The Ghost of Christmas Gray-Orange morality appears in the corner of your room with a version of you that is visibly confused. It explains that this is what your life would look like if in terms of specific pheromonal aesthetics, appreciable only to small subspecies of roaches, if your mom had let you have a certain breakfast cereal during your youth. The pair disappear into thin air.
You tell yourself that it was a hallucination but the visit is dimly, distantly, but unmistakably captured through the window by a neighbor's doorbell cam.
You don't remember the breakfast cereal, and it has no Wikipedia page, but then you spend so much time trying to remember it that you can no longer say with certainly whether you partially remember it or whether you've fooled yourself.
And then there's the roaches. Wikipedia says that they once inhabited a certain Pacific archipelago.
But the roaches died when the archipelago was contacted by European missionaries. This at least opens up to research, and you get several solid theories about what specifically killed the roaches and how their sense of pheromones might have been physiologically felt, at least.
So now you've got the aesthetics of the pheromones, the way that a qualitative dimension might have felt to a distantly extinct animal population, and you feel like the whole thing turns absurd again.
You try to give up.
The doubts that you hold about pheromones also rupture into your mind at terrible times. Your boss tells you to "follow your nose" in an important meeting and you can't recover after that. Or more accurately you insist on trying to recover but do it in a method that is so pained and self-aware that the episode becomes a major entry in your collection of memories that inspire self-loathing.
And yet even in the midst of all of this there is one aspect that hovers over everything else, like dawn.
The more you find yourself contemplating the aesthetic the more it becomes a source of profound inner clarity, deeper even that what you can even articulate in private words.
Beauty. Beauty itself. Beauty in its endless resplendent array of senses. Beauty from the senses but beyond the senses. Beauty that seems somehow beyond the whole world, even though it's only glimpsed in such things as the groin of a tree or an unexceptional historical tea set. Here too beauty is rescuing the world.
The reference at the heart of all of this is impossibly obscure. It's impression on your will is crooked and self-mocking. But in all of it there is enough looseness, enough play between the elements that there is the possibility that it is all redeemed by this experience of beauty. You cannot say that this beauty is what the roaches felt, or even what your human neighbors feel, and you cannot say how the cereal makes it possible. But the possibility is undeniable, and it stirs in you a theme:
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
und der Cherub steht vor Gott.
You can't give up, or at least you find yourself doubting whether little choices betray you.
One day you hesitate before pouring boiling water on some ants. You cannot convince yourself that you know why you do this: hesitate, then torture. You do not know what this means, but you feel strongly that if you had forgotten about the Christmas Ghost as well as you thought you would have, you would have been certain in either killing the bugs or sparing them.