“The X is such-and-such.” Did this sentence exist before the formation of the solar system? If the eternal God were in fact omniscient, then the answer would be yes. Furthermore, this sentence has existed into the eternal past. Apply any content: the narrative of a novel, the lyrics of a poem, etc. Then what sense is there in the claim that “this poem is new” or “this is a recent story?” The content was always coexistent with the infinite mind, and so was never nonexistent.
In other words, this last paragraph has always existed. If there is an Omniscient God, then there is no “time” at which that God would not know the contents of this last paragraph. The play Hamlet existed “before time.” Extending this, the content is not only existent eternally into the past, but simultaneously eternally into the future.
Did Shakespeare create Hamlet if Hamlet existed before (infinitely before) Shakespeare existed? This, so far as I can tell, is applicable only to intellectual things; thus I can say, “Before Shakespeare existed” while also denying a “time” before the play Hamlet existed.
Consider this: God did not create Hamlet, yet Hamlet existed before Shakespeare existed. So, who created Hamlet?
Extending this: What about our thoughts? Any thought I have is subject to this omniscience. Could I have any new thoughts? One begins to catch the scent of determinism, of a theistic fatalism. Are my thoughts mine? I have this particular thought Y, yet this particular thought Y predated me. If such an omniscient God could foreknow these things, then what does this mean for the independence of my mind? My mind, being indistinguishable from its thoughts and expressions, therefore has its full disclosure, its entirety examined infinitely, infinitely prior to my existence.
Richard R. La Croix discussed these ideas at some length.
If this is true, then already at the beginning of things made, God had mulled and scrutinized over all of human history (and then some) infinitely; no detail failed to be infinitely considered. One can only imagine, and inadequately too, how unfathomably sterile and redundant our history must seem to God. It is a broken record.
Moreover, what does this entail for God’s own interaction in history? God knew his own activities before creation, and knew them in infinite contrast, if you will. If he did X, then he would know everlastingly prior to X. If he did non-X, then he would know everlastingly prior to non-X [The degree of applicability of the qualifier “prior” is possibly, but not necessarily zero. For it to be necessarily zero, you might have to invalidate God’s omnipotence.].
To know one will do such-and-such (not merely expect or intend) is to know that one will not do the negative of such-and-such. A condition of knowledge is its correspondence with truth. If you know X, X is true. If you merely believe or think X, there is no necessary inference to X’s truth-conditions. So, if you know that you will do such-and-such, then it is true that you will do such-and-such. You cannot, therefore, know such-and-such will happen and then such-and-such does not happen! This is effectively: such-and-such is true, yet such-and-such is not true.
If this omniscient God knows that such-and-such will¬ occur, then it is not possible that such-and-such will not occur. One must not forget the key importance of the term “know” in the proposition; it is not merely speculative or probabilistic projections. When, in common conversation, a person says, “I know you will die” this is a probabilistic projection. It is not impossible that you are some divine exception to the rule, and you will in fact not die. There is a nonzero chance of your immortality. Now, we agree that it is very unlikely that you will live forever, but this in itself is insufficient to disclude the possibility. To truly know X is to disclude the possibility of non-X.
This is, of course, not an uncontroversial review of some epistemic concepts.
Returning to the fundamental issue: if God knows that He (and you) will do such-and-such, then it is impossible that He and you will not do such-and-such. Consider the implications of this: suppose God knows that He will push a small rock over a cliff at time y. This would mean that it is impossible for God not push a small rock over a cliff at time y. What sort of omnipotence is this?
If God knew he would push a small rock over a cliff at time y, and yet he did not push a small rock over a cliff at time y, then God’s omniscience is emptied of significance and legitimacy. In other words, for God’s omniscience to be legitimate the following conditions must obtain: If God knows X to be true, then non-X cannot be true.
This, however, in application, invalidates omnipotence. If I know I will do X, then I cannot prevent X from being done by me. An omniscient God is a species of determinism, determining itself and everything besides.
