metaphrs Issue 1 | Page 21

I laughed, “Is that more or less than 87 trillion?” You told me infinity was simply one more thing than we care about. One more dot than we can ever see, one more dollar than we can ever have. If our eyes could only see a hundred dots in a centimetre, the hundred-and-oneth dot makes the infinitieth dot, the dot that makes a hundred dots turn into a single line: like that extra frame that turns a flickering sequence of photos into a movie, or that extra rock that turns a bumpy path into a paved road. “With that many dots, doesn’t it make – apart from the start and end points – every other dot, pointless?” The terrible pun either went over your head, or was sensibly ignored. What followed instead was something about how when a scene change happens in a film, the last frame of the former scene and the first frame of the latter scene betrays its disjointed nature, letting us see the individual pictures again: but that these disjoint frames propel the film forward in another direction, and in time these disjointed frames no longer feel as such. By now I was feeling that your metaphor was running a little thin, though it again came to mind the next day as I was cropping out photographs of instant tea issue issue 01 01 | zaw | Chen lin Yi htoo An