All Hallows' Eve

Death is transfiguration and transformation. October 31 is the day on which we think about that. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do stainless steel rats dream of crystal spheres? Do we dream we are butterflies; or do butterflies dream they are humans?

I keep vigil on the night of October 31 not because I'm a Halloweenie. I do it because it is good to remember that death is a terminus — a boundary between two states. Whether you are religious or not, this is clearly true. You have certain rights in one state of being, certain rights (normally fewer) in the second state. You are someone much more interactive in one state, someone normally a lot less in the second.

But for me, the sober judgement of looking back through life and lives is an enlightenment. It lightens the burden of soul through the exploration of what it means to live and to have lived. And the light of the undiscovered country shines brightest on the boundary between the dying year and the harvest, and the living year and the spring.

Transfigured Characters

I think one of the best philosophical points I've seen in comics lately is that dying changes you even if you come back to life again. This comes across in a dialogue between the Black Widow and some reckless bloggers who spread the news that Bucky Barnes is still alive when actually he's had a power weapon rammed through the front wall of his chest.

At first, everybody's wrong. And then they figure it out after the Widow has more or less trashed the office, thrashed the people and threshed the documents as if they were wheat. (See what I did there?)

The truth is that even if comic characters like Steve Rogers, Simon Williams (who?!), Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and Oliver Queen die and come back, they are no longer the same people they were. Their fears of death have mutated. And their fears for their loved ones are even more complex.

The reason for this is simple. None of them died thinking, "Hey, I'm a key franchise character, they won't kill me." In their comic-book world, they died while being heroes or villains or whatever. They had no thought of coming back, they never took it for granted. Their resurrections weren't expected, nor taken for granted after the fact.

But moving from a state of not fearing (or thinking about) death to one of having experienced death, and then being alive again — that is a mysterious return from that "undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns." It is even more so for Steve Rogers, the victim of two deaths and several clonings as of the present time.

Not for nothing did the iconists and semioticists deliberately confound death and transfiguration. If death grants humans a reversal of life, is the reversal of death necessarily the same life? It would appear not.

El Cheapo

It is not a nice thing to call a person you deeply respect. But it is an excellent pseudonym, because my large-hearted iconoclastic cynical skeptic of a great-uncle was not that at all. He was careful about things he thought needed care, but he was always generous with literature of all kinds. He would've got the joke.

I have a shelf of the stuff he used to send me — newspaper clippings, unusual phenomena, and two old volumes of science fiction collected by Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis. It was these that set me on my path to science fiction hunger.

Great-uncle's growly laugh, precise enunciation and sinister shades concealed a man who thought generously of people and stingily of truth. But when it came to accepting things for which he felt he had sufficient evidence, he went large again.

He was a man of great complexity who saw himself as a simple person. His life was full of tension, incongruity, ambiguity and the liberty of mind. But his spirit resolved it all. When he left this morning at half past seven, I could imagine his first interview with his Maker, and how interesting it might be.

But I could not imagine him gone. I am left with memories instead. I will always remember his pale eyes, alert and intelligent, and the gifts of packaged words that he always sent my way.

Death in 60 Seconds

Someone recently pointed out a question which is supposedly one of those people resist asking themselves. "What would you say if you knew you'd be dead in 60 seconds?"

The odd thing is that I don't resist asking such questions. I can't remember ever having worried about dying. When I was very young, I thought I'd be immortal. Then my eldest grand-aunt died and I learnt that people were mortal and logically that included me.

So I learnt to say 'died' instead of 'passed away', 'dead' instead of 'gone to be with the Lord', and 'dying' instead of 'being looked after at the hospital'. At this point, I must credit an unlikely source for teaching me a fundamental truth.

The eclectic F&SF author Piers Anthony pointed out that Death signifies Change. He in turn got this from many venerable traditions. I realised this was obviously true.

And so I figured out that as one of the more final changes, and more certain, one ought to be prepared for it. You might never get married nor move house, but death is inevitable.

That's why I walk around with a mental list of people who I would tell, in my last 60 seconds (if I get that much time), "I loved you. You have been significant and appreciated in my life. Don't be sad. Bye for now."

