Death

I have a bit of an unnatural obsession with death, not so much as a physical concept (though at times, yeah) but as a spiritual one. I adore death. I see it as the big, friendly sledgehammer waiting at the end of the rainbow.

It started its current incarnation, methinks, around the time I played through Arcanum for the first time, and encountered the gruesome philosophy of the necromancer Kerghan the Terrible. His soothing certainty still flows through my mind, each time as clear as the first:

“Death is the natural state of things.”

For those of you who haven't played this charming 2001 video game (hello, world!), you are a person who has survived a blimp crash running around trying to stop an evil sorcerer returning from another dimension to commit racial genocide in a variety of different flavours. Goodness, that sounds cliché.

Anyhow, at the end of the game you find out that the 'villain' has been locked away in a tiny cell for a thousand years, and the real nemesis is a necromancer named Kerghan who has pushed the forces of the spectral realm to their limit and in doing so decided that life is evil. As such he wants to kill absolutely everybody in Arcanum, which is slightly different to what the first villain was doing.

*Spoilers Over*

Kerghan makes a great deal of sense, as well as being a snappy dresser. He identifies Emotions as a negative effect which distorts the soul when it is stimulated by the natural world, and the lack of them – a great, unending river of peace – as the pure state in which they truly belong. While Arcanum holds no concept of metempsychosis (reincarnation for Greek people and learned death-seekers), it fits in pretty well. Referring to Socrates' theory of forms, we are incomplete elements desperately striving to become 'true' elements, needing and wanting nothing. If that sounds familiar to those out east it is because Buddhists preach practically the same thing: an end to desire (a magnetic attempt to structure and complete a form), and the state of bliss that such a thing allows.

Babble babble. I really do get ahead of myself sometimes.

After years of imagining the future and missing out on the actualisation of those musings completely, I have decided upon one thing: death is the only certainty¹. It is the only outcome we mortals can definitively prepare for and, if you'll excuse me for saying so, one that we cannot prepare for enough. Thus I have done away with thoughts of living the dream, of romance and of fame. And I have replaced them with death. Quite simply the idea of death, and preparations for the happy day when I will die.

At this juncture I am forced to consider a question some might be asking:

What exactly is Death?

To which I shall reply with the symbol:

and its meaning: 'The separation of the soul from a body.'

That's all very simple at its basis, but as with all definitions (that ocean I drown within) it demands others.

A body is the most immediately identifiable. They are the physical compounds that surround us. I won't say anything as definitive as that they are the organic cell-structures we have direct control over, nor will I say that they extend to every attribute of the physical world. I shall stay up here on my uncomfortable palisade fence and writhe in the agony of mortal perspective, because as much as I want to die, I want to live as well. It is kinda sorta entertaining.

What we do know about bodies is that their most immediate perceptual centre (you) can be destroyed¹. The general assumption is that this is death, but we don't really know. Maybe the soul just sits around waiting for another controllable vessel to step into its negative-space and resumes what it was doing before, because it is as much a part of the world as the world is a part of it, and only by destroying the universe can you bring about an actual 'death'.

The soul is more of an abstract concept, because it is only detectable as everything that reality isn't. It is not sensed, it does not change, it is intangible and incorporeal. Its existence is empirical: because every force in the universe has an equal opposing force, we assume the same is so for the body.

But despite the fact that it is not physical, it effects physicality. We know this because we respond to things which bear no reason, which are intangible and which STRESS IMPORTANCE are self-destructive. The body has demands to perpetuate its existence, and the soul acts against these demands, responding to emotions (wisely defined by Kerghan as a distortion upon the soul after reacting to an external stimulus) at the detriment of the body.

These two entities bring up another important question: if death is the separation of a soul from a body, what exactly does it mean to have a soul and body connected?

The answer is simply a balanced force held between them; one which is at its most basic level a contradiction. On one half we have the sensory engine that is the brain fueling 'the entity' with senses and commands: 'You must eat, because you are hungry', 'Move away. That object is sharp'. On the other hand we have the emotional engine that is the soul, telling us things like, 'Don't eat, because that animal suffered before it was killed', and 'Let the pain keep coming, it makes the anger and sadness so much less present'.

And by the very fact that we are thinking these things, we can define this paradox-entity as The Mind.

At this point everything begins to blur together. We know that emotions are accompanied by hormones, and many scientists make the assumption that hormones therefore generate emotions – skipping the consideration that it may be the other way around: why can't the soul be telling the brain what to feel, and the brain be interpreting that in a physical way? The simple answer is that if a system works with less pieces, then those unnecessary pieces can be removed. This is the sufferance of mainstream specialisation. Logically, when one considers forms and opposing forces, the soul exists.

Similarly we are given the reverse to consider:

Bodies ideally affect souls. The interpretive language of this is emotion.

The former generates the latter generates the former. A dynamic outcome.

Sweet Elias Canetti. I'm certainly long-winded, aren't I?

Death, then, can be seen as a dissolution of the mind. Two interacting elements are separated, and as such any sense of Self ceases to exist. I imagine it feels wonderful, once you get over the 'hit by a bus' or 'fell into a vat of eels' part. That constant struggle between one thing and another, the decisions, the sensations, the emotions – everything falling away to nothingness in one moment. If that is death, I'm ready for it when it comes.

HOWEVER.

There are other considerations to be made. For example, is Death the natural state? If so, then it means something must have occurred to end the natural state, and that implies a soul can be given direction and intention without actual consciousness. I call this their 'Anywhere But Here' component; a built-in boredom with their own existence which drives them to something else unceasingly. This would mean that so long as death is a natural state, it must also end periodically to satisfy the acting component of the soul. In a word, metempsychosis.

If Life is the natural state, then no direction or intention need to be placed inside a soul; we simply are and always will be. This gives credence to ideas of consciousness being a never-ending and linear path, and I'm just as happy with this outcome, too. At the point my body is 'destroyed' either I continue living despite all probability or the notion of body loses all meaning and I become A: a central godly figure attached to the universe or B: A mind without any external demands of 'feed me' or 'ouch'; capable of generating worlds out of thoughts.

The last would be particularly enjoyable, as I'd become a physical example of what I always have been: an Idea.

The conclusion: Life is grandish. Death is grand.

On that day and at that moment, my mind will blow open. Something will happen, and it will be different.

I can only pinpoint one certainty:

I will at last have reached that place I have been searching for; anywhere but here.

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^1: Quantum Immortality is an increasingly popular theory stating that at the point in which a person will die reality splits along two points: one branch in which the consciousness ends, and another in which it continues to exist. As such we never die: our consciousnesses (consciousni?) continue along the most unlikely paths despite anything that may physically happen.

While I am fully willing to accept this theory, I have to point out that reality is split into an infinite number of possibilities at every moment, and the limitations of dimension are the only thing holding our precise view of the world in place. As these parallel universes do exist, there are consciousnesseseses driving each of them, and those end. I guess they can't exactly be confirmed as soul-bearing entities just as I can't actually prove that you, dear reader, actually have a consciousness and are not simply an expression of my own. This is one of those rare cases where I avoid thinking about something because it discomfits me: I want you to have a soul. I think it makes for a much more interesting universe if you do.