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Posts Tagged ‘Thanatopsis’

Tweets Aplenty

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 24, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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Links #721

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 28, 2024| Leave a Comment »

An unintentional body movement can lead to death.  –  Scott Harlan

Since I often share my earworms with you, I’m unsure how this one – presenting a view of death not at all unlike mine  –  has managed to avoid being featured before.  The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker, Winnie Pond, The Onion, Mike Siegel, C.J. Ciaramella, Popehat, and Marc Randazza, in that order.

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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Tweetenstein

Posted in History, Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, Words, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2024| 1 Comment »

 

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Teenage Throwback Thursday

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on November 2, 2023| Leave a Comment »

The lurid, sensationalized tragedy porn narratives that make up the body of “sex trafficking” mythology are nothing more than Gothic horror tales that opportunists pretend are real.  –  “Unreal Horrors”

Every…sex-work[er]…has had clients fall for her; it’s a natural outgrowth of a situation in which a lonely man spends a lot of time in the company of a beautiful, alluring woman who only shows him her best side.  –  “Out of Bounds”

You are going to die.  Soon.  And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.  –  “Thanatopsis”

Sex and death are but two sides of the same coin:  the former is the door through which we enter the world, and the latter the door through which we leave it.  –  “Eros and Thanatos”

That experience of being a stranger in one’s own community, of being treated like a living oracle, like a weird visitor back from the underworld with divine wisdom to share…that, I think, is the experience which defines the old.
–  “Let There Be Dark”

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The Mysteries

Posted in History, Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on November 1, 2020| 3 Comments »

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.  –  “Thanatopsis”

Every year on the Day of the Dead I write about the inevitability and goodness of Death.  Yes, I said “goodness”; as I wrote in “Eternity“, “Eternal life wouldn’t be a gift; it would be a horror literally beyond imagining.”  I’ve never been especially afraid of death; part of that is due to the fact that “I was a strange, wild, moody Wednesday Addams of a child, born on Halloween night and fascinated with horror lore and imagery.  Autumn was both my native season and the one in which I felt most comfortable…” The rest, of course, was a combination of chronic depression and ruthless pragmatism; for much of my life I endured long periods in which I would have viewed death as a welcome release, and even when I was in a cheerier frame of mind I was still rational enough to recognize that the continuance of life for any given creature requires the regular deaths of countless others.  But it wasn’t until my forties that I started become really philosophical about mortality, and only five years ago did I really start to deeply ponder its spiritual dimension.  The latter development was not merely due to age, though that undoubtedly helped put me in the right headspace; a catalyst was required, and that catalyst was edible cannabis.  I started experimenting with what are typically and not-entirely-correctly called “recreational drugs” near the end of 2014, and though several of them gave me very rewarding experiences with others, it was the psychedelic experiences I had from using largish doses of edible cannabis alone (or more accurately, without human company) that opened the doors to the Infinite and gave me a perspective on death, the soul and my place in Everything which eventually led to a spiritual peace unlike any I had ever known.  I was far from alone; those who refuse to be bound by the Puritanism which has trapped modern humanity in a death-grip have for decades tried to tell everyone else about the healing and mind-expanding power of psychedelic drugs, and since the 1990s studies have increasingly demonstrated the power of such substancies to alleviate depression, PTSD and other mental health issues.  But this is not a new discovery, it is, rather, a rediscovery of truths known to our ancestors millenia ago:

