At first, when we decided to call the issue ‘Dying Things’, we were immediately inspired by the idea. However, there was a despairing tone that mimicked an already dour media: potential bathos, more dead things, and more bad news. That’s when a friend told me about a story he was writing (he wasn’t aware of the new theme). It’s about an old, forgotten graveyard no longer visited. The burial places are unmarked; one has to ask their great-great aunt (who forgets to feed her nebulous cats) to mark the spot on a map; of the few sunken spots that have a gravestone the words have been weathered illegible. One day, a young man visits the graveyard to lay flowers for his great-great grandfather. The dead burst out in a small celebration, “Oh, look who has a visitor!” “We have a visitor?” “Yes, how wonderful!” “Yes, I’m so happy I have a visitor!” This is as far as my friend got with his story. Instead of a theme of oblivion, my friend turned death inside out. This made me realize that too many people see death as the anti-life. To add a separate, but comparably similar, point of view, I adopt D.C. Lau’s commentary on the Chuang Tzu, “[The Chuang Tzu] follows that life is desirable and death undesirable only from the point of view of the living. How then does one know that the reverse is not the case from the point of view of the dead?” To this we aim our next theme: The Living.
In a time when so many things are dying (e.g., the economy, the environment, social standards, culture, language, intelligent consumers, biodiversities, etc.), we must look into this death and seek out life. If we don't, we are susceptible to morbidity, nihilism, and meaninglessness; prone to the modern day panic for absolute happiness. This is not an easy task. When after the awesome foliage turns brown, how often do we remember that the dead leaves nourish the tree from which they have just fallen? Or when do witnesses of the visceral aurora borealis imagine the magnetosphere electrons crashing into atmospheric atoms? Finding life in death is a common, if not cliché, lesson heard throughout our lives. However, it seems that people are still hypnotized by death or consciously forgetful (out of fear/discomfort?) of it. This paradox (from death comes life) is often neglected as trite; perhaps because the inability to understand it is overbearing and foreboding. What we are left with, in this ignorance, is the pain of dying; we are passive to these emotions and allow ourselves to be swallowed too easily into passivity and frankly, an unhappy life. What the cliché doesn't illuminate is that the stamina of these “unhappy” emotions is false; we just don't know how to handle them, and put them off for later. Thus, our own vitality is diminished and we begin to believe that we are powerless against any of these larger forces (i.e., the government, society, Incomprehension, etc). This has been at the heart of human tragedy since the Greeks.
Part of any writing is an investigation of the human condition. Part of this life is death, and ignoring death shouldn’t be tolerated. Courage dictates that (wo)men amidst fear still take on the task. We therefore must engage death if we are to understand life; we must have courage. The first step is difficult and is more of a leap of faith. But the essential lesson (again cliché) is that life moves on; “All Things Must Pass”; your choice is to suffer (and suffer for suffering) or to engage and at least attempt to deal with these dead and dying things (“Nothing beats a failure like a try”).
We should reevaluate the death of the newspaper or the failing economy. It is not a time for remorse, but an opportunity to engage humanity at its forefront; to recast our hope in the new avenues that have opened. To grovel in our angry, frustrated spires is but the nagging of our own demons: we fight the good fight for meaning, and for the empty spaces in our lives that shape the forms we love; our friends and family, our pets, our plants, our conversational tics, our good deeds, etc. We are not talking about non-attachment or the act of getting over death, but writing as the hope to understand death and his spectral sister, life.
In a time when so many things are dying (e.g., the economy, the environment, social standards, culture, language, intelligent consumers, biodiversities, etc.), we must look into this death and seek out life. If we don't, we are susceptible to morbidity, nihilism, and meaninglessness; prone to the modern day panic for absolute happiness. This is not an easy task. When after the awesome foliage turns brown, how often do we remember that the dead leaves nourish the tree from which they have just fallen? Or when do witnesses of the visceral aurora borealis imagine the magnetosphere electrons crashing into atmospheric atoms? Finding life in death is a common, if not cliché, lesson heard throughout our lives. However, it seems that people are still hypnotized by death or consciously forgetful (out of fear/discomfort?) of it. This paradox (from death comes life) is often neglected as trite; perhaps because the inability to understand it is overbearing and foreboding. What we are left with, in this ignorance, is the pain of dying; we are passive to these emotions and allow ourselves to be swallowed too easily into passivity and frankly, an unhappy life. What the cliché doesn't illuminate is that the stamina of these “unhappy” emotions is false; we just don't know how to handle them, and put them off for later. Thus, our own vitality is diminished and we begin to believe that we are powerless against any of these larger forces (i.e., the government, society, Incomprehension, etc). This has been at the heart of human tragedy since the Greeks.
Part of any writing is an investigation of the human condition. Part of this life is death, and ignoring death shouldn’t be tolerated. Courage dictates that (wo)men amidst fear still take on the task. We therefore must engage death if we are to understand life; we must have courage. The first step is difficult and is more of a leap of faith. But the essential lesson (again cliché) is that life moves on; “All Things Must Pass”; your choice is to suffer (and suffer for suffering) or to engage and at least attempt to deal with these dead and dying things (“Nothing beats a failure like a try”).
We should reevaluate the death of the newspaper or the failing economy. It is not a time for remorse, but an opportunity to engage humanity at its forefront; to recast our hope in the new avenues that have opened. To grovel in our angry, frustrated spires is but the nagging of our own demons: we fight the good fight for meaning, and for the empty spaces in our lives that shape the forms we love; our friends and family, our pets, our plants, our conversational tics, our good deeds, etc. We are not talking about non-attachment or the act of getting over death, but writing as the hope to understand death and his spectral sister, life.
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