To Infinity and Beyond!
Who doesn’t love Buzz Lightyear? The guys at Pixar created him for the original Toy Story movie in 1995. Actually, Buzz comes from a movie within a movie and is the toy character that comes from that inner movie. He was modeled after G.I. Joe, which I sort of understand, but never really caught on to even though I was a big G.I. Joe kid. His voice is from Tim Allen, the famous TV Toolman who somehow symbolizes the likable but somewhat over-exuberant guy’s guy who is more like most American males than Tom Hank’s Woody character. If Woody is Gary Cooper in Man of the West, Buzz is Clevon Little from Blazing Saddles. What I like most about Buzz Lightyear, besides his name, which screams of intergalactic travel, is his tag line: “To infinity and beyond!” Speaking to the enormity of the universe is to speak to the unknown. And nothing is more unknown than what lies ahead in the future for us all. Strangely enough, one of Benjamin Franklin’s best known quotes is that, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” The contradiction of the certainty of death is, of course, juxtaposed to the uncertainty of what comes beyond death.
If you look back at the old 1960’s show Ben Casey, a show about a neurosurgeon, they got very prophetic with their use of symbology at the beginning of each episode. The old Dr. Zorba would draw and pronounce the mathematical symbols on the blackboard, in sequence, and say each word: Man…Woman…Life…Death…Infinity. The Infinity symbol is pretty well known even beyond the TV-watching 1960’s public. It is a lateral or “lazy” eight that is called a lemniscate and is based on Bernoulli’s adaptation of what are called Cassini curves. Basically, these are geometrically-defined shapes that used foci and equidistant lines to draw a figure 8 shape. That shape invokes the shape of the Möbius Strip that I referred to in another story recently. And since a Möbius Strip is fashioned like a figure 8 with an added twist (literally), one can run a pencil along it and it creates a continuous line that never ends, but keeps returning to itself in three dimensions (a circle or figure eight does the same, but in two dimensions). Infinity is a very intriguing concept to man, perhaps because he knows he, as a mere mortal, is quite finite.
For all the discomfort that uncertainty brings to human beings, I also think we feel a sense of particular comfort with the notion of infinity. When you were a kid arguing with another kid trying to outdo one another you would say “double that!” and he would say, “triple that!”, and then someone would say, “multiply that by a thousand million!”, and finally someone would come up with “take that to infinity!” and the contest would end. There is nothing more finite than infinity, which is the charming aspect of the concept. In theory you cannot go beyond infinity, which is probably what is so appealing about the tag line “To infinity and beyond!” We know that the universe doesn’t end, it can’t. There must always be something beyond it, and yet, if the universe is infinite or not is still a hotly debated issue in astronomy. The only thing that can be beyond the universe is something we call the void. The void is an empty space that is not valid. I guess that also lives in the contradiction that if it exists as an empty space, it must, by definition, exist, and that means that it cannot be invalid. Emptiness and nothingness are simply not easy concepts to get your head around. That’s probably why we invented something like infinity, as the catch-all for whatever we cannot fathom. It is the final bucket like Captain Kirk’s Final Frontier. Whatever cannot be explained or contemplated is part of infinity, and there is nothing beyond it.
But then “to infinity and beyond!” is a lot like the chicken and the egg and deciding which came first. The only answer is that neither could come first, so it is a null set. All great uncertainties of the world devolve into that contradiction of the null set and sooner or later we all must stop thinking about it because our heads will otherwise explode (or is it implode?) in the infinite loop of contemplation. But in the same way that we know that friction, as imperceptible as it may be, prevents perpetual motion, so too do our mental gears grind enough to preclude infinity other than as a terminal notion. And then Buzz Lightyear tacks on “and beyond!” and we are all at it again.
Yesterday I got a letter from something called the Trinity Society. It confused me because I didn’t know what it was. It did not look like a religious organization and had no clues indicating a connection to Christianity and the Holy Trinity. Then I saw that it was a simple note announcing that they were the leading provider of cremation services in this area (and probably beyond, right?) I immediately did my word association of Trinity and Trident and then to Neptune and I remembered that when I buried my father’s ashes in early 1993, I had his body delivered to the Neptune Society nearby here, and they cremated his remains and delivered them to the Mission San Luis Rey (his designated internment spot) in a plastic bag with his ashes inside. I don’t know why I remember that, but somehow the name Neptune Society stuck with me since it has an imagery of committing something to the deep and thereby delivering it as much as we can here on earth to a place that approximates infinity at the bottom of the bottomless ocean. We were not giving my father a burial at sea, but we still used the Neptune Society for the cremation.
I do not know how the Trinity Society got my name and why they sent this random letter to me (it had my name specifically on the envelope). Could their marketing have something to do with being on the verge of turning seventy? Or perhaps in 1993 I filled something out and that Neptune Society that cremated my father at age seventy, morphed into the Trinity Society and kept their mailing list…except that I didn’t live at this address back then. This got me curious enough to Google “cremation near me” and it seems that this is a highly competitive commercial arena around here. I didn’t see the Trinity Society or the Neptune Society in Yelp’s Top Ten list, but they did pique my interest with some place called Silver Linings. I’m sure that whatever mailing list from which the Trinity Society got my name, by virtue of the power of digital marketing and Google’s tendency to sell our personalized search data, I will only discover the origins of this ploy during infinity and beyond.
As this summer comes to an end, the added recent humidity seems to have brought with it a flurry of house flies. We’re not talking about a Biblical plague, but just a few house flies buzzing around that are unusual and reminiscent of their general annoyance. A fly cannot buzz past you and in front of you on the window pane while you are thinking about Buzz Lightyear without catching your attention. I am no longer that curious kid that pulled the wings off flies to see what they would do, but I am not enough of a Buddhist to let flies be in my space without giving them chase. So, I took a simple tissue and quashed the fly on the glass. I sent that buzzing fly to infinity and beyond and must admit that I hold no remorse. If there is something beyond infinity, I suspect that I have just sealed my fate and that I will be reincarnated as a fly.