gathering together of things.
What looked like a last drink was dispatched.
Esperanza stood up.
'I ought to go.'
"Ought implies can," said Immanuel Kant: but that was on
another imperative occasion, so neither of them heard.
Of course, she had booked a room in the village on the way through. Seven
homesteads in the village did bed and breakfast. Mrs.
Jones had dutifully written down her booking. But she had neither bothered
to open the guest room windows, nor to air the sheets.
"Wizards," she would say to herself on learning of a visitor's plans.
"Wizards," she had said to herself on this occasion, shrugging a row of
exclamation marks off her shoulders. All of this could
have been slightly unfair. It should have occurred to Mrs. Jones, that the
other six B and B's were also run by Mrs. Joneses. That could make a
difference.
'I ought to go,' said Esperanza again.
Their eyes remained together. Her aura
was now in synch. She knew it. He
saw it. She knew he saw it. He took
a hand in both of his. She did not proffer her cheek.
'In my country,' her accented English was itself
accented, and slipping slightly too, 'at such a moment, and between good
friends, it is permitted a kiss upon the mouth.'
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