An Unlikely Idea

I was going to write a story about a zebra. I still will, just not today. I’ve been trying all day to write this story about the zebra and, so far this is all I’ve got, which is to say that I’ve got nothing. The Dark Continent doesn’t want me to think about it right now, maybe Sunday is it’s day off. There’s nothing I can do about that.

I keep dwelling on a conversation that I got wrapped up in the other night regarding whether or not there is such a thing as a soul and further more, if there is, do animals have them? I’m an optimistic type and like to think that there is and they do, respectively.

This is a modern day dilemma, an acceptable topic for debate, but once upon a time there were people who had not yet begun to speculate what, if anything, happens after death. I was thinking about that and I can’t think of any reason why we should ever have wondered about it in the first place. I mean, it’s kind of an odd notion, that death is illusory. What would give us that idea?

People just take it for granted now, the notion that something happens when you die; the soul goes somewhere, and the disagreements over what happens next cause of a lot of conflict. It’s a concept that’s so ingrained in our collective consciousness that most of us cannot imagine what it would be like to be unaware of such an idea. Your opinion on the subject is not important, at least not to me but, what is important, is that you can’t un-know the debate. The existence of the soul is a viral idea that took off and spread like wildfire; enlightening or polluting the human mind, depending on how you look at it. To be human is to be polarized over the question of life after death.

But there was a time, once, long ago, when no one thought about it. We lived and died, just like everything else and then one day, someone had to go poison the waterhole.

Ancient men sat around the fire, getting drunk and waiting for their wives to cook dinner. They did this for thousands of years until one night in August, a big hairy fellow named Leonard says to his buddy, “Hey Sal, what do you suppose happens to us after we die?”, to which Sal replies, “what the fuck are you talking about?!?!”

And our fate was sealed.

Author: d. Nelle Vincent

I write stories about wine and the human condition because the devil, as they say, is in the details. View all posts by d. Nelle Vincent