Posts Tagged ‘Death’
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind”*…
As Greg Woolf observed, “The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest examples of what is sometimes termed a “Mirror of Princes,” a book that illustrates the conduct of both bad and good rulers, and makes clear the difference between them.”
Nicolas Liney reviews a new verse translation of the 4,000-year-old text by Simon Armitage and considers its remarkable power, its extraordinary history, and its profound relevance to our moment…
There are two stories of Gilgamesh, the ancient Mesopotamian epic written in the second millennium BCE. First, there’s the story of Gilgamesh himself, the semidivine king of Uruk. He is 11 cubits tall and four cubits from nipple to nipple (roughly 16 by six feet). He is hyperactive and priapic. He is not a good ruler. The gods create the wild Enkidu out of clay to keep him in check. The pair clash mightily, and then become inseparable. Restless and hungry for glory, they journey to the Forest of Cedar to defeat the monster Humbaba. Then they slay the Bull of Heaven sent by Ishtar, the god of sex and war whose advances Gilgamesh rejects. The gods deem that Enkidu must die, and so he does, slowly and unheroically. Gilgamesh watches over Enkidu’s body until a maggot falls from his nostril, a fantastically intense image that drives home death’s finality.
At this point, the register of the poem shifts, and Gilgamesh’s triumphs are replaced by sorrow and an overwhelming awareness of his own mortality. Alone and anguished, he journeys to the underworld to visit Uta-napishti, the immortalized survivor of a cataclysmic flood, intent on unlocking the secret to eternal life. Inevitably, he is disappointed and returns to Uruk. Gilgamesh is an epic about power, about self-knowledge, about passionate companionship and the unquenchable pain of its loss. Fundamentally, it is an epic about death. Rilke labeled it “das Epos der Todesfurcht”—the epic of the fear of death—and this is what gave it its vital appeal: “It concerns me,” he confessed. “Thousands of years later death is no less bewildering to humankind,” the poet Simon Armitage says in the introduction to his new translation of the epic; “there is no more relatable subject.”
The second story of Gilgamesh is about the text itself, one of the world’s oldest surviving long-form poems. Like Homeric epic, its roots are most likely oral, and questions of authorship are futile. The earliest version was a Sumerian cycle of five poems from around 2100 BCE, probably part of a larger group of stories about the heroic dynasty of Uruk. Sumerian eventually died out, and the five episodes were replaced by one unified version in Akkadian. This was recorded in cuneiform script, often carved in clay tablets, and spread throughout Mesopotamia and the Levant. Sometime between 1300 and 1000 CE, a man called Sin-leqi-unninni created a heavily revised edition organized into 11 “tablets”—referred to now as the Standard Version—which was copied widely and included in the great library of Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king, built in Nineveh in the seventh century.
And then … silence. By the new millennium, Akkadian was a defunct language, and Uruk and Nineveh were in ruins. As far as we know, Gilgamesh was not translated into other writing systems, so when cuneiform fell out of use, the epic seemed to go with it. For centuries it slept, until the Library of Ashurbanipal was discovered by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam in 1850, and what documents could be recovered were transported to the British Museum. Cuneiform was eventually deciphered, and in 1872, George Smith, an assistant curator working on the archive, came across a fragment of the epic describing a great flood—similar to the one in the Book of Genesis,but in a work significantly older than the Bible. This was too much for Smith, who began stripping his clothes off in excitement: “I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion.”
Critics like to say that Gilgamesh is both incredibly old and refreshingly young. Its sheer age staggers—for comparison, just try to imagine a current novel being rediscovered in the year 5120 CE. As a quasi-historical figure, Gilgamesh was considered by Babylonians to be even older: the Sumerian King List,a chronographic record,hyperbolically places his reign in 7800 BCE. Within the world of the epic itself, time reaches back further still: when Gilgamesh meets Uta-napishti, the Noah-type figure who survived the flood long before Gilgamesh, even he can speak of an “ancient city,” Shuruppak, on the banks of the Euphrates. The epic constantly forces us into these dizzying loops of deep time, forces us both to drastically exceed the limits of our brief lifespan and to be persistently reminded of them.
