The ultimacy of death.

THE ULTIMACY OF DEATH

Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life

Peter Heinegg, ed.

Prometheus Books 2003 $23.00 (paper)

Belief in immortality tugs at the human heart. In the earliest burial grounds we find remnants of mementos sent to accompany the dead on their long journey; in Egypt, gold, jewels and the mummies of cats; in China whole carved miniatures of armies to protect the departing king. Even today we of an advanced scientific age still bury our dead while proclaiming everlasting life, and terrorists immolate themselves in hopes of untold glories in a green and flowering paradise. Such excess of human hope or imagination has often served to reinforce social mores by means of sanctions of reward and punishment beyond the grave, giving power to those defining sin or grace. But for every claim of immortality, daring souls have arisen in social or personal protest with ashes on their hands and dry words issuing from their pens, deflating mythic hope.

Peter Heinegg is one of these. In this book he uses the label "mortalism" for the sense of finitude that is the human lot. Like Gabriel at the end of time summoning the dead, Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life resurrects the voices of what Heinegg calls a mighty tradition, of those who have gone before in trumpeting the painful recognition of the ultimacy of death.

Heinegg's selection of authors may not be exhaustive of the category (where, for example is Heidegger's "Being-toward-death," or Sartre's "bad faith"?), but it is indeed impressive and includes Old Testament scriptures alongside Greek and Roman authors. We see characters like Wordsworth, Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, Tolstoy, Santayana, Joyce, Dickenson, Proust, Nabokov, and many more, including a DNA scientist. The sheer profusion of authors evokes Heinegg's repertoire teaching Comparative Literature at Union College in Schenectady or his career as a translator and reviewer for the past thirty years.

Heinegg warns that the readings might provoke angst, despair or pessimism. Indeed, the superficial reader might expect as much fun going through this book as attending a wake. Yet, while this book should find its greatest audience in courses on Thanatology or the nature of the self, the general reader would be happily surprised at its poignancy and beauty--perhaps a bit the way many of us have relished watching "Six Feet Under." There is an eros, as Plato, Freud and any good witch knows, that accompanies death talk of any sort--working a kind of subtle spell, even in the choir of voices here claiming the ultimacy of death. However much we avoid the topic of death, the realm of Hades remains a source of riches for philosophical reflection as well as personal consideration. Even a brief perusal of the Mortalism's tough-minded selections makes this clear.

Covering a span of over two millennia, common themes dominate what Heinegg presents as mortalism's take on death. In descending order of joy/despair, these are: carpe diem, death as nothingness, analogy with nature, and the meaninglessness of finite life

Carpe diem, or "seize the day," is the brightest mortalist theme. In sharp contrast to all ascetical ideologies of world rejection, it advises: "gather ye rosebuds while ye may:" or "Is that all there is? My friend, then let's start dancing." Mortalism's first example of this approach comes from the epic of Gilgamesh after the hero has failed in his quest for the flower of eternal life. It reads like the beginning of one of those self-help books recommending 1001 things to be happy about:

    As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and
    night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let
    your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little
    child thatholds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace;
    for this too is the lot of man.

A thousand years later we hear a similar piece of advice from the Latin poet, Horace:

    He who secure within can say
    Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today,/
    Be fair or foul, rain or shine, The joys I have possessed in spite
    of fate, are mine.

Horace cites similar pleasures of daily life as the best that we can hope to grasp before we disappear forever:

    Your shady groves, your pleasing wife, And fruitful fields, my
    dearest friend, You'll leave together with your life: Alone the
    cypress shall attend.

In a contemporary era, the philosopher George Santayana put it simply, "there is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval"; or the poet Wallace Stevens who declared that death is "... 'the mother of beauty,' since it alone gives shape and intensity to the pleasures of this world."

In direct attack against Pauline Christianity, the readings from Nietzsche argue more stridently not only that the pleasures of this world are all we have, but that the idea of an afterlife sucks the energy from this life:

    If one shifts life's center of gravity out of life into the
    "Beyond"--into nothingness--one has simply robbed life of its center
    of gravity. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all
    reason, all nature in the instincts--everything beneficial,
    everything life-promoting, everything that guarantees the future in
    the instincts now excites mistrust. To live in such a way that life
    no longer has any meaning now becomes the "meaning" of life.

While Nietzsche's vehement naturalism strikes a strong mortalist chord that Heinegg could not resist sounding in this collection, one has to wonder whether the great German thinker actually qualifies for admission to the fold. This is the philosopher whose affirmation of life tolerates no bounds and demands no less than eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche's affinity for the Dionysian over the Apollonian also registers a more flexible, multivalent sense of self than that of mortalism, a shamanic sense shared with the Greek mystery religions for which death is a doorway. (Where, oh where, is Rilke in this collection to remind us of Orpheus?)

Another theme haunting the mortalist chorus is that of death as nothing, death as the big sleep. Heinegg gives us Socrates in the Apology as he prepares to take the hemlock draught that will kill him as a prime example even though the Socrates of later dialogues is more a vehicle for Plato's paradigmatic version of the immortality of the soul.

    Either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness,
    or ... there is a change and migration of the soul from this world
    to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness but a
    sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of
    dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.