----------------------------------------
If Hell is separation from God—that is, a place where God is not—then, if Hell exists as such, God is not omnipresent. God may have the power to be omnipresent, and opt to avoid such-and-such location, but in that case he is technically not omnipresent.
“Separation from God” – what of self-awareness in hell? What of regret? What of memory? Did I create these things? In the Christian system: God did. Thus, the artifacts of God are inexorably bound to me—I am such an artifact! Thus, if hell is complete separation from God, it would more coherent to call Hell “oblivion.”
9.30.2008
9.25.2008
The "Immeasurable Granduer" of Tolstoy
These are a few excerpts from Chapter 5, "Tolstoy: God's Elder Brother," of Paul Johnson's 1989 book The Intellectuals. This should not be taken as a critique of Tolstoy's literature--only his personality. Beautiful writing is beautiful writing, but imbecility is likewise imbecility.
--------------------------------------------------------------
[Tolstoy’s] dairies reveal that, as a young man of twenty-five, he was already conscious of special power and a commanding moral destiny. ‘Read a work on the literary characterization of genius today, and this awoke in me the conviction that I am a remarkable man both as regards capacity and eagerness to work.’ ‘I have not yet met a single man who was morally as good as I, and who believed that I do not remember an instance in my life when I was not attracted to what is good and was not ready to sacrifice anything to it.’ He felt in his own soul ‘immeasurable grandeur.’ He was baffled by the failure of other men to recognize his qualities: ‘Why does nobody love me? I am not a fool, not deformed, not a bad man, not an ignoramus. It is incomprehensible.’ – 107
There were times when Tolstoy seemed to think of himself as God’s brother, indeed his elder brother. – 108
He had the assumptions & attitudes of a Russian imperialist. On being accepted by the army and assigned to a gun-battery (the natives had no artillery) he wrote to his brother Sergei: ‘With all my strength I shall help with my guns in the destruction of the predatory and turbulent Asiatics.’ Indeed, he never repudiated his Russian imperialism or the chauvinist spirit, the conviction that the Russians were a special race, with unique moral qualities (personified in the peasant) and a God-ordained role to perform in the world. – 110
…Tolstoy, by his own account, was also chasing Cossack women, gambling and drinking. – 111
‘To write stories,’ he told the poet Fet, ‘is stupid & shameful.’ Note the second adjective. This was an intermittent theme, that art was an outrageous misuse of God’s gifts… – 114
In youth he was extremely shy with women and so resorted to brothels, which disgusted him & brought the usual consequences. One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he is being treated for ‘gonorrhea, obtained from the customary source.’ … But he continued to patronize whores, varies by gypsies, Cossack & native girls, and Russian peasant girls when available. – 115
When Tolstoy was in the country, especially on his own estate, he took his pick of the prettier serf-girls. – 116
At a time when he was publicly preaching the absolute necessity to educate the peasants, and indeed ran schools for their children on his estate, he made no effort to ensure that his own illegitimate son even learned how to read and write. … So Tolstoy’s son Timofei was put to work in the stables; later, on the grounds of bad behavior, he was demoted to woodsman. – 116
ON 16 June 1847, when he was nineteen, he wrote: ‘Now I shall set myself the following rule. Regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who indeed is the cause of sensuality, indulgence, frivolity and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc., if not women?’ The really depressing thing about Tolstoy is that he retained these childish, in some respects Oriental, views of women right to the end of his life. – 117
He wrote in 1898, when he was seventy: ‘[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. The she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty.’ Or again: ‘It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything.’ He disagreed strongly with the emancipationist views expressed in J.S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women, arguing that even unmarried women should be barred from entering a profession. Indeed, he regarded prostitution as one of the few ‘honorable callings’ for women. – 117
