Multidimensional Daniella

Multidimensional Daniella

A cautionary tale, philosophically by Alexander France

When you're young, you always think that by the time you grow up the future will have arrived, with flying cars and robots and all the rest. Then when you do grow up you realise that it isn't true, and tick off another small box in that dark little place in your mind, the dungeon of dashed dreams. Well, not to be smug, but in my case it did happen. The Future is Here, at least as far as my early 21st century sensibilities are concerned. In 2054, with the help of some clever theories on gravity and electromagnetism by a Swiss scientist called Heinz Hook, the German automobile company BMW brought out the first fully wheel-less car. And in 2072, with the help of some even cleverer theories about the way conciousness arises from the brain by a Scottish neuroscientist called Sir Angus Campbell, the first 'living' robot was born deep underground in an American research bunker. His name is Harry and he's still alive today, if a little slow. And for all the rest, we have pills that fill you up like a meal with full nutrition (a favourite amongst workaholics and athletes), proper 3D cinemas with real 3D films; the debate rages on between stuffy traditionalist flat film-makers and innovative 3D directors over whether any of their work should be considered art; and SI (Standard Information) systems which are installed in everyone's house by law, Big Brother style. The only difference is ours are for looking out, not for anyone looking in. They are combined computers, televisions, hifis, telephones etc etc - all the media in one simple medium. And there's a hand-held version too. But enough of all this. I'm just showing off, when really I should be thinking of what the kids are dreaming about now, and trying to invent before anyone else. That's the way to make a billion.
I'm a little old for all that now though. In fact I feel a little old for everything these days. Getting out of my chair is my current enemy; it makes me make noises I never thought possible of a human, let alone myself. But I thank my fate every day that my mind has not slowed up with my body, and I can still retreat into my imagination and memory unshackled as I am in life. It is a certain story from my memory, perhaps coloured over time by my imagination, that I would like to tell you. My justification, if it's necessary, is that when I was younger I didn't just like to fantasize about the future, what's in front of you. I also loved to think about the sideways from now, the wierder things happening on either side of the narrowness of human perception. And when I was at university I got my first taste of what breaking those boundaries is like. I'm not talking about magic mushroom or LSD trips in my student digs. I'm not even talking about falling in love. I'm talking about a girl. A girl I met who lived in between worlds, for whom there was no boundaries. Her name was Daniella.
Daniella was born in 1986 in a small village in Herefordshire. Her parents were an intensely intellectual coupling; a feminist philosopher and a great poet, and their coming together shook the stuffy 80s establishment, most of whom had previously believed the wife to be a lesbian. Daniella was the only child of their marriage, and since her parents had forgotten their own childhood, so wrapped up were they in plumbing the furthest reaches and deepest depths of humanity, they did not attempt to give her one. Instead she was forced through her parents constant philosophizing and debating to grow up very much aware that she was an insignificant bunch of molecules that had randomly come together and would soon disperse again, no one being any the wiser. This was tough to swallow at the age of six, but Daniella took it on the chin and decided that if that was the case then she need not bother trying to better herself as they taught her at school. Instead she was going to follow the Hindus and try to get herself reincarnated as something interesting, preferably with fangs.
You can imagine Daniella's schooldays were somewhat trying for all involved, especially her teachers (though she would say that she'd had the toughest time). Whenever they tried to state a fact Daniella, as she had been taught at home, would always come up with a million problems with the statement's logic, then question the nature of truth and the ultimate existence of reality. This, although astounding for someone of such a young age, was very annoying to a primary school teacher who had simply told their class that the Egyptians lived in Egypt or something equally as banal. When she moved on to senior school her argumentative attitude towards the teachers was met with some approval by her peers, but she was generally marginalized for being 'wierd'. She led a solitary, furtive existence at school, and when puberty hit her, at home too. Her mother, distracted by her meisterwork "On The Passing Of Women Into The 21st Century: Shall We Continue?" (Continue what? I always thought, but never asked or read it), completely forgot that her daughter's biological clock was ticking away inside her. Soon it began to do things to her that she didn't entirely understand. For the first year of her period Daniella thought she was dying slowly, until she heard some other girls talking about it in the toilet. She felt very relieved. She grew and changed shape and was equally surprised by every twist in the plot of her physical development. By the time she was sixteen she was generally agreed upon by the boys in her year to be 'wierd, but fit.'
Against this background, laughed at by most but occasionally set upon by drunken boys at parties, what was going on in Daniella's head? Was she going through the normal teenage angst, insecurity and feelings of worthlessness? She may well have been, but more importantly (for my story at least) she was also thinking very clearly about her existence. Not in the usual sense of the way she lived her life, but in the really meaty, ultimate-question type way. And although she never got very far with that one (people rarely do), by way of thinking towards the boundaries of her existence, she got to thinking about those boundaries themselves. What were they? Why were they there? And much more scarily in my opinion, was there a way to break them down? For Daniella was not happy. Ignored at home, shunned at school, she wanted to retreat into a place where no one could get her, where she felt safe. And with impeccable philosophical reasoning she concluded that the infinite expanse waiting on either side of her conciousness was the best place to run.
But try as she might, Daniella couldn't break the boundaries. She could touch them, if she concentrated hard, and once she thought she'd felt a fragile part, but there was always something blocking her, a kind of version of herself which always destroyed what she tried to create, belittled what she thought and contradicted what she said. She tried to talk to this alternate self sometimes, but the results were always disastrous. She was moody, wily, selfish, manipulative, dishonest (sometimes equivocal), unfriendly and often rude, and Daniella became so frustrated on occasion she tore her hair out and spoke both parts out loud, so that she seemed like a schizophrenic. But she wasn't really. Everybody is two. Some are three or even four. Daniella, though I dispute it, claims to have met someone who was five, once. Imagine trying to make a decision!
