Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Twenty-Six For a Year, Immortal Forever
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| Youth and Time |
All my life, I’ve been getting into some variation of the following conversation:
Generally Well-Meaning Host or Recruit: “How old were you when you were sired?”
Me: “Oh, I was twenty-six.”
Generally Well-Meaning Host or Recruit: “And you’ve been twenty-six ever since.”
Me: “No. I was twenty-six for one year. And then I turned twenty-seven! Next month, I turn 143.
That’s what I’ve said to everyone who asked me that question this month. Yeah, it comes up a lot.
I was born on September 22, 1870. I’m not the same person I was in 1896.
This shows up all the time in immortal fiction. Nothing wrong with asking an immortal when it happened – the only thing I take issue with is the assumption that ‘twenty-six’ is was pretty much when my life and my personal development ended.
Some immortal fiction has that same conversation almost word for word. Tuck Everlasting, Let the Right One In, and Twilight all come to mind. Except the immortals almost always respond differently than I did.
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Jessie Tuck says he’ll be seventeen until the end of the world. Eli says xe’s been twelve for a long time. Edward Cullen says he’s been seventeen for a while.
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| Seventeen for a while? Whose fault is that? |
Guys – you’ve gotten older since this conversation started. You can’t stop chronological aging, and it will never be the same thing as physical aging.
My people don’t turn into vampires overnight. In most Vampire fiction, it happens in a few minutes, or at least a few nights. For us, it takes one and a half to three years between the infection and your full transition. Hell, it took me a full three years.
We’re not entirely sure when the aging process stops during the transition, so really: my age at my ‘time of siring’ was twenty-six to twenty-nine. God knows: you age so fucking much between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-nine.
And it doesn’t matter, because I’m still 142. But the idea is that I can somehow be over a hundred years old and only twenty-six at the same time.
Ah, but did I officially stop ‘aging’ when I was twenty-seven? Twenty-eight and three point five months? Really – what is my number?
I still remember what happened with my initiate Adam. He was getting nervous about his impending thirtieth birthday and tried getting me to sire him a few months early so he’d be sired at twenty-nine. I’d already spent the requisite five years evaluating him, so I did it – a few months weren’t going to make any difference to me. They apparently meant a world of difference to him, though.
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| Logan's Run came out the year the youngest Baby Boomers turned thirty. Clever. |
Yeah, the Baby Boomer youth obsession hit him pretty hard. Trusting people over thirty was one thing, but being over thirty? I was quite a bit over thirty myself at the time, so you can imagine the depth of my sympathy for his plight.
To this day, he still insists he was just kidding. And to this day, after a round of chuckles, I still insist that I believe him. Yeah, we’re both liars.
Sigh. You know, as a sire, I was supposed to teach him to be a good liar, too. I failed.
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| Dorian Gray: the Poor Man's Immortality |
I’ve said this to every one of my initiates before and after: “Babe – I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will turn thirty. Vampirism only cures physical aging. We already have a cure for chronological aging – it’s death! The only alternative to getting old is dying young. And our business is saving lives, not validating absurd societal prejudices.”
People who actually care about things like chronological age don’t care how young you look or how healthy you are, not usually. If they did, they wouldn’t go by chronological age at all – they’d go by your appearance, health, and abilities. They sure as hell wouldn’t care about the difference between twenty-nine and thirty.
I know these people. I know that back when I was in my eighties, a lot of them would start getting real uncomfortable around me. I mean – I was older than their grandmother. Who cares if I look like I’m still a twenty-something?
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| Jeanne Calment, 20 |
Yep. The Immortal Ageism Paradox. When I was eighty, I was a granny in disguise. Now that I’m sixty-two years older, I’m young again!
Other thresholders go through the same thing. 123: yeah, that’s pretty much a twenty-something, right?
