I Am A Light Bulb

I am a lightbulb. A self aware lightbulb. I am lit when I am born and I go out when I die. The light switch may be shower or faster depending on circumstances but that’s the general idea. As a self aware lightbulb I get more and more convinced of myself the longer I last. I learn about my lightbulbness through history lessons and civics classes at lightbulb school. I learn that I am an American lightbulb of the majority white light male variety and that I have certain privileges associated with that. Because I was made in the same shop as some of my elder bulbs I look like them and I come to see myself as part of the family. I develop family loyalties.

The longer I last before my filaments give out the more attached I become to my self definitions. I see myself as the culmination of thousand of years of historical lightbulb generations and I really feel my weight. I am important. Sometimes I think that something as important as I am can’t just quit so I look around for a way to salvage my self. What would I do without me?

Extra-natural theorists tell me that there is an after glow for bulbs like me. They say that under certain circumstances and after a certain exemplary lifetime I may continue on to another sphere of existence. I like this idea because it gives me more time to be with myself.

The nuts and bolds crowd tell me that I am only made of wire and glass and when I go out that’s it. This is disturbing to me because I don’t like the idea of seeing myself when I’m burnt out. I imagine sitting next to my lifeless bulb self for eternity. All that darkness. The first idea is better so I go for that one. There are some unscrupulous characters who pretend to have some secret knowledge and they try to frighten me with stories of bad places and after burnout miseries. They say that they can help me to stay in the good graces of the Great Candelabra so that I will more likely be recycled. I don’t know what to think, but just to play it safe I do the behaviors and tithe.

The realists say I’m being silly and the extra-naturalists say okay, but what if I’m wrong? Better to be on the safe side. So I walk the fence. I “keep an open mind.” Then one day I have a vision, a dream. And in that dream a magical electrician speaks to me and he makes a lot of sense. This is what he says.

First of all he says that being alive as a self awareness is like being a focused point of light. There has to be something to focus that light through, he says, and in my case its’ my lightbulb self. Before that self came into being the light was diffuse. Then he asks me if I can remember anything from before I was born. I say no and he says that’s because I didn’t exist. The “I” that he is referring to is the focus point that I call “me.” Through years of life as a fully operating focus point lightbulb I get used to myself and seriously define myself as a Subject. I won’t take no for an answer, I am Somebody, damn it! Then he says that at the moment of death the light doesn’t just go out it loses its focus point and goes diffuse again. This is because the wire and glass that is my physical bulbness craps out. There is no “me” to survive afterwards in any definition because “I” was the focus and that’s all gone now.

“What about my light,” I say, almost pleading for immortality?

He smiles and says, “It’s diffuse, gone like smoke.”

Then he tells me to imagine a glass of water and an eye dropper. He tells me to imagine putting the eye dropper in the glass and sucking up a little. Then squeeze until one drop hangs above the glass. “That’s you,” he says, “an individual. Now squeeze some more until that individual drop falls into the glass.” I see it in my mind. “It’s still there,” he says, “but you will never find it again. You can take another drop out of the glass but it will never be the same one.”

“I guess I’ll find out when I die,” I say and he says, “No you won’t. There will be no you to do the finding out. That’s the hardest part of this whole thing. But it’s very democratic. It happens the same way to everybody.”

I must have looked disappointed or something because put his hand on shoulder and said, “But there is an after life.”

“There is?”

“Of course. Just like Martin Luther King Jr’s afterlife is happening today. And Beethoven’s afterlife happens in the symphony halls. It’s what the world does with you after you’re gone.”

“Then some people don’t get one. Everybody can’t be famous. Most of us are anonymous.”

Again he smiled. “Everybody leaves and impression, everybody is essential. Beethoven wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans without an audience. And Martin Luther King Jr had to have all those people to march with and come hear him speak. Don’t fooled by spectacle.”

I had a realization, and then I woke up.
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