Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Darkness, pt 2: Above the Starry Canopy

Yes! Questions... Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?
-- Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Brueder - ueber'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.

Be embraced, millions!
This kiss to the entire world!
Brothers - above the starry canopy
A loving father must dwell.
-- An de Freude / Ode to Joy (Schiller, 1785)

1. I am angry almost all the time now.

Angry at the brokenness of the world.
Angry at the darkness, at the petty lies, the deliberate deceptions, the subtle Escher-like distortions that lead the wide and obvious path smoothly into its opposite without seeming to shift at all.
Angry at the necessary deaths, the unnecessary deaths, the futility of it all, how good and bad alike fall apart into nothingness.
Angry at the emptiness and shadow.
Angry at the Standard Model and its hammer-blow shout of THERE IS NOTHING BEYOND.

It is not good to be angry. It is neither right nor healthy.

Nevertheless, the anger remains. It has been building for a long time.

2. The Standard Model is a poor dumb thing to be angry at.

It is like being angry at television, at the stupidity of synchronous broadcast media, for missing a show you waited a month to watch, when it is neither the show nor the media that really annoys you but the temporality and finitude of life. It is like not crying at your mother's funeral and then bursting into tears a month later when you realise you missed Babylon 5 and, DVD or no DVD, the clock has ticked past a moment that may never come again.

But television *is* like a little death each time you miss a show. A permanent memento mori beamed direct from satellite into your living room.

Or perhaps it's the other way around, and life is like a little television?
Is a signal still out there, making its way to Vega?

Well of course there is.

3. What is my soul?

What is there about me that will survive the final meltdown?

It is easy to reject the idea of the crudely physical being all there is (even the Standard Model with its permanent lightspeed barrier claims that what we call 'physical' is a whole lattice of virtual waveforms and interactions that do not, at least in quite the ordinary way we think of the idea, exist) - but that's the easy part.

What about my thoughts? My skills? My memories? Are they the essential me, or are they merely distractions, shadow-plays thrown by an unseen core within?

Are my friendships me?

Is the 'soul' that I should guard and protect and dedicate my life to, the sum total of my interactions with all the people I have known? Is that who I am? Or is there something more beyond even that?

What is left of me when all that I know, all that I do, all that I touch, all that I look on, all that I feel, are taken away?

Are there any things - small things, ordinary things, perhaps - which will not fade into that dark at the end of life's highway?

Or must I let it take everything I know and leave my soul - whatever it might be - naked with the Unknown?

4. When I look at the world I see darkness and shadow, insubstantial mist peopled with grey ghosts, dashed with tiny specks of reality, joy, and truth. I live for the rare moments when things click and I recognise a face, or I achieve some worthwhile task. In between is a dull blur of futility, pointlessness, contradiction. Petty crimes and tiny shrugs of defeat. The darkness.

But when God looks at the world, He sees only light.

How do I grow eyes like those?

How do I see the truth in everything?
How do I see Christ's face in everyone?

How do I stop being angry?
How do I stop being afraid?

5. To fear is first to believe that there can be a place or a thought or an action which can exist outside of an infinite and loving God's mind.

This is common sense which we learn as children. Touch this, do not touch that. Go here, do not go there. If you touch that or go there you will be shocked by electricity or burned by fire or run over by a car or eaten by a dog. There are choices to be made and many of those choices are irreversible, or appear so. The best will in the world cannot heal the scars of bad choices made accidentally, or accidents endured without any choice at all.

This is the first and hardest lesson of childhood: that there is no way back from some mistakes. No savegame, no DVD, no rewind.

That sometimes, when the show's over and the lights go out and you stumble back from the supermarket an hour too late with an eco-friendly bag full of Foolish Virgin Olive Oil and no TV dinner, that's it, you missed the big reveal, it's gone and now you'll never find out.

To live as an ordinary sane human is to be almost constantly afraid. It's what keeps us alive. It's also what kills us.

Can one learn not to be afraid - can one remember a child's lost belief in that infinite and loving God outside whose mind we can never for a moment step - without becoming completely and utterly mad?

6. What about Hitler, anyway? Surely even God hates *someone*? He'd be evil not to!

It is hard to imagine a Father of infinite forgiveness. That is, it is easy to imagine, because every child dreams that, but hard to picture. As we grow (in religion as in anything else) we learn to put away childish things, among them being kindness and mercy and love.

What's love got to do with faith, after all? You have faith in something solid you can kick, that doesn't give under you. Love... is something brittle, easily damaged, self-destructive even. It bleeds. It dies. Its rotting corpse stinks up the closet under the sink and eventually you have to hold your nose and throw it out.

It is easy to picture a God of infinite and efficient mechanical purity, who quietly and without remorse strips all trace of taint from His heaven. A kind of cosmic Terminator, taking out the garbage. Holy above all. Unvisited by sorrow.

It's easy because we already have a picture of that Father. The grave.

7. The Nazis sang Schiller's Ode to Joy on Hitler's birthday.

Sometimes you cannot judge a person, or a poem, by the company they keep.

Sometimes you cannot judge the company one keeps by the company that company keeps.

If you go on like that, soon you will judge nothing at all.

And then where would we be?

8. I have a choice.

I can believe that all hope of an acceptable world is forever lost, that all things are dust and quarks, a short journey from darkness to darkness through pain.

I can believe that all hope is forever present, here and now, that all things are forgiven and reconciled on this very earth, and that life and mind have never been and cannot ever be lost.

I can try to believe that hope is conditional: that eternal life is achievable by some adept juggling of perishable, self-contradictory short-term meanings.

That last is the only ordinary, sane option.

I do not think I can bring myself to believe it.