Welcome to Issue 3 of this publication, which features three essays addressing the question What is Love?
In "Reflections on that lovely bright spot," Mary Vuk Sussman surveys popular culture references to the L-word and discusses how love of God and exercise may both be healthy for human life. She decides that love is a "bright spot of interest" that pulls us outside of ourselves and enriches our experience of our self in the world. You will also learn, as she did, that Catholics contemplating religious images while receiving electric shocks are better off than atheists in terms of the amount of pain reported...
In "Love analogies," I propose several comparisons that may offer new, or old, insights into how love operates. Plato, through Socrates in The Symposium, argued that the spirit Love was a scrappy pursuer of wisdom and an intermediary between gods and men, comprising a sort of connective tissue of brotherhood. The sense that love is a force for greater human connectivity is both an old and new idea, with tantalizing non-random results of random number generators suggesting to the folks at the Global Consciousness Project that there may be something to the idea of a global collective consciousness. If love involves a deep connectivity coupled with an urge to completion, perhaps we can learn something about human-scale relationships by considering the relationships of particles and forces at the subatomic and cosmic scales...
In "In pursuit of an operational definition of love," Tina Kemp puts forward, though subsequently discounts as too incomplete, a model for how to gauge how much one really loves someone or something. Her "love continuum" and its "relationship dots" offer a quantitative approach to measuring "love" based on how much comfort one will sacrifice for the needs of another...
During this darkest time of year, I hope these essays provide some light and warmth, making for interesting reading for those of you who have some time to kick back out of the work routine and relax. I would strongly encourage that you do take time for yourself, for life, ultimately, is short.
May you and yours have an inspiring holiday season and new year.
Merry Christmas,
Michael Timm
December 23, 2008
In pursuit of an operational definition of love
By Tina Kemp
Blame it on years of studying the logic and objectivity one must in order to earn a math degree, but when as question such as “What is love?” is posed to me, my first inclination is to hammer out a definition. A lot of common definitions of love rely on feelings—affection, desire. A friend of mine, when I expressed my distaste for defining something on such subjective metrics as these, suggested the following operational definition: suppose that we define love as the willingness to give up your own comforts, wishes, and desires to provide for someone else’s needs.
The idea is not that one trades wants and needs like two kids divvying up Halloween candy, but that one person identifies another person’s physical, psychological, or spiritual needs and is willing to give up certain comforts of their own to meet those needs. The degree of the need factors into this, as well as the impact the sacrifice of comfort has on the giver. I might not have to love a pregnant woman on the train—or barring that, the ideal of common courtesy—very much in order to give up my seat, but I would have to love someone a great deal to quit my job and move across the country with them because they needed me to be closer.
There are degrees of variation in the amount of comfort certain situations or decisions provide for the “lover” and degrees in variation of the role that the “beloved” and his or her needs play in our lives. These two variables create tension with each other. The more entrenched in comfort someone is with regard to certain things, the harder they are to give up. The larger role that a relationship with someone plays in our lives, the more the needs of that person concern and influence us. A stronger link to a person and their needs pull us toward someone while our own sense of comfort pushes us away.
It makes sense then, that we can’t simply ask “do you love someone or something?” but rather “how much?” Love is best modeled by a continuum rather than a binary variable. On the far left end of such a continuum, we could put hate, which everyone who passed second grade should know is the opposite of love. On the right end of this spectrum, we would put love, which leads to the ultimate sacrifice—one’s life. In the middle would be indifference—the reaction that most of us have to the majority of individuals whom we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Because we are seeking a definition of love, we’ll leave the left end of this spectrum for another essay (which I highly doubt I will ever write).
If we were going to plot our positive relationships with others as dots on this continuum, where would they cluster? How much variation would there be between your continuum and mine? Most people would probably have most of their relationship dots closest to the zero-point of indifference and then extending out to somewhere in the middle of the right-hand side. We might have a few that that get pulled toward the right end because the person plays such a large role in our lives, but for most of us, we’re probably not willing to go that far.
So, for example, let’s say I have a dot I call “Mom.” If I consider some of the things I would do for Mom—call once a week to catch up, move back to my hometown to take care of her if, God forbid, she ever became seriously ill—and some of the things I wouldn’t do for Mom—like date her friends’ sons just because she imagines it would be nice to be related to one of her friends someday—I can figure out where the Mom dot should go. Given that I’m willing to do anything that would meet her needs and isn’t insurmountably difficult, I would put the Mom dot pretty far to the right. (Would it go all the way to the right? Most of us have never been tested far enough to draw that conclusion.)
We could also plot dots for our beliefs and ideals. We can love freedom, justice, peace, God, or Barry Goldwater. Ideals don’t have physical or psychological needs in the sense that people do, but you could argue that they do have requirements in order to be preserved or upheld. Peace, for example, requires restraining oneself from reacting to aggression with more aggression. Does peace prevail if I flip the bird to that guy who just cut me off? No. Did he commit an act of aggression, which might make me feel he deserves that reaction from me? Yes. Is my comfort zone of wanting to always be in the right and wanting to defend myself going to make it very hard for me to resist this particular counter-act of aggression? Probably. (The conscientious reader, who will have been following along and sketching out my love continuum, should now be able to calculate where to put the peace dot.) The same logic applies: the more we are willing to give up what makes us comfortable, secure, or at least momentarily pacified to preserve or uphold some other purpose, the greater right we have to say that we, in fact, love that ideal.
The neatness and tidiness of this definition and corresponding visual of little dots on a line are comforting in some way, not to mention aesthetically pleasing if you like to have everything well-defined and plotted out. For me, this is the language in which I’ve learned to dissect and address the messy issues in my world. The quintessential math example of a neat definition is the circle: a set of points all an equal distance from a center point. We can visualize it, imagine it, use it to model shapes that we see in our everyday lives. But the circle has a problem—when taken off the geometry classroom chalkboard and into the real world, we find that its edges are ragged and its points not quite as equidistant from the center as we imagined them to be.
My model for love runs into similar problems. Two years ago, I quit my job and moved out of my parents’ house, into another state to be closer to a former boyfriend. This seems at first glance like a perfect example of comfort-versus-needs to fit into this model: Processing annuity applications and living at home was hardly the self-actualization that my pre-masters degree self had dreamed of, but the paycheck and lack of rent was cozy enough. The boyfriend and the relationship were at a critical point where long distance was no longer working and if I loved either of them, I was going to have to meet the need for closeness, so I did what I had to do.
That’s not why I made the decision to move, however (though my parents accepted that as an explanation of why I was disrupting their comfort of having me back at home by my announcement that I’d be leaving just two days before I did). The truth is that I felt awful about my life at the time—the lack of meaningful and interesting work, frustration with art projects some friends and I were struggling to bring to fruition, fear that I wasn’t capable of being financially self-sufficient, and feelings of loneliness and emptiness because I was in love with someone I could only be with once a month. The spark, the impetus to actually make the changes I did arose solely out of the way that I felt about everything at the time. In terms of why I made the decision, the relationship was at least as much of an excuse as it was a driver.
This brings us back to those messy, unreliable, and unquantifiable feelings we were trying so hard to avoid when trying to define love. The optimistically logical among us might try to argue that these things are just additional variables: Given enough research, thought, computing power, and scientific progress, we can know anything there is to know about what makes us feel, think, and act. Love could be modeled, calculated, and sealed in a formula, and the experiential aspect of it reduced to a novel side effect. While efforts that explore this direction might comfort the side of us that seeks boundaries and conclusions, they miss the point. The affections, desires, confusions, and frustrations that surround love—and everything else in our lives—are too subjective to define it, but they are exactly the things that govern our decision-making and drive us to let ourselves become tangled up in relationships with the people around us.
