NINE: The Quest for Immortality

The concept of immortality must have come early in the anomalous human development of a material culture, likely connected with the development of art and writing. Perhaps the artists of the caves of Lascaux in France glimpsed the notion that their creations of magnificently cavorting animals would outlive them. Certainly the Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs were obsessed with immortality.

I went to Egypt to research Tales of Monkeyman, a novel about a man raised by baboons in Kenya. In researching baboons, I discovered that the Egyptians revered baboons as an incarnation of the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, a messenger of the other gods, the god of writing, and the guide to souls on the way to death. Thoth (pronounced “toth” with a long o) evolved into the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury.

I visited the pyramids with the expectation that they were likely to be over-hyped tourist attractions. When I got there, I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. They are so beautiful! There is something about how their image lands on the retina that bespeaks an archetype of Beauty. They were built as monuments to Pharaohs, manifestations of their monumental arrogance, and, along with mummification, an elaborate attempt to achieve immortality. And guess what? For all intents and purposes, they succeeded. They have certainly come closer to immortality than any other humans. They have been remembered longer. Ken Kesey captures this spirit in his story “The Secret of the Pyramids” in Demon Box. He contends that the meaning of the pyramids inheres in their capacity to provide a livelihood to the hucksters who prey on the tourists 4000 years after they were built.

At the time I was in Egypt, archeologists were beginning to understand that while slaves may have been involved in the construction of the pyramids, a major purpose of the project was to employ farmers during the off season, kind of an ancient New Deal. One of the things that I was left with after spending several days basking in the aura of these monuments was this: If they could do that back then, given the level of their technology, if they could mobilize the entire population to create these absolutely magnificent works of art, think of what we could do now.

And yet what are the pyramids but monuments to human arrogance, to human egotism? One of the things one experiences on LSD is the “death” of the ego – at least this is the terminology in the Pschedelic Experience, the loose translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Ralph Metzger and Timothy Leary which guided so many of us on our acid trips. What is this ego? We all have one, and we all have a sense of what it is intuitively. It is the “I” of our internal monologue – the word “ego” is actually a translation from Freud’s German, “Das Ich.” Freud’s definition is broader than that used in the Metzger book, and the more precision we can get in our metaphors here the better.

EIGHT: The meaning of meaninglessness

Something I don’t like to hear from the spiritual side of this equation is how “everything happens for a reason,” a corollary being that if someone dies, it’s because “it was their time.” Bullshit, I say. Tell that to the “collateral damage” of the war in Iraq, the children caught in the crossfire. Shit happens. Accidents happen. Chance is a real thing, and sometimes things do happen for no reason. Recently a friend of mine, Brandi, died from complications of elective, cosmetic surgery. Ever since I met her 15 years ago, she had to struggle to make the rent every month. In the last six months of her life, she “inherited” a church and was on her way to becoming a significant figure in the spiritual life of San Francisco. For the first time in her life (she was in her early 50s), she had enough money. She even bought a house. But then the pain medicine they gave her after her operation interfered with the beta blockers she was taking for high blood pressure, and her heart stopped, just like that. It was not her time.

In one of my periodic efforts to get beyond my atheism, I once started an on-line religion called the Church of the Cosmic Wink. It had one doctrine: “It seems like there might be something....” I’ve advanced a baby step since then. The new doctrine I would propose is: “It seems like there might be something, and whatever the hell it is, we’re going to go for it.”

So, I don’t want to be buried or cremated. I want to drop dead wherever I am and let nature take its course, just as it does with every other of the billions of species. I even have the means to carry this out: a plot of land in the remote Santa Cruz mountains. When I get near to actually dying, I intend to go there and die there like that, like the deer, the squirrels, the bluejays, and the banana slugs.

At one time I thought I would die elsewhere and have my children cart me to this place in the mountains we call Deer Creek. When I mention this, they go “Ew!” It does seem to be asking a lot of my family, though I feel less conflicted about it since “Little Miss Sunshine,” the hilarious movie where the family shoves the dead grandpa in the trunk in order to make it to the beauty contest on time.

Still, it will be easier on everyone if I can just arrange to die there. As we will see in the chapter on different cultural approaches to death, there have been people who have been able to consciously arrange their deaths. This strikes me as a worthy goal. To take charge of our deaths not in a suicidal way but in a conscious way. It seems to me if we stop denying death, it might well be possible to consciously track its progress, to make a date with it and meet it perhaps not with open arms, but at least with confident poignancy. One thing I have no interest I doing is getting beyond tragedy. Tragedy is a beautiful part of the human condition. One of the more compelling aspects of the Christian metaphor is its recognition of tragedy. If anything, I want to get back to an appreciation of tragedy from the post-World War II slide into existential meaninglessness. As Stalin once might have said, the death of an individual is a tragedy; the death of a million individuals is a statistic. In our time where genocide has become as ordinary as toothpaste, it would help for us to get back to where we can appreciate that every single one of those million deaths is a tragedy. No matter if it “their time” or not. No matter if their souls are going on to a “better place” or not. Maybe there’s only one place.

SEVEN: Reality

Speaking of reality: one of the premises of this blog is that reality inheres in the connections we have to each other. Our concept of reality is defined by the consensus we share with others of our species. We agree to a common language – or set of languages – and accept without question the existence of a reality outside of ourselves that consists of concrete, tangible objects. Most of us agree. Those of us who don’t accept the consensus are remanded to institutional care or increasingly left to wander the streets muttering to ourselves.

