The Heat Death of the Soul
Thoughts on the scattering, fracturing, atomizing nature of modern culture and identity.
The heat death of the universe is the supposed final state of all material reality. It is a time when all potential energy in the universe has become so uniformly distributed and scattered across the manifold of space time that it is impossible to generate any heat, momentum, or energy. It is a time where even the last black holes will have slowly radiated out, over many quadrillions of years, every last particle once gathered up beyond their impenetrable event horizons.
Loneliness is a kind of heat death. It is a slow death where the passion of life is drained from the body. Deconstruction of all kinds is a heat death. It is a separating out of wholes into halves, a shattering of unity and form; where homes are mere timbers; churches, mere stones; and lives, a mere succession of events.
Even the heat death of the soul takes place over eons. Long before I was born, already to be a rebel was to be normal. Then, as now, even The Man says, “Screw the man,” and did we not all groan with dread when the words “group project” were uttered?
The compartmentalization of life is a schizophrenic heat death of identity. Where is art? Locked away in museums. Who can understand it? Experts, not you. Where is the concert? Behind metal detectors, in arenas of steel and concrete. Who sings and dances? Singers and dancers, not you. Stand to the side and let the experts show off, for in the heat death of the spirit, one burns alone.
Going abroad, we do not speak of bringing back new mysteries to home country, but of getting away from home country. From your hero’s journey, you return in dread. For you know that no garlands of celebration await you, only piles of work undone.
Every force that draws two or more together in unity is, in the heat death of institutions, not a star burning bright, but a black hole, all consuming. A star preserves and gives light, but a black hole consumes, separates, and destroys. Always a new scandal looms, and in the news cycle, each event is a horizon beyond which untold darkness lies. All power is suspect, for all power is draining and decaying and slowly evaporating. Its remnants are little mounds of dirt to be stepped on and crushed, like the abandoned ant hills of last summer.
Little rebels against rebellion stand up now and again. They light fires in the darkness and say, “come.” Ravenous hands reach in, grasping and gripping. The meager fires of the little rebels burn swiftly and brightly. But the hands have come from barren country where there is no firewood, and nothing they have brought for the burning. Neither have the hands been instructed in the making of fires, or the gathering of wood, nor in the balance of the great structure of the fire, a thing requiring perfect unity. Spread thin, the fire burns cold and fizzles; too tight, and the fire is smothered by its very fuel. So it is in the heat death of community.
In the heat death of sex all are ascetics, self-flagellating monks, hooded in blood-soaked robes, under a vow of silence. Beyond the cloisters, the dark forest looms, but no knight is there to tame the wood, and fantasy only means fetish. Bodies are not unities but separations of parts to be tugged at and hacked away; sources of agony to be escaped, chained, or defaced. No ancient monk ever whipped himself more over sin than the modern one, writhing in agony at the sin of own his square, flabby, flatness, and at the very calling of her name.
In the heat death of the human soul the future is burned for the present and the ashes of the past scattered over the last green fields. The harvest is hacked down as young stems and burned for a mere moment of warmth.
Colliders accelerate the process of the heat death of science. Deconstructing atoms, yet finding only turtle bones and tea leaves within. Once we dreamt of clocks, and fugues, and the music of spheres, and the hierarchical, fractal harmony of all things. Now all that remains is the specimen and the cadaver to be dissected with dispassion; and the infinite expansion of the universe from nothing into further nothingness.
When all is shattered, when Tiamat is carved up, and the last sons of the demon gods are consumed,
then all creation groans in the silence and darkness of the deep,
waiting for the words that can set again the clocks running and fugues playing;
words that speak creation into being;
words no idol, no post-human demigod can speak.