Disconnect.
Where am I?
I had everything clear in my head just now—wonderful lines that swept and swooped and slid across the page, but they’ve emerged chopped and broken. They clatter upon the page, clunkenly.
This damned conspiracy doesn’t want me to succeed. It resists and hinders me. It swivels my head towards the window and glazes my eyes over. Window-gazing. Windows glazing. I’m turning into a zombie. No, foul spot, no! I need to finish my story during the day before the clock strikes midnight and I turn into a vampire. Forgive me if I sound a little rushed (or stoned) but if you’ve accompanied me this far you’ll understand.
I scramble back to our original point of departure.
“This is not her story,” wrote Douglas Adams, alluding to the Rickmansworth girl. I’ve since revealed that her story is mine—and yours too if you want a slice of the action.
But if time and opportunity are so limited, why do I bother with stories at all? Why not tell it to you straight—do an article, write a thesis, or take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times? Isn’t a narrative just a work of fiction? Why spend all that time, you ask, on something that isn’t even factual? A good read is all a work of fiction can aspire to, surely.
Not so. According to John Michael Greer, stories are extremely powerful. He claims that they’re the tools we use to understand the world. Not only do they contain lessons and morals, but as myths they shape the way that we relate to our environment and to life itself.
So don’t worry. This isn’t a narrative in the conventional sense. By attacking the larger philosophical questions, I’ll break down—seven with a single blow—the straw, stick and brick huts of our cosmology. And then, never fear, I’ll go on reconstruct the wreckage into a giant beanstalk that will win us the golden goose. How’s that for a Grimm day’s work?
Our bedtime story for tonight (geez, is it that late in the day already?) is called Lust for Life, or Starry Night, depending on whether we’re in a hedonistic or romantic mood. As you might predict, it’s about Vincent Willem Van Gogh—good biographical fiction.
Not ‘Once upon a time’ but for as long as I can remember, I’ve felt a connection to that soul. I share his nationality, middle name, red beard (before mine went grey) and his socially inept manner. I savor his zest for being, his compassion for his fellow man, his overpowering creative drive, his simple tastes, his passion for life, and the way that he railed relentlessly against physical limits and limited means. I’ve read his letters (to his brother) and covered my walls with his prints. I’ve traced the history of his art and have amassed a library of books. I’ve even named my son after him. If I had been he, I couldn’t have lived a fuller life.
Maybe that’s an indication. Maybe I was once Vincent Van Gogh. Would it be so very far-fetched to imagine that he and I are one? Suppose that he is me reborn into this present body. As a thought experiment, where would that take us?
We’d need to think along the lines of reincarnation; I don’t think you can avoid it. For the sake of argument—no, not ‘argument’; who wants to argue? So, for the sake of, oh, I don’t know, mental gymnastics?—let’s suppose that reincarnation is possible. After all, the greater fraction of the world does.
Do I have any evidence—not of reincarnation in general, but of this particular instance?
Well no, I don’t have any clear memories of being him. I haven’t gone through any déjà vu moments of mixing pigments or of attacking a canvas. I haven’t an unexplained taste for tobacco and absinthe. But that’s okay. The absence of hard evidence doesn’t rule out the possibility of a common ancestry.
Still, there are documented accounts of people recalling where treasure is hidden under the floorboards of a house of a previous life. It’s been mentioned in books. Urban legends abound, so let's allow that it has happened. It's just that where Vincent is concerned, I don’t possess that power of recall.
Since it's rare for people to have memories of their previous lives, reincarnation must involve rigorous brainwashing. Otherwise we’d all be confused about our identity. That would explain my inability to demonstrate a closer connection. The exception proves the rule, so there's hope for me and Vinnie yet.
Say that I’m right. How then to explain the period of time—a half century or so—from the day Vincent shot himself (thirty hours later, actually, and possibly by a teenager) to the day on which I was born? Does that pose a problem?
I can’t see that it would. For reincarnation to be the norm, it would be quite inconvenient for the next life to have to start the instant one shuffled off one’s previous life’s mortal coil. The bookkeeping system for that would beggar belief.
My point is: time ought not to be a problem for a god. God can cope, surely. We want God to be time’s master—I mean, who is in charge here? An all-powerful god must be able to run rings around any old sundial. For souls in a state of limbo in between lives, there must be some cosmic equivalent of a capsule hotel. The Milky Way Transit Lounge Cafeteria—I can picture Douglas Adams there.
