Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 13:45:57 -0400
From: SBronzell-AT-aol.com
Subject: Re: human body transformation (death)


Destroyer of worlds.  Shiva.  Also, dancer, origin of life.  Shiva destroys
and creates.

You're right about choosing to die...martyrs,
disconnect-this-life-support-thing, etc.  I was thinking about that after I
posted.  Still, I wonder...

Re: oxymoron of death and vitality.  Phoenix?

To end is extremely vital to me.  Not caught in some mediocre wishy-washy
attempt.  I'm not trying to raise death to some mythological boondoggle to be
worshipped, etc.  I also find nothing desirable at being at the mercy of
events beyond my control.  That's part of my consideration.  It's beyond our
desire.  Being beyond may not necessarily be bad or anti-desired.  That I am
not in control makes me ever more careful; I have to keep on my toes.
 Keeping on my toes keeps me vital.  When I'm in control I go to pot, become
rich and fat and lazy.  Then something comes along and shakes me up.  Or, I
don't rest on my laurels and always strike out anew, which implies risk.  So
I die to my control.  Negate it.  Negation is not annihilation.  What is
negated continues.  Just not in control at the roots.  Not neurotic.

I certainly am not saying aid and abet the uncontrollable.  If only because
it is beyond such aiding and abetting.  It doesn't need my help.  :-)

Expanding my experience to meet you I am still meeting you within experience.
 That's still rather mediocre.  Important to expand experience, but it's
still experience.  It is a dangerous fantasy to *attack* experience.  It
isn't a fantasy to negate it.  Listening.  Listening without interposing
experience.

And I'm not interested in "growth" through suffering or in making the best of
a bad situation.  What I'm suggesting is that our essential lack of control
is our salvation.  If only because it keeps us on our toes.  Being subject to
death keeps us vital.  And thus when I meet you I don't have time to spend
coloring you with my experience, or expanding my experience to assimilate
yours.  Those things happen but life is too short, or rather mortal, to
devote oneself to such things.  I may never see you again. I may never see
you at all for that matter. :-)

To meet where we are not just sharing experience or having new experience but
also making new living.

What I also may be suggesting is that control is fine but that basically I am
not in control (no essential basis I can point to and say, there I'm safe)
and that being the case, the fact, it does me no good at all to emphasize or
give my devotion or full attention or whatever to control.  I will never win
that battle.  It's a stupid battle.  A self-destructive battle.  My
well-spring is not in control.

So rather than just accepting the inevitable, of making the best out of the
bad, I seem to be suggesting knocking it on the head, jumping the hurdles.
 Which implies the negation of everything I think I am, my experience.  The
inhuman as being the only really humane aspects of ourselves or lives.  To
care is perhaps inhuman.

All of this suggests a very different attitude or use of technology.
 Technology, perhaps, as a song.

Sean Bronzell

Previously:

Sean Bronzell replied to my [Brad's] posting on immortality:

>What I'd like to ask is where do we get the idea that we can ever be
>immortal?  Long-lived is one thing.   But immortal?

I was conducting a *thought experiment*.  We did not create ourselves and
therefore we cannot guarantee our continued existence for even one moment,
much less forever (Descartes proposed, if I remember aright, that God had to
intervene at each moment to keep the world from falling out of existence).
 According to our present cosmology, however, we might be able to extend our
life expectancy into the billions of years (up to the heat death of the
universe).

>Also what is most vital about death, perhaps, is that it doesn't have to do
>with choice.  Nobody chooses to die.  And I wonder sometimes if we would
even
>"choose" to love.

I believe you have an oxymoron here: death is precisely the negation of all
*vitality* (e.g., compare the eyes of the living and the dead).  But, surely,
what is *salient* about death is that it doesn't have to do with choice,
i.e., that it is unhuman.  Many people choose to die -- martyrs and
suicides....  As a *modernist*, an unregenerate avatar of *The
Enlightenment*, I find nothing desirable in being at the mercy of
circumstances outside my control -- I may not be able to domesticate what
doesn't care about me, but I don't have to aid and abet it.

>In perhaps a very real sense, to even meet you I may have to die, or die to
>my experience

I find this a *very dangerous fantasy*.  In order to meet you I may need to
expand my experience (i.e., reach out beyond my particular concerns), but
that's very different from death of which, as Sophocles wrote in Oedipus at
Colonus: "there is then no wedding music or dance -- death is the finish"
(and if there is an afterlife, it's some place else than among the
survivors).  Mightn't it be possible for a person to continue to grow in life
through a continuous unambivalent process of delight?  And, for those who
believe growth can occur *only* through suffering, they should welcome this
possibility of pan-joyous life as an aid to character-building, since then
they'd have to choose at each moment to forego joy, rather than just making
the most of something they didn't have a choice about.

>One doesn't choose earth-shaking events.

Robert Oppenheimer recalled (from the Baghavad-Gita(sp?)) at "Trinity": "I am
become death, destroyer of worlds." (and the scientists were relieved when
the atom bomb explosion did *not* ignite the nitrogen of the earth's
atmosphere, as had been speculated might happen)

Brad McCormick 



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