The Babiest Babe

"A good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards. I suddenly remembered that no one can enter heaven except as a child; and nothing is so obvious in a child— not in a conceited child, but in a good child— as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised. [...] Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures— nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator." — C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (1949)

[Source: Күннэй — Таатта (MV)]

I walk in expecting to see the giants among men, those of fabled virtue and holiness whose statures have multiplied down the ages every time their stories are retold and embellished— and find only children. Shrieking children, tumbling over one another, milling around a vast space, wall-to-wall, if ever we can find any walls in such a boundless place; then, in the middle of them all, lies the most childlike of children, the babiest babe, nursed by his mother. His presence had such gravity that it warped the space around him, and all are drawn to him.

When people enter here they wake up in a sunny, breezy meadow, after their passing in the previous life. Those who die young wake up here young, and those who die elderly wake up here elderly, their consciousness passing between the worlds seamlessly. Immediately following this rebirth, children from all around accost them, tease them, climb all over them, and egg them on to move. Here a scraggly greybeard wakes up from his long slumber, and two young girls in bright yellow dresses dunk a bucket of water over his head. When he comes to, his back has stopped hurting, his spine is again straight, and he has regained movement in his joints. With this renewed strength he puts himself to work, for this is the place where seniority serves youth.

Often people entered after living the full life: a life time of joy, sadness, disappointments and betrayals, tragedies and injustices. They come wizened and cynical, their countenances ghastly, their utterances hateful; they wear grey cloaks which are like the hide of a porcupine, shooting quills upon each perceived slight or offense. The more they are at this extreme of the spectrum, the less kindly they take to the dousing. They scream curses at every child who splashed water onto them, because it feels to them scalding hot, and shake their fists at the kids as they bolt off in retreat, laughing and giggling ridiculously.

As the dousing continues, the morale among the new residents seem to improve, as the suffering of each subsequent douse becomes less and less. The age of the residents now approach the teenage years. Same as earthly adolescence, the soul squeezes through a liminal middle-space in a process as much terrifying and confusing and awkward as it is magical. Those who are at this stage enter a state of rebellion and defiance, not against the cloying love of their parents, as in our universe, but at the imprints the world has left upon them, the scars and the wounds that has accumulated over their lives, insecurity and defensiveness, feelings of vindictiveness and unkindness, self-superiority and inadequacy... The uniform, genteel, starched grey cloaks that cover them tear into shreds, revealing their bearers' true selves: clothes made of fabric of every imaginable colour, one in the earthly colours of autumn, another in pastel pink and blue and purple, another iridescent like the wings of a butterfly... all of them present themselves in varying degrees of frivolity and uproariousness, and no two persons are found wearing the same colours. The last rags of gravitas and respectability are blown away in a stiff breeze, and our friends emerge as fresh and liberated as a crab who has freed itself of its molt.

As spontaneously as happens on a dance floor, the colourful ones join their hands, and start dancing in a circle around the centre of the room, where lies the Babiest Babe in his mother's embrace. The more they dance, the younger they appear, the smaller the circle becomes, and the faster they spin. From where I watch them, the closest ones to the centre dance so hard and so briskly that they seem just a blur, blending into a continuum of light, and I like to imagine that they would keep at it until they are catapulted, in this ecstasy, into a memory of a dining hall, warmly lit in the glow of the late afternoon sun, all of their loved ones alive and somewhere in the house, the dinner being prepared, in a moment which one would wish to last forever.

22 November 2024, Bukit Tiram, Johor