THE FAMILY OF THINGS
on the possibility of reincarnation, our membership/participation in existence, Catholicism, whether our animals can "come with us" when we die, the Holy Ghost, etc
1. NATURE, BEAUTY & EFFICIENCY
It is your portion under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 9:9
Go straight ahead. It’s your fuckin’ life. – Pennywise
Two major incidents occurred this year that made me seriously rethink my place in the universe and my sense of spirituality and my long-lost faith.
I was raised Catholic, baptized, and went to a Catholic school until midway through second grade. I merely went with the flow at the time. I never had a nervous breakdown over the fact that, when I prayed, I did not feel God listening to me on the other side. I didn’t even feel St. Anthony listening on those occasions where I lost something. (St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost things and it is said that he assists people in finding that which is lost.) Even at that young age though, I knew a single prayer session was not supposed to be a transformational event, even if I did wonder whether I was doing it (praying, that is) the right way. I didn’t know if you were supposed to put your head down, clasp your hands, and concentrate really really hard on trying to see the Holy Spirit. I do remember being confused about the Trinity. As in: do I pray to Jesus? Do I pray to his father, who sure sounded like he had superiority of rank over Jesus to me, or do I pray to the Holy Ghost, which I was not even sure about. Was the Holy Ghost the amalgamation of Jesus and his Father? If so, why was a third entity needed at all? If Jesus and his Father are one and the same, why don’t we pray to whatever that Singularity is?
I still haven’t really resolved this, and I am dimly aware that it caused a lot of friction in the early days of the Church, with schisms and splinter groups galore, some insisting that God was the Father of Jesus, and that Jesus – while divine in his own way – was not a replacement figure for his father or even to be thought of on the same celestial terms (he was to be admired and followed, though it was his father who was to be worshipped and prayed to). Or something.
I suppose the doctrine of the Trinity fits best my current understanding of faith, which is one of membership and community. God is the father the son and the more elusive Holy Spirit, whatever that is. I suppose the Holy Spirit can’t just be the father and the son together. It’s something else. Because the father and son together create a dynamic maybe, and that dynamic is best expressed by the Holy Ghost? Or is the Holy Ghost the parts of religion that we can’t figure? The mysterious parts, like how some say the nearer to God you are, the more silent God is because God is silence.
All my life I wanted to be nearer to God. And the only nearness? Silence.
- Reverend Joel Theriot, True Detective
We are not singular blocks that need to be pressed onto the plain of existence like a child putting a piece of Lego on a board. We are a river, involved with and part of the river of time, unable to separate ourselves from that moving river. The Tragically Hip have a song about a river called “Membership” that sort of gets at what I am getting at:
Whether laying down yourself beside it
Or slipping into its cool and rushing effects
Or drifting on it to where it broadens
Your admiration for, for its more elusive aspects
Being drawn along by it
Carried under, carried away
By its long-term membership
We are all migrants through time and we are all members of existence. We can only go with the current of time, not against it. Those who struggle to stay in the past only hurt themselves with the exertion it takes to resist the current. Living in the past is very painful, even if one believes they are doing it for good reasons, such as continuing fidelity to a dead spouse or friend, trying to hang on and keep alive what was because one is the lone keeper of whatever memory needs to be kept live. It’s very human to want to do this. And for a long time before this year I’ve lived in “my best days are behind me” mode. No more.
But since what happened in June (referred to in this post as “THE JUNE INCIDENT”), I have been much more forward-looking. It’s a good thing I have not given up cursing. I think it can help emphasize a point as well as bold font or italics can. And lately I’ve found myself listening to a song that should have a nostalgic pull for me…but doesn’t. I listened to the album Straight Ahead by the punk band Pennywise for almost all of tenth grade. And I loved it. Still do. But the title track is about…well…moving on. And I love the way singer Jim Lindberg snarls the affirmation.
Go! Straight! Uh! Head! It’s your fuckin’ life..
It’s fashionable to bash Christianity these days. It’s been this way for a long time now with the four headless horsemen of Hitchens, Hedges, Harris and Dawkins publishing their various anti-religious screeds. From firstthings.com: “In 2015, [Norm Macdonald] was a judge on the NBC show Last Comic Standing when a contestant delivered a joke trashing the Bible as pathetic in comparison to the Harry Potter series. One of the hosts called that performance ‘brave.’” Brave? It hasn’t been “brave” to rip on religion in nearly a damn century. For Norm Macdonald’s part, he “was not impressed. ‘I think if you’re going to take on an entire religion, you should maybe know what you’re talking about,’ he [told the upstart comedian]. ‘J.K. Rowling is a Christian, and J.K. Rowling famously said that if you’re familiar with the scriptures, you could easily guess the ending of her book.’ Macdonald later told the Hollywood Reporter that ripping on faith is passé these days. True bravery, he said, is for an entertainer to do the opposite: ‘If a guy went up and said, Jesus Christ is our lord and savior, I’d say, Damn, that guy’s brave!”
He’s got a point. When it’s the height of hip to bash Christianity, how much of a risk are you actually taking by going out onstage and preaching to the unconverted?
I understood and understand the urge to bash both Christianity and the Catholic Church the corruption and predatory practices that have been brought to light, but as a doctrine, not a practice, what I like about Catholicism in particular is how it allows for (and indeed celebrates!) beauty in the world. If efficiency was the guiding principle of the world, why is nature so beautiful? Yes, water always takes the easiest route, but that doesn’t mean mighty rivers don’t meander.
The Columbia River in British Columbia is a particularly slow moving and beautiful example of inefficiency in nature. I know that there are no straight lines in nature but the laziness with which the Mighty Columbia slowly wends its way through B.C. before crossing the American border into Northeast Washington state can only be described as a kind of pageantry. It’s about presence, not efficiency. The river then slowly flows southward before making a sharp right turn (right if you are moving with the current) to the west where it heads into central Washington, then moves back north again before cutting south through the lower central half of Washington. It then makes its final westward turn (this would be the famous 54-40 latitude and longitude that was once very nearly the cause of war between the United States and Britain. The U.S. wanted to make damn sure that Manifest Destiny – the god-given right of the country to expand westward – included not just California but the Oregon Territory as well. At this point what is now Washington state still belonged to the British, but there was some confusion over whether the English claimed Oregon territory as well.
President James Polk (who served from 1845-1849) was elected to office largely on the popularity of the slogan “54-40 or fight!” meaning “give us the Oregon territory or we’ll declare another war on the British!” Polk must have been pretty damn pleased with himself when, one year into his Presidency, the Oregon dispute was resolved via the Oregon Treaty in which the British Empire ceded not only Oregon, which terminated at the 54th parallel (right where the mighty Columbia wends its way to the Pacific Ocean) but Washington as well, which came right up to the 49th parallel that served as the border between the United States and Canada on the East Coast.
Manifest Destiny got a whole lot easier in 1846 when, in a single stroke with the Oregon Treaty, President James Polk (who served from 1845-1849) added 559.5 miles to the United States West Coast, Washington state making up 157 of those miles (these figures are rough guesstimates, given the maddening mathematics of the coastline paradox where the smaller the unit of measurement, the longer the coastline grows until eventually it keeps going until infinity. This is the problem of trying to measure fractals instead of true shapes.)
The history lesson is over now. I promise. I will, however, be posting my favourite song by Canadian rock mainstays, 54-40. My all-time favourite song of theirs is a tune called “Casual Viewin’” from the album of the same name:
I was once part of a recording project called The Flower City 3, in which me and a friend wrote songs about our hometown of Brampton (Brampton Comes Alive…an obvious and blatant homage to Frampton Comes Alive). The secret track on that album is a cover of the same 54-40 song, “Casual Viewin.’” The main difference between the real version and the FC3 version is that when we recorded our cover, we didn’t have access to the internet. So we sang the lyrics as best as we could remember them, with some of the lyrics we made up simply referencing the music video 54-40 made for the song. Hence why our version has the line “riding on a bus top/with the chimpanzees” and not “if the dark is light enough to see the ignorance of greed…” although we did remember the “still she cries” refrain.
You can hear our cover below. Just press play.
Anyway, I suppose my point about the Mighty Columbia is that its slow-moving majesty and back-turning don’t exactly jibe with the tenants of efficiency that undergird evolution and other modern theories of the natural world. In no way am I saying I don’t believe in evolution. I do. But evolution, by itself, would not allow for beauty in the world. Evolution is about efficiency.
Therefore the beauty that we see all around us in the natural world is a gift. Waterfalls, icebergs, lightning, the sheared rock on ocean coasts, all of this is part of the pageantry. St Thomas Aquinas wrote about the complexity of creation. His definition of beauty is “that which, upon being seen, pleases.”
Now that might be a broad definition. On nights when the Toronto Maple Leafs are playing but I am working so I cannot watch the game, I am certainly pleased to check the box score online and see something like TORONTO 5 BOSTON 3. While this is not beautiful, in and of itself, it is a visual that pleases me. But Aquinas lived in an era before both the commodification of sport and before box score displays.
Which is not to say that I disagree with Aquinas, a towering figure in Christian mysticism. I suppose what I am trying to communicate here is that beauty requires both a beholder and the object of beauty itself. It requires participation. Or perhaps a better word is membership. I feel part of things, part of the world, when I see something beautiful.
John Donne, the famous recusant Catholic metaphysical poet, scholar, and soldier, once wrote that “every man’s death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind” and for this reason, when one hears the tolling of funeral bells, “ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.”
Poet and critic Dana Gioia writes that “Catholicism currently enjoys almost no positive presence in the American fine arts – not in literature, music, sculpture or painting.” He said there seems to be a tacit agreement on both sides of the divide that “Catholicism and art no longer mix.”
I don’t agree with this, at least insofar as literature is concerned. There are blatantly Catholic and enduringly popular works out there like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, William T. Vollmann’s The Rifles, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair or anything by Flannery O’Connor, one of the world’s most famous Catholic novelists, who once wrote that she wrote her novels to “make belief believable.”
Nic Pizzolatto, writer of the hit HBO show True Detective is a self-proclaimed Christian mystic. Indeed, his debut novel Galveston sure as hell has a Catholic view of self-control and self-sacrifice, as does his masterpiece short story “Between Here and the Yellow Sea,” taken from his 2006 story collection of the same name:
I spend a great deal of time combing through the past, as if answers were there.
I’m at an age when I drive in circles, and I take the words of poets and famous men at face value.
And speaking of John Donne, who Hemingway famously borrowed some lines from, one could argue that Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a Catholic novel, being written and published during the height of its author’s commitment to Roman Catholicism. Ernest being earnest Ernest, he caused quite a stir at his father’s funeral in 1928 when he told gathered friends and family that his father Dr Clarence Hemingway was in hell because he’d died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hemingway was probably not as involved in his faith 33 years later, when he killed himself in the exact same manner. I always find it strange when men of letters leave none behind before eliminating themselves. Unlike your classic Catholic, I don’t find suicide abhorrent. In fact, I think it takes guts. I certainly don’t have it in me to do.
It was surprising to me to initially learn that Jack Kerouac, who was easily my favourite writer when I was a teenager, considered himself a Catholic save for a brief dalliance in Buddhism that yielded the phone-book sized Some of the Dharma, a book best left on the shelf if you ask me. According to his biographer Ann Charters, Kerouac would patiently explain to journalists who wanted to know “what does Beat mean?” that his conception of it involved a kind of “Catholic beatific vision.” He wrote to a fan in the mid-1960s that On the Road, his most famous and enduring work, “was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him.”
Moreover, towards the end of his life as he was living with his mother (whom he called “Memère” and lived with for most of his adult life. Kerouac had a bizarre Oedipal complex and was never really able to live without his mother. His two marriages ended abruptly and with him moving back in with Memère, partly because she never told him to stop drinking, partly because living with her gave him the “kind of monastic life” necessary to write as much as he did in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Alas, aside from The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, parts of the extremely bleak Big Sur, which fictionalizes Kerouac’s experience with alcohol withdrawal and a bout of delirium tremens that nearly killed him, and parts of Visions of Cody, there is not much in the torrent of words that exploded from Kerouac in his post-On the Road years worth reading. I found nothing worth remembering in Doctor Sax, Visions of Gerard, Vanity of Duluoz, Old Angel Midnight, Desolation Angels, and Tristessa. I was delighted, however, much later in life, to discover an earlier poem by the old spontaneous prose master titled “October in the Railroad Earth” that just happens to be an absolute gem. What’s more, an audio recording of Kerouac himself reading the poem exists. Dig it:
I look up at blue sky of perfect lost purity and feel the warp of wood of old America beneath me and I have insane conversations with Negroes in second-story windows above and everything is pouring in, the switching moves of boxcars in that little alley which is so much like the alleys of Lowell and I hear far off in the sense of coming night that engine calling our mountains.
But it was that beautiful cut of clouds I could always see above the little S.P. alley, puffs floating by from Oakland or the Gate of Marin to the north or San Jose south, the clarity of Cal to break your heart.
It was the fantastic drowse and drum hum of lum mum afternoon nathin’ to do, ole Frisco with end of land sadness-the people-the alley full of trucks and cars of businesses nearabouts and nobody knew or far from cared who I was all my life three thousand five hundred miles from birth O opened up and at last belonged to me in Great America…and now it’s night in 3rd Street…with end of land sadness end of the world gladness…all your San Franciscos will have to fall eventually and burn again
My God the talent that man had. The way he could evoke not just an emotional but a spiritual longing. The holiness that reverberates throughout On the Road, even in the little moments…like that scene where the windshield freezes up with ice and Dean uses his sleeve to make a hole he can see through and giggles to himself without taking foot off the accelerator “oh holy hole!”
I love the line where he finally gets to “end of land sadness end of the world gladness” Frisco with “the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
Drinking himself to death in St. Petersburg, Florida, he told his daughter Jan Kerouac “I’m Catholic and I can’t commit suicide, but I plan to drink myself to death.” He succeeded a few months later, dying October 21, 1969, of an internal hemorrhage brought on by a bar fight a few days earlier but exacerbated by his incessant drinking.
It’s a shame that a man who loved life so much isolated himself so determinedly by the end, shut himself off from the great tide of life, kept his eyes shut in bed and let it wash by his door, for he’d been out there in Great America once and felt it was his but now a new movement had cropped up, one that seemed more about style than substance, Kerouac once complained that his earnestness had no place amongst the hippies “me hot, them cool” (that line is in The Subterraneans). He felt his time has passed even though, as a young man, he had once believed that the world was big enough for everybody. He quotes Ecclesiastes 9:9 in On the Road, in fact, the part where he talks about the great wide world humming out there. “It is your portion under the sun.”
The ending of On the Road has been spoken of enough, with its sweeping overview of the “Where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night” – that’s The Great Gatsby…a final paragraph that intentionally echoed “America the Beautiful” by Katherine Bates, a paragraph Jack Kerouac intentionally echoed with his recollection of all that “raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…”).
Visions of Cody is more of a metaphysical study of the Neal Cassady character, here called Cody but in On the Road named Dean Moriarty, and in On the Road Sal has already said his sad goodbye to Dean who turned away from their forlorn hug, “eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again…gone.”
In Visions of Cody, here is the goodbye between Sal and Dean, between Jack and Neal/Cody, all. the more poignant for using the French dialect Kerouac grew up speaking in Lowell, Massachusetts. He spoke Quebecois French, not Cajun or Acadian or France French, although that’s moot for my purposes here because the only French word is adios:
Adios, you who watched the sun go down, at the rail, by my side, smiling.
Adios, King.
I would argue too that the works of Mary Oliver have a Catholic sense of participation and membership in them, a Catholic worldview, even if that was not her intent. Here is a line from “Wild Geese,” one of my favourite poems ever:
Whoever you are,
no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The stained-glass windows and gorgeous spirals of ancient cathedrals aren’t meant to be a “fuck you” to the poor of the world. It’s not an ostentatious display of money (yes, the church has billions, and yes there was and remains some corruption in its upper echelons…but I think the monastic life, and the good works done by the Church over the last two millennia balance the karmic debt. Yes, there have been corrupt Popes and predatory priests, but for the most part church is supposed to ground you and give you an internal road map to help one navigate the flood regions of life.
The secret to being content in life is not money. Or at least, it’s not money to the exclusion of all else. The secret to the tranquility and peace that I enjoy is stability. What that takes is some guarantee of the future, which means some money. But as for the money that goes beyond that which is needed to live, it’s just a pain in the ass. Honestly. It creates more problems than it solves.
I want to get out of the city I am currently in, but I have a landlord who operates well outside the bounds of the law who is making things very difficult for me and my partner. We don’t call him on it because our credit sucks and finding another place is unlikely (and even if it were likely, I don’t want to live in Toronto anymore. Like I said, I like my church Saint Pius X, and I like my new gig teaching guitar to half the youth who attend but the matter remains that I’ve lived here since September 2007 and I am more than ready to move on with my life). Getting my license back is going to cost at least 3k because I have to take a course (Back on Track) and then get the ignition interlock thing due to a DUI I got back in February 2007. There’s also a course I need to take for work that requires another cash outlay but if I’m stuck here for now, I am going to make the best of it.
I have a floor hockey team (I go by the name Danny Selanne because it rhymes and it’s a homage to Teemu Selanne and is kinda silly), I have guitar students, I have a best friend I live with, I have enough groceries in the fridge, and I have finished my novel, which is the major creative project of my life. If I have to backburner the move from Toronto then I have to back burner the move.
Now! Let’s get into the two incidents that made me reassess whether or not something or somebody is looking out for me.
2. MARCH 2023 INCIDENT
Back in March I got into bed a little after 11 one night, read for a half hour or so, then turned out the light and went to sleep. The insomnia that dogged me throughout childhood having finally receded in my 30s, I would have fallen asleep within 15 minutes, which puts the time I drifted off just before midnight.
I dream all night every night. I remember most of my dreams too. Now, I’m not here to bore you, but the dream I had on the night in question happened to impinge on real life, so I have to describe it here:
Me and my oldest sister were sitting side by side in a waiting room. I’m not sure what the place was, but it felt like a dentist office. There were a few other people in there, mired in the typical magazine reading that comprises almost every wait in every waiting room.
And in the dream my sister turned to me and said, with not a little urgency, “Danny. Wake up. Wake up, Danny. Wake up.” Over and over until I understood, as many of us do, that I was dreaming. And my understanding that I was dreaming did not diminish the urgency of my sister’s command. I knew I had to wake up, and when my eyelids fluttered and opened I realized I could smell something akin to barbecue.
Now, I never wake up an hour into sleep. It’s always three or four hours after. My insomnia is trouble getting to sleep, not staying asleep once there.
But now I was awake and I could smell something cooking. It was 1AM. I got up and yanked open my bedroom door to see my apartment was full of smoke. I checked my own place but found nothing, so ran outside to check the windows of the apartment upstairs. Coming from the kitchen window, flames were licking the top part of the oven, where the fan is, and there was smoke everywhere.
I had to pound on the door of the main floor apartment and get the dog out. My neighbour ____ was fast asleep on his couch, hammered, and way too heavy to move, so I ran back out and called 911 and then yelled my landlord’s name (he lives on the top floor) until he came down. He was able to get my neighbour _____ out of his smoke-filled apartment but Lord…none of our smoke detectors had gone off. If I hadn’t woken up when I did, how bad would the fire have gotten?
It probably would have been serious enough to kill my upstairs neighbour, who was passed out hard from drink and only ten-to-twelve feet away from the licking flames. He had drunkenly decided to cook something on the stove and then promptly fell asleep on his couch.
Now, call it what you want to call it but I was woken from a dream at a very opportune and almost miraculously convenient moment. Is this proof of God? Well, nothing is proof positive of God. That’s why we call it faith. But I think it’s proof that some kind of benign force used a familiar person in my dream, a family member, to warn me that I was in danger, as were others.
3. JUNE 2023 INCIDENT
Since my tonic-clonic seizure that hospitalized me for four days in June, I have been trying to figure out just what the heck happened when I was out that first 48-52 hours. The seizure happened sometime before noon on a Sunday and I didn’t wake up until that Tuesday just after noon. (I know this because I was snorting groggily awake to the sound of my phone ringing incessantly and then dozing back off…when I finally awoke for good around 2PM on Tuesday and checked my phone, I saw that the flurry of missed calls was from noon and after on the Tuesday.) So I was “out” for a little over 48 hours. I wasn’t in a coma but I wasn’t just sleeping either. I was something and somewhere else.
I don’t want to get too dramatic here, and I am not saying I’m alone in being convinced that something happened to me, but something did happen to me and I’ve been trying to make sense of it since. I can’t explain this June thing other than by, if not Divine Intervention, than the Actions of some Spiritual Authority.
There’s a story that somebody sent to me after June that reminds me of what happened to me. Here is the link to the original Reddit post about a man who was beaten unconscious and while he was out he lived another life.
I know how crazy it sounds. But this is what happened to me. It wasn’t a dream. The dreams I have are extremely disorienting and fast-moving. Rooms change shape without warning. People shift and become other people. Cities melt away and reveal themselves to be on the edges of sheer cliffs, then fall into the ocean. In my dreams, everything is constantly morphing and changing. Nothing stands. That’s the best way I can put it: NOTHING STANDS.
Which starkly contrasts the experience I had in June when I was out for 48-52 hours. My doctor told me I was not in a coma. But I wasn’t merely sleeping either. I was unconscious. Let’s just say that. If we want to treat it as a dream, then fine. But the way it unfolded was linear, and it had the fabric and the temporal feel of actual life as it is lived. My name was Donald Bighton. I lived in Coquitlam, British Columbia. I do not know the year but everybody had a flip phone. So my guess would be sometime between 2004 and 2006. Before the Blackberry took over. I worked for a hip weekly publication in Vancouver and my boss…I could describe him to a police sketch artist with such detail that it would be him when the artist is done. My boss dressed in impeccable suits, single breasted but with loud ties (not loud shirts, Don Cherry style…also I seem to remember Grapes wearing double breasted suits, which my boss did not wear). I had a wife. I had a son.
I went to work and came home every night for five or six weeks. I worked on stories. The first one was about a charity snowboarding event that had taken place in Whistler but had not distributed the funds to the promised organizations. That was my first story. The man who ran the charity could not be tracked down for weeks. Either his personal secretary was giving me the runaround or the man actually did live like a real life Walter Mitty. First he was on a cruise and could not be reached. After that, he was on a motorcycle trip up through Northern British Columbia, into the Yukon, then north on the Dempster Highway all the way to Dawson City in time for the annual festival there. In my “dream” or my “life,” I was sent up there on an interminable road trip which culminated in my and a co-worker named Sheena’s arrival at Dawson City, where we attempted to track the head of the charity down and get some answers regarding where the hell the donations to his snowboarding festival had gone. The first day he was out snowboarding and we couldn’t reach him.
The second day (which was the Saturday on a weekend) he’d signed up for some kind of Authentic Klondike Experience thing where somebody who knew the area took him into the woods, set him up at an old prospector’s cabin, then left him there to fend for himself among the wilderness and the wolves for two days. Me and Sheena howled at the wolves that night and they howled back. This entire time passed like real life does. There were long dragged out hours where nothing happened punctuated by sporadic moments of excitement and even more rare instances in which we thought we’d found him. On the Monday we learned that he had learned of our presence in town and was actively avoiding us. He chartered a private plane early that morning, and flew out of Dawson City before the sunrise. (In July in Dawson City the sun rises after 7AM and sets just before midnight.)
We never ended up getting our interview. It was clear he’d embezzled or “misplaced” the funds, but without an interview I could only write down what had happened, taking care to couch the language in terms of what I suspected to avoid libelous characterization that can destroy a small weekly rag if a large financial judgement were ever to be issued against it. I remember being disappointed. I remember going home. I could smell the wildfires of Northern B.C. as we drove southward. I could see the smoke. We bought mosquito nets so we could sleep in the vehicle with the windows down one night (having not got what we traveled to Dawson to get, we didn’t want to cost our employer any more money than absolutely necessary, so we scrupulously avoided hotels, motels, and any kid of expensive sit-down eatery. Just fast food, Tim Horton’s coffee, and sleeping in our rented Toyota Corolla. The drive from Dawson City to Vancouver took over 30 hours, and we did it in 3 days and 2 nights. Sheena had all the qualities one would expect from a real person. Personable, funny, sometimes annoying and impatient. A bad driver who nevertheless would tap on a non-existent brake while riding shotgun when she thought I was going too fast.
Here is one last detail that I still am trying to figure out. In my “dream” or “life” as Donald Bighton, I was a musician like I am in my own life. But Don mops the floor with Danny when it comes to singing and songwriting because the first night back home in my apartment in Coquitlam, I sat down and began to record music….crucially…I was using software I, Danny, have never seen before…it was not GarageBand or Cool Edit or Adobe Audition or Audacity or Cubase, five programs that I have used before and am familiar with. After I got home from the hospital I Googled as many audio programs as I could just to get a look at them. The audio program I used looked closest to Reason, a program I myself have never used, but I can’t be totally sure without finding a copy of Reason and going through it. That’s not the main point of this though. The point is this:
The songs that Don was working on are not songs that I, Danny, have written or demoed. They were beautiful songs, with strange winding twists and tempo changes, avoiding the typical verse-chorus-verse format that I, Danny, seem to cheerfully be in bondage to. Don had about four songs that he was working on, and he was playing them back and adding guitar tracks and keyboard tracks (playing chords on the keyboard…something I, Danny, cannot do. I can play single notes but I do not know how to match guitar chords with chords on the keyboard. My own keyboard has the notes written on each white key…that’s how bad I am at keyboard.)
So my question is, even if the whole thing was a dream, where did those songs come from? I’ve never heard them before or since. They weren’t covers, or at least, they weren’t anything I recognized. If I was only dreaming, how did my subconscious write a quartet of songs that reach far beyond my waking capabilities as a musician? Is it some kind of existential tease? Like…here’s what you could write if you had the imagination, kid. Or did I somehow step into another existence? Why did it feel so much like the 2003-2007 era? (I drove across Canada 3 separate times in that 4-year period, and then hitchhiked home in August 2007. I drove across Canada again in 2010, but I never went any further north in B.C. than the Trans-Canada Highway. I’ve never been farther north than Kamloops in British Columbia, because just after Kamloops is where you get on Highway 5, also known as the Coquihalla, my favourite highway in the world, which takes you from just outside Kamloops to Hope, B.C., on an 180 km odyssey through almost unspeakably beautiful mountainous terrain. I’ve never been to Prince George. I’ve never been to Fort Nelson. I’ve never crossed the B.C.-Yukon border and I’ve certainly never been to Dawson City. So how the hell did I know there was a place called Dawson Lodge where I stayed with my co-worker from the newspaper? Is it because it’s such a generic name?
Let’s pretend, for a second here, that I was on the edge of leaving my existence as Danny Lindsay. Would I have walked right into that seemingly just as real timeline as Donald Bighton, a twentysomething from Coquitlam, working for a Vancouver weekly paper sometime in the mid-2000s? Or was that just a highly-detailed dream that lacked all the qualities my other dreams always have (such as dissolving circumstances, constantly changing rooms, geography, identities, motives, feelings, emotions, and fear). Why did I dream in what felt like normal, linear, minute-by-minute time? I waited in Tim Horton’s drive-thrus. I waited to hear back from that embezzling jerk’s secretary. I worked on an article. I recorded music. I went to the bathroom. I took showers. All of these things are things that never feature in my ordinary dreams. Now, one could say well, you’d had a major tonic-clonic seizure, one serious enough to warrant hospitalization, so is it that crazy that you had a different kind of dream than you normally have?
I guess not. All I can go with is my gut. I gotta go by feel. And I’m telling you, it felt like a life I walked into. Will I ever hear those songs again? If I go to Dawson Lodge, will it be the same as it was in my “dream.” What the hell happened? Did I briefly borrow a life?
Maybe when we die we pass through a kind of cosmic video rental store. In the passing we pick up a new life and when we walk out of that cosmic video rental store, we are a new person. Now, it’s interesting that I “joined” this Donald Bighton life when he was already twenty-something years in. Shouldn’t I have been reborn and started at the beginning? Day One?
That’s not how the Reddit guy experienced it, nor how a number of people who commented on that original article experienced this phenomenon.
If this existential video store, or let’s be more inclusive and call it the Existential Pathway is a real thing, I must have missed it. I had my seizure as Danny Lindsay and the next thing I knew I was driving through Northern British Columbia as Donald Bighton. Maybe when people die they just start right up again as someone else. Then again, why would I start up as someone who lives in the same country I do? Aren’t the odds of that astronomically small, given the billions of people I might’ve become? Or does something keep us tethered to a familiar culture? Like there’s some kind of Reincarnation Rule Booklet or something saying “thou shalt not wander too far from a culture one is comfortable with.” But then why not a fifty-eight year old woman from Illinois? Or a six-year old boy from Marin County, California?
Maybe the manner in which the Pathway is experienced is dependent on the life of the person experiencing The Doorway. For example, if the deceased was born in 2003 and never saw or visited a video rental store in their lifetime, shouldn’t that person’s Doorway be closer to a streaming service where they pick a TV show (or, in this case, a new lifetime)?
Or if the deceased is an English fishmonger from Whitechapel who died of plague in 1665, wouldn’t his Doorway mimic the feel of a London fish market from the time of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year? Or, if not an entire market itself, a single vendor perhaps? Somewhere where exchange takes place. Humans have been exchanging and bartering since the time homo sapiens were battling with eight other sub-species of homo for global dominance. Trading tools, meals, territory, safety, people. The act of exchange, particularly all the human effort, energy, and emotion that goes into it (bartering, feigning, outsmarting, wheedling, whining, bragging) is blood deep within us and within the genome of our distant ancestors, so I think that the Doorway we pass through when we die would be familiar to us, or at least, the circumstance would be familiar.
I don’t know what happened. And I’ve given up looking for an answer. I just think that something happened. The day I woke up, Tuesday, I texted people things like “I don’t know what happened or why I’m in hospital. I took a journalistic assignment and something happened.”
I still thought the journalist thing was real because it felt so real and my dreams never, ever feel real.
So. Has the Catholic Church helped me to understand this? Not so far, no. I’ve been going to church to try and observe people amid their faith, to see if something might awaken inside of me. And something has, but it almost feels independent from the church. I already know that the Catholic Church does not agree with reincarnation. You get one shot, and then an interview with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates as to whether or not you’ve been good enough to get in.
But I don’t want to get in, necessarily. The Talking Heads song “Heaven” refers to the titular celestial destination as “a place where nothing ever happens.”
Is it me, or does that sound closer to a description of hell? I don’t want to go somewhere where nothing ever happens, nor do I wish to float around on a cloud and play the harp. I wanna listen to loud rock n’ roll and minor key dance music and I wanna listen to it loud without disturbing the neighbours. As far as I can tell, the angels floating on harps thing is nowhere to be found in scripture. It comes from somewhere else in our culture. The Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercials are as good a culprit as any.
Because I do disagree with the Catholic Church on some major things. One big beef with the arrangement of the afterlife insofar as the Catholic Church sees it: our animals are not allowed to experience whatever happens after death and thus, cannot join us in heaven. Well, the Catholic Church believes in “resurrection, not reincarnation.” But why do the two things have to be mutually exclusive? Jesus can return to Earth and I can die and become Donald and some guy on Reddit can hit his head and live a whole life until he realizes the lamp in his living room is spatially impossible, a realization that spits him out of the Impossible Lamp Life and back into the previous life where a football player hit him hard on his head. Now that’s a headache I wouldn’t wanna wake up to.
But what if reincarnation is real? Is it against Catholic Celestial Protocol that we might be reunited with our pets in the next life? Or perhaps might this explain the strange wordless connection we sometimes feel with an animal upon meeting it for the first time? Is this a reunion from a life we’ve lived before? (I still believe time’s arrow only moves one way: forward. Therefore there shouldn’t be any recognition between a human and an animal who will meet in another life but thus far have not.) Of course I am also pro-choice. I don’t think such an attitude is incompatible with Catholicism.
The enthusiasm and determination with which the Catholic Church dispatches its many trained exorcists seems to me to be on par with the determination that some abortion doctors have to remove a fetus that has no heartbeat rather than making the mother go through the unimaginable trauma of giving birth to a dead fetus. In no way am I comparing demonic possession (which I am not sure I even believe in) to a fetus with no heartbeat except for my agreement with expedient removal. The church believes that a demon can do severe damage to body and soul. What about a dead infant? How might a mother feel upon being told in the first trimester than her son or daughter is dead yet she must keep it inside her another 6 months before giving birth? We have the means nowadays to prevent such tragedies. The Church has no blanket or general anti-technology screed. Jesus has been online since the internet first emerged. Jesus, remember that old Bush song? I do.
I don’t know if “allowed” or “permitted” is a fair word, given how ancient the Bible is, even the King James New Testament. Animals and humans used to be much more strictly segregated. William Earhart, the Vietnam War Veteran Against the War and writer (whom I wrote to once praising his first book…he wrote back thanking me), even the poorest of the poor in Vietnam drew a sharp division between their animals and themselves. Animals were kept “outside,” while people stayed “inside.” This practice was clung to even when the people lacked the very walls needed to create and enforce division. Even (or perhaps especially) when the division is mental, as in “animals belong outside,” it is clung to with the power and sureness of one magnetic clinging to the other. This division can only be undone through great effort, a kind of mental yanking apart. Re-education and propaganda can play roles in this.
4. SEPARATION
For here we have no lasting city, we seek the city that is to come. – Hebrews 13:14
Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. – Philippians 4:6
China Miéville’s The City & the City is a terrifying book about a single city that has been divided into two. The division of Besźel and its “twin city” Ul Qoma is ostensibly drawn along lines of class and culture (although there is sure to be a racial division here, as there always is disguised as class in the form of the gated community or in the form of religion which automatically acquires a large percentage of a given type of people). There’s one problem though: the city and the city itself is too messy to simply split in half like Berlin during the Cold War. Therefore the division is purely social and mental. A single city can contain both Besźel and Ul Qoma, and residents must navigate accordingly. Residents of Ul Qoma may not look at residents of Besźel and vice vera. They may not shop at each other’s stores, speak to or even acknowledge the other.
This rough division is strictly enforced by a terrifying entity known as Breach, who are everywhere at once. If one is caught engaging with the other city, one is arrested by Breach and brought into a windowless building seemingly built in the Brutalist style in order to make an architectural hint at the horror and brutality that goes on inside. Miéville shrouds Breach in the same secrecy that Orwell gives to his thought police, so that when the inevitable encounter with Breach occurs, the reader is first surprised by the obvious humanity of the agents before realizing, with quiet terror, just how successfully these agents have supressed that humanity in order to carry out the torture necessary to elicit the required information.
The charade here is not funny in the slightest. It is grim and Miéville treats in that way, despite the lightness of the genre he is purportedly working in: the detective novel. The author himself has admitted the impossibility of having on city sit on top of another city in a kind of spatial incest: “You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear...you do them all the time, but they also fail, repeatedly, and you cheat, repeatedly, in all sorts of small ways.”
Indeed, in the very first paragraph of the book our protagonist Inspector Borlu accidentally looks directly into the eyes of a woman from the other city. Both look away quickly but that doesn’t change the fact that he has already committed Breach (the novel uses the word as a noun to describe the enforcement agency itself and the act that the agency seeks to eradicate by continuously enforcing Breach. Of course, this begs the question: out of what city does Breach operate? The answer is neither. Wherever Breach is, they are in an interstitial space where ordinary citizens cannot go (because it is not an interstitial space that Breach inhabits so much as is, Breach is the in-between space moving from one spot to another to glare at citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma and keep them in their respective cities.
Life is a lot like life in Miéville’s The City & the City. We have these separations between us, ones of class, race, sex, religion, but also attitude and intent. We move through the city trying not to get caught up in the lives and worries of others. We move through the city trying to stay in our city. We seek not to Breach but keep our heads down and keep going.
There are two churches close to me. One, The Grace Church of the Nazarene, has a Sunday worship that I attended for a few months. The priest who gave the Sunday sermon is quite closed off, not to mention a little lost looking, as if either English is not his first language or he is having some kind of crisis of faith himself and cannot bring himself to read the scripture with conviction. I know that some people are shy, but c’mon guy. We’re not reading Agatha Christie aloud to a cozy living room full of wafting tea. We’re not reading Tom Clancy and James Patterson. This is the Holy Bible. If you can’t read Scripture with conviction, you’ll never read anything with conviction. The shortest sentence in the Bible is “Jesus wept.” When I listen to this guy preach, I want to weep, but for a different reason. I do not think it is sacrilegious to desire/expect a bit of showmanship from the holy father in church. Worship doesn’t have to be solemn and serious. Prayer is a different matter. I don’t think one should necessarily bounce up and down on a trampoline while saying one’s Hail Mary’s or whilst asking St. Anthony for help finding a lost item. So I found a different church, farther away, but with a far better priest: Saint Pius X Catholic Church Parish.
Whether church or a waterpark or a recording studio, I always enjoy being around people who like where they are.
One thing I have learned to be very grateful for, just from going to church and meeting people who have had problems in the past: One majorly destructive vice I had not (yet) succumbed to is gambling, neither in the form of games like poker, blackjack, or roulette or any of that stuff, not by gambling on sports. Just out of curiosity because legalized online gambling had come to Canada and they were aggressively advertising, in the summer of 2022 I kept track of every game in the regular MLB season as if I’d bet the over/under. I can’t remember the paltry amount I “bet” on each game, but it was something small.
Even “betting” with nothing, I felt a certain giddiness when I went on a hot streak and a kind of childish frustration when I lost. I was also amazed at how infrequently I swept the board. There were many days where twelve games were played and I “won” nine or ten. How irritating! Out of the entire season, I swept the board just three times. Calculating my wins and losses at the end of the year, I found that I was down over $4000. And all from casual poor man’s bets where I never bet more than $2 on a single baseball game! Thank God I never bet for real, eh?
Anyway, whether reincarnation is real or not, something happened to me, and it realigned some of my perceptions. I can’t say whether what happened was real, only that it felt real. And isn’t that close to being the same thing? I used to make that argument back when friends, fresh from seeing The Matrix for the first time, were convinced that we are all heads in a vat being fed sensory input by machines and not actually living our lives. At first, I thought maybe this was a dangerous thing to think. After all, if this life is not “real,” then it follows that death is not “real” either.
If Danny dies and all that happens is I become Don, doesn’t that make being Danny less of a valuable experience?
Well no, of course not. I value life as it’s lived, while it’s lived. I’m in no hurry to find out whether reincarnation is real by hastening my course through this life. All I’m saying is, I think there’s a much greater mystery waiting for us on that far shore than we die and the screen turns black. (Because remember, black is not nothing. Black is something. If we die and truly nothing happens, then the screen doesn’t go black. It goes nothing. And we can’t conceive that because well…what’s the color of nothing? It isn’t a color. Well, what does it look like? Nothing. It doesn’t look like anything. What does it feel like? Again, nothing. And around and around we go.
I don’t think we’d go through all this, all of the challenges and hardships and heartbreak, as well as the good times and beautiful experiences, only to have nothing after. Does that make our lives now more or less valuable? Or is it not a matter of more or less, but of difference? Not better, not worse, just different?
I don’t know.
I’m reading the Bible and I’m going to church these days like a good Catholic but part of being a Catholic, as Kerouac always said, is not just being on the road but being on the path. What’s more important, if you had to pick one: the search for meaning or the search for happiness? The latter. Every time. Give me stability and happiness every time. I can live without answers. I’ve done it my whole life. I can live without knowing the color of nothing. I can’t live without knowing the feeling of happiness, of tranquility, of contentment.
Whether I’m Don or Dan, I now suspect that stability is the foundation of happiness. And tranquility can be every bit as profound as pleasures of the flesh or the mind.
Whoever you are,
no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.