It's actually considered a major threshold when you hit 123 in vampire culture (at least today). Jeanne Calment (RIP) was deceased at 122 and holds the record for the oldest verified human lifespan. If you're a 'thresholder,' you're older than the oldest human who ever lived. Naturally, that threshold is subject to change, with improved medical advances. I look forward to the day when the threshold is two hundred or more.
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| Jeanne Calment, 121 |
At 142, I’m not treated like a forty-something. But in my privileged position, I get to see how the ageists of the world treat them.
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| Jeanne Calment, 40 |
Aging and gaining life experience aren’t the same thing – you can stop your aging process in your twenties and it wouldn’t change your ability to accumulate life experience. Aging is the accumulation of damage, not wisdom. And maturation is kids turning into adults physically and psychologically – you can be mature and inexperienced.
Life experience happens just over the course of your being alive – twenty-somethings aren’t ‘twenty-something-shaped’ because their bodies are too healthy; they’re ‘twenty-somethings’ because they haven’t had enough years to be anything else (literally and metaphorically). Except for all those twenty-somethings who are wise beyond their years, of course.
People need to recognize aging and maturation for what they are. And they need to recognize chronological aging for what it is – the earth has made this many revolutions around the sun since you were born. Congratulations!
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This crap goes away in an immortal society. I figure it’s a relief for a lot of human members of the vampire nation. I mean, they turn forty, their American friends give them cards that say crap like: ‘you’re over the hill and its so fucking funny that we’ll laugh at you at make jokes about failing memory, weight gain (because that’s also so fucking funny), and other stereotypes that we’ve decided you’d love to hear about!’
Come to us and you can celebrate your birthday in a place where the forty-somethings are impossibly young, the people under three hundred are hip, and the people over three hundred are revered and respected.
There’s no double standard here – ask most vampires, and they’ll tell you that humans never get old. They all die far too young.
But obviously this stuff can’t go completely mainstream until we discover the cure for aging in humans. In the meantime, all we can do is try to fight this nonsense through education, cultural change, and as much mockery as possible.
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| I am not Peter Pan. |
Images Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Deathism and Music: If I Die Young Lyrics Fisking
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Artist:
The Band Perry
Lyrics:
If I die young bury me in satin
lay me down on a bed of roses
sink me in the river at dawn
send me away with the words of a love song
ooh ooh ooh ooh
If I die
young/put me into cryo/
Lay me
down/so I can be frozen…um?
Damn, I wish
we had more poetic imagery for cryonics. Since I’m more of a ‘rhymes are funny’
rather than a ‘rhymes are pretty’ person, I’m clearly not up to the task.
So anyway,
‘Bury me in satin, bed of roses…’ yeah. That’s nice – it’s detailed, it creates
a nice mental image. Good description.
I just can’t
personally relate to it.
If I die
young, throw my corpse in a wood chipper for all I care. I’m dead – I lost. Anything
short of cryonics isn’t going to give me one sliver of hope, and I’m actually
not legally allowed to sign up for it. One of the few genuine risks to the
Masquerade in modern times is anything involving the medical profession.
Especially if it’s as headline-worthy as ‘vampire cryo patient.’
Yeah, we’re
really cryo-friendly to human members, but if you’re a vampire, our main advice
is ‘don’t die.’
So yeah –
imagining my elaborately decorated deathbed isn’t all that comforting.
And besides,
just to be as overly literal and specific as possible, sending me away at dawn
would be bitterly symbolic in my case: ‘You live by the night, you die by the
day, bloodsucka!’
For another thing, it would
mean none of my vampire buddies could attend my funeral. God knows; that’s
always been a problem for me. I'm always having to disappoint human friends with my constant excuses for missing all of their daytime functions (these are people outside the community). I'm sure my fellow vampires would love some more of that.
Also I’m
allergic to roses. All of my people are. Yeah, that's one of those folkloric tropes that never really seeped into the mainstream. I mean, not a lot of human members even need a reminder about the garlic, but every now and then someone forgets about the roses, and it's one awkward birthday.
Roses aren’t as bad as something
like garlic, but we do get the sniffles and the sneezes something awful.
