A Thousand Faces

A follower of this blog brought up an interesting point in a comment on the last entry. She wrote that:

It's sort of funny to think about all of those fantasy shows and novels that are all about rebalancing the forces of light and darkness now...for some reason it's always darkness/death that's upsetting the balance, and the Hero has to fight in the name of Light. I don't think anyone's written about it being the other way around.

Even though there probably are fantasies where Life is upsetting the balance and Death has to step in, this reader does have a point: they aren't the norm here in the West. There're plenty of reasons we don't see this often in present-day America, a large one of which is Hollywood's adopting of Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces as a guidebook for making blockbuster cinema. Hero is strictly about myths centering on an individual confronting Death, and the "Thousand-Faces" part comes from the variety of symbolic ways different protagonists have faced Death in order to claim some prize and take it back to their community, without bringing the Death they faced back too.

But that standard fantasy story, where Light/Life/Good is interrupted by Darkness/Death/Evil flows deeper than Joseph Campbell. For one, it has to do with the Western focus on linear stories that move from a Balance of Powers (Stasis), to a Flux as everyone tries to figure out a new balance (Intrusion), to a new and different Balance of Powers that can never be like the first (New Stasis). But it also has to do with the linear narratives the West hopes are true as it comes up against Death.

Western culture has inherited a conflict of viewpoints that has played out in a variety of ways throughout the centuries. Two early founding cultures expressed these viewpoints in large, profound ways, though they shouldn't necessarily be credited with inventing them, just embodying them in ways we can study, and doing that before anyone else did. Both cultures rely on linear narratives to determine what survives after death, and that becomes the main question.

On the one hand you have the Mesopotamian understanding, which is that death is the ultimate end of life, and there is nothing that continues after it except for the society the individual lived in. So, life should be lived greatly and, dare I say, epically. This is what Gilgamesh ('He Who Saw All') comes to understand at the end of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Towards the climax of the story, Gilgamesh meets with a pair of survivors of the Great Flood, who were gifted with immortality for doing so. However, they prove to be the exception to the rule, as the gods ordained life and death to mortals, while only life to themselves. The husband of the pair makes this clear to Gilgamesh:

Do we build houses forever?
Do we seal (contracts) forever?
Do brothers divide shares for ever?
Does hatred persist forever in the land?
Does the river forever rise (and) bring on floods?
The dragon-fly leave (its) shell
That its face might (but) glance on the face of the sun?

And even when the immortal tells Gilgamesh where to find a fruit that will give him eternal life, that fruit is snatched away by a snake while he isn't looking. Gilgamesh returns to wonder at the walls of his city, Uruk, and concludes it is these walls, and his nation, which will live on after him, walls which, I should point out, only exist now in our imaginations. The walls of present-day Uruk (think of the homonym...) are shelled and bombed and scattered.

On the other hand you have the Egyptian understanding, which is that there is an individual soul that lives on after death, and that soul's implied future has to be taken into account in life. The Egpytians were very clear that one's actions determined whether that soul would live on after death. The Book of the Dead describes the judgment of a soul as a complete court trial, with several stages, and 42 judges working under Osiris, who, after living and dying and living and dying and living, is well acquainted with the matter. The Book describes the outcome of Orsiris's trial, which is the best possible outcome, where a person's heart (considered to be the seat of consciousness) is weighed against a feather:

Thoth, the righteous judge of the great company of the gods who are in the presence of the god Osiris, saith: "Hear ye this judgment. The heart of Osiris hath in very truth been weighed, and his soul hath stood as a witness for him; it hath been found true by trial in the Great Balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him; he hath not wasted the offerings in the temples; he hath not done harm by his deeds; and he uttered no evil reports while he was upon earth."

And so the linear progression of one's life, and one's choices, culminate in the birth of a soul into, hopefully, paradise, after death, as in the Mesopotamian narrative, except that culminates in the creation or preservation of a society or way of life that will remember those who died to preserve it. In each case, individual death is a milestone along a greater linear narrative of how life and death work. This understanding will create Villains who challenge the linear narratives the artists carry around in life, and might explain why they're so often associated with Death itself. What screws up a linear narrative more than dying at the wrong time?