For an even tougher dose try Roman philosopher and moralist Seneca:

     After death nothing is, and nothing death:
     The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
     Let the ambitious zealot lay aside His hopes of heaven: whose faith
     is but his pride./
     Let slavish souls lay by their fear, Nor be concerned which way or
     where
     After this life they shall be hurled:
     Dead, we become the lumber of the world/
     And to that mass of matter shall be swept
     Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept:/
     Devouring time swallows us whole,
     Impartial death confounds body and soul./
     For hell, and the foul Fiend that rules
     The everlasting fiery gaols.
     Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools,
     With his grim grisly dog that keeps the door,/
     Are senseless stories, idle tales,
     Dreams, whimsies, and no more.

This is the kind of thing that is hard to say to widows or to families of those lost at war or killed in automobile accidents or a hundred other inane ways in which we die. It is the kind of thing grief can not abide, stripped of illusions of permanence, finding such pronouncements background noise that disturbs a kind of necessary listening no mortalist could understand.

A third mortalist theme is the analogy of death with processes of nature.

    Like leaves on trees the race of man is found/
    Now green in youth, now with-'ring on the Ground/
    Another race the following spring supplies,/
    They fall successive, and successive rise/
    So generations in their Course decay
    So flourish these when those pass away.

Marcus Aurelius, going the way of scientific abstraction puts it: "That which dies is not cast out of the Universe. As it remains here, it also suffers change here and is dissolved into its own constituents, which are the elements of the Universe, and your own."

Images or references to animals in the writings are scarce. In Virginia Woolf's description of the death of a moth, or Flaubert's sardonically tender image of a gigantic blue parrot hovering like the Holy Ghost over his heroine's deathbed in A Simple Heart, one may feel something of a relief from the otherwise unrelenting concentration on human self-concern. These tastes of natural allusion also left me wishing for samples from contemporary deep ecology exploring the near-Hindu spirituality and identifications with nature that might have given a different interpretation to our common participation in the cycles of nature. Or consider the role of the totem in Native culture, the figure of the crow, for example, in Castaneda's Teachings of Don Juan, or Carlos leaping into, not avoiding, the abyss. In another vein, consider the images from Zen art of teeny human figures in radiant, completely dwarfing, natural scenes, the individual, dead or alive, only part of a wider, embracing whole.

Most disturbing of the themes in the mortalist collection are those which claim that because life is not eternal, it is meaningless. Heinegg provides lovely examples of the powerful prose of Kierkegaard and Unamuno along these lines (though he doesn't acknowledge their ultimate leaps of faith), but Schopenhauer's example will serve:

    Our existence has no solid ground to stand on except for the
    fleeting moment ... in this sort of world, where no sort of
    stability is possible even for an instant, and where all things
    are swept up in the hurly burly of change, everything plunges ahead,
    races on, tries to keep its balance on the tightrope through a
    constant striding motionbliss is absolutely unthinkable.

William R Clark, the collection's token scientist, offers a similarly bleak response to our mortal existence: "In terms of the basic process of life itself, which is the transmission of DNA from one generation to the next, all of this is just so much sound and fury, signifying certainly very little, and quite possibly nothing." But what notion of meaning is this? Activity does not lose its meaning because it ends. Any story, any relationship, any life finds its meaning precisely in its closure and completion. As for bliss, whatever we taste of it seems to arise spontaneously at any given time and then recede regardless of the perpetual perishing that is life.

Heinegg's collection indeed unveils the "great open secret of our culture," its approach to and acceptance of human finitude. But it also raises questions the cultural critic cannot ignore. Carpe diem may be great advice for an English teacher or a dead poet to give his high school students, and something we who procrastinate need to keep in mind, but it isn't a formula for a good life. Some pleasures need to be postponed or even denied altogether for the sake of greater goods, even should we die tomorrow. The theme of death as sheer annihilation raises other problems. It suggests that actions we take in life are without consequences since we won't be here to witness them. Who can buy this in an age of ecological concern? However small, our actions do have effects, and though death annihilate us, our legacies, some would call it our karma, remain.

Besides, the view of death as nothing also overlooks that key loophole Shakespeare acknowledged in the Hamlet soliloquy "... to sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub." Rub, indeed! Just listen to the old or the dying or to people who dream a lot and see that they are drowning in visions of the dead, dancing ceaselessly with the dead. They seem surrounded by the dead as one African hymn puts it:

    The dead are not dead, they are in the tree./
    Those who are dead are never gone:/
    they are there in the thickening shadow./
    The dead are not under the earth:
    they are in the tree that rustles,
    they are in the wood that groans,
    they are in the water that runs,
    they are in the water that sleeps,
    they are in the hut, they are in the crowd,/
    the dead are not dead (Birago Diop)

Or compare William Clark's account of DNA replication as our ultimate purpose in the food chain to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's version of the ancestors as recurring pattern in the neighborhood--same physical phenomenon, different interpretation or bio-cultural paradigm.

For any tender-minded questioning of the general perspective of Peter Heinegg's Mortalism, the collection serves the valuable purpose of providing a wealth of examples from the hard-nosed, scientific end of the spectrum of possible attitudes toward death. Encountering them together in such beauty and concentration packs a punch reminding us that we are "dust ... and unto dust we shall return." However, the array also helps us to recognize mortalism as an almost entirely Western concept, certainly confined to a restricted and individualistic notion of self that is the legacy of the Western tradition. The mystics, especially those of the east, the shaman, the lover, the madman and their collective outpourings, would form the other end of the spectrum--with only a shift of gears and strong tug of the heart.