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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Monsters” Down in the Dirt, v151 (the November 2017 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the issue book the Light in the Sky the Down in the Dirt Sept.-Dec. 2017 collection book		get the 418 page May-August 2017 Down in the Dirt issue anthology 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

As Passengers

Robert David Roe

    I deeply resent our world in a certain dimension for enforcing what I call meekness on people, on myself but also on people much more deserving of attention than myself. Unspeakably subtle structures in life, at work, in the family, everywhere really, rob us of our self licensure. We can’t all get up and rebel against this oppression because our oppressor is faceless. Certainly no one person and not even a culprit such as a single board of directors enforces the norm that is our quietude. Rather it is society as a whole. It is we ourselves who tell us our ideas aren’t worthy of being heard.
    I am jealous of protestant preachers. I want to speak on a topic with such authority that I must intone almost like someone singing a hymn. I don’t want to believe in God in that way; sin. Rituals. Cleansing. Sacrifice; I just want to speak in long-rolling, opulent tomes of clauses, sentences that may never end.
    Along with some of the realizations I will tell you now, I have also realized it is presumptuous of the preachers. So I have chosen, at this stage in my life, to risk presumptuousness. You see, I am actually a meek person even if I am coming into a new voice.
    I have chosen to risk placing my voice in the atmosphere.

    This isn’t going to the dark place you think it is, but my topic is that our overwhelmingly apparent possession of free will is an illusion. Ultimately I turned away from this belief because I could not face it, because there must be more. This is inconsistent, but if you believe in pure physics it has to be true: we’re made of electrons and other particles. The immutable laws of physics control the motion of objects from the minuscule to the massive, don’t they? Our thoughts and our consciousness itself are electrochemical processes, fully explicable in physics, a closed system. What blossoms in your head is an event in your brain and it’s no more up to chance than the dribbling of a basketball, which when it goes awry always has a determinative explanation. The dribbler applied pressure differently or didn’t see a pebble someone had dropped on the court, which sent the ball off in a seemingly random direction. It’s all predictable even if we don’t know the details of each instant. So is your mind. There is no juncture in the determinative, electrochemical system at which free will can slip in and magically change things. Rather, the utterly authentic illusion that you can do what you will is an effect of a marvelously complex machine.
    I’ve read the results of experiments that sank in more deeply with me than they seem to with most people. In a particular experimental setup, highly repeatable, that has spawned many similar experiments, scientists are scanning the subject’s brain. They ask the subject to push a button at an otherwise random moment of his or her own choosing. A signature burst of activity always comes at a consistent span before the decision—not before pressing the button, but before the decision itself. The neural activity comes before the patient is conscious that he or she will experience the seeming moment of resolution. Your brain knows long before you that you’re going to have the thoughts you have. The physical organ operates with the regularity of the machine it is, with the consistency of all physics. That we’re aware of ourselves is a side effect of the complexity of our nerve network.

    Just as the stars are always in motion, billions of miles away, flying away from us—at more than the speed of light, as it happens—so does our nervous system keep doing its thing without our awareness. The electrons, in their countless multiples of trillions, are always orbiting their nuclei in our spines. Our neurons are always firing and the universe has always already decided what any one of us is going to do. As we surf the moment that is the now, this truth is on our heels. It is atop us, and it is ahead of us right up onto this moment, this one right now in which you comprehend this sentence. Ancient and medieval theory held that the stars were points on a vast sphere, as if pinpricks of light in a shell that enclosed our own world. Might not that just as well be true? Might I just as well indulge a picturesque fantasy? I’ll risk seeming pretentious to say I’ve begun to see the brushstrokes of this being of ours. Yes, I choose this Van Gogh-inspired aesthetic of existence in which the starry night is our painted existence.

    When I read the results I mentioned, they sank right down into me making perfect sense, then loomed up menacingly.
    I no longer believe we’re just slaves to fate—the angle I’m giving you is only one truth in a telescoping series of truths—but I dwelt in that perspective alone for a few days before moving on. I still relapse into the thought loop at times. Those experiments arriving in my hands, even the arising of my self doubt, would have been not my doings but machinations of particles. Even my several days’ cogitation, during which I calmed myself and looked away, were the universe being me. My flash of realization on that week of that year had been inevitable since the unfurling of hydrogen and fire the age of the universe ago.
    I do have a reason for bringing this to you. I’ve never been so sober nor seen the other side so clearly as when I grasped how much sense total predetermination made. Once you see it, you reel. Over some time you adjust and settle into a stance as to what’s happening to your mind, and after that you start to see the texture more clearly; I mean the way the paint lies on this life of ours. The big bang, they say, happened 12 to 14 billion years ago; they could be wrong and might even be wrong about how the universe began, but in a way the beginning happened just a moment ago, and in a way, is all on the verge of beginning to unfold. Paintings in museums are paintings within a painting. All beauty is of one kind. Take a natural monument: a stunning placement of a sandstone monolith in a spartan landscape: that is no older than works of art, which you mistakenly see now as more ephemeral. Hear the right rock song catching you at the crest of a peaking mood. Neither is the monolith more or less inevitable than the song. At the same time of the birthing explosion, so was created this moment here, now, in which I rant to you about the predetermined nature of existence, and you are in the audience, telling yourself in some low-lying vestige of your consciousness, that you choose to sit quietly and listen—more or less rapt, I hope, or I’m going to have a word with you after church.
    The end—of everything, as it were—is also just around the corner. This should thrill you with relief. Life’s all over. Now live the rest of it. You’ve done your damnedest and your damnedest is done.
    If I tried and succeeded with convincing you we had no real choice, would it not deprive money of its ineluctable significance? It would reveal that money is not something you spend but something you do.
    Would it infuse with new mystery the way in which poets and writers interlock these words into these regiments and terraces of time? Can you see it would reveal language itself to be an invention, devised by a single human being or a group of human beings?
    If I could make you see this, that we are all just deeply programmed machines, I would turn you into the absolute passenger. You would be in the backseat of a luxury automobile cruising the city, the pinpoint lights of windows suggesting the shapes of great enterprises. You would have no ability to escape, looking up at the towers through glass. After the lights massaged your perception for a while, after your internal debate as to whether to attack the driver and seize control moved into a rear zone of your consciousness, you would realize a sense of resignation had set up in you, and then even more vague and profound, a deep knowing: that you owned all within your view, and that anyone who affirmed your ownership could be no more foolish than anyone who denied it. That as the one who knew, you could now stop the car and place foot to concrete. Walk the streets and wrap your fingers around the brass, concrete, clean, and filthy details of your kingdom, godless and feeling the truth as your personal, end-all, be-all blood, like some monk of the ages ever sent back to live this life again, and again, and again, and again, and again.
    I only hope to have entertained you.

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