Phenomenal Noumena

By Matt Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 12 Minutes

At forty-four years of age, George St. George, PhD, was one of the youngest professors that the Philosophy department at Ketley College had ever employed. He had earned his doctorate from a prestigious European institute, had already given several successful guest lectures on both coasts, and had written a fresh refutation of transcendental idealism that had been very well received. 

He was also quite convinced that his house wasn’t real.

“George,” said Georgette St. George, his very patient wife, who was a high school literature teacher and had heard crazier theories, “of course our house is real. Look, I’ll show you the mortgage payments.”

He had gotten tangled in the bushes while trying to test their existence. He had also trampled the petunias. “The mere fact of the transfer of monetary assets does not necessitate the reality of the object in question,” said George.

The object in question—the St. George residence—was at the top of a hill, under a great old sugar maple. It was a small, beautiful, historic two-story home on the shady lane of Shady Drive. The road had existed since the days of the Revolution, and the citizens of the street liked to imagine Paul Revere riding up the hill and back down the other side again. Of course, Paul Revere had never ridden up that hill; he had never gotten anywhere near it. But still the legend persisted, held somewhere in that collective memory of old towns.

The St. Georges had moved into the little house the year before when George had received his professorship at Ketley. It had been a promising enough beginning. Every day he drove his rusty Ford down the hill to his office at the college, which was old and cramped and had no windows, and then back up the hill again to his home study, which was also old and cramped and had no windows. He often forgot which was which. He was very content in his work.

Then a chance conversation with Dr. Trout spun him in circles. Timothy F. Trout, with his white Santa Claus beard and deep socratic wrinkles, was the head of Ketley’s philosophy department. Decades ago, he had made waves in academia by submitting as his dissertation not a lengthy and well-researched paper for publication but a bird bath he had carved from a block of marble. Universities had clamored for him. He was well known around the Ketley grounds for lying on the soccer field for hours in his undershirt with his eyes closed, regardless of weather. His body was drenched in sun, rain, and snow; his socks were all grass-stained. Should an under-informed freshman remark that it appeared the old man was “only sleeping,” his devoted disciples would brandish that favorite Troutian axiom: namely, that a thoroughgoing critique of logocentrism must also call into question the uninterrogated assumption of the trustworthiness of one’s own internal speech.

In other words, quoth the fish, philosophers simply spent too much time thinking. As a corrective measure, he spent all his time laying in the grass and hardly thought at all anymore.

George St. George worshiped the man. He saw in Trout a new Anthony the Great, meditating in the desert under the bronze Egyptian sun, only without the meditation. He had only begun to comprehend how his own views might terminate in Trout’s, and he hoped that someday he could think as little as he.

Then, one day at lunch, George was eating chicken cordon bleu in the faculty dining room when Dr. Trout looked over and said: “St. George, I understand you’ve settled into the old Keye house, is that right? He held your position before.”

George set down his fork. “Yes, he sold us the place last year, when he retired.”

“Ah yes,” said Trout. “That retirement could not have come soon enough. Poor, marooned Dr. Keye, still clinging to the last shreds of the Enlightenment. He is dead now I’m sure.”

“Actually,” piped up another professor, “he’s learning to surf in Myrtle Beach.”

“Well, it’s all the same. You know, St. George, Dr. Keye and I had a long-running debate about that house of yours.”

“Oh?” said St. George. “Regarding what?”

There was a St. Nicholas twinkle in the old man’s eye. “Only that very basic question on the dividing line between phenomena and noumena. I poked at his misplaced Kantian optimism in the senses. If, as Kant himself admitted, we have no way to commune with ‘things-in-themselves’—if our experience of the world is filtered through our own interpretation of it—why should we assume even our sense perceptions can be trusted? For all I know, you could be eating quiche.”

George looked down at his chicken, which was growing cold.

“Anyway,” said Trout, “I challenged him to show that the house was, in fact, actually real. He never did prove it.”

That was how the trouble started. Soon George could no longer focus on preparing lectures or grading papers. When he returned from the office, he would linger doubtfully in the driveway, mistrusting the impression the light blue siding and brick chimney left on his retinas. At night he would lie awake and watch the ceiling fan wobble on its axis, listening to the steady whoosh as the blades spun round and round. Finally, one night at 2:00 a.m., he switched on his bedside lamp and wrote in his notebook, by way of summary: “Everything is signs. I have built my own mental world, and these sights and sounds are only referents in my mind with no necessary correspondence to reality. There is no fixed point, there is no anchor: there are only endless signs.” Then he wandered into the kitchen and ate a piece of toast with strawberry jam.