In the East, however, the narratives of Death tend to be cyclical. Look at a Taoist account of creation:

There was something formless yet complete,
That existed before heaven and earth;
Without sound, without substance,
Dependent on nothing, unchanging,
All pervading, unfailing.
One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.
Its true name we do not know;
'Way' is the by-name that we give it.

And by understanding that hidden working of the 'Way,' beyond our being able to speak it, one approaches that formless-yet-complete self and achieves peace. Similarly, Yama, the god of Death, explains to Nachiketa, a Hindu sage who seeks him to ask him whether a person lives after death or not, that:

This wise one is not born nor dies;
From nowhere has He [sprung] nor has He anyone become;
Unborn is he, eternal, everlasting and primeval, -
He is not slain when the body is slain.
Should the killer think "I kill,"
Or the killed "I have been killed,"
Both these have no [right] knowledge:
He kills not, is not killed. ...
The Self is hidden in the heart of creatures [here]:
The man without desire [all] sorrow spent, beholds It,
The majesty of the Self, by the grace of the Ordainer.

In Hinduism, you don't get out of samsara, the cycle of cycles of life and death, until you realize the Atman (Supreme Self), through meditation and grace. As Eastern artists carry these cyclical narratives around in life, they see challenges to these narratives in the form of Separation and Illusion. Significantly, the word "dukkha," translated as "suffering" from Sanskrit, has in it a built-in reference to the sound of a squeaky wheel.

Each of these narratives, Eastern and Western, collects enemies like silt collects in a river. I've tried to mention some general ones above. Sometimes artists set them up like straw men to be knocked down, which is cheap art. But when artists take a breath and step into that question: "what if these opposing beliefs are actually right? What if my narrative won't survive?" that is the birth of good fantasy. Adherents of each narrative daily face challenges holding it up in the real world, where their narrative of life and death is constantly assaulted by challenges, doubts, and, ultimately Death. They need to work out how to cope with these challenges, so they attend the artists' stories, to see how the Hero does it. And so, I'd assert that the best Villains are the ones that threaten not only to send the Hero down to Death, but also whatever the Hero (and the Audience) believes will live on. They challenge the audience's beliefs. This push towards doubt and oblivion is so unsettling that it simply must be dealt with, as epically as possible, to illuminate all the times that the adherents of each narrative walked away unsure, in real life. Agents of Separation could easily lead a practicing Hindu into another three or four reincarnations before he undoes the damage they did. A crazed dictator threatens to destroy the world in Avatar: The Last Airbender, not because he is evil, but because he is attached to his one Element (Fire), and to Power, so it takes someone who knows all four Elements, and who is a child, to re-balance the world. A scientist hero reminiscent of Gilgamesh is on the verge of a new discovery, until her experiments are threatened by some Lovecraftian Egyptian mummifiers who thought her practices were amoral (and vice versa, some Egyptian mummifiers could have their totally-beautiful-and-not-Lovecraftian-at-all eternal life jeopardized by some idiot materialist who cared nothing for their values). Actually, that's almost the movies Contact and Avatar, respectively.

So it's more than the forces of Light, Goodness, Right stereotypically being on the side of Life, it's that they're always on the side of the author's idea of what survives after death, even in anti-hero movies where what survives is endless cycles of pain, suffering, and torment. What distinguishes one from the other comes from where the adherents find doubt about their narrative of what survives after death being right.

And so, the fun of fantasy like that is that it provides imaginary and symbolic ways to confront our own fears of death that those Villains embody: that we will not be remembered, that the things we fought for in life will be destroyed by piggish people, that we will leave the world worse than we found it only because we didn't have a chance to make it better. Also, once their fight is through, their narrative either affirmed, enhanced, or changed, Heroes tend to die with a surviving narrative in toe, bringing about a reassurance that we will, for whatever reason, find peace when we die. In bad stories, we walk away suspecting that peace is a paper moon. In good stories, we think we've at least got a shot at it.

Because I Could Not Stop For Death...

I've got my brain humming on two things: Taoism and Beauty Cream.

There's a lot of talk going around about using science to ratchet up our lifespans. A friend of mine described how he hopes one day that doctors will become mechanics - they'll give people tune-ups, make sure the oil is changed, and basically halt or slow the aging process so that "natural death" becomes a thing of the past.

