Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Page 9

  Heaven plays no more than a walk-on role in the 1943 all-black movie musical Cabin in the Sky, but it’s worth noting that they’re still walking on clouds there. And in keeping with the script’s period stereotypes of childlike, poor-but-perpetually-happy African-Americans, their stairway to Heaven is made of rickety, falling-apart two-by-fours, not that anybody minds.

  Only a few years after Jordan and Cabin came a surprisingly sophisticated Heaven in the British film A Matter of Life and Death (retitled Stairway to Heaven for American release). Visually, its most witty conceit is that Heaven is in black-and-white, while life on earth is in vivid color. (A Heaven-dweller down on earth for some business remarks, “One is starved for Technicolor up there.”) This Heaven is terribly austere and all business; keeping records of who died exactly when keeps clerks busy all day. The look is 1940s futuristic—conveyor belts of the recently deceased, pairs of wings on department store garment racks, an automatic soda machine.

  The plot of A Matter of Life and Death is strictly “high concept,” but it raises some good old-fashioned philosophical questions: Is heaven only a hallucination, the result of brain damage that can be fixed by surgery? Is one ’s willingness to die for a loved one the ultimate litmus test for true love? Is it better to live in black-and-white than in Technicolor?

  This last question suggests that Heaven is itself a movie, or at least a good set on which to make one.

  When the great Hollywood producer-director Otto Preminger arrived in heaven, Saint Peter met him at the Pearly Gates and explained that God would like the director to make one more movie.

  Preminger grimaced. “But I retired years before I died. I’m tired of all the hassles involved in making movies.”

  “Listen,” Saint Peter explained,“we got Ludwig van Beethoven to write a new score for the movie . . . ”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Preminger protested. “I don’t want to make any more movies.”

  “But we’ve got Leonardo da Vinci to do the set design for you,” Saint Peter exclaimed.

  “I don’t want to make any more movies!” the director insisted.

  “Just look at this script,” Saint Peter said. “We got William Shakespeare to write it for you!”

  “Well,” said Preminger, “a score by Beethoven, set design by Leonardo, a script by Shakespeare . . . How can I go wrong? I’ll do it!”

  “Great!” exclaimed Saint Peter. “There’s just one small favor . . . I’ve got this girlfriend who sings . . .”

  Kitsch heaven goes over the top in the 1998 extravaganza What Dreams May Come. This was the first Hollywood Heaven flick to take full advantage of the post-Star Wars special effects revolution, so obviously the filmmakers went the Garden of Eden route—it’s a Monet landscape peppered with Kmart art, then digitalized with flying dogs, fairies, and hot babes. What we get here is Sensory Overload Heaven: every view is crowded with calendar images of beams of golden light, rainbows, cloud-encircled mountains, gurgling streams, blossoming trees, and wildflowers, not to mention Greco-Roman dwellings replete with classical columns and 1950s lawn furniture. It’s heaven for people with ADD.

  No surprise that when it comes to philosophical questions, What Dreams May Come is strictly of the New Age Airhead school of deep-think. An archangel intones, “You create your own image of heaven from your imagination,” “Thought is real, physical is the illusion,” and “Here is big enough for everyone to have his own private universe.” How’s that again? It’s enough to make a Zen master giggle.

  Thankfully, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life—Part VII: Death gives us a wacky Heaven that is more lively and joyful than all the rest—even if it is Satirical Heaven.

  But before Monty’s Flying Circus takes us there, we can’t resist sharing their hilarious setup. The Grim Reaper comes knocking on the door of the country home of some British bourgeoisie where a dinner party is in progress. The host, in blazer and tie, opens up and sees G.R. with his scythe. “Is it about the hedge?” he asks. The wife arrives and invites the Reaper in, simpering to the guests, “It ’s one of the men from the village,” and then, “Do get Mr. Death a drink, dear.”

  Unamused, G.R. informs them, “I have come to take you away.” To which one of the guests replies, “Well, that’s cast rather a gloom over the evening, hasn’t it?”

  Zippity-zip and they are all (the salmon loaf the hostess served happened to be laced with botulism) off to Heaven, arriving at the check-in counter of a modern hotel done up in shades of white. From there the guests are directed to the Red Room, a Las Vegasy theater, the tables crowded with cheerful types from various eras. And suddenly the show begins: a music and dance extravaganza starring a Tom Jones look-alike and featuring angels-cum-chorus-girls with their heavenly breasts exposed. (The popular cartoon feature South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut also featured bare-chested, bosomy angels—are we spotting a trend here?)

  The Meaning of Life ends with a woman by a hearth saying that the meaning of life is, well, uh, and then the usual platitudes: be nice to one another, eat well, enjoy the ride. In context, it is strangely reassuring.

  THE HELL, WE SAY

  Don’t get us started on Hell, the afterlife destination for sinners. Like Heaven, Hell has a post-biblical life of its own, its fiery decor fleshed out by painters, illustrators, cartoonists, and filmmakers, not to mention poets like Dante, whose Inferno gives us nine different levels of helldom. Some of our imagery of this netherworld comes to us via Greek mythology’s Hades, a tough neighborhood on the other side of the River Styx, but most of it comes out of artists’ and comedians’ night-mares.

