Notes on the niche pastime of thinking about death
A lyric essay about a lifetime spent pondering the imponderable
(If you would like to listen to me reading this post with a sprinkling of banter, you can listen to my podcast here)
When my eldest nephew was a nipper, he thought that when you died you just stayed really still for an unspecified amount of time. This brought to mind something from my own time at primary school. We played WW2, Star Wars or any other game that involved pointing a gun-finger at someone, making the pew-pew noise and exclaiming "You're dead". I would then assume my position as a newly dead person, prostrate myself on the painted concrete and wait for a team member to touch my shoulder and say "release!" Then I sprung back to life and pew-pewed the bejaysus out of my previous pew-pewers. So, in those moments of lying still, as the game unfurled around us, the idea of death as an undefined stretch of restless inactivity took hold.
My primary school was also a Catholic school so ideas of heaven and hell were soon inseminated within my hatchling cortex. I could easily picture those mutual realms and, in finding I could picture them, I felt that I believed in them. But this belief never filtered through into my actions. When I plucked limbs and wings from a daddy long legs, I didn't envision the upward dispersal of its soul as I deftly rolled its remaining head and body into a neat little ball between my finger tips.
One idea of heaven that I kept within my mind was a sea of clouds where aerobatic dolphins frolicked about. I couldn't imagine an ideal afterlife without dolphins. There were no dolphins in my notion of hell but it was a bit metal. I remember seeing a cardboard cut out of Tim Curry's wide horned Satyr from the movie Legend, glaring from the display of the video rental shop and thinking that he kinda rocked. Monsters lived in hell and I really liked monsters.
I only got creeped out by the Satan stuff when I was told that if you sat at a candlelit mirror in a field at midnight and said the Hail Mary backwards three times then the face of Satan would appear. Satan lording over his infernal domain? Kind of cool. Satan appearing in a mirror in the middle of a field at midnight? No, no, no, God no.
Again, I could picture stuff and if I could picture stuff that was enough within my child mind to conclude that I believed it. Then, after I had pictured these things enough times, they would become a part of my identity and then, when I heard the claims of other religions, I could dismiss them as outlandish and fanciful. As I got older and befriended kids outside of the bubble of my Catholic community, I became more interested in all of their beliefs.
I once asked a friend at the the local college about what happened in the afterlife because I mistook his pretension for wisdom. He told me that whatever someone believed in, that's where they went. I was really impressed with this answer, despite it being a load of old bollocks. I think it was the generosity that I liked. And, I guess, if one ascribes to a reductionist, neurological viewpoint, one can imagine that, in the brain's last throes of functionality, the person's deepest beliefs surge upwards into an intense waking dream and everybody gets a momentary taste of their own heaven before it all comes crashing down.
My early adulthood veered away from imaginings of dolphins in heaven and into more nebulous spiritual territory, most of it drawn from profound misunderstandings of Hinduism and Buddhism. I envisioned nirvana or samadhi as some cloudlike loci of unending bliss, albeit one that included an experiencer of such bliss, a sneaky little self revelling in its loss of selfhood.
By my thirties, this milksop spiritualism dispersed to reveal the piss-and-vinegar atheism that had been festering beneath. I wanted to know everything and had no time for epistemological trifles such as whether it was possible to know everything. I won't go into a lot of detail about my crusading atheist phase. There isn't much of interest to say about it and if something worthwhile from that time does pop up, I'll be sure to scribble it down. The one thing for now that does stand out is the metaphysical contortions I put myself through when musing on the subject of death.
There's a lot of atheist posturing about death, as if we are staring into the void with a bit more intensity and stoicism than all religious types. This bon mot from Mark Twain was wheeled out regularly:
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
This was true to a certain degree, I wasn't afraid of non-existence. I knew that in my moments of deep sleep, the self vanished as the body persisted.
Nonexistence is a doozy. You could say it doesn't require any effort at all. But we go to sleep most nights with the notion that we will wake up again. The terror that accompanies nonexistence is the thought of the last moments of existence, when you're clawing for breath as your loved ones stroke your hair and whisper inanities.
I recently visited Westminster Cathedral with my wife, and became fascinated with a glass exhibition case that held the remains of St John Southworth. He had been hung, drawn and quartered for not renouncing his Catholic priesthood and his body had been sewn back together, par-boiled, buried, unburied and regaled with a golden mask and fine threads in a gawker-friendly sepulchre. He was definitely dead.
At the same time I could hear a talk being given from the other side of the cathedral and the speaker was telling his audience about how, after breathing their last breath, they would close their eyes on earth and reopen them in heaven. This speech echoed the late poetry of another London priest, John Donne:
One short sleep past, we wake eternally And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.– from Holy Sonnets – Death be not Proud
I wanted to ask the speaker how he knew this but my crusading atheist days were behind me – I still harboured no capacity for religious belief but had rediscovered the pleasure of religious awe. Those spoken words rang out so hollow against the weighty materiality of the mutilated saint in his gaudy dress.
I say this with the admission that I harboured the most wishful, hollow beliefs about death when I was a crusading atheist. I read "I am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter and was touched by how he had kept many of his late wife's clothes and belongings in order to maintain the fidelity of his own cognitive model of her. But I found no personal consolation in the idea that, if a human soul was simply information and function, then a part of that human lived on as long as the information and function continued.
