Language is the province of the living, not the dead. It is very difficult to communicate a near-death experience, perhaps because the part of the brain that produces the language is being killed off, and/or we have not yet assigned words to things we are unaware of outside of this life. I wrote this entry like a musician transposing a melody from an archaic tuning system, there is something recognizable in the tune, but the tones are completely different. Or more simply put, "dead men tell no tales..."
This entry is based on emails I sent to Kurt Eckes of the Drop Bass Network and David Alter of the Superstars of Love in 2005.
My illness hit like a slow motion car crash I didn't see coming. With each week and each round of antibiotics; I got worse and worse. I suspect it was a fungus fueled by the antibiotics, a fungus that spread throughout my entire body, or maybe it was the antibiotics themselves, I don't know.
I felt like I was eighty, I moved like I was eighty, I was an eighty-year-old man. I dragged my feet up three flights of stairs to my apartment, got into bed, and I thought to myself, "this is what it's like to be eighty, this is what the end is like." Then, I started to blackout. The blackness began in the corners of my room and slowly moved in. Not a black cloud, but a void, things stopped existing, so therefore I could not see them anymore. The movie theater down the block, the cafe across the street, the windowsill right next to me, all were gone. The blackness got closer and closer, until I was the only thing left, a solitary pod of life enclosed in an infinite void. I did not "see" an angel, it was not a visual hallucination, it was an icon inside my mind, an abstraction. With the whole world closing down around me, the only thing left was my idea of an angel, somehow forced to the forefront of my mind. I don't even believe in angels, but there it was, a black, bishop-shaped chess piece of an angel with wings flapping, hovering above me. In hindsight, I think it was the black angel of death. I felt a tremor, a shock, my whole body revolted, and my mind yelled, "get away!" Then, I blacked out and I was so far away...
Like traveling to some distant spiral arm of the Milky Way, I saw the earth and all the life in it like a faraway streetlight down the block. Swarms of moths circling the light and heat; were franticly mating and consuming each other for food; and I was one of those moths, blown far down the avenue by some sickly breeze. Like the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, I felt the futility of life. Nothing I could do would ever make a difference to that swarm, and even if I did accomplish an act of significance, it wouldn't matter. One day the streetlight would burn out, with heat and light fading, the moths would die, all would be forgotten, all would be gone. This is my end-life crisis, I thought, I am so outside of life. Everything we know, all we remember, our history, art and technology, our complete culture, is perpetuated in this fragile life orb of collective memory. Our world is a network of brains connected by eyes, ears, and actions operating within an infinite, eternal void. Individuals constantly being born and dying, but the collective memory of all things learned is passed on from generation to generation. This is our world.
Then, like a tide slowly receding, the void disappeared. I could see the corners of my room again, the real world returned. As soon as I returned to this life I felt so bad I asked myself, "how are you ever going to recover from this?" and I realized one day, I was going to lose everything, even my memories. All the information I had stuffed in my brain like a greedy miser of fact would be gone. I struggled to use my mind to remember something. I tried to remember the French, but all I could remember was a Polka band playing accordions with stripped shirts, mustaches, and straw hats. Those annoying bastards. One day I realized, that memory would be gone too.
Somewhere, in some rare abstract/organic dimension, there is a great, Amazon River source of all love. When I pass away: I want to stand alone in the great silence of the universe and be filled with infinite peace. With all my life energy gone, I want to be emersed in the great, Amazon River source of all love.
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