The winter solstice is the time of year when your particular hemisphere is tilted the maximum angle opposite the sun across the plane of the ecliptic.
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Sorry, I was trying to bait Neil deGrasse Tyson into materializing to correct me on whatever random astronomy factoid I assume I bungled. Maybe I have to say it three times in front of a mirror?
Anyhoo, that whole sun:
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| ("and waaaash awaaayy the raain...")* |
I don't remember ever taking much notice of the summer solstice, but the winter one has finality. Used to mean a big midwinter feast to put some meat on your bones so you can pull through to the spring thaw. Last chance to avoid a lean, agonizing death, get it while it's hot. Now it means a bigger feast to put some fat on your fat so you can be pulled by a motorized scooter. But of course the memento mori aspect is rooted more fundamentally in the turning of yet another year. Even the declining, gloomy period is now ending. Even the waning has ceased. You find yourself shrinking, alone, against the stillness of the long night.
I became conscious of mortality at four. My mother was reading me a comic book about a mischievous ghost pranking some pirates, and I suddenly blind-sided her with the question "what's a ghost?" That segued to death. She stammered and hesitated and hedged a bit and I don't quite remember her answer because I was soon bawling my eyes out at the thought of nonexistence, with her backpedalling and struggling to work damage control with talk about maybe it's not the end and how I'll have a long, rich, full life and I'll have lots of fun and friends and see lots of movies. The line about seeing lots of movies stuck with me; even to a kindergardener it sounded like desperate reaching. By that point she must've been in full-on "holy shit I broke the kid!" panic mode.
But it's not like you can fixate on any thoughts at that age even if you want to, so it merely became a recurring, nagging nail in my skull. Besides, decades of life ahead of you sound like an inconceivable infinity anyway when you're young. Interestingly it did not cause me to question religion. For about five years afterwards I tread the cognitive dissonance: that my existence would end, and also all that stuff in my glossy, colorful children's bible about heaven and hell was true.
For years afterwards, I'd spontaneously recapitulate my struggle to wrap my head around the infinity of spacetime stretching around my mortality. As many have described, I'd lie in bed imagining death, stillness, feeling my breaths, counting heartbeats, acutely aware of the pause between them, wondering when the next breath will start and when it finally won't, holding my breath and trying to control it. (On the plus side, when I took a self-defense class which ended with short relaxation/meditation sessions the controlled breathing exercises came easy to me. Ditto for swimming.) The most marking experience came only a few times, that terrifying impression when lying still in the darkness that you are continually shrinking away from everything in all directions, all existence receding from you at all angles. I never discussed this with my parents after the incident with the comic book ghost. A seven-year-old's existential angst just didn't seem like the sort of topic one can politely bring up with one's progenitors. It is not the done thing.
By the time I ditched supernatural hocus-pocus I was ten to twelve years old, just in time to transition to adolescence and a healthy (if annoying to everyone around me) appreciation for nihilism. Nihilism gets a bad rap. As means of wiping the proverbial slate it is developmentally necessary, a level foundation upon which to construct a personal interpretation. Or maybe going through a distinct nihilistic stage is not strictly necessary, except that we're born into so much controlling garbage (religion, nationalism, romance, etc.) that our society imposes such a break with imposed morality upon any capable mind. Maybe a saner world would allow for a smoother transition. A world in which we'd know how to answer a four-year-old's questions.
The extent to which any of us settle such conflicts is... debatable. Unfortunately, clutching at the falsely advertised immortality of fame meshes too well with our instinctive social ape need for validation and recognition from others of our species as markers of in-group acceptance and societal rank. And it is false. Think about it: how much do you actually know about Neil deGrasse Tyson? None of it, whether quote or video, is a representation of his neural pattern, the self. You cannot continue through fame. You fabricate a false image, and die like everyone else. I quoted Soundgarden earlier. I paraphrased Rammstein. Words attributed to a word, of which I could look up some compositing names, none of whom I'd know from Adam.
Then there's vicarity, an example of which prompted this post, overhearing someone brag about buying a movie replica complete with stamped logo. That last part is apparently important. I do own trinkets, tend in fact to buy one as keepsake on any trip. Dime-a-dozen stuff. Tiny figurines, usually. Sometimes fossils. My own little glass and plastic and wood and stone and bone menagerie. But their importance is tied to my memories of the trip taken, memetic buttresses to the internal state, not externalizing to the mass market. Maybe I should get a tattoo of the symbol of torment. That'd show you all I missed the point of that story.
Which brings us finally to influence. Change the world. Save the world. Fuck everyone in the world. Do something that matters. But if you seek immortality by the ripple effect of your actions, then tyranny must be your greatest aim. There is no greater influence than constraint unto effacement, the forceful reshaping of others' existence onto your template. As for creativity, for most of history it's been limited by access to the means of preservation, to ink and paper and shelf space, to marble and tempera. Digitization has done wonders in this regard, expecially for the written word, only to substitute for it the limitations of the attention economy, the tyranny of promotion, the absolutist demand for the world's gaze to "like and subscribe" or at least alight onto my graven images and no other minds before me. Thou art god.
Of course the internet also gives freedom from that game, should you take it. Throw your thoughts out there and if the world will not listen, well, that's its business. You can't save the idiots from themselves, and it would be criminal to try.
The long night comes, regardless.
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* Photo actually taken during an eclipse in 2017.
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