Little flames

The other night, having smoked a couple of joints, I felt my flesh melt from my bones. I was sliding into the mattress, putrefying. (So remind me not to listen to Lift yr skinny fists... when I've been smoking.)

It felt like an insight but into what I'm not so sure. I know I am terrified of dying and can upset myself by thinking about it. I think this is plain sensible. Anyone who is unperturbed by the thought of their death simply doesn't value what they will lose sufficiently or has bamboozled themselves with promises that they could not rationally hope to have delivered. (I've always felt that the central preposterousness of having 70 years to prove yourself worthy of eternal life should be enough in itself to turn anyone with a sense of the ridiculous away from Xtianity. "God loves you but he's going to truly fuck you up if you are naughty in this life." Hmmm. Doesn't sound much like love to me. "Jesus died for your sins." Yes, but why? My children are naughty sometimes, and I might get angry about it, but I don't feel they need to repent it or be severely punished for it. Why? Because I love them. I've never been able to sign up to the "you've got to be cruel to be kind" school of thought. I prefer "you've got to be kind to be kind" because it makes a lot more sense. I never really feel people are being kind to me when they're kicking me in the guts, whatever lesson they hope the kicking is teaching me. Actually, what lesson is God teaching us? M, an acquaintance of mine, was visiting the other day -- his wife, D, is my wife's oldest friend. He had been at the wedding of D's sister. He was about to go to the wedding dinner and he wasn't looking forward to it. D's sister is a hardcore Xtian -- well, she has to be, being a minister -- and the crowd at the dinner would not be M's type, nor mine: I believe three things should definitely happen at a wedding: two people should end the day married who didn't begin it that way, those same two people should have sex regardless of all other considerations including drunkenness, and everyone should get thoroughly pissed. D's sister's crowd don't do "pissed": Jesus doesn't like it, apparently. Anyway, clearly the talk earlier in the day had touched on eternal rewards because M was saying "surely God won't put me in the same place as Hitler for swearing?" "Fuck no," I said (the joke was lost on him, weak as it was). How ridiculous. How can anyone believe that a universe-creating supreme being, who loves you, will punish a bit of pottymouthedness with eternal hellfire?)

Still, at least they have something to look forward to, although I amuse myself by imagining them to be like the child who is convinced they will get a bike for Xmas but instead gets Meccano (although Meccano is probably a better gift than oblivion). I picture Catholic priests, at the moment of their expiry, going "Shit! If I'd only known, I'd have had some SEX!" Forswearing life's pleasures might have made sense to Pascal but I'd want a signed promise from the Almighty rather than a book some half-crazed geezer wrote when he'd been out in the sun a bit long. (On that note, if you haven't read it, I direct you to Michael Moorcroft's Ecce homo. It's one of those books that is very funny without having any actual jokes.)

Sometimes I imagine that your mind will stop like a clock on the point of dying, that you will spend eternity mulling over... well, whatever. That sounds a lot like hell. But I am on the whole a materialist and I do not think we have anything that can survive our bodies. It's nice to think we have little flames that burn within us, and metaphorically, the idea works for me, but the notion is just an artefact of our disbelief that we can really be nothing more than the echoes of electrons' bouncing around the cells of our brains. In many areas of this life though, you can take either a romantic view or a hardnosed one, each unjustifiable by the observable facts, but each making a huge difference to how you live your life, or at least how you see it. Believing we are more than robots leads us to care for each other; strict materialism could not. I think of the conflict as being one between the rational side that a thinking person must have and the "human" side, the side that does not forget that we can be hurt by the world and those in it. Rationally, with our short, fragile lives, which are prone to becoming emptied of value for us, we might feel that we should simply fuck everyone else and make the most of what is there for us. (Adherents of antihuman philosophies such as objectivism have indulged their rational side to an extent that barely allows them to be human at all.) The human side though does not let us take that path. It's the side that hopes, that feels, that rages against the dying of the light. It is probably wrong, probably represents all that is nonexistent, but it's what allows us to love and be loved, to look beneath the skin and see those little flames, and we're better for it.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:41 am