When you are dead

If one were to imitate Dante, that is, to perform the act which Lucan and Virgil did on Homer, then this is the question which you should pose yourself when you start:

What happens to you when you are dead?

You might just as well ask a question just as difficult, difficult in a different way:

What happens to you when you are alive?

What we suspect in general happens when you die can be summarised by a saying I heard from a boy today:

'You know the white light you see, at the end of a tunnel, when you are dying? That is a woman's vagina.'

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I have no interest in talking in a rational way about the strangeness of the world when we are alive. I have appreciated David Icke's work because it involves us in this strangeness: he seeks out things which seem to add up to him alone, and generally convince no-one else. It is convincing to him that we existed in another dimension prior to birth here. And we go back there, scarred and beaten.

Writers don't tell you much about what they believe in their private mind. But it is important not to become dead and empty on that account. In public we can say public and incontrovertible and pointless things. 'Welfare spending should be cut a bit / increased a bit', 'the European Union is / is not a financial benefit to our country'; these are examples of public ideas.

But private ideas exist, and should not be expressed: 'I talk to God in the evening, and he told me when to invade Iraq'; 'the spirit of Gladstone, being eternal now, is with me everywhere I go, and he gives me moral direction'.

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With respect to 'What happens to you when you are dead?', that question should be asked with the following understanding. If we are to go to hell, Dante describes it as a repetitive experience of knowing pain and failure. But heaven, by contrast, is not boring.

We have suspected that heaven would be tedious. But as Dante describes it, God is the source of all ideal entities and archetypes. That is, all possible things reside in Him. When the poet is in heaven, he finds people with higher and higher appreciation of God, this source of all things. And Beatrice cannot take her eyes off him. Why? Because looking at God is looking at life here and now, in all its variety, but absolute understanding and peace.

Those who do not want absolute understanding and peace today will not have it then; this God is simple: the source of intellect and ideas. He makes a distinction between good and evil. What is good is to know the truth. What is evil is to obscure it.

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Today, in the world of late twentieth century Britain, and this first decade of the new century, ideas are considered to be epiphenomena of the brain; intellect is often associated with the illness of some aspergers syndrome or other. Evil is one of those 'hate-speech' words.

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Dante wanted, Barbara Reynolds speculated in her biographical study, to become a monk in a Dominican monastery. That is, he wanted to take part in the highest activity of humans; silent prayerful meditation, alongside soldiering, is the highest occupation. Poetry is always written from the same perspective.