D.E. Tuppins - “ life is one damn thing after another . . . “
I value more and more each cherished second of living as I work closer and closer to a better understanding of mortality, however futile such an effort is by definition - no one having yet broadcast from the void. This essay is one in a series paired with a thematically reciprocal sonnet: satan/g_d; fear/courage; abide/abandon etc., which while providing some creative symmetry does not necessary yield any new information about either topic, but so what? The equivalent would be to suggest that other than drawing oxygen and sustenance; yielding grease and heat there is an inherent glory to that ineffably infrared glow that is our biological mystery from amoeba to octopus. Do you see any? glory I mean - not the parochial parroting of reaction formation that the clerics use to cloud our fear about the cessation of life, I mean the sort of glory found as a child falling face down into deep grass such that for an instant your being is transported from fear by fall into a brilliance of color, smell, maybe even taste and shock from a change in scale of world already becoming mundane now again new, or the taste of cold ice cream shared in the bosom of a loving family on a hot day - your first kiss, the impossibility of a live bird dead from flying directly into a plate glass sliding door? These to me are the glories of life - not the empty promise of an ever after or some claim for the exculpation of sins that are mine alone, sins to be taken by me into a future which will care not a whit about me save anything left legible that might stem the effluence of anguish from our generation’s failure to leave the world better than when we arrived.
In our human hubris, we have become so accustomed to the miracle of existence we fancy ourselves as givers of life, rather than evanescent nodes of rhizome-like other-worldly ginger or anthropomorphized turmeric tuber. Our fulsome human conceit attributes “life-of-its-own” to many inanimate concepts - ghosts, soured domestic relations, regime change interrogations gone bad - human events for which we no longer wish to take responsibility. Fukushima, for example has taken on a life of its own - so much so there are press conferences held with world leaders where nothing is said which is then not shared anywhere to anybody - pretty powerful pull for a mute pustulating ecological chancre in a world willing to pay billions for simple finger twitches on command from pre-pubescent youth of the proper demographic. If that is confusing to follow try this, I presume to write about an activity I’ve spent 60+ years yearning to happen, yet when arrived at in its full misery run screaming for the comfort of lies and obfuscation of my own design - yeah a whole lot more clear. . . why do we struggle to feel more and more alive, yet deaden that same indescribable confusion of loving beauty when in close proximity? How can we attribute a negative value to one aspect of existence - death which only releases our loved one from that torment inherent to breath; while exalting birth that by its very nature portends grief and pain for the object of our affection? And as if that is not enough - why am I compelled to parse what I can’t fathom in such a way as to augment your experience about something I can’t possibly understand, and do so happily?
In some people you meet, the absence of fear is almost tangible as is the sense of zeal for the unknown; yet like the Indians without a prior concept of galleons being incapable of seeing the ships of their doom, so too is it difficult to recognize another human who is living rather than reacting as a trained rat might. Yes that is harsh and describes mostly my own neurosis - or vulgarity depending on ones’ sense of clinical etiquette. There is irony that Lao Tzu so closely anticipated, or more likely strongly influenced the concept of “shadow psychology” in the thinking of Freud’s alter-ego Jung. Whether a penetrating apprehension of our more base inclinations yields a brighter consciousness is ironic in the midst of this our darkest age. However, more ironic still that this essay on “life” would be so species-centric in its discussion as to preclude the devastation wrought by humans on quite literally every life form in this biosphere, as though our faculty for symbolic communication anointed us rulers in this bubble haven surrounded by a near vacuum of a possibly infinite universe - ain’t life grand. If our existence is as spectacular as we have been trained to forget, would it not also hold true that the cessation of life can only be as grand? Yet, however many millennia after the Venus of Willendorf and her mystic fertility, the bulk of our collective spiritual pursuit is devoted to dampening the axiomatic truth about life which derives its most apt description from its counterpart - death. This inextricable link whose unknown nature like Dr. Hawking’s question about time (why can we look backward, but not forward in time?) has so captivated the “lizard” brain of the human species we are paying the sociopathic ciphers amongst us for the privilege of killing each other rather than sitting in a darkened room and simply contemplating the irreducible reality of our demise. This cowardly aversion to our reality is not limited to self-inflicted torment, but has also served to blunt our natural capacity for compassion toward all life, and non-life for that matter. Why is that? Has our inability to honor the privilege and sanctity of our own existence simply mutated into the media version and its smarmy conviction that we are not facing an extinction of our own making?
Here is some magic to chew on. As incomprehensible as these words, ideas or questions might be, what if the notion about something taking on a “life of its own” is now sequencing a set of electrical impulses in your mind that will propagate to some degree out into infinity; what if even after our species is extinguished, those same electrical impulses generated by your recognition of a word combination will however faintly continue to radiate forever? Consider what happens if our species commits the ultimate farce - extinction, and we become a rotting crust. Our infrared signature will continue to dull and eventually become extinguished in the same fashion that biomass became fossil fuel and compressed coal coalesced into inanimate diamonds. We will have truly transmuted and though still possess wavelengths, those will not be the synaptic wavelengths you are generating now. Yes that is convoluted and possibly discursive reasoning; if so, try this piece of magic. What you read is expanded by your thinking and the experience you bring to it, yet for an essay which aspires to enliven your regard for something so essential as life, I am no closer to pulling the rug out from under the collective fog our species seem subsumed by, largely because I eschew the barking necessary to boost my google ranking. Somehow a handful of amoral emotional ciphers have absconded with the essential sacredness of our collective breath and are riding an existential crest of opulence to their grave on the respiration and aspirations of an entire species - does that make this desperate plea to awaken any more clear?
Perhaps we humans will enjoy a similar persistence to that barely perceptible synaptic wavelength journeying however faintly further toward the unknown, and our once verdant biosphere with its former abundance will devolve but continue to adapt on this increasingly synthetic polymer soaked orb less and less capable of supporting life. Even with all of our scientific and spiritual expertise and language we are barely able to describe much less define life. So not unlike the mathematical definition of a circle which we can only approximate as “an N-sided equilateral polygon as N approaches infinity,” life may scale itself to fit the available envelope left here on earth such that the curves of what we thought was a circle of life become more hard-edged and recognizable for the angles they are? This is my life, but I could no more tell you how I got here than I could tell you where I go. Still, for some unexplainable reason I want to prompt you a stranger toward a stronger affiliation to the indescribable joy of laughter rather than the virtual suggestion of humor found on your screen, or a private moment of sorrow felt deeply in what remains of your soul before some ad promises surcease for a price. In the end, I would choose failure for an honest effort to make clear my hope for a successful future for us all than to acquiesce to the neutering of the human spirit by those who prevail at the expense of our highest wants and aspirations - love, safety, rest; whatever desire you are capable of formulating outside of the predictable pattern of behavior we are all being herded into by the same technology that was paraded as the salvation of humanity a scant 10, 20, 30 . . years ago but now is being used by our corporate overlords to inflict the ancient but ever effective “death by a 1,000 cuts.”
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