ON DEATH, NOTHINGNESS AND DYING

ON DEATH, NOTHINGESS, AND DYING

Jeffrey Boatwright

There is always only a nothingness and never nothing. Perhaps this is why this strangest of terms has been allowed to remain undefned. One seems to recognized when one sees it (or doesn’t see it). It’s as if it possessed a quality of lack, of absence, a nothingness about it. And yet, this nothingness has a particularly unique character. One cannot speak of nothing because even this nothingness one fails to fully grasp has a specifc character. There is a unique lasting nothingness for each being. One never experiences a single totalizing Noting, but only hints of your nothingness, of my nothingness. This makes the search for true nothingness, not the nothingness of death, the nothingness of absence, but true nothingness being that of the blank emptiness after death, diffcult to even begin in the imagination. Nothingness of this sort has never been in one’s own mind. Kierkegaard works out something near this in his essay “At A Graveside.” He makes the distinction between the mood of death, which is what most of us still living possess when we think about a life and a world after our own, and the earnestness of death, the grasping of the actuality of it. The latter is by far harder to bring to mind, but can be found in the idea that our own nothingness, perhaps that which belongs most to us, has, much like our own face, never actually been our own. What does one think of when one thinks of a world 200 years from now? The biblical three-score and ten can be shattered and one can still safely assume one will not be among the other living persons of the year 2222. This is, however, a complex question. What is it that one thinks of when one thinks of a world they know they will not live to see? Perhaps it’s a poorly phrased question. The essence of the question is not “what does one imagine the future to look like? To be like?” The essence of the question is “what is one’s idea of one’s own role in a world without them, a world in which they are truly nothing, or at best a memory?” When one thinks of their own nothingness, their own non-being, one still sees the next world from their own place in their own consciousness. The framework of my consciousness cannot be broken down enough to ever fully grasp one’s own nothingness after death. This is the earnestness of death in Kierkegaard’s mind. But did we not just say this idea is impossible, that the framework can never breakdown to such a degree that one escapes one’s own consciousness? Perhaps. But, alas, the experiment continues.

Where is it that my nothingness resides? I regret to say that it is not a matter of the future. My own nothingness exists in this very moment in time, just as every single other person’s does. Yet, it is not within themselves; mine does not reside within me though it exists at this very moment. It is always and only that of another; it belongs to you, to the other. My nothingness belongs only to the thoughts of those outside of myself. Though I can imagine the future, I can think of moments in history hundreds and hundreds of years ago, I never see the time and action of Pericles through the mind of Pericles. I see it through my own thought, my own conscious attempt to reconstruct Pericles’ thinking at any moment of his own life. Pericles’ world – past, present, and future worlds – belonged to Pericles; his nothingness belongs to me. So what is this nothingness, this word that has burrowed its way into modern philosophy seemingly undefned? It is the proof - or enough evidence as needed – that we do live (and die) ecstatically. That is to say we stand out of ourselves. We forever reside within ourselves, in our own brief eternity that makes up all the time we will ever know. And yet at the same time we live outside of ourselves forever in the mind of another as a presence until our absence consumes that presence into memory and that memory into forgetfulness, and then fnally forgotten.

It is the same question, at least phenomenologically, as that of one’s own face. Who does your face belong to? Seems a foolish question. How is it that people most instantly recognize you? Your voice? Yes, but this has the same problem. Your name? No, most of us have nothing to do with our own names; they are almost all given to us by someone else. It’s your face. It is the most “you” of any of your external parts. But you have never seen it, only a refection. That which is yours, most yours, belongs more to me than it does to you. That which is most mine, my own nothingness, belongs more to you than it does to me. What is this modern “nothingness?” It is the thought of another in my absence.

