Colophon

This text originally appeared in Yuggothic Delusions Ogdo.

𓅐

Death is the other of all life. It is in the interests, so far as they might be said to have any, of all beings to understand: That cessation or change beyond some state comes to all that arises. That death will come to them. That death will, in part, be that of the body. That death will, in part, be that of the contents of the mind. That cessation will not come to what has not arisen; it is of appearances, not the mode of appearances.

𓅞

Release from the requirements of life may be felt as orgasmic. Chasing or fleeing death both distract from death by reducing it to its secondary effects. To come to an understanding of the terms of death, it is necessary that the terms of appearances be known. The self appears. The body appears. The mind appears. All of these are subject to the mode of that which appears, and in this fashion, are of one kind with all other contents of appearance.

No infinite state appears. By ‘infinite’ it is meant independent, unbounded by time or space. Appearances cannot be infinitely static. An appearance is known by all else which informs it. For an appearance to be infinitely static, all else would have to follow suit. All else following suit, for one appearance to be infinitely static would be for all things to be infinitely static. Appearances cannot be infinitely or independently changing. That is perceived as changed which once appeared one way and now appears another. In the absence of other states which an appearance might be in, there is no change thereto. An infinitely varying appearance could not be established as the same appearance across time or space. Therefore it could not appear ‘changed’ relative to any other or prior state. Yet it might be agreed that some state may follow or be associated with another in sequence, though most or all of their dimensions may differ.

For an appearance or a sequence of appearances to last requires not merely the conditions necessary to bring it about, but also the conditions to sustain it across time. For an appearance to appear and never fall away would require its suIaining conditions to also continue into perpetuity. In turn, all the conditions upon which those conditions depend would also have to continue, and so on. The immortality of one appearance requires the immortality of all else.

𓉶

A sculptor, by the apotheosis of craft, succeeds in carving a rock of ages. Nothing changes it from the moment of its completion. Nothing of its parameters shall ever vary, not one atom shall ever move from this hardest and truest of objects, no electron on its shell shall dream of being elsewhere. Neither God nor his angels shall move it one Planck length. Independent from the spatial influence of any other thing, frame, or reference point, unchanging in any of its spatial dimensions, would it become a fixed point in time and space, breaking relativity? Would it assume free‐fall, carving an arc of rapid and total devastation across the Earth, all in its path meeting a truly immovable object, unaffected by gravity, heat, hardness, force, any physics as we know them? Or would it even be tangible? The ‘solidity’ of ordinary matter is the product of electrons seeking local minima within the electromagnetic field, and an unchanging electron could not have its potential energy change. But all this is already generously, nonsensically extending to it an exemption to its temporal parameters, that of coherent futurity. If the rock is fixed in time, surely it has no business in the future. Either the instant of its completion is the end of future, all else now crystallised in place alongside the rock, or the future loses the rock entirely. Worse, what is truly unbound by time could not have at a prior time presented any other way. The moment of its creation would immediately extend into the infinite past. If at any one instant, this gorgon or basilisk of objects is perceived, then, if it is truly a rock of ages, at all instants it must be perceived, and that perception also cannot change. Lacking some 'other' state by which its perception might be known as such, what is perceived at all times cannot be distinguished from its prior or posterior conditions, and so it cannot be distinguished as an object at all.

𓆄

Persons are not strictly bodies, nor are bodies static. If it is argued that no state may arise and then remain the case forever, it might be supposed that the state of being dead will reverse. As life is not one fixed state, death is not one fixed state. An embodied person is a specific state (or set thereof) of the body. Walking, talking, dancing to “Hello, My Baby” in a cane and top hat, the stuff of life is the body in motion. Were the body strictly synonymous with life, there could be no corpse. To imagine the person without the body is to imagine the changes which the body in motion undergoes, causes in the world, and by which the embodied person is distinguished, continuing on in its absence. Yet these remain appearances. Even a spectre is some appearing trace which marks out a person or persona in some way. That it is held to be aphysical or only marginally physical does not cleave it from appearances, either the appearances of interaction with spectres or the appearances which might convince one that they are a spectre. The body can easily be imagined without the person. Any corpse will do. Zombies are animate, yet bereft of the patterns which mark the body as an embodied person.

