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(all quotes come from Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World)

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we smell the roses and cut the thorns and delicately place them in pupillary voids our bodies are proof of the existence of another epistemic regime 

the same regime that ends in a timeless dance of black holes 

alone in the void of cosmic proton annihilation, we meditate on a second creation driven though we are toward eudemonia, few things are guaranteed 

futility 

absurdity 

death 

and entropy 

 

Meditation I:

What the fuck even is entropy?

     Through the magnifying glass of thermodynamic theory, we can see it. But, does entropy feel seen? Or is it only “through our eyes that the universe feels perceived” (1)? Through our eyes, does entropy feel perceived? Does the universe feel seen? I guess I can ask myself these questions and find a response just as futilely wrong and right as anyone else’s. Physics claims entropy is a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work. Is it productive work, labor? Are the kinematic renderings of this universe couched in the valorization of capital? Certainly not. That would be so random; more random than molecular disorder lost to heat. As time expands, entropy does. As time expands, lethargy becomes universal.

     Talk about being stuck in the doldrums, huh?

     Hayden White, a postmodern historian, claims that only by staring into history’s horrifying meaninglessness, into the sublime, is the human truly free. “Why is it that human beings put on masks or feathers to conceal their identity? And why is it that they saddle horses and feel the urge to chase the bad guy?” (2) Are we slaves to our historical reductions? To our factual, objective, depersonalized, masked search for Truth? Throw it all away! Discard this rubbish! Stare into the void of sublime meaninglessness and tell us what you find.

     Did you find interplanetary commiseration? You should have. It’s a guarantee. “And why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of plant lice as slaves to milk them for droplets of sugar? Why is it that a sophisticated animal like a chimp does not utilize inferior creatures?” (3) Why? Implicated rationality. Replace why with what. What is that? What is it? What is? 

     “He could straddle a goat and ride off into the sunset.” (4)

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Meditation II: 

Three silhouetted figures. A background of luminescent ice: a “dynamic, living entity that is producing change. Change that it is broadcasting to the rest of the world. Possibly in response to the change the world is broadcasting to Antarctica.(5)” Four appendages each. A central nervous system, we can feel the flash of its synaptic impulse. These sentient beings, wrapped in ceramic-apple-red, are bipedal, yet, at the moment, they sprawl toward the ice. A tilt of their head, an ear close to the surface.

     Intimacy. An aggressive sexual partner—safe words required, rarely heeded. A delicate lover—whispers as the sun rises through your apartment window. 

     “It wakes you up in the middle of the night because there’s no wind and there’s no sound at all, and if you walk out on the ice, you can hear your own heartbeat. That’s how still it is, and you can hear the ice crack. And you can hear the seals. You can hear the seals call, and it’s the most amazing sound. They make these really inorganic sounds. It sounds like, I don’t know, Pink Floyd or something. They don’t sound like mammals, and they certainly don’t sound like animals.” (6)

     It is an active sea. There is a myth about a man who walked on water, who healed lepers, who multiplied fish and bread. And yet, effortlessly, through the frigidity of entropic minimization at the pole, through a democratized Messianism, these three silhouetted figures walk on water. One thinks to himself: “I’m actually adrift in the ocean, a vagabond floating in the ocean, and below my feet, I can feel the rumble of the iceberg. I can feel the change, the cry of the iceberg as it’s screeching and as it’s bouncing off the seabed, as it’s steering the ocean currents, as it’s beginning to move north. I can feel that sound coming up through the bottoms of my feet and telling me that this iceberg is coming north. That’s my dream.” (7)

     The universe dreams through him. This affective change, this currential steering, this vagabond floatilla. It’s the universe’s dream, too. We wonder if we are the universe’s nightmare. We rest assured that the universe has no time for nightmares—too bogged down by managerial tasks. Before we invade the dreams of the universe with horror, it “will regulate us” (8). Certainly.

