A Sideways Look at Time

Watch your husband. If you are lucky—should he die in your presence—scoop him up and shovel him into the cellar; give him the kiss of half-life to keep his circulation going; stick a needle full of blood anti-coagulant into him; then cool his body with ice packs which you should have prepared earlier. Wrap him in blankets and freeze him with dry ice to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Now move him into a capsule of liquid nitrogen which will freeze him to minus 320 degrees but—and this is the hard part—don’t drop him, for should he accidentally slip to the floor (cold cellar tiles, frozen spouse), he will shatter like a ton of glass—a million icy shards of husband everywhere—terrible mess.

Then, rest in hope that cryonics, or “cryopreservation”—using extreme cold to preserve “living” tissue—will keep him intact, until future medical skills can de-ice him and reverse the cause of his death, whether the dicky ticker, the organ moribund, the circling C of cancer cells, curling like a finger, beckoning. (You say he died of old age? Nonsense. It is not legal to die of old age, no death certificate can say that; you must die in a clinical category.)

Of course, people have always wanted life after death, in heaven or in books, through fame or through their children. Of course, the insignia of dying, from death masks to funeral inscriptions, all say Hic Eram (I was here). Of course, individuals have often wanted self-expression after death. One London art critic wants his remains mixed with bread crumbs and scattered outside the National Gallery where pigeons may eat and excrete them in an action painting which would be his final pooh-poohing of such art. A pub landlord wants his ashes put into an egg-timer so that silently and evermore he can be seen to call closing-time: “Time at the bar, now, please.” There is, nonetheless, something about the new death industries—an almost cartoonish quality. Cryonics is also called “suspended animation,” and, rest assured, Walt Disney, king of cartoon, is frozen in California, awaiting his full feature reanimation.

Trans Time is an organization dedicated to seeking ways of extending the natural lifespan. Based in San Leandro near San Francisco, they charge a variable insurance policy, a fee of, say, $300 a year for a healthy forty-year-old man, and, for this, these undertakers of ice undertake to freeze you in perpetuity. Art Quaise, their president, says he believes that “medical advances in future will be able to cure all diseases, and be able to halt and reverse age.” For, as he says, “Isn’t it better to be young and virile than decrepit and aging?” Not for him the ineluctable democracy—even humility—of death. Cryonics is “about realizing that you are the most important person on earth. Nothing else counts unless I’m around to have it count,” he says.

Marina Benjamin, in Living at the End of the World, writes of visiting the Alcor Life Extension Foundation (in Scottsdale, Arizona), the largest cryonics organization in the world, and talking to Steve Bridge, President of Alcor in 1996. He worries his eventual defrosting may leave him with a body but without a personality. He has taken precautions. “I’ve asked all my friends to save my letters and I’ve stored a huge amount of stuff on computer disks over the years. I have access to a lot of who I am, so if I come back minus my memory I can regain part of it by reading about who I was.” Benjamin wryly remarks of this and other conversations with cryonauts: “It may well be that tomorrow’s immortals will be as disappointing as Swift’s everlasting Struldbruggs, who Gulliver expected to be rich, wise, virtuous and just, only to find that ‘they were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of all natural friendship and dead to all natural affection.’ ”

Cryonics is only one option for those who would live forever. David Pizer, a real estate investor in Phoenix, Arizona, had invested large sums in cryonics, so that he could be frozen and reheated later, pizza-like. Now, though, following Dolly the sheep, he wants to be cloned. Like Quaise, he stresses above all the survival of the self: “I want to be able to live forever, in some form, some place. I want either myself or an exact duplicate copy—and I mean exact duplicate—of myself to exist.” (Richard Dawkins, appropriately author of the “selfish” gene theory, has also—though not very seriously—expressed a wish to be cloned.) In Seattle, a company called Immortal Genes offers eternity in a paperweight. For $50, it will preserve your DNA in a little box for the next ten thousand years from which you can be cloned at some later date. If things go wrong there is also a ten-thousand-year money-back guarantee.

All these phenomena might appeal only to a tiny minority, but they are telling features of modernity’s way of death, not typical, exactly, but symptomatic. They reveal, by exaggerating, these current themes: a steep concern with the individual life, a hatred of aging and a reliance on professional expertise and medicalization. Moreover, they illustrate a refusal to join the cyclical aspect of death, so instead of being buried in earth, the body reabsorbed into a larger natural system, flesh to clay, they opt for an off-ground—and linear—event, the individual freezing herself or himself out of society, on a solo mission to escape the compost-heap communality of death by means of a fragmented individual “immortality.” (This is symptomatic of the way modernity treats time, too; denying both its cyclic character and its earthy relationship to nature.)

