Floating subjects

Nothing is really self-evident (certainly not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which are now specious values in the eyes of the American government); but if anything is, it would have to be the idea that there are more objects than subjects. Or so it would seem. After all, for every subject in the universe there are billions of objects. Because these objects present themselves so differently to each subject one could hardly prove they are the same objects; therefore one cannot count any one of them more than once. Outside their manifestation to a particular subject, they do not exist. So what we have are a universe of objects that number in the billions, times the number of possible subjects.

Except for one thing. There could be numberless subjects that have no objects. How did they come to be in the first place? Because those billions of objects needed subjects, and that crying need called them into being. But eventually these subjects grew tired of looking at objects all the time, counting them, cataloguing them, rescuing them, celebrating them, consuming them; doing, in sort, whatever was needed for and to these innumerable objects.

The end result? Billions and billions, uncountable multitudes of orphaned subjects: those insular beings that have drifted to the outer reaches of the cosmos, exiles from the court of matter, renunciates of the objective, floating in their bubbles of blessed solipsism, and eternally free of the compulsion to recognize anything outside of themselves.

How many of these lost subjects clot the vast spaces between the galactic superclusters? As dark matter and dark energy, undetectable by ordinary means, have been proved to constitute the great bulk of matter and energy in the universe, we can hypothesize that the epistemological principle that results in the generation of subjects and objects is essentially a correlate of the principle of creation of dark matter and dark energy, and that there is an infinite number of these lost subjects, whose numbers dwarf the population of objects, which when all is said and done, are after all dispersed rather sparsely throughout the visible universe.

Therefore, to all you lonely nowhere men, living in your nowhere land, I say Bon voyage! Send a postcard to us sometime, saying having a wonderful time, wishing you weren't here, and there's really nothing to see.

Dark Matter (actual photograph)