by Steven Sills
Chapter 6
Considering the Sanctity of Life in Impermanence and the State of Virtual Reality
Purportedly, Pericles made the claim that the maximum age in “ancient times” was around seventy28which means that if, like in all the circumstances needed for his fertilization, a viable fetus, gestation, and a favorable birth, one manages to overcome the odds through propitious events in one’s favor and circumvents the negative, or at least is lucky enough not to stand in the wrong place at the wrong time as happened to Aeschylus when a tortoise fell from an eagle’s talons and landed on his head, or at least so Montaigne claims,29he could live an extra thirty years. But, bizarre occurrences aside, car accidents, smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, being the victim of stress related illnesses or, if one is really hapless, homicides, or the taking of one’s life in this age when businesses are easily ruined in changing fads of the times probably more than halve those thirty years statistically for the vast majority.
In any case, surely in the immediate future with fewer physical burdens and more likelihood of individuals who are not felled in the negative vicissitudes of life living full and active lives until entropy at last sets in to a hurried demise and even a quicker hastening of the breakdown of this seemingly solid substance of man to the elements, as though God were on this planet and eager to erase the foolish cartoon he had doodled before someone important came along and saw it, the majority of individuals in developed countries in particular will no longer need archaic strictures meant to stay out of God’s wrath or to delude themselves that they are communing with saints, prophets, and gods of yesteryear. Even as little as a couple hundred years ago in every part of the world, and even for the affluent who lived in rather crude conditions by contemporary standards for whatever discomforts were eased by the servants they possessed and subject to every bacterial infection with little remedy, religion in this sense of vulnerability was as dire of a necessity as a shot of whiskey when experiencing a toothache; and so the world was rife in gullible, superstitious entities equally ignorant as to how and why lives of suffering should exist as those of the present time, but much more likely to be suffering exponentially more, and more desperate for analgesic ideas of afterlife if not mystical succor and elixirs. In such difficult lives respite was death, and yet feeling the reality of this life, unreal as it often seemed to be, in comparison to abstractions like heaven that even scripture offered no conceptualization of, one could hardly end his life by his own hand so the thought of celestial realms provided justification of one’s life in the here and now and endurance for those hardships.
Back then, life was even more tenuous and could be snuffed away so easily, so humans often emulated fictional essences of scripture, albeit imperfectly, propitiated the Gods in cowering with loyalty each Sunday at church services and by going to confession, and bequeathed these sacrosanct fables of celestial escapism as patrimony to their descendants. Back then these analgesics, these putative gifts vouchsafed for thousands of years to the ages were easily imbibed because of the rarity at that time of the written word and physical travails more onerous and less bearable than any, in most cases, experienced now which made afterlife compensations as real as any empirical experience in their lives.
“My God!” said the Gecko. Even she/it, liberated as she/it was from feeling any necessity to the temples to importune the sacred Buddha for good luck the way all temple goers do while offering their little oblations to the statues, and of course that would be the case as I took care of her every need as though she were a queen, could not get away from divine references and interjections. “Couldn’t this be stated more succinctly? Why not just say that as life becomes more pleasant, the fabrication called God no longer has meaning?”
“I suppose so. I suppose I could; but as all life can be reduced to I woke, I slept, I ate, I shat, I socialized for pleasure, I hated for lack of it, I had sex, I committed adultery, and did as little work as I could get by with, this would not make much of a book. I thought you liked my embellishment.”
“I’ve been having a lot of second thoughts about it to tell you the truth,” said the gecko.
“What do you want from me? I told you that I could not say anything all that profound. Every time I even think I have a clever idea the words connect to other words, becoming large organisms in their own right, and force me to try to blend my intention and theirs into a systematic whole in another rewritten draft. And in reference to life, the whole damned thing gets repeated so often: two thousand and more generations of these people reruns, and I am supposed to say something new about it that billions of men never have. Oh, my God!”
“You have only one life, and this unique one is yours. This one, only, is yours with its own set of circumstances and feelings. What do you think of it all?”
“I think it is lonely. People pass away—you did; when they don’t pass away, the new circumstances that envelop them and remake them cause them to negate previous friendships; language, that bridge of truth connecting insular minds is composed too much of the time in the shoddy construction material of lies, that are only found out when one is on it and it begins to collapse. If I tell a friend a joke to seal a friendship, depending on his mood from immediate experiences in his life, that joke can offend him and immediately end the friendship. We lose who we once were, as we are fluid to the end (for that matter beyond the end for also in the rot that happens thereafter), while the neurological intricacies, pathways back to the past remain like culs de sac that cannot lead backward or forward and just clog the mind. The greatest of all successful lives upon retirement or death is replaced by other talents, and the success he has achieved is merely relative to the people who believe in its worth, and when like him they are dead and long gone that success evanesces too. Even the greatest of beings and most important of events gets buried under so much of what is built up from it and new matter and clutter of future generations (even Einstein is becoming a fossil under the strata of time and ensuing generations of men). Anybody with some sense would relinquish all dreams of success and just try to enjoy his days the best that he can for as long as he can. Even in giving, one ends up taking from something else: a dog is fed with another animal, and in trying to help another person he takes resources that could be used for someone else, and thus an attempt at justice creating its own injustices. Maybe I am crazy.”