The Dogon, of Mali in West Africa, have magnificent communal rituals to celebrate death, massive masked dances with wild impersonations of animals, trees and spirits. Neighboring tribes are satirized, as are white people. Here is someone in a “white-man’s-mask” who does not dance but walks stiffly, an “administrator,” carrying paper and pencil and writing demands for money. There is an “anthropologist” who sits on a chair waving a notebook and asking the daftest questions the Dogon can possibly think of. Here the “tourist” with a camera, pushing everyone out of the way. These dances are pure vitality, in praise of the entire human comedy; a lifeful mask over the face of death.

The Mexican Day of the Dead, with its feasts for the spirits, skeleton puppets, plasticene trees of life, skulls made of sugar and skeletons playing dominoes, is equally an uproarious celebration of life. You mustn’t cry, they say, on the Day of the Dead because it makes the road slippery and treacherous for the returning soul. Italians have their Day of the Dead. The dead are remembered in November, the cemeteries and tombs cleaned and food offered to the ancestors.

The Achuar, headhunters of Ecuador, by contrast, hate and fear their dead. They call death “a spear of twilight” and the dead are given no tombstone, honored with no memory. They are ostracized and expelled from the mind as quickly as possible; the living, they believe, cannot be fully alive unless the dead are truly dead. “Dwelling In Tombs Is Strictly Prohibited,” says a sign on caves, in Golconda, Hyderabad, in India. It is a literal injunction many societies across the world, such as the Achuar, also understand for its metaphoric message.

The Pirá-paraná of northwestern Amazonia also sharply divide death and life; the dead are wrapped in a hammock and placed in a canoe. A woman is buried with her basket containing paint, a mirror and other personal things; a man with his ritual dance ornaments, feather headdresses and monkey-fur tassels; any other property of the dead is burned. The shaman demarcates a line between the living and the dead, by performing rituals with smoke and burning beeswax and snuff. Death over, life begins again.

Aldo Massola, in The Aborigines of South Eastern Australia As They Were, describes how, after death, the spirit went to the Land Beyond the Sky, reached by being blown on the wind, by jumping from a high rock, climbing a tall tree or a wallaby-sinew rope or by clambering up the rays of the setting sun. After a time there, the spirit returned to its totemic center on earth and, entering the body of a woman, would be reborn as a child. Believing in the indestructibility of the spirit, “alternate life and death was like day and night. Aborigines were not afraid to die.” In Australia, just as the Dreamtime Ancestors did not die but returned into the land, so “each Aboriginal person intends . . . to sing himself back into the land,” writes David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous. A traditional Pintupi man will return to the place where he was conceived, his Songline, to die, so that his vital spirit will rejoin the Dreaming there.

These snapshots of death are distinctive, but they have common themes; the acceptance of death as part of nature’s cycles; a sense of a community of the living which is stronger than the individual death, and a love of life which is expressed at once in a hatred of death and in its lively celebration. Against such a backdrop, contemporary Western dying is unusual. The subject is blanked out, a forbidden, freakishly unfamiliar topic. When British TV recently decided to show someone dying on screen, it was described as the “last taboo.” Everyday life is wiped clean of death. It is displaced from the ordinary: fifty-four percent of deaths in Britain take place in hospitals and most people die alone, without family or friends, without any sense of the community of the living (a shift which came about between 1930 and 1950).

Anthropologist Nigel Barley, in an often hilarious book on death, Dancing on the Grave, describes a “post-mortem video,” designed to be watched by the relatives after such a death: a frail old woman, on the point of dying, sitting for the camera in a pink bedjacket, “mouthed the usual orthodoxies celebrating the togetherness of family life and the values of contemporary America while alone in a solitary room in a hospital.” At the end of it, she looks up at the camera muttering, “Is that enough? Is that what they want? Ah, what the hell. You’re all full of crap.”