…sacred tripping was not simply a function of prehistoric religious rituals and shamanism, but an integral, even central part, of the world of the ancient Greeks….The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name, by Brian Muraresku…shows…the centrality of psychedelic use…in an elaborate and mysterious once-in-a-lifetime ceremony at the Temple of Eleusis, a short distance from Athens.  We’ve long known about…the Mysteries…and the rite of passage they offered — because it’s everywhere in the record.  Many leading Greeks and Romans went there, including Plato and Marcus Aurelius…The Greeks and Romans went to Eleusis only once in their lives, like the Muslim hajj, to participate in a nocturnal rite, and were sworn to secrecy as to what went on.  But the constant theme in the ancient literature around this ritual is that it somehow took the sting of death away.  “Death is for mortals no longer an evil, but a blessing” was the phrase attached to it…Historians and classicists have long pondered what this meant and what exactly happened, but all agree that it required drinking a special brew.  And new discoveries of ancient chalices and cups — and new techniques of testing ancient residue — have begun to suggest what made these archaic potions so special…they contained countless herbs and spices and ingredients, among them, critically, elements of ergot, a fungus that infected barley and rye and had potent hallucinogenic effects…Another re-examined excavation in Pompeii found the preserved remains at the bottom of large barrels jars dated to 79 CE:  chemical analysis found it included seeds of cannabis, opium, and hallucinogenic nightshades.  The recipe for the psychedelic brew and the preparation of it was restricted to women, who passed on the secret recipes from mother to daughter, and was the particular preserve of older women.  The effect, we’re told in the sources, was transformative: you saw past life and death, you became unafraid of your own mortality, you gained perspective and inner peace…
When I read this article a few days ago, I wasn’t really surprised; I have long understood that knowledge is cyclic, and many truths are gained, lost, and gained again, not merely on a societal level but in the lives of individuals treading paths new to us, but well-worn by countless others.  And my own life is replete with “coincidences” and “happenstances” which are in actuality nothing but; I see them as the Hand of the Divine, though you of course are free to draw your own conclusions.  I do not have access to the sacred recipe for the transformative cocktail at the center of The Mysteries, and yet I nonetheless have followed in the footsteps of my many-times-great-grandmeres by offering to others the wisdom that mortality is not a thing to fear, but rather a blessing to accept when it comes to us in the fullness of time.

 

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Eros and Thanatos

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on November 1, 2018| 2 Comments »

When [the universe is] over it will fade away, leaving nothing behind except the fact that it existed, and that it was savagely beautiful.  –  “Whistling Past the Graveyard”

Every year on this day, the Day of the Dead, I publish a thanatopsis, a meditation on death.  This is not to say that I myself only think about it at this time of year; as regular readers already know, Death and I are old friends, and “when he at last come to collect me it will be a rendezvous rather than a capture.”  Accordingly, he’s never very far from my thoughts, and I generally think and speak about him with the nonchalance most people think and speak about minor medical problems; at a recent checkup, my doctor questioned my disinterest in undergoing an expensive and extremely unpleasant cancer-screening test which is apparently considered routine for people above 50, to which my response was a shrug and “I’ve got to die of something.”  Some people think this odd, but I remind them that I am a courtesan, and sex and death are but two sides of the same coin:  the former is the door through which we enter the world, and the latter the door through which we leave it.  For the first few millennia of human civilization, sex-goddesses were usually also associated with war and death; the Sumerian Inanna was the twin sister of Ereshkigal, ruler of the dead, and once tried to usurp her sister’s throne (a misadventure which resulted in the death of Inanna’s husband, the vegetation-god Damuzi, and therefore the origin of the seasons).  And Mexican sex workers are among the most devoted worshipers of Santa Muerte, the personification of death.  My belief in the goodness of death is not merely a result of my pagan philosophy, though; it is also based in the practical understanding of the inevitability of death and its role as the redistributor of resources from the moribund to the young, and also in an unsentimental recognition that gerontocracy is the enemy of human progress:

…if you like working your arse off to support the decades-long retirements of a bunch of old dinosaurs whose cognitive norms formed a generation before you were born, just imagine how much you’d love it right now if 90% of the population were born before the Second World War, and a sizeable fraction of the people voting on stuff like sexual rights came of age in an era when it was still considered OK for humans to actually, legally own other humans.  The current rulers of our world were mostly born in the 40s-60s, and their ideas provide ample proof of that; imagine how it would be if most of them had been born in the 19th century…

Humans may be the smartest monkeys, but we’re still monkeys, fragile creatures controlled by poorly-developed minds dominated by primitive fears and foolish ideas.  So perhaps it’s fitting that Western culture’s impending demise is being driven by tyrants whose destruction of freedom and justice is enabled by the masses willing to give them any power in exchange for their impossible promises to delay death, both personal and cultural, just a little longer.

