Voices from my dead

 

Yesterday I was boiling water for oatmeal. As I poured a cup of oatmeal flakes into the bubbling pot, a voice from nowhere, a voice from my dead, appeared: it will stick to your ribs. The cartoon bubble works so well to iconograph the thought process – a liquid like bubble, a soap bubble, inside which move words or some mentalese equivalent.

So it was like that, a cartoon bubble, and it came out of my past, maybe sixty years ago, at a table in Clarkston Georgia where my Dad, now dead, said it, or my Mom, now dead, said it. It was poured into my ear, the ear that was picking up a version of the world: stick to your ribs.

Probably my Dad. It sounded like the old man.

Of course, even as a child I did not think that oatmeal literally stuck to your ribs, but the crossing of the evident, gluelike stickiness of oatmeal and the idea of ribs, something I could feel if I put my hands to my sides and squeezed my torso, somehow seemed brilliant. Everything is, eventually, a question of stickiness. Or at least breakfast is: the jam, the butter, the honey, the eggs.

And here I was far far away from that home, listening to my dead wake up for a moment, and hand me that phrase again.

Though I’ve been washed in the blood of the multitudinous wars that have erased the thought of the traditional afterlife from the hivemind, like anybody else, I also have a sense of the afterlife. Not a plan or a map. Not a place. But, like a cartoon bubble, a certain definite floating as weird as the way neural discharges become a breakfast table in the long ago and a phrase: stick to your ribs.  These things are well below the superficial level of reality in which things are “proved”.