“No, philosophical. What else can it be but that? There are three subspecies of modern men of the new millennium: one that is happy, lives in a provincial effervescence of romanticism in which the world is good because their lives are such, and whose perfect lives are sanctioned by the gods; those who are near destitute whose lives just consist of scavenging and survival, and the intellectuals who are empathic to suffering in all quarters and whose only analgesic is in some degree of judicial altruism.”
“Again, what do you want from me?”
“As it turns out, nothing I suppose.”
“I need some vodka.”
“All right. Clearly you want to implode.”
“Yes, I want to implode. Dark matter is all around. I just want to relinquish myself to it, and as you say implode.”
“Some sub-atomic particles can become firm realities traveling through dark matter, the Higg’s Field30; most cannot. If you are incapacitated you should have saved me the trouble of reaching out to you.”
“Let me remind you, that it is because of my incapacity in taking hallucinogens that you are with me right now. When the drugs go, you go.”
The gecko stopped talking for several minutes, staying in the pensive perennial discernment that Aristotle said God would be in were there a god.31 However, when the gecko opened its mouth everything but the profound came out of it.
“You know, we could have lived such better lives had you just taken a full time job at Thomasat University or Ramkamhaeng, but
no, you wanted your part time jobs to have time to study and to take notes, and meanwhile, free as you were of the bondage of toil, we lived in an apartment the size of a box. I guess I came back thinking that with what’s left of your life you might as well be constructive in the largest sense by writing books for posterity. Maybe you could even get promoted from it.”
“God, you have always been so materialistic.”
“All right. So, I am materialistic, and once was a woman wanting a comfortable home for myself. Lacking solidity, entities in what they consume, in the homes they care to have, in their sexual groping, and in their possessions (the Jews in the concentration camps were most horrified by the depilation that was done on their heads and bodies32as to not even have this and one loses her last material aspect and can feel as the adumbration or the fluid substance that she really is) seek to solidify their crumbling material aspects, propping up their sand castles and the walls around them.”
“With what?”
She/it grinned. “I don’t know. Weren’t the walls around Paris propped up with sexual organs, that one material that everyone gives away happily and is never in short supply? 33 Okay, stop pouting. I haven’t given up on you entirely.”
As societies further secularize and eschew scripture rare intellectuals in their midst will seriously undertake an examination of the ontology of morality and life unflinchingly. And as they do so, they will probably not arrive at any more logical conclusions denying the importance of human life than the writer of this work--life often fecund even in the least optimal places, free and stray as a bitch that alone, disoriented, emaciated in a hostile alley behind a convenience store, finds her bodily orifices sniffed and massaged by a competitor and foe, and soon begins an evanescent amity of several days, an intimate respite from the fears of daily survival, that leads to copulation, conception, and after a period of gestation, more litter on the streets of Bangkok. Every organism, if one were to consider it, which cannot be done as anyone considering this is part of what is being considered, is unique and inherently precious but the fecundity of life established in the social contract of strife set up by the animals under duress in which all must be very fruitful so that some offspring will survive for the next generation and some will be the prey of predators for their sustenance. But that very situation of inherent value categorically depreciated to dispensability when in so many in the fecundity of nature is applicable to all things from products and currency, and the payment of jobs and professions34, and how much a given individual should be cherished. How would a man escape death at his own hand if forced to look very long at his diminutive being?
What had been a sentence an hour earlier was now, when I returned to the chapter again, shown clearly, either deliberately or inadvertently, to have been given a defecation-redaction by the gecko. Upon further scrutiny, clearly a foot or more had been deliberately used to smudge the feces, the incontinent biological functions, evenly across the entire line. Not eager to impugn or malign, had it been a whole lump on a word or a dark raining down on a few words I would hardly have imputed it as anything more than one of those mishaps that even the most scrupulous toilet trained individuals have experienced from undercooked food, a mere peccadillo were it not for the mortifying aspect of the occurrence that evokes memories of infancy and the inevitability of a doddering and feeble senior citizen; but here the subject and the predicate were an even blur, and here, a diminutive being was before me, more than a gecko or a deceased wife, but a muse to which to have a muse at all, could hardly be chastened.
“Everything in here, you as well, look dirty and disheveled,” complained Luklawan. “Unwashed dishes in the sink, books strewn all over the place. Obviously you are seeking the so called ‘truth’ extraneously, and it has made you a wreck as there is no extraneous truth to be had, as much as you smash your brains into every line of a book. This clogging of the mind with other minds is a convenience for lesser minds but it a disgrace for one of your abilities.”
“Luklawan, now that you are dead, see the truth. I am a nobody.”
The gecko looked askance and stayed stationary for ten to fifteen minutes as if it had gone into a state of estivation.
“There are insects galore here,” it at last said. “Even that referred to as dirt is largely strewn diminutive corpses. Do you know that?”
“I do.”
“I do. It sounds like nuptial vows once again.” She laughed. “Your friend does not clean the apartment, or so it seems. He could at least do that for you so that you can write.”
“He isn’t here.”
“When a man entered me, I mean in the human incarnation, it always felt as though I were urinating him. I can only imagine what it feels like to be sodomized, bowels attempting to defecate the intruder,” she said while inspecting the chapter. “Well, it is certainly verbose. I think that we can absolutely say that it is antithetical to any reader’s hopes and wishes, and likely to incur their complete antipathy, but interesting nonetheless like any great philosophical treatise. I congratulate you on the efforts that have hitherto been productive enough on this project.”