Elegy

The liminal space we inhabit when someone dear to us dies opens us up to deep feelings, even to the supernatural: suddenly everything seems infused with meaning. I have written work I consider elegiac for my mother and father, my partner John, for my cat Cookie (See blog post Animals as Inspiration) and even a sister-in-law, lost not through death, but divorce. One of these is a poem, but the rest are fiction. Here is a meditation on a possible afterlife. It first appeared in Dark Matter. Summer 2015 #7

e-heaven

      . . . a new idea for heaven

 I would like to propose e-heaven; I would like to present this to the committee on celestial slash scientific affairs, or the committee on cosmology or the one on hope:  The “e” might stand for energy, which I understand is never lost so that no matter (and speaking of matter, it could be hidden there) no matter what we do it lingers forever in the universe — or the “e” might stand  for electronics or Ethernet which, some believe (and have acted upon their belief by designing clever, colorful, impressive-as-any-Memorial-Stone homepages) might allow us to live forever on the web (which too is always changing but never lost) — and hence and then too, the “e” might stand for erased files that are not permanently erased but momentarily deleted on an abandoned hard drive or floppy discs forgotten in a basement somewhere or garage or landfill waiting to be retrieved by a brainy geek (God?)  – again one of the points being that nothing is ever lost, and here/there/now is a “t” which I will posit stands for time, which we know is only a dimension and not the absolute that it once was thought to be, so that death perhaps is liberation from that dimension, freedom to travel without our bodies on a wave of  light (whose speed is absolute) to find the energy (and our body) which is not lost and dwells here/there in body and emotion (emotion: another e-word, part of the “e” of energy) that is never lost, and an aspect of this proposed liberation being that we can choose the moment or moments (and hence the emotion or emotions), the best moments of our life and inhabit them forever (or for as long as we choose, Free Will being an axiom of this theorem).  And that would be heaven.

Yes, we would ride the light of our life – not a reincarnated life, which, when you think about it is not really our life at all: not our memory, not our experience, not our body (because again I would like to emphasize our body would be here/there too [in e-Heaven] projected by light though paradoxically we would travel [ride the wave of light] here/there only after death, when we have for all intents and purposes lost our bodies, but not really or rather only for that and future moments, but time being the single dimension that it is, the past moments stretch across the universe and are here/there for us [past, present, and future,  here/there, up/down, now/then  being  heuristic devices, not reality] ) — of course, we might choose hell, e-hell, it being the worst moments, moments when we walked the blocks alone dreading to go home or walked them because we had no home – or we might choose to travel to the future, curious merely to observe, without emotion or body, the aftermath – curious to follow a thought to its conclusion. For my part, having held a dying person’s hand, having combed a dying person’s hair, I have found emotion and body to be as fierce as curiosity and thought.

This, of course, is only a proposal in rough draft form. It needs fine tuning. It awaits observational or experimental validation.  No doubt someone will find holes in my science though I have never claimed, and will never claim, to be a scientist, only a pilgrim who has read Einstein for Dummies and who has been intrigued by Schroeder’s cat, as well as unified and string theory, all of whom or which I must credit in part for my proposal. I would also like to thank the ancient Egyptians, who unlike the Greeks (whose Hades was all shadow, not light) believed that heaven would be like Earth, only better: the wheat crops would never fail, the light would shine very brightly, our love would abide.