  Suffice it to say that Hell adds one more reason to be angst-filled about death even if there is an afterlife: What if our souls are eternal but they end up in this torture chamber?

  Let’s not go there.

  As usual, the country singers seem to be more down-to-earth than the painters and moviemakers. As Loretta Lynn sings it:Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Lord, I wanna go to heaven, but I don’t wanna die.

  Well, I long for the day when I’ll have new birth, ’cause I love the livin’ here on earth.

  Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

  Tell it like it is, Loretta!

  We’re with you, Daryl. Pass the oat bran!

  · IV ·

  Post Mortem Life: Postcards from the Other Side

  Is that your late Aunt Lulu on the phone?

  If so, is it bad manners to hang up?

  { 9 }

  Tunnel Vision

  Okay, Daryl, you know the drill: Your heart stops, your lungs cease pumping, your vital signs sign off . . . and suddenly you lift off from your body and hover overhead—in fact, you hover over your own discarded body! And you feel terrific, beatific, like a million bucks. You know you’re dead, but it’s not a downer—it’s an upper! That’s when the music fades in—a celestial serenade, harps, choirs, maybe a flute or two. Gorgeous.

  Hey, what’s that brilliant swirl of light in the distance? You are ineluctably drawn toward it. It’s at the end of a long tunnel. Gotta go there, just gotta. But wait, who’s that standing at the entrance? Uncle Bertie? “Hey, Daryl, wassup?” “Unc, I haven’t seen you since . . . omigosh . . . since you died in 1987! Wow!” And Aunt Lulu. My old soccer coach, Billy Wasalinski. Frank Sinatra . . .

  Holy Moses! This is it! I’m on my way to Heaven!

  Suddenly, a sepia-toned film starts playing in front of you. It’s your very own biopic, the events—or at least the highlights—of your life on earth unfolding on the screen. Look, there’s your old doggie, Buster, racing across the grass toward you when you were only six!

  But just then a voice booms from above.

  “Not so fast, Daryl,” the voice says. “Your time has not yet come. You still have unfinished business on this side. You have to go back and complete your term as treasurer of the Knights of Columbus.”

  And that’s when you wake up on the operati
ng table, gasping for breath. “Wha . . . What hap—happened?” you manage to sputter.

  A woman in a white coat looms over you. “You were gone for a bit there, Daryl,” she says.

  “Gone?”

  “Clinically dead,” she says, pointing to a heart monitor.

  “For how long?”

  “Oh, about ten seconds,” she replies.

  That’s when you realize that you have just had a near-death experience, a phenomenon so popular that it is known to the in-crowd as simply NDE.

  You are in great company, Daryl. The list of glitterati who’ve had NDEs includes Elizabeth Taylor, Sharon Stone, Peter Sellers, Gary Busey, Erik Estrada, Donald Sutherland, Burt Reynolds, Chevy Chase, and Ozzy Osbourne, who actually “died” twice after a bike accident that left him in a coma for eight days. Just so you know we aren’t talking about run-of-the-mill kooks here.

  The NDE craze took off with the 1975 publication of Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death by Raymond Moody. Hundreds of unrelated people interviewed by Moody reported all or at least some of the experiences that you, Daryl, just had. The book was a huge bestseller. A film based on it hit the theaters. More and more NDEs were reported and, with the advent of the Net, NDEers got in touch with one another to compare experiences.

  NDEs appeared to prove not only that there is an afterlife after all, but that the whole religion package is based on genuine experiences. What we had here was no less than empirical evidence of Heaven, Hell, God, Satan, telepathy, and doggie angels.

  But wouldn’t you know it, just when the NDEers thought they had their case locked, along came some science and philosophy types to do their usual killjoy thing. These skeptics usually start off by admitting that they cannot disprove the existence of an afterlife, or even of a foretaste of it during “clinical death,” but on the other hand, the evidence offered—subjective reports of NDEs—does not prove the existence of an afterlife either. As with any paranormal experience—say, seeing flying teapots circling your wife ’s head—there is no objective test to validate the person’s experience. The principal question with NDEs is whether the experience has any connection to our “regular” empirical reality (the “real world”), as opposed to, say, being caused by brain farts.

  “Last week, I think I had a near-life experience.”

  Sudden snaps in the synapses are the skeptics’ alternative explanation for the near-death experiences—they are an unusual form of brain activity, probably kicked into action by the trauma of kicking the bucket. Neurosurgeon Philip Carter reports, “The brain is the ultimate computer. When it shuts down and reboots, it comes back with a lot of activity that can cause changes.” He suggests that both the experience and the memory of the NDE are the product of a brain altered by the event, just as epileptics who report memories of transcendental experiences during seizures have had unusual brain events that can be recorded by an EEG.

  The monitor confirmed cardiac arrest as an elderly man suddenly lost consciousness. After about twenty seconds of resuscitation, he came to. Explaining to him that his heart had momentarily stopped, the doctor asked if he remembered anything unusual during that time.

  “I saw a bright light,” he said, “and in front of me a man dressed in white.”

  Excitedly, the doctor asked if he could describe the figure.