𓀾

If at the end of their life, one were to transform bodily into a child again, whether or not this could be called a kind of death would depend upon the degree to which this prior body and life would impact the behaviour of the new body. If the transformation results in total amnesia with no trace whatever, then it begins to enter the territory of death.

The changes one makes in the world beyond the body alone are the distinguishing traces of the person. Yet the body, too, is a site of dramatic change.

What of a person granted ‘immortality’ of the body? Their body in whatever form becomes immune from the ravages of time and decrepitude, yet they are not granted unchanging memory. Is such a person immortal? At the end of 10,000 years, who inhabits the body?

𓆷

The living know death by the effects of loss.

Grief, the fullness of an end, has great worth to the living. Genuine grief is filling; grief that sours and goes on forever is not. Ritual may help bring grief about, but to try and force out grief one does not feel can only be distasteful.

𓊟

The prevailing view of death has it as a nihil, a void where life once was, the eternal privation of experience. The dead, now non-persons, are too insensate to miss living, shut up in the dark, as in deep sleep. Even staunch atheists frequently describe death as though it were a featureless Hades where the self is eternally kept “just so”. “And if you are pure of heart and deed, you'll all go to a beautiful place called heaven... I’m yankin ya, you just rot in the ground.” The person is reduced to the body.

Depictions of heaven tend to be sparse affairs compared to the fantastic cruelties of hell. Heaven is said to be very wonderful, but the wonder is its contents, not wonderful events which may take place therein. Heaven has no room for mundane acts; perception itself must be modified by heaven, clarified and purified in some way, to preclude temptation, eradicate desire which may not be acted upon without losing heaven's favour. This is difficult to picture as it asks the audience to picture picturing differently. To picture unfathomable agony, unrelenting orgasms of pain in which the body is not only present, but undergoes a maximum of wild experience in the hells, no change in perception is necessary; only the extremes of what may already be perceived need to be pushed to their limits. It is easier to imagine the body in a constant state of greatly eventful stimulation by gratuitous superviolence or indulgent volumes of despair than it is to attempt to impress upon an audience an idea of similar orgasm as a result of an uneventful, causally tepid eternity. Eventless Hadai are easy to picture by relation to dreamless sleep or states of sloth‐torpour. They are often labelled, falsely, as voids. Yet, by their necessary lack of features, they are conditional. Darkness can only be perceived as a lack of light. The totally blind will sometimes be told that sighted visitors left the lights on in their home. These three perceptions equally regard the afterlife as a question of perceptual (causal, phenomenal) occurrence. With the question of perception (in the mundane, perceived-perceiver sense) comes the question of a secondary body, that which must be present (however aphysical and insensate) to undergo the states of afterlife.

As long as the body is held as the necessary substrate of pure experience — experience in the raw, before distinct experiences, the very ‘thing’ of experiencing, which is no object, state, nor lack thereof — then death, which must come to the body, may be seen as ‘ultimate’, the end of all things, mirrored in the permanence of the realms (furnished or unfurnished) supposed to lie beyond it. Life becomes seen as fragile, frail and feeble, a series of cruelties and deprivations. The body seems so strongly correlated with phenomena, ascribed as they are to some sense or other, that this view can be asserted as an axiom: “Oh come the fuck on. Get real. Grow up. You just don’t want to face death so you make up all this dumb shit about a man in the sky so you don’t feel bad about it. When you’re dead, that’s it. Deal with it.” If the body is not the substrate of pure experience, if it is not prior to experience in itself, but only to conditions or sets of phenomena already within experience, then it does not follow that death will bear any resemblance to being shut up in a dark room.

𓁑

Death is conditioned by the antecession of life. What is conditioned is not ultimate.

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