Fussing over limits

Dear diary,

Well I awoke feeling great again. God that sux. I wanted so badly to enter that state where you still feel tired after waking, and then you slip into a deeper-than-ever slumber, like my “son” did at the end of yesterday’s entry, and then…

What happens next, after the Luscious Blackout? They say: no pain no gain. Is that really true? I don’t buy it. I plan on entering a new & better world with all my friends & receiving an endless stream of earnest love & accolades from every fresh confrère. This I am due, on account of my karmic surplus.

I believe in gain without much pain; or gain with minimal pain: in other words, I hate this present world for being all-wrong, & my slogan is “Make Pain Tolerable Again”. —But was it ever? Isn’t that its point, that it’s intolerable? Again, I don’t think so: I think you can have too much or not enough, and I’m lobbying hard for the “just a hint” apportionment. My stance has always been: I understand that a totally painless world would be as dull as a drip painting, and that pain gives things meaning and depth; but just as one who is developing the look of a new currency can add too much glitter to the design of the banknote’s obverse, so also can the world arrive at a sweet spot of painfulness.

Scratch everything I just said. I don’t believe a word of it. I’m just trying to weasel my way out of spacetime.

Why space & time, by the way? Why not some other style of horrors, such as…

You see: we’ve been jailed here so long that we can’t even dream an alternative to this slop they’ve been feeding us.

How did the last intelligent creatures sign off? How did the double-headed serpent-people end up going extinct? Or the articulate squid-folk?

Intelligent creatures. What a loaded, biased phrase. I should retire from intergalactic politics. You can’t just talk as if your own type of being is the only smarty-pants form in existence at present. But, like the problem of pain, what does it mean when we posit that ALL creatures are intelligent? Doesn’t it water down the term? And if we say that a certain subgroup of the class that contains every living being is intelligent while the rest of the class is lacking, where should the line be drawn? And who will dare draw it? Nevertheless, when Blake ends The Marriage of Heaven & Hell with the proclamation: “For every thing that lives is Holy,” doesn’t this sorta have the side-effect of nullifying holiness; in other words, doesn’t it imply the same sentiment as “No thing that lives is Holy”?

It’s like, when you’re in an all-girl trade-school and there’s one particular classmate in Carpentry 101 who catches your fancy, so you sing: “O Juliet, your beauty burns brighter than any other star in the firmament!” Then all the other girls shout “Then what are the rest of us, chopped liver?” And you admit, now duly chastised, in a statelier tempo: “I stand corrected; for now that I fix my gaze upon the lot of ye, as a whole & then also individually, I realize that ye are gorgeous, each & all, in your own unique fashion; therefore it is not as tho Juliet is the sun while the rest of ye are lesser lights in the sky, but rather your entirety is like a billion suns burning at once, so that your collective brilliance blinds me. I change my mind, therefore: now I would like to date you all.” So you end up marrying the entire Carpentry class, just like Jesus did with the saints in his church.

I’m all for this. So I second Blake’s assertion of ubiquitous holiness: it takes the toys from the one brat in the nursery who has hoarded them and redistributes them to all the children. Gently, yet with tough love, it approaches the LORD in Heaven, who is clutching like a miser to his title, and it allows him his own fair share while justly divvying blessings to all, not unlike an infinitely divisible dinner of bread and fishes. That’s why I like it: I think that either everything or nothing is Holy.

But we run into a problem when we realize that, just as nobody could draw the line distinguishing the types of beings that possess intelligence from the ones that lack it, so also the line between life and non-life is either nonexistent itself or hazy and permeable. I love playing this game:

Let’s say that you define life as “that which has movement” because you wanna exclude rocks.

But rocks DO move: their atoms are always quivering with bliss, and they dream of becoming mountains someday soon.

On the other hand, you can make your definition too exclusive: For instance, if we say “to be alive, a thing must possess either hair, fur, or feathers”—OK, now we captured humans, dogs, and birds, but we left out dragons, who have scales because they own all the oceans. Plus, while so unnecessarily hurting the feelings of the latter, we also leave the door wide open for rocks to sneak thru again: for all they need to do is wear a wig (for hair), or a fur coat (to impersonate a lion or alternately Hercules), or a hat with a feather in it (to pose as the firebird risen from its own ashes). They can even get around the amendment, which we ratified in order to include the evil Dragons of Primordial Chaos among the class of living creatures, by simply purchasing a pair of snakeskin boots.

Yes, you can sneak into the garden of paradise by climbing over its hedge and then impersonating various creatures, until you get close enough to the sleeping Eve to whisper Miltonic poetry into her ear, while stroking her platinum curls, that’s all I’m saying. (Only fools attempt to break into Eden thru its front gate: that’s unwise because there’s always cherubim guarding it.)

But, when one species goes extinct and another comes and occupies the desk it was sitting at, I wonder if they often end up writing the same tall tales. Cuz I think that no matter how imaginative one tries to be when composing one’s memoirs, one is practically bound to refract only what has transpired. Perhaps one’s atoms maintain an impression of their own past relations; perhaps, as laws, the physics of this spatiotemporal imprisonment preordained the scope of one’s potential: for one cannot fancy anything new, one can but rearrange what is old & thus imply a novel phenomenon via juxtapositioning.

So you’d think that our usurping super-species would be sorta stuck writing the same myths as us, its precursors, if only because we all wanna harness the flux of whatness at a point most favorable to our current form. To elongate the instant of eternity where pleasure is optimal.

In verses 9-11 of the first chapter of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, “the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem” always sez:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, “See, this is new”? — It hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

But how can it be that everything is only an echo of some past event? If it’s impossible that there should be any “new thing under the sun”, then all these old things had their first occurrence at some point in spacetime — and wouldn’t that itself be breaking the above rule?

I can solve my own dilemma here by declaring the original actions, which predestined all else, to be analogous to the “constructing of the bars of the jail cell,” A.K.A. spacetime. Here’s another proverb from Blake:

Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

I guess I’ll end this now. I’m pretty much out of time. My main feeling, after having blabbed to this point, is that I wish I had written something more simple, like a tale where a wild rodent befriends me as I’m walking down the road, and we spend the rest of the day together playing golf. Or that I had written something offensive that would alienate my entire readership, like an essay in praise of…

I won’t even reveal the word that I was thinking: it is unutterable.

Wouldn’t that be amusing tho? — in this world where everyone’s so eager to prove how virtuous they are, if you were to pen a manifesto about something you don’t even believe in or care about, just cuz you know it’ll get you in trouble with all the “good people”!

I really am irked by what is acceptable.