Monday, April 23, 2012

HOW DO WE REALLY DIE?


Here's a creepy thought. It came from a dream I had when I was in Texas a few weeks ago. It's just a fantasy, but it takes on an eerie plausibility when you look at the graphics I've marshaled here. I'll discuss these pictures in a minute, but first...the dream.



I'll start with a question: what if humans were immortal? I don't mean some time in the future, as in science fiction, or in the afterlife or in reincarnation...I mean physically immortal right now. What if, unbeknown to us, we've always been immortal ever since we first walked the earth? What if none of us dies a natural death. What if we have to be killed, otherwise our cells would continue to divide indefinitely? What if every human who has ever lived was........murdered?



It's a scary thought. It implies a murderer, someone who thins the flock. Those could be  devils or space aliens. It could be a race of Morlocks, as in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. It could be quasi-supernatural thugs who enjoy killing for its own sake, and who have a vulture-like ability to detect physical and mental weakness. My dream was about the latter.

I dreamed that I was in a parking lot, looking for my car when I noticed a couple of thugs heading my way. I was the target, no doubt about it, and there was no doubt the thugs had a murderous intent: it was broad daylight and the lot was full of shoppers, but the men savagely pushed them aside as if they were rag dolls. I ran into a nearby supermarket and the thugs ran after me. Inside they tore up the market in order to get at me. I managed to stay one step ahead, but I was getting tired and the thugs seemed to have infinite energy. At that point I woke up.



Lying in the dark with my eyes open and my heart pounding, my half-conscious mind filled in the rest of the story. After I escaped, the joking thugs walked out of the market, confident that they would get me in the next encounter. Previously frightened patrons took on blank expressions then dutifully tidied up the market. After that they went about their business, completely unaware that anything scary had just happened. They had total amnesia about it.



 I remember thinking, "So that's what death is like." In front of witnesses you're violently killed by thugs who then arrange the corpse so it appears that you died a natural death. The witnesses clean up then, with no memory of the killing, resume their normal lives...until some time in the future when their turn comes. Scary, huh?



Okay, it was just a nightmare, something we all get now and then....but as I was assembling the pictures for this post I began to notice that most of them seemed to confirm the premise of my dream. Almost all of them had a common theme: that death comes not to the fatally sick, but rather to ordinary, healthy people who are minding their own business. It's as if there was a consensus of artists and sculptors of the past that death was murder, something that's done to you with malevolent intent. Look at the pictures. Do you see what I mean?




6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whoa! I wish I had vivid dreams like this. Did you try drawing a cartoon about this and making a storyboard from it?

That's a very interesting question that I've never pondered myself, though many religions like Christianity offer some idea of what eternal life could be (actually, I am a nondenominational Christian myself, but I'm pretty left-wing too. I'm emphatically am not one of those cuckoo Christian fundamentalists that wants to force his opinions on everyone). Sorry I didn't have as much to offer to this post as I usually do, even though this is one of the best ones you've ever written.

kellie said...

That dream is on the button, at least emotionally - Death the violent criminal. Even the most natural death seems a brutal injustice. And everyone has to try and cover it up to keep functioning

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Roberto: Haw! I used to be on the left til one day it dawned on me that taking an industry from its founder and handing it over to a bureaucray is a sure way to guarantee that it becomes uncompetitive, resistant to innovation and corrupt.

Capitalism has periodic slumps, but so does its opposite. There's no use taking on a cure that's worse than the disease.

That's my opinion, anyway. Half my friends are lefties, so we just agree to disagree about stuff like this.

Kellie: True, so true.

Joshua Marchant (Scrawnycartoons) said...

Eddie, you really ought to see things from Deaths point of view. He explains himself quite nicely http://bit.ly/wAgefF

Eddie Fitzgerald said...

Joshua: An interesting poem but...weeeelll....it's hard to regard death as a friend, even if I was lucky enough to have Heaven to look forward to.

The scary thing about death for me is the way Prospero described it at the end of The Tempest.

Adam said...

Haw haw haw! This is great stuff, just the pick-me-up I needed today, thanks Eddie!

Max Well seems to only be able to move in pose to pose or smear frames. I guess he left his inbetweens at home.