When people
tell me they fear death, I look at them funny, as if they’d just told me they
were afraid of breakfast. Every morning, I wake up, workout, shower, eat
breakfast, get on with my day. Every morning, without fail, as do we all, or,
at least, most. And thus I say, with the total assurance of a man with a great
love of waffles, that death and breakfast are much the same. They are total
inevitabilities, not some sum calculation of a long process of choices and
coincidences, not the force of a bullet ripped headlong through flesh, but
waffles pulling you out of a groggy state of exhaustion, accompanied by a tea or
coffee or orange juice, as set by personal taste.
This claim
usually gets met with a look even more confused and, after ascertaining that
the individual in question isn’t just a fan of pancakes, I go on by going back.
Far back, all the way back, as all the way back as my liberal arts degree
allows me to go.
I go back
to the first atoms of carbon on a new born earth, roiling magma and unformed
gas, seas boiling and land a flying car, just a few atoms of carbon, about in
the ether, existence as yet unmolded into blueprint or purpose, a mere fever
dream of something grand yet to come.
And then it
begins.
Forming and
reforming, forming and reforming, something then nothing, nothing then
something, in and back and over and again. And the carbon has grown, evolved,
become something, simple, at first, a single cell, but the beginning. The
beginning and the end for, as the cells are formed, they are unformed, born and
dead in the flap of a butterfly’s wings. But this is not the end because then
it just begins again.
Forming and
reforming, forming and reforming, over and over for a time unreckonable, over
and over for the same length of time that man has stood and looked out over the
earth. And out of this eon of change comes something bigger, grander, more cells,
more processes, a firing of nerves and electrons that some would some day call
a brain and others a computer, but that which is really just another stage in
the form and reform. The creature swims slow, its vision foggy, maybe blind,
and it swims and it eats and it mates, it’s born and it loves and it dies, but
this, too, is not the end. The seas change, the waters cool and our little
bundle of carbon changes right along with them, forming and reforming, made and
unmade, born and unborn.
When next we
meet it, the carbon walks on four legs, short, stumpy, slow, stupid, but with
sight and smell and taste, birth and life and death, over and over again, a
million million generations of short stumpy stupids, until short and stumpy
gets a little bigger and a little smarter, forming and reforming, forming and
reforming.
A great
beast, scaled and magnificent, stands towering over long grasslands, jaw the
size of a six year old kid. The biggest badass in a time made for badasses,
hunting, fighting, mating, living, dying, how our carbon has changed. But still
it does not stop, and still the process continues, forming and reforming, a
million more great lizards, until fire falls from the sky and the lizards are
gone, replaced with beasts more modest, less direct affronts to the gods. In
shape, that is. In mind they aim to, one day, challenge the gods, build cities
stretching so tall that they may scratch god’s balls, then take a strong grip
on them and ask what the hell this is all about.
But that’s
jumping ahead.
So the
carbon forms and reforms and soon the lizards become mammals, from small,
scurrying things, eventually come those that deign to wander on two legs.
Forming and reforming, forming and reforming until the two-leggers begin to
pick up sticks and stones and begin to fight and kill for, they reckon, they
are the apex.
But, as
always, they form and reform, form and reform.
The beasts
learn speech, and from speech they invent their makers, and from their makers
they invent art and love, and this, they say, is the apex, we, they say, are
the chosen ones. And yet still they form and reform, begin and end, live and
die. Over and over, forming and reforming, the carbon mixing and molding,
always a constant across creatures uncountable, those same small atoms of
carbon, born and dead a billion times over, but still our carbon kicks about,
forming and reforming.
The carbon
is part of a farmer, then a leader, then a soldier, then the bricklayer who
builds their first great city, a place called Babylon. But this is not the end.
That which does not truly begin, can never truly end.
So, still
then, the carbon forms and reforms, itself uncaring at its ultimate
destination, a passive traveller in a great cosmic soup.
And then,
once more, the carbon is born, formed, made anew, this time as a creature known
as you. You are born screaming and crying, looking desperately for a something
to latch out onto, something to give you a creator and a meaning and a purpose,
a beginning and an end. And you find a mother, and she is warmth and light and
comfort, she is that which you call god. And you find a father, your soldier,
your shield against the darkness, your rock, and he is what you call protector,
and in your father you find the way of standing, and in your mother you find
the way of loving and for your whole brief span of forming, you will battle in
between these two always, everything a struggle between standing and loving.
And on you go. And soon enough you speak your first word, mama or papa or, if
you are of mind wholly independent, something wholly unrelated, and thus you
find a third path, apart from loving and standing, the path of constant
reformation. And thus you climb and strive.
And
suddenly they cast you off, your god and your protector, alone and unprotected,
surrounded by two dozen other bundles of carbon, learning the earliest ways of
loving and standing, the earliest charades of that which the carbon once
fought, blood caked in its hair, with sticks and stones. Soon you lean of life
without a god and protector constant at your side, and maybe that independent
side develops out a little more. You form alliances, based on cause imagined
rather than common, born out of shared fear, fear of the other, of the one that
you call the teacher, that you call the bully, that you call the yucky ones, of
hair of strange length, face of bizarre lines.
These lines
of war and strife make you, even as your comrades fall off. Suddenly, the yucky
ones become the lovely ones, and you find your basic self changing, growing
longer and bigger and hairier, and the lovely ones haunt you, eating of your
soul as the ancient ones tore with teeth at smaller beasts. Their haunting
becomes a disease of your own soul, and as your body grows, your heart withers,
beaten and cut and scarred, and you make yourself in the image of that which
surrounds you, or, if you said a third word back in that time outside your
memory’s deepest shroud, you make your own image, designed as the yin to their
yang.