‘Should we permit promiscuous sexual intercourse, as many “liberals” wish to do? Impossible! It would be the ruin of family life. To meet the difficulty, the law of development has evolved a “golden bridge” in the form of the prostitute. Just think of London without its 70,000 prostitutes! What would become of decency and morality, how would family life survive without them? How many women and girls would remain chaste? No, I believe the prostitute is necessary for the maintenance of the family.’ – Tolstoy – 118
His wretched brother Dimitri, for instance, was surely an object of compassion: he sank into the gutter, married a prostitute and died young of tuberculosis in 1865. Tolstoy could barely bring himself to spend an hour at his deathbed and refused to attend the funeral at all—he wanted to go to a party instead. – 125
As a rule, Tolstoy took, his friends gave. – 125
[Turgenev] had been generous and thoughtful in helping the young writer [Tolstoy]. In return he received coldness, ingratitude and Tolstoy’s brutal habit of insulting, often brilliantly, the ideas which he knew his friends cherished. – 126
Knowing himself to be dying, Turgenev wrote his last letter to Tolstoy in 1883: ‘My friend, great writer of the Russian land, listen to my appeal. Let me know if you receive this scribble and allow me to embrace you once more hard, very hard, you, your wife, and all you family. I cannot go on. I am tired.’ Tolstoy never replied to this pathetic request, though Turgenev lingered on another two months. So one is not impressed by Tolstoy’s reaction when he got the news of Turgenev’s death: ‘I think of Turgenev continually. I love him terribly, I pity him, I read him, I live with him.’ It has the ring of an actor, playing the public role expected of him. As Sonya [his wife] noticed, Tolstoy was incapable of the privacy and intimacy needed for person-to-person love, or real friendship. Instead he embraced humanity, because that could be done noisily, dramatically, sensationally on the public stage. – 126
Far more serious, however, was Tolstoy’s authoritarian view that only he had the solution to the world’s distress, and his refusal to take part in any efforts at relief which he did not plan and control personally. – 128
He hated democracy. He despised parliaments. …It is a fact of somber significance in Russian history, that for half a century her greatest writer set his face like flint against any systematic reform of the Tsarist system and did his best to impede & ridicule those who tried to civilize it. – 129
Tolstoy was a determinist and an anti-individualist. The notion that events were shaped by the deliberate decisions of powerful men was to him a colossal illusion. Those who appear to be in charge do not even know what is happening, let alone make it happen. Only unconscious activity is important. History is the product of millions of decisions by unknown men who are blind to what they are doing. – 129
The fact that Tolstoy spoke of ‘God’ and called himself a Christian made much less difference than one might suppose. The Orthodox Church excommunicated him in February 1901, not surprisingly in view of the fact that he not only denied the divinity of Jesus Christ but asserted that to call him God or pray to him was ‘the greatest blasphemy.’ The truth is he selected from the Old and New Testaments, the teachings of Christ and the Church, only those bits he agreed with and rejected the rest. He was not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Whether he believed in God is more difficult to determine since he defined ‘God’ in different ways at various times. At bottom, it would seem, ‘God’ was what Tolstoy wanted to happen, the total reform. This is a secular, not a religious concept. As for the traditional God the Father, he was at best an equal, to be jealously observed and criticized, the bear in the den. – 130 to 131
The real enemy were the Western-style democrats, the parliamentary liberals. They were corrupting the whole world with the spread of their ideas. …The greatest danger to the world was the ‘democratic system’ of Britain and the United States. …Russia must turn her face from the West, renounce industry, abolish the State and embrace non-resistance. – 131
On smallpox inoculation: ‘There is no point in trying to escape death. You will die anyway.’ – 132
‘It would be a much better world if women were less talkative…It is a kind of naïve egoism, a desire to put themselves forward.’ – 133
But it is the habit of intellectuals, who write everything with an eye to future publication, to use their diaries as pieces justificatives, instruments of propaganda, defensive & offensive weapons… -- 134
9.16.2008
Berkeley Mad-Labs
This is an older work of mine (four years or so).
