Barely Hinged: Thoughts after Watching Solaris (1973)

SPOILER ALERT DO NOT READ IF YOU DO NOT WANT SPOILERS

I wanted to live longer to feel everything, love everything, become transformed by everything, but do we really need to live a long time for this, let alone anything approximating forever, becoming the immortal, or is one moment enough for this? It is a question that has been asked many times before, but is it a good question at all? Is it a fake question? Is there any fake question?

I ask this in the aftermath of watching Solaris (1973) and consuming more potassium chloride than I would have wanted to try in my lifetime on the insistence of a friend. This potassium chloride — would I have tried it were it not for my commitment to suffering as a way to pass the time, as an attempt to exalt myself fully in this so called experience that I claim to value? I pass a value judgment about salt, its affect on me, its complete change on my state of consciousness and body, its change on the potassium pumps inside me change my entire existence — in some definition of my existence if I am not just the sum but the expression of summations of all my potassium pumps.

I have to get through this entire page, before I remove it from this typewriter, describing this salt, the sensation of salt, the superiority of different salts, how something so small — it changes me. Imagine going into an entire salt ocean. The ocean of consciousness in Solaris (1973) is made redundant by real oceans here on earth, the real salt oceans that are already oceans of consciousness, already capable of absorbing all of us, already able to dissolve us, transport us, turn us into things other than ourselves, combine ourselves into the full collective consciousness. But we would not become as immortal.

Is the written word a way to stay immortal? Not in that way that people mean when they talk about wanting to stay conscious forever — wanting to remain salt. Those people who hope that technology will advance enough so that they live forever tend not to focus on the correct technology, they are not focused on the right sphere of experience. They focus on the changes of states, the deltas between time A and time B, rather than the substrate of the changes, the salt, the water — something basic, something found in the ocean, something making up most of the earth, our entire planet, something so common cannot be the special thing that makes humanity unique, can it?

And yet, on a planetary scale, it is indeed what makes our planet unique on a planetary scale. And yet this is not enough for us somehow, to be part of this unique salt water mass; we do want to be individuated, we do want to be our own sad sacks of salt and water, we do not actually want to be dust in the wind, or particles in the ocean, even though we (and men especially) seem to give themselves comforts that this is okay if they become this, if they become just a part of the ocean, because that would mean that they are part of everything.

And that would mean that they are not nothing, cannot be nothing, are immortal already, and thus have solved this question of the death, what happens after, what happens before, how to make it have any meaning, because if you do not know when you will become apart and a part of everything again and lose all individuation, you can continue to be yourself without such shame, without the shame of being yourself, being apart, but not being part of everything, not being part of God, not having a sense of your power or your presence. If you know that you will be part of the ocean someday, you do not have to be afraid today. But then why do so many want to create a save state of who they are now, as if they are actually afraid of what comes next? As if they are afraid of the terror—