Drift 5
A stream of consciousness stirred by Albert Goldbarth’s “The Song of Two Places.”
Even when we’re gone, we’re here. When I was fourteen someone of a similar age died; I grew distraught at such wanton possibility. There were more deaths and I had to wrest control. My Catholic disposition was insufficient for this unknowable, shapeless truth—that death itself could arrive at any moment of its choosing. So I grew possessed by near-death experiences, or NDEs. I searched every database for abatement. And all I found were various existential projections, each mind shaping its own heaven. Do we all remain imprisoned by perception, even in death? There were some universals. A warm calling light, a tunnel splitting here from there, apparitions of relatives passed, a kind of corded tether attaching soul to body. Hell was described as more of a feeling, and of one’s own making, according to those who had seen it. In fact, everything there seemed to occur by feeling alone, language itself more felt than heard. It was most universally reported: when consciousness is released from body, it perceives by innervation rather than sight.
Some doctors explain these glimpses of afterlife as mere mechanisms of dying brain, last vestiges of neural fire. Just another earthly, material phenomenon to be explained.
No one can know for sure, so we give our shapeless future a name: we call it faith, and we build it a religion.
***
There is the science of it; that we truly can’t get rid of a body. Attempt to turn deadened flesh and organ to ash, or allow its more tedious degradation into wormy matter—even if trapped in box or urn, matter cannot be made into nothing. (“…if zero is nothing…how does it make a 10 by sidling up to a 1?”) We might only be displaced or transmuted. A body releases proof of existence within any attempted destruction, molecules of cell float through atmosphere to take form in another’s breath, lodging itself inside foreign lung. We are all breathing bits of other life.
Then there is the existential testimony, the butterfly effect. Each body’s conscious matter orders it to enact some kind of story. And each act of body, however marginal, unfolds into other bodies, reverberates through time like strummed, taught string. We are peons with abject power to construct wars of the smallest kind, inside our own family or, when isolated, inside our own cell. We give life, too, donate marrow of bone, a quantum of blood or a giving hand. Factions of every decision shed onto new life, over and over again in metamorphosis.
Then there is the metaphysical part, the matter of spirit. What we make of “a simulation-him.” The shape we project onto the shapeless. The birds that bring message, the clock that tells a same time. Even when they’re gone, they’re here.
Between the solar systems: emptiness. Between our neurons: emptiness. And yet we’re here.
***
When we “space out,” do we cross veil to glimpse space where formless matter roam? So much is made of how little of the brain’s real estate we actually use. Where thought loses form is perhaps where we reach our most conscious state of being. Are we capable of being both here and there?
Even when we’re here, we’re gone. To where? Not quite there. We devised a third space of mind, not formless but geometric; accepting all input, arranging it not in knowledge but scattered diorama. We can go to war untouched yet not by imagination. We can hold attention in deficit. Did we really require a purgatory for living? A space where everything can happen but never really to us? Now when we die, some component of our spirit can take shape in image to reverberate alone and forever. Bits of pixelated body lodged in inter-space, eternal and without feeling.
The mind can be Mars. The now can be flying.
But who wants to go to Mars? Soon, we will make reservations for dinner on Elon Musk’s projection of heaven. Even when we’re here, parcels of us elsewhere. We are somewhere in space, not quite here nor there. Maybe to Mars but always conjured in sight. Trapped in the limbo of our own making, not quite heaven or hell but just perpetual tunnel: Even when we’re here, we’re gone. Even when we’re gone, to nowhere.