Dimensions

Dimensions

   One of my aquarium fish passed away the other night, that after a rather lengthy battle of being upside down (swim bladder infection, something that usually comes on unexpectedly and almost always without explanation).  It was and is terrible to watch something once so strong and once so vibrant just struggle to come back, and as with any living being, a difficult decision for the observer, whether viewing from behind a glass tank or behind a glass window in a hospital.  It (the passage of life, no matter the difficulty) is something that all beings need to go through, said Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, although when you are there watching, you find those words difficult to embrace as true.  End the suffering, you think...take the dog to the vet and have her put down, that old quality of life vs. quantity of life debate.  But a fish, you wonder?  Ours was over 12 years old, as are most of the other fish in our 55-gallon tank, trapped as prisoners but safe in a sense...fed, their environment stable, the lights on and off on schedule, the temperature rarely fluctuating.  Rather like our cats, rather like our dogs, rather like us.

   It was ironic then that I began belatedly watching the Canadian series (now in its 4th season), Saving Hope, one which deals with the goings-on in a Toronto hospital except that (at least in the first season...okay, I'm behind here), one of the main characters is in a coma and observing things from the "outside," something puzzling even to him.  Where am I, he asks?  And how --or do-- I get back, or move on?  Along the way, he runs into many other "patients" passing on, from a child to a teen to an elderly gent, all facing their own transitions, some understanding and some not, some returning and some not, some able to remember and some not.  "Nice tux," one says, he being alive and able to see the people in the "middle" of sorts; a curse, he calls it, that of being able to see several dimensions.

   This was also the premise of a recent issue of Wired, that of trying to explain the various dimensions.  Guest interview was writer and director, Christopher Nolan: Higher dimensions may exist, but we have no words to describe them.  Mathematics can give us a glimpse, but only those of us with highly developed algebraic skills (not me, for the record).  Which brings us to the most frustrating part: We can only really see the dimensions below the one we exist in—a problem never more clearly or cleverly explored than in Reverend Edwin A. Abbott’s novella, Flatland, where a three-dimensional creature struggles to explain his existence to a two-dimensional creature who can himself see only one of the dimensions he lives in...Film’s relationship with dimensionality has always fascinated me: two-dimensional representations of three dimensions printed onto a strip whose length adds the dimension of time.  Time is strikingly represented by the rapidly unspooling rolls of celluloid on a projector.  If you’ve ever been in the booth when the film spills off the reel and onto the floor while the movie is running, you have a very tactile idea of the relentless and frightening passage of time by which we all live.

   Interesting idea, that --at least to our minds-- we can only look backward but not forward, at least dimensionally and not immediately.  I thought of this recently, both in watching the television series and in having my first root canal (ouch, you say).  I was dreading the pain since I had heard so many agonizing stories (in my case, unfounded, for the entire procedure was painless...and fascinating;  I marveled at how instruments could be so tiny as to go in and snag a nerve, clean out the chambers and be filled, all within a tiny cramped workspace, and all through a tiny hole as is done in orthoscopic surgeries -- my friend's recent heart stent operation left him with a hole in his arm the size of a toothpick and had him out an walking the next day).  I was losing a part of me, a tooth dying or dead, something that needed to be removed or taken care of before its infection would spread (turns out, even with other animals, an abscessed tooth can quickly lead to heart problems).  Here's my attempt to show the before, during (the canals of the nerve emptied) and after (the canals filled).

The nerve canals cleaned

The infection, pre-root canal

The nerve canals filled

  In the interim, the canals are cleaned (with tiny files then an activated solution), then treated with some sort of antiseptic, then filled and the tiny entry hole capped...voila, your tooth good as new (or what I have to believe is good as new).  All of this done in front of me on a screen a bit larger than my television for viewing.  The television show has been similar, the surgeries depicted working on equally small areas and eliciting equal awe from the patient upon recovery.

   "Death is the original other dimension--a parallel universe that, for millennia, we have anxiously tried to understand," wrote Wired in a piece titled The Talking Dead by Jon Mooallem.   And in the same issue, astronaut Marsha Ivins said: When you travel on Earth, you're almost never out of touch.  Anyone can reach you if they need to.  But going to space, you are really out of reach.  You have comm with the ground and email, sure, but there's not much you can do about those everyday worries: Did I pay the bills?  Did I feed the dog?  I felt like everyday things just stopped at the edge of the atmosphere.   I was totally liberated from Earth.  But all those earthly concerns reattached as soon as we reentered.  By the time I landed, my brain was mapping out a to-do list.

   One thing is certain, we will all find out.  Life ends, and whatever comes next, well, comes next (if anything).  Or at least, that's as far as our 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional minds can imagine.  But if tweaking out a new dimension is as easy as putting on a pair of glasses (as in a 3-D movie, tweaked from a 2-dimensional projection onto a flat screen), think of what wonders might be waiting for us if only we could break past our limitations.  Would we call such a vision a curse?  Or would we stare in wonder (assuming we would still "see" visually) at what was in front, behind, around us...maybe in us?  We may never come to recognize these things in our lifetimes, but perhaps we may finally come to understand empathy, to move from behind that window and see beyond, to relate to that patient, to that wounded lion or elephant, to the moth with only 3 days of life...to a struggling fish.