In Earnest

Today I spent the afternoon carefully opening many books, the collection of my late principal, a man of great integrity, hugely varied interests, and a magpie mind which seized on facts and built palaces out of them. We were looking through the books in order to sort them out and think of a new home for them. There were more than a thousand of them.

In the curious, vacant disorder that accompanies the departure of a man who lived alone, I found an unopened drawer. It contained little brown notebooks.

They were his travel diaries; more than that, they were shared diaries co-written by his late wife, a wonderful lady who had passed on in untimely fashion decades ago. They chronicled the mundane events and the wonderful events of each day in small, meticulous writing. They had pizza one day. They spent £5 on a souvenir for an uncle. They had lists, and tables, and terse descriptions of days which they had clearly enjoyed together.

The books had not been touched for a very long while. I shut their drawer carefully, stabbed by a moment of melancholy sharpened to a sudden point.

Burial Grounds

In some cultures, people are buried. In some, they are left in the cold, clear mountains to be carried away by ice, air and raptors. In others, they get funeral pyres or cremation. Sailors used to be buried at sea.

In many cultures, we honour dead ancestors in their absence. We remember them in stories and images, in spirit and in essence. After all, they are the people whose lives gave birth to ours. I don't know why we want to keep our cemeteries as if they were necropolises though, cities of the dead.

The dead will come to outnumber the living, given finite resources. The world population currently exceeds the combined total of all the dead perhaps up to about 1000 AD. But in a twinkling of an eye, we living will soon be overwhelmed.

The physical spaces some cultures set aside for their dead are not sustainable. Soon, 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust' will have to become the truth, not just a mealy-mouthed platitude uttered at some funerals at which the corpse is to be interred with the hope that the body will last forever.

Some believe that bodies must be intact for the resurrection of the dead — certainly, this belief is as old as Ancient Egypt. I find it hard to believe, however, that a Power which can raise the dead cannot simply reconstitute the bodies from the dust of the cosmos.

And so, we should favour the living over the dead. If a road must pass through the last resting-place of my ancestors, I think they would be amused. No mere road would have served to baulk any intentions of theirs when they were alive.

Terminus: SF&F

Often, this blog has posts about the boundaries between different areas of knowledge. In memory of Roger Zelazny, this post will quote from the dialogue between the god Yama and the monkey Tak. They discuss the nature of the beings known as demons, and this is how the discussion goes:

They sat in Yama's chambers, having taken a light meal there. Yama leaned back in his chair, a glass of the Buddha's wine in his left hand, a half-filled decanter in his right.

"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.

"Yes – and no," said Yama, "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape – then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."

"Oh? And what may that be?"

"It is not a supernatural creature."

"But it is all those other things?"

"Yes."

"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not – so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."

"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."

It is that curious last paragraph to which I must draw the reader's attention. Four points of the compass? It is interesting indeed, and perhaps it shows more insight into the mind of Zelazny's Death-god than anything else. Four choices, and the one choice Death would never choose. But that begs the question, "Which one would Death choose?"

Man Is Born To Trouble

Given that every one of us experiences life in a different way, is it not strange that there are strong commonalities between us all? We can discuss so much, having experienced so little of it in common.

It is the same with states and cities, countries and domains. We think there are bases for comparison, and that what works for the goose will work for the gander. And yet each place has its own history; what is acceptable in one place might not work at all somewhere else.

Still, humans hanker after what they never had, strive to obtain things that others have, make comparisons which seem in abstract useful but in practice are not at all. They do this regardless of historical or social or geographical context?

In the last few days, people have compared Atlantis to Cuba — after all, both are islands, are they not? — and to New York — both are cities, are they not? — and to Cambridge — both were once small swampy places, no?

Crazy, this urge to compare what cannot be compared. And yet, do we not assume there must be universal standards? For example, from a moral perspective, we think killing is bad. Yet, for many reasons, every society will kill given the right conditions. Individuals might protest this, but there is always some line; perhaps only the Jains will try their best not to kill anything at all.