Yes, I think that's a little extreme too. It also might not be true, but if the science isn't actually there, the desire for the science is, and that desire says something about our relationship to going gentle into that good night.

There're plenty of questions that surround this issue, which I'll probably go into later. Is this service a necessity, or a luxury? Where does the money for it come from? Who gets to have it? I hate to sound cynical but I don't think this treatment would end up in philanthropic hands - it would end up being given to the people who could pay for it, and I hear immortality is in high demand. Look at cosmetic surgery, or, as I mentioned, beauty creams. All of these are material ways of trying to deal with death - "if I don't look like I'm closer to the grave, my life will be better. Or, at least, I won't have to think about it for a while."

I'd argue that immortality doesn't look like that. And this is where Taoism comes in.

The little that I know about Taoism comes from The Sacred Art of Dying by Kenneth Paul Kramer. It surveys how a handful major religious and philosophical traditions approach the subject of Death, and includes journaling exercises at the end of each chapter that are actually productive, and not just a thin layer of New Age icing. One of these journal entries was "Redescribe the Taoist process of reversal. In what way does this spiritual path relate to the Taoist attitude towards death?"

Here's what I came up with, after reading the chapter:

"So let's assume that there are two energies to existence, that, together, create a single motion - like the tides, the seasons, or the way that there is day and night, but you can still see the moon during the day, and the moon still reflects the sun's light at night. Together these forces form a whole process, but singularly, they are out of balance. The process of Reversal assumes that one of these forces is connected to Life, and the other to Death, and that, while living, we spend most of our time unbalanced towards Life energy, especially when we crave living above all else. By reversing this natural obsession with Life, through meditation, the fine arts, and practicing dying while alive, we rebalance ourselves and, as a consequence, discover wisdom, simplicity, and a long and productive life."

This is, at least, my understanding of it. Specifically, Taoists use practices like T'ai Chi and Ch'i Kung to balance their own Yin and Yang energies, though Kramer does point out that "fine arts" and "martial arts" are on the list of ways too. I'd definitely make an argument for Theater as a way to rebalance yourself, being a dramatist.

Or, to break with the topic of Taoism for a moment, there's a story of a Tibetan Buddhist monk who was pulled aside on his way to get his groceries to minister to a dying nun. He kneels down and tells her:

"I think it is time for you to go. Now you have got to see whatever your teachers have taught you to see. This is the time to put your visualizations into practice. Whichever form of the Buddha you can best relate to, unite your mind with that Buddha, and don't think about us here behind. We'll be okay. I'm going shopping now. When I come back, perhaps I won't see you, so goodbye."

(This can be found in The Sacred Art of Dying, pg. 70)

That, it seems to me, is ageless. That, it seems to me, is more important than the physical living and dying that produced it. The experience of dying is a part of our life, and our experiences of life will be a part of our deaths. By reversing our obsession with being young as long as possible, we open ourselves to a wealth of simple, wise ways of understanding, and making peace with, our eventual end. I would hate to see my life prolonged almost indefinitely if all I did was worry about prolonging my life even more indefinitely. I'd rather be told, "don't think about us here behind. We'll be okay."

Of course, the distinction I'm drawing between beauty creams and meditation is suspect, and that monk I so admire would be sure to admonish me that both will come to naught in the end.

"Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me..."

Put Thou My Tears Into Thy Bottle

"...are they not in thy book?" -Psalm 56 (King James, just to get fancy)

This is where this notebook gets interactive. I'm compiling a little artistic endeavor and I need the help of anyone out there, in the ether. But fist, a small story to explain:

When I came home from my freshman year of college, I lost someone. This was not a person I knew exceptionally well, but I knew him better than I knew most other people on this planet. He was a musical prodigy, an avid believer in a Right Answer, and his most definitive quality, in my memory, was a reckless love for everyone around him. But I didn't know him well.

He was killed in a car crash, and I found out, oddly enough, just before I had a plaster mold made of the upper half of my face. I keep that mold on my desk. Remind me to write later about Death Masks.

He and his family were Agnostic, and his mother was unsure of how to hold his memorial service. They ended up using our high school theater for the service, and having the viewing was at a funeral parlor in the town across the river. I remember both being jam-packed, and the viewing had a line out the door, not unlike a concert, which was somehow fitting.

