Sinking Season in anticlimatic

Someone once said that “time is a flat circle.” That it’s essentially an illusion created by our subconsciousness to explain a part of our hardware that we can’t observe- like the built in egg trey in the fridge trying to get a look at the power cord. In reality, “time” is the rate in which the fundamental bits of our hardwire communicate with themselves, and with the outside world. Time is the rate at which light bounces off of an object to the lens of our eyes, is then picked up by neural signals that travel organic highways to ignite areas of the brain, which ignite other areas in a somewhat long daisy chain of logical analysis, eventually culminating in more neural messengers running down other highways to activate particular muscles, in a particular order, for purposes of reaching for the original object that the light bounced off of. That entire process, multiplied by how many times we can do it, and similar, without sleeping- multiplied by how many days of life our cells on average can regenerate without dying or going cancerous, and you have the basis for a rate that we generally perceive as “time,” this sort of flowing constant that the entire universe moves at the speed of.

We think it objective, but really it’s relative. In part this is creepy, but in another way it is comforting. A trillion years could pass after we die, and whatever of us is left to exist could- theoretically- experience that in the blink of an eye. Paired with murphy’s law, there is at least a chance that after an imperceivably large amount of time, we could all be reformed again, from our original particles, as babies- and it could seem like the blink of an eye from after we were last formed.

Have you ever tried looking into the well from which you came?
Is it the same well in which we return?
Can we be drawn again?
Can parts mix with others, and be drawn unique?

It’s almost time for my yearly viewing of The Titanic, by which I mean the film, the incredibly detailed “playable” model you can download on PC, and of course the historically accurate animated reenactment on youtube, complete with footnotes of known events at the time stamps in which they occurred.

It’s just in January, when the air gets to be about as cold as the north Atlantic ocean water that I begin to spiral. The spiral is a spiritual, seasonal, and cyclical one- and The Titanic just happens to be what I need to watch while it’s happening. Like how if you have a song stuck in your head, you want to listen to it.

Because The Titanic is really a metaphor for something a lot more horrible than the people who celebrate an interest in it like to pretend. It’s not the love story we enjoy from the movie (and some of the books), it’s not the statement on the hubris of man, or even the basic disaster porn of it.

It is a metaphor for the fate of everything, including the most beautiful and decadent among us, to be interrupted upon the horizon between unobscured beautiful starlight above, and the ink black and bottomless swallowing void below, and to begin sinking at this interruption. It may be slow, but it is assured, and it is a path in one direction. We watch the lights of the boat get swallowed by the black, and we count our days on each of them.

And that’s how my January typically goes. The winds off the lake, along the northern most corridor in the Midwest, box us in almost completely for the long haul. It’s hard to notice how short the days are in September, when everything is still temperate and beautiful, but come mid January mornings, the impact of darkness is unavoidable.

So do excuse me if I collapse like a dying star until the February sun reminds me that beauty can exist in the world after all.