Being in the Real World

No, today’s post is not about university professors leaving their ivory towers to encounter the real world. Nor is it about how to equip our students for the twenty-first century skills they will need to find fulfillment in the real world. If that is what you’re looking for, there’s plenty to wade through in the mass media.

Instead, I’m going to muse on what it would be like for a fictional character to suddenly take on flesh. Fictional characters coming to the real world are all the rage now. Just look at the juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there’s an important difference: the superheroes and mutants are not moving from a comic-book-fiction world into a real world. They’re just here in the real world. In the Once Upon A Time TV series, characters who come from fictional fairy tales actually travel via a portal to Planet Earth, albeit mainly constrained in the small town of Storybrooke. Do they come from a “Book” world? Or do they come from another “Physical” realm? And how would it be “adjusting” to our earthly realm?

As part of my holiday reading, I finished the sixth book in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, “One of our Thursdays is Missing”. While I feel that the overall story is less interesting than the earlier books, there is a fantastic chapter on what it might feel like for a “book” character to physically experience coming alive. The chapter is appropriately titled “Alive”. The protagonist has just made the trip through a “portal” device from BookWorld into the Real World. In her first trip, she is aided by an agent on the ground who has been stationed there for a while.

Paraphrasing Jasper Fforde would not do justice to his description. I’ve italicized the quoted sections in the book to reduce quotation marks. (The quoted sections will be punctuated with some of my musings. So really, these are Fforde’s musings.) Here goes.

I felt a pain in my chest. I didn’t know what it was until, with a sound like a tornado, a hot gush of foul air erupted from this shock, I spontaneously did the opposite and drew in an equally fast gush of air that cooled my teeth and tasted of pine needles.

“It’s called breathing,” came a voice close at hand. “It’s very simple and everyone does it. Just relax and go with the flow.”

“I used to ‘take a breath’ and ‘exhale uneasily’ at home,” I managed to say, “but this is quite different.”

“Those were merely descriptive terms intended to suggest a mood,” came the voice again… “Here you are doing it to stay alive.”

“What’s that random sensation of memories I keep getting?”

“It’s smells. They have a way of firing off recollections...”

That’s one thing we don’t see from the characters in Once Upon A Time or movies with alien invasions. Sometimes the different atmospheres are taken into account requiring some sort of spacesuit or exoskeleton. But more often than not, aliens are able to function in practically the same way. Thor, coming from Asgard, seems just fine on Earth. But maybe he has taken the trip many times and is used to the adjustment, so we don’t see him floundering. Or maybe the atmosphere on Asgard works in the same way as on Midgard. Also, hardly anyone stops to admire the view. Fforde brings to light what might be a major difference between what a book character experiences in his/her own fictional world, and how the actual physical world is much more vivid, and full of extraneous stuff – that would otherwise be distracting to the narrative.

I sat and blinked for some minutes. The view was quite astonishing, not only in range but in detail. I had been used to seeing only what was relevant within a scene. Back home, anything extra would have been unnecessary and was a pasty shade of magnolia with the texture of uncooked dough. Here there was everything, in all directions, in full color and in full detail. Several books’ worth of descriptions were just sitting there… I sat there quite numbed by the overload of sensations.

At this point, the protagonist's helper identifies himself as Agent Square from Flatland. As a two-dimensional being, he experiences three dimensions by moving through and imagining what the square slices measuring out the third spatial dimension look like when compiled. There’s also an interesting discussion about how we three-dimensional beings view time by moving through it in slices. Except that, we can’t quite control the speed and direction in which we move through this fourth dimension. In a previous post, I mused about how one as a reader of a book could move forward or backward at any pace, or jump to different parts of the story at any time in BookWorldTime. But when the BookWorld protagonist enters the real world, she is constrained by the flow of RealWorldTime.

I moved to stand up, but everything felt funny, so I sat down again. “Why does my face feel all draggy?” I asked. “The underneath of my arms too… everything feels all… weighted down.”

“That’ll be gravity,” said Square with a sigh.

“We have gravity in the BookWorld,” I said. “It’s not like this.”

“No, we just talk at though gravity existed. There’s a huge difference. In the BookWorld, gravity is simply useful. Here it is the effect of mass upon space-time. It would be manageable if it were constant, but it isn’t. Acceleration forces can give one a localized gravitational effect that is quite disconcerting…”

“If this were the BookWorld, you’d have one of those watches that counts down from [X time] to add some suspense. Believe me, the plot in this world takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve not done anything for [the boss] for six months. That’s nothing in the BookWorld, barely half a dozen words. Out here it really is six months... The boredom. There’s a limit to how much reality TV one can watch… Now, what do you want to know first?”

“Walking would be a good start.”

Gravity also turns out to be tricky. This passage reminded me of observing toddlers trying to walk for the first time. They toddle. Keeping one’s balance can be tricky, particular if you have a relatively larger head. I just take walking for granted, until I have an accident that impairs my walking ability. Then I start to notice the process of walking. It’s a good thing we can automate and thus filter out of consciousness many of our activities. It would be quite the task trying to breathe, pump blood via the heart, see and smell, all simultaneously while consciously working through the process. Cognitive Overload.

Agent Square turns out to be a good teacher, and walks his student through processes of increasing difficulty. He pushes her to try new things at appropriate times, but also gives her time to digest what she is learning and to automate the process. One of my goals this coming semester in my non-majors class is to monitor cognitive load in my students. I did not do as good a job when I taught the class last year, as I was trying other new things. However, since I’ve decided Not To Textbook the course this coming semester, I feel more freedom to rearrange the units in a way that would make sense both thematically and cognitively. In fact, I started working on this today – my first day back at work after an excellent holiday! Back in the Real World, I suppose.