More Spiritual Stuff

          Context

It strikes me

that my conceptions

in regard to spiritual reality

would be totally irrelevant

if I were a politician

or an insulation installer,

but are at the nitty-gritty

of my bizarre pretensions

to be a superannuated

creator of verbal art.

                   Just Is, That’s All

Considering the enormity of the universe

and the absurdity of my unlikely and insignificant presence in it,

the experience of overwhelming pleasure

on the skin of my face and forearms

due to the late-summer-afternoon high-overcast sky

combining with a gentle breeze that ruffled my pelt

as we made our circuit of Claudelands Park

completely stunned me,

as if that mattered.

                   Funerals

I don’t do funerals.

I think they’re barbaric,

rites of some cult of the cadaver.

Once the life, the spirit, the energy,

the self

has left the body,

whatever’s left has no sanctity for me at all.

Sure, people like to remember love,

and dispose of corpses

in some sanitary and dignified way,

but the fervid need

to put the remains on an alter,

and sometimes visually drinking in its lifeless contours

before disposing of it

doesn’t suit my values at all.

It seems to me like worshipping an empty whisky bottle.

I can remember attending only three funerals:

My daddy’s, when I was nine,

was an open-casket affair.

It confused me deeply

and provoked troubled dreams for a long time afterward.

At my grandfather’s they at least kept the coffin closed,

but all the Hebrew chanting meant nothing to me.

The last one was for a neighbour at my mother’s condominium

one time when I was visiting her in Florida.

The casket was closed and they kept it short.

Lonely old people must die there often.

Then all the remaining oldies

retreated to another neighbour’s place for drinks.

I approved of that part.

                             My Will

I’ve always disliked the cult of the cadaver.

It seems to me that once the life energy leaves a body

that body ceases to be the person –

or dog or cat or cockatoo –

who used to inhabit it

and becomes a thing to be utilised if possible and then disposed of.

Funerals also leave me cold for many reasons,

not the least of which is the voluminous amounts of bullshit

that always seems to accompany them.

Since I have both property and progeny

I also have a will.

What’s important to me about the will –

I mean, how complicated is it to split

whatever’s left 50-50 between my daughters? –

are my instructions for the post-mortem

arrangements.

I’m too old for most of my organs to be useful for transplant,

so I’ve bequeathed my body

to the University of Auckland School of Medicine

to use for instructional purposes.

This also removes the liability

for cremation costs from my estate.

In order to be true to my principles –

and also to save my daughters some money –

my will also stipulates, and I quote,

“I wish no funeral or other formal memorial service be held.”

This doesn’t prevent any of the people who knew me

from using my demise as an excuse

to get together and drink heaps of grog, though.

                          The Flu

The news bulletins seemed so strange to me.

I’d really like to get

H1N1, y’know?

– although not as much

as the plain old seasonal flu,

because swine flu’s symptoms

are milder.

I’ve always enjoyed

having the flu,

ever since I was little.

I like having a few days

to a week or so

of lying in bed

all day

without guilt or restlessness.

I like the luxuriously fatigued feeling in my muscles.

Most of all, however,

I love the fabulous fever dreams

of flying

or bouncing lightly

through a reality far removed from my own.

When I die I want it to be from the flu.

I want to float peacefully off to sleep,

shedding all discomfort and pain,

and whilst soaring through a dream

of spiritual reality,

escape and never come back to Earth.

             Humanists, My Arse

The Yale University Undergraduate

Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics Club

signed a letter opposing a guest lecture

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,

a human-rights and women’s-rights activist

who gets up various Islamic organisations’ collective noses

to the extent that the many threats on her life,

and the murder of her former colleague,

have resulted in her needing constant bodyguard protection.

They said that the reason for this letter

was that they did not believe that she,

“represents the totality of the ex-Muslim experience.”

What horseshit! Nobody does. Nobody could.

She has a voice that educated people need to hear,

whether it offends them or not –

or in this case, most probably, threatens them.

I have little doubt that it was fear

of violent Islamic backlash

that intimidated this club

into this hypocrisy.

I watched a video of her speech,

and the subsequent Q&A session,

and I disagreed with a reasonable amount of what she said,

especially things emanating

from her blinkered admiration of the USA,

but she also made some intriguing points

about Islam’s relationship

with various types of Muslims

that I thought were more than worthy of discussion

by elite undergraduate

atheists, humanists, and agnostics,

including ex-Muslims.

        The Obvious

This moment,

although incorporating

and having been conditioned

by all that’s gone before,

is still all that is.

                        Wonder and Imagination

The Bible is indeed an impressive work of the imagination

of Bronze Age drylands pastoralists

as they sought to amaze their mates

with wondrous tales around the campfire.

The evidence is clear that

some species of dinosaurs

developed and flourished

for fifteen million years or more

before extinction,

and that our species,

which appeared more than ninety million years later,

has been around for only about a million years –

with new discoveries continually

bumping our knowledge of the time

of the first biologically modern humans around a bit.

The realities that science unfolds

reveal a world more wondrous

than those illiterate, long-ago herders

could have ever imagined,

and it’s the people who cling to those biblical campfire tales

as if they were unalterably true

who have little or no imagination,

being disgraces to their distant predecessors.

                             Obituary

Somebody – her name escapes me at the moment

– died yesterday.

She wasn’t exactly famous,

depending on what definition of famous is operative here,

but a bunch of people knew her,

and even more used to know her,

when she was younger.

She’d touched the lives of many;

not millions, but many.

Each of them is important, of course,

just as important as she was,

just as important as you,

just as important as the wife of a motorcycle mechanic

in the village of Troitskoye in Russian Siberia.

They’ve all touched the lives of others in some way,

often for the better, most of them,

just as you have,

but sometimes for the worse.

This interconnectedness of affect isn’t limitless, though,

and over generations,

and centuries,

and millennia,

and aeons

will become diluted to an almost homeopathic extent,

fading from immediate relative insignificance

to eventual undetectable oblivion.

Ripe plums, however, taste good.

Moment by Moment

Death, apparently,

doesn’t want me

for the moment,

no matter what I want,

but even so,

I stumble on

without it.