Tina Kemp dabbled throughout the Midwest in mathematics, German literature, cognitive science, and performance art before stumbling upon a gig turning unstructured customer interactions into actionable business insight. (Her employer’s marketing team wrote that last phrase.) She currently resides in Chicago.
Reflections on that lovely bright spot
By Mary Vuk Sussman
Love isn’t always falling in love. We know from pop song lyrics that falling in love with love is falling for make-believe. But most of us fall in love (sometimes over and over again Woody Allen style) when we are young (or not so young if we happen to be Woody Allen). Love isn’t necessarily making love, though making war is most always a form of anti-love. It certainly isn’t true that all is fair in love and war. And I suppose most people would agree that the love you make isn’t always equal to the love you take either. Love also means having to say you’re sorry more times than you might ever have imagined.
But let me count the ways.
A mother or father loves a child. If you are lucky, the child loves you and other people plus has interest in and passion and love for any number of other things.
Then there is God’s love for humankind and the human capacity to reciprocate this love. If you are not an atheist, you may believe that God loves you and if everything goes as God intended it, you love God, too. If you are an atheist, it could be possible that God loves you too.
Perhaps an atheist forswears the love of God but loves humankind instead, or perhaps in spite of God, and becomes a secular humanist.
But perhaps not; the Nazis, for example, claimed to be godless. Ditto Stalin, ditto Milosevic, ditto way too many others. There are, of course, innumerable examples of people who aver to be God-loving who are indeed misanthropic. Child molesting ministers come to mind. Jim Jones and bomb-wielding terrorists—who profess a deep and abiding love for God but do not seem to blink at inflicting hundreds, sometimes thousands, of civilian casualties when they enact this love of God with an exploding bomb or car or airplane—also come to mind.
And what does one say about the ability to love of atheists such as Isaac Asimov, Salmon Rushdie, or Joyce Carol Oates? Perhaps something like: ye prolific godless ones, your cups sure do overfloweth with love for the written word.
The love of God or the lack thereof certainly does point to some baffling and perhaps troubling contradictions. It makes for highly charged discussion to say the least.
In a lighter vein, one loves the color blue or BMW sports cars or soft angora sweaters or Ivory soap. One loves to fish or paint with watercolors or read books or play golf. One loves to eat spaghetti and meatballs or perhaps peanut butter cookies. These are a few of my favorite things. You remember? When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad?
Consider what life would be like if one did not love much of anything at all—not God, not people, not foods, not colors, not objects, not sports, not exercise.
Darby Slick of Jefferson Airplane apparently understood this state of mind.
When the truth is found to be lies
And all the joy within you dies,
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love.
When the garden flowers, baby, are dead, yes,
And your mind, your mind, is so full of red,
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love.
In contrast to Slick’s loveless and joyless “red” world, we move now to a new definition of love. Might not love might be defined as a kind of bright spot of interest or intensity of good feeling, or good will? Love might be that which transforms our often dreary, angry, bitter, frightening, and sometimes boring lives into something less so.
Once, the discoveries of science seemed to threaten people’s love for God; now it seems the reverse is happening. For instance, the American Heart Association reported in 2007 that stroke patients who have strong religious faith have less emotional distress than those without it. It was discovered that distress complicates recovery; likewise, a 2002 study published in the British Medical Journal concerning the resolution of grief in bereavement found that people with no spiritual beliefs had not resolved their grief by 14 months after the death, but people with strong spiritual beliefs had resolved their grief progressively over the same time period.
A study published in Science News in 2008 found that Catholics experienced less pain when they contemplated religious images when they received electric pulses. Professed atheists reported no such pain relief.
One scratches one’s head when confronted with such study results and begins to conclude (personally, quite reluctantly) that a belief in God might be preferable to a distinct lack of such a belief. Perhaps God really is tantamount to love, especially when we think of love as a bright spot of interest or intensity of good feeling, or good will.
Might exercise also be a form a love? It does, after all, brighten your day, take the edge off all your meannesses, make you more alert and energetic. What better respite from dreary, angry, bitter, frightened, and boring? It makes you happier and healthier and reduces morbidity, sort of like the love of God.
A study published in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that fat people who exercise, and partake even moderately in the intensity of raised pulse and heavy breathing and agitated endorphins, do not suffer as many of the negative consequences of fatness that their non-exercising fat brethren do—and derive some of the same benefits that their skinny brethren get from exercise. Just 75 minutes a week seems to result in measureable improvements, mostly in the form a reduced waist circumference (which seems to be a risk factor for insulin resistance, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and even mortality associated with excess belly fat). Why not jump rope, make love, hop a bike, take a hike, fat or not?
My conclusion? For maximum benefits, combine the love of God with the love of exercise (and this particularly if you are overweight) and you will live longer and be healthier and happier.
I also take the following to be a corollary: when one’s head is too deep into one’s own self, one’s personal quotient of dreary, angry, bitter, frightened, and boring grows geometrically. If one loves a little more (in whatever form one prefers or in infinite multiplicity), almost miraculously one’s Miserable Quotient (MQ) goes down. It seems that when our MQ goes down, our HHQ (Health and Happiness Quotient) goes up.
Love is whatever lures us out of our prison of self-involvement, self-pity, and self-loathing. Love can make you happy if you are willing to share and care and step outside yourself into a space where you can engage with an other (e.g., divinity, person, interest, activity, imaginative space, dog—even cat) to create a bright spot of interest or intensity of good feeling, or good will, that makes life worth living.
Mary Vuk Sussman is a legal assistant specializing in intellectual property law. She is also a freelance writer. Her news and feature articles have appeared in the Bay View Compass, Riverwest Currents, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She enjoys classic and contemporary movies, history, biblical studies, hiking, and cooking.
Love analogies
By Michael Timm
"Because he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love's situation is like this. First of all, he's always poor; far from being sensitive and beautiful, as is commonly supposed, he's tough, with hardened skin, without shoes or home. He always sleeps rough, on the ground, with no bed, lying in doorways and by roads in the open air; sharing his mother's nature, he always lives in a state of need. On the other hand, taking after his father, he schemes to get hold of beautiful and good things. He's brave; impetuous and intense; a formidable hunter, always weaving tricks; he desires knowledge and is resourceful in getting it; a lifelong lover of wisdom; clever at using magic, drugs and sophistry."The epigraph above is spoken by Socrates to his man buddies during a symposium, a sort of ritual party where Socrates and company drink a bit, lounge a bit, joke a bit, and are challenged to eulogize Love, in this case, the Greek god Eros.
—Diotima (via Socrates via Apollodorus via Aristodemus in Plato's Symposium) on Love, 203d
In early Greek myth, considered the child of Chaos, Eros was one of the first gods to come into being and exerted a wide-ranging force of relationship cohesion upon the universe. Later myth reorients him as Aphrodite's son, and in this role, Eros becomes known for his erotic nature (devolving, after millennia, into a little winged boy with bow and arrow defacing many a Hallmark Valentine's Day card).
At their symposium, Socrates and company start by focusing their discussion on the relationships between adult male lovers and their boyfriends, but broaden and deepen their exploration of the topic, especially when Socrates gets his shot. Socrates relates an encounter with one Diotima, a woman from Mantinea he happened to meet one day, who educates him on Love. In contrast to the lineage of Love put forward by other speakers, Diotima argues that Love is a spirit—a messenger intermediary between and connecting the gods and men. Socrates' Diotima further argues that Love is a lover, a pursuer, of wisdom, that which he does not wholly possess: "Wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love of beauty. So Love must necessarily be a lover of wisdom; and as a lover of wisdom he falls between wisdom and ignorance" (Symposium 204b). Socrates goes on to quote Diotima quite a bit, narrating a defense of Plato's metaphysics.[i]
My fascination stems from years of soft concern about the relationship between love and wisdom, the tension between which I first explored in early fictional works written in my teens and later roughly articulated in a freshman college philosophy essay. The gist of the tension I felt is this: intuitively, love seems to involve doing things that don't make sense, while wisdom seems to involve doing only ultimately sensible things. So these two butted heads: Which one ought to trump the other in a well-lived life? Was it more important to be wise without love or to love and be unwise? Shall never the twain meet? And why should two highly socially valued attributes apparently contradict one another?