From a very early age I’ve had a moth-like fascination for this thing called religion. Circling at a distance so as not to singe my wings, I observed my elders. Were they addled? Why would they turn off their brains and believe such fantasies? I pondered such questions at the age of six. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that that my instincts were truly perceptive.
Religions are damnably dangerous. All of them are cults. I can say this categorically because not one of them, not a single world model addresses a couple of essential existential features, and that shortcoming shows that they are seriously deficient.
First, no religion explains the real nature of the relationship between us and God (and with each other). All that stuff about neighbors, treating each other as brothers and sisters, who is in my family and who is not, this tribe and that tribe, the chosen people, Good Samaritans, turning your cheek seven times seven . . . It may seem as is the matter is being dealt with, but this isn’t not so. There’s a far more intimate involvement between all forms of life that organized religions have no inkling of and can't hint at.
And that would be enough to damn them. However, the second deficiency is even more damning. It is this: No system of belief addresses the nature of time. None of them explains how time operates. That understanding is crucial. Unless you have it, you can’t read any meaningful pattern into the warp and woof of the universe.
I must tell you about another science fiction story. Naturally, an alien race was involved, humanoid (writers should always keep in mind the possibility of a film adaptation). In fact, the aliens were virtually identical to human beings—two sexes and all. The major difference was that they were about a thousand times larger, and their inclination was to swat us like midges.
Before colonizing the earth, the giants sent out an exploration party. Some sort of fracas resulted from which the aliens came off second best. One or two survived, but they were brain-dead and no use for interrogation.
As an aside, consider the concept of ‘alien’. According to Ism ideology, there is no such thing of course. We’re all just appendages on the same tree. We’re simply differently shaped limbs on the one jabberwocky. Aliens, plants, or whatever—we’re all just talons, tentacles, trunks and wings. How daft it would be, for instance, if your legs stood in mortal fear of your arms. Still, in such a situation what are you going to do when an alien appears? Philosophize? No way, you pull out your blaster.
Getting back to the story, these aliens were so gigantic that after their prefrontal lobes were removed—their head injuries required major surgery—there was enough space for a lunar module-style office to be built inside the giant’s head. Living quarters were duly installed, along with a contraption that an astronaut-operator used to control the hulk of the giant’s body. Wired up to the remnants of the giant’s brain, he monitored the environment through the giant’s own eyes.
After about six months of training the operator learned the alien’s language and so forth. I don’t know how that went. Maybe it was possible to access the alien’s memory banks. And eventually the human-operated alien was sent back to its home planet in the original spaceship on another fact-gathering mission, this time for 'our' side.
I’m not sure how things turned out after that. For me, the best part of the story was how it portrayed consciousness. The idea that it is the controlling force that sits behind your eyes. Seen in that light, every life form is just a vehicle. Inside every head there sits an operator (begging the question of what homunculus sits behind the operator’s eyes).
And that, I believe, is basically that. We’ve come to the end of the story. It ended with a twist; did you notice? In case you did not, here, in the preamble to the ramblings that preview the following volume, I’ll lay out what you might have missed in all the excitement.
The premise that I used to kick things off did a little shimmy right where things reached their peak. You’ll remember that I began with the supposition that it was I who had the mission to locate and make contact with Theo the Other, the brother-at-a-distance to my Vincent Van Gogh. I spoke of Vee and me. I portrayed him as a version of me, and I merged the two of us into one.
But not so fast.
From your perspective, I have it all wrong. From where you sit, you’ll see the situation quite differently. What you’re going to do as the reader is to bring it all back to your vantage point. I’ve told you that you are quite entitled to rub me out. You would be absolutely correct to remove me from the picture. And you wouldn’t even have to do it by killing me. You just need to ignore me.
When all is said and done (and by now most of it has been), how do you know that you haven’t conjured me up out out of thin air? You assume that I exist(ed) based on nothing more substantial than inky marks across the page (or text on your screen). But you don’t know for sure that I exist. In fact, it’s better for you that I don’t.
This isn’t a trick of the light. There is no me here in your room, in the transit lounge where you sit waiting, or on your bench in the sun this lunch hour. There’s only you. You’re the One. You’re the God, the top Dog, the only player on the block.
What happened was this: you flitzed out of your head into mine. You uploaded (or were uploaded into) the set of attributes and skills and insights of another biology. It allowed you—as me—to postulate the Rickmansworth meme, hypothesize the Theory of Everythink, and then construct the philosophical worldview of Ism. And you’ve brought all that back home. You’ve fetched that bone and placed it at your feet. The question that remains is: Can you grok it?