In my effort to connect, I need to talk about the weirdness of this consensual reality. There are billions of species on this earth. Not a single one of them, other than ourselves, so far as we know, has entered upon a path anywhere near the kind of path we are on. In fact, there is no evidence, Star Wars notwithstanding, that any other species in the entire universe of trillions of galaxies has embarked on such a course. There are many characteristics that define this path: walking on two legs, using fire, wearing clothes, cooking our food, music, writing, TV, cars, Uzis, atom bombs – or for that matter, burying and/or cremating our dead. Call it the development of a material culture for short. And, we have been on this path for an infinitesimally short time by geological or even biological standards. A million years maybe since the first humanoid stood up on its back legs, but only 35,000 years since the weirdness began accelerating, one supposes since the last ice age.

The anomalousness of human development is highly disturbing to me, and even more disturbing in that it doesn’t seem to disturb many others.

Are humans out of sync with nature? Yet how is this possible if we are in fact products of nature?

Of course, I needed to add the caveat “as far as we know.” It is entirely possible that ants, say, have this incredible body of literature written in carbon molecules on grains of sand. How would we know?

Something else that is both disturbing and reassuring at the same time: most of our “knowledge” of the universe, of what we agree to call “reality” comes only within the last 500 years. 500 years ago, the consensus was that the earth was flat, at the center of the universe, and the sun went around it. What’s hopeful about this is the sense that what we think of as reality now is obviously just as “inaccurate” as the previous metaphors.

Metaphor is a good word here. After all, the world does look flat. It does look like the sun goes around the earth. All of our so called knowledge is merely a metaphor for what seems to be true. In “reality,” if I can use that term, our view of the universe even now, is no better than that of a flea on the back of an elephant. Or a louse in the hair of a child, as depicted in a recent South Park episode. In short, despite the apparently geometric expansion of our knowledge of the universe in recent decades, we know next to nothing about what is really going on. I think it might be useful to start with the sum total of all human beliefs about reality and the universe and assume that all of them are true, and yet describe less than a fraction of a percent of the truth. God is highly inaccurate metaphor. “There is no God,” is equally inaccurate. For people to get oh so exercised over whether their particular metaphors are anymore accurate than anyone elses’ is just – what – stupid. And yet so many do get so exercised. What’s up with that? How can we get beyond this inane quibble over the relative accuracy of our wholly inadequate metaphors? Here is another theme of this blog: how do we bridge the gap between the folks on spiritual path that somehow think that what happens in this world – all the suffering and death, much of it caused by this argument over metaphors – is insignificant, that “reality,” the world’s most popular metaphor, is an illusion – and the political folks attempting to take responsibility for what damage humans do to each other and to the planet.

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SIX: I fear feath

Back to death. To think about death clearly, it makes sense to somehow get beyond the fear of death. On the one hand, the fear of death is an instinct handed to us genetically by the process of evolution. It is obviously in the interest of humans as a species to have a “healthy” fear of dying: this way, we will instinctively avoid it. On the other hand, the development of human consciousness has enabled us to rise above many of our instincts: we no longer have to fuck everything in sight (though we may still want to) or gouge out the eyes of our rivals at the shrinking waterhole. The development of rational thought, presumably within the last, what 10,000 years or so, trumps irrational fear.

All living things die. Death is a part of life. Get used to it. Everything has a season.

Yet the fear lingers. One manifestation of my own fear of death concerns how I will be disposed of once the heart-beat monitor flatlines. Despite my sense that consciousness ends once your neurons stop firing, I can’t be sure that sensation will cease right away. So I have an “irrational” fear of both being buried “alive” (or at least still sensate) and of being burned alive, as in cremated before all my sensation has ceased.

I know where these “irrational” fears come from. Like most of our irrational tendencies, they are anchored in early memories. My first experience of hearing about someone I knew dying involved a friend of the family who ran out of air while skin-diving in Florida. I obsessed over that piece of information to the point where I would panic whenever I felt deprived of air. Like when my friends in my all white school would call for a “nigger pile on Henry,” and would summarily jump me and pile on top of me, mimicking the social hierarchy. A few years ago, I watched one of those videos called “The Faces of Death,” real footage of people dying. One segment was of a couple who were underwater spelunking (exploring caves) with scuba gear. They got lost. I can fully relate to the panic they experienced as their air ran out.

During my years in alternative service as a conscientious objector, I worked at a psychiatric half-way house. Talk about unclear on the concept: they had an abandoned refrigerator on the back porch from which the door had not been removed. One night, one of our residents, a beautiful, depressed young girl of no more than 18, decided to climb in, shut the door, and check out. What if after a half hour or so holed up in there she changed her mind?

The burning alive fear comes from my house burning down when I was four. My sister, aged all of seven, and I were home alone with our caretaker Clifford (more of a drunk than a child development specialist). She noticed the smoke coming out of the shingles. We went to find Clifford, who was down the road in the tool shed. He tried to call the fire department using the new-fangled dial phone, but ended up having to go next door to get his brother-in-law, the neighbor’s caretaker, to help. Many of my toys that didn’t get fully burned up retained that inimitable smell of the fire for years. The fire was allegedly started by a squirrel short-circuiting the knob-and-tube wiring, and this story has been immortalized in my novel/story collection called “Squirrels in the Walls.”

Another story in that same collection is called “Death Masks,” wherein yet another incarnation of Barney Blatz inadvertently burns down a storage shack in the woods and subsequently discovers in the ruins a box of masks made by his grandfather, an amateur sculptor, of his medical colleagues upon their demise as templates for making a bust of their heads. But the eyes of the masks radiate with black smudges from the smoke and strike Barney with so much terror that he will fear ghosts forever, regardless of whether he believes in them or not.

To be clear here, to separate reality from fiction: There was a fire; the shack did burn down. I didn’t start it. I did discover the smoke-smudged death masks afterwards.