Do You Want To Know What Heaven Looks Like?

(this hasn't been edited yet, so be warned.)

Amidst pictures of hieroglyphs, my mind keeps circling back to the main actress at the end of The Mummy Returns who asks Brendan Fraiser (after being resurrected and fighting off one of the bad guys with crazy Sai skills she must've learned while dead) a casual, frustrating question. She asks it in this sultry British accent that may or may not be real. I can't remember the exact wording, but this is what I think I remember:

"Do you want to know what Heaven looks like?" And they fly away into the sunset on a hot air balloon.

I should probably go back to the beginning.

***

I love having important books around, even if I don't use them. I think this bad habit of mine reached its heyday after studying Ancient Greek for a measly year - now, I have a Greek New Testament, my Greek textbooks, a binder full of Greek exercises and notes, Plato's Crito in Greek, and, for whatever reason, a Homeric Dictionary and the first 18 books of the Odyssey in Greek that I bought at my college bookstore for an Ancient Greek class I never intended to take. But the ruler of this pantheon of useless information is my faux-leather-bound copy of Smyth's "Greek Grammar," which sits, with its cordovan-color and its gold letters, nearest to the pinnacle of my bookshelf. Comparatively, my full copy of Shakespeare's First Folio is hidden to the side, but that's in part because it's too big to actually fit on the shelf.

And next to that Folio is my newest acquisition, which is also too big for shelf life or my established pantheons of useless information: The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

I've gone about buying up copies of guides to the afterlife, in the pursuit of understanding how humans understand Death. The Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead) was my first one, and I'm also looking to find a good copy of the Medieval European guide to Death: Ars Moriendi. While I'm still wading through my texts, I find myself additionally marred by my preconceptions about them. The Egyptian Book of the Dead in particular, as you can see by my mind being on a continuous loop of The Mummy Returns. Let me see if I can make a little list of some of those preconceptions/obstacles:

-The lady from The Mummy Returns.
-The popular perception of The Egyptian Book of the Dead as a guide to necromancy. Since it refers to the things in it as "spells" (which originates as the Anglo-Saxon word for "story" I believe: e.g. "godspell" meaning "God's Story"), part of me is concerned that by reading the book I am somehow enacting it. Two interesting sidenotes: 1) that's the heart of why theater gets banned - when something happens onstage and the audience thinks it really happened; 2) The Bardo may not be magic, but the name implies that the act of a dead body hearing it read aloud will cause the person's soul/consciousness to ascend. So again there's that performative aspect to the power of the words themselves that is not entirely rational.
-The lingering comparisons I've heard used to dismiss Christianity as some kind of mixtape of Egyptian religion and Neoplatonic philosophy.

As I said, I'm still mid-mystery here across the board: I've finished neither Book of the Dead, and my knowledge of the rest of world religions, let alone how they treat death, comes down to my own experience practicing Christianity and some survey-style books I've read. My Greek has deteriorated so much that I can't really read the New Testament that I bought so I could discern the original intent of the authors. It's just more information in there with snippets of The Epic of Gilgamesh and a vague understanding of symbolism in literature that makes me think I know what's up. Oh, and The Mummy Returns, apparently. For all the books that I love having on my bookshelf, there's very little knowledge I have to go up against some of the challenges in these texts, and in myself.

Which is when that lady from The Mummy Returns stuck on loop finally made something click.

***

My good friend, who's now an expert in the Old Testament, pointed out that one chief characteristic of the Old Testament world was Scarcity. There was never enough food to go around, never enough goodness in the hearts of everybody, never enough power to keep everyone safe, etc. I'm probably butchering that, but you get the general idea. And this idea of Scarcity has been alive and well, even through today. This shone some light one element of The Egyptian Book of the Dead that has always struck me, even if I didn't know how to process it. The Book was originally written as a guide through Duat, the Underworld (where the sun went during the night) through to "Aaru," which theoretically located at the point of dawn in the east. While souls might live in the Underworld, following the advice in the Book and reaching Aaru means you've attained godhood, and can mingle with Osiris and boogey down on the boat of the sun.

