Before Death: An Incoherence
I
I wish often that I was capable of dispatching death from my mind. I feel as I get older comically cliche, a moribund and lachrymose gothic romantic trapped within the manic hyperactive madness of an autist, like some kind of grease paint-smeared weeping clown skulking around graveyards with black balloons. There is something shameful about recognizing yourself in a cliche. We want, I think, a general contradiction of self: to be wholly ourselves in a manner that feels unique enough to be burned into memory while also wanting to feel stitched into the cloth so to speak, to be devoid of the alienation that comes with identity. This maps in brief the tension between anarchism and communism, Lucifer and Jehovah, all kinds of dynamics. Self versus world. If we were not cursed to be within and only within the self, if we could dissociate in a true manner and either see the broader ecosystemic world of interlinked individuals and species and families and orders, of trade networks and communal relations and telecommunication and political hypermaps, this would be far less vexing. That a whole is made up of cells would be no bother; in fact, looking inward, we feel this quite intimately. Or, more accurately, do not feel it.
We don't look at our bodies as disjunct organs, bones, systems, fluids. We do not think of ourselves as brain-and-kidney-and-kidney-and-liver-and-stomach-and. We are cognizant that these are somewhat individuated, having unique roles and unique cell structures and unique needs and weaknesses and treatments. And so in that sense, they matter on the individual level; we certainly are not happy when these organs or systems begin to fail and need to be supplemented or replaced. But likewise, we do not feel an anxiety contingent upon the organs and bones and systems, or upon the cells that make up the organ, or the flora and fauna of the bacterial world that compose a great deal of supplemental systems necessary for our body. My lachrymal pose, as comically easy as it is to find in general form all about culture, doesn't actually erase my contingent individuality. But shame ignores this. Shame has the power to dispatch reality to achieve itself. That's one of its most obnoxious traits.
I think about this because I think about death, often. It is for me the great contextualizer, a horrid black hole at the edge of life that warps everything by its gravity. This awareness shapes everything I am and everything I do. I don't know but also to some degree don't care if this is unique; I am trapped within this body and this consciousness, and that black hole hovering on the horizon like a taunting black eye of dead livestock in the field sits menacing me still, whether this is something we all go through, a narrowed neurosis or a specific psychosis. The details don't matter as much as the state, the fact.
Like all people who pass certain thresholds of life and experience, death has touched my life. If you live long enough and extend yourself toward others enough in friendship and camaraderie, you will know death. My step-grandfather when I was six, a loss so acute that it caused me to sincerely look at death for the first time as something consciousness endures. I fell into a deep, deep depression; prior to this event, I was the hyperactive sort, able to sit and be peaceable but otherwise playing and laughing and reading and galavanting, you know, like a kid. Suddenly, I was sullen and downcast, morose and silent, to the degree that my teachers and parents agreed to put me into school therapy to figure out the root. I was a kid, so I didn't have the words. It wasn't just my Grandpa John's death, though certainly that was part of it. It was, on that reckoning, thinking seriously that he was my grandmother's second husband after my maternal grandfather died when my mom was 19, meaning I had already experienced a death before my birth. In both cases, my mother was robbed of her father figure, be it genetically or by bond. I watched my grandmother grieve for her second husband. I was silly and rambunctious at the wake, as kids are wont to do, but those morose memories stuck with me. It wasn't the abstract notion of grief. These were obvious tears in the spirit. It hit me more fully why my mother hated January; that was the month her father had died, a scar that decades on had not closed and even now thirty years after that still hasn't. And I began to seriously contemplate the notion of my death.
The thing that struck me cold in terror in this wasn't the idea of dying, per se. I had and have little fear regarding being burned or drowned or cut to pieces or crushed in a car accident or shot with a gun or poisoned deliberately or incidentally with pills. I wasn't pleased by the notion, certainly, and elements of it would emerge as aspects of that deep death consciousness that would develop in me over time. But the root concern was something I have since learned is called apeirophobia. A fear of eternity.
