…No Work, nor Device , nor Knowledge, nor Wisdom…”

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…in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Thus spake the Preacher. (Ecclesiastes 19:10)

And I’m here to tell ya, Amen! That is, i’m not really ”here”, I’m dead , ”recently deceased”I think is what they call it.
(A word to the wise: DON’T opt for cremation. Sustained heat of 4000 degrees—sound like fun to ya? oh yes i ”felt” it, maybe only with the memory of neural memory. Or sump’n . Do I know? No wisdom, remember? it may be preferable to lying there in full fleshly integument, being slowly consumed by blind slithering things (green burial or pine box) or, I reckon, to slowly putrefying, then dessicating, in a satin lined coffin. Hey ho, the wet and the dry! )

Seems to me i used to hear people talk all the time about the dead “looking down on“:the living, watching them, maybe even finding them a parking space occasionally, benignly “watching over” them.

Welp— i aint doin it. i can’t love, remember? Love is an intricate “device”, a lotta ”work”. Think youre gonna be enveloped once again in mama’s lovin’ arms? Nah. She aint got no arms now—and she aint nobody’s mama. If i could affect you in any way, i might even try to hurt you. (Why? Why not?) The old ghost stories are true, , hee hee! But dont worry, I can’t. I am powerless now, no work nor device, remember? Better a living dog than a dead lion, like the Preacher also said. I can’t even make sounds, like those “woooo-OOOO-ooo!” vibrato noises in scary movies. if i could make sounds, I’d opt for maniacal laughter. but like i said : no can do. So, if you hear a weird noise in the night, the skeptical guy in the ghost stories is right: it’s just the wind.

And what about the hoped-for reunion with people you loved in life? As i said love is only a fading memory. And, if you think tine changes people, wait’ll you see what eternity can do. its just like you livelies, fifty or sixty years on, might pass by your kindergarten classmates and not know them, not even really see them —and not want to, even if you could. i reckon what we need here, wherever “here” is, is a class president of all the decedents in each year. He ( she? it? i dk what I am now, pretty sure my body was female…) could organize reunions so youd have some clue who you were encountering. But even that’d be too vast, ”…so many! I had not thought death had undone so many!”

“Wherever this is”….where am i? im sure youre wondering, i know i wondered all my blessed life, my “red-troubled days” as A. S.Byatt put it Hey ‘dja catch that! maybe poets do , indeed have some measure of immortality! Cue Emily Dickinson! Again, see?!? i remember their names! But yours…sorry. Forgive me. Or don’t, i dont care. You’ll understand— some day.

Where do the dead go? Once again: can’t enlighten ya. Is this Hell? Will it, or my perception of it, long endure? or is it just an anteroom to, whatevs.

What is a ”self”, anyway? It’s the terrible recognition of separateness. isolation. When it dawns on us as human infants, we patch over the fissure with love and dependence as fast as we can, as thick as we can. but y’know what they say, “ you can’t take it with you”. When it’s gone, (because you’re gone) the terror and tbe initial fear and hatred of the Other is what endures. This aint no Senior Social Center.

i did dictate the engraving on my tombstone. one word: GRATITUDE. To whom? For what ? i remember the answer to the last: for love, beauty, health, comfort.. they were real. Yes. For as long as I was. Vita brevis, no pockets in a shroud, yada yada…

I will try for some benificence, or counterfeit thereof:

Enjoy yourselves!

You probably WON’t see me on the other side, the ”top deck”—

at keast, not if i see you first…. ☠️💀👻!

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Published by Hypatia

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24 thoughts on “…No Work, nor Device , nor Knowledge, nor Wisdom…””

  5. So is that your explanation for “the wisdom of Ecclesiastes”: he was right in his time (and I agree, because there is no suggestion of an after-death reward in the OT) ? It’s pretty grim, and that’s how it looks from here right now. Forgive me dear Chaps, I don’t mean to offend you.

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    1. Not offended at all, dear friend! Slightly concerned, though….Companionship in the darkness exists aplenty in the Wisdom books, for certain. And Qoheleth makes the desolation of what seems like all-but-permanent separation known in words we can borrow when we have none of our own. Let his company sustain you; please know of my ongoing presence and prayers! Eight and seven years respectively have changed the intrusiveness of recent losses for me, but Homesickness and a loneliness that both sneak up on me at times register as a perceptible twinge. I know better than to deny your desolation – and wouldn’t *dare* to do so. Forgive me if my comments seem facile, or prove clumsy. (Hugs, no matter what.)

