I'd Rather Be A Radio

In darkness, Dad and I sit in the truck with the headlights on. The radio doesn’t play. Beyond the Ponderosas, stoic and protective as soldiers, the sky is full of stars. One shoots across the blackness then disappears. Of course, it’s not really a star. It’s a meteor—a molten rock that, having rubbed up against the earth’s atmosphere, releases a kite-tail of space dust into the sky.

“When I die,” Dad says, “I want to go to space.”

At first, I think he’s talking about cremation, as in he wants his ashes loaded into a tiny rocket and launched into orbit. I picture the rocket exploding, Dad’s ashes fireworking into the atmosphere and raining down like confetti.

I question the likelihood of pulling off this request—I can’t imagine getting a stowaway past NASA—but then Dad says he’s not talking about cremation. “Once I’m free of my body, I’m going to space,” he says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, presently I am confined to earth by gravity. I exist within a biochemical machine. But when I die, my consciousness will no longer be bound by a container and subject to physical law. I’ll be able to go wherever I want. And I want space.”

I look out the window and imagine my father among the stars, his body sloughing off into the sky like the meteor’s tail. I feel something twist inside me, a sensation I get whenever I imagine a loved one dying. It’s like momentary vertigo: my brain rotates itself 30 degrees or so, misaligning until I’m able to shift my focus. This time, though, the twisting is eclipsed by a full-body sinking feeling. Would Dad rather be up in space, all alone, than here on earth with me?

He answers before I can ask. “The only thing I’m nervous about is finding my people. You and Mom. Your brother. Grandma Shirley. If I can, I’ll send you a signal. To let you know where I am and that it’s all OK.”

Again, I see the flash of the meteor’s tail. Or maybe I imagine it.

For the next few days, I chew on Dad’s space theory like a piece of gum I can’t spit out. When I’m out with friends or serving drinks at the bar, I store it between my bottom gum and my lower lip, feeling a malleable pressure that never completely dissipates. What I’m chewing on is the tension between science and spirituality. The idea that death is a purely physical occurrence, a gateway to space travel, is a salvation narrative cloaked in scientific rhetoric— terms like “biochemical machine” and “physical law.” I’m fascinated that my father, a self-proclaimed “man of science,” believes in some kind of afterlife. I’m fascinated by what feels like faith.

Why have science and spirituality long been pitted as enemies? Both are products of the same human impulse: curiosity. We want to understand the world, and to rationalize the universe and its energetic properties. Is it even possible to study space or physics without faith? These fields require engagement with concepts and objects that are completely mysterious. Just look at the stars (except our sun, of course): massive collections of hydrogen and helium coalescing in their own gravity, visible yet so far away we’ll never even come close to feeling their heat. We can understand stars as functions of the physical universe, but doing so requires faith in our individual and collective perception, believing our means of measuring and computing are apt to analyze bodies that preclude our existence by billions of years.

I’m not undermining scientific methods—I think it’s miraculous and a credit to our species that we can manipulate aspects of the invisible world to work in our favour consistently. We shoot electrons through a circuit, produce a current, power a light bulb. We predict the orbital period of Halley’s Comet and when we’ll see it next: July 28, 2061. But what about aspects of the world that are not just unreachable or invisible, but imperceptible? We can’t travel back in time to witness how this all began, nor can we travel forward to see what happens next. We can study the hell out of a Martian rock but in the end we’re mainly left with questions. Because while we like to think we know a lot, we ultimately know that we don’t know very much.

I was four years old when my Grandma Shirley died of a heart attack. I don’t remember a thing about it. This makes me sad, angry, and a bit confused. My earliest memory (me in the backseat of my mother’s enormous bronze Cadillac, fiddling with a tape recorder we’d bought at a garage sale) precludes her death. Why did the tape recorder have a larger imprint on my consciousness than my grandmother’s death? Maybe because a consciousness has no physical properties; it cannot be imprinted in a literal sense. At least not to our knowledge.

Within the scientific community, the general consensus regarding consciousness is that it is created solely by the brain. That is, what we experience as thought and awareness is a product of electrical and biochemical processes occurring between neurons, in folds of soft tissue, in a seven-millimetre-thick case of bone. This is a materialist perspective, consistent with the belief that everything on earth and beyond—every aspect of reality—either has material properties or is the product of some kind of material. Scientific materialists say that matter is the only reality. They say when the brain dies, our consciousness dies with it.

Others take what’s called a post-materialist approach—scientists like Stuart Hameroff and Gary Schwartz, who say, but wait, isn’t that a bit reductionist? Isn’t it a bit short-sighted to believe that everything shaded beneath the umbrella of reality must be tied in some way to the material world and our perception of it? Our perception cannot represent the entire equation. What if the brain were not a computer generating its own consciousness, but rather a radio, receiving consciousness like a signal? In other words, even if there is no conduit for the signal, it still exists. We just lack the capacity to perceive it. So what happens when we die? Maybe our consciousness continues on, oscillates back into the universe, looks for another radio to play its music.