The countries that protest the death penalty the most seem to have the fewest scruples when it comes to gratuitously unleashing engines of death on other nations. Perhaps only the Scandinavians seem virtuous in this regard, in recent history. And yet, they too were once feared — we get 'berserker' and 'viking' from those northern lands after all.

The idea is that humanity has left its long adolescence and now rises towards moral adulthood. Many people have said this, in many places. Yet, is this possible at all? Or is it only something that we believe because it is more pleasant to believe it?

These questions trouble me. I know I can kill. I exterminate insects without qualms, and rub my hands in alcoholic gels to kill germs. In a world where otherwise sane people relegate humans to just another link in the natural order, why should there be special dispensation for complex brains? They too will pickle well in alcohol, after all.

Perhaps it is all human vanity. For who knows whether the spirit of man rises upward or that of the animal sinks downward to the earth?

These questions trouble me, but not as much as they should. And that too troubles me.

Unifying Factors

Regardless of the complexities of science and psychology, there are some common experiences that affect the vast majority of people. The death of a child, the death of a parent or a spouse, these things cut to the essence of our lives and bring us together, even if it's only for a brief moment in the surge of the tides.

There is no place for contention at such times, or ought not to be.

Word of the Day: Necrophoresis

I remember that one of the most moving parts of Neil Gaiman's Sandman sequence was the storytelling part (collected as Worlds' End) which comes before the climax of the series and the death of Dream. In that collection is a story about the many ways in which bodies are prepared for dissolution after death. Oddly enough, the word that doesn't appear in that story is 'necrophoresis'.

'Necrophoresis' means 'the removal of corpses', from Greek nekron, 'corpse' and pherein, 'to carry or bear (away)'. It is explicitly used to describe the removal of dead ants from a colony by those still alive, a mysterious phenomenon because somehow ants know another ant is dead even before it starts producing death-related chemical compounds.

The mystery has been solved (there was a paper published by UC Riverside researchers in May earlier this year on it). Apparently, ants emit a couple of chemicals that proclaim, "I'm not dead yet!" These chemicals are called dolichodial (a dialdehyde whose name comes from the Greek word for 'long foot-race') and iridomyrmecin (from the Greek words for 'rainbow' and 'ant').

As long as the ant is alive, it keeps producing these, "Hey I'm still alive!" chemicals. Once it stops, its friends sense this lack-of-life state and carry the carcass out; the chemicals dissipate with a half-life of less than 10 minutes.

Somehow, this process reminded me of academia. Academics publish papers to proclaim their continuing academic life. Once they stop publishing, or otherwise making a nuisance of themselves, they are considered academically dead.

The process also occurs in schools. Some schools are very bad at necrophoresis; the deadwood lingers on, afflicting students with a marked lack of inspiration and the sensation that being taught is a horrible thing. I think that once a teacher stops inspiring students (in a positive way, of course), that teacher should be carried out and dumped. Occasionally, however, just as in some ant colonies, the wrong signals are sent and perfectly functional ants teachers are dumped.

Time's Dark Wings

Tonight I attended a funeral wake for a lovely lady who used to call me 'godson' (as she did so many others). It was an odd reunion of old and very different friends, brought together by an instant of mutual experience. Time had moved a dark wing over us, and the light of eternity had been shadowed for a while.

It was all very sudden. Sometimes, it's just like Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach — the world seems full of chaotic clashes and dissonances, and then we are gone.

Doggone

The oldest dog went to be with her Maker some time during the night. She was the one with the fluffy coat and the snuffling 'heh heh' style of greeting. Last night she was wandering blindly (cataracts) and restlessly (senility) all over the garden, more so than usual. This morning's sunlight greeted her lying stone cold and at peace beside a spreading bougainvillea bush. It was her favourite spot in the sun; I'm glad she found it in the dark.

We got her from the SPCA fifteen years ago, a light brown and white pup with a sort of innocently engaging gaze and a very undemanding nature (except when it came to sneaking food from the cat). She greeted people mostly with kindness and often with drool. She was a lovable dog, much more so than her two colleagues who tended towards over-exuberance and roughing up others for fun.She wasn't a particularly healthy or unusually beautiful creature. She survived surgery for a large tumour two years ago, and we thought we'd lost her then. She proved to be tougher than we thought. Then again, she's always been a surprise.

