'To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour'
(William Blake)
Madness Divine
Let me just say that I am not mad. I've thought about it, as one inadvertently does during such long journeys, and I have reached the conclusion that I am thoroughly sane. So with that I'd like to begin: It is only when you really truly understand what lies between suns that you become a god.
It’s the distances; those epic, unforgiving, and magisterial stretches that forge memory blankness that do it you know. How can a mortal mind take it?
Equations you say? But that is not comprehension. That is management. That is you attempting to manage, to fit the unassailable into a little box marked ‘mystery’, so that you don’t have to think about it. But comprehension, comprehension is something well, something else.
When I was little my father used to play a game. We’d be cruising above the desert of our home planet and suddenly he’d throw open the hatch and deposit us (gently) onto the sand dunes (me and my sister). Two seconds flight-time later he’d cut the engines and then it would begin. The idea of the game was that we were to make our way to him - on foot. Two seconds – we couldn’t even see him! It’d take us the best part of the day to travel the distance and even then we could only make out the fuzzy blip on the horizon. What he was giving us was a vital lesson in cosmic empathy.
But that was many years gone past,
Many years have eluded me as I traipse between suns. I can now say that I really truly understand cosmic empathy. I wonder sometimes, sometimes aloud how time tastes to you? Does it taste the same as it does to me? For me time feels like something that accumulates, something that is constantly depositing a fine layer on me. And as we move farther and farther through time this layer thickens and thickens. And the same applies to distance too because time and distance are brother and sister. I understand from others that you probably see time as something different; something that is lost and never to be recovered. That the passing of time is something not good?
Do you not think that how we feel time colours how we see? I think so. I can’t go back. Not because I feel terror at the enormity of the task but because I have no desire to shed the layers of time and distance I have accumulated in my journey. These are precious. And also, there’s the psychological impact of the interminability of the return journey. That would be bad, not good. But full steam ahead as they say; who knows the same interminability may greet me but it will be a different interminability. Not the same.
But where was I?
Yes, I was talking about distances and time – the mere fact of having traversed them leaves a mark on you. Like a visit to a place of poverty, a brush with death or a meet with someone you admire. It leaves an indelible mark.
What kind of a mark you ask?
Well, an intimate empathy of the scale of nothingness, and an even greater empathy for the nothingness of everything.
Everything and nothing
Life and death
Infinity,
I can see it you know. I really do understand it. It sits there in my mind looking at me; smiling. Sneering at me with its black rotten teeth. The realisation.
The moment of realisation – ha!
It creeps up on you at first, insinuates its way through you and then without warning the realisation strikes you between the temples. Whack! Stunned.
Then follows a sort of giddy excitement. Your mind races around. You want to tell someone what you realise. But, why are you so excited? You have nobody to tell. It’s only you here and your toys in the cargo hold! Why then the excitement? Just imagine you’re the only one in the world. Just imagine. What would excite you? Would anything excite you at all? Exactly.
After the excitement there’s a deep understanding. Yes, that becomes part of you; permeates you, until it soaks through your bones and you become this understanding and realisation.
You realise what it means to hold infinity,
Touch it, and in your hand look at it,
Like a god.
Slipstream Divine
The object (for that is what the inhabitants of the planet would have thought if they could see it) hung motionless above the atmosphere. It was a gross violation of nature the way it just hung there, as below it churned the verdant blue planet swathed in white shawls. The curvature of the planet was gilded; it defined itself against the starry void beyond. The sun carved a huge arc across it; slicing it in half – night and day.
I want to kill them people on the planet
Why?
Because I can…And because nobody will know about it. Nobody will find out because they’ll all be dead and there’s nobody to watch me do it.
But why?
I don’t know. Because I don’t know any of them so I won’t be paying a currency of grief.
What do you mean?
I have not seen them. My eyes have not touched them. My heart has not reached out to them. I don’t know them so I have no emotional attachment to them. So I can kill them.
But just say if I had spent even five minutes with them. Watching their children running around and playing games (which I’m sure they do), watching the mothers doting after them and bossing over them, then I would perhaps think differently. But I am 20 miles above and I don’t have these feelings.
But you could?
Yes, I could but I don’t. That is a fact.
Isn’t that evil?
I don’t know. I suppose it is. But I don’t feel like it is evil. Ok admittedly it’s a bad thing to do, but that is outweighed by the fact that it will make me feel good.
Why?
Because it is act of doing something that most people would say is wrong or evil. And knowing that you will never be found out gives it a thrill like taking a sly shit in somebody's garden or in a field when there’s no one around to watch you. Or deliberately smacking a little kid knowing you won't be caught – because the kids too small to speak and to have a memory.
That’s sick?
Is it?
Yes.
Look, you can’t kill them.
Why?
Because it is not your right to take life. You didn’t give them life so why should you take it?
But who gave them life?
I don’t know. That’s beside the point. The point is you should give them a chance to live. They’ll only get one chance at living. They’ll die eventually anyway. Let them experience it.
Experience what? Life or death?
Life!
Doesn’t the nothingness you have travelled though make them seem amazing or special? Like brilliant crystals in a dull solution?
No. It makes them look pathetic and puny in the shadow of the vastness of everything. And I am that vastness. It has absorbed me into it. I understand true distance, true vastness, true scale – these people are, you can’t imagine. They’re just nothings.
Look, don’t kill them there’s no fun in that. Interfere a little,
play with them…
You’re mad! And you are supposed to be me my conscience?
And you are I?
And we are one.
