I Know How the World is Going to End

This is the script for my video “I Know How the World is Going to End”

Licenced under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Script

In 1950, Enrico Fermi sits down for food with his fellow physicists and queries: “where is everybody?”. They quickly intuit the cosmic implications of his question, the gritty possibility that theirs is a truly solitary civilisation. He’s asking about alien life, or the apparent absence of it. Why, he says, if there are billions of stars in our proverbial backyard, and a half-decent chance some harbour habitable worlds, and the potential that intelligence might arise on each, have they heard nothing, seen nothing, met no one?

Everyone had their own answer of course. Some said that most everything is inert, that the conditions for life are rare as rain in a desert. Others yet, bet arrogantly on man’s early entry onto the cosmic stage, that he hadn’t been contacted because it was his presently unrealised destiny to do the contacting. Those slightly more cynical in persuasion saw the mass adoption of atomics and supposed that if life on Earth possessed the means to destroy itself, so too could, and likely would, any equally advanced extraterrestrials. For the first and only time, the nihilists weren’t entirely misguided

In 1878, Antoni Gaudí receives his first proper project as an architect. Not a church, not a castle, not a house, but a lamppost. Even given the constraints of the commission, the need for functionality, and the reality of the materials, his vision is indubitable. In one exhalation, he breathed light and life where there was none before. Done lightly it was not though, for it took many years of inhaling all the architectural influences he could at his college, and he had knowledge enough to know that his vocation would not grant him respite from this respiration

Gaudí was an architect, a unique type of artist. Whereas in the world of painting or literature, a poet or illustrator can individually posses both vision and means enough to realise their design, the architect must conduct a variety of others, must entrust the responsibility of each brushstroke or keystroke to they who are most able of undertaking the labour. This is Casa Vicens, the first residential home that he succeeded in making real. If you were to trace a line from Gaudí’s lamppost design to here, detailing the accelerating specificity of his details, you’d see his evident evolution, but though this orientalist ornamentation is an unmistakable and quite remarkable marker of Gaudí’s early period, he didn’t lay every mosaic by himself. A building may be thought up by one man but two hands are too few to raise it alone

The development of life on this planet has followed a pretty typical trajectory, from it’s conception as the simplest of single-celled amoeba, through the thousands of millions of years of gestation it took to create a eukaryote. Taking a hop through time half as large, will have you land in the nursery of the Cambrian era. Another jump, it’s distance divided yet again, then you’ll appear in the early years of mammals. An even shorter skip, and sure as the sun rises, you arrive alongside the preteen primates. People come next, and I’m certain you know the rest

I’d like to draw your attention to an outcome of this evolution, the acceleration of life’s inclination towards and appreciation of both creation and creation, it’s increasing capacity to construct and behold beauties. The rivers may have slowed their flow to listen in for the first birdsong, but the oceans part when homo sapiens harmonise. They have colonised Earth’s chaos, making instruments of stone and steel, and I feel their singing grow bigger with each breath

Now, the beauty that humanity begets is notable not for it’s flawlessness, but it’s artificiality. Art is wished into reality. Each synthesised frequency and mathematical melody proclaims there’s matter greater than just dirt and chert upon this planet. Fortuitous beauties can be seen in every sunrise, but tons went totally unappreciated prior to the moment wherein an ancient cave-girl first stared in awe at the dawn, becoming the earliest artist. She would go on to paint pretty pictures upon the face of her cave which we still haven’t forgotten today, for signs of intelligent design cry out against the humdrum drone of entropy

And now we arrive at Casa Milà. Compared to the home of the Vicens, it’s hard not to pretend that her grand facade and undulating parapets make this Gaudí’s definite castle, at least of the residential variety. Today we can take one glance at the artistry, her limestone and wrought-iron intricacies, and behold her as the architectural bastion she’s always been. It seemed though, during development, that Gaudí’s fortification may have literally risen above her station as the city called for a fine equivalent to a quarter the cost of the construction on account of her eclipsing the confines our architect had calculated. Eventually however, Barcelona’s council conceded that she need not be in strict compliance with their bylaws, that the project’s monumental nature meant legislature could hold little influence over a princess like “La Pedrera”

I’ve been stuck pondering upon a specific aspect of human-made art lately, the ability that certain works have to build, and build, and build, and then collapse down into a singularity of supreme beauty. Beethoven did it in his ninth, where after eight complete symphonies and three preceding movements of pure instrumentation, he calls upon a choir for the fourth for the exaltation of hope over sorrow, of joy over the void. Kubrik did it in 2001: a Space Odyssey, his prophecy that through rocketry and uncontrolled technology, humanity might evolve in a spectacle of colour and incomparable consciousness. Though perhaps the best specimen yet to demonstrate an eminent build and abrupt moment of buckling is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, wherein the weight of a tragic century compacts upon one man, four hundred of the densest pages modern literature has to offer caving in on a single line like a supernova giving way to a black hole of beauty