All at
once, you cease to change, and all the combatants stop, and look around as if
Helen magically were restored to her place on the Spartan throne, and you find
your feet again, and you find your god and you find your protector once more,
and the yucky ones that became the lovely ones are now the beloved ones. And
yet your learning continues, and the teacher becomes a guide, and the path, as
it grows infinitely, at once narrows, as you see it shoot off straight towards
a far off horizon, that the bundle of carbon still lying at your base recognizes
well. Now, though, the great struggle is against that horizon, a struggle
fought with loud, harmodius noises and strange substances engineered to guide
you off the path, to show you another way, a way that you cannot seem to know.
A way of forming, and reforming.
But you
skate on forwards, towards the line, towards the zenith you imagine you see on
a road altogether flat, a dreamed of great house, a pretty beloved, happy kids.
Or maybe you don’t, maybe you choose the path of the wanderer, searching the
earth in its great expanse for the origin or the ending, without the self
knowledge to just look within, to see the carbon that makes you.
The zenith
you build up around you, great walls in front of your eyes to keep from seeing
that the horizon line now draws ever closer, and as you forget your beginning,
you begin to lose sleep, lusting after a true notion of that which comes at the
end. The two are one and the same. This the carbon knows but will not tell you,
because it has seen this happen a million billion times before and will a
million billion times again.
Your
greatest comrade in arms, from the struggle you’d almost forgotten, one day
finds his path of reformation begun again, and in this you finally catch your
first glance of the genesis and you witness a terminus, failing to recognize in
the end a new beginning. But that, that will come later, in some long early
morning, on a beach in South Florida, or pitched out by the side of your pool
under the Arizona sun.
Even as you
know you are your childrens’ god/protector, they yet push away from you,
finding their own bodies as changed, and you see them in the struggle that just
a short age ago you survived, and you want to reach out to them and touch them
and make them see that, in the beginning, is an end, but in the now is just
more change. And maybe, probably, you reach them, and they see, and, as you,
they grow up and out and again learn the name of their god/protector, but
maybe, once in an impossible eon, or, at least, an eon you thought impossible
to reach you, they decide to pry open the doors of the train, and make an early
exit, and maybe this destroys you. But in this tragedy there is no true end,
just unforming for the sake of reforming.
As the way
of love, or the way of standing, your children move on and up and out, and into
their own phase of playing out life’s heart strings with chemicals and music.
And you turn to your beloved and you ask where it all goes and she has no more
answer than you.
Soon
enough, that which you whiled your days away with for purposes of survival,
your hunting mammoths, well it pushes you out, says your time is done, now it’s
time to relax, time, finally, to live, but live you cannot because all you ever
lived for is gone now, and you find yourself that little place in the sun, and
you look about in despair, wondering where to which it has all gone. And then,
one day, your children they knock at your door, and in their arms you see it
begin again and your eyes fill with tears and your kids ask you if you’re okay
and you says of course you are, and finally you see it, the forming and the
reforming, and you take the child in your arms and finally you see the carbon.
And then
you live a little longer, really live now, warm and content, your beloved by your
side, her hand in yours, and for the first time you are happy, though never
more so than when your kids knock at the door. Eventually, you feel your
beloved’s grip weaken, slacken, slip from your hand, and you cry, even as you
see it all form and reform.
Time
passes, your own body weakens, your kids put you in what they call assisted
living, but living can never be assisted, for this is a place of ending, and
you know, so it goes, and you see it all reform around you, and you feel your
mind slip, until all you can remember is the face of your beloved the first
time you saw her.
Then it all
comes back, birth, the god and protector, the battlefield, the experiment, the
love and the work and most of all your children knocking at your door, and
then, like that, you are unformed.
But this is
not the end, this is just the start of another age of forming and reforming,
another time of motion and change, and the carbon watches a billion billion
lives begin and end, all pulled into one continuous timeline, all one, the
single celled to you to whatever comes after.
Then all at
once, the great ball of fire that once lit the sky begins to cool, and the
beasts get smaller, and short and stumpy comes back, and the one celled, and
the carbon doesn’t care because its seen it all before, so it just moves on,
ever forward, forming and reforming, forming and reforming, forming and
reforming, and then it all suddenly stops as the light in the sky gets suddenly
brighter and brighter, and soon it all stops and it’s all engulfed in a great
ball of fantastic light.
And the
carbon fears for a second that here, then, is that which we long now dead once
called death.
But out of
the light comes just more forming and reforming, and here now the carbon sees
that which was before earth, the great, awesome expanse of everything, laid out
in every direction, towards an infinity line that those that once lived could
never have begun to understand, and yet here the carbon sees only possibility,
expansion, more and more, forever and ever, all the balls of fire slowly, ever
so slowly, ripping themselves away from each other in that which we call
entropy, and soon it’s all spinning off and the few threads that once held us
all together are torn asunder, the universe itself now finding an ending.
Here yet
though, is still the carbon, against it all. For in nothing there is still
something. But in this nothing we find a barrier that I cannot see past. Even
that, though, is a qualified statement, for, in the great minds of our time,
there is a place beyond maximum entropy, beyond the zero, a new beginning and a
new ending, a new great age of forming and reforming, as all that once moved
forward now moves back, death then life then love then birth, the one celleds,
the short and stumpys, the two-legs, the mammals, the great lizards, the short
and stumpys, the one celleds, the time before the earth, all the way back till
once more on the other end is another end, that again rubber bands back towards
birth life death, death life birth, on and on forever, against it all.
And in this
we find our death, an illusion, just another unforming in a great constant
cycle of forming and reforming. So, then, to fear death is to fear birth and,
even, life itself. Death, in this way, is as breakfast, a beginning and an end
on only a most limited time scale, because, even after the next great age of
maximum entropy, there is the promise of yet another breakfast.
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