The current obsession with keeping everything tidy, not accepting long grass and leaning tombs, and treating a funeral as a refuse disposal problem, reflects a deep malaise in society... Death was never a tidy thing: it is foolish to try and make it so, and to compartment it away from life and the living. -- James Stephen Curl, 1972 (from Death, Dissection and the Destitute by Ruth Richardson, p. 7)
Though I, like approximately 53% of the country, am excited and pleased by the new president-elect, the pleasure of the promising and heartening prospect of change (as shown by these pictures) does not eliminate the unease and "malaise" created by our state of war, economic crisis, and low-grade paranoia about "terror attacks."
We like our lives to be neat, clean, and orderly (at least in the major particulars - socks on the floor don't count). We like to know whom to follow, whom to ignore, and whom to ostracize. We like to know who "We" are, and who is "Other." We like our lines to be clear and drawn in stone, not mutable sand.
This election has shown us how truly messy all of the nice, neat labels we've attempted to place on our lives and the people in them really are. Take Obama. He has been labeled (whether truthfully or erroneously) as "Black," "half-white," "Christian," "Muslim," "Arab," "Terrorist," "Patriot," "Insurrectionist," "evil," and "hope," just to name a few. Half of his labels contradict the other half (though I would like to point out that the duality of being both "Black" and "half-white" reflects the latent racism inherent in our labeling system - after all, a "half-black, half-white" man can still be called just plain "Black," but is qualified as "half-white"). Yet all have been accepted by someone as "true."
Other labels have been flying around: "liberal," "fundamentalist," "feminist," "anti-feminist," "maverick," "VPILF," and so on. Some of them are vague, others specific. But all reflect our desire to compartmentalize, to sterilize, to order the society in which we live.
James Stephen Curl, above, is talking about our tendency to quickly and hastily dispose of our dead. To purify them with chemicals and shut them away in boxes, to burn away their impurities and put them in urns or walls or scatter them over the ground. To sweep the unpleasant reminders of our own chaotic mortality away so that we don't have to confront the fact that we are, like all living things, subject to the messiness of death and decomposition. This fear of our own goopy end, he claims, indicates a "malaise," a discontent with the fulfillment of our lives.
If we accept the messiness of death, we must also accept the messiness of our lives. We must accept the fact that, regardless of our striving against it, chaos will permeate every fabric of our existence, reducing us - eventually - to the fundamental primordial stew from which our ancestral microbes first emerged. And with that knowledge, we accept that our lives are also not under our control.
Certainly, there are elements within our lives over which we do have control - whether to do the dishes, to watch television, how to raise our children, how we interact with one another - but there are even more over which we, as individuals, have little influence. Weather, earthquakes, disease (to a degree). Ultimately, we fear that which we cannot dominate, cannot subjugate to our will.
But to embrace death is to embrace this lack of control; to live with death is to live with the knowledge that there are things beyond us. I do not mean god, or the supernatural, or Fate. I mean the magic of chance, the happenstance that began our existence, the perfect coincidence that causes every interaction - chaos. Life.