As Hemmingway
I died once when I was sixteen.
It was September, 1965. A bright morning. The air was clean.
My car, a ’51 Ford, was in the shop. My father had given it to me the year before. He made a deal with a man who owed him money. The man put a race-banned engine into my car. I was left without wheels for the weekend.
I had a date with a girl, older than me. We would go to the drive-in. There would be no movie.
So I asked my father for my brother’s ’59 Impala. He said yes if I took my mother and sister across town that morning. I agreed.
We crossed the bridge. My mother liked the look of the river. She asked me to take the road along it.
At the tracks I stopped. The sign was broken. Brush grew thick. You could not see left. I pulled forward. The train came fast and struck us.
I was gone.
There was no light, no God. Only everything. The weight of all souls. All who had lived. All who would live. I was part of them and they of me. There was no time. Only joy. I stayed until I was told to go back. I was braided with other strength and pushed down into my body.
I woke under a sheet. They had called me dead. I tore it off and people screamed. The train had crushed the car around me. I told them how to free me. They thought it was impossible but I knew the truck with the chains and told them to use it. They did. The train backed away. Metal screamed. My legs bent and then snapped free.
I lived.
The radio said I was dead all day. My father had to go to the station to make them stop. When I went back to school, men and women cried when they saw me. Some fainted.
Years later, in 1994, I died again. At the VA hospital. My lungs collapsed on the table. I was gone, the same as before. Energy. Souls. No time. Then back.
They cut me open, spread my ribs, drained my lungs. I woke while the knife was still in me. I screamed. They kept me alive. I lost seventy pounds before I left the place.
Now I know this: once you have died, you are always there. Part of you stays. Part of you goes on living here. Two planes, one passing through the other. They never touch.
That is what it is like.
As Dickenson
It was upon a radiant September morning in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-five and five, that I, a boy of but sixteen summers, set forth in the company of my dear mother, never supposing that before the clock had struck the noon hour, I should meet with Death himself, and, for a time, be carried off by his unrelenting hand.
My car, a Ford of the year ’51, gift of my father, was, at that hour, detained within the workshop of one Mr. Tolomei — a man whose debts to my family, contracted through the reckless pursuit of racing, had given my father cause to exact his recompense in labour. And so it was, by a circuitous transaction, that an engine, once too powerful for the track, became destined for my humble conveyance, and I, bereft of my own machine, was forced to entreat my father for the loan of another.
That morning my mother requested that I drive her across the river, and I, being eager to please, complied. The waters shone bright in the sunlight, and she remarked upon their loveliness. Yet soon we came upon that fateful crossing, where the rails, poorly marked, concealed their danger behind overgrown brush and a sign fallen into neglect. There, as I paused but a moment, a great locomotive bore down upon us, silent in its approach, merciless in its swiftness, and in the instant of its strike I was snatched away.
What words may suffice to describe the country into which I then passed? Not the narrow confines of heaven as pictured in the chapbooks of pious men, nor the fearful flames with which they sought to chasten sinners. No, I was gathered into a boundless company — the very essence and energy of all who had ever drawn breath, or ever would. Time and space dissolved; joy beyond reckoning enfolded me. Yet it was not my appointed hour, and unseen companions, strong and patient, wove themselves into me, binding me again to the flesh.
Thus I awoke beneath a white sheet, pronounced lifeless by those about me, and their astonishment was as great as their fear when I moved. The car had been crushed beneath the train’s great iron coupler, and I lay imprisoned within its twisted frame. Yet, as though with knowledge beyond sight, I instructed the men how they might release me: chains from a truck, hidden down the road, would suffice. They obeyed, and by that means I was freed.
The world declared me dead that day, even the voice upon the radio gave me up to the grave, and yet I walked into school but days thereafter, to the terror of my teachers and the fainting of more than one schoolmate.
Years rolled on, and in the summer of ninety-four, in the halls of the Portland hospital, I died once more. The surgeons, striving with their instruments, wounded me sorely, and my lungs collapsed within me. Again I crossed into that vast communion of souls; again I was returned, with pain as my companion. They cut me open, they drained the poison, they stitched and sewed, and I endured months of suffering before I emerged, thin as a ghost, yet alive.
And so it is, that I walk both in this world and in that other, tethered by some invisible strand. For once a man has been to that country, he is never parted from it. The living earth and the realm beyond pass one through the other like waves upon the sea — unseen, unheard, yet forever joined.
As Crowley
On the morning appointed, beneath the bright tyranny of the Sun, the Beast that is called Death struck me, and I was cast beyond the veil. I was sixteen years, yet old enough to be torn from the sleep of childhood and flung into the cauldron of Eternity.
The iron horse, unheralded by trumpet or horn, smote my chariot of flesh. The body fell. The boy was destroyed. But I, the eternal, the flame unconsumed, passed into that limitless Ocean which is beyond Time and beyond Space.
Do not speak to me of God as priests prattle in their pulpits. There was no patriarch upon a throne, nor sentimental angel strumming a harp. There was Power. There was All. I was dissolved in the Body of Nuit, the infinite curve of the night. I was mingled with the company of souls, who are not souls but sparks of the One Fire, bound and braided in ecstasy. There was no beginning, no end, no line, no circle — only the orgasm of existence itself.
Yet the Book was not closed upon me. The Angel, veiled in silence, braided me with others, and drove me back into the sheaths of matter. I fell like lightning into the corpse that bore my name. The sheet was torn away; the dead arose, and men shrieked. The train had wrapped me in its iron embrace, but I commanded with knowledge that was not of the eyes. Chains, I said, from the truck hidden down the road. They obeyed. They freed me, though my body was riven and bleeding.
The profane world thought me slain. The radio proclaimed my passing. My father wept. But I strode again among the living, a ghost in the halls of my schooling, so that even masters and maidens swooned at the sight of me. For I was twice-born, once by the womb of woman, and once by the kiss of Death.
Years passed. Again the surgeons carved my flesh in their clumsy ignorance. Again the breath was stolen from me and I sank into the Abyss. Again I knew the rapture of dissolution. Again I returned, torn and gasping, chained to the Earth by the will of those unseen brethren.
Know then this Mystery: he who has died is never severed from Death. The thread remains. The soul walks in both worlds, as the serpent coils around the Tree and the dove wheels in the sky. The planes interpenetrate like lovers, each unseen by the other, yet each utterly real. This is the great secret: there is no end. There is no death. There is only the Dance of the Infinite, the laughter of the Stars, and the certain knowledge that we are already there, always there, forever.
