I Don't Want to Stop

I was having a dickens of a time explaining to my wife, The Magic Condom Fairy, why I was so afraid of death, if I think death is just the end.  The following lyric, I hope, will clarify.

                                                                              Stop

My beloved wife,

How can I make you fear that great ending enough?

When I close I look and I see two black spheres; they join and fill everything, wrap around my head until I feel them behind me and all the way to my toes, I shrink and curl up into the dread, to the bottom of the endless ocean, and Leviathan, infinite jaws gaping, approaches to swallow the clear that was me.

Consider the alternatives.  Consider we are illusion, run on the Brahman mainframe, and so death is nothing to us, but a cloud over our eternal eye.

Consider that we are bodies, and something else, too, something untouched and uncrunched, dis-entropic goop or mist, and we flit from our corpses to another world or another womb.

Consider, though, that we are what we are, these muck-sacks, these ligaments and bloody tubes, these electrical puss-buckets, these calcium stalactites.  Consider our birth in the wetness and pain, and our coming into the light, and our eating and breaking apart of the world around us, the bouncing bounding particles of dust and light, the taking in of the muscles of our cousins.  All this broadcast iconography springing wriggling live from our brains, our bodies the extruders of this intruder, consciousness.  A meat grinder of mind, with the world shoved in and shat out.

Wrestling in the mud with the earth angels, fusing stars together and bursting sparks around til the mud blazes.  But consider that the operation is the sole cause of this thinking.  A computer mainframe made from sizzling steak, spitting ones and zeroes of red juice.

When it all breaks down, the energy, you say, the energy will run, spilling into other tributaries.  But the electricity, the kinetic heat was never the thing; the process was the thing, the jump and the bite and the neuron fire; the movement of the breast, not the breath at all.

When this one has stopped, when all the pieces have gone away from each other and devoured, that is when the great dark will come; the great end, the one that shouts "everything stops!" loud as a horse whisper.

How is that not to be feared, that stopping?  How to quell the wrenching in the gut, the twisting of the nerves, the flight of senses at the knowing of that end?  In sleep the idea of the quenching comes, and misremembered as rest; in the end when the meat sloughs off, who will be left even to fear?

Hamlet maybe said it better.

I don't want to stop, nor my child, nor my dogs, nor you.  If only I believed, then we could live again, together in another, better world, or as children finding each other in a mud puddle, or maybe two mice in a cabinet, or even ghosts to haunt the joyful places of the earth.

The world, you see, is a joyful rain of muck; every fierce hot anger on the neck, and salty holding back of tears in the corners of the eyes and mouth, every sprained knee, but also every mouthful of sour wine and whiskey, every smile to every person, every pizza, every movie and book and ignoring of friends, and laughing with friends, every coughing with the smoke of the fires or burning leaves, every missed chance, every bitter fluid regret in the back of the throat, every kiss, every hug, every holding apart, everything the great meat-clock records is better, better, better in every possible world than the ending of it.

If you can make me believe I won't stop, I won't stop you, I won't stop you from believing, from believing I won't stop.