“I want the first fiddle” -- Chris van Belle
Berkeley is a wild, postdiluvian, postmodernist anachronism, which is to say, Berkeley is purely a theme park, or at minimum a buffet for the abberant class. What does this precisely mean in precise terms? The answer to this question lies in the bistros and used bookstores, the arteries of Telegraph and Shattuck, and the varied philosophies of the very vocal homeless population.
All of this fierce essentia gave me an opinion of Berkeley as a sheer, disjointed madness rather than a traversable space. These first impressions, however, belie another nature; the research laboratories, while also possessing some form of an unfamiliar psychedelia in their experience, represent a sort of social Masada. These havens separate out the cream from the general milk.
It was half past nine p.m. or thereabouts when I was introduced into this catacomb, this meandering corridor of incredulous saints, this hive of stinging theorems, this empire of the empirical Tao. My guide was my brother, Chris - who deserves one paragraph of description, written in a language he might fathom.
Chris van Belle, in conversation, is analagous to a very user-friendly front end for higher processes, a cascading menu of brevia that refers, if you so inquire, to a distributed information matrix. From ASCII to EBCDIC to Unicode, Chris’s storage of information has been superlative, and inferring from his range of supplementary data, his RAM is updated on a semidiurnal basis. IOW, Chris is a smart card. Our network of memories have had their emoticons, and our personal digital signatures, but its the EDI and the native file formats that truly stir my CPU with a residual and recurring Shockwave.
After several security clearances, such as code-pads on laboratory doors and card scanners, I was finally in the promised land. Amongst this peculiar and verboten habitat, a humorous punchline involves the molecular architecture of the KvAP voltage-dependent K+ channel in a lipid bilayer. What is God? Vibrational submicrogal transfer across a reverse micelle surfactant proBDNF. What is for lunch? Stable low-pressure hydrogen clusters stored in a binary clathrate hydrate.
I have forgotten the room number to this lab, so I am going to refer to “Chris’s” lab as the X_BioHazard_Boom_Boom (XBBB). XBBB is located on the second floor of a brownish, unassuming building (The Building of Doom) on the fringes of the university’s campus. Though the entire floor is dedicated to research in infectious diseases, XBBB is specifically concerned with the virus CMV; another pleasent, though non-biological anacronym ending in “-MV” is the DMV [CMV and the DMV are functionally synonymous].
I noticed with furrowed brow that XBBB was ornamented with warning stickers, biohazard signs, and an emergency washing apparatus. Initially, given this flourescent and multicolored decor, the lab assumed an inviting aura reminiscent of Wonka’s most secret confectionary lab, replete with concoctions able to inflate troublesome gluttons and guttersnipes and gobblers, O my. In XBBB, an errant taste might result in paralysis, cancer, or death, but without the melodious requiems of the Oompa-loompa. There was much danger, too much to chronicle, but suffice it to say that radioactive and mutagenic substances were in my immediate reach. This was a charnel-house, a cloistered fun-farm of many godless lucubrations.
Nonetheless, this is the love of the subject. It is this love, the love of resolving this world in a lucid fashion, that is the understructure of this entire account. The obsession and concentration of these few toilers surpasses the language within which their findings are deciphered. The inspiration that compels such sacrifice on the altar of correct explanation comes to the multitude, but only a smattering perservere to realize some portion of their ends. I wanted to make this declaration outright and without concealing it inside an abstruse quip or simile. On the other hand, abstruse quips and similes are my choicest weapons.
Chris is exceptionally consumed with the sickness, or rather, the virus; he is the guilty monk, repenting for any truancies from his monastery. My visit was brief, but if my visit gives me any representative insight at all into Chris’s normal schedule, then I can rightly infer that Chris has dissolved his total life into that monastic order of the sciences. I was dragged, in the name of progress, to this lab for nearly the whole of my vacation. Moreover, the hours were steadily longer, which is to mean, our nights in the lab went “progressively” later into the morning.
