Musician and artist Marilyn Manson often talks and bases his music and artwork around the way people are fascinated with death, as well as fame (in relation). He comments on how people will use death to gain a certain immortality in the minds of others (fame). His stage name is a reference to Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, one a symbol of fame (and early death) the other of murder. He has further commented that people are willing to die and kill if they know enough people are watching, to gain this immortality or fame. This extends into a social comment on martyrism, television, and the hypocrisy people show between their fascination and thus promotion of death, and their decryment of violence.

More produce that will one day decay or stay fresh forever

I returned a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the expiration date
I came back as a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the date stamped on myself

Did a large procession wave their (Did a)
Torches as my head fell in the basket, (large pro-)
And was everybody dancing on the casket? (cession dance?)

Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want (now it's over)
Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

I will never say the word
"Procrastinate" again; I'll never
See myself in the mirror with my eyes closed
I didn't apologize for
When I was eight and I made my younger brother
Have to be my personal slave

Did a large procession wave their (Did a)
Torches as my head fell in the basket, (large pro-)
And was everybody dancing on the casket? (cession dance?)

Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want (now it's over)
Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

(So) So I won't
(Sit) sit at home
(And) anymore
(And) and you won't
(And) see my head in
(And) the window
(And) and I won't
(And) be around
(And) ever anymore
(And) and I'll be up there on the wall at the store

I returned a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the expiration date
I came back as a bag of groceries
Accidently taken off the shelf
Before the date stamped on myself

Did a large procession wave their (Did a)
Torches as my head fell in the basket, (large pro-)
And was everybody dancing on the casket? (cession dance?)

Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want (now it's over)
Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want (now it's over)
Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

Zodiac Story told by Natsuki Takaya

This is a version of the Chinese zodiac story as told in Fruits Basket. It touches a bit on my fearism, and some death themes. I think its a nice story:

Once upon a time in a particular place there lived a person. The person was alone for a long, long time. After leaving the mountain this person learned that many, many people lived below it. But the person was still alone. Even with a thousand powers and a thousand lives and a thousand memories. The person learned that such things were different from what most other people had. And thus developed a fear of other people. A fear of getting hurt. Despite having many powers, the person was afraid of being different from others.
One day a cat came to visit. The person was bewildered by the sudden visitor. The cat bowed his head reverently. “I have humbly watched you for a long time,” he said. “You are a very mysterious person. I cannot stop being attracted to you. I am merely a stray cat, but please let me be by your side. Please Lord God.”
From that time on, the cat kept his promise, he never left God’s side. Not even for a moment. And that made God very very happy.
Suddenly, God had an idea, “I see, maybe I can get along with others as long as those others aren’t people. If they know the same feelings that I do, maybe I can have a pleasant banquet with them.” God wrote many, many invitations, and sent out many many invitations. As a result, 12 animals came to see God. God was thus surrounded by 13 animals in all. They all held a banquet every night the moon sparkled. They sang and danced and laughed together. And God too laughed out loud for the first time. The moon quietly watched over the inhuman banquet. But one night the cat collapsed. Nothing could be done. His life had run out.
They all cried. It made them realize, that some day everyone would die. The banquets would come to an end. No matter how much they enjoyed them, no matter how dazzling and precious they were. God recited a signal chant, and drew a circle on a sake cup. God made the cat drink, and then spoke to everyone. “Our bond,” God said, “I will now make it eternal. Even if I or all of you die an rot away, we will be tied together by an eternal bond. However many times we die, however many time we are reborn, just as before, we will have our countless banquets. We will all be friends, until the end of time. We will be permanent.”
Everyone nodded empathetically. The rat was the first to drink. Next the ox, next the tiger, next the rabbit. All in order they shared the drink of their vow. When finally the boar drank, the cat started to cry his breath faint.
“My Lord God, my Lord God, why did you make me drink? My Lord, I don’t want eternity. I don’t need permanence.”
Those words were unexpected. To God and the others, they were words of rejection. It devastated them. They scolded and admonished the cat. Even so the cat spoke, “My Lord God, my Lord God, I know its frightening, but let us accept that things end. I know it’s sad, but let us accept that lives depart. My Lord God, I know it was only for a short time, but I was happy to be with you. If one more time we both die and are reborn, and if we meet again. I don’t want to only see you in the moonlight. I want to see you smiling under the light of the sun as well. Next time I don’t want to meet you with only those of us here, I want to meet you while you are smiling within a ring of people. “
The cat twitched his tail one last time and died. But no one cared about the cat anymore. They were filled with the sense that the cat had betrayed them.
Sometime after that, one after the other, the others died. Finally after the dragon died, God was left all alone again. And then another day came, a day when even God died. But God wasn’t afraid, because God was supported by the promise made with the others. “Again. We’ll hold our banquets. Once again, and as many times as we want. For as long as we wish, without changing. I may be sad and alone now, but everyone is waiting on the other side of our promise.”

