Death Muse

With Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington’s rapid, successive passing, I’ve been thinking about death a lot. Or rather, it’s been a frequent visitor that comes knocking at my mind-house. It’s been making me think. What it would take for someone to end their own life. Especially also when they have young dependents.

Their news hit me hard. For a moment I thought I was over it, but Chester came in my dream last night. He was “alive” in the dream, but it soon became a nightmare. I don’t remember specifics of the nightmare, but I woke up, and felt shitty for the rest of the day. Like a dark cloud over my head. I ache. Still won’t leave my mind at 2am.

This year, thoughts of Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse have also frequently entered my head.

They were all such deep-feeling artists. Vulnerable. Sensitive. Raw. The perfect vessels to channel the most profound, enigmatic, inexplicable secrets of the cosmos… If the cosmos ever wanted to tell us anything.

I’ve recently read Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s new book, and reading Stephen Hawking’s update to A Brief History of Time.

All this has had me wondering, if death of the flesh really means the end. I know there are religious explanations, etc. But while religious faith has its emotional and psychological benefits for some (and I respect the prerogatives of those who hold those beliefs), those inscriptions are just not fact when dealing with objective reality. Fact is not a matter of opinion, despite politics.

Fact is, we don’t know most of everything. Everything we know consists of less than 5% of what makes up the universe. While we know their effects and some other crumbs of information, we still don’t know exactly what dark matter is, which composes 27% of our universe, or exactly what dark energy is, which is 68% of our universe. As of today, 95% of the universe is a mystery.

Now comes the part where I (sort of) contradict myself. What if, even though misguided, there is such a thing as after-life? Not some heaven or hell with a bearded man in a white robe or a red dude with horns, but just a different state of being? Like states of matter: liquid, solid, gas, plasma. What if there are parts of us that are made of dark matter? What if it can retain consciousness (whatever that is)? Or what if somehow, when we “die”, we transform and gain entry to a dimension or world where we’re made of antiparticles, a world where electrons and positrons flip roles?

Is death all that bad? The universe is part of us, we are part of it. We are made of stardust. Maybe those artists - the greatest of their generation, subconsciously know something inexplicable but profound. Maybe there’s more to what we’ve known life to be. Maybe they’re exploring it for us.

If there’s anything we know so far, is that there are no backtracks. It’s a one-way trip.

Yet,

Sometimes I’m curious. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes it tempts me.

Sometimes I muse.

But also, I love my family. And I look forward to Star Wars 8, and 9. And Justice League and Wonder Woman 2. And Infinity War.

And the next Pixar emotion feast that makes me 7 years old again.

Or a grilled cheese I can’t and won’t have now because it’s 2am.

There are still things left here, I suppose.

I’d like more socks.

Good night.

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Yes, grilled cheese saves lives.

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You’re probably just getting old. Jeremy Clarkson wrote some funny stuff about ageing, death, and its inevitability. I’ll try and find it and quote it verbatim, because it’ll be less funny in paraphrase.

I get slightly irritated by atheists who think they know everything there is to know, and insist that there is nothing outside of the human experience - or that, if there is, they don’t want to know about it. That’s their lookout, I suppose, but I’d rather believe that humans are little bits of nothing in a vast and unfathomable universe. That’s far more interesting that believing that humans are, like, really clever and the pinnacle of evolution, which clearly isn’t true.

The circle of death and life is, in fact, a quite miraculous one from a hard-physics perspective. The net result is as close as you can get to perpetual motion: it’s the reason life has continued for countless millennia instead of burning out in a ‘peak life’ event. Life on earth is predicated on the re-use of dead matter to construct new life with a tiny, tiny change in entropy. No human-created system comes even close to that level of elegance.

As for people who kill themselves: supposedly, most people contemplate it at some point in their lives but manage to rationalize it away. I honestly think Amy Alehouse probably did drown herself in booze and drugs for lack of a grilled cheese sandwich: angsty poets probably don’t have much time to learn how to cook, and living on junk food and vodka must mess with your neurotransmitters something rotten.

Socks: nobody ever has enough socks. I believe this also has some basis in deep physics, and one day I intend to get an igNobel for producing a formal proof.

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Who’s Jeremy Clarkson, one of those cool, professionally religious folk who also (gasp) do science?

Right? If someone is truly a student of science they would know that we (at least for now) know nothing. We’re smaller than a speck of dust or grain of sand.

Aren’t we all getting old. These thoughts have visited me since my teenage years. I brushed them off as teen angst at the time. They never really left and always returned periodically. What’s changed though, are fear. I used to fear death a lot.

I also do feel older. And more tired. Fear of death has lessened by attrition. But what is old? I’ve never reverted physiologically, can’t tell you if I’ve ever felt younger than my biological age. Was Kurt Cobain old? What is old in this context or in yours? What is old for you?

What are your milestones for age? Career? Children? Years of existence? I don’t have kids (yet), which again makes me wonder what it takes for those who do, what was the pull that they felt so strongly to permanently leave them behind.

I believe in a socks mass murder conspiracy. That’s why they mysteriously, gradually disappear over time. The lint you find in your dryer are sock ashes.

P.S. Someone sent me this today:

GIYF. He drives cars and complains for a living. It’s a British thing, I guess.

I found the whole essay:

http://www.obooksbooks.com/books/3391_30.html

Scroll down to ‘bury me with my anecdotes on’, about halfway down.

Well, Clarkson said it’s when you’ve outlived your usefulness, and I think there’s something in that. I’ve got a bit more mileage left to run, I suppose, but I do get the feeling I’m just taking up space. I guess it’s different for everyone; perhaps Cobain just reckoned he’d done everything interesting that he was going to do. I knew a guy who hanged himself and left a note to that effect.

Lovely cheerful thread this, innit?

I remember Clarkson saying his family were going to push his mother off a cliff as soon as she starts piddling on the carpet.

Humour is useful, of course, in dealing with death. When Antonin Scalia died The Onion promptly published an article titled Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-Year Battle With Social Progress. I’m sure this helped conservative America’s grieving process no end. My personal Onionesque theory on Kurt Cobain is that he died after listening to his own music. And I say that as something of a fan. I won’t make any Linkin Park jokes, it’s still a bit too early for that.

Look into Robert Monroes books

Another british thing?

Haha. I think venting helps.

What’s that mean

Lol, do they get it, though? Not sure many conservatives are Onion fans.

I assume you were well into adulthood by the time they broke out.

Today’s thought: Sometimes I wish I was on the other side of the sociopathy line. How great and liberating it must be to give exactly zero fucks.

Is it only a Chinese thing to think that death is only the start of life?

You can’t possibly not have heard of heaven and hell as paths one can go towards after death. In Norse mythology there is the idea of Valhalla. In Hinduism there is reincarnation. Egyptians mummified corpses for the distinct purpose of wanting to live an afterlife.

Tough to believe if you say you haven’t heard of at least a couple of those.

Conclusion: People are crazy imaginative, no matter where they come from.