Romantic. Now there’s the reason I want my half my guests’ eyes watering up.
Lord make me a rainbow I'll shine down on my mother
She knows I'm safe with you as she stands under my colours
oh and life ain't always what you think it ought to be
no it ain't even grey but she buries her baby
the sharp knife of a short life
well I've had just enough time
Lord make me a rainbow I'll shine down on my mother
She knows I'm safe with you as she stands under my colours
oh and life ain't always what you think it ought to be
no it ain't even grey but she buries her baby
the sharp knife of a short life
well I've had just enough time
Atheists get asked all the
time what would happen if we meet God post-dying. Lots of people have all these
really impressive answers. Me, I’d just start the groveling. I’m talking hands
and knees, tearful, humiliated groveling. Dignity is for the lucky.
I figure that’s win-win. If
God’s actually a nice
superintelligence, my groveling will be unnecessary, harmless, and over before
I know it. If God’s an unfriendly superintelligence, well, I’ll need all the
help I can get. At least I was sent to Hell giving it my best shot.
Yeah, watching over my loved
ones, as a rainbow or otherwise, probably wouldn’t be first on my agenda. If I
was in any position to ask, I think I’d rather God did something more
substantial for them. Like, say, not letting them die horribly like I did.
I really like ‘the sharp knife
of a short life’ line, though. That’s a great one-liner. Good imagery, too.
And then you had to follow it
up with ‘well I’ve had just enough time.’
I’m 142. I could still die
young (in my culture, you’re not old until you’re 300, and maybe not even then). I
haven’t had anywhere near ‘enough time,’ as if anyone was allotted a set amount
at birth. You know, it’d be nice if we could see what it was. How overdue was I
fifty years ago? Or a hundred twenty years ago, when I decided there was no
such thing as ‘enough time?’
That line also completely
undercuts the rest of the verse. We just got the image of your mother burying
her child too young, and completely unexpectedly. You follow that up with a
generic death acceptance sentiment, and it looks forced. It also borders on
insensitive.
When I was growing up, if a
mother lost a child, she mourned for a year in keeping with Victorian mourning
practices. I don’t think trying to assuage it by saying: ‘your five-year-old
daughter had a good run’ would have helped much.
if I die young bury me in satin
lay me down on a bed of roses
sink me in the river at dawn
send me away with the words of a love song
the sharp knife of a short life
Well, I had just enough time
There’s that
line again. It clashes so damn much with the rest of this verse, it’s crazy. It
doesn’t even rhyme with any of it, or fit the rhythm at all. God, it sounds
even more abrupt in audio.
And now they've gotten me thinking about 'love songs.' Huh. The main love song sentiments are as follows: 'You're awesome;' 'You're mine;' and 'I'll love you forever.'
And now you're dead!
Sure, I guess there are some love songs that could work just as well as funeral dirges. In Titanic, 'My Heart Will Go On' was practically both. But I don't know. Knowing my luck, they'd choose something like 'I'm a Believer.'
and I'll be wearing white
when I come into your kingdom
I'm as green as the ring on my little cold finger
well I've never known the lovin' of man
but it sure felt nice when he was holdin' my hand
there's a boy here in town
who says he'll love me forever
who would have thought forever could be severed
by a sharp knife of a short life
well I've had just enough time
and I'll be wearing white
when I come into your kingdom
I'm as green as the ring on my little cold finger
well I've never known the lovin' of man
but it sure felt nice when he was holdin' my hand
there's a boy here in town
who says he'll love me forever
who would have thought forever could be severed
by a sharp knife of a short life
well I've had just enough time
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Nice. Really. Wearing white on your wedding day isn’t enough; you have to wear it to your funeral. Sneaky. Abstinence moralizing in a song about death. Nothing better than some good old medieval reinforcement of the notion that a woman’s worth is her virginity and she needs to keep it in order to die fulfilled. They even used the traditional definition of the verb ‘know.’