G.K. Chesterton famously said that once a person loses their belief in god, they'll believe in anything and I've never heard as many ridiculous beliefs about death as I have heard from my fellow atheists. Transhumanist ideas of uploading consciousness rung as false as the words that echoed through that cathedral – only this time the uploaded consciousness opened the eyes of a synthetic body after their final breath; or was uploaded into a virtual heaven, running in a massive data centre? I'm guessing uploaded selves don't need to breathe but maybe it will be made a feature in the service of fidelity, much like the fake air that Morpheus chastises Neo for breathing in The Matrix.
There are more subtle versions of this transhumanism that have been around a lot longer, legacy being one of them. I wrote a year or so ago about making a digital copy of my voice, partially in the hope that it could live on in perpetuity. I even thought about training a large language model to write poems similar to my own and for the voice to read them out. I could start a new career or die a quiet death while my digital golem wittered on about South London plane trees for eternity.
There are many ways in which dreams of posthumous legacy are far more deranged than all the heavens and valhallas that have proliferated over the ages. I think of the statue of Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana prodding an albatross in the Harrods foyer. That statue of Saddam Hussein, toppled by an enthusiastic coterie of men who proceeded to slap the dictator’s chiselled cheeks with the soles of their shoes. A tower with the word TRUMP emblazoned in gold letters on its summit. A tale told by a traveller from ancient lands about a shattered visage in a desert.
Believing that the self does not survive death is one thing, believing in an eternal afterlife is another. But being invested in the idea that the same material world must pay homage to the likeness of a body that has since returned to the elements is perhaps the most absurd.
A lot of my own notions of how I might live after my death (in the legacy of my writing and how I linger within the memories of those that loved me) seemed to spring from that same hopeful absurdity. As if the internet and the minds of my loved ones formed a disparate network of unconsolidated backup drives that held the surviving fragments of my selfhood which could one day be assembled again like an infinity gauntlet.
There’s a kind of mindset that I like to call “Oz apologetics”, named after the point at the end of The Wizard of Oz where a newly-exposed conman fails to give the characters the thing that he promised them and instead plants the idea in their heads that they have always possessed these rewards. The more I think of it the more I’m reminded of all those empowering seminars where participants walk over hot coals, bellowing mantras before losing all that mojo when they return to their everyday routines.
I have harped on about Blade Runner a few times in this newsletter/blog/internet scratching post but I’ll repeat my previous observations about how on-point the character of Roy Batty was on mortality. His initial motivation is to find a way of extending his life beyond three years of manufactured obsolescence. When his maker, Tyrell, attempts to fob him off with Oz Apologetics (the brightest of flames burns fastest and you have burned oh so brightly), Batty is quick to clamp Tyrell's head between his palms and put out his slow burning flame with little effort. It’s also in that same film where Batty truly understands what it means to be alive when he comes to accept the inevitability of his death and the transience of his existence.
I had a similar moment of insight in a in far less dramatic environment. It happened in the fruit aisle of the big Sainsburies. I don't know if proximity to lemons is a precursor to thoughts about death (insert dad joke about bittersweetness here) but there I was envisioning various post-mortem scenarios among lurid crates of produce.
But this time, instead of indulging in Oz Apologetics, thinking of all the ways that I might persist beyond the death of this body, I turned the question around. I asked myself, if legacy, memory and genetics were all ways in which parts of me continue after my death, then what parts of my current experience would not survive death?
Then, for perhaps the first time in my existence, I looked with wide open curiosity, naivety and openness at my own aliveness.
There is no way in which I can show this experience of my aliveness to you in the same way that you cannot show your aliveness to me. We can look into each other's eyes and sense that the lights are on as we might do when looking into the eyes of a pet. Even a tiny little creature stops absolutely still in the middle of a forest when it becomes possessed of the notion that another sentient presence is watching them. That's the thing that I believe is gone when our brains shut down. All thoughts and notions about death and nonexistence are simply ideas that appear on top of all of this.
There's a phrase I hear quite a lot from those that are incredulous about nonbelief in the afterlife and it's summarised as, " So, you die and that's it?"
My version only changes one word in that sentence but changes the meaning radically and yet it doesn't change the meaning at all. I suppose another Roy Batty might crush my cranium for coining another example of Oz Apologetics but I still think it sums up how I feel right now:
You live and that's it.
So that's where I am in the current stage of my niche pastime of thinking about death. Perhaps I will change my mind if an angel appears at the foot of my bed; or if Elon Musk walks out to meet the press in his new synthetic body, pulls out his phone and continues to tweet (or x) the same inane bile that he once tapped out with his pink, meaty fingers.
Such renunciations wouldn't prove a thing. No living being is an authority on what death is. I've a new pastime now, thinking about what it means to be alive.
Thanks for reading this!
On the day of publication there is no voiceover for this post. However, I have recorded a new podcast episode with a reading of this that needs a bit of a nip and tuck before I upload it. I will post it right here when it’s done. The podcast is up and you can listen to it here.
You might notice that the pixel art is a bit different this week. That’s because they are screenshots of a game I made to go with this post. You can play it here. It’s a bit pants but it’s my first ever game and it always feels great to make things, even crap things.
I’ve also tried out something new in this latest instalment of Rusty Niall, a lyric essay. I’m planning on writing some more because I really enjoyed smooshing my lyrical and critical impulses together. It feels more natural to me to write this way rather than maintaining two mutually exclusive channels for expression and analysis. Let me know what you think of all of this in the comments below.