entropy

 

"The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal."

Camille Paglia

If life was a game, I think it would be more like a game of chess rather than UNO. As much as I want to believe life is a race in an unorganised sector, there are some rules that we haven't written but adhere to. A game of chess is played the same way across the globe, whereas the card game UNO is different. It's more down to convenience and familiarity. Even the rules set by the game makers are questioned. Life can't be that.

In the age-old debate of whether history is linear or circular, I find myself in the latter camp. No, I'm not saying we are living in a matrix. I just believe we are bound by rules that we can't break. These rules define our timelines. The laws of physics, mathematics or even economics. These were always there; we just recognised them along the way.

And these rules forbid us to fabricate the story. Caesar, who made himself dictator for life, had to adopt Augustus to prolong his memory. On the other hand, Joel and Clementine (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) found it hard even after erasing their memories to resist the rules that bring order in our stories. Neither Pax Romana nor Lacuna Inc. could.

We can't dictate. We adhere. We oblige. We succumb. We roll down and show our belly. We are bound to these laws we can't see, so we dread and obey. Sometimes we put up a fight. To make our versions of forever in this finite. Yet we fail. Just look at the ruins of civilisations gone by. Read the poems of lovers written across ages. Our own vain attempts to be remembered or unlove people before it's time.

As everything in the universe slowly moves away from chaos into order or order into chaos. Like a sunflower seed in the ground, sprouting to the warm kisses of the sun every day. Fixing its glance without blinking all of her days. And one day the same star, the lifegiver, falls into chaos and drapes himself with a dark cloak and becomes a black hole, sucking every last warmth from the sunflower who loved him. 

Everything we hold dearly, everything we want to have forever, has in it a code written, a code strong enough to paint chaos into the order we love. Be it empires, be it monuments, be it love or every human relationship. It is the law we can't fight against, yet we try, trying to occupy forever in the palm of our hands. We write poems and stories or even this little piece knowing that tomorrow something can take it away from us. It's revolutionary. But like every revolution, it only gets an honourable mention. Chaos will find its way again.

In this cycle of chaos and order, we are just sojourners. We get to keep what we are given for the time. And when that's being taken away, we can ask for five more minutes. Can I sit with you five more minutes before I leave? And sometimes you don't even get that. Like Richard Parker, who walked into the jungle without looking back, we might not even get a moment either.

And chaos doesn't come to everyone all at once. Death, separation or even forgetting. It finds us individually. For some, order moves into chaos in a snap of Thanos's fingers. For some, order stays for long. You wish to find the Lacuna clinic and remove the memories in your brain to embrace chaos faster. But in life there aren't clinics like that. So we remain like the left behind in Infinity War, trying our best to bring back this chaos into order. Again, this isn't End Game, and we can't do that either. And that minority becomes what Thanos explained: "As long as there are those who remember what was, there will always be those who cannot accept what can be." 

We can't, we just can't. All we can do is accept the laws of nature. Maybe the beauty of things remains in their finity. The fact that it can end one day. It will one day! Maybe that's why a marriage vow has a phrase attached to it, till death do us part. There aren't any friends forever; blood isn't thicker than water. Everything is in order, until chaos comes.

Just look at Caesar now, the man who made himself dictator in perpetuity, lying down on his face. Stabbed by his own. There is this version of the last words of Caesar other than the one we commonly know as Et tu, Brute. It says, You too, my child. You too, my child!

There are days I look at the chaos I don't acknowledge in my mind; I just stand looking at her for a while, thinking how wrong we can be about things we're most sure of. 

As Khalil Gibran wrote,

But there is no other way.

The river can not go back.

Nobody can go back.

To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk.

of entering the ocean

because only then will fear disappear,

because that’s where the river will know

It’s not about disappearing into the ocean.

but of becoming the ocean.

In this edge of chaos we call life, what do we have other than this moment? Before the laws of the universe take over, let me be myself. Let me be. Before chaos knocks at your door, embrace the order. Embrace each other.