Not to mention some subtle
glorification of the idea that the first guy you meet when you’re young is your
True Love and grab him fast while you’re still a virgin so you can be a virgin
at marriage. Because that leads to so many happy marriages.
Fuck, the ‘green as the ring
on my little cold finger’ line is unbelievably fucking creepy. Prettying up the
horror of death gnaws at me, but this is one line short of celebrating how
great it is when someone dies before they can sin. By which I mean 'have sex.'
so put on your best boys, and I'll wear my pearls
what I never did is done
a penny for my thoughts oh no I'll sell em for a dollar
They're worth so much more after I'm a goner
and maybe then you'll hear the words that I've been singin'
it's funny when your dead how people start listenin'
Yeah, that’s
a thing that can happen. And it sucks. It's been said: ‘Once you’re dead,
you’re made for life.’ I always love it when the media targets certain
celebrities with a barrage of cruelty while they’re alive, and then they die
(sometimes through suicide) and suddenly now it’s cruel to insult them. Seems
like your timing was a little off, guys.
It’s even
worse with celebrities who die young, what with our culture romanticizing
youth, and this absurd notion that dying young means preserving that youth
because – well, at least our most recent photo of you will always be young. I
agree. Let’s take a picture of your corpse. Or where it used to be. There’s
your ‘dying young.’
However, this
is kind of hypocritical sentiment for a song that’s all about romanticizing
death. It’s also a fairly cynical sentiment in a fluffy backdrop. Clash.
Also: 'goner' and 'dollar.' Ouch.
if I die young bury me in satin
lay me down on a bed of roses
sink me in the river at dawn
send me away with the words of a love song
ooh ooh the ballad of a dove
go with peace and love
gather up your tears and keep them in your pocket
save em for a time when you're really gonna need em.
oh the sharp knife of a short life
well I've had just enough time
so put on your best boys, and I'll wear my pearls
Also: 'goner' and 'dollar.' Ouch.
if I die young bury me in satin
lay me down on a bed of roses
sink me in the river at dawn
send me away with the words of a love song
ooh ooh the ballad of a dove
go with peace and love
gather up your tears and keep them in your pocket
save em for a time when you're really gonna need em.
oh the sharp knife of a short life
well I've had just enough time
so put on your best boys, and I'll wear my pearls
So yeah: ‘if I die young, I’ll decide I really didn’t need
that lifespan anyway.’ Like if you get mugged in the street and decide you were
better off without that bag. Except then they shoot you.
I think I’d
like to split this song in two, actually. Take that previous verse (after fixing the dollar/goner pain rhyme), the ‘knife,’ and the
basic refrain. Beef it up with some more cynical lyrics, and you might have
something. The melody and voice performance definitely worked for me. Well. I
doubt this song would be even remotely controversial for many people, or the artists
even imagined the existence of a critic like me. Then again, that’s the real
problem.
‘Sour grapes’ is a coping mechanism. I get it. I just think
there are ways that we can cope with this without distorting the reality of
death or telling people not to grieve properly. Coping mechanisms can
unfortunately become problems in their own right. I tend to prefer coping
mechanisms where you do slightly more in the process than just make yourself
feel better. Or at least, coping mechanisms where your ‘feeling slightly better’
doesn’t come at a price.
Whenever I bring up anti-aging research in pretty much any context, people are rarely shy about criticizing it on a technical or ethical basis. If nothing else, it makes for a much more productive coping mechanism than pretending that death is pretty.
Image links in order of appearance:
Image links in order of appearance:
Saturday, July 14, 2012
I Want to Be Forever Knight
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| carling2u.co.uk |
You know what – I like the night. Even when they find a
treatment and I take back the daytime, I’ll still be nocturnal. I like it that
way – I am biologically and culturally nocturnal.
Any sunlight treatment would eliminate the huge risk
vampires run every time we’re away from a nice windowless shelter – which is
great, because that’s the real problem.
