Dedicated to the late Joseph Campbell
I don't really remember the moment I died. I was kind of distracted by the noise and the lights and the voices, the shouting. I don't remember a lot of pain. I mean, there was a lot of it, but I don't remember it much. I mostly remember struggling to move. I felt like I'd been drugged. I couldn't lift my shoulders. I felt heavy. It's weird. What I remember most about my death is trying to not die. I had been very scared of death when I was alive. I don't have any religion to fall back on, so as far as I could tell, dying meant I'd just stop being. At all. I couldn't understand the idea of a universe without me in it. I couldn't imagine what that would be like. I think what I didn't want to accept is that in a universe without me, there wouldn't be any 'me' to notice I was gone.
I woke up on a beach. Well, I didn't really wake up. I kind of found myself. Anyway, I was on a beach. The sun was warm, the breeze was cool, the sky was blue with big, puffy clouds. There is always the smell of the ocean, here. The smell of salt water. There's a beach, and then there's the tree line. Big, green trees. Thick ones. Cedars, mostly. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this place looks just like where I grew up.
I was very aware of my body, of every sensation of being here. I smelled the ocean, I felt the breeze, the sand between my toes as it dried in the sun after wandering through the low-tide. I got hungry at some point and I started to just find food, easy as that. It was fruit and fish at first, fruit that should never have been falling off of cedar trees and fish that beached themselves, just for me. And the fires. There were fires and spits there, just there. I barely remember sitting down at them, and I'm certain I didn't build them.
It was pretty clear that the food was for me, that it appeared when I was hungry. So, I got creative. I imagined different food, and it was there. At first, it only appeared when I wasn't looking, but that didn't last long. I imagined full turkey dinners, hamburgers dripping with fat, pizza boxes stacked up a foot high, platters of sushi, everything. Sometimes, the food would change in the middle of the meal, and I'd hardly even notice. Not until later, anyway. If I felt like something different, it just was something different, right away.
One day, I got a visitor. I say it was one day, but I don�t really know when one day ended and another started. I remember the daytime and I remember the night time, but I don't really remember any division between them. Anyway, I got a visitor.
I guess I should admit that food wasn't the only thing I indulged in before my visitor showed up. I mean, once you figure out that you can call up any food you want to, what's the next thing you'll try? Sex, of course. I spent some time flying and swimming and tooling around the beach, but the simpler instincts took over. I went from consumption to reproduction pretty quickly, even though I didn't really need food and the sex was certainly not procreative.
I had every kind of sex I'd ever had in my life, with gangs of women of all kinds. Then I started having all the kinds I'd never gotten to have in life. Then I started wandering off into all kinds of things I hadn't really wanted to do, but now that I could at a whim, why not? I surprised myself, actually, with what I ended up enjoying. But I guess that's the point of this place. I imagined something pleasurable, and no matter what it was, it gave me pleasure. Sometimes, the women would change in the middle, her hair, her body, how many there were. Sometimes, they turned into men, which was disconcerting. My mind would wander and my world would wander with it.
When they started turning into animals I was very, very disturbed. Not as disturbed as the first time a man showed up, though, and the fact that I was less disturbed by bestiality than homosexuality was the most disturbing, but you probably don't want to know about that. The thing is, I have some phobias, and one of the things that happens with phobias is that you get locked into a frightening image, you get obsessed with the thing that scares you. It's a kind of manic behaviour, I guess. So when, in the middle of having sex, the woman you're having it with turns into the one thing in the universe you're more scared of than anything else, you start to learn to maintain your concentration. I don't know how long it took, but I managed to take control of it all, but the control meant it wasn't as fun.
So anyway, I got a visitor. I was sitting in an armchair on the beach watching a sunset, and she was just there, a stunning, gorgeous, tall woman. I was used to my mind calling things up without me being conscious of it, and I'd learned to trust it, to just go with whatever I'd called up, but this was different. At first, the women who came to visit me didn't talk much, and when I did start asking questions like who are you? and what are you doing here?, they'd avoid them, but eventually they had to admit that they were just part of my imagination. Once the illusion of a real interaction was gone, a certain amount of the enjoyment went away. Trusting my subconscious was the only way to get a surprise of any kind.
But then, there she was, the woman of my dreams, which made sense because I was in a place that was a lot like a dream, but she didn't have that sense of the familiar about her that all my other women had. She said hello, and so did I, and she asked me, actually asked me if I wanted to have sex. I didn't say no.
It was a totally new experience. Not like the imaginary women. Not like sex in life, either, although I don't remember it very clearly, so it's hard to say. Having sex with her was the first time I started to understand that place. It was like a dream. It was just a representation, a set of symbols for other things. The sex we had, the bodies we were in, were just signifiers for something else. I wasn't sure what yet, but I knew that our bodies weren't real, or were real, but what 'real' was had changed for me, somewhere along the way. Time passes strangely here, and in a way, we never stopped... I don't even have a word for it. It wasn't making love. I didn't love her. It wasn't fucking though, either. There was too strong a connection for that. Time passes strangely there, and in a way, I feel like we never stopped, even though that was a long time ago. We never stopped, but I see it differently, little by little. I feel it differently. The bodies are less and less real, and the other thing, the 'something else' is more and more real. When we were done, for the first time since I'd died, I actually felt exhausted. I was panting and sweating and my muscles were shuddering from the effort while the surf splashed up around my legs. But even while I was doing it, I knew that I didn't have a body in that place. She disappeared pretty quickly after that. I can still remember the smile on her face.
I started seeing everything differently. I knew that the beach was my imagination, but I started to think about what that really meant. That woman, whoever she was, was not from my mind. She was too different. If this beach was my mind, then she was from outside of it. Outside of me. I had become my own universe, but apparently, there were other people like me, other dead people, othe minds, other souls.
The visits got more and more frequent. There was a lot of sex. Usually with several people at once. Some of them were less distinct than others. Their bodies shifted, blended into the background. It was creepy, until I realised I was doing the same thing. The interaction, the seeing past the symbols, got more intense. I started to see how immaterial all this matter actually was. Matter just didn't matter anymore. The physical world that I'd created was starting to seem foggy, indistinct. It shifted all the time, without me realising it. It scared me. It scared me that it didn't scare me. I was losing the world. I was losing my body. And I was hardly even noticing it as it happened. It was liking dying again, but slowly, bit by bit. If I wasn't this body, in this place, I didn't know what I was. But I knew I was slipping off into a place that isn't one, where the idea of a position in space or time is meaningless, where there is no such thing.
But the more I let go of the world, the more I'm visited, and without that, I think I would go crazy. Playing in your own imagination is fun at first, but after a while, you're locked in a room by yourself with nothing to do but an elaborate form of masturbation. If I let go of this imaginary world, I'll get to be with people again, but people who aren't people, people who don't have bodies or gender. I won't be a man anymore. I won't be a human being anymore. I don't know what I'll be.
I can't decide if I'm dying or being born or just growing up, but it's going to happen soon. I don't have a choice. I'm starting to see my existence without this body, and there's no going back from that.
I don't know if you'll hear this. I don't know if living people can understand, but I wanted to tell you about what's happening to me here, that I won't be me much longer, that there is no here here. I don't know if that'll help you or scare you. I haven't met any gods or angels or demons since I got here. It's not heaven, but I suppose you could think of it as hell, maybe limbo, if you want to. Maybe telling my story is just the last bit of ego I have. I dont know, but itll be very soon now, and I think this message, if anyone can hear it, is my way of saying goodbye to the way that I understa
Posted by orion at May 6, 2006 11:10 PM