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
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