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.
Posts Tagged ‘Thanatopsis’
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged left-right myth, politicians, psychology, Thanatopsis on December 1, 2017| 9 Comments »
Thanatopsis
Posted in Holidays, Philosophy, tagged ethics, holidays, paganism, psychology, robots, Thanatopsis 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.
Die Young, Stay Pretty
Posted in Biography, Philosophy, Q & A, The Dark Side, tagged anecdote, disease, psychology, statistics, Thanatopsis, video 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.
A Necessary End
Posted in Holidays, Philosophy, tagged A Moral Cancer, crypto-moralism, disease, holidays, paganism, psychology, Thanatopsis on November 1, 2015| 30 Comments »
It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (II, ii)
Just recently, we were once again subjected to the silly spectacle of grown men sonorously pronouncing that yet another of life’s simple pleasures leads to an “increased risk” of cancer…the implication being that one ought to avoid the stuff as though it were poison. Dr. Brooke Magnanti (whose judgment I trust much more than I would that of the WHO) assures me that the risk is small indeed:
A far smaller percentage of people who eat processed meat regularly will get cancer from it compared to the percentage who get cancer that smoke regularly…If it had been better reported, the news should not have alarmed people any more than knowing that sun exposure, hormone therapy of any kind including the Pill, wild garlic, alcohol, and salted fish also definitely cause cancer, in sufficient doses…
Since I’ve been on oral estrogen for over 20 years and don’t actually eat that much bacon or sausage, I have absolutely no plans to make any changes in my diet whatsoever, any more than I would due to any other nutritional proclamation by “experts” (which is to say somewhere between zero and not at all). While I can think of many good reasons to alter one’s behavior, a slightly elevated risk of dying from one cause rather than another is not among them. Colorectal cancer is probably not a particularly pleasant way to go, but guess what? Most of the other possible routes aren’t any better, and some are much worse. As I wrote in “The Day of the Dead“,
…death is the one inescapable experience of material existence. You will die, and so will I, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it…yet vast numbers are so obsessed with this simple and indisputable fact that they waste much of their time on Earth in a struggle they absolutely cannot win. In a pathetic attempt to stretch their allotted quantity of days just a little further, many are willing to dramatically reduce the quality of the whole…
If you really believe that it’s worth turning every meal into an ordeal (or at least a math problem) for the rest of your life in order to buy a ticket for a raffle whose prize is an extra year or two of senility and decrepitude at the end, be my guest; it’s your life and you are free to waste it as you like. But please don’t expect me to join you; I’ve got better things to do with my time here on this plane than to spend it fleeing death. Once a year on this day, I drink a toast to the Reaper and remind him that I’m not afraid of him; when he at last come to collect me it will be a rendezvous rather than a capture, a meeting (whether anticipated or unexpected) of old friends rather than the cornering of a terrified animal by a hunter who has never in the history of the world ever failed to run down his prey.
Even This Shall Pass Away
Posted in Holidays, Philosophy, tagged anecdote, Aphrodite, BDSM, dirty, fantasy, holidays, Ladies of the Night, law, Mexico, paganism, psychology, rape, Thanatopsis, violence vs. sex workers on November 1, 2014| 58 Comments »
Lady fairest ever seen
Was the bride he crowned his queen.
Pillowed on the marriage-bed,
Whispering to his soul, he said,
“Though a bridegroom never pressed
Dearer bosom to his breast,
Mortal flesh must come to clay:
Even this shall pass away.” – Theodore Tilton, “The King’s Ring”
Every year on the Day of the Dead I write about why the holiday exists, why it is necessary, and why ruining the quality of life in an attempt to increase its quantity is both foolish and ultimately futile. To those who have only started reading me this year, or who have only read a few selected pieces over a longer time, this might seem a strange topic for a harlot; one might expect death to be the farthest pole from my topic, except perhaps for mentioning it as an extreme manifestation of whore stigma or when paying my respects on December 17th. But in truth, it’s both predictable and appropriate on a personal, professional and philosophical level.
From a personal standpoint, I would probably have written often on this topic even had I never become a card-carrying prostitute; 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, and I struggled with depression for over twenty years until at long last sex work helped me to get a handle on it. My favorite books, stories and even songs mostly tend to involve death or other melancholy elements, and just look at the stories I’ve published on this blog and in my book (or just the cover of the damned thing, for goddess’ sake!) So if you’ve read more than a handful of my (burnt) offerings and were still surprised that I sometimes think and write about death, you just haven’t been paying attention.
