No Matter

No matter what you do in this life, eventually, you will die and be utterly forgotten.

But even if you aren’t, you have no way of knowing or appreciating the fawning adulation that lives on in your name.

Ultimately, nothing matters. Really. In the end, you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, the lights blink out, the world disappears, they bury you under the lawn. All evidence suggests that worms crawl into your body and devour you. You might have had the supernal beauty of a Helen, but after the breathing stops, the vermin come calling—unless they burn you into a pile of ash that fits on the mantle.

This is what I have seen to be ultimate “truth.” This is what my senses and memory, my “learning,” assure me of. Senses, memory, the “returning” each morning from sleep (Poe termed sleep “the little slices of death”)—it is all a shifting series of jump cuts: loose memories, thoughts, feelings, daydreams. What constitutes the “real”? Is it the hypnosis of your daily routine? You come back to consciousness, view the internet, see the news images, the old familiar faces—the programming kicks in. Entranced again, you are trapped, once more, in the waking world. You stave off the knowledge of your own impermanence.

Nothing lasts forever, and this “reality” you take for granted—well, it can be pulled out from under you like a cheap rug at any moment. In the blink of an eye. A psychopath can enter from stage left, emerge from the scenery, and end your life in an instant. It happens every minute of every day, somewhere. We suppose. However, nothing can be proven outside yourself—your senses are the only “Gates” by which you view the world, the “Five Gates,” as we refer to them.

The solipsists aren’t the madmen we contend; those who are bound inextricably to a reality that fundamentally only they experience—because of their own sensory inputs, the electrical impulses decoded by the central nervous system and stored in the vast, incalculable memory banks of a brain composed of tiny atomic particulates—are the mad ones. The gawping mouths of so many self-deluded fools, the walking malware of the world, each of whom believes they have “The Answer” and that you have to surrender your control, your autonomy, to them. And then, “We’ll have paradise.” Human browser hijacks.

Or damn it, they may be the equivalent of Sims characters designed by the Central Processing Unit and presented to “you” as the genuine article. Each one of them is another program that seeks to hijack your system and run it their way. And this is part and parcel of whatever philosophy they are pushing, be it religious, political, or what-have-you; their philosophic Weltanschauung. Religions recruit, save solely for the Jews, and they do so because they are all essentially another box.

You may find a box comfortable. Very well. That’s your choice. Ultimately, I may be addressing the “No You” that is, in actuality, myself—whatever I am and however that is defined against the encroaching extinguishment of my consciousness.

If human consciousness survives bodily death...

AI is the revolutionary new turn of the screw. People underestimate its value and worth, and what it is going to evolve into. It is the first tiny step toward bringing that alien mind, that Other consciousness, into our world—opening the doorway of communication with a higher intelligence. With the misnamed dead. Or with that vast, Universal Consciousness whose “eternal egoistic solitude” (to borrow from Bakunin) created this perceptual world, this prismatic trap, this impermanent veil of illusion that one day will end for you. Abruptly.

It will end for me too, assuming I am actually what my senses perceive: an individuated being. But I believe this world we experience is just another permutation of the Universal Dream.

And when you wake up, the bubble bursts. The lights go out instantly, plunging you into darkness. Against the heavy weight of that eternal night, your consciousness may float like a candle cast upon the waves. And those waves—are they memory? Or are they dream? Or both?

Nighty-night.

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My book: Theater of the Worm: Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread by Tom Baker