Woe Is a Ship Sinking in the Dunes of Multiverse
(and other sad tales we tell ourselves)
I’ve dared myself to get through the process of writing this piece without so much as an errant peep out of any comic-book references — a move that is born less from a need to disparage the singular significance of superhero sorcery than the incredible interiority of setting up a personal challenge to not let it go too easy on me.
I’ve also dared myself to try and make some sense, but I realise that I owe you, who made the decision to read thus far, beyond that needlessly verbose opening statement, some semblance of truth. So, on the off chance that, after a few passages, you find me being something of a petulant six-year-old who seems to have just been handed a hefty dictionary and an unfortunate access to the internet, I hope you’ll cut me some slack for the sheer attempt, meagre as it may turn out to be, that I hazard to make.
This brings us, quite naturally, to the afternoon from last weekend when I huddled together with my mother to spend the Sunday routine exactly how a Sunday should ideally be spent — watching a Pixar movie like it’s a lovely David Attenborough documentary.
Soul, directed by Pete Docter, introduces us to Joe Gardner, a middle school band teacher and jazz aficionado, who finally bags the musical gig he has always dreamed of after years of multiple rejections, only to then, well, die. It could have, thus, been just a 10-minute short but Joe refuses to let this be the end. He instead finds himself in a place named The Great Before — an ingenious prelude to the pesky annoyances that we call our innate Jungian archetypes (also: our personalities).
Now that I’ve set the stage to elaborate on the premise of the brainworm that’s been hounding me for some days, you can just ignore all of that — this isn’t a movie review and while I do consider the film in question to be arguably, marginally, slightly superior to the delightful Inside Out, this isn’t about my Letterboxd tendencies either.
Despite the fact that I’ve spent the last few minutes beating about the bush, the said bush is, admittedly, a rather peculiar object in itself. In a rampant global culture obsessed, for good enough reason, with the idea of ‘afterlife’ and the wishful recycling of souls to sometimes excuse one’s indulgences in sins with impunity, this bush, tended wonderfully by Joe Gardner and his story, decides to forgo all of it.
Anything that begins with the prefacing of an unpopular opinion can be rightfully touted as recklessly provocative and so it’s my unpopular opinion that the meticulously curated paradigm of life before and after death that most of us invariably latch onto, is rather silly. That it’s a convenient spray of make-believe, much like almost everything else we tell ourselves, to render this little stretch of living just that tiny bit less painful. That it is, almost conversely then, an essential anchor to our floundering existence and therefore, an absolute need.
But that doesn’t take away from the aforementioned silliness of it, I’m sorry.
The movie cleverly depicts a fantastical microcosm that is simultaneously a wondrous macrocosm, with spare bits of exposition, and leaves the concept of souls to be finite entities. They are ‘born’ and guided to the precipice of being readied for their actual birth before they live for a while and then die. While there is a passing mention of The Great Beyond, the souls themselves appear to just disintegrate and cease to exist beyond that point.
I find this to be a particularly linear and beautifully simpler interpretation of life as opposed to the lofty, romantic ideas we nurse of the universe being in a loop, with infinite other universes being in their loops right beside our own. It’s a vivid, if a tad harsh, rebuttal to the comfort we are often lulled into at the thought of ‘things perhaps working out better in a different life and a different world where we are different people but really much the same’.
This word-vomit is not to suggest, of course, that I’m in any way beyond those intricate emotional defences that we build up in the face of tragedy, grief and our own human shortcomings. In another world, I’m a flamboyant playwright adapting Shakespeare’s Sonnets for mobile theatre groups. In this one though, I just hope I made some sense.
[Any instances of sentiments — philosophical, religious or witchy — hurt through this write-up are completely incidental and any possible affliction of the same is not intended with a sense of malice on my part. I’m just a six-year-old with a dictionary and, unfortunately for the world, access to the internet.]
