Death and I are old friends; he was gracious enough not to interrupt my work before it was done, and it’s the least I can do to return that favor when the time comes. – “Die Young, Stay Pretty”
You are going to die. Soon. And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. “Nutrition” will not save you, nor will “health care”, nor “science”, nor “repairing telomeres”, nor “transhumanism”, nor “The Singularity”, nor being “uploaded to the cloud”. And you’re not going to be preserved by the “Rapture” or the “Second Coming” either. You’re going to die sometime between today and your 120th birthday, and the most any of your science fiction or mystical mumbo-jumbo could possibly do to change that would be to extend it a little. And I mean a very little, because any conceivable solution involving brain transplants or computers or electro-horcruxes or whatever which resulted in the illusion of your consciousness continuing (yeah, I said “illusion”; sorry to burst your bubble, but a simulation of your mind is NOT you) in this plane beyond death will require an advanced technical society and a stable economic system to maintain, and I guarantee the plug will be pulled on your pathetic, meaningless, narcissistic ego-trip as soon as the culture you live in collapses and is replaced by a younger, healthier one which realizes that catering to the primitive fears of long-dead plutocrats is a waste of valuable resources. And yeah, that WILL happen, because cultures are every bit as mortal as humans (if longer-lived by a factor of maybe 3 to 10). Beyond that, species also have a limited lifespan, as do planets, “stars and even the universe itself. It is literally impossible to stop the process; entropy increases, and the only way to slow that in one area is to speed it up somewhere else.”
Depressing? Not at all, unless you think cacophony is a good thing. Imagine a piece of music in which every single note is sustained forever once it starts. It’s just as complex as any piece you know, but instead of each note lasting for a certain time before giving way to the next, each continues to drone on at exactly the same pitch and volume, forever, no matter how many new notes are added. By the end of a three- or four-minute pop song there would be nothing but an unbearable din without beauty or structure, and by the end of a typical symphony you’d be trying to get as far away from the resulting sonic abomination as possible. But you couldn’t, because every radio, every iPod, every concert hall, every TV jingle, every kid singing off-key with the wrong words in the entire world would be doing exactly the same damned thing, FOREVER. And any advanced aliens who picked up the broadcasts would certainly come here as quickly as possible in order to obliterate the obscenity with a gravity bomb, or to drop us into the nearest black hole, and good fucking riddance.
The beauty of a piece of music or a dance derives from a succession of notes or steps, each following the other in sequence and each giving way in its time to the next. The meaning of an essay, story or book depends upon each finite word in its proper place. And the meaning of not merely an individual life, but the life of a culture, a species, a world and the entire multiverse depends upon that same finiteness. Death is what gives life meaning, and fighting excessively against it is as childish and futile as the behavior of a toddler who refuses to let another child take his place on the carousel once his ride is done.
Thank you for this, especially the analogy with music.
Succinct as usual Maggie! And top of the morning to you!
https://www.habitsforwellbeing.com/poem-she-let-go/
I’m trying to practice letting go… death is just to far away as I’m in them… moment ! Happy Halloween BTW! Ghouls and Spectres justcare now me!
Love and light to your day Maggie x🌻🌻
I recall a talk by the philosopher Alan Watts in which he expressed amusement at the longing and expectation of eternal life, along these lines:
Those who wish most for eternal life are the same people who become bored, restless, and don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
I definitely don’t subscribe to Kurzweil’s school of thought; didn’t he tell some high-end magazine that he intended to clone his father? I do think the technology is coming – biotechnology, in particular – and people are living longer now (I’m not familiar with the world population’s fluctuations) then before so the proverbial future is even more uncertain. It looks like one thing from a distance but as you get closer but I feel like there are too many details however I also don’t care to be part of the masses so it works out.
For my documentary, I interviewed a doctor who was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic in 2002. He entered a clinical trial and as of today (11.9.17) he is still alive, posting on the odious Facebook.
My point being that he is currently alive and well because of technology but there’s a million other arguments that stem from it. That’s a whole other story.
Not saying you’re a Luddite! And I don’t foresee ‘Transcendence’ …which is really kind of a direct sequel to The Lawnmower Man with Pierce Brosnan and Jef Fahey and the girl from Young Guns II and Pink Floyd The Wall from the early 80s. Anyway, she’s blond and she’s pretty.
Anyway here’s a quote I don’t necessarily agree with but would secretly like to
“I always thoughts the future was what we make of it.”
-E
[ps] yes your writing is on point; ‘the process of creation is as much art as the finished product’ vibe
Cool
I love the music analogy. I know you know this, but for others – the silence between notes is important too. It gives us time to think, to breathe on the journey. There’s a delightful video on YouTube of Bjork interviewing the religious mystical composer Arvo Part about the silence in his music.