With a Line and an Idea

I always begin to write from a bifurcated place; I begin, generally, both with an idea and a line, that is something to say and something said. While watching a documentary on the LDS church, whose founder, Joseph Smith, strikes me as one of the world’s truly wacky translators, I began to think about immortality, when a line (and a half) came to me.

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed

Immortality seems to me to be one of the truly horrific things that could befall a person; I’m not really a suicidal person—I do not ever want to die—but I think that what I do is meaningless if it doesn’t end. I would have no sense of urgency, because immortality means I will exhaust the possibilities of my existence, making those possibilities meaningless. Nothing is of greater or lesser value, because, inevitably, if only out of sheer boredom, I will accomplish everything.

I felt the beginning of another sonnet, a form whose outline I’ve been pushing of late, I felt the need to add, to expand this growing, inexplicable disdain for the eternal. So I wrote

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed between the dirt
and afterlife

at which point I stopped, because I realized that what had begun as a moment of mourning for what will become of me physically, that at the moment of the dissolution of my will, the constituent pieces of my body will be passed about, never knowing the relief of simply being allowed to rest, to end. To be honest, the obvious spiritual component had never occurred to me. Do I also mourn for the immortality of my soul? Am I the only one to mourn, because it would bring such pleasure to those who love me [sic] to know that I have not entirely ended? I found out tonight that Mormons believe in and actively practice baptism of the dead. The pure sense of revulsion I felt as a Jewish man described the day he found out his brother, whom he had watched die in a concentration camp, had been baptized posthumously by the LDS church inspired in me a kind of hatred I don’t normally feel. I understood why Augustine was such a proponent of the freedom of the human will, because I saw how disgusting it would be to have one’s salvation, no matter how beneficent, imposed.

I understand now, that my line (and a half) had a kind of will of its own, that I ought not have tried to tack on a sonnet. I should have had the courage to let it end where it did, and say what it said.

I wouldn’t want to die the way I will,
to live forever, passed