The World of Openings

After the people of the First Country had discovered that the future was not a place but an opening in the present, they began to ask a new question.

“An opening for whom?”

At first this seemed a strange question.

An opening was an opening.

A door was a door.

A path was a path.

A branch was a branch.

What difference could the traveller make?

But one morning a bird landed upon a branch.

The branch bent beneath its feet.

The bird settled comfortably.

A mouse came running along the ground.

It looked up at the same branch.

It could not reach it.

The people watched.

“The branch is offering something,” said the youngest philosopher.

“What?”

“Support.”

“To whom?”

The philosopher pointed to the bird.

The people understood.

The branch had not changed.

But what it made possible depended upon who encountered it.

The next day they found a doorway.

A person walked through it.

Then a dog.

Then a child.

Then a horse.

But when a mouse approached, it slipped through a narrow gap beside the threshold instead.

The people laughed.

“The doorway offers passage.”

“Yes.”

“To everyone?”

The philosopher shook his head.

“To those for whom its relation to the world permits passage.”

The people began looking differently at the country.

They had once thought that things simply possessed properties.

A branch was strong.

A wall was solid.

A doorway was open.

A path was long.

Now they began to ask another question:

What does this make possible?

A branch could support a bird.

The same branch could obstruct a larger creature.

A wall could stop a traveller.

The same wall could shelter her from the wind.

A gap could be a doorway for a mouse and no doorway at all for a horse.

A river could obstruct a walker and carry a boat.

The people gave a name to these strange possibilities.

They called them affordances.

At first the word sounded peculiar.

But they soon discovered that it described something they had been overlooking everywhere.

The world was full of things that did not merely exist.

They offered possibilities.

And those possibilities arose neither solely from the things nor solely from those who encountered them.

They arose from the relation between them.

This changed the way the people understood their country.

They stopped drawing maps containing only mountains, rivers, roads and houses.

Instead they began drawing maps of what could be done.

Here, a bird could perch.

Here, a traveller could cross.

Here, a child could hide.

Here, a boat could pass.

Here, a wall could shelter.

Here, a narrow passage could be entered by a mouse but not by a man.

The same landscape contained many countries.

For every creature inhabited a somewhat different field of possibility.

One afternoon the King visited the mapmakers.

“What is the true map of the country?” he asked.

The mapmakers looked at one another.

“There is no single one.”

The King was displeased.

“Then what are all these maps?”

“Maps of different possibilities.”

“Which one is correct?”

“All of them.”

The King frowned.

“How can that be?”

The oldest mapmaker pointed towards the forest.

“The forest is one forest.”

“Yes.”

“But what it affords to a deer is not what it affords to a woodcutter.”

The King looked at the forest.

“And to a bird?”

“Something different again.”

“And to a lost child?”

“Something different again.”

The King was silent.

At last he understood.

A world was not simply the collection of things within it.

It was the field of possibilities those things made available to its participants.

The discovery spread beyond the physical country.

The grammarians began to say:

“A language is not merely a collection of words. It affords distinctions.”

The judges said:

“A law is not merely a collection of rules. It affords some actions and closes others.”

The teachers said:

“A school is not merely a building. It affords ways of learning.”

And the philosophers began to say something even stranger:

“A concept is not merely an idea. It affords questions.”

The people had once thought that concepts simply described the world.

Now they noticed that changing a concept could change what they were able to notice.

There had been a time when no one had asked certain questions because no one had possessed the distinctions with which to formulate them.

Then someone changed the way the people understood something.

Suddenly a distinction appeared.

Something that had always been present became visible.

A possibility of thought had opened.

The people marvelled.

“The thing was there all along.”

“Yes.”

“Then what changed?”

“The relation.”

The old philosopher smiled.

“You have learned the lesson of the doorway.”

The people began experimenting.

They moved a chair from one side of a room to another.

Nothing about the chair changed.

Nothing about the room changed.

Yet suddenly the room offered different possibilities.

The chair could now be sat upon from a different direction.

A passage that had been open was narrowed.

A corner that had been empty became usable.

The people began to realise that a world could change without its things changing very much at all.

The arrangement could change.

And when the arrangement changed, the affordances changed.

And when the affordances changed, the possible futures changed.

Then came a curious incident.

The King had once forbidden people to enter the eastern garden after sunset.

One evening he changed the rule.

Nothing physical was altered.

The gates remained.

The paths remained.

The trees remained.

But that night, for the first time, the garden afforded a new kind of action.

People could enter.

A possibility had appeared without a new object appearing.

The people were beginning to see the deeper pattern.

Relations established differences.

Differences established constraints.

Constraints differentiated futures.

And now they understood that those differentiated futures were not simply abstract possibilities.

They were possibilities available within a world to its participants.

They were affordances.

The world itself had begun to look different.

It was no longer a warehouse of objects.

Nor was it merely a collection of events.

It was a landscape of openings.

Some wide.

Some narrow.

Some visible.

Some hidden.

Some available to one creature but not another.

Some appearing when a door opened.

Some disappearing when a rule changed.

Some emerging when a new concept gave people a way to see what had previously escaped their notice.

The people began calling this landscape the World of Openings.

But then the youngest philosopher asked a disturbing question.

“If affordances depend upon relations, what happens when the relations themselves change?”

The others looked at him.

He continued.

“If the chair moves, the room changes.”

“Yes.”

“If the rule changes, the action changes.”

“Yes.”

“If the concept changes, what can be thought changes.”

“Yes.”

“Then what happens if the relations do not merely change…”

He looked towards the horizon.

“…but evolve?”

No one answered.

For they could already see the consequence.

If the relations changed, the affordances changed.

If the affordances changed, the possibilities changed.

And if the possibilities changed, then the future itself was no longer the same future.

The country would not merely become different.

It would become a country in which different things could become.

The old philosopher walked slowly to the doorway of the Hall.

He placed his hand upon its frame.

For a long moment he said nothing.

Then he turned to the others.

“Perhaps we have been thinking about change too narrowly.”

“How so?”

“We have asked what happens when things change.”

He looked out across the country.

“Perhaps the more important question is what happens when the relations that make possibilities possible begin to change.”

And somewhere beyond the hills, where no map yet reached, the country seemed to open a little further.

The people could not yet see what lay there.

But they understood that something had changed.

Not a thing.

Not a place.

Not yet an event.

A relation.

And with it, the country had acquired new openings.

New affordances.

New futures.

The question that now stood before them was no longer merely:

What can this world become?

It was more unsettling:

What happens when the world itself changes what it affords?