Monday April 4, 2022; 6:07 PM EDT
- To be, or not to be: that is the question, Hamlet says, in Shakespeare's most quoted one-liner. After a slew of less remembered lines, Hamlet comes around to the matter, or the non-matter, of the not to be side of his question, and the "dread of something after death, the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns."#
- I've been thinking, perhaps too much, about this lately. Not about death, but about life's absence. Of what it means, or—following Hamlet—it doesn't. #
- As happens when one reaches the final demographic (more than ten years ago in this, my 75th year), more and more people one has known for a long time die off. Three I've written about recently are Chris Locke, Kim Cameron and David Hodskins. David is the latest, having died just two weeks ago. I have trouble dealing with his death because being dead is so out of character for him. He was, as one of his other friends put it, intense. He also knew so much I'd love to call on right now, as I write about him. Same goes for the others. But I can't, because they're all dead.#
- Except they're not. #
- See, death is not a state. You can't be dead, because being presumes existence. That's Hamlet's point. In death we no longer exist. We are not to be. Our lives are written on the whiteboard of existence wiped clean when we die. Everything we ever felt, said, wanted, experienced, loved, and knew is all gone. We do leave artifacts: possessions, writings, artistic works, recordings. Those are mortal too, but they are also not us. As beings we are, or are not.#
- Why are there essents rather than nothing? Heidegger asks, somewhere. Essents are what exists. (Or so I recall, as a philosophy major lapsed more than half a century.) Nothingness, about which Sartre devoted half a book, also doesn't exist. There is not a ness to nothing. Or a thing. In death we are thingless. We also don't inhabit Hamlet's "undiscover'd country" from which no traveler returns.#
- Think of life after death as life before birth: as pure possibility.#
- We are embodied creatures, unable to understand anything that lacks existence. Consider prepositions: over, under, within, alongside, behind, through, during, before, after, following, since, underneath. All assume being—existence—in both place and time. Also movement, and travel. Both are essential for humans who be. None of that stuff applies to humans whose being has ended. It just can't. We may speak of ended persons as "departed," "passed" or "gone," but they are none of those, because existence is presumed, and they no longer exist.#
- Those of us with a religious faith—and I am one of them—may contemplate some form of personal existence after our human form ceases to exist. Nearly all of us presume in ourselves a soul, a faith St. Paul calls "the substance of things hoped for" and "the evidence of things unseen." But there is no proof of the scientific kind that the souls that are each of us will go on living as reborn humans or as eternal disembodied souls after we die. Soul itself is also not a scientific term, or recognized by any fully respected science.#
- One of my past occupations was working for the Psychical Research Foundation, which was dedicated at the time to the scientific study of the possibility of life after death. While the PRF found a lot of interesting stuff that maybe suggested that yeah, there is interesting stuff going on, there was no proof beyond shadows of doubt that life as we know it in the here and now continues to exist.#
- And yet I believe in the human soul. I have to, because I know the me I experience is other, if not more, than my body alone. I believe the other I am, and we all are, is timeless and incorporeal, not reducible to our bodies; nor does it require, as our bodies do, the ego to survive. There is a timeless reality that neither bodies nor egos can understand. It is what Camoldoli monks call the mystery. #
- To probe that mystery, it does not help to ask where we come from or where we go, because those questions presume space and place and time. Don't ask the same of the universe. Is there any answer that makes full sense of what came before the Big Bang, a mere 13.5 billion years ago? Does it make any more sense to ask what will happen after the universe dies trillions of years from now, after the second law of thermodynamics plays out and entropy wins, as each of our own bodies models in the world right now?#
- What was before Whitman's "huge first Nothing, the vapor from the nostrils of death"? Whitman says he saw it. He was there before it, knew well his own egotism, and in a soliloquy deeper than Hamlet's (read it here) said "All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me. Now I stand on this spot with my soul."#
- After Whitman died, scientists wanted to study his brain. But somebody fucked that up by dropping it, so it splattered like a melon on the floor. But that brain was not Whitman any more than the craps he took throughout his life. None of us are any parts of our bodies after our lives end. We may bury the bodies of the dead, or preserve them, or burn them and keep or scatter the ashes. All of those acts are ways to remember and respect lost lives. But none of what we call remains belong to a soul that cannot own a damned thing. Pure absence is the damnation.#
- Death is a feature. Death makes life. It is what Aristotle and McLuhan called a formal cause: one of design, one that forms us. #
- I believe all our souls are formed from of vapor from death's nostrils. Death blows us into a body. We then take a ride in that body, running, walking, stumbling, flying through space and time, on the sphere in space we call a world. Then death inhales us at the end of the ride, and we are re-formed into existence free of time, space and place.#
- And if I'm wrong about any or all of those assumptions, and the faith in which I make them, I am content to have contributed to life more than I arrived with when death snorted me here.#