Some time later this morning, we thought to take a look at her license. Heh. It expires today. Goodbye, Sandy!

I still feel sad.

Ecclesiastes 3:20-21

De Profundis

How can we continue to say that access to knowledge and information is one of our educational targets?

Split II

And now I see, as if with blinding sight, what this poem really means. It must be about schizophrenia.

When I quote Dylan, last bard of Wales, these days, everyone thinks I mean Bob Dylan.

But death shall have no dominion.

An old classmate of mine died yesterday. At such times, we remember everything.

Strange Meeting (Redux)

This isn't meant to be some sort of oral commentary wannabe on Wilfred Owen's life and works. But I realise that when I mentioned Strange Meeting a short while back, a lot of people actually clicked on the link and found little of use there. That's because I've been thinking about the poem for almost 25 years now, but never actually wrote down what I thought about it (except during the 'O'-level examinations almost that long ago).

So I suppose I should say something about it, once again cautioning people that this is my own opinion and that in no way does it express an official viewpoint, an academically-qualified exegesis, or any other form of interpretation on which careers may be built or scuttled. It isn't literary analysis.

This is what I think.

Let's begin with context. I think that Strange Meeting is largely indebted to Shelley's incredibly long (but, for its time, not unusually so) poem The Revolt of Islam. Read Canto 5, verses 10-13 (or X to XIII), if you want to see what I mean (you can even read it from verse 1, if you want). We can suspect this because a copy of Shelley's works was given to Owen for his 21st birthday by his siblings. What's telling, however, is that he stops at XIII. XIV (well, verse 14) is the beginning of the triumphal return which Owen never includes. But at this point, we are beginning to lose the thread, for Shelley's poem is about reconciliation between Christianity and Islam.

So what is the thread? Psychologically, the poem clearly contains structures which imply mirroring, reflection, the dopplegänger effect. It is obvious to most that the dead soldiers who meet here, the man and his enemy, are very alike; and also that they have discovered this likeness, this similar sadness and regret, at the immediate point of death, just before final dissolution or whatever else awaits them beyond the terminus of life and death.

This perspective is common to many forms of heroic narrative, for this kind of narrative begins with the special birth of the protagonist and ends with a special death which mirrors the birth. Here, Owen's poem actually depicts the ending of the hero's journey. The tunnels, the subterranean setting – all these are a return to the womb. The hero is completing the last stage; having done his job, he is returning to the fundamental chaos or underlying structure of eternity. It is the 'drawing-down of blinds' found at the end of Anthem for Doomed Youth.

So if this is true, why the encounter on the way home? It is clear that Owen intends to show the essential brotherhood of soldiers, that (just as in Dulce et Decorum est) all are subject to the same Lie. In effect, Anthem, Dulce et Decorum and Meeting form a triptych about death in wartime – the first lays it out formally, with the sanctity of a churchyard elegy; the second is frenzied and manic in its portrayal of vileness; the third completes the picture. And all three interrogate God implicitly, with questions about meaning and truth and the worth of a life; all three speak with the same voice, with a complicity and shared burden of experience.

In the end, Meeting is about ambiguity and the lack of answers. The poem's second voice hints at something higher than the sad condition of humanity which brought the protagonist and antagonist (are they the same person, perhaps?) to this same place of death. And yet, there is no clear vision about what it was that was greater or higher or better than this. War is a dead end – the chariot wheels are clogged and man has reversed his progress – but is there anything better? Perhaps we have to be content with the fact that there are heroes who try and, in the end though they come to grief, know that they tried for something better.

Word of the Day: Thanatopsis

A thanatopsis is, simply put, an essay on Death. It's odd that this should be a literary term rather than a philosophical or religious term, although it can conceivably be either of those. The Greek thanatopsis literally means 'a look at death', from thanatos = 'death' and -opsis = 'eyeing'.

