A while back I posted a piece about how “immortality” had nothing to do with the future, but was rather a necessary requirement for the daily production of a writer. Now I think I’ve come up with an idea that will satisfy all those among us who daydream about being immortalized for the ages like Shakespeare or Chidioch Tichborne. I call it “the hitchhiker’s guide to the pantheon,” and it goes like this.
We start where all humanity started, with the opposable thumb. The thumb is a remarkable appendage. Think about all the practical wisdom evolution has poured into the thumb: prodding it to meet the index finger so as to reassure tribal colleagues all is okay; providing it to infants (and select adults) as a replacement for the maternal teat; establishing it as a weapon to stick in an enemy’s eye (only for home defense, of course); and as a means for stealing away with something after you’ve grasped it (no judgment).
A thumb’s usages are almost endless. You can tell a bub to “take a hike.” You can have someone executed in an amphitheater. You can indicate a loner over by the window to a detective. And I believe my generation of Boomers has contributed greatly to the evolution of the thumb by spending the greater part of the ‘60s and early ‘70s hitchhiking all over the U.S. and Europe. It was magical. We’d just hang a thumb out on the freeway, and away we’d go. Since we often, or usually, had little sense of where we were going, our evolutionary thumbs began to take on the problem of “destination” for us. It was kind of like “dowsing”--or better, like the wand stuff in Harry Potter. Something like “the destination chooses the thumb.”
Unfortunately, the proliferation of serial killers in the ‘80s and ‘90s pretty much destroyed the Golden Age of Hitchhiking for the rest of us. (I’ve always suspected Greyhound and Trailways of bankrolling those bastards, but I have no proof. We didn’t have “talk radio” back then.) Anyway, let’s cut to the chase, so to speak. Here’s how we all end up immortal.
First of all, when I die I leave one of my thumbs to a cryogenic firm. The rest of me gets cremated (it’s more responsible ecologically); then when science refines the ability to reconstruct me from my frozen thumb cells, a la Jurassic Park, I’ll return—as a critic! I’ll “rediscover” my own work of years past, and proclaim myself the new Chaucer or, what the heck, Shakespeare! Having established myself in the pantheon, I can expand the business: David Ignatow, Amy Clampett, any number of British poets named “Peter”-- anonymous poets with heirs who can pay.
I know what you’re thinking: why not let the usual literary processes prevail and get rediscovered “naturally” in a hundred years? But have you thought this through? Can you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of MFA graduates will be hoping to be rediscovered in a hundred years? No critical apparatus can possibly cope with those numbers. But my program can get you in on the ground floor. What’s that worth to you? (Besides your thumb, of course; I’ll need your thumb.)
Thumbs up!
Posted by: David Schloss | January 20, 2024 at 10:22 AM