I've been thinking about that sentiment
for a couple of days now—it's on my mind—“You can't take it
with you, but you should hide it before you go in case you can come
back and get it.” That, for some reason, seems to make more sense
to me than it sounds like. I don't mean literally burying a cache of
gold, so that when you, hopefully, come back, you dig it up and spend
it. You don't know when or what kind of world you're coming back
into. Maybe gold will be worth nothing, and old cigarette
butts will be the prime currency. So the question is, what could you
leave behind when you die that could benefit you if you return to the
world? You have to remember that you may not remember anything of
your previous life when you get back—so what you leave would be
best if it's something that benefits everyone. So, like, to really
oversimplify things, Andrew Carnegie might return to the world and be
delighted to be able to check books out from one of the many Carnegie
free libraries. Essentially this idea of burying something that you
can't take with you so you can come back and get it later is kind of
a Westernized materialistic version of karma. Of course, you're
missing the point if you contribute to the world only because you
want to benefit personally somewhere down the line—but maybe that
idea—only doing things that we can benefit from in some way—is so
ingrained in us that we may well not be able to shake it.
There's one other way of looking at the
whole thing that began to intrigue me when I started thinking about
this whole subject. That is the idea of doing art—the compulsion to
do art of some kind that some people seem to have—and it must be a
compulsion, because it's not encouraged or rewarded—could be
attributed to this theory—that in a past life or existence on Earth
(or elsewhere), the artist was inspired by some form of art above all
other experiences in their life—and now returning to the Earth will
struggle to produce something that, upon returning once more, can
inspire or sustain or console him in some indescribable way.
The whole world could be explained this
way—maybe Bill Gates, in a past life, had to type love letters to a
distant romance, and couldn't figure out the margins and such.
Perhaps the inventor of the photocopier was Bartleby the Scrivener in
a previous existence. Think about Picasso coming back to the world
that he's changed. There's no reason for Heaven or Hell—Heaven and
Hell are here, and satisfyingly complex to suit me. The developers of
the motion picture can marvel at the high-tech theaters everywhere,
but may have to suffer a bit through bad movies. The inventor of the
automobile (who in a previous incarnation had a bad relationship with
horses) now finds himself in a world where it's easy to get around,
but ultimately is a tragic, hellish nightmare that has deteriorated
well beyond the most pessimistic, morbid imagination of any warped
science fiction writer.
Me—I'm pretty lucky, pretty
well-adjusted. I'm not working on any invention, and art looks like a
silly bad habit to me. Sure, in a future world maybe we'll have free
or at least affordable therapy, but in the meantime I write in this
notebook and it works okay, I guess. The only real compulsion I have
is to remove lobsters from the sea and place them into a tank of
boiling water. Maybe I was a plankton or _____ (lobsters' fave food)
in a past life, or something—there's no other reason I can imagine
having it in for these poor creatures.
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