MIGHTY DJINNS! PLEASE ACCEPT OUR TRIBUTE OF ARTICHOKE SALAD
AND BRANDY AS SIGN OF YOUR WONDROUS EVANESCENCE. Nothing. What
about you Cassi, do you hear anything?" She looked at me and I shook my head smiling. Greg's pantheistic tendencies have long been the subject of our good-natured mocking.
"Oh please, I didn't mean that. Or maybe I... but no, even if you consider the very strict view, didn't they discover that the biomass of tiny creatures living in the soil and under the sea beds may be greater than that of everything else put together? I mean, there could be trillions of them right around us. Not to mention the mites that live in our eyebrows and on our skin. The world is teeming with life that we've no idea about. Why couldn't there be something beyond that, something that unlike the eyebrow mites we don't know about yet?"
"Do you think all the secret and mysterious creatures are just mis-sightings of some other mode of life, like a non-carbon-based one?" I asked, this time without intending to mock.
"What mysterious creatures?"
"Say the sasquatch and the unicorn and the... I dunno, the drop bear."
"-not what I was talking about! Oh, it's too stupid for the likes of you."
"Excuse me?"
"Well you two have always been the ones with the full head: logic AND imagination. What have I had?"
This time Clara had her just turn. "What crap! You are like us in this way. You're one of us and if you'd stop belittling yourself just because you haven't done brilliantly in some boring academic subject that that leech of a headmaster of yours has sucked the life out of, you'd see that you do belong here and now. I don't know by what frazzled chance we found each other but here we are, and here we'll continue to be. Just think of all we'll do together! Sure you'll go off to the capital and start kicking the shit out of criminals and we might away from here to somewhere else but what we have is beyond the mere coincidental factor of being in the same spot in space and time. Even if we end up scattered who knows where, we'll still have what we have now; not just as a memory but as an ongoing thing. And I know that in actuality we'll keep doing what we're doing together. So what if we don't have exactly the same abilities?! You my friend are so amazingly clever in being able to make something out of nothing. If I had to survive on a deserted island, I'd definitely take you; for then I'd know that I'd be completely OK. I Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 18
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wouldn't take Cassi!" Some laughter. "I don't trust her after the way she handled a certain survival situation." More laughter. "Sorry folks but someone needed to get on the high horse here. We are after all finishing school and things will be different. This is our night."
It was. There was along silence after, but not an uncomfortable one at all. We were all kinda relieved to have had those things said because we knew we had to acknowledge each other right in that moment in time, on that night, near that lake, in that twilight. I was just glad that some existed who understood some of my quirks.
"So Greg," I asked, "now that we've established that you're not an inferior lackey who's only worthy to bask, or rather bathe in our presence, what did you mean about the forms of life?"
"Sure. Remember when you told me about your thought experiments as a child? Well I actually had one of my own, and it's started to come out again just tonight. It was when my dad took me out to Norway the first time. We took a train inside the country and I could see some birds flying along it and above it from the window. Then they had the thing happen that you see in documentaries. The migrating flock suddenly turns and changes direction but keeping formation. I haven't seen it before and I think I choked on whatever I was eating. And I thought, it's like the flock has a mind of its own. Like it was thinking - or could think - because it was organised in such a complex way. But I guess many people may wonder about that when they see travelling birds. We were going past a forest though and then I looked down to the trees and how they were arranged and I thought, maybe the world could be the same. I mean we couldn't see that the flock was
'thinking' if we watched just one bird could we? So here I was a kid on the train realising that I was just watching one piece of forest. But maybe all the forests and rivers and rocks put together were doing something amazing that I couldn't see. Maybe they were like a person because they were so complex. Or because they were doing something much more profound than I was."
"Oh my! And to think you were ashamed of this sounding stupid. Why, looks like you're quite the loony just like me. A cognitive shaman. Tell us more. How do you think this is manifested here?"
"It even comes back to traditional cultures, now that you mention the shaman. They often believe in things like rocks and trees and water as animate beings-"
"-if I can interrupt, it means beings with a soul 'cause anima is soul in Latin". I couldn't help myself.
"I never realised, cool. So anyway, maybe it's not just the world that's thinking, maybe it is in a simple thing like a rock or water or...a planet. If you look at a proper river, the currents are probably just as complex as whatever's in our brains. Maybe it could be aware of itself. We only judge if things are animate -I should say soulful-from what we're able to observe. But maybe we don't have the language to observe water and rocks. Then we could be in the middle of something incredible right now and not even know it. The rocks could be deciding whether to kill us or spare our lives. And you know, maybe there are 144,000 djinns above the lake. After all, djinns are made of air and there could Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 19
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be clusters of air with such intricacy they'd make what we're talking about seem as primitive as the bleating of a goat."
Having realised --and after two years of soulmateship! --how much more of a connexion we have than I even thought, I hugged him with a flourish. We three stayed at the lake that night for another multitude of hours, talking of everything else under the sun. The very brief darkness came and went and we departed when it was already light. I was all the more glad for us now.
3. Consequences
To obviate the "suspense", Greg was killed by a drunk driver a month after. It was three months before we were to graduate.
As a result of our night on the lake I'd become much closer to him than before. We saw each other in new contexts, without Clara, and talked about things I probably would not have been able to talk to Clara about, at least at that time. And then he died. The news came in when Clara and I were together. A good omen it was, for we would have been even worse off had we found out separately. We were sitting at that bench where we first did our creative version of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" all those years back; and we frequented the spot intensely. From around the corner my father appeared, crying. Although he was obviously upset, I'm pretty sure that he made himself cry in that moment just so that we'd get the news in advance; so we'd know as soon as we saw him all those metres away. It kinda made the suddenness less and I'm actually incredibly grateful to him for the whole way he did it. He came up to us and stopped just an arm stretch away. We jumped up, already aware. He extended his hands towards us and put one hand on each of our foreheads and mouthed it. There were bad news --Our Greg had been killed. He was aware of the devastating significance of this and didn't try to cushion the stab in a way that would have made it unbearably worse. We somehow had no "denial" period where we'd curse at him saying "it's not true" like you might see in many a movie; with limbs flailing and bodies collapsing and tantrums ahappening. This meant that through the very atomic explosion of immediate grief that followed, I saw my father in a new light, much like that of my childhood. It was the dad of the Spanish royal descent and of great heart, not the more down-to-mundaneness personality of the last few years. The key feature was the way he walked up to us and stood. Something very regal about that --a dignified sorrow. We asked him to go back saying we'd be at the house in a bit. As I said before, we were sitting on the bench but once he was gone, we was standing up.
What else can I say about this and what transpired? Shall I give the brilliant and necessary piece of information that I was, we were, utterly devastated to our core, since one would never have figured it out without my sage guidance? There is an image of Clara and I standing there in the clearing, oblivious to the cold and grabbing onto each Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 20
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other's shoulders as if to support each other from plunging into some sort of precipice. Another image of us back at the house. The implied stench of death in the air. Seems silly now but at that moment I was so offended by the fact that somewhere out there, Greg's corpse was already starting to rot. There was something unfitting about that --and I was genuinely surprised that no-one was worried about this; that amongst the consolation-talk inside my house, this was never brought up as a specific subject. It was just so improper - so impolite for Nature to have arranged for this rotting and putrefication, for him to bring Greg back down to the matter-of-factness, to this faceless arrangement of meat and bone. 'Twas a he: Father Nature; one of those abusive alcoholic fathers. That's how he appeared to me that day. It couldn't be a female. Not on that day. Not that I'm suggesting females could not be cruel - far far from it! - but on that day for some reason I felt the cruelty was male. Years later when I was reading about some bullshit Sartre "philosophy" the words "being in itself" jumped up at me. These were the core characteristics of a person --the physical ones. Height, weight, body composition, age, race, gender, whatever else. The most basic properties that according to Sartre largely define a corpse and not a person. I flashed back to that day in my house with my family and Clara's family hovering around us and the only thought spinning around my head was the mundaneness of the meat that was my fellow dreamer. At this stage, you could sell that particular meat by the kilo; there was nothing special about it. After this came the blurred period for me that lasted about three weeks to my recollection. Phasing in and out were real people and situations that were the ghosts and background against the foreground of my brain patterns. I went back to my routine --including school --fairly quickly though, quicker than people expected me to. Reading the word "expected" still brings an ironic smile to my face after all these years. However the reason was quite simple and merely a case of serendipity. It was because I cried. Well, obviously I did in that period but my routine was somewhat interesting. I'd wake up, brush my teeth, and walk onto the balcony of my bedroom in bare feet in the freezing temperature for my planned cry. Then I'd cry for about 5 minutes, but each time I did it I put in a whole day's intensity into those 5 minutes, erupting in a flood of unbridled grief. Naturally by the end of the mini-session I was empty and stopped crying of necessity. With this accidental daily emptiness, I could carry on for most of the day, building it up for the next morning. Feeling the buildup as I was doing other things was pure joy. I craved it.
Emotion-wise, things were quite strange. Although it may have been expected, I was never angry at him, or anyone else about it. Had I encountered the truck driver in person, I'd have probably killed him but outside of that even he didn't haunt my stream of consciousness. What did haunt me was a sense of loss I found most strange at the time. It was as if I'd lost my entitlement to Greg; due to the fact that in the months before, I felt like all our future interactions together had already happened. This meant that when he was dead dead dead, my multitude of pseudomemories of him in the future were lost to reality one by one. Even reading this, you might reasonably suspect that I was in love with him in the literal sense of the word; in fact I was asked this by many many wellmeaners. Naturally I was evasive to them. Were I cowardly I'd have denied it to myself because it's easier to believe I'd lost a friend (even a soulmatey one) than some potential love of my life. But I was gritty enough to admit that I didn't know. Who was I to predict what kind of wondrousness or crappiness a relationship between two people may Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 21
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eventuate to? It was the fact that both he and I were robbed of this opportunity to continually decide this question and many more, and have lots of fun in the process, that was the worst.
By the time I was having these kinds of conversations in my head I'd moved from a purely lost state to a more philosophical one as my latter-day ramblings show. Clara was also seemingly on the road to some degree of recovery. We watched over each other quite closely then. But it turned out that I wasn't watching well enough for she had her own ways of coping and in the process managed to slip one past me. Or at least initially --how long could she keep something major from someone who could co-write and cospeak sentences (and indeed whole works) together with her?
"So how've you been my dear?" I asked when I visited her house at a stage when my ESP
of her finally came to fruition.
"Fine. I mean considering-" she said giving a weak but spirited smile. We were in her bedroom and no-one was home. The solitude of our selves and the raw honesty of the withered trees outside spoke to me, telling me to begin it. I guess Greg's animate trees thing worked in more ways than one.
"Clara, it's me. We're alone and I think I have a pretty good idea that you have something to tell me. Right?"
"Naturally. I'm-"
"-you're uterised."
She knew my terminology for it all but she still stopped in a mild shock. "Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't-" and in a minute she was bawling uncontrollably. I squeezed her knowing that she could manage even less of the grieving procedure in the last weeks than I had.
"Don't. We'll talk about it."
We submerged into a beautiful hour-long silence which she broke.
"Firstly, I know you'll have none of it but I'll still say I'm sorry I haven't been forthcoming."
"You're right. Indeed I will have absolutely none of it...Despite popular opinion, we're not the same person. You've very much your own life to live and I expect some autonomy. You gave me the signals when you thought you were ready-"
"No, no. It wasn't autonomy. It was fear of judgement I must say. I honestly thought you'd be judgmental. And that you'd be tying my own lapse of judgement to what's happened, which is probably a bit true."
