So I've been watching a lot of Mad Men lately, and am getting rather into it. The episode with which I am stopping today is the one revolving around the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's interesting to think of, waiting for fire from the skies. It's also kind of interesting that we always assumed we would end in fire (and brimstone although honestly I've never been quite sure what that is supposed to be. Checked wikipedia, it's just sulfur, disappointing). I'm just fascinated with the image of it. The looking, the waiting. The prospective fire. The fear, I think. Say what you will about looking into it, I am rather fond of the abyss.
That makes it sound both morbid and grand but I don't think that's what I mean. It's just the long view. It goes on forever, and existentialism and meaningless and blah blah, it goes on forever. The world will end and it would be beautiful and terrifying and awesome in the traditional sense of the word. Like God's hand come to flick us off the planet one by one. Or maybe more like FLCL ironing out the wrinkles.
I suppose there is the idea that the earth will swallow itself again, a blue orb of poisoned seas. It seems somewhat more likely than the Waterworld scenario, the evolutionary gap between lungs and gills is so great it seems more likely that the sharks would build civilizations, or that our lungs would expand and we'd be more like dolphins. Or again, the dolphins would just replace us. Where would all that water come from anyway? If all the ice melted, but it were still cool enough on the surface for humanity to survive, which I am assuming is possible, where would the coasts be? One can only assume Siberia is pretty safe, Kansas and Colorado. The Andes. It seems like that also misses the fact that it would happen gradually, because we already know how to farm on water.
I honestly don't know what its like not to be able to see land. It seems nice. A wonderful void, filled with heat and salt and occasionally kelp. For the longest time my two obsession have been the ocean and the desert. When I was young and impressionable I read a book called The Perfume of the Desert. It makes it seem like the desert is really the only place you could find God. Which makes some sense I suppose, why would he want to hang out with everyone else? Not hidden under a rock or anything, but in a more introspective way. Tearing away all the other bits until you're just looking at yourself and this planet and he hangs out somewhere between the two.
Usually I go more for the polytheistic belief systems, but much like Buddhism has many applications, it seems Sufism does too. God has always been a metaphor to me for either Truth or Nature. Capitalization makes all the difference. I have proclaimed a great many things in my time, and will no doubt continue to do so, but it seems silly to me now. It is difficult to have serious conversations about beliefs because I honestly have no idea what I believe. The last time I got really into I muddled up my own thinking quite a bit with my feelings. There is the argument that logic does not or should not apply to beliefs, but that doesn't make much sense to me. Neither does omniscience really. Is it worth playing the game when you already know what all the moves will be? You can only play tic tac toe so many times. There's a finite set of moves, all of them done a practically infinite number of times. You know the outcome and only do it to pass the time, or to see if someone else knows where to put their circles to force a draw. But who would God be playing against? I feel bad for Lucifer. It's understandable why you'd want to stop playing (it is the only winning move), but my god man, how to pass the time afterwards?
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