Keep On Top

I found these pages in a series of handwritten notebooks in a box of material left in a remote storage facility I had rented.  They are interesting enough for me to retype and post here, which will occur as I am able.

I have tried googling and binging and other search engines to find out more about the author or subject matter, but nothing appears, which may mean nothing or everything, as you will find out if you read further.

The earliest post, the one to start with, is here -- a July 1 entry which is the date I typed it and posted it here.  The notebook pages themselves lack dates.

ED. NOTE ...

This note is ONLY for those who have been going from earliest entry to now...a guidepost if you will..

---


If you are keeping track overall, the structure is:

- earliest entry, which started this story, in this blog here,

- then I started the second blog here and this blog continues here, both in tandem for two entries,

- then the second blog only continues the story here,

- and now the story reverts back to this blog here.

17:35

I am tired of writing.  I am tired of this.  Hell isn’t other people, or burning in eternal torment.  Hell is nothing.  No contact, no stimulation, no interaction with the world.  Hell is being trapped in a box.  Hell is something I’ve designed for myself, carefully and with all the resources I could.

The third book Jim put in the box was lying underneath the Sartre book.  Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.  I had read this years ago.  I still remember cogito ergo sum.  I think therefore I am.  I can’t think here anymore, too much despair.  Does that mean I am not?

20:02

I’ve been trying to rouse my spirits.  I will solve this I will.  I will get out of here soon and solve it.

24:49

I am without much sleep or pretty much anything else.  And I am only halfway…I will go crazy in here.  I will.

26:44

One of the other books Jim had left were Sartre’s “No Exit” – hell is other people.  Bastard. 

28:14

I haven’t been able to find a mathematical solution.  The is a little more than a day left to my unboxing.  I am tempted to forget trying.  At this point it is a matter of challenging the best minds of the past 100 or so years, from Einstein to Bohr, Rutherford to Pauli, Feynman to Hawking to Penrose.

Entanglement is an outcome of their thought.  How can I challenge it?

-- TEAR OUT PAGE --

“You know why we will never be together, right?” she asked as we woke up one summer morning the sun streaming into her happy room.  “Because you,” and she turned to look at me across the pillow, “ are too much of a reductionist.  You are too … digital.”

“It is a scientific position,” I said.

“No it isn’t” she said. “It lacks any analog dimension.  It’s short sighted.  Love is analog.  There is no love in your system.” 

She was right of course but I couldn’t admit it then.

“You think because you got damaged you could ignore love. ”

“Not exactly,” I said. 

“Yes, exactly.  Because you don’t love.  You like.  But you don’t love.  And that doesn’t make sense because love is everywhere.  In ways that simply don’t compute in your system. “

“I don’t think …” 

But she wouldn’t let me even start.  “We have talked about this a million times.  And its cool.  But realize the human race selected for love too – it is something that gives the organism survival value.  But you can’t recognize that.  And that’s cool too.  But I can’t tell you a slightly prickly personality without love is someone I want to hang with.  I love you but I cannot create love in you.  That is up to you.  You have to decide you will love.  You have to decide you will reach out, break through your box, and do it without calculation to every single person.  And to me.”

She slowly smiled, a sad smile, at me, got up and kissed my head.  ”Love you.”

34:54

After my depressing sleep and thoughts about purgatory I tried to do some work, to analyze my situation a little more.

I’ve focused on some very particular math to see if we can keep away from forming the entangled quanta – particles have shown to be entangled but we have come in below the particle level.  As I explained before nano are like pieces of math, and if there is some way to create an alternate configuration maybe we can build a new particle out of Mark’s existing particles.  I wonder – I assume he is thinking the same as me still.  He had another week to engage with the world without me but I am not sure that would Mark him (ha-ha get it?) as different from me…and now he is in his box too.  Coming to the same resolution I assume – after all he and I think the same. 

And that is doesn’t really help up solve the current problem.  Two of me.  One of me failed to see the problem and two of us will just double our lacunae.  Rather what’s need is a complimentary person – someone to fill the gaps in what I didn’t see what areas I skipped over.

