Ghost signs, finite energy, and the weight of souls
“Fuck you,” the voice cries out from below in the darkness. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
It is quiet for a bit, then the sobbing that ends in a wail rises up, before falling into the now familiar refrain, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” There is table pounding and then more sobbing, followed by wounded silence.
I am upstairs in bed, trying to sleep, but there are four women downstairs in my kitchen, one of them having learned just that day that she is alone, that she is a widow, and she isn’t having it. The others are doing the only thing they know how, which is to be with her. There is little they can do. There is nothing to say, but there is wine.
They offer the vibration of human souls in close proximity, doing their best to distort that rogue emergency frequency back into something more within the limits of kitchen table normalcy. Like a gaggle of midwives assuring a woman in the throes of the messier parts of life that the worst will soon be over, that the pain will subside into a distant memory, that she will live, that she will survive.
They will hold her hand and assure her that everything will be okay. It will not be okay, of course. Not anytime soon. It will be unfathomably hard, and they won’t be there with her when she finds herself alone in her own kitchen. She will live, she will survive, but it will not be as it was. Her life is forever changed, and she has no idea what that will look like. No one does. This makes her angry. I’d be angry, too.
This is not how it’s supposed to work, we tell ourselves. Somehow, we have all been led to believe the same ridiculous lie — that life will be fair, that at least it should be fair. This is the universal myth we all hold onto: that we deserve more than we are currently getting. We were told there’d be enough for everyone. We were told there’d be more of everything. So, why are we left standing here, holding onto the short end? We don’t know, and this frightens us.
Intellectually, we know the truth, of course. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Life isn’t fair. It’s anything but fair. We are not guaranteed an equal share, no matter what we’ve been told. We know this. Life can’t possibly be fair, because it so clearly isn’t. But deep down in that place we don’t share, we have come to vastly different conclusions about this. Other people may suffer unfortunate luck, with unspeakable consequences, but not us. Surely, not us. We were promised the world, and we expect nothing less — certainly more than this. This can’t be all there is. They said there’d be more.
I’m sitting outside in July, with a blue sky with puffy clouds, and a light breeze. Warm but not too hot. No bugs for some reason, like they were all eaten, except for this one slowly crawling insect that I believe is a spider. It is one of those that carry what looks like a rock on their backs. It creeps across the sofa, in no real hurry, like it’s moving all its worldly possessions but not quite sure where it wants to go.
I am reading Annie Dillard, which makes everyone pay attention to bugs and the natural world. It might be a law, I don’t know, but if Newton or Galileo had been a contemporary of hers, they would have had an opinion on the matter. Some correlation between the writings of Dillard and your immediate interest in bugs. Today, she writes not about bugs, but about something even more vast and unknowable. She’s talking about the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility.
The Pole of Relative Inaccessibility is “an imaginary point on the Arctic Ocean farthest from land in any direction.” She goes on to say that there is an even grander form of this, which is The Absolute Pole of Relative Inaccessibility in metaphysics, which I assume would be a point as far away from all other things in some existential space. That would be inaccessible indeed. We can’t even fathom getting to the nearest star, so I’m not sure how helpful it would be to pinpoint the least accessible place in the universe, let alone existence.
When babies are born, scientists believe that they first see only an indistinguishable array of color and light, their retinas not yet formed enough to distinguish defined shapes. Maybe that’s it, but I think if you gave an infant a fully detailed accounting of the electronic impulses flooding their brain, clarity of form would not be their biggest issue.
“What the fuck is going on?” they would think. “What is all this?”
Not to mention the noise. The sheer cacophony of sound. I would cry, too.
If one were to believe in reincarnation, or the cinematic time loops in which characters relive the same day over and over again, there is that moment in between darkness and when we open our eyes and begin to understand, “Oh, right. This again.”
In my mind, this is the true Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. That space in between. This is, to me, the least accessible place and the furthest point. The conscious unknowing. When you wake up in a strange hotel room, and for those first few seconds, you can’t remember who or what you are, let alone where. Consciousness without shape or meaning. The singular moment of awareness without knowledge.
