He said to himself that every day he would perform the same act. Significantly, this act could not be a trivial or everyday one, such as drinking an inebriating liquid or showering at precisely the same time each day. It would have to be some act that had significance, meaning beyond the act itself.
Immediately, he sensed a problem with his decision, even during the performing of that act. We should probe it. One problem was the question of sameness, which is often confused with the concept of change. Same, for example, is an adjective. It can be used in this sense:
“Let’s go to the same place we went to yesterday,” he said.
“If we go to the same place as we did yesterday,” his friend said, “I will flood the injectors with gaseous Cryonetrium.”
“But today,” he said, “today, it’s a different restaurant by virtue of this being a different day.”
“Just because it’s a different day, Captain, doesn’t mean it’s a different restaurant or that the food will improve.”
He sought to verify his friend’s notion. He drove to the restaurant and found that the restaurant was, indeed, a different restaurant, as this day the sun was hidden behind clouds, giving the restaurant a different profile on the street, where, on the curb, different people had parked different automobiles.
He phoned his friend, whose name was the same this day as it was on Saturday and therefore doesn’t require revealing. “It’s a different restaurant. The sun’s behind the clouds. And if you recall, yesterday there was a green car at the door. Today, it’s a red car.”
“That doesn’t mean anything, Bones.”
“Yours is a problem of precision,” he said to his friend. “Consider John Timmon’s short film entitled change, which is strangely familiar to me even after all these years, or Carianne Garside’s painting called at the same time. No leaf can ever be precisely the same as another leaf. If I decide to place a leaf on a surface every day, the leaf will have subtle differences and the surface I lay it on will have a different accumulation of particulate matter. Nor can I claim that I as the actor will be the same actor as that actor who began the action, as one day I may be rich, another day, poor. When we claim that one man is the same man we mean this as an act of identification or complaint not as an act of intrinsic validity. What’s more, if we perform the same action as the day before we are enacting or performing, rendering an approximation of an image we hold in our minds and attempting to confirm some subtle sense of historical phenomenology.”
“Shoot me, Lieutenant, the Borg’s crushing me to meal,” his friend said, closing the line.
But even though he knew his friend was no longer on the line, he said into the phone, “Let’s go back to the painting at the same time, Carianne Garside’s painting, whose title mocks us with its fascinating irony. Its circles form a counterpoint to the angularity of leaves and fingers.”
How did the question of sameness and change come to him? This doesn’t matter. Perhaps it might in a different fiction.
We can, however, speculate that the concept of stasis played some role. All about him, on his drive home, on his journeys to the market, as he straightened papers on the judge’s desk, he witnessed the panorama of what his life had become. This is when Timmon’s film began to haunt him even though he hadn’t seen it in years. He heard the speaker’s voice come to him on the wind. When he woke in the morning, he heard the last echo of the voice trail out the window: It would have to . . . It would have to . . . and the song of the birds would rise to wave the words away.
And later, as his friend compared the present world to those claimed by science fiction programming, words such as ritual, great purpose, and systematically began to form as regular patterns in otherwise banal surfaces and phenomenon. He saw the word purpose form in the regularities of brick walls. He identified complex conventions in the heads of lettuce. In the sound of running water, he heard the chanting of monks. In recent election results, he formulated a new equation for calculating moribundity. He began to long for states of changelessness or equilibrium or unchanging rhythmic repetition.
He ran to the cinema. He sat in the flickering light of that lonely place and watched the film. He watched it several times. He watched it again and again and, after several more viewings, something stunned him, a realization, a recognition, a revelation: on the screen he was witnessing his own hand. He watched his own finger over and over press that leaf onto the surface, and that by some mysterious method, some confounding or weaving of time, the filmmaker had captured his daily ritual, an action he thought he’d kept secret.
Still more terrifying, the image of the painting suddenly came to him, Carianne Garside’s painting at the same time: those green and orange circles, wherein, with a brush, the artist had captured the repeated patterns of his daily movement through life.