38:22

Shit.  I had fallen asleep.  None of this was there, as I slept, and I can’t remember my dream but I was happy and content and at peace.  Now I am up, and a little groggy, and back in my depressing depressing state. 

No interaction.  No people.  I’ve done something unique answered so many questions and get to suffer in purgatory as a result. 

When I went to Catholic School, when I was young, we had a discussion of purgatory.  Our teacher was a good guy, the kind of priest that truly seemed to care – he helped me in couple ways back then.  He was kind of an Irish alky too though (no offense Jim!) amiable, we called him Father Bleary though if memory serves his name was Leary.

“Purgatory, children, is kind of halfway point for some people.  We pray for the souls in purgatory because even though they are in grace and friendship with God, and they are saved, they still aren’t quite pure. They go to purgatory for purification before they enter God’s presence, because nothing unclean can enter God’s presence.”

What do you do in purgatory?  Someone asked.  “pray?”

“We don’t know.  It’s not like heaven, where you are in God's presence, or like hell, where you undergo constant punishment and torment.  We don’t know”

The class was quiet as we all contemplated, in our fourth grade minds, the question of being purified in purgatory.  I remember thinking what would you do?  Maybe not fire like in hell, but maybe it’s kind of hot?  How do you get purified?  What if you don’t?  Off to hell with you?

Me, now, in purgatory?  Maybe I, after all, invented a purgatory on earth.  Halfway between heaven and hell?  How do I get purified?

-- TEAR OUT PAGE --

I wonder if nano Mark is controlling me thru entanglement.  Making me do stuff to be the opposite of his…

41:51

I just realized something about Mark and I.  Since we are entangled, we have to respect the other.  We both have to make sure that we are and the other is, healthy. 

Second is that it isn’t even.  Nano particles have more power over me than I have over them.  In other words, apparently the default is nano Mark being conscious and me unconscious.  Or is that the default?  Can it be reset?

However we are looking at it it isn’t good. 

41:54

This wait is driving me crazy.  I am lying in the bed trying to shut down.  But I can’t.  I wonder if nano Mark is feeling this way.  Or the opposite.

42:14

Time is crawling.  I wonder if nano Mark is experiencing it whizzing by.  If a feeling is the opposite too.

-- TEAR OUT PAGE --

Not to mention that the thing I have never liked to do all that much, interact with people, is what I cannot do now – because I have attempted to sidestep God’s Order, by nanocloning me. 

Is that right?

I’ll never be able to interact with people again.  I will go comatose if I try because of entanglement.  But that means a life of loneliness.  Unless we solved the problem.  And one solution is to destroy nano Mark.  Rip apart the nanoparticles of him, so they are no longer entangled with mine.   And I’d be free.

But that destruction of him might lead to destruction of me.  If his particles experience destruction who knows what mine might experience.   If his particles experienced Hell would mine heaven?  Or the latter… and am not speculating --- I think there is room for God and an afterlife and all that.  After all the existence of an eternal God with a timeless plan has not been disproved.

So I can’t just destroy him unless I want to risk destroying me.

I hope he thinks of that too, and I guess he will, because I know we must think alike, and the gap of a few days probably hasn’t diverged us that much.  I  write it in the regular diary/mention it to Jim when I get unboxed so Jim gets it too.  So that nano Mark does realize there is no benefit to him to killing me either if it came to that.  So we are cool.

43:40

I am dating these entries differently now, according to the time on the clock.  So they will be going backwards to opening time, which is the way I have started to think about it.

Only a little time gone by now.  It is beginning to wear on me.  Being unable to communicate at all, with anyone.  See a face, talk, touch.  Not that I touched all that much lately.  But I could.

Maria and I had a relationship for a long time, and never really broke up.  But we never got closer either.  Which was okay anyway because we had known each other for so long and were very comfortable.  But I wasn’t sure about what she did or was doing in her job; in a way she was as private as me.   I miss you.

And Jim too.  Hi buddy!  We’ve known each other for a long time too.  You are my closest friend no question, and have done so much for me for so long.  Thank you.

Wow.  Look how maudlin I am getting. 

I haven’t heard anything from the outside about solutions.  I would think Jim and the rest are working furiously.  And nano Mark must be in his box; otherwise I would be unconscious.

