Some guy is in his backyard; he looks into his telescope. And sees the implosion of a sun eight times the size of ours turning in on itself to become super nova, and then a black hole. Everyone is excited, wow, a Super Nova! Wow. Wow. Wow. Bring out the scientists to talk about why this is important. Why, this matters. Why, people around the world will rally and talk and plan and spend exorbitant amount of time on trying to figure it out. Instead of giving that same energy to saving all the four year old babies living on the streets of Brazil. The child lives now, is here now, exists now. The sun, it super nova’d twenty-one million years ago.
What gets the attention, the significance, the meaning? Who decides. How did we all come to the same conclusion, in the same place.
Collective consciousness. A bullet piercing a leader’s temple, exploding out of the back of his head, and then two more dreamers dead within five years. A plane hitting a skyscraper, and then another, the tallest buildings in the world melt into the ground. A deadly contagion breathed round the planet, that for a brief moment stops spinning. The words it takes to explain a multidimensional shift in the consciousness of billions of souls? 1500, to be exact.
I finally grasp the lightness of being. The shocking unimportance of my cells existing only as a conduit for the energy that makes up everything. The energy uses us all. Not heavy, not lasting, not solid, not here. Floating. Skipping the surface of time. Until all that time is sucked into that black hole.
The only thing asked of me through it all: what have I learned? How did I build my character to achieve a greater state of humanity.
This: finally believing it’s not knowing or understanding or feeling or striving, surviving the fall, it’s the sense of – now. Now now, not later now. The existing as human beings here together only in each second we can count, and then – gone. Never was, never will be, only now.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
This is the book that might come close to explaining where I am now, be it two years after my last post, or twenty-one million years after the sun imploded.
The characters in the book; they are all sides of the same person, an examination of how many lives can exist in one body. One ginormous body we all inhabit at once. What is the correct way to live. Live in a way perceived as happy, satisfying, bearable. One character compartmentalizes the elements that make up the whole of his life. Without the connection, it is not confusing, contradictory, unexplainable. Another character sees it all together, overlapping, violating each elements ability to exist concurrently. But, it can’t all be true, real, present. A part of a whole that means something heavy. Who can live knowing all that at once? (Everything Everywhere All At Once may have answered this.)
The female characters have a duty to keep the show running, before they get to have the contemplation part, if at all. They have to do the daily maintenance, and take care of the feelings. A new way I am looking at that is: they don’t need to struggle to find the answers, cause they already know.
And of course the truth is, I already knew that. Now now, not later now, is not a new understanding. Just that, now I have proof.
My copy of this book was “given” to me only a handful of years after it was written, which can’t be true, because this book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, must have been written a century ago, but no. In 1982, a Czech named Milan Kundera wrote the story of a love affair trying to survive an uprising and ultimately an occupation. Is it about the love between the wife and husband, the husband and his lover, the wife with her’s, or all of them, including the dog, in love with an idea?
We are all in love with our idea of what the reality that surrounds us is – what it is – what is it – it is what it is. Living one life, no parallel universe, no reincarnation, no do over. You choose.
Why so serious? Want it to mean something more – meaning have meaning? Place a heavy tombstone over our dead bodies, a huge weight holding us down on this earth, for what? For the people still here to remember the past now? I spend a lot of time in graveyards. As a photographer, it is one of my favorite subjects. They say the soul weighs seven pounds, that’s pretty light. But heavier than our brains.
The upheaval they go through in the book, the Prague Spring, is this time when one thinks the change will be good, for good, for goodness sake. And then it’s not. What story is being told to keep us all going on, moving on, maintaining. The story of the earth moving round the sun, because here it comes again, morning. The primitive physical senses in our torsos that are unreasoned and have been given names like: love, apprehension, or trust, the story told to ourselves by our unconnected cerebral cortex.
Prague is an amazing city, I was there during the occupation, and after. It is noticeably a place in Europe on the line between east and west, it feels in the middle. I’m going to go back there someday. The complexity of the people’s situation and what they have been through gives them an opportunity for greater understanding of what is. I can tell that the trip will be easier this time. I am lighter now. Until then, I think I will use this post writing experience to propel me to read more books from over there, on the other side of the world.
I am having a hard time writing about the intervening two years since the last post. About the world wide death. About big changes in my life and society. Not enough perspective? Too big of a thing? Impossible to sum up in 1500 words?
All the scary things. All the dark complex times I was trying to connect and they didn’t – lobotomy, assassinations, Pearl Harbor, skyscrapers falling in NY. That I can’t write the actual name of the event that happened in 2001 should be enough to stop writing this post. There has to be a way to write this and make a subtle point in the post without explaining the meaning.
Meaning on who’s terms? Instead of searching for meaning or a purpose or what have you, try to understand who defines all of it, and how it was framed. There is no deep “meaning” to understand. I know that the energy is the only true motivation for all life, and existence of matter in the universe is to perpetuate the energy, to keep it moving. The energy must flow, it does not plateau. The energy does not think or ask why it is moving, does not ask how it is moving, does not ask for it to move differently, it already knows all the ways. Or does it? Is the energy searching for new pathways? No, because it is all made up of the same materials, it only has a finite amount of ways to travel. Right? It doesn’t have to mean anything! That doesn’t mean don’t press on with life, find joy in moving the energy around. Can I say anything without some meaning being behind it? Is the invention of language only to collectively contemplate and describe a meaning?
Humans, of which I apparently am one, can just exist and go about surviving without meaning, and not be unhappy or unsatisfied. Yes, we can be the be here now bumper sticker. Life is. That’s it.
Life is is.
And our collective conciseness knows that meaning is nothing and when we let go of the weight of being we are free. The lightness is bearable, because it is what it is.
Isisum. A new philosophy born just now. Not. There is nothing new under the imploding sun.
I went a little far out there towards that super nova when writing this all out on the page. True. But it has been one of those times when life has been hard to explain, hard to process, and we are all different now on the other side of that experience. I had the option to just skip it and write a new post on a book that didn’t take in account the massive change in society, like on all the TV shows that never actually acknowledged the-9-11-terrorist-attacks (there, I did it). But, that wouldn’t be me. I am anything but coy. There are no elephants unacknowledged in my rooms. A reason why I don’t get invited to many dinner parties, I guess. And so,
read it now.