Q. Where’s Reality? A. Which One? [Howl's Moving Castle]

Back in the early days of the blog I had a lot of posts about Hayao Miyazaka. I'm boosting this one to the top on general principle. It's from August 21, 2010.

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If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then? — Samuel T. Coleridge

The castle in Miyazaki’s film, Howl’s Moving Castle, is a marvelous creation. I’m talking not so much about it’s steampunk funkiness, but the fact that its main door can open to any one of four different places. The castle’s master, Howl, determines what those places are, and one chooses by setting a dial above the door. Thus, one can exit the door and, for example, be in a bustling port or a mountain meadow.
I’ve more or less concluded that reality’s like that, only stranger. Howl’s castle, after all, opens to four different places in the physical world. One can, if one so wishes, journey from one of those places to another without going through the castle. That is, of course, how most people do it, because they don’t have castle privileges.
Reality, I believe, is multiple. That is, it affords each one of us multiple experiential realms. We can ‘live’ in those different realms, one by one, but experiences in one realm cannot be substituted for experience in another realm. Our minds, somehow, open into those different realms, as Howl’s castle opens into different physical spaces. What is even odder is that our minds can do this collectively as well as individually.

So, what do I mean by this vague nonsense?
Consider, for example, science. Let’s not be too fussy about what science is. Naiveté on that point is OK for my present purposes. The physicist, the chemist, the astronomer, the geologist, the biologist, and the others, they all want to ascertain objective truths about one of these realities. They’ve got procedures for doing so, and those procedures change and proliferate from time to time. They publish their ideas, go to meetings, belong to professional societies — all to keep one another sane as they search for the objective truths of this reality. Let’s call it Epsilon.
I’m trained as a literary critic, but I’ve also spent a great deal of time moonlighting and spelunking in the newer psychologies. I’m interested in understanding how literature works and I want to cloak or couch that understanding in terms that are commensurate with those used in characterizing Epsilon. I’m hardly alone in this, though we, literary scholars as a profession, are somewhat befuddled as to what Epsilon is like and how to get there. And some of us, of course, have no interest in it, at least not professionally.
At the same time I’m an ordinary human being and I like to read books and poems and plays and to watch movies and TV and so forth. Let’s say that that those experiences happen in reality Gamma. So, we’re in the movie theater watching, say, Peter Jackson’s King Kong — I use this as an example because the theater was packed when I saw it. We can hear one another rustle in the seats, we hear murmurs, breath intake, sighs, and so forth. We’re all in reality Gamma, watching this same movie. But the same is true for all of us who have read and still do read Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” though we’re not together at the same time in the same place. Still, we communicate with one another in ones and threes and so on about the poem. All of us, loosely strungout, in reality Gamma.
All literary scholars, of course, spend time in Gamma. And many of us spend a great deal of time agonizing about the relationship between Gamma and Epsilon. Such agonizing is so institutionalized that it may well be an aspect of another reality. Call it Pi. Lots of literary critics love their Pi.
So, we’ve got three realities so far: Gamma, Epsilon, and Pi.
A couple of days ago I wrote on sex and metaphysics, arguing that, for us humans, sex takes on a metaphysical character. The physiologist can study sex in Epsilon. Any of us can read erotic literature and see erotic plays and films in Gamma. And literary, film, and cultural critics can write about those Gamma-based experiences in Pi.

But my argument in that post was the sex establishes its own reality, its own metaphysic. That reality is manifest in transcendent experiences associated with orgasm, but perhaps, as my friend Tim Perper* has argued, in flirtation as well:

For Simmel, it is thus possible to flirt at each of the Ovidian stages, most intensely, perhaps, during naked sexual involvement itself. Then each orgasm hints flirtatiously that another exists in potentia, and it is the possibility that is alluring. Thus, Simmel empowers his lovers, making them not philosophically objective observers of disembodied Beauty nor Ovidian fauns and nymphs in a world of crystalline Eros. Instead, they are human beings who can invite, enter, retreat, and enter again.

So let’s say that this is yet another reality, requiring another character from the Greek alphabet. Let’s go with Mu.
Now we’ve got realities Epsilon, Gamma, Pi, and Mu. How many more? Darned if I know. But let’s throw in Alpha for ordinary everyday phenomenological reality. We might even go further and say that Alpha is like the interior of Howl’s castle. It’s home base. We depart from Alpha to take excursions to Epsilon, Gamma, Pi or Mu, or, as the case may be, Beta, Delta, Zeta, Eta, Theta and so forth. And when we’re through with our current business in one of those other worlds, we return to Alpha.
But isn’t there really just one world? You know, the REAL one?
Well . . . I suppose we can talk that way. Heck, we do talk that way. Such talk is a really big deal in Epsilon and Gamma. But I’m not so much concerned about how we talk as about how we live. And as far as I can tell, we live in multiple worlds. We do so with great virtuosity and vigor, though we often get confused. Living in those various worlds entails talk, more so in some worlds than others. In some worlds we don’t talk at all. And some talk in some worlds is about what we see and did and smelled in other worlds. So their all intermingled. I figure it’s like a marble in eleventy different colors in, say, umpteen dimensional space. Very frothy.
Um, err, this isn’t very rigorous?
I know.
Doesn’t that bother you?
Yes and no.
Yes and no?
Sure, I’d like rigor. So YES. But at the moment I’m more concerned about just saying it, whatever it is, in any freakin’ form I can get it out there. So NO.
Oh.
Well, if it’s any consolation, I sometimes imagine that, when in Epsilon, we can construct a model of the human mind-in-brain that’s so comprehensive and powerful that we could account for how the mind constructs each one of these realities, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Zeta, Eta, Theta Pi, and so forth, and of course Epsilon. Since we’re constructing this model from within Epsilon, the model must itself be recursive, metalingual.
Why sneaky son of a snitch! You lying bastard! You put me through all this just so you can go recursive on me! %$ @#&!!!
Sorry. As I was saying, I sometimes imagine that. But imaging's one thing. Actually doing it. Ah that’s different.
And, even if one day we can do that, we can’t actually live our lives in that construction, moving about between those many and various realities. The model is but an object of contemplation. No less valuable for that. But only a model. In Epsilon.

ADDENDUM: This post is akin the modal matters I've been discussing recently, see especially this post, on basic modes, and then especially this one on specifically human modes.
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* Timothy Perper, Will She or Won’t She: The Dynamics of Flirtation in Western Philosophy, Sexuality & Culture, Volume 14, Number 1, 33-43, DOI: 10.1007/s12119-009-9060-3.