Forget Me Not

Greetings, blogfans! Today I'd like to explore a topic that's near and dear to all our hearts: Will we leave some kind of lasting legacy? Will anyone remember us? Or, will we be lost among the dead? Let's face "it", together, for a moment--not only our mortality, reality, or "the music", let's face the possibility that nothing exists as a soul or spirit and that, once departed from this place, we're truly gone forever. After all (pun intended), do we know who built the pyramids, or do we only have a vague idea whom they were built for? Do we know who built the roads, bridges, canals, railroads and monumental structures that span most of this world's continents, or do we only have a few names to "append" to a few of them, mostly as footnotes? [Allow me, now, please, a brief digression: In his Gettysburg address, Abraham Lincoln said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." Which, sadly, has pretty much held true. Most of us couldn't name a single soldier who died in battle there, nor much of anything else, but the memory of the lives lost--and the horror of it all--have certainly lingered!] OK, back to the business at hand: Despite the plaques, tombstones, mausoleums, inscriptions, and other aides-memoire and memento mori, it's entirely too easy to forget the innumerable lives that have preceded our own. Even the ubiquitous "Kilroy", whomever he or she actually was, hasn't exactly been immortalized, because the person or persons who created the phrase has yet to be verified! (Yes, legends abound, but facts are something else altogether.) A better example of a legacy is the so-called ciphers faked by Thomas Beale. Not only have they never led anyone to vast riches, they never will, because they're very clever frauds! Yet Thomas Beale's name lives on in the hearts and minds of treasure hunters everywhere, despite overwhelming evidence of the ciphers' fraudulence.


Every day--if we can accept as true the lyrics of the 1976 song, Don't Fear The Reaper, by Blue Oyster Cult--another 40,000 more of us lose our respective battle with life and abandon those of us who survive them. (No doubt that number is significantly higher for 2010.) Since knowing is half the battle, this is supposed to give us all a head's up, at least in terms of coming to terms with the terms and conditions of the human condition. But most of us aren't Pharaohs who can enslave tens of thousands to spend their miserable lives building things in remembrance of us. Most of us have to rely on friends and family to erect some kind of marker at the spot beneath which lie our earthly remains. Most of us have to trust that someone will scratch some kind of inscription somewhere, that will somehow manage to weather this world's storms while our decaying bodies or dusty ashes are forever beyond caring.


So, what's to be done about this whole "it's entirely too easy to be forgotten" thing? Some people commit criminal acts to "make History". Some people write blogs (now that's a criminal act lol), journals, diaries and even post-it notes. But I suspect the vast majority of us put our faith in offspring, and in other family members, to carry on after us--and even, or so we want to hope, to think back upon us fondly. As for me, I know that one or two of my sonnets are good enough to rank with Shakespeare's (I'm modest, too, lol), but I think I'm doing a pretty good job of becoming a cipher to the rest of you, in order to remain a mystery that stays fresh long after this tired, skinny body has been encrypted!