  “Sure, Doc,” he replied. “It was you.”

  When NDEers argue back that a huge number of people report having similar near-death experiences and that this constitutes some kind of inter-subjective consensus, the skeptics remain skeptical, pointing out that the similarity of details in NDEs is undoubtedly the product of communication—just about everyone knows what an NDE should be like from watching TV, or from reading Moody’s book, for that matter. They may also cite the fact that over 20 percent of Americans believe they have experienced alien abduction—not to mention a little inter-life-form hanky-panky. This stat casts a certain doubt over the NDE inter-subjectivity argument.

  Carter and others actually think these NDEs are terrific—not because they signal an afterlife, but because they suggest the process of dying can be a pleasant one. Still, they find that only about 10 percent of near-deathers actually have one of these pleasant experiences; the great majority just feel scared and awful as they conk out.

  But hang in there a minute, Daryl. There are also philosophers (not to mention mystics galore) who hold that altered mental states, whatever their origin—like, say, from ingesting a “magic mushroom”—give us a different kind of information, information about a “reality” that exists outside the boundaries of time and space. The nineteenth-century American philosopher William James certainly thought so. In his masterwork, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James writes about his experiences under the influence of the drug nitrous oxide:One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.1

  If James’s POV sounds familiar, that’s probably because it resonates with the observations that Jill Bolte Taylor made while observing herself have a stroke. Or maybe it ’s because you frequent the same pub we do, the one with a sign behind the bar that says, “Reality is a hallucination brought on by lack of alcohol.”

  { 10 }

  The Original Knock-Knock Joke

  So while you guys are buried in your books trying to figure out if there’s an immortal soul, my Gladys is chatting with her great-aunt Edna every night.

  What’s that got to do with anything?

  Aunt Edna has been dead for thirty years.

  Ah, yes, the so-called séance. Actually, Daryl, there are some bona fide philosophers—men like William James and the nineteenth-century British ethicist Henry Sidgwick—who snuck off into darkened rooms for the very same reason. Not to talk to Edna, of course, but to others on the Other Side.

  And the overwhelming response of the rest of the academic and scientific community was, “Have these good men vacated their gourds?”

  But in the 1870s, weirdness was in the air. Madame Blavatsky, a flamboyant Russian American by way of Tibet, founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875, dedicated to the study of “spiritualism.” Séances were the rage in both England and America. A popular song of the day, “Spirit Rappings,” was at once a harbinger of the New Age movement and arguably the first rap hit:Softly, softly, hear the rustle

  Of the Spirits’ airy wings;

  They are coming down to mingle

  Once again with earthly things. . . .

  Rap-tap-tap lost friends are near you;

  Rap-tap-tap they see and hear you. . . .

  Rap-tap-tap? What could the renowned Harvard professor, Mr. James, possibly have had on his mind?

  As it happens, James (brother of Henry, no relation to Jesse), had open-mindedness on his mind. His American-style theory of knowledge maintained that truth is not static; rather, it is constantly evolving. And the materialists—philosophers ranging from Lucretius to Thomas Hobbes who believed that only the material world is real—were trying to stop truth in its tracks. For James, true theories are useful theories; not only do they square with all the known facts, they open the way to discovering future truths. If the future turns out to contradict today’s truths, no problem: we’ll own up to these contradictions and declare those theories false. But in the meantime, if a hypothesis guides our actions satisfactorily, then it is true enough for James to call it, well, “Truth.” (Unfortunately, Stephen Colbert was not around yet to supply James with his neologism, “truthines
s.”)

  According to James’s epistemology, denying out of hand the possibility of a spirit’s surviving the body was dogmatic materialism: it slammed the door closed on the possibility of newly revealed truth.

  Tap, tap, rap, rap, open your minds to new possibilities, academic bigwigs!

  What’s more, James defended the “will to believe,” specifically when it came to religion. By that he meant our “right to believe anything that is live enough to tempt our will.” While we do not have the right to believe anything that is incompatible with the facts as we know them, when it comes to matters of religious belief or belief in free will—where the known facts are insufficient to decide the question—we are free to choose the way that seems best to us. James wittily showed how this operated when he wrote in his diary, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

  INDELIBLE MARX

  James thought a useful way to divide philosophers was “tough-minded” versus “tender-minded.” The tender-minded are more interested in principles than in facts, more interested in ideas than in sensory evidence, more idealistic, optimistic, religious, and inclined to believe in free will. The tough-minded are more interested in hard facts than in principles, more trusting in sensory evidence than in ideas, more materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, and skeptical. Each feels superior to the other: the tough think the tender are sentimental muttonheads; the tender think the tough are unrefined and callous. Most of us, James believed, are a mixture of the two. But clearly, James had not met Groucho Marx. (Actually, there ’s a pretty good reason for that.)

  Groucho, if whimsical, was thoroughly tough-minded. He once reluctantly consented to join a group of friends visiting a popular and very expensive Hollywood medium. The spiritualist went around the table summoning up dead relatives, relaying messages from them, making predictions, and confidently answering all questions. After two hours, the spiritualist said, “My medium angel is getting tired. I have time for only one more question. You can find out anything you want.”