The displacement of death is not only a social removal from the family into the isolation of professional care, but also a displacement from the earth, the raw intimacy that exists between the dead human body and the natural world. The earth is seen as “mother” to so many cultures and, in widespread traditions, a newborn baby was put on the soil of its mother earth. Similarly, there are many traditions of laying the dead on the earth, completing a circle. The Chinese traditional funeral said: “Let the flesh and the bones return once more to the Earth.” The Romans expressed the all-but-universal desire of the dying to return to their native soil—“native,” of course, comes from natus—born. In dying, you return to the very earth from which you were born, which gives such depth to the inscriptions on Roman tombs: hic natus hic situs est. (Here he was born, here he is laid.) This instinct, like that which drives salmon to return where they were born, so often guides the old back to die at their birthplace—even Christianity’s influence cannot altogether silence its earthbound, and therefore quintessentially pagan, resonance.

“Earth to earth, dust to dust”: the words of Christian burial pay funereal lip-service to the profound—organic—link between the dead body and the soil, but that’s about it. Christianity, removed from pagan mud, has an afterlife which is clean of composty soil, heaven is an “unearthly” abstraction in a vinyl everafter. In a creepy advertisement on Christian television, a camera shot of a young—and exceptionally clean—man in a dinner-jacket was captioned “All dressed up for the most important day of your life.” His wedding? The birth of his child? you wonder. The camera pans back and you see he is in his coffin. This seems all too characteristic of Christianity, which considers death more important than birth and thinks the afterlife is more precious than this muddy earthly life. (Cleanliness being next to godliness only because muddiness is next to paganism.) This attitude was epitomized by Teresa of Avila who openly desired death because she longed for eternal life: “Oh death, oh death, I do not know why you are so feared, since it is you who contain life!” After her death, her devotees declared that her body did not decay and was “incorruptible.” For a linear religion which has long hated nature’s fluxy ways, especially women’s fluxes, Teresa was an icon of perfected flesh. Her very body was thought to have shunned nature’s cyclicity below for the incorruptible heavens above. She would be marble not mold. The same ideas prevail today: “Above-Ground. The Clean Burial. Not Underground with Earth’s Disturbing Elements” runs a full-page newspaper advertisement for a mausoleum director in contemporary America.

Hegel suggested that death rites were constituted of two opposing tendencies: the “fusion” and the “recoil” with respect to the earth, the embrace and the rejection of it. The instinct of recoil can be seen in the frequency of deaths in hospital, in the whole cryonics movement and in society’s general denial of death. Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass expressed the instinct towards fusion:

This instinct for fusion is both place-related—the bootsoles, cabbage-patch and compost-heap—and time-related—to fuse with the seasonal time of the earth. Native American Daniel Zapata says: “We accept death as a part of life. Our lives, our seasons, they rise, they fall, they rise, they fall. We are like the seasons. We come and go.” The Arakmbut of Peru remember their dead in one month, the month of the rivers’ rising, so human death is tied to nature. The ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh describes the quest for human immortality: in one fabulous, filmic image, Gilgamesh dives to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the “watercress of immortality” but what he actually discovers is the story of nature’s time and seasons.

British undertakers have found that the pictures on their walls most popular with mourners are those of the turning seasons, particularly autumn, the paintings of Constable and his trusty, rusty oaks, which acknowledge a dying while placing it within the cycle of nature. (This ties in with the Celtic belief that certain times of the year—particularly the late autumn which we know as Halloween—were “thin” times when humans were closer to the spirit world.) For the easiest way to accept death’s human finality is to contextualize it in nature’s time. When my last grandparent died, one November, that month of dying, I was frantic to find autumn flowers, of rust and leaf-fall colors for her coffin, and thus to bring her death symbolically into the living pattern of nature, its rise and fall, rather than being a death in exile, a plastic moment in a hospital time.

Cryonics represents a spectacular rejection of any such earthy recycling: those frozen bodies (sometimes referred to as “suspendees”) are shot high-tech on a linear trajectory into the future, outside time and alone. An ice-arrow isolation, compared to the warmer composty commons, the companionship of a death in earth. Cryonics is heir to Christianity’s linear-time, both opposed to any circularity, whether the gardener’s pragmatic compost-recycling, or a spiritual reincarnation. Satish Kumar remarks how this “contrasts with the traditional wisdom of India where the life force is seen as moving in circles, where human beings after death can be reborn as animals, birds or trees. Life does not end in death.” (Besides, he adds, wryly, if you’re coming back to this world, you’re a little more careful how you leave it.) Sure-yani Poroso, of the Leco, says: “We have no word for death in our language. Time is not inert. Life returns, after death. The person returns, it is all fertilizing. My grandfather lives in different plants and fruits and from this thought comes a profound respect.”