"How did you think I'd judge you?"
"Not in the usual way of course. But maybe in terms that you'll say that this isn't me, that I wasn't doing right by putting myself in a fragile situation at such a fragile time."
"Isn't you? What the fuck else would it be? Why, anything you do IS you by definition!
Look; I don't think it was an un-you thing. You've had more worldly experience than me in every way, and you've always managed to pull every minute of it off with a grace that I could only dream of. Do you think I'll think less of you now because some dice were Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 22
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thrown and a certain improbable number came up which meant that a contraceptive method failed? I know about real innocence. I'm very aware that it really isn't the same thing as the sexual tameness proclaimed by the belief system of our lovely pastor down the road. Clara, you've always been my innocent. And you haven't done anything in your life to change this, especially not now."
She started up again and I gladly joined in the communal pool of our tears of understanding. Then more silence. This was the moment of my life when I looked at Clara as if for the first time and realised how beautiful she was. Although she later became very attractive by "society's" conventional standards, in these years she probably wasn't. I didn't notice anything wrong with her of course but neither did I really look. When I did in that moment it became clear that she would always be beautiful to me because of who she was. I found her attractive in the most literal and physical sense because of my prior knowledge of her. I guess I have a functional view of beauty: she was beautiful as a body in the functional context of being who she was, not as an isolated head-and-salient-body-parts on a stick. No further changes in her "literal" attractiveness would ever take away my ability to have my own breath taken away by the splendour of her real beauty. But it was especially apparent here when she was her vulnerable vibrant self, sitting on her bed, crying for probably the first time all week. The pre-fetus in her did not mar this splendour but magnified it exponentially. Here was Harem Girl and all the other superheroes of worth (as opposed to "literal" superheroes!) personified. While the human memory doesn't literally operate in photographs or pictures in the head, I imprinted something of that scene inside my head that was closer to a photograph than anything else I'd remember. And I have had the honour of pulling this image from my neurons during many a troubled time in my subsequent life. And each time I was rejuvenated.
Embarrassed of thinking such lofty thoughts for such an unforgivable length of time when there was so much else, I couldn't help myself. "Clara darling, remember what you joked to me during my more withdrawn teenage years?"
"I made an infinite number of jokes about you, you'll have to be more specific."
"Well you said that I was pondering the profound mysteries of the universe whilst most of my peers would be getting high on crack and having teenage pregnancies."
"That's right!" she giggled, "the unwittingly self-fulfilling prophecy of St Clara. Well in part."
"Yes. Of course in part. Not only because of the crack thing but because I'd never insult you by thinking of you as merely a peer."
With our faith in things restored we left the house for some fresh air and to discuss the practicalities of the parasite inside Clara. This is where the actual complications of reality came up. The father was a guy she had a brief (no)thing with a while back, and she had fled from it when she realised the extent of its (and his) emptiness. This time around, he was still as empty and possibly more. I guess here the human world diverges from the physical as in the physical you can only suck so much substance out of a place, and besides 'nature abhors a vacuum'. But in the human world, some people can keep losing substance indefinitely. At this point she deliberately hadn't told him due to a combination Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 23
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of keeping her independence open and some good old fashioned spite out of who he was. I also had the misfortune of knowing who he was and it was this who-he-was that contributed to Clara thinking I'd be judgmental. Didn't change a thing about her dignity in this situation in my opinion though.
"So what are your plans now?"
"Cassi, I'd like to ask you a favour. You're very good at telling me exactly what's on your mind. I'd like you not to get too carried away with the whole unconditional support thing. I don't need it because I don't value it in its most extreme."
"Don't worry, we've talked about this. I know. If I said I'd be with you no matter what, does this mean to include some cruel or insane decisions (like going on a shooting spree) too? Yes, you don't want to be loved completely unconditionally, especially by me, because that pays absolutely no attention to who you are: you could be a complete scumsucking-based life-form like a certain someone, or turn into one, and nothing would change. You know though that I am partly conditional in that I love you largely for the specific content of who you are. So tell me and I'll give you the conditional support I'm sure your decision will warrant."
"Good, good! I'm very much leaning towards having the baby and everything this entails. I could hand over parental rights to someone else but I don't want to decide until I actually have it and spend some time with it. There will be naysayers that will think it's not the right time in my life and the rest --unavoidable I guess in our gingerbread and lollypop town. But I don't want my decisions hampered by the fluky fact of the matter that there is something inside me that I didn't expect. I don't want to be a slave of the unexpectedness of my situation. Of course, I'll be 'terribly inconvenienced' but I don't want to commit the --what's the name of the fallacy?"
"Naturalistic?"
"Uh-huh. I mean it's not an example a logic professor would cheer over but it works nonliterally. Just because an embryo got here at an "unnatural" time in my general life, and amongst tragedy...and from a ludicrous father --doesn't make it bad. It's still a life that I sure as hell want to be a part in raising. I find my greatest freedom in spitting at the brutality of circumstance and elevating myself from beyond the world of the practical. If I'm meant to succeed, this baby won't be a weight and if I'm not then I'd be just making excuses if I pinned my failures on it. Besides I hope to be rewarded for the good things that I now have the opportunity of imparting to the child."
"Why Clara! I've never heard you speak so anthropomorphically of life before! Could the spirit of our dearly departed have been imparted on you?!"
"Oh please. Actually in a way. I'm starting to see the hidden complexity and intelligence in this inanimate world so maybe there is such a thing as some kind of karmic reward in the end, just a different way that's more non-anthropo-shit I can't even pronounce it! I guess I've already dropped my 10 IQ points!"
"Hey, don't insult a pregnant woman you strumpet!"
Another smile flickered but then she straightened herself and quickened her pace through the snow such that I struggled to keep up. She raised her index finger pointing it Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 24
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somewhere into the stratosphere. "There's still the matter of our mister non-carbon-butvermin-based life-form." After a predictably short deliberation, we decided. There was only one option really. The father was to be informed of the fact (for honesty's sake at least but also for several other reasons I need not elaborate on). He'd then be persuaded or coerced if necessary to have absolutely no contact with Clara or the child nor any role in the child's upbringing. When the child was old enough, he or she would decide if this should change. Furthermore, I'd be the one communicating this decision to him. She could have done this but I wanted to. This was my way of consummating the fact that Clara and I were family (although it's been obvious for years). The irony is that the occasion was a child. Some friends enter a family through a baby by being godparents --promising to look after a child if the parents died. My way of entering her family was by being an anti-godparent --promising and making sure that one particular parent would be completely dead to the child, at least in its formative years. Boy was it sweeter and more meaningful than any godparent nonsense!
I visited him that evening. We had a very long talk under the stars, and no-one but us will ever know what transpired. All I'll say is that when I left, we were on amicable terms about the decision as being the right one so I didn't do too badly. An hour later I walked into my house and my mother was standing in the doorway with a somewhat worried look. "There's a letter for you. It's from...well, Greg's uncle found it in his drawer after finally getting around to going through it. It was addressed to you." I was upstairs in my room clutching it before she finished speaking. I think I may have even run so fast as to have exceeded the speed of light in a vacuum thereby travelling back in time to just before she finished. Indeed, the envelope had my name emblemmed in it in his unmistakable hand. I hesitated but mostly from the weird contrast of moods between my anti-godparenting act and this. The envelope imprinted itself firmly in my memory: in the few seconds it took to open, the touch, texture, sound of the paper rustling and its precise weight were all vital bits of information that I processed and stored without realising.
It was brief, and completely bizarre considering that he actually wrote it --and to top it off, it was when he was still living!
"My dearest,
I somehow had the strongest premonition that I would die. Silly isn't it and most likely untrue but if you've received this letter then it was indeed a correct premonition. In this case I'm sorry for all of this to have ended so soon. I feel like we have had an entire future of happenings and potentialities. I'm sorry they did not eventuate, that they were stolen from both of us. I can't tell you not to grieve or be sad, who am I to dictate to you, you who has known best about how to behave for so long? But I can assure you that these wonderous happenings that I've seen you partake in recently will occur again in your life. As they must for you are truly worth it.
I guess at this point in the letter nothing will surprise you so I wanna say that if there is an afterlife, I look forward to meeting you therein, whereby we can experience many more interesting things, but with the timeframe stretched to infinity. Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 25
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Always remember how much I have loved you, and do still from beyond the grave. Greg"
4. The Law of Averages
The years I described have probably been the most important to my post-mortem experiences. About the next years I'll be brief, partly because things were a tad more ordinary and partly because of David. As much as I'd have liked to draw up a full account of how I met him and fell in love and all the rest, retrospect makes it impossible. It's just too hard to go into any kind of detail, now that I know exactly what was wrong with each moment of this history. The best I can do is to recap a bit.
After Greg's letter, I managed to feel more together about everything. School was finishing and my chosen path was to continue the drawing on a more focused scale by doing graphic design. My specific destination was a university in New York that I managed to successfully apply for, having built up a portfolio of work over the years. Naturally Clara and I had to sift through everything for almost a week weeding out
"inappropriate" works. I knew that when entering an institution I couldn't yet afford to be overly punchy with the messages I was presenting; I just hoped that I'd be able to do this soon enough. And so I packed my mindset up and shuffled off across the Atlantic, into the great American wilderness. Many around me probably thought I was running away from my life and everything that's happened recently. Although I planned this very university, this very country and modus operandi over a year ago, it did feel good to leave for a while. Despite the fact that I got the opportunity to polish my cynicism in America more than ever before, I was grateful for the new possibilities. My first months were indicative of the rest of my stay. I met a few people I found amazing but with the general majority I was disappointed. It was probably to do with the luck of this particular uni, town, crowd etc. I could say a cliché: that life was very materialistic there, and a tad superficial. Maybe that was true to an extent. But the main problem was that despite the blandness of the majority of people at home, they were a step above those here on an evolutionary scale. Oh, I don't mean the New Yorkers I met were Neanderthals or stupid. Not at all. Rather it's the abstract-concrete distinction. Humanity leapt tremendously on an evolutionary scale when people acquired the physical ability to think in abstract terms. It wasn't just an increase in mental power, it was an increase in orders of magnitude. And as much as I hate to say it, the people at home were more at home in the abstract while those I met in the US lived in the concrete. It was slightly a materialistic thing but more in terms of the self. College life as I saw it was like a Humean mind that has no core self but consists only of an endless chaos of sensory and mental experiences, one following the other with no-one really home. At college this meant a stream of social gatherings, mind-altering substances, the constantly shifting fabric of relations between people, sexual adventures and misadventures and the like. That's not to say that I stayed out of these things completely, not at all, but I felt I couldn't Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 26
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let the constant string of experiences overwhelm me and replace my own self. Many did exactly this. Even their academic life seemed to consist of an endless string of courses without an abstract Plan. Not that they were stupid, in fact I was constantly surprised at how bright and brilliant the students I had contact with were. So much for the 'stupid American' piece of bigotry. And this was not just college students but friends of theirs and their friends' friends that weren't at all academic. They were still very bright and I respected that. But concrete bright as opposed to abstract bright. As for me, I thought I was the opposite. I was less concretely bright but I had the sense of context and my own thoughtly worlds that I kept since childhood. I don't think I used the library once. I just continued to draw and design and to express things. My education was twofold. The first was with courses at uni helping me acquire more techniques and practice them as well as to think about what I was communicating (crazy eh? I was there to learn and learning actually occurred as was supposed to happen!). The second was by my friends there, and by talking to people getting a feel for the range of views and opinions. This was a definite advantage over home in that here, the number and heterogeneous nature of thoughts and ideas kicked ass comparatively. This was especially true in politics. The uni would have been considered overbearingly liberal in America while people at home would have seen it as conservative to the point of fascism. My roommate's friend Katie, who I became close to, was quite involved in a few organisations both political and recreational. She encouraged me to contribute and at first I gladly took her up on it, designing dozens of promotional posters for various happenings. It was at a slightly later date that I realised the inevitable --I was not meant for any side of the political scale, or anything like that. My inner paradoxes wouldn't allow it. The course I took in visual propaganda helped too. I could always see the hidden messages in images --that's why 90% of advertising, both in Sweden and the US, outraged me beyond belief --but now I could not escape it. Propaganda, presuppositions and fallacies were the cornerstones of everything I saw. My illustrated copies of the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights that I preciously took with me took on a new meaning. Oh, no, I don't mean that I saw propaganda in them --that was always the case!
