The Plight of Bored Immortals
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“Every moment is an eternity, I have mastered spending an eternity in frivolous ways.”
Immortality is only potentially boring to those who find themselves rushing from one moment to the next on an endless quest for the ecstasy of novelty. For the lucky ones it would be more of the same, & to be lucky forever could only be the greatest gift that the universe could possibly arrange. We settle for what we are given, & what we are capable of acquiring in the time we have allotted & nothing is lost in the final balance of things. Information is forever & cannot be deleted, only misplaced. Written over like a hard drive, but not truly irrecoverable. Taken together, immortality is essentially our condition, because the gift of life (& time as a direct consequence) can only be experienced by the living. The eternal recurrence of Nietzsche, merely a playful thought experiment, is more than he could’ve imagined it would become. It is the finest work of hyperstition mankind has ever witnessed. Let me explain further…
The mechanics of cognition & awareness fold back over themselves & become self-aware. This process begins below even the molecular & spirals upwards through atoms & cells & organs before illuminating the structure of which it is composed, like a lightbulb. The resulting filament of flesh produces the light, the glass is the conscious mind, & the light that escapes is the influence on the “outside” world. This of course leads us to the question: When the light is turned off, where does the light go? The answer is simply somewhere else. Darkness, therefore, is only a form of distance. With that, we can assume that there is a very real possibility of the light being called to shine again, under the correct circumstances. It would be presumptuous to assume that this is a certainty, or that any behavior, be it loyalty to an ancient text written on the skin of lambs, or heeding the warnings of bionic souls bound to distant revival engines, will ensure your reconstitution in any way that you believe to be meaningful from the limited view we are currently capable of. But I do not blame them for attempting any formulation whatsoever. Immortality is the heaviest burden the human mind has ever conceived.
It has been my great gift to carry heavy things as far as my legs will carry me, not without stumbling on occasion or wishing to place them on the ground ever so briefly. I understand the appeal of the bored immortals & their wish to escape even heaven as if escape itself was the one genuinely fulfilling activity left. I have found that it is in the running not the finishing of races that races are spent, & they are worth doing regardless of the outcome because of the complete involvement of the body & soul in the endeavor. I believe that laughing zen masters that smoke cigarettes & unkillable swordsmen & neurotic watch-makers & crystal worshipping interpretive dancers all have the same idea about immortality as I do. We are performers, a light that illuminates the darkness for a time before moving to another location to repeat the dance & song. An infinite recurrence beyond what we can currently conceive, a single lightbulb pales in comparison to the brightness of the suns that our light will inevitably compose.