So we come to my entrance in the story, for as hard as Daniella tried, all through sixth form and her obligatory 'gap' year (which she spent in Guinea trying without success to communicate her complicated philosophical ideas to witch doctors), she remained unsuccesful in her attempts to 'go sideways in all directions', as she liked to call it. She turned up at our hall halfway through freshers' week looking both beautiful and aloof, a killer combination for any self-respecting 'Freshers' Friend', as young men with loose morals were known (and liked to call themselves sometimes). She was hounded from the moment she got there with proposals for drinks, dates, and 'fun'. She refused them all.
I watched her from a distance for the first few weeks, not having the courage to go straight up and talk to someone so mesmerizing, waiting for her to give in to someone else so I wouldn't have to think about her. But she didn't, and as time went on I began to realise I had become slightly fixated with her. My jaw slackened and food fell out of my mouth if I saw her at dinner. My notes were in constant disarray from being dropped so many times in her presence. She turned me from a (fairly) coherent young man into a lumbering buffoon, struck dumb by the god of polite conversation. I didn't know what she thought of me but I realised that anything I actually said would probably improve my standing in her eyes, so I resolved to talk to her at the first opportunity. Or the next time I was drunk.
As it happened, we were both sober at our first meeting, and I didn't have to contrive it. I was taken aback by the whole situation at first, but soon I got in the swing of it, especially when I realised that this wasn't going to be one of those awkward "what's your name what's your course what you up to tonight" kind of conversations. We passed each other in the library, out of context, and we held eye contact for a split second too long. It was inevitable. We were on a crash course for hello.
"Hi, er... I think we live in the same building." I said, lamely.
"Yes." This was difficult. I had no idea what to say next.
"Sorry, what's your name?" I knew it already.
"Daniella."
"So, Daniella, what course d'you do?"
"Ancient and Cult Beliefs."
"Wow, that sounds really interesting. So what cultures have you been studying?" I realise how clichéd this all is but I'd never met a girl so inscrutable. I didn't know what to say. Her face was as still and composed as a painting, so that when her lips moved to talk it was unsettling somehow, like watching a plant grow in fast motion, or seeing the hour hand on a clock move.
"Well, I'm here to get books for an essay about Plato." My mind raced to remember something about the philosopher.
"Oh, right yeah, Plato," I said, stalling. "That's the one with the Forms, and the Cave and the Line and all that."
"Yes," she said, and from a small flash of intensity in her eyes I could see she was suddenly interested. I panicked, realising that the terms I had just dredged up from my memory meant nothing to me.
"Heh, not that I'm an expert or anything," but then, with a sudden pang of realisation that it was now or never for me to make a good first impression, I leapt into the strangest conversation of my whole life. "But, you know like, I think it's an amazing idea that there's this whole like fuller, richer world beyond the bounds of our own shadowy perception, like we're trapped in a cave like staring at the wall." As an undergraduate I thought this sounded very impressive, and I was confirmed in my thought by the wide-eyed smile I received from the very attractive girl standing in front of me. Least not I couldn't believe I'd actually got her face to move.
We sat down in far corner of the library and she explained to me in no uncertain terms about her internal fight with the alternate version of herself, and her failure to break the boundaries of her mind. I was shocked, taken aback that someone could donate themselves to philosophy so willingly, like some wierd subjective autopsy that must needs go on while the person is still alive. But at the same time I was even more mesmerized by her than before, fascinated that someone could be dedicated to something so interesting.
After that meeting we saw each other often, discussing the intricacies of what she was trying to do. She encouraged me to try and engage in the same techniques as she used to feel out the edges of my being, looking for the chink of light while trying to ignore the crushing voice of my other self telling me it will never work. She claimed it would help her 'explain it better'. I discovered in my attempts that I am actually three selves, one honest and brave, one distraught with a hint of angry malice and a turncoat, flitting between the two, waiting for weakness. As you can imagine, I did not make much better progress than Daniella, though a couple of times I felt I had come close to really understanding her.
Then one day came the breakthrough. Daniella woke up and managed somehow not to wake her other self, so she snuck to the edge of her being and stuck a big mental sword right in. Her other self screamed in pain, shamed that her enemy had escaped, but it was futile. Daniella was free. She wallowed in wonder at the vast infinity which had lain just beyond the edges of her, dimensionless and with more dimensions that her mind could handle. It was all of it and none of it, together in an infinite contradiction. Then she asked herself, where is my body? Am I still meat? Still stuff? She thought about her arm, and there it was, but stretching and contracting like a computer screensaver. She blinked, and she could see her eyelids from the back. Then she saw in the midst of the vastness of everything, ever, and nothing, including nothing that is something really, her pillow. And her chair, sideways. That looked odd. She sat up and felt the floor under her feet. And suddenly she was running, banging on a door, running into my room.
"I've done it!" She cried. "I've gone sideways in all directions! I'm mymoreself!" I couldn't believe it at first, but the more I looked at her, the more I realised that she wasn't quite the same anymore. She seemed even more still somehow, like a deep ocean.
"Come," she said, "I can take you too. I can help you."
"Okay," I said. "Does it hurt?"
"Not at all." came the reply, but I did not see her make it for I could already feel myself expanding and encompassing so much that it could go on for ever. I became no and yeah, if and but, and all or nothing. It's pretty difficult to put into words. It's pretty difficult to think about it if I'm honest. Unlike Daniella, after that first time I did not feel the need to repeat the experiment. It was all very well, but rather a lot to handle if you understand me. Quite weighty.
And so my amazing story of Multidimensional Daniella (as she became affectionately known around campus) comes to an end. You probably have some questions; I myself have many. But it was a long time ago now and I'm tired. I'm going to watch the SIstem.