Dear diary,
My poor sweetheart had to have the 1962 movie Vivre sa vie (U.S. title: My Life to Live) ruined by Yours Truly, because I kept pausing the scene where Nana talks with the philosopher at the restaurant: between every sentence of theirs I had to interject seventy of my own. I should contact the National Security Agency (NSA) to get a copy of the recorded audio from our room, because, now that it’s the next morning, I can’t remember a single thing that I said, but I’m left with the impression that I solved all the problems of the universe.
This is a good time to repeat the quip from Marcel Duchamp: There is no solution because there is no problem. If I’m in the business of articulating philosophical solutions, I better be doing so solely for the sake of absurdity, as nobody’s gonna benefit from my effort.
Also: what do I mean by saying that I feel that I solved all problems? I mean that the aspects of human communication which result in so much animosity would be smoothed and made harmonious if people would simply “try on for size” my unique new style of thinking. (I’m remaining purposely vague, to avoid being proven right or wrong: I’m trying to start a cult here, not genuinely help anyone.) Speech and silence, love and the lack thereof – I slice thru all these knots…
But to say that one can “solve all the problems of the universe” – is this as comprehensive of a statement as it seems at first glance? No. Because it sounds like one has left unwanted badness no place to thrive; but the truth is that, if badness is banished from the universe, it can relocate elsewhere. The world is bigger than this universe. There are untold universes out there, and each owns infinite dimensions. So it’s better to think of our universe as one state among a planisphere of countries. Solving a problem here, in our neck of the woods, only means that the neighboring universes probably get inundated with extra unwanted badness.
Or does it? Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic – I’m treating societal discord as if it’s helium in a rattlesnake-shaped balloon; but to eradicate infighting from the tail does not necessarily overinflate the head: so harmony and discord are more like temperatures, hot and cold, therefore my philanthropic progress need not deform the appearance of our ultra-dimensional container—the God, within which our universe is as a cell of a body—no, I can only cause it to shrivel or pop.
*
Is it the highest desire of each individual that he share one mind with his neighbor? You meet a stranger who lives in a hut. You build yourself a hut next-door. Now you are neighbors, hutfellows. But just because your abodes occupy the Areopagus doesn’t mean that your brain cases contemplate in tandem. So you buy one of those new machines that have the suction-cup wires that attach to your forehead, and you attach them also to your neighbor’s forehead, so now you two share one single mind. Neither one of you can think a thought that the other does not immediately think as well. So you’re basically one single living creature now. You are the selfsame. Duality has fused back into identity. It’s like reverse mitosis: instead of one cell splitting into two, two souls are now one; tho it’s not the fuzzy math of sexual reproduction, the merge that claims to achieve “one flesh” from two, when “a man shall cleave unto his wife” (Genesis 2:24) – this “one plus one equals one” proposition is actually “one and one make three or more” (unless, the moment you’re born, both your bio-parents expire: your mother due to the complications of childbirth, and your father from the natural course of the changing of the gods – when the messiah enters the world, the current divine ruler’s law is fulfilled and thus abolished, causing that old god to hiss like a flame underwater); it is genuine unity. Ye might as well tear down your respective huts and make one larger hut, or, better yet, abandon fabricated domiciles altogether and simply indwell the Areopagus itself, inscribing upon your entryway the motto of your new family crest: “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD”; as you and your ex·fellow·hutsman share every last private cogitation, now that you’re internetted to the devilbuilder, it no longer matters if the NSA knows every philosophical speculation that you’ve ever uttered, every speech you’ve ever given to ruin any film for any audience, because you and the NSA’s twelve employees are One Fiend now, together with your business partner (the one whose hut you copied); so that makes fourteen souls, total. Regarding this inevitability, here is an excerpt from “The House of Asterion” by Jorge Luis Borges:
It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as well. Anyone may enter.
And Borges’ editor/translator/narrator adds the following footnote after the parentheses in the statement above:
The original says fourteen, but there is ample reason to infer that, as used by Asterion, this numeral stands for infinite.
