July 15, 2013
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Sometimes I get Philosophical – tl;dr
Today – Monday, July 15, 2013 – I finished reading “Looking for Alaska” by John Green. I don’t want to ruin the plot for anyone who has yet to read the book, but I’m going to mention some of the major plot points so you may not want to continue if you don’t like spoilers. Anyway, continuing on. Today I finished reading “Looking for Alaska.” It has been about 36 hours since Cory Monteith was found dead in a hotel room. It has been just over a week since I finished reading “Forbidden” by Tabitha Suzuma (there are spoilers for that, too). It has been nearly 4 months since my 19 year old neighbor committed suicide. It has been 5 months since I nearly killed myself the second time. It has been 7 months since my suicidal tendencies have resurfaced full force with only minor, sporadic breaks from such thoughts. It has been 7 years since I nearly killed myself the first time. It has been 8 years since I had my first real encounter with suicide when my band mate died. It has been 10 years since I was first introduced to the idea of self harm.
This morning while high out of my mind and about ¾ of the way done “Looking for Alaska,” I had an epiphany. Well, I don’t know if you can call it that. I’ve had this thought before, but usually it was too big for me to wrap my head around so I’d shake myself and let it go. But today – I don’t know if it was the book or the weed or my sometimes crippling mental illness or a combination of all of the above – I stopped and thought. Today when I came to the conclusion, again, that life exists only to perpetuate itself and for no other real discernible reason, I mulled that over. There are two domains of life – the prokaryotes and the eukaryotes. Within those two domains are six kingdoms of life – the eubacteria, the archaebacteria, the protozoa, the fungi, the plants, and the animals. Each of those kingdoms contains multitudes of phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species. And then you can even argue, in this instance, that viruses also count as life, for they also reproduce and exist to reproduce. That’s right. From the tiniest virus – which sometimes isn’t even considered life – to the most complex mammal, everything lives to ensure its genetic material gets passed on. The only function and purpose of life is to perpetuate itself – to live and to pass on life to another generation, who will also just live to live and to pass on life.
Life is, then, inherently selfish. The very nature of life is selfish. Even among higher order thinking, life is selfish. If your life is in danger, no one questions your right to take another’s life. Your life exists to perpetuate itself; this concept is so engrained into our core make up that we never even question it. The only time people are expected to put another’s life before their own is when they are defending their family, the propagation of their own genetic material and their own life (or the one who carries the potential to create more future life, i.e. women and children first). But otherwise, we expect everything that lives to do everything it can to continue to live, including killing other living things. We do it every day; every time you eat a hamburger or even a piece of corn, you have killed something alive to allow yourself the sustenance you need to live. And that is not only okay but expected so innately that, again, no one even thinks twice about it. No one questions it.
But what happens when life has reached self-awareness? What happens when the intelligence of life has surpassed the most basic purpose of life itself and begins to think about whether or not living and propagating is the most important thing? Well, for the latter part of that question, the simple answer is that people just don’t have kids. Except that if you are a woman and you don’t wish to have children but then you are raped and you are unfortunate enough to live in an area of the world that views abortion as wrong, you don’t have a choice in the matter, but I digress and that is a particularly disgusting (but unfortunately too common) exception to the rule. And, generally speaking, the choice to not have children is judged but not too harshly. But what about when someone decides to not value their own life? What happens when someone decides enough is enough?
People are always trying to escape life. I haven’t looked into it yet, but I’d be interested to see if dolphins or elephants ever turn to drug-like substances under stress or after a loss or if any have been known to commit suicide (since elephants and dolphins have been known to grieve similarly to humans). I know already that some species of monkey/ape purposefully ferment fruit and then eat it. But is it for entertainment or is it for an escape? Cory Monteith suffered from addiction starting at age 13. Palindromically, he died at age 31 with the most likely cause being an overdose. I do not think that there is a single addict who does not know, somewhere, that what they are doing could kill them. Whether or not that fact is openly admitted or acknowledged is a different question, but somewhere inside everyone knows. Often, the risk is worth the escape. Often, the risk is part of the reason for the action in the first place. Sometimes an addict just wants a break; other times the addict wants to succumb to the worst consequence of their addiction and holds that in mind. “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”
So what happens, then, when people choose intelligence over instinct? What happens when our brains and our thoughts and our consciousness overrides the inherent nature of life itself? What happens when we become so involved in the escape of it, so caught up in getting out of the labyrinth of suffering, that we break every law of nature? I’ll tell you what happens. Alaska drives into a cop car and crushes her chest. Lochan makes a noose and hangs himself. I don’t know what my neighbor did. My high school freshman band mate walked in front of a moving train. People cut themselves until there is no blood left. People take palmfulls of pills that are only meant to be taken one or two at a time. They drive their cars off cliffs or into trees or into lakes. One woman in my town drove into a quarry. They jump off buildings and bridges. They get out of the labyrinth.
And then everyone else always says the same things. They say they were too young. They say they had so much to live for. But do they who say such things understand the heaviness of being suicidal? Do they know how it is to feel the weight of every single atom of air that is pushing down on you from above? Can they grasp the overwhelming blankness that stares back at you when you can’t find any purpose in your own life beyond reproduction and living for the sake of being life? Because we are humans. We think too much to accept that the only purpose of life is to perpetuate life. We create our own purpose for our own life. We find meaning in relationships and activities and existence. We use those meanings to justify our lives – not just life in the scientific sense but how we as intelligent beings live that life. But sometimes those meanings don’t seem to justify staying in the labyrinth. Sometimes, our own consciousness of the world around us and the vastness of it leads to the conclusion that life is no longer worth living. Sometimes we are reminded that we have evolved beyond the purpose of life itself to such an extent that some human beings go directly against the singular purpose of life, which is to keep existing.
Everyone and everything that can be called life also needs to die. That fact alone is what makes perpetuating life so important. Without death, there is no need for reproduction, for fighting to live. There is no need to compete with other life or to take other lives to preserve your own. Everything would just be, and life would be as meaningless as the existence of a rock (although, one could argue that even a rock could have a meaningful existence, not that the rock would ever know it). Everything must die. It absolutely must.
I don’t know how to conclude this essay/rant/philosophical pouring of shit onto electronic pages. I don’t know if life has meaning beyond living and perpetuating life. I don’t know if there is a Great Perhaps in this life or in another life or in an afterlife or ever. I don’t know if everyone gets caught in the labyrinth, but I do know that I am. And I don’t know if I should go fast and straight and get out or if I should live – not for the purpose of life, but because I may be meaningfully connected to other lives. Or maybe just for the purpose of life itself. But then I think of Lochan from “Forbidden” and how there was more meaning in his death than if he had continued to live. And I think about how life needs death. And I just don’t know.
