Worlds in Worlds

Whose story do you want to hear? Whose stories will I tell? Think big, then small.

More than everything. An assembly of everythings. Imagine an archipelago of bubbles, floating in pitch black darkness. Each orb is filled with a kind of suspended, glowing dust. Each fleck of dust resembles a tiny, sparkling diamond. Another description: a collection of snow-globes, each filled with twinkling stars instead of snowflakes. Whose story am I telling?

Look closer. A single bubble, slowly inflating in the dark. Or rapidly inflating? Hard to tell. It is filled with many shining specks, and little shapes like eye floaters. It is everything. Whose story am I telling?

Look closer still, focus on one of those specks until it grows to take up your entire field of view. You’ll end up with a shell of the shark eye sea snail, and a sparkly one at that. It’s got a creamy coloring, a bit of a milky way about it. Whose story am I telling?

Take one shiny point on that shell, and zoom in yet again. It’s now a candle illuminating a rock collection. No, not rocks, but jewellery. One item stands out, an emerald and sapphire ornament. Do you recognize it?

A whole world. Life on its surface. Oxygen to breath and water to live by. There are many stories set on and about this world, but nearly all are skewed, little more than propaganda: they cast the whiny, nose-picking teacher’s pet of this world in their lead role. They ignore the shy girl who has yet to take off her glasses and have her braces removed. If a fair story was to be told about this world, it would star the plants, with a supporting cast of fungi, arthropods and fish. But whose story would you want to hear?

But let’s indulge ourselves for a bit. Look at our own world in this world. Here’s a short story: There’s a country, not too big but not too small. Its banks worry about inflation, its government about the budget, its courts about the law. The end. Politics and economy, whole worlds onto themselves. This story has no interesting characters. You’ve heard it a million times, and you don’t want to hear it again. I admit, it’s not the story I want to tell either. How about a real indulgence? A real story, now that we are in a recognizable world?

It’s fall. Light shines through auburn leaves. The movement of clouds combined with a gentle swaying of branches amounts to a flickering beam being cast on Jackson’s face. He constantly squirms and shifts his spot under the old oak tree, trying to keep the sun out of his eyes. Eventually he sets down his journal, a small, black little notebook with a silvery wire spine, and heads over to talk to an old friend from high school that he spotted across the park. What a world away those days seem now!

In the meanwhile, Jackson’s niece Susy has been busy making a few friends of her own on a nearby pirate ship. Four to be exact, the ship’s full complement. It’s tough sailing, what with each crew member claiming to the captain and accusing the others of mutiny. After a good deal of squealing and giggling, the conflict is not drawn to a conclusion but is rather side-stepped, with Susy remembering that she knows the location of nearby treasure. The other three children follow her down the slide and over to below the oak tree, where they raid Jackson’s bag for chocolate chip cookies. Is this the story I wanted to tell? The final world we visit?

A brave scout marches on a sleek, black ground. Nearby is a tall, spiraling wire fence, recently scaled by our intrepid explorer in search of new wealth and resources for her kingdom. And wealth has she found: a feast, laid out before her on the ground! Being an ant, she has no need for fiat currency. But if I were to translate the value of what she found, to quantify the value of those cookie crumbs, I’d put it at roughly twenty thousand dollars.