Bubbles and Styx In: Pondering the Past
By:@hypericin


Bubbles the land-whale and Styx the crow are enjoying a walk in the sun after a hearty day of adventuring. As we join our heroes, Bubbles is waxing philosophical, as is his wont. Let's listen in...

"You know Styx, life can sometimes be a little hard. Good times do come, but they seldom linger for biscuits and tea. But! Isn't it a comfort knowing that, whatever happens, the past is always there? That all our adventures and good times sit forever, safe and secure, in the universe's own safety box?"

Styx caws raucously, flapping ink-black wings in disagreement.

"Wah! Wah! Really, Bubbles? You big blue buffoon, everyone knows the past is a phantom, a ghost, a mirage! Only the present is real!"

Bubbles closes his eyes and raises a fin, dramatically pointing at the sky, and declares:

"Au contraire, my corvid compatriot! I assert the opposite: only the past is real!"

Styx peers closely at Bubbles, flicking his head, as birds do, from one angle to the next.

"Wah..." he caws thoughtfully, "Bubbles, I'm looking at your face. It is big, blubbery, and very real. Once upon a time, you were a cute calf, small and lithe and graceful. This bubbly young calf is now a fiction! Collapsed in the face of present paunchiness."

Styx holds his wing to his breast, closes his eyes dramatically, and recites:

"I would say,
With great dismay,
The calf is ashes,
Yet ashes exist.

Only memories,
Present memories!
Persist."

Bubbles smiles indulgently, as if he had anticipated this move, and the next three besides. (Though Styx would never admit it, the fishy waft floating from that cavern of a smile was always fiercly intriguing.)

"But what am I, without the calf who so faithfully follows in my footsteps? Just an image! A framed portrait of a handsome whale, torn down immediately and replaced by his successor, ad infinitum. This to you is real?"

Bubbles shakes his great head, and wags a fin.

"No, no, my dear Styx, the past is what is real! The past is the ice cream sundae, and the present is the cherry on top. Delicious! Delightful! But without the ice cream, totally lacking substance. The past gives solidity to the present, and makes it real.

If you take the past, sum all of it together, what to you get? The present! The present is just what the past looks like, all of it, all lumped together. The present is the surface of the ocean, the past is the deep waters beneath."

Bubbles puffs his great chest, summoning his best whalish gravitas, and orates:

Sweet little crow,
All you may see,
Is that briny film,
Hiding sweet fishies!
And so you declare,
"This is all that can be!"
I know those depths well,
And with authority,
I tell you, my friend,
There's more to reality!

Styx ponders, thoughtfully sharpening his beak on a log.

"Of course the past in some sense birthed the present. But this past-mother is gone, forever!" Styx chokes back a sob. "We are left, stranded, on the island of the present. We may never visit her, just try to enjoy her birth-gift, as we do."

A single inky tear dropped from Styx's eye, hung suspended from his beak, and fell into a small cupped leaf, material for a wormy Wordsworth should one pass. They embraced.

The two continue down the wooded path. Rounding a corner, they see a red-roofed pavilion, sheltering a white marble statue of a determined looking whale dramatically uppercutting a peg-legged man. His harpoon hung suspended, forever flying out of his hand. At the base of the statue a bronze plaque read: "Moby's Triumph".



"You say the past isn't real. So why do we bother preserving it?" Bubbles reverently runs his fin down his hero's marble-muscled flank. "Why books, museums, and monuments? Are these naught but altars to a false god: The Past?"

Rewarming to the topic, Styx strikes back, melancholy forgotten.

"Indeed, why bother to preserve it at all? If the past is eternal, it can surely take care of itself!"

Stys lands on Moby's head and knocks it with his beak. Tonk! Tonk! Tonk!

"Hear that? That's the sound of the present, not the past! We must memorialize the past in the present, because the present is all we have. Statues, stories, history books, all just tombstones for the past, all carved with the same epitaph: 'I was once thus, but am no more'!

Even our memories,
Just whispered songs,
Of distant pasts,
Soon to be gone. "

Bubbles scoffs a reverberating foghorn honk, and an iridescent bubble rises from his blowhole. It floats gently down and hovers suspended in front of Styx's face. He watches in fascination as an image resolves inside of it: a distinguished looking raven, surrounded by bookshelves, studying an arcane tome. To the side, a man peers into the study window, looking cold, waving hopefully to the raven. It is that famous masterpiece known to every schoolbird, The Wave-In.



Bubbles holds forth:

"Suppose I could conjure not mere image but reality, a perfect copy of The Wave-In, so perfect that every material corpuscle of The Wave-In's was precisely replicated in its counterpart. You, wastrel wren, to all of our surprise, have a job: you are a gallery curator. I, Bubbles, the renowned art dealer, offer to sell you the copy for ten thousand golden baubles. Would you buy it?"

Styx flutters his wings, outraged in spite of himself.

"Wah! Wah! Too dear! Too dear! The original is valued thus! Hmm... in light of the exquisite craftsmanship, I can offer you fifty baubles, not one more."

"But my dear Styx, why do you shortchange me so?"

"Wah! I don't! I ..."

"That was rhetorical! I will tell you why. If a wealthy collector pays ten thousand baubles for the original Wave-In, and perhaps fifty for it's copy, they are not paying for it's present. After all, every present feature of the painting is replicated in the copy. Therefore, they can only be paying for it's past!"