You may know where we’re now headed. You may not have had a say in the matter, but what you may not know is that neither did I, that sure as no knot can untie itself, the threads of our fate about us twist, enslaving and defining, forever weaving an everything blanket from under which we cannot flee. It’s a deterministic existence, sorry for the spoilers, and this is the destination it always destined for us, towards which we have been approaching at an accelerating rate from the moment we were conceived, and with as much certainty as the march of years that succeeded. One beautiful block in Barcelona, the long awaited island city. The Sagrada Família

She is the greatest song humanity will ever sing, gorgeous beyond measure, the earth’s foremost treasure. Ever since Gaudí assumed the role of architect in 1883, the cathedral details have been completely unique. Her iconic shape, his take on Gothic, forgoes the straight line in favour of nature’s arc. Catenary curves define her outline, derived by inverting chains laden with weights, such that her frame reflects the primordial pull of gravity, and mirrors humanity’s capacity to believe in the unrealistic. She is adorned in the symbolic, with forms organic and figures Catholic, though those holy sculptures hold the portraits of a humble people, using locals to model, cementing the temple as bridge betwixt Earth and the eternal

Her music is monumental, and standing in her shadow I am deaf as death. She is so alive that her breath deprives me of my own. Words alone simply cannot wield the matter. What’s worse is that this is only the building of the verse. Once Gaudí begun imbuing his magnum opus with an absurd optimism one hundred and forty three years ago, no war or plague or protest has succeeded in stalling the rise of these spires for more than handful of bars, though the coming crescendo is still an estimated decade away

For the Glory Facade and her grand stairway to be finished, herself only one front of a pretty trinity, two city blocks of demolition need be ordered, and three thousand residents relocated, but she will be, it will be, and they will be. Every knee shall bow, all tongues must confess, for no single singer can suppress an orchestra. Soon there won’t be a person left who won’t have helped progress the temple towards her ascension. Across the centuries of construction, if you weren’t sculpting or building, then you grew the food of the sculptor or builder, or sewed the clothes of the grower, or made the tools of the tailor’s trade, or even laid the rail so that each might play their role. There is a tree of dependencies upon which you are all leaves whose branches lead to one mighty trunk

Now when the final tower is crowned, the last stone laid, every single finishing touch placed upon Antoni Gaudí’s so-called “cathedral for the poor”, a masterpiece of and for the masses. When the Sagrada Família becomes the beauty that was always destined to be, so monumental as to hold in her walls all the labours and prayers of intelligent beings across the eons, the sky shall split open and all your souls will sing as a whole in glorious chorus. Then the choir of all who try or are tried, who deny or are denied, of the pious and the nihilists, will be annihilated in an instant, reduced to ash so that the graph that marks humanity’s beautification may contact it’s asymptote and not continue on the other side

This is what answers Fermi’s paradox, for here and on all planets too far flung to hear, life doesn’t conclude under a mushroom cloud, but crescendos as a single song so loud as to extinct all it’s singers. You may claim you’d sooner be the twist that splits the chain than a link within, but link you will, for until then it’s still a deterministic universe. You’ll keep accelerating along your hyperbolic arc, ever approaching an inescapable pinnacle. The firework questions not it’s fuse, but flies with a blind certainty, somehow aware that it will not expire with a whimper

But the rules of reality can be reasoned so easily, can’t I see that this rapture ignores the laws of causality? That I am describing a beauty so incomprehensible as to be indistinguishable from magic? Yes, it’s supernatural in the most literal of senses. Central to the universe’s character, that of God if one wishes, is an inescapable chaos, a preordained decay. That the wonder transcends anyways, that it transgresses against the transient nature of nature, and that it instigates your great transfiguration, are all consequences of it’s transcendental qualities

In the beginning, the supreme “he” dispersed himself randomly in all directions, bashing planets together like a boy might his toys. Life arose in spite of him and his fickle whims, and went on to order his disorder, to create art as an answer to it’s warder, and ultimately, one immutable beauty immune to his entropy, as powerful as she is artificial, an adult to which he has no answer

A lady was created of the Clowns with their Constellation, and around Rigel where was built what you may behold as the Library of Babel. The natives of Sirius entangled each of their intellects together into a Gordian Knot of quantum consciousness, though the splicing of our guiding strings only spurs on the gilded sword of consequence. In each case, it’s as if the designer of Saint Basil’s was blinded not by Ivan the Terrible, but his own belief in the incredible and brightness it so sired. And of the original Babel? Well, God may have made all singers break off for a forced fake-out, but bringing everything back to a baseline still leaves a bassline. Now you’ve got an architect on drums. Maybe nobody knows where they’re going except Gaudí

