A while back I was being distracted by television, and I watched an episode of The X-Files. The title of the show was Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, and it features Peter Boyle as a psychic insurance salesman named after the late movie writer Clyde Bruckman. A list of his works can be found here. Like the writer, Boyle's character commits suicide by the end of the episode.
TV Guide rated the episode the tenth best television episode of any show. The reason I found it so interesting was because of T.S. Eliot.
The show begins with a man visiting tarot card readers and crystal ball gazers. He asks them not what he will do in the future, but why he is going to do these things. Then he kills the psychics. Bruckman reports a dead body he finds when taking out the trash. Mulder and Scully realize that Bruckman knows more about the murder than he should, and they question him. It turns out that following the plane crash killing Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, he became obsessed with how so many things have to work out exactly a certain way so that the fateful coin toss could have happened to lead to a man's death. Soon he is able to see the events and how they work together to form the conditions for anyone's death. When the murderer asks Bruckman why he kills people, Bruckman says, "Don't you understand yet, son? Don't you get it? You do the things you do because you're a homicidal maniac." The murderer doesn't kill Bruckman, who soon kills himself, and the FBI catch the murderer after Mulder steps in a pie as foretold by Bruckman.
The usage of so many psychic characters enable the episode to explore the future as well as merely the past and present. Here time--past, present, and future--exist in a constant way and are as set as time as represented in Dry Salvages. That is, it follows a set course, like a river or train tracks or any other symbols from the poem. Unlike most people, Pocahontas, for example, Bruckman (and any other legitimate psychic on the show, though only Bruckman's abilities were verified) can see what's around the river bend.
All the choices you make are set. In the future, they've already been decided. The murderer doesn't kill because he chooses to but because he is a homicidal maniac. He doesn't do anything. It already is. When Sanjaya tells of the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, Arjuna's decision is already made. Actually, there's a scene from the movie Waking Life where a guy explains it another way. That is, scientifically. This is that scene.
Another thing that happened to me recently to make me believe this fatalist view is that I joined an internet community at http://www.timetravelfund.com/. The time travel fund charges $10. Some of this is deposited into a bank account that grows interest until time travel is not only discovered but made economically feasible. Then, a group will come back and pick me up from some point in my life (near the end virtually eliminates foreseeable time travel paradoxes) and takes me to live in the future. With the money I make from my interest, I can comfortfully live in the future for several centuries. Of course there is also the possibility that it doesn't work, and I never get picked up by future time travelers. It's a Schrodinger cat situation. Either I exist centuries in the future, or I do not. There is no likelihood or chance involved. I either do or do not. It is not random but merely unpredictable. The course of time dictates one or the other, and it is already set in that direction. Someone like Clyde Bruckman could tell you that.
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