The Immortals

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My obstinate rejection of time is now taking its revenge on me. Its passage never existed for me. I never felt it as a river that could dry up. It was all around me, inexhaustible, a sea.... I have scorned time, and now it is running out on me.

-Elias Canetti

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I look back across the pages of this notebook and  consider its brothers standing shoulder-to-shoulder at silent attention on the shelf. I wonder at their purpose, at why I've created these sheaves of gently intaglio-inked swirls and lines, why any of us back into dim pre-history have chiseled our crude drawings onto the cave walls around us. And, studying this, I've come to understand that it's a bid for immortality, our petulant, inconsequential "fuck you" aimed at time and a universe that would relegate us to non-existence. The scrawled dragon's teeth I've sown are raised up as this neatly-bound phalanx to stand guard over an otherwise forgotten life against the assault of the Titan Chronos.

Hubris, indeed. We thought that what made humans near-gods was that we could bind time. Life is mostly concerned with casting itself (or at least its DNA) into the future. In service of that, plants bind nutrients but can't learn anything new except by generational trial and error. Animals bind space since they can move to get what they need and can often learn from experiences they have.

But humans — ah, humans, those clever talking monkeys — can bind time itself. They invented a special trick, you see: Language. They learn from the past of others and imagine a future based on it without having to personally experience the often brutal lessons and blind alleys of common failure and rare success. As with all survival traits, this was eventually reinforced with a few molecules of dopamine when we told us stories of us, which increased the odds of survival of those who learned from the stories. At their core, this is what all stories are. We've ever since believed that this trick of projecting ourselves into the future on the back of language made us inheritors of immortality, made us time's master.

But we were all wrong, all the writers and painters and sculptors and kings and popes and wise men, all the religions, all the story-tellers passing tribal memories down thru millennia.

To be fair, it was an easy mistake to make. It's only in my lifetime, perhaps a little more, that a very few humans have actually managed to look over the vertiginous edge of the chasm into deep time. Of course, even those few don't grasp it, really, not deep down in their guts. The revelations that reduce the life of our entire galaxy into a barely-there microscopic flash existing only as an immeasurably small grain of the finest dust roiling in hissing dunes of space/time snaking across an unimaginably vast desert are simply beyond our brain's physical capacity to meaningfully hold or process.

Each Dot Is A Galaxy, Not A Star

Still, it instantly became clear that dying unremembered as a child at birth or being celebrated and marveled over as the source of handprints, nearly unrecognizable tools, crude drawings, and bone fragments in dark stone places after hundreds of thousands of years are both utterly indistinguishable from "zero" on even a microscopic fragment of that timeline.

This is rather a blow to the immortality promised by art in general, and story-telling in particular. I think that deep down inside, we always knew it. At the end of some of our most instructive stories, after all, Phaeton falls and Babel crumbles, and only Time remains, brooding over the chaos.

But I'll keep writing. Why? Because I like writing. Presumably it, as all pleasure does, falls somewhere in the constantly shifting priorities of survival (warmth, sex, food — the usual), all part of that built-in-the-DNA desire to cast ourselves into the future, which in the final analysis is the basis for all human activity. I've lately been writing mostly for me, because like sex or chocolate it tickles that probably-obsolete part of my pleasure center which is still trying to reinforce activities that increase the survival odds of my savanna-dwelling forbears. That tickle of itself is enough to make it worthwhile.

But I have no illusions. I know it will all be reduced to dust and sand before a breath can be taken. Still, I'm no Nihilist. I am at peace with that, and with understanding what is really mine, this infinitesimal slice of Now. After all, what are the odds that even in this near-infinite probability space my consciousness would exist at all for even this brief flash?

So, then. Nothing short of an old-fashioned miracle after all. I'm content with my life as it is and with the mild dopamine rush that I've tricked my primal brain into producing by writing these words at this moment. Which moment, really, is all that matters. In the end, I no longer write with any real thought for the words' future.

Because those words, as I — as all of us -- have none.