Читать книгу Danse Macabre - N. Thomas Johnson-Medland - Страница 7

I wonder why when every single human being on the planet—and every other living thing as well—is moving closer and closer to death, we do not talk about death more often. I also wonder why we do not spend more time trying to make our deaths more meaningful.

For the most part, we spend our time avoiding death at all costs, and avoiding any mention of or thought about its reality. But you know it has got to be impacting everything we do or think. Just because we do not mention something or process that thing verbally does not mean that that thing will not drive and inform everything we do. All it means is that it will drive it and inform it from the subconscious world. From that place, we are less likely to gain power over our fears. From that place—the subconscious—we are more likely to be eaten alive by the dragons we have repressed.

* * *

The idea of death stalks us at every turn.

* * *

It may actually be Death Himself that stalks us at every turn.

* * *

Whether it is the idea of death or Death Himself, it does not matter. We are stalked throughout our whole lives by the notion, the idea, the feeling, the reality and the imminent haunting dream that we are going to “not be alive” someday. Someday, what we are now will either not be at all or will somehow be different—very different. Someday we will die.

We are stalked by this at every turn. We are all stalked by this and yet we fail to talk about being stalked. We live in a silent fear and collusion when it comes to death: “I won’t talk about it if you don’t.”

It is time that we talk about death and the fact that we will all die.

* * *

I have been swimming through words my whole life. They have been under me, over me, and even within me. Everything—even until now—has been a ripple on the surface of their water; a disturbance in their force; a means of waking me up. Everything has led up to this “now”. All of the words, emotions, experiences, and processes that I have seen and handled and lived among coalesce to make me who I am. All that stuff is still in me. Some of those words are about death.

I believe words are a gift for us to use to add meaning to the things we have experienced. Words are a gift to help us unite with other people; unite behind words that can reveal that we are very much the same with some slight variations that make us different. Words are bridges to the separateness among us that makes us one.

* * *

A new universe explodes into consciousness every moment in cosmic time. Pieces of God wake up to remembrance, every time an eye opens to the morning. The whole of creation swims in words and is awakened to itself with every fluttering breath. Each time someone is aware, God has a breath.

In this scenario death is but the closing of an eye. Life is but the opening of consciousness to what it means to be awake—awake and with words. “Now” is life and being awake. This moment has death just beside it, just next to it. But, this moment is itself life.

* * *

Words can help us paint simple and exotic images about the encounters we have and the meaning of these encounters. Words can help us encounter death and uncover the meaning it has in life. We would need to sound those words, first. Then, we would need to share them. This would require we lay down the silent fear and collusion we have surrounding words about death.

Being with over 1500 hospice patients and their families during the approach of death, I have seen again and again how bringing words up and out of the darkness of our interior lives and into the light of day, helps to make us whole and integrated. We are healthier when we are able to allow these things to come up and out of us, and not repress them inside forever.

* * *

Somehow we have lost our words about dying. We have stopped having meaningful discussion and elaborate myths about what goes on and how things unwind. Death has become the great silence. It is a place and a journey we refuse to utter.

* * *

I started out wanting to just tell you stories about death from hospice patients and their families. Then I realized that death was tied to every assumption and hope that we have as human beings and that we would end up having to discuss the dozens of layers of meaning in our lives because death was attached to all of them—death is attached to everything. Death and the idea of death drives everything we do or think or say or that we fail to do or think or say. I guess that may be why we go mute about the subject.

Death is attached to everything.

* * *

Bear with me, the conversation will become muddled. We not only want to avoid the topic, but when we do talk about it, the air gets thick with confusion.

Perhaps it is because death uncovers the great fear in all of us. Perhaps it is because we are unprepared for how death will approach us. Perhaps it is because we are not sure if our stories of death are right or wrong; or if their stories about death are more right or more wrong. Whatever the reason, we do not talk about death much—if at all. And yet, death is a way we must all go.

Our neighbors may not hold the same set of words about what death means. We believe our death is a bursting into resurrection. They believe our death is a becoming of dirt. The other ones—over there—believe that our death is just another way to get back in line to come back to life as something else. Rather than just allowing multiple stories about how things may go; it is just better not to talk about it. Or so we believe.

* * *

We have gotten silent about a lot of things because of this diversity. Who wants to discuss their looming fears with people who have such divergent beliefs? Why risk? But we are going to encounter the rich diversity of belief and story more frequently these days as our technology has made us one village, one people almost overnight. We have had no time to figure out how to live in this new reality.

If we get silent in the face of this great fear, we pass nothing on to our progeny or our surviving race about what it is we are feeling. We deny them the ability to know what is normal in human experience. This kind of silence robs mankind of depth. It is not the silence of contemplation and love. It is the silence of fear. Speaking into the fear is often enough to lift the heaviness of its pall. Not just for us, but for all who come after.

The fear is not simply about feeling unprepared to die, or sharing divergent beliefs about death. The fear is also about feeling unprepared to talk about, contemplate, feel anything about death itself; unprepared because we have not allowed ourselves to playfully and routinely regard death (let alone the mystery of living). In light of this global village of information that we have been thrust into overnight, what could I possibly add to the discussion around death—or anything for that matter?

This uncovers another fear, the fear that talking about death will cause death to happen. Just listen to how people soften their voice to a whisper when they say the words: “cancer”, “death”, “terminal”. The very sound of the words makes us shutter. We impose magic on the words. Magic that does not bear out in principle. Magic that is tied to fear.

* * *

The only sure thing that will come to pass in the life of anything born is that it will die. Living things die. That death hides behind the silence of a myriad of fears.

* * *

Swimming along side and just to the rear of these fears is the fear that hides behind them—pushing them out into plain view. It is the fear of living; the fear of truly being alive. The fear of living hides behind the fear of contemplating or communicating death and the fear of hastening death. It will not let us live because it fears making too much noise in the presence of death. As if it would become a target of death itself. Having a “Zorba-like ethos” or “joy of living mentality” somehow taunts death and all of the other dark, negative forces and attributes of life. If you enjoy life too much, it will surely be taken from you.

Without a regard for death, without bringing it up, without truly living we will never be able to be awaken and live in the now. Our fears of death keep us already dead. Numbed, we sit behind a curtain, viewing death and calling it life. How have we become so mixed up? Why do we choose to live with unresolved fears?

* * *

It is time to carve out some words about death. It is time to uncover some of our fears and look at this thing that will affect all of us.

I will place some words I have found and some words I have formed into a space with enough room around them so we can look at them and see them clearly. Perhaps gain visual access to some notions we had never seen before; maybe hear something old in a new way. Maybe be able to dispel a thing or two that does not fit.

We have become a global village very quickly. We can know way too much, way too quickly. With the onslaught of constant information we have lost our ability to process and lost the time we need to be able to process all of the things we now are able to know in an instant. We need to sit back and craft some words and tell some tales about the things we now are able to know. We need to process the immense world we have at our fingertips twenty four hours every day.

We have not always made the best choices in how to deal with this much omniscience in this short amount of time. It would be good to take this seriously. Maybe we can do some of that here.

* * *

We need to make some words about death and our fears of death; and, we need to share them.

* * *

It may be their first showing for some of us. The words about death and the fear of death, that is. Others will simply be seeing them again—yet anew. Whether we are able to remove those fears we have uttered above will be up to our tenacity—the tenacity of an engaged and steadily paced reader. My job will be to be faithful to giving up new and used words about death; words with ample space for the viewing and feeling. Words that will call you out into the open—for just a bit—to be exposed to potentially new and awkward ways of putting words together; and, along with that, new and awkward ways to put ideas and beliefs together as well.

If our words can help us to remove some of our fears, we will have climbed to the top of the mountain of what it means to be human. We will have summated a critical obstacle.

Many people will take shots at what I say. My aim is to lure you into the conversation; so I am ready for the dialogue that comes with that.

* * *

“Memento mori” is Latin for remembering our death. Remembering that we will someday die—perhaps even today—can build will and passion into our lives. Remembering that we will die can cause us to live by reminding us that we will not always have the opportunity to live.

The desert ascetics were often quoted as saying “Remember your Death.” It became watchwords of the mystical desert experience. Do everything as if you were going to die today. Keep that reality before you as a guide for helping you to make choices. Be prepared to enter the final act, give a good performance. This was a way of talking about death.

* * *

When I first heard this aphorism—“remember your death”—I thought it was the tragic mantra of under-sexed monks. I figured that their life without physical intimacy had caused them to go mad and that they moved ahead in life on the wings of their own fears, repressions, and bitterness. Physical abstinence had caused these folks a morbid depression—sort of sounding pious. I have come to know that that was not the case. Remembering our death is a valuable way to live.

Death is nothing but a transformation of the seed into the plant and the plant back into the seed. It is the leaf becoming the dirt and the dirt becoming leaf. It is the heart becoming spirit and the spirit becoming heart. It is man becoming anew in every possible way that he can.

We would do well to remember that this sort of change is coming for all of us. This change is coming; and, what it is that lies on the other side of this change is not something that we know about with exactitude or any certitude. It is just speculation; so, beware.

* * *

When we look at the impact that knowledge of our own singular death has on our individual lives, we should recognize that it prompts responses. When we look at the impact knowledge of our death as a species has on our species, we should recognize that it prompts responses. These responses are our beliefs, stories, and actions that we build up to avoid the tragedy of our own mortality. Ernest Becker identified that “culture” is the development of our response to our death anxiety.

Becker has reported that when we develop cultural structures and paradigms (religious or social) they are all really getting at somehow building a layer between us and our fear of death. We are piling up all sorts of debris of belief to protect us from immediate contact with death itself. We are building a buffer zone.

In this view, we are always addressing the presence of our own death. We build it into everything we do. All of our movements in this life are to do some great thing that will preclude us from the common misery of death. In this instance, the Desert Fathers were not so much giving us a new commandment, but actually identifying a subconscious mechanism that exists in all of us. Everything we do is at some level a response to our death anxiety.

We remember our death so much that it drives us to do and be in different ways at every turn. Our living is nothing more than our preoccupation with our dying. Some of us are better at pretending this is not true or concealing the truth of this reality than others are.

What we may learn from Becker’s foray into the desert arena of thinking is that we should pay attention to what we are doing in life because this will identify what we believe about death and how we are coping with our ensuing demise. Everything we do or say or hold within us reveals and betrays our response to our fear of death or what we can call the death anxiety.

In a society or country that is genuinely multi-cultural we have some complications surrounding this individual and social mechanism. If we are just simply one tribe, we develop one culture. This one culture is our agreed upon responses to our death anxiety—as a collective unit. It may or may not include a god or divine being, dances, medicine, songs, stories, diets, art, and other strata of praxis and dogma. We build a tower against our dying. The stronger and the higher the tower against death, the better we feel about ourselves and our one culture. It is the best; therefore. Our culture and our tower of belief is the best.

Now, add to that one culture and tribe, hundreds of other cultures and tribes. They are all living side by side. Some of the praxis and dogma that the cultures develop are in direct conflict and opposition to the praxis and dogma installed by other tribes in that same country or region. They are all the best (at least in their own estimations). They have all built towers of belief that are the best. In our linear world; however, not every one can be the best. There must be a BEST of the best.

This conflict necessitates either a battle to determine which culture is correct, or an isolation that simply ignores everything outside of its own beliefs and structures. There is yet a third response, and it is the response I believe we have struck on in our post-modern American society. This third response is to develop an overarching culture that trumps the lesser cultures and beliefs. We build a secret culture that we all really hold to; while still giving allegiance to our own one true culture.

We build a different tower of belief. This one we build with all of the other surrounding cultures. Then we can call that tower the BEST and we will still all be right by proximity and connection.

Now you get a hint of why people do not talk about death in a digital age. It is connected to our whole worldview and the stability or collapse of that worldview.

* * *

Out of Ernest Becker’s theories developed a following. One particular approach to the issues that Becker analyzed comes from TMT or Terror Management Theory. This theory holds that our death anxiety causes enough of a cognitive dissonance in us that—as societies and as individuals—we build up buffers to the fear. In society we call these buffers cultures: religions, beliefs, groupings, clubs and the like. In individuals we call this buffer a sense of self-esteem or self worth.

In either category (societal or individual) we interpret people and groups that are contrary to our culture and our self-esteem as a threat to our stability. We tend to believe things that are different from us are wrong so we can bolster our own belief. “This is good; that is bad,” is clearly one way we express this threat.

This theory is clearly worth looking into as the social scientists involved are highly credible individuals and have wonderful empirical findings to back up the theories. People fear death. Varying levels of that fear change who we are as individuals and as a people.

* * *

This will not be a linear discussion about death. This will be an amble, a wander, and a dance through, in and around all of the transformations in our life that we have shied away from. We will dance with death, we will dance with changes. Don’t expect anything usual. Dance with me among the life that happens around the great transformation in dying into what comes next. Live with me for a while among the things that happen around the dying.

I will share some tales that come right from the bedside of the dying. These things happened around me while I held hands with dying people. They happened as I worked with uncovering the layers and layers of meaning behind peoples’ fears and loves.

I will also share with you some of my own brushes with death. How has death impacted me? Where has he reared his head in my life? How have I gotten along amid that reality?

I will also drag out some tales from the ken of cultural development; things that cultures have said or expressed about death. How have artists have pictured death: painted it in word, canvas, or stone. I will also share a collection of poems about grieving, loss, and death.

Given that the world has become a single village (one that we are desperately trying to figure out) I would ask you to learn to suspend judgment and disbelief. Listen to the things that make us different. Do not simply brush away another persons beliefs or attempt at culture.

Remember, the one thing that we all are living toward and leaning into in this world—whether we are butcher, baker, candlestick maker, theologian, prostitute, congressman, or beggar—is that we are moving toward our death. Everything we do is somehow wrapped up, connected to, and impacted by that notion.

Wander with me, for a while if you will. You will never be the same. If any of these words that are gathered here can prod you into thinking about your own death and what you believe about it, and how that fits into other divergent belief, then I will have succeeded in what I had hoped to accomplish.