For Chris, these intensely unhealthy late night sessions were only exacerbated by his habit of waking up around six or seven in the morning. This round-the-clock chicanery had been the norm for several weeks prior to my coming, and yet Chris exhibited no signs of physical collapse. How long can the human body tolerate such methodical neglect? The answer to his physiology’s fallout might require more of his engagement in lab, more engagement with the catalyst to this general break-up.
I digress. I wish now to desribe Chris’s superior or overseer in the lab, a man by the name of Walter. I was hesitant at first to meet Walter, because I felt it was intrusive and perhaps innappropriate that I be in this relatively high-security lab while important work needed to be done; in short, I felt like some silly tourist in need of some kindergarten-like tour through this shiny, neat place. Fortunately, Walter is a cool goose, a witty kitty, a nice slice, a pleasent pheasant, a humorous tumor, etc, etc.
Near the end of my first night, I had become very comfortable with being in the lab. More importantly, I had became more natural and honest with Walter; the first, second, and third night had become like comedy time in a viral containtment dock. We would joke about Chris’s upstart ways, his insistence on ignoring protocol -- a protocol assembled at the cost of billions of dollars, billions of hours of research at thousands of labs in locations all about the globe. Walter, in a lighthearted fashion, would recount all of the infinite travails Chris’s sense of entitlement had brought him. He said that if Chris was under the tutelage of a different graduate lab worker, he would have been either relocated to another building or simply murdered.
The waggeries and lampooning did not end there, but it is impossible to convey the grandeur of these gatherings. So, I should ask that you recall your own glib great times with fellow glib great persons, and project your happiness into this chronicle; this is the only way to grasp such occasions that fail the phrase. All in all, any adequate description would demand that we include the word, “chortling.”
Chris, Walter, and I...three amigos in the cosmic enchilada, burning the midnight oil with some brainy guacamole. Three musketeers in the caramel core of man’s profoundest search for meaning in the universe. Three domains of cellular civilizations with this feature of consciousness that permits our communion. What is it that orchestrates these unplanned, yet purposeful events? What is it that guides the human body into these non-repeatable situations, this unspeakably joyous happenstance, which ties together with other blisses to unfold like Indra’s pearls? On my present plateau I can glimpse my former trails, and guess at those trails yet to come. The final frontier is always personal.
My last visit to XBBB was like the others, and better than the others. Chris and I arrived, chatted with Walter some, then stepped out to pick up some dinner. We asked Walter if he wanted to come, or at least if he wanted anything to eat; he declined the first, but accepted the latter. Whatever we were going to bring back, he would surely enjoy. I opted for a Chinese dinner. Chris and I inevitably returned, and set out all the take-out packages in a cute buffet-like pattern on the table. The three of us ate heartily and spoke heartily. Though the setting - a cramped laboratory lunch room with flourescent gamma rays - was banal, our collective serenity perceived it as the coolest dive in town, a tower at the edge of reality.
I left early that night, about two in the morning, and walked to Chris’s apartment, nearly seven-thousand miles from the lab. Chris arrived home at five-thirty that morning. We exchanged closed-eyed mumbles before melting into the linoleum floors. My meltedness, however, was short-lived; I arose at seven a.m. in order to meet my ride back to Port Hueneme. Chris, utterly exhausted, mustered up a farewell; the whole visit, at that departure, had seemed to have transpired entirely in that farewell, entirely in one minute. I was off, off, and off a little further.
And so it goes, as with all first-hand accounts of living life, that one must mention how incomplete the narrative is, and ever will be. Therefore, I must capitulate to language, that gloriously helpful hindrance, and confess that no semanteme is capable of denoting or connoting one iota of the my terrific time. It endures in my memory, and in Chris’s memory, but Chris’s telling (if he were to tell it) would differ radically. He would omit this, or emphasize that, or include this other thing. In the end, two divergent paintings would be created, which is to say: how do you know I am giving you the truth?
