memento mori
Tyson Motsenbocker wrote a tranquil poem to run over a smooth guitar foundation in one of his songs I can’t shake.
It tells the story of a man meeting the personifications of Death & Love, but never getting close enough to experience either. His final interaction with one is haunting and forms the basis for most people’s view on death…
Many years later, when the man had grown old
And his beard was long and white
And his face looked like a map of the mountains
Death came to visit him
"Hello", said the man
"Hello", said Death
"All of these years I have looked to find her alone", said the man
"But whenever I came near, I found that you were there also"
"Ah", said Death, sitting down beside the man
"That was your mistake
For wherever Love is, I am close behind
She displays my power and my poetry and even my beauty
When I am nearby, Love's face shines brighter
The colors of the earth burn truer
And time itself speeds"
"I have always avoided her to be clear of you", said the man
"And I too have made a mistake", said Death, rising to his feet
"By never telling you that I always come alone in the end"- Tyson Motsenbocker, A Kind Invitation
Two problems with this formulation of the death process and the life that leads to it:
Firstly, we aren’t just mortal creatures, humans from humus born into frailty and towards inevitable death; we are also natal creatures, born into human bodies and destined to live our lives out on the earth.
Natality tries to capture that idea that “humans are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”
Consider the idea above and its explication from Jennifer Banks & her mortally-rebirthed sage, Hannah Arendt:
Although humans may have been created out of nothingness, the fact that they were made at all paradoxically negates all forms of nothingness. “Once called into existence,” Arendt writes, summarizing Augustine, “human life cannot turn into nothingness.”
In Motsenbocker’s (and indeed in most of Western culture’s) paradigm, death is an ending. It’s a de-creation, a road to non-life. It nips at our heels and chases every moment of love, generosity, or beauty we could hope to experience. It is the ever-present threat of nothingness we, whether with fear or courage, believe awaits us.
Which leads to the second issue I take with this ubiquitous worldview:
We never reach the end alone.
As “human life cannot turn into nothingness” “once called into existence,” so too does this mortal step on the journey not precipitate a lack of community—that thing by and into which we were birthed. Our natality necessitates a trajectory that is up & to the right in generative, not material, qualities. We don’t reach mortality with all our contribution & acquisition depleted, but with the creative work we do in life—the community we build, the art we ship, the communion we cultivate—deeply tied to and through this transition point.
Entropy does not undo reciprocity, what we cultivate lives on in new forms as long as we, created things persist.
And we persist in our natality whenever we engage life with the gifts we’ve been given in the communities we’ve been planted…
Birth and the miracle of our creative beginnings are what indelibly shape us and prove our capacity to creatively act in the world.
