By Abhishek Jha:
A new season of True Detective has just started, but we are still very much obsessed with the poison creosote. While it wouldn’t be too much to expect the same amount of thrill from the makers this time around too, nothing is ever going to be the same without the Texas drawl of Rust Cohle.
The Taxman was not just a true detective but he also brought to us some of the best gyaan ever delivered on television. And that’s why, in this nostalgic reminiscence, I have compiled some of that ash laden, booze loaded coke-visions of the sage. Look deep into this circle and you will find a one-eyed mirror. Here’s the Rust Cohle Ready Reckoner:
1. Cut the narcissism: “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self: an accretion of sensory experience and felling programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when in fact everybody is nobody.”
2. Creepy poet at the summer camp: “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town and the memory’s fading. It’s like there was never anything here but jungle.”
3. On religion: “Oh yeah! Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, ‘He said for you to give me your fucking share.’ People…so god damn frail they’d rather put a coin in the wishing well than buy dinner.”
“If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother that person is a piece of shit, and I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.”
“What’s it say about life, hmm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the god damn day. Nah. What’s that say about your reality, Marty?”
4. To the preacher and shrink: “The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it?”
5. It’s okay if you judge other people: “Look, as sentient meat, however illusory our identities are, we craft those identities by making value judgements. Everybody judges, all the time. Now, you got a problem with that, you’re living wrong.”
6. Kids, spare a thought: “Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.”
7. “Time is a flat circle,” he said: “Eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow. Nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created time to grow the things that it would kill, and you are reborn but into the same life that you’ve always been born into. I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives, and that is the terrible and secret fate of all life. You’re trapped, like a nightmare you keep waking up into.”
8. Anticipates Interstellar: “It’s like in this universe we process time linearly forward. But outside of our space time, from what would be a fourth dimensional perspective, time wouldn’t exist. And from that vantage point could we attain it? We see our space time would look flattened. Like a single sculpture of matter and super-position of every place it ever occupied. Our sentience is just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension- that’s eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now to us, it’s a sphere but to them it’s a circle.”
