Much has happened since the conception of death as an external and transcendent phenomenon by the enlighteners and romantics, even from a pagan perspective, as drawn, for example, from GC Lichtenberg’s aphorism (“when the frost of death comes”). cover my cheeks with frost”), to JW Goethe’s elegies (“sad guest of the dark world: listen to the clatter of the hooves, hear their trot…”).
Death, like all areas of life, has been trivialized (though not formulated any other way, according to Julio Llamazares’ disturbing introduction to Scenes from a Silent Film): “The question is not whether there is life after death, but whether there is life before it.” death”) and as it has been said, “No one wants to be immortal anymore, but we are content with being immortal” is already an inherent, concrete and individual event in a period.
When niches resemble apartment blocks; With crematoriums one of the few smoke-free spaces permitted and old hearses merely delivery trucks, death is already an invitation to collective amnesia. It is also, for this very reason, an excuse for indecision: a double-edged spirit that serves equally as a horizon of mercy in the expectation of a common solution without any quid pro quo, and as a ruse for ultimate impunity: it is the ultimate Corrupt Make no mistake, they know what awaits (their bodies will degenerate later, after all), and – as in the “bandit and his wife” in Dylan Thomas’s poem – he becomes a “ghost” and eventually extinguishes their evil.
As social secularization progresses, a prototypical feature is the individual superiority of the dead when it comes to evoking death already embodied in the afterlife. “We do not give birth to the scope of dying. We joyfully celebrate a new birth rather than accepting it as a new homage to death,” he wrote in his memoir The River. Novels of Chivalry (Fund for Economic Culture), Guatemalan poet Luis Cardoza y Aragón concludes his reflections with a very valuable axiom of the current understanding of death: “At birth one thinks as a species, and at death one thinks as an individual.” Even the most arrogant and insulting lines draw attention to the flesh-and-blood dead rather than death itself: “The dead are fixed in their death / they cannot die by another death,” says Octavio Paz in Piedra de sol. Or “What was it like to die? / Is it as if we were never born? » asks Luis Feria disconsolately in Más que el mar.
This is a death already tailored to the dead person, as in the subtle infusion described by Miguel Ángel Curiel in his overwhelming poem Hospital Room (Water), where the exact moment of the dying person is symbolized by a snowflake. It falls into his eye through a gap in the ceiling. Or, with a completely immanentist approach, death and life play intertwined, inseparable: “Death / attracts us like this. / He doesn’t want me to break / his lifeline.
false truth
What actually happens is that “death no longer exists; “There are only the dead,” emphasizes Francisco Umbral’s narrator in Mortal y rosa, his most profound book, written to mourn the premature death of his son. “I am water in a basket, a sheaf of rain dripping death everywhere,” he adds, explaining that “when the life notes file is closed” the false reality of existence is revealed, finally gaining freedom, someone who has claimed it all along: the “skeleton dandy.”
Even the soul is already a closed adhesion that is released only by death; This is why a French poet wrote, “I am amazed that the dead man I would have been is alive.” Umbral gives an example: “What a great job it is to die in my skeleton,” and concludes: “The scientific thing is to die” and the ethical thing is to have this happen at least once. skeleton that goes out forever and moves your skeleton. Therefore, when someone is no longer there, “every cemetery is a meeting place of masked men,” he warns.
More radically, according to the Austrian writer Jean Améry, not only does death not exist (“it is empty,” and conversely he argues that “dying without empty death seems devoid of content”), but it does not even exist. the deads. For a very short time only the dying person exists, and immediately after that he too ceases to exist. “An abyss separates the liveliness of dying from the desolation of death,” explains the author of Living with Death, a major chapter of his work Rebellion and Submission. On aging (Preliminary Texts). Only the identification plate number of his own design, which he wrote on his tombstone in the Vienna cemetery a few years before he committed suicide, is visible from the year he spent in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Jean Améry, the pseudonym of Hans Mayer, claims without hesitation and without recourse to the shroud that “to die is to explode.”
An unthinkable fact
Thus, death becomes unrecognizable, even unthinkable, in accordance with the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch’s words: “To think about death is to think the unthinkable.” This coincides with the theses of Jean-Paul Sartre, who thinks that death is an absurdity, a negative chance, a “chance” and unthinkable as long as there is a breath of existence.
