Souls on VHS Tape

It was a disquieting thought that if I had a soul, it could be nothing more than a delusion of the stimulant-addled. There's something old-timey about the word "soul", almost as if a concerted effort has been made to erase it from our vocabulary. Surely everyone can not agree on the exact nature of the soul, so except for the mouth breathing tele-evangelists, there was no definition for it in the media of the 80s. The exact manner in which it would exist, the exact means by which it could find salvation, no one religion agreed upon it.

So the spiritual ideas of someone on a cocaine or amphetamine binge would ring true, perhaps, to some secret corner of reality which brings such delusions into its embrace. Perhaps they had been reading New Agey books with their B.S.-meter disabled by drugs, or they were academics researching old Greek or Indian philosophy, or some methed up yakuza from Japan who was into the idea that everything had a spirit or kami. It was easy to see how any number of unorthodox views could conspire to socially construct those destined to be the dregs of society with souls, of some sort.

It is equally possible that the soul-eradication campaign started by Nietzsche had been successful on a segment of the populace, and the only thing we could believe in is the meat of our brains and the tireless logic which asserts the meat to be the basis of our consciousness. Maybe even a few artists could embrace this idea, romanticizing neurons and synapses, giving praise to cortices and lobes.

Then, perhaps, everyone would aspire to be zombies, devouring the uneducated masses who believed themselves to have souls while the devourers were possessed by unspeakable bloodlust and anger, roaming through the Earth asserting the dominance of the immortalized flesh of the damned as they erased damnation itself by swallowing it down their gullets.

Whatever the situation was, it's hard to convince a human being who is afraid of death to relinquish theirself of their soul. For the devoutly religious, whatever their disposition, it is nigh impossible, unless you might convince them that their faith is in error. There is that relentless hammer of logic that so many would love to avoid being anywhere near, as it is so displeasing in its inhumanity, in its task that slaughters all hope.

But abandoning the soul leaves one without that comfort that comes in death, without that promise of another life, with the prospect of annihilation looming. It makes sense on some level for these unfortunate children of the void to turn to drugs, but these fill the void only for a time, so one can picture some lone coke-head masturbating to pornographic VHS tapes he's watching on his TV, tapes which he obtained from the cordoned-off section of the video store, trying to enjoy life while doing stimulants all night, trying to fill the emptiness where a soul would be.

But his soul (if it exists) whether it's some Platonic psuchê, some Hindu jiva, an ancient Egyptian ka, a Japanese kami, or just the spiritual manifestation of some coked up tele-evangelist's inner demons embedding themselves in the flesh of some hapless toddler--we don't really know where it would go when it's gone. Maybe someone does, but I doubt that person would be believed by more than whatever followers they can garner to the cause of their truth.

Brains, on the other hand, are something you can hold in your hands, at least if you remove them from a human body. They tend to die and wither away after this. Removing a brain, like removing a soul, seems to be a usually fatal process, if we are to believe the facts of biology. The universe goes on, it's just that there is no activity in the brain. It's like the universe kills with all of the enthusiasm of a meat packer fifteen minutes before his lunch hour. Surely whatever pain the animal feels is very important to it, for however long it lasts, but the universe kills with seemingly no enthusiasm or care, when we look at things this way.

As foolish as it would seem to a coked-up decade, in a universe made to seem to kill without care--such as through the hands of drug-smuggling sociopaths putting a bullet into someone's head whom they care not a whit for--twenty-five years from 1982, postmodernity for a time seemed to give itself into fantastical notions sold to them by smiling spiritual gurus who told people to abandon reason for the idea that to be successful all they had to do was believe in themselves. But this era of Barnes & Nobles spirituality was still a ways off, their desperation still ate at them. Prozac, the famous first SSRI antidepressant, had not even been invented yet. 1982 was the year of the release of the movie Blade Runner with its monologue on the fleetingness of life near its ending, a movie which my father showed me when I was still quite young and which would have a lasting impact on me, and which was one of the foundational creative works that established the cyberpunk aesthetic.

It played in our VCR (a machine which was a gray affair that played movies on a Zenith TV), and I was too young to realize the true significance of death as portrayed in the movie as my father watched it. It was a dark affair that seemed to influence the aesthetics of every futuristic dystopia to come out of Hollywood afterward, whenever they did. The actors were ghosts flitting about a technology I simply accepted but didn't understand, shimmering through the haze of the mediocre cathode ray tube on our TV from the signal coming from the VCR, and the ghosts among a thousand other things took possession of what may pass for a soul in the 1980s.