Here's what struck me, and what the lady from The Mummy Returns was actually articulating: I never think much about what Heaven looks like anymore. I think a lot about what the Underworld and sometimes what Hell might look like due to my macabre tastes in literature and all this research, but there's some moratorium in me when it comes to the details of Heaven. I run into enough trouble trusting my own intuitions and beliefs to begin with, and the act of thinking of a pleasant afterlife as an actual place seems to have been ingrained in me as somehow gauche, backwards, unenlightened, and generally stupid.

Now, Aaru isn't too specific, any more than the Elysian Fields are, but there is something oddly comforting about it. And it's not being a peer with the gods and free from their control. Call me crazy, but that doesn't actually appeal to me as much as the Abundance that Aaru would represent in the minds of the Egyptians. Aaru's chief defining quality is that it is the spiritual heart (specifically the Ka, the soul) of the Nile, and the word itself means "field of reeds."

I'd never thought of Heaven like a field of reeds before, but I have thought of Heaven as a place of Abundance, even if I couldn't always put my finger on it as specifically as the Egyptians did by putting their Paradise in the sacred center of the thing that gave them life. If the actress from The Mummy Returns did her homework, that would've been apparently what was pretending to have seen after fighting all the bad guys off with her crazy Sai skills.

So much of my looking into Death has involved ghost stories, mutilated bodies, menacing underworld rulers, and the like, but I might be losing the forest for its trees. During this research, I often figuratively wrestle with my own doubts, my own fears, and in doing so I often discover that although I seem to have an abundance of information, none of it is useful. I have a scarcity of wisdom. One thing that afterlives which value a process (The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Bardo Thodol, Dante's Purgatorio...) all cope with is how Death discerns what is essential. And once the dead have passed through the process, they too are only what is essential, and they have that essential thing in Abundance.

This is where looking at how people treat Death gives me perspective.

***

I wonder where my unessentials are in life right now. And I'm starting to wonder what Heaven looks like again. That second wonder makes me think of two things:

-A favorite professor of mine clarifying a line in the Book of John. Jesus at one point is often translated as saying "the Kingdom of God is within you." Apparently the line is something more like "the Kingdom of God is among you." For me this fits better with when Jesus tells his followers that if two or more of them meet in his name, he'll be there too. Calling to mind those two passages is how I begin most of the Quaker Meetings I attend.
-The following quote from the Bardo:

Oh nobly born, when the body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.

From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come. That is the natural sound of thine own real self. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.


Here, 'Reality' is so abundant that its sound is too great to imagine. Of course a Buddhist would probably slap me on the wrists and say that Reality is neither abundant nor scarce, nor non-abundant nor non-scarce, that it has no sounds, but no silence, nor any non-sounds, nor any non-silence ... but the poetry certainly speaks to a kind of abundance you find in other traditions.

Playing the Ghost

There are plenty of ways to practice dying while still alive. Many of these come from established religious traditions, and have important physical, psychological, and spiritual demands, such as being dunked in a river, being covered with paste made from the remains of a fresh cremation, non-orgasmic sex, sitting still and breathing for half an hour, or, sometimes, just simply muttering "death death death" to yourself. I have not (yet) tried all of them. But it occurred to me that, rather than going and burying myself alive at sunset and bursting out of the ground at sunrise, I might want to try to invent my own ritual for dying while alive. But how? The individual cultures and traditions that spawned the techniques I've listed above are thousands of years old. It would be hard for me to hold a candle to their meaning-making abilities. However, it would probably be less expensive than getting drugged and sent through an underground labyrinth filled with puppets meant to represent the people I meet in the Underworld.

(And I suppose this might be more of the heart of my "we don't get Death in America" rant. I don't feel like we generally prepare ourselves for Death in such meaningful ways. Death is sort of the unfortunate consequence to a life that, otherwise, fully intended to live in its apartment.)

My first thought was how to cope with letting go, whether you wanted to or not. Even if the experience of dying isn't entirely available to me, the contrition involved in the passage of time might be a step into that experience. Maybe if I go somewhere that I am no longer welcome, it will show me how life has continued without me, and will go on continuing without me, regardless of how much I would like to have buildings named after me. And the best place for that is a place that I've found myself incredibly attached to, one that is a deep anchor for my own identity, and one that persists without me to this day: my undergraduate college. In less than a year, everyone I know will have graduated. I've also never been back since I graduated. 

So perhaps a pilgrimage to a place that no longer remembers me will give me some insight into how to learn about dying while still alive. Perhaps I will play the ghost, and linger on a bench all day without speaking to anyone, and see what happens.