Rather I appreciated them more because at least there it was more plain, and the propaganda itself wasn't nearly as pernicious as what I saw in the "real" world. Although I continued to be close to Katie, my hobby/career as graphic-designer-for-causes was no more.
Two months after beginning uni I flew back home for a few weeks --Clara's baby was due and I couldn't not spend those weeks with them, not after being accepted as an antigodparent. She was even more beautiful when I first saw her. It was a few days before she delivered. It's hard to avoid the idea of the pregnant glow. Actually, she wasn't glowing but several months of a much more peaceful existence left their indelible and devastating print on her. "Cassi! As you can see I am better," her first words were, "so now that we've established that visually, you must spend the rest of the day establishing to me verbally about you and about how you're better too." Which I did, but for the rest of my stay I didn't mention the US. I didn't need to. Between us, current happenings didn't matter as much, we just continued our usual communal train of thought. It was then that I realised I wanted to come back here pretty much as soon as I graduated. Although I wasn't sure about the rest of my life, this was still my centre of emotional gravity. Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 27
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She gave birth to a boy with no complications at all, delivering him to an eager room of well-wishers that consisted of her parents, myself, and two of our other close friends.
"Have you picked a name yet?" asked one of the friends (Ben I think) shortly after Clara's parents went home for the night. I smiled at her knowingly as I could mouth her response simultaneously with her, so well did I know all this.
"Of course not yet! How could I decide something like a name, that should describe something special about a person, this early? I must see what he's like first. After a few days or possibly a week his name will come naturally."
"Wow Clara," said Ben, "I never figured you to take on board any new age thing. Haven't you always thought things like this to be a bunch of crap?"
"This isn't crap, this is real. Many cultures have mystical or spiritual association with names, but you don't need to be superstitious to see that it's no use carrying one without knowing its origins. It's as ridiculous as people who wear t-shirts in a foreign "exotic" language, such as Chinese or Thai, without knowing what it says. It could be some racist drivel for all they know. How much more so with a name that you wear with you in every situation imaginable?"
"So what are our names' essences?"
She smiled and looked around her, evaluating in a way a rich miser might count his treasures (but in a less miserly way of course).
"Well what have we? Clara meaning clear and bright which I certainly hope I am today. Cassielle, angel of Saturn and Saturday. I guess that's not particularly pertinent to her life except that her folks named her thus to poke fun at overbearing mysticism just like she continues to poke fun at all that's false. Oh and there is a certain element of angelicity there. Ben, son of the south. This is true here in Sweden in the most literal of senses. But it also can also mean son of the right hand thus very aptly describing your able nature. Heidi who is a noble person just as her name means. The original notion of nobility meant one who was inbred into a callous gang of thieves, torturers and marauders. Thus, her name also signals her ability to reinterpret and transform the corrupt into the true, as seen by her nobility which is so very different...Greg meaning one who is watchful, who Cassi and I know from our posthumous epistles expected to be watching us still." Naturally a silence followed, exacerbated by the fact that not even I knew that Clara also received an epistle. Not that I was jealous - it only validated how special what us three had was.
"So you see, I want my son to have a fitting one too." By the time I returned to the US to resume my routine, Clara's son was called David meaning beloved which coincidentally was the name of my future husband. I met David some weeks before my sojourn with little David. He was graduating from the school of political science. We both joked about the term political science being the greatest example of an oxymoron found in modern times. He was Katie's cousin. What other bare facts shall I divulge about him without going into the pointless and awful recollection of the details? I was pretty much taken by him straight away. He presented a nice balance to me, a fitting change from my usual thoughtscape. Like many an Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 28
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inhabitant of my university he too lived in the concrete. However this did not mar him because he managed it extremely well. Furthermore, he was certainly not a Humean mind but his endless string of life experiences had quite the purpose. Although I later discovered it was the wrong purpose for me, I'll still give credit to him having one. Shortly after we started dating, he helped me out in a major way when I was arrested. By that time I had stopped my direct promotional involvement in anything propagandish but I still accompanied Katie to some events. I also happened to have taken the role of her sanity checker, largely due to my ideological non-involvement. One time, a gathering turned into a protest which turned tumultuous. The authorities were called in and I was arrested due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, along with several hundred others. A bit like a throwback to American university life in the 60s, that's what it felt like. When word got to David, he got me an attorney who arranged bail and then had the matter resolved all within a few hours. This was indeed a major feat as the "real" protesters spent several days getting through because an already overloaded system had choked on them. This incident came to epitomise him in my mind --he had a quick instinctive reaction which very much coincided with my well being, he was accomplished but crafty and he did it all without losing his tremendous sense of humour. By then I was in love with him --I'm not ashamed to admit this after the fact. A year and a half later we were married. As suspect as this may sound, looking back I can't figure out who may have proposed the idea to whom, we sorta found ourselves on the same wavelength. Which is pretty much the reason I wanted him in the first place. Everyone at college was over the moon, we made it into the ranks of The Happy Couple. Although Clara didn't say anything explicit in her letters (yes, we who drew and coloured together as kids forsook the information age for some handwritten material as adults, although the crayons only came out occasionally) she was skeptical. This was justified though, because from a description it would seem strange that I picked someone like him. She probably imagined me ending up with someone a little more out-there and alternately-wired in the brain. Perhaps a bit more like Greg. The point was that a description was not adequate so I was willing to wait till he met her. Thinking back to the way he would talk to me in the States, the things he said, what we did, I can see how he can be perceived as a walking cliché. Perhaps he is. But he had me taken in and I knew that for me it was pointless to restrict myself to being with someone whom I had "things in common" with. What does that mean? In my case, even less than for most. Yes, he was very different in attitudes and values and tastes. But in a way that worked, or so I'd imagined at the time. Then I graduated and decided that I must return home and take him with.
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5. Prodigal Daughter
"Everyone gets a nail in the mouth" Kimuri assures me.
"And everyone screams..."
"Everyone."
"Then which one is innocent?"
"The one who does not scream...Mzi, all confess! All. Even before Mugango plants the nail in their mouths. Who'd let their tongue be burnt? No Mzi, us men aren't like that..." Safari Under Kilimanjaro
"You want to move? So soon?"
"Well, yes. I mean I always planned to return in a fairly short time-frame. Now that I've graduated though I don't see why I can't begin work as a graphic designer there. There's a good market."
"Do you miss it that much?"
"Well yeah, and I should spend time with Clara and Davey --he's two and a half, just the right time for the possibility of influence. We did discuss this many a time."
"I know hon. Still, it's the first time you've mentioned it in terms of practical things."
"What do you think then?"
"I'm still willing. I just need some time to readjust to the idea and to make arrangements. You know I've been looking for a new magazine to transfer my column too. Perhaps something in Europe would provide both income and a good base."
"Really? Great! And yeah, there are a few English-language academicky publications in Sweden. You can find something. Definitely with your large skill base..." I said giggling and he joined in. I was completely over the moon then. We were going to build a life together --ours!
Of course that whole exchange was far too conciliatory on his behalf to be normal. He was always so well-mannered. A little too much --I don't think he was exactly in numbing ecstasy over the idea of going. I can of course manage to live with myself for dragging him out here. Had he loathed the notion, he'd have made it known. Instead, he hunted and I hunted. Several weeks later we both bagged ourselves some gorgeous creatures of the Scandinavian snowy pine forest. We were very proud of ourselves and put up plaques with the heads of the beasts. David's was a column on political science much like the one he currently had but for a magazine in Goteborg. It was quite prestigious and distributed across the EU. He also hoped the managerial philosophy would be better than his current so in a way this was a great move for him from a purely selfish perspective. The kill I bagged was a job doing layouts for book covers and other related material at a publisher in Stockholm. This meant we could essentially move to within a few hours drive of my home town because both our jobs allowed for some work from home and we wouldn't have been tied to our respective corporate cages. When I found out about the location of my upcoming corporate cage I smiled bitterly. Stockholm! Greg and I could see each other all the time now! I could visit Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 30
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him while he was in the process of moving up the ranks in the force. I could even watch him violate the civil rights of some slime-ball in the interrogation room... Saying goodbye was surprisingly easy. Because of our Happy Couple tag (which recently got the word Married inserted between the two original words), everyone expected us to do something like this all along. It was fairly close anyway and being relatively affluent people (this being America and New York and college graduates and all) they could afford to bridge the distance when necessary. Katie promised to visit as soon as possible or when we had our first baby, "whichever came sooner". David was holding my hand at the time under the table due to a reflex and as soon as we heard this we squeezed each others hands dry due to another reflex. This was certainly not on the menu anytime soon. Perhaps I should have seen this as a sign that on the truth-level neither of us saw the other as someone we'd have wanted to start an extended family with. Then again this would be reading a tad too much into things.
Our flight was also particularly memorable and blissful. We didn't get distracted from each other for a microsecond. All energies were collated into joyously planning. I
"initiated" him into the country by helping him peruse maps and pointing out landmarks and the associated Astrid Lindgren moments. I guess this was one of the things we definitely had in common from even the most doubting perspective. He could appreciate many of my quirky tastes in literature spanning to my childhood, as well as the things Clara and I created. Because I'd left some of our more controversial works in Sweden (as I mentioned it was clearly not needed for my admissions portfolio) he had yet to see them.
And see them he did, along with seeing everyone else. This was because the day after we arrived Clara organised a semi-surprise gathering for us. The gathering part was the fact that she got my family and many of our friends there. The semi-surprise part was the fact that I knew for sure this is exactly what she would do. But of course the centrepiece was the little one. Barely had we opened the door when he was hanging off my waist, puffy hands digging in and fragile feet kicking the air. "Auntie Caas!!" He couldn't pronounce my name then but it was completely understandable.
"David, look how strong you are. Careful, you'll grind me into the ground! Listen, there's someone I want you to meet. His name's the same as yours."
"Uncle David!" Immediately he too was the victim of an emerging treeclimber. Then, She echoed from behind and came up to us before anyone else. "He's heard so much about you and - can I perpetuate a wives' tale without being a wife?"
"Only you," I said introducing her to David and vice versa.