On a smaller, universal scale with nocturnal living, you
have the limited job opportunities, the inconvenient hours for anything worth
doing (Museums, galleries, libraries – they almost always close at five) and
the lack of bargain matinees.
No bargain matinees. Hey, that was a big deal before Netflix
and the wonders of the Web. Ah, the wonders of the Web, where there are no
hours, either for jobs or for entertainment.
I’d still be working the night shift, sun treatment or not. I
don’t miss the sunshine.
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| article.wn.com |
Part of this might be generational. I spent my early
childhood on a frontier farm. Sunlight dictated our schedules in the other
direction.
Sunshine meant work. On a good day, I’d be doing the
housework indoors in my honored capacity as ‘eldest child.’ More likely, we’d
all be doing the hard labor outdoors. And then fiddle music later, hopefully
distracting us from the fact that we had no air conditioning, no electric fans
or even electricity, no sunscreen, and not even a hat with a brim. And we
didn’t even know it.
A decade later,
I was in the city working inside all day, as one of the first generations to do
that. Another decade, and I was with the vampire community, slowly adjusting to
their schedule. Actually being in the sunshine, instead of seeing it on TV, is
a distant memory from another world. Almost as much as the frontier. I’m a city
slicker now – I can’t go back.
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| truebie.blogspot.com |
When Sophie-Anne Leclerq had her little artificial beach
party on True Blood, it made her even
more alien to me. How can she miss the sun after 500 frigging years? I’m 142. I
did at first. Now? It’s like that isn’t even the way the world looks anymore.
I feel like I live in a different climate than everyone else
I know, where everything’s usually several degrees cooler, it’s always dark,
and the wildlife is a lot more like me. Sure, I’ll talk to them about their
weather, but I don’t want to move there.
Don’t tell that to Nick Knight, the protagonist of Forever Knight. He wants to move there
for life, regardless of the cost. Which is death.
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| (God, it's hard to find a picture of Nick where he looks normal. Stop snarling at me, Nick.) yuchtar.com |
Forever Knight.
Love the title. You could interpret that four different ways: Nick’s last name
is Knight, and he’s immortal. He’s also a Vampire with a traditional sun
problem, and thus has a ‘forever night.’ Also, he was an actual knight in
medieval France, so he’s a knight made immortal. And most importantly, now he’s
a knight-in-shining-armor cop who happens to be immortal, with all that that
implies.
Too bad it’s a misnomer.
Nick doesn’t want to help people forever, because he doesn’t
want to live forever. His main goal throughout the series is to become mortal
again. He tries that even if it consequentially puts humans in danger, because
his domineering sire LaCroix won’t stop hounding him and anyone in his way.
Atonement is a secondary goal, and Nick jumps at every opportunity to be human
even if that would mean cutting short his life and time to help people.
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| home.sprynet.com |
Nick – you spent nearly 700 years killing people. You can’t
make up for that. You’ve gone 100 years without killing anyone – you’re not a
threat anymore. All you can do is help people now. You can save people who
wouldn’t be saved by a conventional police officer – and that’s more or less
the organizing principle behind this series, so you should have realized this
by now.
You’re a philanthropist who’s given millions of your
ill-gotten gain to help the needy with your De Brabant foundation – awesome.
One of the things I’ve liked best about the show is its emphasis on real-world
good deeds. Nick doesn’t do good works by saving people from a never-ending
supply of demons like Angel – he does it the sort of bureaucratic, down-to-earth
way that makes society function.
During the Civil War, Nick was working as a medic for the
Union Army (despite not completely giving up killing). During the Civil War
Angel was – uh, still evil, but I guess 150 years later is when he’d be running
his unlicensed PI service that repeatedly butted heads with the actual police
force. Which was, of course, useless in the fight against demons despite
overwhelming evidence of the existence of demonic activity.
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| en.bestpicturesof.com. |
Angel the Series
makes up for it with the gray Wolfram and Hart plot arc, where the Fang Gang
tries reforming an evil law firm. And Angel signs away his opportunity to be
human, because it meant fulfilling his scheme and saving the world. Nick? Not
so much.
