Midlife Crisis on Infinite Earths
Jul. 30th, 2010 02:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonAs a child I was raised atheist. Don't get me wrong - my parents weren't fanatics about it. There were presents under the trees, painted eggs behind the couch and the occasional muttered curse towards the sky when dad missed the F Train. In fact I came to suspect that my father's lack of faith towards the prospect of an almighty watching down on us was actually rooted in a kind of instinctive spite rather than from the foundation of pure objective rationality. There was no God because if there was the job it was doing was so piss-poor that it didn't deserve to be recognized as such. That, or to be honest, the whole idea just bored him. Mom on the other hand was pragmatically dismissive of the notion of a God Our Father in that way only a survivor of the Brooklyn Catholic School System of the early Atomic Age could be. That and if she was going to entertain thoughts metaphysical, it would be preferrably done so over a glass of wine while pretending to be an Earth Goddess.
But before I go all Holden Caulfield on you I had a point I was trying to make.
I wasn't given the ecclesiastical night-light of a Heaven as a kid. I was taught that there was a void at the end of all things. Something akin to sleep, only dreamless and without waking. At night, out there past the shores of my tiny island bed, the shadows lapped against the walls drowning all that was made comfortably familiar by the light and drenched it with a preternatural terror. From this primordial blindness, my imagination sculpted creatures plucked from the Aquarian grimories and books of faeries that populated my parents' library at the time.
Bed time was a rough ride, one that often ended in sheets soaked with sweat and urine. A menagerie of monstrosities danced around my darkened room. Johnny Red Cap wielding his rusted scythe. A disembodied head with three faces and hovering by a pair of bat wings that protruded from the temples. The Green Lady of the Bog rising out of the water perpetually submerged beneath the eyes. The Thing with a Clock for a Belly. The Whisper Swarms trapped inside the Wall. It got so bad that my poor pooh bear lost an eye in my defense one long and harrowing night.
Over the years progress, the monsters dwindled in that way a certain club does when it becomes stale and only a few die-hards bother to show up anymore. Soon every week there was a desperate Johnny Red Cap trying to make time with a vague anxiety of a coming math test or the ghost of some old horror or another.
By the time I lost my virginity I discovered my nights were suddenly terror-free.
However I did find myself consumed now with the electric goddesses and aloof witches that had come to dominate my imagination.
But I still didn't have a Heaven. The Void remained, patient as a hunter and inevitable as a epilogue to a story you will never finish reading.
It wasn't until I was a young Engineman in the Navy that I would discover the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics. Cruises ran long after all and one can spend only so long up in the bunk indulging onanistic fever dreams. I was reading Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. Unlike my other stabs at understanding a post-Newtonian world (The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li(?) Masters) I was able to sink my mental teeth into a good old fashioned narrative that bubble gum popped with plenty of sexy fun along with the psychedelic coated brain candy I had developed a meta-sweet tooth for.
Of all the ideas in that book one soaked deeper than the rest into the mental gestalt. The fact that there might be parallel earths. Which meant that all those old silver age comic books and Kirk era Trek episodes might have been on to something after all!
There were earths were Rome never fell, England won her independence from the colonies, Dinosaurs still roamed about and if you had a goatee you were probably a complete bastard compared to the you without one.
Which meant, somewhere, out there in the multiverse were countless eigenstates of me... I had stumbled into the conceptual equivalent of a room lined with mirrors on all sides. Where reflections stretch vast beyond the eye's ability to count them. That vertiginous euphoria that washes over the looker. The Narcissist's Paradise.
Finally I had my Heaven and yes, my Hell as well.
For there must've been an earth where I didn't join the Navy and decided to shoot-up with my friends instead. There must've been another one where I buckled down and did everything right. This... this ship, this cruise, this four year gig... it was all just one possibility and no matter how bad things got, no matter how lowly the shit work, the Me-that-did-not-Fuck Up was out cruising SOHO bars with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop while Jim Jarmusch begged to do my script.
But today it occurred to me that no matter how far spread out this fun house mirror army could gather along the even horizon they would all be about my age.
I wonder now, is the ultimate loser me weeping somewhere about approaching forty and all the things he never did. Is even this platonic ideal of me sitting somewhere pondering about the decisions he (shit, she(?)) could've made differently.
A midlife crisis on infinite earths.
Yesterday I got chased by a rather large dog on my bike while taking a graffiti cyclop's picture. Later, down West End, I would have a gang of small children belligerently demand that I surrender to them my bicycle. Which put me in the odd situation of having to flee from a pack of grade school students like some kind of pussy. But what am I going to do? Flex on a bunch of brats (which would've played real well with the passing locals no doubt) or give up my bike? Would another me subcumb to one of these mistakes? Would they have seen a fourth option that eludes me?
Still I got in some nice shots for my troubles... so what are you going to do?
Somewhere another me is going to have a show open soon with much better shots off a much better camera. Somewhere another me is pawning the digital camera he stole from his, excuse me, our, mom.