My issue, deep inside, was not in dying but in being dead. I had from a young age attempted to grapple with infinity and senses of scale. This was in part due to having been immersed in science fiction from birth, where one of the fundamental units of wonder is the scalar, be it the truncation to the incredibly tiny or the explosion outward to the absolutely enormous. That the universe contains as structural elements both galactic filaments and the quantum work of fermions and bosons and more is a shockingly fascinating thing. We attempt as people to stare into phenomenology, the subjectivity of our sensorium which is permanently attenuated by the integrity and structure of our brains and sensory apparati. We pursue, be it as scientists or layman, philosophers or workers, a functional understanding of the structure of things. This is how we can to order the day into hours, the world into measures, value into currency, life into years, and on and on. It is how we navigate the mechanics of the world which allows us to understand in part the mechanics of events we haven't yet experienced; a key part of childhood development is a slow working model of physics, quite literally, so that the act of balancing our bodies to stand and walk becomes subconscious rather than always requiring active effort, that we know the force our limbs create and how different things respond to those forces, that we understand fragility and durability as structural concepts that help us quite literally navigate our day-to-day world. Autism made me fixate on this perhaps a bit more obsessively that an allistic peer, but the notion of its importance is in fact roughly universal. And with scale quickly comes mathematics, infinity, zero, and the infinitesimal.
The last of those elements is interesting in and of itself. We have a funny cultural history with infinitesimals. We had used them as far back as the Greeks and likely much further; Xeno's paradoxes of infinite, for instance, require awareness of the infinitesimal, the thing of infinitely decreasing size or value that nonetheless always maintains a positive value. This is why Achilles can never beat the tortoise in the race, why the arrow can never strike the target. Then, due to the way we structured mathematics and later algebras, it faded from view. In these models, the infinitely small must by necessity have been equal to zero to, in blunt fact, make certain equations work without breaking them, equations which had become increasing useful as the rigors of the sciences and engineering slowly developed into more recordable rigor. And yet in the 1700s when calculus was invented in two places at once by two very different kinds of parallel geniuses, they once more had to deploy the infinitesimal as possessing some value above zero. To take the area under a curve and achieve continuity of the curve, we needed computable area of rectangles of decreasing width until they were infinitesimally thin. This broke with the way we structured mathematics well before our now operating function of axiomatic construction of algebras and geometries had taken root. And its an innovation that by necessity created a brand new field of mathematics that didn't easily integrate with the older form of algebra, hence its positioning as a different field rather than a subset, all having to do with these slight adjustments of structural components.
The play with infinity, zero and the infinitesimal was for a long time a purely intellectual one for me. Intellect for me, to be clear, is a space riven with emotionality and passion; I think its only a certain type of person who considers intellect cold and segregated from the heart. For me, they are bound up in each other. I pursue matters of intellect not out of vanity but because I feel a deep joyful, dutiful compunction, the same way we feel about visiting friends and lovers and engaging in play and laughter and wine and food. I have a supposition that certain intellectual fields, as in fields primarily driven by intellectual activity over physical or practical or social activity, largely arose not from being smarter per se but more as a cultural evolutionary fossil record of autism. The older I get and the more keenly aware I become of the natural intellect required for things like sports, construction, work driven by social connection, hell, just socializing itself, the more obvious it is that things like philosophy and mathematics and art criticism are only a certain subset of all possible intelligences. As mentioned before, most everyone has at root a basic understanding of physics, of chemistry, of biology, of calculus, whether they are conscious of this fact or not; the fact that they can walk, that they can eat without getting sick, that they can make decisions based on time spent and the overlapping of processes means that they are performing all these operations natively within their heads as a matter of due course. So fixating on them, isolating them and studying them directly, feels to me an artifact of them precisely not coming naturally; that what for others is intuitive to some degree is just alien enough that the autistic mind has to focus on it directly to grasp it at all. An incidental benefit of this is the ability to have certain insights about fields by dint of that obsessive focus. But I strongly suspect that focus to have come before the reality that it could be put to broader use. That said, the use of my intellect for me is as natural an extension of myself as my aesthetic tastes, my sense of humor, my desire for community and love. Some people run marathons; I sit and chew over theory texts. Whether one has more objective value than the other is a question frankly for dullards, especially in the context of death. (I promise we're getting there.)