He has all the time in the world to use his gifts for the
good of the society he’s supposedly trying to repay. And he’s throwing it all
away to feel redeemed, without actually being redeemed.
Dying for your own sins, which is Christian in kind of a self-absorbed
way, is easier and more selfish than the hard work, difficult decisions, and
moral ambiguity that constitutes redemption through good works.
Becoming human would be less moral, Nick. You may feel like
you’d be on the side of good, because your understanding of metaphysics is
stuck in the Middle Ages. But all the people you could have helped will still
be dead. And then you’ll be dead.
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| mybeutifulroses.blogspot.com |
But I have to say; the absolute worst is when I have to
listen to Nick frame his desire to be human as the desire to see a sunrise. The
theme narration says it all: ‘emerge from his world of darkness, from his
endless forever knight.’ Yes – Classic Vampire Angst in a nutshell: seasonal
affective disorder.
Louis had that same thing in Interview. I kinda liked that scene, I guess – at least Louis was
getting enthusiastic about new technology. Hah: some of our elders flinched the
first time they saw a sunrise film. I was mostly just excited about the film
itself.
Films were exciting for just being films back in the
Progressive Era. It was just so cool that they could do that with pictures.
Seeing the sunrise itself on film was like looking at old tintypes: ‘Oh yeah. I
forgot about this.’ Commemorating the past, not looking toward the future.
Nick - it’s the early 1990s. Watch a video if you want a
sunrise. You can fast-forward through it, too – and you have color, not like us
poor slobs a few decades before. YouTube is less than two decades away – you
can get all the sunrises you want, all over the world.
Wait a little while longer, and we’ll have Augmented Reality
technology that can simulates the sunrise so it’ll look more real than the real
thing. Constant simulated sunrises that never stop, and all you may need is a
high-bandwidth Internet connection and decent AR glasses. ‘Sun’ = ‘human?’
Wouldn’t that make you superlatively human?
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| simple.wikipedia.org |
Why are you pining for what you lost in 1228, when you have
the whole twentieth century at your disposal, and the 21st is right
around the corner?
I know that sunlight is a symbol, and the sun represents
‘humanity’ for Nick. Well, Nick – think of it this way. Our technology will
allow you to see the sun, meaning technology has created a bridge over which
you can rejoin the human race. We’ve advanced to the point where we can all be
‘human’ together. If that’s what you want, and you don’t know how to feel good
about yourself in any other way.
The sunrise is great: if people like the sun, awesome. We
all have our preferences. And Nick, I’m sure you’d start tearing up if you saw
the sunrise again. You know something that made me cry? Seeing a picture of my
planet from space.
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| collthings.co.uk |
That Big Blue Marble photo from the Apollo 17 mission? It’s
one of the most published photographs now, and barely even raises an eyebrow.
But I saw it and I couldn’t stop thinking: that’s the earth. That’s us –
everything that’s ever happened in human history – right there. Even the Lunar
Orbiter 1 photo from 1966 was exciting – we saw this little scrap of the Earth,
but it was still Earth.
Now you can watch videos on YouTube that pan out from our
planet through the universe.
Here’s an artist’s rendering of the Earth from the 1400s:
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| en.wikipedia.org |
It makes me cry for a different reason.
The amount of scientific and social progress that has
occurred in my lifetime boggles the mind. It’s genuinely humbling to look back,
and think where we were in the 1870s, and where we are now. And I got the
opportunity to be a part of it, to whatever extent I could.
Nick, I don’t know why you’d genuinely give up everything
for the sake of moral symbolism.
I haven’t led a blameless life either, Nick, and I’ve done a
lot that I’m not proud of. But I don’t regret still being here for a moment.
And, in the words of Daria, ‘there’s nothing like seeing the
sunrise, except seeing the sun set in reverse. Get a VCR.
Or better yet, a spacesuit.
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