Western society ignores and hates death, treating the old nudging near to it with dislike and scorn; in contrast to the ancestor worship of many cultures. In Korea, the gatherings for ancestor worship at fixed times of the year were by tradition an important part of the cultural calendar. Genealogies circulated in Korea from 1600 or so, and were, in the 1930s, still the most frequently printed publications. In the West, the miserable moribund are “the elderly,” not, for instance, “the elders.” Snake-oil salesmen touting eternal youth become superstars: people not only buy Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body,Timeless Mind, they even read it. Amongst the Beaver people of the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the phrase “Old-timer” is used to suggest that the elders are sources of wisdom. Cezar, an Arakmbut man in Peru, comments: “Our old people are like a library, or like the roots for us.” In the West, with its cultural obsession with technology and the new, the elders are often considered less wise than a twenty-year-old. It seems slightly perverse that we are devaluing old age at the point when people, in the West at any rate, are living longer and longer. State-of-the-art death-technologists offer an exaggerated register of these wider social attitudes. Art Quaise speaks with contempt of becoming “decrepit and aging,” and the frozen David Pizers, all of cloned him, look forward to a future which can (micro)wave a wand to turn age to youth. They, like society, are blind to the benefits of age, its wisdom, long perspectives and its capacity for exuberant, naughty, life-enhancing shamelessness—the very old can be far better than rebellious teenagers at breaking social rules. Other cultures are kinder. Some have gerontocracies—the rule of elders. In India, bura means “old” and also “wise” and “powerful.”

Modern death is not for amateurs; it is a business, a matter for paid professionals, for the experts. (Cryonics et al exaggerates those characteristics, being both highly technical and very expensive.) There are bereavement counselors and professional undertakers with a selection of priced goods. Grief management is on sale. Death, from coffins to hearses, is packaged. This, be it said, has something of a history. In the sixteenth century, the parish clergy in Madrid took on many more masses than they could hope to actually say. The situation was worsened by economic inflation. As the cost of living increased, so, in effect, did the cost of dying. The masses paid for at lower prices could not support the clergy some years later. Masses went unsaid, and the rich grew concerned to buy their way out of purgatory. Consequently, by 1596, those who could do so began paying a price for masses higher than that required: “creating, as it were, a black market in masses,” as Carlos Eire writes in From Madrid to Purgatory. A generation ago, in Mexico, says Ivan Illich in Tools for Conviviality, the only professionals involved in death were the gravedigger and the priest. “At first, undertakers had difficulty finding clients because even in large cities people still knew how to bury their dead.” Now, “legislation is being passed to make the mortician’s ministrations compulsory.” Today, the technologization of death has meant that in the U.S., the bereaved can go to the funeral in cyberspace, can see the coffin, send flowers and talk about the dead on the Internet.

In terms of medicalization, the omega of death is only matched by the alpha of birth. And there is protest. Like the Natural Birth Movement there is in Europe and the U.S. now a Natural Death Movement. The U.K. has a Natural Death Center with a “Manifesto for the dying,” which instead of letting death be “packaged” in standard supermarket models, aims to let the dying choose their fall, to find the death which is theirs. If modernity’s way of death denies nature, the Natural Death Movement re-emphasizes nature: trees to mark a grave instead of a tombstone and symbolic rituals which tie the dying into seasonal cycles. They also campaign to de-medicalize the process and to promote “midwives for the dying”—skilled companions to those tiptoeing out.

An English Day of the Dead has been suggested, to relocate death within the public and cultural calendar. Bereavement can be shockingly lonely, because modern society denies death so fiercely, seeing it as a personal matter, private to the point of isolation; grievers must grieve alone, the dying must die alone and in a hospital death you may not stay with the body no matter what instincts are keening for you to do so. (When my grandmother died, we were not allowed to stay with her. I felt I could, somehow, warm her with my body, with the warm community of the living at the instant of her death. Usher away such communitas.) It was not ever thus. Death was communal once; until the seventeenth century, the rooms of the dying and the dead were often crowded with people, including children. But the seeds of today’s isolate customs of dying were sown early. From the eleventh century, according to historian Philippe Ariès in Western Attitudes Toward Death, “a formerly unknown relationship developed between the death of each individual and his awareness of being an individual.” From the thirteenth century, tombs were increasingly individualized, with inscriptions and effigies and, from the fourteenth century, the death mask.

