My dear Brain
You had better listen to me because for all your mastery of all the organs you cannot be aware of the number of beats which are left to me. I myself have a pretty fair idea but you give the impression you don’t care.
You could, I dare say, devise a computer which when provided with the speed, strength and regularity of my thumping in relation to other complex factors would provide you with a rough idea of my maximum beat capacity.
The truth is, however, that while I may have a rough idea of the number left I could be utterly wrong as so many other hearts have been in the past. Even specialists with brains superior to yours have been caught out repeatedly.
I am, of course, one with your soul which we are told is immortal. I am sure the soul exists and so are you. The soul it is which waits patiently for the end when it will assume our spiritual remains into itself for the flight to the hereafter and to God knows what. How’s that Anne Hathaway’s husband put it?
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause!
Pause is right, and if we were pausing all our days and doing nought other than pausing on this particular theme we would be as wise before as after. Therefore live, dear brain, reverse the day and the night you live in for it is all you may comprehend, and mark out a decent place in that land of no return by being decent here. Let us hear from Anne Hathaway’s husband again:
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will.
Puzzles the will indeed and will puzzle it until I cease beating. Therefore, be about your business for puzzlement begets fuddlement and your puniness, poor limited creature, might only be shown to be more pronounced.
We are as incapable of understanding God’s designs for us and the concept of life after death as the beasts of the field are of comprehending the quantum theory of radiation. Indeed you would probably achieve a better result by putting a common jackass solely in charge of a human heart transplant than assembling the world’s finest brains to solve the mystery of the hereafter.
The moral here is to know your limitations and have faith in your present state. Trust in the creator’s plans for you. Trust in God and find peace of mind. How simple for those who can comply.
Alas, the imagination which you excite and ferment beyond its normal capacity complies with little save that in which it may indulge itself. I am your most faithful friend. I will be with you to the last when your soul will transport us to that realm which is beyond our ken.
How often, you ignoble wretch, have you implied in the everlasting tavern-wrangle which is the ultimate in human confusion, that there is no creator, no God, nothing at the end of all.
Like all alcoholically-stupefied brains you speak as though you had inside knowledge, as though you had just heard direct from the creator. I believe that God is omnipotent but sometimes I must be forgiven if I suspect that He is a little deaf, for if He heard only a little of the diabolical criticism to which He is subjected in public houses He would terminate the existence of the inane morons who flagellate Him.
Maybe I’m wrong and maybe it is how you provide Him with the laughter which is echoed in his thunder. ‘There is no God!’ I once heard you insist in a public house in Galway after your four kings were well and truly demolished by a straight flush of dubious origins in the biggest pot of the night. If you had kept your eyes open and watched the dealer you would only have had to contend with a very ordinary flush but you were too busy calling the barman’s attention to your empty glass.
You doubt the hereafter and yet you instruct the ever-baffled mouth to pray for your deceased forebears and with your equally confused hands you disburse mass offerings for their eventual exit from purgatory and entry into the heaven in which you place no credence while sojourning on earth.
Sometimes it is as difficult for me to understand you as it is for you to understand the hereafter. It would seem that you endorse heaven with part of you and dismiss it with another. In your interminable tavern-agonising, fortified by overdoses of whiskey, you dismiss God’s very existence and yet you pray in the dark or in times of trial for the same God’s protection and forgiveness.
Your petty theological rantings have the same effect on God as the droppings of an underfed insect on the water levels of the Grand Coulee Dam.
How well I remember the countless times you would scoff at the idea that in the hereafter there would be an immediate judgement, where every last sin, venial and mortal, would be paraded before you, before God and before all the angels and saints and before all the happy souls who were granted access to the sight of God by virtue of their goodness during their stay here.
‘How for Christ’s sake,’ you would ask, ‘could anybody be aware of every last deed and every last thought of every last person who quits this mortal turmoil?’
It’s a wonder you weren’t rendered totally deaf by God’s laughter, you heretical nonentity.
‘How could any so-called divinity,’ you went on, to the wonder and delight of your befuddled cronies, ‘be capable of remembering the countless repetitive transgressions so wearisome and so inconsequential that they should really count for nothing at all and at the same time seem incapable of acknowledging cataclysmic occurrences where millions die?
‘How does He manage to keep a mental record,’ you queried further, ‘of every impure thought to assail the minds of honest men and women?’
The answer is simple, you poor benighted heathen. It is no strain whatsoever on God and His omniscient brain to store a record of all man’s words, thoughts and deeds down to the most infinitesimal iota, from the beginning to the end of time. It is a God who provided man with the brain that devises computers which will one day soon be capable of revealing all of the world’s knowledge and all of man’s doings at the press of a button. Imagine the immensity of a brain which in its stride creates thousands of brains like yours every single day as a matter of course, and this among a million other wonderful creations among all the universes and galaxies ad infinitum.
You talk of cataclysmic happenings. Nature is God’s brainchild just as man is, and He has given both the power to create and destroy at will thereby justly absolving himself but nevertheless dutifully recording all.
Alas, man’s control of both himself and nature is limited in one vital respect. God has seen to that lest man endeavour to destroy God and thus destroy himself. That is God’s charity at work and charity is the material which I house on your behalf together with love and compassion, beauty, truth and tenderness which temper the savagery that often runs berserk in you.
Only I, the heart, am capable of anointing you with love so that you do not instruct your limbs to run amok on murderous rampages.
Alas, I am powerless when your sensitive cess, fibres, layers and ineffable what-have-you are shocked and shattered by pressures and accidents, by traumas and tragedies.
Then I bleed for you as do the hearts of good folk everywhere. Here all truly human hearts extend themselves. Here they brim with concern.
So far you have escaped any serious damage which is truly miraculous when your alcoholic intake and propensity to disaster are taken into account. It is a miracle how your hundreds of all too impressionable components, from the central canal to the pyramidal tract, have withstood the sustained barrage to which you have subjected them since you first learned how to walk.
As far as our relationship goes I am always here supporting you, ever ready to heal and succour to the best of my ability, unendingly repaired to invoke all my human features so that they might operate for your benefit and for your salvation. Yet most of the time you take me for granted, except on those rare occasions when, through your self-indulgence, you force me to beat irregularly and even make me pause for breath or miss a beat on my perilous travail.
My workload is mighty but you never accord me a particle of the credit I deserve and yet in the body of Christ I am the sacred centrepiece, the well of compassion, the only divine dimension.
A million songs have been written about me. The loveliest and most everlasting of melodies have been composed on my behalf. Multitudes of jingles and rhymes are addressed to me every day. Wordsworth was only one of a hundred immortals who singled me out for particular mention:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live
Thanks for its tenderness, its joys and fears.
And what does elegant Tennyson say:
Tis only noble to be good
Kind hearts are more than coronets.And how does humble Shadwell say it?
Words may be false and full of art
Sighs are the natural language of the heart.
And poor, great Goldsmith:
For other aims his heart had learned to prize
More skilled to raise the wretched than to rise.
All poets great and small have celebrated with me. When lesser organs and weary limbs clamour for the bugle of the brain to sound the retreat it is I who stands fast and bears the brunt. It is my courage that sees the body through. I am the rallier, the core. I have no boundaries. I am fathomless in my fearlessness, infinite in my mercy.
Even when you are transmitting demented demands for parley or submission I stand firm. I am the last redoubt. In the final analysis you are not the worst of brains, although by no means are you the best.
I give you some hope, however, out of my love for you. Let there be one good deed, one really unselfish act, one major contribution to the idea of goodness to show you possess the potential for a future which will be the opposite to your past. If this honest recital seems to you to be emotional and maudlin please to remember that it is
From
The Heart