But Gilgamesh’s comparatively recent reentry into the modern imagination makes it feel fresh, not overburdened by centuries of interpretation and adaptation, like Homer or Virgil, and firmly outside Western literary traditions. There is no first looking into Chapman’s Gilgamesh.This can be dangerous for translators and adapters: there’s an urge to treat the epic like a blank canvas, to make it say something relevant to contemporary concerns, which can strip it of its strangeness and also cut it loose from its Iraqi heritage. But the subject matter of Gilgamesh also seems undeniably contemporary: how could a story about ecological destruction, poor leaders, and misogynist alphas not concern us here and now?…
Eminently worth reading in full. A classic which has survived, against all odds, and what it offers us today: “The Epic of the Fear of Death” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* William Butler Yeats
###
As we reach back, we might recall that it was on this date in 2004 that the discovery of what was (and is) believed to be the world’s oldest seat of learning (dating from 295 BCE), the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years.
See also: “Oldest University Unearthed in Egypt“
“Death is not easily escaped, try it who will; but every living soul among the children of men dwelling upon the earth goeth of necessity unto his destined place, where the body, fast in its narrow bed, sleepeth after feast.”*…
London’s Highgate Cemetery (and here)– the resting place of Karl Marx, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Henry Moore, George Michael and many other notables– shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried. Ralph Jones explains…
“A cemetery’s a really bad idea,” said Ian Dungavell. It’s not a sentence I expected from someone paid to run one. But Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, is just as idiosyncratic as the site he presides over. The pair of us were walking around North London’s Highgate Cemetery in late February, as the snowdrops were beginning to flower and rain threatened overhead. As we walked, visitors approached to ask Dungavell, who knows more about the cemetery than perhaps anyone else alive, about specific graves. One woman wanted to know exactly where 19th-century artist Lizzie Siddal was buried. Dungavell tried to explain the route. “It’s slightly tricky if you turn left too soon,” he said. “Then if you turn left too late, we might not see you till tomorrow.”
Dungavell, who is 58 and speaks with the calm precision of an English head teacher, wasn’t speaking ill of his beloved Highgate when he said that a cemetery is a bad idea. He meant that the business of running one has become almost unsustainable. Highgate is the only cemetery in the United Kingdom to charge the public for entry, yet upkeep remains a struggle, costing at least $1.9 million a year. Highgate Cemetery is particularly fascinating because its fortunes have run the gamut—from high to rock bottom, back to high again. It isn’t as easy as it looks, keeping people in the ground.
I was visiting Highgate at a crucial juncture in its history. More change is afoot for this most famous of cemeteries; this “Disneyland of the dead,” in the words of Kenneth Greenway, the cemetery park manager at nearby Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. To put it bluntly: Highgate, which hosts the bodies and ashes of around 173,000 people, is running out of space. What do you do when you can’t create new graves? You reuse the old ones. In March 2022, the UK Parliament granted the cemetery the right to “disturb human remains”—dig up graves to make space for new bodies—in its mission to combat this problem…
The fascinating (if mildly macabre) details: “Disneyland of the Dead,” from @ohhiralphjones.bsky.social in @longreads.com.
* Beowulf
###
As we ponder posterity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Gram Parsons quit the Byrds, allegedly over concerns about a planned tour of South Africa, citing his opposition to the country’s apartheid policies. Parsons headed to France, became acquainted with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones (during the recording of Exiles On Main Street) and reintroduced Richards to country music. On returning to Los Angeles, Parsons formed The Flying Burrito Brothers.
Germanely to the piece featured above, Parsons died in 1973 of an overdose…
Although Parsons had said he wanted his body cremated at Joshua Tree and his ashes spread over the formation Cap Rock, Parsons’ stepfather organized a private ceremony in New Orleans and left the body in the care of a funeral home. But, to fulfill Parsons’ wishes, [Parson’s friend Phil] Kaufman and a friend stole both a hearse and his body and drove it to Joshua Tree. At Cap Rock Parking Lot, they poured gasoline into the open coffin and lit it, creating an enormous fireball. They were arrested and eventually fined $750.00, for stealing the coffin. What remained of Parsons’ body was buried in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Metairie, Louisiana.