Styx is momentarily nonplussed, fearing he had blundered into a trap. But his wily bird-brain quickly reasserts itself.

"But then! Suppose I, the crow Styx, snuck into your dealership on a moonless, cloudy night, when few eyes can seek out my blackness. I cunningly swap the real painting for the forgery. You, the credulous cetacean, exchanged your original for my fifty golden baubles.

But! Would I thereby be better off for it? I would know the true story of what happened. But how could I substantiate it? To everyone else, all evidence would point to my painting as the forgery: after all, the 'renowned' Bubbles sold it to me for a mere fifty baubles. Surely the 'renowned' Bubbles could never be so daft as to sell me the original for that price. Since no physical feature distinguishes them, forevermore the world would mark my copy as forgery, past be damned.

No, the collector buys a story, not the past. A story told, as stories are, in the present. "

Bubbles rubs his white jaw with a fin, the classic pose of a whale deep in thought. Then,

"Hah! You said you 'would know the true story'. Telling! True of what? Of a past which no longer exists? You contradict yourself, crow! 'True' and 'False' must be applied to something, not nothing!"

Styx caws in irritation.

"Wah! Wah! Sophistic whale! 'True' and 'False' properly apply to memories and evidence, not fictive ghosts! If a story fits with these, it is deemed 'True'. Consider! I perch on your big head, and leave you my white gift. The next day, you discover my present. In your mind, you connect it with my landing, and tell yourself a story of wicked Styx and his malfeasance. This story is 'True' until you find evidence to the contrary. For instance, my sweet disclaimer: 'No, no! I would never befoul my dear friend Bubbles! A stray pigeon was surely the culprit!'"

"But this is not true truth! Just a mere approximation. Suppose I were a simple salmon and I believed your ludicrous excuse. Would your dirty deed be erased?"

"No, for I would still recall it!"

"And if you, in a senile lapse, forgot?"

"Then the truth of the matter would be lost forever!"

"Lost to us! But lost, in truth?"

"In truth! It is our concern, after all, not some supernatural scorekeeper's, with whom we may never consult."

Bubbles shakes his massive head superciliously, and starts pacing (or rather, lumbering) back and forth.

"Ah, my poor, befuddled Styx, you set yourself against the greatest avian scholars of our time, your own kinsmen! Owlenstein likens space and time to a great tree, where every moment is but a thin ringed slice. Stephen Hawk claims that if the universe went on a diet and started contracting, we would have this conversation yet again, but in reverse! But perhaps you are smarter than them to tell me otherwise, hmm?"

"As to that, I cannot say! Perhaps Owlenstein's rings do exist in some rarefied sense. And perhaps our weight-conscious universe has a hundred counterparts, where red is green, or we see with our nose, or humans keep birds as pets. But what of it? All these worlds, all these mystical rings, are totally inaccessible to us. We cannot affect them! They cannot affect us! We cannot even known them! As far as we are concerned, these fairy tales simply do not exist."

"You just cited three conditions, and the the past satisfies two of them. While we can't affect the past, we can know it, and we are most definitely affected by it. And to be real, just one of your three conditions must be met. You, Styx, are thereby doubly wrong!"

In frustration Styx lets out a long clattering sound.

"Obtuse orca! We cannot perceive the past, only the present. The past cannot affect us! Only the present can, the past is inaccessible. Observe!"

Styx makes another clatter, followed by tu-gong! tu-gong!, bobbing his head with each 'tu-gong'. On the second, a butterfly emerges from his mouth, its wings as iridescent as Bubbles' bubble. From some feathery recess Styx takes a glass jar and snares the butterfly. It sits on the bottom, slowly moving its wings.



"Watch it flap, Bubbles... Wah! I neglected to give it air! It has perished!"

The butterfly lies still. Bubbles gasps in dismay.

"I ask you now, Bubbles, do those flaps we witnessed still exist, beyond our memories of them? What did those flappings change? If there is no possible evidence of that event, it is simply gone! The past is real only insofar it has a present impact. But don't confuse what I say! That impact is itself entirely in the present."

Styx claps his wings over the jar, and it dissolves into a cloud of sparkling dust. A dozen butterflies of every color fly away, to seek out those flowers most suitable to their preferences. One remained, and settled on Bubbles' nose. He frowns.

"I agree with you, Styx. The past can only appear via the present. But, what of it?"

Bubbles gestures towards the sun, plunging towards the horizon, saturating the sky with glorious red, gold, and violet.

"The sun can appear only via its light. Styx, does this negate the reality of the sun?"

They stand together, suddenly aware of the marvelous spectacle rancorous philosophy had concealed. They turn toward each other, and saw warmth there too, so different from the cold dialectic and taunting insults of debate. The two lifelong friends smiled at each other. Bubbles said softly:

"Everything makes itself known by something it is not."

Holding hands, our two heroes walk home, enjoying the sunset, and each other, in silence. In the following days, all their wonderous adventures; the journeys in the kingdom of the Marmalade Wizard, the excursion to the Crystal Falls, the bewildering nights in the warrens of the Mole Tribes, all crowded the debate from their minds, so that it was soon wholly forgotten. Perhaps, in some sense, it lingered on, embedded in Owlenstein's rings, sustained by a wood which only grows bittersweet with passing years. Or perhaps, as Styx maintained, it was gone utterly. That, dear reader, is for you to decide.