Chapter 6 - George
Playing with his toy city is tiring work. Little self-powered vehicles are moving around it like mice.
Miranda is not sure that she approves of all this technology. Georgie is already starting to enter the code determining the paths of these things around his city. Next thing he'll be taking over aircraft!
But he has an artistic side that she can foster. Beautiful Georgie, only two more days to enjoy your company.
"I'm thirsty Gran..."
Miranda's reverie is broken by Georgie wanting a glass of milk. There is already a cold glass on the sideboard anticipating him.
"Come and sit with me while Gran tells you a story about how cities began. Bring your drawing book..."
She starts in the traditional way:
"Long, long ago...
"There were only a few people in the world. They lived by wandering about, eating plants they could find, or animals that they could easily catch...."
"I'll draw a woman with a bag... see she is looking for fruit in this tree... and here is a man with a spear..."
"But after many, many years some smart people discovered that food plants could be deliberately grown and animals could be tamed to carry and pull things, like a cart or a plough, as well as being bred and killed for food. So now people could build houses in one place and settle down."
"Let's draw them farming... This is the farmer and here is a pig... and a horse..."
"Soon they built villages and some people began to specialise in particular skills. Some would plant and reap and others would make ploughs and some would manage and organise everything."
"People had always swapped things with each other just like they do nowadays in Swap Meets in The Cloud. But now that bakers made bread and thatchers roofed houses, they needed a way of deciding how many loaves of bread could be swapped for a new roof. So, they invented tokens called 'money' as a way of valuing different things like bread and houses, as well as the time other people spent helping or even just amusing them... That's what we call credit today."
"This is the market square; and over here we'll put in the blacksmith who shoes horses and makes things out of metal..."
"The trouble was that not everyone wanted to live in a village. Some were nomadic herdsmen and some found that raiding the new towns and settlers was a lot easier than actually settling down themselves. It was like waiting until a neighbour's tree has ripe fruit then picking them yourself. So, towns and cities built walls and forts and employed soldiers to protect them."
Bands of raiders appeared on the next page and a battle took place outside the town. Georgie and his Gran were having a wonderful imaginative time. The battle raged over the page and onto the next.
"But now the people who controlled the soldiers with their weapons could also make the laws about who owned what. They soon took almost everything of value for themselves and claimed that this was part of the natural order, how things should be. Most people had to share what little was left. So, they had to work very hard to get enough to buy bread or a house."
Pictures of dark hovels and people in rags appeared under Miranda's pencil. George contributed a pig and a chicken and a 20th century train, somehow lost in time.
"There followed long, dark times when almost everyone was enslaved in some way by the most powerful and the very wealthy who gave themselves titles like: 'King' or 'Lord' or 'Tsar'"
"Let's draw a castle up here at the top... and some soldiers of the king."
George has almost finished his milk and is getting a bit sick of what he now realises is really a lesson. Gran is always trying to teach him something. But he likes to watch her and help her drawing; and she's nice to sit with, she's very pretty and she smells nice.
His toy city is beckoning. He wants to adjust his code to improve his traffic flow.
Miranda notices and asks him if he would like some more milk and a biscuit. He follows' her to the sideboard where their desires have already been anticipated by the household food delivery systems.
As they go to collect them from her beautiful sideboard, with its discretely up-to-date service-top, she casually asks him if he has learnt anything.
"I don't know," he says unhelpfully as it's a lesson.
"Well, we made up some wonderful stories about hunters and battles and kings and poor people but do you think any of it might actually have happened?"
"I don't know," he says again, now in his whiny, unhelpful voice.
Miranda is suddenly very serious. She takes him by the shoulders and looks him in the face. This may be the last time she can teach him something.
"This is very important George," she says. "People will tell you lots of things as you grow older, things that they believe themselves and sometimes things that they do not believe but want you to believe. Some of these things will be true and some will be imaginative. It is very important that you learn to tell the difference."
She called him George. Is he in trouble? His face begins to screw up on the verge of tears. She grabs him to her and cuddles him - a nice long cuddle. They are both all too aware of her imminent death.
Then they go back to the couch with the milk and biscuits and she starts to explain what she means:
"Since right back here, before the beginning of our first picture, soon after people learned to speak, they have been making up stories, like, Loopy, in your book. And almost every story we tell, and every idea we have, has been made up in someone's imagination - just like the stories we made up when we were drawing."
"Some of it was true but almost everything we said and drew we just made up. For all of the time since the first humans appeared people have made up a lot more than they could actually show to be true. So, when a person tells you a story it is very likely to have been made up, even if just a little bit. Some people are very good at making up stories with very little real information and if they seem to be true, many people will believe them and then tell others. We call that gossip. Some scientists think gossip is why humans learnt to speak in the first place."
"Until just a few lifetimes ago most people believed made-up stories about how things happen like how plants grow or babies are made. And the older the stories were the more they had spread and the more people believed them, because everyone else they knew did too. Even today a lot of people prefer the world of imagination to the real one. Some like to imagine that they once lived before in ancient Egypt or that the planets and stars influence their lives or that they have an invisible friend. Often artists, like us, and poets and writers and musicians have another world they go to in their imagination that helps them create."
