[Image: “Patience/Trepidation,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river:
The Afterlife
While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,
or riffling through a magazine in bed,
the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.They’re moving off in all imaginable directions,
each according to his own private belief,
and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:
that everyone is right, as it turns out.
you go to the place you always thought you would go,
The place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.Some are being shot into a funnel of flashing colors
into a zone of light, white as a January sun.
Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits
with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.Some have already joined the celestial choir
and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,
while the less inventive find themselves stuck
in a big air conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,
a woman in her forties with short wiry hair
and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.
With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.There are those who are squeezing into the bodies
of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on
the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,
ready to begin another life in a more simple key,while others float off into some benign vagueness,
little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld
by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.
He will bring them to the mouth of the furious cave
guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins
wishing they could return so they could learn Italian
or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.
They wish they could wake in the morning like you
and stand at a window examining the winter trees,
every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.(And some just smile, forever on)
(Billy Collins [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Questions About Angels
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
(Billy Collins [source])
_____
I’ve long had a story idea about the afterlife, with a Twilight Zone sort of premise. It — the premise — goes like this:
When you die, you instantly return to life — immediately cast back to a moment before whatever killed you was a fact of your life. Before the first cancer cell blossomed. Before you stupidly got behind the wheel during the icestorm, not really drunk but not really not-drunk, either. Before you entered the fast-food restaurant which was about to be sprayed by bullets… If you simply die of old age (as the saying goes), or of other nebulous “natural causes,” you return to the moment before you first experienced or even thought seriously about death — all the way back to the birth canal, if that’s when it was.
But here’s the thing: you come back to such a moment, but no one else you know in this life is there. You know only the people whom you don’t know around you at the time of your return. You know them as your “circle” — your family, your friends — and you share memories and history with them, but with no one from this life. Oh, sure, little leaks spring up from time to time: you cross paths, say, in your new back-dated life, with the man or woman you ended up marrying — but it was just in a supermarket aisle, and you didn’t recognize them as such, just thought they looked interesting before you both moved on. Or in this life — Life-Prime, call it — maybe the teacher who so influenced you when you were young died before you felt that influence. Or you’re sure you somehow know the guy behind the airport ticket counter who, in Life-Prime, was your only cousin… It’s all sorta like the old reincarnation myths, except you don’t re-emerge into a newborn’s life, of human or other species; you simply pop into a whole ‘nother life, fully formed as it were, all memories (ephemeral, fickle things that they are) replaced by new ones.
The main reason I’ve never pursued this story (at least, haha, in Life-Prime): I can’t work out how the single most important climactic moment happens — the moment when the protagonist discovers that all this is true.
…which naturally leads to the question: how do we know it isn’t true?
