The Transmigration of Tom Cruise and Other Scarey Thoughts

There are some who argue that as a child we are born tabula rasa, that is a blank slate without any influence of genetics or any other influences bred into us. There are others who believe that we are born preconditioned with lessons and experiences imprinted on us. Nature versus nurture. I am not sure where I lie in this argument, some people feel that they have some sort of past life that has been encoded into them, while others feel that there was nothing before them and all that shaped them were present day living. There are certainly arguments floating around on both sides of the issue, but really only one entity knows for sure and apparently He or She isn’t sharing that with us at this point.

There are the discussions of Plato who argued that there are a fixed amount of souls. According to the writings of Aristotle, the soul is not what makes a body move. Even before that step, a soul must first take what biological entities we are made up of, all those different chemicals and water and turns that into a body. A corpse is not a body and as such a body is not a corpse, contrary to all those police procedural dramas on TV. The soul is what makes it exist as a living body. Unlike the body, which has being only through the soul, the soul itself is a principle of being, and therefore, once created, cannot not be. In other words, the soul is incorruptible, and never ceases to be what it already is. And the circular notion of that argument is supplanted only by the poison scene in Princess Bride.

The Greeks jumped in with their idea of Metempsychosis (μετεμψύχωσις, for those of you who crave detail) which is a philosophical term again referring to transmigration of the soul. Scientology believes that there are only a fixed number of souls, which means that Tom Cruise has really existed for eternity and it certainly felt that way if you ever had to sit through Mission Impossible 3. The Taoist also have similar thoughts and ironically this belief gave me the central arc of my comedic screenplay, “If This is Heaven...”, where the fixed number of souls has created a way-station in paradise before allowing the soul to move on. Nietzsche has weighed in on this as well, but I think I have bandied about enough names and beliefs for now, I can sense your eyes, as mine, are glazing over.

Suffice to say, this is a time honoured and an ongoing debate and the only time the answer becomes apparent is when you die and then I figure you have to sign an Oath of Secrecy to never reveal this information to mere mortals. Well, unless you are Tom Cruise and then apparently the rules of the universe are thrown out the window, metaphorically speaking.

So what is the point of this article you may well ask? I was asking the exact same question about three paragraphs ago. You have to remember that my education was rooted firmly in economics and all of this philosophical stuff sounds like, well, greek to me. But I am sure many people say the same thing about economic theory (What you say? There is such a thing as economic theory?).

As mentioned, I am not sure where I fall in all this, but there are some very odd memories that have been with me for many years. Uncomfortable moments that for some reason cause the hair on the back of my neck to rise. One of the most vivid and dread inducing things I can see is a shipwreck of any kind. I do not know why it is, but if I see a lake freighter aground or even a pleasure boat upside down my breath gets short and I have a strong desire to emulate the figure in the Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. This is not a good thing for a guy who scuba dives. Acute anxiety does not play well a few atmospheres below the water. Encountering an underwater wreck? It feels the way I would image someone walking all over my grave. To quote David Letterman, there is just something hinky about the whole damn thing.

The other is the American Civil War. I remember collecting bubble gum cards in the early 1960's that had such a graphic depiction of the war that I am surprised they were even sold. Try to do that nowadays and you would be buried under a sea of sociologists, psychologists and every concerned parent for the normal development of a child breathing down your neck. But in my generation, they were just pictures a of a very, very bloody war, probably a good lesson to pass on. But I always felt somehow I was part of it. Which side has never really manifested itself, whether Union or Rebel, I don’t know. I just have this feeling I was in it somewhere and probably died in it somewhere.

I doubt I am the only one who has had this type of feeling, that somehow you have experienced something that was foreign to you but at the same time feels somewhat familiar. Maybe it awakened some long buried thought causing an avalanche of unexperienced memories to flow forth. Whether these are false memories as some claim or really are imprints from another soul, again we won’t ever know for sure and that kind of adds to the romance of the thing.

I found a paperback many years ago (Decisive Battles of the Civil War by Lt. Col. Joseph Mitchell) that listed all the Civil War sites and overlapped them with modern day maps and highways. I have a fascination with taking that trip someday to see if anything twigs. I wouldn’t quite say it was a compulsion, that brings up images of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters with the Third Kind, kind of compulsion. But I would like to make it an adventure sometime. However with my luck, I’ll go for a leisurely scuba dive and come across a Civil War sunken ship and from that double whammy my friends, it will spell the end of me. Well, until I park myself in some other body.. corpse... entity, well you understand.