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Meditation III:

“The neutrino is the most ridiculous particle you could imagine. A billion neutrinos went through my nose as we were talking. A trillion, a trillion of them went through my nose just now, and they did nothing to me. They pass through all of the matter around us continuously, in a huge, huge blast of particles that does nothing at all. They’re like… they almost exist in a separate universe, but we know, as physicists, we can measure them, we can make precision predictions and measurements. They exist, but we can’t get our hands on them, because they seem to exist in another place, and yet without neutrinos, the beginning of the universe would not have worked. We would not have the matter that we have today, because you couldn’t create the elements without the neutrinos. In the very, very earliest few seconds of the Big Bang, the neutrinos were the dominant particle, and they actually determined much of the kinetics of the production of the elements we know. So, the universe can’t exist the way it is without the neutrinos, but they seem to be in their own separate universe, and we’re trying to actually make contact with that otherworldly universe of neutrinos. And as a physicist, even though I understand it mathematically and I understand it intellectually, it still hits me in the gut that there is something here around surrounding me almost like some kind of spirit or god that I can’t touch, but I can measure it. I can make a measurement. It’s like measuring the spirit world or something like that.” (9)

     Can we measure the spirit world? Why is it that we try? What is it that we try? 

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Meditation IV:

Emily Dickinson once wrote that she is out with lanterns, looking for herself. 

     “Well, I’ve never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They do get disoriented. They end up in places they shouldn’t be, a long way from the ocean.” (10)

     Emily Dickinson, bashing her head against a rock, yells at an unsuspecting squirrel. He drops his nut. He scurries off into the forest. He is eaten by a scavenging owl. The owl, filled and in need of a digestive aid, lands on the rock. She drinks the sticky blood pooled at the rock’s edges, a shot of espresso after a really heavy meal. 

     “He would neither go toward the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him headed straight to the mountains over 70 km away. Dr. Ainsely explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains. But why? And, here, he is headed off toward the interior of the vast continent. With five-thousand km ahead of him, he’s headed toward certain death.” (11)

     Emily Dickinson feels the trickle down her face. Blood pooling behind her eyes, she cannot see the landmark. She cannot find the rock. She is out with lanterns, looking for herself, completely disoriented. She’s headed toward certain death. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then next week. If not next week, then next year, next decade, next century, next millennium. Yet, she is out with lanterns, looking for herself. Why is it such futility? What is it, such futility?

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Meditation V:

“To sink into bliss.” (12)

     An explosion rocks their world. Water and smoke and ice propel into the atmosphere. A hole is  found on the surface. 

     “I noticed the divers in their routine were not speaking at all. To me, they were like priests preparing for mass. Under the ice, the divers find themselves in a separate reality where space and time acquire a strange new dimension. Those few who have experienced the world under the frozen sky often describe it as going down into the cathedral.” (13)

     The Enlightenment may have killed God. Darwin eviscerated Them. And, yet, religion is not abolished. Visions of entropic stillness replace the apocalypse. Meaning is lost to meaninglessness. Facing a death with no meaning, we continue to create it. A secularized search for beauty and order replaces a religious search for beauty and order. Is the good found in its meaninglessness? Does the sublime speak? Does the sublime feel seen? We travel “from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe, just watching the world go by” (14). We find ourselves untethered, floating in a meaningless ether. We “end up at the bottom of the planet” and find that “every definition of intelligence formulated could be fulfilled by these single-celled creatures”.(15) We are not so special, are we? We don’t mean much, do we?

     We discover and create art for no one and everyone. Sun Ra tells his Arkestra to play for all space entities, for all interplanetary sentience. We “grow and evolve into larger creatures to escape what is horribly violent at the miniature scale”. (16)And it ends, “a frozen sturgeon mysteriously hidden away, beneath the mathematically precise, true South Pole” (17). And it ends, a hideous rock concert in a nightless and rippled expanse.

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Meditation VI:

“We may be witnesses to a biblical prophecy come true and this will be destruction and darkness come up in creation and the beasts will reign over the Earth.” (18)

     Why is it, this destruction and darkness? No reason.

     What is it, this destruction and darkness? Inevitable.

     Just as likely to come from nuclear war as a broken ice cream machine.

     “There’s a lot of crises when the frosty boy goes out. Um, it’s bad news. Word circulates everywhere throughout McMurdo when frosty boy goes down. It’s really good stuff.”(19)

     We know this. And, yet, we march toward the mountains, five-thousand km away, saturated with certain death. And we do it gleefully. What is it, this eudemonia? Human. 

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