Games, Movies, Books, Death, God, and Eternity

 One of the traps I discovered very early was the realization that, if we did not die, that eternity would be as terrifyingly unendurable (almost) as annihilation. Especially as a smart younk kid with his clock chip set way high, and who viewed sitting in a waiting room with nothing to read with sick dread, the idea of running out of stuff to do, or even think, and having, still, all eternity stretching out before one ( because, as George Gamow and Lancelot Hogben had imparted to me, that you take infinity and subtract one hundred million billion years you have--infinity. It still seems maddening to me, but  back them it was a cruel vise: annihilation was terrifying, but so was non-annihilation. Was any step off of the little island of everyday life cause for cowering panic? Was what I wanted as dreadful as what I dreaded?

If I have a genuine personal anger towards Martin Gardner (And I blame him, and not Bertrand Russell, who actually did the snipping) is that he collected inside his volume The Mathematical Magpie a codification of that dreadful vision of ages and ages of inquiry, finally exhausted, with eternity still left to go through. The piece was written originally by Lewis Carroll--but the thing that, much later, made me furious with them is that neither Russell nor Gardner, in reprinting Carroll's nightmare, saw fit to include Carroll (smarter, I would say, than both of them)'s answer to it.

I didn't discover this for a long time because the sequence is from Sylvie and Bruno, which is not one of Carroll's better-known works. (Fess up now: you've never heard of it.) I only found out about it by being given a massive volume of The Complete Lewis Carroll, and at a further point deciding to read the whole thing. It's a strange chimera of a work, neither fish nor fowl, part whimsical fairy-tale and part serious Victorian social novel, replete with philosophical musings on, well, everything. The thought, while Victorian in its deep optimism, is really good.

To paraphrase Carroll's response, he said "What? do you think we should want the same things when we graduate to eternity, that our desires should be the same? Do we then, when we are grown to adults, find ourselves not bitterly disappointed that there isn't ice cream and cake at every meal? "

While that's not a refutation, it would definitely have done me good to have read it. And I resent the all-too-characteristic high-handed manner in dealing with another author.

But it's still a horrifying thing, and so far from conceivable that it makes Heaven and Hell indistinguishable. Physical pain or physical pleasure, the despair of the soul or its bliss, repeated infinitely are equally terrifying. The idea there's a switch that gets thrown so  it just doesn't bother you is nice, but sounds suspiciously like the denial of death in the first place. 

Of course, one of the first ways out of this (in Christianity's own emergency medical kit) is that Eternity is not an infinite extension of time but a transcendence of time, something beyond time. That, however,   brings up another problem--and that has to do with the fact that consciousness is a four-dimensional thing. Being aware takes time. Thought takes time, sensory activity takes time. We can't see how anything can happen without time. The Word was with God, and the word was God--but a word takes time to say.

(Isaac Asimov portrayed that problem (although not intentionally) in his novel The End Of Eternity. He had a breathtaking idea: a group of people who lived outside of the time stream in a place called Eternity, moving up and down the centuries, dipping into time and trying to manage history to eliminate  genocide, tyranny, and all that other bad stuff. But he just couldn't do it without having them act like us (or more precisely, like a 50's version of us: the sexual aspect of this book is also kind of hilarious)--and so hi creates another kind of time--physiotime--that the inhabitants of the time-skyscraper of Eternity are subject to. And unfortunately, he never tries even to speculate about the relationship between time and physiotime. But he has codified  the problem of a timeless religious Eternity: if we don't have time to, you know, think with, how can a timeless ultimate state be anything like life? Being?

This is,more or less, the Hindu solution, that the denial of death only goes so far as to but yourself on a dreary and undesirable eternal wheel that you'd better get off of as quick as you can, into a state that seems to have very little to do with thinking or even consciousness. It has the advantage of being voluntary, but basically it  confirms this all: consciousness is intolerable in infinity, and impossible in eternity. Therefore, it should be given up as basically a bad idea. But don't worry: with Lewis Carroll's magic switch thrown, it won't bother you a bit.

But is this the way it has to be? Especially since, if you don't know that any of the cosmic hoopla is true, consciousness is all we've got. 

Oh but wait, wait, wait, as C. S. Lewis was careful to teach me in his science fiction novels. there's a long semantic distance between 'transcending' and 'getting rid of.'And T.S. Eliot's line from the Four Quartets says 'only through time is time conquered.'  Can an Eternity that is not infinity incorporate Asimov's physiotime?

(Exhibit A440 in favor of blogs: nobody in the world was ever of their own free will going to let me write that previous sentence.)

But really,  is there a model that could look eternity-like and involve, well, us?

For the longest time, it was enough for Christianity, Islam, and other heaven-promising religions to promise an end to pain, starvation and fear. For most people throughout most of history, the promise 'in heaven you'll always have enough to eat and no one will slash you across the face with a knife" was an easy sell, even if it also included "your most pleasurable activity will be prostrating yourself and worshipping an authority figure who we think looks a lot like us." And except for a few relatively harmless mystics, envisioning what existence in heaven was like was safely ignored as the 'initials on screen' part in favor of designing the game whose goal it was.

But structuring Heaven as the goal of the game also makes it the negation of the game. In addition to raising all sorts of complaints about the fairness or the difficulty of the game, or why it involves so many electric shocks, vomiting and anal probes--it also structures it so that the better the game is, the less you want to win it. Is Heaven like the Get to Heaven Game called Life? Traditionally Heaven is the blank pages at the end of the adventure book. Ever After. Now what? Ice cream and cake at every meal forever? 

In dealing with the theodicy problem--Is god the author of evil? Why do bad things happen to good people?--I was profoundly affected by Akira Kurosawa's Ran. In a scene shot on dark gray volcanic wastes, a character says God weeps for our suffering. I asked myself, does that work? Could God author our miseries and then weep over them? And the answer came, not immediately but much later, yes, if God were Akira Kurosawa. 

If God were Akira Kurosawa, he would train us to play our parts well, to make sure we rose to the potential of our scripts, and he would laugh at our wit in saying his lines and weep at the pathos of our suffering--and it would be OK, because after the show we all go back to the Executive Producer's house, play air hockey and try to pick up the production assistant. 

It had the advantage of a system that was not infinity but still boundless, and where the incidents, bad and good, had a sense that made sense to anyone who ever watched a sad movie. If God were Akira Kurosawa and you were Toshiro Mifune, You could make God richer by the way you said His lines.

Good--and had the advantage of Shakespeare on its side--but I said no--more than movies, books. Because books are built by magic from the ground up. Characters live by descriptions and choice of verbs, love by adverbs and link in miraculous ways by metaphor or allusion that are enriched by everything else you've done. You lose the executive producers house, but gain the structure that is deeper than drama, and as big and interconnected as language. 

It is, just maybe, a vision of eternity I could like: a library where all the terrible, wonderful deep books that are what we call life are there to be picked up and read, and wondered at, and laughed and wept over, and as you lay the book down on your lap, you sit back and marvel at the book wherein  yousit in heaven and read these stories--and the book (or blog post) in which God writes these books to learn what mortals are like, what stories are like, and what the Word within Her are like.

This could all be nonsense, and we could be machines within machines within a great big machine thrown up by chance and a series of initial conditions and arbitrary constants--and when we break down the images stop and the processing stops and that's that. I can't assert that any of that is not the way things are.

But all the same , we could be stories inside of stories inside a wild improbable lovely strange story written about God by God about Her characters by Her characters. 

Maybe it's a vision, and maybe it's  an overly fussy bit of self-therapy.

I can live with that.