Doomsday

As a child I created a system of rules, a moral code of awareness, in which any false step could mean my end. I devised simple rituals that became almost second nature. I had to hit the wind chimes every time we pulled into the garage. Jiggle the doorknob. Tap on the table. If I didn’t something bad was going to happen. I am the product of an atheist upbringing, yet left to my own devices I had concocted a theology of sorts. These actions were an innate part of my daily life. I felt not only compelled to perform them, but also, perhaps, commanded. I was living in what I realized to be a state of continuous change, and any moment could bring the end. Thus my list of performative actions helped guarantee, or at least aid in, my survival.

In his lecture “The Sense of an Ending”, Kermode remarks in his discussion of fictive literature that “we cannot… be denied an end,” and he is right to realize the extent of our desire for an ending (23). It seems that this need for finalization is an inherent aspect of life itself. The idea of a beginning, a middle, and an end is everywhere. We are born, we live, and we die. I have often thought that religion arose because of a need to answer the plaguing question of what comes next. My childhood fantasy provided a way to deal with not having any answers and to help alleviate the pain of not knowing. Yet, perhaps what I was struggling with was something more basic, with my inability to understand the control of time itself.

For it is time that we cannot understand. It passes, and we are born and we die. Is there no reason for it? No explanation for how we divide it, and chop it up – creating systems of measurement around “what many concede is an arbitrary date” (Quinby 21). A song by a noise band, Negativland, has the repeating lyric: “Do you know how many time zones there are in the Soviet Union? Eleven. Do you know how many we have? Four.” Now time is a mode of comparison – who is bigger and therefore better? And yet the irony is in the constructed reality with which all things time related are fabricated. So that talking about now is really talking about the past as I wrote it. The structure of time measurement is ridiculous, and yet we base all aspects of our lives around blocks of measured time.

The question of time demands an answer, and so we create elaborate fairy tales to predict the end. To guarantee that the world as we know it can be contained, bounded by a start and a finish. Is it fair then to ask us to be more skeptical? And is apocalyptic understanding completely devoid of skepticism? Can I be a rational skeptical believer? Whether one believes the end will take us by a great ball of fire or a growing epidemic of sterilizing STIs, is it possible to ask us to stop believing? And what then would this mean in dealing with the question of time itself?