The Deadness of Cats

“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

-The Lazarus Project

Last night's Mad Men was a good one. Roger Sterling's former life comes back to seek him out. Betty finally confronts Don on the bread crumb trail to his hidden identity that she's found, the doctor gets a vase thrown at him for telling Joanie she doesn't understand what it is to wait for something, work for something her whole life and then to have it pass her by. The thing I like about this show is that the things you expect to happen never really do, and then other things happen and take center stage and the characters are compelled to react to these events as they unfold, just as surprised and unprepared as we are. It's like life; a curveball thrown at the narrative structure, forcing it to bend, recede, take a different route, form a new branch out of necessity, out of avoidance. Not the predictable route, but its more audacious twin, the parallel universe of the unexpected.

I've been wanting someone well-versed in physics (maybe my dad) to explain to me the Theory of Parallel Universes or the Many Worlds Theory. It keeps coming up over and over again; in the NOVA special that featured Mark Everett, the guy from The Eels, whose dad was a famous physicist, and then in the new Coen Brothers movie. it's funny how things knock on the door of your consciousness a few times before they go their own way.

The Parallel World Theory is actually a neat way to tie up loose ends; it allows all possibilities to exist simultaneously, every branch of choice is a legitimate one, and is consequently manifested. Maybe I am trying to reframe the unexpected, or attempting to impose some sort of order on a chaotic narrative, because lately, it's the chaotic narrative that I seek, that I am attracted to. Neatness and symmetry don't interest me, at least on the outset, but maybe old habits die hard, and subconsciously, I do want some sort of overarching order to things, to stories, to behavior. Maybe it's hard for me to believe that some stories branch off and die, or lay incomplete, and the Parallel Worlds Theory resuscitates the lives we didn't choose. They exist somewhere in some sort of receptacle of unworn choices. And I suppose I want to believe that there is some place for these orphaned choices to go. Nothing and no one deserves to be abandoned, especially a story. And sometimes I suffer from the affliction of having more affection for stories than for people.

This is more than just the exploration of an alternate version of you, because the journey through unmanifested possibility is what writers do. We trace the dots and dashes of what didn't happen rather than the clean lines of what did. It's more than Gwyneth Paltrow's two identities in Sliding Doors, the Tube doors slamming in our faces to reveal that some part of us yielded to a life of Other discoveries. I can't say for sure what it is about, really. Maybe I want to conserve the various parts of me the way we conserve limited resources, or pretend to. I want to believe that the unexplored possibilities of this world are being explored somewhere, in some capacity, rather than just in my own silly, speculative mind. Does this make sense? But ours is a culture where we don't really conserve anything. And if nothing is safeguarded, nothing is saved and rationed out, how do we know what's really precious, unusual, worth socking away?
What I know is that the basis of the Parallel Worlds theory is a thing called Schrödinger's equation. Schrödinger's equation involves a cat in a box with a lever that will release poisonous gas at any second. Actually, there are two cats, in parallel worlds, one dead and one alive. Or perhaps it is just one cat, simultaneously existing in two parallel worlds. Actually I have no idea. All I really know is that the dead cat has two x's over its eyes and apparently x's represent deadness.

Is the inability to accept the intrinsic wastefulness of the notion of choice an inability to accept death? When I struggle with choice, is it actually my own mortality I am struggling with? The thing is, I think about death a lot. I am a morbid person, but I'm also a Buddhist. Maybe I am looking, in narrative, for the lever that allows an escape, into what, I don't know. Perhaps some sort of transcendence. The limits to a story are in it's structure. It is trapped within a limited number of dimensions. And I am constantly feeling around the edges of things, like a blind person exploring the borders of a new neighborhood than like a sighted person exploring the spaces within. But the cat without the x's over her eyes escapes the inevitable trajectory of death time and time again. She always escapes, at every branch of choice, this cat of an infinite number of lives, and probably never realizes just how close she came to death. How is that possible? The extreme possibility in Schrödinger's equation is the cat that never dies. The cat who transcends life? Does this exist? As Buddhist, I believe it does, even if most of us never find it.