Main Entry: sin-gu-lar-i-ty
Pronunciation: “si[ng]-gy&-’lar-&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
1 : something that is singular : as a : a separate unit b : unusual or distinctive manner or behavior : PECULIARITY
2 : the quality or state of being singular
3 : a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists
4 : a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole
“Why are you always so cynical?”
“Because I’m so jaded.”
“And why are you so jaded?”
“Because I’m so cynical.”
Anna rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she says, going back to the picture she’d been drawing, “I’m being serious.”
“That was an attempt at humor,” I tell her. “Maybe I am too cynical.”
“Maybe?” Carl interjects with a smile.
The three of us are at the place I inherited from my uncle, sitting in the kitchen. It’s the only room without boxes on the floor, but that’s because they’re covering the kitchen counters. We made room on the table, though. It was a huge block of marble before someone chiseled it into the shape of a table. I hear that the artist’s name is engraved on the bottom, but no one remembers what it is because the table hasn’t moved since my uncle was in medical school. Anna and I are having green tea and sitting across from one another. Carl is having coffee and sitting to my right. He is in town for a couple days, so naturally the three of us planned to spend an evening together.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I tell them. “I guess it’s because I was fed so much bullshit growing up and I finally started to realize it. Some people can laugh it off or shrug it off, some people can’t. I guess I’m one of the latter kinds.”
Anna says, “I’m not sayin’ it’s a bad thing to be cynical, so you don’t have to get all defensive on me.”
“I’m not getting defensive,” I shoot back, and she looks up at me with a don’t-give-me-that-crap smirk.
“Funny,” murmurs Carl.
I tell them, “I guess I just appear cynical because I don’t feel the need to lie to myself anymore.”
“Lying to yourself about what, exactly?” Anna asks.
“Everything,” I answer. “About the fact that I’m not going to be a famous musician. That I’m eventually going to die. About God. About the fact that we’re all just animals barely clinging to civility by our fingernails. Yadda yadda yadda.” I feel like I’m rambling.
“No,” Carl says, “I know what you mean. We are not told the truth most of the time. I think it is because most people do not want to know the truth if it bothers them in the slightest way. After all, it does seem scary to imagine Heaven vanishing.”
“Is that what that song’s about?” I ask.
“Yes,” Carl answers.
“What song?” asks Anna.
“‘Vanishing Heaven’ by Bian Swan,” says Carl.
“Who the hell is that?”
“She’s the newest pop diva,” I tell her. “She’s the one who said she slept with the president.”
“Oh, God,” she says. “Have I become one of those old people who don’t have a clue about pop culture?”
Carl and I just smile.
“You would not like her music anyway, Ann,” Carl says, putting his hand delicately on hers.
“Gotcha,” she says, sliding the drawing and pencil to Carl.
“So,” she says, drawing it out very deliberately.
“So,” I echo, as if I don’t know what’s going on.
Carl starts adding his touch to the picture Anna had started. Anna reaches into her pocket and gets out a small tin box, from which she removes a small joint and a lighter.
“Ray, dear,” she says, lighting the end of it, “have you considered therapy?”
“Therapy?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, inhaling deeply, “you know, for being so terminally pessimistic.” She holds her breath and smiles. Carl, still hunching over the picture, starts giggling.
“I’m not terminally pessimistic,” I tell them.
Anna blows the smoke out of the corner of her mouth, concentrating her smile on another task. Carl looks up at me, also smiling.
“What’s so funny?” I ask. “I’m not that bad.”
“I hate to crush your ego or whatever,” Anna says, passing the joint to Carl, “but you’re one of the most cynical people I know.”
“No,” I tell her, “I’m one of the most skeptical people you know. There’s a difference.”
“That is true,” Carl says, holding the smoking stick close to his mouth. “There is a difference. But, you’re still a cynical bastard.”
“Shut up, man!” I say, sitting up in my seat and faking annoyance as lightheartedly as I can.
“You are,” he says simply, taking a deep drag.
“Maybe,” I reply, sitting back. “Does that make me a bad person?”
