If the beginning is the end, where does that leave the middle?
It’s the in-between, the gap, the looping path that leads from one bang! to the other; the middle is where all instability, all fluctuation, all the churning motions of entropy do their work. It’s where we live, the only place we’ll ever know.
It’s chaos.
***
John Milton’s follow-up to Paradise Lost, a shorter poem called Paradise Regained, doesn’t really live up to its name. Paradise doesn’t make a single appearance in the poem; it’s been lost forever, and not a single character attempts to rebuild it.
The story takes place hundreds of years after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise. It follows a teenage Jesus Christ on his lonely expedition through the desert, during which he meets Satan, who attempts to tempt Jesus into sinning. It’s a much less exciting premise than your average epic poem, but that’s kind of the point: Milton wants to contrast Jesus’ brand of heroism with the kind usually celebrated in warlords and mythical figures.
By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead
To know...
Is yet more Kingly; this attracts the Soul,
Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That other o'er the body only reigns.
What Milton (via Christ) is saying there, is that the only form of command we should aspire to have is over our own passions, and over the hearts and minds of others. To do this, we’ve got to keep spreading the truth to whoever will listen. That is something more ‘Kingly’ than any war-mongering monarch or Pagan god ever achieved.
But what’s with the title?
Milton’s implication in the whole poem is that ‘Paradise’ has transformed. It no longer exists as a physical location. Never more can humans wander in its evergreen glades, plucking ripe fruits and gambolling naked among the shrubbery.
Instead, thanks to the sacrifices and the truth-telling of Christ, Paradise now exists in the abstract; it exists in the minds, in the souls, of those who follow the teachings of God. And it can be regained, if you simply follow those who are telling the truth, and think hard enough about where you’re going.
***
Cement seemed an obvious choice of building material for the planners of Paradise, as they looked to revive the town from its ashen ruins. After such a devastating fire, surely the only logical thing to do is reconstruct houses from a fireproof material.
Proposals to rebuild the houses with cement, however, were rejected out of hand by the residents. They said 'We're either rebuilding with wood, or we're not coming back to Paradise at all.'
Wood, for as far back as most residents could remember, had been the main building material of houses in Paradise; people were determined that, if they were to move back home, it had to feel like home. It had to look like home. And so, they rebuilt Paradise with wood.
These kinds of disputes between city officials and returning residents defined the reconstruction efforts of Paradise. Jim Broshears, the city’s former fire chief, once promoted the idea that all houses should be surrounded by a ring of brick pavers, to prevent fires from spreading through people’s gardens and into their homes. Much like the cement idea, this proposal was ignored by most residents.
The town’s motto, “In harmony with nature,” seemed to rule out any suggestions of houses surrounded by five feet of bricks. Most returnees, eager to maintain Paradise’s core values, wanted to replant trees around their wooden houses, and knock their wooden fences back into the ground. Again, the people got their wish.
All these disagreements and divisions about what Paradise was supposed to be were only possible thanks to it having been destroyed in the first place. Now that the physical Paradise had ended, all that remained was the idea of Paradise. Paradise in the abstract.
But with enough people returning home, abstraction soon began converting back into reality. Just not in the way that many had hoped it would.
***
There’s a moment in Dark, probably its darkest scene, in which a man called Ulrich travels back in time, only to find someone called Helge, who Ulrich believes has abducted and killed his son. Ulrich decides that if he murders Helge in the past, he’ll never have lost his son in the future. The fact that Helge is merely a child when Ulrich finds him does not deter him; he chases Helge down, and bludgeons him with a rock.
Here we have a mirror of one of the biggest questions in any time-travel conversation: if you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler?
Any attempts to go back and ‘undo’ the bad things that happened in the past are, ultimately, attempts to disrupt the process of cause and effect. If only, we think, we could just do it all over again, with the benefit of the hindsight we have now. None of this would’ve happened.
The creators of Dark have a twisted response to that wish: even if you could go back, you wouldn’t be able to change anything. You could only cause it.
Helge, bloodied and unconscious, is left by Ulrich to die in a bunker. When he eventually wakes, the damage done to his brain is severe enough to change the course of his life. As a result of the attack, he spends the rest of his days taking part in the plot that will eventually lead to the disappearance of Ulrich’s son. Thus, the cycle continues.
If only we could do it all over again, with the benefit of hindsight…
***
The reconstruction of Paradise was underway. The abstract was becoming the concrete (or, more accurately, the wood). More and more people were returning to the town, either due to desperate homesickness, or because they couldn’t afford houses elsewhere, or, for some, because their insurance companies told them it was their only choice.
Paradise quickly became a case-study of time’s hellish spiral of negative cause-and-effect, as their water supply was poisoned by chemicals released in the fire.
Global warming had caused the initial fire; poor planning had caused a high death toll and property damage; property damage had caused Benzene to contaminate the town’s entire water supply; Benzene in the water supply causes cancer in many of those who drink it. Cancerous Benzene in the water supply led many people to drink from potentially unsafe private tanks they’d bought themselves, or to continue drinking cancerous tap water through ineffective filters.
The term for this is ‘Natech’. Short for ‘Natural disasters triggering technological disasters,’ Natech is the sort of phenomenon we should start getting used to, as we progress through our world of unbreakable cause-and-effect chains. Thanks to the interconnected nature of reality, disasters from every different category are always overlapping, each one causing or worsening the next.
***
Trisha Wells, a former Paradise dweller, said in 2019: “I still just want to go home, and not home the place but home a moment in time.”
But the present, the middle, the chaos, is where all of us live. It’s all we’ll ever know. Our entire existence takes place on entropy’s downward escalator. This could be a much smoother descent if we, like the Jesus of Paradise Regained, admit that we cannot return to where we have been in time. Every attempt to ‘redo’ the past merely leads to repetitions of its consequences, each repetition deadlier than the last.
It’s a cycle of eternal recurrence.
***
On February 7th, 2020, the Mayor of Paradise, Greg Bolin, grinned broadly as he cut a red ribbon, declaring Paradise officially reopened. Regained.
By mid-March, though, the town was going quiet again. Shops were shuttered once more. Paradise Town Hall was closed to the public. Staff members of various official buildings started wearing sanitized gloves, in preparation for an outbreak of what scientists were calling ‘COVID-19’.
Months later, in the midst of yet another health disaster, the people of Paradise looked over to the horizon, to see most of California burning, an apocalyptic orange glow rising above it and singeing the sky.
Thus, the cycle continues.
This blog is the second part of a series called Losing Another Day in Paradise. To see the other entries, click the words 'Blogging Volumes' at the top of the page to return to the main menu. The next entry is called Apocalypse Now...
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