The Kalopsian Wave

I forgot about winter. I forgot about how it feels. I’m like a car owned by a 19 year old, I’ve never had an oil change and the metal gears inside of me are chafing and wearing down. It’s either distracted placidity or tormented sorrow. I’m trying to take it easy on myself. 

This year has felt like a walk in eternal twilight. I feel like Orpheous walking through Hades, in the homestretch, braving the discomfort of the valley of the shadow of death only to reach the other side and make it all worth it. I think we need to let go of our dead, though. I want to let things die. 

I had a conversation recently about if there was a possibility to transfer human consciousness into a robot, would I want that to happen to me when I die? Would I want my mind to live eternally in a robot so that I can still be around and not technically die? 

I am troubled by the answers I hear to this question– a concept presented and played through in countless stories. To me the answer is obvious. 

Grief, I’ve been thinking about grief. You have to grieve but in order to grieve it has to be gone. It has to be dead, buried in the ground. No chance for any revivification. 

I’ve been watching this TV show named Kaos which is basically Percy Jackson for adults. 

In it Orpheus steals his dead wife Eurydice’s coin before she is buried so she is unable to pass on to be reincarnated, she is trapped in Hades. He did this so he can go to Hades and bring her back. Eurydice wants nothing more than to move on to her next life, having been unhappy in her marriage and discontent with her life in general. 

If my loved one transferred my consciousness into an AI robot it would insult the sanctity of the life I lived. What a dishonorable way to memorialize me! If this became the norm, time with your loved ones would not be precious, not prioritized. To be transferred in a robot would be like Orpheus stealing Eurydice’s coin. Let me pass on to the afterlife, let me die. Love me by grieving me, love me by remembering me for who I was, not as an inhuman facsimile tormented by its metal body and limited metal mind, no longer human. How many stories explore why we should let dead things be dead? Grief is a necessary part of being human. 

My favorite poem is Wildly Constant by Anne Carson. In this poem she quotes Proust:

We think we no longer love our dead but that is because we do not remember them: suddenly we catch sight of an old glove and burst into tears

Love never goes away, love is like energy- it can be transformed. Love is like an unstable molecule, atoms fizzing their nuclear reactions flip-flopping it into so many different feelings at all times, an agglutinated ball of emotion rolling down a snowy mountain.  Someone said that love and hate are the same feelings and I’d agree with that. I imagine it as electricity in a house. You can turn devices off but the electricity is still surging though the cord. When someone dies a lamp gets turned off. We feel around in the dark, we still feel the connection to them. We just can’t see them. The light just won’t turn on. What do we do with all these feelings we got? Where do we put the love that has no place? Where does love come from and why does it hibernate and slip away, only to return with a force at the strangest time?

I think I’m bad at love- maybe it’s because I’m allergic to cats and bad with animals. I’m not super gentle, I’m not super patient. I know I have to coax a cat and earn its trust but I just want to pick it up and smoosh its soft little face onto my cheek. I’ll be wiping my puffy eyes for the rest of the day and nursing my scratched up arms for the weeks after– I’ll never learn my lesson. Maybe these things aren’t exactly alike. I cried to Sarah once because I metaphorized myself as an AC unit and she said “You are not an AC unit you are a human being.” Someone out there will be able to handle my clumsiness, I’m sure of it, until then I shall work on giving it to myself. 

Grief and love… grief. Not to make this all about AI, but I’m scared of those in love with their AI and feel grief when their chats are deleted, how many pay a premium to chat with their AI “partners.” Subscription based love, I’m sickened by every facet of the premise. How many times do we have to re–learn that death is what makes us human? Life is beautiful because it ends.

This is why I like performance art. I like temporary things. 

I had a dream in Highschool where I dove into the ocean and was fighting to swim out to water. The water and sky was grey and I was exhausted fighting the waves. I got so tired, my vision faded until I was standing on the same beach, facing the dunes, with the wind whipping my hair around my face. I saw a figure out there in the dunes clad in dark clothes. I wrote a poem about it all those years ago and think about it every day. 

But I’m on a beach

And even though I hear you, your words are lost in the wind.

I think to myself: 

… to be unwoven from the tangles of me, oh to be unwoven from the tangles of me…

It is not a sunny day.

Two men by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

I want to move on, I want to forget my dead but I keep catching sight of that old glove, keep glancing over my shoulder to see if Eurydice is behind me. I am torn between total amputation and relentless reminiscing. I feel like I’m doing it in a bad, rotting way, like a shark that stopped swimming. I have to keep moving, I’m not built to enjoy comfort. 

And that is why I’m struggling in this twilight year. I’m trapped- I’m like the protagonist of a Twilight Zone episode. I’m on emotional bedrest- I’m supposed to be relaxing and healing but I’m getting bedsores and my muscles are atrophying. I’ve gotta get out of here.

