Gospel & Universe 🪐 Ars Moriendi

Sky Train (2004)

Dad, I fear that where you’re going there'll be no Sky Train, and no Saturday afternoon to show you around New Westminster, from the cafeteria to my little office at Douglas College.

I fear there’ll be no Charon and no quay, like the one we stopped at for dinner and drinks before getting back on the Skytrain, before rolling over the switches toward the purple dusk and hockey game:

My fear is that where you’re going there'll be no hockey game, no baseball diamond in the sky, and I'll no longer be waiting at second base for that unpredictable grounder.

I write this in fear, not just for you, but for me too, and for all of us, for if there's no Skytrain and no hockey game, no ice and no diamond, neither will there be a café on the corner of Broadway and Granville, no houses climbing the slopes to the peak of Grouse Mountain.

There'll be no play and no sky once the revels are all ended. Is this what makes philosophy of so long life? Is this the dearth of worlds only dreamed of, yet not to come that lies at the heart of Hamlet’s unease? Is this the fear that makes us yearn to see the spectre of our father on the palace walks? Or is it some deeper hunch, about an invisible dimension like ultraviolet waves to the human eye, invisible to see here in the tunnel where our receptors are too weak to pick up the signal?

But what does it matter anyway if there is or isn’t a Heaven if, to the end of our days, we ride the iron rails that run parallel, like iron in our blood, pulsing from station to station, through the networks of our common DNA into the chambers of our heart and the corridors of our brain?

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