But far from the absolute power of salvation that this gave him (“Death does not inspire fear in me and comes naturally to me; after being cultural, I finally return to nature,” he said shortly before he died), for Améry, “Dying” is a fraud of the highest order, an act of impunity. It is murder, it is a “scandal.” There is no room even for mourning, for he emphasizes that “There is only my death” as the only certainty of death. Therefore, he regards Epicurus’ general consolation as a “bad joke”: “While I am, there is no death, while death is there, I no longer exist.” Although it applies to the interruption between me and death, this removes the obviousness of my death. This is a contradiction in terms, because “if I remain in myself (in formulating this) – in the not-I of the sentence – I am does not accept no.” According to Améry, all we can say is that “no” does not exist.
It is interesting that his contemporary and Central European thinker, Elias Canetti, arrived at more vitalist approaches based on similar premises while treating death as an insurmountable obstacle. As for the author of Living with Death, according to the author of The Book of the Dead (Galaxia Gutenberg), death is clearly a fraud and therefore has an unexpected existential end. But Canetti also brings morality into the mix, stating with all the optimism of his will that “the serious and concrete goal in my life, the declared and clear purpose, is to achieve immortality for men.”
According to Améry, death is “the negation of all dialectics: the negation of the negation of negation. The deceased is clearly not the deceased, but he is not. Faced with this gap, Canetti is closer to Borges’s skeptical rather than nihilistic logic: “Death is a life lived, life is a death coming.”
Canetti’s clear honesty lies in his unscrupulous removal of the hypocrisy of altruistic condolences, so deeply rooted in the West, by identifying the “time for survival”. [al difunto] This is a moment of power. The horror of death turns into satisfaction because the person is not dead yet. Only in this sense does Améry offer a complementary approach to what we might call a new selfishness, or even the internalization of selfishness, in the face of death: “The fact that I am dying concerns and concerns me more than anyone else, me more than anything else. The death of others is sad, but one’s own death is a scandal, it is impossible.”
The radical difference is that, while for Améry death is an insurmountable obstacle to submission, for Canetti it can even be an incentive or encouragement to rebellion. “For nothing in the world would I want to be deprived of my sensitivity to the horrors of death. “The best humane attitude is to keep alive the hope of overcoming death completely and never give in to it,” he says.
It’s about keeping the torch burning against all odds, in keeping with George Bataille’s dire warning that if death is completely trivialized, eroticism and life will go to hell with it.
Faced with the shocking image of Cesare Pavese (“death will come and take away your eyes”), today a banal and rather internal understanding of death prevails. Even though he retains his secular persona, the Grim Reaper and his scythe are softened and caricatured; They are literally given pumpkins, just like on Halloween. In The Gift of Life (Alfaguara), Fernando Vallejo endows him with friendly and helpful qualities, like someone shaking hands with an old rival. Two old men talk about it, and it turns out that one of them is death itself, coming to take the other. “After all, Death is not so bad, she is a good woman,” says the narrator: “She consoles the sad, justifies the poor, heals the masturbator, puts the sleepless to sleep, gives rest to the weary… As the most distinguished say today, she performs unprecedented merciful deeds. The most Its complete message is that death will be like sleeping, but without the slightest sleeplessness and without having to get up to urinate: “It is a dreamless sleep. In this case, the physiological mechanism continues to work and stops with death.
What is important is that, in contrast to the external and subsequent death of the past, today a rather contingent and, above all, integrated concept of death prevails. “One by one, the terrible reaper bombards your cob, and all that’s left is your cob,” says Vallejo. It is no longer a qualitative interruption, but arises due to the wear and tear of one’s own existence, and it is only the degree of presumption of the event that changes; One can rejoice that the cob is over, as the Colombian narrator concludes: “You will finally leave the planet of the gesticulating monkeys, consider yourself lucky.”
According to the Cuban Abilio Estévez, in the Distant Palaces (Tusquets), man goes through life carrying his “karricoche” everywhere, until suddenly rust, accident, illness or fatigue prompts him to leave it behind forever. More intimately and earthly, without leaving one’s own body, José Emilio Pacheco, in his poetry collection La arena errante, describes the transience of the vital journey as “púmbale!” It’s the story of a boy who, after stumbling repeatedly, finally couldn’t get up.