She Smiled at Me Part 1 Copyright 10/02/2014 16:55

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Georgie_Yeats
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She Smiled at Me Part 1 Copyright 10/02/2014 16:55

Post by Georgie_Yeats »

“Pythagoras!” snorted the professor with derision. “Pythagoras didn’t exist”. The lecture was on the history of logic, and the professor was taking aim at a question about the ancient Greeks. “I think therefore I am” came a voice in his head. Sitting in the front row of the lecture theatre, George turned round surprised. A pretty black girl was smiling at him. Girls were rare in mathematics lectures. Black people even rarer. George felt the pang of conflicting emotions. He wanted to return the look, but at the same time he didn’t want her to think that he thought her presence strange. Political correctness got the better of him and he averted his eyes. Once again he was thrown into turmoil over race and sex. As a child he had been taught at school that there was no difference between blacks and whites or men and women. Everyone was equal. Yet it wasn’t true. The fact that there were so few blacks and girls in mathematics lectures proved it. Of course that didn’t mean that there were intrinsic reasons for the discrepency. Society could be at fault. Racism and sexism existed. But at the same time it meant that they were different. They must be otherwise how could they be treated differently in the first place. George was different too, and this is where it really got messy. Neither white nor black, he was Cypriot. At least he was a man, but having never had sex, let alone a girlfriend, he sometimes questioned that as well. Now it was sexual anxiety that got the better of him, and he looked back again to see the girl busy with her notes. He sighed, and thought about the voice in his head. He could have sworn it had come from her, and then he realised that he wanted to talk to her. He wanted to talk to her very much. The lecture finished. Panic gripped him. He forced himself to calm down. People filed out of the auditorium. George was the last to leave, still torn between sexual arousal and shame.
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Georgie_Yeats
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Post by Georgie_Yeats »

Cyprus was divided. A small island in the Eastern Mediterranean or perhaps the Middle East if you were that way inclined, Turkey had invaded in 1974, ethnicly cleansed the inhabitants and separated the island into north and south. Of course there had been plenty of Greeks who had wanted to ethnicly cleanse the Turkish Cypriots off the island altogether, but George had been taught that history was not shaped by the little people, but rather imperial power structures vieing for supremacy. Except sometimes. On the other side of the atlantic, on another island, a rag tag band of revolutionaries had challenged the status quo and were still fighting. “We are winning!” was the famous words of their leader upon hearing that they had almost been wiped out. And they were. George had taken this to heart. Sometimes, it was possible for the smallest of things to change the world. The wings of a butterfly can cause a hurricane. This was the famous mantra of the chaos theorists. It was mathematically provable. But what George had always wondered was, could the butterfly actually be conscious of what it was doing? In fact the chaos theorists said “no”. The butterfly could no more predict the outcome of its gentle flight than the mathematician. This was the nature of chaos. So had it been chance that the revolutionaries had toppled the dictator and marched towards victory, or had there been something more? But George was still thinking about the girl.
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Georgie_Yeats
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Post by Georgie_Yeats »

Logic was inescapable. The girl had smiled at him, therefore she was interested. But he had averted his eyes. “She was black”. A different voice. “No”, George thought, “that was not the reason”. But he knew it was. He didn’t understand race. He didn’t understand women. But race seemed more important. Why had history taken this path in dividing the people along such crude lines?. George had read so many different theories, but the one he liked best was the Four Colour Theorem. It had been proved in 1976, but to this day no one seemed to grasp its significance. It states that the smallest number of colours required to colour any map so that no two colours touch is four. Red, yellow, black, white. It was so simple. People were lazy. As they made maps of their world they naturally opted for the simplest colouring. But the theorem didn’t state that they had to use four colours. With seven billions countries one could use seven billion colours. It just made the calculations that much harder. In fact the theorem was so hard that to date it had only been proved with the aide of a computer. Once again, George marvelled at how ruthlessly efficient capitalism was at oppressing. The key was that no two colours touched. Racial purity was assured. George wondered if the girl had heard of the Four Colour Theorem. She obviously didn’t operate according to it. She had smiled at him.
Last edited by Georgie_Yeats on 27 Feb 2020, 06:32, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by mary-annef »

What an interesting set of pieces. I love stories that teach me something - I had never heard of the Four Colour Theorem but googled it. Tackling the topic of race is very brave. I'm curious to see how this develops. Best of luck.
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