At the memorial service, his best friend gave a musical eulogy. This guy was another prodigy, another person who spoke in music, so you can see how they got along. This guy got up there, said a few words, took out his saxophone, and then just started playing. And I think it was the saddest thing I've heard in my life, and even though I hadn't known the guy who died well, in that moment, I could see what it was like for this surviving prodigy to lose one of the only other people in the world who spoke the same musical language he did. 

We've been losing Best Friends and Loved Ones since time began, though, and lamenting (as in, making sound that expresses that loss) seems to be one of our truest, cross-cultural ways of mourning. As with this prodigy, it's often non-verbal - compare that saxophone eulogy to the Irish tradition of Keening. There are poets, musicians, and other writers who've attempted to capture it verbally though, and this is where I need your help. I'd like to collect as many of these lamentations as possible. Here's some of what I have so far, to give you an idea:

"What is this sleep that holds you now?

You are lost in the dark, and cannot hear me."

-The Epic of Gilgamesh

"No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never."

-King Lear

So post comments with lamentations - they don't have to be as classical as these two, but I'm just feeling very epic at the moment. I'm actually sort of trying to find contemporary ones as well. I'll post back later in the week with the artistic endeavor, when it is (hopefully!) complete.

Only What You Take With You

So, to start off basic, I'd like to try to give a quick snapshot of what the American relationship with Death is like, through one of the most fundamental myths of the culture. It generates consistent devotion, and that sort of fractal mythologizing that you only see when a story hits on Truth.

And this myth is, of course: Star Wars.

Are these movies dated? Some of them, yes. They're also memorized by children every year, so their dated quality should make them all the more meaningful, because they're feeding old ideas back into the mainstream.

There're two kinds of Death in Star Wars. One is pathos-ridden, hyper-meaningful, and only happens to main characters. There's plenty I could say about any one of those deaths, because those are the stories that Lucas and others specifically crafted to be the most meaningful to the audience. But I'd rather take a moment to look at the faceless deaths that happen in almost every scene in Star Wars, that are glossed over without a second thought.

Star Wars is riddled with Death. The Galaxy Far Far Away has such a high mortality rate it's a wonder anyone goes outside. Think of the largest-scale annhiliation that we know of: Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuclear fire rains from the sky, vaporizing all of humanity and the entirety of civilization. It's the fear that inspired Star Wars, and has left a permanent brand with how we view the End of the World - not only will we cease to be, but everything our race has spent 3,000+ years accomplishing will come to naught. In this nightmare of a nuclear holocaust, as opposed to an apocalypse, there is no God to save the righteous, there is no hope for survivors (unless you're in post-apocalyptic fiction, which should be marketed as one of the most hopeful and upbeat genres around, considering), there is simply dust.

That incomprehensible amount of annhiliation happens twice in Star Wars - in the same movie. First when Alderaan gets destroyed, then when the Death Star gets destroyed. And barely anyone bats an eye. We even root for the latter planet-sized explosion.

Now, granted, there are differences - the Star Wars nerd in me wants to point out that the human race is bigger than one planet in the Galaxy Far Far Away. It's not the end of civilization. Sentient life in the Universe as we know it does not cease to be. Also, a decent population of the Death Star is clones, and they don't have souls, right?

Souls might be a good way to think about it. When there was a shipwreck, or a cataclysm, people used to report the death count not just numerically. The unit of measurement for death was "souls." Think of someone stopping to say, in A New Hope, "Six billion souls were lost on Alderaan." Certainly beats the five and a half tears Carrie Fischer gets to shed for it, which is all the mourning an entire planet gets.

Or look at Dak, Luke's co-pilot during the Battle of Hoth, in The Empire Strikes Back. He gets maybe three lines, if I remember correctly. A plucky young rebel, he assures Luke "I feel like I could take on the whole Empire myself!" as he jumps into the cockpit. The other two lines are just reports of what's happening on the ship. "Detach cable - cable detached!" "Activate harpoon!" I think that might be it. Then a stray shot blasts the back of the ship and Dak is cooked.

Cooked. His body eminates smoke. And Luke has to keep flying.

