A Meditation

This, the inaugural post of this humble offering, had originally been planned as a self introduction that described my social and political ideologies, handwave their contradictions, and ultimately try to make the case that the dialectic is more important than consensus. But today I read of two deaths that affected me more deeply than I expected, since I have never met either person, and now I find myself in something of a meditative mood--and since there's no time like the present, let's reflect on that sword that dangles above us, that which we do our best to dream away and that which, in the end, will claim all of us. That darkened, twisted blade, Mortality.

The first person whose death I heard of today was of Ajivit Roy, an American secular blogger who was hacked to death by machetes in Bangladesh. The second was Leonard Nimoy, now the late actor of the late cultural touchstone called Star Trek. This post isn't really about them because, as I mentioned, I've never met either of them, and I can't clearly remember if I actually read anything by Mr. Roy at all. His name was familiar when I heard it, but I had to ask to verify who it was. The Original Spock was ancient and had announced over a year ago that he had a terminal condition--his death is no surprise other than it actually occurring. But now they are both dead, and some day there also go I.

That's what I'm trying to write about.

But why? Why a meditation?

I am no Marcus Aurelius. I'd probably barely pass for a philosopher of any stripe, much less one who can command an audience (although, to be fair, Marcus was an emperor and could remove any ear that refused to turn his way--he's dead now too, by the way, as well as any ears he may have bent), but I have a life and I have no doubt that one day I will lose it. And then what?

Void?

Nothing.

Time stretches out after us just as it stretches out before we sprang with a squal and a gush from the womb of the woman who bore us--and, as Einstein instructed us, there is no privileged frame in either space or time. We none of us will miss this life after we are gone any more than we did before we had it. And then as children, when all men look back and remember the joy of it more clearly than any child could conceive of it, we revelled in it without even knowing what it was and with no concept that it could ever end. And now, as men and women (and other?) grown, now that this fact rests upon our psyche and crawls down into our gut whenever it is dark or whenever we, through the hubris that rests behind the human eye, we take a deep honest look at our own reflections which betray the passing of life slowly and inexorably into the abyss which spawned us--what now? I am not now young, but neither have I achieved any great age. I have no right to bitterness as I, fortune be fair, may have as much time left--though hopefully a little more--than has passed, but still there comes the times less and less infrequently where everyone who abandons the fairytales of humankind's adolescence must take pause and make accounting of their own expectations, or else abandon themselves to be a husk. Empty of the complex weaving of consciousness that fools us always into thinking we are something.

So here, reader, is where knife cuts, where the philosopher must admit he can never be king, and what was once madness is now the only wisdom left to our tragic species: there is no life. Not in the way we have always, as humans, tried to convince our twisted ape-bodies that we had. We are no more than an evolutionary bridge in a species of ape between what it was that crawled from the primordial ooze and what will be when our distant descendants either reach the stars and ensure that eyes like ours are witness to the final moments of existence itself or are ignominiously wiped out by our own short-sighted ape-brains unequal to galactic scales. There is no magic in us, any more than there was in the proto-human, or the proto-chimp that joined us and our closest living relatives. There was no magic in the first animal to grow a hair, or to crawl from the ocean, or that first protein that popped together in the sludge we tell ourselves was miraculous. We, and everyone we know, and everything we see, is nothing more than chemistry and chemistry is nothing more than physics. There is nothing separate in us, and in the great view of time there is nothing that separates our parts from the parts of the stones, or the air, or the vacuum of space.

We will one day be that which we were--nothing. And that nothing is the everything that has ever been.

So eat, the world is bounteous. Drink, moderation provides relief from all toil. And be merry, for life is nothing and death is nothing and WE LIVE.





good night