"I think he remembers who you are from when he was born...But Cassi, you haven't changed a bit! Sure, you're older and have grown --up? no, what's the direction gravity pulls in?" She ducked my expected mock slap and came right up to my ear to continue her greeting, "but you're still you, despite supposed claims to the contrary." Greeting, eating, mingling, exchanging, eating, drinking, indulging, engorging and more eating followed and the house split into several after-meal conversations. The one that impacted me most was about a just society. David and I along with Clara and my father Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 31
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were crowded around, with Clara asking David about his work and column. This led to a discussion of David's political philosophy and his ideas about a better political system.
"David, I think I should tell you what I've thought about this for many years and you can tell me where I'm going wrong. After all, I've only been rambling this to myself while you have actual insight" said Clara.
"Sure, I'd love to hear from you. In fact I adore the opinions of those who haven't done anything to do with this academically because they're often surprisingly good."
"I think the main problem in the current political system is that it was based on the wrong principles. It allegedly values individuality and freedom (especially economic freedom, almost to the exclusivity of everything else). And this was understandable because it evolved out the back end of a most oppressive feudalism and period of ruthless monarchy. However it still dehumanises the person because it replaces the physical serf with the abstract one, enslaved to mere principles --ones that treat him or her as a robot."
"In what ways?"
"It seems especially pertinent in justice. We have a system whose goal is to ensure fairness for the individual accused and not society. It's no surprise then that it achieves its intended aim quite well, but at the expense of society. There are no attempts at reconciliation or righting wrongs. Rather, punishment is seen as for its own sake, like an automatic reflex."
"Most interesting. I have criticised the modern system of justice as one of the most major flaws in our political system myself. Clara you've touched a topic close to my heart!"
"Then perhaps you'd care to share what your thoughts are for what we should do."
"Oh no, I couldn't possibly bore you to that extent! I'm used to discussing these things with other colleagues of mine and we all have our elitist vacuous terminology we use that would be impenetrable. I find that as soon as I start talking about these things to a real person they begin to edge away from me. I've even seen grown men flatten themselves against the floor and very slowly and subtly slide under the door into the next room!" Some laughter followed to which David responded by pointing to Clara with his open palm facing up. "But I'd love to hear from you first as I can't imagine you suffering from these problems."
"Are you sure? I think I'll have the opposite effect of largely improvising without knowing what I'm talking about."
"I insist --plus it may inspire me to respond in a way that won't induce a coma." She took in a breath in preparation and lifted her eyebrow at me. I knew this whole thing was a bit of a test on Clara's behalf of who my husband may in fact be from her perspective. But I wasn't angry with her, in fact I realised where she was heading and was eager for the results myself.
"In my opinion we ought to go back to some of the more traditional methods of justice. Ones that existed in tribal societies. That way we can have a system that doesn't create new adversaries on top of the ones already created by the unfortunate situation, nor alternatively would it subject a person to the arbitrariness of a single flawed human Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 32
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being, or even a bunch, weighing the facts their case. Perhaps we need to make the defendant's conscience come into play. We always assume that the accused has no remorse, is it a surprise that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy especially when every part of the system is wired up to reinforce this? This is done differently in some tribes in Africa. As strange as this sounds, perhaps we need to return to some kind of trial by ordeal. I've read about anthropologists' studies of the phenomenon and it seems extremely successful in uncovering the culprit and reconciling. In a usual scenario both the plaintiff and the accused have to reach into a pot of boiling oil to fish out some beans. The one who can't do it is considered...well, shown to be lying. And it works because of the psychological factor. The one who knows he's innocent will calmly reach into the pot and get the beans because he knows he won't be burnt. Kind of like firewalking --no profound supernatural explanation but a psychological one which still makes it work. And of course the guilty one can only refuse out of the real fear of being burnt. This is all in front of the entire tribe of course. After the verdict and penalties, the judges also ensure some kind of reconciliation and a return to the harmonious way of life. I know people can
'fool' the test but I'm sure one can manipulate our own system in a myriad more ways. That's what makes it a good idea --treating the accused as someone with a conscience and possibly employing a psychological test like this one." Everyone looked at David who smiled and cheerfully replied that this was a pretty good idea and that traditional cultures have much to teach us. And this seems to endow some strange level of dignity on the process that our charade of a system doesn't. The conversation meandered to the next topic but I caught Clara's gaze and knew exactly what she was saying. He was too agreeable, too eager to please. Of course he had just met Clara but to let her spout such drivel?!? He didn't have to insult her, just to point out a few things. The brutality often present in traditional cultures, the bigotry and repression that exist therein, the fact that for the test to work we'd have to believe in spirits and become superstitious completely to the point of abandoning the method of looking into things that has been prominent in our society for several centuries, that like torture the procedure's just as likely to yield the wrong verdict, that the facts of the matter do have some bearing on justice (somehow). Instead he took the politically correct stance that these cultures were so special. That they are all pure noble savages (a perfect example of the racism of political correctness can be racist). He took the relativist stance that there are no facts, that the guilt or innocence of someone is socially constructed so if we can find a shaman to get high on something and talk to the spirits (and what kind of intolerant fascist would dare say he doesn't talk to them?) and "reconcile", it doesn't really matter who raped, murdered, maimed, tortured.
These thoughts stuck with me for the next few hours of what was actually a wonderful day overall. I realised I had doubts about my husband, but then again I realised that these were doubts that may have been lurking beneath my consciousness for a while. It was the fact that Clara had thought of all this (of course she didn't tell me but I knew I had her intentions exactly right) not maliciously but for the purpose of looking out for me, and as an enthusiastic, enraptured lover of truth. Besides being grateful to her even if she turned out to be wrong, I realised that it was Clara and not I that had the advantage of sudden immersion in his personality, whereas I could have missed many things about David in Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 33
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the chronology of my gradualness. Although I rejoiced at being back amongst everyone, my newly-formed doubt was still around when we left late in the evening.
6. The Blizzard
Suddenly, Moomin-Troll stopped in the warm, dusky corner where the moonlight did not reach and he was frightened. He felt dreadfully lonely and abandoned.
"Mum! Wake up!" he screamed tugging at her sheets.
The whole world had disappeared!
But mum wasn't waking. Her dreams, in which she dreamt of summer, became more a tad more restless and sadder, but she couldn't wake up in the end. Moomin-Troll curled into a ball on the rug beside her bed. Out in the yard, the long winter's night was still under way.
Moominwinter
We were driving along the ice-covered road and I was silent. David was chatting away about odds and ends but I stared straight ahead watching the blizzard surrounding us that was developing a healthy aggression. As we continued along the aggression increased until finally we had to stop as the road wasn't a road anymore, at least not for a while. We had the good fortune of being in a stretch where the nearest settlement was about 6
kilometres ahead, and a stretch that was practically guaranteed to be empty at this time of night. This meant there were at least no worries about a car or truck slamming into the back of ours.
"Great. Now where?"
"Don't know my long-suffering protector" I blurted out without meaning to be sarcastic. He didn't hear the remark, or didn't parse it. Or didn't show that he had.
"We can't shovel the snow. It's a white wall out there." Indeed I looked out of all the windows to find a glorious black and white nothingness. There was no outside world anymore, just a clearly beautiful image of something like a waterfall but much slower. In fact it reminded me of my winters here as a child, where there'd be a period during which the silence and nothingness would make any creaking sound a major event. Here, there was no sense of force, no noise of crashing liquid. It was a silent and slow waterfall where you could follow with your eyes. Each magnificent instance of the waterfall, each compressed bit of frozen and crystallised water made its way down from an indeterminate height above to an indeterminate height below. Until we were snowed in. Not completely, but enough to make the car immobile. The combination of immobility and the lack of phone reception in this seemingly forsaken place made things quite bad. We sat in the dark car cabin contemplating options for a quarter of an hour until I reported the results of my thought-creating expedition. Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 34
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"Well we have a few forks in this journey of life tonight. We can both spend the night in the car and either hope for the road to clear or try reach some place in the morning."
"It would be a very cold night --the car's already cooling down dramatically from the subzero outside. And we don't know if it won't be worse tomorrow. Next."
"OK. We could both try walk to the settlement or have one of us stay in the car while the other goes. We could find something to clear the initial snowy onslaught and hope that further along the road is clear enough to let us pass."
"Hmm. Any more ideas?"
"Nope. You?"
"No. And they're all bad ideas, judging from which we appear to be in an objectively fucked up situation. We do need to get to the settlement and not spend the night here." We decided we had to go together as we didn't want to separate without an advantageous purpose, which currently seemed lacking. Plus finding the car again would be a challenge
--looking back the way we came revealed a road that was getting more and more subtle in its appearance. We waited five minutes for a decrease in blizzard intensity, got as many layers on as possible from the spare clothes in the trunk and disappeared into the darkness. We held each other by the waist and I realised something hopeful. It didn't matter if Clara was right about David. She could have been and perhaps he's not good for me. If this is the case there's no harm in parting ways now. If he is simply "unsuitable" then from what I know of him, I'd still love to have him as a friend --this need not be a vicious parting. If he on the other hand was totally duplicitous then that option's out but so what? He came to this land of the Moomins of his own accord. Even if it turns out that he has no appreciation for this being the land of the Moomins, he still has a great career opportunity here. I realised I was justifying it to myself possibly to alleviate some guilt about bringing him here but it was natural because this move was much bigger for him than for me. All I knew is that whether he would be my husband, ex-friend or nobody I still had so many things in my life that I couldn't possibly be whinging. I had no right when so many had undergone infinitely more trauma than me. Some have even been forced to submerge their hand in boiling oil to show their innocence! Meanwhile I had Clara and my other friends, little Davey and my newfound career as the non-propagandist graphic designer as well as the land itself. The winter wonderland that produced Clara and Greg had to have produced others as well, and even if it had not, I could still die happy with what I had.
Which is exactly what happened. Fifty metres into our journey I slipped on a piece of ice (possibly due to my thoughts taking the euphoric turn I described) and stacked it headfirst. David cried out but I was already bleeding with what was probably a mild concussion. My ankle was also the site of immense pain such that I couldn't possibly continue a 6 kilometre journey. I'll also admit I still had some semblance of a rush from the pain, not unlike the one of my earlier fall when the Three Inseparables were in Norway. However David had a much grimmer outlook.
"Well it's back to the car for you. Hook onto my waist."
"Wait, what about you? You should still go get help?" Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 35
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"And leave you here not able to move?"
"Hang on, listen here. We need to get out of here now. Don't even carry me to the car, it would waste a precious 5 minutes which will be worse for me anyway. I can still walk, just very slowly, so I'll crawl to the car. I need to move to keep warm anyway. " He hesitated for three seconds and was off after a final embrace.
"I love you."
"And I you!"
