Dying in Prime Time

The dead in the beach shelters at Heracleum—photo by William E. Evans, © 2019

A recent Medium publication by a Duke University student working toward his Doctor of Philosophy caught my attention: To Live Well, Read About Dying by Ben Sarbey. He is arguing in essence that to think about mortality’s end is to prepare for it. And the author provides several other writers’ efforts getting at the subject.

“People who are dying are the same as everyone else, but they also live in another world, apart from others. They have hidden sources of pain, vulnerabilities that are difficult to imagine unless we have been in their place.”

from To Live Well, Read About Dying by Ben Sarbey

Difficult to imagine?—not at all. Sorry, Ben. Though being a student suggests Sarbey is young, and it’s reinforced by his head shot, so he should be forgiven. Though if it were difficult to imagine, all those movies like Carrie and Bride of Chucky wouldn’t have found enormous audiences. Humans imagine dying all the time, mainly because we’d like to avoid it for as long as possible, even if not all that we do reflects the most sound avoidance strategies—like refusing vaccinations because the aliens will implant listening devices…

And one cannot exactly “have been in their place” unless you’ve returned from the hereafter, so how does that work?

“Several prominent memoirs written by dying persons have been authored in the last few years, including Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Nina Riggs’s The Bright Hour, Duke Divinity professor Kate Bowler’s Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, and Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality.”

from To Live Well, Read About Dying by Ben Sarbey

Curiously, he doesn’t mention Montaigne. Curious to me, anyway—the world’s first essayist not mentioned? The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion? And Annie Leibovitz’s portraits of Susan Sontag as she died of cancer? He has reading yet to do.

Leibovitz’s photography is as lyric as any writer could hope to achieve. Imagine what Annie was thinking of while photographing her lover as she suffered—no different than the rest of us, yet she shared their intimate sorrow with the world.

I would agree most of us would rather put off thinking of it until the inevitable comes along, and I’d also agree ignoring it altogether isn’t the wisest, unless you look forward to being rudely gobsmacked.[1] But in its arms-length tone, the Sarbey piece seems dry and disconnected from the actual event. More a book report than relating to an—excuse the expression—live experience.

Me, I believe in screaming loudly about dying. I mean, it’s the end, people, so come on! If you can’t be stirred by this, you’ve been playing too many rounds of Mortal Kombat during the pandemic. And I’ll cheerfully admit I’ve been around death and dying more than some, so it’s a subject I’ve paid close attention to for most of my life—attending your father’s funeral at four-years-old will do that. 

Billy Collins, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, says the prime subject of poetry is dying. Or as he’s been quoted, "Death is what gets poets up in the morning." That and strong coffee. I’m only a part-time poet—reason being it takes too much work to keep at it full time. I mainly use poetry for therapy. Now and again I land a line I like, but it’s hard work and there’s no one to talk to while you’re at it.

Let’s see: I can’t use Montaigne’s best quote on dying, ‘cause I’ve already used it a few times. Ah! Hitchens! Sarbey’s post triggered a reminder that I hadn’t yet read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality essays on how an English curmudgeon chap with lacerating wit faced his final act. Faced it he did.

Hitchens took no prisoners in his one-man offensive against religion. The thought of religion—more precisely, the posturing by clerics, charlatans and wannabes—left him apoplectic. While I’m not a virulent, gun-toting atheist, Hitchens’ sardonic send-ups on the absurdist behavior of English Archbishops and Italian Popes are delightful. Though, no doubt some of Hitchens’ public performances were amping the bad boy persona.

Hitchens did his share of debates against a variety of the pro-religious. In a lecture-formatted debate at the 92nd Street Y, not so long after 9/11, he took on Tariq Ramadan, another privileged lad. Christopher Hitchens and Tariq Ramadan Debate: Is Islam a Religion of Peace? (2013)

Hitchens was not a fan of Islam—not before 9/11, and certainly not after.

[1] Gobsmacked: “Flabbergasted, astounded; speechless or incoherent with amazement.” from Oxford English Dictionary.

