Becoming a friend of death;
[still no title option admins, so here I am typing my feelings out using outdated self formatting.]
I remember when I was just a little kid. I grew up in a rather conservative christian household. Obviously, it was not a natural fit. Yet there were moments when it almost was. When I joined a drama/comedy group for example, or when we sang specific songs. One such song is called “I am a friend of God”
Like so; “I am a friend of God, I am a friend of God, I am a friend of God, he calls me friend”
Yes, I was aware at age nine the first I heard such nonsense that it was insipid, repetitive, and musically really setting a low bar. But if I could figure out how to act like that is true, maybe others will accept me. Spoiler alert; not at all, but that’s not the point.
I think about where I keep myself, philosophically. Yes, I wasted many years of my youth studying philosophy. It’s what we did before sex was easier to come by [get it?! It’s a pun!]
There is significant appeal to the taoist outlook on life. Birth and death, union and loss, these contradictions describe the world around us. None of these values are inherently wrong. We dislike death, but that is our bias intruding. I promise you that any machine you describe a breakdown to can and likely will soon suffer such breakdown. It doesn’t make sense from the point of view of the body to code for thinking about a successful end of life. Either you think there’s something after that or you don’t. You try to focus on whatever good may be attached to such beliefs.
Anyway. Misery has been a long standing guest in my psyche. Death has always fascinated me, all the more when I realized most people do anything not to think about it. That’s like a cult, without a cult leader, hallelujah! I do believe! Again, a joke, I’m not enjoying the anticipation.
I wonder what would happen if you walked into a room, sang the five bars;
“I am a friend of death”
and walked out. That would be an insanely interesting scenario. The point is, I honestly feel that I identify more with death than with God these days. I mean, guy’s immortal, and you’d think that be so cool, but instead it just means he’s seen most of this shit before. It’s hard to impress that thing. I tried, and now I don’t know what to move on to. I get death, death is a final lasting silence, and if you live loud enough you’ll be echoing into eternity. Most humans will be forgotten, and I feel that depressed people are largely of that group. Yes, today is awful, but in 200 years, who will think about it? If it isn’t an incident inciting a war, only the nerdiest of history geeks will know about you and I.
7 comments
That last paragraph really hit me. What if religion has it totally upside down and actually god is Death? Perhaps even a merciful saviour who rescues us from this aberration called life. One thing is for sure, there is proof of death everywhere we look. It is real, tangible, all-powerful and like you said ‘immortal’.
But it’s really sad that some of us come to this point where our only hope of salvation is death. It’s really sad because life really does offer limitless opportunities to feel and sense and experience things which dead things cannot. What went wrong?
I agree with nobody else. Might I say, you are so incredibly intelligent. I think you’d have something to offer the world through your writings. You certainly offer us wisdom.
I agree with nobody else. Might I say, you are so incredibly intelligent. I think you’d have something to offer the world through your writings. You certainly offer us wisdom.
now write me a poem. and make sure that it doesn’t try to be smart.
you write like a robot. it gives me asphyxia and makes me nauseous.
I also related to that last paragraph quite a bit. I’m actually very much a believer but boy have I had my days where I yelled internally at God. I’ve been mad at him sometimes for months. But I always come back, for some reason I just know he’s there. Sometimes I have felt comforted by him. Faith I guess. I don’t even pretend that I can understand much of his plan though. Why things needed to be this way.
Anyways I really related to that because he and I have quite a cantankerous relationship sometimes.
I often think as well about our ancestors and how once a few more generations have come and gone they are mostly forgotten. Sometimes some highlights survive of their lives but even those may not be as accurate as we think.
To me it doesn’t matter that much if we’re forgotten or remembered. Once we die we don’t exist anymore to see how others remember us or talk about us!
I was fascinated by death until I lost someone whose death could easily have been prevented.
I thought about life and death being synonymous. Every choice a person makes leads them ultimately to their death. The butterfly effect but in the present. My decision to write this right now could potentially have fantastical and far reaching consequences in my life, but the beauty of it is I will never know, because I can never come back here to see what could have been. Life is a one way ticket, and death is precisely determined at every moment, but its determination changes every second with each path we alter through our decisions. Life is just choices unto death and therefore life is equivalent to dying. So I think now it’s life that’s more fascinating because we can observe it.