Fear of death
Oct. 22nd, 2003 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaneramosHow timely that I should choose to reread A Wizard of Earthsea now, more than 25 years since my first reading. Within a few months of turning 40, I am as much aware as ever of my mortality. Ursula K. LeGuin's pithy, fantastic masterpiece explores the fear of death.
As a child I lacked an explicit belief system. My family never attended church. My father was a rationalist. Mother read me Bible stories and taught me to respect it, but we hardly discussed God. I took a casual interest in paranormal phenomena like ESP and reincarnation.
I was depressed throughout high school. I never contemplated suicide until my first year of university, and then a question prevented me: if I couldn't accept someone like myself, a homosexual, how could a perfect God accept me? I wasn't convinced of the existence of God or an afterlife, but neither did I want to take the chance of spending eternity some place more awful than here. If God rejected homosexuals, I reasoned, surely suicides were even worse. Maybe if I just accepted the Gift of Life, and got through it without giving in or giving up, that would be enough.
I was afraid of death. This fear is practically universal, and religion exploits it.
In youth we go through a phase when pride controls us more powerfully than fear. Our hormones brace us. This is more characteristic of young men than women. LeGuin's adolescent wizard Ged is fiercely proud, and hateful toward Jasper who tries to humiliate him. So determined and audacious is he to display his prowess that Ged casts a dangerous spell breaching the boundary between life and death. He thinks he's invincible.
Many young people play the same game. I can think of several different versions: drunk driving, unprotected sex, anything that risks life and well-being. The thrill proves we're alive. Some end up dead. Ged gets away with a nasty scar, a shadow haunting him, and his pride deflated, but at least he grows up quickly. Some who gamble never pay the price and keep on living arrogantly.
Religion exploits pride, too. Fundamentalist Christianity told me I had the truth. It gave me a false sense of power. The truth would set me free from fear. In fact it taught me to take life for granted. I could deny my pain, loneliness and thwarted desire, because the suffering would only last a little while. All I had to worry about was loving God. Life might be tough, but the rewards would come later.
Other religions do the same thing, ignoring the fact that life is finite. In the absence of verifiable evidence to the contrary, we must assume that consciousness will end in oblivion and silence. The fact that millions of people believe otherwise, on the grounds of contradictory arguments, proves only that dread is universal.
We are like Ged, who flees his shadow. The shadow skulks around the edges of his dreams, disturbing his sleep and making him miserable. His denial threatens the safety of those around him. Danger accompanies him, prevents him from moving forward, separates him from those he loves. He keeps running away until he realizes how fear limits and wastes his life.
Ged's hope begins when he turns and pursues his shadow. Then he begins to experience true power. His victory lies not in defeating fear, but in accepting it. Darkness and light are joined. The wizard finally becomes whole, without contradictions.
Sometimes I think I have already grappled with fear and become reconciled with death. I try to make the most of what comes my way, living in the present. Other times I realize I still have a way to go on the journey. But at least I have turned around. I'm not running away anymore. Really, victory is a continual process of finding the courage to live and die. I can turn the final page on Ged's story and he goes on living in imagination. When I turn the final page on my own story, my imagination will have finished its work.
As a child I lacked an explicit belief system. My family never attended church. My father was a rationalist. Mother read me Bible stories and taught me to respect it, but we hardly discussed God. I took a casual interest in paranormal phenomena like ESP and reincarnation.
I was depressed throughout high school. I never contemplated suicide until my first year of university, and then a question prevented me: if I couldn't accept someone like myself, a homosexual, how could a perfect God accept me? I wasn't convinced of the existence of God or an afterlife, but neither did I want to take the chance of spending eternity some place more awful than here. If God rejected homosexuals, I reasoned, surely suicides were even worse. Maybe if I just accepted the Gift of Life, and got through it without giving in or giving up, that would be enough.
I was afraid of death. This fear is practically universal, and religion exploits it.
In youth we go through a phase when pride controls us more powerfully than fear. Our hormones brace us. This is more characteristic of young men than women. LeGuin's adolescent wizard Ged is fiercely proud, and hateful toward Jasper who tries to humiliate him. So determined and audacious is he to display his prowess that Ged casts a dangerous spell breaching the boundary between life and death. He thinks he's invincible.
Many young people play the same game. I can think of several different versions: drunk driving, unprotected sex, anything that risks life and well-being. The thrill proves we're alive. Some end up dead. Ged gets away with a nasty scar, a shadow haunting him, and his pride deflated, but at least he grows up quickly. Some who gamble never pay the price and keep on living arrogantly.
Religion exploits pride, too. Fundamentalist Christianity told me I had the truth. It gave me a false sense of power. The truth would set me free from fear. In fact it taught me to take life for granted. I could deny my pain, loneliness and thwarted desire, because the suffering would only last a little while. All I had to worry about was loving God. Life might be tough, but the rewards would come later.
