Meditations In A Municipal Cemetery.

It is surely deeply silly to say so,

but the dead are very dead indeed.

As quiet as the grave!

A cliché, but I hear it here.

The muteness. The peace, if you like.

Dead! Dumbly and irretrievably dead!

It is the contrast, with us, that shocks.

Life! The all or nothingness of it!

Not the tiniest residue of thought,

not the faintest flicker of feeling,

forevermore beyond all stimulus,

past all attempt at utterance,

psychically or otherwise,

so it is to be dead.

Too late! Too late for everything,

even for the quiet contemplation

of Death itself.

Now, while yet capable, is the time,

if time is to be taken, for that exercise.

And surely it might be worthwhile

to confront something so mysterious,

to look at it squarely, at least once,

without recourse to self-deception,

to some facile means of evasion,

to the kind and convenient,

but honestly and independently,

trusting solely to your own reasoning,

not accepting something secondhand

in a matter of such consequence.

It is, perhaps,

a question of maturity.

Children may believe in ghosts.

That is their realm, the realm of play,

the world of fantasy.

As for us, we older mortals,

we might well give up our childish ways

and face the world as it truly is.

The soul! The spirit! The immortal self!

All things pass away:

soul alone persists, is deemed eternal.

Such is the accepted notion.

But is it reasonable

that matter should be deemed less lasting

than something so ethereal?

And what is this self

that would outlive its host?

I have sought by great quietness

to entice it to reveal itself,

but I have found only memories

and, of course, a tendency to think,

a thinking that stops when scrutinized

and, the focus lifted, at once resumes,

the power that is required for witness

the same, it would seem, that propels all thought.

And what of the unique identity,

traceable through all eternity,

of this reservoir of recollections?

My body I can at least identify,

distinguish from other bodies.

As for the essence I call my self,

how differs it from any other self?

Who is there? Announce yourself!

It is I! It is I! It is I!

So one and all earnestly reply,

each the centre of their universe,

all convinced of their own uniqueness.

Yet bodiless selves seem very alike,

to be somehow the same, all the one,

the one trick of the one human mind.

What then? No spirit to survive us?

Loss of life and nothingness thereafter?

And where is this life that can be lost?

Not in any single tissue, certainly,

but rather in the working unity

of the body's many vital parts.

This order deranged,

comes disease and death.

No doubt each atom of us is alive

and, our poor flesh decomposing,

all these, our scattered constituents,

will survive and, in truth, persist longer

than we could dare to measure.

Though all our bodies must prove mortal,

all life, it seems, is eternal,

except for that one vain portion

we imagine ourselves to be.

Could it be that, among all things,

it is just our darling soul,

our dear everlasting spirit,

that must perish, evaporate,

being the misty creation

or our fancy and only unique

in being solely beyond

the laws and blessing of Nature?

Am I one or just one of a kind,

just one bearer of the awareness

that is common to all beings?

If this body should expire,

do I yet persist in my fellows,

wherever the light of life yet shines?

It surely takes a huge humility,

a right leap of self-denial,

to embrace such a vision

of immortality.

I feel the weight of a difficult truth.

Never was anything at once so sure,

and yet so all too questionable,

as my own sacrosanct self,

as my own lone life.

Dare I spurn the solitary self?

Do I dare dispense with Death?

Great questions these, no doubt,

and surely a fitting place to pause.

Such bold enquiries, advanced thus far,

are then best left to the sober mind

to filter at its leisure,

to sort what is worth saving

from what might be mere raving.

It is time to quit this quiet place

that has proved both apt and fertile

for such thoughts on our mortality.

Let us rejoin the busy world beyond.

There's the noise of traffic from the street.

I hear my footsteps as I near the gate.

Do I go forth alone?

I sense some welcome company,

the company, indeed, of everyone,

of all those with equal share

in everything we look upon and feel.