Johnny himself is small and fair-haired. He takes after his paternal grandmother, his mother says . . . .
Cogito, Ergo Sum
by John Foster West
Are the Spirit and the Flesh one and the same thing? Or are they separate entities, dependent and at the same time independent of each other? Perhaps some great Cosmic Law holds this secret. But the one Universal Element that we can depend upon, apparently, is The Lucky Accident.
A warped instant in Space—and two egos are separated from their bodies and lost in a lonely abyss.
I think, therefore I am. That was the first thought I had. Of course not in the same symbols, but with the same meaning.
I awakened, or came alive, or came into existence suddenly, at least my mental consciousness did. “Here am I,” I thought, “but what am I, why am I, where am I?”
I had nothing to work with except pure reason. I was there because I was not somewhere else. I was certain I was there and that was the extent of my knowledge at the moment.
I looked about me—no, I reasoned about me. I was surrounded by nothingness, by black nothingness, a vacuum. Immense distances away I could detect light; or rather, I could perceive waves of force passing around me which originated at points vast distances away, vast in relation to my position in the nothingness.
There were waves of force all about me, varying in frequency. The nothingness was alive with waves of force, traveling parallel and tangential to each other without seeming to interfere one with another. I measured them, differentiated between them and finished with the task in a matter of seconds.
How could I do it? It was one of the capabilities I was created with.
What was I? I perceived the waves of force. I perceived great quantities of mass—solid, liquid, gas—whirling in vacuum, mass built up out of patterns of basic force. I searched my own being, analyzed myself. I was not gas. I was not solid. I was not even force. Yet I existed. I could reason. I was a beginning, a sudden beginning. And I had duration because I knew that time had elapsed since the moment I awakened though I had no means of telling how much time or of even naming the period.
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Could I really be pure reason? Can reason exist? Can rational entity exist without a groundwork of matter, or at least of force?
It could. It must. I was rational entity and I existed. Yet I could find nothing of force, nothing to occupy space about my self. For all I could ascertain, I might have covered a one-dimensional point in eternity or I might have been spread throughout vast distances.
From this reasoning I concluded that rational entity might occur either as some force unlike that of all natural phenomena in space, or as some combination of these forces at the moment beyond my own power to analyze, even detect. I finished with that for the time being.
How did I come into being? I discarded the question as unanswerable temporarily. What was I before that instant I suddenly reasoned cogito, ergo sum? I could not say.
How did I know I even existed, really? Obviously because I was capable of rational thought. But what was thinking? First it was perceiving and accepting my own existence; beyond that, it was recognizing the dark nothingness around me and the forces it contained. I had to exist.
But how did I know nothingness was right? And how did I know its darkness was right? And how did I know the waves of force were waves andforce? And how did I know matter was matter and that I was none of these?
“Symbols,” I reasoned. “I’m thinking in symbols. I could not reason without symbols; therefore I could not exist as I am without symbols to think with.”
Yet whose symbols were they? Where and how did I come by them? I could think back clearly to the instant of my creation, yet I had not invented the symbols in the interim of my existence, nor had they been given to me. What then? They were part of me when I came alive in this universe, had been invented some other time and elsewhere by someone else or by what I was before I became the entity of reason I now was.
Then that first flash of perception in nothingness was not spontaneous. There was something behind it. I was something before that moment, in another era of time, perhaps a creature of substance. But what?
I concentrated. I remembered the symbol Marl. I was or had been an entity Marl. Were there others back there, somewhere? There must have been, must be yet. Was I the only Marl who metamorphosed into this state of rational entity? Surely not. Yet I could contact no other rationale around me as far away as I could probe. How far was that? How could I know. Was it far enough to reach the other Marls, or were they scattered thinly throughout infinity around me like the flecks of mass?
I was suddenly ill. The symbol malaise came to me as the proper description of my malady. I grew dizzy with my sickness. I wished to regurgitate, to cast off this cold, frightening sensation. Yet I was provided with no physical means of doing it. It filled me throughout all my thinking. It was I. I thought to exist. I thought depression, sickness. Therefore I was the malady and it was a hell of malcontent beyond symbolical description.
What was wrong with me? I was frightened. I was concerned for my existence here alone. What was it called? The idea shimmered there on the fringe of perception, then fairly leaped into my consciousness. Existing alone as pure reason was worse than no-existence, was worse than dying or never having been at all. I need another Marl. To exist happily, I must have at least one other Marl to communicate with, to share my thoughts, to share my being.
Is this a necessity, a condition peculiar to me as I am, as reason, or is it a condition that came across the barrier with me from that other state? It must be the latter. An entity of pure reason, having come into existence as reason, would need nothing but himself. Why? Because he would be without emotion.
“I am emotional,” I thought. “I am entity of almost pure reason, but I have inherited emotion from my previous state. It is a disorder of thought, but it can be a pleasant disorder when the emotion is the right one; or, if unpleasant, when satisfied.
“But I could not have emotions as I am now. They are cortical responses, or are supposed to be. What is cortical? No, they are a sort of illogical reasoning, nothing physical—” The rest eluded me.
“I am lonely,” I thought. “Loneliness stems from fear and fear is a basic emotion. I am very lonely. I have been lonely for a long time, bringing it with me here. I would rather sate my loneliness than live to eternity, than know all there is to know. What can quell my loneliness? Another like me, another Marl—whatever a Marl is. I must have, must find another Marl.”
I began to search. I darted frantically about space like a frightened thing, though I could perceive no movement. I knew I passed from one area of space to another because I could measure slight changes in the position of the stars about me. I knew the points of light were stars.
There was duration. I could not know how much. Eternity? A split second? But at last I discovered another like me. No, almost like me, but anotherMarl. The other entity had less of reason,
