Getting A Second Shot

So, after writing about the Dalai Lama, and his seven centuries of intimate ancestry (it's very intimate when you are your own ancestors), I got to thinking about reincarnation. The notion has a lot of fans. It's an attractive scenario for those who really chafe at dying. And that's most of us. Most of us are not at all happy about being extinguished utterly. There's something embedded in our own consciousness that rebels against being snuffed out. It's probably built right into the motherboard.

If it's just your conscious mind trying to grab eternity by the tail, though, I think reincarnation is an unlikely bet. You're assuming your spirit, or soul, is timeless, and just periodically needs a new ride. And presumably this is true for everyone. But we have something like seven billion people now, and we can't all have been serially reincarnated, unless a lot of us are carpooling.

Some people claim to have found out who they were in a past life. I've never understood why they aren't looking into their future incarnations as well. We all seem to have some idea that time progresses linearly, so that our future selves haven't happened yet, but somehow I doubt it. I don't think we're traveling along a rail of time like a bowling ball on the return chute. Maybe we're more like a marble rolling around a rumply Möbius blanket. All the time is happening all the time, but we only perceive that little point where our marble is intersecting the blanket. It seems like a straight line to us as it rolls, but maybe we're going over, under, behind, and ahead of ourselves constantly. Of course this possibility makes our heads blow up. We are wired to have a lack of imagination about time.

Some of the traditions have more interesting reincarnation prospects. Some Buddhists hold that there are a number of realms into which you can be reincarnated, with the ultimate goal of having things figured out so that you can eventually step out of time altogether. You could be a human. Or an animal. You could be a supernatural being, and if you land in the top tier, where it's lilacs and lollipops all the time, you run the risk of being so happy you quit working on yourself, and then you backslide into a lesser realm. I think that's a neat option. It's realistic. Get me into a recliner and I can't even always summon the gumption to change the TV channel. Modern Family episode I've seen ten times already? Good enough, I say.

Or, if you're a certain kind of soul that is unlikely to be Buddhist, you can just freeze your own ass and hope someone comes up with a cure for what felled you. Cryogenics is the sort of technical whizbangery whose proponents think of themselves as forward-looking, but it could equally well be a very short-sighted move. If you choose this path, apparently it has never occurred to you that if you are in some kind of suspended state beyond death, you might discover it's okay after all, just the way it is. And you're nevertheless planning to have yourself yanked right back into a much less satisfactory existence just because of your own lack of imagination. If you come back you're probably going to start out old, for one thing. And if it's just your head that's being frozen for future redeployment, you're going to come back old and really, really short.

We all just want to remain alive. But it's really our consciousness that wants to keep itself going, against all odds. And if we're not consciously aware of the coherence of our serial lives, I can't see how reassuring that is. If, right now, I am the continued soul of a stout-hearted woman who perished in a terrible riveting accident during World War II, but I don't know it, and neither did she, how is that reassuring?

Maybe I do have a spirit that will outlive my earthly ride, but I'm okay if I don't. For now I'll just stick my head out the window and feel the breeze on my muzzle and call it good enough.

A Grave Matter

There's a scandal brewing over at Arlington Cemetery, with the Army reporting an unacceptable number of burial errors. Not the kind that involves burying soldiers who are not entirely dead, which tends to resolve itself in a few hours. This is a matter of mislabeled, unmarked or improperly marked graves. And this is a scandal because, as anyone who has even a rudimentary knowledge of zombies knows, we like to know where our dead people are at all times.

We go to great lengths to assure this, and always have, going back to the earliest days when some people marked the spot with an entire pyramid. Nowadays we mostly use stones and plaques and plastic petunias and teddy bears, but it's the same concept.

It's more important to some people than others. My siblings and I buried our parents somewhere in Bozeman, Montana, after first reducing them to an economical shoebox size, per their instructions. I visit each of them several times a day but in thirty years I've never made the trip to the Bozeman cemetery, and I don't think they mind. The shoebox size takes up less space. We did the same thing with my sister, who would never have taken up much space anyway. Her ashes were turned into the soil of her bodacious vegetable garden, where she spent some of her best time, and now--I snuck a peek a year later--she is marked by a massive bean plant. I go back and forth on whether to tell the current homeowners why their vegetables are so big.

It did always strike me as an odd use of the scenery to plant people full-length in rows and rows, even though I enjoy walking in cemeteries. How is it we haven't run out of room? Apparently in many locations we have, and have taken to stacking up. They won't do it to people who are just a little dead, but the deader you are, I guess the less you mind.

Another way of taking up less space is to save only the head, which is standard procedure in cryogenically frozen people. I find the thought of preserving my head horrifying and would never consider it, unless maybe I'd had some work done. These people have arranged for this treatment beforehand in the hope that they can be revived when whatever killed them is cured, and they're okay with coming back as what can only be termed an extreme quadriplegic. One of these outfits dropped the ball a while back and accidentally thawed someone out, then refroze him, and his still-limbed relatives are hoppin' mad about it. But what if they come up with a cure for cancer and still haven't conquered freezer burn?

The problems at Arlington stemmed from the conversion of the records from paper to digital. They're lucky they only misrecorded some names. If I'd been in charge of the project they'd have to change the name of Arlington Cemetery to The Blue Screen Of Death. Still, I guess it's a horrible thing to go to all the trouble of visiting a loved one and trimming up the grass and putting out a jar of peonies only to find out that the target bones of your affection are several yards away. It's like voting for the Clear Skies Act and discovering it was really the Polluters' Preservation Initiative all along.

The whole matter becomes even more complicated if you're not sure if someone's even dead or not, which can happen if they watched a lot of TV. Not too long ago, the folks in Japan were out looking for their officially-oldest man and when they knocked at his door, they were turned away repeatedly by relatives who did not want to disturb his rest. It turns out he was already thirty years past disturbing, tucked into his bed with a blanket over his mummified remains. If people are old enough, they don't look much different from mummies, but still. You'd think his relatives would have noticed something when they tried to get him to sign the deposit slips for all those pension checks.