Tag Archives: afterlife

Poor Magellan

Geese flying over a mountain lake in low light
Photo by Joshua Woroniecki

‘Until it is circumnavigated, a planet has no soul.’

Hearing this is a surprise.

Many things are a surprise. In chronological order:

  1. I died
  2. There’s an afterlife
  3. In the afterlife you get to talk to the wisest being you can think of (like some kind of drunken thought experiment)
  4. The wisest being I could think of was the Earth
  5. Magellan gave her a soul?

‘Who’s Magellan?’ the Earth asks. Anthropomorphised, she looks a little like me when I was alive, a reckless wrinkled woman with unruly white tentacles for hair. 

We weren’t speaking English, but the Earth’s language.

  1. The Earth has her own language
  2. In my afterlife, I am fluent in the Earth’s language 

I tell her Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who sailed around the world in the 1500s.

This amuses her. She tosses out the names of all the beings that have been tracing her latitudes and longitudes long before human explorers, let alone Portuguese ones, came into existence.

Butterflies. Tuna. Sea turtles. Geese. Wildebeests.

  1. All the migratory animals speak the Earth’s language?

Her mirth at my naivety has grown more unruly than her hair, which flails, snakelike, with the belly-deep force of her laughter.

The Earth’s language is remarkably economical. Somehow I learn the errors of my thinking before she’s had to voice them.

  1. The migratory animals created the Earth’s language
  2. A language is a description of the contours of the self

I realise now my own contours are dissolving.

I think of poor Magellan, and the phrases in the Portuguese language that built his ship, his journey, his self.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 84 of Structured Visions, ‘Language before language’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.

The Maker of Language

New York City window display picture a woman standing in front of neon outlines of jazz instruments, as if conducting an orchestra.
Image by Spencer Imbrock

One of the functions of ‘like’ in everyday speech is as a quotative, or introducer of speech or thought. Research on conversational narratives shows that quotative ‘like’ has a similar effect as the progressive aspect, as an internal evaluation device. 

OK, so you’re about to die.

You’re one of those who thinks there’s an afterlife, and that you’ll meet your Creator there.

You’re seventy-five percent correct.

Here’s what you’re wrong about: you actually get to meet two Creators in the afterlife.

The one people line up to see is the famous one, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.

The one no one seems to even know about is Me, the Maker of Language.

I had a different plan for creation than the other God.

His design was of a world that was already perfect, balanced and complete, something He could sit back and be proud of. You know, ‘He saw that it was good’, and all that.

I wanted to make something that wouldn’t ever be finished, something that could make itself up as it went along.

We didn’t argue about it or anything. We collaborated. We were the first great musical duo. He wrote the chords and the bassline, and I produced linguistic sequences that could be improvised over them.

The problem was that language made people nervous. It made them feel like they were separate from the perfect harmonies the other God had made. Language made them feel like they were supposed to do something more than the rest of creation, which made them feel powerless, like they’d been kicked out of some garden. Then came resentment, which brought out a destructive quality neither I nor the other God had anticipated.

In heaven we share an office, but like I said before, the queues are for Him, not Me.

Everyone assumes I’m the receptionist, or some sort of archivist. It’s probably all the filing cabinets.

When you do finally cop it, can I ask a favour?

Stop by my desk and talk to Me. Bring a few friends along. Help Me get the message out so that in your next life, you might be a little less miserable.

When you come, I’ll be like, Of course you felt separate! That was the point!

You were the goddamned melody!

You were supposed to improvise!

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.