“Not really,” Anna answers honestly. “But, it could turn you into an I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-shit kind of guy, and that’d be most unpleasant.” Wow, she does a great British accent.
“I’m happy with my life,” I tell them. “It’s just that I’m in a position where I have to go against the current just to be myself. Maybe if I’d been born in some other time or place I would be more at ease.”
“You mean,” Anna says, “in a world where Doritos feed themselves to you and a television is always in sight?”
Carl, trying not to laugh with lungs full of smoke, makes a noise like a dying owl. He hands it to me.
“No,” I say. “I just feel like my life is one big cliché.”
“That is because it is,” Carl says. I take a slow, long drag. “Remember, you are just one of almost seven billion people on this planet. The chances of you living a completely novel life are slim. That is why people do stupid things simply to go down in history. You know, like the first person to base jump off of the Statue of Liberty, or the first person who figured out how to enslave people, or the first person to kill a million other people, or the first person to fly a commercial airliner into a building.”
“Jesus,” Anna says. “And I thought Ray was the cynic.” Funny. “And you should say men instead of person. I don’t know of any women who dabble in that kind of stupidity.”
“Wow,” Carl says, “My political-correctness upset the sensibilities of the most pee-cee person I know.”
“My sensibilities are fine,” she says. “I’m just helping you to be more precise.” I never can tell when those two are fighting.
I hand the joint across the table to Anna, and exhale to my left, towards the living room. I look out the large windows that face north. The sun has already set, but the sky is still glowing. The clouds radiate with fiery orange highlights, creating intricate patterns and lighting the ground with their tangerine glow.
I hear Carl adding strokes and slashes and sweeps of lead to the paper we’d been passing around since we sat down. The last I saw it, I’d drawn as perfect of a circle as I could around the cartoon face Carl had made out of Anna’s drawing of a man wearing a skimpy loin cloth. Anna is smoking and watching Carl as he draws.
“One Word time,” I tell them, which was one of the little games we played. They seem to pay extra attention, even though they’re busy passing the joint between one another. “What one word describes,” I pause, “what makes you feel the most cynical?”
I let it sink in a moment, and then said, “I’ll start. I feel the most cynical about being misunderstood.”
“I’m the most cynical about being,” Anna says, almost regretful, “persecuted.”
“Huh,” Carl says, looking at her. There was a strange tone in that simple grunt. He looks at me. “I’m most cynical about being misused.”
“Ray already said that,” Anna says.
“No, he said he was misunderstood.”
“Oh.”
I ask, “Why do you feel misused, Carl?”
“People don’t like me for some reason,” he says, taking a drag. “They like to make their own assumptions about me.”
“Yeah,” Anna says, “well we all know what happens when you assume something.”
“It makes an ass out of you and me,” Carl and I recite together, and he passes it to me.
“I loved that movie when I was a kid,” Carl says.
“I hardly remember it,” I tell him.
As I inhale and slowly exhale, I think about that movie, released from its dusty memory closet. It was some Bad News Bears movie made about the time Carl and I were born. It made it to television about the time we were old enough to play baseball, and certainly by the time we were interested in following a pack of geeky kids trying to win the little league World Series.
I can remember their 70s-style clothing which clung to the strangest parts of the body. They had the wavy, wild hair that looked like they just stopped getting a haircut for a while. The colors were dull greens, thick browns, and rusted reds, the antithetical schemes of the countercultural 60s. And, of course, there was the film itself, which gave everything a yellowish tint like wearing shooting glasses–
“Ray?” Anna says (or repeats) and I snap out of it. She nods to me, looking at my hand.
“Oh,” I say, handing the joint across to Anna. “Sorry. I was zoning out.”
“I noticed,” she says, taking a quick puff and passing it to Carl. She then opens her tin box and gets everything out to roll another.
“Damn, girl,” I tell her, “is that for now?”
“It’s for whenever,” she says, sprinkling chopped bits onto the rolling paper.
I swear it looks like oregano. I used to think that was a joke, or general misinformation. But, it’s not. In fact, you could probably get arrested in this town for carrying oregano in plastic bags. Grandmas beware.