I lifted myself off the ground and turned towards the car. It didn't seem too remote --just a few pangs and whimpers away. By the sixth step I was proficient at putting as much of my weight as was practical on my good ankle. However, the die was cast as I fell again a few metres later. There was no pain but rather a very overwhelming sense of the cold that numbed me all over and made it hard to get up. I decided to rest for a few seconds, to gain energetic momentum to rise and continue towards the car. Oh well. All of us have intentions that go thwarted. By the time those few seconds passed everything in my body was numb. Down to the internal organs I could not ordinarily feel. I was still aware of my surroundings for a few minutes but I realised I was going to freeze, almost certainly to death. Still, I wasn't sorrowful. Perhaps it was due to the fact that my normal brain functions were a tad hampered. Sure, I regretted leaving the world so soon and was sorry for doing this to Clara and little David, and big David and the rest. There was a fleeting thought of never being able to create something that's beautiful to me, but obscene to most others, again. Furthermore, I'll admit there were many flashbacks of my life --and they didn't leave me hopeless but gave the impression of having lived, if only for a brief period and with many hang-ups. All of these were very minor thoughts. The vast majority were peaceful anti-thoughts, the non-reflexive ones, the ones you can't write down in language because they never made it to you language faculty in the brain, even though you can feel them perfectly well. To continue my gratuitous start to my story (this time legitimately), soon I was enveloped by the numbness of cold, my sense of pain gone from the lack of sensation in my limbs and instead replaced with a feeling of relief as the last of the many survival instincts give up. I did not suffer for though I couldn't move, I did not mind. Not even the thought of leaving David and Clara and my family forever made me want to fight. Not that I should feel guilty about this --my brain no longer had the capacity of considering the people in my life. And so I lay in the snow, ready for lifelessness to kick in. It was just like falling asleep or receiving anesthesia. Because lifelessness came, I wasn't aware of it coming; much like when you're falling asleep you're not aware of it and can't point out the precise moment. I can't even use the other death cliché of the world fading away. Fading away for whom? At the time I wasn't there to notice any fading, so it doesn't make sense to talk of fading. Like my childhood brain explosion the paradox splashed out onto the arena of life. I was there and then I wasn't. And the line between the two is the most paradoxical concept imaginable.
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Part Two: Exploring the Universe
7. Awake, My Child
And many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awaken-these for eternal life, and those for disgrace, for eternal abhorrence.
Daniel 12:2
My first awareness was that I had awareness. Or to be precise that I had an awareness once more despite the fact that I remembered being in the process of dying quite clearly. Sometimes when you sleep or go under and return it feels like an immense amount of time has passed. In my more intense months of college I'd be getting quite the less sleep than I should and when I got the chance to sleep for 7-8 hours I'd wake up feeling that I've been asleep forever and that the whole world has passed by. This was different. Here, I truly felt an indeterminate amount of time. I wouldn't have been surprised at only four or five seconds having passed since my supposed death. Nor would a decade passing have astounded me. One thing I knew: I wasn't a body any longer. I knew this because I was only aware of my own awareness and my feelings and my reactions, but nothing else. I had no feeling of any limbs of anything at all, no sense perception of any kind. This meant I wasn't aware of being in any particular place or time. The only thing I had to go by was me. I smiled, metaphorically of course, as I realised I was somehow experiencing the whole cogito ergo sum thing in a very literal and strange way. Still, one thing was for sure. If this was me (who else would it be? --my childhood paradox seemed not to extend into this realm) then death wasn't the end but rather led to whatever this was. This was both exciting and discomforting. The possibility of seeing certain others here filled me with hope and dread. As did my clear awareness that perhaps Clara and the others were standing over the piece of meat that was my body
--such introspection was luxuriously absent when I was freezing. There was also the question of where I was. Not that 'where' is the appropriate word, but for my account to go on I must resort to an increasingly metaphoric and
"anthropomorphic" language. I will thus speak of bodily things even though we know this language is merely an approximation. At the moment though I had no bodily things to, even compare to because there was nothing. "I wonder if I'll enjoy this afterlife if what I have right now is all there is..." I thought, "won't I get dreadfully frustrated and bored?
Shan't I cry out to be destroyed after only a few eons of this nothingness?" There was another aspect to my new-found consciousness. This was my natural emotional response at having literally experienced death firsthand. I guess had I access to any physical tear ducts, they would have received a hefty workout. Not that I was distraught at finding myself there. No. But there was many an emotion there. This is something you will all have to go through, dear readers. In the human world, they say that everyone deals with death differently. In this saying, they're referring to the death of others. However I know the other interpretation of the saying to be literally true. Everyone deals with their own death differently. And it's not just a matter of belief or not, whether you were actually expecting some afterlife or whether you were like me and Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 37
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thought there was no reason not to expect simple oblivion. In either case, the reality of actually having realised that you have been gathered from the proverbial dust is overwhelming. In essence, it doesn't really matter what your beliefs were, it's more a question of personality. Interspersed with my aforementioned reflexions, there was a bit of a dread. Not so much at what will happen now, but at two other things. The first was that the world was very different to what I thought I knew it to be. Perhaps it was my arrogance at seeing myself in the wrong (and how!) but it was not a happy occasion. I didn't cry out at the thought of a continuation in existence but neither was I leaping for joy. The other source of dread was the realisation about the world left behind and especially the anguish caused to all those who cared about me. I literally felt that it was selfish of me to have managed to die. And I knew that this same feeling has already been felt before by many a person, but to a much greater extent.
As I said, I had no sense of anything. The world wasn't black or even blank because it was literally of no colour whatsoever. And to top this I had no feeling of any sensory organs that could have expected some input. It was like my arm falling asleep so profoundly that not only did it feel nothing but it didn't feel anymore --but instead of my arm it was my entire self. Still as soon as I realised I might be here indefinitely I set about experimenting to see what I could come up with. "Well Cassi, let's see you use your imagination to make the most of this tabula rasa you're in." I encouraged myself thus and tried to imagine circles, triangles, colours and other shapes. I succeeded but in a very broad way, as if I was thinking of the concept "circle" rather than seeing its curvature in my mind's eye. "Good Cassi, you're making a start." I froze (this shall be the last time I take note of and apologize for an approximation). That last thought obviously wasn't my own.
Welcoming any change from the zero-dimensional nature of my current existence I attempted probing. Nothing at first. Then I had the idea of becoming more active --I recited a poem I remembered as quickly as I could in my mind. The words came gushing out at an incredible speed --far more smoothly than I could have done in life. While I kept reciting though I turned my attention to other words. Sure enough, they were there. There were other words present. I was not alone. Without a material manifestation, it's surprisingly difficult to distinguish your own thoughts from someone else's. "Who are you? Where am I?" I asked but there was no answer. Eventually I realised that just as I succeeded in getting the Other words creeping into my poem by looking inward, my best chances of getting an answer would be the same. "Where am I?" I asked but instead of preparing myself to receive an answer by means of sensory perception (which I clearly lacked), I looked --nay expected --for an answer to pop up from within my mind. Sure enough, a weak response popped up. "There's been a glitch but don't worry. Just try to teach yourself to feel me and the others and then I can start guiding you around." A guide! "So the spirituals were true!" I blurted out to myself sarcastically. I didn't know whether to feel disappointed or not. My consolation was that this was nothing like any new age thing I heard of. Slowly slowly I continued talking to my guide but this time imagining some spatial representation of him-her-it? popping up in my head; again as naturally as before. This eventually worked as I began to feel some sort of radiation emanating from somewhere. I merely attached the responses in my head to that emanation and lo-and-behold, I had myself a talking puppet guide that I constructed all Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 38
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by myself using only my own mind. I guess in this realm reality was a social construct, or at least a personalised one...
"OK, I can sort of feel something. Is that you?"
"Nope. But at least you've gotten used to communicating so I can try to explain."
"That's a pleasant surprise. So I'm dead aren't I? How long have I been dead? This is some sort of afterlife, I assume?"
"I think I'll answer in reverse. This is the non-material plane where intelligences or 'souls'
as you may know them have their focus transferred back to, once the body they were focussed on expires. As for how long has passed since you lost consciousness, as you'll learn later, there is no exact answer. However in the place where body is situated in the snow, only a few seconds have passed."
"So if I'm not dead (which I'm assuming since you'd have told me otherwise), what am I?"
"Clever girl!" This was how my guide sharply diverged from the traditional angels: they're meant to be transcendent, not make patronising remarks. "Because of the extremely low temperature, you're not dead but in a state of extremely-suspended animation."
"Like one of those people who you sometimes hear about who drown to the point of losing a heartbeat and other life signs and then can at times be reanimated if the environment was cold enough? Or like being cryogenically frozen?"
"Yes, all those."
"So I can revive? Who decides if I do? Do I get to? And what am I to do here anyhow?" There was a pause. Perhaps it was me who was tired of interpreting answers: this was a constructed conversation to a large extent.
"Aren't you embracing this a little too eagerly for someone who's never believed in any such nonsense?"
"No. Unless I'm hallucinating, this is real in which case there must be some kind of explanation whether I find out or not. And I am extremely eager to."
"Well you're in a bit of a pickle. As you've noticed, there's currently nothing in this realm of existence to notice. This is because your Intelligence still has an attachment to the material world because you're not actually dead. This is why your experience is so empty. There were several moments during my sojourn in the non material world where I became immensely amused at what I found out. Quite inappropriately each time, I might add. This was definitely one of those moments. I burst out in hysterics but I kept the reason for my amusement wholly to myself. Truly, I don't think Tanaka would have appreciated the humour. But it was funny to picture the "Fathers of the Church" being right all along. Truly the flesh was evil and incomplete and it was the spiritual world where truth and beauty lay. Augustine was right - the material world was empty (or at least supposed to be according to my recent experiences - didn't mean it was empty to me). And yes I was most bewitched by the image of him rubbing his theological and Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 39
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doctrinal palms together in delight when he first died. Then again, there were all the mistakes he made.
Eventually my guide interrupted my thoughts again. "My role is to work with problematic cases such as yours. As a result I'm to teach you how to navigate around here and to show you into the realm. However what happens to your physical body is outside your control, or mine. If you're found by your husband and revived in time, you'll return."
"So there's no explicit point to my being here?"
"Just the mechanism working its way."
"You said my case is problematic."
"Oh indeed. Most souls transfer their attention to this realm when the body dies. This releases all of their attention and therefore they are not attached to their earthly senses. They can use the whole spectrum of senses to feel everything and everyone in the realm, and to be able to do anything that is possible. With you it's different." Suddenly it made sense for the first time and I almost jumped for joy had I been able to.
"Wait, tell me if I'm right. Because I'm still used to my earthly senses, this is what my soul expects to experience. However I have only emptiness because here there is no sensory information of the earthly kind. I could be in the middle of something really complicated and not know. There could be millions of other souls here!"
"Yes my dear, you're right. And there are souls here, trillions of them, every single one in existence. But you still have your privacy. Anyway as you have already realised, you can only get by right now by teaching yourself to imagine this world with your earthly senses. I'm to help you with this. But notice that you're already doing it. You're interpreting my messages as speech because this is the only way you can imagine this type of content being transferred to you. So you give me a voice. Now you should begin to tune in your other senses. You've already associated me with some light so keep going."
"Are you telling me this I'll be experiencing things by constructing them through my imagination?"
"Yes. But you used to do this every second of your life. Perception requires huge amounts of interpretation even there. Here you must do even more interpreting; but your interpretation will actually be less unreliable than in the material realm. And eventually you'll stop noticing that you're actively interpreting, just like on earth." I still wasn't sure how divergent my experiences would be from what's really happening so my guide was gracious enough to provide me with an analogy. Imagine a blind man who knows about the world by groping with a stick. He's quite proficient but then he gets put into a country with other blind men. Only instead of physical sticks, they grope around with sticks that transmit ultrasound waves and thus have a reach of hundreds of metres. The blind men were also taken from the normal country one by one and they all learnt to replace their physical stick with such an ultrasound one. The ultrasound stick works in quite a similar way to the regular one but is much more powerful. Only this particular blind man couldn't use an ultrasound stick, so he had to use a regular one. Is his interaction with the world wrong? Of course not, every single fact he finds out with his primitive stick is true, because he can still use it correctly. However he's getting a very Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 40
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incomplete picture. He has to go up to each object to experience it while the others need only to scan. This is the same as my experiences --they'd all be true, just a shadow of the whole.