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    1. Outside of the Christian perspective, it probably wouldn’t even be further discussed: “When you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead.” in the natural way of things. The Book of Wisdom has glimmers of thought about an afterlife, but even those need drawing-out through Christ….

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  9. Would “any of this make any sense at all outside of a Christian perspective”? Simon, do you mean this post, my fantasia on becoming a disembodied spirit?
    If so, the answer is : YUH. It ONLY makes sense outside a Christian perspective, where we’re s’posed to believe (or most Christians do) that the spirit, the soul, is immediately subjected to a divine performance review and dispatched to reward or punishment.
    In many of the cultures I studied , whether they believe in a deity or deities or not, they do believe that a dead person’s spirit continues to , yes, “haunt” the material world. Many cultures disguise a person who has killed someone, either by murder or accident, using elaborate facial makeup so the vengeful spirit of the victim can’t recognize the killer and wreak vengeance . Sir James Frazer speculated that this custom is what’s behind the “mark of Cain” story. And in the OT, there is no afterlife, good or bad: God’s worst threat and punishment is to kill someone in a horrible way, and His most favorable promise, like to Abraham, is a long earthly life and many many descendants.
    Gross oversimplification: Hindus and Buddhists believe in a life after life rather than a life after death, right? You either get reincarnated or you achieve blessed oblivion. Zoroastrians appear to have anticipated something closer to the Christian concept, that there will be a judgment and then the soul will exist eternally under the verdict. But, according to Wiki, they still believe that for a couple days at least the soul lingers near the body.
    I’m afraid (as Nanda realized) that Christianity does NOT accommodate my vengeful and bitter little essay.

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  13. Hyp, your ‘fantasia’ reminds me of a book, called _How We Die_, I think. It detailed the sequence of physiological/chemical processes at work. Salutary, like the skull on St. Jerome’s desk, humbling – perhaps leading to gratitude for life, at times, though not always. Still leading ultimately, with time, to the gift of the Resurrection. The Wisdom literature is very good at asking questions we often shrink from, very brave.

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    1. I don’t want to think of death constantly but having a younger sibling die has changed me . I wish I could reverse it. Please, let me regain the illusion of immortality, I can’t live without it, I took it for granted before!
      I reckon it’s not all bad; I certainly can say of her, as Santayana wrote:
      “Living, you made it goodlier to live,
      Dead, you will make it easier to die.”

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      2. Amen, Hyp, she formed you and taught you as no one else in your life could have – or ever will. Don’t forget your discussions of Scripture with your Dad, either. They are another thread of who you’ve become, and will sustain you, too. May I commend to you 1 Corinthians 15:12-24 (and a meditation from St. Braulio of Saragossa [Zaragossa] on the passage – if I can get it to copy from the Liturgy of the Hours?) Through the years, I’ve found both very consoling.

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  14. Simon, “red-troubled days” is a phrase from a poem by A. S. Byatt, “A Dog, A Horse, A Rat”. I saw it in the TLS years go, but it isn’t anthologized and you can’t get it online, except one place, as far as I know: the blog of a mom who lost her son to leukemia.
    I wanted to use it for my sister’s …idk what you’d call it, a collage of pictures and quotations I made for her funeral. Byatt lost her young son in an accident. The poem references King Lear’s lament for Cordelia in Shakespeare’s play:
    “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
    And thou no breath at all?”

    the first few lines of the poem are:

    “A dog, a horse, a rat
    All those red-troubled days
    Heraldic in my head
    Danced in their lively ways.
    The bright-eyed rat, so sleek
    The dog with plume and claw
    The horse’s hot bright neck
    And thou wilt come no more…”

    I don’t know what the poet intended, but to me, “red-troubled days” means: while the red ichor of life still roils and tumbles through the body, and the flesh blushes and pales in turn. If there is suffering, it’s the suffering that comes with merely being a creature of flesh and blood and breath:
    “The terror of their life/ Their moving flesh, their air/ In nostril, lung and heart..” as she writes a few lines later. I don’t think “troubled” here means “bothered”, I think it just means motion, activity, disturbance but not in a negative way.
    “Red-troubled days” is the opposite of the pale, marmoreal stillness of death. And the opposite of whatever exists as an incorporeal spirit.
    (But hey, that’s just me…)

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