Both, like me, probably filled with doubts, ruminations, wishes, secret aches of broken hearts still not mended... both like me were cast-aways on those distant childhood nights were the Sleep of Faith also produced monsters.
Well enough then... step back and away. More smoke, less mirrors I should think. It's a fun place to visit but they're not mine anymore than I am theirs. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving forward and remember there's no parallel universe parking.
But before I go all Holden Caulfield on you I had a point I was trying to make.
I wasn't given the ecclesiastical night-light of a Heaven as a kid. I was taught that there was a void at the end of all things. Something akin to sleep, only dreamless and without waking. At night, out there past the shores of my tiny island bed, the shadows lapped against the walls drowning all that was made comfortably familiar by the light and drenched it with a preternatural terror. From this primordial blindness, my imagination sculpted creatures plucked from the Aquarian grimories and books of faeries that populated my parents' library at the time.
Bed time was a rough ride, one that often ended in sheets soaked with sweat and urine. A menagerie of monstrosities danced around my darkened room. Johnny Red Cap wielding his rusted scythe. A disembodied head with three faces and hovering by a pair of bat wings that protruded from the temples. The Green Lady of the Bog rising out of the water perpetually submerged beneath the eyes. The Thing with a Clock for a Belly. The Whisper Swarms trapped inside the Wall. It got so bad that my poor pooh bear lost an eye in my defense one long and harrowing night.
Over the years progress, the monsters dwindled in that way a certain club does when it becomes stale and only a few die-hards bother to show up anymore. Soon every week there was a desperate Johnny Red Cap trying to make time with a vague anxiety of a coming math test or the ghost of some old horror or another.
By the time I lost my virginity I discovered my nights were suddenly terror-free.
However I did find myself consumed now with the electric goddesses and aloof witches that had come to dominate my imagination.
But I still didn't have a Heaven. The Void remained, patient as a hunter and inevitable as a epilogue to a story you will never finish reading.
It wasn't until I was a young Engineman in the Navy that I would discover the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics. Cruises ran long after all and one can spend only so long up in the bunk indulging onanistic fever dreams. I was reading Robert Anton Wilson's Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. Unlike my other stabs at understanding a post-Newtonian world (The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li(?) Masters) I was able to sink my mental teeth into a good old fashioned narrative that bubble gum popped with plenty of sexy fun along with the psychedelic coated brain candy I had developed a meta-sweet tooth for.
Of all the ideas in that book one soaked deeper than the rest into the mental gestalt. The fact that there might be parallel earths. Which meant that all those old silver age comic books and Kirk era Trek episodes might have been on to something after all!
There were earths were Rome never fell, England won her independence from the colonies, Dinosaurs still roamed about and if you had a goatee you were probably a complete bastard compared to the you without one.
Which meant, somewhere, out there in the multiverse were countless eigenstates of me... I had stumbled into the conceptual equivalent of a room lined with mirrors on all sides. Where reflections stretch vast beyond the eye's ability to count them. That vertiginous euphoria that washes over the looker. The Narcissist's Paradise.
Finally I had my Heaven and yes, my Hell as well.
For there must've been an earth where I didn't join the Navy and decided to shoot-up with my friends instead. There must've been another one where I buckled down and did everything right. This... this ship, this cruise, this four year gig... it was all just one possibility and no matter how bad things got, no matter how lowly the shit work, the Me-that-did-not-Fuck Up was out cruising SOHO bars with Tom Waits and Iggy Pop while Jim Jarmusch begged to do my script.
But today it occurred to me that no matter how far spread out this fun house mirror army could gather along the even horizon they would all be about my age.
I wonder now, is the ultimate loser me weeping somewhere about approaching forty and all the things he never did. Is even this platonic ideal of me sitting somewhere pondering about the decisions he (shit, she(?)) could've made differently.
A midlife crisis on infinite earths.
Yesterday I got chased by a rather large dog on my bike while taking a graffiti cyclop's picture. Later, down West End, I would have a gang of small children belligerently demand that I surrender to them my bicycle. Which put me in the odd situation of having to flee from a pack of grade school students like some kind of pussy. But what am I going to do? Flex on a bunch of brats (which would've played real well with the passing locals no doubt) or give up my bike? Would another me subcumb to one of these mistakes? Would they have seen a fourth option that eludes me?
Still I got in some nice shots for my troubles... so what are you going to do?
Somewhere another me is going to have a show open soon with much better shots off a much better camera. Somewhere another me is pawning the digital camera he stole from his, excuse me, our, mom.
Both, like me, probably filled with doubts, ruminations, wishes, secret aches of broken hearts still not mended... both like me were cast-aways on those distant childhood nights were the Sleep of Faith also produced monsters.
Well enough then... step back and away. More smoke, less mirrors I should think. It's a fun place to visit but they're not mine anymore than I am theirs. Nothing to see here folks, keep moving forward and remember there's no parallel universe parking.