Ivor Cutler
May 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie
I have just been told that Ivor Cutler is dead. Not only that, but that he died nearly 2 months ago. I don’t know how I missed that. R.I.P. Ivor.
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May 4th, 2006 Fred McVittie
I have just been told that Ivor Cutler is dead. Not only that, but that he died nearly 2 months ago. I don’t know how I missed that. R.I.P. Ivor.
Posted in Cutler, Ivor, Death, Story | No Comments »
May 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Stanislaw Lem died of heart failure on 27 March, 2006, in Kraków.
In the spirit of Lem’s work, particularly A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitudes, this blog contains abstracts for papers which have not been written, for a conference which does not exist.
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October 15th, 2006 Fred McVittie
It will not make you a better person.
It will not allow you to walk through walls.
It will not cure you of diseases.
It will not make you immortal.
It will not give you access to other worlds where the sky is bluer and everyone is happy all the time.
It will not make you more attractive to other humans.
It will not change anything at all.
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December 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Enlightenment is not a ticket to a better world. We might imagine that knowing enlightenment, or ‘becoming enlightened’, is a little like a good kind of dying. That when we see the light we are somehow magically transported from this fallen, dangerous world to a better place; a place without war, or fear, or hatred. A place where everyone thinks pretty much the same as we do, and where the grass is greener, the sky is bluer etc etc.
This can’t be right.
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October 31st, 2007 Fred McVittie
The dead things of the world, the inert and inanimate things that lie all around us, are our sisters and brothers. We are part of an extended family of corpses, all engaged in the processes of the dead which are also the processes of matter. Here is grass and a rock, here is water and the wind through the trees. These are the dead things that are so far from where we appear to ourselves to be. But we also are the dead, and the living of our bodies does not exclude its simultaneous death. Death is not held at bay by life but lies alongside it, like a lover, or the shale under the snow. We are in its midst and it is in ours, and when life has gone we will still have that death. Hello darkness my old friend. Here is grass, the wind through the trees.
Posted in Darkness, Death, Matter | No Comments »
November 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Looking out of my eyes I know I am alive right now, and sometimes I am very aware of how alive I am, but a lot of the time I’m barely conscious, sometimes I’m not conscious at all, and even when I am conscious I’m not thinking about anything special, just kind of looking at things, touching things etc. So apart from a few moments of strange self-consciousness (when coincidentally I feel the least connected to the world around me) most of my ‘being’ is pretty much indistinguishable from the being of the inanimate stuff around me. In that sense I am already ‘dead’, at least to the extent that all the other ‘being’ stuff is dead. Of course I know that this feeling of personal consciousness, even to the fairly limited extent that I experience it, is temporary. I understand that one day I will go to sleep and not wake up, and from that moment on this ongoing state of inanimate being will be permanent and unrelieved by the occasional flare of ‘me-ness’. In this sense, the transformation that will take place in my being at this ‘point of death’ does not seem to be terribly dramatic. The lifting of the needle from the record.
I also understand that at some point in the future, either through accident or natural process, the biological systems that hold my body in homeostasis will cease operating, causing my body to begin to break down into smaller and simpler components. Presumably some of those components will ultimately find their way into all kinds of other bodies, objects, plants etc. but most will probably lie around in the ground somewhere, percolating into the ground water and passing through the colons of insects (do insects have colons?). Again no abrupt change in the fundamentals of my being will have taken place through this event; all the component parts of my body are in constant exchanges with the environment anyway, and apparently I am entirely composed of the food I have been eating for the last seven years, food which originated in other bodies, other ground. After my death this process will continue unabated.
At funerals they often say ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, and that rings true for me. Death, in my opinion, isn’t some place you go to, (and potentially return from), it is a perfectly normal state of inanimate being, the normal accompaniment to life and wonderful in its own way.
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November 22nd, 2007 Fred McVittie
When I relax and look at the world I have the strange feeling that it is not inert, passively accepting my gaze and allowing itself to be simply captured by my eyes, but rather that it is alive and active. Between typing these sentences I am looking around a kitchen and the whole room, including the appliances, the furniture, the windows, the cups on the draining board, even the space itself, seems vibrant and strangely alert. I have no sense that the room has ‘consciousness’ or ‘agency’ and there is none of the feeling of a predictive psychology that accompanies the presence of another human being (or animal), I do not feel that the room is ‘thinking’. The feeling is more like the experience one has in the presence of a corpse, or a dead animal, but without the morbidity of that encounter. Here is the palpable presence of undirected, sourceless, intentionality. I feel it all around me right up to the surface of my skin and touching my eyes, balancing and continuing the personal sense of the presence of my own mind at this side of those eyes.
Posted in Death, Light, Liveness, Sense, Space | No Comments »
November 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie
In order to really be (enlightened) one must enter into one’s own death.
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December 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Development in human medicine may one day delay the onset of senile dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and the routine deterioration of memory and reasoning that accompanies old age. (Recent studies have linked these effects with loss of integrity in the white matter of the brain (1).) We may eventually see a time in which aging of the brain is halted and as one gets older there is no loss of mental function, one stays as sharp and alert as a 20 year old, right up to the point when one dies from some somatic breakdown or other. Is this really a good thing? I am not at all sure I want to go out like that, at the absolute height of my cognitive powers, fully wide-awake and fully aware that, if only my body would keep going, then my brain would continue to carry me forward. I suspect that such ‘improvement’ would only add to the fear of death and the impossibility of imagining it. There would be no gradual decline, no fading away, no seeping of consciousness into the fabric of the world, no emptying of the self until the body is a hollow shell. Instead the ghost would be perfectly trapped within the machine, watching the decay of its vessel with increasing frustration and anxiety. There would be no ‘dying of the light’ to rage against, only the solid black wall of terminal embodiment to which we would hurtle, wide-eyed and with our path toward it brightly lit with anachronistic mind.
Let me dissolve into the gathering dusk piece by piece. Take this part of mind, then this, then this. Let me gently forget my friends and family, my home, the books I’ve read and the television I’ve watched, my wife, my past, my name. Return these things from wherever they came, out there beyond the extent of skin and bone. Take my freedom, my independence, my dignity, my continence, my responsiveness, my mobility, my rights as a human being, my sense of self, and stick them where the light of my sun no longer shines. Here is the dark, and here is the whisperer in darkness.
Andrews-Hanna J.R., Snyder A.Z, Vincent J.L., Lustig C, Head D, Fox M.D., Raichle M.E., and R.L. Buckner. “Evidence for large-scale network disruption in advanced aging.” In Preparation. Reported in Scientific American, December 5th, 2007.
Posted in Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Darkness, Death, Embodiment, Life, Light | No Comments »
December 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Two images dominate our understanding of the death experience. In the first of these we imagine death as an embrace of the darkness. We find this in poetic metaphors of ‘the dying of the light’ against which we should rage, in visual representations of death as associated with blackness, impenetrability, and night, and in images of ‘fading’ consciousness, squeezing out of sparks, and the dimming of brilliance in senility. Conversely, there is the apparently paradoxical metaphor which associates death with entering illumination, a moving toward the light and a merging with the glory of that light.
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