But I was unprepared for the intellectual, even as emotionally riven as it was with excitement and zeal, to suddenly become so existentially real. Before, these vectors of scale were envisioned by me much the way a chart in a science textbook might have looked, with myself as the fundamental unit so I could get a grasp of the relation of, say, my size to a building, a building to a planet, a planet to star, etc, but also my life to a turtles life, to a nations life, to a planets life. The numbers flowed relatively easy for me, with a bit of muscle work to drive them into memory, but this was due in large part to how impersonal they were. I looked at the universe, in a sense, through the window of a vessel or a computer screen showing a video game. I don't know why it was this death in particular, but suddenly these scalars took on a human value to me. I began to contemplate the infinite scale of time in relation to my step-grandfather's life, 80 some years, mathing out how many of him stacked end to end it would take to reach back to various times in the world. Sometimes, the number seemed too small: what do you mean two of him would touch back before the Civil War? Other times, the number felt horrifyingly huge: ten full lifetimes of his wouldn't get me even halfway back to the days of Rome, let alone Egypt some few thousand years earlier. I thought as well about the percentage my life took up of his, less than a tenth. This sense of percentage scale began to haunt me: if I lived as long as him, I had lived roughly 1/14th of my life. On its surface, that didn't feel too large, but then I realized my parents were more than halfway dead by that scale, that when I finished high school I would be more than 1/5th to the grave, to that ultimate finality, where the most horrifying scalar revealed itself to me. He was to be dead forever. The mind blanks out against infinity, but here my mind was helped fast, rapt by terror. I thought of a serf in feudal England, in the days of Arthur. How many unnameable lives were lived in their totality, with dreams and favorite songs and loves and anxieties and stories and annoyances? How many of their names were inscribed on the stones of history? It swallowed me whole. I couldn't think or focus. It was just death, a horizonless black hole.
And then death began to accelerate. My grandmother was next, just a year later. I was still a fucking goofball at the funeral, laughing hysterically at single words in a manner that clearly should have belied to my parents some kind of neuroatypicality but for the fact that it was the late 90s and awareness of its depth was, to be mild, lacking. Still, I remember two things clearly: the utter devastation of my grandmother's peers as they clustered together weeping at the back of the wake and my own mother's impossible bereavement. In the wake of my maternal grandfather dying, my grandmother had become an anchor for my mom and clearly beloved. Her house had been the locus of Christmases and Thanksgivings in Connecticut, one of the few things able to bring the three siblings of that side together after the directions of life rent them in three very different directions. Standing in my grandmother's house without her present, knowing that with her and my step-grandfather gone it was only a matter of time until the house was sold, was eerie and unnerving. I know others were there, milling about, cataloging items and beginning the slow painful work of carrying out her will, the peaceable three-way split of all her earthly possessions among her three children. I was only eight, but I was able to see some of the bitter division between my mother, my uncle and my aunt, the micro-fractures that had never quite healed but had been endured for the sake of their sainted mother.
But all I could feel was this sense of being adrift like a cloud alone, roaming the house myself, the halls my mother and her siblings had lived in as children and the television room where they would watch as television itself grew up alongside them and the dining room where they played Scrabble and ate fish on Fridays and the kitchen that still immediately makes me think of my grandmother in her blue clothes and cloudlike white cluster of hair. I remember too her impeccable garden, how vast it seemed to me as a child with the covered well and the steep hill and the curling beds of vegetables and flowers and ferns that felt like an idyllic glade or a living vision of Narnia. We paint sometimes endings in positive light in order to cope with them. There is a practicality to this. Having lived in one home from age one until, though I didn't know it then, my early twenties, with my mother only selling it when I was thirty, this was my first experience saying goodbye to a place laden with so much memory. What frustrated and stung me was not just my inability, once it was sold, to access those memories and feel them dance before my eyes like ghosts but also my inability to live through the memories and stories of my mother, my uncle, my aunt, my grandmother, my step-grandfather. There was so much of family history, the small details, the literary touches of the mundane common life of people otherwise miniscule and featureless as grains of sand in the vast sweeps of time, all about to be lost. Someone else would move in, paint the walls, redecorate. I too had never really reckoned with that kind of violence, that the shifting of furniture and change of paint in a room functions in part to sever that space with its long history in order to establish space for a new one. This precarity of history stung me like a knifewound.
