Flight from Death

This is the time of year when I tend to go to the library and get a lot of DVDs and audio books to accompany my constant, manic knitting in an effort to get stuff made for Christmas. One of the DVDs I watched this weekend was a documentary I had been hearing about titled Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality. It is a beautifully filmed piece created by two young filmmakers who have been rewarded for their efforts with numerous awards. It is also narrated by the soft, elegant, Irish-inlected voice of Gabriel Byrne who could make anything sound significant and inspiring.

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book Denial of Death by Dr. Ernest Becker. This book has been called one of the few truly significant books of the Twentieth Century. It is in the pile of books by my bed that I am saving for when I have "time". I am embarrassed to say I haven't read more than a few selected chapters --- enough to know it is a book to be given full attention. The documentary has now whetted my appetite and I'm moving it farther up on the pile. Honest I am.

There is so much to say about the ideas presented in the film. Though most of us would say, if asked, that we don't spend much time thinking about death, what Becker says is that the awareness of our own mortality underscores everything we do and reminders of its immanence affects our behavior throughout our lives. It is our desire to live beyond our death that drives us to have children, build buildings, create art, write books, plant gardens, etc. etc. etc. That much most of us know. But it is also an awareness of our own impermanence that causes us to behave as we do, both on a personal level and on societal, cultural and political levels. It is inherent in our humanness that we want to endure and survive in ways that have nothing to do with the existence (or non-existence) of an afterlife. We want to live on here, on this earth, in this world regardless of what may happen in the next life.

There is an interview with philosopher Sam Keen who has long been one of my favorite inspirations. I read his books Fire in the Belly and The Passionate Life years ago and sort of fell in love with him. He talks brilliantly, beautifully about intensity about living with passion and fierce attention to the things we love. In many ways he gave me permission to do a lot of the things I do know. Like write this blog. Keen, who is a fine looking man in my opinion, is now over 70 and has taken up the trapeze at this time in his life. He says, with his characteristic self-effacing chuckle that despite having written 14 books, Princeton and Harvard, both of which he has advanced degrees from, never paid attention to him until he became a septuagenarian trapeze artist. But, in the interview, he says that death seems like an outrage at this time in his life, a thing he did not sign on for, and the trapeze, silly though it may seem, is his defense against going "gently into that good night". He also quotes Jean-Paul Sartre that, "All the questions have been answered, except how to live."

In the film there is a good deal of attention spent on some behavioral experiments that I found particularly interesting. Through various experiments, behaviorists found that, when people are put in the position of unconscious awareness of their own mortality they become more violent and punitive toward those the define as being unlike themselves and more accepting and attached to those they define as being like themselves. One example shown was an experiment done with judges who set bail for women arrested for prostitution. On average they set bail at $50 but, when they were influenced by the death reminders, the increased the bails on average to $450.

One of the original videographers on the documentary was from Newburyport, just up the road apiece here. He died on Flight 11 on September 11, 2001 while the film was being made. His death, and the other deaths of that day, have served as a brutal cultural shift in this country and is the basis for some of the most interesting theories proposed in the film. We, as a society, are much more aware of death these days than we were on September 10, 2001 and it is effecting all of us and our nation as a whole. Violence is on the rise, partisan politics has become ridiculously extreme, and the demonization of all that is "other" has led to a kind of vicious, attack-dog mentality to those who don't live lives we consider acceptable. This is something I have been aware of for several years now and, after seeing this film, have a better understanding of.

So, as the film and Becker's book pointed out, our only defenses against all this is awareness and a personal commitment to live passionately and well. A noble goal, in my opinion.

Thanks for reading.