"So what are these other senses?"
"Oh, there are no others, there's only one sense really. It's very multifaceted. Your material senses of touch and sight etc. are merely subsets of this larger sense. Like a person who was restricted to seeing in monochrome has a sense of vision that's a subset of what you know as full colour vision."
"This means I must describe things that are conceptually outside my subset of senses using only my restricted ones. Like this person trying to imagine colour. Is this not a tad like squaring the circle?"
"A marvelous analogy young Cassi!" Of course I shuddered at the words. "You're right about squaring the circle. And it is futile if you want exactness. But if you want a good estimate then squaring the circle is possible and so is what I'm suggesting. Shall we begin?"
"I guess. But what do I call you?"
"There are no personal names here. There's no need. Names are required only when you live in a world that doesn't give full access to what you're referring to. We don't have this restriction so no names. This is the same as what I already told you: I'm not even speaking but you're interpreting this as speech. Oh and by the way there is an aspect of human folklore that's completely right. Many people who are visited by one of us report the fact that we take on a form that is known to them. The real reason however is that this is the only manifestation they can to grasp with their senses. It is their mind that's giving the interpretation, not me choosing who to appear as. I've made many such an appearance. So for practical purposes, my name will be Tanaka. Notice that I did not create this name but your soul did in the process of filling in the blanks." So I learnt the senses from Tanaka. The whole procedure took a few hundred attempts before I became good at it. At the start he'd think of complex words or concepts and I'd tell him. Then we moved onto visuals, sounds and the rest. It was quite fun in the end --a guessing game. Tanaka would create something, some scene or mood and I'd have to tell him. It's incredibly difficult to describe what this felt like but I'll try. Perhaps it was similar to blindsight patients are blind but can often tell what number is being flashed in front of them with an accuracy that beats random guessing. So he'd do something and I'd guess that I was seeing a blue vase being smashed. I imagined the scene with all senses and Tanaka would respond. Although I must add that of course his response essentially consisted of me "guessing" what words he was using, so this may be a sure sign for skeptics that I was imagining the whole thing and was never in the non-material plane. My defence is that this was so different from regular guessing. It was like the answer was under my nose but I couldn't get to it directly. By the end of the hundreds of attempts I got so used to the whole thing that my mind made a shortcut. Instead of guessing what it was and then imagining it, I just imagined. So I saw Tanaka standing there and he'd pull a three-headed tiger out of his coat and I'd see it and tell him "three-headed tiger, and it came out of your coat." The rest of my time in the material plane consisted of this kind of Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 41
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incredible perception. However nothing was static as I'd always be seeing some manifestation of a thing, filtered through a particular concept that was present in my mind. Tanaka (and everyone else) would thus appear in a million "shells", but I knew what was what from the guessing feeling I developed. Interestingly enough despite his Japanese name, he always appeared as a Caucasian male. However I did have my suspicions as to why he was named Tanaka. I mean why I named him so.
8. The Four-dimensional Harmony of Spheres
Voices diverse make up sweet melodies;
So in this life of ours the seats diverse
Render sweet harmony among these spheres;
Paradiso, Dante
"So what's the deal with what you said about a certain amount of time having passed where my body is?" I asked as soon as we completed the sensory training.
"Time does not develop uniformly, at least based on the perspective of the non-material world."
"Does this mean that one second can pass in Cairo while at the same time five seconds pass in Cairns? But if I say "at the same time," this means we have to have our own time in this plane as well don't we..."
"You're already probing some of the more pertinent questions. Yes, time is very different here. As is space. Of course in using the worldly senses you interpret everything here in terms of the material space and time. We don't experience those. But we still have a sense of before and after."
"In other words cause and effect still works here."
"Oh don't worry, you're not about to told off by me for something you'll do in the future."
"Good. Told off? So there are rules and stuff?" I said using the word in its original derogatory sense.
"Of sorts. More on that later. But back to the time concept: there exists a concept of a
'now' in the non-material world. This only corresponds to a point in the "story" of the material world. The material world is merely a four-dimensional entity. When you watch it, it grows in the time-dimension, but non-uniformly."
"Does this mean Intelligences can go back in time?"
"Yes, if you want to put it like that. However from our perspective it would merely be shifting our focus to the earlier part of the four-dimensional sculpture. This means we could go back and see any event that's happened. But not ones that haven't been formed within the sculpture of the world."
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As he said these words I finally put my finger on what's been bothering me about him (because it wasn't that I actually found him patronising all the time). It was merely the overly conservative way he was expressing everything. Not that it felt like his explanations were like he was reading off a script. Rather, he was just going about everything in a very routine fashion. Of course he'd done it all millions of times before I imagine, but sometimes it felt like he wasn't really there, like he was being friendly in a formal way which in this case was worse than informal unfriendliness. That and everything about him seemed static .
"So nobody knows the future for sure despite transcending earthly time."
"Uh-huh. Actually some get to predict quite well. For instance back on earth when you dropped a ball, you always predicted it would fall down. This isn't clairvoyance, just seeing a pattern. For someone who isn't able to see the pattern though, it's a mystery. So I can predict some things about the material world that would seem clairvoyant to you but it's just a result of having access to more patterns with the full use of the senses. Oh and I can still be wrong." I would never have thought.
The four dimensional sculpture was still a mystery so Tanaka aided my imagination with a 3D example. He created a small stack of A4 size transparencies. I picked up the first and saw the picture of a stick figure in the process of walking. Looking down, each transparency in the stack was like an animation cell. I even flipped through them all to get the motion of the person walking, the turning to me, smiling, tipping his top hat and continuing on his merry way.
"See Cassi, in this example the world is two dimensional. Each cell represents the entire world at a moment in time. The third dimension is used to stack these cells next to each other. So now you've seen the entire history of the stick figure world."
"And if I just look at the first few cells that's like going back in time, to the Big Bang of this world."
"Right. Of course there was no Big Bang in either this example or in the real world... Anyway, notice also that even though we've spent a few minutes discussing this world I haven't placed a new cell on top of the pile. This means that in the stick figure world time has not moved on. However I do this now," and he pointed to the pile in a grandiose gesture and about 10 new cells appeared. "He walked two more steps so about half a second has passed."
"So what would be an example of non-uniform growth?"
This was the only time I was ashamed of a question for as soon as he made it happen I realised. This time he inserted a second figure into each cell, going all the way back in time. The world now had 2 inhabitants. However the top few cells were only half the width of the normal cell. They all sat on the left hand side and had my old man with the top-hat walk that extra step. However the new man was on the other side of the world and hence was absent from the last few cells (due to those cells being half the width). He hadn't advanced in time yet. Tanaka pointed again and a new set of cells for this man floated into the gap --this part of the world had caught up. It was brilliant, but one thing bothered me.
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"Tanaka here we --I should say you --are, sculpting every action of every cell. Does this mean that in our world every second is explicitly 'drawn' by various...intelligences?" As I said this the eternal chill one gets when feeling themselves at the centre of a Grand Conspiracy went down my spine. Truly this would be the discovery to end all discoveries
--we'd truly have been puppets all along!
"Hold your horses. These cells I created are just crude examples obviously. With the material world, the basic framework is provided by a set of rules. The human race knows these as scientific laws and has discovered many of them. They even got a few completely right. We can change things around a bit by actively altering something when it's just grafted to the front of the world sculpture. Gratuitousness is impossible though. We can't change the past because there are no means to penetrate the sculpture's older layers and alter them. I couldn't erase your whole life from the Sculpture completely. In another way though, you are like puppets. We have an intelligence for each one of the world's rules to make sure they are followed. Thus, when you fell into the snow it was the Gravity Intelligence sculpting your body to approach closer and closer to the snow with each coming instance in time. And sometimes these laws happen to apply to people's thoughts and acts. Does this really undermine your notion of free will though?"
"No," I said after a fairly long pause. "I've always believed there were laws even if I didn't know whether they were deterministic or not. Now that I know these laws are consciously applied by these Intelligences, what has changed? Not much. And I assume some of these can be non-deterministic as well, right?"
"Yeah. This is when there's some ad-hoc interference in the world, which is rare. But enough talk, we should go and see the material world Sculpture now." Before I had time to agree wholeheartedly I was aware of an enormous multicoloured blob at a distance of what seemed like hundreds of kilometres. It was still too confusing to make sense of it and I could see no detail. "Don't worry, it'll be a mess but that's expected. You can't perceive the four-dimensional nature of it perfectly so if you concentrate you will be able to for brief periods. For most of the time though, you'll be able to see it as a movie of things happening in the world, past and present. Just like the traditional spirit "watching over" the earth from the heavens". We approached further through a spaceless nothingness and I could see the dimensions of this amazing structure. Most of the time like he said, I saw the big picture: I saw stars moving and what looked like planets in orbit. At this stage it was all too confusing for me to identify what was what. Once I relaxed my eyes though and stopped focusing on anything in particular, I began to perceive it holistically. This was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. I can't describe the four-dimensional nature of it. I guess it was a hypercube that was extended in one dimension overwhelmingly, compared to the other three. But then again, no-one can actually imagine what a hypercube looks like either so I better stick to a regular object. In this case it was like a giant rod or a chocolate bar or anything else that is thin and very long in one dimension. The outside was black with scattered balls of light that I took to be stars while one part of the sculpture consisted of a scattering of multi-coloured spherical objects --our solar system. Each sphere, each object, each speck of dust had billions of billions of ones just like it stacked up right next to it --a true animation in the fourth dimension. This is indeed more wondrous than any Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 44
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land of the Moomins. Oh what am I saying, this contains that very land and countless more! The closest analogy I can come up with is when you're working on the computer and it's low on resources and starts to become slo-o-w. When you drag a window across the screen it's not repainted so it leaves a trail of identical windows like the one you're dragging across the screen. You can exactly see the path of the window through the past up to the present. Here though, all objects left such a trace and not a discrete one (for the screen can only show a finite number of windows) but a continuous blur. The result was a multicoloured multidimensional monster of beauty. The fractals you see in earthly animations have nothing on the True Fractal. Not a single jagged edge --how could there be one? --but a continuous interleaving of strands thick and thin, of every appearance possible. 'Twas a magnificent knot, where the rope was Everything and the knot spanned every conceivable combination of twists and weavings, stretching out in every direction, and then some, as far as my mind's eye could see. Eventually I saw the earth. At first it was just a blue-green cylinder-like structure through the centre of the sculpture, like the lead part of a pencil. Only after staring at it for a little longer did I realise for the millionth time that the stretching part of the sculpture is time so that long cylinder in the middle is merely a planet over the course of its history. Focusing my attention on it brought an immediate shock over my senses, like a million knives of pleasantness and unpleasantness. I could see it all in theory, as I had access to all of space and time. In reality, I couldn't make sense of the totality and so had to focus on individual scenes. I saw blades of grass growing and trees cycling from acorn to oak (with complete root system) to ashes all at once; the whole lives of human beings, from sperm and egg through gestation and the repetition of the evolutionary cycle in the womb to deuterisation and those middle years between birth and their departure to the nonmaterial. And to top it off, each part of each human being's body, movement and life was so intimately connected to the preceding it was as if there was a rope holding everything together. I saw family histories: when a family was torn apart and scattered over all the infinite corners of the earth I saw a tree of streaks of pink or brown and other colours (each one representing a body) branch out to the various parts. When there was reunion, the streaks merged and continued with a thicker, more enriched yellow or black that upon closer inspection I could see to be the 'mere' phenomenon of two or more people sharing a life together. I saw change on all the scales imaginable, from the movement of oceans and continents to the movement of legs on a termite. Everything was an open book, like I had been watching the entire history of the world (of course, I have been!) with a persistence of vision that ensured that each time period remained before my eyes, so long as I kept watching.