Other societies go collective. Maori writer Witi Ihimaera describes the Maori way of death in Tangi. The Maori family, he explains, means “not only family living but family dead,” and the past ancestors are “ahead” of you. People stay with the dead body for several days; a death is an event for the whole community. The whole ritual leads to a stronger sense of the continuation of time—the community’s time—not the end of time in the individual’s death.

In Madagascar, the Merina have a death ritual which involves the grinding up and mixing of dead bodies; so that, in effect, the individual defeats death’s finality by being reformed collectively. In Cameroon, in Dowayo ritual, skulls are jumbled up in jars; the individual has died, but becomes part of the collective ancestor-hood. (That point, says Nigel Barley, when the dead individual is dead as an individual, is when survivors can champion their own individuality. Widows, for instance, sing: “Hitherto we have all lived together. Now I shall fart in my hut and you shall fart in yours.”)

The West attempts, almost operatically, to prolong the specifically individual life. It is the individual—the self—which Art Quaise and David Pizer are so zealous to preserve. (And, you have to ask, how many living bodies in wider society could be cared for by all the money being spent on preserving a few over-iced, over-priced dead bodies?) There is a hysterical opposition to euthanasia and to its practitioners; Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan doctor specializing in euthanasia, has been hounded through the American legal system and subjected to endless hate-mail. Such hostility leads some to promote an alternative to medical euthanasia; a voluntary fasting-to-death as by Native American tradition.

The violent opposition to euthanasia and the fantasmagoric cryonics-cum-cloning ideas show an incredible wish to prolong individual life; it is as if the individual’s desire to live forever has become overwhelming at precisely the moment when it looks possible that we as a whole human community, as a collective species, may not. (Not just for fun did Levi-Strauss define the study of mankind as Entropologie.)

Death has an inexorable generosity: each generation takes the stage but eventually must bow out to give room to the next, rotting and recyling. But, as a result of the Western way of death—combining Christianity’s hatred of recycling life and the impossible demands of individuals to live forever, or at least to be represented in mausoleums forever—something rather anally retentive happens with death. In the overcrowded churchyards of Britain, there is little space left for those dying today, because the dead of generations ago still monopolize the burial sites, straddling beyond their time with all the buildings of death, whether marble or stone, mausoleum or crypt or headstone. There is too much Edifice in this death; the stone orchards, with their marble branches. Planting a tree for the dead seems kinder; for all trees are trees of life.

Yet another way modernity is unusual regarding death is that in its full process there is something akin to the erotic—the seeding recreation and conception. One beautiful rendition of this subtle sexuality is in Bill Viola’s installation Heaven and Earth (1992). One screen shows the face of a dying woman, the other a newborn child; they occur simultaneously, they seem to immerse themselves in each other, as the two screens literally and conceptually reflect each other, life in death and death in life. The work is dedicated to his mother who died in 1991 and—death conceiving life—to his second son born nine months later. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth century came the beginnings of the eroticization of death; Thanatos and Eros, Death and Sex. The climax of Romeo and Juliet’s great love is set in a tomb, Bernini’s Teresa of Avila is pure sex and pure death, her orgasmic gasp that of the death agony. (An orgasm was once widely known as the little death.)

English sociologist Geoffrey Gorer, in an article titled The Pornography of Death (1955), describes how this sexual element shadows us this century; that mourning, because it must be private, solitary and somehow shameful, is like a morbid sort of masturbation. As death today is the principal forbidden and rejected subject, so, inevitably, hard on the heels of the forbidding comes the sin itself; Thanatos and Eros in the gruesome coupling of TV sex’n’violence, and in what is probably still the most horrific example, in the pornographic film O a woman was killed on camera for viewers to masturbate over her murder.

When death is used for pornographic violence, the deepest sense of its sexuality is traduced—the regenerative potency of time which needs a death to reseed itself. Time is charged with rebirth only by death. There are notorious stories of copulation at funerals, ancient and modern (more affairs start at funerals than you might like to think), and prostitutes in northwest Europe used to solicit in graveyards, because there is a resurgence of sexual energy even or especially at the point of death.

Time does not die, time is regenerated at and because of death; spring wouldn’t spring if autumn didn’t fall. Days of the dead by common consensus fall at the end of October and November’s beginning—Halloween and the Mexican and Italian Days of the Dead—the year’s polar opposite to May and May Day. If there were no November, there could be no May; no month of sex and couplings without one of partings and deaths. That is the wisdom of death, so bleak, so sadly fair, so ruthlessly generous, with its sincere severity and its sad, sad austere beauty.