Prose: Death

which part of all this is crazy logic, you ask? bear with me.

Death. sometimes taken as the ultimate solution to problems we have in life. recently a dear friend wrote of bouts with the angel of death. i wish him well. is it greener on the other side? what other side?

The President’s Commision, 1981, stated that
An individual who has sustained either
i) irreversible cessation of circulatory & respiratory functions
ii) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain including the brain stem,
is considered DEAD. ( Charles A.Corr et al, 2000)

this is the secularist/scientific definition of death. These definitions, however, are based on purely functional aspects of the body’s mechanism. In these secularist Western scientific definitions the existence of a ‘soul’ is somewhat ‘overlooked’.

what do poets and philosophers think of death?

Death is man’s encounter with the reality of his mortality. A question of one’s control of his own life. It is considered by some to be a change or migration, rather than an extinction. It is a natural law, death is a corollary of birth. Death is simply an absence of life, a state of non-being, a converse of birth. It is a return to a state of unconsciousness. These are but a few ponderings on death. It is strengthened by accounts from the deemed wise and enlightened few.

Aristotle called death a kind of destruction or perishing that involves a change from being to non-being. Death is seen to involve a change in the very substance of the being. When a human dies, two important consequences follow:
i) there is no longer human present - instead, there is only a body or corpse
ii) there is no longer a person present – there is only the person’s remains

Another Greek philosopher, Socrates, gives this account of death when he was sentenced to death:

This thing that has come upon me must be good; and those of us who think that death is an evil must needs be mistaken. For the state of death is one of two things : either the dead man wholly ceases to be and loses all consciousness or…it is a change and a migration of the soul to another place. And if death is the absence of all consciousness, and like the sleep of one whose slumbers are unbroken by any dreams, it will be a wonderful gain…For it appears that all time is nothing more than a single night. But if death is a journey to another place, and what we are told is true – that all who have died are there – what good could be greater than this? What would you not give to converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? It would be an inexpressible happiness to converse with (heroes such as these) and to live with them and to examine them.

In this instance we can observe that Socrates posed the concept of death open to be contemplated. One could see death as the end, or the continuation of a journey.

Consider these ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam :

Although I have a handsome face and colour,
Cheek like the tulips, form like the cypress,
It is not clear why the eternal Painter
Thus tricked me out for the dusty show-booth of earth.

When the cloud washes the tulip’s cheek at New Year,
Get up and make firmly for the wine-cup,
Because this green spot that today is your pleasure-ground
Tomorrow will all be growing out of your dust

Oh wise elder, get up earlier in the morning,
Look closely at that boy sifting dust;
Advise him, ‘Gently, gently sift
The brains of Kaikobad and eyes of Parviz.'
(Peter Avery et al, 1979)

From these stanzas we could see that Khayyam metaphorically envisioned that when a person dies, the substance of the person dissolved to become one with nature, or a ‘return’ to its original state (in this case with earth, for Muslims believed man was created from this element) and continues in some form or another.

One underlying structure that we could sense in all of these philosophical descriptions of death is that there is a ‘soul’, and that the physical body is just a vehicle in its journey, from the realm of the non-being to being and back.

What part of all this is crazy logic, u still ask?

to be continued.