Over time, I've come to adapt my understanding of what wisdom is along Daoist lines, encapsulated in the statement I've put in the mouth of one of the characters in my novel: "Wisdom is gentleness." I'm not sure this entirely clears the way for love—there are lots of rational snowplows out there just waiting to plow in the driveway—but I think it helps. It did raise another question, however, which is if Daoism itself is compatible with love, the kind of interpersonal passion we intuit in the West. I don't know if it does, so perhaps I must also modify my understanding of what love is.
So what is love?
This is one of those questions that seems exceptionally foolish to ask in a philosophical context. At least with life and death these are serious topics, weighty academic axes to grind. Don't we simply know what love is, the way we know we are awake and not dreaming? What possible traction can one essay gain in understanding love in a non-experiential, non-action-oriented way, with just reading or writing words on a page?
Perhaps no word is so bandied about our language and history. Our culture and cultures are already saturated with assumptions about what love is, what it's not, what it does, what it can't, how to get it, how to give it, where to find it, what to do with it, what not to, why it's so gosh-darn important. Not only for these reasons—though they are good reasons—as a term, love carries so much baggage that any definitional meaning has collapsed into a black hole larger than the universe.[ii]
I. Love is to gasoline…
Love is gasoline to our car. We don't just need it. We don't just crave it. It is blood of a global economy, water that quenches a cyclical thirst and empowers interpersonal function. It is what makes life life and not just life. Yet it is not an understandable thing. You can't stand under it—it's fluid. You can look at the engine it powers. You can tinker with the engine. You can rebuild the engine. But you can't synthesize gasoline. And without gasoline, the engine is nothing. Gasoline comes from dead things. Lots and lots and lots of dead things, compressed and compressed and squished and, to quote Weird Al out of context, "dead for a real long time."
You pour gasoline on things you want to burn, incinerate, explode. So, too, love shows fiery byproducts in emotionally volatile circumstances. You run out of gasoline and you have to spend money to get more, or your car won't go anywhere, and you can't go anywhere, and if you can't go anywhere, you're stuck, and if you're stuck you're not really living the life you choose, and if you're not living the life you choose, what's the point? Love is like that too. Full tank: feeling great. Running on empty: find the red plastic gallon with the yellow spout, ’cause it's going to be a long walk.
Fire. Love. Combustion.
Combustion is just pyrotechnics unless you channel it to do work. And what engines we have built to do work with and for love. Marvelous machines. Intricate cultures, beliefs, structures, networks, families, people, faces, places, lives, stories. But they all need fuel. Fuel is like patience waiting to burst. Fuel is sheet music, composed long ago but allowing for and encouraging actualization with effort. Fuel is the stilled guitar string, the pregnant possibility for choice and action. The thing about fuel is we don't ever make our own. We only use what is given to us, process it into new forms, stroke the string, break and recombine the hydrocarbon chain, create a new pattern, radiate what might become fuel for others. Do we all have access to this particular fuel, the gasoline of love? Can we, if conditions are right? What truly governs those conditions?
II. If love is transbiological…
Suppose biology isn't so important a condition—then why should we suppose machines can't love? Or rocks? Or patterns? Or just certain patterns?
As Kate Morrissey sings:
And they might tell you, ’cause they told me,
That this love can't get outside of the family,
That this love can't transcend the boundaries of species, countries.
You saw through all that
When you were young
And now you keep on. You keep on.
And they won't all love you, but the smart ones will.
They won't all love you, baby, but the smart ones will.
And you keep your eyes open, you can't help but get your fill,
And in the meantime, baby, you—you keep on, keep on.
III. Life & love…
Or perhaps biology is essential to the equation, in ways that those with certain political agendas don't care to face. For there exists a deep complementarity between males and females of our species—and all sexually reproducing life. This sexual, social, psychological, physical, and aesthetic complementarity permits the formation of deeply meaningful and subjectively special unions, relationships, organized channels for the exchange of love.
IV. Politicized because of uncertainty…
But special unions are by no means the exclusive domain for love. People will fight in the abstract over unborn children or mental vegetables, because we love human life, but what does this even mean? It seems to go without saying that human life should be valued, loved, above all else. But why? What causes this to be the case? The conventional answer is that human life is special, therefore it demands special treatment. It seems that part of the drive to preserve life, to love it ultimately above even liberty and the pursuit of happiness, may be due to the reptilian remnant of our brain and the innate drive to survive. If this template is so strong, and it is no doubt strong, then it doesn't take much argument to suggest it has transposed itself onto our social structures—even if we individual humans are ignorant of this love-for-life-first projected bias. I'm not saying this projected value is a bad thing. But it is a prejudice around which our various societies place harsh penalties. Homicide, suicide, genocide—almost always are extreme taboos. But issues like abortion and euthanasia plague the borders of the categories we create. We are surrounded by slippery slopes. Then is love instead, if not gasoline, brake fluid? Keeping us from plummeting down the icy inclines? Locking us onto terrain like glacier-pronged boots?
V. Love is a force
Consider love as a physical force. Love, whatever it is, is relational. Love is a force—an action involving two or more entities acting upon one another. It is not an intrinsic property of a substance. In the English language, I don't have love. You don't have love. We don't have love. We aren't love. I love someone, something. So do you. So do we. Love takes an object, when used as a verb. Except for when the word takes on additional metaphysical implications, when it morphs into a special kind of transcendent noun, perhaps in religious or spiritual contexts, a la, God is Love. But even those deemed most holy ask us to use such love, apply it into the world and work for people, to care for others, to act for others' benefit.
VI. Love is good choice
If we are choice-making beings, then love is the product, essence, and motivator of good choices. If we accept some form of "good," then this should be true. When I honestly act for the good, I am loving in some respect. I am loving beyond myself because if "good" exists, good surely exists beyond self-interest. It is thus more than a feeling, an intuition—love is an action, but not just a behavior—all the tightly bound emotions and choices that are packed into a good action by a choice-making being making a choice along the lines of force made possible by relational context. The good choice would exist between the chooser/doer and some object or relationship external to the choice-maker, therefore enhancing the connectivity of the universe via action.
VII. The urge to completion
In football, satisfaction is gained by passing the ball from quarterback to receiver and making a maneuver down the field. Plays culminate in first-downs and ultimately some drives consisting of such plays culminate in touchdowns. Neither first-downs nor touchdowns are ultimate endings for the ball or the players or the game, but passing certain points satisfies the need implicit in the structure of the game. This is like the structure of relationships compelling the choice of love.
VIII. Relations desire saturation
Like an electron attracted to an unsaturated electron shell, lovers draw one another to each other into a system of tension but relative stability. Single electrons are unstable, needy creatures orbiting probabilistically and liable enough to be pawned off to other atoms with high electron affinities. In contrast, paired electrons are mates, like bonded males and females, spinning opposite directions yet occupying the same shaped energy level about a common nucleus. They are relatively stable. They may be said, in the words of my high school chemistry teacher, to be "happy."
