Why do we fear the dead so? What does it know that we do not know? What might it know? That this is all a rouse? Ha! What a joke! What a weak attractor. Perhaps we do not fear death itself, but simply do not want to go so soon! We think we shall wait awhile, and hang here for a bit—hang back, hold you back—just a bit.
Musn’t the first people have effectively come from god?—Even if that god is the god of chance! I am certain it is the holy beginning of life—the beauty of the moment for which a painting could be made: vivid colors at the intersection of the final ape and his better; a crossroads and a passing hat tip from old cowboy to new—to a moonbooted cowboy.
And he’d say “Goodbye space man, goodbye trickster, I am sad, and you will miss me when I’m gone. And you’ll wish you’d have done better. But I will be gone, and you will be lost in space. And you will yearn for warm sun and dusty toes and the salt of my sea. And you will weep for me and for your guilt. But I am caught in your terrible jaws, and I will go this way you ask so kindly and with a grin. Tell our stories and make us your platitudes and dig up our names from time to time, let us live in your memories, the buttresses and aqueducts of your dreams, make us greats and violent ones, conquerors, tyrants and brutes and clever gluts and wine lovers and whores, failed Shakespeares and riotous mouth biters and thieves, comics and weepy worn-dead rock-and-roll vagabonds who just couldn’t fucking die, and your architects too and your dark heroes.
Remember us—we are your Gods. We damn you and haunt your minds with guilt and bless you with our bones, and shower you in our dark red marrow.”
This drama has all been done before—through us. We are the new man. We are too, the old. All of us—you—you are the old man, too. You are a single hair from his weary head lain down against the bare dirt grave wall.
We are late ones and early ones both.
We fear the dead because we know we are them. If we know ourselves to be the last man, then let us know also that we are thereby future’s Gods—and, perhaps, after a very long while, God himself.