Monologue
You all come to me willingly, even though that's only what you all think. You can't really call any of us mere mortals willful, after all.Still, by some twist of contrived circumstance you all find yourselves entering this place
It's a happy place, I like to think. It's where my best work is done, well, all of it, actually, and there are so many happy faces. Were. I meant were. I don't really think of myself as an artist, like some of the uninitiated might call me. You actually might have heard of me, the 'painter of ash station', but I find that to be an injustice to my work, and what I'm trying to accomplish.
Artists, you see, fumble around in the dark trying to answer the deepest questions, well, question, about our condition with their useless degrees. That's not just visual art, that would be any of those soft, feel-y subjects. I don't mind, they put some great stuff out, but for the really important stuff, it just seems sort of badly organized, you know? Like a mismanaged tech company, but it's time for them to go out of business. The wave of innovation is here. I try to answer the Question with a bit more of a clinical methodology. This is the new millennium, after all, and we've applied science to everything else in our lives, so why not this. I'm sort of surprised no one else has thought of this before, really.
OK, so, I guess my work is sort of still art, but only in subject matter. I am a scientist. Ha. It's funny, you see, because I don't have any of that fancy training or anything, but that's how the real pioneers did it anyway, right? Trial and error, empirical observation, the good old fashioned tried and true scientific method. Did you know they don't teach it anymore? But with my way, it's just me, some minor mechanical assistance, and my subject.
Now, to breach THAT subject, ha, if you'll excuse the pun, You're here because you're supposed to be. Me too, actually. I'm pretty sure that all of our human history just might be in anticipation for this, our little encounter right here. Isn't that exciting? All of this! War, love, countless generations of breeding and an infinite number of stories to get to this moment, this single quantum state, this single possibility out of all the rest. It must be like, a bazaillion to one odds of it being me, but that's just the way Fate works.
I bet the Big Guy is watching with baited breath, dying, ha, awkward, to know. I mean, why else would He have set this game in motion, with so many tears and dead lovers and maimed children? What a bad joke! It's really heartbreaking, don't you think? So the crux of the matter, of course, is. 'Where is the soul?' Like, either He doesn't know either and we're his computer simulation about to bear fruit and he gets the answer for His Omniscience 101 final, or else it's been a metaphysical game of hide and go seek, him against us. Well, eat your heart out Jesus and Buddha and Kant and Heidegger, because I've got the foolproof, one hundred percent guaranteed methodology. It's taken a while, sure, but you know what they say about eggs and omelets, right?
Whew. I guess I'm just nervous, my hands are literally shaking right now. I just can't believe that it's be, that I'm about to do it. I can see yours are too, so I guess you must now how I'm feeling, right? Our lives were just a warm up for these next few hours. I mean I'll be able to die happy if this goes the way I think it will. You too, I hope, right? Well, I mean, I guess we'll both see about that! We don't want to count our chickens or whatever, knock on wood.
OK. It's alright. We'll both get through this just fine. I know it. Uh, could you calm down a little? You're kind of freaking me out. Right. Thanks. Do you mind if I keep talking? It helps. I find it relaxing. Right. So, where was I? Uh...wash between the fingers, check for holes in the gloves, great! The Soul. How can we feel it? I mean, come on, we've all got the tight feeling somethings, or that sense of like, urgh, like when someone talks at the movies, or says like 'you dum fag' or something. Classless, I know, right? Like, excuse me, trying to be a decent person over here. That's how we know we've got one, right? It's totally ineffable, cause we can't see it, but it has to be there.
So the better question to ask is, how do you know when you don't have one. Is that death? Should we send some subject to like, those Baptist nutjobs down south and see their reaction, measure it with electrodes and stuff? No, because we can't trust any of that, we know because we, as human beings, know. That's it. I mean, correlation and causation, I may not be degree'd up and everything, but even I know the saying about how one isn't the other. No, I think, and my entire work is based off of a much simpler hypothesis. See, life and death, out machines can measure, and in today's day and age, even control. This one here, for instance. We're really good at building really clever, efficient machines. It's really elegant, actually.
Anyway, my way of thinking is, to tear out a soul from it's natural resting place, that's got to be the worst crime against nature, right? The absolute worst. Like, not even against the laws of nature, but the laws of metaphysics or whatever. There needs to be some sort of reaction. Something maybe even beyond the capabilities of our eyes and ears and machines to perceive, but something we can feel. In our souls. Kind of like a resonance. It just makes sense, you think so, right? And following from that, sort of, the more natural, the closer to the original state it is in, the bigger the adverse reaction has to be, right, all the easier for measuring, or at least picking up on. I'm flying a little blind, so I need to build some sort of idiot-proofing into my experimental design.
I think it's just about time to begin, don't you? Let's find out together, which minuscule part of the body it is that actually contains the soul. Like, I'm pretty sure the heart is right out, contrary to a lot of really smart people in the past. The skin too, probably entirely a waste of time, but I figure, we should go from the easiest parts to the trickier ones, just in case, you know? You understand right? Good. I'm proud of my fastidious methodology here. One micro-gram at a time. I think that's about small enough to get a reading. I don't think the soul, something so weighty could be hiding in an area less than that, do you? Sorry, I can't understand you at all, I'll review the tapes. I'll proceed, with that assumption. You're a real trooper, you know that? I mean, it's just about at the limits of our technology to do this sort of thing at this scale even, so I'm counting on you. I'd hate to do all this for nothing, and have it be my great great grandson who gets all the glory.
