Does my soul drop down into an abyssal sleep, one without dreams, a slumber that lasts forever, once it lays my body down? I had that question in mind when I looked up from my desk and spotted the title on the spine of the movie’s jacket – The Big Sleep. For purposes of confirmation, I consulted my Guide to the Advanced Soul, holding the problem in my mind, opening up the book to a page at random, in accord with the book’s instructions: The measure of mental health is the disposition to find good everywhere. Damn that Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And so the materialist philosophers, the nihilists, and the atheists, were spot on after all. No reward in heaven, no meaning to it all. Jesus and Jesse James both to the same sleep, dreamless like death, eaten by darkness.
Good works won’t save me from it. Love and justice aren’t the end swells of destiny. No Last Judgment, but no Resurrection either. But that in itself wasn’t bad. Wasn’t good. Just was.
And maybe to rise from the plain of deep every once in an eon to dream again the glory and the suffering, to fantasize God and salvation.
Everything that much more precious since there’d be no second chance. And yet that didn’t make me want to cling to the green in the trees any harder. It made me want to grasp less, since life as I’d known it – selflessness and self-aggrandizement, heaven and hell – all of it just a perjured tale. Not a deception imposed by the Mother Church or mother and father or the angels who would come for my relic bones once I died, then sing my soul to heaven forever. But paradise a propaganda told by my dreaming self to keep me blind to the unspeakable quietus which surrounds me as night drowns my eyes.
To refuse to bargain with a fantasy; to not make believe an afterlife improbable; to refuse to negotiate a myth in its final stages when I am in my final stages.
All the drama drained from life and death – bliss versus hell, chastisement versus reward – and all the dissembling opposites which dissolve like detritus at the bottom of an oceanic Nod, sinking into the mind of a mindless God. No grandfather to greet me at Heaven’s Gate. No more grandfather. No more Heaven’s Gate. For who has ever come back to speak to us of regions beyond the threshold? Dozing into a slumber that jackets itself in death. And this finality is not a fantasy, but a peace.
To sleep is to dream and to dream is to live and slip into the garment of the world. But to sleep is to undo all dreams and dreamlessness is death. With all the sprites and invention stripped from the cloth of the world, there becomes Nothing, and nothing left to fear.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within