🪟 Transcript 39 - We are eternal beings
Transcript #39 (Part 5): The material and metaphysical in relation to time and eternity.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
PART 5: IDEALS
We are eternal beings
🪟 39 - We are eternal beings
This is the structure of a story: the beginning introduces the protagonist and sets the scene. We, the audience, are initiated into the protagonist’s viewpoint. As we progress through it, we witness a gradual unfolding of the protagonist’s fate through the manifold events that besiege him or her. The protagonist, an individual with free will (or at least the assumption thereof), is depicted as weaving through these events, navigating certain ups and downs, eventually taking the fall into inevitable troubles.
Aesthetically, the unfolding of protagonist’s story carries a particular tone or ambience to it. It may be loud, terrific, spectacular; it may be tense, meandering, melancholy. Whatever it is, his or her story transpires from event to event, from the consequences of one decision to another, as the story unfolds and expands its contents. As the protagonist comes of age, the narrative threads—loose from emerging inconsequentially at the beginning of the story—gradually become tied together under a certain praxis event, where all things come to a head: the ‘climax’. At this point, the through line on which the protagonist has been treading the whole time becomes clear. This is the purpose behind why the protagonist’s story has been told in the first place! Here, the director’s driving purpose and ambition is made concrete in its depiction.
At the tail end, the story continues to develop, serving to embolden the idea, which may itself be bold or ambiguous, or both. Most of the time, the near-end dangles a vague and wistful-something… as the conclusion approaches, the main characters are enriched, along with the solidification of shadows, textures and colours around those main characters. This continues… until the story resolves completely, that is, when the story ends.
The End. Fin. The viewpoint of the protagonist is wrapped up decisively. The full shape of the story is delineated—as if a music producer has laid the final note, a craftsperson has made the final snip, or a chef has plated the food, saying, ‘it is finished’. This goes for the storyteller, who says thereby without any explicit statement as such: ‘it is finished’. The work is finished; the story is thus told; the finished product has been plated, left up for our judgement. In a film, once the final frame fades off and the end credits begin to roll, the scenes have finally culminated. In a book, once the full stop wraps up the last sentence, the chapters have finally culminated.
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What is so deeply interesting here is that the structure of the depiction is not accidental: the story portrayed in a film hereby wraps itself up with consciousness of its own ending, the full course that it has charted from the beginning through to the ending, and consciousness down to the level of the detail of a particular character or object. A film plays out for us, the audience, frame by frame, and the story exists within it frame by frame—but the most real substance of the story itself, its meaning, is not bound to such material limits. Even when the film is rolling, the exact timeframe, say, minute 21.42 of the film itself is never in actuality its “present moment”, for we do not experience a film in particularity—that is, frame by frame. Rather, we experience the story, perceiving the film from an abstracted point of view: we experience the depiction of the protagonist as a weaving thread, positioned and dispositioned by the beginning, progression, and who they become by the end of the story.
In other words, we do not retrospectively see the film for what it is materially, as a conglomerate of frames. The story is crafted by the director, from a “timeless” point of view, designated for an audience to watch it from a “timeless” point of view; for the viewpoint of the story, an eternal view is a view of the whole story and beyond simultaneously, even as it is seen and interpreted within time; it is a view from everywhere and nowhere at once. For while the film does indeed exist within the dimensions of time, it depicts a story that can only make sense across the entire storyline’s span of time. It imposes meaning upon itself not as particular frames even the sum of its frames, but as one whole, unified narrative.
The structure of the story is the structure of our ontology. The film is an analogy for our material body, which is limited by time and space, while the story is an analogy for the meaning we impose on ourselves and others, which is unconstrained, boundless, infinite, metaphysical. We experience our individual lives, at all times, aeterno modo: from the viewpoint of the eternal—the unity, the whole. In simple words, we live in time, and yet we see all of time, in other words, we live outside time.
From this line of thought, we can see how there is, in fact, no present moment. And certainly, no simply “being in the present”. It is a matter of complete irony when a new-age spiritualist says, “I am being in the present”, for a bird or lily should never say as such: “I am hereby in the present”. The immediacy of our being lends itself as the intersection of the past, present, and future in dialectic with all of time—thus, the present moment is ever only an intersection; what we call ‘Now’ is only the eternally recurring—eternally perishing and eternally rebirthing—crossroads of time. For example, if I lose my memory (that is, my inner sense of history), the present moment loses all meaning; the world would reveal itself to me as a perplexing sandbox of objects I do not understand. This alone demonstrates that time is many orders more than the present moment. The human ‘Now’ is breathed life into by all of our history and all of the future. Without a history and without a future to mediate, the ‘Now’ is dead, and devoid of meaning. This is ‘Now’—the persisting crossroads of time—where the mysterious, manifold branches of all time intersect at a particular point in the unfolding of our subjective experience.
We are within time materially, but we are above time metaphysically. Thus, the ancient and timeless Christian sentiment: we are eternal beings. Insofar as we are metaphysical beings, that is precisely what we are: eternal beings. This is the viewpoint from which the concept of a soul becomes so undeniably obvious it would be stupid to deny, for it merely points to our metaphysical core, which shows us to the fact once again: we are eternal beings. Stories are simply aesthetic microcosms of this reality.