The story brings Parsons fans out to a large rock flake known to rock climbers as ‘The Gram Parsons Memorial Hand Traverse’. At some point, someone added a slab that marked Parsons’ cremation to the memorial rock; that slab was removed by the U.S. National Park Service and is now at the Joshua Tree Inn. Joshua Tree park guides are given the option to tell the story of Parsons’ cremation during tours, but there is no mention of the act in official maps or brochures…
– source
“It’s a rotten job, but somebody’s got to do it”*…
All of us know the pains (and at least occasional pleasures) of work; but as Kayla Zhu and Sabrina Lam explain, some also know its danger…
Some jobs inherently carry significant risks due to factors such as hazardous working conditions, exposure to harmful substances, and the physical demands of the tasks.
Unfortunately, work injuries can sometimes be fatal, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recording 5,486 fatal work injuries in 2022.
2022 saw a 5.7% increase from the 5,190 fatal work injuries in 2021, and meant that a worker died every 96 minutes from a work-related injury that year.
This graphic visualizes the six occupations in the U.S. with the highest rates of fatal work injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, and their number of fatal work injuries in 2022.
The figures come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and are updated as of December 2023…
… While logging workers saw the highest fatal work injury rate, over 1,000 truck drivers died due to work injuries in 2022—the most fatalities out of any occupation…
“Ranked: The Most Dangerous Jobs in the United States,” from @kylzhu in @VisualCap.
* Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery
###
As we take care, we might send carefully-conserved birthday greetings to Gifford Pinchot; he was born on this date in 1865. An American forester, he became the first chief of the Forest Service in 1905. By 1910, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, he built 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres into 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft– no environmentalist– fired Pinchot, who went on to champion environmental causes (in particular, arguing against the wide-scale commercial logging of federal forests that was undertaken after he was ousted) and to serve two terms as Governor of Pennsylvania. In all, Pinchot’s efforts earned him the honorific, “the father of conservation.”
“Analysis of death is not for the sake of becoming fearful but to appreciate this precious lifetime”*…
As Alex Blasdel explains, new research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought…
… For all that science has learned about the workings of life, death remains among the most intractable of mysteries. “At times I have been tempted to believe that the creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure,” the philosopher William James wrote in 1909.
…
In 1976, the New York Times reported on the burgeoning scientific interest in “life after death” and the “emerging field of thanatology”. The following year, Moody and several fellow thanatologists founded an organisation that became the International Association for Near-Death Studies. In 1981, they printed the inaugural issue of Vital Signs, a magazine for the general reader that was largely devoted to stories of near-death experiences. The following year they began producing the field’s first peer-reviewed journal, which became the Journal of Near-Death Studies. The field was growing, and taking on the trappings of scientific respectability. Reviewing its rise in 1988, the British Journal of Psychiatry captured the field’s animating spirit: “A grand hope has been expressed that, through NDE research, new insights can be gained into the ageless mystery of human mortality and its ultimate significance, and that, for the first time, empirical perspectives on the nature of death may be achieved.”
But near-death studies was already splitting into several schools of belief, whose tensions continue to this day. One influential camp was made up of spiritualists, some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine. As researchers, the spiritualists’ aim was to collect as many reports of near-death experience as possible, and to proselytise society about the reality of life after death. Moody was their most important spokesman; he eventually claimed to have had multiple past lives and built a “psychomanteum” in rural Alabama where people could attempt to summon the spirits of the dead by gazing into a dimly lit mirror.
The second, and largest, faction of near-death researchers were the parapsychologists, those interested in phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain. These researchers, who were by and large trained scientists following well established research methods, tended to believe that near-death experiences offered evidence that consciousness could persist after the death of the individual. Many of them were physicians and psychiatrists who had been deeply affected after hearing the near-death stories of patients they had treated in the ICU. Their aim was to find ways to test their theories of consciousness empirically, and to turn near-death studies into a legitimate scientific endeavour.
