Que Sera, Sera

Side B was “I’ll Take Manhattan”

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
7/16/08
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Religious/sera.htm

I dreamed a 25th century priest found an old CD of mine and, with some difficulty, read the long-obsolete item in hopes of finding evidence that Bill Gates really lived, and what he did between the ages of 18 and 60, when he revealed himself as the Christ. He read me and wondered how anyone could be so wrong about the sainted George W. Bush. He concludes that they must have had crackpots back then, too, and tosses the CD.

What happens, of course, is that an emissary from God shows up about 3 am, shortly before my middle-aged bladder is going to wake me up anyway, and vouchsafes glimpses into the future. These nocturnal transmissions are a pain in the butt, but on the other hand, I rest better knowing that any time now the Pleiadians are going to land and save humanity and fix the 2015 World Series. Well, gods are capricious, you know. Pro sports just don’t have enough scandals. But I thought my essays would have done better.

Everyone wants to know the future. Well, sorta. We want to know where the market is going to be next March, or who the next president will be, or if Jim Carrey will ever win an Oscar. (Magic Ball says “no”). But we don’t want to know what day we’re gonna die, or really nasty shit, like how we’ll spend the last twenty years of our lives paralyzed and in unending pain from a bathroom accident.

Fortunately, my bladder warns me about then that if I don’t stop wasting time talking to figments of last nights’ pizza, I’m going to have my own bathroom accident right there in my bed, and the moment of enlightenment passes. On the other hand, am I ever gonna clean up on the 2015 World Series. Ha ha ha. You suckers have NO IDEA.

There’s a movie coming out next year that, if they do it right, has a character who knows the future. ALL of the future. All the future there is: yours, mine, that of every atom in the universe. He has nearly unlimited power, and the US Army takes him, names him “Doctor Manhattan” and tries to use him as a deterrent in the cold war. The movie will be called "The Watchmen".

In this particular world, crafted by Alan Moore, the author of “V for Vendetta,” there were a group of people with social problems who got caught up in the fad of dressing up in a superhero costume and running out and fighting crime. None of them had x-ray vision, or super strength. None of them could leap buildings with a single bound, not even a ranch-style bungalow. They just believed in truth, justice, and the American way, and hoped that this will help them get laid.

What happens instead is that, in the words of one of the caped crusaders, “the masks have eaten their brains.” None of them were paragons of mental health to begin with, and pretending to be nickle-and-dime batmen exacerbates their psychological and personality problems. One of them, Rorschach, ends up pretty much like the guy with the bolt-gun in “No Country for Old Men.” He’s one of the good guys on paper, but he’s got more squirrels running around in his head than does the entire New Forest. He tends to deal with petty annoyances by throwing them down elevator shafts.

But Doctor Manhattan is in an entirely different boat. He is an ordinary human who has become a God. Not a god like one of the caped guys, a well-meaning narcissist named Ozymandias who concludes that for the good of humanity it may be necessary to kill a few million of them. Manhattan is the real deal. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omnicognitive. The US military tries to make a gaudy weapon and national symbol out of him. It doesn’t work out.

He sees the future. All of it. The only thing he can’t see is the plot resolution, because Moore couldn’t come up with a convincing reason why he wouldn’t just blurt it out in chapter three and wreck the whole story. So he had the baddie use faster-than-light particles called tachyons, which muddied Doctor Manhattan’s see-um power. Truly omnicognitive characters are pure hell on plot lines unless you happen to be Kurt Vonnegut.

But it isn’t enough that Manhattan sees the future. The fact that he sees it means that it cannot be altered. He knows, for example, that John F. Kennedy will be assassinated, but because Kennedy has/will have been killed in history, he cannot change it.

In one scene, he is talking with his former girlfriend, and mentions that in a few minutes she will surprise him by revealing that she’s sleeping with a mutual friend. Astounded, she looks at him and says, “You know about me and Dan?” He replies, “No, but I will in a few minutes.” Past, present and future are all one thing to him, and everything is pre-ordained. When she does mention it, he recoils in surprise. She asks how he can be surprised, and he says, “It is all foreordained. Including my responses.” The woman says, “Are you saying that we are all just puppets on a string?” to which he replies, “Yes, the only difference is that I can see the strings.”

Can you imagine a more soul-numbing trap to be in? You know everything that is going to happen, and there is nothing you can do about it, because there is no linearity in time, and if something is going to happen, that is exactly the same as if it already happened, and is happening. The future is as immutable as the past, and the present is a fly caught between those two globs of amber.

To a god, the immutability of time is a death trap and more than a death trap. A god must see a terrible thing coming that could easily be avoided, a simple matter of tightening a bolt on a airplane landing gear, but because it has/will have happened, it is a part of the god’s eternal now, experienced in the immediate forever.

A god knows there is no way out of this most horrible and subtle of traps because if there was, he would already know about it. He lives it constantly, as he does the moment he came into existence, in an eternal now.

Doctor Manhattan, unsurprisingly, has trouble relating to people. When asked to save the human race from an imminent nuclear war, he retreats from the awful vacuity of his omnipresence through quantification. He explains that to him, there is no difference between a living person and a corpse, because they both contain the same number of electrons. Even Rorschach is taken aback by that one.

Prescience and omnicognizance are emotional death traps, ones that both make a god the most powerful entity in the universe and at the same time utterly incapable of any meaningful interaction with it. The god, in the end, is in the position of someone who is watching a movie for the thirtieth time. He knows exactly how it will end, and can do nothing to alter it. He has, in effect, found the rock so heavy he cannot lift it, and is now stuck for eternity, holding it over his head. And from this position, he is expected to relate to, and understand, humanity.

The old song, “Que Sera, Sera” (“What will be, will be”) is an invitation to dream of an inviting but unknown future. But for Doctor Manhattan, or any god, it is the most profound of curses, one which makes the notion that any such god could have a role in human affairs (such as caring about the 2015 World Series) utterly absurd.