30.EPILOGUE.73: December 23, 2003 -- INFINITY.
INTERLUDE SEVEN:
"Night."
I wonder what it would be like, up there. I wonder what it would be like to die up there, up in the blackness, spinning, tumbling, listening to hiss of the air systems, alone and quiet, knowing you will never seen anyone again, and that any sound you make cannot and will not be heard, that outside the confines of your small tumbling room no sound actually exists, that the waves are there, in a potential energy form, but they cannot be translated into anything kinetic and thus cannot displace substances thicker than themselves and thus will never actually deliver any actual sound to any actual ears within hearing range and so it's all silent, silent, silent in this capsule just me alone drifting and running out of air, and sure there would be panic especially when the suffocation begins, but maybe that panic would be worthwhile, something to be endured and relished, just for the chance to die up there, in the stars, out in space, deep blackness stretching forever. I mean everybody's gotta go, and I may not really want to go, except of course when my mind begins to shut down and my gaze turns inward and the rage and hatred I feel for the world around me bends back towards me and I feel my consciousness compressing tighter and tighter into a red hot glowing ball of self-destruction, self-analysis and paranoid dementia and I begin to feel that there's really no other solution, no other final step I can take to solve some hitherto unperceived insoluble problem-- but that aside I don't want to go but if you have to die you might as well die with some sort of element of style and cool and in a way that will in some way at least be remembered in the history books and mythologized and turned into lousy movies starring overblown melodramatic overrated fools like Tom Hanks or Robin Williams, people who can make all the old men and young girls and everybody in between weep the sad tears of a hundred thousand sentimental children by pulling on your heartstrings, massaging your melancholy, doing an amazing plug-and-play routine on all your clichés, at least then I'd be remembered. Not like it would matter to me once the air ran out or, how about, once I started to freeze. Maybe the air doesn't run out but instead the space capsule just gets colder and colder and colder and I turn into a fabulous glittering corpsicle preserved forever as I tumble through the vast emptiness between this place and the nearest star, which would still take me, at the speed I roll, thousands of years to reach, peaceful and dead in the infinite silence, traveling places that really aren't all that interesting when you think about it because infinite freezing black is just still only infinite freezing black, but when you think about it again actually it's kind of fascinating because it is infinite freezing black, tumbling lost in space is tumbling lost in space, going on a voyage, a trace of you continuing forever out there, off this rotten planet with all the things on it that cause nothing but pain, and out there which, even though dead is dead and there's no coming back and I guess it ultimately doesn't really matter where you die because death is the ultimate cosmic betrayal and is, on one level at least, one very important level, all the same because it's death, a zero point, a neutrality, a nullity, and so on one level it doesn't really matter where and how you die, but still somehow dying and traveling for hundreds of millions of years pointlessly through space is still somehow preferable in a way to wasting away in a nursing home or waiting for your malignant prostate to finally turn all your cells against you, or being shot by some ignorant gangsta simply for walking down the wrong street at the wrong time or shopping at the wrong video store when the drug withdrawal finally really hits that fool in the base of his spine and all he can think is kill everyone and maybe somebody will have enough cash on his or her body for me to be able to afford my latest chemical induced sense of bliss, or simply being run over by a bus, traveling through space beats that, doesn't it, at least on some sort of cosmetic level, right-- and of course when I'm dead there will be no perception of any sort of aeons-long journey spinning through an eternity of cold emptiness, sure, but a guy can dream, can't he? If I can't touch infinity I will pretend I can, at least, for a while, when I'm still alive, place myself in an impossible situation and hope against hope that somehow on some level it can and will come true. And there's another fantasy: I'm on a planet, somehow, somehow I've made it and I'm on alien soil alone. I mean, we've discovered two other planets that could be Earthlike, right, we just did that a little while ago, right? And so I'm one one of them and it is Earthlike, perfectly Earthlike and green and blue and filled with primitive animals and insects and plants and water and plenty of air to breathe and things to eat and maybe I'm here alone as well, all alone on a planet all to myself, a planet that looks like Earth did millions of years ago, and sure it's lonely and maybe I even go a bit insane but I can also extrapolate to the future, to the millions of years to come and the inevitable evolution of intelligent life and somehow, if I can just leave a trace, or a monument, or something to let them know I was here, and wonder who or what I was, or maybe there are even some kinds of primitive hominid life on this planet, and maybe they've even evolved to the point where they have language and even if not maybe I can give them language and watch them as they grow as I teach them to think and recognize time, and maybe then somehow I can touch the Infinite that way, somehow I can communicate myself to them and maybe even they can communicate themselves to me and we can both touch the Infinite that way, and even if I'm alone I can use the unknowableness of the future, on this planet, all by myself, to invent a future and somehow touch the Infinite that way, through the invention of culture and language and time, and I can experience the far future and the distant past at the same time because any society that evolves from the point I find myself on this planet, any society that comes will be extremely primitive compared to where I'm at now and so it will seem as if they exist in the past while they really live in the future and through this blending of the past and future, the creation of consciousness and language and society, maybe I can imagine I'm touching the Infinite that way, as I imagine their temples and religions and rituals, societies, and modes of life much in the same way as I do when I read Gilgamesh or Aristotle or Plato, like I did years ago, maybe the only time I ever really felt as if I was touching the Infinite, back when I was taking an ancient philosophy class in The Year 2000 because I needed to prove to the University that my marks were good enough to let me in as a grad student, and it was in that class, and it was through reading Plato and Aristotle and the Ancient Greeks that I actually felt as if I was in contact with something larger than me, but something that was still a part of me all the same, and so I felt as if I actually, very briefly, did actually touch the Infinite, for almost a month, or maybe two, and I felt like I was connected somehow to something more, and part of it was the fact that the Ancient Greeks believed in and didn't believe in their gods at the same time so they could take them seriously as entities and yet take them apart and bend them and manipulate them like the ideas they represented because they knew they were myths and yet somehow they knew they represented something real and you don't really get that now, you don't get many people who treat our gods in the same way, a few maybe but not many, and so I felt like I was walking a tightrope between Infinity and the material world and eventually the two began to blend and mesh and even though sometimes I felt like I was alone I still somehow felt connected, both solidly individual and part of an ever-shifting continuum and my thoughts would drift upwards to the sky, the stars and I felt like maybe I really would some day touch Infinity, drifting in space and inside my head at the same time, cold and warm, alive and dead, and tingling with some kind of energy that made everything feel okay, made the future seem interesting and hopeful, made the exhaustion and pain go away, made everything feel okay, infinite and graspable, but okay, losing myself, but okay.Here I sit, broken-hearted.
Paid my dime...
Oh God I'm so alone....
-- Jean-Paul Sartre
Next: "Trente"....