Memento mori!

Philippe de Champaigne, Vanitas, c. 1671

I have been purposely avoiding the media’s treatment of Aurora, CO shooting.  As usual, it becomes a circus, a sale of unreality.  For some reason, I am thinking of traveling salesmen offering a “health tonic” to the masses—we are under the spell of the television or computer screen.

From a few instances of media’s coverage of the event, I have seen either stupidity in reportage or sentimentality surrounding the whole situation.  Today’s American (and perhaps even beyond America) society has a tendency to emotionalize almost everything.  This includes death.  Emotion is good, however once it is vague or primitive, it will lose the sight of reason.

And so I thought about death.  No, not in any Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson way, but I wanted to get into the heart of the matter of why we emotionalize death.  Certainly, it is difficult to deal with the fact that we are mortals.  In Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, our mortality and the silence of God are the central themes.  Bergman has said that he had an incredible fear of death and so to get to the “bottom” of the fear, he wrote and filmed The Seventh Seal.

In one of the scenes, Death has come for the Actor.  The Actor who had just finished his performance, pleased with himself, climbs a tree, needing a bit of respite.  He has a kind of monologue with himself of the things he plans to do tomorrow.  In the midst of his ritualistic, daily and almost unimportant ruminations, Death begins to saw the tree the Actor is sitting on.  Of course, the Actor protests, but Death (at first) is not answering. 

“Can’t you answer?  Courtesy is cheap!  Who are you?” says the Actor.

Death finally looks up and responds, “I’m sawing down your tree since your time is up.”

In a moment of dark comedy, the Actor pleads with Death—he has a performance that he cannot miss.  Death responds, “It is cancelled.  Because of death.”  And so is his contract with the acting company—annulled.

Well, you can imagine what happens next…Death is not kind or merciful.  And I suppose, it is exactly this, which is forgotten during the coverage of the shooting.  Instead, we are talking about gun laws and mental health, avoiding yet again, that no one lives forever.

Memento mori!  “Look behind you!  Remember that you are but a man!  Remember that you’ll die!” wrote Tertullian in his Apologeticus.  There was a time when the culture cultivated such outlook.  When I studied art history as an undergrad, Middle Ages was my favorite period.  Filled with grotesque figures, depictions of Hell and Death—it was certainly morbid.  But there was something “real” about it too, namely, the fearlessness of depictions.  I am not saying we should go back to the Middle Ages and start carving reliefs depicting in an even more gruesome way of what will happen when we are judged.  And I also understand the historical background—art was a way for the illiterate people to attempt to understand some theology.  What I am saying that we should also not sterilize death.

Acceptance of mortality depends on the acceptance of our materiality.  Easier said than done, of course, and even as I am writing this essay, I am becoming more and more puzzled by this theological exploration.

Death is one of those “unnatural natural” things.  But isn’t the acceptance of mortality also the very acceptance of a good and happy life?  Acceptance of mortality is paradoxical because we feel that if we do accept it, then it has won over us. 

We will always experience fear of death.  What I am commenting on now is that the current culture encourages insulated lives.  This results in the denial of death (and by association, evil).  If death is denied, then it cannot be feared.  If death is not acknowledged, then its “existence” as a reality seemingly does not have a hold on us. 

But here is where the paradox enters: in order for death to not have a hold on our soul, we have to accept it.  And that is why I said that acceptance of mortality depends on the acceptance of our materiality. 

Burial rituals reveal a lot about culture’s relationship to death.  In my own Bosnian-Muslim culture, the body of a dead person is buried immediately.  It is cleaned, wrapped in a simple white cloth and placed in a very simple wooden casket.  All of these serve as reminders of our bodily finitude, and the continuous importance of our submission to God.

The mentality that I was exposed to consisted of two statements: first, “God gives and God takes away,” and second, “we are born from soil and to the soil we will return.”  Of course, we still ask why, we still mourn, we still remember—as we should!  But we mourn and we remember with small awareness that we are neither the beginning nor the end. 

Perhaps, if the young man who killed in Aurora, CO had even a small slice of that awareness, he would have made a different choice.  As it is, he has killed, and by choosing death, he has allowed sin to stain his own soul.