CHAPTER 7

Dear Grasshopper,

There is something undivided in our ancient memory, something so true it cannot find earth pure enough in which to plant itself. Man, cursed and blessed to remember it, toils in the stony soil to make a Heaven of his Earth, but reaps only endless dualities. Good versus evil, order versus chaos, free will versus determinism—all assume fixed points in his mind. But the only thing fixed is the pointer in the moment of his pointing. The dream he clings to is not a lie, yet in attempting to objectify it the mere existence of a “point of view” distorts all but the aspiration.

The world of matter appears less muddled to us than our thinking about space/time, though, at the molecular level, it is Heraclites’ river that always looks the same even as its water of whirling atoms changes each time we put a foot in it. As quantum physicists, Bohr and Heisenberg, argued in their ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’, subatomic particles such as electrons have no real existence, only probability, until the act of observation forces them into a single state. In Kantian terms, there is no actual “there” there until one is posited in perception.

Still, space and time, in scientific terms, can be “constructed” without a dependent subject, though Einstein tells us that in lacking a subject, there can be no tense to time (no “now,” past, or future), and no privileged point of view in space. If by extension of this argument tensed time and fixed space are tied to a point of view, then in what sense are they “boundless” (to use Einstein’s paradoxical characteristic of finite space/time), since boundlessness cannot characterize any point of view? In other words, in what sense can limitless space and tense-less time (infinity) purport to something real outside the dependent subject?

Schopenhauer improved on Kant’s idea this way: The simple fact that reality exists at all presupposes that it must have always been; i.e., is uncaused. So having a place in time in itself outside perception makes no sense; and, for that matter, neither does having a place in space, because wherever reality should care to go, there it must already be. Consequently, ultimate reality, whatever else can be said about it, is uniformly itself. Resultantly, if space, time, and causation do not describe it as it exists in-itself, then objects, which require these categories for context, cannot exist as distinct differentiated things in themselves outside perception either, for there can be no space, time, and causation to separate them. Hence, objects are not objects in themselves. They are perceptual representations of something we can neither divide nor divine as a relational idea: what Schopenhauer called (from our space/time/causal vantage point) an undifferentiated noumenon: Kant’s “unknowable thing-in-itself.”

Space and time, properly understood, are extensions of our perceptual world, but the limitless-ness we attach to them is not. That limitless-ness is only supported in a metaphysical dimension where space, time, and causation have no conceptual purchase. On this point there is no disagreement between Einstein and Schopenhauer: Infinity, as a totality, as a description of reality as it exists as a whole, can only exist outside the perceiving subject. I think I experience infinity in perception when I look into the boundless heavens, but I perceive no such thing. Infinity, from my finite experience, is only an idea and a foil; for all I possess of it is paradox and irreconcilable duality.

In short, I, as a perceiving subject insisting on an object to contemplate, impose duality where none transcendentally exists. This difficulty can be appreciated when, like Hume, I go to look for myself in my thoughts and find only the thought of myself looking for myself. I must be a perceiver to have a perception, but I can never know myself outside the act of perceiving myself as a perceiver. It is yet one more intractable infinity loop that cannot be resolved by logic or experience. Mind and matter, Schopenhauer told us, are transcendentally the same thing. Simultaneously, whatever else the noumenon is in itself, it is necessarily the “double aspect” of what we understand to be elemental matter/energy. As a chair is both a collection of molecules and something to sit on, so too the thing-in-itself lies at the bottom of our understanding of these concepts. It does not cause the molecules or chair—it is the molecules and chair as they exist outside perception. More subtly, this relationship can be appreciated in the mathematical “fix” of Zeno’s Paradox. By saying all-possible infinities are equal to the finite, an indirect proof is provided that demonstrates a relationship of equivalence between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms.

Regardless, what limits our knowledge on one level binds our souls on another. Schopenhauer and Kant provided a metaphysical foundation for something the Buddhists had known from antiquity: Everything in the Universe, from every atom to every galaxy, is—transcendentally speaking—the one same “thing.” We perceive this thing as being something other than ourselves, but this is only an accident of our birth. As children of Prometheus, we pay a price for having stolen fire from the gods: amnesia every time we go to look for ourselves in our thoughts. ~Omar

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, Part Four

Michael moved into the house in a perplexed state. The snowy television screen heralded the return of electricity to the residence, although his start in seeing it was checked on remembering Brae had incidentally switched on the TV that morning. The bluish glow threw a new, disquieted architecture up on the walls, one upwardly shifting in dark, rutted forms. He turned on the lamp by the sofa to reestablish equanimity, but the bulb was faulty and sputtered out under his fingertips. On stepping over to turn off the television, a tantalizingly brief image jumped across the screen. He tried to raise a better signal but, remarkably, the same visual snippet darted away with each click of the dial. Taking hold of the channel knob, he turned it slowly in hopes of lacing together a complete picture, but the incremental bursts were too short-lived to yield anything intelligible. Michael finally gave up and turned off the set, unwittingly plunging the whole house into darkness.

