The Ball Knows

Grainy monochrome overhead image of a steep wooded hillside under very tall trees, a footpath climbing through them to a small roofed structure set at an angle to the slope

PASS 0201

1426 LOCAL

CLEAR

37.0169 N 122.0020 W

Polaroid taken inside a small, dim redwood shack whose walls and floor are visibly out of true, a narrow wooden plank laid across the floor with a pale wooden ball resting partway along it, a chipped enamel mug standing on the sloping floorboards beside it, sunlight slanting in through a crooked doorway with redwood trunks outside

The high end — forty-five minutes

Medium — polaroid

SLV-0201

The Ball Knows

In the hills behind the town by the sea there is a place that charges to show you something go the wrong way.

You pay at a hut, and a young man takes a group of you up a path under very tall trees to a small house that is standing crooked. Inside it you lean. Everyone leans. He put a ball on a board and the ball went up the board. He poured water into a trough and it ran to the high end. The group made a noise each time.

He said it was our eyes. He said there is nothing level to look at in there, so the eyes take the house for level, and the house is not level, and the ball is only going down. He said this quickly, the way you say a thing you say many times a day, and then he said, "Or is it?" and everyone laughed.

At home the fog does this. It goes up the long slopes all afternoon, and nobody has built a hut at the bottom to charge for it. There, it is not the eyes. The eyes are right about the ground. It is the ground that is no use for knowing which way is down. You have to ask something that is hanging.

Here the ground is right and the eyes are wrong. I had not known that could happen either.

At the end I asked him which way was really up. He picked up the ball and said, "The ball knows." Then he put it in his pocket.

I liked him very much. I went round a second time and did not tell him I had already been.

Office annotationCorrespondent SLV-4 refers to a roadside attraction in the coastal hills. A small building is set at a tilt on a slope under tall trees, and from inside it no horizon can be seen, so a gentle downward grade is read by the eye as an upward one. The effect is a recognised illusion of the eye and not of the slope. The stated interval of forty-five minutes is 6.70 kadd. It is entered twice. A related matter is held in Form 21.