Another message, another bottle

I find this from four and a half years ago, when I was thinking again of writing what finally became Dark Fire. I’d forgotten about asking Hemingway to help with it as he had helped with Babe.

Friday June 6, 2014

I am thinking about Inner Voice. I hate to lose all that earlier work, but I think I need to write something more true, more vital, than a story about spies. Or – I wonder, could I merge the two the way LcCarre did? But I don’t have that level of skill, and I don’t care about the external world to that extent.

Papa, I’m going to need help, if you are interested in doing it again.

Can’t you see the connection between thinking of going back to fiction, and thinking about me?

They do seem to get linked.

Well, you are reading again of my last days. Your last days are always upon you, even if you get 50 years more. Do you see? If you die today, if you die in 50 years, it is the same.

You are saying one thing and implying much more.

Yes I am. Did I not always? You live in eternity – you know that. eternity means, not a really really long time, but a dimension above time. It is the dimension Gurdjieff or Ouspensky would call all-time. You understand?

I begin to think so.

All times are contained in all-time, as all days are contained in a year. It is a larger unit of measurement, but in this case a different order of things from the unit.

I went wool-gathering, and I’m back now.

Your life is at the intersection of time and eternity, because any one moment is contained within eternity.

I see that now, very clear.

All right, so if you are always within a year no matter what day or month it is, can you see that it is a sort of linguistic misunderstanding to talk about leaving time and entering eternity? Can you exist in 2014, say, without simultaneously existing in one of the 12 months of 2014, and one of the 52 weeks, and one of the 365 days? You can do it or something like it as an abstraction, but only as an abstraction.

What people mean is something different. You are where you are, in the same sense that you are what you are. It only seems to you that you move because you crawl from one moment to the next, as you were designed to do, and agreed to do, rather than see it all at once.

In other words, the completed-DeMarco exists regardless where the in-process DeMarco happens to be.

Of course, and this should clarify some things. All versions – all possible versions – of your life exist in potential and are a part of your completed being. How else could it be? But if you look through the lens of any one version, that makes everything look inevitable and fixed because it existed before you began.

Yes, I’ve worked that out long ago. Our freedom is in the ability to change timelines.

You could give this some more thought, though. Every version is not equally probable, though all possible by definition. Lives have outliers just as anything else does.

I think I lost where you were going.

Thinking of yourself as alternate versions is a way to carve freedom out of predestination. But what if there really only is one life, consisting of the results of choice? Do the other possible lives exist?

I’m getting a glimmering of your idea, but go ahead.

It’s all a dream. So how fixed can a dream be? How fixed does it need to be?

I’s all a dream. I’ve had the thought but it’s hard to see where to go with it.

You are not your completed-DeMarco any more than you are your various in-process DeMarcos. As long as you identify yourself as DeMarco it is like me identifying myself as Hemingway. Here outside of time/space, do you think I think of myself as Hemingway? Do you think of yourself as only your left foot?

[Thus] reverting to Monroe and his I-There.

He wasn’t wrong. But his metaphor was thoroughly steeped in time, and the best he could do was bring in paradox.

You are saying – (re-reading) – that you exist beyond all-time, as well.

You can’t enter or leave time, but you can become aware of other parts of yourself existing outside of time – I’m just trying to make a differentiation between all-time and not-involved-with-time.

All-time is integrally connected with any and all times because it is the binder that objects are kept in, or the book each page of which is a given time.

Correct, regardless whether one page is a moment or a day or a life; it scales up or down. The other way to not be stuck in a given moment is beyond the Time-Space Illusion Monroe talked about. It has nothing to do with time. The only connection is that individuals within time also extend beyond to other parts of themselves that don’t live either in any one time or in all-time, but outside of the whole physical construct.

Impossible to think of a realm beyond time. If things change, aren’t they changing within some equivalent of time? If they don’t change, can anything happen?

You are right about one thing – it is impossible for you to really envision life beyond time. That’s one reason why religions get so mixed up, trying to describe an afterlife. It’s your fish and mountain analogy again.

All right, to be bringing this back to your point –

To see yourself, don’t expect to see anything you recognize. If a part of you is alien, how can it feel familiar? Or rather, feeling familiar is all it can do. It can’t be very recognizable.

And why does this come up now?

You’ll see.