The Inevitable Cosmic Burp

Here is the form. I will crush it. Now it is a different form. This is the interesting thing.

There is a “novel” that I began writing years ago that I should one day get back to. In fact, it has been on my mind often lately, if only in the periphery. There is a “scene” within it where the protagonist (I laughingly call myself a protagonist) relates a story from his childhood. It is about a friend of his parents named Pat who talks to the child protagonist about the “meaning” of the universe and specifically about dimensions, commenting that the fifth dimension could even be a colossal animal and our four dimensions could be bobbing in its stomach, floating in its digestive fluids.

This was heady stuff for the protagonist at the time - a time before he grew into a cynical man for whom surprise was a stranger.

How do digestive fluids of a colossal, universe swallowing animal relate to the opening quote? Well, they forced that young “protagonist” to torsion his thought patterns. Those patterns of thought were undone and redone again with perhaps a few strands still frayed in the wake of the redoing. The form of his psyche, analogous to a Platonic solid made of paper - a simple origami - was crushed into something less perfect, into something more of this world and not of imaginary realms. Sudden floods of unexpected knowledge or insight can do that to a child and I’m of the hopped-up opinion that the experience is unequivocally positive. Even if that sudden flood of unexpected knowledge or insight concerns goat worship, sibling crib death or overcooked pasta, the end result is positive.

What am I hopped-up on? I’m hopped-up on garlic, honeybuničko.

Were an extended hallway to trace the life of the protagonist from when he was vomited from the vagina to having his corpse unceremoniously dumped into the nearest river, that hallway would contain parallel forms that mirror the protagonist’s psyche. Upon being vomited from the vagina, a pure shape akin to a Platonic solid - a simple origami - sits at one end of the extended hallway. Time passes and eventually an infant protagonist receives trickles of unexpected knowledge or insight. In the hallway, the Platonic form becomes ever more slightly rumpled during the durations of the trickles of unexpected knowledge or insight. At four years of age, a young protagonist witnesses the family křeček unearthing his mother’s eye from its socket. This sudden flood of unexpected knowledge and insight causes the rumpled Platonic solid to warp and crumple. A teenage protagonist watches the dawn for the first time with a few friends after they escape the nightly prisons of their patently comfortable suburban households on a rise overlooking a slope peppered with beer cans growing astride weedy abominations and a sinewy collage of stochastic plastic bag art. In the hallway paralleling his life, the form contorts even further, mangling itself until its original Platonic purity can barely be beheld. All trickles and all floods of unexpected knowledge or insight distort the parallel “form”. Prejudice concerning whether the unexpected knowledge or insight is positive or negative or somewhere on the five dimensional axis in between does not exist. There is no reversal or backtracking to Platonic purity.

I’m sure she would love to see you one last time before merging with the void. - Jeremy Croteau

The heat death of the universe, in this case, is a (very) slow digestive process during which churning (or placid!) fluids within the colossal stomach break down “reality” into states of gradually higher entropy. And, of course, the inevitable cosmic burp at the end of the process births a new universe. Excellent! Everything is explained now.

Jeremy’s void is not only our own deaths but the final digestion of the universe itself. And if the universe can be reborn by a burp, perhaps our tentatively unctuous souls are also reborn once they fully dissolve and disperse into the waters of the river into which we are unceremoniously dumped. Reincarnation by quantum burp.