Sometimes I think, What in the Hell is the POINT of this thing called Life? I don’t mean that necessarily in a dreary, morbid way. More like: What are we actually doing here on this planet? If you believe like me that we’re a random collection of atoms stemming from the random collision of a precise recipe of elements which, 13-ish billion years ago formed the Earth and foundations for life after the Big Bang, then we, that is humans, possess no “inherent” meaning. We’re just freaks of nature.
*(Of course there’s always the “causa-sui,” aka First Cause issue: Sure, the Big Bang, but what came before the Big Bang? And what before that? And before that? And before that…ad infinitum. What or who was the Very First Thing? And how did that/they come to be?)
I was thinking about this because I was thinking about death. My dad, specifically, who died now 29 days ago, on June 2nd. A month tomorrow. (Which is in and of itself almost unbelievable.) His death—specifically, seeing his blue, dead, plastic-like corpse for five hours post-death and before they finally swaddled him in the blue bed sheet and took him away—fractured some deeper understanding of myself and life and the world inside of me.
Dad is dead. Mom will die. I, myself, will one day die. Could be tomorrow; could be in 50 years. No one knows when. I try to grasp the notion of no consciousness, of Dad’s cognitive life—ergo, his whole existence—having been snuffed out entirely, like a flame having dirt dumped on it. Permanent non-consciousness. Like pre-birth. Why does this feel scary? It shouldn’t theoretically feel scary, right? Was it scary before your or I were born? Of course not: We weren’t yet alive; we had no consciousness. We didn’t possess the awareness of existence, the knowledge of being alive, dead, formed, unformed. There was simply—or not so simply—nothingness. So, ditto for death, right?
And yet, I suppose because all we’ve ever had, since we can recall our own experience, is cognitive and emotional awareness; aka consciousness. Without it we are somehow less than fully human. What makes us human is our self-consciousness, our self-awareness. Whereas other animals simply live—we think, assume—on instinct and natural drives, humans have “metacognition,” the ability to think about the fact that we’re thinking, to contemplate our own lives, purpose (or lack thereof) and death. This latter ability—the awareness of and ability to contemplate death—is, I think, what essentially makes being human painful, and yet also gorgeous and worthy.
In The Denial of Death Ernest Becker discusses how the denial of death—our innate inability to psychologically face our ultimate and absolute demise—is basically our Achilles Heel. Our acceptance of or denial about death will be the biggest internal driver of who we are and how we act in the world. It can be argued—I think well—that wars, murder, group think, drugs, alcohol, sex, routine, work, relationships, reading, writing, and many other activities, are in some way fundamentally rooted in escapism, in the desire to look away from death, the thing which we are both forced to endure and cannot fully fathom. Becker refers to this as “annihilation anxiety.”
I have always had a healthy (or unhealthy, perhaps) fascination with and fear of death. As a teen, I got into punk rock, alcohol and drugs and did some wild shit. Things like driving me and half a dozen friends in my old Isuzu Rodeo—black sharpie anarchy symbols and “FUCK YOU” and favorite 1980s LA punk band names scrawled all over the smooth brown dash—at 3am, all of us drunk, me, driving, especially, and going along the dangerous, winding Villanova Road, hitting that 100-yard straightaway before the brutal hard, sharp turn where a cross sits from some local girl who died there years before, and, going perhaps 100 MPH, turning the headlights off and seeing “what happened.” We’d make the turn, but barely, often getting two tires off the ground, the punk music—Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Adolescents, Black Flag, playing at full volume during all of this—and then we’d feel “alive.”
We were, as they say, “young, dumb and full of cum.” Stupid. Reckless. Naïve. We were in high school, teens, at that ridiculous anti-death age where it seems only possible that we’ll live forever. Death, at that age, feels like some joke, some distant, glittering, gaudy, silly fantasy. Adults are absurd to us then. They are laughable aliens only intent on breaking our balls and ruining our “fun.” Me and my buddies back then loved testing the limits, chasing death by the shadowy tail, seeing just how far we could take it, just how close to the cliff, to the utter edge we could get and still come back alive. It was fun. We had A Clockwork Orange raging through our bellies, both the novel and the brilliant Kubrick film.
But now, obviously, things are much different. Starkly so. I am 40, for Christ Sakes, an age no one in their right sane mind thought I’d ever make it to. When I was a teen I didn’t think I’d actually make it to 21. Most of my friends agreed. The LA punk band The Circle Jerks had it right: “Live fast, die young.” Ditto G.G. Allen, who had “Live fast, die G.G.” tattooed on his arm. In 2006, at age 23, living in San Diego, I did a prison-style stick-and-poke on my upper left shoulder that says, simply, “G.G” in tribute. (Yes, I’ve been tested for Hep C and HIV. Many times.)
Now, at 40, I am a writer. I live a fairly “calm” existence, minus the past three-ish years taking in the nuttiness and violence of living in East Harlem during Covid-19 (click here to read my memoir about this), my niece’s suicide attempt, and my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis which led to leaving Manhattan and caretaking for 23 months until he died June 2nd, 2023. Then add falling in love and getting engaged with Britney. We’re likely getting married at the Santa Barbara courthouse in October. Then going to Morocco. And having a celebration for everyone in November, hopefully in Big Sur.
So, needless to say: Life has been a little frantic the past few years. Since 2019 I have lived in El Cerrito (Bay Area), four apartments over 2.3 years in NYC, with my folks in Santa Barbara, in my own little studio in S.B., and then now with Britney in her house in Lompoc, 50 minutes north of S.B. That’s eight places in four years. Yikes. And before—well, before El Cerrito—I’d been traveling and moving a lot as well. So life, in some ways, has been a sort of blur.
I don’t know if life has any inherent “meaning.” I’d agree with the existentialists—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre—that there is no meaning but that this is OK and that the way through this conundrum is either to form your own “meaning” (out of nothing) or, as the older 19th century philosophers I mentioned above believe: Arrive at faith. That faith, to them, was Christianity, being the antidote to “annihilation anxiety,” but it doesn’t have to be Christian faith. Or any religious faith, period. It can be faith in a, as we say in AA, “Higher Power,” which could be the Universe as a whole, Nature, Love, the Ocean, The Unknown, Writing, Reading, etc. It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.
Humans are a strange mix of strong and weak, good and bad, loving and horrible, aware and in denial. Most of us live as if we’ll never die. We can’t face the terrible monster that is the snuffing out of consciousness. It’s too heavy and terrifying a burden to psychologically carry. And so we look away. We kick and fight and scream and avoid avoid avoid.
And then some of us—we writers, for example—refuse to look away; we look. And what do we see? “Man looks into the abyss and the abyss looks right back.” We see nothingness, and that has to be enough. Because there isn’t, in my view, anything else to find. Which brings us back to the existentialists. Meaning-creation or Faith.
One or the other will suffice.