Death and Life Unmask Their Binary
If death and life are part of each other, what are they?
In conversation, a friend teaches me about the body of a tree. The outer bark, the phloem, the cambium, the xylem, the heartwood: the circular layers of a being. What strikes us is how both the ‘outer bark’ and the ‘heartwood’ are often considered ‘dead’, or composed of ‘dead elements’. The deepest core and the visible shell of trees are something that ‘isn’t alive.’
I ask the online dictionaries and forestry guides to speak of heartwood: they name it the ‘dead, central wood of trees’. Also known as the duramen, it is ‘the central, supporting pillar of the tree ....[a]lthough dead, it will not decay or lose strength while the outer layers are intact.’ ‘[N]onliving’, it is ‘usually darker, denser, less permeable, and more durable than the surrounding sapwood.’
Death, a supporting pillar, a source of core aliveness. Other stories tell us more: in some trees, the heartwood is a continent of cells that provides space for entire ecosystems, from heartwood fungi to birds. Some trees have no heartwood at all.
Days later, in a somatics workshop, a facilitator orchestrates a collective cycle, the birth of new breath, the release of air. She sighs into a microphone: ‘Every day sees multiple births and deaths’.
Could thought be that, a cycle of endings and resurrections?
The Lycaones project remembers: in Nahuatl, you don’t say ‘born’ or ‘to be born’, you say ‘to become human’ or ‘returning to human’. There are appropriate questions: ¿Canin otitlacat?, where did you become human?
As an outsider to the language, distanced from its wonders and the cosmogony that nourished them, I humbly approach a book of grammar. The grammar hints at webs of meanings: tlakatl (person), tlaki (that which gives fruit), atlak (doubt), teotlak (sunset), teotl (G-d), tlali (earth), tlaoli (maize), tlahtoa (speak), tlahtolli (language).
The language speaks of constant cycles and returns. The náhuatl verb ‘tlalnamiqui’, to think, means to remember something (tla-ilnamiqui). Ilnamiqui (remembering), refers to ‘finding their liver’ or their chest. Remembering, finding the liver of things.
Within Nahua grammar, life and death seem to lose their oppositional definition of each other, to become compositional definitions. In Nahua oral storytelling, as historian Patrick Johannson Keraudren notes, ‘[e]xistence, nemiliztli, is only the walk (nehnemi) of the human being from birth to death, the diurnal part of his cycle; the other, his death, that is, the journey that the deceased makes in the underworld from his death to his awakening in another existence. To express it metaphorically, we could say that existence (nemiliztli) and death (miquiztli) are respectively the systole and diastole of the heartbeat of life (yoliztli).’
Death is seen as an ingredient, a formation, a definer of life. Existence becomes the day of life, and death the night of life. The human being follows the sun, being born in the east, peaking in the south, dying in the west, to take the journey through another realm towards the north and the east, to be born again. In Nahua culture, to borrow Johannson’s words, ‘dying is a vital defeat’, death is a triumph of life.
In Sufi tradition, it is the ‘wedding day of the soul. In Udmurt tradition, death appears as one of three weddings: birth as wedding of life, marriage as wedding of partners, death as wedding with eternity. A wedding with all, a wedding of two, a wedding as one.
The wonderful writer Jericho Z Vincent, spoke recently about the question that forms their ‘drumbeat of their life’: ‘Is G-d dead or is G-d alive?’ As Jericho says, ‘If G-d is dead, and G-d died 2,000 years ago or whenever the last canonical sacred text was written well then the best we can be today is…paleontologists, looking to [the] sacred past, looking for whatever fossils and remnants we can find and cling to. We would have to revere our ancestors as a connection to a living G-d that we’ll never get to experience ourselves.
But if G-d is alive then every minute is an accumulation of more G-d. Every generation has the benefit of that accumulation of G-d-encounters, and hopefully an evolved ethics and evolved morality that reveals that accumulation of G-d-encounters. A lot is lost in time. We need our ancestors’ wisdom. They have G-d-encounters that are so powerful they are still reverberating today.’
Ancestral reverence and reverence for the present, the tightrope of living and remembering.
At some level, we all understand that the world operates in cycles: the exchanges of life and death, the rhythms of transformation. To know we are mortal, to acknowledge other beings are too, to know that all matter transforms over time, is to even reluctantly, acknowledge a cosmology of complex cyclicity.
Yet the metabolisms of global capitalism - the cycles ‘we’ have structured - are deeply out of touch with a cosmology of cycles. The polyfacetic crisis we face today emerges in part, from a brutal of collision of cycles. For centuries, some of the most powerful groups have aimed to upend the ecological hierarchy of cycles: rather than human beings adjusting their cycles to what surrounds them, they sought to subject ‘Nature’ to one particular human cycle. These groups have sought to impose cycles of exhaustion on regeneration, rhythms of exploitation on the rhythms of dignity. Entire deposits of fossil fuels which take tens of millions of years to form are burned in years. Soils that have taken millenia to nourish are depleted in decades. Bodies that require rest and sacred solace are regimented into accelerated work.
In a sense recycling, for all its banalisation by uncritical environmentalism, is the most complete solution to the ecological crisis. Re-cycling as the multi-directional work of repairing and rerouting cycles.
The way we understand life and the death that forms it shapes how we understand time which shapes how we understand truth which shapes how we understand justice which shapes how we understand life and so the web of links is threaded.
How we understand justice for the past links to how we understand death. How we understand repair is linked to how we understand time. What can we break in circles, in cycles?
In ‘Trauma and Recovery’, the trauma specialist Judith Herman writes, 'The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
What lives could be what refuses to be buried, what shrouds itself in death.
Untitle: To see death and life as irresolutions.