Amatoritsero Ede<\/span><\/p>\n End-time predictions have become an industry. The Mayan example is only the recent variation of a millennial disease. There exists a long demented line of prophets, teachers, gurus, visionaries, clairvoyants and \u2018wisemen\u2019 or plain con artists who all equally have the jobless ears of an impassive God. So they invoke and are awarded apocalyptic contracts of floods, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, rivers of liquid fire till the sky implodes and earth caves in. We are then either \u2018raptured\u2019 into heaven or we rupture here in a hell-on-earth \u2013 if left behind.<\/p>\n Of all the violent agitation for an end-of-the-world, the Pentecostal variation is one of the most frightening. One reason is that it reads the Christian scripture literally, missing the deep metaphysical import of an esoteric-cum-philosophical book, and apportions celestial origins to a material \u2013 even if inspired \u2013 object. Another reason is that the sellers of nightmares rate their poisonous wares higher than any competing delusion. I am thinking of rival myopia found amongst another \u201clunatic fringe,\u201d which equally believes in a physical heaven. But in this case, it is a cosmic realm with alluring virgins waiting to satisfy the suicide bomber\u2019s holy lust as recompense for his having criminally detonated innocent lives here on earth.<\/p>\n Those competing delusions derive from a lack of spiritual or metaphysical knowledge and sheer ignorance. They are based on the confusing of an abstract, imaginary realm with an impossibly physical, palpable and solid existence. This is just the proof and symptom of a face-value understanding of those books that ought to be read esoterically rather than as literal magical texts. Or how do we explain the inscrutable and \u2018rapturous\u2019 Harold Camping, one of the main protagonists of the American Bible belt. He has severally predicted the end of the world and publicly gone to extremes to prepare himself and his flock of sheep, over whose collective eyes he manages to repeatedly pull the wool. After each failed prediction he folds into himself like a collapsed \u2018camping\u2019 chair and enters a deep, embarrassed silence for a while, only to erupt like a persistent boil on the skin of yet another time, another cursed prediction, another impending apocalypse.<\/p>\n We find the exaggerated instance of an already hyperbolic misreading of scriptures in the example of that expatriate American pastor from hell, Jim Jones of Jonestown, Guyana. This megalomaniac assumed the aspect of God and made up his mind that the world must end on November 18, 1978. But like Dylan Thomas\u2019s poet persona, he would \u201cnot go gently into that good night\u2026 [His young] old age would burn and rage at the close of day.\u201d He took 914 lives, 200 of them children, by legislating mass suicide through cyanide poisoning. And his \u2018Peoples Temple\u2019 drank till \u201cthe mug slipped from grip.\u201d<\/p>\n Does the Bible itself not philosophise: \u201cworld without end\u201d? That proposition is repeated in the old and new testaments of the King James Version \u2013 in Ephesians 3:21 and in Isaiah 45:17. While, and because, they read the \u201csecond coming\u201d literally, doomsayers are forced to wax lyrical when confronted with simple, plain prose: \u201cworld without end.\u201d Those who go \u2018camping\u2019 with the hysterical and neurotic probably do so because of the usual fear of death \u2013 even though it is a natural enough transition \u2013 and because of the silence and darkness that follows. Hence the pentecostal insistence that life will go on after death in the usual earthly manner we experience daily, in the same physical body after resurrection, with a plethora of the ills and emotions that wrack that imperfect body, and with our usual worries, woes and earthly desires. Our suicide bomber is in for a shock when he transitions from a palpable three-dimensional world of length, breadth and solid into a transparent, paper-thin ghostly two dimension \u2013 because \u201conce you are dead you are dead.\u201d That is the unchristian but level headed rethought of that long-suffering cuckold and most persecuted Jew and therefore cynical of fictional characters, James Joyce\u2019s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ulysses is unusually obsessed with questions of death and dying and the hereafter or lack thereof. Like Teju Cole\u2019s recent Open City<\/em> \u2013 and though not as obvious \u2013 it is a \u2018walking\u2019 novel in which the protagonist traverses a city \u2013 in this instance, Dublin, in one day. Bloom\u2019s character alludes to Odysseus and the former\u2019s journey through the city mimics the epic wanderings of the latter in Homer\u2019s The Odyssey<\/em>. In the dark, funereal Hades<\/em> chapter of that novel, Bloom marches to the cemetery with a funeral cortege during Paddy Dignam\u2019s burial. In the stream-of-thought style made famous by Joyce, this maverick, apostate Jew-turned-catholic unbeliever ridicules the idea of a physical hereafter typical of the usual way Christians misread the Bible:<\/p>\n Lots of them [the dead at the cemetery] lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers, old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last Day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.<\/p>\n The ridiculousness of the raw physical sense in which Christians talk about the afterlife is expressed in the stream of Bloom\u2019s consciousness above.<\/p>\n What Joyce is saying through the thoughts of Bloom is that there is no proof of an afterlife in the usual Christian way it is usually described by the clergy and accepted by the laity. Beyond the physical world there are metaphysical as opposed to physical principles at work, which the ‘church fathers’ refuse to comprehend. When one dies, the physical world has ended in a sense. Whatever comes after, if at all, is either beyond our comprehension or of a completely different order \u2013 a hyperreal or surreal and dreamlike state and so on. Hence \u2018once you re dead you are dead.\u2019 This is why another modernist like Joyce, T.S. Elliot, declares, \u201cin my beginning is my end.\u201d The End begins at the moment of birth. In a Wole Soyinka poem, “Abiku,” about death and reincarnation, the newborn \u2018abiku\u2019 child, whose mythical fate it is to be born and to die repeatedly in infancy is described as \u201cshaping mounds [graves or death] from the yolk [of infancy or life].\u201d<\/p>\n Every time another prophet of doom stands up in public to sell us his nightmares, we should be prompt in reminding him or her that the whole idea of a ending of the world is philosophically contradictory since the world ends everyday for the departed. If they persist then we ought to sing them their own \u201cEndsongs\u201d as offered by the Nigerian poet, Chiedu Ezeanah:<\/p>\n You have lost the world World without end, Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" World without End Amatoritsero Ede End-time predictions have become an industry. The Mayan example is only the recent variation of a millennial disease. There exists a long demented line of prophets, teachers, gurus, visionaries, clairvoyants and \u2018wisemen\u2019 or plain con artists who all equally have the jobless ears of an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-955","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":994,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/955\/revisions\/994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nYou \u2018ve lost the words
\nYou reap plots of silence
\nAs silences dismantles the leaves
\nAs silences dismantles lives around me
\nIn the minute and hour approaching stars
\nThe trees stink of rain.<\/p>\n