Notes on Dan Deacon's "When I Was Done Dying" Music Video

O nobly-born, let not thy mind be distracted. O nobly-born, that which is called death being come to thee now, resolve thus: “O this now is the hour of death. By taking advantage of this death, I will so act, for the good of all sentient beings.
– The Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup

An age like ours, defined by ever-faster change, accelerates the lazy orbit of the year and steady flow of seasons to a pace much greater than the one to which our ancient bodies are accustomed. Several million years of cyclical, reliable, and mostly gradual developments, and then – BAM! All at once, a few mere generations, and our species is a major geological phenomenon, each generation living in a world unrecognizable to anyone a hundred years before. Our mining, logging, fishing, farming, paving, building, wiring, launching, and manufacturing is (literally) a high-speed chemical reaction transforming everything at once. We’re children of a metamorphic eon.

Perhaps the closest metaphor that we can find in our own lives for what our planet’s undergoing is the sacred mystery of death – when sudden, catastrophic, and unprecedented changes overwhelm the self, accelerating past the point of no return and into unknown territory. Death, as a punctuation mark between one life and many (saplings growing in the light revealed by fallen trees), is not so much “end” as “amplification” of the terrible and beautiful intensity of being – what Rudolf Otto called the “numinous,” a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, ecstatic, rapturous, and inescapable.

In this climactic moment it is all too easy to be swept away – and yet this crucial node is when our words and actions bear their greatest power, our presence most commanding, our impact and potential most profound. We’d be remiss to miss this opportunity, but learning how to hold to center like a spinning gyroscope amidst a cataclysmic quake requires training.

Every generation has its own idea of how to best prepare, and as our world spins ever-faster, novel methods grow from the solution of technology and culture. There was a time when books were bleeding edge, and so we gathered all our death- and transformation- wisdom into texts like Tibet’s Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) and Egypt’s Book of Going Forth. Today, our high technology includes transcranial magnetic stimulation, psychedelics, theatre, and music videos (as well as many others). These psychoactive tools immerse us in “nonordinary” states of consciousness and ready us for later and more ultimate disruptions to our everyday identity. The music video is especially well-suited to portray the death experience’s molten flow of forms, so rapid it confounds the mind’s attempts to name and organize a story. What some might take as merely psychedelic kitsch can be a marvelous arena for you, viewer, to rehearse not giving in to your astonishment – to practice noticing the motion of your mind as pandemonium unfolds !

Maybe nowhere has the medium been more explicitly employed for this than in Dan Deacon’s video for “When I Was Done Dying,” in which – medium is message – nine different animators carry us along a voyage through the protoplasmic, orgiastic afterlife, not even letting us get comfortable in a single style, all throbbing, flowing, streaming, singing, everything is perfect! Get with this and maybe you’ll be that much more prepared for when you realize you don’t actually exist…