Time would carry on. A girl in my elementary school would die of a car accident. Parents of peers would develop cancer and pass away. My father entered in-patient treatment for alcohol abuse and, as part of the program, we would attend split meetings. One hour was devoted to just the family members of the addicted sitting at a long executive table, dark wood with a pricy chandelier above, as we inventoried our feelings to each other per the worksheet and talked through the weighing of divorces, arguments, wounds and bittered memories. Elsewhere, the addicts would sit doing their own guided worksheets, admitting to each other their addictions and cataloging that week's struggles, relapses, stressors and deep history. Then the second hour, all of us would be led into a double room whose partitioned wall was opened and pushed into a crevice just like the elementary school I was then attending with a great circle of chairs so each could comment on all in guided form with stale lunchmeats, cheese, bread and coffee in small white styrofoam cups. Years later, I would sit in that exact room during my out-patient treatment for a suicide attempt, told to sit in silence and color for a full hour, which drove me fucking crazy, and during which time I drew an octopus with a wizard's peaked cap holding a billowing scroll that said NOTHING GETS BETTER. That was a stark confrontation for me to bear at the age of 9, one which grew more choleric and rheumy as my brother sank deeper into his own brooding violence that would mark his preteens and early teenage years and my father would be fired from his job in advertising, struggling for the last decade of his life to make steady income and moving between home businesses, Kinko's, consulting and other ventures between his more gruesome fits of convalescence due to the long-tail effects of alcoholism, all marked by my mother's slow mental unwinding in which she seriously considered divorce or abandonment not out of lack of love but just due to the sheer stress of carrying the house financially on her shoulders while everyone in the family around her fell apart in their own way. And then there was me, a scared and fitful autistic child. And shit rolls downhill. Still, dutifully we attended weekly meetings on Wednesdays. One day, there was an empty chair. We weren't told why. A paper the next day had a minor story within a few column inches devoted to it about a man who was driving erratically and making threats pursued by police to his home where he entered to grab a large knife and charged at the police only to be shot dead in his front yard. It was that same man who struggled with the same addiction my father did.
Of course, my father's own alcoholism was one marked by death. I never really understood this as a child. For one thing, I didn't realize my father's rapacious intake of vodka was atypical, given it was the only thing I'd ever known, and every other adult I came into contact with seemed to easily swill beer, wine and cocktails at any given juncture or function, further obscuring to me what was a common versus uncommon consumption level. But likewise the origins of my father's tenseness, or at least a major complicating factor of his already-inherent melancholy, a melancholy I inherited, was deliberately obscured and kept from me and my brother. It wasn't out of shame or a desire for secrets. My parents just didn't want to burden us and stain our youth with contemplating the bare fact of the torture my father went through in war. Family mythology differed on precisely what was the cause of his deployment in Vietnam. Half the family believed he was drafted while the other half thought he had volunteered, especially given his placement in the signal corp rather than as a grunt on the frontlines. The position the family has eventually come to was that, upon learning his draft number had been called and a few failed attempts at things like burning his draft card to get out of it, he enlisted ahead of time in order to secure better placement. The turn toward war alone was already a jarring one. My father had turned his back largely on the veterans' affairs of his family, instead becoming a musician. He was born in 1950, a child through the birth of rock and roll and a young teen in the age of the Vox amp and the electric guitars which came to dominate 1960s music. He got a bass, a guitar, a microphone and some friends together and put together a band; they even played on the Soupy Sales show once. His artist's dreams and aspirations were dashed by war and the draft. While there in that god forsaken nihilistic war crime of a jungle war, he was caught several times blind firing into the brush, the only thing you could really do when fire emerged from it without line of sight. He'd survived a helicopter crash under enemy fire, rescuing the pilot and co-pilot of the craft before it blew up (Hueys had shockingly poor armor on their exposed gas tanks), only to be shot through both hands like a fucking unbearably on-the-nose beat from a movie as he got his only two confirmed kills, both boys his own age. He got a bronze star and two purple hearts, one for each hole in his hands, and was sent to convalesce in Japan. It was there that he first encountered Nyingma and the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