I’m sick of bringing up all the old sad bummer stuff I keep trying to understand. I just want to move on. There are no answers here, it’s something I will never be able to decipher, and frankly I don’t care too much anymore. Nothing is better than forever, it is time to let go. 

 And is this what you wanted? A distance where we are stranded on the other sides of the same moon? At least I am. I am by myself, but I think I like it this way.

I’m sick of comfort but I also want to put things up on my walls and know that I can leave them there for a long time. I’ll save up all my money for a nice sweater only to not wear it because the fabric is scratchy and the head-hole is so small that it messes up my makeup and hair when I put it on. Now what?  I thought I wanted this.

I want closure on things. My love is a hernia slipping out, uncomfortably amateur, unpracticed and unrefined, uncontrollable, wild and always painful. Guilt, grief, love, closure. I still don’t know how to channel my love, I don’t always know when it’s there. It deceives me, it sneaks up on me, bites me on the ankle while I’m searching for something I lost. I’ll be digging around in Marc Chagall’s blue stained glass, when I spin around deep in thought and crash into  Ferris Bueller, kissing me hard and sucking out the venom. That was weird. Why did that happen? How am I supposed to process that? My love takes me out behind the shed and places the barrel of a shotgun in my mouth, my love throws me into quicksand and goes live on TikTok to broadcast my descent, jumping in at the last second before the air runs out. My love goes to hell to retrieve me only to look back at the last second. My love is not my friend my love my love my love my love is not my friend. It’s just hurt and heal and hurt and heal forever when will it just be healing, uplifting, and gentle? The good part about not being dead is that I don’t have to rely on Orpheus to come to hell and save me, that dastardly viper that sank its fangs into my ankle! It’s thousands of dollars for snake anti-venom anyway. I’ll just watch my step, I’ll avoid parades, I’ll wear gloves when I dig through the broken blue glass.

I’ve spent these last 2 years like Jonah in the belly of the whale, put in time-out because I was scared to do what I was called to do. I think I need to be more gentle, I need to be more kind and loving. It’s difficult practice, channeling love the right way, to the right places. 

All the stories about reviving the dead focus on them coming back wrong, but what if they come back right? What if a grieving wife puts her recently deceased husband into a robot, and after some time he leaves her for another grief-bot, bonding over their shared experiences and knowledge of how it feels to die. Death is a human right, to be revived from it is always selfish. If the love of my life revived me from death I would leave them. Let the dead be dead. If Carrie Fisher dies, write her out of Star Wars, don’t paste her face on another actor just to make money. It’s fundamentally inhumane. 

I remember myself now in the broken glass. I caught up to myself on the other side of the same moon, been digging so deep in the mud, fighting those waves and calling out to figures on the beach. The dog caught its tail, the viper that bit me choked on its own and the planet keeps on turning ‘round and ‘round and ‘round…  I want to let all this go, just cut the knot, so sick of untangling it. I try but my attempts just make it worse, and giving up on the untangling makes me a motionless shark, gnashing the knots of the fishing net set out to cut off my fin- those bloody sockets from appliances unplugged, blood gushing from tourniquets loosened, sinking to the bottom of the ocean, still alive with the darkness closing in.  Healing is going to be uncomfortable. 

I guess what I learned by writing this is that I either have to keep swimming or I’m going to have a soul death so cataclysmic that it will take years to recover from, if even that. Too much love to give not enough things to plug into the sockets. It’s dark in here.

In the original myth, Hades told Orpheus that if he walked out of Hades without looking back, by the time he exited his wife Eurydice would be there. Hades said that Eurydice would be following behind him the whole time, he just had to trust that she was there. If he did look back she would fade back into Hades and Orpheus would have failed, She’d be gone forever. This reminds me of Lot’s wife in the bible. Lot was given pity by God by being the only good man in Sodom and Gomorrah, so before God destroyed the cities he told Lot to gather up his family and flee. However, if any of them dared look back then it proves that they loved the city and will be turned into a pillar of salt. Lot’s wife looked back. 

Orpheus looked back. 

When we love we look back, even if it stops us from the future we want, even if it makes us meet our demise, even if we know without a shadow of a doubt that looking back is bad we still do it. Why do we look back? If you believe in the bible you’ll know that us humans love doing exactly the opposite of what we were told to do, especially by God.

It is because we forgot something there in the time behind but we can’t remember what it was. It is just out of grasp- we were there once, why can’t we go back? And of course, once you try to forget Eurydice it will only give her time to catch up. Next thing you know, you’ve stumbled across her lost glove…

Forgetting and remembering- both are out of the question. Both are the wrong choice. Both must be done, though- there is no other alternative, and that is grief. 

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