Or, perhaps something else entirely!

Saints and Poets, Maybe

After my grandmother died, we were cleaning her house out and I came across several old, empty, cleaned out cookie-tins. As I was piling them up to be packed into the car, I noticed a discarded sock on the floor. It was one of my grandmother's. It was clean, and had probably been in line to be worn before she passed.

Without thinking, I picked up this sock, put it in a cookie tin, and made sure that tin ended up in my room, where I stashed it in a closet. I still don't think I've opened it. Looking back, I suppose there was something compelling about a thing that had made direct contact with my grandmother in her final weeks, but I could've just as easily snatched a pen, a cup, or a book. But none of those really surprised my sense of grief - I can easily picture my grandmother interacting with all of those objects. In fact, I really like imagining her writing in her journal, drinking a cup of tea, watching the birds. But it takes effort, and a kind of anchorage, to remind myself that she also wore socks.

That, I think, is the value of mementos.

Postsecret recently put up a number of sound bytes, mostly taken of answering machines and the like, of people who had died, which had been held on to by their loved ones. None of them is spectacular - even the tape-recorded note of a mother encouraging her daughter is hard to listen to because the recording is so rough. But simply hearing a person speak, using their own cadence and not your memory of their cadence, is enough to shake up your memory of them, to surprise you, to remind you. There is something uplifting in the idea of hearing my grandmother speak again, or one friend play a guitar, or another laugh - but even those are rose-colored. Would I feel the same way about a bill my grandmother paid?

I suppose the thing about having your mental picture of someone you've lost challenged and shaken is that it's very hard to do from the inside out.

The word "Remembrance," often used in liturgy like the Episcopal Communion, comes from the Greek word "anamnesis." If I were to attempt to translate it using this handy sledgehammer, it might mean something like "the up-remembering." It carries with it a sense of there being a kind of "bubbling up" in this specific kind of memory. After all, you realize things you forgot you knew. The physical experience seems to be that these memories come from somewhere else in you and "surface." This becomes particularly interesting when you think about "selective memory," when information you wished to forget suddenly bursts out of the pipes you've made for it.

Effective mementos cause anamnesis. Effective mementos are bad plumbing. Because I know, deep down, that how I imagine the dead is just a filling-in of blanks they've left for me. The substance used is thought, which is crafted and shaped by my own mind. After a while, it becomes sugary. It is not a wholesome experience. But effective mementos will cause an overflow from within of things I never expected to remember about someone. Perhaps this overflow will even bring up new and un-fillable blanks. It won't bring the person back, and it may not stay long, but for a moment, at least, I might be reminded that the person I miss is bigger than my understanding of her, and that her absence was not the only part of her that was too large to comprehend - her presence was, similarly, a mystery.

Emily discovers this at the end of Our Town. Having died giving birth, she sits among the dead in her town's graveyard, as her funeral procession leaves. Against the admonitions of her friends and neighbors, she decides to try to relive her life. She begins with what she thinks will be the happiest memory she can remember - her birthday. The Stage Manager takes her there, and within moments, before her young self even steps into the kitchen where her father is waiting with a birthday present, Emily collapses from grief. The smell of her mother cooking bacon, her father's frame, all the things she'd stopped noticing because they were regular are simply too much for her to take. The Stage Manager stops the memory, and Emily asks if everyone sees the absolute value of each moment in life, the way she just has. The Stage Manager replies, "Saints and poets, maybe - they do some."

For the rest of us, we've got mementos. And also, possibly, the thought that any one thing we do or participate in may be taken by someone who survives us as a lighthouse for who we were, even if it's something as simple as wrapping paper, an answering machine message, or a sock.

***

Also, because I love lists, here's a list of mementos I have:
-A tuft of white fur sealed in an old glass garlic spice bottle (from my first cat)
-A whip, made out of a piece of window framing, a string, and a ball of duct tape
-A four-panel comic strip made on a company notepad, featuring one mouse shaking a can of soda and tricking another mouse to open it (the lesson, as clearly stated by the mouse, is: opportunities are everywhere, you just have to know where to look for them.)
-A zodiac clock that doesn't work (and apparently, now, is incorrect)
-A plaster mask of my own face after I found out someone had died
-A case of tea
-A sock, in a cookie-tin

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.