« September 03, 2005 | Main | September 05, 2005 »

September 04, 2005

the next voice you hear

At 4:00 in the morning only Spike and I are awake. He slits his eyes at me when I turn on the kitchen light. I move him from my chair to read the paper; when I get up to pour a cup of coffee he moves right back again. Okay. He has spent the past couple of days in sullen acceptance of his fate: ball-less, harnessed; and while he was at the vet's I put down new cat litter (made from orange peels), which I like but he hates. He leaves me strictly alone in the mornings now; no more purring and rubbing my face with his, and no chase-the-bottle-top game. I'm sorry, Spikey, but what could I do?

Moo and I watched White Noise the other night, which is a not-very-good movie about (more or less) recording the voices and images of dead people on tape and video. In the movie, the afterlife is crowded and noisy--a kind of huge, featureless waiting room out of a Kafka story. Nobody seems very happy and they're all jostling each other, waiting their turn for a crack at the microphone so they can say "fzshzpblpt xvcwqmntmp."

Anyway the movie made me curious about dead people talking, EVP, and so I went to some sites to hear what the dead have to say. Not a lot, as it turns out. Or at least nothing that I would like to hear, such as "Hey, the afterlife is cool!" or "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," or "Here be monsters." No, the conversations of the dead are mostly as mundane as they were in life (although probably a lot shorter), and they are disappointingly open to interpretation and almost universally impossible to make out, consisting of mumbles, or screeches, or two- or three-word phrases, as if the afterlife's population consists entirely of teenagers trying to remember the words to the songs they knew back on earth.

In White Noise the voice of the dead wife of the main character is clear--she doesn't really even need the tape recorder--and she speaks in complete sentences (more or less). Her husband neglects the rest of his life--job, child--and spends all his time staring at video monitors and waiting for her to talk to him from The Great Beyond. I wondered if he paid that much attention when she was right there on the same astral plane with him. Probably not. Maybe what he really needed to hear, and what everybody listening to the dead needs to hear, is "Go live your life and stop eavesdropping."

Posted by JudyLa at 06:00 AM | Comments (0)