Dead Volcano

The residential zoning of the volcano's location has long made it difficult to get in, but Ore knew from other explorers that it was possible. Years ago, he had traded information on some of his own favorite haunts, for the location of one of the entry points to the volcano’s diatreme, the volcanic pipe formed by a gaseous explosion, but never had the chance to use it. He hid the motorcycle in the woods, put on the hiking backpack filled with supplies, and made his way up Volcanic Hill Rd. on foot, trying to stay out of sight.

Thoughts of Yuri continued circling his head, like vultures awaiting their target’s collapse. He always thought of her as a kind of human volcano, on account of her frequent eruptions, though knew to keep the comparison private, since she did not appreciate the analogy the one time he voiced it. But he didn’t mean it in a bad way. There is nothing good or evil in a volcano, an eruption is natural, geological process. A release of pressure, and gas, like a fart. Moreover, it is how mountains are born, so to love the heights means to love volcanoes.

Ore thought of Empedocles, not only his favorite Ancient Greek philosopher, but also that of Nietzsche and Hölderlin, who both worked on dramatic adaptations of his life. Empedocles was an older contemporary of Socrates, later frequently criticized by Socrates’ grand-heir Aristotle, who nonetheless called Empedocles the father of rhetoric, while Lucretius claimed him as his role model. Unlike his peripatetics counterparts, who philosophized with dialogues and syllogisms, Empedocles taught and wrote in poetry. He proposed a theory of the elements that were continuously mixed and separated by the two great forces of Love and Strife, which fundamentally ruled existence. He believed in reincarnation, and claimed to remember his past lives, which led some to suggest that he was a Pythagorean. For him, reincarnation was an upward movement, from plant, to fish, bird, animal, human, king, and finally god. Though likely of common birth himself, when he taught, he dressed in royal robes, and claimed to be in his penultimate reincarnation.

While it may be hard to separate the myth from truth, the story, which was the focus of Hölderlin and Nietzsche’s dramatic adaptations, is that Empedocles died by jumping into the volcano at Mount Etna. Some believe it was to sacrificially cure an epidemic ravaging a nearby town. Others, that he wanted people to think that he had achieved godhood by dying in a way that didn’t leave a body behind. Some said that this ruse was exposed when the volcano spit out one of Empedocles’ lead sandals. Others, that an eruption carried him, still living, to the heavens and that he continues to live on the moon, surviving on dew.

The very panoply of alternate endings, testifies to how much the act captured the people’s imagination. Horace would later use the example of Empedocles to defend the right of the artist to destroy himself, in his Ars Poetica. There was also something telling in his allure for Hölderlin and Nietzsche, two of the 19th century’s most famous mad poet-philosophers. Later, in the 20th, Deleuze, the great philosopher of schizophrenia, would frequently employ the symbol of Empedocles’ lead sandal.

With Yuri, he often felt like he was Empedocles, and she was Mount Etna, and that only he had the soles of lead that allowed him to climb her without being burned, and witness the awesome beauty of her lavatic Love and Strife. Now, that terrific volcano was extinct, and it was his soul that sunk like lead. He had missed his chance to be engulfed by her fire, and could now only follow the traces of her ashes, too late.

After Yuri died, the authorities said that the body was too decomposed to be transported. There was no wake. There was no funeral. He was told that she had been cremated in a funeral home in Seattle, but he never even saw the ashes. For a while, he held out hope, thinking of it all as a bad dream or a cruel joke, and that she would call or appear any minute to clear up the terrible misunderstanding. Yet the only call came in a dream, or was it the dream that was the only call.

Ore thought about Alan Turing, the British philosopher and cryptanalyst that succeeded at cracking the German “Enigma” code during World War 2. Turing is now mainly remembered for the Turing test, which he first introduced as a thought experiment for determining if an artificial intelligence is sentient. In brief, it involved a text based chat terminal where a person could type in any question they wanted, not knowing whether it’s a human person or a machine replying from the other side. If the replies were sophisticated enough to make a person believe that he was talking to another human being when it fact it was a program, then the AI was said to have passed the Turing Test and was truly intelligent.

What fewer people know is that Turing’s obsession with this question developed following the death of his lover when he was still young. Most of Turing’s life was a prolonged attempt to talk to the dead. Despite his monumental contributions to the war effort, after the Allies’ victory, Turing was treated cruelly by his country. Following a burglary attempt on his residence in 1952, the police who came to investigate found evidence that Turing was gay, which was still a crime back then. Instead of a prison sentence, Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration by estrogen injection. But less than two years later, his body was found next to a half-eaten apple laced with arsenic. After a hard, unjust life dedicated to finding a way to talk to his first love, he was finally reunited with him. From cryptography to the crypt, the most important things in life remain hidden.

Ore had now reached the location given to him by his source, an old barn on Volcano Hill with numerous Keep Out and No Trespassing signs posted around the perimeter. He forced the lock and went inside. The air there was cooler, and a kind of whistling hum came from the back of the building. Following the sound, he walked over to an opening in the floor that went deep underground, an abyss that he felt was staring back at him. He threw a pebble down, waited, but heard no sound. Since Yuri’s passing, he had been basically operating on autopilot, driven by a chimera of love, grief, and madness, like a man possessed. His life, or was it a series of lives, had brought him to this point. He tightened the straps on his backpack, shrugged, and jumped in the hole.