Transcending Death

Walking outside the other day to fetch a take-out dinner from a place where the employees were all wearing masks and gloves, dodging as I went every other human being I could spot, usually by crossing over to the other sidewalk whenever I saw them coming from a block away, and holding my breath whenever there seemed a possibility of our sharing air, however fleetingly, I passed a local meditation center with a message on its road-side pulpit. "Transending Death" it said. It was missing a "c" but I took its point. The message was timely.

Without overdramatizing my own relatively privileged experience of the pandemic, in which I have so far been insulated from the worst losses many people are feeling, it is nonetheless safe to say that mortality has been somewhat more prevalent in all our minds in recent weeks than it was before. A friend was recently talking to me over video chat, and he declared, with semi-seriousness, "If I die from coronavirus I want you to be my literary executor." I instantly replied that he must be mine in turn.

What would my literary executor be asked to do? Well, publish this blog of course. Admittedly, it is already published, but thus far it exists only encoded in binary digital format on a variety of servers somewhere. And that is not nearly enough assurance of perpetuity to comfort obsessional types like me. Eventually, it must not only exist online but also in paper copies, preferably housed in multiple fire-proof locations and safe deposit boxes around the globe. If I could think of a cheap way to have it engraved on stone tablets I would request that as well.

To the extent that I have a scheme for transcending death, it is this. This is my Ozymandian dream of perpetual life. Some day, I shall die. But the best and richest harvest of my thoughts will be recorded for all time as a result of having written this blog. To go down this path, however, almost instantly raises some difficult paradoxes of identity. If the blog is intended to be me, the me that will outlast me, what am I to make of the me that currently exists simultaneously with the blog?

Thinking along these lines, and contemplating the various memento mori that our society is dishing out to us in large quantities at the moment, I undertook the experiment of digging back into some of the earliest posts from this blog—ones I wrote back in 2013. Seven years ago - seven years that I have labored like Jacob in this particular sheepfold. In many cases, this was the first time I had reread these early posts in full. And, as one might expect of any encounter with one's former self, doing so proved a disconcerting ordeal.

I was irritated by some things I had written then that now seemed alien to my sensibility. I was annoyed even more by all the things that hadn't changed at all—to discover, that is to say, that I have essentially re-written the same five or six posts time and again in the years since, compulsively working over the same themes. And then there were the times when I was actually impressed. My former self had known something, I discovered, that I had since forgotten. Far from experiencing pride in this fact, however, it led me into further self-doubt.

If I used to know these things, I pondered, but do not know them now, then plainly there has been a split in my selfhood. I feel like the narrator of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, after he has rejoined straight society, gotten married, and become a slow-witted heterosexual. He describes at the end of the novel coming across the provocative intellectual writings of his former self—Myra. "Franky I can't make head or tail of them," he says. "I certainly went through a pretentious phase!"

Here's why this is a problem to be solved. The blog is, as stated earlier, supposed to be the final record of me—the one that will exist for all time. But if the I who currently exists does not know all the same things as the blog, then is the blog no longer me? Are there two mes? And if so, which one is the real one? O which one? is it each one?

Here though, is where that thing about death comes back into play. Because if we are agreed that at some point I am going to die, and my consciousness will cease to exist as a living entity, then we are going to have to accept that at some point, I am in fact going to forget everything that I used to know, including everything on this blog. Which is why I am trying to back up all my thoughts as blog posts in the first place.

So having something exist on the blog is going to have to suffice. Any forgetting I have done already is simply a foretaste of the universal human doom that awaits me, so it will have to be enough for me that something exists somewhere, even if it no longer exists in my brain. Because that's the best deal I'm going to get.

Except we don't even get that. Because however many copies I make and secret away of the blog, in however many places, the paper on which they are written will eventually wither into dust, the machines on which they are stored will corrode - even any stone tablets would eventually be wiped clean, given enough millennia. There is, in short, the universal slide toward entropy to contend with, and no one has yet found a solution to that. The mortality of one's thoughts can the delayed, but not wholly prevented.

Perhaps the only solution, then, is to subvert the premisses of our original fear of mortality and non-existence itself. Perhaps we must say that it does not in fact negate the value or the truth or the reality of something to discover that it no longer exists. Perhaps what matters is that it existed at some point. Perhaps we are forced to conclude, with Wordsworth, that the things we care about "having been[,] must ever be." The person who wrote the earlier posts on this blog is no longer the exact same person as my current self. But that does not mean he is any less legitimate or real, for having existed.

I recall hearing Alan Moore argue along these lines once in an interview on NPR. He said that, in an Einsteinian vision of the universe, in which reality is four-dimensional, we may only be able to see time in a progressive series of cross-sections, all moving in one direction. Yet the previous times we have occupied all exist behind us—an endless series of other cross-sections—and have as much reality as they always did, despite the limited way in which we can perceive the fourth dimension.

Perhaps this is the sense in which we can vindicate Wordsworth, in light of modern physics. And perhaps it is the best consolation the dry truths of general relativity have to offer.

My sister and I were talking about all this a few months ago. She was particularly disturbed on this occasion by the fact that romantic love between two people could never outlast their deaths, but it led us both into confronting the larger existential conundrum.

I tried to suggest that the value of life in the face of non-existence might be found in service to others; because even if one's individual self is going to expire some day, the human race will continue. And so, to the extent any of us lives beyond ourselves, it is necessarily through others. I still believe this to be true. But it does not quite address the fact that the human race as a whole may have an expiration date—in a unidirectionally expanding universe subject to the law of entropy.

My sister therefore preferred an alternative source of consolation: one more of the Wordsworth/Alan Moore school. She suggested that, ultimately, we have to accept that simply for something to have happened is all the reality it needs. No one ever said that romance would last forever. But why should that fact render it less real? Why should it not be enough that it existed in the first place? I was reminded, somehow, of the words of ee cummings: "love makes the little thickness of the coin[.]"

There is a scene in the great Whit Stillman movie, Metropolitan, in which the unbearable-yet-strangely-lovable over-privileged and over-intellectual college students at the center of the film are debating the viability of Fourierism as a political ideology. One of them points out that Brook Farm failed as an experiment in utopian socialism. The other disputes this. Their interchange is as follows:

-- That it ceased to exist, I’ll grant you, but whether or not it failed cannot be definitively said. 
-- Well, for me, ceasing to exist is — is failure. I mean, that’s pretty definitive. 
-- Well, everyone ceases to exist. Doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure.

That's precisely it. All things must come to an end. We cannot say that therefore they lack any meaning and value.

I recall a meeting of a group of ministry students, back in my Divinity School days. We were, for the umpteenth time, debating the question of the death of organized religion. With churches emptying out, what future was there for our denomination? One of the unspoken assumptions of this conversation was, of course, that if organized religion died, that would mean it had failed.

One of my friends, though, made a very interesting and unexpected point. Why, he asked, if churches die in the future, does that mean they are valueless now? If they provided meaning to people along the way, why is that not enough?

And so too, perhaps, I must surrender my desire for a blog to exist in perpetuity, as an eternal catalogue of my thoughts. Perhaps I am going to have to be content with the idea that simply to have written things is enough, even if they do not last forever; simply to have said and thought things is enough, even if those words and thoughts will not be recorded for all time. If those thoughts had value, they have value still. Having been, they must ever be.

But still, if you are my literary executor, and I have died, please disregard this post. Proceed with the plan to print the contents of this blog and hide it in safe locations around the world. Might as well last for a little longer.