Musing 45
Reading Table Summer 2018 - a small selection from the to-do list.
Immortal Writer
An author doesn’t need a lot to start on his next book. A silence, a mystery, an absence, a contradiction, so Julian Barnes posits in “There Is Nothing To Be Frightened Of”. The subsequent work, in turn, acts as a little question that asks its reader to be a new author in response. A relay- stick of fiction “…. and why am I here?” Even an Agatha Christie or a Jeffrey Archer can do that for you.
At the end of time, or even but a little way farther down the line of time, it won’t really matter how many books you have written, and even less which you personally considered your finest. (Likewise what you read!) Most of us are remembered for who we never even knew we were. All of us will be forgotten at some point of time. Time, my friends, is not your best friend in the face of all eternity. Heck, what has immortality done for the dead lately, anyway?
In five thousand years from now even a Nobel Prize winner may have become reduced to an exemplary passage in an anthology, if he is dragged along by history at all. His story is long done and dusted. What does it add to your life - now that you are dead - that you linger? Is it sadder that no sooner your corpse has been scattered to the wind your name dissapears with it? On the other hand, is it significant that you are recalled by the living a couple of decades later, or fished up out of obscurity as a composer or a fine water-colourist, centuries post-humously - but does your great-great-great grand-baby punk rocker care?
Life After Ice
The idea of kryogenics is bananas. It's sheer materialism and shows us how sick man's mind has become, and perhaps is best destined for extinction. So, providing there are no major electricity network fall outs, or when there inevitably will be, the generators kick in on time and hold out for long enough, you are thawed out by the Revivalist Team of surgeons in eight thousand years from now, then what? Your 85 year old wizzened apple self can finally be reunited with the love of your life who succumbed to a motor neuron disease at 42. She may still be a little slumped and cramped after they pumped the life back into her, and resemble more a reheated soufflé , but hey, she's with it again! Now, here's to hoping she'll want to tango with you and your hip, knee and shoulder replacements and doesn't mind looking into your transplanted eyes and whispering into your bionic supersonic ears.
And then what? You spin her around the ballroom a few more years, living forever, as stipulated in the deal, to dance and sip wine; until you have lived enough of the good life - after all; everything tires in the end, right? Finally you feel old enough for a change of state of being (she 95 and you a 138)? Who says, you can't be happy together dead?
These thoughts occur also to Julian Barnes in "Nothing To Be Frightened Of", in which he examines the finality of death and why that should put the fear of death into us.
Père Lachaise, Paris, aerial view of the cemetery
The Stone As Living Memory
Why do we visit graves? It may be beneficial to help us mourn. Especially for children it helps to have a place to visit. Eventhough it almost sound a little cruel, "Let's visit mummy," and you take the child to a mound of dirt to replace a withered bouquet with a fresh one. You point to the headstone and caress it lovingly; you trace the name and the dates. It may give you comfort for many years; it may lend a sense of belonging and continuation for many generations to come. It makes a fun outing to discover your semi-famous ancestor in a graveyard up in Scotland, next to an ancient yew, that was already as ancient and immortalised in the poetry of your Aunty Dora then, in 1792. Graves make things tangible, ponderable. They lend weight. Gravity. And then they get dug up.
That whistling-whirring sound you will be hearing the live-long day filling the air of the 79th Quartier, in the year 2118, is a virtual particle-light anihilator (replacing the buldozer) respectfully exhuming what is left of who is left at Père Lachaise. It is being demolished for a new 500 floor living-working-recreational tower.
Even if the French would rather become extinct than turn to such drastic innovative measures, the lease on the plot of your nan will expire one day, be she an acclaimed author or not. Didier doesn't like books and Bo, the ecowarrior doesn't have the money for anything deader than a doornail. Just think of all those toxins in the ground, considering the chemo she had before she passed on!
Never fear, its 2864, time to call out the particle anihilator machine for Balzac, who has long since reincarnated as the CEO-Lord of Dominions of that self same Metropolitan Federation. He doesn't know it. You don't know it. He doesn't have time for novels now either. We all agree there is nothing immortal about man in any earthy terms.