“I want the first fiddle” -- Chris van Belle
Berkeley is a wild, postdiluvian, postmodernist anachronism, which is to say, Berkeley is purely a theme park, or at minimum a buffet for the abberant class. What does this precisely mean in precise terms? The answer to this question lies in the bistros and used bookstores, the arteries of Telegraph and Shattuck, and the varied philosophies of the very vocal homeless population.
All of this fierce essentia gave me an opinion of Berkeley as a sheer, disjointed madness rather than a traversable space. These first impressions, however, belie another nature; the research laboratories, while also possessing some form of an unfamiliar psychedelia in their experience, represent a sort of social Masada. These havens separate out the cream from the general milk.
It was half past nine p.m. or thereabouts when I was introduced into this catacomb, this meandering corridor of incredulous saints, this hive of stinging theorems, this empire of the empirical Tao. My guide was my brother, Chris - who deserves one paragraph of description, written in a language he might fathom.
Chris van Belle, in conversation, is analagous to a very user-friendly front end for higher processes, a cascading menu of brevia that refers, if you so inquire, to a distributed information matrix. From ASCII to EBCDIC to Unicode, Chris’s storage of information has been superlative, and inferring from his range of supplementary data, his RAM is updated on a semidiurnal basis. IOW, Chris is a smart card. Our network of memories have had their emoticons, and our personal digital signatures, but its the EDI and the native file formats that truly stir my CPU with a residual and recurring Shockwave.
After several security clearances, such as code-pads on laboratory doors and card scanners, I was finally in the promised land. Amongst this peculiar and verboten habitat, a humorous punchline involves the molecular architecture of the KvAP voltage-dependent K+ channel in a lipid bilayer. What is God? Vibrational submicrogal transfer across a reverse micelle surfactant proBDNF. What is for lunch? Stable low-pressure hydrogen clusters stored in a binary clathrate hydrate.
I have forgotten the room number to this lab, so I am going to refer to “Chris’s” lab as the X_BioHazard_Boom_Boom (XBBB). XBBB is located on the second floor of a brownish, unassuming building (The Building of Doom) on the fringes of the university’s campus. Though the entire floor is dedicated to research in infectious diseases, XBBB is specifically concerned with the virus CMV; another pleasent, though non-biological anacronym ending in “-MV” is the DMV [CMV and the DMV are functionally synonymous].
I noticed with furrowed brow that XBBB was ornamented with warning stickers, biohazard signs, and an emergency washing apparatus. Initially, given this flourescent and multicolored decor, the lab assumed an inviting aura reminiscent of Wonka’s most secret confectionary lab, replete with concoctions able to inflate troublesome gluttons and guttersnipes and gobblers, O my. In XBBB, an errant taste might result in paralysis, cancer, or death, but without the melodious requiems of the Oompa-loompa. There was much danger, too much to chronicle, but suffice it to say that radioactive and mutagenic substances were in my immediate reach. This was a charnel-house, a cloistered fun-farm of many godless lucubrations.
Nonetheless, this is the love of the subject. It is this love, the love of resolving this world in a lucid fashion, that is the understructure of this entire account. The obsession and concentration of these few toilers surpasses the language within which their findings are deciphered. The inspiration that compels such sacrifice on the altar of correct explanation comes to the multitude, but only a smattering perservere to realize some portion of their ends. I wanted to make this declaration outright and without concealing it inside an abstruse quip or simile. On the other hand, abstruse quips and similes are my choicest weapons.
Chris is exceptionally consumed with the sickness, or rather, the virus; he is the guilty monk, repenting for any truancies from his monastery. My visit was brief, but if my visit gives me any representative insight at all into Chris’s normal schedule, then I can rightly infer that Chris has dissolved his total life into that monastic order of the sciences. I was dragged, in the name of progress, to this lab for nearly the whole of my vacation. Moreover, the hours were steadily longer, which is to mean, our nights in the lab went “progressively” later into the morning.