Strange is the world

Strange is the world 

Why should men 

Receive life in this world?

Men's lives are as meaningless 

As the lives of insects 

The terrible folly 

Of such suffering 

A man lives but 

As briefly as a flower 

Destined all too soon 

To decay into the stink of flesh 

Humanity strives 

All its days 

To sear its own flesh 

In the flames of base desire 

Exposing itself To Fate's Five Calamities 

Heaping karma upon karma 

All that awaits Man 

At the end 

Of his travails 

Is the stench of rotting flesh 

That will yet blossom into flower 

Its foul odor rendered 

Into sweet perfume 

Oh, fascinating 

The life of Man 

Oh, fascinating

-The Spirit's song from Akira Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood," the truest adaptation of "Macbeth" on film.

Asat

Asat (Sanskrit) [from a not + sat being from the verbal root as to be] Not being, non-being; used in the Indian philosophies with two meanings almost diametrically opposed: firstly, as the false, the unreal, or the manifested universe, in contrast with sat, the real; secondly, in a profoundly mystical sense, as all that is beyond or higher than sat. "Sat is born from Asat, and Asat is begotten by Sat: the perpetual motion in a circle, truly; yet a circle that can be squared only at the supreme Initiation, at the threshold of Paranirvana" (SD 2:449-50). In its lower sense, asat signifies the realms of objective nature built out of and from the various prakritis, and therefore regarded as illusory in contrast to the enduring Be-ness or sat. In its higher sense asat is that boundless and eternal metaphysical essence of space out of which, in which, and from which even sat or Be-ness itself is and endures. Asat here is parabrahman-mulaprakriti in its most abstract meaning.

-From the Sanskrit Dictionary. The tree is called: ashvattha.

We Are The Lucky Ones

As a companion piece to my dark and dreary musings on the fear of the unknown, I present to you now an excerpt from Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow." It deals with some of the things we've covered in our fearism posts - pre-birth, birth, death, etc. - and offers a different perspective on the unknown.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.

In spite of these odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive. People whom the spotlight has already passed over, and people whom the spotlight has not reached, are in no position to read a book.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

Excerpt from RichardDawkins.net.
Image by Dani Jones.

By the Void!

I’ve come to think that fear of death is nothing more than a biological mechanism that evolved to keep us alive. None of us has any recollection of the situation before birth. I have yet to meet anybody who feels traumatized by the state of affairs before they came to exist. If existence is far superior to non-existence, we should have negative reactions to non-existence regardless of whether it occurs before or after our lives.

Which brings me to a question: would you prefer to die tomorrow or never have existed?


This is from the blog Philosophy of the Void. I love the word void. This concept interested me when it was brought up in rehearsal. That there is nothing to fear of non-existence, that the time before you are born should be the same as after you are dead. It all seems a little too simple, but still interesting, and not the common way of viewing life.