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Eternity

Posted in History, Philosophy, tagged , , , on May 7, 2018| 8 Comments »

Regular readers know that I am not afraid of death, and in fact consider it a positive good.  And so, though I understand why people might want to have a little extra time on this plane, I can’t understand ruining the quality of the whole merely to drag the end out for a few extra years.  Nor do I understand the obsession with or demonization of a natural process; all things die, including nations, species, worlds, suns and even the observable universe itself.  Furthermore, the idea that extending human life would also extend productive life is science fiction; even now people tend to “run out of steam” over time, and even though people in developed countries live longer on average than they once did, there’s no evidence that canalization of the brain takes place any later than it did in ancient times.  What that means is, if you like working your arse off to support the decades-long retirements of a bunch of old dinosaurs whose cognitive norms formed a generation before you were born, just imagine how much you’d love it right now if 90% of the population were born before the Second World War, and a sizeable fraction of the people voting on stuff like sexual rights came of age in an era when it was still considered OK for humans to actually, legally own other humans.  The current rulers of our world were mostly born in the 40s-60s, and their ideas provide ample proof of that; imagine how it would be if most of them had been born in the 19th century.

Even if you believe in souls (as I do), you have to recognize that most of the popular ideas about such life-forces (such as the belief that they are somehow connected to rotting corpses after death) are absurd, childish and impossible.  There is no such thing as changelessness; there are only differing rates of change.  The idea of a changeless entity existing literally forever is utterly ridiculous, and frankly, I think people who imagine they want to live forever – even as a disembodied soul – have not done much thinking about what eternity actually looks like.  Compared to Eternity, the 15-billion year life of the current observable universe is exactly the same as Planck time.  I don’t mean similar; I mean exactly the same.  Indistinguishable.  15 billion years, or 15 trillion, or 15 googols of years (that’s 150,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000), or 15 googolplexes of years, are all exactly the same compared to Eternity.  Eternity is an infinite amount of time, which means any finite number, no matter how incomprehensibly large, is exactly as insignificant in comparison to that as the tiniest number one can define.  Eternal life wouldn’t be a gift; it would be a horror literally beyond imagining.

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Whistling Past the Graveyard

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , on December 1, 2017| 9 Comments »

I often feel as though I’m one of the few adults in a nation full of children.  I watch Americans playing their ridiculous red hat/blue hat games, pretending that their arbitrarily-chosen schoolyard teams are really different from each other in some important way that justifies defending creepy molesters on their team while viciously attacking the same kind of creepy molesters on the other team.  I see jackasses braying about how different things would be if only their team were in charge, despite the fact that both have had long periods in which they held strong majorities in individual states and in all branches of the federal government, yet failed miserably to create the Utopias they keep insisting they can create if only given one more chance; in fact, both have cooperated to build the fascist police state in which we are now trapped.  I see politicians contradicting themselves egregiously while their fawning worshipers are too busy licking their boots to even look up and see both sides of their masters’ mouths projectile-vomiting different kinds of filth.  I see adults so horrified at the basic awfulness of human nature that they try to pretend it’s some evil system imposed from outside (presumably by gods or aliens) like “capitalism” or “patriarchy” that creates the awfulness, when actually it’s just humanity.  The next time someone prefaces a criticism of human behavior with “under capitalism” or “under patriarchy”, keep that in mind while reading it; you’ll see that they’re just whistling past the graveyard.  Very few people can handle the realization that they’re nothing but highfalutin’ monkeys running million-year-old neurological programs that have never been debugged, and that Man’s garbage will have a much more lasting effect on this planet than he will.  They yammer and bleat that this pathetic animal is “killing the Earth”, when in actuality he is at most making the surface environment more hostile for himself and a few closely-related species.  But even beyond that, the Earth is going to die in a few billion years anyway; when the sun goes she’s going to take her children with her.  Nor is this a unique situation; all stars die, some more quickly and spectacularly than most, but all of them go in the end, as will the galaxies they inhabit.  Indeed, the entire universe, and every iota of it, is mortal; it is nothing more than a complex symphony echoing in the abyss.  And when it’s over it will fade away, leaving nothing behind except the fact that it existed, and that it was savagely beautiful.

