Ecology of Souls
One therapeutic aim that I have (for myself) is that of breaking down the psychic barrier between life and death. Modern society tends to confine death into pure loss. It is a wholly unfortunate circumstance in which the individual is stripped of their possessions and tossed into oblivion. This sentiment is summed up by the president when he says that people who die are losers. As such there tends to be a kind of blankness or silence around the topic of death, made most acutely evident by the lack of time or attention given to mourning. So it is little wonder that death seems impossible, is never planned for, is met with by shock, is the worst thing that can happen, an event by which life-itself becomes a charade of immortality that must necessarily end (surprise!) in catastrophe.
The first step in my therapeutic aim would be to unlearn everything I have been taught about death. That death is not over there in the cemetery, or waiting on some future horizon, but rather all around us all the time. That life and death are not separate but the same; that there is no life, no beauty and no meaning without death. That if, as the buddhist claims, that the law of death is the impermanence of all things, then the difference between life and death begins to disappear altogether. I don’t mean to diminish grief, but rather to help me prepare for it. I mean to deprive death of its power to shock. Is that even possible?
Death is nothing to us, Lucretius said because he did not believe in an afterlife. But this amounts to something of a contradiction in his materialist argument. For if, as he says, according to the law of conservation, that nothing can be made by the gods from nothing, and that nothing can be reduced to nothing, then it stands to reason (or at least far-out speculation) that psyche likewise does not arise from nothing, and cannot be reduced to nothing. What Lucretius implies, without knowing it, is that even while our material bodies are recycled in the earth to become new life, so too our psyche returns to the mother, flowing into a river of psyche in the very bosom of the material earth. The implication is that ecology, as we understand it today, must also be an ecology of souls, the pure abstraction of movement, in which spirit and matter, life and death, are folded upon one another in world without end.
Fog, Moss, LIchen, 2008, Inke Essenhigh
