Life is Strange

Life is strange. One minute you’re here, and the next minute you’re not. I didn’t use to be here, and I won’t be here again, but I’m here now. I still find this overwhelmingly strange.

I spent most of my childhood in New York. When I was four or five years old I attended a kindergarten in the lower ground floor of an apartment building on Central Park West. Central Park West is an avenue that runs along the west side of Central Park, a very busy part of mid-town. Every morning the teachers would muster the class on the sidewalk, and arrange us in a line, in pairs, each child holding the hand of another, to prepare us for the orderly crossing of the avenue to the Park. One day, while our little parade formation was still falling in, at ease and permitted to converse, my partner in line said to me, “Before I was born, I used to be a fireman.” I don’t remember replying, or how the conversation may have continued, but I remember thinking it was an odd thing to say. I remember feeling skeptical that it was possible to have had a life before this one, with even a specific career. I don’t suppose this boy had a sense of the doctrines of reincarnation or the transmigration of souls; little kids have very rich fantasy lives. I certainly did. I told one of my classmates that my father was a scientist, and that he had changed a man’s head into a human-size fly’s head, with huge compound eyes, mandibles and antennae. I see now that I was unconsciously plagiarizing the science fiction horror movie The Fly, which had come out about this time. Actually, my father was a lawyer. I also remember telling my classmates that I was a robot, and that my feet could turn into rocket engines, enabling me to fly, like Astroboy in the Japanese cartoons that were on TV in New York at that time.

I remember this moment because my partner in the queue to go to Central Park was saying something very lucid and clear about the strangeness of being alive and knowing that you are alive. At the age of four or five one has enough sense of time (which little kids measure in birthdays and days until Christmas) to know that not that long ago he wasn’t here. So where was he before? He must have been somewhere. He was aware of a stark difference between being alive, and conscious, and here, in New York, and an alternative possibility of non-existence. (This has nothing to do with death, because this case is about what there is before life, not what there is after life.) My friend was confiding to me about how he made sense of this strangeness: he was a healthy child with a good brain, which he was beginning to learn how to use. His conclusion was that he must have had a life before this one. I think I responded to it in a collegial and thoughtful way. I was the same person then that I am now.

Actually, my fellow kindergartner was expressing something very like the Mormon doctrine of pre-existence. The Mormons believe that all human beings have fully formed lives in heaven before they are born. They have taken that metaphysical anxiety – the strangeness of being here versus not being here – and drained it of all doubt and mystery by offering a completely practical solution, which anyone can understand. The Mormons hold that it’s just a simple material fact that we were already alive and who we are before we were born. When you are born you just come down from heaven. After you die, you go back to heaven, which is where you came from. You don’t have to speculate about it, or consult the works of philosophers. You’d have to be daft not to believe that, wouldn’t you?

“I confess that I am hazy on Mormon theology,” Stephen said. “Don’t tell me you have become a Mormon since I last saw you.”

“Of course not,” I said.

“Then why are you banging on about the Mormons?”

“Because of the amazingly practical way that they address this problem, which everyone has experienced, and wondered about, but never been able to resolve on their own in a way that makes any sense. That’s American ingenuity for you, right there. If there’s a problem, you solve it, in a way that eliminates uncertainty and ambiguity.”

Stephen did not express any disagreement with this, and instead merely uttered a low murmur of doubtful assent, mainly out of politeness, I suppose.

“When we say life is strange, we mean that life as a whole is strange, and that one’s own life is strange. If you don’t think life is strange, just look out the window. It’s mind-boggling that we are here. It’s mind-boggling that I am here. It’s mind-boggling that you are here. It’s mind-boggling to think of what “we” means, what “are” means and what “here” means, and even what “means” means. But there is a difference between one’s own life being strange, and life as a whole being strange.

What’s strange about life is that people continue to think there is a relation between themselves and outer space.

Outer space is enchanting: white dots in the night sky. It is the origin of marvels. This is where heaven is, and where God resides and issues his pronouncements.

We only see outer space at night, when it’s dark. Night, sleep, dreams, terrors. The real world is the one we see in the day. The world of daylight is the world in which we can act with a reasonable assessment of the risks.

