How I Became a Monist and Lost the Spirit
It didn't involve philosophy. It involved a dead body at an urban corner.
I’m a monist. I’ve rejected Cartesian dualism since I left Catholicism at fourteen. I don’t expect my mind to outlast my body. I expect it to cease when the matter that sustains it dissolves back into the universe it’s borrowed from1.
That is, of course, the edited biographical version I tell everyone to appear as a legit member of the skeptic, rational community. It’s more likely I became a monist the day I saw my first corpse.
It lay very dead at the corner of Calle Argentina and Calle Real de Pro-Patria (now Avenida Simón Bolívar), half a block from home, at the populous barrio of La Silsa in Caracas, Venezuela. I must have been ten, eleven at the most. Early in the morning we heard a commotion of people running and shouting, looked through the window, and saw some neighbors hurrying to the corner, where a small crowd was gathering. Somebody asked what was going on; somebody answered there was a dead guy at the corner, in front of the entrance to the tire retreading shop. My sister Gladys and I started out down the stairs right away. (Don't ask me where the adult supervision was. My sister, 19 months my senior, was my only supervision. And this was the early seventies, decades before helicopter parenting evolved from parenting anxieties.)
The tire shop entrance was the perfect spot for a morbid audience eager to gawk at a dead body. It was about two and a half meters below street level, at the end of a passageway less than two meters wide. The passageway started half a block down the Calle Argentina, where the street sloped upwards while the passageway remained at the same level. The result was that it reached its deepest point at the corner, and we could just stand on the sidewalk and look down at the corpse like someone looking down at an operating theater.
The body lay face down, covering a pool of blood and blocking it from plain view, which made the scene appear less gruesome. I fixed my eyes on the back of his head. I could see the sharp roundness of a bullet entrance wound; I had the impression the hair around it had retreated, making itself less visible, and only years later it occurred to me it must have been a bald spot. I thought, or somebody said, This guy is super dead, and I saw then that I had no idea what being dead was. I kept looking at the bullet wound, at the inanimate body, and it hit me that whoever the guy had been, he was no more. The thoughts, the mind, had left his mushed brain through the tiny hole. (I had watched enough cop shows by then to know what bullets did to the brain). Or worse, there was no independent mind to leave a mushed brain. Minds could only exist in healthy, well-irrigated ones, as a result of what a living brain does. Take away the organ, the mind ceases to be.
Of course I didn’t have the language to articulate such an epiphany. I was a kid. What I perceived was a wordless intuition, a nonverbal idea. When I looked for words to describe it, I found them in half-remembered catechism lessons from communion prep and badly listened-to sermons from Sunday mass. (If I had been pressed to say what they were talking about at either setting, I would have responded like The Dude to the Malibu Police Chief: "I'm sorry. I wasn't listening.") I never was a devotee or felt the pangs of religious ecstasy I'd observed in others, including kids my age, and my relationship to God and his assistant deities was puerilely transactional (God granted salvation, Baby Jesus granted Christmas gifts, and the Magi forwarded late gifts in January if Baby Jesus was otherwise unavailable on Christmas), but I did remember one’s soul, or one’s spirit, or some immaterial entity that preserved the self, was supposed to leave the body upon death and preserve your memories and identity. That bullet hole, that corpse at the end of an urban passageway, appeared as the first symbols of a counterargument that would evolve in time, as I acquired the ideas and language to express it. I was starting to lose the spirit, or more precisely, to stop believing in the idea that an immaterial entity could survive death.
Other events, readings, and TV shows would help me develop my congenital nontheistic temperament: my Nona's death not much later, whose soul I failed to feel leaving the house — as I was supposed to — at the end of her novena; seeing a guy dying after he was hit by a car in front of the funeral home where my Nona's wake was celebrated; a book on Zen Buddhism by Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki that felt in my hands at fourteen or fifteen; Carl Sagan's series Cosmos in the early 1980s. This post, however, is not about them; it’s about a boy’s early insight triggered by a corpse at an urban corner.
The other stories will be told later.
“We are only the temporary custodians of the particles which we are made of. They will go on to lead a future existence in the enormous universe that made them.” Stephen Hawking, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, Episode 3, around 1:21:30.
I remember watching my mother pick up my great grandfather's dead hand in his funeral casket and patting it. I was horrified.