You Are Among Friends

We just got home from seeing the movie 9.

Let me say this:
If you are afraid of the robot apocalypse, you might not want to see this film.
If you are not afraid of the robot apocalypse, see this film. You should be afraid of the robot apocalypse.

Alright, well, I think I'm biased, because I didn't know I was afraid of the robot apocalypse before, but I was a prime candidate. Maybe it can stand as a review of this film that two ironically-Afroed high schoolers sitting above me snorted and chortled throughout the second half, while I sat clutching my hands and holding my breath, re-evaluating my entire existence. It could have gone either way. But man, I hope I don't sound too crazy when I tell you that I think about humans as a species all the time. It's the film reel spooled in my skull. Can we get into it? All of it? I mean, the shot starts out real wide, so I often think about space, I wonder if all of space is all of everything, and I think about the one small finger-frame that we can observe and investigate, and how most of that is our own planet. We miss a lot. We have to miss a lot.

And so there is no way, as far as I can see, that we are the most highly evolved creatures that exist. I can't know, but I don't assume. I wouldn't dare, not when I'm looking at that huge angle, trying to peer into the dark, wanting to see what I can't see.

Stay with me. Bring the shot down closer now--less dark matter and more Earth, our big floating rock, and all the organisms and cycles and pulls and pushes of physics that have come with age. Here we are, finally,  humans, and our lives are all-consuming and all the time--yet climb only to airplane height and we all but disappear. A swarmed colony of insects, busy and buzzing.

I'm saying, the scope is wide. The scope is time and space. I often think of human beings in that context. Is that a thing? Sociology? Anthropology? How we picked up sticks and first used them to overtake and kill. How, without ever being aware of it, we will serve as picture slides in the slow process of evolution. How we want the best, fastest, most beautiful and eventually we became smart enough, picked up enough sticks and carved enough tools, that we invented machines. The next logical step. Something that has the capability to work beyond our means.

But what is often missing in my consideration is spirit. I think talking about spirit is sort of corny and embarrassing. I don't believe in a physical soul, or on most days, a metaphorical one either. We're all dumb, funny, personable animals, and some of us have just come a little further than others since our days on the Ark. We still move based mostly on instinct, however reined-in those have become. We grunt and moan and bat our ways to the top of our own small piles.

That's where 9 is reassuring, in a way. I hope it isn't too much of a spoiler to say that, in the end, the good guy appears to have overcome, but possibly only temporarily, without any implied "happily ever after." How else would it have ended? It's a robot apocalypse flick. Robots don't sleep. There won't be a sequel. But in the meantime, if robots are the next logical step in evolution, then spirit is not embarrassing. Spirit is then essential. Machines don't sleep, they don't breathe, they don't cry. They make nervous wet first kisses, the smell of dirt in a tilled garden, the little chirping sound our cat makes in the morning, all superfluous. Unnecessary and inefficient.

So we are the last ambassadors of these things. I don't mean that urgently, but I do mean it earnestly. Us, our children, our grandchildren and theirs--I place my tongue firmly in my cheek when I say that they may all outlive the robot apocalypse, assuming their iPods don't start waking up and walking around at night. In the meantime, we are living. We laugh and hurt and stumble through love, ache and sweat and try, and we live, and it's hard and it sucks sometimes, but it's also a privilege, something sacred and individual. It is a secret language we forge with ourselves.