“It is often said that resistance to jihadism only increases the recruitment to it. For all I know, this commonplace observation could be true. But, if so, it must cut both ways. How about reminding the Islamists that, by their mad policy in Kashmir and elsewhere, they have made deadly enemies of a billion Indian Hindus? Is there no danger that the massacre of Iraqi and Lebanese Christians, or the threatened murder of all Jews, will cause an equal and opposite response? Most important of all, what will be said and done by those of us who take no side in filthy religious wars? The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant, or neutral, without inviting their own suicide. And the advocates and apologists of bigotry and censorship and suicide-assassination cannot be permitted to take shelter any longer under the umbrella of a pluralism that they openly seek to destroy.”

from God-Fearing People—Why are we so scared of offending Muslims? by Christopher Hitchens in Slate magazine, 2007

I needed to Google Tariq Ramadan, thinking he might be a student of Islam. His grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood, and his great uncle, Gamal al-Banna, had been a noted liberal Muslim reformer. So he came from a line of involved Muslim speakers. Ramadan has had a long, distinguished academic career, but what he’s best known for these days is his time in a French jail for multiple rape charges—two of which haven’t been adjudicated. Possibly he’s of the old school of misogynists when it comes to sexual relations, e.g. those poor Sabine women who were carried off for a good time. Old school.

The Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna at the Loggia dei Lanzi—photo by William E. Evans, ©2019

From Hitchens’ opening remarks in the debate with Ramadan comes the following declarative: there are no perfect people—which seems self explanatory—there are no perfect books, and thus he concludes it “demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.” Hitchens is referring to the Coptic Pope, forced by the Egyptian dictatorship to declare the Quran is a ‘perfect book,’ i.e. not subject to dispute. As he says, even the non-believers must swear allegiance. When humans through history have needed to close out debate, ‘divine inspiration’ has done the trick—it’s a great closer, one fallible person to the next. The Catholic Church has employed it with varying degrees of success over the years. To the subspecies of obdurate dogmatists who persist throughout history, in all cultures, I have a single reply: Hitchens.

In this debate, the effect of the cancer that ultimately killed him is very visible with his lack of hair, and difficulty speaking—yet Hitchens is still there to debate. One gets the feeling he was standing in his crib facing parents and debating.

So what’s in common between death by disease and death by jihad? Or ethnic cleansing? Dead is dead. It’s impossible in my mind to reconcile a love for life and the willingness to destroy it, knowing full well immortality is fiction, and the grim reaper will assuredly get you as well. I do not understand: having grown up with parents and relatives, then having one’s own family, why you would subscribe to taking another’s life for an unprovable belief.

If there is a god, she walked away from this mess a long time ago.

Though unlike Hitchens, I can see value in religion. As a means to teach comportment and instruct societies, to offer a way forward from the bad places many of us start from—and for the ones who have since lost their way. To offer a conception of life that’s larger than one’s self has been useful to the species. The downside results, the pogroms and slavery, remain to be corrected, but nothing’s perfect.

But dogma? Nah. Dogma is shorthand for not being able to otherwise persuade one’s potential followers that we all end up in the same hole. No matter how brilliant, how clever and disarming, Yorick’s skull is still a hollow place where once a living being dwelled.

Whether it is possible for nations and cultures to step past the internecine massacres remains an open question. Hindu and Muslim, Muslim and Jew, Christian and Muslim, Buddhist and Han. My sense is that we’re back to the lion killing his competitors’ offspring. Or as Carl Sagan might say, we are no different.

The image of the skeletons at the base of Heracleum keeps returning to me. These were living Romans once, and now they are on display for tourists to take in—as cautionary tales, perhaps, if their viewers perceive them as such.

Receiving his death sentence, Hitchens kept at it.