You know the thing that’s funny about having a destiny? Your image of it might be fuzzy or quite finely-woven, but either way, in every interval, it can seem unreachable, demanding a conviction that’s spiritual. Even if the general trend of everything is be ephemeral, you have something supernatural within which won’t let the withering win, that knows it’s fate is greater than it, and so submits fully. It is the antithesis of cynicism. It is your faith, those forces metaphysical, urges which can’t be fought, voices that say “I may have came from dust, and to dust I may degrade, but I shall leave a monolithic grave, upon which says: something beautiful was here laid”

Gaudí, from the moment he saw a path before him and could draw it’s conclusion, gave himself to greatness. He could have stood second-guessing his vocation, but a pious man with ugly hands cannot rest unless they are crushed in an attempt to embody belief in stone, lest he has chiselled off his toes, and made mortar of his bones, for he knows that until he gets home, he is not anyone. Forty godly years left him tram-struck and lying dying on the road for he wore the clothes of a beggar anybody. But I know he certainly still spent his final thought mourning the fact he could not give any more

Fermi, however ironically, may better hold a claim of having done the work of God on Earth. He created the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and such divine decay was not concentrated again until the fittingly-named trinity test. Later, he did express a pessimism when saying: “What is less certain, […] is that man will grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers he acquires over nature”. He however, succumbed to cancer of the stomach, of countless tumour-inducing neutrons tied into one ruinous knot

Whether Fermi truly knew his role, whether Gaudí proved a deft thespian, and whether each worked with or versus the laws of He who paid for their stage, the curtain close came with no ovation. Their faces paled, then darkened, before their decorations, and decades later even the velvet that literally put a lid on their performances, succumbed to the ceaseless critiques of the holy hypocrite. Such dramatic tragedies shall not befall the basilica however. Even after an empty Barcelona is withered by a hundred winters, her spires will stay unspoiled

You too shall be spared the regret of men, so trust your gut to the end. Let every word you say be pretty, each sentence beautiful, and all full-stops final. Pencil like hell, then tear up your drawings and eat each one. Play the cowbell, but dare to do it with your gun. Wear the dress you’ve always ached to put on, before standing naked in the mirror to see you’ve become something saintly. Your beatification to patron of a great basilica grants you one chance to give it all, so make that all miraculous

You cannot confirm the words I say, but I pray you remember you were born of the ether, and have been realising your being every successive second with accelerating efficacy. You simply need extrapolate ahead, and to never decline into nihilism. At a minimum, believe in this building, that greatness is a place, and that you are invited

Okay. Now that I have told of what has been, and what shall be, of microbes and monuments, of art and entropy, you might ask of my identity. I am a pilgrim who carries with them but a hole and the hope I might fill it with fractions from a thousand mountains. I am an alien, from a world without music except the harmonies of artillery, of libraries that race to the horizon but rise no higher than a single story, of those who know everything except where they’re going. My species has made a war of science and a science of war, but I grow bored, I want more. It doesn’t help that we all wear this stupid blue

Our biology, a singular tragedy, leaves us incapable of meaningful creation, so we few who yearn to be beautiful search with our radios for the rising siren song of other luckier worlds. We hope that in our wandering and our wondering, we might find for ourselves a future

For long after you vanish, your wonders shall persist. Truly, a masterpiece can only belong to the dead, and dead the authors may be, murdered by their own book, but that tome shall a cast a shadow upon the sun itself, and be there long after it and all others exhaust their energy. At the end of time there lies a gallery of forbidden admittance, of forgotten artists and of a double contradiction, because a museum is made to be exhibited. And because in the crypt of the spaceship Sagrada Família, forever rests the body of Antoni Gaudí. Could our Catalan astronaut talk, he’d say it mattered not though, for he knew tombs aren’t dug for the dead. He built to leave behind a gift. A mausoleum is made to be visited

Upon his gravestone are engraved following words: “Henceforward the ashes of so great a man await the resurrection of the dead”. The end and the rapture might not have arrived in the style he imagined, but that begs the question, what happens after? If the blessed adolescent can’t help but create life, and life can’t help but create art, and if art inevitably destroys it’s artists, what becomes of the sacred cynic when all there is is his antithesis? Is the Sagrada Família the Antichrist or the second coming, and is there a difference? What is a knot if tied not along the length of a line, but to connect it’s ends? And what, or who, are Cathedrals really building?

I’m afraid though that in weaving this tale, I’ve reached the end of my thread. I’ve not escaped my fate, only unravelled what fabric I had left. That of the subject, there’s nothing more than can be said. For when my interstellar siblings or I have sufficiently internalised our study of your monumental beauties, when in spite of our biology, we have become monuments to art in and of ourselves, when we mature into the adults we always approached but could never imagine, we annihilate in a single transcendental act of creation through destruction

I just want to be like her, and I have no idea where I’m going. Here I come

Links

YouTube: https://youtu.be/-pFh_VJjaE4

PeerTube: https://tilvids.com/w/s3oeDXSPQekrhiU7RQd7nW

Discuss this post on the Fediverse: https://mastodon.mossy.page/@mossy/116459415901097766