by Martin Riker
When Uncle Samuel e-mailed to ask how things were going, Tanya wrote back, “Fine!” She wrote back “Fine!” in between textually fellating a “user” and verbally orgasming for a caller. Perhaps I was angry after all. Certainly I could not stomach wasting an entire half semester, all that progress she had made. And considering that this was likely just a momentary discouragement, and that she would return to her education as soon as she remembered how unsatisfying her life was otherwise, I decided to finish her courses myself, so that at least she would have the credits when she came back.
It was an odd arrangement, and worked only because Tanya was by now such a heavy user (I mean of heroin, though of computers as well) that she spent as much time semiconscious as either conscious or un-. She wasn’t eating much, and lost weight. She remained very far from healthy, of course, and had even begun suffering back problems from slouching at the computer for such long hours. Admittedly, this was partly my fault, since half of her computer time was actually mine—indeed, our existences at this point became almost evenly entwined, as if we were partners in Tanya’s life, or more like roommates in her body, coming and going at different hours as we pursued our separate activities in the individual daytimes of our virtual realities. Nor did I feel bad about occupying so much of Tanya’s consciousness, since my half of our life was much healthier than hers.
Will you be surprised to hear that I did very well in school? I had never thought myself particularly studious, but Tanya’s continuing education courses were not particularly hard. And when that semester ended, and Tanya’s response to Uncle Samuel’s threat to stop the money was simply to stop responding to Uncle Samuel, I at that point went ahead and enrolled in more courses on my own, if still on behalf of Tanya. More challenging courses, in fact, since, if Tanya wasn’t going to take them, then I would take the ones I found most interesting, the ones I might enjoy rather than the ones I thought Tanya would have enjoyed and learned from, which was how I had tried to pick them earlier—fat lot of good it had done!
And those classes did prove interesting, and reading itself I found edifying, a heady liberation from the world’s dreariness, with a feeling of belonging, of being among people you can never speak to or touch but who have a great deal to share with you, whose companionship makes you a larger person, if only inside your own mind. I could thrive in that world—and I did. For two years I did. Yet it was not until I had completed Tanya’s GED and enrolled in an online college program that I truly began to feel I was developing my own intellectual purpose, which of course is where everything once again (but for the last time with Tanya) went wrong.
I had taken a class in philosophy. Actually I had taken several, since of all the subjects, philosophy most interested me, having over the years spent a truly enormous amount of time—surely more time than any living philosopher has spent—thinking about the nature of reality and existence and the world and so forth, simply thinking and wondering about these things. Also because my own existential situation gave me a unique perspective on many of philosophy’s essential questions while also raising for me some existential questions that living philosophers did not or could not even imagine to ask. Of course, I did not expect a handful of online courses from a third-tier college to provide groundbreaking answers to never-before-asked existential questions, but the incredible thing was, one class almost did: a very small class (only four students) devoted entirely to the concept of “eternal recurrence” or “eternal return.”
The doctrine of eternal return originated (or arguably originated, or at any rate our study of it originated) with the nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine, but was popularized, if one can speak of a philosophical doctrine as being “popularized,” in several books by the important German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and more recently, and perhaps more “popularly,” by the 2004 remake of the television program Battlestar Galactica (although this is purely my own interpretation of the ending of that series, which aired in 2009, the year I took this class). It starts from the premise that time is infinite but the universe is finite. There is only so much stuff, so many objects, so many events, constantly being rearranged and reconfigured. But if time is without limit, then eventually—“eventually” meaning over a period of time longer than your brain can imagine—but after an impossibly long period of time, all the existing stuff will have gone through all of the possible reconfigurations and will start over again. The comparison often made is to a game of chess: there is an extremely large number of possible moves, and consequently an almost inconceivably large number of chess games that could be played; but this number is not infinite, only large, and so if you play a different game of chess each time to infinity, eventually all the possible games will have been played, and you will have to play the same ones over. Of course our universe is much more complicated than a game of chess, but when faced with infinite time, the number of “moves” in the game of our universe is no larger, relatively speaking, than the moves in chess—or in tic-tac-toe, for that matter.
Had our class been limited to this basic formulation of eternal return, I would have found it interesting, but not interesting enough that I would be telling you about it now. But since this was a semester-long study, we rather quickly left these basics behind to apply the concept of eternal return in other directions, both backwards to the Pythagoreans and Heraclitus and forward to the internet. We looked at Stoicism and Skepticism, which have in common a lack of attachment to worldly things, which becomes a rather natural worldview once you believe everything is just repeating itself anyway. We considered how eternal return rebukes Christian doctrine, and how the Church, by preaching “progress” toward an “afterlife,” risks devaluing the one life human beings irrefutably have, like skipping midway through a book to get to the ending, as if the ending were the point rather than the book. (And let me here take a moment to congratulate anyone who has read to this point in this book; you are obviously not among the “skippers,” or else you would already have skipped this entire section, if not this entire chapter, by far my longest and most meandering.) We looked at Heidegger, and other thinkers, and in many other interesting directions as well. In fact, the more places we looked, the more the concept of eternal return appeared to be everywhere, so that I began to wonder why I had never heard of it before.