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Thanatopsis

Posted in Holidays, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , on November 1, 2017| 5 Comments »

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.

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Die Young, Stay Pretty

Posted in Biography, Philosophy, Q & A, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , on January 5, 2017| 5 Comments »

Live fast ’cause it won’t last.  –  Chris Stein & Debbie Harry

In Monday’s column “Crystal-Gazing” I wrote, “I don’t think it’s likely I’ll be around to see [the mid 2030s], but many of you will be.”  Several readers asked me why I believed I wouldn’t make it to that point; after all, I’d only have to live to 70, and the average white American woman born in the 1960s lives to about 75.  Now, I could point out that statistically, my chance of dying before 70 is roughly equal to my chance of living past 80, but that wouldn’t quite be true; a lot of the reason the life expectancy keeps increasing is that infant mortality keeps decreasing, so anyone who survives childhood isn’t statistically likely to live as much longer than her ancestors as it might appear just from looking at those life expectancy figures.  Also, most of the female members of my family live into their ’80s, even if the male ones have an odd tendency to die under strange and often newsworthy circumstances (ask me about that if we ever get drunk together).  That having been said, a fair number of relatives of both sexes have contracted cancer or more-exotic terminal diseases, some of them at early ages (like the maternal uncle who died of leukemia in his late teens), and I’ve had several close brushes with sudden death (two of them of the “hushed-nurse-saying-I-shouldn’t-be-alive” variety), so I don’t think my familial or personal life expectancy is quite as high as that of the general population.

And thereby hangs the tale.  As I’ve stated before, I have absolutely no intention of ever enduring chemotherapy; if I develop cancer I’m going to seek out palliative care, put my affairs in order and let the disease take its course.  I’ve seen more than my share of people I love spending their last days hooked to machines in sterile institutions, dying in infernal contraptions surrounded by shouting doctors and nurses pounding on their chests and shooting chemicals into their veins, or electrically shocking their soon-to-be-corpses, instead of expiring quietly in their own beds surrounded by loved ones.  So I have a DNR order; if it’s respected I will die when I die rather than being dragged violently back across the threshold because mere humans have decided I’m not allowed to leave this plane yet.  Furthermore, though the more strictly-rational among my readers may scoff, I’ve never claimed to be strictly rational; my several close brushes with death (and a frank assessment of the chances I have taken in the past and those I continue to take on a regular basis) have led me to feel that I’m living on borrowed time, and Death knows that “when he at last come to collect me it will be a rendezvous rather than a capture“.  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.  He’s passed me by on several occasions when he probably should have taken me, and I’m not such a fool that I think he’s going to keep doing that indefinitely.

Nor would I want him to.  I’ve clearly stated my philosophy on this subject many times, including in my fiction; it’s mortality which gives life meaning, and I think it’s a bit rude for those whose dance is done to keep hogging the floor rather than making “room for the new dancers who are always waiting for their turn.”  And besides all of that, I’m far too independent to be able to enjoy a life of decrepitude and dependence, and far too vain to desire a life in which I’m no longer the object of desire.  The song below has always been among the larger group of my favorites, and I don’t feel any differently about it at 50 than I did at 15; when I go, I want people to still be able to honestly talk about how beautiful I was.  Shallow?  Probably.  Silly?  Maybe.  But my friends will tell you I rarely ask for anything, so I don’t think it’s greedy of me to ask that no one begrudge my wish to not have to endure years or decades of life after the things I like best about it are gone.

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