Insighting

I walked a long way today, my first long walk in a long while. The physical exertion of walking great distances generates better thinking than the mental exertion of attempting to generate better thinking. It's like this: you think about globalisation, and there is no reward for it. You walk around the globe, and you find that you know a lot about globalisation.

I am reading Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen stories, about an Oxford don who has a remarkable breadth of learning and a truly irritating way of using it. He solves mysteries, normally backwards and upside-down. Apparently, Crispin (not his real name) wrote nine detective novels from 1946 onwards. He listed his recreations as excessive smoking, Shakespeare, idleness and cats (among others). He also listed his antipathies, and made sure that his characters displayed interesting traits.

Reading Crispin is like taking a long walk in somebody else's head. Taking long walks in Singapore is like taking a long walk in Lee Kuan Yew's head. It is all very terrifying and reminds me of Escher prints, especially the one in which the monks walk around in endless circles; I think it's called Castrovalva.

Black & White

It is in black and white, sometimes, that we find the limitations of truth. Escher taught us that, this peculiar son of the wetlands; his etchings defied mathematics and brought a premature end to enlightenment for those who could see the signs. For black and white are the ultimate perceptive truisms; one is all the lack of light can be; the other is where no darkness can hide.

And yet, Escher made one into the other, with the mechanisms of knife and pen, of pencil and ink, of clever Moorish intaglio and Flemish guile. Night became day which was night; monks were trapped in a never-ending ascent which was really descending; if he had not scorned political commentary and the brash commentary of modern art, he would have been a truly lethal force for the dissection of the inane and unscrupulous.

I had an Escher moment today. I saw with blinding clarity again. And I knew, in that instant, that we were all trapped in an Escher print. And as everyone knows (or eventually figures out), there is only one way out of an Escher print. You cannot try to claim the prerogative of the artist over his art – Escher has trapped the artist before. You cannot try to claim the justification of faith and holiness – Escher has mocked that weakness of imperfect humanity before. And you cannot even try to claim the primacy of reason, for Escher has dispensed with reason through its very own tools.

In the end, the only way out is to place yourself in the hands of Escher's creator. There is no possible confirming argument from within the Escherian world for a creator. But only by believing is there the hope of a way out of it. Or else, there is no final doom; there is only an eternity of ascending and descending, an interminable confinement in a Castrovalvan space. There, then is Hell, nor would we be ever out of it.