He moved toward the cloaked steps in a vague heading, and found in its bower a heaven big enough to take on incandescent feelings he had neither the will nor conceit to call exclusively his own. He pulled himself up along the banister, more by reverie than careful deliberation, and rounded the corner into his room. A second lamp was turned on at the night table, and the edge of the wavering bed rose to offer a soft landing. Indescribably tired, he removed the tuxedo and sat for a long time staring at his socked feet. He was shot-through with more emotion than he could bear, and between the dizzying alcohol and nameless woman, it was doubtful sleep would come simply because he welcomed it. A glance at his clock revealed a flashing twelve; it would need to be reset in a moment of greater sobriety than was presently had. He muddled around his bed a few seconds longer before peering out the drapes.

The view, like the previous night, was black but for the same beacon-of-a-window across the way. As he pondered the coincidence, he spied what must have been the same woman moving back and forth in front of her curtains. She resembled a blurry microorganism up until the moment she dropped, pointedly, into an austere chair. The occasion of happening upon her felt oddly scripted, like a performance had been delayed on his account. It was only with her reaching over to switch off a lamp that it dawned on the accidental voyeur she was nude. At the precise second her apartment went dark, the table light over Michael’s shoulder also blinked out. He skirted the bedposts to hit the rim of the lampshade, although shaking fingers turned up only a loose bulb in the socket.

The sleep medication was lying on the same table, as was his earlier abandoned bottle of beer. After returning from the bathroom he took a pill with the remaining slug of alcohol. Nothing was left between him and begrudged sleep, so he turned out the light. His careening head had no thought but the pillow, yet on looking up through the darkness he spotted the red eye on the camcorder. Like the television downstairs, it had been inadvertently switched on when there was no electricity. He tried to crawl out of his sinkhole to deal with it, but only succeeded in knocking the beer bottle off the table. As the glass container rolled away over the floor, he could blearily see it, and even thought about retrieving it, but was already too mired in drowsiness to care. It was soon in the hallway and dropping down stairs, one step at a time. The descent stretched far beyond the point where the bottle should have hit bottom, and with each additional pop of glass on hollow wood the echo grew.

Feeling vertigo, the sleeper looked down at his feet for reassurance. They were carrying him along a narrow footpath between two shadowy buildings. He pushed out into a warm cerulean sky where the gothic architecture of Purcell College grounded him. Flowers were everywhere. Stargazer lilies, jeweled pansies, deep carmine mallows—all jutted out along the many winding brick paths that tied the campus together; fragrant lavender punctuated their headiness. Being unsure of his destination, the dreaming man walked unhurriedly to savor a rush of feeling. It was a romantic sentiment he had experienced little since his early twenties, one where every manifestation of natural beauty moved him profoundly.

A shadow soon set a chill at his back, and each time it lurched in his direction, he would turn to find only a spire blocking the Sun. Undeterred, he ambled on until the mysterious presence swooped down to set a riotous breeze loose in the trees. Branches heaved and leaves rustled, but the enlivened chorus could not mask the thump of a teetering gargoyle perched on a nearby ledge. Its eyes peered down indifferently, although Michael sensed another set of eyes, higher up, was more intensely focused on his movements. He tried as inconspicuously as possible to glimpse what was following him: to spy its image in one of the many windows on campus. But its shadow always molded itself to an expectation, like a low cloud. His gaze dropped to his feet on finally appreciating the queer leaf shadows covering the path. They were jagged, crescent-shaped slivers of light, and indicated en masse a solar eclipse was fast approaching. Something then caught his attention in a faraway window: a bird trapped in a classroom, or perhaps a hand beckoning him. By the time he reached the window ledge it had evaporated like a mirage. Still, the dark panes had more to yield, for a little girl was on the other side of the glass nestled down in the growing, womb-like shadow. The solar eclipse, nearing totality, had tugged the whole campus under its umbra. Michael turned in the last blink of daylight on seeing the wino materialized under an oak tree. The man was looking up into the sudden starry sky with a frightful expression.

He could see it.

The dreamer, wanting to see it too, reached down to pick up a rock and hurled it into the air…

T   H  U  M  P  !

Chapter Seven, Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.