Catafalque

What may happen if I die? Imaginatively, a great deal. Maybe I'll lie where I drop, and a mass of foodstuffs will expand around me: all the pizzas and tacos I ever ate, all the dust I swallowed, the water, saliva, backwash I drank. Maybe I will be surrounded by people: the inhumanly saurian teachers of the dim foggy past, the bearded warriors that drove my family out of our home, old men that played chess in the parks and yelled at me to get down from the benches. Maybe my friends will be there. Maybe. It's possible a few lovers, requited and unrequited, might show up. But what would they do? Stand? Sing? Lacerate themselves? That's the last thing I'd want. Talk amongst each other? In some ways, while I still have life, I'd prefer to tie off some areas from others. But after death, let the gates open. Let all the causal flotsam and jetsam eddy away into the future, because we all know we'll just end up scattered over the planet, a fine sprinkling of snow that never takes for all that long, that's swept by wind, that thaws or compresses into something different.

What else might happen? There might be light. Chains that bind my being may break. The eternal darkness, eternal bliss free from the confines of ego and grasping. Or maybe just another cycle, a place to guide my grasping all the more ferociously. Maybe I'll wander as a ghost on a mountain, bemused and confused by the world of the living. Maybe I'll stand on cliff-tops and not feel the wind. Maybe places of power which have drawn people since misty immemorial time will have no significance for me. Maybe the stars lose their twinkle, but remain as ideas, as diamonds embedded in the pudding of my thoughts. How horrible it would be to be plagued by the obsessions of life, but all the more so. What if death removed all the possibility of transformation. Hey, the universe may not be just. Maybe resurrection happens, in which case you get no respite. No release. No comforts. No reasons to write self-indulgent posts about mourning masses, the causal imprint on this wide and long World. No reasons to deck out my death in twenty-first century catafalques. No reason to glorify, or to fear, or to hope anything from it.

Nihilism stands at the door, but the door has become thicker of late. And I no longer hide from it as if it were a gaggle of Jehovah's Witnesses driven by their own afterworldly terrors. No, it is here. It is possible. But something in me dances it away.

Consider: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."