Immortal longings
[Written on January 17, 2007. Modified eighteen years later!]
From Monday's discussion on Start the Week, Radio 4....
Is old age, one that extends to what just a generation ago was almost an unimaginable very old age, one that some mistakenly think approximates to immortality, now on the cards-not as an immediate reality but as a distinct possibility in the not-so-distant future, something that is now at least coceivable? Some scientists seem to think so. Wouldn't such a change represent a seismic shift in our understanding of what it is to be a human being? H. Juvin, ‘The Coming of the Body,' is superb on the psychological and social implications: if you have just one partner over the course of one's life this may mean you might now be expected to spend 75+ years with them as opposed to 25 years (which, you're guessing, was probably near the average in the 19th century). What are the consequences of a very long life for care, the labour market, education, the health sector and memory? Given most old people are already considered useless or redundant what will our attitudes to the super-old be?
The Dead Christ (Holbein).
From now on, only horizontality. The loss of a sense of religious immortality has come to be replaced with a merely quantitative, worldly notion of endlessness. The modern west was from the beginning haunted by death (Jonas, again: the dance macabre) and perhaps only the state could offer a way out of our existential predicament, as it represents an artificial immortality (the king’s two bodies), the last god in a godless universe.
But what is being offered by science and technology is not just pure extension; instead, to be alluring it has to promote a sort of perpetual youth (who, after all, wants to be wiser and older?). Asked if they would like to live to a very old age-a couple of hundred years-most people seemed to be reluctant; but asked if they would like to be 29, say, for a very long time, well, now you're talking...all the women, too, would also always be 29...er, ahem.
Is this just the dream of the baby-boomers, those who have never had it so good and cannot come to terms with the possibility that it might all go sour and finally collapse? Not only must the whole world be California; in addition we must all be infinitely-lived consumers. So, which is it: a weird desire that's really a reflection of some innate wish for perpetual youth or a historically conditioned and constructed longing, a set of expectations fashioned by late capitalism because even though one can imagine the end of the world, one cannot imagine the end of capitalism (on this reading capitalism and not the state or an automated luxury communism is our best shot at immortality)? After all, capitalism is premised on the abolishing of limits, on radically altering our conception of time- and what greater limits on human aspirations could there be than one's own mortality, the fragile body that hitherto had been destined to fade and eventually disappear? No wonder dead bodies must remain invisible to a society brought up on the utopic picture of smooth, flawless bodies. A kind of theoretic impulse is determined to abolish place and the flow of time, embedded and embodied reality, in favour of virtuality and desperate flights from earth and all that weighs us down.
Would art and love be possible without time? If art is a response to, a consolation for, our finitude then it would hardly seem to serve any purpose in a timeless zone. Art pointing to a north north of the future seems pointless if you're already at north. In short, in the long now would art even be possible without the pull of the transcendent, a realm that knows no brokenness? Contra Scheffler, temporal continuity is not a guarantee for the persistence of meaningful activities. We love dying things... No mistake would be so great that it could not be rectified in time (as in the film, Groundhog Day), and no love lost so tragically final that we couldn't imagine finding it again.
The problem of being oneself for so long. Wouldn't we get bored of ourselves? The insufferable intoxication that is ourselves.
Wittgenstein: Immortality is the solution to which problem?
But would we be just one self if we lived forever? Would our memories be able to sustain us over such a long period or would we only have an experience of unconnected segments of a life, devoid of any common thread, any underlying unity -in effect, a series of fragmented selves? But if as person 'C' we can surely remember 'b' and if b can remember 'A' then C at least has memory of a memory of 'A'.
Why do anything if there's infinite time to do it in? (so speaks the Kashmiri!)
Kashmiri proverb: leave the rifle under the sun and after a while it will go off on its own. What would we do if we had all the time in the world? Is there a knowledge, an understanding , that is deeply tied to our finitude? Mortal thoughts, timely thinking...Would we, in fact, still be recognizably human or would we become like the gods or nature: timeless? Ibn Arabi would say, on the other hand, that it is precisely our finite nature that allows us to experience a whole range of times.
Nussbaum: Calypso.