IX. The desire for complementarity
Other cosmic particle pairs are tethered through quantum entanglement—where one particle's behaviors are inextricably entwined with another's, even if that other particle is nowhere in physical proximity. The lack of proximity does not put a damper on the relationship—something keeps these particles related outside of conventional cause-and-effect, action-reaction. The property has been observed and is highly counterintuitive, yet it exists and bespeaks another tendency toward connectivity in our observable universe, whether a remnant of an older, deeper unity or some heretofore not understood universal law. Entanglement is significant in the discussion of love because what is the nature of that connection for these particles? Why are they connected? What makes them act together even when parted? Some force we do not understand through physics alone. A force that unites pairs, creating system wholes out of parts.
X. Christmas cards
Love is giving and receiving Christmas cards—the tethers of distant relationships manifest in colorful paper and cultural scribbles.
XI. Relationships are like Planet of the Apes
People are tender when it comes down to it, but sometimes people turn to bitterness out of excess fear or power.
XII. Rhythm
I recently saw the Milwaukee Rep put on the play Eurydice, a retelling of the Orpheus myth. It was good. The playwright explains Orpheus' and Eurydice's ultimate inability to connect in the afterlife, and his inability to rescue her from the underworld, as a failure of the two to stay in rhythm. (Even here, in reimagined myth, it was simply a question of timing!) In the myth and the play, Orpheus—the world's greatest musician—must march out of Hades without turning ’round to look upon Eurydice—the love of his life and in the play a curious and literate female emphasizing the written word—who was prematurely taken to the land of the dead. As they make their way upwards and outwards through the darkness, she following him, she stumbles at his back and calls out his name; he turns at her call and all is lost. In that moment, he laments that she never learned rhythm and could not reproduce his music, which he played to guide them out of Hades, in her mind. Their relationship did not survive this asymmetry despite their mutual love. Like the myth, the play's ending does not suggest the two remain mystically entangled afterwards—they are forever and tragically severed.
XIII. Coming together
Let us consider rhythm, in a wider sense, to be an ebb and flow of asymmetry to symmetry, a push-pull between these two organizational principles, neither which terminally supersedes the other, but whose pattern might be recognizable and reconcilable to conscious beings. In love, there is asymmetry when a subject lacks an object or an object lacks a subject, or, to parse the situation in more postfeminist terms, when a person lacks another person with whom to relate.[iii] There can be symmetry if two (or more) such complements organize themselves in some tandem pattern. Such symmetry depends, however, upon a natural isolation or bifurcation or asymmetry of things so that they can come together.
XIV. Coming to rest in space
Like chemical reactions where activation energy must supply a spike to combine reagents, human relationships seek both dynamism and stability. People require dynamism to attract them from less organized, relatively stable states into chaotic situations which can resolve into more organized, less stable but more interesting, and still somewhat stable, states accommodating tension or complexity.
Example: You go to a party and get drunk and go home with someone. The party and the alcohol are catalysts, lowering the activation energy required to meet and greet this other someone. But still, you must input some form of energy to meet and greet them and perhaps get to know them a bit. Your single state has ruptured, replaced first by an open field of possibility like that before a defensive safety intercepting a pass and now headed to the opponent's goal line, and then by a less certain but potentially stable and more highly organized state of existing within a relationship with the other you have befriended. Once this relationship's dynamism and stability regimes are tested sufficiently, however, you may enter into another relatively stable regime where it would take even more activation energy or even greater catalysts or substantial decay of either party of the relationship to move the situation from the new status quo. Those couples and pairings who are able to come to rest so in space may be said to love each other in the sense that their relationship is sufficient to withstand the equivalencies of other particle collisions (roving suitors or tempting adulterers) and the instabilities of possible new products (children or families or dogs or cars or apartments or jobs).
Human relationships are not just chemical reactions, but all relationships follow the same patterns when viewed as systems behaving as systems or not—are they stable, unstable, chaotic, and/or how are they changing or trending under changing conditions? It's relatively easy to break things down in these terms; it's relatively difficult to separate oneself from the empirical emotions incumbent upon a participant in such reactions when they are actually happening. This, combined with different degrees of social or political or physical impotency, prevent different patterns from being understood or attempted or enacted in real-time.
XV. "All men are brothers…"
The night Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, you could feel the energy and good will and hope incarnate in all those people standing outside in Chicago, and even though I was isolated from them, watching the proceedings on television and the internet, I participated in a hugely emotional experience I sensed was shared by millions. There is research being done at Princeton University on the effects of human consciousness related to massive human events on the results of random number generators. The researchers have found changing patterns surrounding events like Sept. 11, 2001 and the Nov. 4, 2008 presidential election. During these historic moments when so many people are focused in on the same event, connected and amplified through global media, the hypothesis is that the intentions of the masses of humanity actually changed the laws of probability, affecting the random number generators. The research for this Global Consciousness Project examines the nature and possible influence of collective consciousness, and the results so far suggest that not only does some degree of human connectivity already exist, but that it has potentially meaningful and empirical effects, and that those effects can be modified by human intention of some kind (whether emotion or action or choice is not known). Anyone who takes an interest in a compelling sports contest or a musical recital or a military maneuver already feels the nature of this extended kinship that transcends the self and the family and takes root in some underlying at-least-emotional-and-perhaps-metaphysically-significant human firmament. We feel not only the weighty or lofty consequences of a winning or losing scenario, not only the accomplishment or failure of some task, but also the togetherness with those others also focused on the same task or togetherness with those for whom the task is engineered. Emotional and empirical evidence of such human togetherness calls to mind the rallying cries of the Abraham Lincolns and Martin Luther Kings and Barack Obamas of the world—people whose voices resonated with a call to future unity embedded in the very fabric of our humanity. We might call this propensity for human connectivity, and/or its actualization, love.
Then there is love that has or takes no extant object, creative love, love of a creator for creation to be. This love is still relational, but it is highly asymmetrical. The writer, painter, dancer, football player, pianist, speaker, researcher—they do not know what specifically it is they will love, but they engage in a process driven by love between what they are in the moment and what they in the next moment continue creating. More than a love of the creative process, there seems to be a forcing-through-the-surface-of-something-created and, like the sexual creation of new human beings or the emerging of babies through the typically-too-small birth canal, both the creation and the created are exhilarating when the creator's consciousness is engaged.
XVII. Not falling down
I recently went ice skating for the first time in my life. I only fell once. I watched others skating around me. Many of the kids were speeding around, moving fluidly and using both feet effortlessly. Many other people moved fairly well, but not as fast or as graceful as the kids. At first, I tended to favor pushing with my right foot, while keeping my left foot straight like a ship's keel. This didn't seem to be the way most others skated, and eventually I was able, with much difficulty overcoming the resistance of my body not wanting to move that left foot, to use both feet to move on the ice. While having a good time on the rink, I came up with the following realization about the definition of ice skating: ice skating is not falling down while wearing ice skates. Love is like ice skating.
XVIII. Love is meeting deadlines
Douglas Adams famously said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." A deadline is like a first down or a touchdown—it is a compelling completion. Love exists with such thresholds—lovers strive for and meet or fail to meet goals that are never final but always refreshing and compelling.
XIX. Back to Plato
"To sum up then…love is the desire to have the good forever" (The Symposium 206a).
XX. Be of good cheer
Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and be of good cheer in the new year.
Michael Timm is a freelance writer. He has written and is in the process of revising a novel, The Philosopher of Milwaukee. He writes news and features for the Bay View Compass newspaper, of which he has been the assistant editor since 2005. His writing has also appeared in the Riverwest Currents, Shepherd Express, and Wisconsin Trails magazine. He earned his B.A. at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., in 2004 studying both Anthropology and English. His totem animal is the platypus.
[i] If you want to read a more thorough discussion on the nature of love, I'd recommend you read the Symposium. If you're into that kind of thing, it's great fun, including both physical and intellectual humor, sexual innuendo, philosophical banter, and crazy characters. But don't take my word for it.
[ii] Interestingly, following this anecdotal analogy through to its logical conclusion actually generates a metaphysically reasonable situation, or at least one compelling to a great many of human beings: Love, as the ultimate philosophical substance, would supersede, infuse, and transcend every component part and process of the whole of existence. This sounds an awful lot like some religious, spiritual, and mystic beliefs. The question then becomes whether love's hugely successful historic PR campaign, with all its multitudinous brands, constitutes actual philosophical mass or just empty volume.
[iii] Note that in our language we are so disposed to subject-object thinking that personhood itself, as a term, does not easily, if at all, permit such usage and you might find my assertions offensive if you value primarily the individual agency of a single, perceived-unified human person over and above humanity or perpetually-possibly-unified human people. This is because a person is in itself deemed a complete universe, an individual, lacking nothing except an environment; it is a figure in need only of ground, rather than in need of a complementary unit whose isolated existence demands not only the existence of but also the proximity/relevance/relation to its complement.
Welcome to Issue 2
Sometimes our contact with it is painful. Sometimes it's daunting or confusing. At other times, we can't help but laugh at it in spite of ourselves.
The second issue of this publication has assembled a fresh range of voices on a topic that I think many are reluctant to thoroughly, openly, and deeply unpack. This resistance is in no small part, I suspect, because it's a theme that confronts each of us as mortal human beings and makes us naturally afraid. It's also due to an epistemological slipperiness--for there's really no way for living beings to directly experience it. The topic, of course, is Death.
To discuss death is to remind ourselves of our frailty, our finiteness, our uncertainty, and our aloneness--to reflect (honestly or not) on if the way we are living our lives is in any sense worthy should we die tomorrow. This alone should make the question of What is Death? meaningful. But death also leaves some details to explore that leave traces, whether physical evidence or emotional experience. There is much to learn from both categories, and therefore I am grateful that a few brave souls contributed to this exploration.
WATER Institute senior scientist, and funny man, John Janssen briefly relays a bizarre encounter between his younger self and two women on a mission to save his soul--by poking out his eyes. In "Death of death's certainty," Janssen makes the point that 20th century developments in quantum mechanics leave us no certainty in the 21st century, only probability. When do you really know somebody's really dead? Janssen asks. This question is no longer as easy as it once seemed.
Archaeologist Kevin Cullen presents an excellent survey of what human burials can tell us about how people have faced death within different cultures at different times throughout history and prehistory. Read about the Australopithecine Taung Child--whose skull was taloned by a bird of prey. Or Ötzi the Iceman--who was shot with an arrow and exiled to die in the Alps. Cullen also takes the reader on a journey highlighting deliberate burials, often showcasing the monolithic extravagance with which masses of people have mobilized to commemorate their honored dead. The "death industry" is not strictly one of the ancient past, however--just consider the billions of dollars and tons of paperwork that go into legal death and burial in the Western world today. After reading Cullen's "The archaeology of death: New insight into human mortality throughout time and across cultures," you may never quite look the same at a cemetery headstone again.
Opening herself up to the vast abyss within, poet Helena Fahnrich resolved herself to reflect on death in four journal-like entries. In what I have titled "Meditations on the ultimate interloper," she relays, with an honest and sometimes scouring intensity, her personal experience facing the death of a former lover and heroin addict, the surreal urban anonymity of a neighbor quietly dying two floors beneath her new apartment, and the psychological death that lurks within us all when life's strains become too much.
September 22, 2008
The second issue of this publication has assembled a fresh range of voices on a topic that I think many are reluctant to thoroughly, openly, and deeply unpack. This resistance is in no small part, I suspect, because it's a theme that confronts each of us as mortal human beings and makes us naturally afraid. It's also due to an epistemological slipperiness--for there's really no way for living beings to directly experience it. The topic, of course, is Death.
To discuss death is to remind ourselves of our frailty, our finiteness, our uncertainty, and our aloneness--to reflect (honestly or not) on if the way we are living our lives is in any sense worthy should we die tomorrow. This alone should make the question of What is Death? meaningful. But death also leaves some details to explore that leave traces, whether physical evidence or emotional experience. There is much to learn from both categories, and therefore I am grateful that a few brave souls contributed to this exploration.
WATER Institute senior scientist, and funny man, John Janssen briefly relays a bizarre encounter between his younger self and two women on a mission to save his soul--by poking out his eyes. In "Death of death's certainty," Janssen makes the point that 20th century developments in quantum mechanics leave us no certainty in the 21st century, only probability. When do you really know somebody's really dead? Janssen asks. This question is no longer as easy as it once seemed.
Archaeologist Kevin Cullen presents an excellent survey of what human burials can tell us about how people have faced death within different cultures at different times throughout history and prehistory. Read about the Australopithecine Taung Child--whose skull was taloned by a bird of prey. Or Ötzi the Iceman--who was shot with an arrow and exiled to die in the Alps. Cullen also takes the reader on a journey highlighting deliberate burials, often showcasing the monolithic extravagance with which masses of people have mobilized to commemorate their honored dead. The "death industry" is not strictly one of the ancient past, however--just consider the billions of dollars and tons of paperwork that go into legal death and burial in the Western world today. After reading Cullen's "The archaeology of death: New insight into human mortality throughout time and across cultures," you may never quite look the same at a cemetery headstone again.
Opening herself up to the vast abyss within, poet Helena Fahnrich resolved herself to reflect on death in four journal-like entries. In what I have titled "Meditations on the ultimate interloper," she relays, with an honest and sometimes scouring intensity, her personal experience facing the death of a former lover and heroin addict, the surreal urban anonymity of a neighbor quietly dying two floors beneath her new apartment, and the psychological death that lurks within us all when life's strains become too much.
September 22, 2008
Death: Going nowhere in particular
By Michael Timm
With the inadvertent kicking of something that feels to my left foot like a jellyfish, I start to feel not alone in the ocean swells. When I see a clear circular blob in the water that looks like it has red insides, I double-time on my noodle and scramble back to the shore. As the moon jellies start piling up on the shore, I start to wonder.
Beached, these strange invertebrates are dead or dying, waiting for the dehydration that will sap their bodies of form, structure—even substance. Reclaimed by resurgent wave action, they drift to sea, at home in the water, which provides the jelly with a means for life. On land, they are queer sacs of unknown fluids, defiant of sand and surf and bare human footsteps. In water, they undulate with the quiet and fearsome grace of belonging to my exclusion. On land, in the shore zone, they are subject to the camera shutters and stick prodding of human beings, though the sea birds graciously or wisely avoid pecking at the motionless corpse globs. They are inert, sans eyes, sans ears, sans mouth—sans soul?
What is Death? What is Life? Why the human capitalization of such terms? And, perhaps the larger question: What is any of it for at all?
The latter is the kind of question that gets into my head when I start thinking and stop inquiring. When I may understand the myriad connections of my life history and learning but cannot or no longer appreciate them. When, beyond the philosophical ax grinding of a search for meaning, the question about what the point of it all is actually and empirically and emotionally rears its head, not in ugliness—that would be easier to combat—but in dullness and easiness and simplicity. This question is like a death, a ceasing of movement, of progress, of striving—it comes like the sudden waking from a torrid nightmare when time and space and self arise somehow terribly real but subtly and inescapably awhack.
At those times I find myself as beached as the moon jellies. There is no struggle because there is no medium in which to struggle. There is simply the fact of life washed ashore and unable to breathe or move or consume unless and until the waves return.
Such waves of inspiration, of feeling-what-it's-all-for/about-ness, do come. Often, they seem probabilistically linked to certain kinds of human social intercourse—the kind where the self is forgotten in self action with certain kinds of peer others. Not always the same peers, not always the same others, not always the same self—but always a similar feeling of thereness, of rightness, of meaningfulness generated by who knows precisely what. But because they are waves to some extent determined only by contingency, they cannot be wholly self-generated and isolation cannot defeat isolation.
It would be nice to say that choice can toggle between life and death, that conscious beings such as this writer can and do select life over death in every opportunity. But somehow, it's not that simple. There may be emotional circadian rhythms as well as other biological ones, for with every new day the hierarchy of needs and preconceptions is reset, the video game of existence starts anew from level 1, and we must climb each day just to get to and through the points we know will cause us problems later on—if only in hopes of solving or surpassing them. And it is obvious that choice loses its bearing on life and death in most cases—for while sex and suicide remain options for human beings, there is no real option of being born or not for the human who will be born, nor is there a real option of staying alive when one's time to die has arrived. Medical technology may forestall death or extend life (though doing one by no means implies the other) but we are mortal and we will die. Great storytellers tell of great men and women who, when their old age ripens their souls into wisdom, desire not to live on but merely to live well until accepting their death—not on their terms but with the sense that their time has truly come.
***
One of the things I may have actually learned is something my father said before my grandfather died, but while he was biologically having a rough time and living in a nursing home which raised dubious emotions within our family. While discussing the theoretical and philosophical and ethical implications of euthanasia (or more precisely, its complement: keeping a human body alive to the extent medically possible), my father defended the family's decision to house my grandfather in his nursing home on several grounds. The most philosophically significant was this: Who are we to say when he should live or die? It's selfish to apply our perspective of what quality and sanctity life has to another human being, whose life impacts not just our own lives but also those of many other people and things we cannot wholly appreciate or predict. There is a certain humble justice in this view, though no doubt it can be argued rationally either way. The point here is that life is not just about us. Nor is death.
Another thing that struck me as significant after my grandfather had died was how my uncle described the process of dying. At the funeral luncheon in the bar, he made an honest comment how my grandfather's death differed to him from that of my grandmother's. She had died four years earlier after complications of cancer. My uncle said that for the family, from his perspective, grandpa had died many times: there were many little deaths along the way to his final death. The loss of his wife; the loss of his apartment; the loss of his car; the loss of memory; the loss of his mental clarity; the loss of his latter-day girlfriend; the loss of being able to dance; the loss of being able to walk; the loss of being able to take care of himself. I take my uncle's point, though I don't believe this process truly differed from my grandmother's death—I think the family at large just participated more thoroughly in my grandfather's death than hers because she was gone and so my grandpa was alone (also, he had some tremendous clutch stamina that kept him rebounding after each setback—there was a definite spirited element of him that remained continuous, even as every other part of his identity was stripped away). I also know I had greater contact with my grandpa over those intervening four years than I probably ever had with my grandma, so there was also a gender and cultural difference in our relationships that would have not provided me a window into the many comparable phases of her death.
There is also the sense that death is a great finisher, an equalizer, a relief. Once my grandpa actually died—once he'd finished that marathon—the surrounding family's responsibilities toward him and each other changed. In many cases the caregiving responsibilities suddenly lifted, even if the formal and financial and grief responsibilities spiked. The difference between dying and death in this context is the difference between a continuous and a discrete function, or between analog and digital systems, or between a movement and a revolution. In the former cases, there exists a spectrum of emotion and action and relation while in the latter cases a single event defines all that follows it (or surrounds it in phase space) in clear contrast to what has come before (or the previous phase).
Death is thus a discontinuity. As a discontinuity, it is the point of no return from the perspective of the living who perceive a process once deemed alive. Biochemically, such a system no longer self-catalyzes. It is dead. It has died. Its parts disassociate and form other wholes, but no longer the same living whole.
Death can also be considered a landscape, however—whatever lies beyond the discontinuity both for the living and, if applicable, for the dead. For many Christians, this would be an imagined heaven. For Buddhists, this would be (eventually) the no-self land of Nirvana. For Hindus and ancient Greeks, it would be reincarnation of some form—the deposition of one's sole-ness into another pattern that will live and die again. For the ancients of many cultures, or just generally speaking, it would be a culturally specific imagined and quasi-mythic afterlife landscape: the place from which stories descend, in which gods and heroes and devils reside (often more segregated by alleged virtue than on Earth). The landscape of death is thus the great undreamt dream, the place life intrinsically belongs and returns to.
Who knows. Such spaces could exist in or as dimensions not directly perceived by human beings. They also physically could exist in or as alternate universes in a multiverse of possible universes or a multiverse of possible quantum universe states. It is almost completely pointless to speculate (given my current limited knowledge of such possibilities), but suffice to say there are a few uncertainties and possibilities about afterlife realms. So far as I know, no one has demonstrated any compelling rational foundation for the existence of any landscape apart from the shared human imagination, however. It's perhaps best left unknown and as an object of faith and superstition, because if we really knew perhaps we would live lives with entirely different priorities and upon entirely different premises. As it is not knowing we have a hard enough time finding meaning in life or giving life or other lives meaning, so our ignorance in the matter plays well with our purported reverence for democracy and valuing a plurality and diversity of opinion.
***
A thousand little deaths sap the life from the living dead. One big death heaves a nation into turmoil. Death is private—the only truly private property. Death is communal—the ritual that creates a context for loss, pain, transformation. Death separates, pulling the beloved and the enemy equally away forever. Death unites in wake of itself, drawing together enemies and casting new lines of love. Death is an ending, the cessation of life. Yet life is predicated upon death—all life grows out of death. New generations succeed the old, destroying what once was sacred and regurgitating it as energy in newer, finer processes unimagined before and yet still destined to dissolve. To make way. To trade on entropy.
Yet on the human scale, to our reptilian brains, death remains the monster in the dark, stalking from within and without, the constant companion, the unseverable shadow, that entity which assumes the personae of evil because we are bred to fear it. To survive. To defeat death, to derail her, to defy.
Thus death motivates. It is a mother of invention. Perhaps the mother. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Harry Potter, fear of death or hope for more than life has peopled our greatest stories with heroes and villains questing for immortality. Such characters are memorable throughout the ages, replicated in many different story forms, and relevant across cultures and to distinct individuals. Death, as the great but inexorable unknown, is one of the greatest motivators for storytelling in all our history.
Science fiction has inherited the immortality quest story and packaged the most potent versions for people of the 21st century. Mary Shelley had her Dr. Frankenstein, who created a chimerical creature of dead body parts that pushed the boundaries of what was alive—a man but not a man but more than a man but less than a man.
Frankenstein remains the archetype of science and technology's relationship with humanity to this day. The power to kill, to die, is within each woman and man; the power to birth, only with each woman; the power to create life from scratch thus far has eluded both woman and man. We have created things, though. Our technology is our defense against and our primary interface with the natural world. It is also transforming that natural world. Sometimes it alone is what separates us from other life and from personal death. It is also transforming us. Consider your relationship with the personal computer today and 10 years ago. Consider your relationship with your cellular telephone today and 10 years ago. Consider your relationship with your car; your climate control comforts; your eyeglasses; the pins that healed your broken limb; the satellites that beam television signals into your home; the internet—any of our 21st century co-dependencies.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that a merging of biology and technology is approaching, a singularity in history beyond which humans will no longer be humans and machines will no longer be machines. He has been criticized, at one level for supposing that exponential technological growth means what he says it will mean, and at another for supposing that exponential growth will continue indefinitely in terms of the increasing capacities of our technology. The idea of transhumanism, however, is a compelling and fear/awe-inspiring one.
Does such a transhuman state constitute death? An afterlife? Or just change? What thresholds are possible? Acceptable? Which should be fought? Which should be yielded? Which should be pursued? Acting to further fuse our selves with our technology, and with each other via our technology, is the modern-day Frankenstein story, and one I don't think sufficient individuals are contemplating in a broad enough context to prevent the forward flow already underway in the technological world, whether or not it culminates in a Kurzweilian singularity. For many, I think this is a wave of what-it's-all-for-ness that is too difficult to resist. And if, down the road, such a transformation changes what mortality means, then will we defeat death? It seems to me that to defeat the monster in the dark requires a psychological maturity and not a technological fix, while relying too much on the latter may too distance us from appreciating the complementarity of life and death so vital to this planet.
Of course, death has never been the final word in the human story. The nature of the afterlife has been the subject of fertile mythic imagination. We can't seem to fathom nothingness—there must be a place and a time and a shape before, now, later, and forever (even if this is not known to be true or if it becomes known as false).
In Greek myth, the dead descend to Hades, an underground realm whose overwhelming characteristic seems to be its inertness. Yes, there is torture and ensnarement and loss. But mainly, Hades is simply the inexorable final location—unless you get a free pass like Hercules or have friends in high places like Persephone. The rest of us are bound within the greatest accumulation of souls as certainly as a body of matter drawn beyond the event horizon of a black hole. (Both black holes and death are, to our knowledge, absolute discontinuities—the former for spacetime and the latter for life.)
In Norse myth, the dead can be recalled to participate with the living and the immortal in glorious battle. Anxious to amass a quality fighting force in their impending battle against the giants, the gods of Asgaard even go so far as to stack the deck against the finest living human warriors, so as to basically conscript them into the armies of Valhalla.
At the conclusion of The Republic, Plato's Socrates waxes, to modern sensibilities, bizarrely about what he thinks happens to our souls after death. If I recall correctly, there is a many-nested sphere emanating outward beyond the Earth and souls of the deceased are out here processed through a sort of reincarnation recycling factory before they are shipped back to Earth. It makes a good sci-fi story premise, but seems fairly inelegant as far as natural systems go, though it isn't that far from the standard Christian viewpoint.
Such a rationalized heaven is one consequence of elevating human beings to premier status when considering what happens after death—if humans are special (due to their capacity for rational thought, their capacity for free choice, their capacity for moral agency…pick your prerequisite special capacity) while alive, then it follows to some thinkers that we must also be special once dead. Our souls may thus be weighed for the virtue done during life and ranked or disposed of accordingly. Such ideas sit well with most political ruling classes on the planet as they reinforce and reflect a meta-Pavlovian system of justice negotiated by punishment and reward, with ultimate punishment or ultimate reward forever postponed like a never-ending pre-orgasmic plateau. A merit-based heaven also establishes an epistemologically untouchable ideology capable of both viral transmission and supporting dubious authorities, the dynamics of which will be clear to some readers without explanation and which will not be discussed here. (An interesting experiment would be to isolate and interview a good number of self-described Christians and ask them a set of specific questions about the nature of the afterlife they envision; both the similarities/convergences and idiosyncrasies/divergences they describe would be telling about what people think about heaven—and this could be done with more rigor and validity than a Barbara Walters special, especially if funded by somebody with grant money in psychology or sociology or even, God forbid, marketing research.)
Anthropologist Jane Goodall has written about her observations of chimpanzees thrashing about in a rainstorm. The experience seemed to her one of protoreligion, protospirituality. Perhaps it's the immensity and power and uncontrollability of thunderstorms that stirs in us and our fellow primates such awe, wonder, and fear. When stimulated by these same emotions that simultaneously connect and sever us from the wider world around us—connect us with others presumably experiencing the same emotions and sever us from that which the individual can neither control nor predict nor defend against. Like death, the storm is an almost unfathomable beyond that at once frightens us and encourages imagination of the sublime—so that it's no accident that heaven is often associated with the sky, and the gods, with its moods.
It's not that far from the unknown, uncontrollable sky to heaven. And if we remove human beings from the privileged metaphysical position and realign ourselves as but a keystone species within the vast biosphere (even as it changes dramatically under human and other influences), then perhaps it's not that far from heaven to the ground, either. Though no doubt this will be met with much socioreligious resistance, we might be in dire need of developing an alternative popular conception of the cosmic order.
***
I've gone nowhere, and I've gone there in far too many words. This is probably because I know nothing. Nothing about death. But I do want to return to the jellyfish.
I fled the jellyfish because I was afraid of them, repulsed by them, did not understand them. Intrinsically I abhorred them—rationalizing this distaste by fearing a sting that could harm me and coddling my sense of entitlement to a clean swim in the ocean without hindrance. But I also knew nothing about them. They were alien to me. Exotic and dangerous anomalies. I did not know, for example, that the Linnaean classification name for moon jellyfish is Aurelia aurita. (Aurelia was my grandmother's name and also the source of inspiration for the middle name of the protagonist in my unpublished novel.) I did not know they are 95 percent water. I did not even know that there are male and female jellies. I did not know that astronauts even took moon jelly polyps into space to examine the effects of microgravity on their development.
A useful operative definition of death for me, then, may couple nicely with Einstein's maxim that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Death is the cessation of curiosity, the paralysis of the creative intellect, the cowering of the spirit in comfortable knowledge when it might instead boldly imagine and fully live.
Michael Timm is a freelance writer. He has written and is in the process of revising a novel, The Philosopher of Milwaukee. He writes news and features for the Bay View Compass newspaper, of which he has been the assistant editor since 2005. His writing has also appeared in the Riverwest Currents, Shepherd Express, and Wisconsin Trails magazine. He earned his B.A. at Ripon College in Ripon, Wis., in 2004 studying both Anthropology and English. His totem animal is the platypus.
Meditations on the ultimate interloper
By Helena Fahnrich
I have seen one dead body.
My grandmother died three years ago, my grandfather about 15 years ago. The funeral I went to, however, was not one of theirs, nor was the body I saw. The funeral and the body were those of a boy I had met my freshmen year of college.
It was a private college and he was the goalie for the soccer team. I met him through friends who smoked pot. He took up an OxyContin habit from his sister’s boyfriend’s backdoor pharmacist, and eventually that boyfriend led him on to shooting heroin. Richie was found dead somewhere on the south side in a car by the police. I remember not getting closer than about 10 feet to the corpse. From afar, his face looked bloated and polished with makeup. Richie. I remember Jerry Garcia singing through the loudspeaker-sounding stereo system in the funeral home. The last time I had seen him was two months before at a concert; high on heroin and standing in a corner, he could not reply to my conversation.
There were several two-by-three-foot tack boards mounted within the room, and there were bunches of pictures pinned against the board like some strange reminiscence of a Sunday school exercise. His father kept saying with a passive, accepting smile on his face, “it was his time—it was just his time to go.” I remained there for a while, looking for something in the room, or among the gatherers, or my memories. Before long his sister and her boyfriend showed up. I sit here now and wonder about my place among them all. I was there because I knew him, because I took his virginity, and I saw his funeral as a farce because I had seen what form the dead heroin addict’s intimacy took. The Living hold funeral gatherings. What is death?
An unsubstantial erotic encounter between two people
who had shared shreds of substance abuse,
and social circles,
danced around a young woman’s incessant longing for fulfillment
and a young man’s sense of cavalier.
They partook in each other’s weaknesses at their own, separate discretion.
The corpse I saw that day was a metaphor for the relationships I had with Richie himself as well as the rest of the people I knew then. That day we were drawn together by something powerful, by both life and death, yet simultaneously I felt there was something off. Like trying to sail over sand, or going swimming in jeans and a sweatshirt, riding the wave of humanity loses its swing when effort and motion mean something else.
So then, is that what death is? Swinging? I feel compelled to say no, but then I think of Bob Marley’s funeral procession. It became a massive, joyous, and musical celebration of his life in the streets of Jamaica. What I felt at Richie’s funeral were the layers of cover-up wearing off the giant face in the room. Part of me identified with his life, and though my addiction took a different form, it was one of many feelings of empathy that stood in front of me when I would see him. That day I was unnerved to see the lifelessness I held within my life by seeing it in his.
There was judgment in that room.
Judgment, a close cry from death.
And death’s accoutrement hung from the ceiling like streams of crepe paper one might walk through at midnight on a New Year’s Eve.
I took fistfuls of them.
I have this belief, or maybe it is a feeling, that caring for someone is supposed to have some underlying unflinching sense of solemnity. Do relationships simply create effects in the lives of people? Knowing a grandmother for 21 years of my intimate life, and seeing the ripple of her passing over time is the significance of death (?). "Passing" is an open well of meaning in the land of description pertaining to death. For example, my father neglected to inform me the details of her funeral. I did not attend. I heard of her death, and then I heard of her funeral. I say this without anger or spite, though, because things have been mended, but I am regularly perplexed by her passing because it literally passed me by. I kept on living my life with this information without having ever seen or been a part of the end of her life. I saw her a few days before she died. My mother and I went to see her. My father was there with my two half-brothers. My brother was there also, and my uncle Eddie. She had been taking spoonfuls of morphine out of a large, amber colored glass jar.
Dear reader, when I die I want to be burned.
8.26.08
Death is a metaphor in my life. All things take shape in some way, for example, a job, finding a book, a mentor, coming upon certain types of music, friendships, vices. The parting of ways is just as much a death as letting go of old forms of identity that might have taken residence within one shape or another.
Death,
to be the face of what I cannot look at
to be the place where I go when I must understand that which I do not want to.
Death is a paradox, for it is a gift,
which I constantly forget.
Death for the day
and the time that it comes for.
There is something that I have nothing to say whatsoever about death.
How can I answer?
Or reply? Or comment?
This has become my ode
to the anthropology of:
Two thousand words on "What is death?"
And what if, at the end, I do not have two thousand words? What then?
8.27.08
Last night, on the 88th anniversary of women winning the right to vote, a young white policeman brought me news of death.
I moved into my apartment two weeks ago, and I have not formally met anyone in my building as of yet. It is a small brick building with just six apartments, and I live on the third floor, in an east-facing apartment. Last week Friday, I woke up a bit late in the morning and left to run some errands in the afternoon, and when I got downstairs there was an obvious gas leak. It was strongest on the first floor, but since the first floor is just three stairs up from the ground floor, I assumed it was seeping up through the woodwork from the basement. When I returned, the aroma had not subsided and I called my landlord. I could even smell gas in my apartment, most notably in the closet next to my bathroom, which I thought odd, and when I left for work I was feeling dizzy. I brought my phone to call Stacey back to see what exactly was going on, but forgot soon after I arrived at the deli.
I remember having the rushed feeling that something was needed. I was in the building, on the other side of a door, above a basement. I was there and capable. Yet, I was simultaneously living my life, taking care of myself by way of mundane responsibilities. I was attending to the details that amounted to less than 10 physical dollars. I was leaving to make sandwiches and close the deli. I happened to not be the person who was to intervene. Can I call myself an interloper?
The policeman said they were not sure about how he died, just that I was not in any danger.
“You have nothing to worry about, it wasn’t a homicide,” were his words. He did not give any other information. I did not ask. Did the boy die from asphyxiation? Did he kill himself? The policeman took notes about my encounter with the gas and so I assume it had some significance.
My computer dictionary defines interloper as, “a person who becomes involved in a place or situation where they are not wanted or are considered not to belong.” Can I call myself an interloper?
I did not tell him that earlier in the evening, when I was arriving home, there were two boys standing outside. One was on the phone saying things like “Something is wrong,” and, “I can’t get a hold of him. Why isn’t he answering?” When I walked up behind them they asked to be let in, they called me ma’am, and I did.
I remember there were loud bangs coming from downstairs that caused things to rattle. They must have been trying to break the door down. Soon I heard a short, loud, blip from a police car or ambulance, and soon there was a delicate knock on my door.
The policeman said the boy had been dead for about four or five days—it takes a corpse five or six weeks to decompose, that is, if it has not been embalmed by a person in order to interrupt the process of decay. The first week the body bloats, flies and maggots collect at its orifices, due to the bacteria. Did I smell the rot, thinking it was someone’s garbage? I can’t say for sure.
8.30.08
Write something right now.
Boundaries are giving me a block about death, even with the broadness of this topic looking at me in the face. One word—how can I write about one word when my mind is so engorged in emotions that I don’t want to focus?
However, words are what place me back in the perspective of my own identity. How can I speak about death? I don’t know anything about it. I could not even give it a direct look. I’ve run from death, and I run from fear, which is the closest emotion I have to death. What is death? It is fear, and threat, which come as a pair. Death is all the ugly pain in life, it is the dark side, it is confusion. It is a part of life.
Why do all these things, encompassed by the word death, recur in the phases of life, of my life?
Aside from "it’s just the way it is" reasoning, the next obvious thought is that life is the other half of death. If I live, then I must die, and the refraction of these two great archetypes will fill existence with experience. Life and death are events that create the evolution of events. These are the events that create learning and growing, they are the cause of, and for, the cycle of life. The two events tell us plainly why we are here, and why we leave this existence. We are born, and at the end, we die.
Our topic is death, but I am hesitant to write about it because of the dark and ugly things I might uncover to my reader.
Death is the nutcracker to the walnut of my delicate, sensitive love.
It is the humiliation and pain that I find in my heart when I look in the faces of those whom I look to for guidance.
It is the incomprehensible rejection from the intellectual camaraderie that I look for in peers, or rather, my perceived incomprehensible rejection.
It is the process of my awkward youth figuring out the path to proficiency in love and life.
Death is the gradual dull a bottle of whiskey will bring as it goes down “smoothly,” and the satisfaction of cutting my chin on the cement after falling off my bike because I was so drunk; all in the name of love.
It is the comfort in seeing my blood and feeling the flesh of my knuckles scraped off on the brick wall outside.
Death is the sickness of self-abuse, and sharing the camaraderie of this sickness with my father, who laughed and smiled at me with genuine love and empathy when I quoted Dylan to him, “When a bottle gets empty it sure ain’t worth a damn.”
Death is knowing clinical depression and sleepless nights.
It is the fear I have over living in my mind and body.
It is watching my sanity slip through my fingers one cool, fall evening after stepping on my glasses.
Hysterically laughing and crying for 20 minutes, as my aunt attempted to maintain my sanity with her own composure (she has had her share of panic attacks), and it was in her basement that I lost control of my conscious sanity. That night I felt a death that I will never forget.
I throw clichés out the window of the passenger’s side
onto the adopt-a-highway strip.
Fahnrich, 24, is a student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, with a major in rhetoric and a minor in philosophy. Originally from Racine, she has lived in Milwaukee for six years. A poet and a writer, her writing includes creative nonfiction prose and fiction, though she prefers poetry. Her plans include studying rhetoric at the graduate level. A painter, drawer, and avid film watcher, Fahnrich also pays close attention to astrology, drinks lots of tea, and enjoys camping and swimming laps.
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