“But reading Mortality, it's clear he knew in his bones that the end was coming sooner, not later, and, more than just intellectually, experienced the irrational disbelief in death to be the illusion it was. Because he contracted cancer of the oesophagus, he was also cursed with the knowledge that his illness would inflict the most personal insult: taking his voice before it took the rest of him.

from Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens,’ Review, by Alexander Linklater in the Guardian newspaper.

Hitchens mourned for what he knew inevitably he would lose:

“Timing is everything. The exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech."

from Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

In his review, Alexander Linklater continues:

“The real struggle in Mortality is not with mortality. Hitchens cleaves to the logical conclusion of his materialism. He hints, rather, at a fear of losing himself, of becoming an imbecile, someone who might, in terror and pain, say something foolish or (God forbid) religious near the end, to give his enemies satisfaction. The true struggle of his last writings is to remain himself, deep in the country of the ill, for as long as he can."  

from Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens,’ Review, by Alexander Linklater in the Guardian newspaper.

Hitchens’ friend, Christopher Buckley wrote that for him it was, “sobering and grief-inducing to read this brave and harrowing account of his ‘year of living dyingly’ in the grip of the alien that succeeded where none of his debate opponents had in bringing him down."

“He noted there that some of the essays had been written in ‘the full consciousness that they might be my very last. Sobering in one way and exhilarating in another, this practice can obviously never become perfected.’ “

from NY Times’ book review, Staying Power by Christopher Buckley.

Writers, whether they mean to or not, are writing for those who come after—if it’s just for the several days, weeks, months between when the piece is written and the first readers pick it up. I’ll confess it’s my motivation—though it took a while to realize it.

It doesn’t seem all writers understand this, though Hitchens did. The writer who rushes through the sentences with protean vigor, giving no hint of looking back or acknowledging he’s but a point in time, bores me. Like horses with old fashioned blinders incapable of seeing much beyond what’s in front of their faces.

I don’t know whether Hitchens came from that breed of English so soaked in the classics it colors everything about how they view the world, though it feels that way listening to him. His recall of quotes was intimating. I’ll admit to a certain envy in what this subspecies of Brits can comfortably debate, quote, dispute—like baseball stats—which also are pretty much foreign to me.

Americans, on the whole, seem less concerned about what’s come before them; they can barely recall events in their parents’ generation let alone the last century—no time, no time, no time, like the White Rabbit with a pocket watch in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The English, or at least a portion of them, remain steeped in the world’s history—a result of their far flung empire, or more likely the major cause of it, that curiosity of what lies over the horizon. Generalizations, to be sure, but in Hitchens’ case, utterly convincing.

A stale yet perpetuated gag of mine is making fun of the English accents while watching PBS murder mysteries, insisting we Americans are the superior connoisseurs of the language, and require subtitles to follow the incoherent conversations of, say, the middle-aged Vera the detective and her slang, and how the English are ruining a perfectly good language. In the presence of Hitchens’ impeccable language, I wouldn’t dare.

Some things just seem so absurd that all you can do is go over the top. The dark process of dying strikes me as one of those. Not a time to pray—or if you do, pray to the sun as George Carlin recommends, a real thing in the universe. Otherwise, Carlin says praying to a higher power is a 50-50 roll of the dice.

George Carlin - Stand Up About Religion  

Carl Sagan’s book, Broca’s Brain, more than anything else of his, has stayed with me. Written in the 70s, his speculation on the human brain, what does what in that black box has been supplanted by newer research, though he’d probably smile and say ‘that’s how science works.’

“The title essay is named in honor of the French physician, anatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca (1824–1880). He is best known for his discovery that different functions are assigned to different parts of the brain. He believed that by studying the brains of cadavers and correlating the known experiences of the former owners of the organs, human behavior could eventually be discovered and understood. To that end, he saved hundreds of human brains in jars of formalin; among the collection is his own brain. When Sagan finds it in the Musée de l'Homme, he poses questions that challenge some core ideas of human existence such as ‘How much of that man known as Paul Broca can still be found in this jar?’—a question that evokes both religious and scientific argument.” [emphasis added]

from Wikipedia article on Broca’s Brain

That my very lovely brain has evolved—and presumably improved—over previous models didn’t surprise me, but hearing that one brain had evolved on top of another, more primitive one? I found it fascinating. Totally logical; one adds new modules as required; you don’t want to reboot the entire stack each time you do an upgrade.