Finally, there emerged the smallest contingent of near-death researchers, who could be labelled the physicalists. These were scientists, many of whom studied the brain, who were committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences. Like dreams, the physicalists argued, near-death experiences might reveal psychological truths, but they did so through hallucinatory fictions that emerged from the workings of the body and the brain. (Indeed, many of the states reported by near-death experiencers can apparently be achieved by taking a hero’s dose of ketamine.) Their basic premise was: no functioning brain means no consciousness, and certainly no life after death. Their task, which Borjigin took up in 2015, was to discover what was happening during near-death experiences on a fundamentally physical level.
Slowly, the spiritualists left the field of research for the loftier domains of Christian talk radio, and the parapsychologists and physicalists started bringing near-death studies closer to the scientific mainstream. Between 1975, when Moody published Life After Life, and 1984, only 17 articles in the PubMed database of scientific publications mentioned near-death experiences. In the following decade, there were 62. In the most recent 10-year span, there were 221. Those articles have appeared everywhere from the Canadian Urological Association Journal to the esteemed pages of The Lancet.
Today, there is a widespread sense throughout the community of near-death researchers that we are on the verge of great discoveries…
…
… Perhaps the story to be written about near-death experiences is not that they prove consciousness is radically different from what we thought it was…
… there is something that binds many of these people – the physicalists, the parapsychologists, the spiritualists – together. It is the hope that by transcending the current limits of science and of our bodies, we will achieve not a deeper understanding of death, but a longer and more profound experience of life. That, perhaps, is the real attraction of the near-death experience: it shows us what is possible not in the next world, but in this one…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’,” from @unkowthe_again in @guardian.
* Dalai Lama
###
As we ponder passages, we might send innovative (and painless) birthday greetings to Robert Andrew Hingson; he was born on this date in 1913. An anesthesiologist and inventor, he is best known for three major inventions that continue to relieve pain and suffering worldwide today. One is a very portable respirator anesthesia gas machine and resuscitator, called the Western Reserve Midget, used to deliver a short-term, general anesthetic.
The second came from extensive experiments in the use of anesthesia to prevent pain during childbirth, leading to the invention of the continuous caudal epidural anesthesia technique.
The third and best known is his “peace gun,” a pistol-shaped jet injector that enabled efficient, mass, needle-less inoculation worldwide against such diseases as small pox, measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, leprosy, polio, and influenza. It can inoculate 1,000 persons per hour with several simultaneous vaccines.
“The Dunning-Kruger effect is the hemophilia of dynastic capitalism”*…
Anyone too scared to say Thanatos, Elizabeth Schambelan argues, might wind up with Theranos…
… Melinda Cooper thinks family capitalism is a useful term for comprehending our circumstances. The historian Steve Fraser proposes dynastic capitalism, which has a stronger sense of occasion. Either phrase seems like it could appease the nomenclatural martinets among us, the ones who think neo-feudalism is almost as vulgar a term as fascism, and that vulgar rubrics must be avoided as we strive to come to grips with such classy phenomena as private submarines that vaporize on their way to James Cameron’s favorite place, state officials obsessing about high school athletes’ menstrual cycles, children getting chemical burns while working the graveyard shift in slaughterhouses, and Sam Bankman-Fried paying somebody 700 million dollars to introduce him to Orlando Bloom. But I digress. With respect to family or dynastic capitalism, there is an incredible moment in The Inventor, the HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, when one of her investors—the famous venture capitalist, the one in the cowboy hat, if that narrows it down, whose name is escaping me—defends his choice to give her millions of dollars by noting that one of her grandfathers ran a hospital and the other ran a bank (or something to that effect), “so you see, she came by it quite naturally!” Another of the VCs in the documentary is wearing a tie covered in Bitcoin logos, and says he invested in Theranos, Holmes’s company, because Holmes was friends with his daughter, and that if his gut cosigned, he’d be willing to invest in “a guy and a dog, or two girls and a cat,” though presumably only if at least one member of the team could claim friendship with his child or his labradoodle. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the hemophilia of dynastic capitalism. The dynasty is perhaps best understood expansively, as encompassing friends, and relatives’ friends, and loyal retainers with up to four legs, but nevertheless insular and exclusive, rarely open to true upstarts. Entrepreneurship in this system is a euphemism for a set of favors dispensed from above, from a consortium of patrons that might or might not include the innovator’s literal daddy.
