Death: A Piece of Horror Nonfiction

[A Defrocked Academic]

[2021 edit: I originally removed this piece because I thought it wasn’t up to TLO standards. But a thread with an empty first post doesn't look very nice. Here is a slightly revised version.]

I don’t have time for science and philosophy. I’m going to suffer and die. My aim is to get others to realize that they are also going to suffer and die so that they will act accordingly.
– YellowJester, Antinatalists, attack!

The world breathes like a great lung. Out go the living, in go the dead, through every pore.
– Peter Wessel Zapffe, On the Tragic

I. Death and the world
99.9 ∞ % of the universe is empty or composed of dead matter. The vast majority of all humans who have ever lived are dead. Moreover, the maniacal creation and destruction of life that characterizes the thin sliver of torment we call the biosphere is essential to our daily business. Most of us dress in the dead skin and eat the dead flesh of formerly breathing, suffering creatures. Even those ethically-minded souls who would opt out remain killers. In order to sustain life, your body must kill invading microorganisms. Unseen insects expire beneath your feet. The only way to stop killing is to die.

Unlike the pristine lifelessness of the rest of the universe, only within the biosphere – and the attendant necrosphere, realm of oil and coal – are dead things sullied by the residue of former life. But death also haunts the noosphere or realm of human thought. Intellectually we are patchwork golems or Frankenstein’s monsters, our heads full of the ideas of dead people. In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Schopenhauer’s selected essays and aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale (a dead person) describes the hold of the dead over the living:

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The living occupy the world of nature, but the world of thought is also inhabited by the dead, and especially by the ‘mighty dead’, the founders and ancestors; indeed in this world they are no longer dead, they live on, they appear in dreams and waking dreams, they are immortal – and shall we too not be immortal, in that other world?

Many have stepped up to provide what amounts to an answer to that final question, but one example will suffice. The answer, per Prof. David Benatar, is no:

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The evolution of life, including human life, is a product of blind forces and serves no apparent purpose. We exist now, but we will not exist for long. That is true of us as individuals, but in the grand sweep of planetary time, let alone cosmic time, it is also true of our species and all life. (The Human Predicament, 2017)

In other words, even the undeath achievable within the noosphere will fade away as all thinking beings die and things return to their natural condition.

II. Death and literature
Death leads to distance and distance to longing. Lovecraft longed for the worlds and visions of dead authors such as Poe, and Lovecraft and his worlds were longed for in their turn by his immediate literary descendants, who are now dead. We remain to read their stories and letters, to find the dead longing for the dead, the dead speaking to the dead.

Like all stories worth their salt, Thomas Ligotti’s “Nethescurial” is a narrative where death takes center stage. As successive levels of the frame narrative are breached by horror and death, the thresher draws nearer to the primary-world readers: us. As noted above, the world of literature works the same way. The master dies, then the disciples. We are left to read what they wrote, going over their old letters and stories. But death will rise from the paper to touch us.

Our private lives follow the same pattern, yet more painfully. Your grandparents die, then your parents. You find yourself standing alone on the front line as darkness closes in. Literature is full of authors who wrote oh so cogently about their death anxiety, sometimes writing so well that it feels as if we are the ones speaking. Someone appears to be expressing our very own thoughts and feelings. We experienced this. Surely the person who wrote this cannot be dead? Yet he is. They are. They all wrote and thought so well and they all had the same apprehensions and experiences as us – and they died. Every last one. Think about what that means for you.

III. Death and you
Those who are born have missed out on the opportunity for non-existence. But there are second chances. Let us see what one of the great doctors had to say on the topic (before he died):

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On only one point can the experiencer be certain – in the every-day understanding of the term. No matter how his fate might unfold, it will end in death. And even if death comes late, the torments of old age will catch up with him in time and dictate the terms of his life without any regard to the desires and plans he might still have left. This knowledge of death, perhaps the most bitter gift of our surplus of consciousness, is given to us as early as in childhood; during our journey down the river of life, the distant roar of the waterfall of death reaches across the valley. Many attempt to drown it out by making noises of their own, but the stillness that follows only becomes twice as fearful. However, all are not affected as strongly, nor in the same way. There is a vast distance between a dry awareness of the duration of the life span and the utterly devastating [imaginary] pre-experiencing of the process of dissolution, with all the burning questions that thereby arise and the strange light that is cast upon all human affairs. From battlefields and graveyards the living man hears the thunder of that which once was. Great works lie toppled upon the ruins of great works, and behind the pageantry he espies the silent millions who labored and tilled the soil while the tumult of history raged past above their heads. Now all is still, both that which came to fruition and that which came to naught; the difference has been leveled out. The ruler of the earth and the nameless victim – here they mix dust and here they exchange dust, while new peoples surge across the plains, charged with fresh vigor. The earth breathes like a great lung; the living emerge and the dead are sucked in through every pore. The history of all creation is encompassed by the painfully vivid co-experience [medoplevelse] of renewal on an incomprehensibly vast scale, and the nightmare of recurrence in great things and in small. Peter Wessel Zapffe, On the Tragic (my translation)

Everything is about death. Even when it is not about death, it is still about death. Why did the chicken cross the road? So it could get to the other side and peck at a hot dog lying in a ditch so as to become the living grave (Schopenhauer) of the assorted critters that were ground up and turned into that hot dog. Thus the chicken can starve off death for a little while longer. But that chicken is still going to die. We are born out of a nonexistence that is like death, we spend our lives fending off death, we succumb to death. What is life about? Perhaps we can guess the answer.

Intellectually I can entertain the thought that I am a physical being and will one day die. In dubious mercy, my culture has conditioned me to have no emotional comprehension of this fact. But there are those who would have it otherwise. In a little volume titled Death Poems, Thomas Ligotti endeavored to tear down the wall between death and reader. The effect is cumulative. After reading a number of poems that seem careless, almost childlike in their simplicity, the reader comes to a startling realization: they are going to die some day.

It is a gift.