Apeirophobia
Feb 15 2017


Yes, there is a fear of eternal life.

Which shouldn’t surprise me,
because the list of phobias is endless, as well.
And who among us
isn’t neurotic with fears?
Perhaps most, those who appear the strongest;
like the swaggering Oz,
quivering with dread
behind his thick black curtain.

Are they imagining themselves in heaven,
exhausted by virtue 
fed up with perfect weather?
Reunited with their loved ones,
who also could annoy
and know them all too well?
Like a Thanksgiving dinner,
forced to sit
for everlasting life.

Or perhaps reborn,
living the same quotidian lives
over and over
and over again?
Or reincarnated
as who-knows-what,
the accumulation of sin 
the weight of karma?

And will we be
forever young?
Or become frailer and frailer
with slow inexorable age,
declining
as the universe thins
into a cold dark stillness?
Imagine, day after day
awakening in pain, confusion
black despair
with no escape possible;
confined
to a devil’s island
of perpetual torture,
the immortal body
a thick-walled fortress
nothing can break?

And yet, I fear death more.
There is the actual dying, of course.
But also the bottomless abyss
of the unknowable.
And then the carnal joy
of the embodied
I will desperately miss;
the exhilaration
of music and colour,
the working of muscle,
food, and touch, and sex.

Perhaps
we’ll achieve immortality
by downloading our minds to computers,
or suspending our brains
in chemical baths
wired-up to the world.

As if, in the afterlife
exactly now, 
I am 3 pounds 
of jelly-like material 
afloat in sterile glass;
certain
of my breathing, unthinking in-and-out,
the heft 
of this cheap ball-point pen
in my well-practiced hand.

The feel
of the smooth flow of ink,
these words
appearing on the page.
Because seeing is believing
in the gentle light of dusk.



A short article in the Atlantic on-line introduced me to this new word. My immediate thought, of course:  who doesn’t want to have eternal life?!! 

I started playing around with that, and then the poem led me into a technological form of eternal life, and from there into a rumination on the nature of reality. 

Because if everything was virtual, and consciousness a simulacrum, how could we tell? After all, isn’t seeing believing? Isn’t the touch of an object confirmation of its reality? We needn’t be disembodied brains floating in some chemical broth to appreciate the doubt implied by those question marks. Because even in our flesh and blood bodies, all of perception is, by definition, mediated; the world is, by necessity, presented at a remove:   incomplete information comes to us from the outside world, is conveyed  along nerves into the black impregnable box of the skull, and is then processed by our brains -- unavoidably influenced by experience and psychology -- into what we are certain is out there. And it is hard to dispute this reality, because it’s pretty much unchanging:   testable, reproducible, reliable; day in and day out. Nevertheless, who can definitively say that the world is not virtual, some elaborate simulation in some alien’s brain? ...Yes, there are serious philosophers who have speculated about the nature of consciousness in exactly this way!

I think this digression into virtual reality is not a digression at all, but rather completes the poem. Because while one may be worrying over the implications of an eternal after-life, what’s to say this isn’t it? After all, if we’re immortal, then aren’t we living it out right now, somewhere along that infinite trajectory? Even if it takes the form of a disembodied brain floating in some chemical soup being fed some kind of synthetic experience. So in that case, or whatever form it takes, it turns out that eternal life is pretty good, and all those fears unfounded!