Why did he keep his consciousness when I lost mine?  There was something in the process that gave him a consciousness spin but not me?  Could I figure that out?  Can I reverse it?  Can Jim and the others?

But there is no noise, no noise from the outside world and I imagine, none from me.  No sense of others around because, if they sense me I’ll go back into my coma and, if I sense them only, like looking through a one sided mirror, I think I’d soon go crazy seeing but not touching, not being able to communicate with them.

It’s ironic I’ve gone from trying to do too much to trying to do something, anything.  It’s probably even more ironic that I can’t use technology to do anything – when all my life I’ve worked with it and created it and understood it.

-- TEAR OUT PAGE --

--- TEAR OUT PAGE ---

One of the dreams I had when I was out came to mind.  It was Bleary again, in the classroom.   “So Jesus experienced suffering.  And loneliness.  And everyone ran away.  And Dante said hell is nothing – no connectedness, nothing.  Frozen.  So Jesus was experiencing something that Dante later described as hell. 

“Imagine that,” he said.  “No one there.  No one to share your suffering.  No one to reach out to you.  Some of you may feel that now.”  And I steeled myself for him to look at me but he didn’t.  And I sensed Maria looking at me from my left, from her seat.

“What do you think?“ And now he called on me, and I opened my mouth to speak and everyone was looking at me but I couldn’t the words wouldn’t come out, and suddenly we were out at recess and someone yelled at me “C’mon Mark throw the ball” but I just stared at it.  And Maria, but adult Maria, walked up to me her eyes beautifully dark.   It was night.  And she wore nothing/everything.

December 1

I woke up suddenly this morning.  In a room that I thought at first was the copying room.  It was soothing, with wood and leather.  But I was in a bed, with wires and tubes attached to me.

I sat up suddenly and they all broke off when I did.

 

A note was on a table next to me.  “Dear Mark,” it began, and I read about the past few days.  “…We are working on the solution,” it said as it came to its end.  “In the meantime, we were worried about you.  So you and nano Mark are isolated now  to permit the superprobabilities and, hopefully, keep each of you in a conscious state.  Two of you, working on this, will probably solve it quicker than all of us on the outside.

“Love you buddy.  I will see you soon.  Jim.”

A pile of books was next to the note.  “No Man Is An Island” by Thomas Merton was on top.  Bastard. 

I knocked them off, pissed at what had happened.  The most incredible fucking development.  I am in a fucking box.  A large fucking box.  No one knows if I am awake or asleep.  No one knows if I am alive or dead.  I am Schrodinger’s fucking cat, writ large.

I don’t even now if it’s worth writing this.  Will any one read it?

I got up and explored the rest of the room. 

There is a bed and the usual stuff here, and the other rooms have food and more books and a bathroom and in the back there is water recycling equipment like the astronauts have and workout equipment and food and food and food cause I’m not gonna be able to show anyone out there that I am consuming anything, that water is running into here, that electricity is being used,  that the Internet is active, that I am accessing websites, etc. etc. etc.  that I am taking a shower or peeing or eating cause any knowledge would collapse the probabilities. 

Or at least Jim and the others think.  I am back now reading the synopsis again more carefully and slowly.  “We have taken probably excess precautions to make sure that you are safe,” Jim wrote.  “Mark is in another room just like this one; we set both up in an attempt to isolate you as much as humanly possible.  No one has said it outright, but we are worried that entanglement could be life threatening to you.  We can’t have your consciousness deteriorating.”

“Hopefully you can read this.  We had put you in the room on life support that was designed to break away if you woke.  The difficult thing is that we won’t have any indication if you have and, speaking for me, I can’t really let you go on without even knowing your state.  You might be pissed at that, interfering with your experiment and all, but I can’t let you go on without knowing, consciously, the alternatives.  So after a lot of thought I’ve told everyone we are going to break the seal two days from when you’ve been put in here, which is the only way we can ascertain if you have recovered.  But we aren’t going to break Mark’s seal then, hoping that, if we are right, you will be conscious.  He probably will collapse then because the entanglement will work in reverse – you will be up and he will be in a coma state.  He knows, and we have identical times in each room, so he doesn’t just collapse on the floor, he’ll know to get someplace comfortable when he can pass out.  If all goes well I will talk to you about two days from when you read this.  The timer is on the wall. “

I glanced up.  47:32 it read in big red numerals.

