The End

Aug 28 2018

When I looked up eschatology

it said “the science of last things.”

How reassuring, that there is a science to this,

a search for truth

about the last slice of pie

my maxed-out credit card

the one great love of your life.

And the final answer

to Man's perpetual question

of what comes next,

after the last rattle of breath

when the body pales and sags

and the face imperceptibly flattens,

and you can just imagine

some fleeting weight

departing its mortal flesh

wondering how, and why, and when.

Apparently, in some esoteric lab somewhere

a gaggle of white-coated acolytes

working on a generous grant

are bent over Bunsen-burners and test tubes

and have seen beyond the pale.

Have already cracked death,

the last of life, and its aftermath

but haven't published yet,

unwilling to risk

their endless denunciation

by the fierce defenders of faith,

the end

of their sweet collegial sinecure.

More specifically, it was the New Yorker (Sept 3 2018) , and the word was eschatological. My iPad has a convenient function that allows me to click on a word, and the definition comes up. I'm not sure of the ultimate source of the magazine's generic dictionary, but I trust their authority. So here is the exact wording:

“eschatological: the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind. Christian hope is concerned with eschatology, the science of last things.”

Those last few words immediately struck me with their presumption, their odd conflation of science and faith: as if science might actually have the power to answer the age-old mystery about after-lives and reincarnation and everlasting heavens and hells. And also their evasion: the euphemistic substitution of “last things” for what they clearly meant, which is “death”. The science of last things was an irresistible invitation to riff, and so I grabbed a pen and gave my stream of consciousness free reign. (“Riff” (as per Merriam-Webster): ...2 : a rapid energetic often improvised verbal outpouring; especially : one that is part of a comic performance. 3 : a succinct usually witty comment.)

When I sent the rough draft of this poem to my first readers, I prefaced it with this (below). I thought I'd repeat that paragraph here, since it gives an interesting context to my writing. I'll elaborate by saying that I hardly wrote at all this summer, and was seriously wondering if I was all written out. (Hardly wrote poetry, that is. Lots of prose. But that's another story.) This year, the last week of August is unseasonably cold here (ironically, in this year when climate change seems so ominously omnipresent, the only place in North America, it seems!), and so the electric heater and the disinclination to be outside.

“It's definitely the weather. I already feel in hibernation mode. I'm sitting at the dining room table (my usual writing surface) in a very cold room with a lovely electric heater keeping my feet toasty warm and losing myself in the flow of writing. So after a summer when it was looking as if my pathetic career as a self-proclaimed poet had arrived at its predictably ignominious end, here I am coming up with stuff almost daily. Here's the first rough draft. A little Billy Collins-ish, if I'm permitted to say. This is one of those that pretty much wrote itself. If I look at the page I transcribed it from, there is almost nothing crossed off; it flowed out the end of my pen almost word for word. Those ones often feel as if they're too easy and therefore illegitimate; but then as often end up being pretty good ones, and definitely keepers.”