I kept watching the front of the sculpture which sure enough was growing outward in the direction of the future. Like Tanaka said, it was uneven in places but there was no great lopsidedness. I grossly exaggerate my watching period though. From the moment I first looked at the outer realm of the stars to the time I collapsed from mental and emotional exhaustion that comes from seeing the Big Picture, the world grew by less than a second. I knew this because a fisherman in Indonesia I noticed at the start to be casting his rod had moved the hook closer to the water by about half a metre by the end of my inspection. Of course I could have measured it by the number of footsteps David was currently taking in the blizzard or by Clara's actions. The truth was that I roamed places Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 45
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unfamiliar. I felt completely unready to dare bring my attention to the world-lines of those I knew.
Seeing my utter despair at having undergone such an impossible task, Tanaka held me upright. "Had enough for now?" he said. Instead of waiting for an answer, he told me to relax my senses (like blurring your own vision purposely) and in an instant the sculpture faded leaving us with our attentions focussed on the top slice of the structure. In other words we were back in the 'present' and hovering over our planet which from its long snakelike multidimensional shape returned to its familiar spherical one, with the refreshing sight of clouds passing by and oceans turning in their beds.
"I have a question..." I managed to get out after the very welcome silence that followed.
"When I saw the earth it was a rod through the spiral's centre. But with time, the earth's rotation around the sun should show. Its path should be a spiral! I remember enough about my science class in when our teacher drew such a spiral representing the earth when we were doing space-time graphs."
"You had a helluva teacher to be showing you those!"
"I did. Doesn't the rod-like nature mean that the earth is at the centre of the universe and not moving?"
"Indeed, my enlightened one. You've uncovered one of our greatest jokes: the most fundamental piece of "obvious" knowledge humans have about the universe is in fact a blunder!"
No matter how many times I may look back on this conversation that took place my memory is weakened because of the strangeness. I was prepared to accept this eternal life I was given without asking, I was completely comfortable with so many strange and inconceivable things being true but this was just hard to stomach. He took me to a vantage point where I observed the earth from space and what do you know it --it was at the centre. Still. Restful. Suspended and pampered by the vast army of planets (including the sun!) orbiting around it. It was a bit like Ptolemy's scheme for the universe, but even he didn't dream of the complexity manifested therein. They didn't move in circles like the Old Science nor ellipses like the New --nothing moved in a simple manner. Rather their wanderings seemed to my untrained eye to be reminiscent of ants or people, constantly changing directions and with no simple equation governing their path. He told me about the equants and the real retrograde motion. About the celestial spheres that were much more complex than geometric spheres. About the mechanics of something as heavy as the sun moving around the centre of the universe located once more within the recesses of our humble planet. "Tell me, this centre doesn't happen to be Jerusalem does it?" I asked in exasperation at one point after being shown more and more seemingly arbitrary details, and yet here was the demonstration: I saw everything more clearly than I'd experienced at any point in my earthly life. The triumphs and mistakes of the Greats, Galileo, Newton, Einstein were paraded in front of me with great efficiency. All were visionaries, but all made as many false statements as we now know Galen made. At one point, all seemed a dream where Tanaka was a con artist and I a sufferer of an auspicious mental syndrome. The kind that leaves me so removed from reality that I'd be a good luck charm in some cultures and people would rub my forehead for their marriage Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 46
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to be fertile or for the monsoon season to come in in its correct time. Or even for the donkey to be blessed with an offspring. However with more explanations this phase passed.
So what's the truth of the matter? Well, it matters little compared to other things I encountered. Nevertheless, I shall indulge, but only for a while. The universe is apparently about 58 billion kilometres in diameter, with the stars being much smaller and closer than previously thought. The stars are not expanding --the red shift actually has another cause. The current scientific measurements of the masses of the planets are pretty much correct, except for that of the sun being off by several orders of magnitude, this from a miscalculation due to the fact that there actually is no universal law of gravitation but rather a series of laws each enacted by its own Intelligence (or soul if you will) and their interplay is something even Einstein never dreamed of. The combination of those laws leads right back to placing the earth in the centre with the planets undergoing literal retrograde motion. The true system and the modern scientific one are observationally equivalent, "or else how could anyone have navigated a spacecraft to the moon or Mars or anywhere else?" Tanaka exclaimed at one point. Interestingly enough one 'modern'
demonstration that the earth rotates, Foucalt's Pendulum is the result of the complex interplay of gravitational attractions between the pendulum and the various planets as they orbit around it. This all made sense to me in a bizarre way after a while. I realised that if this was testing the openness of my mind, how much more shattering would it be to re-evaluate my former life and my relationships and the nature of humanity from the point of view of the truth? This was frightening. Although I knew I'd have to deal with it at some point --hell I wanted to! --I mentioned nothing as of yet. My temporary silence most importantly included my dearly departed who may or may not be amongst this plane of existence. So I avoided the personal for a while and became the inquisitive scientist. I turned my attention to facts and more facts.
After a certain point, Tanaka stopped my questions about the structure of the universe, of particle motion and the true meaning of relativity: he'd had enough.
"This is all well but there's no time. Plus I've reached the limit of things I can tell you that you'll understand in terms of your senses. There is a practical aspect though: we'll ascend to the Intelligent Designer via the planets and you'll be able to hear them sing."
"What? Intelligent Designer? Singing planets? Maybe I truly am in hospital with waaay too much morphine in my system."
"You'll see. The Intelligent Designer is the creator of all of this, us, the non-material plane and of course the world sculpture in all its intricacies. More on that later. I said I'll ascend thee to the planets and this I will do."
"What's this about singing though?"
"As you've already gathered each animate being has a soul or Intelligence like your one here. However there are many more other intelligences governing laws and objects. Each planet in the Solar System has an intelligence attached to it, one that is particularly powerful."
"And they do what exactly?"
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"They all have a purpose instrumental to life and consciousness in the universe. You already don't need to be convinced that the sun has a purpose central to life, although what your biologists have assigned to it fills only a small part of its true duties. Similarly the moon is quite obvious. Others I'll leave you to discover."
"Tell me at least one. Saturn, say."
"Certainly Cassielle. That particular planet observes reflections in the Sculpture's fabric and can therefore see and interpret history. It is the source of all the interpretive memories and projections into the past for every other intelligence. Sorta like a librarian if I want to consult the archives since we can't exactly walk through the middle of the Sculpture. Even now as you're contemplating your past in novel ways, it's made possible by Saturn."
By then I was virtually in hysterics. "This is astrology all over again!"
"Yes and no. Just because past astrologers had no idea about the real way the planets influence our lives doesn't mean the planets don't. And the real thing is completely scientific and precise of course. As for singing, each object in space fine-tunes its motion by emitting what you'll probably interpret as a musical sound. Every planet has its own key centre and chord which is the one associated with its usual motion when it's not in retrograde. For your info, Saturn's note is B flat, its chord is B blat minor seven. Now let's away."
And we were. We left the earth and ascended towards the moon and the other planets. At first I couldn't hear anything. What was there to hear? There was only the blackness of space and the immense light of the Great Light Emanator that was currently setting over a meridian somewhere in the Pacific.
My first impression was the grandness of the direct motion of the planets. 'Twas nothing like the models Tanaka showed me. The real thing is so much more dynamic and vibrant. The sheer speed through which they whoosh through space is astounding and --what? As I paused my train of thought I realised that I indeed heard a whoosh, and with no atmosphere it must be coming from the planets themselves. Or rather from my mind interpreting the planets. Immediately I knew how to receive the sounds. I relaxed and just like in my sense training focussed on directly being aware of, on directly "guessing", the melody and harmony. It swooped down on me from the silence capturing my attention and tears. A haunting sound it was --like a very far-away orchestra playing an extremely slow and polyphonic drone. An awe-full sound, I thought, suddenly rediscovering the original meaning of that word with glee. I was reminded of the Gregorian chant as well as other chants, but this was so much deeper and more penetrating that it took a few thousand notes before I dared to focus deeper (thus effectively turning up the volume). The bass notes were lower than any that could be heard by any ear and I truly felt them with my imaginary sense of supervibration. Everything was sustained and yet dynamic. It was then that we drifted past Mars in close proximity and I could catch its own voice. The actual sound was interesting in the way that it contradicted the traditional mythology of the planet directly. Mars was supposed to be the bloody deity of strife and destruction. In reality, while its sound was hardly placid, it wasn't harsh either. None of the planets were. Even the radical redness of Mars was tempered by the incredibly warm sound. The Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 48
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entire experience of the planet was harmonious, with all the sensory inputs working together and achieving a reputation for the planet that went beyond the concept of the god of war.
The sounds of a single planet singing is something I'll never forget. First you see the planet approach from afar and there is merely a noise. As it gets closer, you begin to differentiate several notes within it. You might be able to identify which chord it is if you know a bit about musical theory but it's still a chord that can't be heard by a material sense of hearing. The richness and all-pervasive texture of the overtones, other chords and whole melodies hinted at by this seemingly simple drone makes a whole orchestra sound like a single note. It's like Mars is playing an instrument that's millions of kilometres long, with each length of it adding layers of complexity. Then the planet goes right past you and you see that it's changing course somewhat. And you realise that the chord has changed (in both pitch and type) in the time you've been listening, only you didn't notice. In fact this occurs regularly and it takes an immense concentration to obtain the pattern. It's worth it though, being the heartbeat of the universe and all. With each moment the planet slightly adjusts its orbit and so its eternal song changes. There is no specific sense of a composer but neither is there a need for one. No forced consonance either. The planet then fades into the distance and as you turn your attention to all the orchestras of all the planets you realise that the beauty lies in the fact that the souls that operate the planets feel no need to make their contribution harmonious with the whole. By not deliberately playing in tune but just doing their own thing the planets manage to create something that feels more natural than music that's pleasant to the ears. There was another aspect to the music that I found truly pleasant. It seemed to have no verbal purpose. Now that I knew there was some Designer to it all, I was almost afraid of finding a universe singing praises to a narcissistic creator. However the planets weren't doing that at all. They just were. And they were doing a marvellous job about it, despite being supposedly in-anima-te. Certainly a better job than many living beings I knew of. I was stunned. Dwarfed. As we kept ascending I took note of each planet and object in space. Each was different, each sang a new song. The universe turned out to have been a strange combination of the visions of Pythagoras, Aristotle, Dante and Maimonides on harmony, astronomy and music. No matter how much crap I saw in other aspects of the non-material plane, this was probably my favourite part of the world. I didn't mind it at all. In fact I was laughing and crying carelessly as we ascended further and further into the Outer Songs. Too bad my guide was no Beatrice.
9. The Intelligent Designer
"Where to now?" I naturally asked after we completed our circuit.
"Shortly I'll take you to see the Intelligent Designer who will tell you more about the conditions of your stay here."
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"Oh indeed. So what, there is a God after all? At least I know neither Christianity nor Islam are true or I'd be in the hellfire with much poking and torture and the pulling apart of limbs --all metaphorically speaking of course! --which I don't think this is, as annoyed as I may be at some of your ideosyncrasies, Tanaka."
