The Dimensions of Certainty

The past ten days I've been re-reading Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. For those of you who aren't familiar, the "novel" is a fictional scholarly examination of a fictional documentary of a fictional event, replete with real and imagined footnotes, as well as a subplot/subnarrative focused on the unfortunate chap who first found the treatise. The book is unorthodox in its format, page layout, and chronology, but for all its gimmicky greatness, there's still a story there and that story is about a house that manifests interior spaces larger than the exterior reveals. It begins with a tiny discrepancy and finally grows to massive proportions that demand a team of explorers and documentarians. The point here isn't to retell the story or review the book, it's simply to present the idea of dimensional complicity. Yes, I know what complicity means.


Consider a dimension as a limit. Say a point wants to become a line, but the one dimension it belongs to stifles its expansion. Say a line wants to become a wall, but the two dimensions it belongs to keep it flat. Think of dimensions and the limits they enforce as the only thing that stands between us and absolute dimensional entropy.

Now consider a dimension as an opportunity. A point is free to become a line, but must find a way to unfold into the second dimension. A line wants to become a wall, but must acquire depth. Think of dimensions and the opportunities they offer as the only thing that makes expansion possible.


This is clearly a pessimist/optimist argument, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how to view the dimensions around me. House of Leaves deals primarily with the possibility of structures altered by perception (what you see is what you get, literally - if the stairs seem endless, they become endless). Is there really any reason that we can't think of our 3 dimensional journey, participating as it does, in the 4th dimension as well, as a structure? Is it possible then, that this structure is altered by our perception of it? Heisenberg was really the first to delineate this in a scientific sense (uncertainty principle and observer effect), and his concern was primarily the effect of observation on technical data, but the upshot is the same. Perceiving the course of my life, as I must, necessarily affects its structure (and consequently, the sensory data I receive and assess). My evaluation, then, is as flawed as any scientific evaluation - but is it flawed in a consistent way? Do you ever become so familiar with your own margin of error that it no longer has any effect?

More importantly, can the way I see things actually make them bigger or smaller? This might be an argument for absolute relativity, so Einstein might be on my side, but according to a footnote in House of Leaves, so is Gunter Nitschke. Danielewski recounts his description of "experienced or concrete space":

It has a centre which is a perceiving man, and it therefore has an excellent system of directions which changes with the movements of the human body; it is limited and in no sense neutral, in other words it is finite, heterogeneous, subjectively defined and perceived; distances and directions are fixed relative to man...

That final line should probably read "fixed relative to a man." Because if the early lines are to be believed, every space is going to be different to every man. Some think this goes without saying, that our notions of near and far, large and small, bright and dark, etc are necessarily different. These, however, are qualitative assessments of space (and for that matter, time), not quantitative. Most of these people would concede that objects in space have an objective quantitative set of properties (extension, mass, etc) that are measurable, re-measurable, and verifiable by peer-review. Except of course, David Hume.


I, like Hume, am beginning to wonder. As I consider the possibility of returning to school for Art Conservation, I feel my interior spaces unfolding, opening outward at a pace my exterior can't match. I hear the clatter of floorboards being layed down in a thousand different hallways, I feel the new neural pathways firing that allow me the luxury of daydreaming or worrying, I see the silent elastic fibers of time extending and contracting before me. Going back to school would require an investment of close to five years and over 12,000 dollars for prerequisite classes. Can I shorten this time just by looking at it differently? Literally? Can I make this room bigger by looking at it differently? Can I conjure the space and time I need by force of will? By application of sense? If I could, would I?

Maybe. Maybe I'd make it all look a little shorter and more possible. If only to take that first step.