True Nature of the World and Surrounding Environs, Lesson 1:

I am quickly learning that the truth of the universe simultaneously requires more and less technicality than werewrightwork. It’s like trying to analyze a morality play co-written by Isaac Newton and Aristotle. This format works better than the list of important facts. It gives me space to think.

I’m still getting my head around the first concept I was taught today. Victor struggles himself to explain it. He spent fifteen minutes trying to describe some bizarre scenario involving a lamp and a mutilated piece of paper before giving up. I managed to understand that it’s connected to corpuscles? Or at least, it’s part of why they’re no longer considered to exist.

Here’s what I understand. Things behave differently based on whether someone’s paying attention and how. That makes sense on some level. My brothers’ behavior is increasingly well-behaved the more they respect the person watching them, with Mother getting the best behavior and me getting the worst. But Victor’s claiming that everything behaves like this. That you can’t trust that a rock will still be a rock when you’re not checking. I objected, of course. It’s possible that something might change when it’s not being observed - the rock could be moved or soaked or split open while my back is turned - but to say it’ll definitely change cannot be proven without observing it. Then he said ‘that’s the mystery of it’, and when I threw my notebook in his face, he clarified that it’s easier to recognize that it’s happening when you observe something that usually isn’t observed, not directly. This was his list of examples:

• Really small things.
• Really large things.
• Hard to see things.
• Truth.
• History.
• Divinity.

It all rather sounds like nonsense, but he has to have some reason for believing this.

The second part of the lesson involved defining what ‘The United States of America’ is. That was much harder than I thought it’d be; it’s surprisingly difficult to define a country. It is not its soil; countries edit their borders regularly, so it can’t be described as an intrinsic property of the dirt. If the fields around Henshaw turn to glass, it wouldn’t stop being Henshaw; the crops would just fail and we’d just starve to death. It is not the people either. When a country edits their borders, people living on the outskirts might suddenly stop being part of that country. Never mind that half of this country decided they didn’t want to be in the USA and then they weren’t for half a decade. The best explanation I could come up with was ‘a shared agreement’. Everybody agrees that the USA is the USA so this is what it must be, like fiat money. I thought I had him, but then he asked me about people who don’t agree that the USA is the USA, and whether their opinion matters. At first, I thought it didn’t, but then I realized he was probably talking about the Indian coalition to the West, the one that formed after the Kit Carson debacle. Of course their opinion matters, people have died over it! After that, he stopped asking me questions and let me practice whittling for a bit - it’s good training to keep the hand steady for when I start cutting flesh and bone again instead of wood. While I did, he told me stories; he’s a better teacher than he is a storyteller, and my attention was more on the whittling rather than his word. Still, I recognized the one about the god devourer tricked into swallowing a stone - that one I learned from a book of Greek myths, Zeus foiling Cronus after Gaia created the Earth. The others were new. One was about a world of mud, shaped by water beetles and buzzard wings and the heat of the sun into the mountains of a proud people. Another was about a giant who created worlds and gods before the gods made his own flesh into the Earth.

Were they all histories? Histories that aren’t ‘observed’ here, not in Henshaw, Missouri. What’s supposed to change after this observation?

If I wake up tomorrow and everybody’s praying to Zeus, I think I’m going to throw him into the lake.