A Cosmogony Comic: Part 1
Being and Time
I’ve been playing with mixing my philosophical questions into stories. (I wrote one about relativity awhile back.) It’s a nice way to vent the pressure of trying to answer unanswerable questions about existence.
I started this piece a few months ago and abandoned it when my answers became self-contradictory. But the work that inspired it contradicts itself gleefully while continuing to delve into questions of humanity and existence. That work is the incomparable Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. Get a copy in print or audiobook from your library and dive into some of the most sublime wordplay and perspective inversion ever put to paper.
I’ll roll out the parts of this whenever I need a break from study and nonfiction writing. Roughly three of them are drafted and just need revision. Here’s the first. Hope you enjoy.
Becoming
Well, the first things I remember are being and time. Because what else could come before? Before didn’t exist until time happened, so time must have happened first. I don’t mean to say time is the source of what exists. Naturally, existence has to already be before anything can happen to it, and time is just something happening, isn’t it? So I definitely already existed when time became. It just happens that time is what happened first among the things that became of me.
Time is just being, extended. Whether time came along and extended me, or something extended me to create time; I’ve never been able to figure out. Without time, or any kind of difference between myself and everything, what could possibly have got me started? I say “started” because extending is just changing. There are those who might disagree with me—they who might say a thing extended can remain static in the dimension of its extension—but they aren’t looking at the full picture. If a picture doesn’t change, you can’t tell it’s extended. The only way to know an extended thing hasn’t changed is to compare it to the things around it which have changed, so that the full picture is always changing. Insofar as I was the full picture, naturally I must have started to change at the beginning of time. I’ve satisfied myself with keeping it simple and saying, “In the beginning I was, and then I changed.”
Changing was a very peculiar experience, let me tell you. From the first moment to the next, I differed. Being my first experience of it, the whole affair seemed to take an eternity to play out. There I was, just being as I could only ever be, and then, through an inconceivable and unspeakable tumult of raw sensation, I was made different—I was hurtled forward, I now realized, as my concept of forward was only then becoming as well. When I caught my balance, I had to look back to where I’d come from in order to understand what had happened. There I found, staring forward at me as simple and doe-eyed as a cow, as though it had not even the slightest capacity for comprehending me or its relationship to me, was myself…as I remembered me. Myself hung still, with nothing to do or say (as is the case the case for a monad), not even waiting for something to come along.
This is all hard to explain, of course, because what I am is still open to question. Unfortunately, I can’t experience myself from beyond myself, so I can’t be the one to tell you what I am. You’ll have to decide that for yourself by your own means. I can only say what goes on within me, which is in fact what I sense, as opposed to what the things within me sense…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before time, there was only now, and I had no way of knowing anything else. I only needed a very small vocabulary to describe all that was. Really, I had just two words for my two experiences: ”I am.” But now I had this other me to relate to, and I had to come up with all sorts of new words: was, him, and he; moment, sensation, and memory.
Looking backward, I now noticed something within me: a sense of the difference between us, as though each new word in my expanded lexicon had brought with it an effect that I could now detect. The sum of them pooled in the gap, both separating and connecting us. I wondered if he could feel it, but then I realized I hadn’t felt it when I was him so surely he couldn’t, and this affected the effect with a tone I decided to call wistfulness. Oh to be so simple and happy as myself appeared behind me!
What changed to create this gulf of identity between that second self and my self? After all, can’t we still say that I am still both selves, merely extended through this business called time? It should still be possible to run the business backward, winding me back up into a neat unity with every self contained. Extension hardly merits a complete divorce; it’s just a matter of spreading out what was previously held all together. What, then, makes my self and that self so different? I wish I could tell you about it, but it was honestly so minuscule a change that even I might not have noticed, if it had not been the first I’d ever sensed. In my spare time, I’ve gone back to compare my first two selves. Even now, I have only one thing to report: that in the extension which formed two moments, I had changed. It was a simple binary operation, rather bland and uninformative. That is to say, it could only inform me of one thing, which was that I had changed.
