Long Division of the Soul
Reg and I had the movie Before Sunrise on our "One Week List"1 for about three years now. I finally saw it this week and figured it would make good livejournal prompt fodder. With the same prompt, but no idea what the other person is going to say, will we at last find out if we are..... THE SAME PERSON?!
Before you read any of this, I want to issue two disclaimers:
1) I am no theologian.
2) I am not high.
My favorite conversation in Before Sunrise is this (You can watch it here, about four minutes into the clip.):
Jesse: Do you believe in reincarnation?
Celine: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.
Jesse: Yeah, right. Well, most people, you know, a lot of people talk about past lives and things like that, you know? And even if they don't believe it in some specific way, you know, people have some kind of notion of an eternal soul, right?
Celine: Yeah.
Jesse: OK, well this was my thought: 50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet. 10,000 years ago, there's, like, two million people on the planet. Now there's between five and six billion people on the planet, right? Now, if we all have our own, like, individual, unique soul, right, where do they all come from? You know, are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls? 'Cause if they are, that represents a 5,000 to 1 split of each soul in the last 50,000 years, which is, like, a blip in the Earth's time. You know, so at best we're like these tiny fractions of people, you know, walking... I mean, is that why we're so scattered? You know, is that why we're all so specialized?
After some lazy, half-assed Googling, I think that the party line on "the population growth problem" is that the balance of souls that are in living humans and the balance of souls on the other side shifts to favor the former as the population of the earth grows.
But that's boring, guys. Soul division, in addition to being the title of my band's follow-up to our smashingly successful debut album, is a fun concept to play around with.
People talk about "soulmates" a lot. I mostly learned about this concept via The WB and Plato through the filter of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. These sources usually represent soulmates as paired halves. If you follow the Before Sunrise theory, though, you've got thousands of soulmates. In meeting one, you won't acheive completeness, but you will still feel more whole. Maybe it's less romantic, but it isn't completely UN-romantic, and it feels much more realistic.
And I think the smaller fraction approach might also help people be a little cheerier if their identified soulmate gets struck by lightning or a bus or cancer. Maybe not. But I don't think the other popular approaches to thinking about souls offer much solace either.
Next time on Robin's Uneducated Half-formed Thoughts about Souls as Inspired by Movies: The Iron Giant.
1A to-do list, written in crayon, with a deadline of one week, where one week does not equal seven days, but does equal however fucking long it takes.
Before you read any of this, I want to issue two disclaimers:
1) I am no theologian.
2) I am not high.
My favorite conversation in Before Sunrise is this (You can watch it here, about four minutes into the clip.):
Jesse: Do you believe in reincarnation?
Celine: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.
Jesse: Yeah, right. Well, most people, you know, a lot of people talk about past lives and things like that, you know? And even if they don't believe it in some specific way, you know, people have some kind of notion of an eternal soul, right?
Celine: Yeah.
Jesse: OK, well this was my thought: 50,000 years ago, there are not even a million people on the planet. 10,000 years ago, there's, like, two million people on the planet. Now there's between five and six billion people on the planet, right? Now, if we all have our own, like, individual, unique soul, right, where do they all come from? You know, are modern souls only a fraction of the original souls? 'Cause if they are, that represents a 5,000 to 1 split of each soul in the last 50,000 years, which is, like, a blip in the Earth's time. You know, so at best we're like these tiny fractions of people, you know, walking... I mean, is that why we're so scattered? You know, is that why we're all so specialized?
After some lazy, half-assed Googling, I think that the party line on "the population growth problem" is that the balance of souls that are in living humans and the balance of souls on the other side shifts to favor the former as the population of the earth grows.
But that's boring, guys. Soul division, in addition to being the title of my band's follow-up to our smashingly successful debut album, is a fun concept to play around with.
People talk about "soulmates" a lot. I mostly learned about this concept via The WB and Plato through the filter of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. These sources usually represent soulmates as paired halves. If you follow the Before Sunrise theory, though, you've got thousands of soulmates. In meeting one, you won't acheive completeness, but you will still feel more whole. Maybe it's less romantic, but it isn't completely UN-romantic, and it feels much more realistic.
And I think the smaller fraction approach might also help people be a little cheerier if their identified soulmate gets struck by lightning or a bus or cancer. Maybe not. But I don't think the other popular approaches to thinking about souls offer much solace either.
Next time on Robin's Uneducated Half-formed Thoughts about Souls as Inspired by Movies: The Iron Giant.
1A to-do list, written in crayon, with a deadline of one week, where one week does not equal seven days, but does equal however fucking long it takes.