And Luke's reaction? I wish I could find it on youtube to show you, but instead I'll have to describe it. He slowly turns back to flying, and takes a deep breath.

That's it.

That's the American reaction to Death, because most deaths will happen to people we don't know. Most of them happen on massive scales that we can barely comprehend anyway, and so we don't try. We reduce them to numbers to contain their implications. 150,000 here, 2,000 there. It's like someone somewhere is keeping score. We've gotten very good at counting the dead. And we take a deep breath, and we ignore the smell of cooking flesh, and we keep looking forward. The price of lifting up the Individual is that, in the end, it's every man or woman for themselves. And so, we've also gotten very good at blaming the dead. "He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," "I told her not to wear that dress," and the like. But blame doesn't change the reality, any more than a fairy-tale or a fable can explain the presence of the sun, or where mannequins really come from. When numbers won't suffice, we build narratives. 'Clones don't have souls anyway.' 'The people on the Death Star were evil.' 'The Haitians died because they sold their souls to the devil,' after the recent earthquake in Haiti, is one of my favorites. Certainly an Emperor-worthy quote.

Because certainly we can't be reminded that someone will treat us as just a number when we go, right? We're going to be remembered. We're going to get a funeral. We're going to get an x-wing fireworks show and a pyre and our son mourning over us as the John Williams score crescendos. Right?

No. If numbers and cultural myths are to be believed, most of us will die like the rest of the stormtroopers.

This is not the last I have to say on the matter, but this entry is getting long.

I'll leave you with one more key moment in Star Wars. It's touches on the idea of this notebook:

One might think of the following entries as a compendium of the things we "take with us," when we go to face Death. They end up saying more about us than almost anything else - which is why I find this topic so unbelievably fascinating.

101

Hello. Thanks for coming, and welcome to my notebook.

I hope you find some of this information useful. Before I go any further, I just wanted to be clear about what you'll find here, and what you won't.

Years ago I got interested in the study of Death. It's one of the most important topics we'll ever face in the entirety of our existence, and yet we shy away from it so quickly, or we find neat boxes to put it in: this is Portrayals of Death in Visual Art, this is Psychology of Dying, this is That Scary High School Health Class. Comparatively few people seem to want to approach the topic head on, on its own terms. Particularly in America, where Death doesn't really fit in with most of our narratives about how our lives are going to be. I'm looking forward to the entry I write on Healthcare, and in particular the character of "Grandma," who, despite all the rhetoric about whether she has private or public insurance, is still going to die.

There is so much to learn: about Death, from Death. By my count, it's one of three experiences all humans will go through (birth and breath being the other two). We've dismissed so many of the mysteries and the stark realities surrounding Death, when we need to be confronting those mysteries and realities the same way we confront the inside of an atom or the medical promises of a jungle flower, or religion, or literature, or our own minds. This is how I want to treat Death: as a mystery to be investigated, instead of a taboo topic at the dinner table, or an exotic romp into the latest gore-filled fantasy. I want to understand Death on its own terms.

So this is a record of my research into the subject of Death, and how we make sense out of it. For lack of a better term, I'm calling it "Death Studies," because if there was a Masters in Death Studies out there, I'd sign up for it. I picture it as a text-based program that touches on several disciplines while belonging to none of them. Sadly, it doesn't exist, so this is my approximation of it. What follows is an investigation of the "texts" of Death, which will include everything from religious traditions to public policy to personal experiences. While I'll touch on how major academic fields deal with Death (Psychology and Anthropology stand out as ones I feel like I'll dip into often), these are not the "texts" I'm primarily interested in.

Here're some things this notebook is not:

-A Scholarly Journal. This is a notebook I'm sharing with you, that will include what I find as I investigate something I'm interested in. I'm not writing this to claim authority, I'm writing this to instill curiosity.

-A Gothic Doomfest. I have nothing against the Goth movement, but I'm simply interested in the pursuit of new information, not appealing to any one subculture over another. I'd like to think my findings will produce some kind of hope in the reader, regardless, even if it's a bittersweet hope.

-Necromancy. I'm not interested in talking to the dead. I'm looking forward to writing an entry about how mediums are con-artists, and have been for thousands of years.

-A Ghost-Hunters Guide. I'll definitely be investigating Ghosts, but more for what it says about the people who see them.