(no subject)
Pardon me while I work this out outloud. Sorry if you have heard this before from me: I am still working on it.
Once you pass some chronological or life-event goalpost, your mortality asserts itself. Death is not some vague distant event, it's a task you're gonna have to do, whether you want to or not. At times, it looks terrifying, when it comes clearly into focus, that cold fanged shadow that stalks you, but most of the time, it's a nagging annoying chore you'd really rather avoid.
It feels like loss, akin to the loss of your loved ones in the past - they went and left you alone with missing them, an hollow ache. This makes no sense, of course, because once you die, if anyone loves you, they experience the loss, not you. Loss is a space that you move in and out of, as you remember familiar people, places and things that are permanently out of your sight. In this loss space, the sense of their absence lives.
I decided it was self-pity. Solipsism. Poor me, boo hoo, I'm so valuable, and I have to die, and the wonderfulness that is me will go "poof". Ehem. I know how that sounds, by the way.
The key to thinking myself out of this morass is asking if I am really valuable because I'm unique. That's what they tell you, that you're a unique individual, hence valuable, that your point of view has value because only you can produce it. What if my value is as a vessel for a larger task or event or system? If my contribution can't be an individual, what if I am part of the larger fabric, and my job is to be that strand that repeats what the last strand did, but in a different place and time?
I was walking toward the metro after a play last week at about 10:30 at night, and when we looked straight ahead, there was the Capitol dome ablaze in lights, like a monument to capitalism and the creaky elegance of old DC, and it struck me how many pairs of compatriots had been in some "capital of everything" at night, walking back from some entertainment - drinking, bear-fights, wrestling, gambling, plays, music, etc - and looked up to see the main government center, altar, grand pooba's tent, durga statue, whatever is central, ablaze with light and emblematic of their nation. And pairs of us had been doing this over and over for thousands of year, thousands of people, thousands of centers of thousands of empires.
So maybe my job is not to be unique, to think the Thought Never Thought Before. Maybe I am the next in line to think the nearly identical thought as the last umpty-ump people in the same situation as mine; that the pattern is the important part, the overall scheme and how we play our part. When I die, it's no matter, because when I got to the part where I was supposed to be, walking at the right time of night, facing in the right direction, I became the vessel for the thought that needed to be thought there, that was inevitably going to be thought there.
If the repetition is the meaning, then my death is important partly because it happens. When I get to that place where my death is going to happen, I will think the thoughts and have the feelings that millions have had before me at the moment of their deaths, just as I should.
Is that completely mad. I dunno; might be.
Once you pass some chronological or life-event goalpost, your mortality asserts itself. Death is not some vague distant event, it's a task you're gonna have to do, whether you want to or not. At times, it looks terrifying, when it comes clearly into focus, that cold fanged shadow that stalks you, but most of the time, it's a nagging annoying chore you'd really rather avoid.
It feels like loss, akin to the loss of your loved ones in the past - they went and left you alone with missing them, an hollow ache. This makes no sense, of course, because once you die, if anyone loves you, they experience the loss, not you. Loss is a space that you move in and out of, as you remember familiar people, places and things that are permanently out of your sight. In this loss space, the sense of their absence lives.
I decided it was self-pity. Solipsism. Poor me, boo hoo, I'm so valuable, and I have to die, and the wonderfulness that is me will go "poof". Ehem. I know how that sounds, by the way.
The key to thinking myself out of this morass is asking if I am really valuable because I'm unique. That's what they tell you, that you're a unique individual, hence valuable, that your point of view has value because only you can produce it. What if my value is as a vessel for a larger task or event or system? If my contribution can't be an individual, what if I am part of the larger fabric, and my job is to be that strand that repeats what the last strand did, but in a different place and time?
I was walking toward the metro after a play last week at about 10:30 at night, and when we looked straight ahead, there was the Capitol dome ablaze in lights, like a monument to capitalism and the creaky elegance of old DC, and it struck me how many pairs of compatriots had been in some "capital of everything" at night, walking back from some entertainment - drinking, bear-fights, wrestling, gambling, plays, music, etc - and looked up to see the main government center, altar, grand pooba's tent, durga statue, whatever is central, ablaze with light and emblematic of their nation. And pairs of us had been doing this over and over for thousands of year, thousands of people, thousands of centers of thousands of empires.
So maybe my job is not to be unique, to think the Thought Never Thought Before. Maybe I am the next in line to think the nearly identical thought as the last umpty-ump people in the same situation as mine; that the pattern is the important part, the overall scheme and how we play our part. When I die, it's no matter, because when I got to the part where I was supposed to be, walking at the right time of night, facing in the right direction, I became the vessel for the thought that needed to be thought there, that was inevitably going to be thought there.
If the repetition is the meaning, then my death is important partly because it happens. When I get to that place where my death is going to happen, I will think the thoughts and have the feelings that millions have had before me at the moment of their deaths, just as I should.
Is that completely mad. I dunno; might be.