But the real turn for me came late in the semester, on the day the class’s instructor finally shared with us his own personal theory of eternal return, which (he now revealed to us) had been the topic of his doctoral dissertation, which was why we had been able to spend an entire semester on just this one subject, a subject some other, less deeply informed instructor would likely have covered in half a class.
My instructor’s own theory, as described in his dissertation, which I am able to excerpt verbatim for reasons that will become clear later, goes like this:
The fundamental obstacle to Nietzsche’s formulation of “eternal return” is that the progressive albeit cyclical model of time upon which it predicates itself is blatantly contradictory to the “Dionysian” or just totally anarchic spirit of liberty-from-“received ideas” that makes Nietzsche “Nietzsche” in the first place, and which (spirit) the various other facets of this formulation do, obviously, enjoy.
Lest we place undue blame on the thinker, consider that the historical moment out of which he utters his utterance contains only inadequate models of time vis-à-vis experience. Meaning what? Meaning Herr Friedrich lacked the tech to know better. For it is only our modernity that allows us to avoid comparing reality to, for example, a chess game (being a series of events having a discernible beginning and end) and to replace this linear “game” model with the more ontologically apt metaphor of the internet (being a space of unbound experience wherein such words as “beginning” and “end” are totally and utterly beside the point—Beyond Start and Finish!—vestiges of a model of “progress” Mr. Nietzsche was trying to shake but was stuck with, simply because he did not yet have the internet, or
say rather that humanity in his moment was not in a very good position to notice the internet, it having “not yet been invented,” and so naturally they failed to draw comparisons to it).
To clarify: As a culture we speak ad nauseum, in fear and self-congratulation, of the many changes the internet has wrought upon our lives, as if our lives were one thing and now are something totally different, when in fact what has truly changed is our understanding. In purposefully applying the internet’s precedent to concepts of reality and experience and time, however, we instantly recognize that Nietzsche’s key mistake, utterly systematic in how greatly it messes everything up, is the limiting of the concept “eternal return” to denote only the notion of a present that departs then cycles back, rather than, as the example of the internet suggests (or rather as the existence of the internet makes at last possible to conceive) (or rather as the application of our attention to the already existing internet finally allows us to figure out) a reality in which everything exists in a state of perpetuity and nothing ever leaves. It is not that ideas or patterns of history return but that our attention returns to them. All we ever study is our own attention, the application of our attention, where it chooses to hover, at which moments, and, to a lesser extent, why. It even probably follows, or “follows,” that our attention itself is not strictly “ours,” that rather we should speak of Attention with a capital A, a fundamental force in the universe of which we are mere participating bits—although for feasibility reasons this latter line of inquiry lies outside the purview of the current study.
But we now at least have the terms to see plainly, based on all of that, that what we call “life” is nothing but the path Attention takes across the always-already-existing objects of our reality; and what we call “selves” are the vehicles of Attention, as well as its self-reflectors; and what we call the “reality” of our reality is the field of possible topics and objects that Attention, through its aforementioned vehicles, returns to over time; and what we call “time” is the spatial organization of this attention; and what we call “history” is the discernible if totally bogus and fabricated pattern of the sequence of this returning; even what I have called “our modernity” is merely the particular set of objects upon which Attention, in the historical moment I personally utter out of, happens to fall; and what we call “the future” is the set of attentive acts that we have yet to take notice of in the illusory forward extrapolation of the current manifestation of Attention’s self-awareness; and what we call “death” is a shift, not of objects, but of perspective; and what we call “birth” is the reification of a previous perspective by which the Attention again returns to its various topics and objects, which in the meantime have themselves altered in position, maybe, or in duration, if there even exists such a thing, but not, to any significant degree, in type.
So that in the end (being the recognition of endlessness), the term “eternal return” refers quite simply to the illusion of change, the lie of progress, without which what we call “life” quickly loses its liveliness, which sounds tautological, because it is tautological, as are all things eternal, i.e., as is everything.
Typing it here, I find I am much less impressed with my instructor’s theory now than when I first encountered it, due no doubt in part to all that happened later to spoil it for me.
But even the theory itself—I’m a little embarrassed to recall how awestruck I was at the time, though certainly you can see why. For decades my existence had been a giant question mark, yet here was the first seemingly reasonable explanation of my personal state of being in the world. We are, all of us, nothing but vehicles of attention! Everything exists in a state of “perpetuity”—and nothing ever leaves! In hindsight, I see in the above passage little more than the flippant whimsy of an autodidactic graduate student, but back then it seemed like the answer to every question I’d ever asked.