As I’m watching her hands, it occurs to me that she is sprinkling chopped bits of plant matter onto a small sheet of plant matter. You could almost argue that this was an organic hobby. Almost.
“You know,” I say, taking the dwindling joint from Carl, “I used to think it was certain chemicals that let me see things I never would have. You know. Mind-expanding shit, and all that.” Carl, who had been intent on his drawing, tilts his head to look at me. I take a drag, pass it on, and continue, “Though there is a bit of truth in that, I think I would’ve discovered most things on my own.”
“You mean by maturing normally?” Anna asks.
“Yeah, sort of,” I tell her. “It’s not maturity really. After all, I’m thirty and I still don’t feel very mature.”
“You act it,” she says, which throws me off, “sometimes.” That’s what I was waiting for. She passes the burning bit of paper on to Carl.
“Oh,” I manage. “Well, thanks.” I think that was the first real compliment I’ve received in a while. “What I mean is that I noticed that the stories I heard on TV didn’t match what I experienced for myself. Some of the stories we heard growing up were just scare tactics.”
“Some?” Carl says.
“Okay,” I answer. “Well, most. It’s just that when you discover for yourself that the government and the media are full of shit, it’s kind of infectious. It spreads to the rest of your thinking. I mean, who else is full of shit? Is anyone not full of shit? It’s kind of unsettling. I realized this while the three of us and Teona were sitting out by the fire. You know, that one night.”
Carl softly says, “That one night.” Anna nods slowly, rolling the paper into the familiar shape. Both she and Carl are grinning.
“I realized that everything we’d learned growing up was suspect, especially everything I thought was true.”
“Yes,” Carl says. “Me too. I think we all discovered a lot that night.”
I look at him, managing a smile. I probably look like a dog that’s been caught eating the cat’s food. He just smiles back at me, and sets the roach on the ashtray. I almost get the feeling it’s his way of reminding everyone of past indiscretions. I guess it’s better than what most guys would’ve done. At least he and I feel no animosity, and no one started throwing punches.
“It was an eye-opener,” Anna says, and Carl goes back to drawing.
“But once I think about it,” I continue, “I wonder if it would’ve happened anyway. I mean, would I have discovered everything on my own without all the drinking, smoking, and dropping?”
Anna stops rolling, Carl stops drawing, and the three of us share a silent moment.
“Hopefully,” Anna finally says, “but how long would it have taken you?”
“That’s the problem,” I reply. “There’s no way to know. No way to prove my point.”
Carl stops and slides the drawing and pencil to me. How long would it have taken me to shrug off the fear of breaking mirrors, spilling salt, and making wishes at 11:11?
“Well,” I say after a brief pause, “it’s like superstition.”
“What is?” Anna asks.
“What we’re talking about,” I answer. “Cynicism, I guess.”
“How is it like superstition?”
“I used to be genuinely superstitious,” I tell them, almost like a confession. “I used to make wishes every time a clock said eleven eleven. I actually worried about breaking anything reflective. Even when I was in college, when I felt I had a good grasp on the world, I still saw truth in my horoscopes. I even felt that artificial intelligence was a bad idea because I was afraid it would take over the world.”
Anna says, “A lot of people fear artificial intelligence.”
“Why do you think that is?” I ask.
“We’re naturally xenophobic,” she says. “We fear things that are different than us. I mean, we tack on the term ‘artificial’ without thinking about it. If something is really intelligent, what is artificial about it?”
“Good point,” I tell her. “I think that if the kind of AI you’re talking about is created, it will be because an intelligent species–namely, us–did it. But humans wouldn’t have existed had it not been for the evolution of intelligence in the first place. Animals wouldn’t have existed had it not been for plants. They filled the atmosphere with the oxygen that we are breathing at this and every moment. Regardless of why things have turned out the way they have, life creates life creates life creates life…” I give them a chance to enter, but they are still listening to me.
“What if we did create something intelligent that acquired a life of its own? So what if it was more capable than us? Wouldn’t that be incredible?”
“I think it would be,” Carl answers.
“Me, too,” says Anna.
“Me, three,” I add.