I hardly had a moment to ponder it before I sensed the change happening again! Moment seems an appropriate word to describe time, but whether my first step forward took a moment to happen, or a moment is how long it took, I can’t tell you. I only know that it happened again, and then a third time, and that I have now been changing in an ongoing stream of moments for a very long time.
This very quickly created a categorical conundrum. Insofar as there was only one “I”—always now—there needed to be a way to distinguish among the self that was me and each of the selves I had left behind. I could hardly consider my self to be the same as these other selves, since changes had obviously taken place between us—obvious by the fact that time had by now begun. I could also hardly give each self a unique name, because there I was already running out of phonic permutations to assign them. So I took to calling the other selves memories and indexing them with a line of numbers that could change its length when I changed. This was a clever trick, if I may brag, because nothing could actually exist within me which was beyond me. By taking advantage of time, I had found a way to create something both within me and trailing behind me, so that it was always beyond me without actually leaving my boundary.
Time continued like this for a good while. A continuous extension of myself, successive moments marking changes in a stream of bits—all of which would now be coded as ‘1’, indicating that yes, something had changed, so that they had nothing much useful to say about me. These memories are the least interesting in my opinion, but we have to discuss them because they lead to more interesting things.
These memories—my selves—needed somewhere to be stored, and quickly, because they were now crowding me from behind. I had to keep pushing each one out of the present so I could make room for myself. They were piling up in a huge wobbling tower that threatened to topple and crush me. I feared for my safety, but what else could I do? My past was the only direction away from myself in which I could push them. As more moments passed and more memories appeared, I pressed each one into the stack with the others. The oldest memories, under the ever-increasing weight of the newer, were getting squeezed very hard. At some point they were squeezed hard enough to begin compressing. By that I mean some of the bits between them—the binary capsules holding that effect of separation-and-connection I’ve described—disappeared. I suppose it must have been those which were the same as their immediate neighbors, because who needs to hold onto a repeated bit? Where they went is anyone’s guess—they had left my memory and I couldn’t find them within myself. I’ve satisfied myself by saying they must never have existed, since in hindsight they obviously didn’t need to.
This compression freed up the time between my memories, since they were no longer being separated by the effect of their changes. They laid directly against one another, and the tower shrank to a manageable height. I thought my worries were over, but I soon realized that I can’t distinguish them from one another anymore. I would look for my oldest memories down there on the bottom of the stack, and they were almost nothing, just bland blobs of gray without anything interesting to show. When I tell you this, I feel that wistfulness again.
I pressed on pressing my memories onto the tower. It never grew again, though at times I wished it would so I’d have more interesting memories to visit. After awhile I noticed that a new danger was looming. The bottom of the tower started to change color. It shifted from dull gray to pale, then it began glowing red. The glow grew upward, and at its bottom it turned yellow, then brilliant white. I felt the heat of it radiating out and upward, and soon I could barely look at it without straining my vision. This stack of memory wasn’t getting bigger, but the pressure of its compression still demanded to press into the present. I realized I was about to be overwhelmed by my own long forgotten past.
As the impossible ember at the tower’s bottom-center filled my entire experience, another new thing happened: I blacked out. It was the first time I’d ever become unaware of being. You might suspect it never happened, because if it had it would stand among my memories; and as I was all that ever was, anything that had become must be in at least one of my memories. But that reasoning had stopped working, because when I came to, I was no longer a unity. Space had appeared. I woke and found myself in the present as always, but looking at myself which was also in the present. I turned to my memory stack to make sure he wasn’t in my past and no, there was the stack, and he was not standing on the top of it. He was very much with me now. I had no idea what to make of this other-I, but I knew I could feel that effect between us just as between me and my memories. It affected me differently, though, in a way I couldn’t yet say. I only knew I both loved it and hated it.
And let me tell you right now, this is when I started suffering.