infinities

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.
Andre Malraux

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts into the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for int he deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.
But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radience and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking...
What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
-The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K Leguin

I am back to the chair, the question, the infinity of infinities, the tower of possibilites that stretches through thought and emotion and dimension and space and ends always with the singularity, the singularity of one human life that somehow, in the pale face of every infinity, defies nihilism enough to have infinite meaning, infinite worth.
I am back to the chair and the pills, red pill or blue pill, matrix or lie, perceptual reality or objective reality, the ocean or the air. The mind, in the ocean, blunted and blurred by the waves, finds its place in the power of lies, in the strength of subjectivity, in the obsoleteness of one life among many. It's easy to believe in the water, the life-force, the completeness of that world. But there's more... there's more, and as the mind awakes from the numbing lies that make every day possible, it has to face the possibility of something so great that it could break. There is more than the water; there is the air. But what happens to one mind waking?

The universe is expanding, and the expansion close to us is somewhat negligible. It is easy to believe, then, that the unverse cannot be infinite, because the speed of light sets the limit, and the universe has an age, determined by ancient microwave radiation. If the universe has an age, and matter cannot go faster than the speed of light relitivistically, then the universe must be finite.
But oh, it expands. And the farther away two objects held together by the strong and weak force get, the faster the expansion is. It's not a relativistic expansion, but the expansion of space. And if at a point very far away from me space can break the speed limit that light sets (light only sets a relativistic speed limit, relative to the natural expansion of the universe; spacial expansion can exceed it), that means that space can be travelling faster than the speed of light, so that if something is infinitely far away from me, maybe I will never see it or have any knowledge of its existence. That means I can't justify the finiteness of space with the age of the universe; it means that maybe space isn't finitely curved, either negatively or positively, maybe curvature is zero and space is infinite.
I am at the whims of infinity. I have no powers against it.

If string theory is correct, or even M-theory, and there are dimensions beyond the dimensions I can experience, and the symmetry of large and small is observed, maybe the entire infinity of my universe is at a point of infinity, infinitely small, and maybe in its miniscule nature, it is curled up into the almost infinitely small dimension that a single string or brane vibrates through. Maybe if you zoom out of infinity, it because one infinity in a holistic ocean, an ocean of synergism, an ocean that is made of water molecules that constituently envelop my entire universe, and maybe in that ocean there is one mind floating...
Maybe in my mind the strings that make up my subatomic particles contain worlds in their manifold dimensions, universes in which there are worlds with oceans in which there is one mind floating...
It doesn't end, of course.

There is the infinity of quantum physics, the infinity of the many worlds theory, the infinity that every possibility within a probability wave is actualized in a parallel universe, just like a brane of our world is suspended in parallel to more dimensions.

There is the infinity of perception and quantum reality; maybe only my perceptions make my world real; then what is there when I don't look at it? An infinity of nothingness...

There is the infinity of science. Maybe it's all a futile explanation. Maybe none of it is real, and the idea that our temporal-entropy-defying universe is just an aberation in my mind, and all of this expands from me, and there is nothing objectively real, nothing that can be determined outside of my thought and my calculation, so that no matter how hard I try to reach out to an objective world that may even lie parallel to the chaos of my mind, I can never reach it, my hands hit the absence of possibility. I am isolated from everyone and everything, but everyone and everything is just a characteristic of the infinity I generated from my mind, from the aberrations of my brain cells, from the lack of objectivity.

It is one mind emerging from the ocean of comfortable lies, emerging into the Freudian ocean, emerging out of a facsimile of order into the blurred light of disorder. I am faced with the choice of pills. Either the external world guided by physics is just an infinity of infinities, and each idea is a three-dimensional guide of a four-dimensional function, or the external world is projected from the chaos of my mind, that could, (another quagmire) be projected because I am an aberration, and the entire real world does exist above the surface of the waves, or because there is only me, and my mind, in the universe, and the facades of symmetry that it spews are just attempts to realize meaning in the nothingness.

Or maybe philosophy and science are the real diseases. Maybe I run from the possibility of order. Maybe I find solace in the idea that nothing is real, it's a fluke, there's no meaning, every infinity is stacked on infinity. If I run away from order and embrace this idea, isn't it far safer than trusting order, only to find out eventually that it's all a lie, a fluke, with no meaning? Philosophy disengages me from the world; if I am disengaged from the world, nothing can hurt me. Anything that turns out to be unreal and chaotic cannot hurt me because I have already predicted it; I have never trusted it.

Maybe that happens with people, too. Maybe I can't trust my mind, I can't trust my image, I can't trust these infinities or these projections. Maybe it's safer to obsess over them endlessly, to hold them at a distance, to doubt to protect myself from the possibility of the realization of my doubts (it's so much easier if I create them than if I discover that they're true).

Love is an absolute belief in something. Even the act of completely loving is an absolute belief, an absolute vulnerability. If I love, I admit that maybe there is some sort of order, maybe it's not a lie, maybe it's real, maybe even if chaos exists, love is enough to defy it. If I love completely, I abandon the possibility of phenomenology; I abandon the belief that nothing can be secured in the haze of quantum probability; I abandon my passion for obsessively planning the positive paths of a photon as it is split either right or left, so much that the plotting becomes the reality, and the photon is not even split, not ever, and that is okay, because I have a theory for that, too.

What if, growing up, I learned that something absolutely terrifying and devastating could happen to me if I believed in something and engaged in something? What if the act of believing was the act of giving up my control over my beliefs about the world? If I believe in something, without thinking, without obsessing, then I don't have plans for all of the alternate realities, the diverging universes, the hazy probabilities. I don't have any safeguard if my certainty is thwarted by uncertainty. But if I think, if I separate myself from everyone and everything by an ocean of thought that I can't even begin to express (thereby ensuring that nobody will ever make it through the moat, and I'll never lower the drawbridge), nothing can hurt me. And I'm so afraid of being hurt; I'm so afraid of being wrong.

What if, once upon a time, before all of the battles and all of the walls, I believed and loved absolutely? What if I put all of my trust in someone, and never doubted, and never thought about the possibility of them hurting me, because I was too young maybe, back then, or hadn't learned? What if then, subsequently, when I was the most vulnerable, when I completely loved someone, they betrayed me? What would that teach me?
It would teach me that opening up is stupid... it would teach me that getting hurt again could destroy me... it would teach me that there's something wrong with me, so that I can't be like everyone else.

It would be safe, then, to distance myself. Everything bad that everyone could think about me, I'd think it about myself first, and therefore if they ever thought it about me, it would only confirm my thoughts, not destroy my security. It couldn't hurt me, because I'd already hurt myself.

It would be safe, then, to believe that nothing's real, to deny meaning. Because it would hurt far worse to believe in something completely, to trust it, and then to find out that it was wrong, to find out that all of my hopes were built on a false foundation, and there was nothing left.

It would be safe to hurt myself so no one could hurt me. It would be safe to never love completely so that no one could hurt me. It would be safe to read about physics and philosophy and doubt everything so that nothing could hurt me.

Do you know what would also be safe? Writing a blog entry about my innermost emotions so I can expect them before they surprise me, so they can't hurt me.

It's all a loop, and a loop extends infinitely.