My brain hurt like a warehouse
The irony of life is that we never really understand it until death. What I mean by this is that I don't think that the human mind can appreciate its own demise until it is at that threshold. Until then, don't we all feel immortal? Do we not indeed possess a certain immortality until we die? I suppose that's something of a contradiction, but until you are dead, you can't really be certain that you can die...of course by then the information is useless, but you can only know death by proxy. One can only gain knowledge through their own perceptions of another's death. But what can our perceptions even tell us? We can tell that a body has ceased to work, but beyond that, there is little that we will ever know of death. What we believe in regards to it is ultimately irrelevant, because what we believe can never be based on experiential fact.
Granted, this is a morbid conversation to some, but these topics should never be eschewed for fear of them. What is there to fear in the unknown? What is there to fear of anything? As long as there is life, there is no need for fear, and once there is death (assuming death even exists as we presume it to) fear becomes entirely irrelevant.
... Have you ever noticed that caricatures always seem to look the same no matter whom they are depicting? It seems to me that any "artist" could perfect one look for their caricatures and then change the hair and clothes from case to case. Hell, a dedicated mind could even come up with three or four general purpose caricatures and make a good amount of money drawing pictures that look nothing like anyone.
Granted, this is a morbid conversation to some, but these topics should never be eschewed for fear of them. What is there to fear in the unknown? What is there to fear of anything? As long as there is life, there is no need for fear, and once there is death (assuming death even exists as we presume it to) fear becomes entirely irrelevant.
... Have you ever noticed that caricatures always seem to look the same no matter whom they are depicting? It seems to me that any "artist" could perfect one look for their caricatures and then change the hair and clothes from case to case. Hell, a dedicated mind could even come up with three or four general purpose caricatures and make a good amount of money drawing pictures that look nothing like anyone.
posted by Video James at 6:37 PM
2 Comments:
A question: is living inherently good? Is life all we have, making death a giant loss vs. is death the deprivation of the subject, making it value-neutral? Mortality, imho, is the source of religion. That is, the physical reality of mortality is what is empirically available to us, but we're too chickenshit to accept it & we gotta conjure outta thin air a waiting metaphysical reality to make that bitter pill go down easier. In the immortal words of Larkin, religion is "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die." (Or perhaps our ideas of the afterlife are manifestations of some innate collective desire for utopia. Hmmmmm.) Granted, I'm kinda simplifying, but you get what I mean.
And pace yr comments w/r/t caricature, I humbly present a counterexample in David Levine, the de facto house artist over at an old favorite, the New York Review of Books. Dude's drawings capture the anomaly of the man.
Hmmm, I wouldn't go as far to say that the afterlife arises from an innate desire for utopia. It may in the case of Western Religions, but look at the afterlife of Persian mythology, or even pre-Christian Judaism where you kinda sit around in the dark for eternity. The Afterlife may spawn, indirectly, from a society's view of life. Basically, a society that praises the success of the individual and shuns the poor and disadvantaged would have less of an ideal afterlife to spur individual accomplishment, whereas a society that values the success of the community would have a more rewarding afterlife to encourage sacrifice. Of course, this is a generalization, but I'm definitely going to give it more thought.
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