Dorothy and Dylan in Sepia, 2
When we first got goldfish, it freaked me out that we had pets that didn’t blink or close their eyes when they slept. They just stared. What were they thinking? Marty still sometimes stands by the aquarium, regarding, and asks, “What are they thinking?”
I don’t believe a single cartoon has been able to handle the fact that fish don’t blink. We’re so used to blinking as a response. Closing eyes and opening them. And so people describe sharks as having lifeless eyes because they don’t blink. Snakes, too.
Insects don’t have eyelids and don’t blink but they’re too small for us to be consciously bothered by it. But, as with fish, when we blow them up large and make them characters in cartoons and movies, we give them eyelids so they can blink and show emotion. If it blinks and shows emotion you may be able to attempt to reason with it. Whatever doesn’t blink is lacking “soul”, without feeling, having no ability to reason as we reason (or even as a blinking cat reasons), “blindly” motivated by only its own mechanical sense of instinctual justice and therefore not subject to personal, passionate plea and argument. Except for god. Many people think of god as having a kind of All Seeing Eye that doesn’t blink. If that god’s All Seeing Eye blinked, then all the lights would go out. So, god doesn’t blink. Yet people don’t think of god as lacking soul. Indeed, people think of god as being the god father of soul. But they’re wrong. James Brown was the god father of soul.
Inspired by the movie, I reread Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and finished it last night.
At the wheel of his slow car, Bob Arctor forgot theoretical matters and did a rerun of a moment that had impressed them all: the dainty and elegant straight girl in her turtleneck sweater and bell-bottoms and trippy boobs who wanted them to murder a great harmless bug that in fact did good by wiping out mosquitoes–and in a year in which an outbreak of encephalitis had been anticipated in Orange County–and when they saw what it was and explained, she had said words that became for them their parody evil-wall-motto, to be feared and despised:
IF I HAD KNOWN IT WAS HARMLESS
I WOULD HAVE KILLED IT MYSELF.That had summed up to them (and still did) what they distrusted in their straight foes, assuming they had foes, anyhow, a person like well-educated-with-all-the-financial-advantages Thelma Kornford became at once a foe by uttering that, from which they had run that day, pouring out of her apartment and back to their own littered pad, to her perplexity. The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they’d meditated on how to ball her, and remained. Her heart, Bob Arctor reflected, was an empty kitchen: floor tile and water pipes and drainboard with pale scrubbed surfaces, and one abandoned glass on the edge of the sink that nobody cared about.
The novel’s even more brilliant than I’d remembered it to be.
Because I’m Worth It has a Mysteries blog post up and yesterday I made a couple of silly comments on it, in which I speculated the object in question was a “sentient life being”. I’d intended to write “sentient living being” but was eating ice cream and was conversing with Marty so was distracted. Playing around, meaning to correct my comment with another comment on how I’d intended to write “sentient living being”, I instead questioned if “sentient life being” was redundant, though I was thinking, no, not on certain levels, at the same time already bogging myself down with now we’re getting into questions on how to absolutely qualify sentience when all I’d intended to do was make a stupid joke with Kate Moss as the punch line. I’d this fantasy going that the metallic sphere in the picture was some alien being and the tube or nozzle down near the grass was its one eye. Sucked in by the celeb columns and using them as its only information source about Earth, the creature had fallen in love with Kate Moss and had come to Earth and landed in this out-of-the-way lawn behind a nowhere building and was waiting for Kate Moss to pass by, its one lonely eye inspecting all that passed and no one even knowing it was sentient and stopping to welcome it to Our World. Certainly, as it was in England, Kate Moss should pass by at any time, the creature had at first believed. But the days and weeks passed and no Kate Moss. Eventually, Because I’m Worth It comes along and takes the photo, wondering what is this thing, but failed to recognize it was a sentient living being as the creature, despondent, sunk in hopelessness, too long ailing over both the loss of its dream and its foolhardiness, was scarcely aware of her presence and so didn’t even bother to squack and buzz in greeting. And because its one eye doesn’t blink as ours blink.
Yeah, I know. But that’s my story for the creature and I’m sticking by it.
Returning to reading A Scanner Darkly, I came on this passage about an hour later.
“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person’s eyes maybe died back in childhood. What’s dead in there still looks out. It’s not just the body looking at you with nothing in it; there’s still something in there but it died and just keeps on looking and looking; it can’t stop looking.”
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