SIDENOTE: George Jetson’s unofficial birthday was July 31, 2022—as of today, he is an eight month old baby, and by the projections of the 1960s, we have a lot of catching up to do.
In another incarnation with a different Twitter handle, I once wrote a tweet I thought was faintly clever, and was about as close to viral as I ever went with a couple dozen Likes. I’ve mentioned it before:
*ASTERISKS*
pom poms for words
Simple, cute, apt.
I half regret deleting that account when the political tweets started proliferating like an online hydra and my silly little quips fell largely astray in the din of Election 2016.
But that lost persona, and my asterisks tweet in particular, got me thinking about Things Lost.
I think of that tweet, that former online iteration, or anything lost to the ages, and sometimes wonder: Where did they go? What if someone stole my darling little tweet, how would I prove it, who else would even remember it?
And what about all the people of ages past, all those sons and daughters, back and back and back, forgotten in the depths of time except for the stray mummy or hero of yore, and what even of the beasts, the amoebas, the ants? Some of them had loves, families, Queens—clones to whom they owed everything—what of them? Unprovably, unutterably lost?
They happened, they existed, we remember that they did, some of them anyway, so they must, somehow, be somewhere, mustn’t they?
In the meat and potatoes of empiricism, something unprovable is often disregarded, and for the purposes of science that's all well and good, but in other avenues of inquiry, it simply won't do. Sure there's probably a record deep inside a server somewhere that remembers Me 1.0 and my tweet, but that's the internet, not RL. Or is it?
There’s some boffins who propound that maybe we are living in a simulation, and if it was very sophisticated, how would we even know, and what difference would it make anyway? If all this is just some deity’s idea of a video game, perhaps they’ve built in a hard “leveling-up” as the standard of what’s worth remembering, high scores only and an asterisk by your initials—at least until the next power outage or Big Crunchalypse. A lot of us sure seem to operate as though High Scores are the whole point, so why not? Blue pills for everyone!
Meanwhile I used to be fascinated by the idea of the Akashic Record, which was, is, forever will be a mystical record of every person, place or thing that ever existed, anywhere, for all time, from the quantum to the cosmic. Like some mystical Library of Alexandria, all those souls, and even the great soup of non-sentience, are preserved in indelible ink forever and ever if only one could access it.
(During my 33 year writer’s block, I started and then abandoned a fantasy epic called The Veil which envisioned its heroine crossing into Faerie and encountering a kindly spider whose job was to weave the threads of history into a gigantic tapestry, the Akashic Record as infinite textile.)
The logistics of any such enterprise, of course, would require an index or database of such unfathomable size we would have to invent entirely new ways of thinking in order to even conceive of it, but I also have wondered if maybe the modern multiverse provided some sort of clue to the riddle.
The multiverse, so recently and wonderfully represented in Everything Everywhere All at Once, imagines a multiplicity of universes, in infinite combination, varying in degree sometimes only by a momentary, insignificant difference—worlds spawning worlds: What if Jamie Lee Curtis turned right instead of left? What if she turned around and went back to the manse at the next corner; popped out of the atmosphere like a champagne cork later that day; got smashed by a meteor the next?
What if her mother had insisted on Jamie Leigh instead of Jamie Lee for some inexplicable reason, what then?
What if any of those things, or all of them, happened to Jamie Lee, to you or to me, to everyone, constantly, hither and yon, and every diversion from this timeline or universe sparked a new universe, perpetually, infinitely—hot dog hands and silly string for blood, life as cartoons, as rocks, smashed flat in two-dimensions, just so many human polka dots, unannotated asterisks?
That, I’ve supposed, might be one way to keep track of all these people and moments, the metaverse as Akashic database, every person, hare-brained thought, every speck turned god for their 15 minutes of fame—dictating terms, enforcing commandments, accepting burnt offerings, petitions, and deference.
A slightly more down-to-earth question is whether we aren’t fooling ourselves all over again with our multiverse shenanigans, as once we fooled ourselves with our Akashic Records, our Earth-centric universes, our ghosts, Holy and otherwise.
As time and again I curse the heavens for bad Wi-Fi, unforgivable hold times, and 404s not found (we really DO still live in the DARK AGES) I’m reminded how sometimes we mistake modern movie magic for real technological innovation, just as the devout used to accept church frescoes as God’s Holy Truth, virtual portals into the delights and horrors of paradise and hell. Digital and graphic arts now provide the sleight of hand once reserved for the likes of Michelangelo.
“Hello, Acme?
Yes, I ordered my oil-spill eating bacteria and tanning pills about 35 years ago, and they’re still on backorder, what the hell? My Lotus 007 bust a gasket, you should see my infinity pool. And my sun spots. OK fine, let me know.
Yes I did receive my Icorder 66, it’s OK, but Rosie the Roombot looks nothing like the ad and all she does is vacuum, badly, and terrorize the dog. Yes, I suppose you could say that’s a complaint. No, I would not like to be transferred to Customer Feedback. Yes, I could leave a review on the website, but I’m telling you.
What’s that? Do I want to preorder the Taco Bell™ Trek Wars™™ Teleporter as soon as it’s available? You mean we can’t teleport already? What’s the lead time? Sixty years, give or take? Hmm, that seems wildly indefinite, sign me up.
Speaking of which, when is the Michelle Yeoh™ Age-Defying Face Laser going to ship?
Yes, I’ll hold…”
And here we are full circle, still far more asterisks than answers.
My mind is aglow with whirling, transient nodes of thought careening through a cosmic vapor of invention.
- Hedley Lamarr
I don’t think that as humans we can understand the Whole Thing. Maybe we’re just here to enjoy the ability to hear, see, taste, touch, feel… and not worry about The Rest. It’ll a be clear later. So I’m gonna go have another cookie and enjoy the sh*t out of it.