But each of these two components has its own rich back-story.

In Greek mythology, Thanatos (Gk. θάνατος) is Death, son of Night and Darkness. Hypnos (Sleep) is his brother; Morpheus ('He Who Shapes') or Oneiros ('Dream') is his nephew. The word thanatos itself seems to come from the same ancient root as the Anglo-Saxon 'dwindle' – "to decline into nothing, to waste away". Of course, the most common usage of the word in modern times is in euthanasia, 'a good death'.

The Greek ops means 'eye', and from this root we obtain 'cyclops' = 'round eye', 'optics' = 'having to do with the action of the eye', 'ophthalmology' = 'the study of the chamber of the eye', 'autopsy' = '(to see with) one's own sight', 'biopsy' = 'a sight of living material', 'synopsis' = 'to see (all) together'. The eye is the most expressive and perceptive part of the facial anatomy; in classical Greek, ops can mean 'face' as well as 'eye'.

Thanatopsis, then, is not just writing about Death; rather, it is the perception, apprehension, attempted understanding, and acceptance of the idea of Death. It is, in many senses of the phrase, a demonstration that one possesses a 'dark-adapted eye'.

An Unusual Journeying (Part 3)

What I tell you three times is true, says the old formula beloved of fairy-tales. And so, here is the third and last 'fit' as Lewis Carroll might have said.

I have no discernible fear of death. I have a list of things I think I fear; here are some of them: pain, torture, prolonged awareness of incapacity, the debilitation of disease and old age, the loss of loved ones in an untimely and/or senseless-seeming way.

Over the years, I have discovered that the material rewards of an attitude which does not cling to this life are great. They are not positive material rewards (free cars, extra loot, a larger house) but rewards in the breach; these are rewards which make material things less inviting.

The first of these rewards is peace of mind. A major source of anxiety seems to be removed when someone is without a fear for the ending of life. Does it really matter what a person does to you? Yes, it might and often does; but it might matter less when you realise that he is for the maggots as much as you, that some things can be easily laughed off because they are not even as frightening as death. You can afford to take the long view and realise that if you were to die that night, a lot of things would shift in significance and value. You can afford to be at peace with yourself and with others.

The second of these rewards is contentment. When you have peace of mind, you can be content – and happy with what you have to live on. I know my work is worth a lot more than I'm paid. But it does not matter at all. It is enough that I have the tools of my work and the ability to relax and enjoy them. You can take act towards goals: contentment is not necessarily immobility, inertia, incapacity or lack of desire to do something new and different. But you can decide firmly that enough is enough, sit down and stick to your own mission statement.

The last of these rewards is a sense of perspective. [It's hard to define that, but the link I've just given might help. Heh.] Investing recently with a friend of mine, I was a little surprised to find that he rated me at the high-end of risk-taking. I asked him why. He said that my answers to his questions had shown that I really did not care if I lost the entire "fortune" that I had invested with him. He's right. If a man can live on less than $300 a month (as some people say), then a man who earns $1.2m a year certainly has more than enough. That man is now able to give away at least $1m a year. It is probably true that few such people do, because they might have forgotten how to survive on $200k a year, let alone $3600 a year with no bonuses. I make less than $100k a year myself, but I am extremely aware that that puts me in the top 10% of all the world's people (I think you need about US$60,000 for that).

Ah, take time to delight in life while you have it! It's the one online game you can really play in character. While the penalties for character death seem awful for an online game, bear in mind that leaving your computer to have dinner can be a good idea. Peace, contentment, a sense of perspective - what great gifts I have received!

An Unusual Journeying (Part 2)

In this second part, I'm going to talk about what is perhaps an abnormal psychology. Mine.

The fear of death is an interesting phenomenon. The Romans used to say timor mortis conturbat me, and it remains a popular motif to the present day. A student of mind once did a research project on anthropomorphic personifications of Death, he with the hood and the scythe. Perhaps the only modern author to move significantly away from that macabre image is Neil Gaiman, whose Death is a wide-eyed young lady Goth with an ankh and a pleasant bedside manner.