All you think you are can be scrapped as valid in the non-time of being dead. Your existence as dead is fact. How much you will exist and for how long is debatable. But not worth debating until we agree on a few fundamentals.
The Remains
All you think you are is lost to death.
What remains is what people think about you.
If I look at myself, that means there is zero chance of the real me being "carried over" through the realm of life. Apart from that genetic aspect. But really, this does not make me any happier. My genepool is not a winning one. Don't pick it for the Ark next time.
Until we understand what it takes to understand existence we cannot discuss the varying states of being.
As long as we equate existence to being alive there exists nothing in death. It makes those who remember the dead exploitative recyclers. But what do the dead care? What does it tell the living about you though? Why do we want to meet the parents (when they are still - more or less - alive)? It belongs to the same fact hoarding obsession we have which we mistake for knowing somebody for who they really are. Imortally. The way you get to know someone by loving them.
Loving Memory
There is such a thing as loving memory. Such a memory is not to become leaden like a grieving remembrance and become the other side of the coin of compulsive love, infatuation. It should retain its levity of the etheric, especially tonal ether which composes a memory of the heart. Is it perhaps something we should cultivate consciously for every dead person (of which speaking no ill of the dead is a beginning?)
To remind us of this, there is music at funerals. It's for us, not because the dead need it. Ideally, this music should be impersonal and merely suitable for lamentation. We all lament differntly, you say? I don't think so. I think there are many ways trying to help us get back to the point of lamentation. There are many routes that lead us astray (into melancholy, sentimentality and pathos.) Once we are there, then, it's time to lament, but do we get that right?
Until we recognise the enemy amongst us - the walking, mechanical, staccato non-being (zombie) - we cannot begin to see what is truly living. A synonym for eternity, with no years for numbers to count it down.
This is precious! A well-written keepsake - I resteemed it and upvoted.
Mozart's Requiem is eerie. The images it evokes when I hear it .......
My apartment is so filled with books, I barely have enough space for (some of my) art - and the storage in my studio is overflowing. On top of that, I traded with other artists ..........
It's the nightmare of growing older: running out of storage space. On, oh, so many fronts....
I often revisit my loving memories and say things to my favorite dead people. I guess I just assume somehow they can hear my feelings if they can't hear spoken words...
I often feel too there is an "Inbetween" language (of a spiritual nature). The spoken word is not all there is. Plenty of non-verbal language and even telepathy around. It is one thing to marvel at how many languages we have discovered in under a century, in animals and plants we could never have believed in before we had microscopes and knew about hormones etc; but I am waiting for us to learn to listen in a new imponderable way, now. With feeling exactly!
Yes, feelings are more universal in their scope.
Maybe the resurgence of Punk-Rock is the perfect antidote for Cryogenics.
I am all for giving that a go!
For anybody who didn't quite know what there is not to love about Punk-Rock here's a little refresher list to run through.
I'm not sure you need punk to persuade you not to keep your bones on ice. You don't seem the type to be into that long long- term planning. I haven't got you down as one of those people who have their funeral already arranged, either.
Indeed, I can just see your own wishes getting overruled anyway, getting a personal send off as a valued community member, with plenty of live-tributes. You give the impression of being engaged with your fellow townsfolk and out there in the middle of things- even if on the sideline, behind the lens, crouched down, on the back, blending in, on a ladder....). Then again, who knows on which of the seven seas you'll be by then....
Greenday! Yum, thanks! Indeed, you know what they say about the best laid plans. "Blending in, on a ladder" Giggles, you got me, guilty as charged.
Such an interesting topic. Sounds like I will have to read "Nothing To Be Frightened Of" .
I also question all of these 'upload your brain' schemes. While its true you might be able to replicate your neural network in a computer system. What people fail to talk about is the transfer "consciousness". Ie you have to die to be reborn into the computer, and while the new entity has a continual sense of history, the old entity (aka you !) simply does not wake up the next day. So rather than living forever in the computer, your simply spawning a clone of your brain which lives in your place once you die.