“All my best bud.  You will be pleased to know that aside from this small glitch, every other thing has gone right.   There are no anomalies whatsoever.”

Right.  No anomalies.  I am a fucking rat in a cage – no a fucking cat in a box – and he says there are no anomalies.  I threw his fucking note down.

 

November 1 later (44:12)

I’ve been pacing through the rooms.  I should try to start to get to work but I’ve been pacing.  Back and forth back and forth.  What the fuck?  Of all the things that could go wrong, of all the things we planned for, it’s entanglement?  Really?  And entanglement as cause of consciousness?  Fuck me.  Fuck fuck me.

I am the probably absolute reductionist.  We are nothing but bits and pieces of matter, thrown together at random over 4 billion years, forces beyond our comprehension.

And that is all life is too, the mice proved that.  When we copied Jekyll and made Hyde we proved that too, that life was just a set of reactions we could copy.  And man is just an animal writ large. 

There is no noise, no noise from the outside world and I imagine, none from me.  No sense of others around because if they sense me I’ll go back into my coma and, if I sense them, the experts think, like though an undetectable one way mirror a video feed over the internet, I will soon go crazy seeing but not touching, not being able to communicate with them.

We can’t even communicate on a time delayed manner, sending them this notebook, using a computer or anything else…even time delayed communication would collapse the probabilities, according to entanglement theory.  It even works through time and probably on an indeterminate basis – we wouldn’t know exactly how then would affect now aside from probably random blackouts.  Oh efff me. 

TEAR OUT PAGE

And so here it is, my creation, and me.   What now?  No longer alone, someone separate from me who yet is me.  Will that alleviate loneliness?  The loneliness of the sufferer?  The loneliness that Christ Himself underwent on the Cross when all had turned away from Him, even Peter His Rock, even God His Father:  “My God, My God why hath Thou forsaken me?”  The gray aloneness, the horrific nothing, no one, they can listen but even then they are all too willing to offer advice.
You must have done something they will say.  It is your behavior.  You enticed him on.  ARGGHHHH!  Listen to me and share my suffering.  Wow, I guess Christ thought that too…
The room had gotten so quiet.  Even Maria was quiet.  Outside was grey and cloudy.  Inside Father Bleary, who kept every other bank of florescent lights off, for some reason, moved slowly in the semi-gloom, up and down the rows of silent, afraid children, at the chairs fixed to their desks, unmoving, waiting to see what he was going to say.
“What about the suffering of the innocents?”  he repeated into the silence.  He slowed as he got near me.  “Why has God let us on earth be hurt?  Why has Jesus broken His Promise?  We are being hurt, some of us in this very room.  Why?”  He stopped above me.   His words just hung there in the air, in the grey.  The room was tense, wanting something, anticipating something, some relief of this tension, four graders holding their breath, a priest asking the questions that no one else would even ask, staying away from the ugly truths.
“There is no solution for us to the suffering of the innocents,” he finally said, gently, “none at all.”  And the room let out a collective breath, not so much at the answer but at the fact he had said something, anything.  But as the meaning of his statement came clear, as it penetrated our young minds, our tension lessened but we started to get confused.  How could a priest say this?  What is he trying to do?
He went on.  “You know, some people think the worst part of suffering is the loneliness.  Some people who suffer can’t tell anyone, or if they do, they aren’t believed, or, if they do, they are believed, but the people they tell think it’s their fault, that the sufferer cause the suffering, or the people they tell simply run away.”  And his hand fell on my shoulder, briefly as if it was just a casual touch, and I could tell, I could feel, that Maria noticed it.
“Isn’t that what happened to Jesus?  On the cross?  Didn’t everyone run away, even Peter?  Only a week earlier He was being greeted as king of the world, riding into Jerusalem people singing Hosannas to Him, praise echoing in his ears, but behind the scenes people were working to bring him down, to kill him.  Probably some of those same people who were in the crowd praising him were planning to kill him.”
And we went silent again. 
“Everyone had run away from Him.  No one listening.”  He went up to the front of the room and turned around.  “Even his Father, his God.  God running away from God.  My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
“Haven’t we felt that?  Just like Jesus?  When we, the innocents, suffer?” 
His words hung there in the air, we were holding our breath again, give us an answer Father we silently pleaded, relieve our tension, something anything, make it simply, make it understandable.
“There is no reason we can understand for the innocents to suffer,” he finally said.  “No reason even Jesus could understand.  My God, he cried out.  Why have you given up on me?   Why have you forsaken me?  Suffering can be so great.  It can destroy you.”
He looked all around now.  Everyone was fixed on him.
“But it won’t,” he said.  “It won’t.”  And we breathed again.  “Because like Jesus, you can still call on God.  You can still say God, why am I suffering.  And remember we studied Job last fall, and Job suffered too, and he called on God too, and God’s answer there was you don’t understand Job, you don’t understand me, or what I am, or what is happening to you.”
“We know a little more about how Jesus suffered, and we know he was God, and even God suffered on this Earth, on His Earth.  He suffered, died and was buried.  And He was alone.  Even God was alone and I think aloneness makes suffering worse, much much worse.“
The bell rang but none of us wanted to leave.  We wanted a resolution, a tidy resolution, something to send us home feeling good, but Father Bleary just turned to his desk to his books and started tidying them up, ignoring us.
We slowly got up and got our things.
“One more thing,” he said suddenly, and his words rang out in the silence and gloom and everyone stopped moving, hopeful this was the resolution.  “Jesus said My God, my God.  He knew God was still there.  Even though God was silent.  He still had faith.  Even though God wasn’t answering.  And that is the only solution I can give to you.  All of you.  Keep your faith.  God is there.  Keep your faith,” he repeated one more time looking at me again, and we all left.