Several years ago I read about a scientific study indicating that one out of three people have no internal monologue, no inner homunculus to offer a constant stream of unsolicited opinions and irritating queries. My guess is that a disproportionate number of dynastic scions enjoy this enviable yet hazardous self-congruence. There is no still small voice to muse, “Hmm, does Theranos sound kind of sinister” or “Does OceanGate sound like a Daytona Beach water park that opened in 1995?” Both Holmes and Rush evinced blasé contempt for regulatory agencies and accrediting organizations, because they stifle innovation, are run by bureaucrats, etc. And if a bureaucrat hadn’t shut Holmes down, Theranos would still be operating little slices of purgatory in Walgreens stores across the land. Holmes called them “wellness centers,” which is a weird name for a place where a person with syphilis has a thirty-five percent chance of getting a false negative on their syphilis test. Rush had a similar rhetorical bent. He said there were sensors all over the Titan to provide real-time monitoring of “hull health,” as if the hull were living tissue and the submersible perhaps a gigantic kernel of corn, which for all I know is the vibe his marketing team was going for—organic and plant-based, if a bit high-carb. More to the point, calling the sensors hull-health monitors is like calling a fire alarm a building-health monitor, except in this analogy if the fire alarm goes off, it means the building and everyone in it will cease to exist in two milliseconds.
…
I do think Holmes is a useful comparanda for Rush, but of course, she’s not the only one. Maybe she’s on my mind simply because of that recent profile that offered real-time monitoring of the health of her ability to gull journalists. Or maybe it’s because Theranos, the word, is a kind of twisted emblem for an entire ethos. Even if she never voiced it to herself, Holmes knew what the real namesake of her company was. I’m not the first person to comment on the similarities between the two words. The differences are typical of what is called taboo deformation—little changes to phonemes that permit a dangerous word to be safely said aloud. Persephone’s name was perilous to utter because she was queen of the underworld, so people used variations like Persephassa. Anyone too scared to say Thanatos might wind up with Theranos.
I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead and the recently incarcerated, but I just don’t have the energy for taboo deformations of my sentiments. I’m tired of the sensation of gradually sinking through an abyssopelagic murk where light is a memory kindled by queasy blips of bioluminescence. Lanternfish have bio-lamps attached to their heads by slim appendages; the orbs hang directly in front of their open mouths, attracting prey. But at least lanternfish aren’t pompous megalomaniacs who arrogate the right to steer us all into darkness and then expect to be thanked for letting us exist in the sickening phosphor of their tiny little privatized suns. That’s more than can be said for our era’s plutocratic class, as apotheosized by an unhinged emerald-mine heir who looks like he’s had a marginally successful face transplant—a chilling visage, once mystifying to me in its peculiar lifelessness, finally explicable as the mask of a psychopomp who’s here to usher all of us to the chthonic depths whence came his wealth and ego. On the scale of self-awareness, Stockton Rush was a veritable Socrates compared to the space captain who is currently the world’s richest man. As for the scale of the damage wreaked by each entrepreneur’s risky business—I am not going to engage in that calculus. It is hard to take much satisfaction in the knowledge that chaos agents are vulnerable to the chaos they create. I don’t think I could rejoice in mortal comeuppance even if the most richly deserving person were on the receiving end, and even if the circumstances were less horrific than what befell those aboard the Titan, and even if it really were comeuppance instead of the mere illusion of it. If there is going to be justice it will have to be in life, since death by definition just evens out the scales. Theranos is coming for us all…
Eminently worth reading and pondering in full: “Little Privatized Suns,” from @ESchambelan in @nplusonemag.
Via Ingrid Burrington‘s (@lifewinning) glorious newsletter, Perfect Sentences.
* Elizabeth Schambelan
###
As we reevaluate our esteem of estates, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).
You must be logged in to post a comment.