Patrícia Portela

Fragments from the novel Going up not North

First there was silence.

The first time I spoke I was put in prison.

This book is dedicated to… Well…that is a good question isn’t it? Maybe to everyone who helped to nearly kill me and then resurrect me. A little changed, but at least alive. Yes, all those readers who made me possible. Not only to philosophers who read, holding their heads in their hands, while developing complicated theories about the world, not only to those old Greeks with their parchments unrolling into their laps, but also people who prefer to read with the book on their knees, people who prefer to lie down, on the bed, on the sofa, people who read on the balcony so that they can peep at pretty boys going down the lane, people that cannot resist and read the final page of the book first, people that can not start the day till they read every single sentence of the newspaper including the obituaries, lovers who read to one another, students reading before an exam, a teacher to a student, a mother to a child. To all the people who read in buses, in prisons (and I have been there!), or in large queues while waiting for their social security number to come up, whoever reads to learn, whoever reads to forget, to pass time, to endure, to resist, to discover, or to move on…whoever yeah whoever… I… a humble native from Flatland, dedicate to you, inhabitants of space in general, and to you, solid readers in particular, in front of this book at this very moment, …… whatever you’re thinking, I count on you to turn each one of these pages, wishing that just as I was introduced, through reading, into the mysteries of three dimensions, having been given only two, that you shall slowly begin to understand the bi-dimensional world and discover the insights of flatlanders, and that in this way we can change the course of History through laws of fiction.

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Chapter 1

Chapter 1 Image
differences between a spatial man and dots or flatman.

Flatpeople cannot be in space, but boy, can we read books. We can slide over the outline of the letters and follow the labyrinths of lines that make up each word and sentence, and in this way follow the stories written in any book made of flat pages. It sounds difficult, but in fact, for a flatlander it’s natural and considered one of the most exciting sports – it is a bit like swimming and diving after throwing yourself into endless corridors of playground slides, while competing as a gymnast at the Olympics on every apparatus at the same time, simultaneously doing your taxes, cooking a 3 course meal for the entire family while making love to your wife and preparing a brilliant financial analysis for a company that is about to go bankrupt.

It is also a dangerous sport and the reason I ended up in prison. Life used to be simple: I lived in a very ordinary house like this one, On a street like this, in a suburb of a city like this, in a little country like this… Everything was made out of simple lines going north, south, east, west or in any of the 360 degrees that encompassed our world. Everyday I got up direction south, got dressed diagonally southeast, while complaining to my wife, still southwest in bed, that I had no ironed shirts, I ate my breakfast, brushed my teeth northwest, northeast, northwest, northeast, remembering I should make an appointment with my dentist for a check up and went out, always heading north … My life had a clear direction. At the end of the day and on the weekends, me and my family used to walk through groups of letters like g-a-r-d-e-n, s-e-a-s-h-o-r-e or p-a-r-k and that would be it. We could even visit exciting foreign emotions like SCHADENFREUDE…SAUDADE…TRISTESSE…PATHOS..WABI SABI… Life was simple and abundant in Flatland. There were no such things as solids, volumes, textures, or problems such as time or space. To know the distance between the line of a house, for example, and the line of a tree, we would calculate the amount of blurriness surrounding those lines – the blurrier the further away! This was one of the basic principles of distance in Flatland that prevented people and things bumping into each other all the time. Very practical and no one ever bothered to ask themselves why. But while we are dealing with practical matters, I guess some of you are trying to imagine what I look like! Since you have one more dimension than me, you cannot see me, the same way I cannot see you, since I have one dimension less than you. Or should I say the reverse, since I have one dimension less than you, you cannot see me and I cannot see you since you have one more dimension than me… But it is very simple: You are reading a book right now, right? Imagine I am here beside the letter X, oh there is no X, well what is a good word with a X… You are reading a book right now, right? Imagine I am here inside the axis of the two lines that make the letter X…I know some of you can see 4 unfinished triangles around, but that’s not me… a little bit below that you can see the shape of a triangle. Now, imagine you could lower your eyes to the level of the page or imagine the book would tilt until you have the page at the level of your eyes, got it? This way you come very close to our flat condition and how we look at things… so if you could look at me from the top like you see now you would see a triangle but the closer you get to the same level as the paper you would see me only as a straight line… but the difference is that I am very very very very small … so you have to imagine this line is shorter, so short that for your eyes I am just a piece of information that looks like…well, not much really, on my own…but get a lot of us together…