My point is that, once we’ve managed to share a single mind, and thus to become the selfsame being, which is fused seamlessly with the national-level intelligence agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, we might as well assume that all the other citizens of this globe will eventually join us. So now all of humankind is literally one man. Does this solve our nonexistent problems? No, for now we’re like Adam walking in the garden of Eden before Eve was created; or, if you prefer, like Lilith planting her Tree of Wisdom before Adam was molded. Or Chaos asleep before Jehovah was born. But rather more like Adam in the garden, after all, because we have a lot of animals to talk to, but no other humans, since we’ve absorbed all the humans. Can’t you all buzz to each other inside your Hive Mind? a heckler asks. Well, yes, but when you’re lonely, you don’t really consider your own thoughts to be adequate companionship. Unless someone like Shakespeare fills your imagination with real people, your thoughts alone do not satisfy your craving for friendship. You desire something beyond; something fresh and unexpected. Animals help, to an extent, but they’re too predictable. You love them, so you become them as well: you absorb all the birds, the fish, the creepers, even the housecats. Now there’s nothing alive beyond your One True Self. So my deeper point is that unity leads inescapably to alienation—it’s tautological: if you roll every soul like a snowball into a single existence, the ensuing life will find itself floating in lifelessness. Or if it finds any foreign intelligence—if our grand unification discovers the slightest trace of outer-life intellect (that is, any soul that avoided merging into the United Life Conglomerate) it will absorb it.
That’s why I say that literal immortality is agony, an illness: Death is a boon to the ever-living, as atomization is the goal of God. When God exploded, it was not a tragedy. Nor was it a mistake: for, when a mirror grows so big that it has nothing left to reflect, it will happily shatter itself to reflect its own shards.
*
What is luck? Is it simply getting what you want, when you want it? But we don’t always know what is meet for us (is anything truly meet for us?), let alone what we want. Say a piece of metal falls out of the sky and lands on your head. It hurts when it hits you, so you might consider this an unlucky development. But you pocket the slab as a keepsake & resume your travels. (Your occupation is wanderer: your employer pays you to wander from town to town aimlessly.) Now you enter a superstore and attempt to purchase a painting and a room to display it in: The Passage from Virgin to Bride, by the aforesaid Duchamp; and something sparsely furnished, facing west—preferably with bright white walls and an ornate bed. The clerk declares: “The price is one obol.” (I steal this unit of money from Lucian, whose tales I’ve been reading—it’s how much the ferryman Charon charges the shades of the dead to cross from the shores of the Styx to the underworld proper.) So you reach into your purse, which matches your tan capris, and rummage thru the coins, searching for an obol, while the clerk looks on. Now, when his eye alights upon that strange metallic slab that fell out of the sky earlier—you put it in your purse after it hit you on the head, remember?—the clerk exclaims: “Is that what I think it is!?” And you say, “Wait a moment while I affix these suction-cup wires to your frontal lobes.” And, once this is accomplished, you fire up the mind-merger mechanism and reply, “Yes, this is what—” yet the clerk interrupts via pure thought: As we have become the same existence, we no longer need to voice words aloud with our tongue to communicate: we now share the same thoughts; yes, we can see that this glowing slab in our purse is indeed what our late clerk’s pre-divine spark assumed it was: the pearl of great price, worth enough to purchase this entire superstore and thirteen more just like it.
So we thought it was unfortunate when we got struck by the object that fell from the neighboring universe’s mothership, but it turns out we were actually immensely fortunate, because—
P.S.
I refuse to decide which alternate ending to use. I could make the slab begin to glow and expand until it fills the entire horizon with poisonous lava, thus freeing all of us vampires from our cursed perpetuity. OR I could say that the slab turns out to be an actual fragment—in fact, the nipple—from the neighboring universe’s mothership; and, like a lucky lizard foot, it can regenerate the rest of its body that it detached from; so now we inherit a vast spacecraft all our own, just as when, earlier in the day, we cloned our precursor Lincoln’s hut. Either way, the following lie shall serve as a capper:
Now we can play the whole dream over again, this time with finesse.
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