Foxes

Cavities of your body,

the charm of any cave.

The hollow of your chest

a den of foxes.

Leaves and sticks and clumps of hair -

the by-products of wanting.

Youth

If I could, by cunning,
touch my fingers to your lips,

Then later on
I'd touch my own

Pretend that we had kissed.

In all the world
what boy could dream

A finer dream than this?

Angst

by David Eagleman

As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are - which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst.

Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don't execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate and important work.

After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up and start again. When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

These are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we're forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

from Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives

The Illusion of Competence

by W.I. Miller

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense."

from Humiliation and Other Essays

Hello Again

Etching out transitions in your private lives straining the abdominal corset in order to emit an awful, strident keening along the contours of green manifold and bituminous variegated cardboard structures that dominate this frame in startling sequence, sectioned in descent to overlap and shielding tender eyelines from undigested data.

For there will come a day when you will be abandoned and upon that day do not forget the nut I squirreled away inside you there will be some headaches I will of course be occupied with separate projects it was advised that healthy boundaries perhaps include brocaded hats and mohair bangled disproportionate the whole of the broadside managed quite meticulously do not fret, so do not fret.

A heart as large can nurse a baker’s dozen kittens boiling as a pile hair and keratin agape and soon aggrieved with no regard and aping feeling stamping about shuffling rough in some other man’s nest thawed out of wedlock, dividing breath with episodic misgivings it is here that I strike at you piercing hollow spaces with an ivory rod my birthright.

A question of deserve begins with four words, in the absence of magnetic north such things will prove impossible packed parcels and crowded dendrites clustered about you want you cloudy and cold, arrogant and inviolate, yellow hair denatured in the inky curd of guile and spittle and a futile calling.