… The American poet Wallace Stevens in his poem “The Rock,” and it is worth taking note this is a later poem in Stevens’ corpus, says, “It is an illusion that we were ever alive.” This line contains more truth than one perhaps wants to admit. The questions “what do we know about death?” of “what does it mean, what is it like, to die?” are the fairest questions humans have ever asked. Stevens’ opening line shows us how we know more than we are willing – or maybe wanting – to admit. The choice of the word “illusion” is misleading. One wants to replace to word with “kindness.” This is has no theological

meaning; the kindness extended to us is not extended by a god of any kind. We are all and alone the only reason we are alive and, at the same exact time, dead. It is only because of memory that we live and die, and we live and die ecstatically. You reading this, idle reader, are an illusion to me. The existence of any person reading this, in his home, at her desk, on a long subway commute, will never be something I know and remember, or remember and forget. This is as much of death as we will experience: forgetting. It is perhaps the reverse – to remember – that is all we will know of life. But what of this kindness? If I were to place myself on this subway, and I raise my head enough to see another passenger reading a book I hold dear, perhaps immediately after I notice this passenger reading this beloved book, he gets off at the next stop. I have a different stop to wait for. I’d return to whatever I happened to be reading or listening to, but later that night, later that year, I may walk past my bookcase, or through a book store, and see that very book. If I remember to myself that man I saw reading this book, my act of remembering such a person, regardless of the total lack of interaction or conversation, keeps that man ecstatically alive. He now lives outside of himself, and lives through time in a different way. But he will not know this life, and I will never know it if the roles were reversed. If I were the man on the subway, reading a book held dear to some passenger I never meet, when that person sees the same copy of the book and remembers a man reading it on the subway, my life is extended – the kindness of memory – though I will never know or experience such kindness, such extension. But isn’t this the way kindness should be? The same can be said of death, perhaps must be said of death. We die daily, as St. Paul says we must in his letter to the Corinthians. But Paul will send us back to a theological interpretation or approach one wants to avoid. None of this is to claim the act of remembering or forgetting is the same as the act of physical dying a bodily death, but the effect is the same, or similar enough to be uncomfortable to realize. Let’s return to the example of the reader on the subway. If I did see him, I noticed he was reading a book I care about, and then forget. What then? I mean to say, truly forget. This is what Maurice Blanchot calls “oblivion.” Oblivion is to truly forget, and to truly forget is to forget that you have forgotten. Lost to oblivion, beyond return, simply and actually dead. When I see the very same book on my shelf, maybe the exact same edition, I remember nothing of this passenger, not even that faint ficker, that strange trace in the dark of “I used to know this.” He is gone. He is dead here and now even as he continues to walk the streets, ride the subway, and read a book I loved. That 23 | ESSAYS

man is dead without knowing it. This is to say that this man has entered a life with a lasting effect, and then left it without having to slowly fall away from the world. At no point was there a hospital bed, a late night phone call, an anticipated grief. He simply was until he wasn’t. It is at best a tacit agreement, but one submits oneself to the memory of other with the knowledge one could always be forgotten, one could always die before one’s body no longer functions, and is this not in its own way a kindness? Dying this way is not to say we see people bodily die each day. We are not all soldiers on a battlefeld. Death is inescapable, because the nothingness of others is always ours and only ours. Perhaps this gets in the way of our own lives, which is why Epicurus makes such a stoic demand of us, but nonetheless, we think so often of death because we can never get used to it, and as diffcult as this is, as much as one wishes it were not this way, it’s the way it must be; it’s a beautiful idea that remains alive in the world. This is what we have to be reminded of, not that death is always and forever present, but that it must be that way, and that there is a beauty in that, a heartbroken beauty, but beauty nonetheless. The corrective to the epicurean idea then becomes Nietzsche and Emerson when they tell us, demand from us, “learn to forget.” Forgetting is the truest, most everyday experience of death. Don’t think least of death but dive in, because it’s in the same place that we and others die, that we and others also live. There is a great gift here too. Everything a life contains, the true fullness of it, our life and death comes from, and is given to us, from others. Here is Schopenhauer’s “Nothingness is the Fullness of Being.” Both of these fundamental pieces of our lives, the Nothingness of it all, the Fullness of it all, are given to us from without, and we give to others from within. It may have been an illusion we were ever alive, but it is a kindness, nonetheless, a kindness undeserved and unrecognized.

