On a recent Sunday, L. A. and I recorded the ‘Space Train of Love’ episode for the Up Your Dialogue podcast. I delighted in it, for here was the chance to outline my theory of the Fifth Dimension, a philosophy developed in my forthcoming novel, The Preserve.

In Melville’s Chapter 9 of Moby-Dick, the Sermon chapter, the question of the purpose of exploration has been disconnected, unplugged at the start. Logically the disconnection is not invalid. It reminds me of Augustine’s Confessions: if the physical life of man is so brief and transitory, whence the bother to learn? Learning is an engagement of this world, the world of temptation and of sin. It is the realm of the devil. Learning beyond the word of God is obviously other than godly.

Why explore space or the rules of the universe, Spinoza’s sum-of-all-mathematical laws, or journey otherwise to knock on the door of the Creator? According to the Gospels, the kingdom of heaven lies within you, — (and just in case, there’s a handy, holy reference book should you have any questions). Aside from any practical impossibility of reaching the ends of the universe or the edges of existence, the journey is flawed at inception.

And here is where Melville’s philosophical logic resides, on the merits:

     “I have striven to be thine, more than to be in this world’s,” says the

      Jonah of Father Mapple’s sermon, “or mine own; yet this is nothing,

      I leave eternity to thee; for what is man that he should live out the

      lifetime of his God?”

A man (and his species) are not to live eternally, but the idea of what I have called the Space Train is to bring the universe’s collective final beings, those descendants of all the species of the universe that ever lived, to the Fifth Dimension Entity (FDE) and proverbially knock on the Creator’s door. Obviously, the conversation should account for all life, space and time in four dimensions. It would naturally include a satisfactory answer to the ‘why’ of all suffering and a proper moral justification for it.

If The Preserve brought us to the FDE’s door to ask one question, a sequel should reveal what the question is, how it is answered, and what follows after the answer. Only these criteria would satisfy Melville’s incomprehension of the lifetime of his god.

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