🪟 Transcript 41 - Dreaming of death
Transcript #41 (Part 5): A meditation on impending death.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
PART 5: IDEALS
Dreaming of death
🪟 41 - Dreaming of death
Imagine this (and really put your feeling to it): how indescribably heavy is the weight of death, of dying—of that anticipated series of moments of life wrapping itself up? So heavy and burdensome, that it truly is quite terrifying! Is this not the case for each one of us? When we see to our end, when we feel—and really feel, or contemplate—the final full stop, that is, the slow drift of our last passing breath, we encounter the burden of the End in its full montrosity.
What is the monstrosity of this burden and where does it alight from? We are put in a predicament something like how a story finds itself put into a book: conceived with an infinite spirit, yet constrained to time and space—the universal, inviolable laws of which include a clear and definite end. (Except, of course, the story lacks the self-consciousness to despair of this like we do.) What does this mean, exactly? The spirit of the story, as with our being, is bent irrevocably toward the infinite. It is omni-dimensional. It is infinite and eternal in its capacity, flowing into all streams of time and space, moving and forming itself infinitely, but book-time (or immediate time) has a leash on its neck. The story, as with our being, must eventually encounter the impending final full stop. It must be put through the fiery furnace of the Conclusion. After all, even the blessed Holy Scriptures has a final page and a final full stop: it remains a finite document, no matter how infinite the depth of its spirit. The same goes to music. Even the most divine anthem, delivered by as much as the angelic hosts of heaven, must materially rise and fall, eventually giving itself up to silence. Even the flesh and blood of Christ had to leave this earth. So too it is for you and I, even as we are no gods or saints, the nature of time operates as a leash on our infinitude.
Furthermore, the fact of the end is not so simplistic. Anyone can perceive how this anticipated moment—the slow, wistful, sighing drift of death—does not let itself be counted merely as one event among many. Time crudely refuses us such a materialistic perception. A man may not say of his life’s finitude, with a tone of factuality and indifference: “there is my start, there is my midpoint, here is my end; all is well and good with it”. No! This is not the nature which time has allotted for us. As endings delineate the final shape of the contents, deeming it complete, decisively wrapping it up, so for those who dream of death, there arises an altogether crushing point of view: the point of view of the immanent whole. These final moments are where all preceding events of life fall together into its place and will decidedly fall together into place, where life is to find itself at wit’s end! The full stop is placed, and the words are delimited. After very much ado, here is where the story is hereby thus told. Everything has led up to this moment—the End—and the finished product is hereby up for review.
Not only are we beings that actively anticipate our endings before the writing has finished (or even indicated any real possibility of finishing)—we are equally beings who, in dreaming of our endings, reflect tyrannically and absolutely from its imposing point of view. From the viewpoint of the cliff, there emerges an excess of retroactivity. We recount the entire corpus of writing thus far and to come by the quality of its end, which stamps its mark on the full story, blaspheming its satisfactions, composing its own desires, relating its own truisms! Finality is anticipated, dreamed—and it asserts itself, crushing us with its opinion, exposing all the other points of view as the lower: as naked, bare, and rather crude in comparison. All other worldviews in comparison—all worldliness and secularity—crumbles away like mere dust before this immensely substantial worldview; they fall so vastly short, that they fade away immediately into pettiness and insignificance, like feathers crushed under a rock, and the feathers of peacocks and crows are crushed equally. Indeed, an entirely new worldview comes alive for all of us: at the imagination of our last month, our last day, our last hour, our last minute!
Eternity—aeterno modo (the eternal view)—is thus framed and comprehended in view of death. It pays heed not to how pitifully or brilliantly an individual’s story began, nor with how much sweetness or despair it entails, but it takes fervent stock of how the story ends. From the eternal view, finitude comes before our infinitude—and it comes to be judged, to be provoked, to be seen in full transparency, through and through. We know this by the excess of revelation that comes in being towards death. As is commonly the case with the closing sequences of a film or the final sentences of a book, so too it is for our final moments—which carries an excess of aesthetic, ethical, and religious significance, seemingly overriding everything else at its coming.
The hour of death counts infinitely. But now, no one knows when this hour will strike. One is never safely secure once and for all from the inopportune arrival of possibility’s end. One knows only that it strikes of its own accord. Death is always nigh, like a thief in the night, so it always remains close and in sight—not as some faraway possibility, but as a possibility which frames all our actualities (and as Heidegger writes, “higher than actuality stands possibility [möglichkeit]”.) Why else do we grapple so pro-actively, so morbidly, with our impending death—even when we are in perfect health and security, even when we are loved, well-fed, and cared for? Why else does death impose itself so monumentally on our psyche, whilst the birds of the air roam around free from these dark shackles that besiege us? The moment of death provokes not only in the moment itself, but in every living moment and in life itself—for it counts infinitely, and who on earth knows when the moment of reckoning will arrive.
Indeed, what matters infinitely is not only that the time of the End is unknown, but that it is never far away. The exact date and time of death does not matter, as much as the harrowing awareness that there is an unpredictable yet certainly impending moment in which finality soon shall be realised—that our eternal possibility has a cliff, from which it is to be severed, seeped dry, of itself—and that we are always (inescapably) on a journey towards it. Why else is the moment of death is so revered, if meditated upon properly, even if it is of a far-remote stranger? The inevitable passing away of a human soul is shrouded by the scent of ultimate concern. It is wrought with universal seriousness. (It is also not difficult to see how the human experience of mortality is threaded through all perennial wisdoms.) Each one of us knows that this time will indeed come, and it is will come soon, and soon enough—to complete life decisively. And so it remains, at the end of the cliff of possibility stands an eternal lighthouse: a lighthouse of death, which illuminates all our actualities. We have not arrived yet. But we will, we can see it from afar, we can see its light divining upon other individuals, wrapping completely around them so that they disappear in its light. And yet since this light is infinitely concentrated, as it happens when an inordinately bright light completely overcomes the illumination of dimmer lights, so we see its blinding light from afar as closer, realer, more enlightening than anything else.
It is the case thus! At the final phrases of my own life-scribe’s writing, the full circle of time shall knock, and the ghost of time—eternity—shall arrive to decisively complete my history. Death is the end for me. Death is the true, complete end—since it is the end of all possibility. After it, there is nothing—there is no more “what if”, no more movement nor the anticipation of movement; there is no hope and no faith. What I now call ‘I’ will be no more. ‘I’ becomes nothing. Infinitude dissipates into infinitude; there occurs a release of the soul, born of nothingness, into nothingness. The eternal spirit is unshackled from its captivity to the material—time and space. The divine breath of God—my spirit—returns to its birthplace of absolute nothingness. I become one with the nothingness. At the slow process of its transpiring, the essence of my entire life thus far will be determined. But until the angel of death arrives for me, from here below I will remain—always living, always dying.