He struggled in Japan with those images of death. He had seen death, obviously, growing up in a family of hunters and born to a father who had served in the Philippines in the conflict after World War II and with two uncles who had served in World War II and Korea respectively. His father and his father's brothers were ferociously tight-lipped about their experiences; it was unclear whether it had made them more bitter and cruel, given their home life before those conflicts including my great-grandfather raping my great-grandmother and his subsequent beating near to death by my grandfather and great-uncles in her defense. The three of them had endured a hard and challenging life and each gave birth to children far too young. My grandfather, fresh from war and death along the shores and waters of the Phillipines, returned to Georgia to marry immediately and produce a child when he was still 20 and my grandmother 18. Neither had had any time to process what they had endured before the stresses of raising a family in the exploding decade of the 1950s. But in Japan, suddenly my father was forced to sit inside his own impossible guilt, the faces of those two boys, as he told me and my brother, swimming in front of his face almost every night. They were roughly the same age as him, also hurled into a conflict against other boys, not even men, forced to shoot to kill unless they too would be killed. I am unsure what my father thought of the war prior to going, but he made it very clear what his thoughts were after that event. In military science, there is a field called killology, the study of how to kill, to produce killers, to make a soldier capable of pulling the trigger with minimized regret, remorse or PTSD. We have a cultural fantasy that PTSD only emerges from having violence done to you externally; clinically, we see this other shadow image, that of the trauma of having inflicted great violence, especially in a way that feels in retrospect irreconcilable with ones morals or ethics. It turns out, barring certain relatively rare cases, getting a person able to willfully kill another consistently is, thankfully, quite hard. But so it was for my father too. He had taken two lives, lives which very well could have been his, and the notion that there was some reason they died and he didn't felt abundantly and obviously untrue. So, he had to know.
My father was raised a Methodist, just like every good boy of the American South following the revival years of the 1800s and the second burst of it off the back of the World Wars. This type of Christianity comes with a non-insignificant amount of death fixation baked into, sometimes obscured but always present. There is no concern about heaven and hell and the ultimate immortal domain of the soul without awareness of death, or at least not easily. Calvinists and presbyters found one easy trick around it, but that is to implant a level of neurosis regarding your already-destined spiritual home, which for those on the wrong side of that equation leads again to a fearful and petrifying countdown until the day of their death and damnation. My grandparents were dutiful Christians, like their parents before them and their parents before them, and so they enrolled my father in the choir, in assisting at church, and with various religiously-tied activities like Boy Scouts, where he made Eagle. The issue, inevitably, with Christianity to the melancholic and to the philosophically inclined (which is more a tedious and useless burden than a real boon, to be honest) is that it inevitably falls to bits in your hands. It turns out handwaving the problem of theodicy with often quite ridiculous and contrived arguments about will and agency really just genuinely doesn't answer the question satisfactorily. We cleave to these religious superstructures of metaphysics and ontology because they provide clear definable order in a messy, confusing and chaotic world, and the fundamental reality of that metaphysics and ontology is frankly far less important than the always-and-very real superstructures we create with them.
What my father found lacking in Christianity he, like many of his generation, found generative within Buddhism. It helped, of course, that many (though not all) schools of Buddhism approach it closer to a philosophical structure than a purely theological one, much like key strands of Jewish and Islamic thought. The notion of samsara, the natural brutality and messiness of the world and the hideous violence of attachments and their progency, felt naturally resonant to my father. The Bardo Thodol was, for him, the most important of all. Bardo is the broad term in Buddhism of metempsychosis, the migration of the soul between death and birth, though through this usage it also came to be used as the term for any definable period, including mortal life. Some schools of Buddhism map clearly this process; others leave it judiciously open-ended, an unknowable but natural periodicity given the finite limit of all life. It is, for the Buddhist, the second life, one as natural an extension as adulthood is from childhood; in fact, to call it a second life implies that they are separate and not unified. Even birth itself is not a beginning but merely another step. The Bardo Thodol however takes a far more specific and structured approach, offering key guidances for the soul experiencing metempsychosis. This, apparently, touched my dad deeply. He either had or sought to have a copy for the remainder of his time in Vietnam, his usage of psychedelics (like many of his cohort) was guided in part by it, and growing up he told me and apparently only me that it was the book he wanted to be buried with. My father never was able to overcome the psychic cost of killing. His PTSD nightmares and psychic ruins came less from his own suffering, per se, and more his awareness of the stain of guilt. A taken life cannot be returned, and in this even notions such as restorative justice fail on the ultimate level of the irrestorability of a lost life. Death, it turns out, is a one-way door, the limit of our horizon, beyond which lays infinity in black inky void we cannot ever meaningfully touch. That he hurled two lives into it irrevocably wrecked him. It was, in large part, what drove him to do drugs when he returned to the states and, eventually, to drink himself into oblivion.