The Seven Stages of the Dwarves

I was standing in line at the tobacco counter the other day. I had finished some grocery shopping and throughout my travels up and down the aisles I had this recurring vision of winning a lottery. Not one to tempt fate, I decided to buy a ticket. As I stood in line, I juggled the groceries around in my arms and fished some money out of my pockets for the tickets. There were only two other people in the line in front of me so I thought the ice cream I purchased should still be frozen by the time I got to the car. However, what I didn’t count on was the guy in the line in front of me being what could only be described as a lottery professional. He had a stack of tickets about the size of a deck of cards, and each one had to be scanned by the computer to verify his winnings or as it turned out his non winnings. In my estimation, and I had lots of time to do my estimating, maybe a quarter of them were winning tickets. My first thought was why didn’t he check them at home and only bring in the winners? But then I thought maybe the scanning of the tickets is all part of the entertainment for some people. Although, to give some educational credit, I now know the French for “No prize”. It was bored into my brain with the same cadence of a Gregorian chant.

By this time my arm was growing a bit numb from the ice cream and I thought that maybe splurging 5 cents on a plastic bag wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. But I had renewed hopes as the cashier was finally done with the scanning and had totaled the man’s winning. Those hopes were dashed when the man began to buy more tickets with the grace and reverence of a wine connoisseur. I would not have been surprised at all if he had held them to his nose and sniffed them. As I said before, I had lots of time to think.

Finally, the next person ahead of me shuffled up to the counter and laid open a plastic folder on the counter. This was not a good sign. He had selections in Pro Line Sports, Pro Picks and Point Spread and was reeling off phrases that were as foreign to me as ordering a Timmies coffee is to an American. By this time my ice cream was about to start dripping onto the floor so when my opportunity eventually did come, I quickly bought my tickets and I scurried out the door, hoping not to leave a Chocolate Mocha trail behind me. It was then that I realized how quickly I went from being in an excellent mood into being grouchy.

I never really thought I would hit this stage, but I have become rather grouchy lately. Fortunately for all around me I haven’t quite made the leap to grumpy, but as it is, grouchy can be bad enough. I don’t become obnoxious to the people around me, it is more that I am grouchy to the rest of the world; politicians for one. I just don’t seem to have any patience for their rhetoric anymore. Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Green it doesn’t matter what the political stripes are, I just don’t have time for their petty bickering of whose fault it is and whose fault it isn’t and whose fault it is that something isn’t being done quickly enough or whose fault it is that things are being done too quickly and recklessly. I am tired of hearing that our national troubles can be laid at the feet of a previous government 75 years ago, or 30 years ago or 2 years ago. If I was within earshot of a politician I would simply tell them to shut up, sit down, accept the responsibility of their action, their parties action and proceed accordingly. But that is about as likely to happen as a snake crawling back into its discarded skin. How is that for an apt metaphor?

When I was a bit younger, I didn’t really notice the fine line between grouchy and grumpy. As an illustration, grouchy to me is using the greatest invention of the world; the mute button on my remote control. I can sit and mumble to myself, but happy in the knowledge that I didn’t have to listen to that crap on the TV anymore. Grumpy would be leaving the sound on during the news and getting all worked up over those aforementioned politicians and telling everyone in the neighbourhood my rather unrelenting opinion, because the rest of the world is wrong and only I am aware of its inanity. In talking with my wife and children, this is a phase they are not necessarily looking forward to.

In our propensity to always categorize and sequentially rate life and death just as Dr. Kübler-Ross did with her stages of grief, I think in life, we will all progress through the Seven Stages of the Dwärves. I have made my way through Happy (the 1970's, not surprisingly), Bashful (for most of my youth), Sleepy (the child rearing phase), Sneezy (during that one particular summer of hay fever) and Dopey (although a case for the 1970's can be made here as well). Still to come, I’m sure, will be the Doc stage where I will be analyzing every medical symptom as they are presented in my friends and myself as we keep aging and the ever popular Grumpy to carry me down the stretch.

I think grouchy is kind of like a way station on the way to grumpy. It’s a place you have to get through before moving on. Like being in the Little Leagues. I don’t want to deride grumpy as a state of mind, or an undesirable place to be. God knows I will probably reach that stage soon enough and in all likelihood I will probably revel in my grumpiness.