“But,” starts Anna, “then xenophobia kicks in. When people think of AI as a life form, they recognize that there are a lot of ways that it could be superior to us. For some reason, we feel that somehow its first thoughts will be to dominate humanity.”
“I don’t think that AI’s first thought would be to take over the world,” I say.
“Me either,” she says, “but we’d be fooling ourselves if we didn’t at least acknowledge the possibility.”
“That idea just seems so human, though,” I tell her.
“What does?” she asks.
“The idea that AI would want to dominate the world in the first place. Most of our evolutionary heritage is steeped in violence and hierarchy and domination. An important part of being at the top of the pyramid is being dominant over something or someone. That’s just how it works in the organic world. But cold, calculating, so-called artificial intelligence wouldn’t be prone to the same primal defects that we are.”
“If we created them,” Carl says, “wouldn’t we be the ones programming them?”
“True,” I admit. “But the kind of AI I’m talking about, would program itself, like our DNA programs us.”
“You know,” says Anna, “we would totally be like God to a race of artificially intelligent beings. We would be the Creator, in the same vein as the idea that God wrote our DNA.”
“So true,” I say. “If anything, that’ll be the reason it gets invented in the first place. Someone wants desperately to be God.”
“So,” Carl says, “if know that it’s coming, then maybe we should reconsider genetic engineering.”
“Why’s that?” I ask.
“As a way of keeping AI in check. Our kind of life may be at the top of the pyramid now, but there is no way we are going to remain on top forever.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I say.
There’s a pause, a natural break in a conversation, like hitting return on a paragraph.
“I don’t think the meaning of life is artificial intelligence,” Anna says. “I think it’s art.”
“I love you, babe,” says Carl.
“I love you, too, Carl.”
“That’s sweet,” I say. “Without getting into some philosophical discussion on the aesthetics of paintings over sunsets, what is art? I don’t mean, how do we interpret art. I mean, what is art exactly?”
Anna says, “Monet, Mozart, Godiva, scented candles, and foreplay.”
Carl says, “I think art is anything that inspires or otherwise moves you.”
“What do you think art is?” Anna asks me.
“Painters are just collections of matter, creating art out of canvasses and paints. Musicians tap into a rare phenomenon in the universe, manipulating the atmosphere with sound waves. I think it could be argued that nuclear generators are an artistic manipulation of incredible amounts of energy. And what do intelligent beings do? They manipulate living brain cells into consciousness. I believe that anyone who feels spiritual or numinous is taking advantage of something unique to our form of matter. The mountains, the oceans, the sky, and the sun don’t have what we have, and that’s what sets us apart. I think art is just the expression of intelligent beings showing an appreciation of their consciousness.”
“Does that mean,” Carl says, “that gravity can be an artist? I think some of the pictures the Hubble sent back have been what I would call art.”
“Beauty can be what we want it to be,” says Anna.
“You know what I think is beautiful?” Carl asks, adding, “Besides Anna?”
“What?” I prompt.
“That we can sit around and talk about this. All three of us are just conscious bags of unconscious bones. We could just as easily have been some seawater, a few boxes of chalk, a bag of charcoal, and a couple rusty nails. Think of the beauty inherent in the simple fact that you are one of those collections of simple matter that has attained consciousness.” He pauses. “And not only that, your mind is a consciousness that is conscious of its consciousness.”
I start laughing. Somewhere in the back of my head, beneath the scalp, I can feel a tingle. I know it is just my imagination, but I feel it nonetheless. Anna is smiling. Carl looks at me as if I just took his last candy.
He asks, “Is there something wrong with what I said?”
Still giggling, I shake my head. I tell him, “I laugh involuntarily when something really amazes me. I’ve always done it. I don’t know why.”
“Numinous!” Carl exclaims, suddenly springing back to confidence. “You feel numinous.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I think you’re right.”
The three of us sit there a moment, smiling.
“I still don’t get it,” Anna says to me. “You seem so optimistic, but pessimism is what comes across. You seem to love everyone and hate everyone, all at the same time. Even after all these years of knowing you, and even after this conversation, I still have one unanswered question.”
“And that is?”
“Why are you always so cynical?”
THEre is no END