One of the things Grandma Shirley constantly told my mother was, “Always put your children before your housework.” Grandma followed her own mantra. Her house was a mess. Her kids thought she was the world.

A couple weeks after she died, my family moved across town. With Dad busy at work, Mom had to do most of the packing and cleaning by herself, and knowing my brother and I would be a distraction, she told us stay outside for the day. Play on the swings. Dig for worms. Make a potion out of wet leaves.

But I was an attention-hungry child obsessed with my mother. I kept asking to come in and help. “No,” my mother repeated. “Go play outside.”

This happened several times before I told her I’d heard Grandma Shirley’s voice in the wind. I didn’t say what I’d heard, just that I could hear her voice.

My mother froze. Here I was, four years old, and the subtext of my interruption was Grandma’s old mantra: “Always put your children before your housework.” My mother put down her broom, or maybe her bottle of Windex, or maybe the box labelled “Kitchen Miscellany,” and took a break to play with us.

Was I the radio that day, receiving and relaying the consciousness of my dead grandmother? I don’t know. I remember nothing. It’s possible it was all a highly sophisticated plan to entice my mother into a backyard Lightsaber duel, but I don’t give myself that much credit. I was four. I regularly ate dog treats.

There are so many stories with spiritual overtones like this. That time on the bus you thought of an old friend, only to have her text you five minutes later; or when you felt lonely, homesick in a new city, and next thing you know your mother is calling. These things have happened to me, and they’ve probably happened to you. It’s synchronicity. The question is whether we read it as pure coincidence or as glimpses into some kind of universal connectedness: a feedback loop of consciousness, more complex and miraculous than the most intricate spider’s web.

I think we were in the studio when Michael found the freckles. I was sitting on his lap in a tank top, watching him pitch-correct the sound waves of a vocal line.

He rubbed the top of my right shoulder and said, “Hey, did you know you have an Orion’s Belt?”

I looked down at my shoulder and saw three freckles aligned in a near-perfect row, spaced equidistantly like the stars in the constellation. At the time, my excitement barely exceeded that of a shrug, but over the years I’ve become somewhat obsessed with these three points of concentrated pigment. They make me feel like I’ve been marked. I’m not saying I’m some kind of chosen one, or that I’m a celestial consciousness materialized as a woman on earth, or that the Orion mothership is going to suck me skyward after I save humanity or whatever, but there is something about the freckles that seems transcendent. I like to imagine the stars speaking to me, not verbally but symbolically; I don’t hear a celestial voice in the wind, but I see it on my skin. I bristle against phrases like, “I’m one with the universe,” but what if the stars are telling me that I am, and we all are? Sometimes I ride my bike home in the dark, spot Orion, and yell into the void, “I am your daughter!” I breathe in the night and exhale loudly. It’s an audible reminder that my air is no longer inside me, but part of a bigger entity.

Just because you can’t see something from one point of view doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist from another.

I guess humans have a limited scope of perception and always will. Just because you can’t see something from one point of view doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist from another.

I guess I hope my father and the post-materialists are right. Without the limitations of a bodily container, I hope our conscious selves will be able to travel to times and spaces we can’t even conceptualize.

I guess I’d rather be a radio than a computer, and I guess that I believe my tangible and intangible selves are separate yet intimately linked entities. By “tangible self” I do not simply mean “physical self” or “body,” but rather all the ways my body presents itself to the world. Appearance, speech, movement, touch—these are the ways we interact with our environment, the channels by which we come to understand ourselves as individuals. But these presentations often feel insufficient, or in some way discordant with what’s going on inside, within consciousness. I read my journal entries, see myself in a mirror, hear myself cry in front of a lover and think, but wait, that’s not actually me. The discrepancy between my self and my presentation of self makes me want to cut a circle in the top of my head, lift it off like the lid of a jack-o’-lantern, and show you what’s really inside. “Aha,” you’ll say, gazing into pink folds of cranial tissue. “There you are.”

It’s the future. I’m not sure what year, but if all has gone well—for myself and the earth—it’s at least 2070.

I am looking at the body I used to live inside, the one I used for running, eating, kissing, wiping the tears from my daughter’s cheek. The body is lying on a bed. There are people around it. I love them.

I’d like to tell them, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, but I don’t have a voice, and I can’t stay here long. Where is my father? Somewhere. The universe has unfurled itself like a daffodil in sunlight. I can see down its throat, and I am ready to be swallowed.

words by mica lemiski art by caitlin mcdonagh