That death horizon was painted into him. There was a fullness to my father before his firing and subsequent hurtling into the abyss of addiction, beyond any semblance of a functionality. This fullness was one of his spirit and mind, of course, but also his body. There was a living vivacity to him, his flesh filled with life. This only became apparent to me as, in the throes of his addiction, he began to shrink, to deflate, to hollow out. Even when his weight would balloon, it would be carried on him ungainfully, making his body take shapes that were on some level fundamentally unnatural for him. Some of it, it turned out, was not the weight of fat at all but instead of fluid wept by his cirrhotic liver into his abdominal cavity, swelling it as though pregnant, an issue for which he would in time semi-routinely visit the hospital to be tapped and drained like a keg. Bearing witness to this, knowing what it stemmed from in him, and that it took the severity of intermittent in-patient stints as well as the lingering threat of my mother divorcing him to disclose this in full to me and my brother added an insoluble element of fragility to not just my father in specific but to my understanding of adults within the world and their relationships. My father had lost long-time friends in his struggle against alcohol, people who seemed to know on paper the severity of the demons which drove that addictive behavior but were numbed to sympathy either by being chronically embarrassed by him personally and professionally or, in some cases, having the functionally fly-by-night purely surface level friendship of dinner parties and pleasant notes shared by the upwardly mobile middle class. That sub-executive level band of American society has always suckled at the teat of the American monied aristocracy, themselves pale shadows of the real aristocrats of the old world and their incessant vampirism. The upwardly mobile dog will betray their own kin for another pass at the nipple, bite each other's throats in service to the black god Mammon and the societal clout that can be bestowed or, as we learned as a family, so easily taken away. To say I was embittered by this abandonment of my father in the depths of his struggles would, obviously, be an understatement. All I could imagine in that moment was the potentiality of my father's death and the stomach-churning vision of those crowing cocks at the funeral bawking about how much they respected and adored him despite having abandoned him, and us, to suffer alone.
But likewise watching a parent with that degree of medical frailty, passing in and out of the hospital, gaining and losing weight, makes the notion of death roar up to the forefront of your mind. It didn't feel like a hypothetical in any way. During one stay in the hospital after a routine tap-and-drain, he had internal bleeding, a hemorrhage so bad they told us to say our last goodbyes. Eventually, after much hectoring, they searched and found a nicked artery by a careless surgeon's hand, which they cauterized. But this constant yo-yoing on death's edge gave the sense of my father as half-gone already, a phantom lingering on the doorway. We bought a bed for him to sleep in downstairs as his neuropathy robbed him of the ability to climb the stairs. He was in and out of coherence depending on his proximity to relapse. It wasn't his fault, really. He had agency, of which I was quite insistent at the time, but burdens and scars accrue and actions become constrained by them despite our vanity. And this added the additional veil of death consciousness, when death encroaches upon life, a failing body and inconsistent sanity, like a house slipping off of a cliff inch by inch into the sea. And in my father I had always seen myself, the same melancholic inclination, the same tendency to let our minds drift toward abstraction beyond materiality even when it was detrimental to do so, the ability to get lost within the labyrinth of the mind and memory, to collapse in the long-winded and overgrown internalisms of Southern oracular and written traditions. We were gardens overgrown. Even when my parents tore up the planters on the sides of the house and along the back edge of the back yard to terminate what once had been a beautiful and robust garden but had since become disconnected patches of weeds, I could only see a kind of death: death as erasure.