That we retain the same stem brain as a frog is also instructive, though I only croak when hoarse. More to the point, our brain collectives, once accreted, cooperate at times and other times argue amongst themselves, like any close family. Which might explain some stuff.

In Sagan's 1994 lecture: The Age of Exploration, speculating on other life in the universe he offers: “we confuse the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence.” Up until recently astronomers hadn’t found another star with orbiting planets—an absence indeed. Two-thirds of the way through his lecture (at +/- 1:00:00), he shows the photograph taken from the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts looking back toward Earth as they were sailing off leaving the solar system. Sagan points to a small, brighter dot in a background field of haze as it appeared from that far away: “So there it is, a pale, blue dot. That’s us. That’s home. That’s where we are.” And proceeds to list all the history of all the cultures contained in one pale, blue dot.

The point of Sagan’s talk was how all the ways mankind has insisted we are ‘at the center of the universe,’ beginning with the belief that Earth was the center while the sun and stars revolved around it, to our ‘special’ consciousness that we claim sets us apart from the other great apes was being “demoted by science.” And I’d add that god has always been made in the likeness of man…

When asked by an audience member to comment on consciousness as a strictly human characteristic, Sagan’s off the cuff response was:

“If it means an awareness of the external world, and modifying your behavior to take account of the external world, then I think microbes are conscious. If you mean deep thoughts, like Bishop Berkeley’s contention that nothing exists except what’s in his mind, I’m with the microbes, myself.”

From Carl Sagan’s lecture, The Age of Exploration

Sagan died in 1996 at 62.

“My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence were provided by such a god... on the other hand if such a god does not exist then our curiosity and intelligence are the essential tools for survival. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is essential for the welfare of the human species.”

from Broca’s Brain by Carl Sagan

Which brings me back to what Hitchens—who I expect Sagan never met—was trying to say about perspectives on life.

I’ll go out on a limb and say Hitchens didn’t scorn the sincerely religious, and though he was frustrated by some of their practices, what he despised is the ‘business’ of religion—and the politics—how it is wrapped in self-righteous robes. As my sister once said about a person she knows and loves, “It’s hard arguing with God.”

Being curious about the unknowable is as innate to the human species as the gift of speech; it’s written into the DNA. Casting the unknowable into fixed, immutable truths is where we’ve always gone off course, no matter what the inspired prophets and holy men will proclaim, and psilocybin mushrooms aside. Carlos Castaneda is familiar with that latter one.

“We men and all other luminous beings on earth are perceivers. That is our bubble, the bubble of perception. Our mistake is to believe that the only perception worthy of acknowledgment is what goes through our reason. Sorcerers believe that reason is only one center and that it shouldn't take so much for granted.”

from Tales of Power by Carlos Castaneda

Neil deGrasse Tyson says he’s comfortable with the Big Bang Theory—with the entire universe existing in a single, infinitely small singularity and exploding from there into galaxies fleeing away from each other—mainly because the known science fits the theory. When asked ‘what the hell came before that,’ he cheerfully says he hasn’t a clue, because that time is unknowable, existing outside of our own.

I’ll like Christopher Buckley to have the last word:

“In her afterword, Carol [Carol Blue, Hitchens’ wife] relates an anecdote about their daughter, then 2 years old, one day coming across a dead bumblebee on the ground. She frantically begged her parents to ‘make it start.’ On reaching the end of her father’s valedictory feuilleton, the reader is likely to be acutely conscious of Antonia’s terrible feeling of loss.”

from NY Times’ book review, Staying Power by Christopher Buckley.

Hitchens died at 62 in 2011. He was born in 1949, a truly great year for babies.