In 1901, Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts, hypothesized that the human soul was a physical thing with a calculable mass. He set about trying to prove it by weighing terminal patients before and after their deaths, to determine if there was a difference. He chose six patients in a nursing home and weighed them on a scale that was sensitive to within two tenths of an ounce, or 5.6 grams, at the moment of their deaths.
One of the dying patients lost 21 grams, and despite absolutely no corresponding evidence from the other dying patients, that is the number MacDougall determined was the weight of a soul. Twenty-one grams was the difference between a sentient being and a pile of useless organic matter.
It was junk science, of course, and the product of selective reporting, but the number was widely shared and remains in our collective consciousness. This fantastic notion that the difference between life and death, between consciousness and darkness, is a mere 21 grams of energy.
It’s possible that life has a measurable weight, since at some level, even energy has mass. According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, mass is energy, and energy is mass. You’re not going to be able to measure it with your kitchen scale, but it could be measured. What, then, would the spark of life weigh? What would it matter?
When I finally shuffle off this mortal coil, where will that energy go that used to be me, the spark that formed my identity? It cannot disappear because energy is finite, a fixed amount that cannot be created or destroyed. But it will have left my body and rejoined the universe to be spent on something else.
What makes me unique unto myself is not simply the electronic impulses firing within my body from the moment of conception until death. Energy gives life, but not purpose or meaning. The minute I die, I cease to exist except in the memory of others. There may be a physical record of my exploits, an accounting of my time here, but there would be no other evidence that I ever existed. Just the shadows and imprints of what used to be.
A stain, if you will.
This may be why we strive so hard to leave a legacy behind. Art. Literature. Music. Science. It may be nothing more than a stain, but we want it to be a stain with a shape and form that others will recognize for lifetimes to come. That we will live on in the minds of others. Just as Beethoven and Shakespeare live on in our collective consciousness, that melody or clever turn of phrase we all recognize.
We won’t all get a statue of David or a symphony, a law of matter, or a rural road named for us. Most of us won’t make it past the memories of those who knew us intimately. Within a hundred years, everyone we ever knew will be gone, and so will we. We might show up as part of a digital archive, a single point in an unintelligible mass of data, but it will mean about as much as the weight of a soul. It existed, but it will have no meaning in the grand scheme of things. A single grain of sand in a vast, ever-shifting desert.
A ghost sign is a sign that has been abandoned by time and exists only because no one has bothered to remove it or paint over it. It no longer represents a going concern, but is a remnant of a forgotten past. Sometimes, it’s not even the sign, but the stain left over from where the sign once was.
When you’re very young, the world is nothing but possibilities. You can do anything, be anyone. The world is your oyster. Over time, possible paths become closed to you. You can no longer be the youngest astronaut or a renowned fighter pilot. Your chances of inventing something extraordinary or discovering a new species diminish over time. As your time on earth begins to wane, your focus narrows.
I am not yet finished making things, and it’s possible that the evidence of my existence will live on in strange ways, long past the point when anyone will remember by name. A ghost sign, long forgotten, that was once new. I was the first to see it, to conceive of it, and then it became a reality and was printed on metal and wood and erected for all to see. But one day, if it still stands, it will be faded and chipped, long forgotten, and useful no more.
Which is why I write, I suppose. Not simply because I will leave something of substance behind, but because when someone reads the words I have taken the time to write, if I’ve done my job properly, my ideas will live on in their mind, and they may choose to share those ideas with others.
Like a Horcrux of sorts, the making of art is your soul broken up into an infinite number of pieces, a finite amount of energy split into tiny shards and spread out across the consciousness of many. As long as humanity continues to exist, we can achieve immortality by living on in the minds of others. Our energy, that individual spark of the soul, lives on. Which is why we feel the pressure to leave something behind, a memento of our passing, one more verse added to the hymn, a ghost sign, an elaborate stain.
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