Other religions do the same thing, ignoring the fact that life is finite. In the absence of verifiable evidence to the contrary, we must assume that consciousness will end in oblivion and silence. The fact that millions of people believe otherwise, on the grounds of contradictory arguments, proves only that dread is universal.
We are like Ged, who flees his shadow. The shadow skulks around the edges of his dreams, disturbing his sleep and making him miserable. His denial threatens the safety of those around him. Danger accompanies him, prevents him from moving forward, separates him from those he loves. He keeps running away until he realizes how fear limits and wastes his life.
Ged's hope begins when he turns and pursues his shadow. Then he begins to experience true power. His victory lies not in defeating fear, but in accepting it. Darkness and light are joined. The wizard finally becomes whole, without contradictions.
Sometimes I think I have already grappled with fear and become reconciled with death. I try to make the most of what comes my way, living in the present. Other times I realize I still have a way to go on the journey. But at least I have turned around. I'm not running away anymore. Really, victory is a continual process of finding the courage to live and die. I can turn the final page on Ged's story and he goes on living in imagination. When I turn the final page on my own story, my imagination will have finished its work.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 12:07 pm (UTC)I'm convinced that it's the very finiteness of life that makes it worthwhile.
On reflection, the concern with "life after death" is kind of silly when we don't know exactly what "after" means. Time itself might be quite different from what we think; it is common to say that time causes entropy, but it is also equally correct to say that entropy causes time. Why do we mourn for the time we will miss after we are dead, but not the time we missed before we were born? The visceral fear of death is built into our bodies, but the existential fear of death might reflect a misunderstanding of what it is to be alive.
On another subject, you've made me think that a religious upbringing might be a good thing if it can temper the appeal of fundamentalism. Without early experience with religion, maybe you didn't develop the defense mechanisms that could protect you from its excesses. Instead of helping you, it consumed you.
All in all, this is a very interesting and provocative post.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 01:14 pm (UTC)That is undoubtedly true. My fear mostly has to do with not accomplishing things I want to. As much as I try to live in the present, I still hold certain dreams which will require a lot of hard slogging. Perhaps I'm not well served by them.
a religious upbringing might be a good thing
I doubt it. My family's lack of religious beliefs was not what screwed me up, in fact it is my father's rationalism that eventually helped me make my own sense out of life.
My parents let me down in that they were too emotionally stunted to acknowledge I was depressed. I was such a good boy, and didn't cause any trouble, that they didn't mind if I spent entire summers locked in my bedroom.
I became afraid of life because I was lonely and homophobic. Religion offered an escape.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 02:49 pm (UTC)I think that Van's defense mechanisms (or lack thereof) against the self-hatred that Christian fundamentalism reinforced are the ones that should be examined, rather than why fundamentalism appealed to him. It obviously doesn't, now, and he is also, I believe, a healthier individual. I think, based on more than just Van's case, that a concentrated program to reassure people that they have intrinsic self-worth would do a lot more than making sure they have an "adequately religious" upbringing. :)
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 12:26 pm (UTC)I'm really glad you posted about this.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 01:25 pm (UTC)When I think of my shadow self, I often think of the discussion I once heard in the local Unitarian congregation, that Gollum was Bilbo's shadow.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 01:28 pm (UTC)One of the men who put together the Gathering Call for the first Radical Faerie event, held in the southwestern deserts (Arizona, I think?) back in 1979, is Mitch Walker, a Jungian psychotherapist who did some writing about the concept of facing the Shadow with specific reference to internalized homophobia for queer men. His approach was playful, creative, and magical. I have a couple of articles but have never been able to find his books--one was titled Visionary Love, I think. I often want to go back and re-read his stuff because the reality is that a lot of the men who come to the Faeries for sanctuary have been damaged by society's incredibly resilient, far-reaching and insidious structures of homophobia.
I'd forgotten this particular facet of the Wizard of Earthsea. Another reason to bump it to the top of my reading list!
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 01:45 pm (UTC)I remembered that the shadow represented fear, but the book gives it more explicitly: "fear of death."
Thanks for your encouraging comments, and I hope the rest of your day goes more peacefully.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-22 08:35 pm (UTC)followups to the Earthsea "trilogy"
Date: 2003-10-23 06:34 am (UTC)Both are so very different from the first three that I thought I didn't like them...until I caught myself reading them AGAIN immediately upon finishing them. The first three remind me of the great saga poems with a bit of legend and religion thrown in--the Kalevala or Beowulf with just a touch of the Argonauts and the afterlife. The fourth and fifth, written decades later, are more, well, reality based is the only way I can describe them, although that may seem an odd phrase in connection with a series involving witchcraft and dragons.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-23 07:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 07:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-23 06:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-27 06:14 am (UTC)Your point is well taken.