TRANSMISSION 35

Carrying the Torch

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“The burden of success is that we get to continue racing. The burden of racing is that we might succeed: reaching artificial milestones of no objective meaning, only to be flung back in the race. The privilege is that our failures are forgotten: our failed hypotheses do not affect the true nature of reality. The downfall is only in thinking that the race is real: to unwittingly lock ourselves into meaningless success tracks. Similarly, the burden of our lives is that we are living; the privilege is that we get to be anything at all. While we don’t get to fully define how we live or how we came to be, we cannot deny that we are alive. Each one of us carries forward the torch of life, not fully able to wrap our minds around where it came from or where it will end up, but each doing our best to figure it out along the way. That’s all there really is to do with it. Our act of existence is all the success we could ever hope for.”

We all bore the responsibility of torchbearer. We are all part of the chain of life that extends through spacetime. Am I the one who is to carry the torch to the finish line? Or am I the one who carried the torch off into the rain, never to return? Either way, I am the last. Well, I am the last who I know of. The universe is big, and there are many places other life could have bloomed into existence. If there are any others out there, I suspect they are now fading out just like my strain of life, for the universe is not dying just for me, but for all: there is no further horizon.

For us left, we would likely be a handful of lonesome wanderers speckled vastly through space, each with our own origin stories, adversities, and masterpiece productions that will fall mute once there are no more observers left. I imagine we would each be sitting alone as the last-of-lineage torchbearers, invisible to each other in the fog of an expanding universe. We might all wonder who else is out there and if there was ever a way in the past to have met one another. We might all wonder why it was us who happened to hold the torch last. We would likely struggle with the guilt of surviving beyond so many people and so many things while holding ourselves up to this ultimatum of existence: the inability to take any further steps. We’ve all run out of energy, literally and figuratively.

In life, there has been no finish line to push toward. The finish line simply emerged when we stopped moving forward; it fetched us once we stopped trying. In that sense, I’ve found some contentment amid being last, because at least I have the comfort of knowing the finish line will see me off when my time has come (when I decide I’m ready). The end is in sight now. The peace of not having to carry the torch anymore is upon me, the unsettling peace of knowing there is nothing more I can do. I won’t have to keep pushing; I won’t get to keep pushing.

Thinking back to when we were still bound to Earth’s stellar system, harvesting the asteroid belt and moons for our physical and mental hopes of better futures, I think that’s when our collective torch shone brightest (or at least my personal perception of it). We were finally enacting the adventure we had been dreaming about, and it was a big mysterious universe we were gearing up to set off into. Those collective aspirations were unmatched by any other period. When reality contains so many unknowns, we behold diffuse excitement, because anything could be possible. As time goes on, though, we come to understand the workings of reality, and our destinies converge onto the only things that were actually possible all along; the disillusion swoops in to deafen our torches as we vie to match pace, equipped only with our mortal minds that eternally lag behind acceptance of reality.

I imagine all the other life out there would have equally set out with hope and emerged at the far side scarred with character and wisdom. But really, even though we like to think of it that way, you don’t emerge out the other side, you just accumulate more scars as time goes on. Whether the scars are traumatic or motivating is up to the individual. And though these days I often indulge in the mental fabrication of other-life constructs, I can’t say how plausible it is that other life exists. I would say that in the vastness of the universe it is likely there was other life at some point, but to survive until now would mean significant technological advancements that not all life was innately destined to achieve. In fact, no life was innately destined to achieve anything of this scale; our strain of life fought hard to get to where we did. But what really were we fighting for?

We tried to save away forever in a moment. We tried to encapsulate our existences in the torches we all passed forward. But inevitably, the torches fail to capture the things we cared about most: they fail to capture life. How could a nonliving symbol capture the essence of a living thing? How could a higher-level construct encompass a lower-level construct? We are the ones who projected meaning upon our torches. And consequently, we necessarily will also be the ones who extinguish the torches when there is nowhere left to hold them.

I lie spread among the cosmic dust out here, holding my torch up as the stars set on the universal scale: a universe going dark. But this universal night will not reemerge into day the same as a star for a planet. No, this cycle is much more destructive: the totality of all things will be lost before a new existence reemerges in whatever cycles this universe happens to go through, if any. All the features of reality that have been impacted through our thoughts turned into actions, all the information contained within the universe, it all will soon enough be lost in meaningless maximum-entropic glop.

Our meanings have only then been meaningful to ourselves. So we desperately latch onto life while we are alive. We fervently hold on to ourselves while we are of conviction. And we diligently disallow the desolation from discreetly dispatching our declarations, undividedly reclaiming our voices to endeavor our way back deeply into that deadening darkness to divulge our most dazzling displays of radiation: the diffusion of our indefinite dreams into definite reality.

HOLD ON TO LIFE

I guess you had to go now.
I wish you hadn’t gone.
Life was never easy,
but for some it’s just too much.

Though our time is fading.
I’ll see you once again.
Come find me at the old house,
and I’ll see you off, my friend.

I’m hanging on to memories
of long forgotten things.
It’s funny how the years pass.
You know, a long time ago,
we had some dreams.

Far far from now,
I thought we would be
still going strong.
But what did we know?
Still going on,
but this time I’m alone.

What you came to be,
I had to know.
Is it time yet to let you go?
We fell apart so long ago,
but you’re still my friend;
I thought you should know.

Descend the deep.
I’ll fight the breach
to quell our hearts and find a start.
The darkness creeps up on the weak;
I’ll stay up all night to watch the fire.

END TRANSMISSION