"No, it's not. There's no God. There is however an Intelligent Designer who created the universe and all the Intelligences and everything there is."
"What's the difference?"
"God is something infinite and perfect. Humanity made God up to obtain an ultimate allencompassing solution. The Intelligent Designer is a finite, imperfect being --just a very brilliant one quite clearly surpassing the rest of the universe put together."
"Mistakes-"
"He does make them." Despite all the strangeness I witnessed about the universe thus far, I was sure the Designer had neither male genitalia nor a Y chromosome to be legitimately called a he. Two possible explanations followed. Either Tanaka was putting things in a way he thought I'd understand (and I'd also have to interpret his message as a 'he') or he was doing it to annoy, to confound rather. Although I've already let some of my annoyance at his conservatism show, I didn't want to call him on this one so early so I went along for now.
"Let me speculate. I trust he's not omnipotent in terms of being able to create the logically impossible. What about total physical power?"
"There are some limitations but for our purposes He can do practically anything. Whether He shall is of course another thing."
"Good. So pretty much omnipotent. Omnipresence he must have because all the souls are omnipresent here, even you and I because we are not in any particular location (as we have access to every point of the space-time that already exists). Am I on the right track?"
"Yes, by all means continue to speculate and I'll correct you."
"So which attributes are left for which the Intelligent Designer can be different to the human God?..Omniscience. Makes sense: with non-omniscience, even being the smartest being in the universe, you're bound to make some mistakes. And it does seem like the world has...one or two glitches."
"It does, although many of these are a natural consequence of the rules put in place and the Intelligences that enact them."
"I don't want to seem like a mutinous one so soon but putting rules in place whose natural consequence is a glitch would itself be a glitch wouldn't it?" I continued after his silence.
"Now there's probably at least one more of the traditional attributes we should discuss to figure out where this Designer stands. What about omnibenevolence?"
"This is a more difficult one. Morality is pretty much something made up by the human race to suit certain purposes. With regularity, His purposes differ from those humans made for themselves - and this results in consequences that can easily seen as immoral from a human perspective."
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"What, like famine and molestation?"
"Most of the time the world runs as a machine according to deterministic rules, of which these would be an occasional consequence. I meant for instance that when I take you to Him, what He will decide for you may not necessarily be the same as your sense of what a just fate for you would be."
"So there is a hell?"
"No no. There is no punishment for the sake of itself. There are consequences to certain bad actions that while rectifying the situation feel punishing to the perpetrators. But again this is because conscience like morality is created by the soul for itself. This was my point, if your Majesty will allow me to return to it. When you strip away your human bullshit, morality is really the natural order of things. Put a bunch of selfish organisms to live in a world with a resource and they will most of the time evolve their behaviour to share the resource according to some ordered system that would maximise their survival rates. This is natural justice. This is something the Intelligent Designer cannot avoid following because it's just what happens. However in some instances following this conflicts with what you or I might believe. But the Intelligent Designer sees things from within a much broader context while we're more concerned with local goodness." I immediately got the impression that everything was swell except for the Ultimate Question. For most people this would be where this Intelligent Designer originated from. This was on my mind too and I asked it. But I was more interested in another question, although it is very related to the first. Did the Designer have free will? If it (or he as Tanaka would have it) created the laws of nature, why did it seem like it had to follow them? If it was the first cause of everything whence were its essences or features derived?
And if we were the necessary outcome of this (even if we're really Intelligences and not mere bodies) how exactly are we moral agents?
When I blurted all of this out, Tanaka smiled. Different souls are different, he said, and when they get introduced to the non-material plane they are concerned with different things. This question however (or at least the first part) is something that not a single Intelligence has failed to ask. That's why a special 'box' has been prepared which the soul may enter (ie. shift attention to) to obtain the answer. That and my series of questions had no answer in a language. Eager to get a break from my guide and venture out on my own if only for a while, I enthusiastically imaged the box. Being in the non-material plane it wasn't inside the world sculpture which meant it wasn't at any particular location in the world. But as you have already fathomed, dear reader and interpreter of my psychosis, it was possible for souls to create experiences in this plane as well. Ones that allowed for interaction too, like Tanaka's Smashing of Vases. The box was therefore interpreted in my mind as something familiar. A phone booth. A simple one but with walls that were solid at the bottom and with tinted glass at the top. I needed some privacy. There was a buzz in the "air" and the phone rang. I entered and picked it up and immediately the Grandest of Answers fell into place.
"Oh," I muttered, putting down the handset and leaving the booth. Was that it? That was it. All wrapped up nicely. No paradox, no impossibility. Just knowledge of exactly how the Intelligent Designer could have come to be. Disappointing, really. Not the explanation, it was adequate although I obviously can't set it down (human language Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 51
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won't do plus it really is too small to fit in the margin). The mere fact of receiving one was disappointing.
"Now what?"
"Now that you're starting to make sense of the Designer, you're off to meet him. I'll image the entrance to the hall and then you just ascend. I'll wait for you outside."
"Marvellous" I said without hiding the relief at yet another break from my non-Beatrice. I became aware of a gorgeous earthy smell as I found myself on wooden steps. My Intelligence or soul (or hallucination) was at the entrance to a large hall made entirely of wood. This was it, perfect proof of the degree to which I was using my own senses to make my own sense of things. I'd imagined that other people who were frozen to death would have all imagined some kind of building, but each one would be different. I wasn't looking for a palace with an opulent radiance emanating from the Inhabitant. So what I got was something akin to a Viking dining hall, raised from the ground level but not too much, and very plain.
I ascended, entered the door and sat on the empty wooden chair. There was another chair opposite me. Both chairs had straw for softening purposes. A small table with two mugs of mead. That was it, the rest was empty. Alas, alas, so much wasted space in my sensory interpretation of me being received by the Designer! It was sitting in the other chair looking at me. I say looking when I mean 'being aware'. I had endowed it with no gender, as well as no human figure. It was a strange blob of fluorescent lights of different colours. Meanwhile I knew that had I seen an old man with a beard of flowing whiteness or a Greek warrior goddess or Kali devouring infants or Gaia swirling the eath's waters and imbibing them with her feminine energy or any other such form I'd have been enraged to the point of utter distraction.
"Welcome Cassi. How do you like my creation?"
"Thanks. Um, I knew the rainforest colour scheme was overdone by its designer since I was little! And now I know I was right. Other than that, the creation it's very nifty and interesting. I've only seen a few things though."
"I know. And how's Tanaka. Still patronising?"
I smiled. "You may not be omniscient but at least I know you're not senile and you know a bit of what's happening in your realm." A silence, which I tried to patch up. "Sorry, was I being disrespectful? Then again, I can only think the thoughts I am thinking and you'd probably know them anyway and-"
"Don't worry, I appreciate the honest manner. Actually few people speak to me like that. Perhaps because most come here after spending their earthly existence following a belief system that idolises me as something I'm not. Well actually it creates a being that doesn't exist and then their expectations of that being are falsely transferred to me. No matter how I put it the end result is often some serious grovelling! I bet if you wrote down our conversation and showed it to some people most of them would never be able to stop themselves from imagining me as a man in a flowing robe, of my voice as male. Old habits die hard."
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"Oh yes, I've been meaning to ask. If this is how things are, what's the deal with religion?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well how true are they? And how did they originate? And why do you continue to allow them --why not reveal the true state of things?"
I knew instantly that the Designer smiled in response, despite the blob not showing any movement. There was just a warmer feeling about.
"You're impatient to discover. Good, because you may not have much time here."
"Yes, I was told there'd be some sort of decision. May I hear it now then?"
"Don't see why not. There will be no bending of rules for you. You won't get to decide whether you go back or not. That will be decided by material circumstances. David's still in the blizzard, if he finds you and you're saved then you'll be debriefed and your attention returned to your body. If you die, you'll have to be retrained a bit because this will free up the full spectrum of your senses and you won't need to be using these visual and verbal approximations. Until such time, you're free to roam around as much as you want. After one more session with the guide."
"Roam free? You mean others don't-"
"Oh, they are free because they are not restricted to doing one thing at a time. But all have tasks. For those who are embodied, their task is to be embodied. Once that job of theirs expires, I assign them others. You think poor old Tanaka would have chosen to guide newcomers around?"
"No...no. So I won't have a task...yet. What's the task of being embodied then?"
"You may as well ask me what's the purpose of the universe. I'm not being sarcastic, I will tell you. The two statements actually answer each other. The purpose of creation is to actualise the inherent beauty, complexity and potential of structure and consciousness. Sounds wanky, I know. But then again you can't appreciate what this means to the extent that I do. Initially, I created Structure and Consciousness only. These were the Intelligences, every single one in existence, including you. This allowed for some stunning possibilities because they were differentiated. Hehe, as an aside you can at least rest easy that the real universe isn't relativist. I soon created a hierarchy where there would be tasks that are essential to this realisation. However because this is my first and only universe and I ain't all-knowing, I made a mistake. There was much wasted potential."
"How so?"
"There were few restrictions. My world had no suffering and therefore no reason to be noble. There was no lack of resources because none were needed so Intelligences had no reason, no motivation to extend themselves. The cynics of the human world have been saying for centuries that heroism and free will aren't worth the suffering that exists in the world. How wrong they are. They don't know the true mechanisms of it though. They don't know just how valuable it is to have a restriction." Escape from Eternal Life – free PDF version from http://anadder.com/eternal_life 53
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"But couldn't there be much less of the more gratuitous things without the loss of...restrictive potential?"
"Oh yes. I and my assistants have made many mistakes which we're constantly trying to fix. It's hard because of the complexity. But you'll be amazed at how actually successful the material world is to provide the restrictions."
"So you needed a material world to restrict?"
"Yes, there needed to be some concrete framework. If everyone was just floating around like we are now, consciousness and awareness and structure would be at a very low point. The focus of an Intelligence in a state of perfect freedom would be evaporated in a thousand directions. Trouble is needed to actualise potential just like compression is needed to explode gunpowder."
"That sounds an awful lot like a quote from one of my favourite fictional abbes."
"Yes, Faria. The Count of Monte Cristo's one of my favourite books." I gasped. "Sorry but I hardly imagined the creator of the universe having favourite books."
"I'm made of the same stuff you are, there's just more of it. Anyway, essentially this is the worldly scene. As I said; the purposes of the universe and of embodiment refer to each other. The purpose of the universe is to be embodied. And vice versa, although it may take you a while to figure out the reverse. The Intelligences all know what goes on in the world and still, the free ones practically beg me to be shifted to human form. The current waiting list is 300 years because of the limited number of human bodies. I bet none of the cynics believe that."
"I do! Although I was never that cynical. So there is reincarnation?"
"There could be. In practical terms, each Intelligence is allocated one earthly lifespan due to the limitations. There have been some notable exceptions though which I've granted for special purposes. However, with time, I may begin a project whereby more bodies are created which will allow me to give everyone a second turn, or beyond."
"This is amazing. You haven't told me about the religion thing."
"True. Well of course some of their teachings are right. The ones that say there are souls and that death isn't the end. Of course they're completely off the mark about the nature of this soul. It's not mystical in that nothing is, everything is there for some discrete reason. Also there's no heaven and hell as you've obviously seen though and material life is not a mere test. Um, which other ones are right in certain parts? The ones that say that the angels are actually jealous of human beings for their nature that is more flawed yet has more potential. Some of the ethical teachings can be considered a good idea. For many religions, even less than 'some'!"