Truth be told, I had no such conceptions of death. To me, it was a boundary, the line between life and afterlife. I still believe it's a line that everyone will cross it at least once; nobody has ever been exempt, although some have returned and some have passed on without a clear demarcation that we can contemplate.

In that sense, I echo the implicit philosophy of Gene Wolfe's eponymous hero, Severian, from The Shadow of the Torturer. His executioner's blade is the carnifex named Terminus Est. This name has often been mistranslated as '(This) Is The End', but a more subtle translation relies on the actual meaning of terminus: 'boundary'. A terminus is therefore a bound. It is a point or line or plane between one place and another. And to me, death has always been that. It has no concrete existence except as a consequence of what is on either side of it, much as a point, line, plane or other boundary marker of zero thickness.

What are the consequences of this? Well, it makes me more patient, more forgiving, slower to anger than I normally am. I am prone especially to wrath and impatience, but as the Good Book says, it is because we love each other that we know we have passed from death to life. Death and life are asymmetrical opposites, much as yes and no - negation is much more powerful than the other, but affirmation has more possibilities.

It also seems to have instilled in me a rather ironic sense of humour. I live in a culture surrounded by trophy-hunters, all looking for trophies such as wealth, examination performance, property, and professional certification. It amuses me, sometimes to the point of arousing ire in others. Ah well. You can't win them all.

In my next post I suppose I'll be speaking more of the material consequences as opposed to the psychological consequences. And I continue to thank God for the highly unusual gift of equanimity in the face of death.

An Unusual Journeying (Part 1)

I was born with a payload of odd genetic traits. I'm sure many of you have them too, but perhaps not all at once. I have an odd form of colour-blindness, some missing enzymes, odd bands around my arms, functional ambidexterity, a brain which is resolutely neither left-biased nor right-biased, and some other stuff. I used to think, when I was a child, that I wasn't entirely human.

Now I am older, I marvel at the range of humanity and people we call human (and who look human each day) and realise how human I really am. But one of my genetic traits had an unforeseen and deeply empowering result in my life, and I will discuss this later.

An aside first: the Latin word peregrinor is an interesting verb meaning 'to be different, to be unusual, to be strange or foreign, to wander, to voyage, to journey in foreign lands'. Try to understand that its sense is somewhat akin to the Greek xenos, as in 'xenophobia'. It is the word from which we get the name of the peregrine falcon - i.e. a falcon which appears to be always wandering or travelling.

When I was about five years old, I contracted a nasty illness because of one of my genetic traits. I began to haemorrhage everywhere. My quick-thinking grandfather ensured I was rushed to hospital, whereupon I was hooked up and treated to a complete blood transfusion. I felt no fear. I had been having these nosebleeds ever since my return to Singapore from the land of my birth. I bled easily, scarred easily, had learnt to endure the daily inconvenience and the finger-pointing of my peers.

It crossed my five-year-old mind that I might die. I resolved then, at that very young age, that dying was OK. It was quite peaceful in the hospital, with the regular and muffled sounds, the enforced visiting hours and meals, the solitude and quiet. And the next stage, as far as I knew, was death. So be it.

My mother and grandmother thought I was being excessively morbid. When I recovered, they always got upset when I spoke of it. The menfolk were more mysterious. They had a secret. I'm not sure know if it was the one I now know they have.

You know, when you have decided that dying is OK, life holds no terrors for you. You don't become more reckless; who wants to die in some crazy and violent incident which leaves you in a semi-dead state or an extended condition of pain and suffering? But you become more composed. And very little that people can do to you will change that. Inducements, threats and blandishments are irrelevant, since you or the other person might well be gone before they can take effect.

And you don't go crying to God in fear of death and the afterlife; if you go to God, it is in conversation during the still silences of the night, during the sliced moments of the day, never with human fright, but with rational fear.

The attitude that people perceive you have will also be unusual. Many people will not know why you are like that, why you will speak in the darkness, or do the peculiar, or endure the insane, or attempt the impossible. Not that I do all these things, but that's just my opinion. In my next post, I'll be more specific about the outcomes of journeying in this state of mind.