Cosmic Microcosms

Self-reflection is a science. It can be examined in detail. You just have to be willing to view the objective, however. Not all objectives are equal, especially when you filter out the subjective.

Introspection is recursive, showing similar things the deeper into the field of vision you go. Sometimes, biology is a metavisual summary of the things that led to its function or, alternatively, dysfunction.

When you are breached, you bleed. When you launch your defenses, you become febrile. When you sleep, you detoxify the actions of your day. When you die, when it all adds up, your final tally is tabulated. Thus, your epitaph is reduced to a number. Or a concept. Or some secretion that carries with it the DNA of everything you did, didn't do, refused, or allowed.

As such, I examine my tears in the microscope, because lacrimation is self-reflection.

I prepare my investigation, using a slide removed from the slippery slope of my looking glass. I drop one of my tears onto the slide and roof it over with a clear coverslip, which is how I covered everything I ever did. If one were to look closely, one could see right through me. Now I wish to do that very thing, but forensically.

Here's looking at me!

My microscope is now a well-oiled observing machine. It wasn't always. I've racked the view of myself into a blur too many times. But now I need to refocus, for any science relies of the accuracy of its data.

I examine the slide with the naked eye, and note the general direction of the moisture's flow. It is slow and diffuse. What I see is spread out way too thin.

Now I swallow hard and get down to business.

Using the 10X objective, I see a shape. My homunculus is writhing uncomfortably. Now it is is gasping; it is drowning. Normally astride my mind and directing my innervations, it is blindsided by my innovations--those devised for gain; those orchestrating manipulations; those unfairly dismissing the otherwise fair.

I rotate the lens to the 20X objective, and I could make out the filamentary remains of heart strings. They play chords of regret, a dire dirge of birdsong that falls from the sky along with the feathers from the hopeless.

Now I rotate the stage such that I view, through my life's keyhole, using the 40X objective. If life's a stage, then I take a bow, however undeserved. How could I have been so myopic! There, at that magnification, discrete and adding up to more than the mere addition of their parts, I can make out the proteinaceous smithereens of my soul.

Magnifying further, I see them as, instead, "dithereens," since they vacillate to and fro from righteousness to treachery, from right to wrong, from selflessness to solipsistic gain: a positive sum game. And the game is afoot.

And disembodied. And recalcitrant.

My dithereens glow in a sickly green shade of envy; in a fiery red heat of aggression; in a black doom of what might have been. There are shadows that block my backlit light source, and they cower in wait for their chance to eclipse me.

Life is chemistry, and chemistry is observable. Calculable. You just have to look through the right keyhole. And while keyholes are patent without their indwelling and unlocking keys, one can see the tumblers of life just out of reach of the combination uncombined.

And then I use my oil immersion for a 100X view. It is oil of motion and the elixir of life, magnifying the motes of inaction. I see another shape there, reaching for my drowning homunculus, a power of 100X larger, in the distance.

I see the elements in its electron shells, ionized, estranged. It is she. And like my own homunculus, it is hers, drowning, too, face-up.

She reaches for me, and me to her. But we are too separated by powers of magnitude. And sometimes, there is no key for the keyhole and the tumblers suffer non-alignment.

Now it is too late, for the laboratory has been defunded and is closed.