minus [+36] A talk on types of death with examples after the singularity or before:
There is one dead body in the room beside the table. Another person who may die at anytime in the living room. They are bleeding and being ignored.
Park: refers to Francoise Dastur who produced a profound mediation on the idea that to practice philosophy is to practice how to die… or something like that.
Sam is sitting on the dining chair looking at the body that is half fallen on its face, head down, eyes wide open and bulging. Traces of foam in the corners of the mouth. Mouth frozen, teeth clenched, lips drawn back into a tight circle. Cherry-red cheeks, the rest of the face bluish pale. Unquestionably dead.
<<Ein Vortrag über die Arten des Todes mit Beispielen>>
Park: I don’t understand it, even if it was imminent, inevitable in one way or another, it will soon be continued. The provisional nature of the start and the definitive nature of their end, like now. Pointing at the discarded weapon and the casings…
Sam said: The provisional nature of postponement and the definitive nature of farewell. He looks under the table and continues: She remained beautiful while she was already biting into the void with her teeth, very white teeth. Her face used to be as if cut in onyx.
Park is looking at the body from the other side: (resting on the pillow of vomit she had spat out. Her blackened body, her blue thighs and legs, bent like those of a locust frozen in mid-leap, could be seen beneath her long linen shirt.)
Park quotes Dastur again: How do we confront death? This question imposes itself at critical moments, such as when our lives are in danger or ike today when we observe dead bodies like this….
Sam quotes Defoe and says: <<The wagon contained sixteen or seventeen corpses. Some were wrapped in sheets, some in coarse woollen blankets, some were almost naked, or so loosely wrapped that their wrappings fell off when they were thrown out of the wagon, and they came to lie quite naked among the rest; But it didn’t matter much, or nobody else cared about the indecency, since it was obvious that they were all dead and were to be thrown into the common human grave in a colourful jumble, for no distinction was made here, but rich and poor went together; there was no other type of burial, and it was not possible that there would be any other, for coffins were not available for the enormous number of victims. >>
Park: The unbearable nature of this ((the idea of)) A memory of sensory perception that is lost and can never be repeated (the blind person who remembers what can never be seen again; the deaf person who remembers what can never be heard again; the person who buries the dead).
Jess, leaning against the doorframe: It is the idea of not finding one’s way in the limited practice. The unimaginability of the cessation of memory and projection. Never again: tomorrow. Where does that leave: me? As soon as the hereafter is understood as an illusion, there is no consolation. To the….
Park says: For us, jess, this is a/the trolley problem, we had to choose between these people and those they will kill in the future, initially we had to let them kill so we could be sure they were what we thought. Mostly we cannot choose because we lack certainty but in this particular micropolitical event we can and so we must.
In the next room a man is lying on his side, his head on his arm, his back against the wall, the small hole in his abdomen bleeding, shaken, suddenly, by the coma. With a last effort, he pushed himself into a sitting position. He could see the strip of moonlight. For the first time in his life he was afraid. He realised that he would die as he had lived: unwanted and alone. He was still breathing. Sweat poured down his face.
Jess asks: Still do we have the right to be who finally decides everything? To always be aware of this definitive end, as early as possible, to live in and in the awareness of what is always already and always coming to an end.
Sam says: Yes. Perhaps consciousness has not been afraid for this or that, nor for this or that moment, but for its whole being; for it has felt the fear of death, the absolute master. It was inwardly dissolved, trembled within itself, and everything fixed trembled within it.
Park smiles: The goal of all life is death, and they looking back: the lifeless were there because of (earlier) the living. I wish our employer would speak more clearly.
Jess says: Did Laurence Sterne write about death in Tristum Shandy?
<<Rondeel mit Klingelzeilen aufs Klingelzeichen gehört nun wandre Maria>>
Sam said: Orientation in the world is based on the ability to find rules. Rules presuppose that whatever happens can be seen in such a way that it has a view that is not definitively unique, but comparable, repeatable and categorisable. But this is a fiction. Whatever happens is definitive and incomparable. Cognition was previously only possible under this fiction. We are only ready to use the fiction as a fiction (not as an axiom or premise). The definition of living, temporal existence is the definitive of every moment. This definitive is hidden under the preconception that we have erected over it in order to be able to bear it. The image of the definitive is death. Image means: seeing the definitive from the outside. The inner experience of the definitive is unique and definitive. It is also the cessation of experience.
Jess sighed: The horror of images does not diminish. You can only manage not to remember it at times. I used to think I’d get used to these things.
Park is putting her gun away: Death, if we want to call that unreality that, is the most terrible thing, and holding on to what is dead is what requires the greatest strength. Powerless beauty hates the mind because it expects of it what it cannot do.
Sam: The provisional nature of postponement, delaying death and the definitive nature of farewell.
The technician says from the office: I’ve copied the data, just cleaning up.
Jess shrugs: I’ll call this in…Hello Murphy, sorry to call so late, tell Frank and send a team here, we have some bodies. We’ll urgently need an ambulance or two as the murderer is still alive. And some escorts to guard him. After despatch open a casefile…
Park: The goal of all life is death, and looking back: the lifeless was there earlier than the living.
The technician says from behind Jess: Machines and atoms decay and die. Everything is stardust.
Sam quotes: Francoise Dastur produced a profound mediation on the idea that to practice philosophy is to practice how to die… .
Jess closes her phone: Faulkner said the only immortality consists in the certainty that everything ends with death, or something like that.
Park says: Who wants to be surprised by what finally decides everything? To always be aware of this definitive end, as early as possible, to live in and in the awareness of what is always already coming to an end.
The technician says: Humans never stop thinking that only they think about death, it’s why Levinas is wrong about the death of the other… We know our cats think of death. Steve asked after a slight pause: who were these people?
Park: Bad ones, they inflicted slow torture, or what amounts to cancer death or its equivalent as an appropriate way to die, they like consciously and physically torturing . Reducing the other(s) to bodies without organs, one is ready to stop.
<<Zweites Quergespräch über Todesarten mit Beispielen>>
Sam is pulling back the rug in the sitting room. Revealing the nearly invisible hatch to the basement.
The man with small holes in his abdomen groans. It was an even, terrible sound, a moaning of a regularity that didn’t seem human; more like animal cries or the grinding noise of a machine.
Sam says: if you live, you will never leave the insane asylum or prison cell again. Solitary confinement, nothing can save you.
Park: The unbearable is the idea of memory of sensory perception that is lost and never to be repeated (the blind person who remembers what can never be seen again; the deaf person who remembers what can never be heard again; the sociopathic murderer who is never to see daylight again). It is the imagining of it, not the realisation of the limited practice. The inconceivability of the cessation of memory and projection. Never again: tomorrow. Where does that leave: me? As soon as the hereafter is understood as an illusion, there is no consolation.
Sam says as he opens the hatch allowing daylight into the cellar: “Consciousness has not been afraid for this or that, nor for this or that moment, but for its whole being; for it has felt the fear of death…” Time to rescue the victims.
He cried out loudly that he didn’t want to die. When he saw his hands gradually turning blue, he stopped screaming. His face became rigid. He said nothing more. Park kicked his ankle
Park smiles: The goal of all life is death, and looking back: the lifeless was there earlier than the living.
The sound of sirens approaching.