Yes, George was befuddled all right. Even before this, he had already been predisposed to the belief that the human mind could not step into the world beyond its own borders…though this was probably not due to any great intellectual prowess but rather from the fact that he was so inept at dealing with the physical world in the first place. He burned his eggs every morning. He shattered lightbulbs when he attempted to replace them. He was constantly running into things, and his body was covered in bruises from the little fists that, it seemed to him, were always lashing out from the end tables and sinks. Now, thanks to the spurring of Dr. Trout, George found himself in his greatest battle with the physical realm yet.

But the house did not really want to fight. While George stumbled around like a blind man, it sent breezes through the windows to ruffle at his hair, and hummed deep and ancient through the electric lamps. And though these invitations were unable to pierce the philosopher’s shell, they were not unnoticed by his wife.

The fact was, the blue house on Shady Drive was the first house they had owned together. Before this, it had been all university housing and apartments. Neither of them had particularly minded: George was incapable of noticing the difference between one place and the next, and for Georgette, the best quality in a living arrangement was not the place itself but the foundation it offered her for other explorations. A comfortable chair was the wall of a pool from which she could kick off into the open water, allowing her to set out on horseback through the woods alongside Eudora Welty, or in a troika through the dark snow with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, or in a boat with Virginia Woolf to see the lighthouse. The comfort of the physical space was precisely in not having to notice it. She could tolerate a leaky faucet or a broken ceiling fan or cobwebs with easy grace, so long as they did not interfere with her ability to read and write and prepare her lessons. 

But the house at the top of the hill was different. For the first time, Georgette began to feel as though a doorway had opened between the world in her mind, where she had always been comfortable, and the space in which her body slept and ate and walked. 

She began doing things she’d never done before. She bought flowers and arranged them in vases. She moved her armchair around until she found a place that was just right, by the big window in the front room. Best of all, she bought a big bookshelf, the kind she had always wanted when she was a little girl, and put it right behind her armchair. Now, when she read, she found that she would slip between borders of her worlds, into a Russian train station with the whistles blaring and then back out again to hear the birds singing in the sugar maple. She would be working on her lesson plans and then catch herself smelling the warm, dusty smell of the old wood creaking around her. And on the occasions she returned very late from school at the end of the day, she would pause on the front porch and watch the sunset turn the sky purple and red.

“George, look,” she said one day. “This is our home.”

“If it exists at all, it is only a house,” he said. “Many people have lived here before us, and many people will live here after. ‘Home’ is only an illusion, a mixture of fond emotions and survival instincts that you have imbued on the blank canvas of your physical space. Again, if it exists at all.”

But she didn’t know. When she looked at the light of the sunset coming in through the smudged, dirty window behind the curtains, it felt more like the place was imbuing itself on her and not the other way around.

So the two went on, one flower with petals closed tight and another slowly opening. George, for his part, grew more and more desperate. He tried a myriad of philosophical approaches, even ones he did not agree with: he knocked holes in the wall with a hammer. He laid in his study for hours with his eyes shut and his earplugs in, trying to claw his way by reason alone to the floral wallpaper on the other side of his eyelids. He went to the county clerk’s office and studied blueprints, and read books on construction. He found none of it reliable; he was trapped. In his notebook, he wrote: “Senses aren’t trustworthy. Speech isn’t trustworthy. Words aren’t trustworthy. Even my thoughts aren’t trustworthy. How can we reach anything beyond ourselves?”

He was also driving Georgette crazy. “George, you have to get off the floor. You have to eat something. You have to patch those holes in the wall. You’re destroying this house, and you’re making yourself sick.”

To the credit of the poor, distraught philosopher, he loved his wife. He got up off the floor. As he did, the house stirred, and the grass and the trees whispered together: they saw their chance at last.

It happened three nights later when George offered, with an uncharacteristic willingness to consciously interact with the space-time continuum, to cook dinner for Georgette. It was finals week at the high school, and she was sitting on the carpet in the living room, grading papers on Jane Eyre. He made her pancakes, which he burned, and sausages, which he undercooked. But she was grateful nonetheless. Neither of them noticed, when they went upstairs to bed that night, that he had left the dishes stacked on the stove with the burner still on.

The smoke detector woke them. 

“Fire!” cried Georgette.