… Where is it these memories go? Where are they when they’re ours? Those moments when someone ask you a questions, tells you a story of someone they’ve just run into, and you say, “Oh yes, I remember her!” We know we have it; it feels like it’s ours. This seems to be the only answer. As far as where these memories are when they are dormant or latent, the answer is they are simply ours. Where are the memories? I simply have them. But what of those times when we forget what happens? Here a curious phenomenon happens. Just by being in the presence of another, to be an entity

that can be sensed in some why, is to offer oneself to the memory of another. By reading on the subway, that man may have just been reading the book on his commute to work, but at the same time he offers himself. And if I look up and see this man reading a particular book, just the very sight of him, the sense of him, offers him to my memory. What happens here is something remarkably beautiful. Weeks later after I’ve seen this man, I see the same book on my shelf and remember the man I saw reading on the subway; the offering has been accepted. However, he does not offer an image; he offers himself. I don’t recall the book alone – though it may have been the book that accepted the offering – what I recall is the man, the subway, the seat, was it crowded? Was it empty? Was it loud or quiet? Perhaps it was quiet and that’s what allowed him to read? All these follow with the offering of oneself to the memory. And is this fimsy, fuzzy, unverifable memory not better than a photograph?

If I had a photograph of this man on my wall, what would I actually have? I would have what I can see in the photo. Maybe he’s leaning forward as he reads. Maybe there’s someone next to him? no one next to him? But what has this become? Something has changed radically. It is no longer mine. The photo is now detached from me. It now belongs to the frame, the wall, the camera. It belongs to something not myself, something artifcial. And now, with this photo on the wall, when I walk by my bookcase and see the spine of the same book, I no longer remember. Why? Because it is no longer a memory. It is now information contained in a frame. What’s most important, and most troubling, about this is the safety and risk of it all. The man in the photo on the wall is safe. The information belongs to the frame and the camera and is safe in the photo. Memory does not work this way. To submit something to the memory is to put it at great risk, the risk of forgetting. And yet, is it not better this way? Is it not more honest? What’s offered to the memory is taken by the camera lens. One does not give oneself to the photo, the photo takes. But it takes these images, this information, to a safe place where one can return to, and retrieve again and again, the information the camera has taken. But where does memory take this offering? We don’t know. One says, “we don’t know” in a phenomenological sense. Neuro-scientists call tell us how synapses work and function, about memory being a matter happing in the amygdala, the chemical reactions happening in the brain, though all this is remarkable, it at the same time is irrelevant to the experience. One does not feel chemical reactions in the brain; one simply forgets. And this is the claim that matters most: it is better to risk, and offer it up to the memory, than arrest it safely in a photo. 25 | ESSAYS

Memory’s failing becomes most troubling not with the man and the book on the subway, but when it comes to those we love and have lost. Here is the greatest risk. When one watches another die, one wants photos because one cannot handle the risk. This is, of course, an understandable desire. But the photo does not contain the dying person; it contains the information. The colors and shades are now turned to pixels. However, memory presents the offering back to us, the presentation may be clearer sometimes than it is at other times. Memory may never give the exact offering back, but this way the offering becomes anew each time. Think of the story of the offerings of Cain and Abel from Genesis. To put it in its most simplifed way: Cain offers a sheaf of wheat to the lord, something from the earth, something replaceable, and Abel offers a Lamb, something concerning life and death, a living creature killed in offering. Cain’s offering is rejected, and Abel’s is accepted. This is much like the photograph and the memory. There is nothing at risk in Cain’s offering. The feld Cain took the wheat from will grow more. Abel’s sacrifce has everything at risk. Abel’s sacrifce cost the life of an animal. To offer something to the memory is to offer it’s life, and, therefore, the possibility of its death. The memory of the dying person is submitting the person to another death. Everyone has to physically die, but one has to die again by being forgotten. The photo of the dying person after they have died physically does not preserve such a person. The picture on the desk of this person belongs more to the desk than it does to me. However, my memories belong fully to me. They are mine, faults and all. I am not separated from the memory. I require no mediator, because the memory is not sitting somewhere, waiting, like the picture on the wall or the desk; it is simply mine. There it is, because there I am. And when we forget, we truly lose something that belonged us, something that was offered by the world to me and my memory. It is perhaps the greatest fear to forget. But we do forget. We forget because the world offers itself to us constantly. Neuro-scientists do not propose there is a limit to the amount of information the brain can hold; the answer is unknown at this point. But there is only so much one can pay attention to, and when one’s attention shifts, memories fade. Some are recovered by readers on subways, sounds in the wind, smells from kitchens, but nearly all fade. They move with such speed, such swiftness; they hide so well. It seems many would rather be forgotten. They leave us quietly and quickly. They leave us as if they had somewhere else to be. And it’s better this way. Let them keep their appointments, rather than keep them waiting, stuck in a frame on a wall.