For Chris, these intensely unhealthy late night sessions were only exacerbated by his habit of waking up around six or seven in the morning. This round-the-clock chicanery had been the norm for several weeks prior to my coming, and yet Chris exhibited no signs of physical collapse. How long can the human body tolerate such methodical neglect? The answer to his physiology’s fallout might require more of his engagement in lab, more engagement with the catalyst to this general break-up.
I digress. I wish now to desribe Chris’s superior or overseer in the lab, a man by the name of Walter. I was hesitant at first to meet Walter, because I felt it was intrusive and perhaps innappropriate that I be in this relatively high-security lab while important work needed to be done; in short, I felt like some silly tourist in need of some kindergarten-like tour through this shiny, neat place. Fortunately, Walter is a cool goose, a witty kitty, a nice slice, a pleasent pheasant, a humorous tumor, etc, etc.
Near the end of my first night, I had become very comfortable with being in the lab. More importantly, I had became more natural and honest with Walter; the first, second, and third night had become like comedy time in a viral containtment dock. We would joke about Chris’s upstart ways, his insistence on ignoring protocol -- a protocol assembled at the cost of billions of dollars, billions of hours of research at thousands of labs in locations all about the globe. Walter, in a lighthearted fashion, would recount all of the infinite travails Chris’s sense of entitlement had brought him. He said that if Chris was under the tutelage of a different graduate lab worker, he would have been either relocated to another building or simply murdered.
The waggeries and lampooning did not end there, but it is impossible to convey the grandeur of these gatherings. So, I should ask that you recall your own glib great times with fellow glib great persons, and project your happiness into this chronicle; this is the only way to grasp such occasions that fail the phrase. All in all, any adequate description would demand that we include the word, “chortling.”
Chris, Walter, and I...three amigos in the cosmic enchilada, burning the midnight oil with some brainy guacamole. Three musketeers in the caramel core of man’s profoundest search for meaning in the universe. Three domains of cellular civilizations with this feature of consciousness that permits our communion. What is it that orchestrates these unplanned, yet purposeful events? What is it that guides the human body into these non-repeatable situations, this unspeakably joyous happenstance, which ties together with other blisses to unfold like Indra’s pearls? On my present plateau I can glimpse my former trails, and guess at those trails yet to come. The final frontier is always personal.
My last visit to XBBB was like the others, and better than the others. Chris and I arrived, chatted with Walter some, then stepped out to pick up some dinner. We asked Walter if he wanted to come, or at least if he wanted anything to eat; he declined the first, but accepted the latter. Whatever we were going to bring back, he would surely enjoy. I opted for a Chinese dinner. Chris and I inevitably returned, and set out all the take-out packages in a cute buffet-like pattern on the table. The three of us ate heartily and spoke heartily. Though the setting - a cramped laboratory lunch room with flourescent gamma rays - was banal, our collective serenity perceived it as the coolest dive in town, a tower at the edge of reality.
I left early that night, about two in the morning, and walked to Chris’s apartment, nearly seven-thousand miles from the lab. Chris arrived home at five-thirty that morning. We exchanged closed-eyed mumbles before melting into the linoleum floors. My meltedness, however, was short-lived; I arose at seven a.m. in order to meet my ride back to Port Hueneme. Chris, utterly exhausted, mustered up a farewell; the whole visit, at that departure, had seemed to have transpired entirely in that farewell, entirely in one minute. I was off, off, and off a little further.
And so it goes, as with all first-hand accounts of living life, that one must mention how incomplete the narrative is, and ever will be. Therefore, I must capitulate to language, that gloriously helpful hindrance, and confess that no semanteme is capable of denoting or connoting one iota of the my terrific time. It endures in my memory, and in Chris’s memory, but Chris’s telling (if he were to tell it) would differ radically. He would omit this, or emphasize that, or include this other thing. In the end, two divergent paintings would be created, which is to say: how do you know I am giving you the truth?
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