Inorganic Origins

CAPTAIN KIRK

“Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe. I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.

I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.”

- William Shatner

SPACE

Enveloped in the vastness of space, you find yourself suspended in an endless expanse of darkness, a stark void that stretches infinitely in all directions. Cloaked in a space suit, your only lifeline in this boundless vacuum, you're acutely aware of the slender barrier—a mere few millimeters of technology—that stands between you and the void's lethal embrace.

Oxygen flows, life-sustaining thank God, yet eerily silent. You float adrift, alone with your thoughts. And the realization dawns, profound, unsettling. A moment of clear crisp clarity: this vast darkness, this near-total absence of life. 

Organic life, a total anomaly.

Such abyssal experience, here shared by Captain Kirk at the age of 90, offers a wild!~ reflection on reality, a brutal reminder of life’s unfathomable rarity in space.

KUBRICK

In a similar fashion, Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" exposes this profound isolation and existential dread experienced in the vastness of space. This film, unlike any other, masterfully conveys the terrifying indifference of the cosmos, an existential horror genre that mirrors the eerie silence and infinite darkness that envelops us.

As you float, suspended between life and the void, Kubrick's portrayal of space as a realm of maddening mystery and existential challenge resonates, amplifying the realization of organic life's fragility amidst an unconcerned universe. This stark contrast between the warmth of biology and the ice cold indifferent expanse around us underscores the narrative tension, drawing a key connection to the ‘somewhat-shocking-to-his-trekkie-fans ‘ insights and ‘true-to-most-down-to-earth-folks’ emotional turmoil experienced by Shatner during his space journey.

FREUD

Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, understood what William Shatner saw on his voyage into space. He delved into this particular subconscious grief in many of his works, saw it manifest in the psyche of humans in life and sex, and formulated from it the concept of Thanatos, the 'death drive' - as a biological, physics-driven natural pull to tension-cessation, to inertia, to our inorganic origins.

As a clinician, Freud focused on deriving all his concepts, including Thanatos, from clinical and life experience, generalizing them only in as far as they are useful for therapeutics and to critically analyze culture and human discontent with modernity. His impetus was not theological, nor philosophical. It was very practical. In fact, it is well known that his concept of Thanatos came from his observation of sadism and masochism. These extreme forms of behavior led him to develop the concept of a destructive drive right next to Eros, and consistenly insist on their duality.

In order to understand how and why Freud arrived at the concept of the death drive, it’s key to understand his principle of ‘Constancy’ (Konstanzprinzip), a principle guiding the course of life that does not originate in life per se, instead it’s a practical allusion to physics and the physical laws powering the universe. Much like Shatner and Kubrick, he would have observed that there is an enormous force at play, pulling us towards its vast darkness, inactivity, death — and biological life is simply an ephemeral momentous rebellion against this inorganic immensity.

Our psychological tensions, our biological metabolisms, our lives in their entirety are constantly being drawn in by this degrading entropy, hurtling day to day towards unliving  “— namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world”, as Freud notes in Beyond The Pleasure Principle, 1921. Thanatos, is therefore the most potent drive in the the universe. It's nothing personal. To Freud, it was simply ‘physics’.

EROS

… and then, 

there is a twist

a strange beauty enters stage

from this extreme gravity

arises EROS

sprouting a 'tiny oasis of life'

and that's us!

a miraculous force against all odds

life, originating in a cell, emerging out of the deepest void