Reversible Linear Model

There are problems with the cyclical model. It is uneconomical to posit two two-dimensional planes, two one-dimensional planes, and so on. Perhaps the world of the dead dead, so much like our own, really is our own, though entered, as it were, from the other side. In one revised version, the dimensions are not linked in a ring, but form a simple chain. We die and move one link to the left (right and left are, of course, just metaphors); when we reach the end of the chain, we start back the other way, and so on, back and forth, forever.

A variant of this model ventures to account for the existence on our plane of both animate and inanimate objects. Life is defined as rightward motion through our plane. On their leftward journey, the dead manifest as inanimate objects.

In the inventive “two-ply” theory, these objects would include our own bodies. Every person has two parts, body and voice (the more common term, soul, is a misnomer). The voice arrives on our plane of existence by moving rightward, the body by moving leftward. We are the temporary conjunction of two parts moving in opposite directions along the chain,²² the marriage of 1. the ghost of grammar, also known as a voice; and 2. the ghost of a ghost, also known as a body. Thus we die into life from two directions.

Many thinkers would add at the rightmost end of the chain another plane not described by the Founder: silence. The other dimensions are as in the ring model, only traffic is two-way; thus our dimension may not be the only one to boast of two-ply inhabitants.

Some thanatomaths make sense of this idea by explaining the half moving leftward as idea, meaning, or diegesis and the half moving rightward as its material matrix. Linguists will recognize the familiar pairing of signifier and signified. In silence, as the turnaround zone, signifier and signified are one. Intuitively, we feel this to be true; while silence may possibly under certain artificial conditions be said to “represent” silence, it also, undeniably, is silence.

You will note, however, that silence introduces an enigma into an otherwise rational order. We can certainly imagine that, after a long series of transformations, we might at last, with a sigh of resignation or relief, cease altogether to be. What is a little harder to understand is how, having already become nothing, we can die yet again. In nothing there is nothing to die, at least that is how it seems to us. So dying becomes an wondrous act of creation ex nihilo.

But I will remind you that some scientists claim something similar for the entire universe. Theorists of the Big Bang unpack whole galaxies from a single point; we could call that point a period. Or a comma, its curved tail a saucy hint of more to come.

Infinite Linear Model

Some would argue, however, that there is no reason to stop and turn around at death, except our sentimental attachment to what we call life, combined with our positive inability to imagine what death-sub-2 might be like, let alone death-sub-3, death-sub-4, and so on. It is entirely possible that while it is true that we will keep on dying forever without ever quite ceasing to exist (as the adherents of the other models aver), we will never return to this world.

If there are in fact an infinite series of deaths, this would put paid to the contrivances of the two-ply theory, unless there are two sets of inhabitants of the necrocosmos, one dying rightward forever, the other dying leftward. The latter, upon reaching silence, either turn around to go back the other way; pour into silence to be extinguished forever; or—the most attractive solution, for its symmetry—continue on past silence into echelons of ever more ineffable negations. But on this topic nothing definite can be affirmed.