I finished the collection of paragraphs contributed by Philosophy Now magazine readers on the subject of Metaphysics.  Metaphysics entails thinking about the nature of the Real.  I capitalize Real, because with just a little thought, one recognizes the similarity between “the Real” and the term God.  Language is our failing attempt to point at what we mean by “Reality.”  God and Reality are dimensions apart from ordinary, everyday knowing.  The “meta” indicates the enormity of these “framing functions” for our diminutive knowledge.

A song on my wife’s playlist haunted me when I listened with her, while we worked together in the yard.  “I Hung My Head” by Johnny Cash seemed as if I was the one in the story.  It was as if I knew the unnamed male.  I examined the lyric this morning.  The lyric and the dirge-like tune entails  mystery because the piece amounts to a statement of metaphysics.

Terms indicating undefined, ill-considered, boundaryless experience is found in the first two stanzas.

time to kill
borrowed
practice
went off

These terms indicate a scene of “play”, — a young man holding a rifle that does not belong to him, pretending to take aim, and then the rifle, not his, “goes off” in his hand.  A man on horseback in the distance falls from his horse.  The horse runs on.

The scene is reminiscent of my childhood days when I played “cowboys and Indians” and we’d pretend to shoot at and kill each other.  In play, actions do not matter, have no consequence, have no event horizon.  Nothing about play matters.

Alas the firing of the rifle has inescapable consequences.

The scene shifts in a heartbeat,  a domino effect, a concatenation of boundary effects.  A small piece of lead metal, a thoughtless act had:

orphaned a man’s children
made a widow of his wife
the young man a fugitive begging for forgiveness
rendered life so unbearable that death became his desire

The last two stanzas reveal the song writers proposal that Reality is defined, by the power of death over life.  Before the tragic young man of our story is to suffer the verdict of the jury, the gallows, he has a vision of a rider coming to ride with him, into the horizon.  The rider is the man he has killed.  Indeed, the dead come to fetch us all.  Our finitude is the ultimate event horizon that conditions everything.

The last conscious act of the young man is to pray/ask for God’s mercy.  How human.

Enjoy the song…………