"Marta Randall - Circus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randall Marta)

Circus
by Marta Randall
If a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties,
does away with ideas of things and will not admit that every
individual thing has its own determinate idea which is always
one and the same, he will have nothing on which his mind can
rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power of reasoning.
PLATO, Dialogues, Parmenides
By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by
convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space.
DEMOCRITUS, Fragment 125

A


A1. The hands look remarkably like our own, but
are, of course, different. The print is too old
and too faint to allow the scoop to work on any
other part of the figure; only the hands are in
focus sharp enough for the scoop to extend its
invisible filaments into them and run an analysis.
The print is a tool; this much is clear. But the
contents of the print, at first, baffle us. The
hands move without hesitation, continuously,
spinning twelve shining balls through the air.
Vaguely discernible behind the moving balls is
the face of the juggler. The expression is neither
happy nor solemn; the eyes are softly
unfocused, the brow unlined, the lips straight
and full - it is an expression of total
concentration. Gradually the print dims even
further, the face dissolves completely, and in the
last few seconds the hands, too, disappear,
leaving the ball dancing alone against a dark,
static-smudged backdrop. The flight of the
balls, graphed in continuous lines, is complex,
and describes a symbol for the death of the
universe.
A2. The print itself is, by now, well beyond the orbit
of Pluto. It is encased in a sealed sphere,
properly pressurized, filled with a gas which will
preserve its dying molecules on the flight home.
We watch a third-generation reproduction, DNA
set into a chip of plasma. The scoop cannot
work properly on the reproduction, and its
readings on the original print are inconclusive. It
cannot give us a level-dating, nor does it
provide a tool-to-symbol ratio for the print. We
observe what results there are; we study the
glowing lines of the ball-curve graphics; we