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
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
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.