George considered whether or not the word-sign could be said to have any actual referent in the external world. Then the smoke was stinging his eyes and, against his better judgement, he followed his wife down the stairs and out onto the front lawn.

The flames were coming out the windows. They heard the sound of sirens as the fire engine came racing up the hill. All their neighbors were watching. This, they thought, was the most exciting thing that had happened since Paul Revere had ridden up the hill and back down the other side again. The firemen unraveled the hose and let loose a torrent of water.

“My books!” said Georgette, her hands clasped to her face.

Then George did something very brave and very stupid. Covering his mouth and nose with his shirt, he ran back inside. Georgette shouted, and the firemen bellowed, but he did not listen. He ran inside the front door and into the living room, where he shoved at Georgette’s bookcase with all his might. 

Then there was a mighty roar, and a great gust of wind, and the house shook. He felt the heat burning his face and the smoke in his nostrils. He saw the wallpaper curling like charred fingers, and smelled the reek of the upholstery belching fumes. Glass crunched under his shoes, and he heard the howl of the inferno. In a baptism by fire, the physical world presented itself to him in all her terror and power and he was ripped from that room in the high tower where he had contented himself. There it was, naked and brute before him, and he could not deny it. 

It should not have been possible for George to move the bookcase, but somehow, he suspected, the phenomenon of raw encounter with the noumenal filled his physical body with a strength hitherto unknown. Or, maybe it was just adrenaline. In any case, skinny, sweaty George St. George fought against the dragon, throwing himself against the bookshelf with everything he possessed. It took three great heaves. On the third, the bookshelf tipped and crashed out the window. Georgette’s books went tumbling down onto the front porch, spilling across the fresh green grass.

Then a firefighter seized George by the shoulders and dragged him out of the house. 

He lay there, coughing on the lawn, watching the smoke go up into the sky. Georgette ran over to him, crying, and hugged his neck very hard. He felt her skin and her salty tears. Here, again, was the physical world.

When they returned the next day, the house was a husk of black ash. There was almost nothing recognizable about it. Walls and floors and ceiling still stood, as did melted furniture, Georgette’s chair and sofa and coffee table. But the place, though it still existed for her in her memories, was gone.

“Perhaps it wasn’t real after all,” said Georgette.

“The mere fact of temporal non-presence does not negate the reality of having, at one time, possessed the quality of being,” said George.

She knew what he was trying to say. She squeezed his hand.

They took the last week of the semester off as emergency leave, and with Georgette’s books as their only salvaged possessions, they moved into a new house. This one was rented, and it was not on a hill. It did not have a big sugar maple out front and Paul Revere had never ridden down its streets. The front room was too sunny and the back rooms were too dim, and there was no good place for a big bookcase. But, that first night, as they sat on the floor staring out at the bare walls and unadorned carpet, their shoulders touched like shy little children and they felt the wind come through the open screen door.

When George returned to Ketley, before the start of the spring semester, Dr. Trout passed him in the hall. The old man, who was preparing for another session on the snow-covered soccer field by applying sunscreen to his nose, gave George an impish grin. 

“Shame about the house, St. George,” the elder philosopher said. “I suppose we’ll never solve that problem now, will we?”

George looked around wildly. “Who said that?”

“What the devil are you talking about? I’m standing right here.”

But George kept looking straight ahead, as though he were staring right through the old man. “The head of the English department warned me about this! Auditory sensations in the south halls, spectral in nature, approximating the intonation of seventy-six-year-old philosophy professor named Timothy Trout. The existence of such an individual, however, has never been definitively proven.”

Dr. Trout turned very white, and his lower lip trembled. Ashen-faced, he wandered away, murmuring under his breath. George waited until he was gone, then allowed himself an uncharacteristic chuckle and locked the door to his office.

And at home, as she prepared her lesson for the start of her own classes the following week, Georgette heard the call of a chickadee. Her skin prickled; she looked up. The house was still mostly bare, and what furniture they had procured was strange and unfamiliar. But again she heard the chickadee’s call, each dee-dee-dee like the wheels of a train coming out of a dark tunnel and into the light, and she felt again that same power, that same intense awareness. She did not understand this magic. Perhaps it was a ghost or a promise, something indefinable out there in the world that had opened her eyes and was working its spell on her. Listen, it said.

There was the sound of an engine, and George’s old Ford was coming into the driveway. She closed her book. Stepping out of the screen door, she went out to meet him under the purple sky of the setting sun.

✷

Story by Matt Mills · Photo by Paweł Czerwiński

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