St Anselm’s Senior Common Room
The fire had been attended to with unnecessary seriousness, as if it too might be implicated in recent philosophical instability.
Blottisham arrived late.
He paused at the threshold before entering, as though testing whether the room would behave consistently.
Quillibrace noticed immediately.
“You are checking the continuity of the environment,” he observed.
“I am not,” Blottisham said too quickly, taking his seat. “I am simply… observing.”
Miss Stray looked up.
“That sounds like the same thing, differently framed.”
“It is not,” Blottisham replied. “Observation is normal. Continuity-checking is—” he hesitated, “—your sort of word.”
Quillibrace folded his hands.
“‘My sort of word’ is doing a great deal of work there.”
Blottisham ignored him.
There was a pause.
He looked around the room again, more carefully this time, as though ensuring no further ontological irregularities had entered during his absence.
Stray spoke gently.
“You seem more cautious than usual.”
“I am not cautious,” Blottisham said. “I am simply no longer assuming things remain stable without verification.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“Ah. Post-instability epistemic hygiene.”
Blottisham frowned.
“That sounds like mockery.”
“It is description,” Quillibrace replied. “Mockery would require excess.”
Blottisham shifted in his chair.
“I have been thinking,” he said.
A faint silence settled — the kind that gives thinking room to reveal whether it is structural or merely anxious.
“Yes?” said Stray.
“In the dream,” Blottisham continued carefully, “I assumed that if something was not ‘real,’ then it could not sustain consequences.”
Quillibrace raised an eyebrow slightly.
“And you now suspect otherwise?”
Blottisham hesitated.
“I now suspect that consequences do not wait for permission from ontology.”
Stray’s expression softened slightly.
“That is a cleaner formulation than your usual distress permits.”
Blottisham shot her a look.
“I am not distressed.”
“Of course,” Quillibrace said calmly. “You are merely undergoing structural reorganisation.”
Blottisham exhaled through his nose.
“I am trying to re-establish something,” he said. “A baseline.”
“A baseline of what?” Stray asked.
“Reality,” Blottisham said immediately.
Quillibrace tilted his head.
“That is ambitious.”
Blottisham leaned forward.
“It is necessary. If I cannot assume what is real, then everything becomes… optional.”
Stray considered this.
“That does not follow,” she said.
“It feels like it follows.”
“Yes,” Quillibrace agreed. “Feeling is often the earliest form of mistaken ontology.”
Blottisham glared at him.
“I am not mistaken.”
“You are stabilising,” Quillibrace corrected. “Poorly, but actively.”
A pause.
The fire shifted.
Blottisham spoke more slowly.
“After the dream, I tried to ignore it. But that didn’t work.”
“No,” said Stray. “It rarely does.”
“So I tried something else,” Blottisham continued. “I tried treating everything as if it were still straightforwardly real.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“And?”
“It resisted,” Blottisham said simply.
Stray looked up.
“‘Resisted’?”
Blottisham gestured vaguely.
“The conversations. The categories. Even ordinary words. They didn’t behave as cleanly as they used to.”
Quillibrace’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“Words rarely behave cleanly. You are only now noticing.”
Blottisham ignored this.
“I am trying to rebuild a sense that things are what they are,” he said. “Without all this… relational interference.”
Stray blinked.
“Relational interference?”
“Yes,” Blottisham said, with growing conviction. “All this idea that meaning depends on context, participation, structure, interaction—whatever it is you two keep doing to language.”
Quillibrace smiled faintly.
“We do not do it to language. We observe that it is already doing it.”
Blottisham waved a hand impatiently.
“That is exactly the problem.”
Stray leaned forward slightly.
“And what would you prefer instead?”
Blottisham hesitated.
“Stability,” he said.
Quillibrace nodded.
“A noble aspiration.”
“A usable one,” Blottisham insisted.
Stray asked quietly:
“And where would that stability come from?”
Blottisham opened his mouth.
Paused.
Then, less confidently:
“From things being what they are.”
Quillibrace regarded him for a moment.
“And how do you determine what they are?”
Blottisham frowned.
“You just… know.”
A silence followed.
Stray spoke softly.
“That is not a method. It is a hope.”
Blottisham looked irritated again, but less securely so.
“It used to work.”
Quillibrace inclined his head.
“Until something interrupted the ease with which you were able to ignore its conditions.”
Blottisham stiffened slightly.
“I am not ignoring anything.”
“No,” Quillibrace said. “You are attempting to re-establish ignoring as a stable practice.”
That landed quietly.
Blottisham sat back.
“I don’t like this version of things,” he said.
Stray nodded.
“That is understandable.”
Quillibrace added, almost gently:
“It is not a version of things. It is a version of your relationship to them.”
Blottisham frowned.
“That sounds like the same thing.”
“It is not,” Stray said softly.
Another pause.
The fire cracked once.
Blottisham finally said:
“So what am I supposed to do with the fact that things don’t stay fixed when I need them to?”
Quillibrace considered this.
“Nothing,” he said. “You are not in a position to author their stability.”
Stray added:
“But you are in a position to participate in how they stabilise.”
Blottisham looked between them.
“That is not reassuring.”
“No,” Quillibrace agreed. “But it is accurate.”
Blottisham sighed.
“I preferred the version of reality where accuracy was reassuring.”
Quillibrace allowed a faint pause.
“That version was never particularly interested in your preferences.”
Silence settled again.
But this time it was less fragile.
More like something had been placed down carefully, rather than dropped.
Blottisham finally spoke, more quietly:
“So I can’t go back.”
Stray shook her head slightly.
“No,” she said. “But you can stop trying to make ‘back’ do explanatory work it cannot support.”
Quillibrace nodded once.
“And begin instead,” he added, “with what remains stable under conditions you now know are not as simple as they appeared.”
Blottisham stared into the fire.
For once, he did not immediately object.
The room, for its part, remained consistent enough to continue.:::
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