Thus when the time came to choose topics for our final papers, I of course chose to write about my instructor’s own theory, which pleased him immensely. He even offered to tutor me, should I have questions or need any additional help. By which I mean that he agreed to tutor Tanya, since she was the one enrolled, the actual human being whose name appeared in the online course roster, to whom my instructor naturally assumed his compliments were addressed. It was Tanya he claimed to be very impressed with, Tanya he made himself available for, which was perfectly fine with me (I was not seeking credit, or not that kind of credit, even if I was perhaps a bit sad not to receive any). Or it would have been fine had it not caused such a catastrophic mess.
For on the day I received my instructor’s approval for my paper topic, in an e-mail that also included several compliments on my recent performance in the course, I was on that day in such good spirits that I made a terrible mistake. When ceding control of Tanya’s body—as I did at a certain point every evening, allowing her body finally to fall asleep, typically for many hours—I inadvertently left open the “window” on my computer’s browser that contained the internal e-mail system for the class, a window I of course took great care to close every time I was done with it, no doubt anticipating precisely the sort of disaster that my negligence in this case allowed. For when she finally awoke, after many pleasant hours during which I was feeling good about myself and had not yet realized my mistake, she stumbled over as usual to the computer console and, having not yet drunk her several cups of coffee and seeing a window open that looked vaguely like the browser windows she performed her work in, she went ahead and did what she always did, she typed a bunch of porn into it.
Of course this was my fault and not Tanya’s. She was just doing her job and had no reason to suspect anything amiss. Still I could not help feeling furious while she typed, and terribly worried, as she pressed Send, of the impression she would make on my instructor.
One minute and forty-five seconds later, when his reply arrived, my fury and worry turned rather quickly to monumental disappointment, for his message took a markedly similar tone to Tanya’s.
Indeed, this man whose ideas I deeply respected, and in whom I had even invested a certain amount of hope, this highly educated academic professional spent the next full hour exchanging pornographic messages with Tanya, who was not even fully awake, whose hair was a mess and who was farting and scratching herself, stumbling around making coffee and using the bathroom the whole time. If ever in my tenure on this planet I was more disgusted than I felt right then, I do not remember it. I had seen whole lives sunk into drunken squalor, a bull decapitated, Donald’s hairy back—but these were merely physically or morally disgusting, whereas this was an affront in all those ways and intellectually as well. I was disgusted at the situation and the people involved. At myself for being careless, at my instructor for disappointing me, and at Tanya, who had not actually done anything wrong.
Given the severe negativity of my feelings, you might be surprised to learn—as I am rather ashamed to recall—how conflicted I felt the following day, when my instructor wrote to say that he would be traveling downstate on some sort of academic business, that by coincidence he would be taking the train to Peoria that very weekend, and this seemed a “singular opportunity” to get together to discuss my paper topic in person, in case I needed any additional guidance with the more nuanced aspects of his theory vis-à-vis the something or other and so on.
Of course, any decent person would have wanted nothing to do with him, let alone to meet him, at that point. Yet Samuel Johnson, in full knowledge of how repulsive the whole thing was, nonetheless found himself (I found myself) begrudgingly eager at the prospect. Even knowing what I knew, still I wanted to meet him. More to the horrible point, in my mind this despicable event had already become our meeting, my instructor’s and my own. I, who for excellent reasons had always avoided engaging a sober human being in direct interchange, was now seriously considering “meeting up” with a disappointing pervert-intellectual for the simple reason that I believed, or wanted to believe, despite mounting evidence,
that he could help solve the riddle of my existence.
In fact it must have been more than that. It must have been that in addition to my deluded self-interest, I had also lost sight of Tanya. Clearly, that was the case. At some point in the course of my education—no longer her education—I had left behind my vision for her future. My own interests had come to occupy me, and I had given up on hers. Perhaps I even realized it, and felt ashamed of it, but not ashamed enough to change my mind. Perhaps I felt I’d been wrong about her; for all those years I’d been wrong. A father cannot live his child’s life for her, nor was I even her father, nor was I even alive. It had all been a fool’s errand from the start, its only purpose to provide purpose to a fool, and I had filled up many years with it, but now it was done. Now there was something I wanted to do for myself, not Tanya. And wasn’t that for the best? Since nothing I had done “for Tanya” had helped her in the least? I would meet with my instructor, my disgusting, depraved, lascivious instructor, on the remaining chance that I might learn something, perhaps even figure out a way to bring an end to all this, to be done with this world and finally move on!
And so I agreed to meet with him. I told him we’d meet in a bar by the train station. I thought that would be safe. Or rather I thought that it didn’t matter. Or rather I didn’t think. I would go against decades of better judgment and every ounce of common sense, which I happened to notice had gotten me nowhere. I would take from this man whatever knowledge he could offer me, after which I would at last retreat from Tanya’s life, would set her free of both my selfishness and my well-meaning incompetence, would sit quietly in the back of her mind and mind my own business forever.