 END TEAR OUT PAGE

July 26 9 pm

Holy crap indeed.   Some philosophers might well characterize matter that way.
But he was/I am functioning (so far!) and although every one wanted to rush into the room and start testing both of us, we needed a minute, ignoring the many many observations that were being made of us, and simply staring at each other, absorbing the other.
I backed away from the door and he did too and we smiled, both of us wanting the other in “their” room.  It shouldn’t matter, this territoriality, after all we were made of the same genetic stuff, but I still perceive him now as another.
Wow Maria!  What now?
And all that went though my head in a second, as he waited on the other side of the connecting door and I decided then and there, because I was here first, and it would only be polite after all to him define the territory and so strode through into “his” room, and so come closer to him.
I had never seen myself this close before, seen myself as others see me, and the heightened anticipation, the adrenaline, enhanced my perception and for him too as we reached out and grasped each other’s hands and held them for a minute.  Reasonably firm grip, skin fairly soft.  He rotated my hand and looked at the backside of it, and then I did it back again it was a very odd thing because it was the same hand, two of them, in full mirror image, the back of my hand, with its hairs and veins and finger ligaments and knuckles and his fingertips wrapping around them with their visible nails, and rotating the hand, slowly and the wrinkles where the skin is and the color slowly changing to from the lighter palm on mine to the darker skin and just the reverse on his, thumb and forefinger meeting at the exact same angles, on either hand, and looking like a mirror image exactly but in 3D and over to the back of his hand, and every single thing looking the same once I rotated it in my mind, ever hair and vein and ligament and knuckle in the right place but rotated wrong until I figured it out, and then it snapped into place it was exactly the same as mine, wow.  An intellectual construction, the nano, essentially little equations putting themselves together into something here and tangible something I could now see and feel and that looked just like me.  Wow wow.  I was weak all of a sudden and looked around for a chair and he did too, after all we were probably having the exact same reactions.
I have made this.   This is another who is thinking the same as me right now, feeling the same.  “Right?” I asked, and he said it at almost the same time, and we both smiled.  Jim looked at us, and I shook my head now, but on the other hand it would be valuable to us, to science to record it now, so I stood up and he did at the same time walked into my room to get my notebook and when I came back he had his in hand and was sitting and had started writing already.  I sat and started too, and so these pages.