On Death — mnchrm col. xxxii
Beginning Transmission —
It’s a lovely day in Chicago today. Warm, near 60 degrees, and humid in a way that preserves the heat even in the shade. Leaving for work this morning I was glad to have forgone the heavier jacket in favor of a denim one. In our fickle Chicago atmosphere, it’s one of the first days that makes you stop and think, ‘Oh yeah, this could be Spring.’. Not even to mention the light — the light! A photographer’s dream. Photography is basically just chasing the fabled “good light”.Yet — this is Chicago. Our weather is indeed fickle. It still may snow in April. Let’s enjoy what we’ve got while we’ve got it.
It’s not just the recent uptick in weather that makes me feel optimistic; all signs point to a fresh start. Baseball is back (and the Cubs are already a mess!), a new season of anime started (Kimetsu no Yaiba has been my favorite debut so far — will let you know how that changes); life is good.
Like I said last week, I’ve begun anew on my novel. I spent a lot of time returning to the themes, textures, feelings I had hoped to evoke. Some changes so far have been small (One character has been renamed from “Elizabeth” to the perhaps-softer “Elisabeth”) and others are large (like the structure).
When I start to research a new topic, I like to start with the big picture: What is ____? I guess it’s sort of an cliche 100-level college course opening, but I think it’s effective. Photography is the process of capturing light on some durable medium. Simple. It’s not just focusing light, or temporary storing.
When I start writing anything longform, I start with a “onesheet”. To me, this is almost a freewriting exercise, where I write what interested me, what a rough story might be, references for texture and tone, questions I want to answer and questions I have, everything. This is a textural piece, designed to help evoke a specific feeling of discovery and wonder in me, the writer.
So, in another cliche, the cornerstone of my story is death. Impending death, past-death, and beyond. It’s got to be the most played-out topic — but I hope I’m able to add some nuance to it. In going back to the beginning, I started where anyone might: the Wikipedia page for death.
In particular, I was looking for some sort of consensus on what death was, what constitutes it, when it occurs. It seems like something you would want to be very clear on: Wikipedia says that around 1900 around 800 people a year in England and Wales were buried prematurely. Can you believe that? I mean, we all know what death is, but as it turns out, maybe no one knows what death is.
Wikipedia says, "One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. […] Such determination therefore requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This is difficult, due to there being little consensus on how to define life."
Well, fair enough. Depending on the circumstances, it could be defined as the moment the heart stops beating, or the moment all the blood stops circulating, or the point in which brain activity stops.
That’s just biological death. Even Wikipedia makes the jump here to the existential, saying: “As it pertains to human life, death is an irreversible process where someone loses their existence as a person.”
Damn.
Through the references on that page, I came across one of those old, brutalist websites: free from the tyranny of CSS, the bloat of JS. This is straight HTML, baby.
It presents an interesting idea, on a concept it calls Information-Theoretic Death. The author opens, “A person is dead according to the information-theoretic criterion if the structures that encode memory and personality have been so disrupted that it is no longer possible in principle to recover them.”
This definition of death relies on passing the point of revivability. He argues, as long as you can be recovered, you are not dead. So what would you be? Temporarily not-living?
Anyways, it’s a fascinating article, that advocates for cryopreservation or something similar. So going to the homepage, I find out the author of the article is none other than Ralph C. Merkle, a board member and former director of Alcor Life Extension Foundation; the largest cryopreservation firm I know of. Wild.
Bias or not, it’s worth a look.
I really should just have the em-dash (—) mapped to a keyboard shortcut by now. It’s got to be my most-used punctuation, aside from the period. I just rely on apps autocorrecting to it from a double hyphen, or pasting it in when in extreme duress. I keep meaning to really tweak the layout for my HHKB, which I swapped the controller on to add bluetooth, but is otherwise pretty stock. Maybe that’ll be my project tonight.
I changed my Twitter bio recently (today, even). I decided to swap out the title “polymath” (Someone who is knowledgable about many fields) to “philomath” (someone who loves to learn). I do have a diverse set of knowledge, but I started to think polymath perhaps implied a proficiency I couldn’t claim. Really, it’s my diverse set of interests, ability to pick up new topics and connect them in unique ways, and drive for self-improvement I wanted to convey. Maybe philomath says it better. What do you think?
I also added “Rōnin”, perhaps my favorite of the alternative terms for “freelancer”, many of which I proposed this past week.
As I start to try and write more public, I’m finding myself somewhat conflicted. I don’t really have much objectionable content on my twitter, but it is sort of opaque in a vague, not-straightforward way. Conventional wisdom would say to sand all the edges down, maybe cut back on the dumber jokes I make… But I don’t really want to. I sort of think it’s my dumb profile, and there’s many a New Yorker editor with dumb Twitters. It’s a work in progress.
Thanks to those of you who have sent me replies back in response and support of last week’s letter. I love to get them. The discussion these can generate is perhaps the most seductive draw of newsletters for me.
What do you look forward to most in Spring? How’s your baseball team doing? What anime is starting this season I should keep an eye on?
Hope you all get off to a good start this week!
Your Faithful Commander,
— I
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