inklingfair I finally finished my Big History course last Friday because I was home sick but too restless not to work. And it was the perfect setting for a weekend filled with science fiction.
Sliding Doors moment: meeting Eva to deliver some kefir. By serendipity, she was home in Manila from Nepal meeting Rache and Henry. I had seen some lovely photos of her and her fiance on Bambikes in Intramuros, but we hadn’t seen each other face to face in years.
I earlier planned on taking the LRT2 to Katipunan and just walking to the coffee shop but since it was overcast and Jasmin had her day off, Josh decided to drive me and walk with Amy around a nearby bookstore.
We chatted about kefir care, Nepal, old acquaintances, and then the conversation ground to a halt. We took a few photos and said goodbye. It was a glimpse of another universe I no longer walked in, and I guess I was relieved I didn’t feel I wanted to.
Josh and I watched the last four Westworld episodes on Saturday and Sunday night – and talked late into the night about free will, predestination, recursive errors of revelation, the hour of death and evolution from humanity as we know it.
Sunday afternoon we had watched Blade Runner 2049, and though it had some awkward and predictable narrative points (a waste of Robin Wright’s talents, too), it still had the beautiful atmosphere and landscape of the first film. I didn’t remember uteri being built into advanced female replicants, though.
We talked about the spiritual dimension of the bicameral mind and its building blocks – so memory -> improvisation -> consciousness might translate into history -> free will -> soul. Occam’s razor would pare it down into primordial soup, Goldilocks conditions, trial and error, machine learning over billions of years, disarray.
But like Dolores, I choose to see the beauty of things. There exists the ultimately knowable Mystery, and I don’t mind the slow reveal.
Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash
