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.