Image of an X

Anyway… I was talking about reading! It is an amazing sport, specially because it is always varied and you can get all sorts of different emotions besides getting technically very good at it… For example: if you are in good shape, you can sportread whole paragraphs in one go…but it’s tricky …I once saw my cousin fall all the way from the top of a page of Brothers Karamazov and not stopping until he was impaled on letter A half way down page 37 of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, without even noticing he had changed authors, let alone thematic content. But watch me:

Image of Type

That was a paragraph where Hermes Trismegistus explains the whole idea of decomposition of a body in search of gold, page 37 of the Opus Magnum… …and the next second I can be sliding in a totally different landscape such as this:

Landscape

That was part of the “Electrical Theory” by Giordano Bruno, which I am very deeply into these days, and one of the reasons why he was burned alive by the Inquisition. It is fun to slide through the boudoir of Camille, or 200 pages of Tolstoy’s battles while my son is caught in a tornado with Dorothy as her house is lifted out of Kansas and transported to Oz. (…) The meeting point at the end of the sport was always in an Ian Fleming novel, one of our favorite stories to slide through. We would always end the day there with a competition: STORY BOARDING To see who could hold on as long as possible, sliding non-stop until the end of the page, arrive there first and hope for the page to be turned. (…)

Chapter 2

Head

One day, lazily sliding for a bit of relaxation, I accidentally discovered a strange letter like this :

Finger Print

I thought it was such an amazing letter with so many lines that no doubt it had to have a lot of meanings. I took what you would call a “lot of time” in your world, to memorize this amazing letter and started investigating it.

At dinner, I discussed and shared my ideas with my family. My wife thought it was just another of my weird hobbies and my son kept telling me it was a landscape letter, not meant to be de-codified. Still, I persisted with my investigation and still today I wish I had never paid that much attention to it. Maybe I’d be happier though more ignorant today.

But at the time I could not know what kind of tragedy I was getting into. On another day, it was a Sunday, I was a bit bored, sliding at random, and I ended up in a police report…I discovered this:

Report nr xf 234533176 ref 11/65/04 (image) Date of birth: 16.05.1962

Height: 1.85m

Weight: 83kg

Color of eyes: blue/grey

Color of hair: blonde

Observations: Accused of escaping custody…

Criminal Report

I could not believe what my bodyline was sliding through! This “strange letter” was a fingerprint! Well, I know what a fingerprint is, I just had not slid through one before. But, the issue here is, that for me to be able to find a fingerprint in Flatland, there has to have been a contact between this suspect and my world. But a fingerprint requires a finger, and a finger requires a hand, a hand needs to be linked to arms, and arms don’t just float around without bodies. And they should all have a head on top and legs below and they usually come with feet attached. A real person. Just like James Bond so…this meant that somewhere, James Bond complete with martinis, beds, blonde girls, submarine cars with sophisticated gadgets, laser watches, creepy guys with bad teeth, midgets with razor hats and so forth… all really existed! Every single thing that I had ever come across while sportively reading actually existed already somewhere else and everything that was written was true! Everything was true! You cannot imagine how devastated, how flabbergasted I was … even if you think you can imagine, you can’t, because arms and legs and chests and fingers, and toenails and pretty blonde girls and dry martinis must be pretty normal in your life, you pretty much start from that when you are born… But imagine a guy, well… actually a dot, a simple dot like me, that suddenly realizes the house he has cared for is nothing but a design for a 3D one in your world, a map is a detailed guide to one of your real cities, the clothes I wear are only patterns to make better ones in beautiful fabrics I have read about but never imagined really existed! My life was fake …and every single sentence I have read in my life was actually an enregistration of what is really happening in another dimension. My life was fake and James Bond was out there living the real one. I almost collapsed. First I was speechless, then seriously ill, I could not even read that would give me nausea… but then I decided it was my mission, to make Flatland a better place. It was time for a change. I formulated my concept of the third dimension and called a press conference to tell all my flatmates