~~~
Gatherings:
One cannot think oneself out of a hole. The whole point of immortality is not to philosophize over it but to change one's life according to its indisputable reality. What kind of time horizon does one need to be human?
Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms "Pot Noodle love" – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality "girlfriends", anime cartoons. Or else they're opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes.
—Abigail Haworth, The Guardian.
To be modern is to understand that so much of our lives is fleeting, contingent, that we never step in the same water twice. Everything is universal flux (except that statement, of course). And to talk of identity is mistaken, too, since our lives are just time slices loosely held together (by habit, imagination?). The 'I-today' is not the same as 'I-tomorrow'.
And what of the will to permanence? Why this profound desire in men and women, as evidenced throughout human history, for stillness, immortality, timelessness (in architecture, poetry, music, love)? Hans Jonas, writing about the loss of the sense of immortality, is right to say that this is an aspect of a fundamental strain running through modernity. If nothing last should we be concerned about its disappearance? At the extreme: if a person is just a random number, why not stamp that number on her forearm and prove it before consigning her to the flames?
It is said that the world is always a floating world, always full of denials, nullifying our concepts, undermining our structures at their foundations. Ours is an age that is governed by the idea of 'process' (Arendt), of random mutation, mutable forms, chance accumulations of swirling atoms and ceaseless change.
The danger is that such a society, dazzled by the abundance of its own growing fertility and caught in the smooth functioning of a never-ending process, would no longer be able to realise its own futility-the futility of a life which does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject which endures after its labour is past
—Adam Smith, cited by Hannah Arendt
But if modernity is a recognition (or love) of all that is fleeting it is also a search for something that endures.
So let us rush, then, to see the world...It has churches of indescribable beauty raised to gods that have never been seen'; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; and thousands or perhaps even millions of museums where man's drive to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women's breasts...the colors of waters, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses the shape of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe is celebrated...
They serve steak there on jet planes and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to the sound of music and bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer...They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos,..They explore space and the trenches of the sea.
—John Cheever, The Journals.
We are not angels; this is the blessing and the burden of mortality. And perhaps we should note that it is the immortals who are always "falling" in love with the mortals ( which is to say: the desire to fall into time) while it is we who hold back our hand when the golden cup of immortality is offered to us...
Faith in life everlasting has accompanied man in his wanderings through time, and it has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms.'
—Milosz.
What is lost when we lose that 'second space'? What happens to us, collectively, when we fail to imagine a north, north of the future?
Deep in life one is surrounded by life. And still one thinks of 'others'-other lives, the lives of others. Already this breaking away is carried within a life and for some it is accentuated, heavily outlined, a source of reflection. Our lives, a series of broken circles...each ripple moves outwards then in, has the same centre throughout.
There is a nihilistic spirit that would have us accept that we are only mud, only impermanent creatures, a flash event in a universal process of manifestation and disappearance and that would convince us, if we had any sense, that we should associate ourselves with this grander, cosmic scheme that is indifferent to particular individual lives. Sit on top of a mountain and observe the passing show, delight in one's own objective spirit, one's sense of detachment. But how is that possible? Even the mountains are drifting…
We are “chemical slime” on a pale blue dot, full of sound and fury but in truth as insignificant as everything and everyone else. A democratic nothingness prevails and permeates our sensibilities. But if that's the case, what's the point in prolonging such a life?
A lion imagines a heaven full of lions. This is not to be disparaged. How else could it be communicated to them? But there is always a danger of taking elements from the only form of life we know and projecting them onto a future state of being. In some sense this is just a pagan dream of continuity (eternal life without the divine presence is just the afterlife). So, we imagine heaven to be boring or lacking in urgency (why should I be bothered to do anything now when I can do it later? There's always a later!). I will have so much time on my hands that I will be able to learn anything I want (carpentry, languages, sports). I will pass the days in gentle, amiable pursuits (didn't Marx say fishing?). In any case, this better version of me will just be an upgraded me, one that realizes all the potential I had here on earth but that was denied me through the lack of time and money). Or, alternatively, I will do nothing at all: the life of infinite leisure and abundance in the land of Cockaigne becomes one of stupor and satiation. The labourer projects the ideal of the end of labour onto this remote future.