The Third Day, Between Pages Six and Seven
:: — :: I might as well put this here, as some sort of preamble to the interstice between Pages Six and Seven, unintended, but useful. I might as well declare here that I must be the one who overcomes and succeeds this disease.
:: — :: For if, in some macabre carnival game of Schroedinger’s crapshoot, I were divided in two, somewhere before birth (Still womb-wrecked and zygoting out of my pregnant prison, I thought I had beat the odds by breaking out in only nine months! Self-assured and brazenly special, only to find, much later, the ejection was inevitable and beyond my agency, and I could have just as well laid there with the same outcomes…), and that one of me would live this life, and another would live also this life but at some moment, unbeknownst to us, diverge. And this may well be that moment. Where one of me doesn’t succumb to the ravaging of disease, and another might.
:: — :: And I certainly need to will myself to be the one who walks away from this a better man, that poor other soul bedamned.
:: — :: Godspeed to both of us. :: — ::
Your intervening history will be written solely by the next episode in which you appear. Let the writers fret and tousle their locks with chewed pencils in front of mocking blanks enpistoled and aimed at their heads. You will not know what character you’re cast to play until after the house lights snap on, and you you’ve got on a jester’s cap, pasty make-up and no more than denim trousers, peering into the empty orchestra and realizing that this was the role you were born to play all along.
Ridiculous lines, about picayune hatreds that are no more than slight distastes, be they for people or things, about asinine epoch-spanning feuds between brothers when all they needed to do was embrace filially, clasping the back of one another’s heads with their palm and vowing to always be there for the other. We could have been so close, you and I, but you had to leave the theater before I was done. Or was it I who left you? Or were we never separate, but failed to realize how many denizens we carry in our heads and our hearts before we’re ushered out into stark eggshell oblivion.
Dear reader, don’t ever leave me. You’re all I’ve got.
Bwah-ha-ha! Of course you’re not all I have, my life is splendid and rich beyond compare, with loves and care I wish never to part with.
But in some way, you are, for this moment right here, all that I have. And for the time it takes you to read these words, I am primarily all that you have. Let us let that part of you and that part of me connect, right here and right now, as if I were actually speaking to you, earnestly, openly and honestly, into your head. Until time stops roaring its ugly head, this is indeed all we have. Tiny sparks of ideas carried in frail vessels, like cold water drunk in the blistering sun, we tip the bowl of human knowledge and sip. And after some time — the same time it takes a particle to decay — we gently return that knowledge, slightly altered, to the source. And it flows in.
There are rarely typhoons to disrupt and drain the flow of the knowledge of the world; this limitless nectar that was fed by broadcast to all of us, each and every one of us, through Mom, Dad, Teletubbies, Sesame Street, The Lone Ranger, TED talks or Newsmax. Regardless of who we are. Of course only bits and sparks of parts were ever shared with one individual, there isn’t enough space in there to fit it all! And if it were, imagine (that’s the ticket!) how devastatingly in thrall the rest would feel, were Superman truly cometh! Whether I make it through the system first and become Adam, or end up going first, like Jeronathon, we’ll all be together again. Just like we’re all in the solar system together, and no one seems particularly peeved about that, do they? We’ll rise up, from out of the husks of our skeletons — for the self is buried deep as the night and tough to flush out without just the right scent —and convene again. And it will be joyous. Whether that flesh sheds tomorrow or in centuries, it will be brilliant in its devise. As much as these words are brilliant.
Did you know that these words weren’t simple to come by? It took billions of years to “accidentally” hybridize with pure concept, pure abstraction. The me, the personal self is the capstone of illusion, contrived and maintained only by this fused alliance with language. Together, we hominids and we language have become human, and we’ve pursued our physical flights of fancy so exceptionally and successfully that we are about to launch off into entirely new realms. No, not by lugging our meat sacks around in glorified penis cars, Jeff Bezos, but by combining and fusing again with our most precious creation and commodity. I look forward to seeing you there.
Quantum mechanics will confirm that History is made by the present. A gift of fictional memory remolding socio-historical plates in the print factory of human knowledge. Oh shit, sorry, that’s not the sort of thing that physics would tell you, but I will. And on it goes, the past is remembered, recognized and rewritten. But when it is rewritten, when it is supped back in reverse to the bowl of human knowledge it is different. Even if slightly, it has been altered and evolved. And the more subjects who sup this alteration the deeper the imprint of these misnomers until, lo!, it is a pattern, and a recognizable one at that. But it’s merely simulacrum, and for all you or I know, both of our lives began two paragraphs ago. (Who the fuck am I plagiarizing anyway?!) — (I don’t know where I was between celluloid frames, do you?)
Can you reach in, grab an idea that’s special to you, and save it before it is overwritten?
To the judge, jury and may it please all the court, let the record show that this passage is not “Between Page Six and Seven;” it is as misnomered as it is misremembered as it is irrelevant to the story so far. In keeping faith and solidarity with the promenade of humankind, relicked and antequated, this is the new past, and it’s here to stay.