Professionally speaking, I must point out that whores often deal with the dark side of human nature. Fear and sex are inextricably intertwined, and men who have rape fantasies or other “bad” urges may seek out sex workers to help them explore these in a safe and non-judgmental space; others, unfortunately, may seek out unwilling sex workers for the same reason, and the only “safety” they seek is their own relative safety from legal consequences. Dominatrices and some fetish workers specialize in dealing with the darker aspects of human sexuality, and in criminalized, semi-criminalized and quasi-criminalized systems virtually all sex workers (especially those who work the street) are at a much greater risk of violence or even death than their domesticated amateur sisters. And nobody who is afraid of death, or who views it as an unpleasant subject improper for polite company, could do the work I do now; take a look at a few items in any of my TW3 columns and I think you’ll see what I mean.
It is no accident that sex workers are among the most dedicated worshippers of the Mexican death-goddess, Santa Muerte, and that many of the myths surrounding pagan whore-goddesses (who were sometimes war-goddesses as well) involved violence and death; even long before criminalization of sex work was the norm, it was recognized that sex itself comes from the same hidden parts of the human psyche as those less-pleasant things. Sex originates from the deepest wellsprings of life, but so does death; the latter is no less a biological process than the former. Sex brings new life into the world, but death sustains that life; every one of us (yes, even vegans) continues his existence at the expense of the other lives we consume every single day in order to keep our internal fires burning and repair our damaged or worn-out tissues with materials stolen from the dead. Not even plants are innocent of this colossal carnage; since some substances (such as phosphorus) are comparatively scarce, all life would soon grind to a halt were the constant supply of corpses to be choked off. Nor is sex itself all moonlight and love songs; in many species it’s a brutal, coercive affair, and even among humans it can never be purged of its bestial and terrifying aspects, no matter how much feminists and other puritans insist that it can. Sex and death are our constant reminders that for all our pretensions we are still animals; no wonder those uncomfortable with that fact try to disguise and sanitize both of them, to hide them from the children and speak about them in whispers, to bind them in legal codes and bury them under layers of ritual. But no matter how deeply we bury our sexualities they reassert themselves, and no matter how diligently we try to delay death, it will come when it will come. Both are impossible to ignore and impossible to prevent, and human society would be a lot better off if we learned to accept both as indisputable facts of material existence. 
The Dance of Death
Posted in Holidays, Philosophy, tagged holidays, imaginative fiction, psychology, Thanatopsis on November 1, 2013| 33 Comments »
You might be a king or a little street sweeper,
But sooner or later you dance with the Reaper. – Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey
Today is the Day of the Dead. It has been called by many names over the centuries (Samhain, All Hallows Day and El Dia de los Muertos are but a few) and it has been observed at a number of different points on the calendar, but that hardly matters: Death is the one great universal experience, the sacrament shared by every dynamic thing from the most ephemeral of microbes to the stars and galaxies themselves, the inescapable conclusion to every form of existence not already dead in its immutability. As such, the day on which we celebrate it is immaterial, though mid-autumn to me seems a properly symbolic time.
In last year’s column I discussed the irrational fear of death, which has increased dramatically as people have become less accustomed to it (due to both the decreasing violence of human life and the increasing disconnection of human existence from the natural world). Many live their entire lives in dread of it; they submit to any tyrant who falsely promises to delay it for a while, stunt and warp the development of their progeny in a foolish attempt to “protect” them from it, and deny themselves many of the pleasures of life, even to the point of restricting themselves to the consumption of life-forms they can pretend weren’t validly alive in the first place. To these people the traditional depiction of Death, a terrifying figure who cuts down human lives like so much ripe wheat, is the most meaningful one; they see it as a monster, a pitiless destroyer to be fled for as long as possible no matter what the cost.
But this is not the only depiction of Death we find in the iconography of our species. Though its comparative distance from modern daily life has resulted in most developing a paralyzing dread of it, that same distance has allowed wiser heads a sense of perspective; in recent centuries some depictions of Thanatos have become more complex and nuanced, even positive. Now that it no longer stalks our lives as closely as it did for most of history, some have even begun to realize that a world without it would be cold and static: life and growth require change, and change must eventually lead to dissolution. A world without death would be one without development or advancement, a world as still and inert as an insect trapped in amber. And because this is not such a world, death can also be something else: a release. We have learned to prolong life, but often at the cost of sickness, torment and debility; all too often, modern medicine is nothing more than a cheat, denying to Death an organism which Life has abandoned. At such time, Death may become a longed-for companion, a lover who, after a long flirtation, one is at last eager to embrace.
Obviously, neither extreme is desirable for the majority of a human life; our species itself would be doomed if too many young people were overly enamored of the Ever-Smiling One, and we’ve already seen what happens when an entire culture hides under its collective bed and refuses to risk even the most casual encounter with It. The Dance of Life is, paradoxically, also a dance with Death; the steps are many and intricate, and we change partners many times as we move across the decades. And when the time for the final figure comes at last we should not make fools of ourselves with spastic capers in a vain attempt to change the pattern, but rather take the long-anticipated partner’s hand and pass gracefully from the floor to make room for the new dancers who are always waiting for their turn. 
The Day of the Dead
Posted in History, Holidays, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged censorship, cult of the child, Day of the Dead, harm reduction, holidays, hysteria, Mexico, psychology, Thanatopsis on November 1, 2012| 50 Comments »
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. – Arthur C. Clarke, 2001
As I wrote yesterday, last night would have been a fine one for trick-or-treating, were most children still allowed to roam unsupervised as we did; unfortunately, our decaying society is far too obsessed with “safety” to let the kids be kids. It’s a peculiar paradox: the Child Cultists enshrine an idealized, romanticized view of childhood “innocence” to the point of trying to force it upon young adults who have long since grown out of it, yet are so frightened of the imaginary haunts their timid souls see in every shadow that they cheat actual children of the joys of childhood.
That self-defeating retreat from the world is especially poignant today, the one our ancestors set aside to remind themselves of the omnipresence and inescapability of death. As I pointed out in last year’s Halloween column, every last one of us will join the departed majority in the briefest of moments (cosmically speaking); fear of death is therefore futile because death is the one inescapable experience of material existence. You will die, and so will I, and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it…yet vast numbers are so obsessed with this simple and indisputable fact that they waste much of their time on Earth in a struggle they absolutely cannot win. In a pathetic attempt to stretch their allotted quantity of days just a little further, many are willing to dramatically reduce the quality of the whole. And while it’s certainly their right to use their own lives this way, it is not their right to inflict upon their children a lifetime of paralyzing dread of every activity which might conceivably end in the grave just a little bit sooner than hiding indoors would, no matter how remote the possibility of its occurrence. Such an existence is not living, but vegetation.
“In the midst of life we are in death,” reads the familiar text from the Book of Common Prayer; people used to understand that, and though individual responses to it ranged from the hedonistic to the morbidly religious, practically nobody was in denial about it until a couple of decades ago. What happened? How did we go from understanding this to ignoring it like small children with our hands over our ears shouting, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU BLAHBLAHBLAH”? I think there are several causes, the most prominent of which is Western culture’s increasing urbanization; when one lives on a farm one sees death almost every day, but it’s possible for an urban office worker to go months without seeing any identifiable carcass larger than that of a cockroach. Even most of the meat eaten by modern urbanites doesn’t really look like part of a dead animal; the one exception, chicken, is increasingly encountered in the form of nuggets, chunks or “boneless, skinless breast portions”. Another cause is the fact that our society is a lot less violent than it used to be; people live longer and far fewer are killed by direct action of man or beast than in centuries past. And while that’s a good thing it has a bad side effect: the less familiar a phenomenon, the more likely people are to view it with irrational fear.
Neither of these social changes is likely to be reversed anytime soon (and I hope the second is never reversed), but there is a third cause, no less important than the other two, which we could easily undo if we really wanted to. And that is the disappearance of cultural rituals designed to remind us of exactly what I’ve discussed here. Every culture has rites, celebrations and observances to honor the dead; in Mexico, for example, today is El Dia de los Muertos, from which this column takes its name. But while the Mexicans and many other peoples have continued these traditions to the present day, most people of European descent (including Americans and Australians) have tamed and neutered All Hallows Day until it’s nothing more than another excuse for overindulgence. And though we once understood that an annual dose of controlled fear and mild chaos helped children to cope with the existence of Mortem Imperator Mundi in much the same way vaccines protect them from disease, we have forgotten the former (and many of us the latter as well). In past times, The Day of the Dead was just a formal observance of what most people already recognized, a ceremonial declaration of the omnipresence of death. But now that the more mundane and routine encounters with the Grim Reaper are so much less common for the average Westerner than they were for his grandfather, we need the ritual – in all of its morbid glory – more than ever.
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