I’ve written (and occasionally add to) a series of posthumous poems. No, this blog is not an ectoplasmic emanation. Rather, the poems are part of a very old experiment.
The “live each day as though it were your last” thing never really worked for me. For one thing, if it really were my last, I’d probably be tethered to IVs, monitors, etc., which would limit mobility. And people would get tired of my saying goodbye to them all the time. Plus, the intellectual understanding that we will die is hard to translate into immediate affective response: our brains are wired to believe we will live forever and that bad things will happen to other people, not us. On a macro scale, this is precisely why the climate crisis is carrying us headlong over a cliff, with minimal efforts to stop it. So instead of all that, I’m following a practice described by Marcus Aurelius and various other of the Stoics: imagine that you have already died. You’ve used up your last chance – or wasted it. You’ve said goodbye to your loved ones for the last time. If you didn’t realize what was important in life, it’s too late now. Or is it? The other part of the exercise: imagine further that, in spite of your death, you are somehow able to walk the earth, observe, communicate, do things. You have some kind of reprieve. You don’t know how long this “after-life” will last. But however long it is, you can do things you wanted to do, but didn’t, while alive.* (For Marcus, that meant living virtuously and contemplating the cosmos. Maybe for you that means occupying senatorial offices and demanding a climate adaptation plan) When I was a kid, I (and some of my friends and cousins) were really into Casper the Friendly Ghost. Walking through walls was awesome! I also have a vague memory of seeing the TV series version of Topper, though I only saw the movie as an adult (wasn’t there a TV show based on it, in the 60s?). Anyway, Marcus Aurelius is essentially imagining an existence like George’s and Marion’s: ghosts who are agents. You can still do stuff (including good stuff). They can neither see nor hear you (unless you want them to). You can observe without being scrutinized; you can take time to assess; you can see things differently; you can do some good or try to undo some bad. As a post-vivified person, you don’t have to worry about all the things the living worry about: what other people think of them, trivial things they “have to” do, their reputation, career, appearance, bank account. None of that can touch you. So: What would one do with such freedom? How would you write? In fact, you can’t do anything about those things anyway, even while alive. What other people do and say, how chance weights the dice, are ultimately beyond one’s control: people will say whatever they want about you (true or false); your career can be scuttled by a schemer’s professional jealousies; you can save money all your life, but your bank can still go bust. Looking back from beyond the tomb, all this seems obvious. It may seem obvious to someone with a terminal illness, or someone who’s just lost everything. But in the thick of what we think of as “normal” life, we feel like we can and must control everything. And our motivations for doing so are often trivial, if not a little nauseating. Most of the writers I know are middle class professionals or are striving to be middle class professionals. Home ownership, raising a family, schmoozing gatekeepers, always craving that brass ring that always seems to re-appear ahead of us. And little or no time for political activities – besides writing and teaching, of course, which are, of course, our jobs. The result is that some things happen and some don’t – and it’s often difficult to gauge the relative importance of any given goal or action – including what, how, and how much we write. The global climate meltdown that’s currently underway brings all this into stark relief. A lot of people are dying (or having their lives destroyed) because of it, and their numbers show no sign of decreasing. In fact, it’s a pretty sure thing that those of us in the USAmerican middle class will be among them within a generation, unless all the political and business leaders in the world are struck dumb by a divine apparition within, oh, about the next twenty minutes or so. We certainly have something to lose; but we’re deluding ourselves about how long we will get to keep it – whether “it” is our stuff or our lives. It’s hard to believe that, with storms increasing in intensity, repetition, and duration; with droughts that are longer and more frequent; with displacements of people due to food shortages and rising sea levels – that with all this, the economy will keep chugging along, and life will not become radically different. Alas, dear reader, it will. So: long live posthumous literature! Take charge and write some, before it’s too late. ----- * Variation: imagine you were condemned to die but got an indefinite reprieve at the last minute – same principle.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |