The View From The Soul

The View From the Soul

          She was cute and perky and couldn’t have been blonder, with see-through eyebrows, and a distance-runner’s body that did it for me; she was the friend of some friends of mine and the co-presenter of a late-morning hello-housewives TV show:

          “Well, Peggy, who is our guest for today?”

          “Well, Mario,” talking through a toothy smile, eyes on camera and not Mario, “Blah-blah, the sister-in-law of Spurs’ assistant trainer Blah-Blah, is coming by to show us some of her amazing macrame creations!”

          … that kind of thing

          My friends and she and I were lazing on the concrete apron by the Trinity University swimming pool, and somehow the conversation came around to wills, and I mentioned that I’d bequeathed my cadaver to the U of Texas medical school for instructional purposes.

          This freaked Peggy out. She shuddered and grimaced at the idea of students cutting her body’s innards apart in minute detail. “Have you ever seen what that looks like? It’s so – so humiliating!”

          It didn’t occur to me to mention that my GP daddy had a photo of himself, along with a couple of med-school pals, hamming it up over a cadaver they’d been dissecting. Probably a good thing.

          All I said was that once I’m dead I won’t give a fuck about that.

          Oh well, I wasn’t even considering the possibility of getting anywhere with Peggy on a personal level, anyhow – I’m not a distance runner. I did, however, line her up to interview for a newspaper column I was writing at the time.

          Thirty-six or thirty-seven years later, what I should’ve said then came to me. None of that facepalm-a-few-hours-later business; it took a while.

          What came to me has to do with, as cliché would have it, the mystery of death. Sure, what I told Peggy, that dead is gone, that being dead is like blacking out from too much whisky, only not waking up the next morning wondering how I got there and what bones and furniture I’ve broken – that it’s the same nothing as before I was born – is most likely the case.

          Other speculative hypotheses remain as yet undisproven, though. We may indeed be in some way what could be called, for want of better words, spiritual beings. If the scientific method ever demonstrates that all of these speculations are impossible, then blackout it is – no argument.

          Since we don’t as yet have the technology to do this, I’ll speculate that, although unlikely, our self-or-spirit-or-soul-or-whatever does exist in some form. For various reasons, though, I consider that all the concepts of the soul of all the well-known religions are too unlikely for me to take them seriously, primarily because they’re all culture-specific, but I’m not going to get into that here.

          The basis for my speculation here comes from the physicist Richard Feynman, who noted that since the half-life of the phosphorous in the brains of mammals is about two weeks, all of the atoms in our brains have been there for less than a month. This, however, does not change our memories or values or personality quirks, all of which continue seamlessly as the atoms come and go – barring some trauma.

          Feynman called this continuing self a dance in which the molecules that become our brains take part before moving on, always replaced by new atoms, ‘but always performing the same dance, remembering what that dance was’ when they’d arrived.

          So, what is the nature of this dance, and does it survive the demise of the flow of oxygen molecules to the atoms dancing it?

          Okay, Peggy, let’s just speculate that the dance is composed of unimaginably complex sets of waves somewhere on the electromagnetic – or some other – spectrum for which we have as yet no instruments that can detect them: sort of like TV broadcasts with no TV receivers, only much more complex.

          Now, what these wavy spirits do and where they go after the body dies is of course wide-open to all sorts of imaginative speculation.

          Heaven and Hell? Childishly, ridiculously unlikely, culturally specific, and anyway, even if less than total bullshit not within viewing range of any med school laboratory table, so no problem for Peggy.

          Migrating intact into a foetus in the womb of a pubescent rape victim in rural Uttar Pradesh or a capybara in the eastern Peruvian Amazon or some other sentient mama? Well, maybe, but the likelihood of this suffers from too many how-abouts, and anyway, it doesn’t involve being on a ceiling at some University School of Medicine looking down.

          What I think is more likely, whilst less likely than oblivion, might be that people’s individual spirit units merge with a more or less all-encompassing world-soul that, in part, encompasses the spirits of all deceased sentient beings. This, by the way, would be a good basis for ethical behaviour, as you would then at death experience all the pleasure, pain, joy, terror, and, well, experience of every other sentient being, so what you do to others really would come back to you to experience – but not the experience of your cadaver being sliced up, as you would have already left it.

          This leaves us – unless you have some further speculations, which I’d love to hear – to consider ghosts, or individual wave complexes hanging out in the world. It seems to me that ghosts that haunt houses or other places where they’d been when alive would be the spirits of really boring people, when – once freed from the body – they’d have a whole world, maybe a whole universe, to explore, but instead just stay put, and those souls who stick around to torment those who’d done them wrong would be vindictive sorts with whom I’d want nothing to do, especially when everything is available to me.

          Also, since our spirits would no longer be plugged into our sensory-input organs, would they be able to perceive things in the physical world or only in that of complex wave systems of a certain wavelength? Shit, how the fuck would I know? Maybe something to consider.

          Anyway, Peggy, all this has taken us to the crux of your problem. Even though it seems to me to be much less likely than nothingness or merging with the world-soul, I concede the possibility that we may become free spirits, emancipated by release from our bodies, and that, even more unlikely, we somehow maintain the ability to perceive physical phenomena. I know that you’re neither a boring nor vindictive person, but if the idea of the indignities and aesthetic yuckiness of dissection distresses you, why watch?

          I know that, despite all those ifs and increasing degrees of unlikeliness, should I have the chance to observe my cadaver’s dissection I certainly would. I think it’d be fascinating. And besides, I’d love to see the med students' reactions when they get to my dick.