The Mormons think that outer space and heaven are the same thing. It’s a nice idea, but there is no relation between your life and outer space. We can’t even see it properly. The reason stars seem to twinkle is because of the limitations of the human eye. Twinkling is caused by astigmatism, which is an effect of the curvature of the cornea. We are anatomically unable to even see outer space.

Many years ago I went to a convention in Laramie, Wyoming, to write a magazine article. To get there you had to fly to Denver, Colorado, and then take a twelve-seater plane northwards over the mountains to this little town which was the home of the campus of the University of Wyoming and not much else, unless you include a role in the American conquest of the Wild West in the 19^th century. The legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy was in jail there for a while. The title of the convention was the Sixteenth Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation. Most of the people attending the conference believed that they had been physically captured by technologically advanced human-like beings from civilizations in outer space, and taken from their ordinary lives in America up into big vehicles capable of interstellar travel of the kind you might see in a science fiction movie.

In a big college auditorium, participants took to the stage to testify to the audience about their experiences of alien abduction. Their accounts were remarkably similar. Typically, a person would be woken from sleep by an alien intruder, and then projected upwards into a space craft, where they would be subjected to invasive and painful physical procedures focused on their genitalia. Women would describe in poignant detail being inseminated with alien sperm, and carrying to term a half-human, half-alien baby, and then having the baby traumatically taken away from them.

They would often give a detailed account of their efforts to lay their hands on some small portable object from the space craft which they could bring back to earth with them, to prove that their experience had really happened. This article would inevitably be lost in the confusion of the return journey.

One of the people attending conference was a rather unhappy woman who was a Mormon from Utah. She was attending the conference because she thought she might have been abducted by aliens. I said to her, “You haven’t been abducted by aliens. The people here who say they have been abducted by aliens are nuts. You’re not nuts.”

As a Mormon, she had strayed into the wrong room, but one that was not far from familiar territory. Mormons have a coherent cosmology and way of life based on the idea that God and his authority over the human race are lodged in the heavenly firmament of outer space. They believe that God is a human being with a body who lives on or near a planet called Kolob, which is at the geographic centre of the universe. The idea of alien abduction could be seen as a malign deviation from this doctrine.

The title of the conference meant that there had been fifteen of these events already. It was the kind of gathering that is common in the United States, bringing together for a few days members of a far-flung diaspora, united by a shared, highly specialized interest, and who see their affinity as a badge of belonging. In this way there are regular clan gatherings of owners of vintage Volkswagens, or vintage Corvettes, or Harley Davidson motorcycles, or of some rare breed of dog. For a few days, you can use a vocabulary that would be unintelligible to anyone not a member of the group. You can share in-jokes which are not especially humorous, but which are appreciated because no one who isn’t a member of the group can understand them. In the case of those who had registered for the Sixteenth Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation, the common experience they shared was that they believed they had been abducted by extra-terrestrial intelligent beings.

The conference was led by a psychologist named Leo Sprinkle. He had been on the faculty of the University of Wyoming for 25 years until the university fired him without actually firing him because he wouldn’t stop banging on about alien abduction and reincarnation and similar fancies during business hours. So he quit, but he didn’t leave Laramie. He hung out his shingle as a freelance psychologist specializing in the needs of clients who said they had been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens. He would coax out of them their accounts of alien abduction, and where their memories of the experience were buried under psychic layers, he would use hypnosis to enable them to overcome mental obstacles and uncover from the depths of their minds memories of their experiences in alien spacecraft. He had no shortage of clients. He died in 2021 at the age of 91.

Most of the participants in the conference were nuts, but that doesn’t mean that the stories they told were meaningless. Their stories were examples of what William James (American psychologist and philosopher, and the brother of the novelist Henry James) would call a variety of religious experience.

The attenders of the conference found meaning and purpose in their lives in telling the world about how they had been abducted by aliens. The stories they told were as old as human civilization, and reflect a profound human need to find the purpose of one’s life in a cosmic setting.

In Thomist theology, angels “are sent by God to inform men of their ultimate being, purpose and destiny.” Replace angels with aliens, and you see what I mean.