"But although these imaginative stories once seemed to explain the things we didn't understand about the actual world, they were often wrong and stopped people bothering to find out the things about plants and animals and electricity and light and the chemical elements and their atomic properties that we know about today."
"So, people couldn't fly; or go into space; or communicate, except by sending another person or animal as a messenger; or build cars; or computers; or VPA's; and The Cloud couldn't exist; and there were no motors to replace a slave or a servant's labour; or toys like your plastic city."
"No plastic toys! That must have been awful," says George in mock horror, his confidence fully restored.
'He's so clever,' Miranda thinks with pleasure.
The drawing book has been an excellent way of keeping him engaged while she attempts to leave him a legacy that she has inherited from her parents and they from theirs, right back to the Enlightenment.
"Making up ideas about how the imaginary world might work is fine; but then experiments in the real world should be designed to try and prove that the idea is wrong. If experiments fail to disprove an idea in the real world it may be right."
George has begun fidgeting and she realises that this idea is still far too complicated for him. Even some adults have difficulty with it. Miranda turns to a clean page in the drawing book and begins to draw a rainbow and above it: Munchkin Land from the Wizard of Oz.
"Testing ideas in the real world is called 'empiricism' and it's a very grown-up idea. But it's really quite sensible. Suppose I say: 'Somewhere over the rainbow there is a yellow brick road'"
"There is Gran," George immediately confirms.
Sure enough, with a yellow pencil Miranda is drawing a brick road spiralling out under Dorothy and Toto and into the distance.
"So, you tell me how you could show me that there isn't really a yellow brick road that you can go to?"
"Because you can't go there! It's just a story Gran. Munchkin Land is just made-up like Treasure Island. But it's real in the story and there in the picture."
"Good boy, that's exactly right. If you can't actually go somewhere or see it or test it some other way, like using a microscope, but some people seem to know something about it anyway, it's probably just a story someone made up - because almost all stories that people tell are made-up."
"So, if someone talks about something that no one has seen or felt with their hand or heard or tasted or smelt, you can be pretty sure that someone made it up. And even if someone says it is real because they have seen it or heard it or felt it with their hand, they should be able to tell you where and when and how you can do the same. That's always a good idea because you need to be sure that they are not imagining it or telling a fib - like when you told me that a dinosaur broke my vase."
"Anybody can imagine a story and there are lots and lots more imaginative stories than there are sensible ideas that are useful in the real world. But people once believed many silly stories just because they never asked the sensible questions: what evidence do you have; and how could I test it for myself."
"Perhaps the most important question to ask is: What would I need to do to prove that it isn't real?"
"If they can't give you a sensible answer then you can be sure that it is neither true nor false in the real world and belongs in the world of imagination where true and false have no meaning."
"You know the film you like of A Midsummer's Night Dream where Oberon and Titania are having a squabble and this has made the weather stormy and unsettled?"
"Yes," says George.
"When you watch it on the MV it seems real because the MV tricks all our senses into believing they are experiencing something real. And it's a lovely, imaginative story about Gods and fairies and magic that seems to explain the weather. But we understand that things on the MV are not the same as in real life and it teaches us that we can easily be tricked into thinking things are real when they are really just made up."
"Do you know that at one time people believed that gods and fairies were actually responsible for things like the weather. They never asked: 'how could I show that there isn't a god or a fairy doing this?' If they had, they would have realised that you can't prove a god isn't true. And if you can't think of a way of proving something isn't true, then it's probably made up."
This is all getting too much for George. Too many words.
Remembering Paton's Reconciliation of Titania and Oberon in the historical National Gallery of Scotland, last time she was in Edinburgh:
Miranda draws Titania in the middle of the page then adds some fairies and Bottom lying asleep - but she keeps his donkey head. George adds some green with his pencil and Miranda shades the background to highlight the figures, adding light blue here and there to give the picture a magical feel.
For a little while she watches Georgie intensely colouring-in her initial sketch - trying to stay within the lines.
When George tires of colouring the picture, she continues with the lesson.
"In the story: now they have stopped arguing the weather will become calm. But if they fight again, it will become stormy again."
George takes up a pencil and dashes long lines across the page. "Stormy!" he says. She smiles indulgently as he continues to 'improve' her far too preciously drawn picture.
"Oberon and Titania are like most of the things we might dream or imagine. Even though we know that they are just made up we can't prove they don't exist somewhere. So sensible people said that we should ignore any claim that something is true or false until we have a way of testing for its existence in the real world."
"Today most people accept that the weather is in the 'sensible' world of physics and chemistry. We do not think that the weather is caused by Oberon and Titania, because they belong in the fantasy world of human imagination and storytelling. Nor do we think that earthquakes or volcanoes are the work of the gods."
"Imagination is like the world of dreams. Sometimes you dream of nice or horrible the things. When you wake-up you might try to find something that shows that you are no longer dreaming. You need to look around; or listen; or sniff or taste your arm; or pinch yourself."
"If you don't see or hear of feel, maybe you are still dreaming."
George pinches her instead. But only in fun.
"I wonder if Bottom was just dreaming the whole story?" she asks smiling, as she puts the drawing aside.
It's time for lunch.