lapsedmodernist | Johnny Cash Cosmology

earlier today i walked over to

nuncstans's apartment and listened to johnny cash singing "the man comes around" and "hurt." then she and i went to the L cafe and both ordered the Johnny Cash sandwiches (they have all these sandwiches named for famous singers, like they also have the Leonard Cohen and the Patsy Cline). it was really good--pastrami with melted cheddar. i guess there is some metaphorical communion thing happenning with that, no?

i am so incredibly sad that johnny cash is dead.

i am agnostic, in the pure, most distilled epistemological sense about life after death. but, like fox mulder, i want to believe! the other weekend on the island we were talking about ghosts and i said that i wished i had an experience with a ghost like some people close to me have had, because then i would be able to believe in afterlife. when i was younger i had a confused cosmology, which weirdly enough, was the basis for the short story published in last week's New Yorker called "The Brief History of The Dead" by Kevin Brockmerier. so i had this fear of death, but less of individual death, and more of a global disaster. somehow, to myself i articulated it that if everyone was dead, there would be no one left to believe in afterlife, so even agnosticism would be negated as a category, at least as an existing discourse that presented various possibilities. so this story in the New Yorker was about a limbo-like city where people go after they die; it's not heaven, it's something else. the rumor in the city is that it is the place to which they are tethered as long as people who remember them are still alive. and so it makes sense that they stick around the city for up to 70 or so years, finding jobs and apartments, reuniting with their families, and after several decades, they vanish--it is unclear where they go. then a scientist, among others, arrives in the city and makes it clear that a deadly virus has been released on Earth with a 100% infection and mortality rate. more and more people start arriving in the city, but also more and more people start vanishing at an exponential rate, because everyone who remembers them is dying so rapidly. new people arrive and vanish within the course of the day:

"If the only life they had was bestowed upon them by the memories of the living, as Russell was inclined to believe, what would happen when the rest of the living were gathered into the city? what would happen, he wondered, when that other room, the larger world, had been emptied out?
Unquestionably, the city was changing. People who had perished in the epidemic came and went very quickly, sometimes in a matter of hours, like a mid-spring snow that blankets the ground at night and melts away as soon as the sun comes up. A man arrived in the pine district one morning, found an empty storefront, painted a sign in the window with colored soap ("SHERMAN'S CLOCK REPAIR, FAST AND EASY, OPENING SOON"), then locked the door and shuffled away and never returned. Another man told the woman he had stayed the night with that he was going to the kitchen for a glass of water, and when she called to him a few minutes later he did not answer. She searched the apartment for him--the window beside her dressing table was open, as though he had climbed out onto the balcony--but he was nowhere to be found. The entire population of a small Pacific island appeared in the city on a bright windy afternoon, congregated on the top level of a parking garage, and were gone by the end of the day."

that story just tapped into something with me. i try not to think about it. death is the ultimate schrodinger's cat experiment, to mix and match metaphores, you don't know what's there, epistemologically, until you open that pandora's box, but if you open it you are dead (whatever that means). but the thing is, if there is something that can sway my agnosticism towards the belief that there is life after death, it's something like johnny cash dying. because i can't believe that he is not somewhere singing right now, because he just is. i have absolute faith in that. any other scenario is simply impossible, even in my hyper-rational worldview.